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UEthnicity must be decoupled from its imperial, racist and nationalist deployment. Uethnicity designates identity as a constructed process +not a given essence. The centrality of the notion of the state in the social sciences.
UEthnicity must be decoupled from its imperial, racist and nationalist deployment. Uethnicity designates identity as a constructed process +not a given essence. The centrality of the notion of the state in the social sciences.
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UEthnicity must be decoupled from its imperial, racist and nationalist deployment. Uethnicity designates identity as a constructed process +not a given essence. The centrality of the notion of the state in the social sciences.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives
Prof. Dan Rabinowitz
ethnikos (Greek) = heathen* Heathen = earthen (of the land) In ancient Hebrew: Amey Aratzot (literally: peoples of (any) lands, Denoting marginal non-believers) Land = eretz (phonetically similar to German erd, earth.. And to modern Hebrew word cradle) Patria = father(land) Indegeneity = basal affiliation R. Wiiliams (1983) Keywords • Ethnicity: socially defined on the basis of cultural criteria • Race: socially defined on the basis of physical criteria‘*
* Van den Bergh 1967:9
Stuart Hall’sprescription*: ‘Ethnicity’ must be decoupled from its imperial, racist and nationalist deployment. (and once it is): Ethnicity designates identity as a constructed process – not a given essence. * After Loomba 1998:176 • On Whiteness: R. Frankenberg 1993: A structural location tat confers exclusive privilege, s tandpoint from which to view and assess Self and Other, and a set of cultural practices that is usually unmarked, unnamed, and normatively given. This relative invisibility both enhances and is an effect of its dominance. ‘Faye Harrison 1995: “The dominant site from which knowledge is produced and validated” • Kimberley Hohman (2000) on the pleasures of whiteness: • Being able to watch TV and see people like yourself widely represented. • Never being asked to speak on behalf of their race • Being able to succeed without being called a credit to their race • Being able to have a bad day without wondering whether bad incidents were race related. • The centrality of the notion of the state in the social sciences • Eric Wolf and the post French revolution growth of the social sciences. Comte, San Simon and later others: social forces can be consolidating. Not disruptive. • The state as a taming, organizing institution that will help put social forces into check, constructively. • In fact the notion of the constructive state is earlier: part of Augustine world view (right to refuse lecture) • And other foundational notions of the state in western thought (Avineri) • Ties in with European history: • 1648 (Westphalia): birth of the ethnic state • 1848: birth of the ethnic nation • The idea of the ethnic nation-state: a pillar of modernity. The basic category in the social science. • There is a link to Hegel here. • Best exemplified by the 1983 trilogy. • Gellner: Nationalism as a false conciousness, inculcated by interested parties in order to facilitate the transition from agrarian to industrial civilization. A bureaucratic class was needed, and was produced through nationalized and democratized education system and culture. • Anderson - the masses took part as well. • Hobsbawm and Granger: • And note: the primordial ethnic state is not the only option • The Westphalian vision opens a space for another vision too: that of the Melting pot. • The potent immigrants’ state will enable people to assimilate and become one through the force of equal citizenship. Naturalized subjects. • Of course both primordialists and relationalists must tackel the tensions and contradictions that keep emerging between that vision and real life out there. • עד כאן מעובד • The problem of Euro-centrality in this model of the state and its ethnic origins: • Chaterjee’s valid reservations about applying the European concept of the state on the post-colonial state. (post colonial in the temporal sense, not the theoretical sense developed in post-colonial theory) • And the cobbling together of ME states or African States or SE Asian state and their boundaries by external imperial powers. This created a reality that contradicts the very spirit of Westphalia: all ME states are multi-ethnic a-priori! • A vision developed elsewhere, in a specific historical and political context • The circumstances of importing it elsewhere are problematic • And, specific contexts: The Ottoman reality that preceded modern statehood in the ME, for example, was on of benign co-existence of multiple ethnic groups, in the shaddow of a state largely oblivious to identity (preoccupied, at best, with taxation and military recruitment. • ????? • Admittedly, much of this could be argued about European states too: particularly if we take the relational thesis, which claims that states emerge through invention, imagination and manipulation. • Yet in the ME it is still different: the chief agent is after all not the local elite, which is capable of gradual development and elaboration of a narrative and national ideology in keeping with local society and cultural norms. • Instead, in the ME we had external agents and local elites which depend on them to do it. • What is happening in Iraq today is the most vivid example. • But look at Iraq at the 1920, at Fahlawi Iran, at post Mandate Lebanon or Syria, and you find similar dynamics. • This essentially is Kandioti’s and Cole’s critique and attempt to relate theory to the post colonial ME. • ????/ This theoretical conundrum happens in an area with extraordinary diversity. Due to: • Geographical • Geo-Political • Ottoman heritage of coexistence • And relatively stable situations in terms of groups’ boundary maintenance. • And, as Maoz and Sheffer emphesize, it all take splace in a region where the legitimacy of talking, asking questions, researching and of course writing and publishing about ‘ethnicity’ is often non existence. • No word in Arabic for ethnicity. And no incorporation of the European term (such as etniyut in Hebrew). • So tough task indeed. • So the two approaches are not incompatible or contradictory. • None of them can be easily dismissed. • Nor do we need to chose one and stick to it. • Nor can we claim that they developed in two separate paradigmatic trajectory, divorced and isolated of each other. • And while the relational approach is often more nuanced and has a better explanatory value, we will at times find ourselves taking primordial viewpoints seriously in this course. • If only because they often are nearer the way actors - lay people as well as ethnic enterpreneurs and advocates of the nation - tend to read reality. • Is one of them more ‘sociological’? • Is one more ‘Anthropological’? • One of them is certainly more Focaudian