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Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Mara Loveman and Peter Stamatov, with whom he
is writing a paper on this subject.
References
Brubaker, Rogers (1998) Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nat ionalism,
in John Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of
Nationalism , pp. 272306. New York: Cambridge University Press.
DiMaggio, Paul (1997) Culture and Cognition,A nnual R eview of Sociology 23(1):
26387.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997) Social Mindscapes: A n Invitation to Cognitive Sociology.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
SOME CURRENT PRIORITIES FOR ETHNICITY STUDIES
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN
University of Oslo
The proliferation of ethnicity studies witnessed during the last threedecades has also seen gradual shifts in research priorities. Whereas plural-
ism in relat ively stable, often colonial contexts provided the focus and locus
of many studies in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps especially in social anthro-
pology, studies of nationalism and minorities in the context of dominant
nation-states were foregrounded in the following decade. Two themes
dominated the academic scene in the 1990s: multiculturalism (or culture and
rights) and migration. Of course, the boundaries are not clearcut, neither
between decades nor between topics and some specialities, such as the
British tradition of race relations, have been a powerful presence through-
out but this holds true as a general description. Accompanying this
thematic change, there has also been a general theoretical movement from
sociological perspectives to anthropological and even socio-psychological
ones. As in other branches of the social sciences, identity has become a
core term among students of ethnicity indeed, some of us would argue,
they have been avant garde in this respect while ear lier concerns with, say,
labour markets, political systems and group integration have received com-
para tively less attent ion.
As of today, studies of ethnicity, whether they concentrate on the politi-
cal or the emotional dimension or both, must see it in the dual context of globalization and post-traditional society. The former implies that ethnic
phenomena in particular places are likely to be influenced by similar
phenomena elsewhere, by the ubiquity of the market and of real-time
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information technology. As Peter Worsley (1984) remarked years ago, mili-
tant Tamil ethnopolitics in Sri Lanka would almost certainly have been
influenced by TV transmissions of events on the Israeli West Bank. Thus,
in a sense, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about a universal grammar ofidentity politics, caused both by similar structural conditions and contagion.
The second dimension, post-traditional society (G iddens, 1991), refers to
the loss of imperative, unquestionable forms of identification and implies
that identification is necessarily reflexive and fraught with uncertainty.
Almost everywhere , there are continuous negotiations over the proper sym-
bolism, behaviour and even emotions that express group identity. What it
entails to be a proper North Indian Brahmin, an African American, a Sami
or a Yanomam is a kind of question that is both unanswerable and acute.
These aspects of contemporary ethnicity, obvious today, were rarelypresent in research before the mid-1980s, when ethnic identity tended to be
taken for granted. The constructivist views characteristic of influential
theorists like Barth (1969) in ethnicity studies and Gellner (1983) in studies
of nationalism, have thus been developed further by researchers emphasiz-
ing the essential ambiguity of any form of identification, often under the
influence of feminism and/or deconstructivism. Hybridity has accordingly
become something of a catchword recently.
Three fields of comparative enquiry, all of them incidentally of much
more general relevance than the term ethnicity studies implies, appear tobe particularly fruitful in the near future, seen from my perspective as a
comparativist.
Social identification is and will remain a core theme in the social sciences
and humanities. The degree of group integration, the kind of group that
emerges at any point (ethnic, class, gender, regional . . .) and the relation-
ship between individualism (currently an ideology of enormous power
worldwide) and group loyalties are all crucial both for peoples well-being
and for societal processes. In addition, what could be described as the
tension between ambivalence and fundamentalism characteristic of reflex-
ive modernity remains overtheorized and understudied.
Identity politics is both wider and more narrow than ethnicity: it includes
non-ethnic (say, religious or gender-based) movements but excludes non-
political ethnicity. A tremendous force from Congo to California, identity
politics has filled part of the post-Cold War ideological void and finds its
expression in phenomena as diverse as revivalist Islam in Europe, Ameri-
can college multiculturalism, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and new school
curricula in Sweden. In contrast to research on identification, identity poli-
tics is widely studied but often weakly theorized, and theoretically informed
comparison is rare .Rights and discrim ination . A recurring theme in the literature on ethnic-
ity, pursuing the social conscience and liberating potential of the social
sciences, concerns inequality based on ethnic distinctions. Familiar from
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many if not most polyethnic societies, such differences are often articulated
through local discourses about cultural difference and counteract public
ideologies of equality.
To avoid ghettoization of the academic ethnicity field, this way ofdelineating subject matters if not exactly this delineation is in my view
advisable. Particular patterns of cultural identification and social process
are rare ly confined to ethnic phenomena. Subjectively experienced prob-
lems of identity are, tout court, part of the modern condition; identity poli-
tics of comparable kinds appear on both sides of the ethnicity boundary;
and many different kinds of groups are subjected to unequal access to
rights and resources. Unless one keeps an eye on everything which is not
ethnic, there is a real danger that scholars, usually against their own inten-
tions, end up confirming a view of the world as essentially made up ofcompeting ethnic groups.
References
Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1969)Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Oslo: Scandinavian U ni-
versity Press.
Gellner, Ernest (1983)Nations and Nationalism . Oxford: Blackwell.
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity . Cambridge: Polity.
Worsley, Peter (1984) The Three Worlds. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
RETHINKING RACE
ROGER WALDINGER
UCLA,Los Angeles
Oscar Handlin wrought an earlier revolution in US immigration histori-
ography when he realized that the history of immigration was the history
of American people, in the process, excising a large port ion of the people
he purported to describe. His sociological contemporaries were not guilty
of the same slip; the major accounts of the 1960s sought to understand an
ethnic order made up of the descendants of those who had become Ameri-
cans not just by consent, but by force as well. However, the analysis
proceeded as if all groups of outsiders started equally at the bottom,
confronting barriers of similar sorts. More importantly, the underlying
framework neglected the contrastive nature of the social ident ities that the
immigrants and their descendants gradually absorbed . We know who we areonly by reference to who we are not; likewise, for the progeny of the E uro-
pean immigrants, who became members of a majority that defined itself
through exclusion. But the US literature was slow to acknowledge that
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