The study of the processes by which ethnic groups and nations are formed has been beset by a persistent and fundamental conceptual difference among scholars concerning the very nature of the groups involved, namely, whether they are 'natural', 'primordial', 'given' communities or whether they are creations of interested leaders, of elite groups, or of the political system in which they are included.1 The primordialist argues that every person carries with him through life 'attachments' derived from place of birth, kinship relationships, religion, language, and social practices that are 'natural' for him, 'spiritual' in character, and that provide a basis for an easy 'affinity' with other peoples from the same background. These 'attachments' constitute the 'givens' of the human condition and are 'rooted in the non-rational foundations of personality.'2 Some go so far as to argue that such attachments that form the core of ethnicity are biological and genetic in nature.3 Whatever differences in detail exist among the spokesmen for the primordialist point of view, they tend to unite upon the explicit or implicit argument that ethnicity, properly defined, is based upon descent.4 Since, however, it is quite obvious that there are very few groups in the world today whose members can lay any serious claim to a known common origin; it is not actual descent that is considered essential to the definition of an ethnic group but a belief in a common descent.
There are some aspects of the primordialist formulation with which it is not difficult to agree. Even in modem industrial society, let alone in pre-modem or modernizing societies, most people develop attachments in childhood and youth that have deeply emotive significance, that remain with them through life either consciously, in the actual persistence of such attachments in the routines of daily life, or embedded in the unconscious realms of the adult personality. Such attachments also often provide a basis for the formation of social and political groupings in adult life for those for whom they have a continuing conscious meaning in their daily lives. Even for those persons, particularly in modern societies, who have been removed from their origins or have rejected their childhood identifications, such attachments may remain available in the unconscious to be revived by some appeal that strikes a sympathetic psychic chord.
It is difficult, however, to travel much further than this with the primordialists. First of all, it is clear that some primordial attachments are variable. In multilingual developing societies, many people command more than on language, dialect, or code.5 Many illiterate rural persons, far from being attached emotionally to their mother tongue, do not even know its grope name. In some situations, members of linguistically diverse ethnic com munities have chosen to change their language in order to provide an additional element in common with their group members. In other situations ethnic group members have deliberately shifted their own language and educated their children in a different language than their mother tongue in order to differentiate themselves further from another ethnic group.6 Finally, many people, if not most people, never think about their language at all and never attach any emotional significance to it.
Religious identification too is subject to change—and not only by modem cosmopolitan man engaged in enlightened spiritual quests. Shifts in religious practices brought about under the influence of religious reformers are common occurrences in pre-modern, modernizing, and even in post-industrial societies. Sometimes such shifts are clearly designed to promote internal solidarity and external differentiation from other groups.7
Even one's place of birth and kinship connections may lose their emotional significance for people or be viewed negatively. A psychoanalyst might argue that these attachments at least pursue men through life and must always remain as potential sources of affective involvement with others. Yet, millions of persons have migrated by choice from their native places in both modem and traditional societies and, while many have retained an emotional attachment to their place of origin, many have chosen to assimilate to their new society and have lost any sense of emotional identification with their homelands. For those who do not migrate, one's place of birth identifies a person, but a sense of identity based on attachment to one's region or homeland usually does not become a politically significant matter for those who remain there unless there is some perceived discrimination against the region and its people in the larger society. Moreover, even the 'fact' of one's place of birth is subject to variation. A person is born in a particular village or town, but one is not born in a 'region', for a region is itself an artificial construct. A person may be born in Savannah, Georgia, and not consider himself a 'Southerner'. It is also possible obviously for 'Southerners' to be born out of their region. Insofar as kinship connections are concerned, the range of genuine kin relationships is usually too small to be of political significance. Fictive kinship relationships may extend the range of some ethnic groups rather broadly, but their fictive character presumes their variability by definition. Consequently, even 'the facts of birth' are either inherently of no political significance or are subject to variation.8
As for the argument that it is not place of birth or kinship or mother tongue or native religion that defines ethnicity but a belief in a common descent that draws on one or more of these attachments, it must be conceded that the argument stated in this general form is not without force. Many ethnic communities do explicitly proclaim or implicitly assume that the underlying basis of their unity is shared descent. It is not at all difficult to find a broad spectrum of such communities. Broad as the spectrum may be, however, it will still not suffice to encompass all the culturally-defined collectivities whose members lay claim to special privileges because of some shared cultural features and who are united internally by their attachment to them, unless we define common descent so broadly as to include shared historical, linguistic, or religious experiences. In the latter case, however, we do nothing more than redefine descent to equal shared cultural features.
