Ethnicity without groups
Author(s): ROGERS BRUBAKER
Source: European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie /
Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie , 2002, Vol. 43, No. 2, Études critiques (2002), pp.
163-189
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
Ethnicity without grou
I. Common sensegroupism
Few social science concepts would seem as basic, even indis
pensable, as that of group. In disciplinary terms, 'group' would appear
to be a core concept for sociology, political science, anthropology,
demography and social psychology. In substantive terms, it would seem
to be fundamental to the study of political mobilization, cultural iden
tity, economic interests, social class, status groups, collective action,
kinship, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, multiculturalism, and minori
ties of every kind.
Yet despite this seeming centrality, the concept 'group' has remained
curiously unscrutinized in recent years. There is, to be sure, a substantial
social psychological literature addressing the concept (Hamilton et al.
1998, McGrath 1984), but this has had little resonance outside that
sub-discipline. Elsewhere in the social sciences, the recent literature
addressing the concept 'group' is sparse, especially by comparison with
the immense literature on such concepts as class, identity, gender, eth
nicity, or multiculturalism—topics in which the concept 'group' is
implicated, yet seldom analyzed its own terms (1). 'Group' functions as
a seemingly unproblematic, taken-for-granted concept, apparently in no
need of particular scrutiny or explication. As a result, we tend to take for
granted not only the concept 'group', but also 'groups'—the putative
things-in-the-world to which the concept refers.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented
to the conference 'Facing Ethnic Conflicts',
Center for Development Research, University
of Bonn, December 14, 2000; the Working
Group on Ethnicity and Nationalism, UCLA,
January 13, 2001; the Anthropology Collo
quium, University of Chicago, February 26,
2001; and the Central European University,
Budapest, March 20, 2001. Thanks to partici
pants in these events for their comments and
criticisms, and to Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox,
Liana Grancea, David Laitin, Mara Loveman,
Emanuel Schegloff, Peter Stamatov, Peter
Waldmann, and Andreas Wimmer for helpful
written comments.
(i) Foundational discussions include Coo
ley 1962 [1909], chapter 3 and Homans 1950 in
sociology; Nadel 1957, chapter 7 in anthropo
logy; Bentley 1908, chapter 7 and Truman
1951 in political science. More recent discus
sions include Olson 1965, Tilly 1978 and
Hechter 1987.
163
Rogers Brubaker, University of California (Los Angeles).
Arch.europ.sociol.,XLI 11,2(2002), 163-189—0003-9756/00/0000-741 $07.soper art + $0. ioper page ©2002 A .E.S.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
My aim in this paper is not to enter into conceptual or
casuistry about the concept of group. It is rather to address
atic consequence of this tendency to take groups for granted
of ethnicity, race and nationhood, and in the study of ethnic
national conflict in particular. This is what I will call gr
tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, inter
geneous and externally bounded groups as basic constitu
life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundame
social analysis (2). In the domain of ethnicity, nationalis
mean by 'groupism' the tendency to treat ethnic groups
races as substantial entities to which interests and agency
uted. I mean the tendency to reify such groups, speakin
Croats, Muslims and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia
and Protestants in Northern Ireland, of Jews and Palesti
and the occupied territories, of Turks and Kurds in T
Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans in
they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded
unitary collective actors with common purposes. I mean th
represent the social and cultural world as a multichrom
monochrome ethnic, racial or cultural blocs.
From the perspective of broader developments in social
persisting strength of groupism in this sense is surprisin
several distinct traditions of social analysis have challen
ment of groups as real, substantial things-in-the-world.
such sharply differing enterprises as ethnomethodology
tion analysis, social network theory, cognitive theory, fem
and individualist approaches such as rational choice and
More generally, broadly structuralist approaches have
variety of more 'constructivist' theoretical stances, which
level of rhetoric, at least—to see groups as constructed, co
fluctuating. And a diffuse postmodernist sensibility em
fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed fo
boundaries. These developments are disparate, even cont
analytical style, methodological orientation and epistem
mitments. Network theory, with its methodological (an
ontological) relationalism (Emirbayer and Goodwin 19
(2) In this very general sense, groupism
extends well beyond the domain of ethnicity,
race and nationalism to include accounts of
putative groups based on gender, sexuality,
age, class, abledness, religion, minority status,
and any kind of 'culture', as well as putative
groups based on combinations of these cat
egorical attributes. Yet while recognizing that
it is a wider tendency in social analysis, I limit
my discussion here to groupism in the study of
ethnicity, race and nationalism.
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ETHNICITY
1988) is opposed to rational choice theory, with its meth
sometimes ontological) individualism; both are sharply a
opposed, in analytical style and epistemological commitm
modernist approaches. Yet these and other development
ed in problematizing groupness and undermining axiom
group being.
Challenges to 'groupism', however, have been uneven. They have
been striking—to take just one example—in the study of class, especially
in the study of the working class, a term that is hard to use today without
quotation marks or some other distancing device. Yet ethnic groups
continue to be understood as entities and cast as actors. To be sure,
constructivist approaches of one kind or another are now dominant in
academic discussions of ethnicity. Yet everyday talk, policy analysis,
media reports, and even much ostensibly constructivist academic writ
ing routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial and national conflict in
groupist terms as the struggles 'of ethnic groups, races, and nations (3).
Somehow, when we talk about ethnicity, and even more so when we talk
about ethnic conflict, we almost automatically find ourselves talking
about ethnic groups.
Now it might be asked: 'What's wrong with this?' After all, it seems
to be mere common sense to treat ethnic struggles as the struggles of
ethnic groups, and ethnic conflict as conflict between such groups. I
agree that this is the—or at least a—common-sense view of the matter.
But we cannot rely on common sense here. Ethnic common sense—the
tendency to partition the social world into putatively deeply constituted,
quasi-natural intrinsic kinds (Hirschfeld 1996)—is a key part of what we
want to explain, not what we want to explain things with\ it belongs to
our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit (4). Cognitive anthro
pologists and social psychologists have accumulated a good deal of evi
dence about common-sense ways of carving up the social world—about
what Lawrence Hirschfeld (1996) has called 'folk sociologies'. The evi
dence suggests that some common sense social categories—and notably
(3) For useful critical analyses of media
representations of ethnic violence, see the col
lection of essays in Allen and Seaton 1999, as
well as Seaton 1999.
(4) This is perhaps too sharply put. To the
extent that such intrinsic-kind categories are
indeed constitutive of common-sense under
standings of the social world, to the extent that
such categories are used as a resource for par
ticipants, and are demonstrably deployed or
oriented to by participants in interaction, they
can also serve as a resource for analysts. But as
Emanuel Schegloff notes in another context,
with respect to the category 'interruption', the
fact that this is a vernacular, common-sense
category for participants 'does not make it a
first-order category usable for professional
analysis. Rather than being employed in pro
fessional analysis, it is better treated as a target
category for professional analysis' (2000: 27).
