What is Ethnicity? PDF

# What is Ethnicity? It takes at least two things to create a difference. Gregory Bateson (1979: 78) suggests that “clearly each alone is - for the mind and perception - a non-entity, a non-being. Not different from being, and not different from non-being. An unknowable, a Ding an sich, a sound fro...

# What is Ethnicity? It takes at least two things to create a difference. Gregory Bateson (1979: 78) suggests that “clearly each alone is - for the mind and perception - a non-entity, a non-being. Not different from being, and not different from non-being. An unknowable, a Ding an sich, a sound from one hand clapping.” Words like “ethnic groups”, “ethnicity” and “ethnic conflict” have become common terms in the English language, and they keep cropping up in the press, in TV news, in political discourse and in casual conversations. The same can be said for “nation” and “nationalism”, and it has to be conceded that the meaning of these terms frequently seems ambiguous and vague. There has been a parallel development in the social sciences. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion in the growth of scholarly publications on ethnicity and nationalism, particularly in the fields of political science, history, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology. This growth is probably only paralleled by the explosion in studies featuring the terms “globalisation”, “identity” and “modernity”, which incidentally refer to phenomena closely related to ethnicity and nationalism. The relationship of ethnicity to other forms of collective identification, including gender, local and religious identity, will be discussed in the final chapters of this book. In social and cultural anthropology, ethnicity has been a main preoccupation since the late 1960s, and it remains a central focus for research today. Although I hope the relevance of this book extends beyond the confines of academic anthropology, it is built around the contributions of anthropology to the study of ethnicity and kindred phenomena. Through its dependence on long-term fieldwork and its bottom-up perspective on social life, anthropology has the advantage of generating first-hand knowledge of social life at the level of everyday interaction. To a great extent, this is the locus where ethnicity is created and re-created. Ethnic relations emerge and are made relevant through social situations and encounters, and through people's ways of coping with the demands and challenges of life. From its vantage point right at the centre of local life, social anthropology is in a unique position to investigate these processes at the micro level, although it needs to be supplemented by other approaches such as history and macrosociology in order to develop a full picture of ethnicity and nationalism. Anthropological approaches, moreover, enable us to explore the ways in which ethnic relations are being defined and perceived by people; how they talk and think about their own group and its salient characteristics as well as those of other groups, and how particular worldviews are being maintained, contested and transformed. The personal significance that ethnic membership has to people can best be investigated through that detailed on-the-ground research which is the hallmark of anthropology. Finally, social anthropology, being a comparative discipline, studies both differences and similarities between discrete inter-ethnic situations and settings. It is thereby capable of providing a nuanced and complex vision of ethnicity in the contemporary world. An important reason for the current academic interest in ethnicity and nationalism is the fact that such phenomena have become so visible in many societies that it has become impossible to ignore them. In the early twentieth century, a leading social theorist such as Max Weber discarded ‘ethnic community action’ (Gemeinschaftshandeln) as an analytical concept, since it referred to a variety of very different kinds of phenomena (Weber 1980 [1921]). Weber also held that ‘primordial phenomena’ like ethnicity and nationalism would decrease in importance and eventually vanish as a result of modernisation, industrialisation and individualism. Many early to mid-twentieth-century social scientists shared this view. However, it was eventually proven wrong. In fact, ethnicity, nationalism and other forms of identity politics grew in political importance in the world after the Second World War, continuing into the twenty-first century. Wars and other armed conflicts in the 1990s and 2000s have typically been internal conflicts, and many of them from Sri Lanka and Fiji to Rwanda, Congo and Bosnia — could plausibly be described as ethnic conflicts. An influential theory of geopolitical conflict from the post-Cold War era even claims that future conflicts would largely take place in ‘the faultlines’ between ‘civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996), although this particular view has been argued against on empirical grounds (Fox, 1999). Ethnic or nationalist struggles for recognition, power and autonomy, however, often takes a non-violent form, like in the Québecois independence movement in Canada. Moreover, in many