Ethnicity in South Asian Culture and Literature-

by
Saurabh Pant
IN Guidance of-
dr. Pandurang Bharkale

Soul research work

Representation of Social, political, Cultural and Literature's image in South Asian Ethnic Groups-

Note: This book contains two parts;

1st, this one deals with social and identical formation of Ethnicity
2nd however will deal with the literature that represents Ethnicity in South Asian Subregions, especially
SAARC at large.
Part 1- Understanding Ethnicity

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Understanding Ethnicity

Abstract
Ethnicity is as popular as it as ever been as a subject for study in the social sciences. However, due in part
to its popularity ethnicity has become an unwieldy concept and currently suffers from both polysemy
whereby it has multiple definitions and synonymy whereby it is close in meaning to other terms like
nation and race.
Here I propose a new definition of ethnicity that is based on three core elements, namely common
descent, a common history and a common homeland. This definition both allows space for a variety of
interpretations of ethnicity such as primordialism and constructivism and allows the scholar a means by
which to differentiate ethnic groups from other communal groups like castes, nations and races.

1. Introduction
Ethnicity has been a major subject in the social sciences for the past several decades. First appearing in
the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972, it has recently become a source of debate in the field of political
economy, where many scholars have investigated the relationship between ethnicity and civil war,
growth, institutions and violence using econometric tools. This recent spurt of activity has not, however,
been accompanied by significant efforts in pinning down ethnicity as a concept. With the recent
exceptions of Fearon and Laitin (2000) and Gil-White (2005), scholars have avoided asking hard
questions about what exactly ethnicity is and how it is different from other terms in the social sciences
like caste and race. As it stands now ethnicity thus suffers from both polysemy whereby it has
multiple definitions and synonymy whereby it is close in meaning to other terms like caste and
race.
Here I propose a new definition of ethnicity that is based on three core elements, namely common
descent, a common history and a common homeland. In defining ethnicity in this minimal way (Gerring
and Baressi 2003), I therefore allow for a variety of interpretations of ethnicity such as primordialism and
constructivism while also allowing the scholar a means by which to differentiate ethnic groups from other
communal groups like castes, nations and races. This paper is organized as follows.
In section two I examine the ongoing diverse and controversial debates about the nature of ethnicity. In
particular I discuss what Fearon and Laitin (2000) call the interpretivist and quantoid paradigms,
where the latter can be divided into primordialist and constructivist approaches.
In section three I build upon Fearon and Laitin (2000)s previous attempt to define ethnicity through an
ordinary language definition by basing a definition of ethnicity on a belief in common descent, a common
history and a common homeland. I then show how this definition allows for greater scope in allowing
scholars to distinguish between ethnicity and similar concepts like castes, nations and races.
Finally, in the conclusion I return to the two dominant paradigms of primordialism and constructivism
and show how my definition can allow for both approaches while also curbing the excesses of both.

2. Defining Ethnicity
Defining ethnicity is a minefield, as many authors have recognized. As we shall see in this section,
scholars have proposed a bewildering variety of approaches to ethnicity, all of which are currently in use.
Much of the confusion stems from the fact that, as already mentioned, ethnicity is a new term in the social
sciences, even though the word ethnic has been used in the English language since the midfourteenth
century. Its meanings have changed radically throughout history: originally referring to heathens, pagans
or gentiles, it acquired racial characteristics in the nineteenth century and was used in the twentieth-
century U.S. as a way to refer to those immigrants of non-northern or western European descent (Eriksen
1993: 4). It first grew in importance in the social sciences as anthropologists tried to make sense of the
emergent social and cultural formations within Africa and other parts of the Third World in the 1960s
(Eade 1996: 58).
Hence ethnic groups took on a new meaning, namely the idea of tribe, formerly used to refer to a
sociopolitical unit whose members were related by kinship ties. This shift in meaning took place as many
social scientists attempted to critique the eurocentric discourse in which the peoples of the developing
world were referred to as tribes while those in the developed world remained peoples or even
nations. This latest incarnation of ethnicity meant that, for the first time in the history of the word, it
was and continues to be applied universally across the globe.
Yet if ethnicity has now become a universal concept, does it then follow that we should have a universal
definition of ethnicity? In attempting to deal with the quagmire of defining ethnicity, scholars have largely
adopted two strategies, which Fearon and Laitin (2000: 4) name the interpretivist and quantoid
approaches. The former refers to the strategy of using a variety of situational definitions suitable to each
case study, an approach used by a variety of scholars, especially anthropologists who are cautious in
defining ethnicity outright and prefer to let their subjects define the term.
Eller (1999: 7), for instance, claims that, rather than being a single unified social phenomenon, ethnicity
is actually a family of related but analytically distinct phenomena. An interpretivist approach is also
apparent in much postmodernist and post-Marxist work. Such authors as Stuart Hall, Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein claim that ethnicity must be viewed as a plastic and malleable social construction,
deriving its meanings from the particular situations of those who invoke it Ethnicity has no essence or
center, no underlying features or common denominator (Smith 1998: 204; cf. Wallerstein 1987).
The interpretivist stance has merit inasmuch as it allows everyone who uses a concept to mold and
modify its definition. In their desire to let non-academics define difficult concepts like ethnicity the
interpretivists are therefore inherently democratic, unlike the quantoid social scientists who attempt
to impose their hegemonic definitions upon others. However valid it may be in this regard, the
interpretivist stance is nonetheless problematic for social scientists looking to compare ethnicity and
ethnic conflicts in a variety of places and periods.
Indeed, the result of this postmodern and interpretivist shift within the social sciences means that even
within academia ethnicity has been expanded in its meaning to capture identity groups formerly seen as
separate entities: for instance, Connor (1994) cites examples in sociology where ethnic groups are taken
to be synonymous with minorities and even all identity groups which are mobilized for political ends,
whereby such indiscriminate application of ethnic group to numerous types of groups obscures vital
distinctions between various forms of identity. If nothing else, Connor (1994: 101-102) notes, this use of
ethnicity as a cloak for several different types of identity... presumes that all the identities are of the same
order. As Gerring and Barresi (2003: 202) note, this type of lexical confusion means that, as scholars
cannot achieve a basic level of agreement on the terms by which we analyze the social world, agreement
on conclusions is impossible.
It is for this reason that the quantoid approach is more popular among political scientists and other non-
anthropologists. This paradigm may be defined as a scientific attempt to precisely define ethnicity, no
matter how it is used in common parlance.2 This approach is to be distinguished from the way terms are
defined in the dictionary and Fearon and Laitin (2000)s ordinary language approach which we will
examine later in that it allows the scholar to construct ethnicity according to his/her preference(s) rather
than those of the masses. Scholars who follow this approach tend to situate themselves somewhere
between two extreme camps, namely essentialism/primordialism and instrumentalism/constructivism.3
The first school can best be described as that which is so prevalent in journalism and non-academic
discourse today, namely the view that ethnic groups are ancient and immemorial kinship groups and thus
given facets of social life. This paradigm was first expressed by German romantic philosophers like
Herder and Fichte and has continued to be held to one degree or another by such writers as Basil
Davidson, Clifford Geertz, Edward Shils and Steven Van Evera (cf. Van Evera 2001). One variety of
primordialism which holds some sway today is the sociobiology approach of Pierre van den Berghe,
where ethnic groups are actual kinship groups and members use nepotism to propagate their line.
However, such an approach necessarily includes groups based on common descent, i.e., castes in India
and European aristocracies, that most scholars would not consider ethnic groups (Van den Berghe 1996,
Vanhanen 1999, Whitmeyer 1997).4
The second paradigm, i.e., constructivism, is one used by most scholars today across the social sciences.
It first overtook primordialism as the dominant paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to such
anthropologists and sociologists as Fredrik Barth, Abner Cohen, Ernest Gellner, Aidan Southall, Nathan
Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who all agreed, for one reason or another, that ethnic groups
and/or nations are the artificial constructs of modern elites for their own purposes.
In recent decades it has become widespread through the works of Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly,
Rogers Brubaker and Eric Hobsbawm, among others. The central idea of constructivism is that ethnic
groups are artificial and constructed rather than natural and eternal, and, just as they can be created, they
can also be destroyed or, in the postmodernist vocabulary, fragmented and deconstructed. In summarizing
the various strands of constructivism, Chandra (2001: 7) claims that it holds that ethnic groups are fluid
and endogenous to a set of social, economic and political processes.

3. Redefining Ethnicity

3.1. Common Descent and Common History

While much has been achieved in debating the merits and demerits of both interpretivist and and
quantoid interpretations and, within the quantoid camp, primordialism and constructivism, it is
important to recognize that, perhaps, a moment has come for the field of ethnic studies to move beyond
these simple dichotomies that have dominated the field for the past four decades. Such a task has already
been undertaken by Fearon and Laitin (2000: 3-4, 20), who disagree with both the quantoid and
interpretivist schools. They rather argue that social scientists should be concerned with using ordinary
language definitions of terms, which are constructed by finding principles of attribution based on intuition
and popular usage.
In their attempts to cover the groups intuitively understood to be ethnic while excluding those groups not
normally considered as ethnic, Fearon and Laitin (2000) eventually come up with a definition of ethnic
groups as groups larger than a family for which membership is reckoned primarily by descent, is
conceptually autonomous and has a conventionally recognized natural history as a group.
This approach is very similar to the minimal definition proposed by Gerring and Barresi (2003),
whereby the definition uses the least amount of description necessary to cover all applicable cases but no
more. As such, the ordinary language or minimal definition is more suitable for use in political economy
than the quantoid or interpretivist approaches for three reasons.
First, in relying upon popular usage to provide a definition, it makes it easy for academics to step down
out of their ivory towers and discuss with policy makers and the general public, who tend to be unversed
in theories of ethnicity and nationalism, the relationship between ethnicity and various political and
economic factors without getting bogged down in explaining the definition of ethnicity. Indeed, Connor
(1994: 91) has often remarked how debates over definitions have frustrated him and other scholars from
progressing in their study of the subject, writing that such terms as nation and nationalism are
shrouded in ambiguity due to their imprecise, inconsistent and often totally erroneous usage The
linguistic jungle that encapsulates the concept of nationalism has only grown more dense over time. In
being both precise and correlated with popular usage, the ordinary language approach is therefore more
suitable for giving policy recommendations than the quantoid approach.
Second and as important, the ordinary language definition gives certain key qualities that must be present
for an ethnic group to exist, thereby allowing researchers to construct data sets based on such a
definition.5 Indeed, some scholars do not give any such key qualities: Hutchinson and Smith (1996), for
example, admit that not all of their six characteristics of ethnicity are essential for an ethnic group to
exist.6
However, many quantoid theorists already do list similar key qualities in their definitions see for
instance Nash (1996: 25), whose three essential criteria for the creation and maintenance of ethnicity are
assumed kinship ties, commensality and a common cult. Yet one is struck by the technical nature of such
a definition, relying on the rarely-used (and even less understood) concept of commensality; Nashs three
criteria are unfortunately indicative of the quantoid approach to defining ethnicity using often obscure
and complicated terminology. If the scholar is to use a set of criteria that clearly marks ethnicity, (s)he
should rely upon criteria that correlate with popular usage.
A third reason for using the ordinary language definition is that it allows for conceptual clarity by
eliminating the polysemy of the interpretivist approach. As noted, Fearon and Laitin (2000)s definition
relies on three aspects of ethnicity, namely a common descent, conceptual autonomy and a common
history. The first and third qualities are, as noted above, relatively common among definitions of
ethnicity: while descent features most strongly in primordialist definitions, a common history is strongly
emphasized by Smith and his fellow ethnosymbolists in their discussion of myth and memory. The
element of common descent, for instance, allows for one to distinguish ethnic groups from groups of
citizens who may share a common history. An obvious example here is the group of people known as
Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKCs) from 1948 to 1983, who, while sharing a history
of living in Britain or British colonies, were as varied as the British Empire itself.

3.2. The Importance of the Homeland

Fearon and Laitin (2000: 9)s second category of conceptual autonomy comprises an attempt to exclude
such groups as Indian castes and the British upper class, in that an aristocracy cannot exist
conceptually unless commoners exist, and the same applies for classes and castes. By contrast, the
existence of an ethnic category does not depend conceptually on the existence of any particular other
ethnic category. In other words, the conceptual autonomy roughly corresponds to whether a group is
defined by its internal attributes or in opposition to another such group.
Yet there are several problems with the use of conceptual autonomy as a defining factor for ethnicity.
First, as already noted in the case of commensality, it is hardly likely that conceptual autonomy is a
criterion that would correlate with popular usage. Second, while Fearon and Laitin (2000: 9) agree that it
is an empirical fact that ethnic groups understand themselves through contrasts with other ethnic
groups, they fail to recognize that there are no ethnic groups (or nations) in recorded history that have
not in some way defined themselves in opposition to another such group or groups. Indeed, along with the
turn away from primordialism in the late 1960s came a further recognition that ethnic groups do not exist
autonomously but are constructed and defined through their boundaries with other ethnic groups (Barth
1969, Cohen 1978, Melville 1983).7
Conversely, one cannot easily argue that castes and classes are not conceptually autonomous: members of
high castes in India and the upper class in Britain can trace their ancestry back to invaders from central
Asia and Normandy, respectively, who were, at the time, ethnically different from the resident population.
Indeed, the same argument applies to the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi, whom Fearon and
Laitin (2000) nonetheless claim to be conceptually autonomous.
A better way to exclude classes and castes from a typology of ethnicity while also including Hutus and
Tutsis is the notion of a homeland. Traditionally understood as the original home of an ethnic group,
the homeland is much more readily used in popular discussion of ethnicity than conceptual autonomy.
Smith (1998: 63) includes a homeland in his definition, noting that Ethnic nationalists desire the land of
their putative ancestors and the sacred places where their heroes and sages walked, fought and taught. It is
a historic or ancestral homeland that they desire, one which they believe to be exclusively theirs by
virtue of links with events and personages of earlier generations of their people.
Smith (1991: 9) defines this homeland as The historic land where terrain and people have exerted
mutual, and beneficial, influence over several generations. The homeland becomes a repository of historic
memories and associations The lands resources also become exclusive to the people; they are not for
alien use and exploitation.
The homeland is missing from the ordinary language definition because Fearon and Laitin (2000) attempt
to include groups like the nomads and the Roma (Gypsies) who do not live in a definable territory.
However, these cases are somewhat controversial, as many Roma conceive of themselves as the
descendents of immigrants from north- west India (Mayall 2004) (8) and nomads often can both trace
back their ancestry to an original homeland (9) and recognize local sites as having ethnohistorical
significance (Hobbs 1989).10
A homeland also provides a way to exclude classes and castes yet include groups like the Tutsi and Hutus.
Despite the fact that the both the British upper classes and high castes in India descend from foreign
invaders, (11)this fact has little to no relevance in contemporary British and Indian societies, since neither
group claims Normandy or central Asia as their homeland.12
Contrarily, the idea that Tutsis are originally from Ethiopia while the Hutus are indigenous to the Great
Lakes Region has great contemporary resonance in regional ethnic politics, playing, for instance, a role in
the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Mamdani 2001: 195).
One possible response to substituting a homeland for conceptual autonomy in the ordinary language
definition is that, by excluding castes and classes and including the Roma, it results in the same set of
groups as the original definition and is therefore no better or worse. However, there are two very good
reasons to include a homeland in a definition of ethnicity. First, recent political economy scholarship has
shown how important ethnic homelands are to the study of ethnic conflict and war.
Toft (2001: 5-6) argues that the likelihood of ethnic war is largely a function of how the principal
antagonists a state and its dissatisfied minority think about a territory in dispute Ethnic groups will
seek to rule territory in which they are geographically concentrated, especially if that region is a historic
homeland. On the other hand, conceptual autonomy seems to play little role in predicting conflict or
war between groups; one need merely note the prevalence of caste conflict across India and various
degrees of class conflict across nearly the whole world.13
Second, the addition of a homeland to the definition allows us a better way to tackle the controversial
question of whether racial groups should be included in a set of ethnic groups. According to the original
ordinary language definition, races cannot unquestionably qualify as ethnic groups since they are not
clearly conceptually autonomous: as with castes and classes, they are largely defined in opposition to
other groups rather than their internal characteristics: as Banton (1983: 106) writes, ethnicity is generally
more concerned with the identification of us, while racism is more oriented to the categorisation of
them.14
Indeed, one cannot imagine a group of people defined by the color of their skin if all people have the
same color skin. (The same would go for defining people on the basis of other racial features like
epicanthic [eye] folds, hair type, nose shape, etc.) Yet while some scholars like Banton (1983) and Smith
(1991: 21) would agree that ethnic communities must be sharply differentiated from a race,15
many others like Eriksen (1993: 4-5) would disagree. For instance, Varshney (2001: 365) claims that, by
classifying religious, racial and sectarian conflicts as ethnic conflicts, the scholar can thereby compare
disputes which are often similar in their intensity, duration or relative intractability.
When one applies the homeland criterion to racial groups, one gets a complex answer. One could make
the case that racial groups can be said to have homelands: blacks come from Sub-Saharan Africa, whites
from Europe, Hispanics from Latin America and Asians from Asia. Indeed, the names originally devised
by the German scientist J.F. Blumenbach when he codified what we today call races in 1795 and the
names we give these races today Caucasian, African/Negroid, Asian/Mongoloid seem to hint at some
sort of racial homeland for these groups, which is not surprising given that Blumenbach drew upon the
Swedish scientist Linnaeuss 1758 categorization based on the four continents of Africa, America, Asia
and Europe (Gould 1994).
Yet when Blumenbach first classified humans into racial categories in 1795, he did not name his own
group Caucasian because he thought that the Caucasus mountains were the original home of the
European, North African and West Asian peoples. Rather, I have taken the name of this variety from
Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most
beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; That stock displays the most beautiful form of the skull,
from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most easy gradations. . . .
Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind
In that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of
mankind (Blumenbach 1795, quoted in Gould 1994). Thus Blumenbach thought that the Caucasus were
not the homeland of the Europeans but rather the homeland of all humanity, and therefore gave this name
to the people Linnaeus had formerly called Europeans (Gould 1994).16
Blumenbachs racial categorization is indicative of the way races are often conceptualized using
geographic terminology but without any putative link to a homeland. Indeed, as we have already seen in
the case of the British aristocracy and the Indian castes, it is important to distinguish a mere place of
origin from a homeland to which a given group sees as part of its identity. For instance, while white
Americas come from Europe, the image of Europe as a homeland has relatively little resonance for them,
especially as compared to white minorities in Africa.17
Furthermore, white Americans rarely designate themselves European-Americans, preferring to
use the aforementioned word Caucasian.18 White Americans also have less attachment to their place of
origin than black Americans, who have increasingly called themselves African-American since the
demise of the word Negro in the 1960s.19
Both African-Americans and black residents of the West Indies were at the forefront of the pan-African
movement in the early 20th century, which promoted, among other ideas, the idea of Africa as the
homeland for all blacks in the world and, among adherents of Marcus Garvey, the return of blacks to
Africa. Needless to say, the white separatist/supremacist movement in the US does not call for whites to
return to Europe but rather establish a white homeland in the US. Finally, one need merely contrast how
visits to Africa by American politicians are often seen as a ploy to garner more African-American votes
(Sithole 1986); similar visits to Europe are never seen as attempts to increase support from European-
Americans.20 Thus it is much easier to make a case for black Americans as an ethnic group than white
Americans.
Yet the above should not suggest that black Americans constitute an ethnic group. The fact remains that,
as with many white Americans, most black Americans do not actually know their specific place of origin.
As opposed to most Africans themselves, who are very aware of their specific homelands, black
Americans cannot identify, in Smith (1991: 9)s words, the sacred places where their heroes and sages
walked, fought and taught. This problem has led black Americans as well as West Indians and Black
Britons to view the entire continent of Africa as their homeland, adopting such dispirate heroes and
sages as the 20th-century Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie and the 19th-century Zulu king Shaka Zulu
despite the fact that practically no black Americans are of Ethiopian or Zulu descent.21
One need merely contrast African-Americans with people of South Asian descent in Fiji, East and South
Africa and the Caribbean, almost all of whom can identify the part of South Asia normally Gujurat and
the Punjab in north-west India where their ancestors originated.
In other words, what matters here is whether black Americans identify themselves along quasi-biological
lines or geographical lines, where the former is indicated by use of the word black and the latter by
African-American. It is indicative that many if not most journals and magazines targeted to black
Americans prefer the word black over African-American, as seen in the titles of Black Collegian,
Black Enterprise, Black Men, Black Scholar, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education and Todays Black
Woman; of particular interest here is Afrocentrism founder Molefi Asantes Journal of Black Studies.
There may a trend towards referring black Americans as African-Americans just as there is a trend away
from referring to hyphenated European descendents in the US, but much of this change has to do with
legitimating black Americans as immigrants similar to hyphenated Europeans rather than a shift towards
emphasizing the African roots of black Americans.22

