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Did You Know This? - 6
What is Ethnicity
According to Anthropologists?
By Thomas
Hylland Eriksen (1993)
Nharnet Team (March 10, 2005)
(Ethnicity is
one of the terms many Eritreans are nowadays using with high
frequency. Nharnet.com is pleased to present to its readers a
material on that subject written from an anthropologist’s perspective.
Author Eriksen states and questions: “
The word ‘ethnic group’ has come to mean something like ‘a people’. But
what is a people?”
He attempts to provide an answer based on
anthropological perspective. Good reading.)
***
Words like "ethnic groups",
"ethnicity" and "ethnic conflict" have become quite common terms in the
English language, and they keep cropping up in the press, in TV news, in
political programmes and in casual conversations. The same can be said
for "nation" and "nationalism", and many of us have to admit that the
meaning of these terms frequently seems ambiguous and vague.
There has been a parallel development in the social sciences. During the
1980s and early 1990s, we have witnessed an explosion in the growth of
scholarly publications on ethnicity and nationalism, particularly in the
fields of political science, history, sociology and social anthropology.
In the case of social anthropology, ethnicity has been a main
preoccupation since the late 1960s, and it remains a central focus for
research in the 1990s. In [Thomsa Hylland Eriksen’s book of 1993 is
emphasized] the importance of anthropological approaches to the study of
ethnicity. Through its dependence on long-term fieldwork, 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. Ethnicity emerges and is made
relevant through ongoing 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. Anthropological
approaches also 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 as well as other groups, and how particular world-views
are being maintained or contested. The significance of ethnic membership
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 ethnic phenomena. It thereby provides 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, many social theorists held that ethnicity and
nationalism would decrease in importance and eventually vanish as a
result of modernisation, industrialisation and individualism. This never
came about. On the contrary, ethnicity and nationalism have grown in
political importance in the world, particularly since the Second World
War.
Thirty-five of the thirty-seven major armed conflicts in the world in
1991 were internal conflicts, and most of them - from Sri Lanka to
Northern Ireland - could plausibly be described as ethnic conflicts. In
addition to violent ethnic movements, there are also many important
non-violent ethnic movements, such as the Québecois independence
movement in Canada. In many parts of the world, further, nation-building
- the creation of political cohesion and national identity in former
colonies - is high on the political agenda. Ethnic and national
identities also become strongly pertinent 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. During the same period, indigenous populations such as
Inuits ("Eskimos") and Sami ("Lapps") have organised themselves
politically, and demand that their ethnic identities and territorial
entitlements should be recognised by the State. Finally, the political
turbulence in Europe has moved issues of ethnic and national identities
to the forefront of political life. At one extreme of the continent, the
erstwhile Soviet Union has split into over a dozen ethnically based
states. With the disappearance of the strong Socialist state in the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe, issues of nationhood and
minority problems are emerging with unprecedented force. On the other
extreme of the continent, the situation seems to be the opposite, as the
nation-states of Western Europe are moving towards a closer economic,
political and possibly cultural integration. But here, too, national and
ethnic identities have become important issues in recent years. Many
people fear the loss of their national or ethnic identity as a result of
a tight European integration, whereas others consider the possibilities
for a pan-European identity to replace the ethnic and national ones.
During the electoral campaign preceding the Danish referendum on
European Union in June 1992, a main anti-EU slogan was: "I want a
country to be European in". This slogan suggests that personal
identities are intimately linked with political processes and that
social identities, e.g. as Danes or Europeans, are not given once and
for all, but are negotiated over. Both of these insights are crucial to
the study of ethnicity.
[Eriksen’s book shows] how social anthropology can shed light on
concrete issues of ethnicity; which questions social anthropologists ask
in relation to ethnic phenomena, and how they proceed to answer them.
Some of the questions it discusses are:
· How do ethnic groups remain distinctive under different social
conditions?
· Under which circumstances does ethnicity become important?
· What is the relationship between ethnic identity and ethnic political
organisation?
