13

Ethnicity and Nationhood

When the Twelfth International Congress of Anthropological and Eth-

nological Sciences met in July 1988 in Zagreb, Croatia—then Yugosla-
via—I was asked to contribute a paper to a symposium on “Contem-
porary Ethnic Processes.” The symposium was organized by Yulian
Bromley, director of the Institute of Ethnography, Academy of Sciences
of the USSR, Moscow, and then chaired in Zagreb by Leokadia M.
Drobizheva of that institute. The congress gave some hints of the inten-
sifying ethnic conflict that would end by destroying the former Yugosla-
via, and in our symposium Professor Drobizheva discussed publicly for
the first time the politically contentious role of “historical memory” in
relation to national/ethnic consciousness in the Soviet Union.
In this highly charged setting, my paper argued that neither nations
nor ethnic entities were primordial creations; both were constructed un-
der historically definable social, economic, and political conditions. This
also meant that in the future we would have to think of “culture” in a
less essentialist and more relational manner.

A hundred years ago many liberals and socialists heard and expected
that a liberal or socialist internationalism would put an end to the array

Originally published in the Journal of Ethnic Studies [Ljubljana], no. 21 (1988): 27–

184
Ethnicity and Nationhood 185

of competitive nation-states. Very much contrary to these expectations,

nation-states have multiplied in the modern world. New nation-states
have emerged through the breakup of empires and culture spheres pred-
icated on other principles of organization. Contrary to expectations,
too—and contrary especially to the predictions that modernization
would put an end to ethnic exclusivity—groups and clusters of groups
passionately dedicated to the politics of ethnicity have also proliferated.
Everywhere, the expansion of citizenship has seemingly been accompa-
nied by the emergence into the public sphere of social and cultural en-
tities that define themselves through claims to differential ancestry and
use these claims to mark out distinctive social trajectories. Since World
War II, moreover, many previously “acquiescent ethnic groups” have
been waging armed struggles to win political autonomy or to set up
sovereign states of their own. Indeed, some people have argued that
World War III has already begun—of 120-some wars going on at pres-
ent, perhaps three-fourths involve conflicts between states and ethnically
marked populations within them. Wars between sovereign states ac-
count for less than 3 percent of such struggles, and insurgencies only 15
percent (Nietschmann 1987).
Not only have both nation-states and ethnic groupings multiplied,
but the odd and distinctive phenomenon that marks them both is that
claims to autonomy or sovereignty are advanced and fought over in
terms of kinship. To be precise, these terms are based not on the actual
genealogical reckoning of demonstrated genealogical linkages but on
imputed, stipulated kinship. Such claims of stipulated kinship, in the
service of establishing what Benedict Anderson (1983) called “imagined
communities,” are founded on an ideology of common substance sup-
posedly connecting all the claimants to an ethnic or national identity.
That common substance is imagined to pass down the generations partly
through biological transfers, “descent,” and partly through the handing
down of a valued, culturally learned “tradition.” As various scholars
have pointed out, this kind of ideology tends to fuse biology and socially
acquired heritage, to establish each such social entity as a monad, sep-
arate and distinctive from all other such monads, each possessing an
essence that marks it off from others possessed of different essences. The
ideology “naturalizes” these distinctions, establishing them in the nature
of things; and this commonsensical view of the nature of things is placed
in the service of claims to exclusiveness and priority, monopoly, and
precedence.
These claims, often real enough to the participants, require analysis—-
186 Connections

and that analysis has been one of the major concerns of the anthropo-
logical sciences. We understand, as scientists, that such claims to the
possession of eternal essences are based on fictions. We know, for one
thing, that groups claiming commonality through descent change over
time. We know that they become salient under certain determinate cir-
cumstances and recede into oblivion at other times. We also know that
such entities have always existed in the presence of other ethnikons,
peoples, nations; that they mix and fuse with others, both biologically
and culturally; and that, therefore, social and cultural entities and iden-
tities are not given but are constructed in the very maelstrom of change
and upheaval. We are thus instructed to be attentive to the precise ways
in which they construct and relinquish claims to identity under the pres-
sure of complex forces, processes that underwrite, maintain, exacerbate,
or cool ethnic assertion.
How nations are constructed—socially, economically, politically,
and in communicative terms—is now much better understood than be-
fore; say, during the 1930s and World War II. Social historians, studying
history “from below” as well as “from above,” have shown us how
politics, the law, the army, and the educational system were reshaped
to form new systems of hegemonic national cultures: to make Britons
of Disraeli’s two hostile nations; to turn peasants into Frenchmen (Weber
1976); to make Italians to inhabit a new unified Italy; to turn the fifty-
odd German principalities into a German Reich. (It should be remem-
bered in this context that the entire problematic of Ferdinand Tönnies’s
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which still haunts sociological inquiry,
is an extrapolation from the unwilling incorporation of Schleswig into
the Bismarckian empire.) We have also learned a great deal from the
models of social scientists who have shown how the successive forma-
tion of nations into nation-states took place in relation to one another.
The advances of some core-states in the developing world system con-
strained the opportunities for their followers and dictated the develop-
ment of new national responses among the second and third cohorts of
new entrants. Thus the symbolic forms of nation building have been
remarkably similar, even as the various nations were consigned to quite
different positions in the distribution of power and control over “the
conditions of production.”
The symbolic forms of nation formation have been quite similar:
flags, emblems, holidays, monuments, songs, theater; the construction
of a national aesthetics; resurrection and reformulation of literature, oral
and written; exaltation of a standard language (Mosse 1975). Yet these
Ethnicity and Nationhood 187