The same might well be said of common sense
ethnic categories.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
common sense ethnic and racial categories—tend to be
and naturalizing (Rothbart and Taylor 1992; Hirschfeld 1996; Gil
White 1999). They are the vehicles of what has been called a 'partici
pants' primordialism' (Smith 1998: 158) or a 'psychological essential
ism' (Medin 1989). We obviously cannot ignore such common sense
primordialism. But that does not mean we should simply replicate it in
our scholarly analyses or policy assessments. As 'analysts of naturaliz
ers', we need not be 'analytic naturalizers' (Gil-White 1999: 803).
Instead, we need to break with vernacular categories and common
sense understandings. We need to break, for example, with the seeming
ly obvious and uncontroversial point that ethnic conflict involves conflict
between ethnic groups. I want to suggest that ethnic conflict—or what
might better be called ethnicized or ethnically framed conflict—need
not, and should not, be understood as conflict between ethnic groups, just
as racial or racially framed conflict need not be understood as conflict
between races, or nationally framed conflict as conflict between nations.
Participants, of course, regularly do represent ethnic, racial and
national conflict in such groupist, even primordialist terms. They often
cast ethnic groups, races or nations as the protagonists—the heroes and
martyrs—of such struggles. But this is no warrant for analysts to do so.
We must, of course, take vernacular categories and participants'
understandings seriously, for they are partly constitutive of our objects
of study. But we should not uncritically adopt categories of ethnopolitical
practice as our categories of social analysis. Apart from the general unre
liability of ethnic common sense as a guide for social analysis, we should
remember that participants' accounts—especially those of specialists in
ethnicity such as ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, who, unlike nonspecial
ists, may live 'off as well as 'for' ethnicity—often have what Pierre
Bourdieu has called a performative character. By invoking groups, they
seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being. Their catego
ries are for doing—designed to stir, summon, justify, mobilize, kindle and
energize. By reifying groups, by treating them as substantial things-in
the-world, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs may, as Bourdieu notes,
'contribute to producing what they apparently describe or des
ignate' (1991a: 220) (5).
Reification is a social process, not simply an intellectual bad habit. As
a social process, it is central to the practice of politicized ethnicity. And
(5) Such performative, group-making prac
tices, of course, are not specific to ethnic
entrepreneurs, but generic to political mobili
zation and representation (Bourdieu 1991b:
248-251).
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ETHNICITY
appropriately so. To criticize ethnopolitical entrepreneu
ethnic groups would be a kind of category mistake. Rei
precisely what ethnopolitical entrepreneurs are in the busin
When they are successful, the political fiction of the unifie
momentarily yet powerfully realized in practice. As anal
certainly try to account for the ways in which—and co
which—this practice of reification, this powerful crys
group feeling, can work. This may be one of the most impo
the theory of ethnic conflict. But we should avoid unint
ling or reinforcing the reification of ethnic groups in ethn
tice with a reification of such groups in social analysis.
11. Beyond groupism
How, then, are we to understand ethnic conflict, if n
sense terms as conflict between ethnic groups? And ho
beyond groupism? Here I sketch eight basic points and then
section, draw out some implications of them. In the fi
illustrate the argument by considering one empirical case.
Rethinking ethnicity
We need to rethink not only ethnic conflict, but also wh
ethnicity itself. This is not a matter of seeking agreement
The intricate and ever-recommencing definitional casuistry
ethnicity, race and nationalism has done little to advance
and indeed can be viewed as a symptom of the non-cumulat
research in the field. It is rather a matter of critically s
conceptual tools. Ethnicity, race and nation should be c
not as substances or things or entities or organisms or collective
individuals—as the imagery of discrete, concrete, tangible, bounded and
enduring 'groups' encourages us to do—but rather in relational, pro
cessual, dynamic, eventful and disaggregated terms. This means think
ing of ethnicity, race and nation not in terms of substantial groups or
entities but in terms of practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive
schémas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms,
political projects and contingent events. It means thinking of ethnicization,
racialization and nationalization as political, social, cultural and psycho
logical processes. And it means taking as a basic analytical category not
the 'group' as an entity but groupness as a contextually fluctuating
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
conceptual variable. Stated baldly in this fashion, these
mere slogans; I will try to fill them out a bit in what follows.
The reality of ethnicity
To rethink ethnicity, race and nationhood along these l
way to dispute their reality, minimize their power or d
significance; it is to construe their reality, power and sig
different way. Understanding the reality of race, for exam
require us to posit the existence of races. Racial idioms, i
ratives, categories and systems of classification and racia
seeing, thinking, talking and framing claims are real and
especially when they are embedded in powerful organizat
reality of race—and even its overwhelming coercive pow
settings—does not depend on the existence of 'races'. Sim
reality of ethnicity and nationhood —and the overriding pow
and national identifications in some settings—does not d
existence of ethnic groups or nations as substantial groups or
Groupness as event
Shifting attention from groups to groupness and treatin
as variable and contingent rather than fixed and given (6
take account of—and, potentially, to account for—phases
nary cohesion and moments of intensely felt collecti
without implicitly treating high levels of groupness as con
ing or definitionally present. It allows us to treat groupness
as something that 'happens', as E. P. Thompson famously
class. At the same time, it keeps us analytically attuned to th
that groupness may not happen, that high levels of groupnes
crystallize, despite the group-making efforts of ethnopoli
neurs and even in situations of intense elite-level ethnopoliti
Being analytically attuned to 'negative' instances in this way
domain of relevant cases and helps correct for the bias in
toward the study of striking instances of high groupne
mobilization or conspicuous violence—a bias that can engender an
'overethnicized' view of the social world, a distorted representation of
whole world regions as 'seething cauldrons' of ethnic tension (Brubaker
1998) and an overestimation of the incidence of ethnic violence (Fearon
(6) For accounts (not focused specifically on
ethnicity) that treat groupness as variable, see
Tilly 1978: 62//; Hechter 1987: 8; Hamilton et
al. 1998. These accounts, very different from
one another, focus on variability in groupness
across cases; my concern is primarily with
variability in groupness over time.
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ETHNICITY
and Laitin 1996). Sensitivity to such negative instances c
potentially fruitful analytical attention toward the problem
failed efforts at ethnopolitical mobilization.
Groups and categories
Much talk about ethnic, racial or national groups is ob
failure to distinguish between groups and categories. If
mean a mutually interacting, mutually recognizing, mut
effectively communicating, bounded collectivity with a
ity, corporate identity and capacity for concerted action
adopt a less exigent understanding of 'group', it should
category is not a group (Sacks 1995, I: 41, 401; Hand
McKay and Lewins 1978; Jenkins 1997: 53ff) (7). It is at
basis for group-formation or 'groupness' (8).
