Ethnicity

Steve Fenton

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658438
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this extensively revised edition, Steve Fenton updates his concise and accessible introduction to ethnicity, drawing on new published work and recent social and historical changes. Discussing an extended range of theorists and illustrations from around the world, Fenton explores and clarifies the core meanings and the shifting ground of this contested concept. More space is given to ideas of 'threat' and 'competition' in conceptualizing ethnicity, as well as to recent issues in migration, especially increased migration to the US from Central and South America. Fenton situates ethnic identities and interest in the changing modern world, and seeks to explain the contemporary conditions of delineation along ethnic and racial lines. Without assuming the centrality of ethnic difference, this book asks: Does it matter? When does it matter? Is it as important as many have assumed? The second edition of Fenton's highly regarded Ethnicity will continue to be an invaluable text for students of sociology, politics and international relations coming to the subject for the first time. Its innovative and challenging approach will also appeal to more advanced scholars of race and ethnicity.

1

Ethnos: Descent and Culture Communities

Ethnic group, race and nation are three concepts sharing a single centre – or ‘core’ – with some notable and important differences at the periphery. Common to all is an idea of descent or ancestry and very closely implicated in all three we find the idea of shared culture. Ideas about culture will include myths about the past, beliefs about ‘the kind of people we are’ and the idea that ‘culture’, language, dress and custom, define a group. All three terms relate to ‘descent and culture communities’. Ethnic group, race and nation are all viewed, by themselves or by observers, as peoples who have or lay claim to shared antecedents. This idea of shared ancestry may not be as precise as the genealogies of extended families (though how can we tell how much imprecision is concealed in family trees?) but there is nonetheless a repeating theme of ‘people coming from the same stock’. In English, this word ‘stock’ is mostly used with reference to animals, so in its use with reference to people it has a strong biological sense, a strong sense of genealogy and type. This sense of shared ancestry can certainly be found in the dictionary definitions of all three of these terms:

Race: a group of persons (animals or plants) connected by common descent or origin; a tribe, nation or people regarded as of common stock. [my emphasis]

Nation: an extensive aggregate of persons so closely associated with each other by common descent, language or history as to form a distinct race of people usually organised as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory. [my emphasis]

Ethnic: (an adjective) pertaining to nations not Christian; pertaining to a race or nation; having common racial, cultural, religious or linguistic characteristics especially designating a racial or other group within a larger system. [my emphasis]

(Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 1993)

Shared references

‘Ethnic’, the only adjective, refers to the previous two by listing race and nation and ‘common racial, cultural, religious or linguistic characteristics’. The definition of ‘nation’ refers to common descent and a distinct race of people. And that of ‘race’ refers to common descent and tribe, nation or people. Clearly, all three occupy very much the same territory of meaning; not precisely the same but so close as to make it impossible to consider them separately.

Much of the sociological literature on these terms has been concerned to distinguish them by means of separation, that is by distinguishing them in such a way that one makes a clean break from the other. It is far better to start by saying that all occupy the same terrain. Having said this, the next step is to show the respects in which, as we move from the core outwards, they diverge. What they all convey is a sense of a people. This is precisely the meaning of the term in which ‘ethnic’ has its origins: the classical Greek word ethnos. The word has preserved this meaning in modern Greek, covering the English sense of both nation and ethnic group (Triandafyllidou et al. 1997).

Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon (1897), the authoritative source on classical Greek usages, cites a number of meanings which are shifts in emphasis in different contexts and at different periods of ancient Greek history. They are:

Ethnos: Number of people living together, body of men; particular tribes; of animals, flocks; (after Homer) nation, people; (later) foreign, barbarous nations; non-Athenians, (biblical Greek) non-Jews, Gentiles, class of men, caste, tribe.

The adjectival form, ethnikos, has two principal meanings: national and foreign.

So, the Greek ethnos has the meanings which are attached to modern English usage of nation, peoples, especially foreign peoples, or tribes and castes plus the adjectival national and foreign. For tribe we might now read ‘ethnic group’. We could have added ‘race’ in its pre-nineteenth-century forms when it had similar connotations of nations, peoples and even classes. It was the rise of biological and anthropological science in the nineteenth century which gave to ‘race’ its special meaning of grand divisions of humankind.

