1
The Concept of Ethnicity
i What is an ethnic group?
MAX WEBER
'RACE' MEMBERSHIP
A [particularly] problematic source of social action [.,.] is 'race identity': common inherited and inheritable traits that actually derive from common descent. Of course, race creates a 'group1 only when it is subjectively perceived as a common train this happens only when a neighbourhood or the mere proximity of racially different persons is the basis of joint (mostly political) action, or conversely, when some common experiences of members of the same race are linked to some antagonism against members of an obviously different group. The resulting social action is usually merely negative: those who are obviously different are avoided and despised or, conversely, viewed with superstitious awe, Persons who are externally different are simply despised irrespective of what they accomplish or what they are, or they are venerated superstitious! y if they are too powerful in the long run. In this case antipathy «s the primary and normal reaction. However, this antipathy is shared not just by persons with anthropological similarities, and its extent is by no means determined by the degree of anthropological relatedness; furthermore, this antipathy is linked not only to inherited traits but just as much to other visible differences.
If the degree of objective racial difference can he determined, among other things, purely physiologically by establishing whether hybrids reproduce themselves at approximately norma) rates, the subjective aspects, the reciprocal racial attraction and repulsion, might be measured by finding out whether sexual relations are preferred or rare between two groups, and whether they are carried on permanently or temporarily and irregularly. In all groups with a
lb  Max Weber
What is an ethnic group ? 17
developed 'ethnic' consciousness the existence or absence of intermarriage (conntebittm) would then be a normal consequence of racial attraction or segregation. Serious research on the sexual attraction and repulsion between different ethnic groups is only incipient, but there is not the slightest doubt that racial factors, that means,, common descent, influence the incidence of sexual relations and of marriage, sometimes decisively. However, the existence of several million mulattos in the United States speaks clearly against the assumption of a 'natural' racial antipathy, even among quite different races. Apart from the laws against biracial marriages in the southern states, sexual relations between the two races are now abhorred by both sides, but this development began only with the Emancipation and resulted from the Negroes' demand for equal civil rights. Hence this abhorrence on the part of the Whites is socially determined by the previously sketched tendency toward the monopolization of social power and honour, a tendency which in this case happens to be linked to race.
The connubiitm itself, that means, the fact that the offspring from a permanent sexual relationship can share in the activities and advantages of the father's political, economic or status group, depends on many circumstances. Under undiminished patriarchal powers [...] the father was free to grant equal rights to his children from slaves. Moreover, the glorification of abduction by the hero made racial mixing a normal event within the ruling strata. However, patriarchal discretion was progressively curtailed with the monopolistic closure [...] of political, status or other groups and with the monopolization of marriage opportunities; these tendencies restricted the connubium to the offspring from a permanent sexual union within the given political, religious, economic and status group. This also produced a high incidence of inbreeding. The 'endogamy' of a group is probably everywhere a secondary product of such tendencies, if we define it not merely as the fact that a permanent sexual union occurs primarily on the basis of joint membership in some association, but as a process of social action in which only endogamous children are accepted as full members. (The term 'sib endogamy' should not be used: there is no such thing unless we want to refer to the levirate marriage and arrangements in which daughters have the right to succession, but these have secondary, religious and political origins.) 'Pure' anthropological types are often a secondary consequence of such closure; examples are sects (as in India) as well as pariah peoples, that means, groups that are socially despised yet wanted as neighbours because they have monopolized indispensable skills.
Reasons other than actual racial kinship influence the degree to which blood relationship is taken into account. In the United States the smallest admixture of Negro blood disqualifies a person unconditionally, whereas very considerable admixtures of Indian blood do not. Doubdessly, it is important that Negroes appear aesthetically even more alien than Indians, but it remains very significant that Negroes were slaves and hence disqualified in the status hierarchy. The conventional connubium is far less impeded by anthropological differences
than by status differences, that means, differences due to socialization and upbringing (Biidting in the widest sense of the word). Mere anthropological differences account for little, except in cases of extreme aesthetic antipathy.
THE BELIEF IN COMMON ETHNICITY: ITS MULTIPLE SOCIAL ORIGINS AND THEORETICAL AMBIGUITIES
The question of whether conspicuous 'racial' differences are based on biological heredity or on tradition is usually of no importance as far as their effect on mutual attraction or repulsion is concerned. This is true of the development of endogamous conjugal groups, and even more so of attraction and repulsion in other kinds of social intercourse, i.e., whether all sorts of friendly, companionable, or economic relationships between such groups are established easily and on the footing of mutual trust and respect, or whether such relationships are established with difficulty and with precautions that betray mistrust.
The more or less easy emergence of social circles in the broadest sense of the word (soziale Verkebrsgememschaft) may be linked ro the most superficial features of historically accidental habits just as much as to inherited racial characteristics. That the different custom is not understood in its subjective meaning since the cultural key to it is lacking, is almost as decisive as the peculiarity of the custom as such. But [...] not all repulsion is attributable to the absence of a 'consensual group'. Differences in the styles of beard and hairdo, clothes, food and eating habits, division of labour between the sexes, and all kinds of other visible differences can, in a given case, give rise to repulsion and contempt, but the actual extent of these differences is irrelevant for the emotional impact, as is illustrated by primitive travel descriptions, the Histories of Herodotus or the older prescientific ethnography. Seen from their positive aspect, however, these differences may give rise to consciousness of kind, which may become as easily the bearer of group relationships as groups ranging from the household and neighbourhood to political and religious communities are usually the bearers of shared customs. All differences of customs can sustain a specific sense of honour or dignity in their practitioners. The original motives or reasons for the inception of different habits of life are forgotten and the contrasts are then perpetuated as conventions. In this manner, any group can create customs, and it can also effect, in certain circumstances very decisively, the selection of anthropological types. This it can do by providing favourable chances of survival and reproduction for certain hereditary qualities and traits. This holds both for internal assimilation and for external differentiation.
Any cultural trait, no matter how superficial, can serve as astarting point for the familiar tendency to monopolistic closure. However, the universal force of imitation has the general effect of only gradually changing the traditional
18  Max Weber
What is an ethnic group?
customs and usages, just as anthropological types are changed only gradually by racial mixing. But if there are sharp boundaries between areas of observable styles of life, they are due to conscious monopolistic closure, which started from small differences that were then cultivated and intensified; or they are due to the peaceful or warlike migrations of groups that previously lived far from each other and had accommodated themselves to their heterogeneous conditions of existence. Similarly, strikingly different racial types, bred in isolation, may live in sharply segregated proximity to one another either because of monopolistic closure or because of migration. We can conclude then that similarity and contrast of physical type and custom, regardless of whether they are biologically inherited or culturally transmitted, are subject to the same conditions of group life, in origin as well as in effectiveness, and identical in their potential for group formation. The difference lies partly in the differential instability of typeand custom, partly in thefixed (though often unknown) limit-to engendering new hereditary qualities. Compared to this, the scope for assimilation of new customs is incomparably greater, although there are considerable variations in the transmissibility of traditions.
Almost any kind of similarity or contrast of physical type and of habits can induce the belief that affinity or disaffinity exists between groups that attract or repel each other. Not every belief in tribal affinity, however, is founded on the resemblance of customs or of physical type. But in spite of great variations in this area, such a belief can exist and can develop group-forming powers when it is buttressed by a memory of an actual migration, be it colonization or individual migration. The persistent effect of the old ways and of childhood renuniscencescontinuesasasource of native-country sentiment (Heimatsgefiibf) among emigrants even when they have become so thoroughly adjusted to the new country that return to their homeland would be intolerable (this being the case of most German-Americans, for example).
In colonies, rhe attachment to the colonists' homeland survives despite considerable mixing with the inhabitants of the colonial land and despite profound changes in tradition and hereditary type as well. In case of political colonization, the decisive factor is the need for political support. In general, the continuation of relationships created by marriage ts important, and so are the market relationships, provided that the 'customs1 remained unchanged. These market relationships between the homeland and the colony may be very close, as long as the consumer standards remain similar, and especially when colonies are in an almost absolutely alien environment and within an alien political territory.
The belief in group affinity, regardless of whether it has any objective foundation, can have important consequences especially for the formation of a political community. We shall call 'ethnic groups' those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group
formation; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists. Ethnic membership (Gememsamkeh) differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action, like the latter. In our sense, ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere. On the other hand, it is primarily the political community, no matter how artificially organized, that inspires the belief in common ethnicity. This belief tends to persist even after the disintegration of the political community, unless drastic differences in the custom, physical type, or, above all, language exist among its members.
This artificial origin of the belief in common ethnicity follows the [...] pattern [.,.] of rational association turning into personal relationships. If rationally regulated action is not widespread, almost any association, even the most rational one, creates an overarching communal consciousness; this takes the form of a brotherhood on the basis of the belief in common ethnicity. As late as the Greek city state, even the most arbitrary division of the polis became for the member an association with at least a common cult and often a common fictitious ancestor, The twelve tribes of Israel were subdivisions of a political community, and they alternated in performing certain functions on a monthly basis. The same holds for the Greek tribes (pbyUi) and their subdivisions: the latter, too, were regarded as units of common ethnic descent. It is true that the original division may have been induced by political or actual ethnic differences, but the effect was the same when such a division was made quite rationally and schematically, after the break-up of old groups and relinquishment of local cohesion, as it was done by Cleisthenes. It does not follow, therefore, that the Greek polis was actually or originally a tribal or lineage state, but that ethnic fictions were a sign of the rather low degree of rationalization of Greek political life, Conversely, it is a symptom of the greater rationalization of Rome that its old schematic subdivisions {curiae) took on religious importance, with a pretence to ethnic origin, to only a small degree.
The belief in common ethnicity often delimits 'social circles', which in turn are not always identical with endogamous connubial groups, for greatly varying numbers of persons may be encompassed by both. Their similarity rests on the belief in a specific 'honour' of their members, not shared by the outsiders, that is, the sense of 'ethnic honour' (a phenomenon closely related to status honour, which will bediscussedlater). These few remarks must suffice at this point. A specialized sociological study of ethnicity would have to make a finer distinction between these concepts. (.. ,]
Groups, in turn, can engender sentiments of likeness which will persist even after their demise and will have an 'ethnic' connotation. The political community in particular can produce such an effect. But most directly, such an effect is created by the language group, which is the bearer of a specific 'cultural possession of the masses' {Masienkulturgut) and makes mutual understanding (Verstehen) possible or easier.