By distinguishing consistently between categories and gro
problematize—rather than presume—the relation betw
can ask about the degree of groupness associated with a
egory in a particular setting and about the political, so
and psychological processes through which categories g
with groupness (Petersen 1987). We can ask how people—and
organizations—do things with categories. This includes limiting access to
scarce resources or particular domains of activity by excluding catego
rically distinguished outsiders (Weber 1968 [1922]: 43//, 34 iff, Barth
1969; Brubaker 1992; Tilly 1998), but it also includes more mundane
actions such as identifying or classifying oneself or others (Levine 1999)
or simply 'doing being ethnic' in an ethnomethodological sense (Moer
man 1968). We can analyze the organizational and discursive careers of
categories—the processes through which they become institutionalized
and entrenched in administrative routines (Tilly 1998) and embedded in
culturally powerful and symbolically resonant myths, memories and
narratives (Armstrong 1982; Smith 1986). We can study the politics of
(7) Fredrik Barth's introductory essay to
the collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries
(1969) was extraordinarily influential in direct
ing attention to the workings of categories of
self- and other-ascription. But Barth does not
distinguish sharply or consistently between
categories and groups and his central metaphor
of 'boundary' carries with it connotations of
boundedness, entitativity and groupness.
(8) This point was already made by Max
Weber, albeit in somewhat different terms.
As Weber argued—in a passage obscured in
the English translation—ethnic commonality,
based on belief in common descent, is 'in itself
mere (putative) commonality [(geglaubte)
Gemeinsamkeit], not community [Gemein
schaft] [...] but only a factor facilitating com
munal action [Vergemeinschaftung]' (1964:
307; cf. 1968: 389). Ethnic commonality means
more than mere category membership for
Weber. It is—or rather involves—a category
that is employed by members themselves. But
this shows that even self-categorization does
not create a 'group'.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
categories, both from above and from below. From abov
on the ways in which categories are proposed, propagat
institutionalized, discursively articulated, organizational
and generally embedded in multifarious forms of 'gove
(Noiriel 1991 ; Slezkine 1994; Brubaker 1994; Torpey 2000; Martin
2001). From below, we can study the 'micropolitics' of categories, the
ways in which the categorized appropriate, internalize, subvert, evade or
transform the categories that are imposed on them (Dominguez 1986).
And drawing on advances in cognitive research, ethnomethodology and
conversation analysis (9), we can study the sociocognitive and interac
tional processes through which categories are used by individuals to
make sense of the social world; linked to stereotypical beliefs and
expectations about category members (10); invested with emotional
associations and evaluative judgments; deployed as resources in specific
interactional contexts; and activated by situational triggers or cues. A
focus on categories, in short, can illuminate the multifarious ways in
which ethnicity, race and nationhood can exist and 'work' without the
existence of ethnic groups as substantial entities. It can help us envision
ethnicity without groups.
Group-making as project
If we treat groupness as a variable and distinguish between groups
and categories, we can attend to the dynamics of group-making as a
social, cultural and political project, aimed at transforming categories
(g) Ethnomethodology and conversation
analysis have not focused on the use of ethnic
categories as such, but Sacks, Schegloff and
others have addressed the problem of situated
categorization in general, notably the question
of the procedures through which participants
in interaction, in deploying categories, choose
among alternative sets of categories (since
there is always more than one set of categories
in terms of which any person can be correctly
described). The import of this problem has
been formulated as follows by Schegloff (2000:
30-31): 'And given the centrality of [...] cate
gories in organizing vernacular cultural
'knowledge', this equivocality can be pro
foundly consequential, for which category is
employed will carry with it the invocation of
common-sense knowledge about that category
of person and bring it to bear on the person
referred to on some occasion, rather than
bringing to bear the knowledge implicated
with another category, of which the person
being referred to is equally a member'. For
Sacks on categories, see 1995: I, 40-48, 333
340, 396-403, 578-596; II, 184-187.
(10) The language of 'stereotypes' is, of
course, that of cognitive social psychology (for
a review of work in this tradition, see Hamilton
and Sherman 1994). But the general ethno
methodological emphasis on the crucial
importance of the rich though tacit back
ground knowledge that participants bring to
interaction and—more specifically—Harvey
Sacks' discussion of the 'inference-rich' cat
egories in terms of which much everyday social
knowledge is stored (1995: I, 40ff et passim; cf.
Schegloff 2000: 29ff) and of the way in which
the knowledge thus organized is 'protected
against induction' {ibid., 336$), suggest a
domain of potentially converging concern
between cognitive work on the one hand and
ethnomethodological and conversation
analytic work on the other—however different
their analytic stances and methodologies.
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ETHNICITY
into groups or increasing levels of groupness (Bourdieu 1991
Sometimes this is done in quite a cynical fashion. Ethnic an
insurgencies, for example, often adopt what is called in French
du pire, a politics of seeking the worst outcome in the short ru
bolster their legitimacy or improve their prospects in the l
When the small, ill-equipped, ragtag Kosovo Liberation Arm
up its attacks on Serb policemen and other targets in early
example, this was done as a deliberate—and successful—str
provoking massive regime reprisals. As in many such situa
brunt of the reprisals was borne by civilians. The cycle of a
counterattacks sharply increased groupness among both Kos
ians and Kosovo Serbs, generated greater support for the K
both Kosovo and diaspora Albanians and bolstered KLA recr
and funding. This enabled the KLA to mount a more serious
to the regime, which in turn generated more brutal regime rep
so on. In this sense, group crystallization and polarization
result of violence, not the cause (Brubaker 1999).
Of course, this group-making strategy employed in the late 1
not start from scratch. It had already begun with relatively hig
groupness, a legacy of earlier phases of conflict. The propi
materials' the KLA had to work with no doubt help explain
of its strategy. Not all group-making projects succeed and th
succeed (more or less) do so in part as a result of the cultur
chological materials they have to work with. These materials
only, or especially, 'deep', longue-durée cultural structures s
mythomoteurs highlighted by Armstrong (1982) and Smith
also the moderately durable ways of thinking and feeling that r
'middle-range' legacies of historical experience and political a
while such raw materials—themselves the product and prec
past struggles and predicaments—constrain and condition th
ities for group-making in the present, there remains conside
for deliberate group-making strategies. Certain dramatic eve
ticular, can serve to galvanize and crystallize a potential gr
ratchet up pre-existing levels of groupness. This is why del
lence, undertaken as a strategy of provocation, often by a v
number of persons, can sometimes be an exceptionally effective
of group-making.
