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Three Dimensions of Ethnic Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Donald L. Horowitz
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Extract

The growing recognition of the importance of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the politics of the new states has given rise to an urgent need for theory. Although this need extends to all aspects of group relations, the first priority is for systematic classification to reduce the bewildering array of descent-groups in the developing world to manageable proportions and comparable cases. With a view to facilitating comparative analysis, the aim of this paper is to make a modest beginning in the formulation of meaningful categories.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , January 1971 , pp. 232 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1971

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References

1 For the sake of terminological clarity, what we shall refer to as vertical groups are divided by what are usually called horizontal cleavages, while horizontal groups are divided by vertical cleavages.

2 Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York 1958), 189Google Scholar. For this reference to Weber, I am indebted to the work of Rene Lemarchand, cited below.

3 In addition to these variations in kind, there are variations in the degree to which descent is an ordering principle of the society. A system of ethnic stratification, for instance, may be more or less rigid, depending on the extent to which possession of nonascriptive qualifications can compensate for the lack of ascriptive characteristics in facilitating access to status opportunities. Brazil is most often cited as an example of a mixed ascriptive-nonascriptive system (involving color and class), but in greater or lesser measure exceptions to the ascriptive principle are made everywhere. And, of course, there is nothing to prevent horizontal and vertical ethnic differentiation from coexisting within the boundaries of a single state.

4 Doornbos, Martin R., “Kumanyana and Rwenzururu: Two Responses to Ethnic Inequality,” in Rotberg, Robert I. and Mazrui, Ali A., eds., Protest and Power in Black. Africa (New York 1970), 1090Google Scholar.

5 Malays, for example, admire die business skill of the Chinese, but often regard Chinese behavior as crude and uncultured. See Wilson, Peter J., A Malay Village and Malaysia (New Haven 1967)Google Scholar. West Indian Negroes readily grant the greater solidarity, thrift, and shrewdness of East Indians; yet Indians are referred to by the pejorative term “coolie” and are denied possession of cultural traits that would entitle them to prestige according to the norms of Creole society. See Skinner, Elliott P., “Group Dynamics and Social Stratification in British Guiana,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, lxxxiii (1960), 904–912Google Scholar. Indians, for their part, admire the physical strength of Negroes, but do not acknowledge the moral worth of presumed Negro behavioral patterns in general. See Klass, Morton, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Cultural Persistence (New York 1961), 244Google Scholar.

6 See Lemarchand, René, “Power and Stratification in Rwanda: A Reconsideration,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, vi (1966), 602–605Google Scholar; Dollard, John, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (3d ed., New York 1957), 179Google Scholar, 212, 262, 282; Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in Ante-Bellunt South (New York 1956), 151Google Scholar. See also Banton, Michael, Race Relations (New York 1967), 87Google Scholar.

7 This is especially the case after the firm establishment of audiority and before widespread dislocations are produced by the appearance among the subordinate group of a large elite that cannot be accommodated by the ascriptive social structure.

8 “Power and Stratification,” 609–10.

9 The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon (New York 1968), 9Google Scholar.

10 ibid., 135.

11 For concrete illustrations, see Lemarchand, “Power and Stratification”; and Lemarchand, , “Revolutionary Phenomena in Stratified Societies: Rwanda and Zanzibar,” Civilisations, xviii (1968), 16–49Google Scholar.

12 Lemarchand, “Power and Stratification.”

13 In Nigeria, the advent of British rule interrupted a Hausa-Fulani invasion southward, and after independence “many Southerners feared that the departure of the British had opened the way for its continuance”—a fear reinforced by occasional Northern utterances. Schwarz, Walter, Nigeria (New York 1968), 76Google Scholar. In Ceylon, Tamil invasions had resulted in a de facto partition of the island long before colonial rule. But the teaching of Sinhalese history had kept the issue dimly alive and given it periodic political significance. In 1957, when the Prime Minister agreed to a decentralization that would have devolved considerable local power on Tamil authorities in the North and East, the opposition toured the country, displaying maps with a black footprint over the areas to be “ceded” to the Tamils. Kearney, Robert N., Communalism and Language in the Politics of Ceylon (Durham 1967), 117–18Google Scholar.

14 See, e.g., Skinner, Elliott P., “Strangers in West African Societies,” Africa, xxxiii (October 1963), 307–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Lemarchand, “Power and Stratification,” 609.

16 See the interesting analysis and prognosis of Blumer, Herbert G., “Reflections on Theory of Race Relations,” in Lind, Andrew W., ed., Race Relations in World Perspective (Honolulu 1955), 13–17Google Scholar.

17 ibid., 16. For the role of new elites in transforming some Indian castes from subordinate to parallel groups, see Bailey, F. G., “Closed Social Stratification in India,” Archives of European Sociology, iv (1963), 122Google Scholar.

18 The term “territorial integration” is employed here in the sense that it has been used by Weiner, Myron, “Political Integration and Political Development,” The Annals, ccclviii (March 1965), 57–58Google Scholar.

