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1 Rethinking Chinese ethnicity
Assimilation and ethnicity
Two important aspects of assimilation are its directionality and the influence differential between the assimilator and the to-be-assimilated (Teske and Nelson 1974: 363–4). Much of the classical American literature on the subject either implicitly or explicitly treats assimilation as a one-way process, suggesting ‘an essentially unilateral approximation of one culture in the direction of the other’ (Siegel et al. 1953: 988), typically in a context of unequal status and power. Accordingly, it is alleged that assimilation operates in the direction of the dominant group exerting influence on the less dominant group – a unilineal process of social change. Such a view, elegantly articulated in Park’s (1950) influential theory of race relations’ cycle, contains a sense of inevitability and irreversibility. The eventual absorption of minorities into the dominant culture and the gradual disappearance of ethnicity are to be understood and accepted not only in terms of what they are and what they will be, but also in terms of what they should be. A theory of ethnic relations and social change becomes an ideology in disguise which, in spirit and in practice, prescribes rather than describes. What is prescribed here is the vision of one country, one culture, one ideology, one way of feeling, thinking and doing – a loopback into a tribal existence of oneness and homogeneity.
This dominant view of assimilation in the social science literature evokes images of an eager majority group intent on moulding, shaping and, if necessary, coercing minority groups ‘to become alike’ and ‘to fall in line’, so to speak. This view is based on one assumption: the assimilator and the to-be-assimilated are both willing game players, the former to affirm his sense of cultural superiority and racial homogeneity, the latter to gain cultural acceptance and structural integration. In van den Berghe’s (1981: 217) words:
… it takes two to assimilate. Assimilation is sought by members of the subordinate group – granted by members of the dominant group … For assimilation to take place, therefore, it takes a convergence of desire for it from the subordinates and acceptance by the dominants.
This willingness to be assimilated thus cannot be taken for granted either theoretically or empirically. As van den Berghe argues, a desire for assimilation must be motivated, often from an initial position of inequality, so that assimilation confers some benefit.
While hypothesising that ‘the more unequal their relative position is, the more of an incentive members of the subordinate group have to be accepted into the dominant group’, van den Berghe (1981: 216) is cognisant of a contending hypothesis that points to the persistence of ethnicity and ethnic sentiments and the propensity to feel an emotional bond with those presumed to be kindred. Contrary to the American model of assimilation, this contending hypothesis makes it theoretically imperative not to take assimilation and the demise of ethnicity for granted. Understood in this sense, assimilation is problematic and demands explanation when it happens, as is the disappearance of ethnicity.
In striving towards a realistic model of assimilation – realistic in the sense that it addresses theoretical queries as well as observed empirical variations – the theorist needs to develop a good grasp of the concept of ethnicity and its role in model-building. What then is ethnicity? Van den Berghe (1978: 403) advocates a sociobiological view:
My central thesis is that both ethnicity and ‘race’ (in the social sense) are, in fact, extensions of the idiom of kinship, and that, therefore, ethnic and race sentiments are to be understood as an extended and attenuated form of kin selection.
This view is based on his interpretation of the sociobiological concept of ‘inclusive fitness’ (Hamilton 1964), a phenomenon associated with the propensity to ‘prefer kin over non-kin, and close kin over distant kin’ (van den Berghe 1978: 402). Van den Berghe’s view of ethnicity in terms of maximising individual fitness by behaving nepotistically and, therefore, ethnocentrically is essentially in consonance with that of the primordialists, who see ethnicity as ascribed, ‘deeply rooted, given at birth, and largely unchangeable’ (van den Berghe 1978: 401). The primordialists, accentuating the ‘subjective’ feelings of the ethnic experience, argue for the irreducibility of ethnic membership to class membership. As van den Berghe (1978: 404) argues:
[e]thnic groups, for nearly all of human history, were what geneticists call breeding populations, in-breeding superfamilies, in fact, which not only were much more closely related to each other than to even their closest neighbours, but which, almost without exception, explicitly recognised that fact, and maintained clear territorial and social boundaries with other such ethnic groups.
