Материал: ethnicity

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Pritchard (16) chose the name because it was "hallowed by a century of use" (p. 463) but was in fact a term used by the Dinka to refer to the Nuer who in actual fact call themselves Naath. The Dinka call themselves Jieng, and both of these are made up of a number of named groups whose linguistic and cultural unity and diversity is still unknown. Nor do we know enough about them to know whether there was ever a sense of ethnic unity that pervaded all Nuer or all Dinka "until the colonial administration told them (who) they were . . ." (46, p. 463). People from one Nuer (or Dinka) subgroup often did not know the names of all other subgroups in their own ethnic unit and could be treated as alien strangers when among one of the other groups of the cluster. Southall then goes on to ask how Dinka and Nuer might have differentiated from one another and from each of their own subgroupings. By using a subjective approach to widely accepted ethnic or "tribal" entities, he shows them to be both imposed from outside and to be the result of complex processes of differentiation, all of which went unremarked because Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt both adopted the accepted colonial labels attached to groupings of peoples in the southern Sudan.

The unit problem then has made us aware that the named ethnic entities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily or, even worse, inaccurately imposed. Barth's (1) contribution was in seeing this problem and deciding to view ethnicity as a subjective process of group identification in which people use ethnic labels to define themselves and their interaction with others. Southall (46) went even further to suggest that the confusion over ethnic labels should provide a key to the evolution of social-cultural differences. It ought not, therefore, to be glossed over by a naming convention or a set of coding techniques. Instead, the ethnicity concept suggests that there is a problem here whose solution will take us toward an understanding of specific culture histories and general evolutionary processes of culture growth and change.

The context problem is both ideological and historical. Anthropology has always stressed context as a basic methodological tenet. Behavior, material culture, beliefs, values, taboos, are all to be understood in their own contexts, otherwise their meaning and significance escapes us. Once the new states of the third world emerged, once American Indian groups, Inuit (Eskimo), and others saw themselves as parts of larger wholes and used this as a major feature of their own group identities, then multiethnic contexts became essential to the understanding of these groups. The older units, culture, tribe and so on had been excised from context because ( a ) they often were isolated (indeed, the more so the better!) and ( b )we assumed an analogy between the "tribal" unit and an aboriginal culture of the same structural type. The assumption was useful and still is for comparative and

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The Definitional Problem

The qualities discussed above are predefinitional or what I refer to as an "approach" (9, p. vii), i.e. they describe assumptions about what is the most important aspect of a problem. The table is intended to demonstrate that the shift from "tribe" to "ethnic" is a fundamental one involving changes in our basic paradigms and postures concerning the nature and shape of things we study. It does not, however, say much about what ethnicity is, and it is to that task we must now turn.

Most people using the term "ethnicity" find definitions unnecessary. Isajiw (27) looked at 65 studies of ethnicity in sociology and anthropology and found only 13 that defined the term. My own experience has been much the same. Writers generally take it for granted that the term refers to a set of named groupings singled out by the researcher as ethnic units. Membership in such groups (defined subjectively and/or objectively) are then shown to have an effect on, or correlation with, one or more dependent variable(s). In this sense, ethnicity is widely used as a significant structural phenomenon. But that is hardly a definition.

In sociology where the concept has had its major use up to now, ethnicity is seen as a set of sociocultural features that differentiate ethnic groups from one another. Max Weber (52) defined it as a sense of common descent extending beyond kinship, political solidarity vis-a-vis other groups, and common customs, language, religion, values, morality, and etiquette. In anthropology, Barth (1) summarizes anthropological definitions as usually having four elements: 1. a biologically self-perpetuating population; 2. a sharing of culture values and forms; 3. a field of communication and interaction; 4. a grouping that identifies itself and is identified by others as constituting a category different from other categories of the same type. He criticizes anthropology for having isolated the ethnic unit conceptually so that cultural and social forms are seen as relatively isolated outcomes of local ecological adaptation. This assumes some kind of continuity of the unit as an entity over time and a relation to a particular location. Empirically this may or may not be true with differential effects on cultural and social forms.

To go beyond this, Barth (1, p. 13) uses the "most general identity, presumptively determined by . . . origin and background." Ethnic groups are then those widest scaled subjectively utilized modes of identification used in interactions among and between groups. The location and reasons for the maintenance of a we/they dichotomization becomes the crucial goal of research and theorizing. Vincent (49), using a Weberian definition from Smith & Kronberg (44), adds a crucial element. By focusing more squarely on the political aspects of ethnicity, she sees what Fried (18) has already

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noted for the concept "tribe." Ethnicity is not a "most general" or widest scaled identity but rather it can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization.

