CEUCEU

The Integrated Department of Sociology and The Integrated Department of Sociology and AnthropologyAnthropology

Fall Term 2009-2010Fall Term 2009-2010

Ethnicity and the State: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives

Prof. Dan RabinowitzProf. Dan Rabinowitz

ethnikos (Greek) = heathen*Heathen = earthen (of the land)In ancient Hebrew: Amey Aratzot(literally: peoples of (any) lands, Denoting marginal non-believers)Land = eretz (phonetically similar to

German erd, earth.. And to modern Hebrew word cradle)

Patria = father(land)Indegeneity = basal affiliationR. Wiiliams (1983) Keywords

• Ethnicity: socially defined on the basis of cultural criteria

• Race: socially defined on the basis of physical criteria‘*

* Van den Bergh 1967:9

Stuart Hall’sprescription*:‘Ethnicity’ must be decoupled from

its imperial, racist and nationalist deployment.

(and once it is):Ethnicity designates identity as a

constructed process – not a given essence.

* After Loomba 1998:176

• On Whiteness:

R. Frankenberg 1993: A structural location tat confers exclusive privilege, s tandpoint from which to view and assess Self and Other, and a set of cultural practices that is usually unmarked, unnamed, and normatively given. This relative invisibility both enhances and is an effect of its dominance.

‘Faye Harrison 1995: “The dominant site from which knowledge is produced and validated”

• Kimberley Hohman (2000) on the pleasures of whiteness:

• Being able to watch TV and see people like yourself widely represented.

• Never being asked to speak on behalf of their race

• Being able to succeed without being called a credit to their race

• Being able to have a bad day without wondering whether bad incidents were race related.

• The centrality of the notion of the state in the social sciences

• Eric Wolf and the post French revolution growth of the social sciences. Comte, San Simon and later others: social forces can be consolidating. Not disruptive.

• The state as a taming, organizing institution that will help put social forces into check, constructively.

• In fact the notion of the constructive state is earlier: part of Augustine world view (right to refuse lecture)

• And other foundational notions of the state in western thought (Avineri)

• Ties in with European history:• 1648 (Westphalia): birth of the ethnic state• 1848: birth of the ethnic nation• The idea of the ethnic nation-state: a pillar

of modernity. The basic category in the social science.

• There is a link to Hegel here.

• Best exemplified by the 1983 trilogy.

• Gellner: Nationalism as a false conciousness, inculcated by interested parties in order to facilitate the transition from agrarian to industrial civilization. A bureaucratic class was needed, and was produced through nationalized and democratized education system and culture.

• Anderson - the masses took part as well.

• Hobsbawm and Granger:

• And note: the primordial ethnic state is not the only option

• The Westphalian vision opens a space for another vision too: that of the Melting pot.

• The potent immigrants’ state will enable people to assimilate and become one through the force of equal citizenship. Naturalized subjects.

• Of course both primordialists and relationalists must tackel the tensions and contradictions that keep emerging between that vision and real life out there.

• עד כאן מעובד

• The problem of Euro-centrality in this model of the state and its ethnic origins:

• Chaterjee’s valid reservations about applying the European concept of the state on the post-colonial state. (post colonial in the temporal sense, not the theoretical sense developed in post-colonial theory)

• And the cobbling together of ME states or African States or SE Asian state and their boundaries by external imperial powers. This created a reality that contradicts the very spirit of Westphalia: all ME states are multi-ethnic a-priori!

• A vision developed elsewhere, in a specific historical and political context

• The circumstances of importing it elsewhere are problematic

• And, specific contexts: The Ottoman reality that preceded modern statehood in the ME, for example, was on of benign co-existence of multiple ethnic groups, in the shaddow of a state largely oblivious to identity (preoccupied, at best, with taxation and military recruitment.

• ?????• Admittedly, much of this could be argued about European states

too: particularly if we take the relational thesis, which claims that states emerge through invention, imagination and manipulation.

• Yet in the ME it is still different: the chief agent is after all not the local elite, which is capable of gradual development and elaboration of a narrative and national ideology in keeping with local society and cultural norms.

• Instead, in the ME we had external agents and local elites which depend on them to do it.

• What is happening in Iraq today is the most vivid example. • But look at Iraq at the 1920, at Fahlawi Iran, at post Mandate

Lebanon or Syria, and you find similar dynamics.• This essentially is Kandioti’s and Cole’s critique and attempt to

relate theory to the post colonial ME.

• ????/ This theoretical conundrum happens in an area with extraordinary diversity. Due to:

• Geographical• Geo-Political• Ottoman heritage of coexistence• And relatively stable situations in terms of groups’ boundary

maintenance.• And, as Maoz and Sheffer emphesize, it all take splace in a

region where the legitimacy of talking, asking questions, researching and of course writing and publishing about ‘ethnicity’ is often non existence.

• No word in Arabic for ethnicity. And no incorporation of the European term (such as etniyut in Hebrew).

• So tough task indeed.

• So the two approaches are not incompatible or contradictory.

• None of them can be easily dismissed.• Nor do we need to chose one and stick to it.• Nor can we claim that they developed in two

separate paradigmatic trajectory, divorced and isolated of each other.

• And while the relational approach is often more nuanced and has a better explanatory value, we will at times find ourselves taking primordial viewpoints seriously in this course.

• If only because they often are nearer the way actors - lay people as well as ethnic enterpreneurs and advocates of the nation - tend to read reality.

• Is one of them more ‘sociological’?

• Is one more ‘Anthropological’?

• One of them is certainly more Focaudian