Rethinking Ethnicity

Richard Jenkins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781473902985
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"A welcome and brilliantly crafted overview of this field. It represents a major advance in our understanding of how ethnicity works in specific social and cultural contexts. The second edition will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers alike."
- John Solomos, City University, London

The first edition of Rethinking Ethnicity quickly established itself as a popular text for students of ethnicity and ethnic relations. This fully revised and updated second edition adds new material on globalization and the recent debates about whether ethnicity matters and ethnic groups actually exist.

While ethnicity - as a social construct - is imagined, its effects are far from imaginary. Jenkins draws on specific examples to demonstrate the social mechanisms that construct ethnicity and the consequences for people?s experience. Drawing upon rich case study material, the book discusses such issues as: the ?myth? of the plural society; postmodern notions of difference; the relationship between ethnicity, ?race? and nationalism; ideology; language; violence and religion; and the everyday construction of national identity.

Arguments

I have been working on matters to do with social identity in general, and ethnic identity in particular, for nearly thirty years. As a social anthropology student, a post-doctoral researcher, and subsequently as a university teacher in sociology and anthropology, I have always been keenly aware of the intellectual and political importance of these topics, and the difficulties which one faces in trying to research and teach about them adequately, openly, and even-handedly.

The questions and issues that I have encountered during this time are not, however, important only in my professional, academic life. These attempts to understand better social identity – and more specifically ethnicity – are part of an ongoing dialogue with my own history and biography, and are the product of personal experience. Coming from a family that, according to the researches of my amateur genealogist sister, mixes English, Welsh and Irish ‘blood’, I was born in Liverpool, moving as an infant to a middle-class suburb of Rotherham, in Yorkshire. From there, at the age of eight, I was brusquely transported to a respectable working-class housing estate on the hilly fringes of Larne, a small Northern Irish town. Identified by my peers as English, in the years between eight and twenty-five I had to learn to understand, if not actually fully participate in, the ethnic subtlety and bluntness of Northern Ireland. On the one hand, to negotiate the boundary between English and Northern Irish; on the other to negotiate the distinction between Protestant and Catholic. While it has been very many years since I have been able to see myself as English, I am not, in any straightforward sense, Irish either. And being Protestant in Larne was a very different thing than it had been in Rotherham.

But Larne eventually became – and remains – home. Northern Ireland is certainly where I feel most ‘at home’. My children were born there: half me, half their Dutch-Indonesian mother. In the peregrinations that followed, they eventually came to call Swansea, in South Wales, home (and I have come to support the Welsh rugby team). In the court of final demands, they continue to call themselves Irish, by dint of place of birth and sentiment, but they do ‘being Welsh’ in many important everyday respects. And as their home, and as the home of some of my dearest friends, Swansea has become in large part home to me also. To add to the personal tale, I now live within ten miles of my childhood Yorkshire home; but I have definitely not ‘come home’. I could add in further complexities – not least with respect to my relationship to a small town in Denmark, where I have spent a great deal of time over the last ten years – but these are perhaps sufficient to show why I am interested in identity, and ethnicity in particular.

There is another kind of genealogy too, which emphasizes two particular moments, one longer-term engagement, and a consistent thread of indebtedness. The first occasion was in the early 1980s. The SSRC Research Unit on Ethnic Relations in Birmingham, where I was a researcher at the time, was running a taught Master’s degree and I ended up doing a few lectures on anthropological approaches to ethnicity. This made me look at issues, concerning anthropology as well as ethnicity, to which – perhaps paradoxically, given the research I was doing at the time and had already done in Belfast – I had hitherto given insufficient attention. Some of what I say in later pages was first said then. The second occasion was ten years on, in March 1992, when I was Visiting Professor in the Institute of Ethnography and Social Anthropology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. A great deal of the thinking that has gone into Chapters 5 and 6, in particular, dates from then. More generally, over the last ten or more years I have spent a good deal of time as the guest of colleagues in Scandinavia, particularly the anthropologists at the Universities of Aarhus, Bergen, Copenhagen and Oslo. I cannot adequately acknowledge the importance of this ‘secondary socialization’ into another, perhaps more congenial, anthropological tradition. In all of these contexts I have been enabled – or required – to revisit, and to engage at close quarters with, the work and thought of Fredrik Barth. The subsequent intellectual debt runs throughout this book.

1	Anthropology and Ethnicity

In this book I am trying to understand better how ethnicity works, taking as my starting point an approach that I call the ‘basic social anthropological model of ethnicity’. The value and potential of this social constructionist model, which is probably most often identified with the work of Fredrik Barth, have not always been acknowledged as widely as they deserve to be. Many of the discussions of ethnicity under the various signs of postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism, for example, appear to draw on core themes of this anthropological model, not least its insights that ethnic identifications are negotiable and the boundaries of ethnic groups imprecise, with little or no acknowledgement, or perhaps even knowledge, of their intellectual genealogy. The sound of a wheel being reinvented, often to the accompaniment of vigorous claims to intellectual novelty and radicalism, has been unmistakable. Nor, in fairness, is it the first time that these particular ‘new’ ideas have been rediscovered. The anthropologists themselves also have a case to answer in this respect, in that their social constructionist model is itself rooted in an earlier sociological literature, particularly Weber and Hughes, that they rarely mention. So there is a lineage to be traced.

