Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

From Tribes to Ethnic Groups 27

things. Similar, perhaps, to the ways in which social control encourages deviance, formality informality, and power resistance (Jenkins 2008: Chapter 16), the official policing of borders may foster unofficial alternatives.

At several points in this chapter, I have mentioned in passing the possibilities for developing the ‘basic anthropological model of ethnicity’. Before exploring some possible avenues for this development, other matters require further introductory attention. These are, in particular, the interrelationship of different ethnic identities within one ‘society’, the relationship of ethnicity to other kinds of social identity with which it might be thought to have affinities, and, following on from these, the ‘nature’ of ethnicity.

3 Myths of Pluralism

The development of the notion of the ‘plural society’ was, much like anthropology’s gradual abandonment of the ‘tribal’ model, an adjustment to a changing world. It, too, emerged out of the discipline’s theoretical investments in social groups, as the basic unit of analysis, and processes of social integration. The notion of pluralism or the ‘plural society’ was a response to two distinct, if not dissimilar, problems.

Some colonial territories, for example many British possessions in Africa and elsewhere, were governed by means of a system of indirect rule, through native courts and chiefs. In these situations different collectivities – ‘tribes’ – were integrated into the colonial administrative framework through different sets of institutions and administered according to localized and conflicting bodies of custom and law. How was one to conceptualize the convergence of these separate institutional systems – one (or more than one) for the tribespeople, another (or others) for the Europeans and the urbanized intermediate groups – into a coherent and integrated social system?

A different situation pertained in those colonial territories that were, by contrast, basically unitary institutional systems for the purposes of politics and government. In these systems the indigenous peoples, although contained within and controlled by the state, were rarely, if at all, considered to be jurally adult members of the polity. As the twentieth century drew towards its mid-point this situation began increasingly to exhibit signs of change. The ‘natives’, in short, were increasingly moving from subjection to citizenship. The meek, it appeared, were about to (re)inherit their particular bits of the earth. But what would be the political structure of the resultant new nation-states?

Both of these questions spoke to the same history: the creation, by the European powers, of colonies or other dependent territories – and, later, emergent new states – whose internationally recognized boundaries bore little or no resemblance to the local spatial arrangements of ethnic identity or cultural variation. As such, they lacked the clear-cut homogeneous national identities which at that time still seemed to characterize the established states of the Old World. Social anthropologists had to develop a new analytical model in order to understand the changing situation.

In fact, they didn’t develop a new model. They turned to political science instead. The notions of ‘pluralism’ and the ‘plural society’ have their origins in Furnivall’s analysis of colonial policy in South East Asia in the 1940s (Furnivall 1948). The social anthropologists who are perhaps most closely associated with the elaboration of his ideas are M. G. Smith, in the context of West Africa and the Caribbean (Smith, 1965; 1974), and Leo Kuper, in his studies of South Africa and other African states (Kuper, 1971; Kuper and Smith, 1969). A number of sociologists have also found the

Myths of Pluralism 29

plural society model attractive and useful: Schermerhorn (1978: 122–63) and van den Berghe (1967, 1981) are perhaps deserving of particular mention in this respect.

When these writers talk about pluralism, they mean the institutional incorporation of different ethnic groups or collectivities into one societal or state system. In other words, as opposed to the homogeneous nation-state, there is the heterogeneous plural society. Even though the model’s initial formulation significantly predated Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, the concept of pluralism, as Barth (1969a: 16), Cohen (1978: 398) and Eriksen (2002: 48–9) have recognized, sits reasonably comfortably alongside the basic anthropological model of ethnicity. Logically and theoretically, the progression from an awareness of the importance of ethnicity to the identification of a pluralist social system is an obvious, although not a necessary, step to take. Although relatively few social scientists have been concerned with the theoretical elaboration of formal models of pluralism, the word ‘pluralism’ has carelessly passed into the everyday vernacular of many social anthropologists and other social scientists, as a loose and apparently useful descriptive term for labelling all multi-ethnic societies.

