Ethnic Domination in Deeply Divided Places
From Firenze University Press Book
Guido Panzano, ULB, Free University of Brussels
A conscious application of analytical concepts to the empirical reality requires clear examinations and a bunch of basic definitions. For this reason, before examining the crux of the book, namely what I shall call ethnic domination and the hegemonic state in Israel and Estonia, I will here expose some preliminary considerations on ethnicity and the state. To start with, a working definition of ethnicity is essential. Ethnicity is a widely explored concept throughout the social sciences and a controversial category in political discourses. Despite its current utilizations, however, it remains far to be commonly understood. Moreover, its boundaries with ‘race’ and culture, or nation, remain fuzzy and blurred. For a brief story of the concept, it was during the 1960s that the category of ethnicity received a more accurate attention by social anthropology and other social sciences, in particular in European universities, initially as a viable and less contestable category than ‘race’, fallen into disgrace after the atrocities of the Second World War (Hylland 1993; Jenkins 1997; van den Berghe 1987).
In a conundrum of definitions, partly inspired by a terminological suggestion of Joseph Marko, we can individuate two polar paradigms concerning the study of ethnicity, the ‘naturalistic’ and the constructivist-instrumental approaches, and then propose a third, namely constructivist-structural, one (Marko 1995; cf. Smith 1986). Firstly, the ‘naturalistic’ approach considers ethnicity as the feelings of common descent, though it recognizes the presence of continuous cultural ‘stuff’ among generations. The most relevant contribution in this first paradigm is the work of Anthony D. Smith. According to him, ethnicity has an identifiable core, namely an ensemble of myths, memories, values, and symbols (1986, 54), of which the mythomoteur, namely the constituent myth, provides the whole ethnic identity and the group itself with performative meaning (135–54). These myths, memories, values, or symbols, once elaborated by the mythomoteur, can endure, by constituting a kind of ‘mold’ or ‘template’ for subsequent cultural, social, and nation-building processes (56–7).
An ethnic group, in the French term ethnie, is thus defined as a named human population with a myth of common origins and ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of common culture, an association to a motherland and a perception of solidarity, at least among the élites (Smith 2004, 19; 2013, 191). When the ethnie is politicized, thus emphasizing territorial and even civic elements, it is deemed to ‘become’ a nation (1986; 2013, 196). Although he tried to present his theorization halfway between modernism and perennialism, Smith gets back into our approach of ‘naturalism’ because, in retracing the history and origins of ethnies, they tend to seem objectified or even teleologically defined (cf. Foucault 1971). However, I have referred to this approach as ‘naturalism’ — with single inverted commas — in order to keep it well separate from perennialism, or naturalism — without single inverted commas — term used by Smith himself in order to depict those (often racist) putative theories considering ethnic identities as primordially given, related to ancestry or even genetics. Secondly, the constructivist-instrumental approach, based on the post-modern view of culture, relies on the work of Frederik Barth, who firstly placed emphasis on the investigation of the ethnic boundary that defines the group, and “not the cultural stuff that it encloses” (Barth 1969, 5).
This pathbreaking idea was part of an intellectual Zeitgeist of social anthropology during the 1960s (Jenkins 1997, 13). According to this orientation, ethnicity should not be conceivable as historically given, but rather as an intensively malleable phenomenon. It is indeed a practical resource, which both individuals and groups can opportunistically utilize for their aims, and even discard if other, and more rewarding, alternative ways of bordering communities are available (Cordell and Wolff 2004, 5). According to Barth, in fact, ethnicity is the ‘social organization of cultural differences’, and the social sciences should study the border creation and maintenance processes. In other words, only when cultural differences make a sensible difference they matter (Hylland 1993, 39), as ethnicity is the product of group contacts and not of isolation (35). Going further Barth’s considerations in the deconstruction of the concept, in his seminal works Rogers Brubaker criticized what he calls the common-sense ‘groupism’ of social sciences (2004). This is the tendency to take discrete and bounded groups as the basic constituents of social life and fundamental units of analytical works, by reifying them as they were internally homogeneous, externally defined and collectively unite (2004, 8–9; 2009). Contrariwise, according to Brubaker, they are not categories of analysis, but rather ‘categories of practice’, namely, “a key part of what we want to explain, not what we want to think with; in other words, it belongs to our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit” (2004, 10).
DOI: 10.36253/978–88–5518–480–9
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