ETHNOCULTURE (Vol.1, 2007 pp. 2-14)
ETHNICITY IN ANTHROPOLOGY
E.L. Cerroni-Long
Eastern Michigan University
Is ethnicity a new phenomenon, requiring specific analytical perspectives, or is it instead a very ancient one, seemingly novel only because of the contingent characteristics of its reappearance? And does anthropology have the most appropriate disciplinary tools for its study? Can the results of anthropological research on ethnicity be constructively applied to policy making, and in particular toward assuaging ethnic conflict? Or can the anthropological approach at least be used to clarify the parameters of the ethnic phenomenon? These questions are quite relevant to the ongoing epistemological assessment of anthropology in general and sociocultural anthropology in particular, and the way these questions are answered may either contribute to the demise of our discipline--now so often and broadly prognosticated--or assist anthropologists in recalibrating their research focus toward more robust research applications.
The way anthropologists have been approaching the study of ethnicity has so far mainly highlighted the inherent fragility of a discipline emerging from two scientifically discredited intellectual premises: the emphasis on the qualitative, hierarchical difference between the "civilized" and the "primitives" theorized by the social evolutionists, and the correlation of biological and behavioral variation at the basis of racialist ideology. That both of these untenable assumptions were catalyzed and reinforced by the Zeitgeist emerging from Western colonial expansion, industrialization, and subsequent economic imperialism--the historical matrix giving rise to modern anthropology, too--makes its scientific aspirations even more questionable. Thus, it is understandable that postmodernism has affected sociocultural anthropology even more destructively than other disciplines. As Gellner pointed out, postmodern practioners "agonize so much about their inability to know themselves and the Other, at any level of regress, that they no longer need to trouble too much about the Other. If everything in the world is fragmented, multiform, nothing really resembles anything else, and no one can know another (or himself), and no one can communicate, what is there to do other than express the anguish engendered by this situation in impenetrable prose?" (quoted in Davies 2005:158). Gellner was voicing his sarcastic dismay about the state of anthropology in the early 1990s; since then there have been further disciplinary developments, and they are particularly relevant to the study of ethnicity.
Theoretical frameworks
Ethnicity came to the attention of social scientists in the late 1960s. Partly this was the result of worldwide decolonization processes, highlighting issues of nation-building in ethnically heterogeneous new states. But, more cogently, it was the result of "discovering" the persistence of ethnic diversity in societies--such as the United States--where it was supposed to have long disappeared through assimilation and integration processes. In their classic sociological study of ethnicity in the US, Glazer & Moynihan (1963) claimed that the American "melting pot" had never really happened, and time has further validated their argument. In fact, the last three decades of the 20th century have seen such an increase in the sheer proliferation and political relevance of ethnic groups that one may wonder why the anthropological study of ethnicity has not become a thriving disciplinary subfield.
The reason for the fairly limited engagement of our discipline with a topic that may uniquely benefit from the application of our research approach has to do only partly with the already mentioned paralyzing impact of postmodernism on anthropological theory and practice. More specifically, anthropological research on ethnicity has been hampered by the way ethnicity came to be defined in anthropology, by the way this definition dovetailed with postmodern trends in social-science research and thus became orthodoxy, and by the way it is completely dissonant with the perceptions and understanding of ethnicity by the ethnic subjects themselves. In other words, there is a considerable conceptual gap between the way most anthropologists now tend to approach the study of ethnicity, and the way members of ethnic groups perceive and experience their membership.
This dissonance between the theory and practice of ethnicity is forcefully discussed by Francisco Gil-White in a paper titled "How thick is blood? The plot thickens...: If ethnic actors are primordialists, what remains of the circumstantialist/primordialist controversy?"(1999). Indeed, the circumstantialist vs. primordialist controversy seemed to be at the core of the early anthropological involvement in the study of ethnicity, and it highlights the matrix of current approaches.