There are two more serious objections to the primordialist point of view on ethnicity. One is the assumption that sometimes accompanies it that the recognition of distinct primordial groups in a society is sufficient to predict the future development out of them of ethnic communities or nations. This assumption, which is associated principally with the early European ideologists of nationalism, is no longer widely held even by their primordialist descendants, for it is clearly an untenable proposition. A second point of view is more widely held, namely, that ethnic attachments belong to the non-rational part of the human personality and, as such, are potentially destructive of civil society.9 This notion suffers from two defects. One is that it ignores the possibility that an ethnic identity may be felt or adopted for rational as well as affective reasons to preserve one's existence or to pursue advantage through communal action. The second is the assumption that primordial attachments are more dangerous to civil order than other kinds of potential conflicts, presumably because of their highly emotive character. However, there is no empirical evidence to warrant the view either that primordial conflicts have produced more disruption in civil societies than economic, class conflicts or that the former conflicts are less amenable to compromise than the latter.
While many primordialists will concede that some aspects of culture are changeable and that the boundaries of ethnic groups may be shifted in the course of social and political movements that promote their interest, they stand firm on one point, namely, that ethnic groups properly so-called are groups based on distinctive cultures or origin myths or patterns of exchange with other groups that have core features that persist through time.10 Even this bedrock position of the primordialists poses problems for the student of com-parative ethnic movements. For one thing, while some ethnic groups do draw upon old and rich cultural heritages with a persisting core, many movements create their cultures after-the-fact, as it were. If, on the one hand, there are groups such as the Jewish people whose social and political identities have undergone innumerable transformations while a core culture has been retained and transmitted over the millennia by the rabbinate steeped in the Talmudic tradition and by ordinary believers following their daily 'self-defining routines',11 there are sufficient examples of other groups whose core cultures are less easy to identify, but that have nevertheless formed a basis for cohesive and sometimes successful ethnic and nationalist movements. The mushroom growth of ethnic political movements in the United States in recent times provides at least a few examples of the latter sort that are more than ephemeral in nature.12
A second difficulty with the bedrock primordialist position is that, even where there is a persisting core culture, knowledge of its substance may not be of much use in predicting either the development or the form of ethnic movements on behalf of the cultural groups in question. Certainly a knowledge of the core religious cultures of orthodox Judaism or of traditional Islam in India would have suggested that the least likely possibilities would have been the rise of a Zionist movement or of the movement for the creation of Pakistan, for the traditional keepers of those cultures, the rabbinate and the ulema, have consistently argued that a secular national state is incompatible with either religion. Of course, both the rabbinate and the ulema have been largely responsible for the persistence of Jewish and Islamic communities wherever they have persisted, but they are communities differently defined and bounded than are Israel and Pakistan.
Do these criticisms of the primordialist perspective then mean that any cultural content should be removed entirely from the concept of ethnicity? Is ethnicity to be seen from the extreme instrumentalist point of view as the pursuit of interest and advantage for members of groups whose cultures are infinitely malleable and manipulable by elites? Are 'ethnic conflicts' merely 'one form in which interest conflicts between and within states are pursued', 13 and ethnicity 'a communal type of organization which is manipulated by an interest group in the course of its struggle to develop and maintain its power'?14 And is culture change part of a bargaining process' that can be understood best in terms of a market model by which ethnic group leaders and members agree to give up aspects of their culture or modify their prejudices for the right price?15 The statements just cited come from a literature that tends to treat cultural factors in ethnic movements as epiphenomenal. Abner Cohen in fact has written about groups that create cultural markers for purposes of internal communication with each other in secret societies and dominant cliques.16
The fact that new cultural groups can be created for purposes of economic and political domination, however, does not mean that the primordialist perspective is not relevant to our understanding of ethnic groups with long and rich cultural heritages. In other words, one possible route toward reconciling the perspectives of primordialists and instrumentalists may lie in simply recognizing that cultural groups differ in the strength and richness of their cultural traditions and even more importantly in the strength of traditional institutions and social structure. The persistence over time, for example, of religiously-based communal institutions among Jews and Muslims wherever they are found means that these cultural groups always form potential bases for ethnic movements. However, the mere persistence of the core religious traditions of such groups as these offers no prospect for predicting whether or when ethnic movements will arise among them and whether or not such movements will be effective in mobilizing their members. Such cultural persistence suggests only that it is likely that the groups can be mobilized on the basis of specific appeals and not others and that, when ethnic appeals are made, the preexisting communal and educational institutions of the groups will, if made available for the purpose, provide an effective means of political mobilization. In short, the values and institutions of a persisting cultural group will suggest what appeals and symbols will be effective and what will not be and may also provide traditional avenues for the mobilization and organization of the group in new directions. Nevertheless, the leaders of ethnic movements invariably select from traditional cultures only those aspects that they think will serve to unite the group and that will be useful in promoting the interests of the group as they define them. When they do so, moreover, they affect the self-definition of the group and its boundaries, often to such an extent that the ethnic community or nationality created out of a pre-existing ethnic group may be a very different social formation from its progenitor. Or, in the case of groups that have had a sense of identity and community even before ethnic mobilization takes place and that contain elites whose traditional right to define the group and its boundaries are well-established, ethnic mobilization led by others than the traditional elites will introduce into the group conflict-ing definitions of its essence and extent.