parts of the world, nation-building — the creation and consolidation of political cohesion and national identity in former colonies or imperial provinces — is high on the political agenda. In a very different kind of context, ethnic and national identities have become fields of contestation following the continuous influx of labour migrants and refugees to Europe and North America, which has led to the establishment of new, permanent ethnic minorities in these areas. Since the Second World War, and especially since the 1970s, indigenous populations such as Inuit, Sami, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines have organised themselves politically, and are demanding that their ethnic identities and territorial entitlements should be recognised by the state. Finally, the political dynamics in Europe has moved issues of ethnic and national identities to the forefront of political life since the 1990s. At one extreme of the continent, the erstwhile Soviet Union split into over a dozen states, most of them based on ethnic and linguistic identities. With the disappearance of the strong socialist state in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, issues of nationhood and minority problems emerged with unprecedented force. At the other extreme of the continent, the reverse appears be happening, as the nation-states of Western Europe have been moving towards a closer economic, political and possibly cultural integration within the framework of the European Union, since the early 2000s. But here, too, national and ethnic identities have become important issues in recent years, as witnessed, for example, in the growth of right-wing nationalist parties at the European elections in 2009. Many Europeans fear that cultural standardisation following tight European integration will result in the loss of their national or ethnic identity. Others, who take a more positive view of such processes, welcome the possibilities for a pan-European identity to replace ethnic and national ones in a number of contexts. During the electoral campaign preceding the first Danish referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in June 1992, one of the main anti-EU slogans was: ‘I want a country to be European in.’ This slogan suggested that personal identities were intimately linked with political processes and that social identities, for example as Danes or Europeans, were not given once and for all, but were subject to negotiation. Both of these insights are crucial to the study of ethnicity. At the same time, debates about multiculturalism and the integration of immigrants have also, from a different perspective, raised important questions about national identity. ## Ethnicity And Nationalism This book will show how social anthropology can shed light on concrete issues of ethnicity; what questions social anthropologists ask in relation to ethnic phenomena, and how they proceed to answer them. In this way, the book will offer a set of conceptual tools which go far beyond the immediate interpretation of day-to-day politics in their applicability. Some of the questions that will be discussed are: * How do ethnic groups remain distinctive under varying social conditions? * Under what circumstances does ethnicity become important? * What is the relationship between ethnic identification and ethnic political organisation? * Is nationalism always based on ethnicity? * What is the relationship between ethnicity and other forms of identification, social classification and political organisation, such as class, religion and gender? * What happens to ethnic relationships in situations of rapid social and cultural change? * In what ways can history be important in the creation of ethnicity? * What is the relationship between ethnicity and culture? This introductory chapter will present the main concepts to be used throughout the book. It also explores their ambiguities and thereby introduces some principal theoretical issues. ### The Term Itself Writing in the 1970s, Glazer and Moynihan argued that “[e]thnicity seems to be a new term” (1975: 1), pointing to the fact that the word’s earliest dictionary appearance is in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Its first usage is attributed to the US sociologist David Riesman in 1953. The word ‘ethnic’, however, is much older. It is derived from the Greek ethnos (which in turn derived from the word ethnikos), which originally meant heathen or pagan (R. Williams, 1976: 119). It was used in this sense in English from the mid fourteenth century until the mid nineteenth century, when it gradually began to refer to ‘racial’ characteristics. In the United States, ‘ethnics’ came to be used around the Second World War as a polite term referring to Jews, Italians, Irish and other people considered inferior to the dominant ‘WASP’ group (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). None of the founding fathers of sociology and social anthropology — with the partial exception of Weber granted ethnicity much attention. In early modern Anglophone sociocultural anthropology, fieldwork ideally took place in a single society and concentrated on particular aspects of its social organisation or