Ethnicity and Everyday Life

Christian Karner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134198559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Mixing theories of the everyday with a wide range of case studies, this book explains the 'character' of ethnicity, from being a political tool of exclusion, to a source of meaning and solidarity, and the relationship between culture, power and identity.

Combining theories of the everyday with empirical case studies, this book examines:

• the 'dual character' of ethnicity – as a political tool of exclusion and source of meaning/ solidarity respectively
• the relationship between culture, power and identity
• the significance of historical/socio-economic contexts to ethnicity and everyday life.

This book addresses many important questions through a critical application of theories of the everyday to a series of case studies that include travellers, the South Asian diaspora, contemporary Austria, and asylum seekers in 'Fortress Europe'.

This book provides an accessible and coherent introduction to the sociology of ethnicity and will be essential reading for undergraduate students on cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and sociology courses.

1
ETHNICITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

I hope readers will forgive me for starting another chapter with a biographical snippet: my first self-conscious engagement with the concept of ethnicity occurred in the early 1990s to the backdrop of the collapse of former Yugoslavia, as the world watched in horror the unfolding of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. The demise of communism, so a then widely circulating explanatory narrative went, had allowed suppressed but deep-seated identities and divisions to resurface; ethnic conflict and violence were, so such simplistic accounts continued, the inevitable result. While the oversimplifications inherent in these self-proclaimed ‘explanations’ have been revealed and challenged since (e.g. Gilliland 1995), they none the less contain a set of assumptions that provide a suitable point of departure and subsequent criticism for this chapter. First, these accounts assumed ethnicity to be an innate, deeply engrained determinant of people’s behaviour and loyalties that overrode both individual agency and alternative sources of identity. Second, these accounts reproduced the common association of ethnicity with conflict (Hutchinson and Smith 1996: 3). Third, they also contained some assumptions about everyday life, portraying ethnicity as a force disruptive and ultimately destructive of the previously largely harmonious lives shared by neighbours and citizens of a state that was no more; arguably, the accounts in question hence also implied that peaceful everyday routines were incompatible with ethnic identities assumed to be inevitably divisive. In what follows, I cast a critical eye on each of these assumptions: I discuss the much-debated relationship between ethnic groups and traditions on the one hand, and individuals’ lives, ideas and behaviours on the other; moreover, I question the very problematic conflation of ethnicity with conflict as well as the equally problematic association of the everyday with the supposedly trivial, apolitical and culturally insignificant. In other words, this chapter sets itself the task of working through complex bodies of literature on the two concepts at the heart of this book: ethnicity and everyday life. Rather than establishing easy-to-digest working definitions, I provide multi-dimensional conceptual frameworks for thinking about ethnicity and everyday life, which will guide the analysis of my empirical case studies in subsequent chapters. The theoretical groundwork presented here is rounded off by a brief mention of relevant methodological and ‘disciplinary’ questions: how might we study ethnicity and/in everyday lives, and which academic traditions and disciplinary approaches may guide us along the way?

ETHNICITY

Ideas about racial, national and ethnic groups ‘bear strong family resemblances’ (Fenton 2003: 8). Nations tend to be associated with territories, state institutions and cultural histories as is reflected in a seminal definition of nationalism as the attempt to ‘make culture and polity congruent’ (Gellner 1983). While ‘race’ is primarily associated with physical characteristics, it is now widely acknowledged that ‘races’ are social constructs rather than biological givens; the choices of physical markers assumed to be racial characteristics are historically and culturally variable. As shown by some of the most infamous historical chapters (e.g. slavery, the Holocaust, apartheid), racial classifications have been politically highly significant and tragically consequential as ideological tools variously used to condone inequality, injustice, exploitation, oppression, dehumanization and genocide. Their often terrible political uses stand in tragic contradiction to the fact that modern genetics confirms the biological non-existence of distinct ‘racial groupings’:

There are two . . . reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it [is] meaningless to speak of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries. In other words, there is often greater variation within a ‘racial’ group than there is systematic variation between two groups.

