Материал: ethnicity
Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology
Ronald Cohen
Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 7. (1978), pp. 379-403.
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Ann. Rev. Anfhropol. 1978. E379-403
Copyright ' 5 1978 by Annual Reviews Inc. AN rights reserved
ETHNICITY: PROBLEM AND
FOCUS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Ronald Cohen
Departments of Anthropology and Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201
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." New journals have appeared using the terms in their titles, and special programs of ethnic studies are showing up in university catalogs. Almost any cultural-social unit, indeed any term describing particular structures of continuing social relations, or sets of regularized events now can be referred to as an "ethnic" this or that. This can be seen in the proliferation of titles dealing with ethnic groups, ethnic identity, ethnic boundaries, ethnic conflict, ethnic cooperation or competition,ethnic politics, ethnic stratification, ethnic integration, ethnic consciousness, and so on. Name it and there is in all likelihood someone who has written on it using "ethnic" or "ethnicity" qualifiers to describe his or her special approach to the topic.
Is it a fad? Is it simply old wine (culture) in new bottles? Is it merely a transparent attempt by anthropologists to adapt to "ethnic" studies, dropping terms like "tribe" because those we study find it invidious when applied to themselves? In making such an adjustment, is anthropology simplyjettisoning its own traditions to save its rapport? Is it, in other words, not anything more than a means, a shift in jargon, to achieve old ends? Or is it, as Kroeber once said disparagingly of "structure" when it burst onto his scene years ago, that we like the sound of the words-"ethnic," "ethnicity" -that they connote a posture toward our work or some hoped for achievements we are striving to make part of our message, our quest?
380 COHEN
Possibly it is all of these. But Kroeber was wrong about "structure"; it wasn'tjust a momentary fad. It went on to replace the older term "pattern" and developed into a, perhaps the, central concept of the discipline. Something about "structure" reflected more adequately what we had previously meant by pattern; it implied the newfound rigor of detailed field studies in the 1940s and 1950s and indicated the directions toward which we were moving. So too, I believe, with ethnicity. Certainly it encompasses problems and foci from the past. But it does more; it represents newer foci not easily equatable to older emphases, not simply conditioned by the same factors that "produce" or "cause" or make up culture and tribe. "Ethnicity," like "structure" before it, represents a shift toward new theoretical and empirical concerns in anthropology. In this sense, "ethnicity" signals a change that should be understood from several angles-historical, theoretical, and ideological.
The Problem in Perspective
With only a few exceptions (3, 21, 32, 43, 49, 50), anthropologists have assiduously avoided any central concern with problems of ethnicity.' Despres (14) has examined 13 of the leading textbooks of anthropology from 1916 to 1971 and found no index listings for "ethnic," "ethnic group." Ethnology, ethnocentricism yes, but "ethnic" if it appears at all is without definition or sufficient importance to be given an index entry. After 1971, however, things change. Beals & Hoijer (2) and Harris (22) both have index items mentioning "ethnic" and discussions of "minorities" and "ethnic populations."
Analyzing this trend, Despres (14) has suggested that it may be due to the impact of Barth's (1) influential book on ethnic groups and boundaries. But this begs the question. Why should Barth (1) and others (12, 33) have been well received when theoretical and empirical works that came out earlier were avoided or considered peripheral to the major theoretical concerns of the discipline?
Certainly it was not for want of awareness. The fieldwork greats of the 1940sand '50sknew they were dealing with what we now call ethnic groups; they knew they were often as not creating arbitrary and artificial boundaries. This was especially true among the nonstate peoples such as the Tiv or the Nuer or the Tallensi. In such cases, and they are the majority, the anthropologist tried as best he or she could to provide a name for the "tribe" even when the group faded imperceptibly into other named groups more or
'Thesepoints and the references dealing with them are taken from Despres (14, pp. 188-89). In this same piece, Despres also provides useful review of the anthropological literature and what he sees as its main currents of thought.
ETHNICITY 381
less similar and was broken up into named subgroupings that had strong we/they feelings dividing them. Such problems were partly resolved by the concept of the stateless society with its segmentary opposition between internal divisions that could unite (variously) against outside foes, then divide and remain in opposition afterwards. However, what about possible cultural differences between internal divisions? What about alliances and oppositions and obligations that cut across the named ethnic entity into other nearby units with distinct "tribal" identities but roughly similar cultures?
