The Sociology of Ethnicity

Sinisa Malesevic

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761940425, 9780761940418
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This book offers an original synthesis of existing knowledge, pointing forward in a manner that could influence a new generation's conception of the field and its agenda. If it attracts the attention it merits, it could prove one of the most important books about ethnic and racial relations since the nineteen-eighties."
- Michael Banton, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Malesevic provides a thorough and balanced account of the sociological foundations of the study of ethnicity... His presentation is as critical and engaging as it is easy to read and logically organized. It is invaluable reading for sociologists."
- Jon Fox, British Journal of Sociology

Spanning classical sociology to current debates, The Sociology of Ethnicity synthesizes the leading sociological interpretations of ethnic relations and provides a coherent theoretical framework for its analysis.

In this thoughtful and accessible text, Sinisa Malesevic assesses the explanatory strength of a range of sociological theories in understanding ethnicity and ethnic conflict. While acknowledging that there is no master key or blue-print to deal with each and every case of interethnic group relations, The Sociology of Ethnicity develops the best strategy to bridge epistemological and policy requirements for interethnic group relations.  

The Sociology of Ethnicity will be required reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates studying ethnicity and race in sociology and across the social sciences.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

The sociological understanding of ethnicity

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Although the term ‘ethnicity’ has its roots in the Greek term ethnos/ethnikos, which was commonly used to describe pagans, that is non-Hellenic and, later, non-Jewish (Gentile) or non-Christian, second-class peoples, its academic and popular use is fairly modern. Sociologically speaking, the term was coined by D. Riesman in 1953 and it gained wider use only during the 1960s and 1970s (Glazer and Moynihan, 1975).¹ However, from its inception ethnicity has remained a ‘hot potato’ of sociology. Although the term was coined to make sense of a specific form of cultural difference, it acquired a rather different set of meanings. While the Anglo-American tradition adopted ‘ethnicity’ mostly as a substitute for minority groups within a larger society of the nation-state,² the European tradition regularly opted to use ethnicity as a synonym for nationhood defined historically by descent or territory. At the same time both traditions shared a joint aim to replace what had become a popular, but heavily compromised (due to the Nazi experiment), concept of ‘race’. Nevertheless, popular discourses, in both Europe and North America, have ‘racialized’ the concept of ethnicity, that is ‘race’ was largely preserved (in its quasi-biological sense) and has only now been used interchangeably with ‘ethnicity’.

Furthermore, the collapse of the colonial world in the 1950s and 1960s has brought even more confusion on questions of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity. The homelands of former European colonizers have become populated with new, post-colonial immigrants, who are visibly different. Following the consolidation of North American popular and legislative discourse these groups have also become defined as ‘ethnic’, thus simultaneously preserving old definitions of historical ethnicity by descent or territory (i.e., Welsh, Flamans, Walloons, etc.) while adding the new definition of ethnicity as an immigrant minority (i.e., Pakistani, West Indian, Sri Lankan, etc.).

The fall of communism and the break up of the Soviet-style federations along ‘ethnic’ lines and the emergence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ policies in the Balkans and Caucasus have further complicated these definitional issues.

With the wars on former Yugoslav soil, extensive and influential mass media coverage of ‘ethnic conflict’ has seen the term ‘ethnic’ degenerate into a synonym for tribal, primitive, barbaric and backward.

Finally, the ever-increasing influx of asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants to Western Europe, North America and Australia, who do not necessarily express visible or significant physical, cultural or religious differences to their hosts, together with their uncertain legal status (i.e., waiting for a decision on asylum), has relegated the term ‘ethnic’ to a quasi-legislative domain. In this context, the term ‘ethnicity’ often refers again to non citizens who inhabit ‘our land’, just as it did in the days of ancient Greece and Judea; that is, to second-class peoples.