culture (Eriksen and Nielsen, 2001). British anthropology in the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown or Malinowski, moreover, tended to favour synchronic ‘snapshots’ of the society under study. With its emphasis on intergroup dynamics, often in the context of a modern state, as well as its frequent insistence on historical depth, ethnicity studies represents a specialisation which was not considered particularly relevant by the early twentieth-century founders of modern anthropology. Since the 1960s, ‘ethnic groups’ and ‘ethnicity’ have become household words in Anglophone social anthropology, although, as Ronald Cohen (1978) remarked more than thirty years ago, few of those who use the terms bother to define them. In the course of this book, I shall examine a number of approaches to ethnicity. Many of them are closely related, although they may serve different analytical purposes. Sometimes heated argument arises as to the nature of the object of inquiry and the appropriate theoretical framework. All of the approaches of anthropology nevertheless agree that ethnicity has something to do with the classification of people and group relationships. In everyday language the word ‘ethnicity’ still has a ring of ‘minority issues’ and ‘race relations’, but in social anthropology it simply refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive. Although it is true that ‘the discourse concerning ethnicity tends to concern itself with subnational units, or minorities of some kind or another’ (Chapman et al., 1989: 17), majorities and dominant peoples are no less ‘ethnic’ than minorities. This will be particularly evident in chapters 6-8, which discuss nationalism and minority-majority relationships. ### Ethnicity And Race A few words must be said initially about the relationship between ethnicity and ‘race’. The term ‘race’ has deliberately been placed within inverted commas in order to stress that it is not a scientific term. Whereas it was for some time fashionable to divide humanity into four main races, and racial labels are still used to classify people in some countries (such as the USA), modern genetics tends not to speak of races. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994). In other words, there is in many respects greater genetic variation within a ‘racial’ group than there is systematic variation between two groups. Third, no serious scholar today believes that hereditary characteristics explain cultural variations. The contemporary neo-Darwinist views in social science often lumped together under the heading ‘evolutionary psychology’ (see e.g. Buss, 2005), are with few exceptions strongly universalist; they generally argue that people everywhere have the same inborn abilities, and that interesting variations exist at the level of the individual, not that of the group. Concepts of race can nevertheless be relevant to the extent that they inform people's actions; at this level, race exists as a cultural construct, whether it has a biological reality or not (see also Banks, 1996: 54; Jenkins, 2008: 23-4). Racism, obviously, builds on the assumption that personality is somehow linked with hereditary characteristics which differ systematically between ‘races’, and in this way race may assume sociological importance even if it has no ‘objective’ existence. Social scientists who study race relations in Great Britain and the United States need not themselves believe in the objective existence of racial difference, since their object of study is the social and cultural relevance of the notion that race exists, in other words the social construction of race. If influential people in a society had developed a similar theory about the hereditary personality traits of red-haired people, and if that theory gained social and cultural significance, ‘redhead studies’ would for similar reasons have become a field of academic research, even if the researchers themselves did not agree that redheads were different from others in a relevant way. In societies where ideas of race are important, they must therefore be studied as part of local discourses on ethnicity. Should the study of race relations, in this meaning of the word, be distinguished from the study of ethnicity or ethnic relations? Pierre van den Berghe (1983) does not think so, but would rather regard ‘race’ relations as a special case of ethnicity. Others, among them Michael Banton (1967), have argued the need to distinguish between race and ethnicity. In Banton's view, race refers to the (negative) categorisation of people, while ethnicity has to do with (positive) group identification. He argues that ethnicity is generally more concerned with the identification of ‘us’, while racism is more oriented to the categorisation of ‘them’ (Banton, 1983: 106; cf. Jenkins, 1986: 177). This would imply that race is a negative term of exclusion, while ethnic identity is a term of positive inclusion. However, ethnicity can assume many forms, and since ethnic ideologies tend to stress common descent among their members, the distinction between race and ethnicity is a problematic one, even if Banton’s distinction between groups and categories can be useful (see chapter 3). Nobody