4. Conclusion
To test this new definition of ethnicity we should go back to the primordialism/constructivism debate to
see how it encompasses these two paradigms.
Since the ordinary language definition does not emphasize fluidity and endogeneity to external factors, it
is obvious that it would not support Collier et al. (2003)s et al.s claims that Scotland or other nations
and/or ethnic groups could be created when it is economically advantageous to do so or that their salience
and/or existence would fluctuate along with other factors (cf. Green 2004). Indeed, such ethnic
characteristics as belief in a common descent, history and homeland do not waver over mere years or
even decades. However, on the other hand, a belief in common descent can and does change over
generations and centuries when, due to intermarriage, old beliefs in common descent are disregarded and
new ones are formed: as Van den Berghe (1996: 59) notes, three or four generations of 25% or more
exogamy typically erode both racial and ethnic boundaries, and lead to the formation of new ethnic
groups.23
These phenomena of both ethnic assimilation and creation are easily observable throughout world history,
whether in the case of the assimilation of the Banyoro of Buddu (Uganda) into Buganda (also Uganda)
over the course of the 19th century, (24) or the creation of a new American nation, separate from Britain,
by the time of the American Revolution.
While a belief in common descent can and does change significantly over merely a few generations, a
belief in a common history or a common homeland is not likely to change as quickly. In the latter case,
one need merely observe the current arduous attempts to create a European (supra)national identity in
light of the fact that European history is largely filled with centuries of almost constant internal warfare.
(Indeed, one could argue that one byproduct of this search for a common European identity has been the
rise in both anti-Islamism and anti-Semitism in Europe over the past years and decades, since a shared
Christianity, wars against Muslim invaders and the persecution of Jews are three of the very few aspects
of European history common to most European nations.) Even more slow to change, however, is a belief
in a common homeland: while the Jews are perhaps most notable in their attachment to their homeland of
Israel for the past three millennia, they are by no means anomalous.
While the above might suggest that the ordinary language approach therefore has more in common with
primordialists like Van den Berghe than constructivists, it is important to also note that the approach does
not disallow a key feature of constructivism, namely the ability to hold multiple identities at the same
time. In Scotland, for example, there is nothing wrong with the supposition that people may choose to
emphasize their class identity over national (Scottish) or state (British) identity at a given point in time
and that their emphases can and will change.
The approach even allows for multiple ethnic identities: one need merely observe the nested identities of
the traditional residents of the Ssese islands in the Ugandan part of Lake Victoria, who can legitimately
identify themselves ethnically as Basesse, Baganda or Bantu, where all three identities qualify as ethnic
under the ordinary language approach. Furthermore, in its emphasis on a common history, the ordinary
language approach allows for the creation of new identities when formerly unitary ethnic groups or
nations are split between states and thereby develop separate histories, as with the Somalis and their
residence under colonial rule in Ethiopia and British, French and Italian Somaliland (cf. Miles and
Rochefort 1991).25
Thus my definition allows for both change and continuity in a way with which few scholars would
disagree except for those on the extremes of the primordialism/constructivism continuum. It would be
nice, of course, if scholars henceforth use this definition in political economy literature. However,
regardless of my own personal vanity, it would be helpful if scholars were to use any definition of
ethnicity, since unfortunately few political economists ever refer to a definition of ethnicity in their work
(Green 2004). Therefore, if political economy studies of ethnicity and nationalism are to move forward,
scholars must first examine their preconceptions of ethnicity before engaging in the debate on the
interpretivist, quantoid and ordinary language approaches. Only then will they be able to avoid
repeating the mistakes of previous scholars.
notes:
1 I thank Jim Fearon, Frances Stewart and participants at a UNU WIDER conference in Helsinki and at a
CRISE seminar at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, for many useful discussions and
suggestions. All errors are of course my own.
2 Gil-White (2005: 4) is explicitly quantoid in this sense: it does not matter to me what truck-drivers
or lawyers etc. usually mean by ethnic group.
3 While some scholars might argue that constructivism and instrumentalism are different, I agree with
Lustick (2001: 22) in his assessment of instrumentalism as one variety of constructivism.
4 See Smith (1998: 147-151) for a critique of Van den Berghe along these lines. We will examine castes
and classes more in section 4.
5 For one example of such a data set based on Fearon and Laitin (2000), see Fearon (2003).
6 Ethnic groups habitually exhibit, albeit in varying degrees, six main features (Hutchinson and Smith
1996: 6). It does not help matters that, almost alone in the field, Hutchinson and Smith (1996) write about
ethnies, or ethnic communities, rather than ethnic groups; similarly and equally unhelpfully,
sociobiologists like Van den Berghe (1996) and Gil-White (2005) use the word ethny.
7 For instance, Melville (1983: 272) notes that ethnicity is essentially a continuous, dynamic process that
occurs between two or more ethnic populations, while Cohen (1978: 389) claims that ethnicity has no
existence apart from interethnic relations.
8 This is reflected in the presence of a red 16-spoke wheel in the middle of the Romani national flag,
copied directly from the Indian national flag.
9 However intrigued the [Maaza] Bedouins [of Egypt] are with descriptions of foreign lands, these
places have little appeal to them, and some are repulsive. An exception is Arabia, the original homeland
of the Maaza (Hobbs 1989: 73).
10 Hobbs (1989: 87) notes that the social and political histories of the Maaza are recorded in place
names, [i.e.,] the tomb of the early Maaza raiding leader Ruwayshid. Another example is the Gattaar
mountain, where one of the founding fathers of the Egyptian Khushmaan [clan member], Sulimaan
Awaad Raadhi, spent his life after coming from Arabia (Hobbs 1989, 77). These sites are clear examples
of what Smith (1998) calls ethnoscapes.
11 Both Bamshad et al. (2001) and Cordaux et al. (2004) show stronger genetic links between high castes
in both North and South India to central Asians than to tribal groups in their own areas.
12 The Normans, for instance, assimilated completely within English society within two centuries
(Hastings 1997, 44). In fact, one could argue that both groups have so successfully indigenized
themselves that they are emblematic of their respective nations. In Britain one need merely note the
popular title of Englands Rose bestowed upon the aristocrat Princess Diana, while in India the highest
caste, the Brahmins, are the priests in the religion most central to Indian identity, namely Hinduism.
13 For one example of how caste conflict plays out in contemporary South India, see Harriss (2002).
There remains, however, more research to be done into the differences between conflict generated
between conceptually autonomous groups and non-conceptually autonomous groups.
14 To make this point in more down-to-earth terms, one need merely question the concept of White
Pride put forth by white supremacists: what, exactly, is there to be proud about being white, other than
not being black? As we shall see in a moment, the opposite case of Black Pride is more complex.
15 Similarly, Malik (1996: 174-177) notes, among sociologists and anthropologists there is a general
sense that if race describes differences created by imputed biological distinction, ethnicity refers to
differences with regards to cultural distinctions.
16 Blumenbach also altered Linnaeus taxonomy by substituting Mongoloid for Asian and Ethiopian for
African and adding the category of Malay for the native inhabitants of Australia and the Pacific Islands
(Gould 1994).
17 In an autobiography of her childhood in what was then Rhodesia, Fuller (2003: 8-9) noted with
bemusement her mothers professed love for Scotland, as her home even though she had only set foot
there as a tourist.
18 Interestingly, white supremacists like David Duke prefer the phrase European-American to
Caucasian, perhaps in an effort to legitimize white nationalism; cf.
www.duke.org
www.duke.org
or
http://www.eaif.org/.
http://www.eaif.org/.
Perhaps indicative of the white supremacist use of the phrase, Google records only 1.2m hits for
European-American, fewer than for Irish-American (1.5m), Arab-American (1.6m), Chinese-
American (1.6m), Japanese-American (1.6m), German-American (2.0m), Afro- American (2.1m),
Italian-American (2.7m), Mexican-American (2.8m), Asian-American (11.7m) and African-
American (89.7m).
19 It is interesting to note that Negro, unlike African-American, does not have any geographical
connotations (Keita and Kittles 1997, 535).
20 Indeed, such a strategy might even decrease a politicians share of the white vote inasmuch as one
can speak of such a thing: see for instance the recent animosity towards the French, German and Spanish
for not fully supporting the US in its invasion of Iraq.
21 Oprah Winfrey has claimed, exceptionally and to loud scepticism in both the US and Africa, that she is
of Zulu descent (Munnion 2005).
22 In this sense one could see Alex Haleys efforts to trace his ancestry back to Africa in Roots as
exceptional rather than stereotypical. For current attempts by black Americans at tracing back their roots
see Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (2001).
23 Caselli and Coleman (2002: 6) rather argue that assimilation among non-Anglo white immigrants to
the US has taken place when newcomers learn the language well enough that they [can] disguise their
ancestry.
24 Wrigley (1996: 218-219) notes that this thorough absorption of the Buddu natives took place within
four generations at the most.
25 While many scholars still speak of the Somalis as a singular ethnic group or nation, it is increasingly
evident that citizens of the unrecognized country of Somaliland whose borders corresponde with the
former borders of British Somaliland see themselves as a separate nation from other Somalis. Cf.
Jacquin-Berdal (2002: 190).
Ethnicity and it's Social Construct

Abstract
There has been little serious work to integrate the constructionist approach and the cognitive/evolutionary
approach in the domain of race, although many researchers have paid lip service to this project. We
believe that any satisfactory account of human beings racialist cognition has to integrate both
approaches. In this paper, we propose to move toward this integration. We present an evolutionary
hypothesis that rests on a distinction between three kinds of groupskin-based groups, small scale
coalitions, and ethnies. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we propose that ethnies have raised
specific evolutionary challenges that were solved by an evolved cognitive system. We suggest that the
concept of race is a byproduct of this mechanism. We argue that recent theories of cultural transmission
are our best hope for integrating social constructionists and cognitive/evolutionary theorists insights.

1. Introduction.
A dominant view about races today is the so called social constructionist view. Social constructionists
propose that the concept of racei.e., the belief that a classification based on skin color and other skin-
deep properties like body shape or hair style maps onto meaningful, important biological kindsis a
pseudo-biological concept that has been used to justify and rationalize the unequal treatment of groups of
people by others.1
Social constructionism became prevalent mainly because from the 1970s on, it has been widely
recognized that the biological concept of subspecies, that is, of populations of conspecifics that are
genetically and morpho- logically different from each other, could not be applied to humans. For one
thing, it has been shown that there is more genetic variability within human racial groups than between
them (Lewontin 1972; Brown and Armelagos 2001).
Moreover, assigning an individual to a race does not buy the inferential power you are usually warranted
to expect from a biological kind term.2 Finally, classifications based on different phenotypic traits (skin
color, body shape, hair, etc.) usually cross-cut each other (Brown and Armelagos 2001). Thus, the racialist
tenet that skin color and other skin-deep properties pick up different biological groups has been assumed
to be false.
Biology has thus fuelled the recent racial skepticism of social constructionists, that is, the view that races
do not exist.3 But social constructionists about race are not mere skeptics. They usually underscore the
instability and diversity of human beings concepts of races. For instance, Omi and Winant note that an
effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and decentered complex of social meanings
constantly being transformed by political struggle (2002, 123; see also Root 2000). Others suggest that
the notion is a modern invention, rooted in the eighteenthcentury taxonomies of Linnaeus and
Blumenbach. For them, there were times or places where people did not have any concept of race (Banton
1970).
The constructionist contribution to the understanding of racialism is important (for a critical review, see
Machery and Faucher 2005). It rightly suggests that human beings concepts of race do not occur in a
social vacuum: social environments are important to explain the content of our concepts of race. It also
correctly emphasizes the diversity of human beings concepts of race across cultures. Any account of
racialism has to be consistent with these facts. However, it is not without difficulties either. First, it does
not explain why many cultures have developed some concept of race and some classification based on
phenotypic features. Moreover, the social constructionist approach does not explain the commonalities
between the culture-specific concepts of race, e.g., the concepts of race in contemporary North America,
in nineteenth-century France, in Germany
during the Nazi era, and so on. Some aspects of the folk concepts of race vary little across cultures
(Hirschfeld 1996), while others vary much more. This should be explained.
In recent years, there has been a growing literature in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary
anthropology about racialism. Although no consensus has yet emerged, several proposals have recently
attempted to describe the underlying cognitive mechanisms responsible for the production of racial
concepts (e.g., Hirschfeld 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001; Gil- White 1999, 2001a, 2001b; Kurzban et al. 2001;
Cosmides et al. 2003; Machery and Faucher 2005). Researchers agree that racialism has not been selected
for: it is a byproduct of an evolved cognitive system, which was selected for another function. However,
they disagree on the nature of this system.
The cognitive and evolutionary approach to racialism is a needed supplement to the social constructionist
approach. The recurrence of racial classification across cultures and the commonalities between them
suggest that racial classifications are the product of some universal psychological disposition. However,
evolutionary theorists face a challenge that is symmetric to the challenge faced by social constructionists.
Since they posit a species-typical cognitive system to explain racial categorization, they have a hard time
explaining the cultural diversity of the concepts of race.
It has to be shown that the claim that a species-specific human cognitive system underlies racialism is
consistent with the evidence that racial concepts vary across cultures and times and are influenced by
culture-specific beliefs.4
Thus, we are confronted with two explanatory approaches to racial categorization that are symmetrically
incomplete. This point has been recognized by several evolutionary-minded researchers. Indeed, they
have paid lip service to the project of integrating the constructionist approach and the
cognitive/evolutionary approach in the domain of race (e.g., Hirschfeld 1996). However, in the domain of
race, few have walked their talk.
In this paper, we propose that the theory of cultural evolution is the proper framework for integrating both
approaches to racialism. In line with the social constructionists emphasis on the social environment, we
claim that the concept of racehow race membership is thought ofis culturally transmitted: one
acquires the concept of race from ones social environment. However, we insist that social learning is
determined by several factors. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we emphasize particularly the
importance of an evolved, canalized disposition to think about ethnies in a biological way. We argue that
our proposal accounts for the similarities between culture-specific concepts of race as well as for their
differences.
Our strategy is the following. In Section 2, we distinguish three kinds of groups, kin-based groups, small-
scale coalitions, and ethnies. Following Gil-White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we propose that ethnies have
raised specific evolutionary challenges that were solved by an evolved cognitive system. The concept of
race is shaped by this mechanism. We thereby meet the challenge faced by the social constructionist view:
we account for the similarities between concepts of race. In Section 3, we build on Boyd and Richersons
theory of cultural evolution (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2004) in order to integrate
social constructionists insights and cognitive/evolutionary theorists insights.We thereby meet the
challenge faced by the cognitive/evolutionary approach: we account for the differences between concepts
of race.