20 Max Weber
What is an ethnic group? 21
Wherever the memory of the origin of a community by peaceful secession or emigration ('colony*, ver sacrum, and the like) from a mother community remains for some reason alive, there undoubtedly exists a very specific and often extremely powerful sense of ethnic identity, which is determined by several factors: shared political memories or, even more importantly in early times, persistent ties with the old cult, or the strengthening of kinship and other groups, both in the old and the new community, or other persistent relationships. Where these ties are lacking, or once they cease to exist, the sense of ethnic group membership is absent, regardless of howclose die kinship maybe.
Apart from the community of language, which may or may not coincide with objective, or subjectively believed, consanguinity, and apart from common religious belief, which is also independent of consanguinity, the ethnic differences that remain are, on the one hand, aesthetically conspicuous differences of the physical appearance (as mentioned before) and, on the other hand and of equal weight, the perceptible differences in the conduct of everyday life. Of special importance are precisely those items which may otherwise seem to be of small social relevance, since when ethnic differentiation is concerned it is always the conspicuous differences that come into play.
Common language and the ritual regulation of life, as determined by shared religious beliefs, everywhere are conducive to feelings of ethnic affinity, especially since the intelligibility of the behaviour of others is the most fundamental presupposition of group formation, But since we shall not consider these two elements in the present context, we ask: what is it that remains? It must be admitted that palpable differences in dialect and differences of religion in themselves doxiot exclude sentiments of common ethniciry. Next to pronounced differences in the economic way of life, the belief in ethnic affinity has at all times been affected by outward differences in clothes, in the style of housing, food and eating habits, the division of labour between the sexes and between the free and the unfree. That Is to say, these things concern one's conception of what is correct and proper and, above all, of what affects the individual's sense of honour and dignity. All those things we shall find later On as objects of specific differences between status groups. The conviction of the excellence of one's own customs and the inferiority of alien ones, a conviction which sustains the sense of ethnic honour, is actually quite analogous to the sense of honour of distinctive status groups.
The sense of ethnic honour is a specific honour of the masses (Massenehre), for it is accessible to anybody who belongs to the subjectively believed community of descent.The 'poor white trash', i.e., the property-less and, in the absence of job opportunities, very often destitute white inhabitants of the southern states of the United States of America tn the period of slavery, were the actual bearers of racial antipathy, which was quite foreign to the planters. This was so because the social honour of the 'poor whites' was dependent upon the social déclassement of the Negroes.
And behind all ethnic diversities there is somehow naturally the notion of the
'chosen people', which is merely a counterpart of status differentiation translated Into the plane of horizontal co-existence. The idea of a chosen people derives its popularity from the fact that it can be claimed to an equal degree by any and every member of the mutually despising groups, in contrast to status differentiation which always rests on subordination. Consequently, ethnic repulsion may take hold of all conceivable differences among the notions of propriety and transform them into 'ethnic conventions'.
Besides the previously mentioned elements, which were still more or less closely related to the economic order, conventionalization [...] may take hold of such things as a hairdo or style of beard and the like. The differences thereof have an 'ethnically' repulsive effect, because they are thought of as symbols of ethnic membership. Of course, the repulsion is not always based merely on the 'symbolic' character of the distinguishing traits, The fact that the Scythian women oiled their hair with butter, which then gave off a rancid odour, while Greek women used perfumed oil to achieve the same purpose, thwarted -according to an ancient report - all attempts at social intercourse between the aristocratic ladies of these two groups. The smell of butter certainly had a more compelling effect than even the most prominent racial differences, or - as far as I could see - the 'Negro odour', of which so many fables are told. In general, racial qualities are effective only as Limiting factors with regard to the belief in common ethnicity, such as in the case of an excessively heterogeneous and aesthetically unaccepted physical type; they are not positively group-forming.
Pronounced differences of custom, which play a role equal to that of inherited physical type in the creation of feelings of common ethnicity and notions of kinship, are usually caused, in addition to linguistic and religious differences, by the diverse economic and political conditions of various social groups. If we ignore cases of clear-cut linguistic boundaries and sharply demarcated political or religious communities as a basis of differences of custom — and these in fact are lacking in wide areas of the African and South American continents-then there are only gradual transitions of custom and no immutable ethnic frontiers, except those due to gross geographical differences. The sharp demarcations of areas wherein ethnically relevant customs predominate, which were not conditioned either by political or economic or religious factors, usually came into existence by way of migration or expansion, when groups of people that had previously lived incomplete or partial isolation from each other and became accommodated to heterogeneous conditions of existence came to live side by side. As a result, the obvious contrast usually evokes, on both sides, the idea of blood disaffinity {Blutsfremdbeit), regardless of the objective state of affairs.
It is understandably difficult to determine in general—and even in a concrete individual case-what influence specific ethnic factors (i.e., the belief in a blood relationship, or its opposite, which rests on similarities, or differences, of a person's physical appearance and style of life) have on thef ormationof agroup.
There is no difference between the ethnically relevant customs and customs
22  Max Weber
What is an ethnic group ? 23
in general, as far as their effect is concerned. The belief in common descent, in combination with asimilarity of customs, is likely to promote the spread of the activities of one part of an ethnic group among the rest, since the awareness of ethnic identity furthers imitation. This is especially true of the propaganda of religious groups.
It is not feasible to go beyond these vague generalizations. The content of joint activities that are possible on an ethnic basis remains indefinite. There is a corresponding ambiguity of concepts denoting ethnically determined action, that means, determined by the belief in blood relationship. Such concepts are Völkerschaft, Stamm (tribe), Volk (people), each of which is ordinarily used in the sense of an ethnic subdivision of the following one (although the first two may be used in reversed order). Using such terms, one usually implies either the existence of a contemporary political community, no matter how loosely organized, or memories of an extinct political community, such as they are preserved in epic tales and legends; or the existence of a linguistic or dialect group; or, finally, of a religious group. In the past, cults in particular were the typical concomitant of a tribal or Volk consciousness. But in the absence of the political community, contemporary or past, the external delimitation of the group was usually indistinct. The cult communities of Germanic tribes, as late as the Burgundian period (sixth-century ad), were probably rudiments of political communities and therefore pretty well defined. By contrast, the Delphic oracle, the undoubted cuhic symbol of Hellenism, also revealed information to the barbarians and accepted their veneration, and it was an organized cult only among some Greek segments, excluding the most powerful cities. The cuJt as an exponent of ethnic identity is thus generally either a remnant of a largely political community which once existedbut was destroyed by disunion and colonization, or it is - as in the case of the Delphic Apollo -a product of a Kuhurgemeinschaft brought about by other than purely ethnic conditions, but which in turn gives rise to the belief in blood relationship. All history shows how easily political action can give rise to the belief in blood relationship, unless gross differences of anthropological type impede it.
TRIBE AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY: THE DISUTILITY OF THE NOTION OF 'ETHNIC GROUP'
The tribe is clearly delimited when iris a subdivision of a polity, which, in fact, often establishes it. In this case, the artificial origin is revealed by the round numbers in which tribes usually appear, for example, the previously mentioned division of the people of Israel into twelve tribes, the three Daricpbylai and the variousphylai of the other Hellenes. When a political community was newly established or reorganized, the population was newly divided. Hence the tribe is here a political artefact, even though it soon adopts the whole symbolism of
blood relationship and particularly a tribal cult. Even today it is not rare that political artefacts develop a sense of affinity akin to that of blood relationship. Very schematic constructs such as those states of the United States that were made into squares according to their latitude have a strong sense of identity; it is also not rare that families travel From New York to Richmond to make an expected child a 'Virginian'.
Such artificiality does not preclude the possibility that the Hellenic pbylai, for example, were at one time independent and that the polis used them schematically when they were merged into a political association. However, tribes that existed before the polis were either identical with the corresponding political groups which were subsequently associated into a polis; and in this case they were called etbnos, •n.otpbyle or, as it probably happened many times, the politically unorganized tribe, as a presumed 'blood community', lived from the memory that it once engaged in joint political action, typically a single conquest or defence, and then such political memories constituted the tribe. Thus, the fact that tribal consciousness was primarily formed by common political experiences and not by common descent appears to have been a frequent source of the belief in common ethnicity.
Of course, this was not the only source: common customs may have diverse origins. Ultimately, they derive largely from adaptation to natural conditions and the imitation of neighbours. En practice, however, tribal consciousness usually has a political meaning: in case of military danger or opportunity, it easily provides the basis for joint political action on the part of tribal members or Volksgenossen who consider one another as blood relatives. The eruption of a drive to political action is thus one of the major potentialities inherent in the rather ambiguous notions of tribe and people. Such intermittent political action may easily develop into the moral duty of all members of tribe or people (Volk) to support one another in case of a military attack, even if there is no corresponding political association; violators of this solidarity may suffer the fate of the (Germanic, pro-Roman) sibsof Segestes and Inguiomer-expulsion from the tribal territory - even if the tribe has no organized government. If the tribe has reached this stage, it has indeed become a continuous political community, no matter how inactive in peacetime, and hence unstable, it may be. However, even under favourable conditions the transition from the habitual to the customary and therefore obligatory is very fluid. All in all, the notion of 'ethnically' determined social action subsumes phenomena that a rigorous sociological analysis - as [I] do not attempt it here - would have to distinguish carefully: the actual subjective effect of those customs conditioned by heredity and those determined by tradition; the differentia] impact of the varying content of custom; the influence of common language, religion and political action, past and present, upon the formation of customs; the extent to which such factors create attraction and repulsion, and especially the belief in affinity or disaffinity of blood; the consequences of this belief for social action in general, and specifically for action on the basis of shared custom or blood
Max Weber
What is an ethnic group?
relationship, for diverse sexual relations, etc. - all of this would have to be studied in detail. It is certain that in this process the collective term 'ethnic3 would be abandoned, for it is unsuitable for a really rigorous analysis. However, we do not pursue sociology for its own sake and therefore limit ourselves to showing briefly the diverse factors that are hidden behind this seemingly uniform phenomenon.