This conscious and intentional preference for members of the same ethnic group as well as the deliberate attempt to maintain clear spatial and social distance from other ethnic groups is at the root of one anthropological school, which sees ethnicity as a phenomenon that deepens as one moves from the boundaries towards the centre (Rosaldo 1988). It is at the centre, in the middle, not on the outer edges, where things or events ethnic ‘concentrate’, ‘gather together’, ‘thicken’ and ‘pile up’ – some strong concepts used by the Ilongots of northern Luzon in the Philippines in describing and explaining ethnicity (Rosaldo 1988). In this view, ethnicity is cumulative over time, maintaining and preserving the condition prior to the point of culture contact as well as resisting and defending attempts at cultural penetration, dilution or absorption by a dominant group. Collectively, members of ethnic groups enjoy the experience of gathering together. By so doing, in ‘a state of healthy vitality and well-being’, using Rosaldo’s phrase, the group becomes ‘strong and thick’.
In contrast to the primordialist and sociobiologist views of ethnicity are those of the situationists, who suggest that ethnicity is a phenomenon emerging from ‘a constantly evoking interaction between the nature of the local community, the available economic opportunities and the national or religious heritage of a particular group’ (Yancey et al. 1976: 397). The theoretical focus here is on how members of a particular ethnic group go about manifesting themselves while in full view of the opportunity structures in the wider society. In due course, ethnicity emerges, unfolds and takes shape. The human being is an active agent selectively and strategically displaying his ethnic emblems. Ethnic identity is merely ‘a thing’ subject to manipulation and differential presentation; it is not a reflection of the true self. As Rosaldo (1988: 164) puts it, ‘Ethnic identity, a thing that groups put on and take off to signify their difference from other such groups, comes to resemble clothes, masks, emblems or badges’. The situationists view ethnicity more as form and process than as content, and most empirically expressive and visible along ethnic boundaries, not in the ‘centres’ (Barth 1969: 15). Thus, Nagata (1974) would argue for the plausibility of a model of ‘ethnic oscillation’ whereby individuals, with no single or fixed reference group, interpret situational requirements, adjust and display themselves for social affinity, expediency and social mobility. Foster (1977: 114) completes this line of thinking:
An ethnic identity is not necessarily an all-or-nothing, permanent thing. One may claim one identity in one situation and a different identity in another situation, depending on the relative payoffs.
Nagata, like Foster, argues that some individuals, in coping with particular exigencies of survival, develop a double identity and lead a double life.
Concentrating within and crossing ethnic boundaries
Rosaldo (1988: 161) is disinclined to see these two anthropological views as necessarily contradictory to each other. Neither does he think that the two conceptions completely explain the empirical phenomenon of ethnicity. To him, ethnicity is neither completely expressive (and primordial) nor completely instrumental (and situational); rather, it ‘usually is both instrumental and expressive, and theories that oppose the two perspectives have posed a false dichotomy’. On occasions of cultural ‘get-together’, ethnic identity ‘thickens’ while the traditions are selectively re-enacted, not simply repeated.
Rosaldo’s attempt to ‘reconceive’ ethnicity – by criticising the distinction drawn by the primordialists on the one hand and situationists on the other as being ‘more analytical than empirical’ – was anticipated by De Vos and Romanucci-Ross’s (1982: 378–89) analysis of the instrumental and expressive uses of ethnicity. The vectors of expressiveness and instrumentality of ethnicity interpret, define and regulate interpersonal relationships both within and between ethnic groups. Instrumental behaviour is essentially goal-oriented, a means to an end, while expressive behaviour is an end in itself, ‘a result of a prior need or emotional state’ (De Vos and Romanucci-Ross 1982: 379).