The word ‘ethnic’ found its way into English (after a number of early spellings such as ‘aethnycke’) and appears to have long had the sense of ‘foreign’ and the sense distinguished from Jewish (i.e. Gentile) and distinguished from Jewish and Gentile (i.e. heathen). In fact the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1993) states that ‘ethnic’ derives from the Greek ethnikos, ‘heathen’, citing this heathen sense despite the fact that the Greek adjective also clearly had the more neutral sense ‘national’. Once ‘ethnic’ or equivalent establishes itself in English, with the first citation from a written work of 1473, it regularly has the meaning of ‘heathen and foreign’. The Oxford Dictionary then cites a second set of meanings, mostly dating from the nineteenth century, when it becomes generalized, losing the special ‘heathen’ sense. Thus we have this definition: ‘ethnic’: pertaining to race, common racial or cultural character. By 1935, they are citing Huxley and Haddon (of which more later) and their famous argument for the abandonment of the term ‘race’ and its replacement by ‘ethnic’. The Oxford Dictionary also cites the term in its combination with (ethnic) minority group and as a noun meaning one who is not a Christian or Jew. In both the USA and Britain, the noun form ‘ethnics’ is used to mean something other than majority.

Before leaving the Greek dictionary we should note three other ancient Greek terms which have a meaning approximating to people or ‘class’ of people. One is phylon, for which Liddell and Scott give the meaning ‘race, tribe or class’ followed by a second meaning, ‘nation’. Phylon too has a meaning as a class within the animal kingdom. Genos is defined as ‘race, stock or kin’. This latter term has a closer link to the notion of family, offspring and descent. But it too can mean tribe ‘as a sub-division’ of ethnos and can mean classes in the animal kingdom. All these words – ethnos, phylon and genos – encompass shared meanings of people, tribe, nation and class, with shades of difference from one to another. The word for people in Greek, which moves away from all these three but nonetheless could be translated as ‘people’, is demos. It is, in Liddell and Scott, given a first meaning of district, country, land, but subsequently ‘the people, the inhabitants’ of a district or land. It has two further meanings. One is its meaning as ‘common people’ as against aristocracy, the people of ‘the country’ as opposed to the elite people of the city. The other is ‘in a political sense’ the ‘sovereign people, the free citizens’, this being the sense which modern English users know in the word ‘democracy’.

Stock, type, people, breed

Four things are of special interest in this examination of one language (Greek), a language which happens also to be the source of a good deal of modern terminology. First, all these terms mean something like ‘people’ and all except genos were used in ways which today might be translated as ‘nation’. The meaning of genos as specific descent group and sub-group, and as ‘less than a nation’ is fairly clear. However, genos and the Latin equivalent genus have provided the English ‘genus’, which has been used in biological sciences to mean ‘stock, race, kind’. Second, all of them, bar demos, could have the meaning of a ‘class’ of animals or people; in the animal and plant kingdom, modern biology has adopted phylon and genos, neither of which, in common usage, has given us words meaning anything like people or nation. Genos, though, appears in ‘genocide’, ‘the deliberate extermination of an ethnic or national group’. Third, an idea of cultural difference is conveyed by the way in which these words for people, and particularly ethnos, were used to mean other peoples, who spoke other languages, lived in different countries and, in a later context, were not Jews, or were neither Jews nor Christians. Fourth, the words make distinctions which had significance within the societies and periods from which they emanate. The Greeks in general and the Athenians in particular expressed this strong sense of difference between themselves and other peoples. Later, distinctions of Jew, Gentile or Christian and others became important. And in the word demos for people, the distinction between citizens (free) and unfree persons was the important one.

Nation

The word ‘nation’ came into English via French from the Latin root natio, which has provided the word for ‘nation’ in virtually all Romance languages. It too has an original meaning of a ‘breed’ or ‘stock’ of people who share a common descent or were regarded as so doing. The fact that it has something to do with descent is betrayed by the word natio’s own root in the verb nasci, ‘to be born’. The Oxford Dictionary gives references to usages of ‘nation’ as early as 1300. The idea of common descent and the idea of people of a territory were both present. Its earliest uses were not solely – as some have implied – in the context of student groups (nationes) in medieval universities, identified by country of origin (cf. Greenfeld 1992). The Latin natio is clearly quite close in meaning to the Greek ethnos. It even shares the biblical sense of ethnos; the Oxford Dictionary cites English usage of ‘nations’ meaning ‘heathen nations’ in biblical use as early as 1340.