More recently, Kunstadter (29) has tried to differentiate types of ethnicity. Using ethnicity as a generic notion, he distinguishes three varieties: ethnic group, ethnic identity, and ethnic category. By ethnic group he means a set of individuals with mutual interests based on shared understandings and common values. How much is shared is an empirical question, and common interests may lead to a degree of organization. By ethnic identity, he refers to a process by which individuals are assigned to one ethnic group or another. It therefore implies boundaries, their creation, maintenance, and change. Ethnic categories, says Kunstadter, are classes of people based on real or presumed cultural features. It involves more or less standardization of behavior toward the category by others in the society. Ethnic categories may or may not correspond to ethnic groups, even when they share the same name, depending on where and when the categorization is being made, and by whom (14).

Anthropologists have not, in their conceptualization of ethnicity, taken up the Wirthian (53) tradition in which the indicators of ethnicity are dispensed with as trivial. Instead, ethnicity is seen as one among several outcomes of group interactions in which there is differential power between dominant and minority groups. From this perspective, ethnicity is an aspect of stratification rather than a problem on its own (cf 43). As we shall see, this is more a theoretical issue than a definitional one.

To summarize, ethnicity, as presently used in anthropology, expresses a shift to multicultural, multiethnic interactive contexts in which attention is focused on an entity-the ethnic group-which is marked by some degree of cultural and social commonality. Membership criteria by members and nonmembers may or may not be the same, and the creation and maintenance of the ethnic boundary within which members play according to similar and continuing rules (1) is a major aspect of the phenomenon.

The structural features however, are still there. Terms like "group," "category," "boundary," connote an actual entity, and Barth's concern with maintenance tends to reify it still more. On the other hand, Vincent (49) warns us that it is inherently a mercurial fluency that evades analysis if it is stopped and turned into a thing. The situational quality and multiple identities associated with ethnicity lead me to see it as a set of sociocultural diacritics which define a shared identity for members and nonmembers. The diacritics most often used are those discussed by Isaacs (26) in his analysis of the roots and effects of ethnicity in the modern world (physical appearance, name, language, history, religion, nationality), although to be more exact the variety, numbers, and kinds of such markers are as numerous as

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humankind's capacity to attach significance to any and all objects and behaviors that provide some common characteristics for group membership.

To get round the reification problem, I would define ethnicity as a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness.The process of assigning persons to groups is both subjective and objective, carried out by self and others, and depends on what diacritics are used to define membership. The nesting quality is similar to that of a social distance scale in which the greater the number of diacritical markers, the closer one gets to a particular person and/or his kin group. It differs from a social distance scale because ethnicity is an historically derived lumping of sets of diacritics at varying distances outward from the person, so that each of these lumpings acts as a potential boundary or nameable grouping that can be identified with or referred to in ethnic terms, given the proper conditions. It is similar to a social distance scale, however, in that the number of diacritics decreases inversely with the scale of inclusiveness. Diacritics that take in the largest numbers of people are used at the most inclusive levels of scale, while those that distinguish at lower scale levels become more important when more localized or smaller scaled distinctions are being made. The division into an exclusive grouping is always done in relation to significant others whose exclusion at any particular level of scale creates the we/they dichotomy.

As writers since Max Weber have noted, the diacritics always have about them an aura of descent. Even when acquired by assimilation, they are quickly incorporated into the microculture of individuals and families as part of their own heritage and identity. Once acquired by whatever process, such identity is then passed down the generations for as long as the grouping has some viable significance to members and nonmembers.

Ethnicity, then, is a set of descent-based cultural identifiers used to assign persons to groupings that expand and contract in inverse relation to the scale of inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the membership. The important point is that ethnic boundaries are not, as Barth (1) implies, stable and continuing. They may be in some cases and may not be in others. They are multiple and include overlapping sets of ascriptive loyalties that make for multiple identities (20, 23).

Situational Ethnicity

In his recent attempt to develop a theory of ethnicity, Despres (14) admits that so far conceptions and theories are too ambiguous to go much beyond Barth's (1) formulation. As already noted, Barth sees ethnicity as a continuing ascription which classifies a person in terms of his most general, most inclusive identity. It structures interaction between co-ethnics and between