would suggest that the horrors of Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s were racial, but they were certainly ethnic in other words, there is no inherent reason why ethnicity should be more benign than race. Besides, the boundaries between race and ethnicity tend to be blurred, since ethnic groups have a common myth of origin, which relates ethnicity to descent, which again makes it a kindred concept to race. It could moreover be argued that some ‘racial’ groups are ethnified, such as American blacks who have gradually come to be known as African-Americans; but also that some ethnic groups are racialised, as when immutable traits are accorded to ethnic minorities; and finally, there are strong tendencies towards the ethnification of certain religious groups, such as European Muslims. Formerly known by their ethnic origin, they are increasingly lumped together as primarily ‘Muslims’. Finally, Martin Barker’s notion of new racism (Barker, 1981; cf. also Fenton, 1999: chapter 2) seems to elide the distinction. The new racism talks of cultural difference instead of inherited characteristics, but uses it for the same purposes; to justify a hierarchical ordering of groups in society. The relationship between race and ethnicity is complex. Ideas of ‘race’ may or may not form part of ethnic ideologies. It could nevertheless be argued that the main divisive mechanism of US society is race as opposed to ethnicity. Discrimination on ethnic grounds is spoken of as ‘racism’ in Trinidad and as ‘communalism’ in Mauritius (Eriksen, 1992a), but the forms of imputed discrimination referred to can be nearly identical. On the other hand, it is doubtless true that groups who look different from majorities or dominating groups may be less liable to become assimilated into the majority than others, and that it can be difficult for them to escape from their ethnic identity if they wish to. However, this may also hold good for minority groups with, say, an inadequate command of the dominant language. In both cases, their ethnic identity becomes an imperative status, an ascribed aspect of their personhood from which they cannot escape entirely. ### Ethnicity And Nationalism In the first two editions of this book, I concluded that race could simply be seen as a form of ethnicity; a subset of ethnic variation where the physical appearance of different groups or categories is brought to bear on intergroup relations. In the US, the term ‘visible difference’ is often used to this effect. However, I have revised my position somewhat since then, and have come to believe in the utility of keeping the two concepts apart. Ethnicity is a wider concept than race, as pointed out by Richard Jenkins (2008: 23). Quite clearly, there exist important ethnic differences which are not thought of as ‘racial’ in the sense of being based on group-specific, immutable characteristics. On the other hand, as argued by Peter Wade (2002), Michel Wieviorka (1997) and others, the boundary between what is perceived as natural, biological differences between groups, and acquired, cultural differences is often fuzzy in practice. Ethnic differentiation frequently entails, to a greater or lesser extent, the existence of folk notions of inborn group differences that are assumed to explain some cultural differences. On the other hand ethnicity can arguably exist without accompanying notions of race, as witnessed among people of European descent in the USA, which often maintain ethnic (or national) identities as Germans, Italians, Irish, etc. without implying any form of genetic determinism. The case of Bosnia is also an obvious one in this respect, as Bosnian Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox (Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs) maintain ethnic differences with no reference to separate ‘racial’ origins. But could it equally well be said that race can exist without ethnicity? It may be no coincidence that Wade (1997, 2002), one of the strongest defenders of the view that race and ethnicity should be kept conceptually apart, is a Latin Americanist. In the countries of South and Central America, the relationship between race and ethnicity is complex, and the two kinds of distinctions are only partly overlapping. The conventional view is that ‘the study of blacks is one of racism and race relations, while the study of Indians is that of ethnicity and ethnic groups’ (Wade, 1997: 37). Although this contrast does refer to different forms of social classification, with distinctive analytical implications, the boundary is fuzzy. In Brazil, the black-brown-white continuum in terms of pigmentation is a dimension of classification which has an obvious class element which may indeed overrule phenotype (wealth ‘makes people paler’), but which does not imply the existence of separate ethnic categories based on cultural distinctiveness, as is the case with Brazilian Indians. The North American situation, while different from the Brazilian one, reflects a similar complexity and ambiguity in the relationship between race and ethnicity. Whereas Brazilians have a great number of terms used to designate people of varying pigmentation, the ‘one-drop principle’ prevalent