The Political Anthropology of Ethnic and Religious Minorities

Arpad Szakolczai, Agnes Horvath, Attila Z. Papp

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815382126
• eBook ISBN: 9781351209175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents some arguments for why a political anthropological perspective can be particularly helpful for understanding the connected political and cultural challenges and opportunities posed by the situation of ethnic and religious minorities. The first chapter shortly introduces the major anthropological concepts used, including liminality, trickster, imitation and schismogenesis; concepts that are used together with approaches of historical sociology and genealogy, especially concerning the rise and fall of empires, and their lasting impact. The conceptual framework suggested here is particularly helpful for understanding how marginal places can become liminal, appearing suddenly at the center of political attention. The introduction also shows the manner in which minority existence can problematize the depersonalizing tendencies of modern globalization. Subsequent chapters demonstrate how the described political anthropological conceptual framework can be used in certain European regions, and in the case of certain ethnic and religious minority, and each illustrates that instead of charismatic leaders, trickster politicians are emerging and increasingly dominate, through the "public sphere", the space of modern politics emptied of real presence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

Individualization as Depersonalization: Minority Studies and Political Anthropology

ARPAD SZAKOLCZAI and AGNES HORVATH

ATTILA Z. PAPP

This chapter offers an introduction to the book. It presents the arguments why a political anthropological perspective can be particularly helpful to understand the connected political and cultural challenges and opportunities posed by the situation of ethnic and religious minorities. The article concisely introduces the major anthropological concepts used, including liminality, trickster, imitation, and schismogenesis; concepts that are used together with approaches of historical sociology and genealogy, especially concerning the rise and fall of empires, and their lasting impact. The suggested conceptual framework is particularly helpful for understanding how marginal places can become liminal, appearing suddenly at the center of political attention. The article also shows the manner in which minority existence can problematize the depersonalizing tendencies of modern globalization.

There are, at least, five good reasons why minorities—ethnic, linguistic, or religious—are a worthwhile, even important, area of study for the political and social sciences. To begin with, and most simply, because they simply exist, even though often they are ignored, or belittled, following the seemingly self-evident logic of identifying a nation-state with a single group. Second, such groups offer color and variety; it is good to know about them, as they help to stay aware about the multiplicity of life and culture in a world increasingly threatened by global uniformity. Third, and even more importantly, beyond “exotic” charm, such communities offer a reality check against these processes of mechanization and uniformization, moving beyond the idea of taking the “modern West” as an unsurpassable horizon. Fourth, beyond merely surviving, in contrast to the dominant majority of their respective countries, they perform, or could perform, an important role of mediation. Fifth and perhaps most importantly, the existence of such minorities both render evident and help to literally resist the arguably most central and most pernicious aspects of modern globalization, which is not simply standardization, mechanization, bureaucratization, commodification, or commercialization but also depersonalization. The central aim is to analyze this phenomenon with the help of concepts developed in political anthropology.

This short introduction will offer an overview of political anthropology,¹ with a focus on its features that might have particular relevance for minority studies. The central aim of this volume is to suggest a theoretical framework for analyzing the situation and role of minorities, with a focus on deeply divided societies, and to apply it for some European countries where significant ethnic minorities are present, and where there is a strong religion-based conflict dividing the society. Anthropological concepts central for this theoretical framework include liminality, imitation, trickster, and schismogenesis; concepts that are little used, especially together, outside specialized anthropological studies but that have particular relevance for the study of sociopolitical conflicts in the modern world. In particular, using the conceptual pair “marginality/liminality,” this volume investigates how such situations emerge in peripheral areas that are also in between major cultural, political, and civilizational centers and in the outskirts of Europe, and how such “marginal” places can gain a liminal position in mediating between societies and cultures but also in becoming permanent sources of conflict. Such at once marginal and liminal areas, studied in some details in the chapters that follow, include Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Lithuania, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland.

The reason why we offer a set of anthropological concepts that were so far rarely used in the study of contemporary politics is dual, justifying the undertaking from two angles. On the one hand, living as member of a minority — ethnic, linguistic, or religious — is a matter of everyday living and an often quite difficult, conflictual one. Studies of such situations easily require the standard anthropological or ethnographic tools of extended fieldwork and participatory observation. However, on the other hand, the very existence of such minorities as minorities, often quite isolated and embittered minorities, is a consequence of long-term historical changes, mostly due to the building and collapse of empires. This implies, at a first step, the rise of a conquering empire, and its subjugation of various people, often involving forced population movements and then a protracted existence under such an empire that often can extend for long centuries, under which various efforts are made by central authorities to integrate and assimilate the conquered; eventually, the necessary collapse of an empire might lead to situations of nation-state-building with its own homogenizing efforts as a legacy. This also implies that the perspective of political anthropology makes use of comparative historical sociology, especially the genealogical perspective, as pioneered by Nietzsche and developed further by Max Weber, Eric Voegelin, and Michel Foucault.

