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CHAPTER 1
What is Ethnicity?
It takes at least two somethings to create a difference ... Clearly each alone is – for the mind and perception – a non-entity, a non-being. Not different from being, and not different from non-being. An unknowable, a Ding an sich, a sound from one hand clapping.
Gregory Bateson (1979: 78)
Words like 'ethnic groups', 'ethnicity' and 'ethnic conflict' have become common terms in the English language, and they keep cropping up in the press, in TV news, in political discourse and in casual conversations. The same can be said for 'nation' and 'nationalism', and it has to be conceded that the meaning of these terms frequently seems ambiguous and vague.
There has been a parallel development in the social sciences. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion in the growth of scholarly publications on ethnicity and nationalism, particularly in the fields of political science, history, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology. This growth is probably only paralleled by the explosion in studies featuring the terms 'globalisation', 'identity' and 'modernity', which incidentally refer to phenomena closely related to ethnicity and nationalism. The relationship of ethnicity to other forms of collective identification, including gender, local and religious identity, will be discussed in the final chapters of this book.
In social and cultural anthropology, ethnicity has been a main preoccupation since the late 1960s, and it remains a central focus for research today. Although I hope the relevance of this book extends beyond the confines of academic anthropology, it is built around the contributions of anthropology to the study of ethnicity and kindred phenomena. Through its dependence on long-term fieldwork and its bottom-up perspective on social life, anthropology has the advantage of generating first-hand knowledge of social life at the level of everyday interaction. To a great extent, this is the locus where ethnicity is created and re-created. Ethnic relations emerge and are made relevant through social situations and encounters, and through people's ways of coping with the demands and challenges of life. From its vantage point right at the centre of local life, social anthropology is in a unique position to investigate these processes at the micro level, although it needs to be supplemented by other approaches such as history and macrosociology in order to develop a full picture of ethnicity and nationalism.
Anthropological approaches, moreover, enable us to explore the ways in which ethnic relations are being defined and perceived by people; how they talk and think about their own group and its salient characteristics as well as those of other groups, and how particular worldviews are being maintained, contested and transformed. The personal significance that ethnic membership has to people can best be investigated through that detailed on-the-ground research which is the hallmark of anthropology. Finally, social anthropology, being a comparative discipline, studies both differences and similarities between discrete inter-ethnic situations and settings. It is thereby capable of providing a nuanced and complex vision of ethnicity in the contemporary world.
An important reason for the current academic interest in ethnicity and nationalism is the fact that such phenomena have become so visible in many societies that it has become impossible to ignore them. In the early twentieth century, a leading social theorist such as Max Weber discarded 'ethnic community action' (Gemeinschaftshandeln) as an analytical concept, since it referred to a variety of very different kinds of phenomena (Weber 1980 [1921]). Weber also held that 'primordial phenomena' like ethnicity and nationalism would decrease in importance and eventually vanish as a result of modernisation, industrialisation and individualism. Many early to mid-twentieth-century social scientists shared this view. However, it was eventually proven wrong. In fact, ethnicity, nationalism and other forms of identity politics grew in political importance in the world after the Second World War, continuing into the twenty-first century.
Wars and other armed conflicts in the 1990s and 2000s have typically been internal conflicts, and many of them – from Sri Lanka and Fiji to Rwanda, Congo and Bosnia – could plausibly be described as ethnic conflicts. An influential theory of geopolitical conflict from the post-Cold War era even claims that future conflicts would largely take place in 'the faultlines' between 'civilizations' (Huntington, 1996), although this particular view has been argued against on empirical grounds (Fox, 1999). Ethnic or nationalist struggles for recognition, power and autonomy, however, often takes a non-violent form, like in the Québecois independence movement in Canada. Moreover, in many parts of the world, nation-building the creation and consolidation of political cohesion and national identity in former colonies or imperial provinces – is high on the political agenda.