What is obvious from this brief history of the term is the fact that ‘ethnicity’ contains a multiplicity of meanings. Such a plasticity and ambiguity of the concept allows for deep misunderstandings as well as political misuses. While the concept was solely confined to the academic world this was not such a big problem. However, once it acquired legislative and institutional underpinnings through formulations such as ‘ethnic minority’ or ‘ethnic group’ it has had much more devastating effects. Institutionalized and bureaucratized definitions of the concept, such as imposing the idea that a particular individual legally belongs to an ‘ethnic minority’ or to one ‘ethnic group’, is not only the strongest possible source of reification of (always dynamic) group and individual relations, but it also becomes a form of oppression by caging individuals into involuntary associations. In such a situation cultural difference, which is by its nature changeable, flexible and fuzzy, is arrested and codified, thus preventing social change. Hence popular and legislative understandings of ethnicity are severely erroneous. This error comes from a profoundly unsociological view of cultural difference as something immobile and definite. To clarify all these historical, geographical and contemporary misuses and misunderstandings one has to explain who exactly is an ‘ethnic’, and what ethnicity stands for in contemporary sociology.

Since the classics of sociological thought, with the exception of Max Weber, did not operate with the term ‘ethnic’, sociologists had to turn to anthropology and, in particular, to the seminal work of Frederik Barth (1969) in order to explain the power of cultural difference, both historically and geographically. Before Barth, cultural difference was traditionally explained from the inside out – social groups possess different cultural characteristics which make them unique and distinct (common language, lifestyle, descent, religion, physical markers, history, eating habits, etc.). Culture was perceived as something relatively or firmly stable, persistent and exact. Cultural difference was understood in terms of a group’s property (i.e., to be French is to be in possession of a distinct culture to that of the English). Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries provided nothing short of a Copernican revolution in the study of ethnicity. Barth turned the traditional understanding of cultural difference on its head. He defined and explained ethnicity from the outside in: it is not the ‘possession’ of cultural characteristics that makes social groups distinct but rather it is the social interaction with other groups that makes that difference possible, visible and socially meaningful. In Barth’s own words: ‘the critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (1969: 15). The difference is created, developed and maintained only through interaction with others (i.e., Frenchness is created and becomes culturally and politically meaningful only through the encounter with Englishness, Germaness, Danishness, etc.). Hence, the focus in the study of ethnic difference has shifted from the study of its contents (i.e., the structure of the language, the form of the particular costumes, the nature of eating habits) to the study of cultural boundaries and social interaction. Ethnic boundaries are explained first and foremost as a product of social action. Cultural difference per se does not create ethnic collectivities: it is the social contact with others that leads to definition and categorization of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. ‘Group identities must always be defined in relation to that which they are not – in other words, in relation to non-members of the group’ (Eriksen, 1993: 10).

Furthermore, Barth’s research established a foundation for understanding ethnicity in universalist rather than in particularist terms. Since culture and social groups emerge only through interaction with others, then ethnicity cannot be confined to minority groups only. As Jenkins (1997) and Isajiw (2000) rightly argue, we cannot study minority ethnic groups without at the same time studying the majority ethnicity. The dominant modernist paradigm of post-World War II sociology has traditionally viewed ethnicity as a parochial leftover from the past that will largely disappear with intensive industrialization, urbanization, universal national education systems and modernization. Ethnic difference was understood in rather narrow particularist terms. On the other hand, even the staunch critics of the modernization paradigm maintained this particularistic view of ethnicity. While trying to discredit the modernization thesis by drawing on the re-emergence of ethnicity in 1970s’ and 80s’ America, they have been equally responsible for confining ethnicity to minority groups. Their argument that the ‘awakening of ethnicities’ invalidates the melting pot thesis is equally flawed. Since this argument is purely historical it simply preserves a particularist comprehension of ethnicity. By stating that ethnic identities are more persistent than was envisaged by modernists, critics continue to operate with particularist, and also essentialist understandings of cultural difference. If ethnicity is understood in universalist terms as a question of social interaction, culture and boundary maintenance, it means that there is no culturally and politically aware social group which is able to create a believable narrative of common descent without drawing upon some conception of ethnicity. In other words, as long as there is a social action and cultural markers to draw upon (religion, language, descent, etc.), there will be ethnicity. And this is indeed where sociology enters the stage.