· Is nationalism always a form of ethnicity?
· What is the relationship between ethnicity and other types of
identity, social classification and political organisation, such as
class and gender?
· What happens to ethnic relations when societies are industrialised?
· In which ways can history be important in the creation of ethnicity?
· What is the relationship between ethnicity and culture?
The term itself
"Ethnicity seems to be a new term", state Nathan Glazer and Daniel
Moynihan (1975: 1), who point to the fact that the term's earliest
dictionary appearance is in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Its
first usage is attributed to the American sociologist David Riesman in
1953. The word "ethnic", however, is much older. The word 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-14th century until the
mid-19th 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 group of largely
British descent. None of the founding fathers of sociology and social
anthropology - with the partial exception of Max Weber - granted
ethnicity much attention.
Since the 1960s, ethnic groups and ethnicity have become household words
in Anglophone social anthropology, although, as Ronald Cohen (1978) has
remarked, few of those who use the terms bother to define them.
[Examined in Eriksen’s book are] a number of approaches to ethnicity.
Most of them are closely related, although they may serve different
analytical purposes. All of the approaches 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 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.
Ethnicity, race and nation
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 has dubious descriptive
value. Whereas it was for some time common to divide humanity into four
main races, modern genetics tends not to speak of races, and this has
two main reasons. First, there has always been so much interbreeding
between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed
boundaries between races. Secondly, the distribution of hereditary
physical traits does not follow clear boundaries....
The relationship between the terms ethnicity and nationality is nearly
as complex as that between ethnicity and race. Like the words ethnic and
race, the word nation has a long history (R. Williams, 1976: 213-214),
and has been used in a variety of different meanings in English. We
shall refrain from discussing these meanings here, and will concentrate
on the sense in which nation and nationalism are used analytically in
academic discourse. Like ethnic ideologies, nationalism stresses the
cultural similarity of its adherents, and by implication, it draws
boundaries vis-a-vis others, who thereby become outsiders. The
distinguishing mark of nationalism is by definition its relationship to
the state. A nationalist holds that political boundaries should be
coterminous with cultural boundaries, whereas many ethnic groups do not
demand command over a state. When the political leaders of an ethnic
movement place demands to this effect, the ethnic movement therefore by
definition becomes a nationalist movement.
Ethnicity and class
The term ethnicity refers to relationships between groups whose members
consider themselves distinctive, and these groups may be ranked
hierarchically within a society. It is therefore necessary to
distinguish clearly between ethnicity and social class.
In the literature of social science, there are two main definitions of
classes. One derives from Karl Marx, the other from Max Weber. Sometimes
elements from the two definitions are combined.
The Marxist view of social classes emphasises economic aspects. A social
class is defined according to its relationship to the productive process
in society. In capitalist societies, according to Marx, there are three
main classes. First, there is the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, whose
members own the means of production (factories, tools and machinery,
etc.) and buy other people's labour-power (i.e. employ them). Secondly,
there is the petit-bourgeoisie, whose members own means of production
but do not employ others. Owners of small shops are typical examples.
The third, and most numerous class, is the proletariat or working class,
whose members depend upon selling their labour-power to a capitalist for
their livelihood. There are also other classes, notably the aristocracy,
whose members live by land interest, and the lumpenproletariat, which
consists of unemployed and underemployed people - vagrants and the like.
Since Marx' time in the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of classes
has been developed in several directions. Its adherents nevertheless
still stress the relationship to property in their delineation of
classes. A further central feature of this theory is the notion of class
struggle. Marx and his followers held that oppressed classes would
eventually rise against the oppressors, overthrow them through a
revolution, and alter the political order and the social organisation of
labour. This, in Marx' view, was the main way in which societies
evolved.
The Weberian view of social classes, which has partly developed into
theories of social stratification, combines several criteria in
delineating classes, including income, education and political
influence. Unlike Marx, Weber did not regard classes as potential
corporate groups; he did not believe that members of social classes
necessarily would have shared political interests. Weber preferred to
speak of status groups rather than classes.
