The Foundations
Page 11
Smith classifies the well-known ethnosociologists Frederick Barth and S. Seidner as situational perennialists.79
The main idea of the Norwegian ethnosociologist Frederick Barth consists of the refusal to consider ethnoses and nations as fixed societies and the suggestion to understand ethnic identity as a constantly changing “border” between different social segments.80 In different contexts, according to Barth, a single individual can act perfectly well as the carrier of different ethnic identities, which are determined not once and for all by a given structure, but by flexibly changing situations.
The difference between constructivists and situational perennialists consists only in the fact that constructivists think that the strategy of political and economic elites concerning the “artificial production of ethnoses” is characteristic for certain stages of social development, and in other stages its demand falls off; whereas the “situational perennialists” are convinced that the ethnos as a constant (“perennial”) form of the rearrangement of governing and economic powers in society will always exist.
The Historical Context of the Appearance of the Instrumentalist Approach
In its understanding of the ethnos, instrumentalism, at first glance, so contradicts the primordialist approach that it seems entirely irrelevant for comprehending the essence of ethnic phenomena. It is obvious that ethnoses as simple societies are found outside of such categories as “rational choice,” “the use of identity for the realization of individual interests and increase of social status,” since in the koineme there exists neither those preconditions nor the space for them. Social stratification and, even more so, the principle of individuality, first arises in other stages and types of society. One gets the impression that instrumentalists are speaking of some entirely different phenomenon than the ethnos. And when they do not make a distinction (as the constructivists also sometimes fail to do) between the ethnos and the nation (to say nothing of the even more rarely mentioned but just as important category of the narod), then their conceptions become entirely confused and inadequate.
However, it is worth looking more closely at this approach and trying to understand what instrumentalists have in mind.
Much will become clear if we pay attention to the time and place of the appearance of this approach — the United States of America in the 1860s and 1870s. At this time in America, there was a storm surrounding the abolition of the last remains of racial and ethnic segregation, which was a familiar feature of American politics right up until the 20th century. If we recall the initiatives of Madison Grant to forbid interracial marriages by law in the 1920s, it becomes understandable how fresh and how relevant questions about the ethnos were in that period. At that same time, the foundations of “political correctness” — norms of official, public expression — were laid, which had to take into account some ethnic norms: equality, tolerance, respect for human rights, and the rejection of discrimination on racial, gender, or social grounds.
Instrumentalists argued with those circles in the USA that still held to racist views and which had to be convinced that ethnic identity was nothing other than a social convention. Hence the polemical fervor of the instrumentalists and the explicit signs of their being ideologues. This position can well be understood and supported; however, in the overall body of instrumentalist studies, it is worth distinguishing that which is of actual scientific worth for Ethnosociology from that which should be discarded as excesses and ideological polemics.
The Relevance of Instrumentalism and its Limits
Let us determine the place of American society from the 1950s–1970s until today on the ethnosociological scale of societies. In the US, we find a contemporary national state with a high degree of development of civil society institutions which are found in an active stage of development and which attack the national conscious that has formed from the side of greater openness, tolerance, globalism, and attention to human rights. Instrumentalism is one such theoretical, conceptual weapon in the attack of civil society on all the forms of collective identity that preceded it (hence the mixing of ethnos, race, and nation). For civil society, all forms of collective identity are “hostile” and require dismantling. This attitude lies at the foundation of the instrumentalist approach, the task of which is to analyze society down to the individual and to explain social structures on the basis of the interaction of individuals. This explains much in instrumentalism and allows us to find a corresponding place for it.
At the same time, instrumentalists, despite their constant confusion of concepts (ethnos, nation, race) sometimes stumble across the ethnos and ethnicity in their proper sense. And these moments can be valuable for Ethnosociology as a whole.
From the perspective of a social façade, the ethnos retires into the background during the transition to the narod, and during the development of a nation it is altogether hidden from view (the nation is a simulacrum of the ethnos). In the transition to civil society, it seems, the ethnos simply should not exist. But it is present phenomenologically, and instrumentalist sociologists are called upon to allow this discrepancy. Instrumentalists “stumble across” the ethnos in the process of transitioning to a civil society and try to interpret it from the position of new criteria. Many of the conclusions that instrumentalists draw in the course of the work have worth as a description and analysis of the status of the ethnos in a society transitioning from national state to civil society. And here Instrumentalism is entirely appropriate and adequate.
If we reject the untenable pretensions of the instrumentalists to describing the ethnos as such and the phenomenon of ethnicity as something universally applicable to all types of society in all epochs, then we are left with a fully workable set of sociological analyses of the ethnos and ethnicity in highly differentiated Western capitalist societies. And in this case Instrumentalism will be an altogether adequate approach to use in analogous situations, for instance in the case of Western Europe, where we are dealing with a society in the transitional state from the nation to civil society and where the ethnic factor is also becoming more and more topical.