Groups and organizations
Although participants' rhetoric and common sense accoun
ethnic groups as the protagonists of ethnic conflict, in fact
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
protagonists of most ethnic conflict—and a fortiori of
violence—are not ethnic groups as such but various kin
tions, broadly understood and their empowered and aut
bents. These include states (or more broadly autonomo
their organizational components such as particular ministries, of
fices, law enforcement agencies and armed forces units; they include
terrorist groups, paramilitary organizations, armed bands and loosely
structured gangs; and they include political parties, ethnic associations,
social movement organizations, churches, newspapers, radio and televi
sion stations and so on. Some of these organizations may represent
themselves, or may be seen by others, as organizations of and for par
ticular ethnic groups (i i). But even when this is the case, organizations
cannot be equated with ethnic groups. It is because and insofar as they
are organizations and possess certain material and organizational
resources, that they (or more precisely their incumbents) are capable of
organized action and thereby of acting as more or less coherent pro
tagonists in ethnic conflict (12). Although common sense and partici
pants' rhetoric attribute discrete existence, boundedness, coherence,
identity, interest and agency to ethnic groups, these attributes are in fact
characteristic of organizations. The IRA, KLA and PKK claim to speak
and act in the name of the (Catholic) Irish, the Kosovo Albanians and
the Kurds; but surely analysts must differentiate between such organi
zations and the putatively homogeneous and bounded groups in whose
name they claim to act. The point applies not only to military, parami
litary and terrorist organizations, of course, but to all organizations that
claim to speak and act in the name of ethnic, racial or national groups
(Heisler 1991).
A fuller and more rounded treatment of this theme, to be sure, would
require several qualifications that I can only gesture at here. Conflict and
violence vary in the degree to which, as well as the manner in which,
organizations are involved. What Donald Horowitz (2001) has called the
deadly ethnic riot, for example, differs sharply from organized ethnic
insurgencies or terrorist campaigns. Although organizations (sometimes
ephemeral ones) may play an important role in preparing, provoking and
permitting such riots, much of the actual violence is committed by
broader sets of participants acting in relatively spontaneous fashion and
in starkly polarized situations characterized by high levels of groupness.
(11) One should remember, though, that
organizations often compete with one another
for the monopolization of the right to re
present the same (putative) group.
(12) In this respect the resource mobiliza
tion perspective on social movements, eclipsed
in recent years by identity-oriented new social
movement theory, has much to offer students
of ethnicity. For an integrated statement, see
McCarthy and Zald 1977.
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ETHNICITY
Moreover, even where organizations are the core protagonis
depend on a penumbra of ancillary or supportive actio
of sympathetic non-members. The 'representativeness' of organi
zations—the degree to which an organization can justifiably claim to
represent the will, express the interests and enjoy the active or passive
support of its constituents—is enormously variable, not only between
organizations, but also over time and across domains. In addition, while
organizations are ordinarily the protagonists of conflict and violence,
they are not always the objects or targets of conflict and violence. Entire
population categories—or putative groups—can be the objects of organ
ized action, much more easily than they can be the subjects or underta
kers of such action. Finally, even apart from situations of violence, eth
nic conflict may be at least partly amorphous, carried out not by orga
nizations as such but spontaneously by individuals through such everyday
actions as shunning, insults, demands for deference or conform
ity, or withholdings of routine interactional tokens of acknowledgment
or respect (Bailey 1997). Still, despite these qualifications, it is clear that
organizations, not ethnic groups as such, are the chief protagonists of
ethnic conflict and ethnic violence and that the relationship between
organizations and the groups they claim to represent is often deeply
ambiguous.
Framing and coding (13)
If the protagonists of ethnic conflict cannot, in general, be considered
ethnic groups, then what makes such conflict count as ethnic conflict?
And what makes violence count as ethnic violence? Similar questions
can be asked about racial and national conflict and violence. The answer
cannot be found in the intrinsic properties of behavior. The 'ethni
quality of 'ethnic violence', for example, is not intrinsic to violent
conduct itself; it is attributed to instances of violent behavior by perpetr
tors, victims, politicians, officials, journalists, researchers, relief wo
ers or others. Such acts of framing and narrative encoding do not simply
interpret the violence; they constitute it as ethnic.
Framing may be a key mechanism through which groupness is
constructed. The metaphor of framing was popularized by Goffma
(1974), drawing on Bateson 1985 [1955]. The notion has been elaborate
chiefly in the social movement literature (Snow et al. 1986; Snow a
Benford 1988; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gamson 1992; unitin
rational choice and framing approaches, Esser 1999). When ethnic fra
(13) These paragraphs draw on Brubaker and Laitin 1998.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
ing is successful, we may 'see' conflict and violence not only i
but in groupist terms. Although such imputed groupness is th
of prevailing interpretive frames, not necessarily a measure
groupness felt and experienced by the participants in an even
pelling ex post interpretive framing or encoding may exercise a p
feedback effect, shaping subsequent experience and increasing
groupness. A great deal is at stake, then, in struggles over the
tive framing and narrative encoding of conflict and violence.
Interpretive framing, of course, is often contested. Violen
more generally, conflict—is regularly accompanied by social strug
label, interpret and explain it. Such 'metaconflicts' or 'conflic
the nature of the conflict', as Donald Horowitz has called them
do not simply shadow conflicts from the outside, but are int
consequential parts of the conflicts. To impose a label or pre
interpretive frame—to cause an event to be seen as a 'pogrom'
or a 'rebellion'—is no mere matter of external interpretation
constitutive act of social definition that can have important
quences (Brass 1996b). Social struggles over the proper coding and
interpretation of conflict and violence are therefore important subjects
of study in their own right (Brass 1996a, 1997, Abelmann and Lie 1995).
Coding and framing practices are heavily influenced by prevailing
interpretive frames. Today, ethnic and national frames are accessible and
legitimate, suggesting themselves to actors and analysts alike. This
generates a 'coding bias' in the ethnic direction. And this, in turn, may
lead us to overestimate the incidence of ethnic conflict and violence by
unjustifiably seeing ethnicity everywhere at work (Bowen 1996). Actors
may take advantage of this coding bias and of the generalized legitimacy
of ethnic and national frames, by strategically using ethnic framing to
mask the pursuit of clan, clique or class interests. The point here is not
to suggest that clans, cliques or classes are somehow more real than
ethnic groups, but simply to note the existence of structural and cultural
incentives for strategic framing.
Ethnicity as cognition (14)
These observations about the constitutive significance of coding and
framing suggest a final point about the cognitive dimension of ethnicity.