Theories of social class always refer to systems of social ranking and
distribution of power. Ethnicity, on the contrary, does not necessarily
refer to rank; ethnic relations may well be egalitarian in this regard.
Still, many poly-ethnic societies are ranked according to ethnic
membership. The criteria for such ranking are nevertheless different
from class ranking: they refer to imputed cultural differences or
"races", not to property or achieved statuses.
There may be a high correlation between ethnicity and class, which means
that there is a high likelihood that persons belonging to specific
ethnic groups also belong to specific social classes. There can be a
significant interrelationship between class and ethnicity, both class
and ethnicity can be criteria for rank, and ethnic membership can be an
important factor for class membership. Both class differences and ethnic
differences can be pervasive features of societies, but they are not one
and the same thing and must be distinguished from one another
analytically.
The current concern with ethnicity
If one runs a word search programme through a representative sample of
English-language anthropological publications since 1950, one will note
significant changes in the frequency of a number of keywords. Words like
"structure" and "function", for example, have gradually grown
unfashionable, whereas Marxist terms like "base and superstructure",
"means of production" and "class struggle" were popular from around 1965
until the early 1980s. Terms like "ethnicity", "ethnic" and "ethnic
group", for their part, have steadily grown in currency since the mid-
to late 1960s. There may be two main causes for this. One of them is
change in the social world, while the other concerns changes in the
dominant way of thinking in social anthropology.
Whereas classical social anthropology, as exemplified in the works of
Malinowski, Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard and
others, would characteristically focus on single "tribal" societies,
changes in the world after the Second World War have brought many of
these societies into increased contact with each other, with the state
and with global society. Many of the peoples studied by social
anthropologists have become involved in national liberation movements or
ethnic conflicts in post-colonial states. Many of them, formerly
regarded as "tribes" or "aboriginals", have become "ethnic minorities".
Many former members of tribal or traditional groups have also migrated
to Europe or North America, where their relationships with the host
societies have been studied extensively by sociologists, social
psychologists and social anthropologists.
Some ethnic groups have moved to towns or regional centres where they
are brought into contact with people with other customs, languages and
identities, and where they frequently enter into competitive
relationships in politics and the labour market. Frequently, people who
migrate try to maintain their old kinship and neighbourhood social
networks in the new urban context, and both ethnic quarters and ethnic
policical groupings often emerge in such urban settings. Although the
speed of social and cultural change can be high, people tend to retain
their ethnic identity despite having moved to a new environment. This
kind of social change has been investigated in a series of pioneering
studies in North American cities from the 1920s and in Southern Africa
from the early 1940s, and we will return to these studies in the next
chapter.
In an influential study of ethnic identity in the United States,
Glazer and Moynihan (1963) stated that the most important point to be
made about the "American melting-pot" is that it never occurred. They
argue that rather than eradicating ethnic differences, modern American
society has actually created a new awareness in people, a concern about
roots and origins. Moreover, many Americans continue to use their ethnic
networks actively when looking for jobs or a spouse. Many prefer to live
in neighbourhoods dominated by people with the same origins as
themselves, and they continue to regard themselves as "Italians",
"Poles" etc., in addition to being Americans - two generations or more
after their ancestors left the country of origin.
A main insight from anthropological research has been that ethnic
organisation and identity, rather than being "primordial" phenomena
radically opposed to modernity and the modern state, are frequently
reactions to processes of modernisation. As Jonathan Friedman has put
it, "[e]thnic and cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization
are not two arguments, two opposing views of what is happening in the
world today, but two constitutive trends of global reality" (Friedman,
1990: 311).
Does this mean that ethnicity is chiefly a modern phenomenon? This is a
tricky, but highly relevant question. The contemporary ethnic processes
referred to above can be described as modern in character. In an
influential statement on political ethnicity, Abner Cohen (1974a) has
argued that the concept is perhaps most useful in the study of the
development of new political cultures in situations of social change in
the "Third World". However, important studies of ethnicity have been
carried out in non-modern, non-Western societies as well.
