Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions

Marcus Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134899609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Ethnicity has been a key concept in anthropology and sociology for many years, yet many people still seem uncertain as to its meaning, its relevance, and its relationship to other concepts such as `race' and nationalism. In Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions the major anthropological and sociological approaches to ethnicity, covering much of the significant literature and leading authors, are outlined clearly and concisely.

Chapter 1

Introduction: basic positions and the life of an idea

Quite suddenly, with little comment or ceremony, ethnicity is an ubiquitous presence. Even a brief glance through titles of books and monographs over the past few years indicates a steadily accelerating acceptance and application of the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic’ to refer to what was before often subsumed under ‘culture’, ‘cultural’, or ‘tribal’.

(Ronald Cohen 1978:379)

Despite Cohen's confident assertion it now seems clear, some fifteen years later, that he was describing a rather transient phenomenon. Certainly, books and monographs are still published that contain the key terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic’ in their titles, but my impression is that they are less common than they were in the heyday of the 1970s. Anthropological interests have moved on since then and new topics and theoretical interests have seized the imagination. Ethnicity is not necessarily relevant to these new interests or, if it is, it has yet to be demonstrated.

Yet ethnicity continues to fascinate and perplex, particularly students of anthropology who sometimes feel bewildered by the vast and disjointed range of possible reading recommended to them. The purpose of this book is not to offer a startling or radical new interpretation of ethnicity, but to attempt to summarize and link much of the important work that has already been done. The linkage is not always easy. A number of disciplines have contributed to our understanding of ethnicity—anthropology, sociology and social geography are the major ones, but there have also been contributions from social psychology, sociobiology, social work and educational theory, and even literary studies. I could not possibly hope to cover all these disciplines and my major focus is therefore on anthropology and sociology.

The area I could perhaps have covered but didn't is sociobiology. Here there is only one author of real significance, Pierre Van den Berghe. Van den Berghe himself has provided a handy summary and overview of his work and the debate it has caused (1986), together with a significant book-length study (1981). Other contributions on the relationship between biology and ethnicity can be found in Kirkwood et al. (1983) and Chapman (1993a). It is always possible that such biological approaches will come to assume a position of dominance within anthropology, but for the moment they constitute a rather self-contained sub-field. The exception to this is the public, rather than the academic, discourse on ethnicity. I touch on this briefly at points through the book and have a more substantial discussion in Chapter 6.

WHY ANOTHER BOOK ON ETHNICITY?

Even within social anthropology the linkage between various approaches to the study of ethnicity is not always obvious. Even a cursory glance at the literature reveals that there are several authors—past and present—who have written in apparent ignorance of the work of other authors who claim to be writing about the same issue. One occasionally gets the sense that the wheel has been invented several times over. I will return to the issue of parallel strands of scholarship below, but first a brief account of my own motivation in writing this book.

As an undergraduate anthropology student in the 1970s I had learned about ethnicity from Sue Benson (author of Ambiguous ethnicity [1981]) and Esther Goody (among other things, the co-author of an article in the James Watson volume, Between two cultures [1977a]). They had taught me about Frederik Barth and from them and others I learned about the Manchester School's work in southern Africa (both discussed in Chapter 2), but I was also stimulated by their discussions of minority groups overseas or as ethnic enclaves within wider nation states. From Caroline Humphrey I learned about the Soviet Union and the ‘nationality problem’ (also discussed in Chapter 2).

Influenced by all three I went on to doctoral studies, originally concentrating on a migrant Gujarati religious group in Britain, although I later went to India and studied members of the same group there. Gradually, Frederik Barth and the Manchester School faded from my memory as I began to read studies of Asian and other minority migrant groups in Britain and to concentrate on the ‘race and ethnic relations’ literature (discussed in Chapter 3). I had no difficulty in describing at least part of my work as the study of ‘ethnicity’; before I had finished my doctorate I attended a conference on ‘Gujarati ethnicity’ which was entirely concerned with overseas Gujaratis, there being not one paper on Gujaratis in Gujarat. I had not sat down to consider what the kind of ‘ethnicity’ I was now involved with had to do with the kind of ‘ethnicity’ that Barth was describing. Nor, it seemed, had any of the other participants at the Gujarati ethnicity symposium—certainly none of the papers referenced Barth.