As the title suggests, however, I also argue that this basic anthropological approach to understanding ethnicity requires – still, some ten years after the first edition of this book appeared – some rethinking. In particular, we need to recognize, first, that ethnic categorization – the identification of others, in contrast to self- and group identification – is fundamental to how ethnic identification, or indeed any kind of identification, works, and, second, that power and authority are completely basic to how categorization works. Similarly, there is a need to think through ideologies of ethnic identification, and the relationship of ethnicity to cognate identifications such as ‘race’ and national identity.

There is also something to be said about anthropology. Mine is an approach to social anthropology that would probably be understood by many of my disciplinary colleagues – even at a time when anthropology, certainly in the United Kingdom, may be becoming less narrowly disciplinary – as somewhat heterodox. In fact, I know, because some of them have told me, that my identity as an anthropologist is suspect in their eyes. Although formally qualified as a social anthropologist, I have spent most of my teaching career identified – by job title and by most significant others – as a sociologist. I have spent much of that career exploiting and enjoying the creative ambiguities of the intellectual borderlands, doffing and donning disciplinary caps as it suited me. Much of my research has been about topics – class, the labour market, racism – which have been claimed by sociologists and, if they think about them at all, disavowed by most social anthropologists. Theoretically, I owe huge debts to the writings of Max Weber and G.H. Mead, the two great classical theorists who have been most conspicuously neglected by social anthropology. Yet despite this history, and despite occasional moments of irritation with anthropology’s intellectual and professional border police, I have never seen myself as anything other than an anthropologist-doing-sociology (and always doing anthropology too). Fortunately sociology is a sufficiently catholic discipline to tolerate this degree of agnostic pluralism (or, to put it another way, sociology has always allowed me to have my cake and eat it).

If the arguments that I offer in this book are plausible, then the anthropological approach to ethnicity – if nothing else – requires rethinking. Or, rather, because in the ten years since this book’s first publication its impact has probably been greatest outside anthropology, still requires rethinking. Rethinking the topic also might suggest some rethinking, at least, of the discipline. Echoing Edmund Leach’s words in his 1959 inaugural Malinowski Lecture (1961: 1), calls to rethink on a disciplinary scale are vulnerable to interpretation as arrogance. They certainly need to be justified. So, first, a few words about anthropology.

Locating social anthropology

The disciplinary question has two dimensions: the intellectual content of social anthropology and its relationship to cognate disciplines. One matter on which I am not going to dwell is the conventional distinction between social anthropology (largely British) and cultural anthropology (largely American). In the first place, the study of ethnicity is one of the areas in which that distinction has been of least moment. In the second, American anthropology has become more complex and diverse, and more difficult to characterize monolithically. In the third, there is every reason to believe that a new global domain of socio-cultural – or, indeed, culturo-social – anthropology is emerging, in which this fault line has ceased to be of particular importance. This is a development in which European scholars and anthropological traditions have been conspicuous. Although my own background and training are in British social anthropology, and what I have to say is likely to reflect that in places, too much should not be made of this.

With respect to intellectual content, the primary emphasis in anthropology is still, as it has been since the discipline’s inception, upon understanding the cultural Other (defined, historically, from a European or North American cultural viewpoint). Historically, this fascination with the absolute elsewhere is one aspect of the discipline’s roots in the colonial encounter. More interestingly, it has always called for an imaginative leap, and an epistemological daring – which some might, ill-advisedly, call a conceit – that is not always present in its nearest intellectual neighbours.

This, perhaps more than anything else, underpins the anthropological emphasis on the personal experience of ethnographic field research. Every academic discipline is grounded in ontological and epistemological axioms that allow knowable objects of inquiry, and how they are to be known, to be taken for granted as the bedrock of disciplinary reality. The basic epistemological premise of social anthropology is that to understand Others they must be encountered. If the sine qua non of history is engagement with primary sources, the equivalent for anthropology is fieldwork. Long-term participant observation is the source of anthropological epistemological authority. An anthropologist’s claim to know about her research site and the people who live there is typically, in the first instance, personal and experiential: ‘I know because I was there’. Her knowledge is grounded in an ordeal of sorts; fieldwork is a professional rite de passage, a process of initiation. Without the ‘extremely personal traumatic kind of experience’ that is ethnographic fieldwork (Leach again, ibid.), she is unlikely to be recognized by other anthropologists as a full member.