The concept of the 'ethnic1 group, which dissolves if we define our terms exactly, corresponds in this regard to oneof the most vexing, since emotionally charged concepts: the nation, as soon as we attempt a sociological definition.
NATIONALITY AND CULTURAL PRESTIGE
The concept of 'nationality' shares with that of the 'people' (Volk) - in the 'ethnic' sense - the vague connotation that whatever is felt to be distinctively common must derive from common descent. In reality, of course, persons who consider themselves members of the same nationality are often much less related by common descent than are persons belonging to different and hostile nationalities. Differences of nationality may exist even among groups closely related by common descent, merely because they have different religious persuasions, as in the case of Serbs and Croats. The concrete reasons for the belief in joint nationality and for the resulting social action vary greatly.
Today, in the age of language conflicts, a shared common language is preeminently considered the normal basis of nationality. Whatever the 'nation' means beyond a mere 'language group* can be found in the specific objective of its social action, and this can only be the autonomous polity. Indeed, 'nation state* has become conceptually identical with 'state' based on common language. In reality, however, such modern nation states exist next to many others that comprise several language groups, even though these others usually have one official language. A common language is also insufficient in sustaining a sense of national identity (Nationalgefiihl). [...] Aside from the examples of the Serbs and Croats, this is demonstrated by the Irish, the Swiss and the German-speaking Alsatians; these groups do not consider themselves as members, at least not as full members, of the 'nation* associated with their language. Conversely, language differences do not necessarily preclude a sense of joint nationality: the German-speaking Alsatians considered themselves -and most of them still do - as part of the French 'nation', even chough not in the same sense as French-speaking nationals. Hence there are qualitative degrees of the belief in common nationality.
Many German-speaking Alsatians feel a sense of community with the French because they share certain customs and some of their 'sensual culture' (Sinnenkultur) [...] and also because of common political experiences. This can be understood by any visitor who walks through the museum in Cotmar,
which is rich in relics such as tricolors,pompier and military helmets, edicts by Louis Philippe and especially memorabilia from the French Revolution; these may appear trivial to the outsider, but they have sentimental value for the Alsatians. This sense of community came into being by virtue of common political and, Indirectly, social experiences which are highly valued by the masses as symbols of the destruction of feudalism, and the story of these events takes the place of the heroic legends of primitive peoples. Lagrande nation was the liberator from feudal servitude, she was the bearer of civilization (Kahur), her language was the civilized language; German appeared as a dialect suitable for everyday communication. Hence the attachment to those who speak the language of civilization is an obvious parallei to the sense of community based on common language, but the two phenomena are not identical; rather, we deal here with an attitude that derives from a partial sharing of the same culture and from shared political experiences.
Until a short time ago most Poles in Upper Silesia had no strongly developed sense of Polish nationality that was antagonistic to the Prussian state, which is based essentially on the German language. The Poles were loyal if passive 'Prussians', but they were not 'Germans' interested in the existence of the Reich; the majority did not feel a conscious or a strong need to segregate themselves from German-speaking fellow-citizens. Hence, in this case there was no sense of nationality based on common language, and there was no Kttltttrgemeinschaft in view of the lack of cultural development.
Among the Baltic Germans we find neither much of a sense of nationality amounting to a high valuation of the language bonds with the Germans, nor a desire forpolitical union with the Reich'/m fact, most of them would abhorsuch a unification. However, they segregate themselves rigorously from the Slavic environment, and especially from the Russians, primarily because of status considerations and partly because both sides have different customs and cultural values which are mutually unintelligible and disdained. This segregation exists in spite of, and partly because of, the fact that the Baltic Germans are intensely loyal vassals of the Tsar and have been as interested as any 'national' Russian (Niitionalrxsse) in the predominance of the Imperial Russian system, which they provide with officials and which in turn maintains their descendants. Hence, here too we do not find any sense of nationality in the modern meaning of the term (oriented towards a common language and culture). The case is similar to that of the purely proletarian Poles: loyalty towards the state is combined with asense of group identity that is limited to acommon language group within this larger community and strongly modified by status factors. Of course, the Baltic Germans are no longer a cohesive status group, even though the differences are not as extreme as within the white population of the American South.
Finally, there are cases for which the term nationality does not seem to be quite fitting; witness the sense of identity shared by the Swiss and the Belgians or the inhabitants of Luxemburg and Liechtenstein. We hesitate to call them
Max Weber
'nations', not because of their relative smallness - the Dutch appear to us as a nation- bur because these neutralized states have purposively forsaken power. The Swiss are not a nation if we take as criteria common language or common literature and art. Yet they have a strong sense of community despite some recent disintegrative tendencies. This sense of identity is not only sustained by loyalty towards the body politic but also by what are perceived to be common customs (irrespective of actual differences). These customs are largely shaped by the differences in social structure between Switzerland and Germany, but also all other big and hence militaristic powers. Because of the impact of bigness on the internal power structure, it appears to the Swiss that their customs can be preserved only by a separate political existence.
The loyalty of the French Canadians towards the English polity is today determined above all by the deep antipathy against the economic and social structure, and the way of life, of the neighbouring United States; hence membership in the Dominion of Canada appears as a guarantee of their own traditions.
This classification could easily be enlarged, as every rigorous sociological investigation would have to do. It turns out that feelings of identity subsumed under the term 'national* are not uniform but may derive from diverse sources: differences in the economic and social structure and in the internal power structure, with its impact on the customs, may play a role, but within the German Reich customs are very diverse; shared political memories, religion, language and finally, racial features may be sources of the sense of nationality. Racial factors often have a peculiar impact. From the viewpoint of the Whites in the United States, Negroes and Whites are not united by a common sense of nationality, but the Negroes have a sense of American nationality at least by claiming a right to ir. On the other hand, the pride of the Swiss in their own distinctiveness, and their willingness to defend it vigorously, is neither qualitatively different nor less widespread than the same attitudes in any 'great' and powerful 'nation'. Time and again we find that the concept 'nation directs us to political power. Hence, the concept seems to refer - if it refers at all to a uniform phenomenon - to a specific kind of pathos which is linked to the idea of a powerful political community of people who share a common language, or religion, or common customs, or political memories; such a state may already exist or it may be desired. The more power is emphasized, the closer appears to be the linkbetween nation andstate. Thispathetic pride in the power of one's own community, or this longing for it, may be much more widespread in relatively small language groups such as the Hungarians, Czechs or Greeks than in a similar but much larger community such as the Germans 150 years ago, when they were essentially a language group without pretensions to national power.
complex
ngster s.
Ethnicity and Nationalism
me nation and the origins of national consciousness
BENEDICT ANDERSON
[..-]
Nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular fcind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular', capable of being transplanted, wtth varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments.
CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to consider briefly the concept of 'nation1 and offer a workable definition. Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes:
44 Benedict Anderson
The origins of national consciousness
1 The objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists;
2 The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept - in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender-vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis;
3 The 'political1 power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.
In other words, unlike most other -isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes or Webers. This 'emptiness' easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is 'no there there'. It is characteristic that even so sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless write that: '"Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable1 (Nairn 1977:359),
Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a~big-N - rather as one might Age-with-a-capital-A - and and then to classify 'it' as an ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion'rather than with 'liberalism' or 'fascism*.
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely ^back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses' (Renan 1947:892). With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to selfconsciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist' (Geliner 1964: 169). The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished,
not by their falsity /genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically -as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society'. We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien regime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To the question'Who is the Comte de X?' the normal answer would have been not 'a member of the aristocracy' but 'the lord of X', 'the uncle of the Baronne de Y' or 'a client of the Due de Z'.
The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.
It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.
Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.
THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
If the development of print-as-commodity is the key to the generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity, still, we are simply at the point where communities of the type 'horizontal-secular, transverse-time' become possible. Why, within that type, did the nation become so popular? The factors involved are obviously complex and various. But a strong case can be made for the primacy of capitalism. At least .20 million books had already been printed by 1500, signalling
46  BeneoYct Anderson
The origins of national consciousness
the onset of Benjamin's fage of mechanical reproduction1. If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination. If, as Febvre and Martin believe, possibly as many as 200 million volumes had been manufactured by 1600, it is no wonder that Francis Bacon believed that print had changed 'the appearance and state of the world'.
One of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise, book publishing felt all of capitalism's restless search for markets, The early printers established branches all over Europe: 'in this way a veritable "international" of publishing houses, which ignored national [sic] frontiers, was created' {Febvre and Martin 1976: 122). And since the years 1500-1550 were aperiod of exceptional European prosperity, publishing shared in the general boom. More than at any other time it was a great industry under the control of wealthy capitalists. Naturally, booksellers were primarily concerned to make a profit and to sell their products, and consequently they sought out first and foremost those works which were of interest to the largest possible number of their contemporaries.
The inktal market was literate Europe, a wide but thin stratum of Latin-readers. Saturation of this market took about 150 years. The determinative fact about Latin - aside from its sacrality - was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it. In the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the total population of Europe was quite small; very likely no larger than theproportion in the world's population today, and - proletarian internationalism notwithstanding - in the centuries to come. Then and now the vast bulk of mankind is monoglot. The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon. To be sure, the Counter-Reformation encouraged a temporary resurgence of Latin publishing, but by the mid-seventeenth century the movement was in decay, and fervently Catholic libraries replete. Meanwhile, a Europe-wide shortage of money made printers think more and more of peddling cheap editions in the vernaculars.
The revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism was given further impetus by three extraneous factors, two of which contributed directly to the rise of national consciousness. The first, and ultimately theleast important, was a change in the character of Latin itself. Thanks to the labours of the Humanists in reviving the broad literature of pre-Christian antiquity and spreading it through the print market, a new appreciation of the sophisticated stylistic achievements of the ancients was apparent among the trans-European intelligentsia. TheLatin the}'now aspired to write became more and more Ciceronian, and, by the same token, increasingly removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life. In this way it acquired an esoteric quality quite different from that of Church Latin in medieval times. For the older Latin was not arcane because of its subject-matter or style, but simply because it was written at all, i.e. because of its status as tot. Now it became arcane because of what was written, because of the language-in-itself.
