How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict (Integration and Conflict Studies) by G & uuml;nther Schlee

Author:G & uuml;nther Schlee [Schlee, Günther]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857455833
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Language and Ethnicity

Ethnicity is a form of collective identity, and thus belongs to the same class of phenomena as religious affiliation, lineage, clan, or class membership.1 It is the awareness of belonging to an ethnic group, and the belief that others belong to other groups of this kind. Ethnic groups differ from other groups, like voluntary associations or age sets, by the following criteria: they comprise people of both genders and all ages, or, as Elwert (1989) puts it, entire families. Even where exogamy extends far beyond the nuclear family, ethnic groups comprise sufficient exogamous units to guarantee self-sufficiency in biological reproduction: marriage partners can be provided within the ethnic unit. This means that ethnic groups have the potential to recruit members by birth, and, indeed, that is how they recruit most of their members. It does not mean that this is the only form of recruitment and that there is no ethnic conversion.

The criterion of self-sufficiency in biological reproduction sets the lower limit of the size of an ethnic group. The upper limit is set by the criterion of alterity. As ethnic groups define themselves and are defined in contradistinction to other such groups, an ethnic group can never comprise all of humankind. Ethnic groups tend to be medium- to large-scale human aggregates, typically ranging from thousands to millions. Many ethnic groups, including those which do not have a ‘nation state’ to their name, exceed many independent states in the size of their populations. ‘Ethnic group’ and ‘nation’ form a pair of concepts, the first stressing cultural aspects, the second political ones. ‘Nation’ includes the additional element of statehood in one or another form. One can say that an ethnic group plus a state in which it predominates or a claim to such separate statehood is a nation. The fact that political rights like self-determination are attributed to nations in the political and juridicial discourse does not help to define which ethnic group qualifies as a nation and which one does not. Any ethnic group can claim to be a nation and become one through such a claim. The only difference between an ethnic group and a nation without a state is that the latter claims political sovereignty and the former does not necessarily do so. This distinction may not be very helpful in solving practical political issues, but social science does not provide a more helpful one.

Ethnicity is a cultural construct and its construction materials are cultural as well. There are other cultural constructs which are partly based on biological givens, like the social category ‘gender’, which is partly based on biological sex, but, in all cases in which ethnicity claims to be based on biological facts like discontinuities in the distributions of genes (race), such claims can be shown to be without a biological basis. Genes may cluster in different ways, but they never mark ethnic boundaries. Ethnic groups are never based on race, but very frequently on beliefs about race. Another element ethnic groups tend

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