It is not clear from De Vos and Romanucci-Ross’s formulation whether instrumental ethnicity in terms of the five thematic concerns of achievement, competence, responsibility, control–power and mutuality applies to interpersonal relations both within and between different groups. Nevertheless, their ‘expressive ethnicity’ in terms of harmony, affiliation, nurturance, appreciation, pleasure and fortune clearly and explicitly denotes social relationships within a particular ethnic group. In combining and synthesising the formulations of Rosaldo and De Vos and Romanucci-Ross, as well as those of the primordialists and the situationists, one may observe that interpersonal relationships ‘in the centre’ are characterised by an excess of ‘expressive’ over ‘instrumental’ ethnicity. Within the centre of an ethnic group, in such private places as homes, community halls or clan associations or on such ritualistic occasions as festivals, religious worship and holidays, ethnicity is manifested mainly expressively to meet the emotional need for appreciation, affiliation, harmony and pleasure. The individual is subsumed willingly within a larger whole (which is invariably more than the total of its parts) to find and express his sense of belonging, and of continuity with a tradition. Yet, as De Vos and Romanucci-Ross (1982) and Rosaldo (1988: 169) are quick to point out, the persons and the group are also conscious of pleasure turning into suffering or even death when the gatherings are penetrated by outsiders, threatening loss of their own identities and possibly, eventually, of group survival.
Yet, in such private places, on such ethnic ritualistic occasions, there is no shortage of manifestations of instrumental ethnicity either. Rituals not only explain but also affirm group and, therefore, personal origin. As De Vos (1982) puts it, they solve the perennial human problems of where we are from, what we must do and how we are different from others. In the centre, ethnicity is primarily primordial and expressive at the personal level. Yet it is also constructed and used at the group level, noticeably towards group cohesion.
In answering the question of why humans co-operate, van den Berghe (1978: 409) identified three main principles of human sociality: kin selection, reciprocity and coercion. By kin selection, he means that humans are expected to co-operate within the same kin group and, by extension, the same ethnic group. Ethnic groups appeal to individual loyalty because they are ‘supra-families’. While relations within ethnic groups are essentially co-operative, intergroup relations are typically characterised by competition and conflict, which is visibly observable along the fringes, in common public places where boundaries intersect and overlap. Sometimes, competition and conflict are muted. As van den Berghe (1978: 409) puts it, ‘ethnic groups may enter a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship based, for instance, on the exploitation of two specialised and noncompetitive niches in the same market’. Reciprocity can occur between non-kin and between ethnic groups. It is co-operation for mutual benefit, to exploit, and there is an expectation of exchange and return. Co-operation within and between classes, and between non-ethnically based trades, occupations, associations, organisations, institutions and communities, is typically in the realm of reciprocity.
At the fringes of ethnic boundaries, in common public places, where materialistic transactions are negotiated and completed, the instrumental use of ethnicity emerges. It is also in these places where the situationist view begins to gain plausibility. Ethnicity becomes changeable, culturally and ecologically defined and situationally sensitive. The classical view holds that it is at the boundaries where ethnic action happens, more dramatically so when either co-operative or conflictual relationships between ethnic groups need to be strategised and enacted with obvious political and economic consequences.
It is at these moments of boundary crossing when Hoadley (1988: 504) insists that enquiry be focused ‘on those aspects of cultural and public life most likely to reveal ethnic boundaries and evidence of individuals having crossed them’. What then is the motivation for crossing boundaries? Hoadley (1988: 604) argues that, ‘[a]ll things being equal, the authority and status enjoyed by the majority group within a society exerts a natural attraction for minorities’. The situationist view is once again invoked here, that a member of a minority is strategising realities, constructing and reconstructing them, in order to profit both psychologically and materialistically.
The next question, for both ethnic actors and students of ethnic relations, concerns behaviour, or how do ethnic actors conduct themselves in their public lives? In part, the answer depends on the balance of power between the ethnic groups, on the one hand, and the fluidity and ease of flow between these ethnic boundaries, on the other hand.
In majority–minority relations, members of the minorities may be tempted to try and ‘pass’, a form of denial of the authentic self. As De Vos (1982: 28) suggests, passing requires maintaining a façade and a variety of intrapsychic and external manoeuvres. Conversely, in relations of balanced power and relatively equitable distribution of resources, ethnic actors cross boundaries for different reasons.