Second was the impact of the Reformation, which, at the same time, owed much of its success to print capitalism. Before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and within fifteen days [had been] seen in every part of the country. In the two decades 1520—40 three times as many books were published in German as in the period 1500-1520, an astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. His works represented no less than one third of all German-language books sold between 151S and 1525. Between 1522 and 1546, a total of 430 editions (whole or partial) of his biblical translations appeared. [...] In effect, Luther became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could 'sell'his new books on the basis of his name.
Where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century. In this titanic 'battle for men's minds', Protestantism was always fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin. The emblem for this is the Vatican's Index Libromm Probibitorum - to which there was no Protestant counterpart -a novel catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion. Nothing gives a better sense of this siege mentality than Francois Ts panicked 1535 ban on the printing of any books in his realm - on pain of death by hanging! The reason for both the ban and its unenforceability was that by then his realm's eastern borders were ringed with Protestant states and cituis producing a massive stream of smugglable print. To take Calvin's Geneva alone: between 1533 and 1540 only forty-two editions were published there, but the numbers swelled to 527 between 1550 and 1564, by which latter date no fewer than forty separate printing presses were working overtime.
The coalition between Protestantism and print capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics - not least among merchants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin - and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe's first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans. (Francois I's panic was as much political as religious.)
Third was the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs. Here it is useful to remember that the universality of Latin in medieval western Europe never corresponded to a universal political system. The contrast with Imperial China, where the reach of the
48 Benedict Anderson
The origins of national consciousness 49
mandarinal bureaucracy and of painted characters largely coincided, is instructive. In effect, the political fragmentation of western Europe after the collapse of the Western Empire meant that no sovereign could monopolize Latin and make it his-and-only-his language-of-state, and thus Latin's religious authority never had a true political analogue.
The birth of administrative vernaculars pre-dated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, and must therefore be regarded (at least initially) as an independent factor in the erosion of the sacred imagined community. At the same time, nothing suggests that any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national, impulses underlay this vernacularization where it occurred. The case of 'England' - on the north-western periphery of Latin Europe - is here especially enlightening. Prior to the Norman Conquest, the language of the court, literary and administrative, was Anglo-Saxon. For the next century and a half virtually all royal documents were composed in Latin. Between about 1200 and 1350 this 'state' Latin was superseded by Norman French. In the mean time, a slow fusion between this language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon of the subject population produced Early English. The fusion made it possible for the new language to take its turn, after 1362, as the language of the courts - and for the opening of parliament. Wych'ffe's vernacular manuscript Bible followed in 1382. It is essential to bear in mind that this sequence was a series of 'state', not 'national', languages; and that the state concerned covered at various times not only today's England and Wales, but also portions of Ireland, Scotland and France. Obviously, huge elements of the subject populations knew little or nothing of Latin, Norman French, or Early English. Not until almost a century after Early English's political enthronement was London's power swept out of 'France',
On the Seine, a similar movement took place, if at a slower pace. As Bloch wrily puts it, 'French, that is to say a language which, since it was regarded as merely a corrupt form of Latin, took several centuries to raise itself to literary dignity' (Bloch 1961: 98), only became the official language of the courts of justice in 1539, when Francois I issued the Edict of Villers-Cotterets (Seton-Watson 1977:48). In other dynastic realms Latin survived much longer-under the Habsburgs well into she nineteenth century. In still others, 'foreign' vernaculars took over: in the eighteenth century the languages of the Romanov court were French and German,
In every instance, the 'choice' of language appears as a gradual, unselfcon-scious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. As such, it was utterly different from the selfconscious language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. One clear sign of the difference is that the old administrative languages were jmt that; languages used by and for officialdoms for their own inner convenience. There was no idea of systematically imposing the language on the dynasts' various subject populations. Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of language s-of-po we r, where, in one sense, they were
competitors with Latin (French in Paris, [Early] English in London), made its own contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom.
At bottom, it is likely that the esotericization of Latin, the Reformation, and the haphazard development of administrative vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a negative sense - in their contributions to the dethronement of Latin and the erosion of the sacred community of Christendom. Ir is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.
The element of fatality is essential. For whatever superhuman feats capitalism was capable of, it found in death and languages two tenacious adversaries. Particular languages can die or be wiped out, but there was and is no possibility of man's general linguistic unification. Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was historically of only slight importance until capitalism and print created monogiot mass reading publics.
Whileit is essential to keep in mind an idea of fatality, in the sense of ^general condition of irremediable linguistic diversity, it would be a mistake to equate this fatality with that common element in nationalist ideologies which stresses die primordial fatality of particular languages and their association with particular territorial units. The essential thing is the interplay between fatality, technology and capitalism. In pre-print Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that had print capitalism sought to exploit eachpotential oral vernacular market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process. (At the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential assembling zone. One can detect a sort of descending hierarchy here from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular syllabaries of French or Indonesian.) Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, created mechanically reproduced print-languages, capable of dissemination through the market.
These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communications below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people
Benedict Anderson
The origins of national consciousness
in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.
Second, print capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to the individualizing and 'unconsciously modernizing' habits of monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate of change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. 'By the 17th century languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms' (Febvre and Martin 1976:319). To put it another way, for now three centuries these stabilized print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that his twelfth-century ancestors were not to Villon.
Third, print capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects inevitably were 'closer' to each print-language and dominated their final forms. Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insisting on their own print form.'North-western German'became Piatt Deutsch,alargely spoken, thus substandard German, because it was assimilable to print-German in a way that Bohemian spoken Czech was not. High German, the King's English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence. (Hence the struggles in late twentieth-century Europe for certain 'sub-'nationalities to change their subordinate status by breaking firmly into print - and radio.)
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them were largely unself-conscious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity. But as with so much else in the history of nationalism, once 'there', they could become formal models to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit. Today, the Thai government actively discourages attempts by foreign missionaries to provide its hill-tribe minorities with their own transcription-systems and to develop publications in their own languages: the same government is largely indifferent to what these minorides speak. The fate of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the zones incorporated into today's Turkey, Iran, Iraq and the [former] USSR is especially exemplary. A family of spoken languages, once everywhere assemblable, thus comprehensible, within an Arabic orthography, has lost that unity as a result of conscious manipulations. To heighten Turkish-Turkey's national consciousness at the expense of any wider Islamic
identification, Atatiirk imposed compulsory romanization. The Soviet authorities followred suit, first with an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory romanization, then, in Stalin's 1930s, with a Russifying compulsory Cyril licization.
We can summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the argument thus far by saying that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries (which were, on the whole, the highwater marks of dynastic expansionisms).
Yet it is obvious that while today almost all modern self-conceived nations - and also nation states - have 'national print-languages', many of them have these languages in common, and in others only a tiny fraction of the population 'uses' the national language in conversation or on paper. The nation states of Spanish America or those of the 'Anglo-Saxon family' are conspicuous examples of the first outcome; many ex-colonial states, particularly in Africa, of the second. In other words, the concrete formation of contemporary nation states is by no means isomorphic with the determinate reach of particular print-languages. To account for the discontinuity-in-connectedness between print-languages, national consciousnesses and nation states, it is necessary to turn to the large cluster of new political entities that sprang up in the Western hemisphere between 1776 and 1838, all of which selfconsciously defined themselves as nations, and, with the interesting exception of Brazil, as (non-dynastic) republics. For not only were they historically the first such states to emerge on the world stage, and therefore inevitably provided the first real models of what such states should 'look like', but their numbers and contemporary births offer fruitful ground for comparative enquiry.
REFERENCES
Bbch, Marc (1961), Feudal Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2 vols,
translated by I. A. Manyon). Febvre, Luc i en, and Henri-Jean Martin (1976), The Coming of the Book. The Impact of
Printing, 1450-1800. London: NewLeftBooks (translation of UApparition dn livre.
Pans: Albin Michel. I95S). Gellner, Ernest (1964), Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Nairn, Tom {1977), The Break-up of Britain. London: New Left Books. Renan, Ernest (1947-61), *Qu*est-ce qu'une nation?' In Oettvres Completes. Paris:
Calmann-Levy, vol. I, pp. 887-906. Swon-Watson, Hugh (1977), Nations and States. An Enquiry into the Origins of
Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
Ifpi^ct^ race and nation
HYLLAND ESIKSEN
[■ ■ ■]
^Edamcity seems to be a new term', state Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan ((975:1), who point to the fact that the word's earliest dictionary appearance istnthe Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Its first usage is attributed to the American sociologist David Biesman in 1953. The word 'ethnic', however, is much older. It is derived from the Greek ethnos (which in turn derived from the word ethnikos), which originally meant heathen or pagan. It was used in this sense in English from the mid-fourteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, when it gradually began to refer to 'racial* characteristics. In the United States, 'ethnics' came to be used around the Second World War as a polite term referring to jews, Italians, Irish and other people considered iirferiorto the dominant group of largely British descent. None of the founding fathers of sociology and social anthropology - with the partial exception of Max Weber - granted ethnicity much attention.
:' Since the 1960s, ethnic groups and ethnicity have become household words in Anglophone social anthropology, although, as Ronald Cohen (1978) has remarked, few of those whouse the terms bother to define them. 1 shall examine
34  Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Ethnicity, race and nation 35.
a number of approaches to ethnicity. Most of them are closely related, although they may serve different analytical purposes. All of the approaches agree that ethnicity has something to do with the classification of people and group relationships.
In everyday language the word ethnicity still has a ring of 'minority issues' and 'race relations', but in social anthropology it refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive. Although it is true that 'the discourse concerning ethnicity tends to concern itself with subnational units, or minorities of some kind or another' (Chapman etai, 1989:17), majorities and dominant peoples are no less 'ethnic' than minorities. [. . .]
ETHNICITY, RACE AND NATION
Af ew words must be said initially about the relationship between ethnicity and 'race*. The term race has deliberately been placed within inverted commas in order to stress that it has dubious descriptive value. Whereas it was for some time common to divide humanity into four main races, modern genetics tends not to speak of races. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there has always been so much interbreeding between human populations that it would be meaningless to talk of fixed boundaries between races. Second, the distribution of hereditary physical traits does not follow clear boundaries. In other words, there is often greater variation within a 'racial1 group than there is systematic variation between two groups.