The contemporary concern with ethnicity and ethnic processes is partly
related to historical changes such as the ones mentioned above. It could
nevertheless also be argued that the growing interest in ethnicity
reflects changes in the dominant anthropological mode of thought.
Instead of viewing "societies" or even "cultures" as more or less
isolated, static and homogeneous units as the early
structural-functionalists would tend to, many anthropologists now try to
depict flux and process, ambiguity and complexity in their analyses of
social worlds. In this context, ethnicity has proven a highly useful
concept, since it suggests a dynamic situation of variable contact and
mutual accommodation between groups.
From tribe to ethnic group
As mentioned, there has been a shift in Anglophone social
anthropological terminology concerning the nature of the social units we
study. While one formerly spoke of "tribes", the term "ethnic group" is
nowadays much more common. Ronald Cohen remarks: "Quite suddenly, with
little comment or ceremony, ethnicity is an ubiquitous presence" (R.
Cohen, 1978: 379). This switch in terminology implies more than a mere
replacement of a word with another. Notably, the use of the term "ethnic
group" suggests contact and interrelationship. To speak of an ethnic
group in total isolation is as absurd as to speak of the sound from one
hand clapping (cf. Bateson, 1979: 78). By definition, ethnic groups
remain more or less discrete from each other, but they are aware of -
and in contact with - members of other ethnic groups. Moreover, these
groups or categories are in a sense created through that very contact.
Group identities must always be defined in relation to that which they
are not - in other words, in relation to non-members of the group.
The terminological switch from "tribe" to "ethnic group" may also
mitigate or even transcend an ethnocentric or Eurocentric bias which
anthropologists have often been accused of promoting covertly. When we
talk of tribes, we implicitly introduce a sharp, qualitative distinction
between ourselves and the people we study; the distinction generally
corresponds to the distinction between modern and traditional or
"primitive" societies. If we instead talk of ethnic groups or
categories, such a sharp distinction becomes difficult to maintain.
Virtually every human being belongs to an ethnic group, whether he or
she lives in Europe, Melanesia or Central America. There are ethnic
groups in English cities, in the Bolivian countryside and in the New
Guinea highlands.
Anthropologists themselves belong to ethnic groups or nations. Moreover,
the concepts and models used in the study of ethnicity can often be
applied to modern as well as non-modern contexts, to Western as well as
non-Western societies. In this sense, the concept of ethnicity can be
said to bridge two important gaps in social anthropology: it entails a
focus on dynamics rather than statics, and it relativises the boundaries
between "us" and "them", between moderns and tribals.
What is ethnicity?
When we talk of ethnicity, we indicate that groups and identities have
developed in mutual contact rather than in isolation. But what is the
nature of such groups?
When A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn investigated the various meanings
of culture in the early 1950s (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952), they found
about three hundred different definitions. Although Ronald Cohen is
correct in stating that most of whose who write on ethnicity do not
bother to define the term, the extant number of definitions is already
high - and it is growing (B. Williams, 1989a). .... As a starting-point,
let us examine the recent development of the term as it is being used by
social anthropologists.
The word "ethnic group" has come to mean something like "a people".
But what is a people? Does the population of Britain constitute a
people, does it comprise several peoples (as Nairn, 1977, tends to
argue), or does it rather form part of a Germanic, or an
English-speaking, or a European people? All of these positions may have
their defenders, and this very ambiguity in the designation of peoples
has been taken on as a challenge by anthropologists. In a study of
ethnic relations in Thailand, Michael Moerman (1965) asks himself: "Who
are the Lue?" The Lue were the ethnic group his research focused on, but
when he tried to describe who they were - in which ways they were
distinctive from other ethnic groups - he quickly ran into trouble. His
problem, a very common one in contemporary social anthropology,
concerned the boundaries of the group. After listing a number of
criteria commonly used by anthropologists to demarcate cultural groups,
such as language, political organisation and territorial contiguity, he
states: "Since language, culture, political organization, etc., do not
correlate completely, the units delimited by one criterion do not
coincide with the units delimited by another" (Moerman, 1965: 1215).