In October 1987 I came to Oxford to take up a temporary post in anthropology, following the sudden death of one of the university's many distinguished anthropologists, Edwin Ardener. Shortly after I arrived, a one-day symposium on ‘Ethnographic approaches to ethnicity’ was organized by some of Edwin's former colleagues and students and, as his replacement and as one who listed ‘ethnicity’ as an interest, I was encouraged to attend. As the day wore on I became more and more ill at ease. I was reminded of an episode from my doctoral fieldwork in Britain when I had gone to attend an event organized by ‘my’ group but had mistakenly entered the wrong room where an entirely different Gujarati religious group was holding a meeting. It was at the start of my fieldwork and I knew few faces and had little grasp of Gujarati, but I struggled for an hour or more to make sense of what was going on before my mistake began to dawn on me. I was wondering if I should explain myself or simply slip out quietly when a member of ‘my’ group put his head round the door and rescued me. I had a similar feeling at the Oxford symposium. I recognized some of the words (particularly ‘ethnicity’) and had heard of some of the participants, but I couldn't seem to get a handle on what they were talking about. Undoubtedly, the fact that I was new to Oxford and its ways contributed to my feeling of being in the wrong place, but there was no one this time to rescue me.

It was when I encountered this third kind of ‘ethnicity’ at the Oxford symposium (discussed in Chapter 5) that I began to think that there might be some crossed wires somewhere. This book is an attempt to uncross those wires and to disentangle several strains of anthropological discourse on ethnicity. Even within the anthropological literature, I have chosen to discuss only a few works. For the most part these are the most popular and well-read works and therefore will be familiar—at least by title—to an undergraduate or new reader. This book is not, therefore, a comprehensive catalogue of everything anthropologists have had to say about ethnicity. It is instead an attempt to draw a basic ground plan which will allow readers, and particularly students new to the discipline, to place other texts with ‘ethnicity’ in the title (and—as I discuss in Chapter 5—those without) that they may come across.

BASIC POSITIONS

Before I outline the approach that will govern the structure of this book, let us start with a selection of definitions and comments, culled from a wide spread of literature and written from a variety of theoretical approaches:

Ethnicity may be evaluated almost entirely upon a biological basis or upon purely social characteristics. Negroes tend to be at the first extreme, since they are most physically variant of all the groups in the community, and the Irish at the other extreme since they are most like the native white stock.

(Warner and Lunt 1942:73)

The term ‘ethnicity’ refers to strife between…ethnic groups, in the course of which people stress their identity and exclusiveness.

(Abner Cohen 1969:4)

[Ethnic identity] is imperative, in that it cannot be disregarded and temporarily set aside by other definitions of the situation.

(Barth 1969b: 17)

[E]thnicity is a social identity characterized by fictive kinship.

(Yelvington 1991:168)

The phenomenon of ethnicity is evidently much more complex than earlier analyses allowed.

(Epstein 1978:5)

One senses a term still on the move.

(Glazer and Moynihan 1975b: 1)

[Ethnicity] is a term that half-heartedly aspires to describe phenomena that involve everybody, and that nevertheless has settled in the vocabulary as a marker of strangeness and unfamiliarity.

(Chapman et al. 1989:16)

…it may be that ‘ethnicity’ is so vague, and so variously used, a term that its definition can only be stipulative and arguments against its definition only sterile.

(Anthony Cohen 1985:107)

In sum, ethnicity labels the visibility of that aspect of the identity formation process that is produced by and subordinated to nationalist programs and plans—plans intent on creating putative homogeneity out of heterogeneity through the appropriate processes of a transformist hegemony.

(B. Williams 1989:439)

‘Ethnicity’ and ‘race’ are terms which cover many sins. Both terms suggest biological relationships between those identified with one or another group or classed together in one category; both terms suggest that there are social and sometimes cultural dimensions.

(Zenner 1985:117)

…a collection of rather simplistic and obvious statements about boundaries, otherness, goals and achievements, being and identity, descent and classification, that has been constructed as much by the anthropologist as by the subject.