Thus, Instrumentalism is effective and adequate for the study of ethnic phenomena in highly differentiated societies, where it actually very often serves the realization of concrete social tasks of an entirely rational quality. In such complex societies, the ethnos exists in special circumstances: it is torn away from its natural environment, placed in the milieu of a more complex social structure, and in these conditions, begins to manifest itself according to an entirely new script. In this new ethnic script, an instrumentalist exploitation of the ethnic factor both by political and ethnic elites and by members of the middle and lower social strata is entirely plausible.
In a complex society, the ethnos can manifest itself in the form of ethnic lobbying, ethnic crime, the creation of ethnic networks which help its members climb the social ladder predominantly on the basis of their ethnic identity, and even the use of ethnic motifs in political campaigns. In a complex society, the ethnos becomes the object of many-sided manipulations. Instrumentalists focus on this phenomenon and describe it entirely correctly.
Instrumentalism is a means for the study of ethnic phenomena in complex societies that are transitioning from nation-states to civil societies.
With this clarification, the very reason for the argument between primordialists and instrumentalists, as well as between constructivists and instrumentalists, is lost. Each approach has its limits, beyond which it loses its meaning and applicability.
Instrumentalism and the Sociology of the Narod
The instrumentalist method can be applied in another situation: in the study of the narod. The narod is a society that, in contrast with the ethnos, is socially differentiated, contains within it upper and lower classes, and consists of several ethnic groups. In it there are not yet distinctly separated individuals as social actors and distinctly rational scripts of conduct. But a certain distance in relation to the ethnos and its Primordial (Edwa
rd Shils) allows it to relate to the ethnic factor pragmatically, on which instrumentalists insist.
One form that this kind of instrumental use can take is the ascription of a certain, distinct ethnic origin to the elites, which helps consolidate their distinction from the masses and legitimize their power. It is another matter to what extent this ascription reflects conscious manipulation, ethnic fact (often, if not always, in ancient states elites did indeed have a different ethnic origin than the masses), and symbolic-religious-magical factors. In certain narods and in certain situations one could well meet with the instrumentalisation of the ethnos and its “politicization,” despite the fact that the ethnos itself has neither a political nor a pragmatic dimension in itself.
Conclusion
Completing our overview of the fundamental methods of Ethnosociology, we can separate out the following points:
1. The most productive method is Cultural Primordialism, which states that the ethnos is an organic, primordial, fundamental concept (Primordial, koineme). But at the same time, we must immediately take account of two additional points:
a) Neither biological, zoological, nor racial elements, nor the factor of kinship (lineage) enter into the basic definition of the ethnos, since the ethnos is above all a social and cultural phenomenon.
b) Furthermore, the ethnos exists by itself only in simple societies; beginning with the “narod” right up until the “nation” and “civil society,” we meet with its derivatives, i.e., not with the ethnos itself, but with its transformations, although in these more complex societies, too, the ethnos can, with a certain amount of effort, be tracked down in the sphere of the “social unconscious.”
2. The constructivist method is entirely adequate for considering the phenomenon of the “nation” (as the “second derivative” of the ethnos), since in the “nation” we are dealing with an artificial phenomenon, constructed for pragmatic purposes. At the same time, we should take into consideration the correction of the ethnosymbolists (Anthony Smith, John Breuilly) and turn our attention to the fact that according to their orientation, the ethnos is present in national societies in a “symbolic” form.81 To apply the constructivist paradigm to the ethnos, however, and to assert that it was produced at some point out of the political aims of a group of elites is absurd.
3. Instrumentalism is suitable for the study of the ethnic factor and ethnic processes in complex societies, especially in the period of transition from a national state to civil society. Moreover, it can be applied in certain cases to the analysis of social stratification in traditional societies with a prevalence of the “narod,” when the issue at hand concerns the coupling of ethnic indices with social status (most often in the religious and governing political elites). But an instrumentalist approach to the analysis of the ethnos as such is entirely fruitless and leads to irresolvable contradictions.
4.
Foreign Ethnosociology
I. The German School of Ethnosociology, Cultural Circles, Ethnopsychology
The Term “Ethnosociology”
The term “Ethnosociology” was introduced in the earliest stage of the establishment of Sociology as a science by, Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909), one of the first sociologists.82
Gumplowicz was born in Poland and later emigrated to Austro-Hungary, and the majority of his texts were published in German. He is also originated the term “Ethnocentrism,” which the American anthropologist William Sumner later made popular.
The term “Ethnosociology” was most used in German-speaking circles for precisely these reasons. Therefore, we will begin our consideration of ethnosociological schools with Germany, including here the German-speaking authors from Austria and Switzerland, and will then move to those countries in which this discipline is known by other names: “Cultural Anthropology” in the USA, “Social Anthropology” in England, and “Structural Anthropology” and “Ethnology” in France.