2. Ethnic Cognition and Racialism.

2.1. The Ethnic Cognition Hypothesis.

There is now a large body of evidence that small coalitions were not the only important social groups
during human evolution (Bettinger 1991, 203205; Rodseth et al. 1991; Richerson and Boyd 1998, 1999,
2001; Richerson et al. 2003, 369). Besides their kin-based groups and small coalitional groups, our
ancestors also belonged to larger groups, often called tribes or ethnies.
Ethnies are large groupsfrom 500 members to some thousands. They are divided into smaller units,
sometimes called bands. An essential property of ethnies is that they are cultural units. The members of
a given ethnie share many culturally transmitted beliefs, preferences, and norms, including norms of
cooperation, and these beliefs, preferences, and norms tend to differ from those that prevail in other
ethnies (Richerson and Boyd 1998, 1999). Finally, ethnies are characterized by a normative endogamy.
The Nuer in Sudan and the Iroquois in North America illustrate this form of social organization. Ethnies
are also specifically human. There are clear traces of ethnies in the archaeological record 50,000 years
ago (Klein 1999) and ethnies may have existed earlier (but see Knauft 1991, 392).5
We follow Boyd, Richerson, and colleagues in hypothesizing that this form of social organization has
created sui generis adaptive pressures. According to them, besides the cognitive mechanisms that evolved
to deal with kin and small-scale coalitions, Mother Nature has endowed us with
More generally, it is plausible that this social organization put enough selective pressures on humans that
we evolved a cognitive system dedicated to various dimensions of the ethnic life. With Gil-White, we
would like to suggest that this is the key for understanding racialist cognition.

2.2. An Adaptive Scenario: Ethnic Cognition and the Exaptation of Human Folk Biology.
Gil-White has suggested the following adaptive hypothesis (Gil-White 1999, 2001a, 2001b).6 Humans
are disposed by evolutionary design to perceive ethnies as biological species. They apply their evolved
folk biology to them. Our folk biology contains the innate knowledge about biological species and the
reasoning heuristics that are generally applied to them (Atran 1990; Medin and Atran 1999). Essentialism,
that is, the belief that categories are defined by essences, is supposed to be an important element of this
system (Atran 1990; Gil- White 2001a; but see Machery and Faucher 2005). We are thus disposed to
believe that ethnic membership is an essential property, which is transmitted at birth from ones parents
and which determines peoples behavior.
During human evolution, folk biology was applied to ethnies, because ethnies and species shared several
important characteristics (Gil-White 2001a, 518519). Ethnies are characterized by clusters of stable,
culturally transmitted behavioral norms, and different ethnies have often different norms. Thus, like
conspecifics, coethnics behave similarly, and members of different ethnies behave differently. Besides,
when members of two different ethnies interact, the interactions whose success requires shared behavioral
norms often remain fruitless. Humans are sensitive to such costs. Hence, norm boundaries tended to
coincide with many social interactions.
This is particularly true of mating. Finally, ethnies are often distinguished by external markers (McElreath
et al. 2001). Our ancestors tended to broadcast their ethnic membership and to pay attention to these
signals (dress, body marks, etc.). Parents and children usually display the same markers. To summarize,
ethnies share the following characteristics with species: coethnics have a distinctive morphology (dress
etc.), coethnics behave in a characteristic way, ethnic membership is based on descent, and reproduction
is endogamous. Gil-Whites hypothesis (2001a, 518, 530532) is that our folk biology has been exapted
to be applied to ethnies: that is, thinking biologically about ethnies was adaptive and was selected for.
This is good epistemology

2.3. Racialism: The Misfiring of Our Ethnic Cognitive System.

According to this hypothesis, races trigger by mistake our folk biology-based ethnic cognitive system.
That is, people tend to assume erroneously that humans with a given skin color or a given phenotype form
an ethnie. The reason is that the physical properties that define race membership are similar to ethnic
markers. And, like ethnic markers, they are shared by parents and children. Thus, skin color, body type,
and other properties are taken to be ethnic markers.8
2.4. The Ethnic Cognitive System.
The evolutionary importance of ethnies suggests that Mother Nature has predisposed us to pay attention
to peoples ethnic membership (Gil-White 2001a; McElreath et al. 2001).
Hence, ethnic or racial membership should be a primitive of our encoding of peoples characteristics
(with gender and age, for example). This is supported by the literature about race categorization.
Psychologists generally agree that race is automatically encoded by adults (but see Kurzban et al. 2001).
Notice that this does not imply that humans are always paying attention to ethnic or racial membership to
the same degree. Ethnicitys or races salience may vary from context to context.
Given that ethnic information may be important early in life, for example to determine which individuals
to imitate during childhood or youth, ethnic and racial encoding should be active quite early in life.
Hirschfeld (1996) shows indeed that young children spontaneously encode race information (particularly,
when it is presented verbally). In order to determine peoples ethnic membership, one has to pay attention
to the physical cues that signal it, i.e., to ethnic markers. Thus, we should be disposed to pay attention to
ethnic markers. Gil-White
We should also be endowed by design with a domain-specific mechanism to learn concepts of ethnies,
that is, beliefs about ethnic markers, behaviors, etc., of members of specific ethnies. Clearly, we are not
predisposed to entertain any specific ethnic concept, say NUER. But we may be predisposed to learn
ethnic concepts in a specific way. Lets call the hypothetical domain-specific mechanism through which
we learn concepts of ethnies the ethnic concepts acquisition device (ECAD).
Gil-Whites evolutionary argument suggests that the ECAD is based on our folk biology. Now, concepts
that are formed by a domain-specific cognitive system have a default content. For, when these concepts
are formed, the domain-specific system fills them in with default beliefs. This idea has been applied to
religious concepts by Pascal Boyer. No culture has developed a concept of a god that exists only on
Sunday (Boyer 2001).
Boyer suggests that the cognitive systems that create religious concepts provide the default assumption
that, like any other individual, gods exist continuously. The same is plausibly true of our ethnic and racial
concepts. That is, when our ethnic cognitive system forms an ethnic or a racial concept, it fills it in with
some default assumptions. Hence, by default, ethnic and racial concepts should be similar to animal
species concepts.
This idea is supported by Hirschfelds developmental studies and by Gil- Whites cross-cultural data.
From an early age on, and in several cultures, children reason about ethnies and races in a biological
manner. That is, in several respects, they reason about ethnies and races as if they were species. For
instance, they believe that some racial properties are transmitted at birth and constant over life. We call
this disposition biologism. Hirschfelds studies cast some light on the ECAD (Hirschfeld 1996).
Particularly, they show that this system is on very early. Moreover, its inputs are not necessarily, and
maybe not primarily, visual. Linguistic inputs, for example names, say Nuer, may be sufficient to
acquire an ethnic concept. McElreath et al.s and Gil-Whites arguments about the importance of ethnic
markers suggest that visual cues, for example bodily and behavioral characteristics, are likely to trigger
the ECAD as well. Other perceptual cues, for example auditory cues like a foreign language or a specific
accent, may also be important.

3. Culture and Evolved Cognition: Toward an Integrated Account of Racialism.

3.1. Cultural Transmission.

Modern theories of cultural transmission provide the proper framework for integrating the two main
traditions in the study of racialism (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd2004; Sperber 1996).
The core idea is that many beliefs, preferences, reasoning patterns are socially learned: like in traditional
social learning theory, they are acquired from ones social environmentfrom ones cultural parents.
However, Boyd, Richerson, and their colleagues emphasize that several forces determine which
information is culturally transmitted (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Richerson and Boyd 2004; Henrich and
McElreath 2003). In other words, cultural transmission is shaped by several biases. Two kinds of biases
can be distinguished, the content biases and the context biases (Henrich and McElreath 2003). The
context biases favor the acquisition of beliefs, concepts, etc., from specific cultural parents.
For example, in some situations, cultural transmission is conformist: people tend to acquire the beliefs,
etc., that are held by most of their cultural parents (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and Boyd 1998).
In other situations, cultural transmission is prestige-dependent (Henrich and Gil-White 2001): people
acquire the cultural variants that are held by prestigious individuals. The content biases correspond to the
psychological systems that favor the transmission of specific beliefs, etc., instead of others (attractor in
Sperbers terminology, cognitive track in Boyers). Beliefs, etc., that fit with these psychological
systems are easily memorized and easily applied by cultural learners; those that do not fit with them tend
to be forgotten.

3.2. How Children Learn Racial Concepts?

We propose that concepts of race are culturally transmitted. This is in line with social constructionists
reliance on traditional theories of social learning, that is, with the idea that the concept of race is acquired
fromones social environment.
This explains why within a culture, at a time, people tend to have the same concept of race. This also
explains why different cultures at different times have endorsed different concepts. We add to social
learning theory the idea that the two context biases mentioned above, namely, conformism and prestige-
dependent imitation, affect the transmission of the concept of race. Thus, the acquisition of the concept of
race by a cultural learner depends on whether successful individuals or most cultural parents classify
people into races.
However, whereas social learning theory suggests that the mind has no disposition to think about races in
a particular way, we propose that human ethnic cognition creates a cognitive track for the cultural
transmission of racial concepts. That is, it favors the acquisition of concepts of race that are consistent
with the default assumptions provided by our folk biology. Concepts of race that are inconsistent with
these assumptions are less easily memorized. Thus, we propose that by default, humans tend to think
biologically about groups of individuals that share superficial properties like skin color or body shape.
This provides a framework for integrating most theses and pieces of evidence of the social constructionist
approach and of the evolutionary/ cognitive approach to racialism. Importantly, this is a mere framework,
not a psychological hypothesis. Within this framework, several detailed hypotheses can be formulated.
For instance, one could propose that children spontaneously classify people into races (Hirschfeld 1996).
Skin color (or other physical properties) or race names could trigger the ethnic concepts acquisition
device.
As a result, concepts of specific races would be created and would refer to the classes of individuals that
have these physical properties or are referred to by these names. These classes would be assimilated to
ethnies and default beliefs, based on childrens folk biology, would be assumed to be true of them. This
hypothesis fits well with the recurrence of racialism across cultures. Instead, one could argue that children
do not classify spontaneously people into races. They are primed to draw racial distinctions when their
cultural parents use racial classifications. The ECAD would then influence the way children think about
races, selecting for biological concepts of race. Childrens concept of race and their concepts of specific
races would also be influenced by the way cultural parents think of races.
The racial distinctions that are made by children can be consistent or inconsistent with the distinctions
that are made by cultural parents. Detailed empirical hypotheses have to specify what happens when the
ECAD, conformism, and prestige-dependency pulls in different directions. For instance, if children
spontaneously classify people into races, one wants to know what happens when their classification is
inconsistent with the classification that is made by their cultural parents. Detailed empirical hypotheses
and new empirical evidence, maybe based on longitudinal studies, are needed.

3.3. Solving the Integration Challenge.

The framework presented above integrates the social constructionist approach and the
evolutionary/cognitive approach. The concept of race is socially learned, as social constructionists would
have it. However, our evolved ethnic cognition creates a psychological bias in favor of biological
concepts of race. Moreover, this framework explains the most striking aspects of racialism.
Since the cultural transmission of the concept of race is assumed to be primed by the ethnic cognitive
system, the cross-cultural recurrence of racialism is to be expected. Moreover, the fact that races tend to
be thought of biologically is thereby explained.
Social constructionists have rightly emphasized those aspects of racialism that vary across cultures and
times. The framework proposed here predicts which aspects vary across cultures and how they vary.
WhereasSOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND RACE 1217 biologism should tend to be cross-cultural,
aspects of our concepts of race that are not based on the evolved components of our folk biology should
vary across cultures.
Conformism and prestige-dependent imitation are important to explain cultural variation. Concepts of
race that are held by prestigious cultural parents or by most parents should be easily culturally
transmitted. More historical work is needed to find out whether some conceptualization of race
membership has spread within a population because of the influence of some prestigious individuals.
Finally, we propose that acquired, culture-specific content biases favor some concepts of race over others.
Not all content biases are innate. Some are culturally acquired. Concepts of race that are consistent with
these culture-specific folk theories may be transmitted more easily than other concepts of race within the
corresponding cultures. Since racial concepts are filled in with default values derived from folk biology,
the concept of race within a given culture should be strongly influenced by the culture specific aspects of
peoples folk biology in that culture. Evidence suggests that the concept of race is influenced by culture-
specific theories of contamination and by the culture-specific aspects of folk biology (Hirschfeld 1996,
Chapter 2). More historical and ethnographic work is needed to determine whether across cultures,
racialism tends to rely on culturespecific folk theories.

4. Conclusion.
Social constructionists and evolutionary-minded social scientists avoid interacting with each others. This
is detrimental and unjustified. For, cognition is shaped by culture and cultural transmission is an evolved
aspect of our mind.
Racialism, that is, the belief that groups of human beings made on the basis of skin color (etc.) map onto
biological kinds, illustrates this point. Any good theory of racialism has to take into account the main
points of the social constructionist approach, including the fact that peoples concepts of race vary across
cultures. However, without a cognitive cum evolutionary background, the social constructionist approach
is incomplete.
Our position aims at accounting for the similarities and for the differences between culture-specific
concepts of race. Instead of simply illustrating this diversity, as constructionists do, and instead of
neglecting it, as many evolutionary/cognitive scientists do, we try to explain it. Concepts of race are
culturally transmitted. The cultural transmission of these concepts is shaped by several biases. It is biased
by conformism and prestigedependent imitation. These two biases are supplemented by an evolved ethnic
cognitive system that is misapplied to races. This system, the ethnic concepts acquisition device, results
from the exaptation of our folk biology. Together, these biases determine whether skin color and other
superficial properties are treated as ethnic markers.
The study of the interaction between culture and our evolved cognition is still in its infancy. We are
conscious that our approach is just a small step. But, we believe that the theory of cultural transmission is
currently our best hope for unifying the social sciences.
notes:

1. Notice the following distinction. Racialism is the idea that classifications made on the basis of some
visible physical features (skin color, height, hair, etc.) have a biological reality. It must be distinguished
from racism that adds value judgments (mostly negative, but sometimes positive) to racialism. In this
paper, we focus on racialism.
2. But see the discussion in Nature Genetics, Supplement, November 2004. Moreover, some inferential
power comes from the fact that the concept of race continues to play a fundamental role in structuring
and representing the social world (Omi andWinant 2002, 124).
3. We use the term race to refer to the groups that are identified as races by some society. Although there
are no racesmeaning that the groups that are identified by a set of phenotypic properties, like skin color
and hair appearance, have no biological realitythere are groups that are identified as races, e.g., blacks,
whites, and Hispanics in the United States of America or Aryans and Celts in Germany at the end of the
nineteenth century.
4. The same point can be made about other aspects of our cognition (e.g., Sperber 1996; Faucher 1999;
Mallon and Stich 2000; Boyer 2001).
5. We are aware that the notion of ethnie is quite controversial in some anthropological circles. For the
sake of space, we do not discuss the standard objections to this notion.specific cognitive mechanisms
whose function is to commit us to respect the norms of our own ethnie (particularly, the group-beneficial
norms).
6. Machery and Faucher (2005) discuss other evolutionary/cognitive hypotheses.(though certainly bad
science), for it promotes inductive generalizations on the basis of limited contacts. Since members of a
given ethnie tend to behave similarly because they share the same norms, such generalizations tend to be
true. More important, a biological view of the ethnic world plausibly reduces the frequency of fruitless
interactions across ethnic boundaries, particularly mating across ethnic boundaries.7 It may underlie a
preference for interactions with coethnics and a reluctance to interact with members of other ethnies.
7. Of course, migrations, cultural influences, and economic exchanges occur between ethnies. However,
exchanges across ethnic boundaries differ markedly from exchanges between coethnics.
8. Although we endorse most of Gil-Whites ideas, we disagree with him on several points (Machery and
Faucher 2005). Particularly, we believe that we have no evolved disposition to entertain most of our folk
biological beliefs.(2001a, 548549) also suggests that children are predisposed to pay attention to specific
types of ethnic markers, like clothes or body marks.
Ethnicity and Cultural politics

Keywords: Ethnicity, Culture, Violence, Democracy, Patronage

Abstract
Since the publication of Donald Horowitzs Ethnic Groups in Conflict, there has been an increasing
convergence on the classification of ethnic identities among comparative political scientists. But there is
no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification and the definitions that individual
scholars propose do not match their classifications.
This article proposes a definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in
comparative political science to a greater degree than the alternatives. According to this definition,
ethnic identities are a subset of identity categories in which membership is determined by attributes
associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described in the article simply as descent-
based attributes). I argue, on the basis of the definition proposed here, that ethnicity either does not
matter, or has not been shown to matter, in explaining most outcomes to which it has been causally linked
by comparative political scientists, including violence, democratic stability and patronage.

WHAT IS ETHNIC IDENTITY AND DOES IT MATTER?