Ethnicity, race and nationhood exist only in and through our percep
tions, interpretations, representations, categorizations and identifica
tions. They are not things in the world, but perspectives on the
( 14) These paragraphs draw on Brubaker et al. 2001.
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ETHNICITY
world (15). These include ethnicized ways of seeing (an
construing (and misconstruing), of inferring (and mis
remembering (and forgetting). They include ethnically o
schémas and narratives and the situational cues that acti
as the ubiquitous televised images that have played such
role in the latest intifada. They include systems of cla
egorization and identification, formal and informal. An
the tacit, taken-for-granted background knowledge, e
sons and embedded in institutionalized routines and pra
which people recognize and experience objects, places, p
or situations as ethnically, racially or nationally marked or
Cognitive perspectives, broadly understood (16), can
constructivist research on ethnicity, race and nationh
stalled in recent years as it has grown complacent with
of simply asserting that ethnicity, race and nationhood are
they can help specify how they are constructed. They c
how—and when—people identify themselves, perce
perience the world and interpret their predicaments in
national rather than other terms. They can help specify ho
can 'crystallize' in some situations while remaining lat
potential in others. And they can help link macro-level
micro-level processes.
III. Implications
At this point a critic might interject: 'What is the poi
Even if we can study 'ethnicity without groups', w
Concepts invariably simplify the world; that the concept o
bounded ethnic groups does so, suggesting something m
and clear-cut than really exists, cannot be held against it. T
(15) As Emanuel Schegloff reminded me in
a different context, this formulation is poten
tially misleading, since perspectives on the
world—as every Sociology 1 student is
taught—are themselves in the world and every
bit as 'real' and consequential as other sorts of
things.
(16) Cognitive perspectives, in this broad
sense, include not only those developed in
cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropo
logy but also those developed in the post- (and
anti-) Parsonian 'cognitive turn' (DiMaggio
and Powell 1991) in sociological and (more
broadly) social theory, especially in response to
the influence of phenomenological and ethno
methodological work (Schutz 1962; Garfinkel
1967; Heritage 1984). Cognitive perspectives
are central to the influential syntheses of
Bourdieu and Giddens and—in a very different
form—to the enterprise of conversation analy
sis.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
ethnic group may be a blunt instrument, but it is good enough as
approximation. This talk about groupness and framing and p
categories and cognitive schémas is all well and good, but mean
killing goes on. Does the critique matter in the real world, o
all—only in the ivory tower? What practical difference does it m
I believe the critique of groupism does have implication
rather general ones, for the ways in which researchers, journ
icymakers, NGOs and others come to terms, analytically and prac
with what we ordinarily—though perhaps too readily—ca
conflict and ethnic violence. Here I would like to enumerate five o
before going on in the final section to discuss an empirical case.
First, sensitivity to framing dynamics, to the generalized codin
in favor of ethnicity and to the sometimes strategic or even cyni
ethnic framing to mask the pursuit of clan, clique or class int
alert us to the risk of over-ethnicized or overly groupist interpre
of (and interventions in) situations of conflict and violence
1996). One need not subscribe to a reductionist 'elite manipulat
of politicized ethnicity (Brubaker 1998) to acknowledge that t
put on conflicts by participants may conceal as much as it re
that the representation of conflicts as conflicts between ethnic o
al groups may obscure the interests at stake and the dynamics
What is represented as ethnic conflict or ethnic war—such a
lence in the former Yugoslavia, may have as much or more to
thuggery, warlordship, opportunistic looting and black-mar
teering than with ethnicity (Mueller 2000; cf. Collier 1999).
Second, recognition of the centrality of organizations in e
conflict and ethnic violence, of the often equivocal character
leaders' claims to speak and act in the name of ethnic groups a
performative nature of ethnopolitical rhetoric, enlisted in the ser
group-making projects, can remind us not to mistake groupist
for real groupness, the putative groups of ethnopolitical rhet
substantial things-in-the-world.
Third, awareness of the interest that ethnic and nationalist
may have in living off politics, as well as for politics, to borrow
distinction of Max Weber (1946: 84), and awareness of the p
divergence between the interests of leaders and those of their
constituents, can keep us from accepting at face value leader
about the beliefs, desires and interests of their constituents.
Fourth, sensitivity to the variable and contingent, waxing and
nature of groupness and to the fact that high levels of groupness
more the result of conflict (especially violent conflict) than i
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ETHNICITY
lying cause, can focus our analytical attention and policy
on the processes through which groupness tends to de
tallize and those through which it may subside. Some att
given recently to the former, including tipping and cascade
(Laitin 1995, Kuran 1998) and mechanisms governing the
diffusion of schémas and the 'epidemiology of represent
1985). But declining curves of groupness have not been
atically, although they are just as important, theoretically
Once ratcheted up to a high level, groupness does not re
of inertia. If not sustained at high levels through spec
cognitive mechanisms, it will tend to decline, as every
reassert themselves, through a process of what Weber (in a
apposite context [1968 (1922): 246-254]) called 'routin
taeglichung, literally 'towards everydayness').
Lastly, a disaggregating, non-groupist approach can br
lytical and policy focus the critical importance of intra
nisms in generating and sustaining putatively interethn
baker and Laitin 1998: 433). These include in-group 'policing,'
monitoring, or sanctioning processes (Laitin 1995); the 'ethnic outbid
ding' through which electoral competition can foster extreme ethnici
zation (Rothschild 1981; Horowitz 1985); the calculated instigation or
provocation of conflict with outsiders by vulnerable incumbents seeking
to deflect in-group challenges to their positions; and in-group processes
bearing on the dynamics of recruitment into gangs, militias, terrorist
groups or guerrilla armies, including honoring, shaming and shunning
practices, rituals of manhood, intergenerational tensions and the prom
ising and provision of material and symbolic rewards for martyrs.
IV. Ethnicity at work in a Transylvanian town
At this point, I would like to add some flesh to the bare-bones ana
lytical argument sketched above. It is tempting to comment on the
United States. It would be easy to score rhetorical points by emphasiz
ing that the 'groups' taken to constitute the canonical 'ethnoracial pen
tagon' (Hollinger 1995)—African Americans, Asian Americans, Whites,
Native Americans and Latinos—are (with the partial exception of
African Americans) not groups at all but categories, backed by political
entrepreneurs and entrenched in governmental and other organizational
routines of social counting and accounting (Office of Manage
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
ment and Budget 1994). It would be easy to highlight th
cultural heterogeneity within these and other putative 'gr
minimal degree of groupness associated with many ethnic
the US (Gans 1979; Heisler 1991).
But rather than take this tack, I will try to address a h
drawn from a region historically characterized by much h
of ethnic and national groupness. I want to consider brief
ity works in an East Central European context characteri
uous and often intense elite-level ethnonational conflict since the fall of
communism (and, of course, by a much longer history of ethnonational
tension). Here too, I want to suggest, we can fruitfully analyze ethnicity
without groups.