forms have been introduced under different conditions, involving—as

Antonio Gramsci understood so well—historically strategic alliances of
classes and segments of classes that wield hegemony over both internal
and external relations of the state.
When we look at ethnic phenomena (in the sense of efforts to under-
write the solidarity of groups through appeals to commonalities of de-
scent and tradition), we are faced with a much wider range of circum-
stances that generate what seem to be similar effects. Ethnic phenomena
arise under the impact of widely different promptings. A first step to-
ward understanding them, therefore, is to look at them in different sit-
uations, to portray them in their very different scenarios.
A first scenario is that of groupings ordered by kinship among other
groupings ordered by kinship, characterized not only by descent and
affinity but also—in the absence of an overarching state—by autono-
mous processes of fission and fusion. An example of this is furnished by
Maurice Godelier in his study of the Baruya of the Eastern New Guinea
Highlands (1982). Once forming part of a cluster called Yoyue, they
broke with them in hostile action and fissioned off, invading territory
occupied by other people and incorporating some of them while driving
out others. The resultant federation of clans, held together by the initi-
ation cult brought by the invading newcomers, constitutes the people
now known as the Baruya.
A second scenario for the formation of ethnically defined groups is
furnished by situations along the frontiers of European expansion, under
the aegis of mercantile “capitalism.” Thus in North America local clus-
ters of people formed ethnically defined alliances, such as the Iroquois,
the Ottawa, and the Chippewa, to take advantage of opportunities in
the trade for furs and hides. In the ensuing military competition among
European powers for control of the new continent, such macrobands
were also able for a time to exploit their positions in the local balance
of power. Similar situations obtained on the edges of the Dutch, French,
and Portuguese advance in Brazil; on the ever-widening area impacted
by the slave trade in Africa; and on the Siberian frontiers of the Russian
fur trade. Temporarily, but only temporarily, ethnogenesis in these sit-
uations took place under conditions of relative autonomy, as yet un-
hampered by the political, legal, and military constraints of colonialism.
It was accompanied—indeed, underwritten—by lively exchanges of
goods and information among the participants, giving rise to notable
examples of cultural creativity as the result of interchange.
This kind of scenario comes to an end with the establishment of state
188 Connections

dominance and control over territories with defined limits. From this
perspective, a function of the hegemonic state is to inhibit the processes
of fusion and fission, as much as the securing of control over rival in-
ternal and external sovereignties. States, of course, stake out claims to
a monopoly of power that can be realized only partially, thus causing
the effective exercise of sovereignty to be distributed quite unevenly in
both space and time. Yet, because one of the important functions of
states is to secure “the conditions of production” (Borochov 1937)—to
construct the social, economic, political, legal, and ideological infra-
structure that renders expanding production possible—states also pen-
etrate into localities and regions, curtailing local autonomies and sub-
jugating their upholders, but also offering new opportunities and
opening new lines for social mobility. In either case, the formation of
ethnic clusters—whether constrained in their functioning or privileged
under changed circumstances—must now go forward in an active inter-
change with the state. Thus, in Spain, political centralization favored
Castile and dampened the development of the Basque country and Cat-
alonia. In France, Paris subjugated the many other “Frances” (Braudel
1984) and curtailed the autonomy of the maritime towns. But integra-
tion can be quite uneven: in Britain, the conquest of Ireland subjugated
the Gaelic speakers to a class of Anglo-Irish landlords; in Scotland, war-
fare broke the back of the Scottish landed class but opened up the road
to an alliance of Scottish merchants with the city of London.
What spells subjugation for some opens up opportunities for others.
Some opportunities are economic, most notably in trade. An example is
furnished by Abner Cohen’s study of the emergence of Hausa cattle
traders in Nigeria, who secure their control over trade routes and trans-
actions through the development of an especially pious, ethnically based
Islam (1969). Similar commercial diasporas, giving rise to ethnically de-
fined networks, occur elsewhere (Curtin 1984). Other opportunities are
political-bureaucratic, offering points of entry to ethnic groups that mas-
ter the appropriate skills of literacy and professionalism, such as “Ny-
asalanders” (Malawians) in Central Africa (Epstein 1958), Creoles in
Sierra Leone (Cohen 1981), or Garifuna in Belize (Wright 1986). Still
other ethnically defined networks may straddle several domains, as did
the Scots who moved into Asian commerce, railroad construction, and
missionary activities and into the cadres of empire in the nineteenth
century. In that context it is worth remembering that a whole cult of
Scottish nostalgia and ethnic identity—representing the Highlanders as
Ethnicity and Nationhood 189