What is ethnic identity? Since the publication of Donald Horowitzs Ethnic Groups in Conflict in 1985,
there has been a convergence among comparative political scientists on which identities we classify as
ethnic. For Horowitz, ethnicity is an umbrella concept that easily embraces groups differentiated by
color, language, and religion; it covers tribes, races, nationalities, and castes. (Horowitz 1985, 53).
Much of the recent theoretical literature on ethnic politics explicitly follows this umbrella classification
(e.g. Varshney 2001, Chandra 2004, Wilkinson 2004, Htun 2004, Posner 2005).
Even more importantly, the four principal datasets on ethnic groups that constitute the foundation for
cross-national empirical studies of the effect of ethnic identity in comparative politics the Atlas Narodov
Mira (Miklukho-Maklai Ethnological Institute 1964), a dataset on ethnic groups in 190 countries
published by Alesina et al in 2003 (Alesina et al 2003), a comparable count of ethnic groups in 160
countries published by James Fearon in the same year (Fearon 2003) and the Minorities at Risk (MAR)
project (http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/) -- also by and large employ this classification. There
remain only some quibbles on the margin about whether castes should be excluded (e.g. Fearon 2003)
or retained (e.g. Atlas Narodov Mira 1964, Varshney 2001, Chandra 2004, Wilkinson 2004, Sambanis
2004, Htun 2004, Posner 2005) and whether region and clan should be included in the list .
But we do not have a definition which matches this classification. Many comparative political scientists
do not define the term before using it. And those that do often classify identities as ethnic even when they
do not correspond to their own definitions. Horowitz, for instance, counts Hindus and Muslims in India,
Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, and Creoles and Indians in Guyana and Trinidad as ethnic categories
even though they do not possess his primary defining characteristic of a myth of common ancestry
(Horowitz 1985). Fearon counts Hindi-speakers as an ethnic group even though individuals who either
speak Hindi or have Hindi as their mother tongue do not meet his definitional criterion of having a
distinct history as a group or a shared culture valued by the majority of members (Fearon 2003). And
Chandra often counts categories based on region as ethnic, even though it is not clear whether these
groups meet her definition of ethnic groups as ascriptive groups (Chandra 2004, Chandra 2005).
Why is a definition necessary if we are approaching a consensus on classification? Because a definition
tells us how to evaluate and build theories about ethnic identity and concepts based on ethnic identity,
such as ethnic diversity, ethnic riots, ethnic parties, ethnic voting and so on as an independent variable.
We now have a large body of work in comparative political science that argues that ethnicity matters
for violence, for democratic stability, for institutional design, for economic growth, for individual well-
being and so on and makes general, cross-country predictions about its effects (e.g. Horowitz 1985,
Rabushka and Shepsle 1972, Przeworski et al 2000, Posen 1993, Petersen 2002, Geertz 1973, Dahl 1971,
Bates 1974, Landa 1994, Caselli and Coleman 2001, Fearon 1999, Chua 2003, Cox 1997, Kaufmann
1996, Reilly 2001, Toft 2003).
Claims that tell us why these variables matter for some outcome are always based on the assumption that
ethnic identities have particular properties that explain the outcome. If we are to assess these claims and
build new ones, we need some basis on which to judge which properties can reasonably be associated
with ethnic identities. A definition provides an analytical basis for making this judgment.
This article proposes a definition of the term ethnic identity which captures the conventional
classification to a greater degree than previous definitions. According to this definition, ethnic identities
are a subset of identity categories in which eligibility for membership is determined by attributes
associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described in the article simply as descent-
based attributes). This definition differs from previous ones in two ways.
First, it introduces a distinction between categories of membership and the attributes that qualify
individuals for membership in that category. The two concepts have been conflated in previous work, but
making a consistent distinction between them has large consequences for how we think about ethnic
identity. Second, it empties the definition of characteristics such as a common culture, a common history,
a common territory and a common language, which are only sometimes associated with the identities that
we think of as ethnic and thus cannot be thought of as defining characteristics.
My approach to building this definition is to identify the principles underlying the classification of the
term ethnic identity in the specialized community of comparative political scientists not to define
ethnicity according to some objective criteria, or to capture broader social scientific usage or everyday
usage. The virtue of this approach lies in the opportunities it provides for cumulation of research on
ethnic identity as an independent variable.
In order to theorize about the effect of ethnic identity in a cumulative fashion, we must evaluate the
previous body of work in comparative political science that argues that ethnicity matters, retain the
insights that survive an evaluation and discard those that do not. And in order to evaluate whether and
how ethnicity matters in the way these works propose, we need a definition that tells us what the
properties of ethnic identities, as classified by this body of work, are. It would be an added advantage if
this definition also captured the way in which the term is understood among other communities but that is
not my main concern.
I show here that many of the properties commonly associated with ethnic identities in our explanatory
theories do not characterize the identities that we classify as ethnic in general, although they may well
apply to particular subsets of these identities. These properties include common ancestry, a common myth
of ancestry, a common language, a common culture, and a common homeland.
Based on the definition proposed here, I also identify two properties that are indeed intrinsic to ethnic
identities, on average: constrained change and visibility. By the property of constrained change, I
mean that while an individuals ethnic identities do change in the short term, the pattern of change and the
mechanisms driving it are constrained by the underlying set of attributes. By the property of visibility, I
mean that some information about an individuals ethnic identity categories and the categories to which
she does not belong -- can be obtained through superficial observation. But these two properties are not
uniquely associated with ethnic identities -- they characterize all identity categories in which membership
is determined by descent-based attributes. And they are only associated with descent-based identity
categories on average. Particular descent-based identities may well resemble particular non-descent-
based identities in particular contexts.
This forces us to conclude that ethnic identity and concepts related to ethnic identity such as ethnic
diversity, ethnic riots, ethnic parties, ethnic violence, ethnic conflict and so on either do not matter or
have not been shown to matter by most previous theoretical work on ethnic identity as an independent
variable. Only a small subset of our previous claims about why and how ethnic identity matters rely on
properties that have been shown to be intrinsic to ethnic identities.
In most instances, the mechanisms driving our explanatory theories about the effect of ethnic identity
assume properties such as fixedness of identity, cultural homogeneity, and a shared history that are not
associated with ethnic identities even as classified by this body of work. The cause of the outcome they
seek to explain, thus, must be some other variables that act independently or in interaction with ethnic
identity. Thus, these theories must either be reformulated by taking into account the role of one or more
omitted variables or read as theories that are not about the effect of ethnic identities at all.
As we seen, then, defining the concept of ethnic identity in a way that accords with the conventional
classification in comparative political science is an enterprise distinct from defending or perpetuating the
use of the concept in our explanatory theories. Rather, it provides a basis on which to question the
findings of previous theories and the continued use of the concept. But if we discard the findings of
previous theories or discontinue the use of the concept, we must have a clear idea of what we are rejecting
and why and what to replace it with. Thus, just as we need a definition of ethnic identity to defend the
use of the concept, we need a definition of ethnic identity to justify why it should be discarded.
Section 1 elaborates on the definition proposed here. Section 2 situates this definition in the lineage of
past definitions, eliminating in the process some of the properties routinely associated with ethnic
identity. Section 3 identifies two of the properties that can indeed be taken to be intrinsic to ethnic identity
constrained change and visibility. Section 4 uses the discussion of the properties that can and
cannot be associated with ethnic identity to evaluate theories about how ethnicity matters.

1. Definition of Ethnic Identity

By identity, I mean any social category in which an individual is eligible to be a member. Ethnic
identity categories, I propose, are a subset of identity categories in which eligibility for membership is
determined by descent-based attributes.
By attributes that determine eligibility for membership I mean either those that qualify an individual for
membership in a category or those that signal such membership. By descent-based attributes, I mean
attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with descent. By attributes associated with
descent I mean attributes that are acquired genetically (e.g. skin colour, gender, hair type, eye colour,
height, and physical features), or through cultural and historical inheritance (e.g. the names, languages,
places of birth and origin of ones parents and ancestors), or acquired in the course of ones lifetime as
markers of such an inheritance (e.g. last name, or tribal markings). By attributes believed to be
associated with descent, I mean attributes around which a credible myth of association with descent has
been woven, whether or not such an association exists in fact. The definition thus includes both a
subjective and an objective element.
The set of identity categories in which membership is determined by descent-based attributes is large.
Ethnic identity categories are a subset of this larger set defined by the following restrictions: (1) They are
impersonal. (2)They constitute a section of a countrys population rather than the whole. (3) If one sibling
is eligible for membership in a category at any given place, then all other siblings would also be eligible
in that place. (4) The qualifying attributes for membership are restricted only to ones own genetically
transmitted features or to the language, religion, place of origin, tribe, region, caste, clan, nationality, or
race of ones parents and ancestors.
If some of the restrictions that constitute the subset of ethnic identities appear somewhat arbitrary, they
are. Why impose a rule that requires siblings to be equally eligible for membership before a category can
be called ethnic? Why allow this particular set of descent-based attributes and not others? I do not offer
analytical justifications for these restrictions here indeed, I argue later that there is not so far a good
reason to wall off ethnic identities from other types of descent-based identities. But my purpose here is
simply to identity those restrictions that we must impose in order to approximate the conventional
classification of ethnic identities. Once we have identified these features, we are in a position also to
recognize their arbitrariness and discard them where necessary.
Let me illustrate this definition using the fictionalized example of Helen, imagined from a mlange of
characters in Mary Waters study of West-Indian immigrants in New York (Waters 1999). Born in the
English-speaking island of Trinidad to parents of African origin, she has dark skin, dark brown eyes and
straight hair. She moved to the US after obtaining her high school diploma in Trinidad and works there as
a food service employee, earning $25,000 a year. She belongs to, and votes for, the Democratic party
there. She married a Haitian man in New York, and learned to speak French, which is now her primary
language of communication with her children and husband. Her brother Derek, who has lighter skin, light
brown eyes and otherwise similar features, remained behind in Trinidad. Their parents are well-educated
professionals who belong to the Peoples National Movement (PNM) in Trinidad. They are Presbyterians,
but Helen herself converted to Catholicism after meeting her husband.
According to the definition above, Helens ethnic identity categories include Black (in which the
qualifying attribute, according to current norms, is descent from African parents, signaled by attributes
such as the colour of her skin and physical features) and West-Indian (in which the qualifying attribute is
descent from parents who lived in Trinidad, signaled by her accent among other attributes). Both these
categories are determined by attributes associated, or believed to be associated with descent, and both of
which place Helen and Derek in the same categories. Her ethnic identity categories also include "African-
American" (in which membership is determined by the attribute of descent from African parents, skin
colour and physical features, in the US). Derek, because he stayed behind in Trinidad, cannot call himself
"African-American." But if he were to move to the US, he would be eligible for membership in this
category just like his sibling.
Helens ethnic identity categories according to this definition do not include several other identity
categories also based on descent-based attributes such as descendant of PNM supporters (excluded
because it is not based on either on physical features or on the language, religion, race, tribe, caste,
nationality and place of origin of her parents), people with dark brown eyes (excluded because, while it
is based on her physical features, it excludes her sibling, Derek), and female (also excluded because it
excludes Derek).
They also do not include Catholic (determined not either by descent or a myth of descent, but by
conversion, openly acknowledged, during her lifetime), French-speaker, (determined by a language
learned during her lifetime rather than her ancestral language), working class (determined by attributes
acquired during her lifetime such as her high school diploma and her job as a food service worker), and
Democrat (determined by her joining the Democratic party during her lifetime).
This definition captures most, but not all, of the categories that comparative political scientists include in
the list of ethnic categories. For instance, although that list includes all categories based on language, this
definition makes a distinction between categories in which the attribute for membership is an ancestral
language (or a language presented as an ancestral language), which it takes to be ethnic and categories
in which the attribute for membership is the language openly acquired during a lifetime, which it does not
take to be ethnic. It also provides a decision rule for whether and when to classify ambiguous categories
such as those based on clan and region as ethnic categories. A regional category is an ethnic category
according to this definition only if the membership rule takes into consideration the region of origin of an
individuals parents and ancestors, rather than the region in which an individual currently resides.

2. Comparison with Other Definitions

The most widely used definitions of ethnic identity proposed in previous literature include the following:

According to Max Weber ethnic groups are those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in
their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of
memories of colonization or migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group
formation; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists.
(Hutchinson and Smith 1996, 35).
According to Donald Horowitz: Ethnicity is based on a myth of collective ancestry, which usually
carries with it traits believed to be innate. Some notion of ascription, however diluted, and affinity
deriving from it are inseparable from the concept of ethnicity. (Horowitz 1985, 52).
According to Fearon and Laitin, an ethnic group is a group larger than a family for which membership
is reckoned primarily by descent, is conceptually autonomous, and has a conventionally recognized
natural history as a group. (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 20).
In a subsequent refinement, Fearon defines a prototypical ethnic group as one that has several of the
following features as possible: (1) Membership is reckoned primarily by descent (2) Members are
conscious of group membership (3) Members share distinguishing cultural features (4) These cultural
features are valued by a majority of members (5) The group has or remembers a homeland (6) The group
has a shared history as a group that is not wholly manufactured but has some basis in fact. (Fearon
2003, 7)
According to Anthony Smith, an ethnic group is, a named human population with myths of common
ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more elements of a common culture, a link with a homeland
and a sense of solidarity. (Hutchinson and Smith 1996, 6) Virtually all definitions in this inventory agree
that descent is somehow important in defining an ethnic group. The differences are over how precisely to
specify the role of descent, and whether and how other features should be combined with it in defining
ethnic groups. The role of descent is specified in four different ways: (1) a common ancestry (2) a myth of
common ancestry (3) a myth of a common place of origin and (4) a descent rule for membership. The
features combined with 7 descent include: (5) a common culture or language (6) a common history and
(7) conceptual autonomy.
Below, I consider whether any of these characteristics, separately considered, can adequately define
ethnic identity, and then evaluate definitions based on combinations of them. Taking examples of sets of
categories commonly classified by comparative political scientists as ethnic, I ask three questions of
any single defining characteristic: (1) Do the membership rules for inclusion in any single category within
a set require individuals to have this characteristic in common? (2) Do the membership rules for inclusion
in different ethnic categories within a comparable set require individuals to have different values on this
characteristic? (3) Do the sets of categories that comparative political scientists classify as ethnic uniquely
possess these characteristics?
An ideal definition should fulfill all three conditions. But the first two are most consequential for the
purpose of this project. A definition that covers most of the categories that we call ethnic allows us to
evaluate claims about how ethnic identity matters even if it includes some extra categories, since it
describes, at a minimum, the entire sample from which the inferences are drawn. But a definition that
excludes categories that we routinely classify as ethnic makes us less able to evaluate these claims
because it describes a truncated sample.

a. Common ancestry
A common ancestry definition must stipulate the nearness of the connection required to call a group an
ethnic group does common ancestry mean a shared ancestor one branch ago, a hundred branches ago, or
a million branches ago? Without such a stipulation, we can find a point of intersection in the family trees
of any two individuals by going back far enough, thus eliminating group differentiation altogether
(Cavalli-Sforza 2000). Lets stipulate that by common ancestry, we mean that individuals in the same
ethnic group share a more proximate ancestor than individuals in different ethnic groups. This minimally
reasonable stipulation excludes many of the categories that we classify as ethnic.
Take the categories Black and White. As a set of categories based on race, they fit the conventional
classification in comparative politics, and are explicitly counted as ethnic in at least Fearon 2003,
Alesina et al 2003, and the MAR dataset (which uses the term African-American rather than Black). We
know that many white Americans from former slave-owning families share proximate ancestors with
black Americans. Consider the example of E.C. Hart, classified as a Louisiana white, who had several
children with Cornelia, a woman of colour (Dominguez 1997, 26- 27).
Harts children with a white wife would have shared common ancestry at the most proximate level -- the
same father -- as his children with Cornelia. But the two sets of children were not classified in Louisiana
as members of the same group Harts children with Cornelia were then classified as colored and would
now be classified as Black, while his children with a white wife would then and now have been classified
as White. Thus, in classifying these categories as ethnic, comparative political scientists appear to be
following a rule that does not rely on common ancestry.
At the same time, individuals whose ties of ancestry that are far more distant, if they exist at all, such as
Irish-Americans and Lithuanian-Americans, or Jamaican and Nigerian immigrants, are classified as
members of the same ethnic categories. In the case of other categories, such as Hindus and Muslims in
India, Punjabis and Sindhis in Pakistan, Flemish and Walloon in Belgium, the question of common
ancestry does not even arise. We cannot, thus, take a common ancestry to be a defining feature of an
ethnic group indeed, individuals often belong to different ethnic groups despite the objective fact of
common ancestry.

b. A Myth of Common Ancestry

Let us turn now to a myth of common ancestry. There are certainly many cases of ethnic groups with a
myth of common ancestry, especially among tribes in Africa. For example, Yorubas in Yorubaland trace
their descent to the mythical ancestor Oduduwa, and Yorubas in different ancestral cities trace their
descent even more specifically to particular sons of Oduduwa (Laitin 1986, 110). Zulus in South Africa
claim direct descent from the patriarch Zulu who was born to a Nguni chief in the Congo basin area.
Kikuyus in Kenya claim descent from the single ancestor Gikuyu. Indeed, the great influence that
scholars who study Africa have had on the study of ethnicity may be one reason why a myth of ancestry is
so often proposed as a defining characteristic of ethnic groups.
But this criterion excludes a good number of groups that we also classify as ethnic, in Africa but also in
other regions, which do not claim an ancestor in common and do not differentiate themselves from others
in a comparable set on the basis of myths of ancestry. This is the case with Blacks and Whites in the U.S.,
Punjabis, Sindhis, and Pathans in Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims in India, Serbs and Croats in the former
Yugoslavia, Blacks, Whites, Coloreds and Indians in South Africa, among others, none of which claim an
ancestor in common (whether or not such an ancestor can be exists in fact), or differentiate themselves
from each other on the basis of myths of ancestry.
The irrelevance of a myth of common ancestry to membership rules in groups that we commonly think of
as ethnic can be illustrated especially clearly when we consider the process by which new ethnic groups
form as a result of fissures from old ones. Consider one example of this process of fission: Pakistani
Bangladeshi Punjabi Pakistani Sindhi Pathan Baluch
The anti-colonial struggle produced the initial ethnic category of Pakistani a An early fissure in this
category, itself a product of a fissure from the larger category Indian, between Bengali Muslims and
others, resulting in the separate state of Bangladesh for Bengali Muslims. Other new ethnic groups to
emerge within Pakistan included Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans and Baluchs. Myths of common ancestry
were not part of the process by which entrepreneurs and masses within these groups distinguished
themselves from each other. Yet these groups are routinely classified by comparative political scientists as
ethnic (e.g. Horowitz 1985, 281, Fearon 2003, Alesina et al 2003).
Perhaps, we might object, what is important here is not a myth of common ancestry but a myth of
common origin, with which it is often conflated. In the case of Blacks and Whites, for instance, we might
concede that while neither group is defined or distinguished by a common ancestor, both categories are
associated with distinct points of origin: Blacks in Africa and Whites mainly in Eurasia. Similarly, while
Serbs and Croats are not distinguished by common ancestry, they can be associated with distinct
territories in central and southern Europe. And in the example of group fission that I raised above, each
fissure is associated with a distinct territory. I will turn to this point next.
But first, let me relate the critique so far to the definition that I propose in this article. To argue that the
fact or myth of common ancestry does not capture the classification of ethnic groups used by comparative
political scientists does not imply that ancestry, real or imagined is not important quite the opposite.
According to the definition I propose in this article, ancestry, or a myth of ancestry, is critical to the
definition of an ethnic group, but common ancestry, or a myth of common ancestry is not.
For instance, the membership rule for classification of individuals as Black or White in the US separates
individuals who have, or are believed to have, some African blood from individuals who do not, or are not
believed to, have a drop of African blood. (Nobles 2000). This membership rule renders the categories
Black and White ethnic categories because it requires the possession of attributes based on ancestry (the
proportion of African blood) even though it does not require common ancestry. By the same logic, the
category Mohajir in Pakistan would be classified as ethnic because the qualifying attribute is descent, or
fabricated descent, from parents who immigrated from North India. The fact of common ancestry, even if
it were verifiable, is irrelevant to this membership rule.

c. A Common Region of Origin, or Myth of a Common Region of Origin.