in the USA entails that people are either black or white, and that ‘a single drop of black blood’ (sic) contaminates an otherwise pale person and makes him or her black. Conversely, ethnic identity in the USA is, as mentioned above, not necessarily correlated with ‘race’. At the same time, African-American identities are associated with social solidarity and specific sets of shared practices and values, thus resembling ethnic identities. A final point is the fact that discrimination based on presumed inborn and immutable characteristics (race) tends to be stronger and more inflexible than ethnic discrimination which is not based on ‘racial’ differences. Members of a presumed race cannot change their assumed inherited traits, while ethnic groups can change their culture and, ultimately, become assimilated into a dominant group. To conclude, race and ethnicity should be seen as kindred terms which partly overlap. Notions about cultural uniqueness and social solidarity tend to be stronger with respect to ethnic categorisations, while the idea of biological, nowadays dubbed ‘genetic’, difference is stronger in racist thought and practice. Strictly speaking, members of a ‘race’ do not need to have specific shared cultural characteristics in order to be subjected to the same treatment by others. Although members of an ethnic category generally assume that they have the same origins, current commonalities at the level of culture and social integration tend to be more important as sources of solidarity and collective identification. As later chapters will show, ideas about ‘racial purity’ may or may not be invoked as part of the ideological toolkit justifying ethnic cohesion, but notions of biological or genetic uniqueness are not a necessary component of ethnic identity, just as ideas of common cultural heritage do not necessarily enter into discourses of racial difference. ### Ethnicity, Nation And Class The relationship between the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ is nearly as complex as that between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’. Like the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘race’, the word ‘nation’ has a long history (R. Williams, 1976: 213-14) and has been used with a variety of different meanings in European languages. I shall refrain from discussing these meanings here, and will concentrate on the sense in which nation and nationalism are used analytically in academic discourse. Like ethnic ideologies, nationalism stresses the cultural similarity of its adherents and, by implication, it draws boundaries vis-à-vis others, who thereby become outsiders. The distinguishing mark of nationalism is, by definition, its relationship to the state. A nationalist holds that political boundaries should be coterminous with cultural boundaries (Gellner, 1983: 1), whereas most ethnic groups, even if they ask for recognition and cultural rights, do not demand command over a state. When the political leaders of an ethnic movement make demands to this effect, the ethnic movement therefore by definition becomes a nationalist movement. Although nationalisms tend to be ethnic in character, it is debatable whether there is a necessary ethnic foundation for national identity (A.D. Smith, 1986; Eriksen, 2004b), and we shall look more carefully into the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism in chapters 6-8. The term ‘ethnicity’ refers to relationships between groups whose members consider themselves distinctive, and these groups are often ranked hierarchically within a society. It is therefore necessary to distinguish clearly between ethnicity and social class. In the literature of social science, there are two main definitions of classes. One derives from Karl Marx, the other from Max Weber. Sometimes elements from the two definitions are combined. The Marxist view of social classes emphasises economic aspects. A social class is defined according to its relationship to the productive process in society. In capitalist societies, according to Marx, there are three main classes. First, there is the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, whose members own the means of production (factories, tools and machinery and so on) and buy other people’s labour-power (employ them). Second, there is the petit-bourgeoisie, whose members own means of production but do not employ others. Owners of small shops are typical examples. The third and most numerous class is the proletariat or working class, whose members depend upon selling their labour-power to a capitalist for their livelihood. There are also other classes, notably the aristocracy, whose members live by land interest, and the lumpenproletariat, which consists of unemployed and underemployed people — vagrants, petty thieves and so on. Since Marx’s time in the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of classes has been refined in several directions, not least through studies of peasants in the Third World (Wolf, 1964) and through Bourdieu’s and others’ analyses of cultural classes defined through symbolic power rather than property (Bourdieu, 1984). Its adherents nevertheless still stress the relationship to property