Terminologically clumsy, the controversy relates back to Max Weber's prediction about the inevitable demise of "primordial phenomena" such as ethnicity and nationalism as a result of modernization (1921). Building on that assumption through the perspective of symbolic interactionism, Fredrik Barth (1969)--the most influential representative of the circumstantialist approach--advocated a view of ethnicity as emerging from the circumstances through which members of an ethnic group define themselves in relation to members of other groups. Cultural differences do not create ethnic boundaries in a primordial, static way; rather, it is only when the circumstances make it important to recognize ethnic boundaries that cultural differences are invoked, or even invented, to justify the process. In fact, Barth argued that cultural variation may well be the effect, rather than the cause of ethnic-boundary formation. Thus, ethnicity is to be found between, rather than inside groups, and can be defined as the social identity emerging from the circumstances characterizing intergroup relationships (Eriksen 2002:12-13). The primordialists, on the other hand, argued that: "There is something fundamental and ‘given’ in the nature of ethnicity ... which antedates, transcends, and imposes limits on the subjective views that people may have about the characteristics of the people it affects" (van den Berghe 1978:xvi).
At first sight, the distinction between primordialist and circumstantialist frameworks for the study of ethnicity seems a useful step toward clarifying the various definitions of this concept and putting them into some kind of unifying perspective. But the presumptive identification of two comparable types of theoretical approaches is highly misleading, since it implies a non-existent common theoretical ground between the two. In other words, primordialists and circumstantialists cannot be considered to represent comparable, and potentially cross-fertilizing theories since they simply do not refer to the same reality. To fully appreciate this fact it is necessary to go beyond the mere level of concept definition, as provided above, and see what function is assigned to ethnicity by primordialists and circumstantialists respectively. What we find is very clear-cut, since it relates to the theoretical core of each approach. Thus, while the primordialists focus on the study of human personality and see ethnicity as a fundamental texturing factor for self-definition, the circumstantialists--also sometimes called "instrumentalists"--concentrate instead on the study of human interaction and see ethnicity as an instrument for structuring social organization.
This theoretical contrast is well exemplified, for example, by a primordialist like Harold Isaacs on one side and by Fredrik Barth on the other. Isaacs is most explicit in pointing out that the objective of his study is not ethnicity as such but "basic group identity", which is described as "composed of what have been called 'primordial affinities and attachments'. It is the identity made up of what a person is born with or acquires at birth. It is distinct from all other multiple and secondary identities" (Isaacs 1975:29-30). In the view of primordialists these elements are well-defined and numerable, going from the shape of the body to national identification, and being provided with quasi-mystical importance (Dormon 1980:34). On the other hand, Barth specifically argues that:
We can assume no simple one-to-one relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences. The features that are taken into account are not the sum of "objective" differences, but only those which the actors themselves regard as significant. ...The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses (Barth 1969:14-15).
Surely it must be evident from these statements that what Isaacs and Barth are respectively referring to are irreconcilable realities, not the two complementary sides of the same coin, as it is often assumed. As a matter of fact, when stripped to its essentials, the primordialist/circumstantialist controversy does not seem to have to do with ethnicity at all. Rather, it is rooted in different views of what the self is and how human experience is basically structured.
The primordialists assume that human beings are endowed with an organizing mechanism, the personality, which becomes, so to speak, the "vessel" of emblematic experiences, and that these experiences interact among themselves (and with the "vessel"), coalescing into a discrete reality called "self-identity". Admittedly, it is important that these experiences be such that they provide the individual with symbolic links with "significant others" (the social dimension) and with a sense of "belonging" in time and space (the historic and territorial dimension). Also, the process by which these experiences go to coalesce into a sense of identity is long and fraught with difficulties, since a healthy self requires that the ethnic "concretion" remain consistent and free of ambiguity (De Vos & Romanucci-Ross 1975:375). However, the crucial factor in the whole process is the human capacity for distilling self-identity out of multifarious life experiences. Thus, the primordialists differ considerably from the 19th century racialists. While those believed in inborn, biologically-rooted characteristics, passed on from generation to generation because of race, the primordialists believe that the only thing that is inborn in human beings is the potential for personality maturation. This maturation is achieved through the acquisition of a basic group identity that is ethnically flavored.
The circumstantialists, on the other hand, do not presuppose the existence of any psychological vessel of ethnic identity. Rather, "people sustain their identity through public behavior, which cannot be directly evaluated: first it must be interpreted with reference to the available ethnic alternatives". That is to say, "ethnic identities function as categories of inclusion/exclusion and of interaction, about which both ego and alter ego must agree if their behavior is to be meaningful" (Barth 1969:132). In other words, the process of identity formation does not take place in some predetermined and identifiable psychological structure but it unravels itself dynamically in social interaction.
