Minority
Although the term “minority” is of prime importance to this study, I will not attempt to define it here in the comprehensive and reasoned way it deserves, as this would be a task beyond the scope of my research, which has, as we have seen, more specific objectives. That is why, as a starting point, I will resort to the use of the concept of “minority” as it was defined in the latest report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR 2010).
The UN report highlights, first and foremost, the fact that any definition of “minority” must take all relevant factors (both objective and subjective) into consideration. On the one hand, it should refer to the characteristics that are common – and beyond their power to change – to all of the members of a minority group, such as shared ethnicity, language, or religion. On the other hand, this definition should reflect the characteristics of their self-identities.
I will now examine the following definition of “minority” that was proposed by Francesco Capotorti (Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities) in 1977:
A group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose members – being nationals of the State – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity, directed towards preserving their culture, traditions, religion or language.
(OHCHR 2010, 2)
Several points can be made concerning this definition. First, the definition claims that being in “a non-dominant position” is a sufficient enough feature to identify a group as a minority. Whether or not the group in question is a numerical minority is not a decisive factor as there are quite a few instances in which a numerical majority is in a socially and politically disadvantaged position. By way of illustration, the OHCHR report cites the case of the indigenous population of the Republic of South Africa under the apartheid regime. There are also other examples, such as the Shia in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the Sunnis in Syria before the so-called “Arab Spring.”
Another point to be made regarding Capotori’s definition is that the OHCHR report notes that binding the definition of “minority” to having citizenship of the country in which the group lives makes it too narrow. Indeed, according to widely accepted notions of the minority status of a group, this group may include people who are immigrants to the country in question who have yet to receive citizenship and are unlikely to receive it soon but do not intend to leave the country in the foreseeable future. The so-called Gastarbeiters (i.e., migrant workers) in Germany are a case in point.
Without delving into the definition of “minority” any further, I should point out that my study is concerned with the issues of minorities that differ from the rest of the population of a given country as a result of their cultural – in the sense of national, ethnic, and religious – identity.
Identity and culture
To define the term “cultural identity” we first have to clarify the general meaning of identity, as well as that of culture. As in the case of the term “minority” above, here, too, I will narrow my focus to only those aspects of the definition of these two terms – “identity” and “culture” – which I will be using further on in this study.
Identity is viewed in different ways in psychology, sociology, and philosophy. However, it is invariably associated with the specificity (or uniqueness) of the existence of its subject, as well as with the subject’s awareness of this specificity. The subject possesses an identity due to the unique combination of her characteristics, but also as a result of the continuity of all of her individual actions (in the case of collective identity, this is also due to the interconnectedness of the members of the group). In other words, “the formation of group identity is a process whereby individuals recognize in each other certain attributes that establish resemblance and affinity” between them (Isin and Wood 1999, 19).
The other term I would like to define here is “culture.” Perhaps the most popular and succinct definition of “culture” from an anthropological point of view is “patterns of learned behavior” – meaning that these are not natural, physiologically determined acts performed “instinctively;” rather, they are constructs created during the process of people interacting with their environment and with one another. These constructs were developed over time as human groups went through the process of adapting to their surroundings, which means that the only way individuals belonging to a group can access them is by learning them from other members of the same group. In the words of Terence Turner (1993, 426), “Cultures are the way specific social groups, acting under specific historical and material conditions, have ‘made themselves’ . . . [C]ultures . . . are historically contingent products of such collective activity.”
To my mind, what is especially important in this formulation is that culture is defined as the way specific social groups have “made themselves” within the context of actual historical circumstances. Thus, Terence Turner presents an unquestionable distinctive feature of culture: that it invariably has a group-specific character that unifies people who belong to the respective cultural community by distinguishing them from all others. In other words, culture is the collective “software of the mind” that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another (Hofstede 1991).