Suppose, instead of common ancestry, we define an ethnic group as a collection of individuals with a
common point of origin, or a myth of common origin. We can certainly identify a subset of ethnic groups
that are associated with a common point of origin. But the perception of a common homeland,
presupposes the existence of a group, it does not define it. Given a group with this perception, we can
reason backward, proposing that definition of a region and choosing that time span that allows us to
discover a common region of origin. But we cannot, from the point of origin, predict ethnic group
boundaries.
To illustrate, lets return to the case of Blacks and Whites in the U.S. We might associate Blacks in the US
with a common origin in Africa, and Whites with a common origin in Eurasia. But these associations
depend on (1) the definition of region that we employ and (2) the time period we choose to start at.
Some definitions of region and choices of time period would reveal distinct common homelands for both
groups, while others would reveal a shared one.
If we categorize Africa and Eurasia as distinct regions, then we can associate Blacks and Whites with
distinct regions of origin and thus as distinct ethnic groups. But there is no analytical reason why we
should think of Africa and Eurasia as distinct regions instead of disaggregating further within both
categories. If we thought of regions in Africa, including present-day Liberia, Ghana, Cote dIvoire, Togo,
Benin and Cameroon, as distinct, then we should have not one but several ethnic groups corresponding to
origin in these regions. Similarly, if we thought of regions in Eurasia, including France, Ireland Germany,
Lithuania, Poland and Italy as distinct, then we would also have several ethnic groups. The identification
of Africa and Eurasia as regions of origin requires us first to define Blacks and Whites by some other
criteria other than region and then employ that definition of region of origin that includes members of
these pre-defined groups and excludes non-members.
Further, even if we take Africa and Eurasia to be distinct regions, arguing that Blacks and Whites
originate in these two regions makes sense only when based on an arbitrary choice of time period. We can
identify distinct points of origin for Blacks, for instance, if we start with the beginning of the slave trade
in the sixteenth century. But if we continued going backwards from this point, we would find a point at
which both Blacks and Whites originated in present-day Africa (Cavalli Sforza 2000). And if we went
forward, we could just as easily say that both groups share a common homeland the US.
The argument that ethnic groups are defined by association with a homeland, thus, holds up only when we
take the groups in question as given and go backward in time, stopping at exactly the point at which the
ancestors of the two groups are found in separate geographical regions. Serbs and Croats and Bosnian
Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, for instance are now associated with distinct homelands, in Serbia,
Croatia and Bosnia. But going back in time simply to the 9th century, we might have thought of all three
groups as possessing a common homeland in the South Slav regions, and so to be one, not three ethnic
groups. Punjabis, Sindhis, Pathans and Baluchs can be seen equally as belonging to distinct territories or
as belonging to the same one.
Similarly, Sinhalas and Tamils in Sri Lanka have distinct homelands only if we define northern Sri Lanka
as a distinct region, and the rest of Sri Lanka as another distinct region or, going even further back, we
define present-day Tamil Nadu as a distinct region and trace the migration of Tamils from there to Sri
Lanka. But why should we define the region in this way? Why not think of all of Sri Lanka, or the
northern tip of Sri Lanka and the southern tip of India as a single region, and thus think of both the
Sinhalese and Tamils as having a common homeland? To the extent that the definition of group comes
before the definition of a distinct region of origin, a fact or myth of a common region of origin cannot be
seen as a defining characteristic of ethnic groups.
Further, there are also many sets of ethnic groups, defined often by religion and race, in which the
distinctions between categories in the same set do not depend upon the fact or myth of a distinct
homeland. Some examples include Hindus and Muslims in India, Christians and Muslims in Nigeria,
Blanco, Pardo and Preto in Brazil and so on.

d. The Descent Rule

The descent rule, identified by Fearon and Laitin, is the most recent attempt to clarify the role of
descent in the definition of an ethnic group. As they point out: In deciding a persons ethnicity, we do not
need to know anything about his or her cultural habits, mother tongue, religion or beliefs of any sort.
Rather, we simply need to know about parentage. In ordinary usage, to ask What is her ethnicity? is to
ask about what ethnic group her parents (or other close ancestors) were assigned to All that is necessary
to be counted as a member of an ethnic group is to be able to have accepted the claim to be immediately
descended from other members of the group (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 13).
There is an important ambiguity in this definition: Should we define a group as ethnic if the criterion for
membership in the group is that the parents of all members were coded as members of the same group
whether or not that group was also considered ethnic? (hereafter Descent Rule 1). Or should we define a
group as ethnic if the criterion for membership in the group is that the parents of all members were also
coded as members of the same group and that group was also considered ethnic? (hereafter Descent Rule
2)
To illustrate the difference between the two versions, take the example of American Jews. According to
Fearon and Laitin, many Americans who cannot perform a Jewish ritual and dont speak Hebrew still
consider themselves and are considered by others as ethnically Jewish because that is the way their
parents and grandparents were coded. (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 14).
For the analyst to code American Jews as an ethnic group, is it sufficient simply that the criterion for
membership in the category American Jew is that ones parents were coded as Jewish whether or not Jews
were considered an ethnic group in the lifetime of ones parents (Descent Rule 1)? Or must the criterion
for membership in the category American Jew be that ones parents were also coded as ethnically Jewish,
requiring ones grandparents to also be coded as ethnically Jewish, which in turn would require ones
great-grandparents to be coded as ethnically Jewish and so on into infinity (Descent Rule 2).
Descent Rule 1 covers a larger set of cases that we commonly understand to be ethnic than the rules that
ethnic groups must have a myth of common ancestry or common origin. But it excludes several cases in
which individuals routinely consider themselves, and are considered as members, of a group that we
classify as ethnic even when their parents were not coded as members of this group.
Take for example the category Yoruba when it was invented in Nigeria in the nineteenth century. At this
time period, the parents of those who were classified as Yoruba were not themselves classified as Yoruba
for the reason that this category did not exist during their lifetimes. According to Descent Rule 1, then, the
category Yoruba in the nineteenth century would not be coded as ethnic. But the category Yoruba is
universally coded as an ethnic category by all comparative political scientists, without making a
distinction between time periods.
As another example, consider the category Backward Caste in India, which included as members
individuals who possessed a given set of last names and/or ancestral occupations. The category was
introduced by the Indian Central Government in 1990. Within a few years, 52% of the Indian population
classified itself and was classified as backward. Yet the parents of those who termed themselves
Backward Caste were not coded by themselves or by others as Backward Caste because, as in the
case of the first generation of Yorubas, this category did not exist during their lifetimes. A straightforward
application of Descent Rule 1 would lead us to code the first generation of Backward Castes as a non-
ethnic group to the extent that membership in the category Backward Caste did not depend upon ones
parents also being classified as backward caste.
As a third example, take the identity category Mohajir, routinely classified as an ethnic group in our
datasets (Fearon 2003, Alesina et al 2003). As noted above, this category refers to those who migrated to
Pakistan from north-India and their descendants. The parents of many of those classified as Mohajir were
not classified as Mohajir themselves. Applying Descent Rule 1 would lead us to code the first generation
of Mohajirs as a non-ethnic group, to the extent that membership in this category did not depend upon
being able to code ones parents as Mohajirs.
As a fourth example, take the case of the Creoles in Louisiana (Dominguez 1986): individuals were
initially classified as Creole in Louisiana if they were born in colonial Louisiana and descended from
French and or Spanish parents the parents were in many cases not themselves classified as Creole.
Again, Descent Rule 1 would lead us to code Creoles as a non-ethnic group, since you could be Creole
even if your parents were not coded as Creole.
Finally, take the case of categories such as Colored. Individuals were classified as Coloured in the
U.S. not only when their parents were also classified as Coloured, but also when one of their parents
was classified as White and another Black. (Nobles 2000, Dominguez 1986). An application of the
descent rule would treat Coloureds as non-ethnic categories. In a partial attempt to address such cases,
Fearon and Laitin note that in the case of mixed marriages, arbitrary (and political) conventions that may
vary from place to place are employed. (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 13). But while arbitrary conventions
might be employed about which group the children of mixed marriages should be assigned to black,
white, colored, mulatto, quadroon, mestizo, multiracial and so on), the conventional classification of all
such groups, at least within political science, is that they are ethnic. A definition of the term ethnic,
therefore, should include such cases.
The discussion above suggests that although Descent Rule 1 covers a large number of categories
classified as ethnic, it needs to be modified to take these additional cases into account. The definition here
is one such modification. According to this definition, Yorubas, Mohajirs, OBCs, Creoles and Coloreds
would all be ethnic categories because membership in each depended upon the possession of descent-
based attributes that refer to language, religion, tribe, race, caste, nationality, region or physical features:
descent from parents who belonged to a set of ancestral cities in the case of Yorubas, descent from parents
who were born in North India in the case of the Mohajirs, descent from parents who belonged to a set of
caste categories in the case of the OBCs, descent from parents who were born in Europe in the case of
Creoles, and descent from parents and ancestors who included both Whites and Blacks in the case of
Coloreds. This definition does not require that children share in the same descent-based categories as their
parents just that the attributes that qualify them for membership in ethnic categories are acquired
through descent.
Descent Rule 2 is circular: for a present day American Jew to be qualified as ethnic, every preceding
generation of his ancestors must also have been descended from ethnically American Jews, who
themselves should have been descended from ethnically American Jews and so on into infinity there is
no logical way to identify an original set of ethnic American Jewish parents. We could apply Descent
Rule 2 only if we arbitrarily stipulated that some set of identities were ethnic at some starting point, and
then coded other identities as ethnic in relation to this initial set. And this arbitrary application of Descent
Rule 2 would eliminate even more of the categories that are routinely classified as ethnic than Descent
Rule 1.

e. A common culture
Suppose we define a common culture broadly as a shared set of symbols, values, codes and norms
(consistent with Rogowski, cited in Wedeen 2002). Broad definitions of this sort do not specify which
symbols, values, codes and norms it is important to share. If we require group members to share all of
them, that would probably disqualify almost all the groups that we count as ethnic. Take the category
Yoruba. Those classified as Yoruba share some aspects of culture so defined for instance, a common
myth of origin, the worship of a common set of deities, and a common language. But there are also many
aspects of culture that they do not share. Yorubas who trace their origin to different ancestral cities in
Yorubaland, for instance, speak different dialects of the Yoruba language, have localized festivals, and
distinct myths of origin, institutions and rituals.
Christian and Muslim Yorubas not only have different modes of religious practice and observance but
different sets of value orientations (Laitin 1986). The symbols, codes and norms of those classified as
Black, similarly differ a great deal: there are actual or perceived differences between Jamaican blacks
and American blacks based on language, work ethic, and family values (Waters 1999), between blacks
from the north and the south, (Lemann 1992 ), between middle class and poor blacks and urban blacks
and rural blacks (Malcolm X 1964).
Consider, finally, the category Hindu. There are many symbols, codes and norms that those classified as
Hindu do not share, or do not believe they share: Adharmis, for instance, speak different languages, have
different rules for interdining and intermarriage, and practice different rituals than Satnamis the same
goes for Bengali-speaking Hindus and Malyalam speaking Hindus, for rich and poor Hindus, for urban
and rural Hindus, for Hindus who are academics and Hindus who are businessmen and so on.
Suppose we interpret the common culture definition to mean, not that individuals should share all or most
of the same values, symbols, codes and norms to qualify as members, but that they should share more
with each other than they do with out-group members. In other words, a pair of individuals from the same
ethnic group should have more in common than a pair of individuals from different ethnic groups.
Although it appears initially appealing, this condition is logically unsustainable in a world of cross-cutting
ethnic identities.
Lets return, first, to the case of the Yorubas. On one dimension of ethnic identity, we classify the Yorubas,
the Ibos and the Hausa-Fulanis as distinct ethnic groups. In order to satisfy this condition, we would need
to show that a pair of Yorubas might have more in common with each other than a pair consisting of a
Yoruba and an Ibo, or a pair consisting of a Yoruba and a Hausa-Fulani. But we know that there is at least
one other dimension of identity on the basis of which we can also organize the same population that of
religion which we also classify as an ethnic identity. On the dimension of religion, we classify the same
population as Christian and Muslim, and we also think of Christian and Muslim as ethnic identity
categories. If we define ethnic categories by a common culture, this means that any two Christians must
have more in common with each other than a Christian and a Muslim.
As long as these two dimensions cross-cut to some extent, this second claim contradicts the first. If all
Yorubas have more in common with other Yoruba than with Ibos and Hausa-Fulanis, for instance, then all
Christians cannot have more in common with each other than with Muslims, because there will be at least
some Christians and Muslims who are both Yoruba. The same logic also applies to our other running
examples Hindu and Muslim, and Black and White. Individuals in many groups that we classify as
ethnic have cross-cutting memberships in other ethnic groups. So, if we say that ethnic groups are defined
by a common culture as defined above, we would be ruling out an unreasonably large number of cases.
Consider a third conceptualization of culture. Suppose when we say that a group has a common culture,
we mean simply that they inhabit the same framework of meaning -- they use the same concepts, and can
understand each other, whether or not they subscribe to an identical set of symbols, values, codes and
norms, and whether or not they speak the same language. This is akin to Wedeens conceptualization of
culture as a semiotic practice (Wedeen 2002). Individuals who share a common culture, then, must, to
paraphrase Geertz, be able to agree that something is a wink rather than a twitch, whether or not they
wink at the same time and whether or not they value a wink in the same way.
Even with this very reasonable definition of culture, we cannot define ethnic groups as cultural groups.
Many ethnic groups are composed of still smaller groups with specialized vocabularies that are not
mutually intelligible. In New York in the 1960s, the street vocabulary of sections of Harlem was the
equivalent of Sanskrit for many middle class Blacks (Malcolm X 1964, 317). But both sections would
classify themselves, and be classified by others, as members of the same ethnic category Black.
And although a middle class Black may have been able to comprehend perfectly a white neighbour from
her own class and educational background, this shared conceptual vocabulary would hardly lead her, or
others, to classify these two individuals as part of the same ethnic group on that basis. Given some prior
basis for defining ethnic groups, we can then probe the extent to which they share common frameworks
of meaning. But if we were to define ethnic groups as groups that shared such common frameworks, we
would lose many of the groups that we routinely classify as ethnic.
Consider a fourth definition perhaps by a common culture, we mean not that group members share all
symbols, values, codes and norms, but that they share some key symbols, values, codes and norms that
distinguish them from members of other groups. This is a restatement of Barths claim that ethnic groups
are defined by the cultural markers that differentiate the boundaries between them, not by the cultural
stuff that is contained within these boundaries (Barth 1969).
But in many of the groups that we classify as ethnic, cultural markers need to be backed up by descent-
based attributes, or the myth of having descent-based attributes in order to delimit group boundaries.
Sikhs in Punjab can acquire the cultural markers associated with being Hindu, for instance, by cutting off
their hair and ceasing to wear a turban. But as long as they own descent from a Sikh family, they count
themselves, and are counted as Sikhs rather than Hindus. Further, cultural markers that coincide with
descent-based attributes are often the product of ethnic group mobilization rather than a pre-existing
characteristic that defines the group itself.
Finally, suppose we define culture simply as language. An ethnic group, then, is simply a group that has a
common language. Different ethnic groups should have different languages. A survey of even a handful of
examples illustrates the lack of fit between this definition and the groups that we often recognize as
ethnic. Some ethnic groups certainly have a common language, which distinguishes them from other
groups in the same partition of the population: the Yoruba are an example, as are Tamils and Sinhalese in
Sri Lanka, Zulus and Xhosas in South Africa, and French and German speakers in Switzerland. But many
groups that we classify as ethnic do not have a common language. Hindus include speakers of at least 17
major languages, not to mention hundreds of dialects. Christians and Muslims in Nigeria do not speak the
same language, but we think of them as an ethnic category. And Blacks and Whites in the US speak the
same language for instance but are classified as different ethnic groups.

