Exot°c No More0 EDITED BY JEREMY MaCCLANCy Jeremy MacClancy is professor in social anthropology at Oxford Brookes University He is the author or editor ofa number of books, including Gornvsmii~g Gulutre, PopularizingAntbropology, and The Decline ofCarlisrn. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2002 byThe University of Chicago “Fieldwork at the Movies” © 2002 by Faye Ginsburg All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States ofAmerica II JO 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 ISEN (cloth): 0-226-50012-8 ISEN (paper): 0-226-50013-6 The University of Ciucago Press gratefully acknowledges a subvention from the Royal Anthropological Institute in partial support of the costs of production ofthis volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Exotic no more anthropology on the front lines I edited byjeremy MacClancy. p. cm. Jncludes bibliographical references and index. IsBN o-zz6-~ooiz-8 (cloth alk. paper) — ISEN 0-226-50013-6 (pbk. alk. paper) i. Anthropological ethics. 2. Anthropology—Field work. ~. Philosophical antbropology I. MacClancy,Jeremy. GN33.6.E93 2002 302 — dcz i 2001005920 @The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements ofthe American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanei~ce of Paper for Prinreti Library Materials, ANSI z39.48—1992. 6. Imagined but Not Imaginary: Ethnicity and Nationaljsm in the Modern World RICHARD JENIKINS When Yugoslavia disintegrated, new states emerged. Some ofthose new states had old names, names that had vanished from the international map more than fifty years earlier. In some ofthose new states, new ways oftalking about similarity and difference within the region emerged also. An ugly civil war turned, in places, into something even uglier, something that was perhaps diflicult to talk about in a post Holocaust Europe. Where “race” or similar markers oflineage and descent might once have been evoked, “ethnicity” became the word of choice to identil5ï friend and enemy, and to dramatize lines ofalliance and conffict. In the process, a novel obscenity—”ethnic cleansing”—entered the vocabularies of both protagonists and observers. Events in Kosovo since the mid-x99os are a stark reminder, ifone were needed, that the genocidal impulse remains a present danger, not to be dis missed as the barbarism of previous generations or “the uncivilized.” Kosovo is also a reminder that problems of this nature can never be seen as local. In some re spects, there is no such thing as “local” any more. Other things, in other places, also seem to have become less easy to say. In cen tral Africa, for example, the murderous mass violence between Hutu and Tutsi would certainly once have been called “tribal,” as if to describe it thus rendered further explanation unnecessary: they have tribes, not us. Now, however, following the example set by anthropologists decades earlier, it is likely to be represented in the Western news media as “ethnic”. as if to describe it thus renders further ex planation unnecessary. At the other side ofthe globe, in the context of significant popular support for a new republican constitution and the world media stage offered by the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the issue ofAboriginal land rights and living conditions ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM IN TI-lE MODERN WORLD / 115 has dramatized the complex, multiethnic, political reality of the Australian state. This has tempted out from the shadows a taken-for-granted, popular white su premacism to which the state seems not to have a ready response, perhaps because it has also turned a harsh light on the foundations ofAustralia in bloodshed and large scale extermination. A consensual name for that history has yet to been found. Cioser to home, for ine at least, Northern Ireland during my childhood there was a place in which ethnicity, Protestant and Catholic, was perhaps the major identificatory theme—apart from gender—organizing everyday life (see figure i). But it was not, at that time, a place in which people talked much about “ethnicityÇ’ “culture,” or similar abstractions, although matters of nation, background, reli gion, and sect were, and still are, visible, audible, and tangible. Today, however, even though the word “ethnicity” itself may not be a staple of everyday speech, appeals to “identity,” “culture,” and “tradition,” to excuse violence, to drum up external support, or to euphemize shared histories of violence, are stocks-in-trade of the local political scene. Whether the 1998 Good Friday agreement can change this, founded as it is on ethnic categories and constituencies, still remains to be seen. Less dramatically, in many places around the world—from the transnational arenas of the European Union to the internal politics of the People’s Republic of China and the orderly municipalities of social democracies such as Denmark— ethnic and national identity are among the