By defining ethnicity as a structuring principle of social organization that becomes operative through interaction the attention is squarely set on group dynamics. Thus, if the primordialist approach emphasizes the importance of ethnic identity (an individual process), the circumstantialists’ concern is with ethnic group formation and maintenance, which obviously implies the importance of boundaries. In turn, the understanding that the continuity of ethnic units depends on the creation and maintenance of a boundary also implies that the way the boundary is conceptualized from inside the group is likely to differ from the way this becomes conceived and treated by outsiders (Dormon 1980:30).
In other words, the process of ethnic group formation must have a cognitive component, and this brings to the fore the analytical complications of the emic-etic contrast in cultural investigation. As a matter of fact, the specific focus of some other theoretically influential treatments of ethnicity, such as, for example, those of Leach and Moerman, was the choice of cultural units of analysis by the anthropologist, taking in consideration the emic-etic contrast.
Thus, Leach, faced by the "cultural interpenetrations" of Southeast Asia (Leach 1960:50), chose to define the specificity of the Kachin and the Shan of Highland Burma not by inapplicable criteria of cultural uniformity, well-defined territory, language, or sociopolitical organization, but by the dynamic complementarity of their ritual behavior (Leach 1954). This was a consciously etic choice, partly determined by Leach’s specific interest in the process by which ethnicity and political change are linked together, but it certainly put into focus the impermanence and the political manipulation of symbolic interaction across ethnic groups. On the other hand, encountering the "dependent incompleteness" of peasant groups in Thailand, Moerman resolved to adopt a committed emic position. The ethnic group that became his unit of analysis, the Lue, are essentially self-defined and this self-definition is achieved by conscious contrast with other ethnic groups: a Lue is a Lue by not being a Yuan (Moerman 1965).
In isolating and describing the parameters and the process by which the Lue define themselves as a distinct ethnic group Moerman proposes a fundamental methodological shift. While in classic Weberian terms ethnicity was an "ascriptive state", to be studied deductively, a cognitive-inclined interactionist approach would lead to defining it as sets of criteria of category membership which are variously applied by group members and by outsiders for self-definition or alter-definition. The use of these criteria is highly contextual but the criteria themselves are arranged in logical, "nesting" taxonomic hierarchies, and the choice of criteria (the "ethnic labels") used in each specific case is determined by interactive cues which are likely to be as systemically arranged as the taxonomies themselves. All of this evidently implies that ethnicity cannot be seen as separated from ethnic group membership, even if the two concepts must be kept analytically distinct. Also, such a definition of ethnicity requires that it be studied inductively and as a process, rather than deductively and as a state.
Finally, the recognition of the cognitive component in ethnic-group formation and maintenance suggests the necessity for a reassessment of the ascriptive character of ethnicity. At least insofar as a certain groups of people define their uniqueness on the basis of certain specific characteristics (the ethnic-category membership criteria) they have an investment in maintaining and perpetuating them. Thus Moerman can affirm that "there seems ... to be a curious complicity between native and ethnographer. I consider the Lue to be an ethnic entity ... because they successfully present themselves as one" (Moerman 1967:9). According to Moerman this is done to "avoid opprobrious class identification through asserting the higher primacy of a non-stratifiable ethnic identification" (Moerman 1967:10). But is this the only possible explanation? And how can this explanation be used to justify cases in which the group perpetuates ethnic characteristics that, in the context in which they are expressed, turn out to be highly stigmatic?
One way to look at this problem centers again around the concept of boundary, not seen anymore as the focus of social interaction but rather as the structuring mechanism of perception. Mary Douglas has variously discussed pollution beliefs (1975) and the structure of a meal (1972) as expressions of the way the human mind reproduces what it sees as the implicit categories of the universe. Boundaries, and the opposition they imply between the within and the without, are seen as fundamental aspects of these categories. From a somewhat different point of view but reaching similar conclusions, Theodore Schwartz has seen ethnic-group formation as the result of the same psychological processes of selection, opposition, and metaphorical aggregation that are also at work in totemic categorization (1975). Certainly, as it was said at the beginning, if we conceptualize by creating logical categories of perceived differences, then it is quite possible not only that the idea of self emerges from the discovery--and the internalization--of a "generalized other" (Mead 1934) but that the sense of self cannot develop completely (and consciousness become operant) unless we posit it in relation to a group that "contains" it and to a group (or groups) that "opposes" it. Thus, ethnicity becomes a logical category necessary for cognition.
