Article in Sociology · August 000 doi: 10. 1177/S0038038500000304 citations 37 reads 5,200 author

The idiom of ethnicity

It is contended that, though certain conflicts have a quality that makes them

appear distinctive to English-speaking observers of the current generation, for the

purposes of social science ethnic conflicts are not a special class of conflicts. For those

purposes it is necessary to try to identify causes, to analyse the conditions under

which they produce particular effects and to be cautious in the use of metaphors

such as that of an engine which powers a conflict.

In the English language the expression ‘ethnic group’ was proposed by Huxley

Sociology Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 481–498. Printed in the United Kingdom © 2000 BSA Publications Limited

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and Haddon in 1935 as a substitute for ‘race’ to identify groups at the national level;

this may be called primary ethnicity. Very shortly afterwards it came into use

independently in the United States to identify hyphenate groups (like Irish-

Americans); this may be called secondary ethnicity. The difference between the two

is that ‘primary ethnicity’ denotes the shared sentiment and collective action of

persons who belong together, or believe they should belong together, as members of

a sovereign political unit. Secondary ethnicity is a similar identification of persons as

sub-divisions within a sovereign political unit. The distinction is important because

the two kinds of ethnicity have very different political consequences. It parallels the

argument about whether the nationalism of people who are members of a nation-

state is the same as the nationalism of a group attempting to become such a state,

though the dividing line between the two kinds of ethnicity is drawn differently.

In both cases the new adjective was used to designate a kind of group; the

assumption that there were distinctive ethnic relations appeared later. Ethnic groups

(whether primary or secondary) are currently distinguished from national, religious

and racial groups by cultural distinctiveness associated with a belief in distinctive

origin, though any particular group may be both ethnic and national, ethnic and

religious, ethnic and racial, or distinctive on multiple dimensions. The various

things identified by the adjective ethnic are now frequently grouped together as

ethnicity, as if this can be an attribute of social life. The adjective is also used in

everyday English to denote kinds of food, costume and the like, so that there is a

family of expressions which constitutes an idiom of ethnicity.

In the West, the social scientific and popular uses of the idiom have interacted

and come into frequent use. In national censuses members of the public may now be

asked to classify themselves ethnically (i.e. in the sense of secondary ethnicity). The

appearance of such a question in an official form reinforces ideas of the legitimacy of

this mode of classification despite the inconsistencies in its application. Classifica-

tion by ethnic origin is regarded as less misleading than classification by race.

The presence in a language of a word does not mean that there is some thing

which corresponds to that word. A sentence starting ‘Ethnicity is …’ will reflect

current popular usage, drawing upon experiences which differ from one linguistic

group or sub-group to another. The person in the United States who speaks of

ethnicity will have different experiences in mind from a speaker in Britain, France,

Germany, Malaysia or Bosnia. The content of ethnic consciousness varies in time and

space and cannot easily be abstracted from its setting. Social scientists should

therefore be suspicious of the proposition that ethnicity can be scaled on a con-

tinuum of variation in salience, intensity and meaning, ranging from domination

through enclosure and competition to optional ethnicity (as advanced by Nederveen

Pieterse 1997:366). Such a claim generalises to the rest of the world the meaning

currently attributed to the word in the English language and reifies the idea of

ethnicity.

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m i c h a e l  ba n to n

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Noting that certain proper names recur in the historical record as designating

groups with common cultural features and a belief in common descent, Anthony D.

Smith (1997) has been led to conclude that ethnic ties are universal. The use of

‘ethnic’ to group similar phenomena helps commentators organise their data and

can be applied even when the people themselves have no word for ‘ethnic’. The

difficulties arise because the expression ethnic is a member of a family of related

expressions, including nation, national minority, indigenous people, and so on. To

say that a conflict is ethnic, or to attach the adjective ‘ethnic’ even to a simple

proposition, as in referring to ‘ethnic hostility’ or ‘ethnic tension’, is to attribute to the

conflict, hostility or tension, a distinctive quality and to imply that it is best

understood as a member of a sub-class of things which share common features. It

implies that recognition of a relationship as ethnic opens a route to a superior

explanation of what is going on.

A decision to recognise a group by a particular name is a political action. Often it

entails the rejection of an alternative. The classification of a group may well define its

status and the rights of its members, as has been exemplified by the case of Kosovo,

for the policy of the Belgrade government was based on the distinction between a

nation and a national minority. Describing the recognition of ethnic groups and

nationalities in the Soviet Union, Tishkov (1997a:20) has insisted that ‘a crucial factor

in this process has not been the existence of a shared name held in common by a

group of people and thereby signifying the existence of a primordial entity … the

crucial factor has always been the political will of “outsiders” or group elites, and

intellectual/academic exercises.’

In the Balkans, the name ‘Muslim’ can designate a group that is more ethnic than

religious; official names may not reflect self-identifications at ground level, and

individuals sometimes identify themselves in whichever way they believe may be to

their advantage. Just as Turkish officialdom sometimes claims that the Kurds are

really Mountain Turks, so the Serbs have on occasion maintained that Macedonians

are really Southern Serbs, have put them under the control of the Serbian

Patriarchate and have enforced use of the Serbian language. When the government of

Bulgaria in 1984–89 attempted forcibly to assimilate its ethnic Turkish minority it

contended that the group in question consisted of Bulgarians who had been made

into Turks during the Ottoman occupation and wished to be recognised as

Bulgarians once again. The number of Muslim Macedonians has varied from one

census to another; at times they have been more ready to identify themselves as

Turks; at times they have been susceptible to a ‘quiet assimilation’ into the Albanian

ethnic group; some have declared themselves Roma (Poulton 1993: 48–56, 92). The

confusion is such that one writer (Glenny 1993:72) claims: ‘You may find many areas,

both in Macedonia and Bulgaria, where the peasants really do not know whether

they are Macedonians or Bulgarians (and in some places they think they may be

Serbs).’ Their answers may depend upon their inferences as to the purpose for which

Ethnic Conflict

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the question is being asked. It appears that in some villages ethnic identification has

little significance for daily life. The villagers may tell an inquiring stranger that they

would never allow their daughters to marry men of another religion, but that does

not mean that such marriages do not occur. The failure of everyday life in the villages

to correspond to abstract principles has made it easier for ideologists and politicians

to disagree about the location of ethnic boundaries.

In many regions the adjective ethnic is not used officially for the designation of

groups. In China there are groups officially recognised as minority peoples. In Japan

the descendants of Korean immigrants are regarded as a national rather than an

ethnic minority. The Burakumin, of the same national descent as other Japanese but

treated much less favourably, are not called an ethnic group. In Pakistan refugees of

the partition in 1948 have formed a new group, the Mohajirs, which now seems to be

recognised as an example of secondary ethnicity, implicitly classifying them

alongside Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and other territorially-based groups. A shared

history of fifty years is not a long one and the Mohajirs lack any distinctive cultural

tradition, so they would not qualify as an ethnic group under English law, but it is

their shared sense of grievance which has set them apart from the rest of the

population. If they are not an ethnic group, then what kind of group are they?