At more complex levels of scale, the same problem appeared in reverse, albeit less severely. The multiethnic nature of complex chieftaincies and states was too obvious to avoid. Still, many of us were led by theoretical concerns to underplay the multiethnic quality of the societies we studied and chose one dominant ethnic group as our main focus. Thus, I wrote of the Kanuri of Bornu (7), knowing and reporting that ethnicity itself has always been one of the dimensions of social rank in the society (8). Where this was not the case, as with Leach's (34) work on Highland Burma or in studies of modern interactions in multiethnic societies, such works were in a sense peripheral to the traditional thrust of the discipline. This was, in effect, to understand assumedly homogeneous sociocultural units as entities, the relations of their parts to one another and to the whole, and the relation of the whole and its parts to their physical and sociocultural environments. Those who did not look for or create homogeneous settings or could not were forced by their data to admit that multiethnicity was central to the understanding of social process and structure as they had recorded it in the field. But throughout the 1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s, such studies were still in the minority within anthropology. The main concern was to understand non-Western societies as isolates (ethnography) or as a universe of such units (cross-cultural comparison).
But things change and ethnicity is moving onto center stage. The reasons are complex, but I would choose two as major determinants. These are first the unit problem and secondly the problem of context.
Hinted at above, the unit problem highlights what others (14, 23, 31, 47) have called the subjective/objective issue in ethnicity theory. Should ethnic units be isolated on the basis of social-cultural categories and analysis? Or should they be seen as valid when they reflect only those loyalties and ascriptions made by a people about themselves. In traditional ethnography, this issue is often noted, then bypassed. By contrast, ethnicity opens up the question of categorization by nonmembers (the objectivist emphasis) as opposed to a person's own identity or identification with a particular ethnic group (the subjectivist emphasis). Some workers (1) stress the subjectivist perspective; others (20, 31) try to include both categorization and identity
382 COHEN
in their conceptualization. Categorization is what anthropologists do when they name a "tribe." It is also done by all outsiders. Group X may see itself as A in specific circumstances and be labeled as B by others. A and B are invariably related but not necessarily congruent. Thus, Kanuri people refer to congeries of non-Muslim peoples to the southeast as Kirdi.But Kirdi see themselves as a number of quite distinctive ethnic groups. The problem becomes more complex when it is realized that in Kanuri-dominated towns such people often accept the dominant group's term and claim they are Kirdi. Only much closer questioning elicits their home-based subjective identifications.
Ethnographers as outsiders must also categorize. Earlier fieldworkers decided on the basis of their own training, their theoretical problems, and the distribution of cultural traits in a region who were and were not Dinka, Tiv, Dogrib, Nuer, or Kanuri. The views of the people as to who they were was recorded and some attempt was made to link the fieldworker'sunit to the local conception. However, if there was a lack of agreement, it was noted, then largely ignored (44).
In cross-cultural research, problems associated with sociocultural units have become a central methodological issue. Naroll (37, 38) has tried to resolve it in two ways: (a) by asking what factors are usually associated with the fieldworker's(objectivist) delineation of a "cultunit," and (b) by developing techniques for coping with situations in which separately named and described units are in fact differently named outgrowths of a common culture. The latter causes autocorrelational errors (Galton's problem) that Naroll feels must be dealt with if valid generalizations are to emerge from crosscultural survey techniques.
Galton's problem includes the notion that an ethnography generally does not isolate a unique system or one that is sufficiently differentiated to be a separate unit. But then, what does? To resolve this issue, Naroll (37) has derived six factors from the work of ethnographers based on the distribution of traits generally used for categorizing, namely, political organization, language, ecological adjustment, territorial contiguity, and local community structure. These he claims are the most often used correlates of differentiated "cultunits." But no set of criteria fits all cases. Instead, they vary with societal complexity, regional and continental contexts, the ethnographer, and probably with time as well. In the end, Naroll's criteria do not solve the problem. They are instead useful techniques which attempt to set conventions for coding and comparing cultures. What the reality-status of such "cultunits" is, how they fit into a changing world and a developing anthropological epistemology, is left unresolved.
The problem is most dramatically raised by Southall's (46) attempt to reevaluate the reality-status of Nuer and Dinka. He records how Evans-