most crucial bases of claim and coun terclaim about who gets what, and how much. Ethnicity, origin, and cultural dif ference seem, at least for the time being, to have replaced ciass conflict as the motor ofhistory. Ethnicity is not, however, only a matter ofviolence or the politics ofcollective entitlement. For many people it is simply a source of the intangible collective good offered by “community.” But it can also have many other meanings. When the new young star of American golf, Tiger Woods, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey TV show in the United States in 1997, he used the opportunity to insist that, de spite being claimed and fêted as such, he was neither black nor African-American. He was, he suggested, “Cablinasian,” a mixture of Caucasian, Black, north Ameri can Indian, and Asian. His tongue was at least partly in his cheek, ba there was also something serious in his rejection ofa crude category ofidentity—black—and his insistence that, ifdescent in these terms matters, and in American society it surely does, it is anything but a simple matter. Sport offers other pertinent illustrations of the salience ofethnic and national identity in the modern world. There is an increasing flexibility of national identi fication in terms of sponsorship or team membership. The pursuit of individual career advantage and prestige, combined with the quest for national sporting suc cess, has produced, for example, an Irish international soccer squad most ofwhom FIGUR £ i The visual representation of divisjon in northern Ireland: Republican mural, Derry, and Loyalist inural, south Belfast. (Photo from Dern,ç Mark McEvoy/Panos; from Belfast, Alain le Garsmeur/Panos) ETHNICITY ANn NATIONALISM IN THE MODERN WORLD / 117 were bom outside ireland and some ofwhom have, at best, one Irish grandparent. Several players who participated in the 1998 football World Cup competition had to choose which national team to play for. Similarly, Greg Rusedski, one of Britain’s top men’s tennis players, speaks with the soft Canadian accent ofhis “na tive” province ofQuebec. These examples suggest rwo—apparently contradictory—conclusions. On the one hand, ethnic and national identities mean a great deal to the individuals who claim them, and offer enormous potential for collective mobilization. Attach ments ofthis kind are something for which, and aboutwhich, humans remain pre pared to fight. They are, literally, calis to arms, imbued with their own impera tives: they impel people to do things. On the other hand, however, ethnicity and nationality appear to be flexible, capable of transposition and transplantation. They seem to be on the move, resources to be consti-ucted or manipulated rather than forces before which we must bend or break. From this point of view, their meaning is not dictated by history or the blind passions of the “blood” but made by us, as individuals or collectivities, in response to our needs and interests. Thus there are two interpretations of ethnic—or national—identity. On the one hand, it is seen as a fundamental, even an irrational, psychosocial, emotional force. On the other, it appears to be a negotiable, perhaps even superficial, per- sonal resource. These opposing points ofview begin to converge, however, ifwe recognize that my examples all suggest that ethnic or national attachments, far from withering away in the face of increased internationalism, are at least as im portant in the global arena of the late (Christian) twentieth century as they have ever been. Even in the supposedly “advanced” Western world of Europe and America it is still acceptable to claim and identi& with ethnicity. li is still accept able to do so despite the collective guilt inspired by a history ofslavery, colonial ism, and genocide that has, for the moment anyway, consigned “race” and “tribe” to an uneasy quarantine of disreputability (if not final oblivion). Neither the progress ofmodern “rationality” nor the shape-shifting of postmodernism’s cele bration ofinfinite difference have undermined the power of ethnicity and national identity to move people and to shape their lives. WHAT IS IDENTITY? Similarity and difference are the toUchstones ofhuman social identity, which posi don US with respect to all other people. They tell US who we resemble and from whom we differ. They provide us with at least some idea of what we can expect from others and what they can legitimately ask of us. They are the latitude and longitude that provide US with a functioning, if somewhat imprecise, orientation to the social environment that we must daily navigate. i i 8 / RichardJenkins It makes both logical sense and social sense to say that without sirnilarity there can be no difference, and vice versa. This is one of the basic principles of all ciassification systems. li should not, however, be understood as merely a ver sjon of the static binary oppositions so beloved of structuralist approaches to language and culture.