In a very different kind of context, ethnic and national identities have become fields of contestation following the continuous influx of labour migrants and refugees to Europe and North America, which has led to the establishment of new, permanent ethnic minorities in these areas. Since the Second World War, and especially since the 1970s, indigenous populations such as Inuit, Sami, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines have organised themselves politically, and are demanding that their ethnic identities and territorial entitlements should be recognised by the state. Finally, the political dynamics in Europe has moved issues of ethnic and national identities to the forefront of political life since the 1990s. At one extreme of the continent, the erstwhile Soviet Union split into over a dozen states, most of them based on ethnic and linguistic identities. With the disappearance of the strong socialist state in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, issues of nationhood and minority problems emerged with unprecedented force. At the other extreme of the continent, the reverse appears be happening, as the nation-states of Western Europe have been moving towards a closer economic, political and possibly cultural integration within the framework of the European Union, since the early 2000s. But here, too, national and ethnic identities have become important issues in recent years, as witnessed, for example, in the growth of rightwing nationalist parties at the European elections in 2009. Many Europeans fear that cultural standardisation following tight European integration will result in the loss of their national or ethnic identity. Others, who take a more positive view of such processes, welcome the possibilities for a pan-European identity to replace ethnic and national ones in a number of contexts. During the electoral campaign preceding the first Danish referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in June 1992, one of the main anti-EU slogans was: 'I want a country to be European in.' This slogan suggested that personal identities were intimately linked with political processes and that social identities, for example as Danes or Europeans, were not given once and for all, but were subject to negotiation. Both of these insights are crucial to the study of ethnicity. At the same time, debates about multiculturalism and the integration of immigrants have also, from a different perspective, raised important questions about national identity.
This book will show how social anthropology can shed light on concrete issues of ethnicity; what questions social anthropologists ask in relation to ethnic phenomena, and how they proceed to answer them. In this way, the book will offer a set of conceptual tools which go far beyond the immediate interpretation of day-to-day politics in their applicability. Some of the questions that will be discussed are:
• How do ethnic groups remain distinctive under varying social conditions?
• Under what circumstances does ethnicity become important?
• What is the relationship between ethnic identification and ethnic political organisation?
• Is nationalism always based on ethnicity?
• What is the relationship between ethnicity and other forms of identification, social classification and political organisation, such as class, religion and gender?
• What happens to ethnic relationships in situations of rapid social and cultural change?
• In what ways can history be important in the creation of ethnicity?
• What is the relationship between ethnicity and culture?
This introductory chapter will present the main concepts to be used throughout the book. It also explores their ambiguities and thereby introduces some principal theoretical issues.
THE TERM ITSELF
Writing in the 1970s, Glazer and Moynihan argued that '[e]thnicity seems to be a new term' (1975: 1), pointing to the fact that the word's earliest dictionary appearance is in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Its first usage is attributed to the US sociologist David Riesman in 1953. The word 'ethnic', however, is much older. It is derived from the Greek ethnos (which in turn derived from the word ethnikos), which originally meant heathen or pagan (R. Williams, 1976: 119). It was used in this sense in English from the mid fourteenth century until the mid nineteenth century, when it gradually began to refer to 'racial' characteristics. In the United States, 'ethnics' came to be used around the Second World War as a polite term referring to Jews, Italians, Irish and other people considered inferior to the dominant 'WASP' group (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). None of the founding fathers of sociology and social anthropology – with the partial exception of Weber – granted ethnicity much attention. In early modern Anglophone sociocultural anthropology, fieldwork ideally took place in a single society and concentrated on particular aspects of its social organisation or culture (Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001). British anthropology in the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown or Malinowski, moreover, tended to favour synchronic 'snapshots' of the society under study. With its emphasis on intergroup dynamics, often in the context of a modern state, as well as its frequent insistence on historical depth, ethnicity studies represents a specialisation which was not considered particularly relevant by the early twentieth- century founders of modern anthropology.
Since the 1960s, 'ethnic groups' and 'ethnicity' have become household words in Anglophone social anthropology, although, as Ronald Cohen (1978) remarked more than thirty years ago, few of those who use the terms bother to define them. In the course of this book, I shall examine a number of approaches to ethnicity. Many of them are closely related, although they may serve different analytical purposes. Sometimes heated argument arises as to the nature of the object of inquiry and the appropriate theoretical framework. All of the approaches of anthropology nevertheless agree that ethnicity has something to do with the classification of people and group relationships.