Concepts of race can nevertheless be important to the extent that they inform people's actions; at this level, race exists as a cultural construct, whether it has a 'biological' reality or not. Racism, obviously, builds on the assumption that personality is somehow linked with hereditary characteristics which differ systematically between 'races1, and in this way race may assume sociological importance even if it has no 'objective' existence. Social scientists who study race relations in Great Britain and the United States need not themselves believe in the existence of race, since their object of study is the social and cultural relevance of the notion that race exists. If influential people in a society had developed a similar theory about the hereditary personality traits of red-haired people, and if that theory gained social and cultural significance, 'redhead studies' would for similar reasons have become a field of academic research, even if the researchers themselves did not agree that redheads were different from others in a relevant way. In societies where ideas of race are important, they may therefore be studied as part of local discourses on ethnicity.
Should the study of race relations, in this meaning of the word, be distinguished from the study of ethnicity or ethnic relations? Pierre van den Berghe
(1983) does not think so, but would rather regard 'race' relations as a special case of ethnicity. Others, among them Michael Banton (1967), have argued the need to distinguish between race and ethnicity. In Banton's view, race refers to the categorization of people, while ethnicity has to do with group identification. He argues that ethnicity is generally more concerned with the identification of 'us', while racism is more oriented to the categorization of 'them*. However, ethnicity can assume many forms, and since ethnic ideologies tend to stress common descent among their members, the distinction between race and ethnicity is aproblemaric one, even if Banton's distinction between groups and categories can be useful. I shall not, therefore, distinguish between race relations and ethnicity. Ideas of 'race' may or may not form part of ethnic ideologies, and their presence or absence does not seem to be a decisive factor m interethnic relations.
Discrimination on ethnic grounds is spoken of as 'racism' in Trinidad and as 'communalism' in Mauritius, but the forms of imputed discrimination referred to can be nearly identical. On the other hand, it is doubtless true that groups who 'look different' from majorities or dominating groups may be less liable to become assimilated into the majority than others, and that it can be difficult for them to escape from their ethnic identity if they wish to. However, this may ako hold good for minority groups with, say, an inadequate command of the dominant language. In both cases, their ethnic identity becomes an imperative status, an ascribed aspect of their personhood from which they cannot escape entirely. Race or skin colour as such is not the decisive variable in every society.
The relationship between the terms ethnicity and nationality is nearly as complex as that between ethnicity and race. Like the words ethnic and race, the word nation has a long history, and has been used with a variety of different meanings in English. We shall refrain from discussing these meanings here, and will concentrate on the sense in which nation and nationalism are used analytically in academic discourse. Like ethnic ideologies, nationalism stresses the cultural similarity of its adherents and, by implication, it draws boundaries vis-a-vis others, who thereby become outsiders. The distinguishing mark of nationalism is by definition its relationship to the state. A nationalist holds that political boundaries should be coterminous with cultural boundaries, whereas many ethnic groups do not demand command over a state. When the political leaders of an ethnic movement make demands to this effect, the ethnic movement therefore by definition becomes a nationalist movement. Although nationalisms tend to be ethnic in character, this is not necessarily the case. [.,,]
ETHNICITY AND CLASS
The term ethnicity refers to relationships between groups whose members consider themselves distinctive, and these groups may be ranked hierarchically
36  Thomas Hyliand Eriksen
within a society. It is therefore necessary to distinguish clearly between ethnicity and social class.
In the literature of social science, there are two main definitions of classes. One derives from Karl Marx, the other from Max Weber. Sometimes elements from the two definitions are combined.
The Marxist view of social classes emphasizes economic aspects. A social class is defined according to its relationship to the productive process in society. In capitalist societies, according to Marx, there are three main classes. First, there is the capitalist class orbourgeoisie, whose members own the means of production (factories, tools and machinery and so on) and buy other people's labour-power (employ them). Second, there is the petit-bourgeoisie, whose members own means of production but do not employ others. Owners of small shops are typical examples. The third and most numerous class is the proletariat or working class, whose members depend upon selling their labour-power to a capitalist for their livelihood. There are also other classes, notably the aristocracy, whosemembers live by land interest, and the lumpenprotetariat, which consists of unemployed and underemployed people - vagrants and the like.
Since Marx's time in the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of classes has been developed in several directions. Its adherents nevertheless still stress the relationship to property in their delineation of classes. A further central feature of this theory is the notion of class struggle. Marx and his followers held that oppressed classes would eventually rise against their oppressors, overthrow them through a revolution, and alter the political order and the social organization of labour. This, in Marx's view, wras the chief way in which societies evolved.
The Weberian view of social classes, which has partly developed into theories of social stratification, combines several criteria in delineation classes, including income, education and political influence. Unlike Marx, Weber did not regard classes as potential corporate groups; he did not believe that members of social classes necessarily would have shared political interests. Weber preferred to speak of 'status groups' rather than classes.
Theories of social class always refer to systems of social ranking and distribution of power. Ethnicity, on the contrary, does not necessarily refer to rank; ethnic relations may well be egalitarian in this regard. Still, many polyethnic societies are ranked according to ethnic membership. The criteria for such ranking are nevertheless different from class ranking: they refer to imputed cultural differences or 'races', not to property or achieved statuses.
There may be a high correlation between ethnicity and class, which means that there is a high likelihood that persons belonging to specific ethnic groups also belong to specific social classes. There can be a significant interrelationship between class and ethnicity, both class and ethnicity can be criteria for rank, and ethnic membership can be an important factor in class membership. Both class differences and ethnic differences can be pervasive features of societies,
Ethnicity, race and nation
bui they are not one and the same thing and must be distinguished from one another analytically.
[••J
FROM TRIBE TO ETHNIC GROUP
There has been a shift in Anglophone social anthropological terminology concerning the nature of the social units we study. While one formerly spoke of 'tribes', the term 'ethnic group' is nowadays much more common. This switch in terminology implies more than a mere replacement of one word with another. Notably, the use of the term 'ethnic group' suggests contact and interrelationship. To speak of an ethnic group in total isolation is as absurd as to speak of the sound from one hand clapping. By definition, ethnic groups remain more or less discrete, but they are aware of - and in contact with -members of other ethnic groups. Moreover, these groups or categories are in a sense created through that very contact. 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.
The terminological switch from 'tribe' to 'ethnic group' may also mitigate or even transcend an ethnocentric or Eurocentric bias which anthropologists have often been accused of promoting covertly. When we talk of tribes, we implicitly introduce a sharp, qualitative distinction between ourselves and the people we study; the distinction generally corresponds to the distinction between modern and traditional or so-called primitive societies. If we instead talk of ethnic groups or categories, such a sharp distinction becomes difficult to maintain. Virtually every human being belongs to an ethnic group, whether he or she lives in Europe, Melanesia or Central America. There are ethnic groups in English cities, in the Bolivian countryside and in the New Guinea highlands. Anthropologists themselves belong to ethnic groups or nations. Moreover, the concepts and models used in the study of ethnicity can often be applied to modern as well as non-modern contexts, to Western as well as non-Western societies. In this sense, the concept of ethnicity can be said to bridge two important gaps insocial anthropology: it entails afocus on dynamics rather than statics, and it reladvizes the boundaries between 'Us' and 'Them', between moderns and tribals.
WHAT IS ETHNICITY?
When we talk of ethnicity, we indicate that groups and identities have developed in mutual contact rather than in isolation. But what is the nature of such groups?
38  Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Ethnicity, race and nation
When A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn investigated the various meanings of 'culture' in the early 1950s they found about 300 different definitions. Although Ronald Cohen is correct in stating that most of those who write on ethnicity do not bother to define the term, the extant number of de6nirions is already high - and it is growing. Instead of going through the various definitions of ethnicity here, I will point out significant differences between theoretical viewpoints as we go along. As a starting-point, let us examine the recent development of the term as it is used by social anthropologists.
The term 'ethnic group' has come to mean something like 'a people'. But what is 'a people' ? Does the population of Britain constitute a people, does it comprise several peoples (as Nairn, 1977, tends to argue), or does it rather form part of a Germanic, or an English-speaking, or a European people? All of these positions may have their defenders, and this very ambiguity in the designation of peoples has been taken on as a challenge by anthropologists. In a study of ethnic relations in Thailand, Michael Moerman (1965) asks himself: 'Who are the Lue?' The Lue were the ethnic group his research focused on, but when he tried to describe who they were - in which ways they were distinctive from other ethnic groups-he quickly ran into trouble. His problem, a very common one in contemporary social anthropology, concerned the boundaries of the group. After listing a number of criteria commonly used by anthropologists to demarcate cultural groups, such as language, political organization and territorial contiguity, he states: 'Since language, culture, political organization, etc., do not correlate completely, the units delimited by one criterion do not coincide with theunits delimited by another' (Moerman, 1965:1235). When he asked individual Lue what were their typical characteristics, they would mention cultural traits which they in fact shared with other, neighbouring groups. They lived in close interaction with other groups in the area; they had no exclusive livelihood, no exclusive language, no exclusive customs, no exclusive religion. Why was it appropriate to describe them as an ethnic group? Afterposing these problems, Moerman wasforced to conclude that r[s]omeone is Lue by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness' (Moerman 1965: 1219). Being unable to argue that this 'Lueness' can be defined with reference to objective cultural features or clear-cut boundaries, Moerman defines it as an emic category of ascription.1 This way of delineating ethnic groups has become very influential in social anthropology.
Does this imply that ethnic groups do not necessarily have a distinctive culture? Can two groups be culturally identical and yet constitute twodiff erent ethnic groups? [.. JArthis point we should note that, contrary toa widespread comrnonsense view, cultural difference between two groups is not the decisive feature of ethnicity. Two distinctive, endogamous groups, say, somewhere in New Guinea, may well have widely different languages, religious beliefs and even technologies, but that does not necessarily mean that there is an ethnic relationship between them. For ethnicity to come about, the groups must
have a minimum of contact with each other, and they must entertain ideas of each other as being culturally different from themselves. If these conditions are not fulfilled, there is no ethnicity, for ethnicity is essentially an aspect of a relationship, not a property of a group. This is a key point. Conversely, some groups may seem culturally similar, yet there can be a socially highly relevant (and even volatile) mterethnic relationship between them. This would be the case of the relationship between Serbs and Croats following the breakup of Yugoslavia, or of the tension between coastal Sami and Norwegians. There may also be considerable cultural variation within a group without ethnicity. Only in so far as cultural differences are perceived as being important, and are made socially relevant, do social relationships have an ethnic element.