When he asked individual Lue what were their typical characteristics,
they would mention cultural traits which they in fact shared with other,
neighbouring groups. They lived in close interaction with other groups
in the area; they had no exclusive livelihood, no exclusive language, no
exclusive customs, no exclusive religion. Why was it appropriate to
describe them as an ethnic group? After posing these problems, Moerman
was forced to conclude that "[s]omeone is Lue by virtue of believing
and calling himself Lue and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness"
(Moerman, 1965: 1219). Being unable to argue that this "Lueness" can be
defined with reference to objective cultural features or clear-cut
boundaries, Moerman defines it as an emic category of ascription. This
way of delineating ethnic groups has become very influential in social
anthropology.
Does this imply that ethnic groups do not necessarily have a distinctive
culture? Can two groups be culturally identical and yet constitute two
different ethnic groups? This is a complicated question... At this
point, we should note that contrary to a widespread commonsense view,
cultural difference between two groups is not the decisive feature of
ethnicity. Two distinctive, endogamous groups, say, somewhere in New
Guinea, may well have widely different languages, religious beliefs and
even technologies, but that does not entail that there is an ethnic
relationship between them. For ethnicity to come about, the groups must
have a minimum of contact between them, and they must entertain ideas of
each other as being culturally different from themselves. If these
conditions are not fulfilled, there is no ethnicity, for ethnicity is
essentially an aspect of a relationship, not a property of a group.
Conversely, some groups may seem culturally similar, yet there can be a
socially highly relevant (and even volatile) inter-ethnic relationship
between them. This would be the case of the relationship between Serbs
and Croats following the break-up of Yugoslavia, or of the tension
between coastal Sami and Norwegians. There may also be considerable
cultural variation within a group without ethnicity (Blom, 1969). Only
in so far as cultural differences are perceived as being important, and
are made socially relevant, do social relationships have an ethnic
element.
Ethnicity is an aspect of social relationship between agents who
consider themselves as being culturally distinctive from members of
other groups with whom they have a minimum of regular interaction.
It can thus also be defined as a social identity (based on a contrast
vis-a-vis others) characterised by metaphoric or fictive kinship (Yelvington,
1991: 168). When cultural differences regularly make a difference in
interaction between members of groups, the social relationship has an
ethnic element. Ethnicity refers both to aspects of gain and loss in
interaction, and to aspects of meaning in the creation of identity. In
this way, it has a political, organisational aspect as well as a
symbolic one.
Ethnic groups tend to have myths of common origin, and they nearly
always have ideologies encouraging endogamy, which may nevertheless be
of highly varying practical importance.
"Kinds" of ethnic relations?
This very general and tentative definition of ethnicity lumps together a
great number of very different social phenomena. My relationship with my
Pakistani greengrocer has an ethnic aspect; so, it could be argued, do
the war in former Yugoslavia and "race riots" in American cities. Do
these phenomena have anything interesting in common, justifying that we
compare them within a single conceptual framework? The answer is both
yes and no. One of the contentions from anthropological studies of
ethnicity is that there may be mechanisms of ethnic processes which are
relatively uniform in every inter-ethnic situation: to this effect, we
can identify certain shared formal properties in all ethnic phenomena.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the substantial social
contexts of ethnicity differ enormously, and indeed that ethnic
identities and ethnic organisations themselves may have highly variable
importance in different societies, for different persons and in
different situations. We should nevertheless keep in mind that the point
of anthropological comparison is not necessarily to establish
similarities between societies, but it can also be to reveal important
differences. In order to discover such differences, we must initially
possess some kind of measuring-stick, a constant or a conceptual
bridgehead, which can be used as a basis of comparison. If we first know
what we mean by ethnicity, we can then use the concept as a common
denominator for societies and social contexts which are otherwise very
different. The concept of ethnicity can in this way not only teach us
something about similarity, but also about differences.
