Ethnicity and Religion

Intersections and Comparisons

Joseph Ruane, Jennifer Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138880375
• eBook ISBN: 9781317982845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Religion has regained political prominence in the twenty first century and not least for the manner in which it intersects with ethnicity. Many ethnic conflicts have a strong religious dimension, and religion appears as a powerful force for mobilisation, solidarity and violence. Religion and ethnicity can each act as a powerful base of identity, group formation and communal conflict. They can also overlap, with ethnic and religious boundaries coinciding, partially or completely, internally nested or intersecting.

This volume maps the different forms of intersection: cases where religion is prioritised in private life and ethnicity in public, where each coexists in tension in political life, and where the distinctions reinforce each other with dynamic effects. It maps the different patterns with case studies and comparisons from Ireland, Northern Ireland, France, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Malaysia. It shows how ordinary people construct their solidarities and identities using both ethnic and religious resources. This opens up analysis of the socially transformative, as well as politically antagonistic, potential of religion in situations of ethnic division.

This book was published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Ethnicity and Religion: Redefining the Research Agenda

JOSEPH RUANE* & JENNIFER TODD**

*University College Cork, Ireland, **University College Dublin, Ireland

ABSTRACT This article maps some of the effects when ethnicity and religion overlap. Sometimes one category, with its related values and solidarity, is prioritized; this is expressed in the common view that religion is subsumed in ethnicity, and religious labels become markers of ethnic groups. Sometimes the effects are additive, each source of distinction and group solidarity strengthening the other. Sometimes there are interactive effects, with dynamic and emergent properties producing a more complex field of relationship. After tracing examples and arguing against a reductive approach, three avenues for future research are highlighted. First, mapping patterns of interrelation of ethnicity and religion in cultural distinction-making and group formation, showing the conditions and effects of each. Second, looking at the longer-term historical, state and geopolitical conditions for change in these relations. Third, reframing theories and concepts so better to grasp the range of ways religion and ethnicity function in social practice.

Religion has regained political prominence in the twenty-first century and not least for the manner in which it intersects with ethnicity. Many ethnic conflicts have a strong religious dimension, and religion appears—for example, in the role of fundamentalist religious groups at the centre of ethnonational movements—as a powerful force for mobilization, solidarity and violence (Coakley, 2002; Smith, 2003; Fox, 2004). This raises important research questions. Historical and comparative research shows that religion and ethnicity can each act as a powerful base of identity, group formation and communal conflict. They can also overlap, with ethnic and religious boundaries coinciding, partially or completely, internally nested, or intersecting. What happens in these cases? Is ethnicity or religion prioritized, and by whom, in what areas of life? Are the effects additive, with ethnic and religious distinctions each reinforcing the other? Do they coexist in tension? Or are there interactive effects with dynamic and emergent properties producing a much more complex field of relationships? When are there additive, when conflicting, when interactive effects?

Recent literature on ethnicity, ethnic boundaries and ethnic identities provides us with the conceptual tools to analyse these interrelations (Cornell, 1996; Lamont & Molnar, 2002; Brubaker, 2002; Jenkins, 2008). Yet the literature on ethnicity has shown little interest in this question, operating with an inclusive concept of ethnicity whereby communities defined by religious labels are included in the general category of ‘ethnic’ (Chandra, 2006). The appeal of this approach for comparative study of ethnicity is that it extends the range of cases while bracketing or sidelining a potentially powerful and troublesome variable; but it comes at a cost. It misses the insights that could be gained from comparing religion and ethnicity as contrasting sources of identity, community and conflict. Where it addresses the fact of overlap at all,it does so in a reductionist way, assuming that when ethnicity and religion are co-present, the specificity of the religious element can be ignored.

This volume looks at the interaction between religious and ethnic distinctions, both in cases where they appear to define the same populations (Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Ireland) and in cases where there is significant cross-cutting and differentiation (Ghana, Zimbabwe). It begins to map the possible effects of interaction, and aims to set an agenda for future research on the interrelation of ethnicity and religion. Part of that agenda is conceptual and theoretical. The very definition of ethnicity is contested. Narrowly conceived, ethnicity is usually conceived as a descent-based category associated with territoriality and with a distinctive origin myth (Connor, 1994), whereas religion is concerned with the sacred, and more narrowly again with confessional organizations and practices. This seemingly clear distinction, however, does not grasp the range of ways that religious and ethnic categories are used in practical processes of cultural distinction-making, group formation and conflict. A key question is whether, in these situations, it is best to work with clear and narrow concepts of religion and ethnicity and build up to the complex identifications that are made by individuals and groups, or to break down the concepts of religion and ethnicity still further.

