A Cultural History of Democracy in the Medieval Age by David Napolitano;Kenneth J. Pennington;
Author:David Napolitano;Kenneth J. Pennington;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism
WALTER POHL
This is a troubled field, distorted by manifold political and ideological misuses that continue to weigh heavily on scholarly debates. After 1945, a generation of brilliant scholars, such as Eric Hobsbawm (1990), was inspired by the hope that national, ethnic, and racial prejudices had only been a passing phenomena in history. Yet rather than fading away, nationalist and racist attitudes are on the rise again. Terms such as ethnicity and identity, once coined to avoid more loaded terms, have acquired unpleasant overtones by ideological misuse. Some historians argue that we should avoid using them, and perhaps refrain from studying the phenomena they describe altogether, so as not to encourage further misuse. However, that would mean leaving the field and its language to those who promote racial, ethnic, and national prejudices. Where partisan appropriations of history are used to argue for the superiority of one group of people over others, it is our duty as historians to offer more precise pictures of the past.
It is true that the significance of our scholarly terms and concepts has been blurred by their use in everyday language, where recent research has had little impact. A variety of scholarly definitions have been proposed (Eriksen 1993; Sollors 1996). The fundamental rift is between âessentialistsâ and âconstructivistsâ (Wimmer 2008). The traditional view that regards ethnic groups, nations, and races as ânaturalâ units, conferred by birth and common origin and defined by appropriate cultural traits, has been largely abandoned in the humanities and social sciences, but has resurfaced with shortcut interpretations of genetic data (Geary and Veeramah 2016). Ethnicity is better understood as socially constructed through a belief in common origins. However, being constructed does not mean that identities are completely flexible and imaginary. Both external perceptions and self-identifications can be remarkably resilient over centuries in some cases. Any theoretical concept has to accommodate both phenomena, the resilience of ethnic/racial/national identifications and their flexibility and changing salience. What is important is where these concepts are useful as heuristic tools, and it makes little sense to debate which groups âareâ ethnic, racial, or national. Rather, we should ask which forms of social distinction and identification mattered where, and how they were usedâfor example, for integration, competition, closure, or domination (Wimmer 2008).
I would propose the following working definitions (Pohl 2013b). Ethnicity is a principle of distinction in the social world according to perceived natural and inborn affiliations and/or putative common origin. Ethnic identity is supposed to be something one is born with, intrinsic to group membersâunlike most other identities that refer to distinctive features in the social world (countries, cities, polities, cultural traits) or in the supernatural sphere (religion). Ethnicity can, but need not, imply ethnocentric prejudice and notions of superiority and inferiority (unlike ârace,â which is inseparable from racism). Ethnic ascription and categorization may or may not correspond to group self-identification, but in most cases the mental mapping of inclusive social groupings achieved through ethnicity allows navigating the social landscape quite adequately. Ethnic identities
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