f. A common history
Consider now another way of defining an ethnic group an ethnic group is a group that has a common
history. Suppose we define history to mean simply a shared past. What does it mean to say that
individuals share a past? Does it mean having lived through the same key events in the course of a
lifetime? In that case, all individuals of the same age group throughout the world would share a common
history, in that they all lived through the same events whether or not they were aware of them.
Suppose we try a definition that is less absurd, defining history to mean events that occurred at least one
generation previously, and which were claimed to have been part of the particular experience of some
group. For instance, although the potato famine may in some sense be part of the history of the world, it is
particularly part of the history of the Irish living at that time, who experienced it most directly. Having a
common history then means sharing a connection to events that that marked the lives of the generations
which preceded us.
But how would an individual know which generations of people to affiliate herself to when looking for a
common history? Should someone of Irish descent born in the US affiliate herself to generations who
were born in or lived in the US? Should she affiliate herself to generations born in Ireland? Should she
affiliate herself to subsets of generations born in the US for instance, the ancestors of University
professors? Or the ancestors of black men? In order to identify her history, she needs a rule to tell her
which group she belongs to. A common history, then, cannot be the defining characteristic of a group,
ethnic or otherwise. To have a common history already presupposes the existence of a group based on
other criteria.
Anthony Appiah puts it best: Sharing a common group history cannot be a criterion for being members
of the same group, for we would have to be able to identify the group in order to identify its history.
Someone in the fourteenth century could share a common history with me in a historically extended race
only if something accounts for their membership in the race in the fourteenth century and mine in the
twentieth. That something cannot, on pain of circularity, be the history of the race. (Appiah 1992 32)

g. Conceptual Autonomy
By conceptual autonomy, Fearon and Laitin mean that the existence of an ethnic category does not
depend conceptually on the existence of any particular ethnic category. (Fearon and Laitin 2000, 16).
But we know from a large literature that the definition of any ethnic group presumes and depends upon
the existence ethnic others. Indeed, membership rules exist for the sole purpose of distinguishing
insiders from outsiders. This criterion, if applied, would eliminate virtually all ethnic groups from the
definition.

H. A Combination of Characteristics.
Although I considered each characteristic individually, most definitions of ethnic identity incorporate
several secondary characteristics in addition to the primary characteristic of descent, although the precise
combination they employ varies. But any definition that requires a combination of characteristics captures
only a subset of most of the identities that comparative political scientists classify as ethnic. This is
because, as I have tried to show above, each characteristic, taken singly, captures only a subset of these
identities at best. Since any single defining characteristic discussed above captures at best a subset of the
classification that we started with, any combination of characteristics will capture a still smaller subset.

Non-Ethnic Identities Set of Identities Classified as Ethnic Descent-based attributes Descent Rule 1
Language/ Myth of Common Ancestry/ Descent Rule 2/ Fact of Common Ancestry Combination of
Characteristics The bold circle represents the set of identities conventionally classified as ethnic by
comparative

Political scientists that is, identities based on race, language, caste, tribe, religion, nationality, and,
sometimes, region and clan. Each circle within it represents a subset captured by a particular definition.
The largest subset is captured by definition proposed in this article (labeled Descent- Based attributes),
which eliminates only categories based on religion, or language and so on if the attributes for membership
are acquired voluntarily over a lifetime rather than by descent. This is followed by Descent-Rule 1, which
would eliminate several additional categories such as Yorubas in Nigeria in the 1900s, OBCs in India in
the 1990s, Mohajirs in present-day Pakistan, the first generation of Irish Americans in the US, the first
generation of Creoles and Coloreds and so on.
These two subsets are followed, in some unspecified order, by language, a myth of common ancestry, the
fact of common ancestry and Descent Rule 2, each of which cover some smaller subset of identities. I do
not include independent subsets defined by characteristics such as a common culture, a common history, a
common territory and conceptual autonomy since they are secondary rather than primary criteria that
may be associated with a pre-existing group but do not define it.
The smallest subset in the diagram represents a definition based on some combination of characteristics.
If we define an ethnic group as a group in which membership is determined by Descent Rule 1 and by a
distinct history, for example, we would eliminate still more sets of categories, including Hindus and
Muslims in India, Blacks and Coloreds in Louisiana (Dominguez 1994), and Christians and Muslims in
Yorubaland, since categories in each set share a history with others in the same set. With every additional
characteristic that we include in the combination, we would exclude still more. As such, these definitions
cannot be used to evaluate causal claims associated with ethnic identity in general, because they would
truncate the sample of categories that the claims refer to.

3. Properties of Ethnic Identity Categories

I identify two intrinsic properties of such descent-based attributes: stickiness and visibility. From
these properties of descent-based attributes, I infer two properties of ethnic categories constrained
change and visibility.

(a) Constrained Change

Attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent are, on average, difficult to change
in the short term. In contrast, attributes not associated, or not believed to be associated with descent, can,
on average, be easily changed even in the short term.
To illustrate, lets go back to Helen. One of the attributes given to her at birth skin colour lies at one
extreme on the scale of stickiness. Skin colour can, with medical help, be changed within a single
generation, and there are a handful of cases where it has been (Griffin 1996, Larsen 1997). Skin colour
can also be changed through a change in the interpretive framework within which it is viewed: if a
sufficiently large number of external observers adjust their frameworks, Helens particular shade of skin
colour might be reinterpreted as light rather than dark. But such a change is likely to be made with a great
deal of difficulty, and over a period of time.
There are degrees of difficulty. Changes in skin colour and gender are likely to be most difficult. Changes
in physical features are likely to lie in the middle, in part because of the constraint of making change in
any one feature appear consistent with others. Helen might easily change her hair type, for instance, by
having it curled, or her eye colour, by wearing contact lenses. But in order to make the myth that these
new attributes were given at birth credible, she would also need to change other attributes, such as skin
colour and features, to make them consistent with that myth. Effecting changes in the place of birth of
ones parents and ancestors, or last name or ancestral religion may be least difficult, especially in the
context of relocation or migration, when new histories can be more easily invented.
In contrast, attributes not based on descent, or at believed to be based on descent, are, on average, easier
to change. Helen might change her educational qualifications, for instance, simply by returning to school.
She might alter her income by asking for a raise or both her occupation and income by getting a higher
paying job. She can bring about these changes without having to erase her previous attributes. While one
cannot claim birth in the US without renouncing birth in Trinidad, getting a masters degree does not
require her to disguise the fact that she has a high school diploma.
Here as well, there are degrees of difficulty. Changing your initial endowment of economic resources
acquiring more land for instance can in some contexts be almost as difficult as changing your skin
colour. Changing your educational credentials is often less difficult but it requires a significant
investment in time and money. And changing jobs or party membership perhaps easier. But the degree of
difficulty here depends upon context rather than on some intrinsic property of such attributes.
There is also an area of overlap in the degree of stickiness of individual attributes that fall into the two
types. Some attributes that are not descent-based such as land ownership or accent may lie towards the
high end of the scale of stickiness. And some descent-based attributes, such as last name or the religion of
ones parents, may lie towards the low end to the extent that the myths required by these changes may be
easily invented. Such overlap is consistent with differences in the average tendency of both types of
attributes.
It is common to assume that because the attributes defining them are fixed in the short term, ethnic
identity categories are also fixed in the short term. Individuals can change between identity categories,
often quite rapidly, by combining and recombining elements from their set of attributes differently. But
the pattern of change should be constrained by the underlying distribution of attributes. Thus, the property
of constrained change can be legitimately associated with ethnic identities in the short term, while the
property of fixedness can not. Consider Helen again. Helens stickier attributes consist of her skin
colour, her birth in Trinidad and her descent from African American parents. While she cannot change
these attributes in the short term, she can, by selecting different attributes, change the categories in which
she activates her membership.
If she emphasizes the attribute of birth in the English-speaking island of Trinidad, she can activate
membership in the category West-Indian. But if she de-emphasises her foreign birth, and highlights
instead the attributes of skin colour and descent, she can activate membership in the category Black.
Her ability to change the categories that she activates is constrained: while she can change to categories
defined by a different selection of sticky attributes that she possesses, she cannot change to categories
based on sticky attributes that she does not possess (e.g. German, if the category German is defined on the
basis of birth).

(b) Visibility
A second property of descent-based attributes is that they are, on average, more visible than attributes
acquired in the course of a lifetime. By visible attributes, I mean attributes which can be ascertained
through superficial data sources such as the name, speech, features and dress of individuals. The larger
the number of sources that contain information about an attribute, the more visible it is. By invisible
attributes, I mean attributes which can be ascertained only by more careful observation and background
research (Chandra 2004). As above, this claim refers to distributions rather than particular attributes.
Once again, lets go back to Helen to illustrate. Some of Helens descent-based attributes, such as her
gender, skin colour, hair type, physical features are immediately displayed on her person. Others, such as
the language of her parents (English), are contained in her name. Less precise information on the religion
of her parents is also available in her name, which, even though it does not allow the observer to pinpoint
it precisely, allows the observer to rule out religions such as Islam or Hinduism.
The way in which observers code such information is the result of social construction. Helens shade of
skin colour, for instance, might be interpreted in the U.S. as black, but in Brazil as brown. This
difference is the result of differences in historical and institutional contexts that have taught individuals to
instinctively code the same data in different ways (see Chandra 2004). But the main point is that some
raw data about some of the attributes given at birth are always visible, often in multiple data sources,
regardless of how the observer interprets them.
Information about attributes not associated with descent can also be visible. Perhaps the most visible of
non-descent-based given attributes is age, always visible in speech and features. Education, income and
place of residence (rural or urban) are sometimes visible in accent and appearance, but typically not in the
name or features (unless they are correlated with descent). Profession or organizational membership can
be visible in dress (the suits that lawyers and bankers wear, the uniforms of policemen and firemen,
badges and rosettes signaling party membership etc) but not when an individual is off-duty and also not
in the name or features. But on average, attributes not based on birth are less visible and less frequently
visible.
For instance, Helens occupation as a food-service worker is signaled during working hours by her
uniform. And when she is wearing her uniform, or when she is at work, her income and educational
background may be inferred from her occupation. But when she is dressed differently and/or off duty her
non-birth given attributes immediately become less visible. In contrast, some information about her
descent-based attributes is always visible, no matter what the context of observation, in her name and
features.
Here, as above, there is an overlap in the degree of visibility associated with both types of attributes,
probably larger than the area of overlap associated with the stickiness of both types of attributes. Gang
membership is not given at birth, but, when proclaimed in tattoos, haircut and other marks on the body,
can sometimes be more visible, and more frequently visible, than many descent-based attributes. And the
religion of ones parents, while given at birth, can often be less visible than ones educational
qualifications or age.
The link between the property of attributes and categories is straightforward in this case. When attributes
are visible, membership in the categories based on them will also be visible. But note that visibility can
coexist comfortably with multiple identities and with error (Chandra 2004). The information a person
displays on her person can make several of your identity categories visible, not just a single one. And
even though information on an individuals declared and potential ethnic memberships is visible,
observers can often get it wrong. Lets return to Helen to illustrate. Two of the ethnic categories in which
she is eligible for membership are West-Indian, and Black, made visible by her skin colour, hair and
features. But observers might well miscode her as Nigerian or Brazilian. But the main point is that our
ethnic categories are visible enough, on average, to permit such guesses.
Note, further, that the properties of constrained change and visibility apply to all descent-based
identities rather than ethnic identities specifically -- and apply to all descent-based identities only on
average. Since ethnic categories are only a subset of categories based on descent-based attributes, we
should also see constrained change and visibility in some categories which are based on descent-based
attributes but which we do not think of as ethnic e.g. gender. But because some attributes associated
with descent are either not sticky or not visible, those ethnic categories based on such attributes may not
exhibit the properties of constrained change and/or visibility. And finally, since some non-descent based
attributes may also be sticky and/or visible, we might also see the properties of constrained change and
visibility associated with some categories that are neither ethnic nor descent-based.
The two properties identified here need not be exhaustive -- there may well be others that apply precisely
and uniquely to ethnic identities as identified here. One promising direction in which to proceed in
identifying others is to explore the fact that offspring of the same parents typically share the same set of
ethnic identity options. It may well be that because individuals are more emotionally connected to
siblings than non-siblings, membership in ethnic categories should arouse greater emotional attachments,
or create a greater tendency to demonize ethnic others, or increase the stakes of conflict, than membership
in other types of categories, even those based on descent (e.g. gender). By the same logic, if we assume
that individuals care more about the wellbeing of siblings than more distant connections, we may see a
greater degree of within-group altruism among members of ethnic categories than members of other types
of categories.1
This may be a critical difference between ethnic identity categories such as Black, other descentbased
identities such as women and non-descent based identities such as Republicans. Even when these
other identities are also visible (e.g. women) and sticky (e.g. Republican in the US), they often cut across
siblings, and this may be a consequential fact. Such properties are routinely associated with ethnic groups
by comparative political scientists but without justification.2 The definition proposed here provides an
analytical foundation on which to infer such an association, or establish its absence.