Consequently, whether or not the culture of the group is ancient or is newly-fashioned, the study of ethnicity and nationality is in large part the study of politically induced cultural change. More precisely, it is the study of the process by which elites and counter-elites within ethnic groups select aspects of the group's culture, attach new value and meaning to them, and use them as symbols to mobilize the group, to defend its interests, and to compete with other groups. In this process, those elites have an advantage whose leaders can operate most skilfully in relation both to the deeply-felt primordial attachments of group members and the shifting relationships of politics.
The differences of viewpoint between primordialists and instrumentalists have also found expression among South Asia specialists in their efforts to interpret and explain ethnic and nationality movements there. The differences have been most pronounced in discussions of the origins and development of Muslim separatism and the Pakistan movement. From the primordialist point of view, which was also the view of the leaders of Muslim separatism, Hindus and Muslims constituted in pre-modern times distinct civilizations destined to develop into separate nations once political mobilization took place. The differences between the two cultures were so great that it was not conceivable that assimilation of the two could take place and that a single national culture could be created to which both would contribute. The contrary view is that the cultural and religious differences between Hindus and Muslims were not so great as to rule out the creation of either a composite national culture or at least a secular political union in which those aspects of group culture that could not be shared would be relegated to the private sphere. From this point of view, Muslim separatism was not pre-ordained, but resulted from the conscious manipulation of selected symbols of Muslim identity by Muslim elite groups in economic and political competition with each other and with elite groups among Hindus.17
This issue has recently been joined again in an exchange between Francis Robinson and me.18 Although Robinson and I agree on many aspects of the Muslim separatist movement, an apparent difference persists concerning the relative weight to be assigned to the pervasiveness of Islamic values, to the strength of Muslim religious institutions, and to the extent to which a Muslim identity existed in the nineteenth century as constraining factors on the possibilities for Hindu–Muslim cooperation and on the freedom of Muslim elite groups to manipulate symbols of Muslim culture in the political process. Robinson argues that 'the religious differences' between Muslims and Hindus in the nineteenth century, before social mobilization began, 'were fundamental' and that some of those differences, such as on idol worship, on monotheism, and on attitudes toward the cow 'created a basic antipathy' between the two communities 'which helped to set them apart as modem politics and self-governing institutions developed in town, district and province.' The Muslims of Uttar Pradesh (UP), primed by these fundamental religious differences, already conscious of themselves as a separate community, and aware that they were a minority, 'feared that the Hindu majority would not only interfere with their religious practices such as cow-sacrifice, but also. . . would discriminate against them' on such matters 'as education and employment.19 In short, Hindus and Muslims in nineteenth-century India were separate religious communities predisposed towards, if not necessarily pre-ordained as, separate national groups. If it was not a foregone conclusion that Hindus and Muslims would go separate ways politically, it was unthinkable that the separate identities of either group could be subordinated or assimilated to the other.
Robinson's argument is not entirely inconsistent with the model developed in my Language, Religion and Politics in North India which, although it emphasized the roles played by elite groups in manipulating cultural symbols to create political identities, did not ignore either pre-existing cultural values or intergroup attitudes as factors influencing the ability of Mites to manipulate particular symbols. In fact, the model developed in Language, Religion and Politics did not take off from an extreme instrumentalist perspective or from the assumption that either elites or the groups whose interests they claim to represent are cultural blank slates. Rather, it began with the following question: Given the existence in a multi-ethnic society of an array of cultural distinctions among peoples and of actual and potential cultural conflicts among them, what factors are critical in determining which of those distinctions, if any, will be used to build political identities? In the model developed in Language, Religion and Politics, the factors emphasized were the roles played by particular elites groups, the balance between rates of social mobilization and assimilation between ethnic groups, the building of political organizations to promote group identities and interests, and the influence of government policies. However, it was not assumed that the pre-existing cultures or religious practices of ethnic groups are infinitely malleable by elites.
['Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity among the Muslims of South
Asia', in Political Identity in South Asia, ed. David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (Curzon
Press: London, 1979), 35-43: reprinted in Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and
Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991), 69-108.]
Yerevan State University Think tank online simulator Globalization and Nationalism
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