Most of the contemporary literature bypasses this question by bundling together ethnicity narrowly conceived and religion narrowly conceived into a broader inclusive notion of ethnicity (Chandra, 2006). This is a mistake for three reasons. First, and conceptually, to take such an indiscriminate approach to ethnicity is to focus on boundaries rather than on the meaning and organization of those boundaries (religious, or racial, or narrowly ethnic). This dissociation of boundary from content is, we believe, a wrong turn in the social sciences (Cornell, 1996; Ruane & Todd, 2004; Jenkins, 2008). Symbolic boundaries and symbolic content, social boundaries and the intricacies of institutional organization, are intrinsically interrelated (Barth, 1969, pp. 14, 15, 30; Lamont & Molnar, 2002, p. 168; Jenkins, 2008, pp. 121–122). Second, and following from this, simply to bundle together religion and ethnicity is to fail to recognize the distinctive character each brings to symbolic distinction and social division. One would expect conflicts informed by religious distinctions to have a symbolic logic different from narrowly ethnic forms of conflict (Anderson, 1991, p. 6). If they do not, if instead they converge, this raises important questions about how and when symbolic distinctions translate into patterns of behaviour, questions that require that we take the symbolic distinctions seriously. Third, to take a broad and inclusive concept of ethnicity gives no explanatory purchase on whether or why in some circumstances ethnicity might lead to particularly persistent or intense forms of conflict.¹ Explanations of the particular persistence and intensity of ethnic conflict typically point to the characteristics of ethnicity narrowly conceived as descent, lineage, quasi-kin consciousness (Horowitz, 2001, pp. 45–49; Connor, 1994) and then—often—generalize illegitimately from a few (narrowly defined) ethnic conflicts to all (broadly defined) ‘ethnic’ conflicts.

A different set of questions arises when we begin to unpack the ways populations themselves understand the character of their communal bonds and the sources of their cultural distinction. In situations where religion and ethnicity are cross-cutting distinctions, individuals routinely choose to prioritize between them, but we know little about why and when they make the choices they do. For example, in some situations both religion and nationhood are in question, as historically was the case in the ethnoreligious shatterzones on the Rhine. In other cases, religious distinction exists within an ethnonational consensus (as in France or Great Britain), or ethnonational distinction within a religious consensus (as in the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia) (Coakley, 2009). Even when ethnicity and religion appear to coincide in defining the same populations (in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and Malaysia), they define them in different ways, with different prioritization of aims and different permeability of boundaries. Actors not only choose to highlight one or other distinction, but also distinguish among themselves on these grounds. In Northern Ireland, whether actors define themselves in terms of theological beliefs and religious practices, or in terms of ethnic descent groups, in terms of nationality or of key moral-political values affects not only the persistence and permeability of boundaries, but also their precise place: to what group Catholic unionists or dissenting Protestants are assigned or welcomed. In Israel, broad ethnoreligious alliances were forged by activists who quite strategically chose differentially to emphasize religious or political factors for different subgroups (Shenhav, 2003). In each of these cases, a broad coincidence of religious and ethnic distinction disguises intense intra-group variation and contention over the nature of the distinctions, with very strong fundamentalist religious clusters nested within the divided populations. Whether religious or secular clusters take the lead in mobilization and representation is of major political import, with implications that spread well beyond the conflict zone itself into the mobilization of ethnic (or ethno-religious) diasporas and regional or global religious communities.

As an initial step in analysis, a dichotomous distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ ethnicity and religiosity results in the simple schema shown in Table 1.

Typical examples of (1) in the table would be Irish Catholic nationalism, Ulster unionism and Zionism; typical examples of (2) would be Basque and Catalan nationalism; typical examples of (3) would be the religiously-transformative groups described by Ganiel in this issue; and typical examples of (4) would be mere categories—Ulster Scots in the USA—with a particular provenance but neither ethnic solidarity nor religiosity.

