8 - Ethnicity and nationalism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

‘Identity’ can be more or less of a fixed quantity. Some of the possible variation here depends upon the type of identity that is under discussion: a sexual identity that rests upon biology, for example, is generally more stable than a gender identity that can owe more to environmental influences. But, as we shall see, there are arguments about degrees of ‘fixedness’ even within the same identity category. Is ethnicity, for instance, an immutable identity, or is it better seen as a social construction, more malleable and more subject to the vagaries of social relationships? Anne Phillips (2007) has investigated the claim that to consider ethnicity as a real or fixed entity is to fall into the same error that once divided human beings into different races. Just as ‘race’ is now broadly understood to be a political construct rather than a scientific one, so we would do better to think of ethnic identity as something more plastic than solid. Its emergence as a ‘real’ category may owe more, then, to the manipulative desires of political organisations and activists than it does to any grass-roots insistence. Phillips's argument coincides with that of Brubaker (2004: 8). In a treatment of ‘ethnicity without groups’, he points to a mistake made in discussions of ‘groupism’. It is an error, Brubaker writes, to consider ethnic collectivities as ‘basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis’; or to think that they are ‘substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed’; or to ‘reify’ them, ‘as if they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups’; or to ‘represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocks’.