(Eriksen 1993: 4)

Ethnicity, the third of the three related concepts, is widely associated with culture, descent, group memories/histories and language. So what are the family resemblances that Fenton mentions and that my earlier ‘day survey’ of the Guardian presupposed in emphasizing the prevalence of questions of ethnicity, nationality and ‘race’? Apart from the fact that politicians, the media and ‘ordinary’ social actors frequently use the three concepts interchangeably, a closer look confirms that they share several characteristics. Crucially, and contrary to widespread beliefs that national, ethnic and ‘racial’ groups are ‘naturally occurring’ entities, they reflect and rely upon social processes and discourses that construct and subsequently naturalize/ reify group differences. As such, Benedict Anderson’s definition (1983) of the nation as a community ‘imagined’ against the backdrop of a particular historical and technological context (i.e. the era of capitalism and the printing press) may be partly extended to groups assumed to be ‘racial’ or ethnic in character (see Jenkins 2002: 21): the facts that racial taxonomies are culturally and historically variable and ethnic boundaries are often contested (see later chapters) show that ‘racial’ and ethnic categories are context-dependent social constructs – albeit tremendously powerful ones. George Orwell once commented that ‘all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect are [of course] entirely spurious, but they are important as long as people believe in them’ (1962: 100). Among social scientists, this is known as W.I. Thomas’ ‘first law of social constructivism: if someone believes a thing, it will affect what he or she does, and it will therefore be real in its consequences’ (Jenkins 2002: 21).

A central family characteristic common to ideas about nations, ethnicities and ‘races’ is thus their propensity to draw boundaries and hence to attribute group membership. These are profoundly political practices that variously reproduce or challenge existing power structures by perpetuating or opposing existing distributions and inequalities of status, wealth and the ability to implement decisions: it is in this sense that a recurring definition of ethnicity as ‘politicized culture’ (e.g. McCrone 1998; Malešević 2004), the strategic use of cultural characteristics, may be understood. Moreover, most discourses – by which I refer to written and spoken language employed in particular historical contexts, for political purposes and/or with discernible social effects (e.g. Fairclough 1992; Weiss and Wodak 2003) – about national, ‘racial’ and ethnic groups claim to evoke and articulate a particular type of ‘comradeship’ (e.g. Spillman 1997): a group solidarity that purports to cross-cut and supersede internal differences of class, status, wealth and power, and hence to ‘unify’ a group of people in spite of such differences. Later parts of this book will emphasize that such discourses not only overlook persisting power differentials within the groups they construct, but they also ignore human agency, intra-group conflicts and contestation as well as cultural change as near-omnipresent social realities.

Having acknowledged such family characteristics common to various types of perceived and/or self-identifying social collectives, the question remains as to what distinguishes an ethnic community from national and ‘racial’ groups as its conceptual siblings. A tentative answer to this question is provided by the concept of ethnie, defined as ‘a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of common culture [e.g. religion, customs, language], a [frequent] link with a homeland and a sense of solidarity among at least some of its members’ (Hutchinson and Smith 1996: 6). As far as working definitions go, this is very helpful and captures much that the concept of ethnicity implies to members of ethnic communities and to academics who study them; Hutchinson and Smith draw attention to the existence of a name or label used variously by outsiders and/or members of a given ethnic community themselves; they further underline the significance of a (perceived) past and of a group-specific culture – by which we here refer to more or less widely shared ideas, social practices, norms and forms of social organization; moreover, Hutchinson and Smith observe that ethnic groups are positioned in space as much as in time, as is reflected in frequent emotional attachments to a particular territory, either currently inhabited or considered to be a now lost ancestral homeland; finally, this working definition makes reference to the significance of ethnic co-members recognizing themselves and others as belonging (or not) to the same community, a recognition that implies not only a degree of reflexivity but also often – though by no means invariably – a heightened sense of solidarity with others considered to be part of the ‘in-group’. All this being said, a working definition usually constitutes a mere starting point to a debate rather than its finishing line. In this particular case, Hutchinson and Smith’s working definition raises numerous important questions, some of which – including the following – will recur throughout this book: How, and by whom, are ‘names’ given to groups of people and would these groups, in the absence of such labelling processes, constitute ethnic communities? How might the relationship between cultural ideas and practices on the one hand, and individuals’ beliefs and behaviour on the other, be best conceptualized? What, in other words, is the scope for human agency in relation to an ethnic group one is assumed to ‘belong to’? Conversely, how do ethnic traditions impact on the lives of social actors? Do ethnic categories and traditions come to matter under particular social circumstances? If so, what are they? Is consciousness of belonging a prerequisite for a cultural community to become an ethnic one?

Groups and traditions, individuals and circumstances

Among these complex issues, questions pertaining to the relationship between cultures and individuals have preoccupied academics studying ethnicity more than any others. The resulting and longstanding debates have been shaped by competing schools of thought that emphasize the assumed determining force of (ascribed) ethnic identities and the significance of circumstances as well as human agency respectively. The former paradigm, often referred to as primordialism, may be thought of as a form of cultural determinism that postulates the more or less non-negotiable power of ethnic ties and is widely associated with a much-quoted passage from Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures:

[A] primordial attachment . . . stems from the . . . assumed givens of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connections . . . [and] the given-ness . . . [of] being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language . . . and following particular practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom . . . are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness. . . . One is bound to one’s kinsman . . . one’s fellow believer . . . as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some . . . absolute import attributed to the very tie itself. The general strength of such primordial bonds . . . differ[s] from person to person, from society to society, and from time to time.