The paradoxicality of such a situation is not always understood in contemporary political analysis. The reason is that the central concepts of modern social and political theorizing are closely connected to the specific answer given to the concrete political and religious problems that emerged in Europe after the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and thus the medieval world order, but theorists fail to see the contingency of their own answers, starting with the ideas of Machiavelli and More, and especially Hobbes. The significance of anthropological approaches and concepts is thus not simply that they stay close to the everyday reality of minorities but that such concepts can escape the limits of taken-for-granted modern concepts, closely tied to the (absolutist) state.

The central paradox of the postimperial situation is that the mess generated by empire-building, this “concupiscential conquest” (Voegelin), always driven by an inner void, is not easy to clear away.² Populations that became mixed, as forced to live together for long decades or centuries, cannot be easily separated. The oldest example for the absurdity of such efforts takes us back to the Book of Ezra in the Old Testament, a first case for ethnic cleansing, where the high priests, back — eventually — from the Babylonian captivity, stood judgment over their people, expulsing those with foreign wives. In such a context, enforced homogenization by the “liberated” people can be even more oppressive and violent than imperial policies; while the seemingly “liberal” and “democratic” solution of tying down people, in a setting where intermarriage was the fact of life since generations, to a single and unambiguous ethnic identity can be just as oppressive and even ludicrous.

Beyond these problems, we would like to single out for attention one particularly problematic element of the taken-for-granted framework of modern European thought, associated with the legal, administrative, bureaucratic, processual, and policy-obsessed aspects of state formation. This is the increased depersonalization associated with the rise of the modern world — not exclusive to politics, but particularly pronounced there, and rendered visible by various minorities.

DEPERSONALIZATION VERSUS THE MINORITY PERSON

The problem of the depersonalizing effects of the modern state and modern capitalism was at the heart of Max Weber’s work. This aspect, which cannot be reduced to the more specific diagnoses of “bureaucratization” or “rationalization,” has recently been emphasized by Wilhelm Hennis, a political scientist who argued that Max Weber’s central theme of work was concerned with the tension between personality and the “life orders” under contemporary conditions.³ It is due to perceiving such depersonalizing effects that Weber was intrigued by Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modern nihilism, animating some of his last conclusive words, like the January 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, containing the passage “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness … [w]here there is nothing,”⁴ giving a negative response to the still open ending of the Protestant Ethic, envisioning that the “last men” of this civilizational development could be “ ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart: this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved,’”⁵ or his last completed lecture course on General Economic History in the 1919–20 winter term, ending with evoking a new “Iron Age.”⁶

Such diagnoses are notable not simply due to their pessimism but by capturing a type of development where depersonalization is continually increasing, paradoxically together with rising individualism and fake personalization. This is because the term “individual” has two radically different shades of meaning. On the one hand, the “individual” stands for the concrete, single human being, implying the myriad ties and connections one carries within his or her person — family, friends, and colleagues or religious, ethnic, linguistic, and professional. On the other, in both modern economics and the “public sphere,” the individual is a single, atomized entity, alchemically separated from every possible tie, left with nothing else but one’s “interests” (a word itself capturing in-between-ness but here transmogrified into something objectified “inside” the individual) and reasoning power; thus, a conceptualization perfectly compatible with the most extreme depersonalization. Depersonalization divides entities, where each divided entity must construct an “identity” that would then be “recognized” by the others; quite close to the analogy of the way the nation-states “recognize” each other, in the Westphalian system. However, the multiplication of recognized identities does not necessarily mean an undisturbed personality but quite the opposite. Over time the negative aspects of depersonalization and the deep-seated anxieties it produces are also becoming more and more evident and dominant, leading to increasing warfare and conflicts, not only in the past but the present as well.

Thus, beyond terms like “ambivalence” or even “tension,” we need concepts that can capture together both sides of modernity, depersonalization, and individualization and the increasing gap and tension between the “person” (the authentic, concrete self) and the “individual” (a bundle of sensation that tries to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, “constructing” one’s identity). There is an anthropologically derived term that does this feat, and this is “bipolarity,” developed by Gregory Bateson on the basis of his earlier concept of “schismogenesis.” Here, we immediately enter at the heart of the history of the long past centuries, the schismatic history of the civilization to which we belong. Such schisms include the Great Schism between eastern and western Christianity, the Reformation and the subsequent further schisms within western Christianity, the schisms between nations and social classes, resulting in the social and national problems tearing apart the continent and leading to World War I, the East–West schism of the Cold War, and, most recently, the waves of mass migrations that became a new state of normalcy in the contemporary world.

By pursuing Weber’s diagnosis one of the central anthropological concepts has already been introduced. In the next sections, a more systematic introduction will be offered about the central anthropological concepts on which this book relies.