Ethnicity is not a thing or a collective asset of a particular group; it is a social relation in which social actors perceive themselves and are perceived by others as being culturally distinct collectivities. While Barth has made it clear that social contact is a precondition of ethnic group difference, mere contact is not enough to generate a sociologically meaningful sense of group membership. As Weber (1968) emphasized, it is the effectiveness of social action and, above all, a political aspect of group action that ‘inspires belief in common ethnicity’ and transforms group membership into a political community. Sociologically speaking, despite its obvious diversity, ethnicity is in the last instance a politicized culture.³ As sociologists we do not study ethnic group behaviour simply to detect the variety of cultural difference that group relations can take. We become interested only when that cultural difference is mobilized for political purposes, when social actors through the process of social action (re)create the narratives of common descent to respond to a changing social environment. Cultural difference framed as ethnic difference is sociologically relevant only when it is active, mobilized and dynamic, and not a mere difference. However, the very fact that ethnicity, just as all other aspects of social relations, is for the most part a dynamic and mobile force, it makes the range of sociological inquiry much wider and more penetrating than it would otherwise be.

Although Barth has provided a groundwork for the elementary understanding of ethnicity, his approach fell short of accounting for these political and structural repercussions in the construction, organization and institutionalization of cultural difference. Why, when and how do individuals and groups maintain ethnic boundaries? In trying to give an answer to these questions post-Barthian sociology has moved in different directions. The main aim of this book is to set out clearly epistemological differences and similarities between these diverse sociological accounts of ethnic group reality, and to critically assess the explanatory potential of the leading sociological interpretations of ethnic relations. However, before I introduce these distinct sociological perspectives in the study of ethnicity, it is necessary to make some conceptual clarifications.

Ethnicity and the neighbouring concepts

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In popular discourse, just as among some academics working in this field, there is a tendency to use terms such as ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, ‘nationality’, ‘religious group’ or a specific regional, mostly continental, designation interchangeably.⁴ Thus in the British context, a label such as ‘Asian’ often refers to an ethnic collectivity whose descent can be traced to some geographical location in the Indian subcontinent (Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, Baloch, etc.). It can also, simultaneously, be a ‘racial’ description referring to an individual with markedly darker skin colour, brown eyes or glossy black hair. This label is also used for making reference to nationalities such as Pakistani or Bangladeshi. For the most part it also indicates a specific religious denomination, and it is regularly employed to denote Muslims. And finally the very name designates a particular, non-European continental location. Similarly, people from Northern Ireland are sometimes labelled as religious groups (Catholics or Protestants), sometimes in terms of their nationality, that is loyalty to a particular nation-state and the passport they hold (Irish or British), sometimes in terms of their geographical origin (Ulstermen or Northern Irish), and sometimes they are categorized in ethno-political terms as Republicans and Loyalists or Unionists and Nationalists.

The problem with these interchangeable uses is twofold. First it is obvious that although these labels, from the point of view of those who make a categorization, often refer to the same groups of individuals, they conflate very distinct forms of collective membership. Not only is it not the same thing to describe a particular collectivity in religious, geographic, cultural or racial terms but, more importantly, such an approach to categorization links together and naturalizes forms of collective membership that do not necessarily have anything in common. Such an attitude essentializes and reduces cultural, political and value diversity of an individual to a single clear-cut label such as ‘Asian’ or ‘Irish’. This, in turn, works as a form of circular reasoning, where Asian = Muslim = Pakistani and vice versa. No group designation is clear cut and unproblematic, and terms such as ‘Pakistani’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Asian’ are in themselves extremely broad and vague descriptions which involve numerous very diverse forms of sub-groupings and particular ways of being a Muslim, Pakistani and Asian, making this labelling strategy deeply flawed and potentially dangerous.

Secondly, not only is it that these terms often refer to different forms of collectivity; some of the concepts used are, from the sociological point of view, simply not viable. Defining groups in terms of race, religion and continental origin are examples of popular, native or folk concepts which are often constructed in an ad hoc manner by social actors who are themselves trying to make sense of their everyday reality. As such they have no sociological or explanatory grounding. Although there are clear genetic and physical variations between human beings such as skin colour, hair type, lip size and so on, as biologists emphasize there are no unambiguous criteria for classifying people along the lines of these characteristics. Any such classification would artificially create groups where in-group variation would be greater than their presumed out-group variation. In other words ‘race’ is a social construct where phenotypic attributes are popularly used to denote in-groups from out-groups. Since there is no sound biological or sociological foundation for its use in an analytical sense, one should treat ‘race’ as no more than a special case of ethnicity. Hence when the term ‘race’ is used in popular discourse it cannot refer to a ‘sub-species of Homo sapiens’ (van den Berghe, 1978: 406) but is applied only as a social attribute. It is viewed as a ‘socially defined group which sees itself and is seen by others as being phenotypically different from other such groups’ (van den Berghe, 1983: 222). As Collins (1999: 74) rightly argues,

a sociological distinction between ethnicity and race is analytically pernicious because it obscures the social processes that determine the extent to which divisions are made along the continuum of somatotypical gradations. Race is a folk concept, a popular mythology that elevates particular ethnic distinctions into a sharp break. As sociologists, our analytical challenge is to show what causes placements along the continuum.