(this book, Chapter 7, p. 190)

These are eleven of literally dozens of quotations I could have used. They exemplify several of the difficulties I experienced in trying to write this book, and several of the issues raised in the following chapters. The first quotation is really only of historical interest, as it is possibly the first use of the word ‘ethnicity’ in the sense we understand it today (the OED makes reference to a rare earlier meaning of ‘heathen superstition’ from 1772). After the initial confidence of the first two or three quotations, it is startling how quickly and often the term comes to be doubted. By the 1980s it is not so much a term ‘on the move’, as Glazer and Moynihan describe, but a term under fire. The two penultimate quotations sound a slightly more positive note by seeking to understand ethnicity within the context of two other terms with which it has come to be associated—‘race’ and nationalism. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with these associations in more detail. The final quotation, taken from the last page of this book, is not so much a definition as a comment and not, I admit, a particularly illuminating one. I won't enlarge on it here, and it should be read in the context of the book as a whole (just as all the other quotations should, of course, be read in their own proper contexts).

I selected quotations that specifically talked of ‘ethnicity’—the quality of being ethnic, not of the adjective ethnic itself. Is there any point in distinguishing sharply between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic group’, if we assume like many authors (for example, Abner Cohen 1969:4; Chapman et al. 1989:11) that the former is what the latter has or expresses? Certainly there are a number of earlier writings (for example, those of the early Manchester School discussed in Chapter 2) which make use of ‘ethnic (group)’ without feeling the need for an associated abstract noun, and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, it is the adjective and not the noun that has largely entered public discourse. There are also writings on ethnicity which make little or no reference to an associated adjective or which are dismissive of the whole concept of ‘ethnic groups’ (for example, Jenkins [1986]). It is not my intention in this book to cover the descriptive literature on ‘ethnic groups’, and although I am forced to use terms such as ‘group’, ‘population’ and even ‘ethnic group’ on occasion I am wary of the sociological reductionism involved. I do not think that ethnicity is simply a quality of groups, and for the most part I tend to treat it as an analytical tool, devised and used by academics.

THIS BOOK: STRUCTURE AND CONTENT

The book is organized into five main chapters, together with this introduction and a brief conclusion. In Chapter 2 I discuss some of the earliest and most influential writings on ethnicity. These writings conform most closely to the traditional anthropological paradigm of a European or American anthropologist travelling to a remote or exotic part of the world (that is, remote or exotic to the anthropologist) to study the people who live there. The exception to this pattern comes with a group of Soviet anthropologists whom I consider mostly for their contribution to theory rather than practice. The ethnographic focus in this chapter is broad, but concentrates mostly on Pakistan, the Soviet Union and south-central Africa. In Chapters 3 and 4 I turn to a consideration of a rather different literature, one that has been created as much by sociologists as anthropologists. The ethnographic focus here is on ‘ethnic minorities’ in the United States and Britain. These chapters introduce the subject of ‘race’ and its relationship to ethnicity.

In Chapter 5 I introduce another new theme—nationalism—and again examine its relationship to ethnicity. The ethnographic focus here is on the sub-national populations of Europe. Chapter 6 extends the discussion of the previous chapters by examining constructions of ‘race’, ethnicity and nationalism in everyday language and behaviour, away from the analytical constructions of academics. I present two case studies in this chapter: the first looks at the meanings and uses of the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ in press reports of the Bosnian conflict; the second outlines a dispute over multicultural education policy in Britain in the 1980s and again draws upon press reports. Finally, Chapter 7 offers some brief comments on thinking about ethnicity as an academic construct.

In a wide-ranging survey of literature such as this the material could be organized in a variety of ways. I could, for example, have taken the ethnography as my starting point and grouped my discussions around ethnographic focal points—either geographical (all the literature on Africa, followed by all the literature on Europe, and so on), or somehow topic focused (all the situations where there is ecological interdependen...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Tilte
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: basic positions and the life of an idea
• 2 Ethnicity unearthed
• 3 Ethnicity and race in the United States
• 4 Ethnicity and race in Britain
• 5 Ethnicity and nationalism
• 6 Ethnicity unbound
• 7 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index