The setting, familiar to me from field research conducted in the
second half of the 1990s, is the city of Cluj, the main administrative,
economic and cultural center of the Transylvanian region of Romania.
Of the approximately 330,000 residents, a substantial minority—
somewhere between 14 and 23 percent—identify themselves as Hunga
rian by ethnocultural nationality (17). The city, as I indicated, has been
the site of protracted and seemingly intractable ethnonational conflict
since the collapse of the Ceauçescu regime in December 1989. But this is
not, I will argue, best understood as a conflict between ethnic or national
groups. To think of it as a conflict between groups is to conflate cate
gories ('Hungarian' and 'Romanian') with groups ('the Hungarians',
'the Romanians'); to obscure the generally low, though fluctuating,
degree of groupness in this setting; to mistake the putative groups
invoked by ethnonational rhetoric for substantial things-in-the-world;
to accept, at least tacitly, the claims of nationalist organizations to
speak for the 'groups' they claim to represent; and to neglect the every
day contexts in which ethnic and national categories take on meaning
(i7) In the US and much of northern and
western Europe, 'nationality' ordinarily means
'citizenship', that is, membership of the state;
and 'nation' and 'state' are often used inter
changeably. In central and eastern Europe, by
contrast, 'nation' and 'nationality' do not refer
in the first instance to the state, but ordinarily
invoke an ethnocultural frame of reference
independent of—and often cutting across
the boundaries of—statehood and citizen
ship. To identify oneself as Hungarian by
nationality in Transylvania is to invoke a
state-transcending Hungarian ethnocultural
'nation'. In the text, following the usage in this
setting, I use 'ethnic' and 'national' inter
changeably.
At the last census, conducted in 1992, 23 %
of the population of Cluj identified as Hungar
ian. More recent statistics, however, suggest a
smaller population identifying as Hungarian,
at least among younger age cohorts. Of persons
getting married in 1999, 14.4% identified their
nationality as Hungarian. Of primary, middle
school and secondary school students in 1999
2000, 15.1%, 14.3% and 14.8%, respectively,
identified as Hungarian. Contextual differ
ences in identification may account for part of
the difference, as might different age structures
of Romanian and Hungarian populations and
differential emigration rates during the
1990s.
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ETHNICITY
and the processes through which ethnicity actually 'wor
life.
Here, as elsewhere, the protagonists of the conflict have been organi
zations, not groups. The conflict has pitted the town's three-term
mayor—the flamboyant Romanian nationalist Gheorghe Funar—and
the statewide Romanian nationalist parties against the Cluj-based
Democratic Association of Hungarians of Romania (DAHR), at once a
statewide political party with its electoral base in Transylvania and an
organization claiming to represent and further the interests of the
Hungarian minority in Romania. Rhetoric has been heated on both
sides. Mayor Funar has accused Hungary of harboring irredentist
designs on Transylvania ( 18); he has called the DAHR a 'terrorist
organization'; and he has accused Transylvanian Hungarians of secretly
collecting weapons, forming paramilitary detachments and planning an
attack on Romanians. Funar has ordered bilingual signs removed from
the few buildings that had them; banned proposed celebrations of the
Hungarian national holiday; called for the suspending of Hungarian
language broadcasts on Romanian state television; called for punish
ment of citizens for displaying the Hungarian flag or singing the Hun
garian anthem; and proposed to rename after Romanian personages the
few Cluj streets that bear the names of Hungarians.
The DAHR, for its part, is committed to a number of goals that
outrage Romanian nationalists (19). It characterizes Hungarians in
Romania as an 'indigenous community' entitled to an equal partnership
with the Romanian nation as a constituent element of the Transylvanian
state—thereby directly challenging the prevailing (and constitutionally
enshrined) Romanian understanding of the state as a unitary nation
state like France. At the same time, it characterizes Transylvanian Hun
garians as an 'organic part of the Hungarian nation' and as such claims the
right to cultivate relations with the 'mother country' across the border,
which leads Romanian nationalists to call into question their loyalty to
the Romanian state. It demands collective rights for Hungarians as a
national minority and it demands autonomy, including territorial auto
nomy, for areas in which Hungarians live as a local majority, thereby
raising the specter of separatism in the minds of Romanian nationalists.
It demands that Hungarians have their own institutional system in the
domain of education and culture—yet that this institutional system
( 18) Transylvania had belonged to Hungary
for half a century before the First World War
and again for four years during the Second
World War.
(19) The DAHR program can be found
in English at http: //www.rmdsz.ro/angol/
aboutus/p rog. htm.
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
should be financed by the Romanian state. It demands t
public, state-funded education in Hungarian at every level
branch of the educational system, including vocational e
demands the right to take entrance exams to every school an
in Hungarian, even if the school or department to which
applying carries out instruction in Romanian. And it
re-establishment of an independent Hungarian universit
the establishment of publicly funded but independent H
guage radio and TV studios.
Like ethnic and nationalist organizations everywhere,
claims to speak for the Hungarian minority in Romanian,
terizing it as a singular entity, 'the Hungariandom of R
româniai magyarsâg). But no such entity exists (20). The
residents who self-identify as Hungarian are often sharply c
DAHR and there is no evidence that the demands of the DAHR are the
demands of 'the Hungarians'. On the question of a Hungarian
university—the most contentious political issue of the last few years—a
survey conducted by a Hungarian sociologist found that a plurality of
Hungarian university students in Cluj preferred an autonomous system
of Hungarian-language education within the existing university to the
DAHR goal of re-establishment of a separate Hungarian university
(Magyari-Nândor and Péter 1997). Most Hungarians, like most Roma
nians, are largely indifferent to politics and preoccupied with problems
of everyday life—problems that are not interpreted in ethnic terms.
Although survey data and election results suggest that they appear to
vote en bloc for the DAHR, most Hungarians are familiar only in a vague
way with the DAHR program. Similarly, there is no evidence that
Mayor Funar's anti-Hungarian views are widely shared by the town's
Romanian residents. When Funar is praised, it is typically as a 'good
housekeeper' (bun gospodar); he is given credit for sprucing up the
town's appearance and for providing comparatively good municipal
services. Almost everyone—Romanian and Hungarian alike—talks
about ethnic conflict as something that 'comes from above' and is stirred
up by politicians pursuing their own interests. The near-universal
refrain is that ethnicity is 'not a problem'. To be sure, a similar
idiom—or perhaps ideology—of everyday interethnic harmony can be
(2o) Of course this point holds not only, or
especially, of the Hungarian minority, or of
minorities generally. In Romania as elsewhere,
those who claim to speak for dominant
nations—nations that are closely identified
with the states that bear their names, referred
to in German as Staatsvölker or 'state peo
ples'—also routinely reify those 'nations' and
characterize them as singular entities with a
common will and common interests, where in
fact no such entity exists.
i8o
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ETHNICITY
found in many other settings, including some deeply d
plagued ones. So the idiom cannot be taken as evidence
evance of ethnicity. The point here is simply to under
between nationalist organizations and the putative 'gro
names they claim to speak.