There are, however, those who have been concerned with precision in the concept’s usage. M.G. Smith (1974: 108–10, 205–39, 341–2) distinguished three types of pluralism. The first of these is cultural pluralism, in which, although a society is composed of different ethnic groups, these are not relevant in the political sphere or as a criterion of citizenship. Examples of such a situation are Brazil or, arguably, the United Kingdom. Second, there is social pluralism; in this situation, although ethnicity is relevant in terms of political organization, it does not affect citizenship, the incorporation of individual members of ethnic groups into the state. Here one can point to the West Indies, the USSR as was, or Belgium, as examples. Finally, Smith talks about structural pluralism, where ethnic identity directly affects citizenship and the incorporation of collectivities into full membership of the state, as in the South Africa of apartheid, Israel, the USA (with respect to native Americans), and Burundi. These different kinds of pluralism correspond in an approximate fashion to what Smith describes as different modes of incorporation, the principles through which individuals or collectivities are incorporated into membership of the society: uniform or universalistic, equivalent or segmental, and differential (1974: 333–7). In a later discussion (1986: 194–8), he identifies differential incorporation with hierarchic plurality, equivalent/segmental incorporation with segmental plurality, and the mixture of both modes of incorporation with complex plurality. Finally, to complicate – or confuse – the matter further, Smith also talks about the plural society as a generic type, in which cultural diversity is associated with the rule of a dominant minority through the medium of a state system (e.g. 1974: 214).

R.A. Schermerhorn has also attempted to conceptualize pluralism and its varieties with a degree of rigour (1978: 122–5). He distinguishes between normative pluralism, which is a political ideology in its own right, political pluralism, which describes a society with a multiplicity of political interest groups, cultural pluralism, which relates to a multi-ethnic society, and structural pluralism, a society which is institutionally internally differentiated in a manner which reflects the differentiation of its population. Although cultural and structural pluralism are analytically distinct, ‘they have a dialectical relation of mutual implication in the empirical world’ (p. 127). Since Schermerhorn understands ethnic relations as

30 Rethinking Ethnicity

intimately bound up with relationships of integration and conflict, and with processes of group identification and categorization, cultural and structural pluralism are, from his point of view, necessarily interconnected. In adopting this position his debt to social anthropology is plain; his attempt to analyse conflict in a framework which also explicitly emphasizes an integrative dimension owes something to Max Gluckman’s analyses of ‘custom and conflict’ (Gluckman 1956; 1965).1 It remains important, however, to distinguish between the models of pluralism put forward by Schermerhorn and Smith; for Smith there is no necessary association ‘in the real world’ between structural pluralism and cultural pluralism.

Such differences notwithstanding, Smith and Schermerhorn are clearly working within a broad theoretical framework of shared understandings about ‘plural societies’. As such there are a number of general criticisms to which they – and other authors such as Kuper and van den Berghe – are equally vulnerable. The most basic of these, following Ronald Cohen (1978: 399), is that the notion of pluralism implies that cultural or political homogeneity – ‘monoism’, to coin an unlikely neologism – is the social norm. This, of course, harks straight back to the anthropological atom of comparative analysis, the bounded tribal society, which was discussed in the previous chapter. In fact, it is poly-ethnic collectivities, with fluid and permeable boundaries, which appear to have been, and still to be, the norm. Neither the isolated tribal group nor the ethnically homogeneous nation-state, to take the extreme ‘monoist’ theoretical alternatives, is much in evidence in the historical or the contemporary sociological and anthropological records.

A second criticism is that, at the end of the day, the notion of pluralism is theoretically vapid. The best that can be said is that it is merely profoundly descriptive, going no further than the extensive cataloguing of concrete situations by reference to a classificatory scheme of ideal-typical plural societies, an approach exemplified by van den Berghe (1967: 113–15, 132–48). The classificatory quagmire into which this approach can beguile the analyst is clear from my account of Smith’s work, above. A further, related, criticism is that the model resists the incorporation of other principles of stratification – such as class – or of international relations.