Following a cognitive route we have reached conclusions about the "necessity" of ethnicity that are remarkably similar to those offered by both the primordialists and the circumstantialists. In a way this is not surprising, since each of these three theoretical approaches is imbued with psychologism, albeit built on different theoretical frameworks, respectively focusing on personality development, symbolic interactionism, and cognitive categorization. Stripped down to their ideational scaffolding these three frameworks closely correlate to influential "schools" of psychological anthropology: culture-&-personality for the primordialists, processualism for the circumstantialists, and structuralism for the cognitivists. This may partly explain the gradual establishment of the circumstantialist approach to the study of ethnicity as orthodoxy. As culture-&-personality and structuralism came to be seen as flawed theoretical approaches, and as the study of "praxis" became celebrated as the perspective that could most successfully combine Weberian and Marxian insights on social organization (Ortner 1984), the circumstantialist analysis of ethnicity became the norm.
There have been two additional factors reinforcing this trend: the rise of postmodernism and the increase in ethnicity-related conflict. It has been convincingly pointed out that postmodernism, as a general ideological stance, emerges from the conditions created by late, advanced, or consumer capitalism (Jameson 1991, Norris 1993). The postmodern condition is one in which traditional social frameworks lose their coherence, strength, and stability so that consumption becomes the only mechanism for self-definition. As a consequence, the postmodern subject hungers for affiliation but only to the extent that it implies personal choice (i.e., the exercise of "consumer freedom"). The circumstantialist approach to the study of ethnicity fits the postmodern Zeitgeist particularly well since it is constructivist, in the sense that it emphasizes the subject's agency in the process of ethnic-boundary development, and it is dynamical, since both ethnic boundaries and ethnic identity are seen as the result of contingent, and constantly changing interactive processes. This harmonizes with the postmodern critique of "objectification" in social science and the concomitant attention to subjectivity and creative agency in identity formation. As a matter of fact, the postmodern preoccupation with the rejection of any type of "essentialism" is also behind the critique of the culture concept itself, the key theoretical and methodological focus of sociocultural anthropology (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1991, Strathern 1992). It is therefore hardly surprising that a cultural approach to the study of ethnicity, while arguably canonical at the stage in which anthropologists saw no reason to distinguish between "tribes", "ethnic groups" and "nations" (Lewis quoted in Eriksen 2002:97), is now considered irrelevant or even inappropriate (e.g., Baumann 1999; Nash 1988, Vermeulen & Govers 1994).
Social-science studies of ethnicity in the US--where postmodernism has been particularly influential--have long been emphasizing its creative, situational aspect (e.g., Goode 2001, Stern & Cicala 1991, Waters 1990). Furthermore, by taking the circumstantialist argument to its ultimate conclusions, some scholars ended up equating ethnic groups with interest groups (e.g., Cohen 1974). Thus, ethnicity comes to be seen as a "political" phenomenon, losing its priority over other forms of reference-group formation, and culture itself gets both politicized and trivialized, simply becoming a commodity, invoked in reference to "the jouissance of the late capitalist consumerist subject, playing with the heady new opportunities for self-creation that the ever-growing world of commodities appears to provide" (Turner 1994:419).
That ethnic diversity has led to so much intergroup conflict in the last quarter century is the other factor which may have favored the adoption of a circumstantialist view of ethnicity among anthropologists. Obviously, the possible correlation between ethnicity and conflict has received attention in the framework of each of the three theories discussed above. Thus, it has been pointed out that a stigmatic ethnic identity leads to intra-psychic conflict and to problems in interpersonal relations (Lee & De Vos 1981). On the other hand, cognitive dissonance in the structure of one’s assumptions regarding ethnic categories of membership may lead to learning problems (Douglas 1975). But the management of ethnic boundaries in interaction may lead almost implicitly to ethnically-rooted inequality and thus to conflict. Consequently, a circumstantialist approach ends up highlighting the conflict aspect of ethnic diversity, which has attracted so much attention by social scientists, particularly in reference to situations in which conflict has emerged between groups that had previously coexisted peacefully.