In everyday language the word 'ethnicity' still has a ring of 'minority issues' and 'race relations', but in social anthropology it simply refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive. Although it is true that 'the discourse concerning ethnicity tends to concern itself with subnational units, or minorities of some kind or another' (Chapman et al., 1989: 17), majorities and dominant peoples are no less 'ethnic' than minorities. This will be particularly evident in chapters 6-8, which discuss nationalism and minority-majority relationships.
ETHNICITY AND RACE
A few words must be said initially about the relationship between ethnicity and 'race'. The term 'race' has deliberately been placed within inverted commas in order to stress that it is not a scientific term. Whereas it was for some time fashionable to divide humanity into four main races, and racial labels are still used to classify people in some countries (such as the USA), modern genetics tends not to speak of races. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). In other words, there is in many respects greater genetic variation within a 'racial' group than there is systematic variation between two groups. Third, no serious scholar today believes that hereditary characteristics explain cultural variations. The contemporary neo-Darwinist views in social science often lumped together under the heading 'evolutionary psychology' (see e.g. Buss, 2005), are with few exceptions strongly universalist; they generally argue that people everywhere have the same inborn abilities, and that interesting variations exist at the level of the individual, not that of the group.
Concepts of race can nevertheless be relevant to the extent that they inform people's actions; at this level, race exists as a cultural construct, whether it has a biological reality or not (see also Banks, 1996: 54; Jenkins, 2008: 23–4). Racism, obviously, builds on the assumption that personality is somehow linked with hereditary characteristics which differ systematically between 'races', and in this way race may assume sociological importance even if it has no 'objective' existence. Social scientists who study race relations in Great Britain and the United States need not themselves believe in the objective existence of racial difference, since their object of study is the social and cultural relevance of the notion that race exists, in other words the social construction of race. If influential people in a society had developed a similar theory about the hereditary personality traits of red-haired people, and if that theory gained social and cultural significance, 'redhead studies' would for similar reasons have become a field of academic research, even if the researchers themselves did not agree that redheads were different from others in a relevant way. In societies where ideas of race are important, they must therefore be studied as part of local discourses on ethnicity.
Should the study of race relations, in this meaning of the word, be distinguished from the study of ethnicity or ethnic relations? Pierre van den Berghe (1983) does not think so, but would rather regard 'race' relations as a special case of ethnicity. Others, among them Michael Banton (1967), have argued the need to distinguish between race and ethnicity. In Banton's view, race refers to the (negative) categorisation of people, while ethnicity has to do with (positive) group identification. He argues that ethnicity is generally more concerned with the identification of 'us', while racism is more oriented to the categorisation of 'them' (Banton, 1983: 106; cf. Jenkins, 1986: 177). This would imply that race is a negative term of exclusion, while ethnic identity is a term of positive inclusion. However, ethnicity can assume many forms, and since ethnic ideologies tend to stress common descent among their members, the distinction between race and ethnicity is a problematic one, even if Banton's distinction between groups and categories can be useful (see chapter 3). Nobody would suggest that the horrors of Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s were racial, but they were certainly ethnic – in other words, there is no inherent reason why ethnicity should be more benign than race. Besides, the boundaries between race and ethnicity tend to be blurred, since ethnic groups have a common myth of origin, which relates ethnicity to descent, which again makes it a kindred concept to race. It could moreover be argued that some 'racial' groups are ethnified, such as American blacks who have gradually come to be known as African-Americans; but also that some ethnic groups are racialised, as when immutable traits are accorded to ethnic minorities; and finally, there are strong tendencies towards the ethnification of certain religious groups, such as European Muslims. Formerly known by their ethnic origin, they are increasingly lumped together as primarily 'Muslims'. Finally, Martin Barker's notion of new racism (Barker, 1981; cf. also Fenton, 1999: chapter 2) seems to elide the distinction. The new racism talks of cultural difference instead of inherited characteristics, but uses it for the same purposes; to justify a hierarchical ordering of groups in society.
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