Similarly, the use of concepts such as a ‘religious group’ or a regional-continental designation to pinpoint cultural difference is often misleading. While continental descriptions such as ‘Asians’ or ‘Afro-Caribbeans’ in Britain, or ‘Afro-Americans’ or ‘Amerasians’ in the US, might be workable in a politically correct administrative sense, they are clearly too vague and too broad to be of any sociological use. These geographic labels are often no more than a convenient bureaucratic strategy which evades engaging with the hegemonic role of state civil servants in shaping particular group-centred discourses. In the same vein, when referring to groups other than those bound together by a strict set of religious beliefs or a group association based on a particular theological doctrine, the label ‘religious group’ is often used as no more than a euphemism for a particular form that ethnicity can take. Since ethnicity is a common name covering many diverse forms of political action which are defined in collective – cultural – terms, ‘ethnicity’ is able to accommodate all of these specific labels such as ‘race’, ‘religious group’ or ‘regional-continental demarcation’. This is not to say that ethnicity is a more clear-cut concept than the other three. On the contrary, it is as untidy a concept as can possibly be. Its main and perhaps deciding advantage over the competitors is its ability simultaneously to allow for sociological generalization without affecting particular instances of it.⁵ Unlike ‘race’, ‘religious group’ or ‘continental designation’, ethnicity has more of a universalist potential which, on the one hand, is decisive for the conduct of coherent social research practices and, on the other, is sensitive enough to appreciate and accommodate the variety of forms which cultural difference can take.

Finally, concepts such as nation, nationality and nationalism do occasionally overlap with those of ethnicity (as for example in the notion of ethnonationalism), but for the most part they refer to ideologies and political movements associated with historical projects of political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, that is, with the macro processes of state making, building or breaking. In many ways the study of nations and nationalisms belongs to an historically specific period of transition from the feudal agrarian world of multilingual empires to modern industrial monoglot states, and to current debates on globalization and decline of the nation-state.⁶ Since this book does not explicitly deal with any of these large-scale historical events it makes no more than a sporadic reference to concepts such as nation and nationalism, and when it does it is only when it is directly related to the processes of ethnic group action.

The structure of the book

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The key objective of this book is systematically to survey and critically analyse leading sociological theories of ethnic relations. As any review of this kind it is bound to be incomplete, selective in its choice of theories as well as in the parameters used for the classification of diverse individual positions. The work of any individual sociologist is, as a rule, always richer, internally less coherent and often more contradictory than standard taxonomic categorizations tolerate. Any attempt to find the common denominators behind distinctly personal sociological accounts of social reality has to be somewhat reductionist, omitting a great deal of theoretical and empirical research material that makes these individual interpretations so unique. Although development of a sociological understanding of ethnicity is impossible without the people who formulate these theories, what matters sub specie aeternitatis are not the particular individuals but their creations – the ideas, concepts and theories themselves. To fully understand t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Classical Sociological Theory and Ethnicity
• Chapter 3 Neo-Marxism: Capitalism, Class and Culture
• Chapter 4 Functionalism: Ethnicity, Modernization and Social Integration
• Chapter 5 Symbolic Interactionism: The Social Construction of Ethnic Group Reality
• Chapter 6 Sociobiology: Ethnic Groups as Extended Families
• Chapter 7 Rational Choice Theory: Ethnic Group Membership as an Individual Gain
• Chapter 8 Elite Theory: Ethnicity as a Political Resource
• Chapter 9 Neo-Weberian Theory: Ethnicity as a Status Privilege
• Chapter 10 Anti-Foundationalist Approaches: Deconstructing Ethnicity
• Chapter 11 Sociological Theory and Ethnic Relations: Where to Go From Here?
• References
• Index