But it is precisely this phenomenon which most highlights the already mentioned conceptual dissonance between the circumstantialism of so many anthropologists and the apparent primordialism of so many ethnic group members, who claim an inherited cultural uniqueness and make it the basis of their social and political activism. In fact, this has even spilled into the world of scholarship, with the development of a new social-science discipline, ethnic studies, in which one of the unspoken prerequisites for research seems to be group membership (Pangle 1998). All of this calls attention to the potential value of a cultural approach to the study of ethnic diversity (see Cerroni-Long 2001, de Heusch 2000, Eriksen 2000, Flores 1998, Jenkins 1997). Actually, such an approach seems to strongly characterize non-Western anthropologists, and particularly Chinese scholars such as Xihu Ruan (Mu 2004:5), but it has also subtly inspired the development of multiculturalism as a political philosophy (Kymlicka 1995, Taylor 1992).
The cross-cultural differences characterizing the anthropological study of ethnicity may in fact implicitly indicate the crucial importance of looking at ethnic groups as cultural units, and to study them in a comparative framework. However, such an approach also demands a robust clarification of the culture concept, which has currently become ever more loosely applied both popularly and in new social-science fields, such as Cultural Studies. By analyzing whether cultures and ethnic groups are different or the same, and by relating their reality to the structure of the nation-state, new analytical frames would emerge that could greatly facilitate research. Ethnicity is a lived experience, and the anthropological research approach, aimed at detecting macro patterns on the basis of micro observations, and analyzing the global through the local, is a particularly useful tool for understanding a phenomenon with wide-ranging repercussions. Anthropological research has already contributed quite markedly to clarifying some crucial aspects of ethnicity; the development of a cultural approach promises to give further insights of major disciplinary importance on a range of research issues.
Research issues
One major issue anthropologists have already greatly contributed to clarifying is the race/ethnicity conundrum. At the conclusion of World War II, during which racialist ideologies had been translated into nefarious racist policies, the United Nations called on distinguished international academicians to develop a "Statement on Race" which would clarify any possible confusions and misuse of the concept. Four statements were drafted in subsequent years, and anthropologists actively participated in the conferences from which such statements emerged. One of the most active among them was Ashley Montagu, who went on to write many influential studies on the perniciousness of racial classifications, and who suggested that the concept of race be abandoned altogether and "substituted with ethnic group", since the term recognizes the existence of specific human communities without "obfuscating emotional implications" (1964:379-380).
Montagu's suggestion has not been completely adopted, even among anthropologists, and an apparently paradoxical attachment to the concept of race has also been perpetuated among members of some ethnic groups which have been the collective targets of racist discrimination. The reason given is that by holding on to the racial connotation they both highlight this history of discrimination and express their defiance of it (see Bonilla-Silva 2003). From a biological point of view, however, it is now amply documented that there is often greater variation within any so-called "racial" group as there is between two of these groups; the distribution of hereditary physical traits simply does not provide clear group boundaries (Brace 2005). It is also quite clear that mental capacities do not correlate with any other specific sets of physical or biological traits--such as eye color or blood group--and there simply are no available physical markers for alleged group superiority or inferiority. Nonetheless, the human propensity for perceiving--or constructing--group boundaries on the basis of diversity in gross physical characteristics is certainly an important ingredient in intergroup relations, and the historical reality of racialist/racist ideologies is a complicating factor in the study of ethnicity.
It may be useful in this respect to develop a typology of ethnic groups which would encompass a distinction between groups identified on the basis of specific physical markers and those that are not as "visible". Also, such a typology should take into account the history of specific ethnic groups in relation to racist classifications, so that, for example, the descendants of African slaves in the Americas must be seen as sharing an experience which incorporates physical displacement, forced cultural uprooting, and sustained, racially-motivated discrimination. Therefore, groups created by the slave trade are neither indigenous nor migrant ethnic groups, and while they may differ among themselves, they also have certain common features that are analytically important.
Indigenous groups, on the other hand, should themselves be distinguished between independent populations which have become incorporated into a dominant nation-state--or set thereof--as the result of Western colonial expansion, and those who instead represent a type of hyper-regionalism, having maintained cultural distinctiveness within long-established political structures in spite of presumably unimpaired potential for social integration. The Welsh or the Basques are certainly indigenous to a particular territory, but they do not have the typological characteristics shared, for example, by the Maori, the Guarani, or the Aleut (Eriksen 2002:14), who in fact highlight their commonalties as victims of Western colonialism by sometimes calling themselves First Nations, or Fourth World. "Self-determination and legal recognition of the rights to own, manage, and control their lands are key demands" of these groups (Hughes 2003:20), which also have often suffered from racially-motivated discrimination, and whose reliance on non-industrial modes of production makes them particularly vulnerable in the capitalistic world system. But the attachment to a particular territory, and to the way of life it has catalyzed, is typical of both types of indigenous groups and explains the separatist--or at least autonomist--drive of so many of them. This phenomenon has been correlated to the weakening of dominant nation-states under the pressure of globalization, but, in a way, it simply confirms the cultural content of ethnicity, to the extent that the distinctiveness of certain groups is strong enough to withstand the assimilatory thrust of centuries of social domination and administrative incorporation.
