02 Symposium (JB/D) 14/3/01 2:11 pm Page 17

SYMPOSIUM ON ETHNICIT Y 17

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 Nationalism’,
in John Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of
Nationalism, pp. 272–306. New York: Cambridge University Press.
DiMaggio, Paul (1997) ‘Culture and Cognition’, Annual Review of Sociology 23(1):
263–87.
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

SOME CURRENT PRIORITIES FOR ETHNICIT Y STUDIES

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

University of Oslo

The proliferation of ethnicity studies witnessed during the last three

decades has also seen gradual shifts in research priorities. Whereas plural-
ism in relatively 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 earlier concerns with, say,
labour markets, political systems and group integration have received com-
paratively less attention.
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

Downloaded from etn.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 15, 2015

02 Symposium (JB/D) 14/3/01 2:11 pm Page 18

18 ETHNICITIES 1(1)

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 of
identity politics, caused both by similar structural conditions and contagion.
The second dimension, post-traditional society (Giddens, 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 Yanomamö is a kind of question that is both unanswerable and acute.
These aspects of contemporary ethnicity, obvious today, were rarely
present 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 to
be 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 people’s 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 discrimination. 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

Downloaded from etn.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 15, 2015

02 Symposium (JB/D) 14/3/01 2:11 pm Page 19

SYMPOSIUM ON ETHNICIT Y 19

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 of
delineating subject matters – if not exactly this delineation – is in my view
advisable. Particular patterns of cultural identification and social process
are rarely 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 of
competing ethnic groups.

References
Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Oslo: Scandinavian Uni-
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 portion 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 identities that the
immigrants and their descendants gradually absorbed. We know who we are
only by reference to who we are not; likewise, for the progeny of the Euro-
pean immigrants, who became members of a majority that defined itself
through exclusion. But the US literature was slow to acknowledge that

Downloaded from etn.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 15, 2015