Institutionalising Ethnicity and Nationess

Abstract

One of the main arguments set out in the first two parts of this book is that ethnicity and nationess have much more to do with ideology than identity. I have tried to show why this is important, both at the conceptual and theoretical levels. Not only is it that ethnic groups and nations are not pre-given and static forms of human collectivity, as most social analysts now agree, but also that ethnicity and nationess for the most part do not irresistibly emanate from the individual’s ingrained need to belong. There is nothing inevitable in the complex relationship between individuals, groups and their ‘cultural shells’. Collective cultural difference is not, and sociologically speaking can never be, a mere synonym for ethnicity or nationess. And this is not simply because of the highly dynamic and fuzzy quality that cultures themselves exhibit, but also because of the contingent and arbitrary character of how and why certain practices or artefacts are chosen from the nearly unlimited repertoire that cultures provide. Thus, when a claim is made to safeguard one’s identity this has very little if anything to do with culture but a great deal to do with politics. For ethnicity and nationess are not what they are often presented to be — a set of specific cultural demands — but something rather different: politically motivated forms of social action. In other words the social researcher can never take popular claims for cultural authenticity for granted as, with most appeals to ‘cultural roots’, one is not on the terrain of identity but of ideology.