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CEU

The Integrated Department of Sociology and


Anthropology
Fall Term 2009-2010

Ethnicity and the State:


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

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