Despite the continuous elite-level ethnopolitical confli
the fall of Ceauçescu, 'groupness' has generally remain
time did Hungarians and Romanians crystallize as disti
bounded groups; in this sense groupness failed to 'happe
with Târgu Mureç, another Transylvanian city where g
tallize in 1990, is instructive. In Târgu Mureç, ethnically fr
over the control of a high school and over the control
ment in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ceauçescu
broadened into a generalized conflict over the 'ownership' a
the ethnodemographically evenly divided city. The conf
in mass assemblies and two days of street fighting that
dead and 200 injured. In the days leading up to the viole
categories had become palpable, sharply bounded group
intensely felt collective solidarity and animated by a si
distinction between 'us' and 'them'. The violence itself reinforced this
sense of groupness, which then subsided gradually as life returned to
normal and no further Hungarian-Romanian violence occurred, here or
elsewhere in Transylvania.
No such crystallization occurred in Cluj. There were, to be sure, a
few moments of moderately heightened groupness. One such
moment—among Hungarians—occurred when Mayor Funar ordered a
new plaque installed on the base of a monumental equestrian statue of
Matthias Corvinus, celebrated king of Hungary during the late fifteenth
century, in the town's main square. The statue, erected at the turn of the
last century at a moment of and as a monument to, triumphant Hun
garian nationalism, is perceived by many Hungarians as 'their own' and
the new plaque deliberately affronted Hungarian national sensibilities
by emphasizing the (partly) Romanian origin of Matthias Corvinus and
representing him—contrary to the triumphalist image projected by the
statue—as having been defeated in battle by 'his own nation', Moldavia
(Feischmidt 2001). Another moment occurred when archeological
excavations were begun in front of the statue, again in a manner calcu
lated to affront Hungarian national sensibilities by highlighting the ear
lier Roman—and by extension, Romanian—presence on the site. A third
moment occurred in March 1998, when Mayor Funar tried to bar
Hungarians from carrying out their annual March 15 celebration com
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
memorating the revolution of 1848, this year's celebrat
quicentennial year, having special significance (Brubake
midt 2002) (21). A final moment occurred in June 1999 a
much-hyped soccer match in Bucharest between the nat
Romania and Hungary. In Cluj, the match was televised on a huge
outdoor screen in the main square and some fans chanted 'Afarä, afarä,
eu Ungurii din faräV (out, out, the Hungarians out of the country!)
and vandalized cars with Hungarian license plates (Adevärul de Cluj
1999)
In each of these cases, groupness—especially among Hungarians,
though in the final case among Romanians as well—was heightened, but
only to a modest degree and only for a passing moment. The first event
occasioned a substantial but isolated Hungarian protest, the second a
smaller protest, the third some concern that the commemoration might
be broken up (in the event it proceeded without serious incident) and the
last some moments of concern for those who happened to be in the town
center during and immediately after the soccer match. But even at these
maximally group-like moments, there was no overriding sense of
bounded and solidary groupness for those not immediately involved in
the events (22). In short, when one shifts one's focus from presupposed
groups to variable groupness and treats high levels of groupness as a
contingent event, a crystallization, something that happens, then what is
striking about Cluj in the 1990s is that groupness remained low and
groups failed to happen or to crystallize.
(21) To Romanian nationalists, Hunga
rians' commemoration of 1848 is illegitimate,
for it celebrates a regime that was as much
nationalist as revolutionary, aspiring to—and
briefly securing—unitary control over Tran
sylvania. Romanian nationalist mythology
commemorates not the revolution, but the
guerilla struggle against the Hungarian revolu
tionary regime, led by Avram Iancu, to whom a
colossal monument was erected under Funar's
sponsorship in 1993.
(22) Even for those who were involved in
the events, one should be cautious about infer
ring an overriding sense of groupness. I was in
Cluj in the summer of 1994, when excavations
in the main 'Hungarian' square were about to
begin. I was staying with the family of a lead
ing figure of the DAHR, albeit one of the more
liberal figures. At one point, he proposed:
'Menjünk âsni? [Shall we go dig?]' At a
moment of overriding groupness, such a joke
would be unthinkable; here, the nationalist
projects of Mayor Funar were—at least for
some—a joking matter. One further incident is
worth mentioning in this connection. In 1997,
a long-closed Hungarian consulate re-opened
in Cluj, reflecting a warming of relations
between Budapest and the newly elected pro
western government in Bucharest. Funar
protested—in vain—against its opening and
when it opened, tried to fine it for flying the
Hungarian flag. A few weeks after its opening,
five men pulled up in a pickup truck, placed an
extendable ladder against the side of the build
ing, and—removed the flag, in broad daylight,
as a small crowd looked on. The next day, they
were apprehended by the police; Funar char
acterized them as 'Romanian heroes'.
Elsewhere, this sort of incident—which could
easily be construed as involving the desecration
of a sacred national symbol—has been enough
to trigger a riot. Here, nobody paid much
attention; the incident was coded as farce, not
as sacred drama.
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ETHNICITY
To note the relatively low degree of groupness in Clu
between organizations and the putative groups they claim t
not to suggest that ethnicity is somehow not 'real' in this s
it is purely an elite phenomenon. Yet to understand how et
it may help to begin not with 'the Romanians' and 'the
groups, but with 'Romanian' and 'Hungarian' as categor
suggests a different set of questions than those that come t
we begin with 'groups'. Starting with groups, one is le
groups want, demand or aspire towards; how they think
and others; and how they act in relation to other grou
almost automatically by the substantialist language to attrib
agency, interests and will to groups. Starting with cat
contrast, invites us to focus on processes and relations
substances. It invites us to specify how people and org
things with and to ethnic and national categories; how
are used to channel and organize processes and relation
egories get institutionalized and with what consequences.
ask how, why and in what contexts ethnic categories ar
used—to make sense of problems and predicaments, to a
ities and affiliations, to identify commonalities and conn
frame stories and self-understandings.