19 Doornbos, “Kumanyana and Rwenzururu,” 1136.

20 See, e.g., the suggestions of Weiner, Myron, The Politics of Scarcity: Public Pressure and Political Response in India (Chicago 1962)Google Scholar, chap. 3, which reflect this structural situation.

21 See Doornbos, “Kumanyana and Rwenzururu.”

22 See ibid.; Doornbos, “Protest Movements in Western Uganda: Some Parallels and Contrasts” (mimeo., 1966), 5; Nayar, Baldev Raj, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton 1966), 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Wriggins, W. Howard, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton 1960), 460Google Scholar. See also Ratnam, K. J., Communalism and the Political Process in Maylaya (Kuala Lumpur 1965), 170Google Scholar.

24 See, e.g., Isaacs, Harold R., “Color in World Affairs,” Foreign Affairs, xlvii (January 1969), 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaacs, , “Group Identity and Political Change: The Role of Color and Physical Characteristics,” Daedalus, xcvi (Spring 1967), 353–75Google Scholar.

25 See the contributions to the issue “Color and Race,” Daedalus, xcvi (Spring 1967)Google Scholar. On color images in the Western Hemisphere, see Hoetink, H., The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations (London 1967)Google Scholar.

26 In the vertical system of eastern Rwanda, for example, the Tutsis were the superordinate and the Hutus the subordinate group. “Yet, the evidence shows that in some cases the strength of the local Hutu lineages was such that the Tutsi found it expedient to absorb these meddlesome 'upstarts' into their own caste. In a fascinating discussion of the power struggle which took place in Remera Gravel notes that ‘the Hutu lineages which have been in situ longest have acquired some sort of priority of rights on the hill. Their members are respected and the heads of the lineages have much influence on their neighbors, and have an important voice in local administration. … The powerful lineages keep the power of the [Tutsi] chieftain in check. If, however, they become powerful enough to threaten the chieftainship they are absorbed into the upper caste. Their Hutu origins are “forgotten.”’ “Lemarchand, “Power and Stratification,” 604–05, quoting Gravel, Pierre, The Play for Power: Description of a Community in Eastern Rwanda (unpubl. Ph.D. diss. 1962), 229Google Scholar.

There is a parallel in the completely different context of Negro slavery in the British West Indies, where children of mulatto parentage, three steps removed from their African ancestry, were by statute considered white. In exceptional cases, usually involving wealthy or well-connected mulattoes, the Jamaican Assembly sometimes passed private bills to confer on individuals without the requisite generational removal all the legal rights of whites. See Edwards, Bryan, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (4th ed., London 1807), 11Google Scholar, 20–23. I have dealt with these and other questions involving the color line in an unpublished paper, “Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery” (mimeo., 1969).

27 See Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill 1968), 91–98Google Scholar.

28 For evidence that this possibility genuinely disturbed the slaveholders, see Brackett, Jeffrey R., The Negro in Maryland (Baltimore 1889), 32Google Scholar, 38.

29 Jordan, 96.

30 Cf. Dollard, 61, for the apocryphal story of a Negro riding in a railroad car reserved for whites on a Southern train. Asked to move to the Jim Crow car, he announced he had “resigned” from the “colored race.” Obviously, the reply sounds absurd in the Southern context only because color was an immutable indicator of subordinate identity. There is a double impossibility, physical and social: (1) Color-group membership is fixed. (2) Even if it were not, movement from one group to the other cannot be at the choice of a member of the subordinate group in a system of ethnic stratification. It would be less impossible on the first count to decide to “resign” from a linguistic, ethnic, or religious group; and on the second count if the group did not occupy an ascriptively subordinate position.

31 The distinction made by Laponce between “minorities by force” and “minorities by will” is suggestive in this connection. Laponce, J. A., The Protection of Minorities (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1960)Google Scholar. By the former, Laponce seems to refer mainly to subordinate groups in hierarchical systems; by the latter, to parallel groups excluded from political power.

32 Wilson, 25.

33 For a similar view of race or ethnicity as stemming from presumed hereditary differences, and pigmentation as only one of many potential differentiators, see Shibutani, Tamotsu and Kwan, Kian M., Ethnic Stratification: A Comparative Approach (New York 1965), 44–45Google Scholar, 218–19.

34 Cf. Wriggins, 232.

35 Even the North American system of slavery, which placed a premium on the visibility and permanence of the identifying criteria, was obliged to resort to evidence of ancestry in the case of mulattoes who claimed to be descended of a free mother. Stampp, 195–96.

36 Sebring, James M., “Caste Indicators and Caste Identification of Strangers,” Human Organization, xxciii (Fall 1969), 199–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 This method enabled a few fortunate or foresighted Ibos to escape death by taking refuge with sympathetic Yoruba neighbors who provided them with Yoruba clothing. This account is drawn from the official Eastern version of the riots, Nigerian Pogrom: The Organized Massacre of Eastern Nigerians (Enugu 1966), 15Google Scholar, 19.

38 Vittachi, Tarzie, Emergency '58: The Story of the Ceylon Race Riots (London 1958), 54Google Scholar.