(Geertz 1973: 259–260)

There has been considerable debate on whether Geertz has been wrongly accused of portraying culture and descent as irresistible determinants of people’s loyalties and behaviour. For example, Richard Jenkins (1997: 45) points out that Geertz merely suggests that certain ties ‘are seen to have an . . . overpowering coerciveness’ and that the strength of the bonds in question varies across individuals, social formations and historical eras. This assumed blueprint of ethnic primordialism may therefore, according to such alternative readings (see also Brubaker et al. 2004: 49), be perfectly compatible with the above-mentioned first law of social constructivism and its emphasis on the very real consequences of people’s beliefs and perceptions. However, such ongoing debates and arguably necessary corrections must not detract from an important observation contained in Geertz’s account that any serious discussion of ethnicity needs to engage with: the fact that membership in cultural and ethnic groups is widely, though certainly not invariably or inevitably, experienced as an ascribed identity, as a place in the world one is born into, a social position that can trigger a profound sense of solidarity with fellow group members, and frequently places the individual in networks of social relationships and perceived responsibilities that appear to be if not ‘natural’ at least self-evident. Implicit in such observations is another insight crucial to any discussion of ethnicity: the fact that social bonds, solidarity and identifications inevitably involve some people and exclude others, that social identities rely on boundaries delineating ‘us’ from ‘them’. However, while this recognition is echoed by most studies of (ethnic) identities (e.g. De Vos and Romanucci-Ross 1995: 361; Baumann and Gingrich 2004), it does not entail an inevitable commitment to primordialism, and there has been, as we shall see, a great deal of debate on the ‘nature’, origins and negotiability of ethnic boundaries.

In light of the above-mentioned critical rereading of Geertz, the metaphor of a continuum of interpretations may be more apt than the idea of competing schools of thought. That being said, the second major paradigm of ethnicity contained in the literature may be described as a broad ‘church’ made up of different versions of social constructivism. Richard Jenkins observes that social constructivist approaches to ethnicity and cultural differentiation are premised on an ‘appreciation that ethnic identity is situationally variable and negotiable . . . [that] “groups” are not distinct things in a positivist sense . . . [but] contingent and immanently changeable . . . emergent product[s] of interaction and of classificatory processes’ (1997: 50). Among such social constructivist approaches we may, taking our cue from Steve Fenton, distinguish between instrumentalist and situational/circumstantial models respectively: instrumentalist conceptualizations (e.g. Cohen 1969) regard ethnicity as a social and symbolic resource mobilized in the self-interested pursuit of economic and political goals, as a collective strategy of survival, social mobility or group reproduction through historically grounded, though not continuously utilized, channels of communication and networks of support and solidarity. Not entirely dissimilarly, situational/circumstantial accounts hold that an individual’s ‘actual identity deployed or made relevant changes according to . . . social situations’ and that ‘ethnic identity is important in some contexts and not others’ (Fenton 2003: 84). Miri Song’s observations, contained in her aptly titled book Choosing Ethnic Identity, may be regarded as paradigmatic of the situational model:

Every group’s culture is complex, diverse, and constitutive of a wide variety of practices and . . . traditions, which may espouse different values and positions. No group’s culture is static or unidimensional; rather, it is always contested and in flux. . . . [W]e need to see [individuals] as agents who actively negotiate their . . . ethnic identities in relation to both insiders and outsiders in a multitude of contexts. Within limits, minority individuals can contest the meaning of a particular ethnic identity, including the terms of . . . group membership. For instance, what does it mean to be Chinese in Britain today? Does it mean speaking a Chinese dialect and partnering with a Chinese person? Or does it mean being informed by both Chinese and British identities and cultures?

(Song 2003: 42–43)

Social constructivist approaches to ethnicity may be traced to the early work by the Norwegian social anthropologist Fredrik Barth who famously defined ethnicity as a form of social organization based on the drawing and reproduction of group boundaries. Ethnic groups, Barth observed, were ‘categories of ascription [by others] and identification by the actors themselves’ (1969: 10). He thus drew attention to the important and subsequently much-discussed fact that the construction of boundaries and hence of communities implicates often powerful outsiders as well as group members. Crucially, such boundary drawing, ascription of membership and identification with a particular community are ongoing social processes and accomplishments rather than the inevitable result of a ‘natural’, pre-existing state of affairs. Moreover, and in contrast to the common association of ethnicity with the notion of a shared culture, Barth emphasized that the continuity of an ethnic group required merely the ‘maintenance of a boundary’, often despite changes to the cultural characteristics and organizational forms associated with it; articulating a paradigmatic shift in the study of ethnicity, Barth stressed that ‘the critical focus of investigation . . . becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (1969: 15).