Although the concept of ethnicity should always have the same meaning
lest it ceases to be useful in comparison, it is inevitable that we
distinguish between the social contexts under scrutiny. Some interethnic
contexts in different societies are very similar and may seem easily
comparable, whereas others differ profoundly. In order to give an idea
of the variation, I shall briefly describe some typical empirical foci
of ethnic studies, some "kinds of ethnic groups", so to speak. This list
is not exhaustive.
(a) Urban ethnic minorities. This category would include, among others,
non-European immigrants in European cities and Hispanics in the United
States, as well as migrants to industrial towns in Africa and elsewhere.
Research on immigrants has focused on problems of adaptation, on ethnic
discrimination from the host society, racism, and issues relating to
identity management and cultural change. Anthropologists who have
investigated urbanisation in Africa have focused on change and
continuity in political organisation and social identity following
migration to totally new settings. Although they have political
interests, these ethnic groups rarely demand political independence or
statehood, and they are as a rule integrated into a capitalist system of
production and consumption.
(b) Indigenous peoples. This word is a blanket term for aboriginal
inhabitants of a territory, who are politically relatively powerless and
who are only partially integrated into the dominant nation-state.
Indigenous peoples are associated with a non-industrial mode of
production and a stateless political system (Minority Rights Group,
1990). The Basques of the Bay of Biscay and the Welsh of Great Britain
are not considered indigenous populations, although they are certainly
as indigenous, technically speaking, as the Sami of northern Scandinavia
or the Jívaro of the Amazon basin. The concept "indigenous people" is
thus not an accurate analytical one, but rather one drawing on broad
family resemblances and contemporary political issues.
(c) Proto-nations ("ethnonationalist" movements). These groups, the most
famous of ethnic groups in the news media of the 1990s, include Kurds,
Sikhs, Palestinians and Sri Lankan Tamils, and their number is growing.
By definition, these groups have political leaders who claim that they
are entitled to their own nation-state and should not be "ruled by
others". These groups, short of having a nation-state, may be said to
have more substantial characteristics in common with nations than with
either urban minorities or indigenous peoples. They are always
territorially based; they are differentiated according to class and
educational achievement, and they are large groups. In accordance with
common terminology, these groups may be described as "nations without a
state". Anthropologists have studied such movements in a number of
societies, including Euzkadi or Basque Country (Heiberg, 1989), Brittany
(McDonald, 1989) and Québec (Handler, 1988).
(d) Ethnic groups in "plural societies". The term "plural society"
usually designates colonially created states with culturally
heterogeneous populations (Furnivall, 1948; M. G. Smith, 1965). Typical
plural societies would be Kenya, Indonesia and Jamaica. The groups that
make up the plural society, although they are compelled to participate
in uniform political and economic systems, are regarded as (and regard
themselves as) highly distinctive in other matters. In plural societies,
secessionism is usually not an option, and ethnicity tends to be
articulated as group competition. As Richard Jenkins (1986) has
remarked, most contemporary states could plausibly be considered plural
ones.
The definition of ethnicity proposed earlier would include all of these
"kinds" of groups, no matter how different they are in other respects.
Surely, there are aspects of politics (gain and loss in interaction) as
well as meaning (social identity and belonging) in the ethnic relations
reproduced by urban minorities, indigenous peoples, proto-nations and
the component groups of "plural societies" alike. Despite the great
variations between the problems and substantial characteristics
represented by the respective kinds of groups, the word ethnicity may,
in other words, meaningfully be used as a common denominator for them.
In later chapters, it will be shown how anthropological approaches to
ethnicity may shed light on both similarities and differences between
different social contexts and historical circumstances.
Analytical concepts and "native" concepts
The final problem to be discussed in this chapter concerns the
relationship between anthropological concepts and their subject-matter.
This is a problem with complicated ramifications, and it concerns the
relationships between (i) anthropological theory and "native theory",
(ii) anthropological theory and social organisation, and (iii) "native
theory" and social organisation.