Ethnicity is an aspect of social relationship between agents who consider themselves as culturally distinctive from members of other groups with whom they have a minimum of regular interaction. It can thus also be defined as a social identity (based on a contrast vis-a-vis others) characterized by meta-phoric or Active kinship. When cultural differences regularly make adifference in interaction between members of groups, the social relationship has an ethnic element. Ethnicity refers both to aspects of gain and loss in interaction, and to aspects of meaning in the creation of identity. In this way it has a political, organizational aspect as welt as a symbolic one.
Ethnic groups tend to have myths of common origin and they nearly always have ideologies encouraging endogamy, which may nevertheless be of highly varying practical importance.
'KINDS' OF ETHNIC RELATIONS?
This very general and tentative definition of ethnicity lumps together a great number of very different social phenomena. My relationship with my Pakistani greengrocer has an ethnic aspect; so, it could be argued, do the war in former Yugoslavia and 'race riots1 in American cities. Do these phenomena have anything interesting in common, justifying their comparison within a single conceptual framework? The answer is both yes and no.
One of the contentions from anthropological studies of ethnicity is that there may be mechanisms of ethnic processes which are relatively uniform in every interethnic situation: to this effect, we can identify certain shared formal properties in all ethnic phenomena.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the substantial social contexts of ethnicity differ enormously, and indeed that ethnic identities and ethnic organizations themselves may have highly variable importance in different societies, for different individuals and in different situations. We should nevertheless keep in mind that the point of anthropological comparison is not
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
215
■ —=8
Whose Imagined Community?
Partha Chatterjee
Nationalism has once more appeared on the agenda of world affairs. Almost every dav, state leaders and political analysts in Western countries declare that with "the collapse of communism' (that is the term they use; what they mean is presumably the collapse of"Soviet socialism), the principal danger to world peace is now posed by the resurgence of nationalism in different parts of the world. Since in this day and age a phenomenon has first to be recognized as a 'problem' before it can claim the attention of people whose business it is to decide what should concern the public, nationalism seems to have regained sufficient notoriety for it to be liberated from the arcane practices of 'area specialists' and made once more a subject of general debate.
However, this very mode of its return to the agenda of world politics has, it seems to me, hopelessly prejudiced the discussion on the subject. In the 1950s and 1960s, nationalism was still regarded as a feature of the victorious anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa. But simultaneously, as the new institutional practices of economy and polity in the postcolonial states were disciplined and normalized under the conceptual rubrics of 'development' and 'modernization', nadonalism was already being relegated to the domain of the particular histories of this or that colonial empire. And in those specialized histories defined by the unprepossessing contents of colonial archives, the emancipatory aspects of nationalism were undermined by coundess revelations of secret deals, manipulations, and the cynical pursuit of private interests. By the 1970s, nationalism had become a matter of ethnic politics, the reason why people in the Third World killed each other - sometimes in wars between regular armies, sometimes, more distressingly, in cruel and often protracted civil wars, and increasingly, it seemed, by technologically
sophisticated and virtually unstoppable acts of terrorism. The leaders of the African struggles against colonialism and racism had spoiled their records by becoming heads of corrupt, fractious, and often brutal regimes; Gandhi had been appropriated by such marginal cults as paci-fism and vegetarianism; and even Ho Chi Minh in his moment of glory «       was caught in the unyielding polarities of the Cold War. Nothing, it ; r       would seem, was left in the legacy of nationalism to make people in the i;       Western world feel good about it,
-' This recent genealogy of the idea explains why nationalism is now
viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life. What had once been suc-
i- cessfully relegated to the outer peripheries of the earth is now seen picking its way back toward Europe, through the long-forgotten provinces i       of the Habsburg, the tsarist, and the Ottoman empires. Like drugs, ter-
f rorism, and illegal immigration, it is one more product of the Third World that the West dislikes but is powerless to prohibit.
In light of the current discussions on the subject in the media, it is surprising to recall that not many years ago nationalism was generally J-       considered one of Europe's most magnificent gifts to the rest of the world. It is also not often remembered today that the two greatest wars of ■ ;■       the twentieth century, engulfing as they did virtually every part of the j        globe, were brought about by Europe's failure to manage its own ethnic .'i i       nationalisms. Whether of the 'good' variety or the 'bad', nationalism was ■jr       entirely a product of the political history of Europe. Notwithstanding i;       the celebration of the various unifying tendencies in Europe today and of the political consensus in the West as a whole, there may be in the recent J        amnesia on the origins of nationalism more than a hint of anxiety about
whether it has quite been tamed in the land of its birth. .',[. In all this time, the 'area specialists', the historians of the colonial
world, working their way cheerlessly through musty files of administrative ■V,'      reports and official correspondence in colonial archives in London or V-~      Paris or Amsterdam, had of course never forgotten how nationalism ;       arrived in the colonies. Everyone agreed that it was a European import; : >       the debates in the 1960s and 1970s in the historiographies of Africa or \:       India or Indonesia were about what had become of the idea and who was responsible for it. These debates between a new generation of nationalist historians and those whom they dubbed 'colonial ists' were vigorous and often acrimonious, but they were largely confined to the specialized : ;■       territories of 'area studies'," no one else took much notice of them, -f Ten years ago, it was one such area specialist who managed to raise
once more the question of the origin and spread of nationalism in the framework of a universal history. Benedict .Anderson demonstrated with
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216 MAPPING THE NATION
much subtlety and originality that nations were not the determinate products of given sociological conditions such as language or race or religion; they had been, in Europe and everywhere else in the world, imagined into existence.1 He also described some of the major institutional forms through which this imagined community came to acquire concrete shape, especially the institutions of what he so ingeniously called 'print-capitalism1. He then argued that the historical experience of nationalism in Western Europe, in the Americas, and in Russia had supplied for all subsequent nationalisms a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they liked.
Anderson's book has been, 1 think, the most influential in the last few years in generating new theoretical ideas on nationalism, an influence that of course, it is needless to add. is confined almost exclusively to academic writings. Contrary to the large])' uninformed exotidzation of nationalism in the popular media in the West, the theoretical tendency represented by Anderson certainly attempts to treat the phenomenon as part of the universal history of the modern world.
I have one central objection to Anderson's argument. If nationalisms in the rest of the world have ro choose their imagined community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity, Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized,
I object to this argument not for any sentimental reason. I object because 1 cannot reconcile it with the evidence on anti-colonial nationalism. The most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a diffemicrvtixb the 'modular* forms of the national society propagated by the modern West. How can we ignore this without reducing the experience of anti-colonial nationalism to a caricature of itself?
To be fair to Anderson, it must be said that he is not alone to blame. The difficulty, I am now convinced, arises because we have all taken the claims of nationalism to be a political movement much too literally and much too seriously.
In India, for instance, any standard nationalist history- will tell us that nationalism proper began in 1SS5 with the formation of the Indian National Congress. It might also tell us that the decade preceding this was a period of preparation, when several provincial political associations
PARTHA CHATTERJEE 217
If".
I       were formed. Prior to that, from the 1820s to the 1870s, was the period of
■ i.        'social reform', when colonial enlightenment was beginning to 'mod-
ernize' the customs and institutions of a traditional society and the I political spirit was still very much that of collaboration with the colonial J        regime: nationalism had still not emerged.
it This history, when submitted to a sophisticated sociological analysis,
\ \. cannot but converge with Anderson's formulations. In fact, since it seeks ; ■ to replicate in its own history the history of the modern state in Europe, !nationalism's self-representation will inevitably corroborate .Anderson's :; decoding of the nationalist myth. I think, however, that, as history, nation--i ■/       ali sm *s autobi ograp hy is fun dam e n tally fl awed,
I '■■ By my reading, anti-colonial nationalism creates its own domain of
\ [■ sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle ■: with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social insti-
■tutions and practices into two domains - the material and the spiritual.
The material is the domain of the 'outside', of the economy and of state-; craft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its
-1       superiority and the East had succumbed. In this domain, then, Western : I        superiority* had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully J-       studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an 'inner'
domain bearing the 'essential' marks of cultural identity. The greater
one's success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, there-] ;■■      fore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one's spiritual p       culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anti-colonial
nationalisms in Asia and Africa.2 \ J There are several implications. First, nationalism declares the domain
■ \       of the spiritual its sovereign territory and refuses to allow the colonial
power to intervene in that domain. If I may return to the Indian example, jthe period of 'social reform' was actually made up of two distinct phases, \\ In the earlier phase, Indian reformers looked to the colonial authorities j - to bring about by state action the reform of traditional institutions and I ?. customs. In the latter phase, although the need for change was not dis--i. j?        puted, there was a strong resistance to allowing the colonial state to
intervene in matters affecting 'national culture'. The second phase, in my ; i        argument, was already the period of nationalism.
' ■;_ The colonial state, in other words, is kept out of the 'inner' domain of
\ X        national culture; but it is not as though this so-called spiritual domain is left unchanged. In fact, here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a 'modern' '■;       national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an ima--. r.        gined community, then this is where it is brought into being. In this, its
■ true and essential domain, the nation is already sovereign, even when the J.        state is in the hands of the colonial power. The dynamics of this historical
218
MAPPING THE NATION
PARTHA CHATTER]EE
Ü19
project is completely missed in conventional histories in which the story of nationalism begins with the contest for political power.
I wish to highlight here several areas within the so-called spiritual domain that nationalism transforms in the course of its journey. I will confine my illustrations to Bengal, with whose history I am most familiar.