Furthermore, if we think of culture as the process of the self-creation of communities within the context of actual historical events, we will foreground its contingent character – the fact that the specific characteristics of a group’s way of life cannot be “deduced” from principles; instead, these characteristics must simply be accepted as a given and should be valued by the members of the respective community for what they de facto are, without having to rationalize or justify this stance.
In addition, the definitions of “culture” emphasize the relationship between the forms of behavior which, taken as a whole, distinguish one group from another, as well as the ways in which these forms are interpreted in the respective cultural context:
Culture is a historically created system of meaning and significance or, what comes to be the same thing, a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives. It is a way of both understanding and organizing human life.
(Parekh 2000, 143)
The culture of a given community demarcates what is acceptable from what is unacceptable behavior (i.e., how one is expected to behave, or not to behave, in particular circumstances). This distinction is based on historically established values. The self-creation of a community (if we refer back to Turner’s terminology) does not have a mechanical character, that is, it is not simply reproducing such forms of behavior that contribute to the survival of a group in the respective conditions; the self-creation of a community also incorporates the formation of mechanisms for explaining and morally justifying a particular way of life. In other words, a community’s self-understanding and self-organization presuppose each other.
At the descriptive level, some scholars have pointed out the following as elements of culture: values, language, religion, standards of behavior in day-to-day life, exemplary intellectual and artistic achievements of members of the community, traditions and rituals, and characteristic patterns of living including styles of architecture and patterns of land use (see, for example, Kidd 2002, 10). Geert Hofstede (1991, 8) classifies these elements into four categories: symbols, heroes, rituals, and values.
Whose identity?
If we are to work with the term “cultural identity,” we need to know who the carrier of this identity is. Ranked by degree of their internal cohesion, there are three kinds of “candidates” for this “position”: particular types of people (i.e., categories of people), particular groups, or particular communities.
The development of gender studies in the past few decades has shown beyond a doubt that gender differences are not just physiological but also cultural. However, if we assume that there is a female cultural identity, it cannot be attributed to a particular group or community; in other words, what we have here is a category of people. As we will see later, belonging to a community entails maintaining relationships of solidarity among the members of the community, while holding discriminatory attitudes toward all others (see Tönnies 2001, 17). The term “group” is more vague. Many authors use it as a synonym for community when writing about “ethnic groups.” The prevalent notion, though, is that “group” is a more general term. A group’s members belong to it insofar as they not only share some identical characteristics (as in the case of categories of people), but also common goals, values, and some form of internal organization, be it formal or informal.
The difference between communities and groups in general (the former may also be regarded as a type of group), is that the relationships within a group are not necessarily characterized by solidarity and mutual identification; groups may also be quite disjointed. One may regard as a group, for example, the staff of a company because the staff members tend to share common goals and values regarding their professional activity; however, while they may belong to the same organizational group, they do not have any particular moral commitments to each other, or at least not any that are more binding than the universal moral norms and standards of decent behavior.
In the publications concerning minority policies, the term “community” is used primarily in the sense of Gemeinschaft as defined by Ferdinand Tönnies (2001) in his seminal book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887. In Chapter One, Tönnies introduces the term human “association” (Verbindung) signifying a group of people bound by relationships based on mutual affirmation. He distinguishes between two types of associations of people, which he calls “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft). The former is conceived of “as having real organic life,” and the latter “as a purely mechanical construction, existing in the mind” (Tönnies 2001, 17). The main difference between the two is that “community” is about the kind of coexistence of its members, which is based on mutual trust and feels “familiar, comfortable and exclusive” (i.e., it is “exclusive” in the sense that members of the community are treated differently from non-members). “Society,” on the other hand, is about public life, or life “in the outside world,” as Tönnies (2001, 18) puts it. “In Gemeinschaft we are united from the moment of our birth with our own folk for better or for worse. We go out into Gesellschaft as if into a foreign land” (Tönnies 2001, 18). There is “a community of language, custom, belief; but a society for purposes of business, travel, or scientific knowledge” (Tönnies 2001, 18). In other words, “society” simply means “individuals living alongside but independently of one another” (Tönnies 2001, 19).