in their delineation of classes. A further central feature of this theory is the notion of class struggle. Marx and his followers held that oppressed classes would eventually rise against their oppressors, overthrow them through a revolution, and alter the political order and the social organisation of labour. This, in Marx’s view, was the chief way in which societies evolved. The Weberian view of social classes, which has partly developed into theories of social stratification, combines several criteria in delineating classes, including income, education and political influence. Unlike Marx, Weber did not regard classes as potential corporate groups; he did not believe that members of social classes necessarily would have shared political interests. Weber preferred to speak of ‘status groups’ rather than classes. Theories of social class always refer to systems of social ranking and distribution of power. Ethnicity, on the contrary, does not necessarily refer to rank; ethnic relations may well be egalitarian in this regard. Still, many polyethnic societies are ranked according to ethnic membership. The criteria for such ranking are nevertheless different from class ranking: they refer to imputed cultural differences or even inborn racial differences, not to property or achieved statuses. There may be a high correlation between ethnicity and class, which means that there is a high likelihood that persons belonging to specific ethnic groups also belong to specific social classes. There can be a significant interrelationship between class and ethnicity, both class and ethnicity can be criteria for rank, and ethnic membership can be an important factor in class membership. Both class differences and ethnic differences can be pervasive features of societies, but they are not one and the same thing and must be distinguished from one another analytically. ### The Current Concern With Ethnicity If one were to run a word-search programme through a representative sample of English-language anthropological publications since 1950, one would note significant changes in the frequency of a number of key words. Words like ‘structure’ and ‘function’, for example, have gradually grown unfashionable, whereas Marxist terms like ‘base and superstructure’, ‘means of production’ and ‘class struggle’ were widespread from around 1965 until the early 1980s. Terms like ‘ethnicity’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnic group’, for their part, have steadily grown in currency from the late 1960s until the 1990s, and have remained widely used since then. There may be two main causes for this. One of them is changes in the world, while the other concerns changes in the dominant way of thinking in anthropology. Whereas early to mid-twentieth-century anthropology, as exemplified in the works of Malinowski, Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, Lévi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard and others, would characteristically focus on single traditional societies, changes in the world after the Second World War have brought many of these societies into increased contact with each other, with the state, capitalism and global society. Many of the peoples studied by social anthropologists have become involved in national liberation movements or ethnic conflicts in post-colonial states. Many of them, formerly regarded as ‘tribes’ or ‘aboriginals’, have become redefined as ‘ethnic minorities’. Furthermore, many former members of tribal or traditional groups have migrated to cities or to Europe or North America, where their relationships with the host societies have been studied extensively by sociologists, social psychologists and social anthropologists. Many traditional peoples have moved to towns or regional centres where they are brought into contact with people with other customs, languages and identities, and where they frequently enter into competitive relationships in politics and the labour market. A major change taking place worldwide in the twentieth century was urbanisation, and reportedly (Davis, 2006), in 2007, for the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population was urban. Frequently, people who migrate try to maintain their old kinship patterns, cultural practices and neighbourhood social networks in the new urban context, and both ethnic quarters and ethnic political groupings often emerge in such urban settings. Although the speed of social and cultural change can be high, many retain their ethnic identity generations after having moved to a new environment. This kind of social change was investigated in a series of pioneering studies in North American cities from the 1920s to the 1950s and in Southern Africa from the early 1940s to the 1960s, and we will return to these studies in the next chapter. In an influential study of ethnic identity in the United States, Glazer and Moynihan (1963) claimed that the most important point to be made about the ‘American melting-pot’ is that it never occurred. They argued that, rather than eradicating ethnic differences, modern American society has actually created a new form of self-awareness in people, which is expressed in a concern about roots and