4. Evaluating Theories About the Effect of Ethnic Identity

It is startling how few of our previous claims about the effect of ethnic identity are sustainable in light of
the intrinsic properties of ethnic identity identified here. These include Caselli and Coleman and Fearons
recent work on patronage and ethnic mobilization (Fearon 1999, Caselli and Coleman 2001), Janet Tai
Landas work on trading networks (Landa 1994), and Chandra's own work on patronage (Chandra 2004).
Caselli and Coleman and Fearon argue that there should be an association between patronage politics and
ethnic politics because patronage politics favours coalitions based on identities that are hard to change,
and ethnic identities are hard to change.
This argument is consistent with the property of constrained change identified here. Ethnic 1 I was
introduced to this idea by Will Le Blanc, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at
MIT. 2 Indeed, it is surprising, given how important descent has been in the definitions of ethnic identity
in comparative political science, how few of our explanatory theories actually explore fields such as
sociobiology which can tell us something about the properties of groups which keep offspring together.
The work of Pierre Van Den Berghe is a prominent exception.
Identities, I suggest, are not quite as hard to change as Caselli and Coleman and Fearon argue it can be
easy for individuals to switch between ethnic identities within the constraint of the underlying set of
attributes. But to the extent that change in ethnic identities is more constrained than change in non-ethnic
identities, the argument is upheld. Landa (1994) argues that under conditions of uncertainty, the visibility
of ethnic cues allows individuals to select trading partners and enforce contracts. Chandra (2004) argues
that given the information constrained environment of elections in a patronage-democracy, the visibility
of ethnic identities makes them more likely to be activated in voter and party behaviour than non-ethnic
identities. While these arguments remain to be tested empirically, their reliance on properties that can be
taken to be intrinsic to ethnic identities at least makes them logically sustainable.
However, the arguments made even in this handful of works should be read as applying to descent-based
categories in general, not ethnic identities in particular. There are constraints not only on changing
identity categories based on ancestral language and physical features but also on changing identity
categories based on gender, or the party membership or class of ones parents (e.g. descendants of
landowners, children of Communists). And, while ethnic identities are visible, on average, so are
identities based on gender or age. These theories, therefore, must be read as theories about a larger class
of identities than simply ethnic identities.
By far the largest number of explanatory claims about ethnicity rest on properties that I have argued
above are not intrinsic to ethnic identities in general, such as fixedness, a common culture, and territorial
concentration. As such, they cannot be taken as claims about the effect of ethnic identities in general
they should apply either to a specific subset of ethnic identities, or claims about the effect of ethnic
identities combined with some additional variable. Rather than reading them to mean that Ethnicity is
associated with some dependent variable Y, we should read them as claims meaning either that A
particular subset of ethnic identities are associated with dependent variable Y or that Ethnicity, along
with some other variable X, is associated with the dependent variable.
Consider, first, a family of theories which link the politicization of ethnic divisions with democratic
destabilization. With some variations, the reasoning underlying such arguments is as follows:
Democracies are destabilized by the permanent exclusion of some minority groups from power. Ethnic
divisions are fixed. Elections based on ethnic divisions, therefore, produce permanent winners and
permanent losers based on ethnic demography. Consequently, the politicization of ethnic divisions
threatens democratic stability (Horowitz 1985, Rabushka and Shepsle 1972, Chua 2003).
The key property of ethnic identity that this argument rests on is fixedness: if ethnic identities are fluid,
not fixed, then the other propositions fall through. But we know, based on the definition proposed in this
article that fixedness is not an intrinsic property of ethnic identities constrained change is. If we find
that ethnic identities consistently acquire fixedness in a democratic context and that fixedness in turn
threatens democratic stability, it must be due to some extrinsic variable that interacts with ethnic identity
which has not been theorized. Consider, further, the body of work on institutional prescriptions for multi-
ethnic democracies.
Among the most influential of these prescriptions is the proposition that democratic governments should
accord ethnic minority groups collective cultural autonomy (Kymlicka 1995, Lijphart 1977). The
reasoning goes as follows: Cultural recognition is an important right. Ethnic minority groups have distinct
cultures. Therefore, democratic governments should assign minority groups cultural rights (Kymlicka
1995). Opponents of this proposal take the position that economic rights are more important than cultural
rights (Barry 2001).
But all sides assume that ethnic groups possess the property of a common culture. As I argued above, no
matter how we define a common culture, it is not a distinguishing principle of ethnic groups in general.
Rather than thinking of culture as a constant property of ethnic groups, we should reconceptualize it as a
variable associated with all types of groups to varying degrees (Wedeen 2002).
In their current form, then, these institutional prescriptions cannot be taken to apply to multi-ethnic
democracies in general. They should be read and evaluated as prescriptions for democracies in which
social groups have acquired a high degree of cultural cohesiveness, whether or not such groups are ethnic.
Take, next, the family of arguments linking ethnic identities with various forms of violence.
According to one such argument, one cause of civil war between ethnic groups is the security dilemma
introduced by the collapse of the state (Posen 1993). The reasoning is as follows: the collapse of the state
governing a multi-ethnic society creates an environment analogous to anarchy in the international
environment, with ethnic groups analogous to states. In an anarchic environment, ethnic groups, like
states, arm themselves out of fear for their own security. But this makes other groups, like states, more
fearful and gives them an incentive to arm themselves also. The result is an increased threat of war,
reducing everyones security in the long run. War is especially likely the groups in question have a history
of rivalry, since this gives each more reason to assume the worst of the other.
This argument assumes that ethnic identity categories, like states, are fixed entities for if individuals
could change their ethnic identities, then one response to the collapse of the state might be simply to
switch to less threatening identities rather than go to war. Second, it implies that ethnic groups are more
likely than other types of groups to have a common history. Otherwise, the security dilemma should be an
explanation for inter-group conflict in the wake of state collapse in general, rather than ethnic conflict in
particular. But we cannot take either fixity or a common history to be intrinsic properties of ethnic
identities. Ethnic identities can change even in the short term as individuals combine and recombine
elements from their fixed set of attributes differently.
Further, a common history does not distinguish ethnic groups, but is a product of some process by which
ethnic groups are mobilized. This argument, thus, cannot be read as an argument about the effect of ethnic
identities per se. The effect of ethnic identities here is contingent upon some extrinsic, omitted, variable
that produces fixity in ethnic identities and a perception of a common history, which should be included
in the analysis.
According to another argument in this family, ethnic violence is motivated by emotions such as fear,
hatred or resentment (Petersen 2002). The initial trigger for such violence, according to this argument, lies
also in the collapse of the state. But given this trigger, the target of violence will depend upon the specific
emotional response aroused among ethnic groups. Groups motivated by fear will choose as their target
those ethnic others who are the greatest threat. Groups motivated by resentment will choose as their target
those ethnic others who are farthest up the status hierarchy whether or not they are the greatest threat. And
groups motivated by hatred will target those ethnic others with whom they have battled in the past,
regardless of their threat potential and their position on the status hierarchy.
If this argument is to be read, as it is intended, as an argument about ethnic violence rather than violence
in general, then ethnic groups must have the property of experiencing stronger, or distinct, emotional
reactions in the wake of state collapse than other types of groups. Neither the definition of an ethnic group
that I have proposed here, nor the alternative definitions, justify this assumption. This does not mean that
this argument is wrong but it does mean that t is incomplete. In order to sustain the argument, we would
have to demonstrate why we can reasonably associate individuals to have distinct emotional associations
with their ethnic identities which they do not with other types of identities.
Another argument in this family theorizes that intra-group policing can prevent inter-ethnic violence. One
of the assumptions underlying this argument is that ethnic groups are distinguished by the property of
dense network ties, which make within-group cooperation easier than across-group cooperation. As
Fearon and Laitin put it: Why are inter-ethnic relations frequently characterized by a tension that is
relatively absent in intra-ethnic relations, giving interethnic relations, even when peaceful, an ominous
quality? Because social networks are better developed and interactions more frequent within ethnic
groups, individuals have easier access to information about their coethnics than they do about ethnic
others. (Fearon and Laitin 1996, 730).
But we cannot infer this property based on the definition that I have proposed here and the classification
of the ethnic categories that it justifies. In order for this argument to be plausible, thus, we would have to
demonstrate either that such ties are indeed intrinsic to the groups we classify as ethnic or identify some
omitted variable that creates social networks within ethnic groups and not otherwise. Consider a final
argument, which explains the association between modernization and ethnic politics by invoking the
property of territorial concentration (Bates 1974). The reasoning is as follows: The goods of modernity
are distributed on a spatial basis. It makes sense for individuals desiring access to these goods, therefore,
also to organize on a spatial basis. According to the author, there is no denying that the members of an
ethnic group tend to cluster in space (Bates 1974, 464). The struggle for access to these goods, therefore,
is organized on an ethnic basis.
The argument is informed by the study of ethnic politics in Africa, and it certainly appears to be the case
that several ethnic categories in Africa are territorially concentrated. But we cannot take either territorial
concentration or the memory of a common territorial homeland to be an intrinsic property of ethnic
categories in general. And we can certainly imagine non-ethnic categories that are territorially
concentrated. This argument, thus, should be read, not as a general argument about ethnic identities but as
an argument about territorially concentrated identities, a concept which has an imperfect overlap with a
subset of ethnic identities. This is only a quick survey of a few influential examples of the body of work
that theorizes about the effect of ethnic identities, or concepts related to ethnic identities. A more
extensive and more detailed discussion of several such arguments can be found elsewhere (Chandra 2005,
Chandra 2001a, Chandra 2001b).
The broad point I wish to make here is not that these arguments are wrong but that we do not so far
have reason to believe that they are right. These families of theories have not demonstrated on analytical
grounds that ethnic identity categories, as they classify them, should have an explanatory effect on the
outcomes of interest. In order for these theories to be sustainable, we must show at a minimum that the
properties they take to be intrinsic to ethnic identity can actually be inferred from the definition proposed
here, or a better one.
Ultimately, if we are not able to identify any further properties that are unique to ethnic identity, we
would be better off substituting the concept of ethnic identity in our theories with concepts such as
descent-based identities or identities based on sticky or visible attributes. But if we do, does this
mean that this attempt at definition was wasted? To the contrary. The negative claim, that ethnicity does
not matter, is a discovery of great magnitude. It should have far-reaching consequences for research and
data collection, suggesting that we should abandon the large number of theories and datasets that we have
on ethnicity and start again on an entirely different foundation. A claim of this magnitude cannot be made
lightly. It must be justified perhaps even more strongly than the claim that ethnicity matters. And, just as
we need to define the concept of ethnic identity to establish that it matters, we also need a definition in
order to establish that it does not matter.
Literature and ethnic Pigeon Polling