Finally, there is a set of trenchant criticisms of the pluralist model made by Heribert Adam, a sociologist who has written extensively about the South Africa of apartheid (Adam 1972; Adam and Giliomee 1979: 42–50). Although not all of these criticisms need detain us here, three are particularly serious. First, Adam argues that the pluralism approach overestimates the autonomy of the segments of a supposedly plural society. In the process it neglects to examine the necessary degree to which they are all reciprocally implicated in a societal framework of common political, social and economic institutions. This implicit criticism of the pluralism model also emerges from a reading of Gluckman’s analysis of inter-ethnic relationships in South Africa (1956: 137–65). Second, the emphasis on cultural and political diversity as the primary sources of heterogeneity ignores the role and importance of economic disparities and inequalities – from Adam’s point of view, capitalism – in the production of social cleavages. Finally, with respect to Smith’s general notion of the plural society, Adam denies that there is a necessary association between cultural diversity within the political boundaries of one state and domination by a cultural minority; he argues that such a condition could, in theory, lead just as easily to a system which granted each cultural segment equality of representation.

Myths of Pluralism 31

These criticisms amount to a heavyweight challenge to the pluralist perspective, so substantial that there seem to be no compelling reasons for insisting upon its continued usefulness in the analysis of ethnicity and ‘race relations’. This is particularly the case with respect to the ‘strong’ version of the pluralist model, as articulated by Smith or Kuper, for example. Even with respect to the ‘weak’ version of the notion, however – the everyday, almost casual, usage which equates plural societies with multi-ethnicity – if the above criticisms are admissible there are irresistible grounds for removing the word from the social science vocabulary altogether: if, in this sense, all societies are to some extent plural societies, from what is pluralism actually being distinguished?

And there is another reason, not yet discussed, for dismissing altogether the plural society model. Schermerhorn, as we have already noted, recognizes the ideological or normative uses of the notion; similarly, Adam has highlighted the uses to which the South African state during the apartheid years put the notion of pluralism in legitimizing its ‘separate development’ and ‘homeland’ policies (Adam and Giliomee 1979: 45). This is all the more reason for treating the concept with caution in academic discussions of inter-ethnic relations. If we cannot talk about pluralism without potentially importing into our discourse ideological baggage of this kind, then perhaps we are better not talking about it at all. At the very least, the word deserves to live out its days in the inverted commas which, as with ‘race’, denote a degree of dissension or controversy.

This does not, however, seem to be about to happen. If for no other reason, this is because some anthropologists2 continue to talk about pluralism or ‘plural societies’ when they appear to mean nothing more than multi-ethnicity (e.g. Doornbos 1991; Grillo 1998; Maybury-Lewis 1984; Rapport 1995). But there is another – frequently implicit – notion of pluralism increasingly afoot in current debates. This quasi-analytical and normative model, different to the one I have been talking about so far, has enjoyed a vogue under the sign of various strands of postmodern critique. The word ‘pluralism’ may not always be used, but the impulse and the concerns are unmistakable.

The key to this new discourse of ‘pluralism’ is a celebration of difference: as the site of resistance to Eurocentric and androcentric meta-narratives of history and progress; as the basis for imagining a new world of mutual recognition and tolerance; as a bulwark against fundamentalist images of the world; as an assertion of the rights to autonomous (co-)existence of peripheralized, marginalized, minorityized peoples; as the inspiration for ethics and politics of representation and diversity which challenge the centralization, the homogenization, the integration, and the domination of the nation, or more particularly the nation-state; and as the inspiration for new analytical models of the complexity of the human world (e.g. Benhabib 1996; Gutmann 1994; Irigaray 1993; Rutherford 1990; Seidman 1997; Woodward 1997).

In social theoretical terms, this multi-faceted and heterogeneous strand of argument and debate acknowledges that the world is a less straightforward place than – with the naïvety of a post-war generation which (mis)took the particular world in which it grew up to be the norm rather than the historical exception – we perhaps once thought it was (Baumann 1999; Eriksen 2002: 143–61). This acknowledgement was a reaction to the material and political uncertainties of the post-1989 world – which were to be followed by the further uncertainties of the post 9/11