Barth’s legacy, his focus on the social processes of boundary maintenance and his acknowledgement of historical changes occurring within ethnic communities, resurfaces in parts of the empirical case studies contained in this book. While emphasizing people’s everyday lives (and the relations of power and inequality in which they are embedded) and introducing the crucial variable of cultural change, Barth’s work also takes note of a further core concern of sociological enquiry – human agency; he thus observes that ‘boundaries may persist despite what may figuratively be called the “osmosis” of personnel through them’ (1969: 21). The metaphor of osmosis allows for the hugely important fact that not every individual regards him- or herself as equally or permanently ‘defined’ by the boundaries that encircle them and the social categories to which they are deemed to ‘belong’. To illustrate such ‘flow of personnel’ across persisting ethnic boundaries, we may think of individuals who marry outside their ethnic group, often to their co-ethnics’ considerable disapproval, who migrate or who convert to a different religion. As I will argue in later chapters, a convincing account of ethnicity and everyday life must be able to detect and analyse such exercises of human agency.

Recent contributions to the sociological study of ethnicity have asked the important question: Do some social constructivist reactions against the alleged determinism of primordial models run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is there not quite clearly something about ethnicity that many people experience as a profoundly important and often lifelong emotional attachment to what they regard as ‘their’ culture, history, language and community? If so, how successful are models of ethnicity that rely exclusively on a situational, circumstantial or instrumental conceptualization of such a ‘spell’? And, as suggested by Steve Fenton, is it not perhaps the case that primordial and social constructivist accounts raise two rather different analytical questions concerning the ‘nature of the ethnic tie’ and the contexts in which it becomes important respectively? Fenton thus points out that ‘someone may have an ascribed ethnic identity which is embedded in their personality and life experience, yet still perceive the circumstances under which it may be instrumental to deploy it’ (2003: 84). Our next challenge thus resides in locating an analytical model capable of reconciling the enduring effects of people’s enculturation into a group (without reverting to a crude form of determinism and stereotyping) on the one hand, with contextual variation, human agency and historical change on the other. As we shall see, such a model requires a clarification of both the ‘culture concept’ and of the relationship between culture and ethnicity.

Culture/habitus, crisis/politics

Given the association of ethnicity with cultural characteristics/ boundaries, our understanding of the former will be decisively shaped by our conceptualization of the latter; in other words, much hinges on our approach to the concept of culture, itself one of the most widely used yet often most vaguely defined of notions. In order to advance our discussion, we are well advised to turn to Raymond Williams, a key figure in the history of British cultural studies. Williams begins his arguably most influential contribution to the ‘culture debate’ with an observation also highly pertinent to any discussion of everyday life: culture, he states, is ordinary. Williams then makes an argument that goes some way towards reconciling cultural histories and group socialization with human agency and cultural change. Culture, he insists, consists of two key aspects: ‘the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to’ and ‘the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested’; culture is thus always simultaneously traditional and creative, known and innovative, consisting of both a ‘whole way of life [and its] common meanings’ and ‘the special processes of discovery and creative effort’ (Williams 1989 [1958]: 4).

A similar conceptualization emerges from Zygmunt Bauman’s work on culture as a form of praxis, a never completed activity of ordering the world, of organizing behaviour, of ‘mak[ing] predictable and manageable the living space of human beings’ (1999 [1973]: 74). Bauman stresses that the structuring work performed by culture is an always still ongoing process beset by a defining, ‘sense-giving ambivalence’: between ‘creativity’ and ‘normative regulation’, between ‘inventing’ and ‘preserving’, between ‘discontinuity’ and ‘continuation’, between ‘novelty’ and tradition, between routine and ‘pattern-breaking’, between norms and their transcendence, between the regular and the unique, between the ‘monotony of reproduction’ and change, between the predictable and the unexpected (Bauman 1999 [1973]: xiv). Both Williams and Bauman thus locate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: ETHNICITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE
• 2: POWER AND CLASSIFICATION, MEANING AND RESISTANCE
• 3: IDENTITY, DIASPORA, HYBRIDITY
• 4: ETHNIC MAJORITIES, ‘THE STRANGER’ AND EVERYDAY LIFE
• 5: FORCED MIGRATION AND STRUCTURES OF FEAR IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
• CONCLUSION: THE QUEST FOR INCLUSIVE MEANING
• REFERENCES