origins. Moreover, many Americans continue to use their ethnic networks actively when looking for jobs or a spouse. Many prefer to live in neighbourhoods dominated by people with the same origins as themselves, and they continue to regard themselves as ‘Italians’, ‘Poles’ and so on in a hyphenated way (Italian-American etc.) several generations after their ancestors left the country of origin. An insight from anthropological research has been that ethnic organisation and identity, rather than being ‘primordial’ phenomena radically opposed to modernity and the modern state, are frequently reactions to processes of modernisation. As Jonathan Friedman has put it, “[e]thnic and cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are not two arguments, two opposing views of what is happening in the world today, but two constitutive trends of global reality” (1990: 311). Does this mean that ethnicity is chiefly a modern phenomenon? This is a tricky but highly relevant question. The contemporary ethnic processes referred to above can be described as modern in character. In an influential statement on political ethnicity, Abner Cohen (1974a) argued that the concept is perhaps most useful in the study of the development of new political cultures in situations of social change in the Third World. It must be added, however, that some of the most important studies of ethnicity have been carried out in non-modern societies, though if quantity were anything to go by, ethnic studies are most vigorously pursued in Western societies. The contemporary concern with ethnicity and ethnic processes is partly related to historical changes such as the ones alluded to above. It could nevertheless also be argued that the growing interest in ethnicity reflects changes in the dominant anthropological mode of thought. Instead of viewing ‘societies’ or even ‘cultures’ as more or less isolated, static and homogeneous units as the early structural-functionalists and Boasians would have tended to do, anthropologists now typically try to depict flux and process, ambiguity and complexity in their analyses of social worlds. In this context, ethnicity has proven a highly useful concept, since it suggests a dynamic situation of variable contact, conflict and competition, but also mutual accommodation between groups. ### From Tribe To Ethnic Group As already mentioned, there has been a shift in Anglophone anthropological terminology concerning the nature of the social units we study. While one formerly spoke of ‘tribes’, the term ‘ethnic group’ is nowadays much more common. In the late 1970s, Ronald Cohen could well remark: ‘Quite suddenly, with little comment or ceremony, ethnicity is an ubiquitous presence’ (1978: 379). Although the peak of ethnicity studies was possibly reached a few years later, quantitatively speaking (Banks, 1996: 1), the study of intergroup dynamics and cultural variation has reached a point of no return in the sense that it is difficult to envision future social scientists talking about ‘alien tribes’. This change in terminology implies more than a mere replacement of one word with another. Notably, the use of the term ‘ethnic group’ suggests contact and interrelationship and, ultimately, that we all live in one, ‘continuous’ world. To speak of an ethnic group in total isolation is as absurd as to speak of the sound from one hand clapping (see Bateson, 1979: 78). By definition, ethnic groups remain more or less discrete, but they are aware of and in contact with members of other ethnic groups. Moreover, these groups or categories are in a sense created through that very contact. Group identities must always be defined in relation to what they are not in other words, in relation to non-members of the group. The terminological switch from ‘tribe’ to ‘ethnic group’ may also mitigate or even transcend an ethnocentric or Eurocentric bias which anthropologists have often been accused of promoting covertly (most famously, perhaps, by Said, 1978). When we talk of tribes, we implicitly introduce a sharp, qualitative distinction between ourselves and the people we study; the distinction generally corresponds to the distinction between modern and traditional or so-called primitive societies. If we instead talk of ethnic groups or categories, such a sharp distinction becomes difficult to maintain. Virtually every human being belongs to an ethnic group, whether he or she lives in Europe, Melanesia or Central America, although the significance of their ethnic membership is bound to vary. There are ethnic groups in English cities, in the Bolivian countryside and in the New Guinea highlands. Anthropologists themselves belong to ethnic groups or nations. Moreover, the concepts and models used in the study of ethnicity can be applied to modern as well as non-modern contexts, to North Atlantic as well as Asian or African societies. In this sense, the concept of ethnicity can be said to bridge two important gaps in social anthropology: it entails a focus on dynamics rather than statics, and it relativises the boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, between moderns and tribals (see also Jenkins, 2008: chapter 2). ### So What Is Ethnicity? When we talk of ethnicity, we