The working definition of ethnic group adopted by the IUAES Commission on Ethnic Relations is "any community viewing itself as culturally distinct from others with which it is fundamentally related at the sociopolitical level" (www.emich.edu/coer/Objectives); this highlights the fact that an ethnic group is not politically independent, i.e., a sovereign state, no matter how rudimentary or complex sovereignty might be. Thus, while ethnic groups can be seen as "nations", they are not quite full-fledged cultures, in the Boasian sense of self-contained, autonomous "peoples" with a distinct tradition of self-governance. It is quite understandable, therefore, that such groups may crucially aspire at achieving--or recapturing--"cultural wholeness" through separatism. When such aspirations combine with attachment to a particular territory, perceived as the group's ancestral homeland, they become even stronger.
In the case of ethnic groups catalyzed by migration processes such aspirations may not always develop, especially when members of the group are spatially dispersed, or if they feel that they have lost their cultural uniqueness through inter-ethnic marriage, religious conversion, or other processes of social integration. Paradoxically, this may also result from such strong attachment to the culture of origin that no hybridization is felt likely to ever occur, and people still simply consider themselves members of their home community, albeit in a diasporic form. Nonetheless, if discrimination by members of the host culture marginalizes the immigrant group, calling the attention of its members to their collective minority status, the conflict between attachment to the ancestral culture--or to an unwittingly hybridized version of it--and loyalty to the host country may further increase, and eventually generate separatist aspirations.
As a matter of fact, discrimination, or the perception of it, may be the most effective catalyst of ethnogenesis, or the process by which members of a subcultural group--that is, a group sharing characteristics which are different enough from the mainstream for members to feel a sense of specialness and separation--slowly end up being so radically distinct from their compatriots that they assign themselves a new ethnic status. Ideology--be it religious, political, or broadly connected with lifestyle choices--is often the basis of subcultural differentiation, and ideological conflict--and even sectarian divergences within the same ideology--typically trigger the type of discriminatory reactions on the part of the dominant group which can end up favoring ethnogenesis. The case of the Sikhs of India is one of the most carefully analyzed examples of this process (Axel 2001) but other ethnic groups may be fruitfully studied in light of such dynamics.
All of the processes described above, from the sovereignty claims of indigenous
populations to the separatist movements of ethnic groups variously emerging
from migration, regional marginalization, cultural hybridization, or subcultural
ethnogenesis have been occurring with increasing frequency in the last quarter
century. Some scholars have seen this phenomenon as the result of a "new
tribalism" being catalyzed by the breakdown of traditional structures of
ideological dominance and social control (Moynihan 1993). Others relate it to
globalization processes which increase inequality between entire populations
while they also highlight potential social mobility at the individual level
(Appadurai 2006). Others still see it as the prologue to a "clash of civilizations"
driven by growing interaction among populations characterized by incommensurably
different values and beliefs (Huntington 1996).
Certainly, the world-wide growing impact of media, mobility, and migration must
be seen as a catalyst of the politicization of ethnicity in inter-group relations
since the 1970s. However, a distinction should be made between the use
of ethnicity and its content. Glazer was among the first social scientists
to point out (1975) that the factors that contribute to making ethnicity a common
focus of conflict, social revindication, and militancy in general have only
peripherally to do with the characteristics of ethnicity. The causative factors
he identified included the proliferation of multi-ethnic societies in the contemporary
world, the declining importance of class as a focus for intergroup conflict
and as a vehicle for maximization of benefit, and the fact that ethnicity often
becomes entangled with ideological choices leading to separatism and nation-building.
Indeed, to the extent that ethnicity is used as a mechanism for boundary formation
and maintenance it is always ideological, and may best be studied as political
scientists do, by seeing it in the context of a historically-rooted analysis
of the specific social setting in which it emerges, interpreted in terms of
the type of antagonisms it triggers and the political strategies it engenders
(e.g., Mouffe 1993, Young 1976).