Johannes Gottfried Herder: Narods as the Thoughts of God
The German philosopher Johannes Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), predecessor of the Romantics, prominent figure of the German Enlightenment, and one of the first thinkers of modernity, tried to describe the history of mankind as an intelligent and goal-directed process, the main driving forces of which are narods. The concept of the “narod” (das Volk) is central in Herder’s philosophy. According to Herder, the diversity of narods arises from a diversity of natural, historical, social, and psychological conditions. All narods are distinct, which is expressed in the diversity of their languages. And in languages, primordial consciousness and freedom manifest themselves. The highest manifestation of humanity is religion.
Herder asserted that the structure of language predetermines the structure of thought (the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, made two hundred years later).83 , 84 Herder thought that each narod is completely unique and that diversity is not a limitation but abundance: “In a wonderful way, Providence separated peoples (narods) not only by forests and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climatic conditions, but also by languages, inclinations, and characters.”85
The difference between societies shows to what extent each of them is unique and original, and not to what extent they are “backward” or, on the contrary, “correspond to the times.” In this respect, Herder expressed himself very precisely: “The savage who loves himself, his wife, and his child, with quiet joy, and is devoted to the life of his tribe as much as to his own, is in my eyes a truer being than an educated shadow, involved in the endeavors of the fellow-shadows of the whole human race.”86
We cannot measure one Volk (narod) by the yardstick of another, Herder insists, since each one bears within itself the standard of its own perfection, entirely independent of the standard of another. Herder maintains that “each people carries in itself the center of its happiness, as a bullet its center of gravity.”87 For him, Volks (narods) are “the thoughts of God,” his manifestations. The German poet Heine said of Herder: “According to his thought, peoples are the strings of a harp, on which God plays”.88 In such an understanding, the concept “narod” can be likened to Leibniz’s monad, which synthetically absorbs all contradictions into itself.
Although Herder did not hold strictly to one specific terminology, it becomes clear from a substantial analysis of his works that he understood the concept das Volk to simultaneously be both the ethnos and the narod (as ethnosociology understands them), but not the nation. The nation as a phenomenon of the epoch of Modernity and a construct of the third estate is a class formation and is inseparably connected with the state. Herder, especially in his early works, harshly criticized the instrumental use of the concept of das Volk for political aims, all forms of nationalism (the attack of one narod on another was, according to Herder, an attempt on “a thought of God” and the “plan of Providence”) and attempts to hierarchize peoples (narods) on any scale — racial or evolutionary. The idea of the hierarchization of ethnoses seemed as absurd to him as the attempt to figure out whether the note “do” is better than the note “re.” Moreover, Herder strictly opposed the class stratification within the narod. “There must be only one class in the state,” he wrote, “das Volk [the narod], but not the crowd; and to this class both the king and the simple peasant must belong.”89 Herder recognized a hierarchization within the narod (the presence of stratification is a sign of the narod as laos), but he denies “class differentiation,” rejecting thereby the nation as an artificial construct. His understanding of the “narod” is holistic and integral and gravitates to the “ethnic.” Sympathy to ethnicity (although without the use of this term) is also displayed by Herder in that he emphasizes the adequacy of the simplest societies (“savages”) and calls for a “living into” (einfuhlen) them in order to understand them and to establish for oneself a picture of how they understood the world from their position. This anticipates the method of “psychological empathy,” “sociology of participation,” “Sociometry” (G. Moreno), as well as the techniques of contempora
ry ethnosociologists and anthropologists.
Herder asserts that at the basis of the narod lies its spirit, which he called der Volksgeist (narodni spirit) and identified with “culture.” Herder was one of the first in Europe to use the term “culture” with its current meaning, as the totality of customs, rites, beliefs, attitudes, and value-systems, defining the mode and identity of a society.
Herder is famous for his polemics against Kant, who in those same years advanced the concept of “civil society,” based on universal values and the domination of reason, which completely contradicted Herder’s pluralist notions of a multiplicity of cultures and their independent value.
Johannes Gottlieb Fichte
The first-rate German philosopher Johannes Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) together with Herder is considered a herald of the theory of the ethnos. Fichte’s ideas about the narod (he, like Herder, did not distinguish between the narod and the ethnos) were developed in the spirit of his philosophical theory about the “absolute subject.” He considered the narod the expression of such a subject and a historical-cultural unit, preceding the division into “individuals.”
In his political texts, Fichte formulates the principle of the primacy of the narod over the state and calls the Germans to a narodni rebirth on the basis of a cultural and ethnic unity.90
Fichte thought that between the Germans contemporary to him and ancient Germans there existed a direct, immediate, ethnic connection, expressing itself in the continuity of language. On this basis, he analyzed the German character as a direct trace of the behavior of ancient Germans, described by Tacitus.
In contrast to Herder, Fichte was a follower of Kant and paid attention mainly to the rational side of culture.