indicate that groups and identities have developed in mutual contact rather than in isolation. But what is the nature of such groups? When A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn investigated the various meanings of ‘culture’ in the early 1950s (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952), they identified 162 different definitions. Most of those who write on ethnicity do not bother to define the term, and the actual usages of the term vary. Instead of going through the various definitions of ethnicity here, I will point out significant differences between analytical perspectives as we go along. As a starting point, let us examine the recent development of the term as it is used by social anthropologists. The term ‘ethnic group’ has come to mean something like ‘a people’. But what is ‘a people’? Does the non-immigrant population of Britain constitute a people, does it comprise several peoples (as Nairn, 1977, argued), or does it rather form part of a Germanic, or an English-speaking, or an Atlantic, or a European people? All of these positions may have their defenders, and this very ambiguity in the designation of peoples has been taken on as a challenge by anthropologists. In a pioneering study of ethnic relations in Thailand, Michael Moerman (1965) asked, rhetorically: ‘Who are the Lue?’ The Lue were the ethnic group his research focused on, but when he tried to describe who they were in what ways they were distinctive from other ethnic groups — he quickly encountered problems. His problem, a very common one in contemporary anthropology, concerned the boundaries of the group. After listing a number of criteria commonly used by anthropologists to demarcate cultural groups, such as language, political organisation and territorial contiguity, he states: ‘Since language, culture, political organization, etc., do not correlate completely, the units delimited by one criterion do not coincide with the units delimited by another’ (Moerman, 1965: 1215). When he asked individual Lue what were their typical characteristics, they would mention cultural traits which they in fact shared with other, neighbouring groups. They lived in close interaction with other groups in the area; they had no exclusive livelihood, no exclusive language, no exclusive customs, no exclusive religion. Why was it appropriate to describe them as an ethnic group? After posing these problems, Moerman was forced to conclude that “[s]omeone is Lue by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness” (1965: 1219). Being unable to argue that this ‘Lueness’ can be defined with reference to objective cultural features or clear-cut boundaries, Moerman defines it as an emic category of ascription.¹ This way of delineating ethnic groups has become very influential (see chapter 3). Does this imply that ethnic groups do not necessarily have a distinctive culture? Can two groups be culturally identical and yet constitute two different ethnic groups? This is a complicated question, which will be dealt with at length in later chapters. At this point it should be noted that, contrary to a widespread commonsense view, the existence of cultural differences between two groups is not the decisive feature of ethnicity. Two distinctive, endogamous groups, say, somewhere in New Guinea, may well have widely different languages, religious beliefs and even technologies, but that does not necessarily mean that there is an ethnic relationship between them. For ethnicity to come about, the groups must have a minimum of contact with each other, and they must entertain ideas of each other as being culturally different from themselves. If these conditions are not fulfilled, there is no ethnicity, for ethnicity is essentially an aspect of a relationship, not a property of a group.² This is a key point. Conversely, some groups may seem culturally similar, yet there can be a socially highly relevant (and even volatile) interethnic relationship between them. This would have been the case with the relationship between Serbs and Croats following the break-up of Yugoslavia, or the tension between coastal Sami and ethnic Norwegians. There may also be considerable cultural variation within a group without ethnic differences (Blom, 1969). Only in so far as cultural differences are perceived as being important, and are made socially relevant, do social relationships have an ethnic element. Indeed, the similarities between bounded, competing ethnic groups may in fact be highlighted, as shown by Simon Harrison (2002) in an article describing intense ethnic boundary-making between groups which see each other as similar in important respects. Ethnicity is an aspect of social relationship between persons who consider themselves as essentially distinctive from members of other groups of whom they are aware and with whom they enter into relationships. It can thus also be defined as a social identity (based on a contrast vis-à-vis others) characterised by metaphoric or fictive kinship (Yelvington, 1991: 168). When cultural differences regularly make a difference in interaction between members of groups, the social relationship has an ethnic element. Ethnicity refers both to aspects of gain