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The idea that social theory needs not only a historical but also an anthropological dimension goes back to the classics. Weber tried to incorporate anthropological studies into his approach, while Emile Durkheim, his contemporary, directly championed an anthropological perspective to sociology. However, the most relevant anthropological ideas do not derive from Durkheimian sociology but rather from its main dissenters. These include Arnold van Gennep, who in his Rites de passage introduced the idea “liminality,” Gabriel Tarde, who suggested the centrality of the term “imitation,” thus redirecting sociology to Platonic foundation, close to the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville, and even Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and designated heir, whose ideas about the importance of praying (theme of his unfinished dissertation) and gift relations directly challenged the Durkheimian focus on rituals of sacrifice, or Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his focus of participation, away from Durkheim’s neo-Kantian concept “collective representations.” Further ideas that were for a long time marginal even for anthropology but now are increasingly becoming central, through political anthropology, for social and political analysis include the “trickster” and “schismogenesis.”⁷

Within the scope and limits of this writing, it is not possible to introduce these various ideas in detail. We can only illustrate how they all hang together. This offers a novel way to analyze the genesis of the modern world in depersonalization, through a series of concepts that were developed by anthropologists in their studies of nonmodern and non-Western societies. It thus overcomes the central problem of self-referentiality in social theory: analyzing the rise and dynamics of modern societies in emptying entities by concepts developed from within these same societies.

To start with, liminality helps to capture and analyze, with a degree of analytical rigor, what happens under ephemeral and fluid conditions of transition and uncertainty.⁸ Rites of passage are those rituals that assist the transition of a group of individuals, or an entire community, through major points of passage in life: birth and death, adulthood and marriage, illness or other types of crises, or simply the rhythm of seasons. They have three phases: rites of separation; the rite itself, a performance or testing; and the rites of reaggregation. The main liminal moment is the middle stage, but each of the three phases is liminal in its own way.

While the concept was developed through studying rituals actually staged in various small-scale populations in the world, its relevance for the modern world, or for understanding the dynamics of historical events, is evident. A social, political, or economic crisis can be analyzed as a real-world large-scale moment of transition in which the taken-for-granted, stable structures of social and human life are suddenly suspended, and there is an intense search for a solution. This is the type of situation that was at the center of Max Weber’s political sociology, the problem of an “out-of-ordinary” (ausseralltägliche) situation, for which he developed the term “charisma.” For Weber, out-of-ordinary situations cannot be solved by ordinary, traditional-customary, or rational-legalistic means, because the stability that is the basis of such solutions was undermined. They require the appearance of a special kind of person who has “charisma” or a transcendental power for transformation. Weber clearly intimated that Europe after WWI required such leaders, but there are never guarantees that such persons would arrive.

Political sociologists and political scientists over the past century meticulously applied the Weberian terminology to the actual “out-of-ordinary” political leaders of the past century, without paying attention to the question whether these leaders had genuine charismatic qualities. This is where the anthropological concept “trickster,” invented by Paul Radin, is particularly helpful.⁹ Tricksters abound in folktales, mythologies, and ethnographic accounts in most cultures of the planet. The trickster is a peculiar in-between figure, specialized in soul fetching or depersonalization. It is the eternal outsider, not member of any community, not participating, thus not having emotional ties, but for the very same reason able to perceive how it is possible to direct others through their emotions, or even outright stimulate or produce emotions in others, literally playing with human emotions as if on a musical instrument. They are lonely wanderers, moving from one place to another, always in search of conditions where they could suddenly jump from the periphery into the center, making themselves useful, even indispensable, convincing people to accept the changes in themselves. Thus, tricksters are living paradoxes, both outcasts and culture heroes, in many cultures even considered as second founders of the world. The trickster is a central conceptual tool complementing Weber’s “charisma” in capturing a type of political leader that is outside both the realm of tradition and legal rationality. The conditions that favor their rise are situations of distress or crisis, where stabilities are dissolved, emotions become high, and people look for somebody who could guide them out of disorder.

In order to understand the trickster mode of operation, we need to review in some detail, what happens in uncertain and anguishing periods of transition. As the taken-for-granted order of things has become suspended, the form of conduct that were previo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Individualization as Depersonalization: Minority Studies and Political Anthropology
• 2 Trickster Logics in the Hungarian Dual-Citizenship Offer
• 3 “Liminal” Orthodoxies on the Margins of Empire: Twentieth-Century “Home-Grown” Religious Movements in the Republic of Moldova
• 4 Fluid Identity, Fluid Citizenship: The Problem of Ethnicity in Postcommunist Romania
• 5 Central Marginality: Minorities, Images, and Victimhood in Central-Eastern Europe
• 6 Defending the Nation from her Nationalism(s)
• 7 Reconciliation and After in Northern Ireland: The Search for a Political Order in an Ethnically Divided Society
• 8 “In the Margins of Europe”: Cypriot Nationalism, Liminality, and the Moral Economy of the Financial Crisis
• Index