This practical ethnographic emphasis on ‘seeking quietly the local terms of life’, during a ‘patient engagement’ with the everyday lives of others (Dresch and James 2000: 2) has inclined the discipline towards a focus on the details of face-to-face life. ‘Big pictures’ may thus be elusive. How to extend the ethnographer’s view beyond the immediate realities of everyday social settings has probably been a concern for fieldworkers since Malinowski. During the 1990s this concern hardened up around two issues: how to deal with history, and how to grasp globalization. Each had roots in earlier debates about how, ethnographically, to document social changes that play out over longer periods than fieldwork allows for and are rarely specifically local. With respect to history, anthropology long ago abandoned the notion of an ‘ethnographic present’, within which non-modern peoples and communities waited patiently to enter modernity. We no longer believe that there are ‘peoples without history’. The contemporary ethnographic challenge is how to enter into and understand those ongoing histories from the vantage point of everyday life. With respect to globalization, anthropology has moved away from the notional isolation in which it located the people that it studied, towards an appreciation of physical and virtual interconnections and interdependence that is more appropriate to the age. The challenge for the fieldworker has become how to see the global in the local, and vice versa.

Engagements with history and globalization – and this book is concerned with both – have encouraged new reflections on the pragmatics of fieldwork, in a lively literature about ‘anthropological locations’, ‘shifting contexts’ and the ‘construction of the field’ (Amit 2000; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Strathern 1995). Placing ethnography firmly in the ‘wider world’ (Dresch et al. 2000), a central theme of these discussions has been how anthropology should respond to a world in which the time-space coordinates of fieldwork are no longer fixed in settled, bounded communities, in which change, if it happened at all, only happened very slowly. The object of anthropology has, it seems, changed (Fog Olwig and Hastrup 1997).

In fact, there are good reasons for insisting that not much has changed at all. It is not, for example, clear that the small communities and ‘traditional’ cultures of the heroic era of anthropology were, actually, settled, bounded and slow to change. History and archaeology tell us a tale that does not quite match the stereotype. And the modern world is characterized by continuity as well as change, settlement as well as mobility. Perhaps even more to the point, most anthropologists – certainly the overwhelming majority of anthropology graduate students, for whom the ethnographic rite de passage remains the passport to professional employment – continue to do something that resembles ‘traditional’ fieldwork: short- to medium-term participatory engagements with people in relatively compact settings. In other words, anthropological research remains typically ‘local’. And two of the most important distinguishing features of the discipline remain that it is empirical, and that data collection is usually done in the first person.

A comparative, essentially relativist perspective on socio-cultural diversity is also central to anthropology. But perhaps the most important foundational assumption of modern anthropology – its crucial ontological premise – is that human beings, regardless of cultural differences, have more in common with each other than not. This ‘psychic unity’ of humankind allows for the possibility of sufficient cross-cultural understanding for the interpretive and comparative ethnographic enterprises to be epistemologically defensible. Despite a minor failure of epistemological nerve during the last couple of decades, inspired by critiques of ethnographic research practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977, 1990) and apparently sophisticated engagements with self-consciousness and postmodernism during the 1980s, particularly the debate about the (im)possibility of representation (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986), most anthropologists continue to do their field research in the belief that it can be done, however imperfectly. Grimshaw and Hart (1995) may have been correct to diagnose a collapse of faith in scientific ethnography, but faith in ethnography – as method and as data – remains.

With respect to theory, social anthropology, in addition to its own specialized theoretical concerns, such as kinship, has always participated in general social theory (although, as I have already suggested, the traditions deriving from Weber or Mead have attracted relatively few anthropological adherents). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anthropology is more theoretically heterogeneous than at perhaps any point in its history: interactionism, culturalist interpretation, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, post-colonialism, and postmodern critique all twinkle in the current disciplinary firmament. Although Marxism seems to be in the same regrettable post-1989 quarantine as in other disciplines, there are signs of positive re-engagement with biology and evolution (e.g. Boyd and Richerson 2005; Richerson and Boyd 2004). However, at least one remnant of the structural functionalism that dominated the discipline during much of the twentieth century remains at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. This is the emphasis – which is no bad thing – upon methodological holism: the aspiration to study all aspects of a situation or a group’s way of life, or as many aspects as possible, in the belief that they are all potentially, at least, interrelated.

Allowing for this holistic aspiration – because it is never more than that, if only because of the practical demands of field research – anthropologists have always specialized in studying particular aspects of the human world: symbolism, ritual and religion, myth, kinship and the family, morality, custom and law, micro-politics, and ethnic and communal identification are perhaps the most conspicuous and characteristic. These interests derive partly from the engagement with Other cultures, partly from the experience of data gathering within the give and take of face-to-face interaction, and partly from anthropology’s nineteenth-century origins in a fusion of romanticism, exoticism and evolutionism, in the context of European and North American colonialism (Kuper 1988). Taken as a whole, this constellation of interests may be characterized as a bias in the direction of the cultural and the everyday:

Anthropologists … have always derived their intellectual authority from direct experience of life … That is, they knew the exotic Other and their readers did not. Within that framework of bridging the gap between civilized and primitive, they emphasized the salience of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Arguments
• Explorations
• Rethinking Ethnicity
• Notes
• Sources and Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index