In practice ‘high’ and ‘low’ are opposite ends of separate continua, involving intensity, salience, solidarity, conceptual thickness or thinness, permeability or closure, exclusivity or inclusivity of boundaries, institutionalization and politicization (Cornell & Hartmann, 1998; Ashmore et al., 2004; Wimmer, 2008). The different measures do not converge. Thin identities can be held with great intensity whereas thick identities may be unmarked in the everyday run of life: Englishness is a thick, highly institutionalized identity but is not normally highlighted, indeed researchers have found respondents avoiding the category (Condor, 2000; Edensor, 2002; Fenton, 2007). We need to allow for much finer shading and more varied combinations. We also need to allow for the variation produced by individuals, groups, activists and states constantly renegotiating and reprioritizing and redefining the place, salience and meanings of boundaries.

Table 1. Varieties of ethno-religious overlap

		Religious identity and group solidarity
		High	Low
Ethnic identity and group solidarity	High	1	2
	Low	3	4

We asked the contributors to this volume to discuss intersections of ethnicity and religion in cases where they had undertaken research, taking account of at least some of these distinctions and at least some of the questions outlined above. We begin with a case where a multiplicity of religious divisions cross-cut a multiplicity of ethnic divisions—Ghana. Arnim Langer shows how individuals in Ghana—from elite student and non-elite backgrounds—hold each set of distinctions to be salient, but attach very different relative importance to them in different contexts. Ethnicity is held to be important in the public sphere, particularly by the upcoming elite who anticipate a level of preference or discrimination on its basis, but it is not important in private life where interethnic marriages are common. Religion, not important in public, is held to be very important in private life and there is widespread opposition to marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims. This lack of crossover between publicly institutionalized ethnicity and private religiosity disproves those theories that see ethnicity as important publicly because it is important personally. It confirms how the personal salience of distinctions is not readable from objective factors—for example, ethnic intermarriage takes place despite major language difference.

Turning to a case of substantive overlap between ethnicity and religion in Malaysia, Graham Brown analyses the increasing importance of religion in state discourse and practice. Conventional explanations see this as reflecting a popular response to the disruption of traditional identities brought by globalization and urbanization. Brown shows that this is too simple. Although there is some decline in the reported salience of ethnicity vis-à-vis religion, this is structured in a complex manner at the popular level and insufficient to explain the ‘desecularizing’ shift at state level. He argues that the change is a consequence of the increasing top-down ‘legibility’ of religion as a means of differentiating and ‘disciplining’ the population and exerting social control. Here clear political interests in distinction dominate over any gradual social change in boundaries.

In Northern Ireland, state (British and Irish) interests in blurring distinction give greater openings to popular attempts to renegotiate boundaries. Three papers look at the variation between groups and over time. Mitchell points to the growing tendency in the literature to see religion as an important and independent factor in individual motivation and group formation even in cases of ‘ethnic’ conflict. Working from qualitative and biographical material relating to working class Protestant loyalists in Northern Ireland, where the ethnic and religious distinctions coincide, she shows the tensions within the ethnic/ religious mix and the variety of ways that individuals choose to prioritize ethnicity or religion. In this situation, individuals hold both sets of distinctions as salient in most aspects of their lives; but the perceived interrelations vary quite dramatically, producing a complex set of relationships in which religion and ethnicity offer contradictory imperatives to individuals, each salient, neither dominating fully the other.

Lowe and Muldoon take a wider sample of respondents from Northern Ireland and the border counties, covering areas with high experience of violence and with low experience of violence. They look at the different combinations of self-reported religious and ethnic categories and the varying degrees of ‘collective self-esteem’ associated with the categories in each case. Their study confirms the existence of unexpected identity combinations (Protestant Irish, Catholic British) even in areas of high experie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Ethnicity and Religion: Redefining the Research Agenda
• 2. The Situational Importance of Ethnicity and Religion in Ghana
• 3. Legible Pluralism: The Politics of Ethnic and Religious Identification in Malaysia
• 4. The Push and Pull between Religion and Ethnicity: The Case of Loyalists in Northern Ireland
• 5. Religious and Ethnonational Identification and Political Violence
• 6. Symbolic Complexity and Political Division: The Changing Role of Religion in Northern Ireland
• 7. Ethnoreligious Change in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study of How Religious Havens Can Have Ethnic Significance
• 8. Ethnicity, Religion and Peoplehood: Protestants in France and in Ireland
• Index