The first such area is that of language. Anderson is entirely correct in his suggestion that it is 'print-capitalism' which provides the new institutional space for the development of the modern 'national' language.3 However, the specificities of the colonial situation do not allow a simple transposition of European patterns of development. In Bengal, for instance, il is at the initiative of the East India Company and the European missionaries that the first printed books are produced in Bengali at the end of the eighteenth century and the first narrative prose compositions commissioned at the beginning of the nineteenth. At the same time, the first half of the nineteenth century is when English completely displaces Persian as the language of bureaucracy and emerges as the most powerful vehicle of intellectual influence on a new Bengali elite. The crucial moment in the development of the modern Bengali language comes, however, in midcentury, when this bilingual elite makes it a cultural project to provide its mother tongue with the necessary linguistic equipment to enable it to become an adequate language for 'modern' culture. An entire institutional network of printing presses, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and literary societies is created around this time, outside the purview of the state and the European missionaries, through which the new language, modern and standardized, is given shape. The bilingual intelligentsia came to think of its own language as belonging to that inner domain of cultural identity, from which the colonial intruder had to be kept out; language therefore became a zone over which the nation first had to declare its sovereignty and then had to transform in order to make it adequate for the modern world.
Here the modular influences of modern European languages and literatures did not necessarily produce similar consequences. In the case of the new literary genres and aesthetic conventions, for instance, whereas European influences undoubtedly shaped explicit critical discourse, it was also widely believed that European conventions were inappropriate and misleading in judging literary productions in modern Bengali. To this day there is a clear hiatus in this area between the terms of academic criticism and those of literary practice. To give an example, let me briefly discuss Bengali drama.
Drama is the modern literary genre that is the least commended on aesthetic grounds by critics of Bengali literature. Yet it is the form in
which the bilingual elite has found its largest audience. When it appeared in its modern form in the middle of the nineteenth century, the new Bengali drama had two models available to it: one, the modern European drama as it had developed since Shakespeare and Moliere, and two, the virtually forgotten corpus of Sanskrit drama, now restored to a reputation of classical excellence because of the praises showered on it by Orientalist scholars from Europe. The literary criteria that would presumably direct the new drama into the privileged domain of a modern national culture were therefore clearly set by modular forms provided by Europe. But the performative practices of the new institution of the public theatre made it impossible for those criteria to be applied to plays written for the theatre. The conventions that would enable a play to succeed on the Calcutta stage were very different from the conventions approved by critics schooled in the traditions of European drama. The tensions have not been resolved to this day. What thrives as mainstream public theatre in West Bengal or Bangladesh today is modern urban theatre, national and clear])' distinguishable from 'folk theatre'. It is produced and largely patronized by the literate urban middle classes. Yet their aesthetic conventions fail to meet the standards set by the modular literary forms adopted from Europe.
Even in the case of the novel, that celebrated artifice of the nationalist imagination in which the community is made to live and love in 'homogeneous time',4 the modular forms do not necessarily have an easy passage. The novel was a principal form through which the bilingual elite in Bengal fashioned a new narrative prose. In the devising of this prose, the influence of the two available models - modern English and classical Sanskrit — was obvious. And yet, as the practice of the form gained greater popularity, it was remarkable how frequently in the course of their narrative Bengali novelists shifted from the disciplined forms of authorial prose to the direct recording of living speech. Looking at the pages of some of the most popular novels in Bengali, it is often difficult to tell whether one is reading a novel or a play. Having created a modern prose language in the fashion of the approved modular forms, the literati, in their search for artistic truthfulness, apparently found it necessary to escape as often as possible the rigidities of that prose.
The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national, and yet recognizably different from the Western, was shown in perhaps its most exaggerated shape in the efforts in the early twentieth century of the so-called Bengal school of art. It was through these efforts that, on the one hand, an institutional space was created for the modern professional artist in India, as distinct from the traditional craftsman, for the dissemination through exhibition and print of the products of art and for the creation of a public schooled in the new aesthetic norms. Yet
220
MAPPING THE NATION
this agenda for the construction of a modernized artistic space was accompanied, on the other hand, by a fervent ideological programme for an art that was distincdy 'Indian', that is, different from the 'WesternV Although the specific style developed by the Bengal school for a new Indian art failed to hold its ground for very long, the fundamental agenda posed by its efforts continues to be pursued to this day namely, to develop an art that would be modern and at the same time recognizably Indian.
Alongside the institutions of print-capitalism was created a new network of secondary schools. Once again, nationalism sought to bring this area under its jurisdiction long before the domain of the state had become a matter of contention. In Bengal, from the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the new elite that took the lead in mobilizing a 'national' effort to start schools in every part of the province and then.: to produce a suitable educational literature. Coupled with print-capitalism, the institutions of secondary education provided the space where the new language and literature were both generalized and nor- : malized - outside the domain of the state. It was only when this space was : opened up, outside the influence of both the colonial state and the European missionaries, thai it became legitimate far women, for instance. : to be sent to school. It was also in this period, from around the turn of : the century, that the University of Calcutta was turned from an institution of colonial education to a distinctly national institution, in its cuniculunv its faculty, and its sources of funding,*'
.Another area in that inner domain of national culture was the family. The assertion here of autonomy and difference was perhaps the most dramatic. The European criticism of Indian 'tradition' as barbaric had focused to a large extent on religious beliefs and practices, especially those relating to the treatment of women. The early phase of 'social\ reform' through the agency of the colonial power had also concentrated on the same issues. In that early phase, therefore, this area had been identified as essential to 'Indian tradition'. The nationalist move began by disputing the choice of agency. Unlike the early reformers, nationalists: were not prepared to allow the colonial state to legislate the reform of; 'traditional' society. They asserted that only the nation itself could have i the right to intervene in such an essential aspect of its cultural identity.
.As it happened, the domain of the family and the position of women underwent considerable change in the world of the nationalist middle class. It was undoubtedly a new patriarchy that was brought into existence, different from the 'traditional' order but also explicitly claiming to be different from the "Western' family. The 'new woman' was to be modern, but she would also have to display the signs of national tradition and therefore would be essentially different from the 'Western' woman.
P ART H A CHATTERJEE
221
1-
The history of nationalism as a political movement tends to focus primarily on its contest with the colonial power in the domain of the outside, that is, the material domain of the state. This is a different history from the one I have outlined. It is also a history in which nationalism has no option but to choose its forms from the gallery of 'models' offered by European and .American nation-states: 'difference' is not a viable criterion in the domain of the material.
In this outer domain, nationalism begins its journey (after, let us remember, it has already proclaimed its sovereignty in the inner domain) hy inserting itself into a new public sphere constituted by the processes and forms of the modern (in this case, colonial) state. In the beginning, nationalism's task is to overcome the subordination of the colonized middle class, that is. to challenge the 'rule of colonial difference' in the domain of the state. The colonial state, we must remember, was no t just the agency that brought the modular forms of the modern state to the colonies; it was also an agency that was destined never to fulfil the normalizing mission of the modern state because the premiss of its power was a rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the ahenness of the ruling group.
As the institutions of the modern state were elaborated in the colony, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the ruling European groups found it necessary to lay down - in law-making, in the bureaucracy in the administration of justice, and in the recognition b v the state of a legitimate domain of public opinion - the precise difference between the rulers and the ruled. If Indians had to be admitted into the judiciary, could they be allowed to try Europeans? Was it right that Indians should enter the civil service by taking the same examinations as British graduates? If European newspapers in India were given the right of free speech, could the same apply to native newspapers? Ironically, it became the historical task of nationalism, which insisted on its own marks of cultural difference with the West, to demand that there be no rule of difference in the domain of the state.
In time, with the growing strength of nationalist politics, this domain became more extensive and internally differentiated and finally took on the form of the national, that is. postcolonial, state. The dominant elements of its self-definition, at least in postcolonial India, were drawn from the ideology of the modern liberal-democratic state.
In accordance with liberal ideology, the public was now distinguished from the domain of the private. The state was required to protect the inviolability of the private self in relation to other private selves. The legitimacy of the state in carrying out this function was to be guaranteed by its indifference to concrete differences between private selves - differences, that is, of"race, language, religion, class, caste, and so forth.
40 Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Ethnicity, race and nation
necessarily to establish similarities between societies; it can also reveal important differences. In order to discover such differences, we must initially possess some kind of measuring stick, a constant or a conceptual bridgehead, which can be used as a basis of comparison. If we first know what we mean by ethnicity, we can then use the concept as a common denominator tor societies and social contexts which are otherwise very different. The concept of ethnicity can in this way not only teach us something about similarity, but also about differences.
Although the concept of ethnicity should always have the same meaning lest it ceases to be useful in comparison, it is inevitable that we distinguish between the social contexts under scrutiny. Some interethnic contexts in different societies are very similar and may seem easily comparable, whereas others differ profoundly. In order to give an idea of the variation, I shall briefly describe some typical empirical foci of ethnic studies, some kinds of ethnic groups, so to speak. This list is not exhaustive.
1 Urban ethnic minorities. This category would include, among others, non-European immigrants in European cities and Hispanics in the United States, as well as migrants to industrial towns in Africa and elsewhere. Research on immigrants has focused on problems of adaptation, on ethnic discrimination from the host society, racism, and issues relating to identity management and cultural change. Anthropologists who have investigated urbanization in Africa have focused on change and continuity in political organization and social identity following migration to totally new settings. Although they have political interests, these ethnic groups rarely demand political independence or statehood, and they are as a rule integrated into a capitalist system of production and consumption.
2 Indigenous peoples. This word is a blanket term for aboriginal inhabitants of a territory, who are politically relatively powerless and who are only partly integrated into the dominant nation state. Indigenous peoples are associated with a non-industrial mode of production and a stateless political system. The Basques of the Bay of Biscay and the "v/elsh of Great Britain are not considered indigenous populations, although they are certainly as indigenous, technically speaking, as the Sami of northern Scandinavia or the Ji'varo of the Amazon basin. The concept 'indigenous people' is thus not an accurate analytical one, but rather one drawing on broad family resemblances and contemporary political issues.
3 Proto-nations (so-called ethnonationalist movements). These groups, the most famous of ethnic groups in the news media of the 1990s, include Kurds, Sikhs, Palestinians and Sri Lankan Tamils, and their numberis growing. By definition, these groups have political leaders who claim that they are entitled to their own nation state and should not be 'ruled by others'. These groups, short of having a nation state, may be said to have more substantial
characteristics in common with nations than with either urban minorities or indigenous peoples. They are always territorially based; they are differentiated according to class and educational achievement, and they are large groups.