However, the content of ethnicity--what Barth dismissively called the "cultural stuff" enclosed by ethnic boundaries (1969)--should be studied in its own right, and this is something sociocultural anthropologists are best equipped to do, as long as they can avoid psychological reductionism. Defining culture as "the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society" (Huntington 2000:xv) translates into a view of ethnicity as a mental phenomenon. As discussed above, the theoretical frameworks adopted by so many anthropologists studying ethnicity have unfortunately often involved such a view. This was also the view behind the policies of forced "acculturation" developed in various societies striving to eliminate ethnic diversity; it was expected that if members of ethnic groups could be taught to substitute their original values and beliefs with those of the dominant group their assimilation would speedily follow. That this approach has been consistently and completely unsuccessful (see Cerroni-Long 1986) should clearly indicate the weakness of its premises.
There are several reasons why a holistic analysis of the cultural content of ethnicity is very important. First of all, it may be the best approach for clarifying the correlation between ethnicity and stratification. Various classic studies have documented the process by which, when various ethnic groups are bound together--by factors of interdependence that limit their options of escaping the relationship--they end up becoming stratified in a sociopolitical framework in which the access to resources becomes patterned according to the differential success of each group in achieving the "social norm" set by the group with the most initial power (Dahrendorf 1959). Furthermore, the more sociocultural differences, or "cleavages", to use Gluckman’s terminology, exist between groups, the greater the potentiality for intergroup conflict. An extreme instance of potentiality for conflict is found in societies made up of ethnic groups so incompatible that they have developed separate sociocultural institutions but which are held together in a stratified system by the coercion (social, economic, and political) of one dominant group (Smith 1965). It seems clear that an analysis of the parameters of culture-clash among ethnic groups imbricated in situations of potential conflict might help considerably in preventing open struggle, or at least in defusing its violence.
As a matter of fact, cultural analyses of ethnic-specific perspectives on violence and peace, justice and crime, punishment and reward, may provide extremely useful insights into the mechanisms which may assuage or exacerbate intergroup conflict. And while it may seem that to analyze these issues would demand a mentalistic approach, related to the "values, attitudes and beliefs" of the people involved, the strength of the sociocultural research method is its holism, allowing us to detect the subtle and seemingly disparate catalysts of patterns of behavior which, while entrenched, may not even be related to consciously held values, attitudes and beliefs. Furthermore, the comparativism implicit in the anthropological analysis of culture highlights the correlation of various patterns of behavior on the basis of the functions they fulfill, which in turn provides useful insights into ethnic-specific practices and the potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding and conflict they imply (Whitehead 2007).
A second reason why studying the cultural content of ethnicity is important is because of the light it may throw on the correlation between ethnicity and nationalism. It was argued earlier that ethnic groups are not full-fledged cultures--in a Boasian sense--because they are not politically autonomous. So, in a sense, they may be "nations without states"; indeed, it was pointed out before that some indigenous groups prefer to be called "First Nations". Such a description, however, may be quite confusing because of the common correlation seen to exist between nation and nationalism. There is widespread agreement among political scientists that nationalism, as a political ideology, is a modern phenomenon; so, how do "First Nations" fit into this framework? An anthropological approach to nationalism highlights three crucially clarifying aspects of this issue. Firstly, political sovereignty, no matter how rudimentary and different from the way it is currently understood, characterized any population--ethnos--large enough to give rise to a consciousness of group-specific characteristics (Bodley 1994). Secondly, the state, as a type of political organization, simply emerged out of historical circumstances leading to ever larger concentration of people, and resources, to be governed (Carneiro 1970). Thirdly, nationalism--the political ideology which led to the emergence of the modern nation-state--is all, basically, ethnonationalism, to the extent that it stakes the legitimacy of state sovereignty on cultural homogeneity (Gellner 1983, Smith 1986). The fact that so many contemporary nation-states are in fact multi-ethnic but culturally defined by one hegemonic group is behind the dramatic current increase in ethnic conflict.