noble savages—was invented in the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies (Trevor-Roper 1983).
A quite different scenario born of constraint and opportunity is that
of the emergence of ethnic markers in the labor markets of the capitalist
world. The advances and retreats of industries with different require-
ments for the elements of production, including labor, together with the
segmentation of work processes into distinctive operations, create very
different circumstances for populations of workers. The case that would
show the rest of the world what to expect in the future was early in-
dustrial Britain, where proletarianization of the English working class
went hand in hand with the large-scale immigration of Irish workers,
allocated, at lower pay, to the more menial occupations, and much re-
sented. The burgeoning demand for labor on plantations around the
world led, first, to the wholesale export of African slaves, later to “the
second slavery” of Indian and Chinese contract laborers, and still later
to the contracting of multiple “available” ethnic groups (for a recent
Central American example, see Bourgois 1988). Expanding industry in
North America was heavily fed by the cityward movement of Afro-
American ex-slaves after the Civil War. Since the end of World War II,
Europe—previously a major exporter of people—has become a region
of immigration. Göran Therborn summarizes the effects of this as “the
Old World turned New,” but “getting the worst of both worlds, the
underclass ghettoes of the New while keeping the traditional cultural
closure of the Old” (1987: 1187). Lest we fall into a misplaced meth-
odological individualism—looking at the migrant as an individual agent
and forgetting the folks he or she left behind, the remittances sent home,
the active connections woven across oceans between sending and re-
ceiving areas—we must come to see the new ethnic economics and pol-
itics as connecting regions of the so-called core with regions of the pe-
riphery as quite new, and often emergent, cultural phenomena.
Finally, there is the scenario of ethnic assertion in secessionist rebel-
lions against dominant states. I have already mentioned that the greater
part of the wars going on in the world at the present time are between
Third World states, most of them created in the twentieth century, and
so-called minorities, ethnic clusters both new and old fighting to gain
autonomy or set up independent states, or to defend their resources
against invasion by their putative co-citizens. The Miskito in Nicaragua,
the Xawthoolei in Burma, the Tamil in Sri Lanka, the Palestinians in
Israel, and the Maya in Guatemala are only a few of these. One may
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hazard the guess that war is one of the most effective ways of intensifying
ethnicity. For obvious reasons this is a process not easily studied, but it
is worth the anthropologist’s attention. I will mention here only the
outstanding study by David Lan (1985) of how the Shona rebels, during
the conflict that created an independent Zimbabwe, constructed for
themselves an identity as quasi-reincarnations of royal warriors by de-
veloping links of communication, through the agency of spirit mediums,
with the mhondoro, the spirits of the dead Shona kings and chiefs. Not
every example is as dramatic as this, but the reformulation and inno-
vation of tradition under the aegis of ethnic ideologies is an ongoing
process in the modern world.
In conclusion, let me state my conviction that, if we are to understand
the range of phenomena touched on in this presentation, we shall also
have to revise our time-honored conceptions of “culture.” Perhaps that
concept, too, is a legacy of a time when we thought in essentialist terms,
of each Volk, each people, with a distinctive culture, a characteristic
mode of integration, its own worldview. This manner of apprehending
culture very much begged the question of just how unity and integration
were achieved, under what circumstances, and with what degree of uni-
formity or differentiation. We need to substitute for this all-too-easy
view of cultural homogeneity a much more organizational perspective.
It will mean looking at culture making and remaking in terms of partic-
ular, specifiable processes of organization and communication, always
deployed in contexts “of different interests, oppositions, and contradic-
tions” (Fox 1985: 197). Recently, Fredrik Barth (1983, 1987) has taken
up Robert Redfield’s notion of a “social organization of tradition”
(1956), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have pointed out how
traditions are often invented as “responses to novel situations which
take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own
past by quasi-obligatory repetition” (1983: 2). We are challenged to
comprehend culture always “in the making” (Fox 1985), to learn to
comprehend just how, in the midst of ongoing action, the protagonists
combine old and novel practices into ever-new and ever-renewed figu-
rations.