The first part of the Oxford English Dictionary section on ‘nation’ essays a general definition that we cited earlier:

An extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language or history as to form a distinct race or people, usually organised as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory.

The source goes on to say that early uses showed more of ‘the racial idea’ and later uses, the political. Early (1300–86) references described Englishmen (‘Ingles man’) as a nation. And the Dictionary cites Fortescue in 1460 referring to the King being compelled to make his armies of ‘straungers’ such as ‘Scottes, Spanyardes … and of other nacions’. In a history of Carolina in colonial America (1709), the writer says that ‘two nations of Indians here in Carolina were at war’. But ‘nation’ has also had the meaning of a class of persons or even animals. A 1390 cited work refers to lovers, or gentle people, as a nation (‘Among the gentil nacion love is an occupacion’), and similarly schoolboys are described as a nation in late seventeenth-century usage. An early eighteenth-century usage refers to animals as ‘the nations of the field and wood’.

Race

Finally in this trio we come to the word ‘race’, again a word which appears in most Romance languages and is cited as deriving from the French race and the earlier French rasse, matched by the Italian razza and Portuguese raça (Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 1993). Its earliest uses in the sixteenth century have a sense of ‘breeding’, persons of the same family or bred from the same ancestors and, like many of the other words we have traced, it could be applied to animals as well as humans. In 1600, it was used to mean ‘a nation or tribe of people regarded as of common stock’ and there are indications that it was used to mean simply a people of a land or even just a class of people as in ‘a race of heroes’. It was not until the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century that it began to acquire the meaning of ‘one of the great sub-divisions of mankind’. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it had become the key term in a whole science of classifying the divisions of humankind by physically defined races which were also widely believed to be the basis of differences in ability and temperament in a global racial hierarchy (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Banton 1987; Malik 1996). After challenges to this race science in the early part of the twentieth century, by the 1950s the term ‘race’ was in retreat. The 1986 Oxford Reference Dictionary states that the notion of ‘race as a rigid classificatory system or system of genetics has largely been abandoned’.

Looked at etymologically and historically, the usages of these three terms, ‘ethnic’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’, support the suggestion that all three have a great deal of common ground. Contained in their past and present usages are ideas of common descent, a common belief in shared descent, ideas of class or type and about the people of a place, country, kingdom or other form of state. Closely associated or implicated in these terms – and especially in ethnos and ‘ethnic’ – are notions of cultural character, language and difference and foreignness. Despite the fact that they are such closely related ideas, race, nation and ethnic group are frequently considered to be quite different topics: race and racism, nation and nationalism and ethnic groups and ethnicity. Remarkably, one recent publication dealing with ‘racism’ states that it does not ‘deal with “ethnicity”, a topic covered by a different volume’ (Bulmer and Solomos 2000).

The demise of race

We have referred to the decline of the term ‘race’ and this is certainly true by contrast with what may be regarded as the high point of racial terminology and race thinking – somewhere in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. The Nazi regime in Germany, through to the end of the Second World War in 1945, adopted race science as the guide to its genocidal politics, although academic and scientific attacks on race thinking had already begun. Race thinking had four main characteristics. First, that it was possible to classify the whole of humankind into a relatively small number of races defined primarily by physical and visible difference. The second was that races so defined shared not just appearance type but also temperament, ability and moral qualities. The third was that there was something that could be called ‘racial inheritance’, whereby the physical and moral qualities of the race were preserved through racial descent. And the fourth was that the races of the world were hierarchically ordered with something referred to as the White race, the Caucasian race or sub-division of these (Nordic, Anglo-Saxon) being superior to all others.

All four of these ‘propositions’ are now either rejected or not regarded as having any social scientific value. Although physical characteristics (such as skin colour and eye and hair formation) are clustered in particular populations, the attempt to arrive at final classifications of races has largely been abandoned. This is both because we know that there is significant variation within populations referred to as ‘races’ and because of the sheer difficulty of determining boundaries between races, not least because of the movement and mingling of populations. It is, however, the second and third propositions that are most roundly rejected – the idea that racial difference ‘predicts’ social and moral qualities. There never was anything but speculative support for such arguments and anthropology and sociology now adopt the contrary argument – that social and cultural qualities are socially and culturally transmitted. All these first three taken together were components of the fourth proposition, the equally discredited white supremacist line of argument. (Students who wish to follow some of the points raised here should consult Banton 1977; Barzun 1965...