This state of affairs has been considerably complicated by the misguided application of some ideological principles loftily presented as universal and "democratic" but which in fact reflect a very culture-specific intellectual tradition built around extreme individualism. The supposedly "liberal" interpretation of democracy focuses on the exercise of the political rights of free and autonomous individual subjects (e.g., Gutmann 2003), giving rise to the "civic nation", which, in contrast to the "ethnic nation", is supposedly constituted by a population sharing only the social contract implied by citizenship, and being protected on that basis. Indeed, some of the constitutional foundations of many modern nation-states incorporate these principles, obfuscating the reality of ethnonationalism and cultural hegemony. The United States is a particularly striking example of this contrast between abstract ideological stance and actual practice, which gets further obfuscated by the widespread popular denial that an American culture exists at all (Cerroni-Long 2004).
The enormous increase in human migration that has been generated by globalization exacerbates the multi-ethnic reality--and consequent lack of cultural homogeneity--of so many contemporary nation-states. New immigrants are simply foreigners, but they may link up with members of local ethnic communities on the basis of a common origin, and their influx strengthens the cultural distance from the hegemonic group. Expressive practices typical of a foreign cultural heritage--such as language, religion, family system, education, taste in food, adornment, entertainment, artistic expressions, and even healing practices--are reinforced by the sheer numbers of people adopting them, and this gives further emphasis to the fact that such people live in a setting defined by profoundly different cultural expectations, and that these expectations imbue the structure of any so-called "civic nation". It is this discovery which has given rise to "identity politics", which adopts the language of the individualistic human rights tradition to argue for the protection of group-specific "cultural rights" (see Rosaldo 2003).
Multiculturalism, as a political philosophy, emerged from this paradoxical strategy, and it has the potential to shape effective accommodationist policies. Its various applications, however, often reveal such egregious misunderstandings of culture and its dynamics, and of how the cultural content of ethnicity may precipitate conflict, that it actually ended up being considered counterproductive. Multicultural education, in particular, may well be one of the most important pedagogical developments of the last quarter-century (Early & Ang 2003). Anthropological studies of the cultural content of ethnicity can contribute very markedly to developing the most appropriate forms of multicultural education, but efforts in this direction remain modest in scope and limited in their effectiveness (Cerroni-Long 2002, 2006).
It has even been argued that multiculturalism is a politically subversive ideology, aimed at bringing about the final collapse of the nation-state, already weakened by the economic dynamics of globalized capitalism. In this view, multiculturalism just foments the "tribalism" so many equate with the "fall of civilization" as we know it (Roosens 1989). It would be useful if anthropologists clarified that the term "tribe" designates a particular type of political organization characterizing a certain phase of human demographic concentration, correlated with specific subsistence patterns and related lifestyles. It should also be pointed out that inter-tribal conflict has historically been dramatically lower than conflict between states in general and nation-states in particular. Thus, we may wish to embrace the gradual "erosion of the authority of the state combined with generally smaller-scale semi-autonomous units banded together in a supra-national federation or in several such federations" (Bell & Freeman 1974:12). This would disconnect the state from the nation, spreading political control among members of a freely entered administrative union--thus avoiding the pitfalls of empire on the one hand and those of the multi-ethnic nation-state on the other. But, as the case of Yugoslavia has dramatically illustrated, the establishment of a supra-national political unit may not alleviate the potential sources of ethnic conflict among its members, and because of this its existence may be unstable and its disintegration highly volatile. Again, a clear understanding of the cultural parameters of nationhood may give great insights into the best strategies for defusing political conflict.
Finally, yet another reason why the study of the cultural content of ethnicity is important has to do with the epistemological value of anthropology itself. If ethnic groups are nations without states, the study of their cultural characteristics can throw light on the role played by political autonomy on the process by which cultures emerge, stabilize, change, and die out. In other words, by studying the characteristics of quasi-cultures--in all their many permutations--the anthropological definition of what a culture is can be usefully refined. The disciplinary claim of modern sociocultural anthropology is the scientific study of culture--as the fundamental adaptive mechanism of our species--and of the variety of actual cultures which are the contingent outcome of such a mechanism. This is our locus of analysis, and our research methods both permit and constrain us to study human behavior through such a perspective. From a methodological point of view, the cultures we study are actually located in the behavior we observe, and in the interpretation of behavior we derive both from the native actors and from the multilevel comparative perspective which is at the basis of our approach. Studying the cultural content of ethnicity would encourage a clearer understanding of our disciplinary objectives, and of the scientific validity of our methods, so that we can pull out of the long crisis of confidence--and of ethnographic nihilism--which has been triggered by postmodernism, and start gearing again our research toward robust theory-building and ethnological analysis.
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