Consider here just two of the many ways of pursuin
centered rather than a group-centered approach to eth
First, a good deal of common-sense cultural knowledge a
world and one's place in it, here as in other settings, is org
ethnonational categories (23). This includes knowledge
and others' ethnocultural nationality and the ability to a
others to ethnonational categories on the basis of cues su
accent, name, sometimes dress, hair style, and even ph
includes knowledge of what incumbents of such categor
how they typically behave and how ethnonational catego
matters in various spheres of life. Such common-sense
(23) On categories as 'repositories] for
common sense knowledge' generally (Sche
gloff 2000: 29), see Sacks 1995, I, 40-48, 333
340. For cognitive perspectives on social cat
egories as structures of knowledge, with spe
cial regard to ethnic, racial and other 'natural
kind', like categories, see Rothbart and Taylor
1992; Hamilton and Sherman 1994; Hirsch
feld 1996.
(24) Even when such common-sense,
category-based stereotypical knowledge is
overridden, the very manner of overriding may
testify to the existence (and the content) of the
category-based knowledge that is being over
ridden. On the general phenomenon of
'modifiers' that work by asserting that what
is generally known about members of a
category is not applicable to some particular
member, see Sacks (1995), I, 44*45- Among
Hungarians—even liberal, cosmopolitan Hun
garians—I have on several occasions heard
someone referred to as 'Roman, de rendes'
(Romanian, but quite all right) or something to
that effect.
i83
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
knowledge shapes everyday interaction, figures in stor
about themselves and others and provides ready-made e
certain events or states of affairs. For Hungarians, for e
rizing an unknown person as Hungarian or Romanian m
one interacts with him or her, determining not only the la
the manner in which one will speak, a more personal an
(bizalmas) style often being employed with fellow Hung
Romanians, categorizing two persons speaking Hungari
language setting as Hungarian (rather than, for example,
happen to be speaking Hungarian) provides a ready-ma
for their conduct, it being common-sense knowledge ab
that they will form a bisericufa (clique, literally: smal
others of their kind, excluding co-present Romanians, w
have the chance. Or again for Hungarians, categorically organized
common-sense knowledge provides a ready-made framework for per
ceiving differential educational and economic opportunities as structur
ed along ethnic lines, explaining such differentials in terms of what they
know about the bearing of ethnic nationality on grading, admissions,
hiring, promotion and firing decisions and justifying the commonly
voiced opinion that 'we [Hungarians] have to work twice as hard' to get
ahead (Feischmidt 2001; Fox 2001). These and many other examples
suggest that ethnicity is, in important part, a cognitive phenomenon, a
way of seeing and interpreting the world and that, as such, it works in
and through categories and category-based common sense knowledge.
Ethnic categories shape institutional as well as informal cognition and
recognition. They not only structure perception and interpretation in
the ebb and flow of everyday interaction but channel conduct through
official classifications and organizational routines. Thus ethnic (and
other) categories may be used to allocate rights, regulate actions, distri
bute benefits and burdens, construct category-specific institutions,
identify particular persons as bearers of categorical attributes, 'cultivate'
populations or, at the extreme, 'eradicate' unwanted 'elements' (25).
In Cluj—as in Romania generally—ethnic categories are not institu
tionalized in dramatic ways. Yet there is one important set of institutions
built, in part, around ethnic categories. This is the school system (26).
(25) On 'population politics' and the meta
phor of the gardening state, see Holquist 1997:
131; Bauman 2000; Weiner 2001. Genocide, as
Bauman observes, 'differs from other murders
in having a category for its object' (2000: 227,
italics in original).
(26) Traditional churches, too, are built
around ethnic categories, with two 'Hungar
ian' churches (Roman Catholic and Calvinist)
and two 'Romanian' churches (Orthodox and
Greek-Catholic or Uniate). With aging con
gregations, dwindling influence and increased
competition from less ethnically marked
neo-Protestant denominations, the traditional
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ETHNICITY
In Cluj, as in other Transylvanian cities, there is a sepa
language school system paralleling the mainstream syste
from preschool through high school. These are not priv
part of the state school system. Not all persons identifying
Hungarian attend Hungarian schools, but most do (85grades
1-4, smaller proportions, though still substantia
later grades) (27). In Cluj, moreover, there are also parall
university level in many fields of study.
Categories need ecological niches in which to survive
the parallel school system provides such a niche for 'H
ethnonational category. It is a strategically positioned n
schools not only provide a legitimate institutional home
public space for the category. They also generate the so
foundations for a small Hungarian world within the la
one (Feischmidt 2001). Since the schools shape opportu
and contact probabilities and thereby influence friendship
at the high school and university level, marriage patter
world is to a certain extent a self-reproducing one. Note th
reproduction of this social world—this interlocking se
tionships linking school, friendship circles and family—
strong nationalist commitments or group loyalties. Ethn
be reproduced without high degrees of groupness, large
logic of contact probabilities and opportunity structure
ting moderately high degrees of ethnic endogamy (28).
This brief case study has sought to suggest that even
intense elite-level ethnic conflict and (by comparison
States) deeply rooted and stable ethnic identifications,
the workings of ethnicity without employing the langu
groups.
V. Conclusion
What are we studying when we study ethnicity and ethnic conflict?
This paper has suggested that we need not frame our analyses in terms
churches are less significant than schools as
institutional loci of ethnic categories.
(27) Data are drawn from figures provided
by the School Inspectorate of Cluj County.
(28) Of the Hungarians who married in
Cluj in 1999, nearly 75 percent married other
Hungarians, while about 25 percent married
Romanians. This suggests a moderately high
degree of ethnic endogamy, but only modera
tely high, for about 40 percent of all marriages
involving Hungarians were mixed marriages.
Data were compiled from forms filled out by
couples, consulted at the Cluj branch of the
National Commission for Statistics.
i8s
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ROGERS BRUBAKER
of ethnic groups and that it may be more productive to focu
categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schémas, commonsense
knowledge, organizational routines and resources, discursive frames,
institutionalized forms, political projects, contingent events and vari
able groupness. It should be noted in closing, however, that by framing
our inquiry in this way and by bringing to bear a set of analytical pers
pectives not ordinarily associated with the study of ethnicity—cognitive
theory, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, network analysis,
organizational analysis and institutional theory, for example—we may
end up not studying ethnicity at all. It may be that 'ethnicity' is simply a
convenient—though in certain respects misleading—rubric under which
to group phenomena that, on the one hand, are highly disparate and, on
the other, have a great deal in common with phenomena that are not
ordinarily subsumed under the rubric of ethnicity (29). In other words,
by raising questions about the unit of analysis—the ethnic group—we
may end up questioning the domain of analysis: ethnicity itself. But that
is an argument for another occasion.
(29) As Weber put it nearly a century ago
(1964 [1922]: 313; cf. 1968 [1922]: 394-5). a
precise and differentiated analysis would
'surely throw out the umbrella term "ethnic"
altogether', for it is 'entirely unusable' for any
'truly rigorous investigation'.
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