Under these circumstances, entry into class-, interest- and opportunity-based relations does not typically demand a complete abdication of one’s ethnic identity, although one’s ethnicity is being worked on. At one moment, a person may temporarily submerge it in favour of a façade closer to and more identifiable with the other group. At another moment, he may decide deliberately to express his ethnicity when emblematic usage of the language, clothing, culture and customs of his own ethnic group will favour him in the transaction. Sometimes, transactions are best negotiated when ethnic boundaries and stereotypes are maintained.
So, on the fringes as well as in the centre, ethnicity can be instrumental and expressive, with the ethnic actor being fully aware and alert, and not assimilated. He does not ‘pass’ as one of the dominant group, nor does he lead a ‘double life’. He is not a marginal man either. He has a primary, core ethnic identity, best expressed and nurtured in private. This is his master identity. He also has a secondary ethnic identity, the acquisition of which is sociologically and psychologically problematic and, therefore, demands a more vigorous explanation than we presently have. Just like the primary ethnic identity, this secondary ethnic identity needs to be acquired, nurtured, presented and validated. Foster (1977: 114) maintains that, ‘[v]alidation is accomplished by showing that the individual in question has certain critical behavioural attributes that define the ethnic category’. Thus, in this case, the ethnic actor cannot just present a superficial identity for situational gains. He must have it internalised, yet in a way that will reconcile with his primary ethnic identity. He must be capable of enacting the many critical and necessary emblems of the other ethnic groups – language, cultural practices, behavioural comportment, values, etc. – while remaining most natural and spontaneous in one language (Sapir 1968), one ethnic group and one community.
Conceived as diametrically opposing assimilation are the related theories of cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, and integration. Borrowing John Dewey’s concept of democratic pluralism, Horace Kallen (1924: 122–3) stresses that, ‘[c]ultural pluralism is possible only in a democratic society whose institutions encourage individuality in groups, in persons, in temperaments, whose program liberates those individuals and guides them into a fellowship of freedom and co-operation’. Pluralism articulates a pattern of ethnic relations whereby groups that are different from each other in fundamental ways come to share a common culture and a common structure of institutions within the confines of a ‘plural society’, while allowing for the preservation and perpetuation of ethnic distinctiveness in businesses, religions, voluntary associations, clubs and media, as well as among families, kin networks, friendship cliques and intergroup marriages.
As an ideal and an ideology, pluralism promotes cultural and social heterogeneity and, therefore, self-awareness and self-direction in the private spheres, as well as unification and co-operation in the public domain – without necessarily creating ethnic division and social conflict. Louis Adamic (1938), extending the idea of cultural pluralism, borrows from the poet Walt Whitman’s phrase ‘a nation of nations’ to highlight the multicultural character of America as an immigrant country.
In the process of integration, what emerges is a synthesis of two or more ethnic cultures – such a process unites but does not homogenise the two groups. Following Glazer and Moynihan (1970), who first stressed the processual quality of integration, Femminella (1961) uses the word ‘impact’ to describe ‘a booming collision (of two cultures) resulting in a forced entanglement’. Postiglione (1983: 23) suggests that ‘out of the process of impacting and integration evolves a new synthesis which gives meaning and importance to the developing nation’ – the complex forces of this ‘culture collision’ yield a creative aftermath (Postiglione 1983: 22).
Skinner’s views of the Chinese in Thailand
It is generally believed that the Chinese in South-east Asia exhibit a strong sense of cultural persistence and continuity. Mallory (1956: 258) points to the ‘amazing loyalty of the Chinese to their own culture century after century … so that they perpetuate their language and social customs and hold firmly to them’. More recently, Ohki (1967: 5) suggests that ‘the Chinese culture is highly resistant to being worn down by other cultures during the acculturation process’. Although there may be some truth in this observation, it is fallacious to assume that Chinese migrants react in the same way in the vastly different physical and social environments of South-east Asia. In Thailand, for example, the literature seems to suggest that the Chinese bear more attributes of social integration and assimilation than of conflict. Skinner (1963: 1) has found that a majority of the descendants of Chinese immigrants in each generation merge with Thai society and become indistinguishable from the indigenous population to the extent that fourth-generation ‘Chinese’ are practically non-existent. He feels that the reason why many western and Chinese observers grossly overestimated the number of Chinese in T...