It can be argued that the terminological shift from "tribe" to "ethnic
group" mitigated the formerly strong distinction between "moderns" and
"primitives". The growing anthropological interest in nationalism
entails a further step towards "studying ourselves". For if ethnicity
can be non-modern as well as modern, nationalism must be identified with
the modern age, with the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism as
parallel starting-points. Nationalist slogans, movements and symbols
have later penetrated into the heartlands of anthropological research.
Nationalism, being a modern state ideology, is present in the social
worlds in which the anthropologists themselves live. Although there are
interesting differences between particular nationalisms, nationalism as
such is a modern ideology. When studying nationalism in a foreign
country, it is therefore difficult to use one's own society as an
implicit contrast as anthropologists have frequently done when studying
"exotic" societies. In fact, as Richard Handler (1988) has observed,
nationalism and social science, including anthropology, grew out of the
same historical circumstances of modernisation, industrialisation and
the growth of individualism in the 19th century. For this reason,
Handler argues, it has been difficult for anthropologists to attain
sufficient analytical distance vis-a-vis nationalisms; the respective
concepts and ways of thinking are too closely related (cf. also Herzfeld,
1987; Just, 1989).
Handler's point is also valid in relation to modern ethnopolitical
movements. Their spokesmen tend to invoke a concept of culture which is
in fact often directly inspired by anthropological concepts of culture,
and in some cases they self-consciously present themselves as "tribes"
reminiscent of the "tribes" depicted in classical anthropological
monographs (Roosens, 1989). In these cases, there is an intrinsic
relationship between anthropological theorising and "native theory".
Additionally, when anthropologists study contested issues in their own
societies, there is a real risk that the scholarly conceptual apparatus
will be contaminated by the inaccurate and perhaps ideologically loaded
everyday meanings of the words. For this reason, we should be
particularly cautious in our choice of analytical terms and
interpretations when we study phenomena such as ethnicity and
nationalism.
The points made by Handler and others in relation to the study of
nationalism and modern ethnopolitics, can nevertheless be seen as
general problems of social anthropology. The main problem concerns how
to articulate the relationship between anthropological theory, "native
theory" and social organisation (Mitchell, 1974). In a sense, ethnicity
is created by the analyst when he or she goes out into the world and
poses questions about ethnicity. Had one instead been concerned with
gender, one would doubtless have found aspects of gender instead of
ethnicity. On the other hand, persons or informants who live in the
societies in question may themselves be concerned with issues relating
to ethnicity, and as such the phenomenon clearly does exist outside of
the mind of the observer. But since our concepts, for example ethnicity
and nationalism, are our own inventions, we must not assume that the
actors themselves have the same ideas about the ways in which the world
is constituted - even if they are using the very same words as
ourselves! History and social identity are constructed socially,
sometimes with a very tenuous relationship with established, or at least
official, facts.
There are often discrepancies between what people say and what they do,
and there will nearly always be discrepancies between informants'
descriptions of their society and the anthropologist's description of
the same society. Indeed, many anthropologists (e.g. Holy & Stuchlik,
1983) hold that it is a main goal of our discipline to investigate and
clarify the relationship between notions and actions, or between what
people say and what they do. One may disagree with their "rationalist"
perspective, which seems to assume that a simple, "economic" means-end
rationality underlies all social action, but the general problem remains
important: why is it that people say one thing and then proceed to doing
something entirely different, and how can this be investigated?
This discrepancy is relevant for ethnic studies, and it requires that we
are clear about the distinctions between our own concepts and models,
"native" concepts and models, and social process. In some societies,
people will perhaps deny that there is systematic differential treatment
between members of different groups, although the anthropologist will
discover that such discrimination exists. Conversely, I have met many
Christians in Mauritius who have sworn, in conversations, that they
would (for ostensibly sound reasons) have nothing to do with Muslims;
later on, it has turned out that they in fact entertain quite strong and
sometimes confidential relationships with Muslims. It is, indeed,
frequently contradictions of this kind that lead to anthropological
insights. |