4 Ethnic groups in 'plural societies'. The term 'plural society' usually designates colonially created states with culturally heterogeneous populations (JFurnivall 1948; M. G. Smith, 1965). Typical plural societies would be Kenya, Indonesia and Jamaica. The groups that make up the plural society, although they are compelled to participate in uniform political and economic systems, are regarded as (and regard themselves as) highly distinctive in other matters. In phiral societies, secessionism is usually not an option and ethnicity tends to be articulated as group competition. [...]
The definition of ethnicity proposed earlier would include all of these 'kinds' of group, no matter how different they are in other respects. Surely, there are aspects of politics (gain and loss in interaction) as well as meaning (social identity and belonging) in the ethnic relations reproduced by urban minorities, indigenous peoples, proto-nations and the component groups of plural societies alike. Despite the great variations between the problems and substantial characteristics represented by the respective kinds of group, the term ethnicity may, in other words, meaningfully be used as a common denominator for them.
NOTE
I In the anthropological literature, the term emicrefers to 'the native's point of view*. It is contrasted with etic, which refers to the analyst's concepts, descriptions and analyses. The terms are derived from phonemics and phonetics.
REFERENCES
Banton, Michael (1967), Race Relations. London: Tavistock,
Berghe, Pierre L. van den (1983), 'Class, race and ethnicity in Africa'. Ethnic and Racial Steves, vol. 6(2), pp. 221-36.
Chapman, Malcolm, Maryon McDonald and Elizabeth Tonkin (1989), 'Introduction: History and social anthropology' In Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds) History and Ethnicity, pp. 3-21. London; Roudedge.
Cohen, Ronald (1978), 'Ethnicity; Problem and focus in anthropology1. Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 7, pp. 379-404.
FurrrivallJ.S. (1948), Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Sutdy of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan (eds) (1975), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kroeber, A. L. and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952), Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press.
222 MAPPING THE NATION
The trouble was that the moral-intellectual leadership of the nationalist elite operated in a field constituted by a very different set of distinctions - those between the spiritual and the material, the inner     ..;;'. and the outer, the essential and the inessential. That contested field over ■ which nationalism had proclaimed its sovereignty and where it had ima-gined its true community was neither coextensive with nor coincidental to the field constituted by the public/private distinction. In the former field, the hegemonic project of nationalism could hardly make the distinctions of language, religion, caste, or class a matter of indifference to     ,:, I itself. The project was that of cultural 'normalization', like, as Anderson l suggests, bourgeois hegemonic projects everywhere, but with the all-important difference that it had to choose its site of autonomy from a position of subordination to a colonial regime that had on its side the most universalistjustificatory resources produced by post-Enhghtenment j social thought.
The result is that autonomous forms of imagination of the community [-were, and continue to be, overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the postcolonial state. Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not     :ji p in our inability to think out new forms of the modem community but in      ~ ■. our surrender to the old forms of the modern state. If the nation is an r imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and      :_ instate at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows vis to do this.
Writing just before his death, Bipinchandra Pal (1858-1932). the fierv leader of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and a principal figure in the pre-Gandhian Congress, described the boarding-houses in which students lived in the Calcutta of his youth:
Students' messes in Calcutta, in my college days, fifty-six years ago. were like small republics and were managed on strictly democratic lines. Everything was decided by the voice of the majority of t he membe rs of the mess. At tb e end (it every month a manager was elected by the whole 'House,' so to say, and he was charged with the collection of the dues of the members, and the general supervision of the food and establishment of the mess.... A successful man- * \. ager was frequentiy begged to accept re-election; while the more careless and lazy members, who had often to pay out of their own pockets for their mis- | management, tried to avoid this honour. j
. .. Disputes between one member and another were settled by a 'Court' of " the whole 'House': and we sat night after night, I remember, in examining      -.f. . these cases; and never was the decision oi this 'Court'questioned or disobeyed ,:|.. by any member. Nor were the members of the mess at al! helpless in the mat-    . | ter of duly enforcing their verdict upon an offending colleague. Fur they M
PART HA CHATTERJ EE 223
could always threaten the recalcitrant member either with expulsion from the mess, or if he refused to go, with the entire responsibilitv of the rent being thrown on him. . And such was the force of public opinion in these small republics that I bave known of cases of this punishment on offending members, which so worked upon thera that after a week of their expulsion from a mess, they looked as if they had just come out of some prolonged or serious spell of sickness... .
The composition of our mess called for some sort of a compromise between the so-called orthodox and the Brahmo and other heterodox members of our republic. So a rule was passed by the unanimous vole of the whole 'House,' that no member should bring any food to the house , . . which outraged the feelings of Hindu orthodoxy. It was however clearlv understood that the members of the mess, as a body and even individually, would not interfere with what any one took outside the house. So we were free to go and have all sorts of forbidden food either at the Great Eastern Hotel, which some of us commenced to occasionally paUonise later on. or anywhere else.7
The interesting point in this description is not so much the exaggerated and obviously romanticized portrayal in miniature of the imagined political form of the self-governing nation, but rather the repeated use of the institutional terms of modern European civic and political life (republic, democracy, majority, unanimity, election. House, Court, and so on) to describe a set of activities that had to be performed on material utterly incongruous with that civil society. The question of a 'compromise' on the food habits of members is really settled not on a principle of demarcating the 'private' from the 'public' but of separating the domains of the 'inside* and the 'outside', the inside being a space \vhere 'unanimity' had to prevail, while the outside was a realm of individual freedom. Notwithstanding the 'unanimous vote of the whole House', the force that determined the unanimity in the inner domain was not the voting procedure decided upon by individual members coming together in a body but rather the consensus of a community - institutionally novel (because, after all, the Calcutta boarding-house was unprecedented in 'tradition'), internally differentiated, but nevertheless a community whose claims preceded those of its individual members.
But Bipinchandra's use of the terms of parliamentary procedure to describe the 'communitarian' activities of a boarding-house standing in place of the nation must not be dismissed as a mere anomaly. His language is indicative of the very real imbrication of two discourses, and correspondingly of two domains, of politics. The attempt has been made in recent Indian historiography to talk of these as the domains of 'elite' and 'subaltern' politics.** But one of the important results of this histori-ographical approach has been precisely the demonstration that each domain has not only acted in opposition to and as a limit upon the other
224
MAPPING THE NATION
but, through this process of struggle, has also shaped the emergent form of the other. Thus, the presence of populist or communitarian elements in the liberal constitutional order of the postcolonial state ought not to be read as a sign of the inautheriticity or disingenuousness of elite politics; it is rather a recognition in the elite domain of die very real presence of an arena of subaltern politics over which it must dominate and yet which also had to be negotiated on its own terms for the purposes of producing consent. On the other hand, the domain of subaltern politics has increasingly become familiar with, and even adapted itself to, the institutional forms characteristic of the elite domain. The point, therefore, is no longer one of simply demarcating and identifying the two domains in their separateness, which is what was required in order first to break down the totalizing claims of a nationalist historiography. Now the task is to trace in their mutually conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one hand, in the domain denned by the hegemonic project of nationalist modernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that normalizing project.
This is the exercise I wish to carry out. Since the problem will be directly posed of the limits to the supposed universality of the modern regime of power and with it of the post-Enlightenment disciplines of knowledge, it might appear as though the exercise is meant to emphasize once more an 'Indian' (or an 'Oriental') exceptionalism. In fact, however, the objective of my exercise is rather more complicated, and considerably more ambitious. It includes not only an identification of the discursive conditions that make such theories of Indian exceptionalism possible, but also a demonstration that the alleged exceptions actually inhere as forcibly suppressed elements even in the supposedly universal forms of the modern regime of power.
The latter demonstration enables us to make the argument that the uni-versalist claims of modern Western social philosophy are themselves limited by the contingencies of global power. In other words, 'Western uni-versalism' no less than 'Oriental exceptionalism' can be shown to be only a particular form of a richer, more diverse, and differentiated conceptualization of a new universal idea. This might allow us the possibility not only to think of new forms of the modern community, which, as I argue, the nationalist experience in Asia and Africa has done from its birth, but, much more decisively, to think of new forms of the modern state.
The project then is to claim for us, the once-colonized, our freedom of imagination. Claims, we know only too well, can be made only as contestations in a field of power. Studies will necessarily bear, for each specific disciplinary field, the imprint of an unresolved contest. To make a claim on behalf of the fragment is also, not surprisingly, to produce a discourse that is itself fragmentary. It is redundant to make apologies for this.
PART HA CHATTERJEE 005 Notes
1. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflntwm on the Orip-n and Sbrrnd of Nationalism. London 1983. apt <>i
2. This is a cenual argument of lry book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World- A Uenvattw Discourse?. London 1986.
3. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 17-49
4. [bid., pp. tJS—4«.
r- u £ue.»hiSl0rL0f lhis muv*m™1 has »»™ recendy studied in detail by Tapati
r^rT^r^^'ullwJMoki^ °f" to" "Indian".\r!: Artists, AatMa and Natumohw in Ben-el lSStl~i^2u. Cambridge 1992.
See,Anil<:han<ira Banerjee, 'Years of Consolidation: 1883-1904'; Tripurari Chakravarn The University arid the Government: 1904-24'; and Pramathanath Baneriee Reform and Reorganisation: 1904-24', in Niharranjar. Ray and Fruufchandra Gupta, rfs' Hundred Iran of the Lmimsitv of Calcutta. Calcutta 1957, pp. 129-78, 179~«10 and 211-318 7. Bipinchandra Pal. Memories of My Life and Times, Calcutta 1932, reprinted 1973 pp. vol-xri, 1
ruS' &^,n^; by Ae ™riwM e5SayS ™ Ranajit Guhii- ed- S'/*0?"T" vols 1-6-
Delhi 194)2-90 The programmatic statement of this approach is in Ranajit Cuba 'On
S t9pCW ' 1 ! HiSE°ri°Srapl,>'of Cotonlal India'" »n Cub.*. ed„ Saltern Stud^vol. 1