To quote Tönnies (2001, 19), “Community [Gemeinschaft] is old, Society [Gesellschaft] is new, both as an entity and as a term.” Community is associated with rural life, and Society with “the third estate.”1 The paragraph in Chapter One, devoted to the definition of the two terms, ends with the following conclusion:
Community means genuine, enduring life together, whereas Society is a transient and superficial thing. Thus Gemeinschaft must be understood as a living organism in its own right, while Gesellschaft is a mechanical aggregate and artefact.
(Tönnies 2001, 19)
The German sociologist distinguishes between three types of community: “by blood,” “of place,” and “of spirit” (Tönnies 2001, 27; emphasis in original). According to him (Tönnies 2001, 28), these three types may be described as kinship (referring above all to the nuclear family), neighborhood, and friendship or comradeship. While it is clear in what sense and to what extent kinship meets Tönnies’ criteria for community, it is necessary to elucidate his understanding of the other two types of community.
Neighborhood, according to Tönnies (2001, 28; emphasis in original), “is the general character of life together in a village.” The spatial proximity of its residents and “even the way the holdings run alongside each other, cause the people to meet and get used to each other and to develop intimate acquaintance. It becomes necessary to share work, organization and forms of administration.”
Friendship, or comradeship, in the sense of “a community of spirit,” includes not just informal ties based on mutual sympathy, but also religious communities and communities that arise from within cultural life. Tönnies views art “as a kind of priestly activity, for everything that is good, noble, and in some sense holy, has to be experienced through the senses in order for it to work on the mind and conscience” (Tönnies 2001, 50).
Among contemporary scholars, Amy Gutmann has attempted to fill the conceptual “space” between “community” and “group” with an intermediate term – namely, “identity groups.” Her criterion for belonging to such a group is the identification of each of its members with one another (Gutmann 2003). Such mutual identification may be based on a shared culture, as well as on the pursuit of a common, selfless cause that inspires the members of the group. Gutmann (2003, 13) distinguishes between identity groups and groups bound by “instrumental interests.” The motives for participating in these two types of groups are different: one is for the self-identification with a particular circle of people, while the other is purely for self-interest. However, there is also a significant difference between two kinds of identity groups: groups bound by a common cultural identity and groups whose members identify with one another by their own choice insofar as they have decided, each in their own way, to unite behind a common ideal. In the first case, if we use ethnic groups as an example, the bond between members is a contingent one and self-identification with the group is quite inert and difficult to change by a consciously made decision. In the second case, people unite of their own free will and take on the responsibility of creating, for example, an association for the protection of animals or in support of AIDS victims, and can leave the group at any moment. It goes without saying that this typology refers to modern societies. In an Islamic state, for example, society as a whole is regarded as an identity group, in Gutmann’s terms. The same holds true also for totalitarian systems of social order.
Identity: essence or construct?
The “essence-or-construct” dilemma is not just theoretically interesting; it is also directly relevant to the subject of this study. The manner in which minority claims are justified is of decisive importance for the success of the public legitimatization of these claims and, subsequently, for the ability of civil society to exercise its communicative power. It is one thing to try to convince the public that the full realization of a particular identity requires certain conditions if identity is understood as an essence; it is quite another thing if it is understood as a construct.
In the publications on this theme, the conception of identity as an essence of its carrier is called “essentialism,” while its conception as a construct is called “constructionism.”2 As is often the case in social sciences, this debate is asymmetrical because hardly anyone openly defends the essentialist concept of identity, while the number of publications against it is constantly growing.3 The reason for this apparently puzzling state of affairs is, in my mind, that the methodological tradition in social sciences predisposes scholars to take an essentialist approach to identity. It is somehow natural for them to strive to explo...