Fanons increasing popularity among postcolonial critics, together with his militant revolutionary activity
and impact on subsequent anti-racist movements, has led him to be a fascinating subject for more than
one biographer.
Alice Cherkis Frantz Fanon: un portrait is an intimate testimony to Fanons life from the point of view of
a psychiatrist who worked with him, and was first published by Seuil in 2000, the same year as David
Maceys mammoth historical study Frantz Fanon: A Life, published by Granta. These joined David
Cautes summary Fanon of 1970 and Albert Memmis self-consciously playful biographical article, La
vie impossible de Frantz Fanon [The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon] of 1971. These are perhaps just
some of the best known and most explicitly biographical among a host of studies of Fanons career and
intellectual development, charted also by thinkers such as Irene Gendzier, Nigel Gibson and Patrick Ehlen
to name a few.
It is striking, however, how many studies imply a certain mutability in the Fanonian persona, a protean
quality indicating that this is an elusive thinker who wore a series of masks. For David Caute, for
example, there were two Fanons, the pragmatic realist who wanted to force the French to realise the
impact of the Algerian war on living conditions in France and Algeria, and also the more alienated Fanon
who wanted his French friends to share in his subjectivity (Caute 49). Similarly, David Macey dwells
on the amnesia surrounding Fanons legacy in Martinique, in France and in Algeria, as if to convey his
resistance to categorisation according to national frameworks, while also examining the split between the
Third Worldist, revolutionary Fanon and the postcolonial Fanon of identity politics.
Moreover, Albert Memmis La vie impossible de Frantz Fanon presents itself as a partially fictionalised
and certainly stylised version of Fanons life, according to which Fanon experiments with a series of
identities (Martinican, French, Algerian, African), but at the end of which we find an enigmatic figure
who na jamais accept de retourner lui-mme [never accepted to return to himelf] (Memmi 272.
My translation).
It is also perhaps telling that Cherkis personal testimony begins with the observation that, though Fanon
was voluble about his political commitments, he was uncomfortable recounting particularities from his
personal life, and her own reticence towards the possibility of biographical disclosure leads her to dub her
study a testimony once removed (Cherki 4). Critics have identified multiple incarnations of Frantz
Fanon, and he emerges as a slippery persona that they struggle to pin down in biographical form.
This article will complement these depictions of the mobility and intractability of the Fanonian persona
by exploring the mutability of the narrating voice in the apparently autobiographical Peau noire, masques
blancs. As a francophone intellectual militating against colonialism, Fanon knows he retains a precarious
relation with the colonised more generally and writes from a position that is on some level estranged from
that of the masses in whose name he argues. As a result, his text presents a perplexed persona who,
alienated both by colonialist racist discourse and by his position as a francophone intellectual in the
margins of colonised society, nervously alters the identity of the self he stages.
In this eclectic and hybrid text, Fanon first shifts between a subjective je [I] and the more abstract,
objective nous [we]. The je at times serves to relativise and soften his pronouncements, as if to
betray an anxiety about their broader resonance and applicability, whilst at others it works to emphasise
the affect and trauma of his lived experience as a black man. The je is also a sign of autobiographical
subjectivity, though this is not a constant Fanonian self but a shifting performance that masks more than
it reveals. Expressions of doubt and alienation, however, are interspersed with a more confident stance in
which the philosopher and psychiatrist claims to speak for, by turns, the Martinican, the colonised, the
black man. Yet even here, Fanons apparent assertiveness is deceptive, and the degree of his identification
with these groups can be subjected to questioning.
Furthermore, Fanon intermittently upholds the importance of negritude as a source of identity, but he also
rails against its potentially limiting effects. He then affirms the selfs belonging to the universal category
of humanity, though he is anxious to distinguish this humanism from that of the French, which he sees as
bound up in the colonial mission to assimilate and therefore alienate the colonised other. If Peau noire is
on the one hand, then, an assertive and militant critique of colonialism, its narrating persona is on the
other hand a slippery figure unable, or perhaps purposefully unwilling, to tie the polemic to a specific
identitarian position.
The fabric of the narration of Fanons Peau noire, masques blancs has received little attention, and the
work has tended to be analysed above all for its concepts and arguments rather than for its form. Anjali
Prabhus article Narration in Frantz Fanons Peau noire, masques blancs: Some Reconsiderations is a
rare example of a highly sophisticated reading of hybridity in Fanons text, not only in the analysis of the
black mans splitting and doubling but also in the selfstaging of the narrating je. According to Prabhu,
the text testifies to the tremendously difficult task of reclaiming the existence of the individual,
sensuous, original black man that he heroically (or tragically) wishes to undertake (Prabhu 201). The
present article will refine Prabhus point, however, by problematising the feeling of authentic
subjectivity to which she claims that Fanon adheres, and by identifying both the dynamism and the
uncertainty of his personas presentation (Prabhu 191).
Peau noire has an autobiographical dimension that is usually overlooked, but even more, the
autobiographical je is not one that knows itself fully or that remains constant in its identifications with
the Antilleans, the ngres, the colonised or merely the men in whose name he speaks. This exposition
of Fanons eclectic persona is, moreover, not intended as a critique of the theorists inconsistency, but
precisely as a testimony to the paradoxes and impasses of francophone intellectual writing under
colonialism. The tensions experienced by the francophone writer are to a certain extent related to those
analysed by a long tradition of thinkers, including perhaps most famously Sartre, who explores in
Plaidoyer pour les intellectuals the paradox of the intellectuals position divorced from the masses whose
condition he analyses:
Pour lutter contre le particularisme de lidologie dominante, il faudrait prendre le point de vue de ceux
dont lexistence mme la condamne. Mais pour prendre ce point de vue il faudrait navoir jamais t un
petit-bourgeois puisque notre ducation nous a infects au dpart et jusquaux moelles. Et, comme cest la
contradiction de lidologie particulariste et du savoir universalisant chez un petit-bourgeois qui fait
lintellectuel, il faudrait ne pas tre intellectuel.
[In order to struggle against the particularism of the dominant ideology, it would be necessary to adopt the
point of view of those whose existence condemns it. But in order to adopt this point of view it would be
necessary never to have been a petit-bourgeois since our education has infected us from the beginning and
into our bones. And, as it is the contradiction between particularist ideology and universal knowledge in
the petit-bourgeois that makes him an intellectual, it would be necessary not to be an intellectual.] (Sartre
417. My translation.)
Fanons narrator suffers from a comparable double bind in his vilification of the class of intellectuals to
which he inevitably belongs, though his anxiety is also part of a particular unease experienced by the
privileged but traumatised elite of colonised writers. Like Aim Csaire of the previous generation, he
seeks through his writing no less than to liberate the colonised black man from oppression, and yet his
ability to speak for the people is highly suspect. The alienation inherent in Fanons writing is a result of
colonial and racial tensions, and it is these tensions that lead the persona to pluralise his position and
voice.
Peau noire, masques blancs is an incendiary study of the violence of colonialism and of the traumatic
effects of French colonial discourse. Exploring in depth the alienation experienced by the black man who,
believing himself to be French, is subjected to racism when he arrives in the mtropole, the text presents
the identity of the colonised as traumatically split in ways that will be discussed later in this article. But
Fanons depiction of alienation is intensified and problematised, because the voice narrating the text is
itself not reconciled with his identity and stance.
The language of the opening pages of Peau noire, masques blancs already betrays something of the
changing position of the je towards his project. The text begins with the dual statement that:
lexplosion naura pas lieu aujourdhui. Il est trop tt . . . ou trop tard. / Je narrive point arm de vrits
dcisives [the explosion will not happen today. It is too soon . . . or too late. I do not come with timeless
truths] (Fanon 9).
Fanon is predicting a seismic shift, a decisive change that will achieve the force of an explosion, yet it is
not clear when this shift will take place. There is an assertiveness in the anticipation of radical change,
and yet at the same time the certainty of the change is undermined by the haziness of its timing. Equally,
the first statement is presented as neutral and objective, and yet the je that creeps in immediately in the
second paragraph retracts that objectivity and betrays a doubtful and cautious subjectivity. Next, Fanon
leaps to assert his search for un nouvel humanisme . . . / La comprhension des hommes . . . Nos frres
de couleur [a new humanism . . . / Understanding among men . . . / Our colored brothers] (Fanon 9).
Here again, the hesitant je is effaced and subsumed in the simultaneous affirmation of a universal
humanism and of black fraternity. And even more, on the following page he states the ambitiousness of
his project by affirming: nous ne tendons rien de moins qu librer lhomme de couleur de lui-mme
[I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself] (Fanon 10). The tentative
je is now replaced by the confident nous of French philosophical discourse, and the persona makes
the bold claim that his work will serve no less than to liberate the black race.
Nevertheless, despite the inflammatory quality of most of Fanons pronouncements in the following
pages, the philosopher intermittently veers away from his assertions. He admits, for example, that
beaucoup de ngres ne se retrouveront pas dans les lignes qui vont suivre [many Negroes will not find
themselves in what follows], only to counter this admission with the further defiant statement that les
attitudes que je me propose de dcrire sont vraies [the attitudes that I propose to describe are real]
(Fanon 14). The nous has once again become je, even if now, unlike at the beginning, the je
recklessly lays claim to the truth of his utterances. The most confident assertions, then, are intertwined in
these lines with signs of doubt.
Fanon claims a universalist stance even as the je admits his distance from the experiences of many
black men. The pithy, fragmented statements of Fanons introduction lurch from the general to the
specific, and on to the autobiographical and the singular.2
Exhibiting the rigidity of the labels propagated by colonial discourse, Fanon for the most part uses Noir
and Blanc as broad but static categories pitted against one another. In stating le Blanc est enferm dans
sa blancheur./ Le Noir dans sa noirceur [the white man is sealed in his whiteness./ The black man in his
blackness], Fanon is deliberately replicating the Manichaeism of colonial discourse, and the use of these
generalised terms is part of his endeavour to reveal the absolute nature of the colonial vision (Fanon 11).
Much of the introduction to Peau noire, masques blancs in this way appears to refer to blacks and
whites and not the particular contexts in which different black and white people live.
Nevertheless, the final pages of this introduction suddenly retreat from the general and return to a focus
on the Caribbean. Fanon continues to affirm the importance of his vision of a new future, and yet cet
avenir nest pas celui du cosmos, mais bien celui de mon sicle, de mon pays, de mon existence. En
aucune faon je ne dois me proposer de prparer le monde qui me suivra [this future is not the future of
the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence. In no fashion should I
undertake to prepare the world that will come later] (Fanon 15).
What had appeared to be a global analysis of black versus white turns out to be a specific engagement
with the history of Martinique during the twentieth century. Similarly, Fanon notes, tant Antillais
dorigine, nos observations ne valent que pour les Antilles [since I was born in the Antilles, my
observations and my conclusions are valid only for the Antilles], and the study is no longer set up as a
project for the liberation of all black men (Fanon 16).
Although he aspires to a universalist vision of freedom and emancipation, Fanon at the same time strives
not to obfuscate the specific experiences of Martinicans. In addition, there is a further slippage in both
quotations between an analysis of all Martinicans, and a reflection on the experiences of Fanons
narrating persona. The je is also autobiographical and calls on personal lived experience, and if at times
he wants to figure this experience as somehow exemplary, he also questions the possibility of such a
gesture. Across the few pages of the introduction, then, Fanon flits disconcertingly between the universal,
the specific, and the autobiographical, as if to stress the co-implication of the three levels. The relation
between these stances, however, and the philosophers conception of and investment in each of them, will
remain unresolved as the text develops.
Fanons first chapter is a study of the black mans language, and this reflection on the use of French will
be one of the initial sources of irony in his self-presentation. Beginning with the neutral voice of an
analyst, Fanon sums up his argument with the following statement: le Noir Antillais sera dautant plus
blanc, cest--dire se rapprochera dautant plus du vritable homme, quil aura fait sienne la langue
franaise [the Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter that is, he will come closer to being
a real human being in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language] (Fanon 18).
Parroting the colonial discourse of assimilation, Fanon performs the point of view of the coloniser in
order to stress his distance from the latters way of thinking. The use of the French language may be for
Fanon an important tool for the colonised to assert his equality as well as his resistance, but the
colonisers belief that the colonised is only a man if he masters the colonial language is one aspect of his
dehumanising violence. Even more perniciously, the colonisers sense of the superiority of his language
infects the colonised, so that dans un groupe de jeunes Antillais, celui qui sexprime bien, qui possde la
matrise de la langue, est excessivement craint [in any group of young men in the Antilles, the one who
expresses himself well, who has mastered the language, is inordinately feared] (Fanon 20-21).
The colonised Antillean, desperate to achieve the status of the French, rolls his rs and attempts to speak
like a Frenchman only to give away his local accent in the next sentence, as demonstrated by the anecdote
of the Martinican in Le Havre who orders: Garrron! un v de bi [waiterr! Bing me a beeya] (Fanon
21). Nevertheless, Fanon himself also insists on the proper use of French and stresses the damaging
effects of parler petit ngre [to talk pidgin nigger].
Turning now to an autobiographical idiom, he states that as a doctor, je madresse toujours aux bicots
en franais correct [I make a point always to talk to the so-called bicots in normal French], and
laments that the language of the petit ngre serves only to stereotype and pigeonhole him further
(Fanon 33).
It means that the black man continues to conform to the white mans expectations of his inferiority and it
hardens his essence as subordinate. Fanon is performing a certain role here, however, and his own ironic
use of the derogatory term bicots indicates both his distaste towards such categorisations and the
manner in which the French litter their speech with slang, with their own version of petit ngre. The
French themselves do not always preserve the standard idiom, and Fanon is also mocking the colonisers
misuse and deformation of the French language (and of Creole).
More recent supporters of the Crolit movement such as Chamoiseau and Confiant reveal the difficulties
associated with Fanons embrace of the French language, though it should be remembered that they were
writing at a time when attitudes towards Creole would have been very different. It is also perhaps true that
the celebration of local idiom was less likely to be convincing as a symbol of resistance at the time of
Fanons writing. Nevertheless, the question of Fanons own attitude to and use of French remains a
perplexed one: he denounces the violence of the colonisers assumption of superiority but himself
upholds the use of a good register of French.
Yet the idiom of Fanons chapter on language is itself eclectic. Fanon is clearly highly educated in French
literature and thought, and his language enables him to play the role of an assimilated French academic
and psychiatrist. The use of Valrys image of language as dieu dans la chair gar [god gone astray in
the flesh] to emphasise its power is significant both because the metaphor underlines the significance
and (godlike?) impact of Fanons use of French and because it does so by means of a reference to the
French literary canon.
The chapter is also peppered with quotations from French thinkers such as Sartre and Leiris, though
Fanon refines Sartres analysis of negritude poetry in Orphe noir by stressing the difficulty of
inventing a black poetic language. At the same time, Fanon frequently writes with the confidence of a
psychiatric diagnosis, including categorical statements on the condition of all colonised peoples alongside
his literary references.
Again, Fanon cites a French thinker, psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, and though he will subsequently
criticise Mannonis assumption that the dependency of the colonised predates colonisation, in the chapter
on language he straightforwardly argues against the use of a black pidgin with reference to Mannonis
thesis. Despite Fanons clear adherence to a French academic tradition, however, and despite his critique
of local dialects, the chapter also retains a linguistic richness and multiplicity. Alongside Valry and
Sartre, Fanon cites Damas and Csaire, and though he uses their work in order to support his analysis of
the hegemony of French, the dynamic, syncopated rhythm of Damass lines seems alien to the
conventions of French verse.
Similarly, the many quotations in Martinican idiom interrupt the academic register of the French, and the
anecdotes such as that of the man in Le Havre, or of the idioms Fanon uses in his clinical practice, give
the text a linguistic diversity and freshness.
This richness is once again a sign of Fanons indecisive self-staging as a francophone writer, intellectual
and psychiatrist; his language reflects both an urge for immediacy and academic abstraction. He embraces
a French academic heritage and recommends a standardised French, but his prose has a lively eclecticism
and resonates with a local and spoken idiom. Fanons philosophical and psychoanalytic language is
broken up by traces of everyday immediacy, oral rhythms closer to lived experience, and these transcend
the boundaries of the academic language and tradition.
Many critics have objected that Fanons education and analysis distance him in problematic ways from
the colonised subjects he sets out to liberate. Neil Lazarus, for example, refutes the criticism levied by
Christopher Miller, namely, that Fanon ignores pre-colonial traditions, but argues rather that Fanon
occludes the subaltern. According to Lazarus, Fanon, at least in Les Damns de la terre, risks falling into
the trap of speaking for the masses (Lazarus).3
More specifically, in his study of anti-colonial leadership in Dubois, Fanon and Cabral, Charles F.
Peterson notes that Fanon writes from the point of view of the colonised lite and appears to have little
understanding of the experience of the masses. According to Peterson, as Fanon writes of the travails of
colonized life in Black Skin, White Masks, he states his argument to be on behalf of all colonized men,
when in fact the colonized life he describes is that of the privileged few (Peterson 93).
The colonised man figured in Le Noir et le langage is one who has had some education in French and
who is at least partially assimilated. Peterson goes on to argue that this blindness is eradicated by the time
of Les Damns de la terre, but it remains an ambiguous effect at this stage of Peau noire.
Moreover, Franoise Vergs goes further and argues that the difficulty with Fanons analysis is that he
never explores the effects of slavery on Antillean consciousness. Even more, Vergs comments on
Fanons rejection of his Antillean heritage in favour of Algerian national identity, and she conceives this
as a rejection of his enslaved ancestors. For Vergs, Fanon disavowed a society in which the master was
always present on the scene of history and in the primal scene. Fanon disavowed the Creole filiation, the
enslaved father and the raped mother could not be his parents (Vergs 594). So Fanon from this point of
view is hopelessly estranged from the people he sets out to liberate.
It is undoubtedly true that Fanon cannot help but write from the perspective of the colonised lite, but my
interest here lies above all in the multiple strategies he undertakes in his writing to mask, to justify, or to
overcome his position of alienation. Fanon endeavours no less than to liberate the black man from
himself, and in this sense he sets himself up as a leader and spokesman. By offering a psychological
analysis of the condition of the colonised, he exposes their suffering and paves the way for their
emancipation.
In taking on this role, however, Fanon at times uses a language and a set of analytical tools that are alien
to the subject of the analysis, and isolates himself from the subaltern in whose name he writes. He
justifies this process by pointing out the dangers of adhering rigidly to what he terms parler petit ngre,
but the very terminology used, as well as the argument, seem to patronise those who have not attained the
education he was fortunate enough to receive.
In addition, however, Fanon litters his academic French with anecdotes, with Creole idioms and personal
encounters, and his language in fact lends a suppleness that his argument, at face value, would reject. He
notes that a keenness to learn and to acquire power can also, in the Antillais, lead to a rare mastery of the
French language, and he cites the elegance and lexical diversity of Csaires speeches as an example.
Yet he simultaneously disrupts his own academic French by quoting a spectators comment in Creole,
when a woman fainted while listening to Csaire delivering his electoral campaign, that Franais a t
tellement chaud que la femme l tomb malcadi [his French (the refinement of his style) was so
exciting that the woman swooned away] (Fanon 39). The narrating persona finishes by performing a
flexible dynamism, a combination of immediacy and conceptual abstraction, and subverts his stated
argument with regard to the maintenance of standardised French.
While this sense of the francophone intellectuals alienation and mutability is apparent in the above ways
in Fanons discussions of language, it is in lexprience vcue du noir that the psychological
phenomenon of the coloniseds alienation is analysed explicitly. The voice of Fanon the psychiatrist and
thinker also occupies a changeable position here. First, Fanon at times maintains the generalised terms
Noir and Blanc and analyses the universal condition of the colonised black man. The black mans
ontology is conceived and defined by the white man: car le Noir na plus tre noir, mais ltre en face
du Blanc [for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man]
(Fanon 110).
But Fanon at the same time wants to refuse the masterful position of the psychiatrist analysing the black
man from the outside, and he opens the chapter with the striking cry sale ngre! [dirty nigger!]
together with the subjective response of the je reacting to his objectification. Much of the chapter goes
on to narrate the personas experience of alienation on arriving in France, believing himself to be French,
only to be subjected to a series of racial stereotypes that sever him from his self-image: mon corps me
revenait tl, disjoint, rtam, tout endeuill dans ce jour blanc dhiver [my body was given back to
me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning that white winter day] (Fanon 113).
This narrator wants to shy away from analysis of the images placed upon him (je ne voulais pas cette
reconsidration, cette thmatisation [I didnt want this revision, this thematization]) (Fanon 112), and
seeks to convey a brute subjective reality. While on one level the text offers a generalised psychoanalysis
of the black mans alienation, on another level the writing refuses its objective stance and the persona
speaks from raw experience.
At the same time, however, Fanons je is also not a transparent autobiographical self: it is not clear that
it is Fanon himself who speaks, and in any case, the persona explores this experience of alienation rather
than disclosing an alternative hidden self. This textual subject is, moreover, an opaque figure who
precisely evades the gaze of the European. Alienated by the white mans image of him, the persona
repeats in response: je me glisse dans les coins, je demeure silencieux, jaspire lanonymat, loubli
[I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility] (Fanon 116).
This self-dissimulation is ostensibly a response to the white mask worn by the black man, and yet the
effect of this search for anonymity is also that the narrating self eludes the grasp of the reader. The je,
then, is curiously both singular and universal, it conveys subjective experience but also refuses to give
away much of the identity of the author. Appearing to reject a stance of generalised philosophical mastery,
the self is nevertheless depersonalised, and the autobiographical Fanon is hidden in the recesses of the
text. The je is autobiographical but also insists on a form of anonymity.
Fanon shifts between the general and the singular, but he also prevents the singular je from coming too
close to autobiographical disclosure. Analytical statements are juxtaposed with raw subjective expressions
of desperation and discontent, but these at the same time preserve the narrators anonymity. Equally,
Fanon intersperses the subjective reactions of the alienated black man with the point of view of the racist
coloniser, but these merge into one another to reveal how the colonised absorbs the colonisers way of
thinking. The insistent pattern of le ngre est une bte, le ngre est mauvais, le ngre est mchant, le
ngre est laid comes alongside the confession mon corps me revenait tal . . . [the Negro is an
animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly, my body was given back to me
sprawled out . . .], to suggest that the personas apparently subjective voice is already riven by the
colonial vision (Fanon 113).
Similarly, imagined citations such as regarde, il est beau, ce ngre and le beau ngre vous
emmerde, madame! [look how handsome the Negro is and kiss the handsome Negros ass,
madame!] interrupt the personas musings, but again, are a part of his internal dialogue and serve to split
his voice further (Fanon 114). Fanon the intellectual vows that he knows that the stereotypes he cites are
false, but in the text they are presented as voices from inside his consciousness. Even the voices of
coloniser and colonised are blurred, and the narrating persona performs in this self-obfuscation both the
black mans selfloss, and his inaccessibility to the readers searching grasp.
Fanons wavering attitudes towards Sartre and negritude in this chapter contribute to this sense of the
personas uncertainty towards the various identificatory strategies with which he experiments. Quoting
Sartres Rflexions sur la question juive, Fanon nevertheless argues that the black mans subjection is
distinct from that of the Jew because it is from his very skin that he is alienated. More problematically,
having shown his indebtedness to Sartre, Fanon goes on to rail against Sartres understanding of negritude
as a stage in a dialectic that would culminate in the socit sans races [society without race].4
Sartres pronouncement serves no less than to rob Fanon of his negritude, indeed, to take away his sense
of being. First, then, it is significant that Fanon is both heavily influenced by Sartre and angered by his
conclusions. Secondly, Fanons argument is additionally contorted because he himself is unresolved on
the question of negritude. He adamantly affirms the importance of black identity and states his response
to Sartre by repeating plus violente retentit ma clameur: je suis un ngre, je suis un ngre, je suis un
ngre [my cry grew more violent : I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro] (Fanon 138). But he
also admits that lexprience ngre est ambigu, car il ny a pas un ngre mais des ngres [Negro
experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes] (Fanon 136).
In addition, he quotes Csaire to stress that negritude is not a monument or edifice but an action, a
process: ma ngritude nest ni une tour, ni une cathdrale, / elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol, / elle
plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel, / elle troue laccablement opaque de sa droite patience [my
negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral,/ it thrusts into the red flesh of the sun,/ it thrusts into the
burning flesh of the sky./ it hollows through the dense dismay of its own pillar of patience] (Fanon 137).
Even more, by the end of the chapter he affirms je me sens une me aussi vaste que le monde [I feel in
myself a soul as immense as the world] (Fanon 140).
And by the end of the book, Fanon goes so far as to assert le ngre nest pas. Pas plus que le Blanc
[the Negro is not. Any more than the white man] (Fanon 231), and he states categorically that black
skin has no essence, no inherent ontology, and does not carry with it any specific values. Taken together,
these multifarious statements suggest that Fanon wants both to identify with negritude, with a notion of
black identity, and to reach beyond it.
Furthermore, if he does retain the term ngre, the reference to Csaires poem alongside the point about
the plurality of black identity suggests that an affirmation of negritude would not signify a specific notion
of selfhood. The lived experience of blackness is celebrated by Fanon, and yet the lived experience to
which the reader gains access is only that of alienation and there is no exposition of specific black cultural
practices or traditions. Ngre is a term that Fanon endlessly circles around, then, but whose meaning he
is unwilling to identify. Fanons call for black self-affirmation does not rely on a clear sense of ethnic
specificity.
It is humanism, rather than negritude, moreover, that Fanon finishes by championing at the end of the
text. Uneasy about the meaning of the term ngre, Fanon speaks now for the liberation of lhomme. If
the black man is to be recognised for his humanity, however, this requires not the admission of a shared
culture or identity but precisely the celebration of difference. Humanity is championed because it is
dynamic, and each individual capable of endless selfinvention.
Fanons je is now not intent on identifying himself as ngre, but as a man who constantly evolves. If
in the conclusion to Peau noire Fanon repeats several times je suis un homme [I am a man], this is a
means for him to assert his freedom to create himself and not in order to claim an identity determined by
the pastbe it by colonialism or by shared suffering.
The term homme is a sort of empty signifier, it is deployed as a call for a recognition of the freedom of
all, and as an affirmation both of the power, and the needs, of every human body. Fanons humanism here
is also an assertion of respect for the corporeal, it is voiced as a seizing of physical force and a refusal of
physcial and mental torture. It is perhaps here, then, in this championing of materiality and immediacy
that Prabhu locates Fanons equation of agency with authenticity, though again, I would argue that this
affirmation of subjectivity is a strategic and performative gesture of resistance rather than an assertion of
an originary self.
Moreover, Fanons conclusion refuses a humanism based on the past, on the weight of history: je ne suis
pas prisonnier de lHistoire. Je ne dois pas y chercher le sens de ma destine [I am not a prisoner of
history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny] (Fanon 229).
His affirmation of human value is not rooted in a belief in past achievements, and Fanon vilifies the
sclerotic form of Eurocentric bourgeois humanism. This new humanism does not involve la cristallisaton
chez le Blanc dune culpabilit envers le pass de ma race [a crystallization of guilt toward the past of
my race] (Fanon 228). It calls for the liberation of all men and for the celebration of human diversity.
Against the dehumanising force of slavery, Fanon now upholds not so much the specific identity of the
black man as black, but his belonging to the universal but protean community of the human.
Fanons triumphant humanism, however, like his negritude, has a certain ambivalence. For a critic such as
Gary Wilder, the interest of Fanons work lies in its struggle to challenge both the universalism and the
particularism of French colonial discourse. According to Wilder, Fanons notion of lived experience
addresses the complex nexus of reason and unreason, assimilation and rejection that structures the
colonial vision, and offers an effective critique of both colonial humanism and nativism (Wilder).
Wilder argues that the conclusion to Peau noire, however, recommends a crude, bland humanism that
glosses over the nuances of the preceding analyses. Fanons abstractions suggest an ungrounded vision
of postracial universalism that his own text has already rendered implausible (Wilder 51). From this
point of view, Fanons humanism is not the culmination of his anti-colonialism but an empty call that
elides some of the more difficult questions posed by the text. Moreover, it would not be difficult to
criticise Fanons celebration of lhomme as androcentric.
Bhabha argues that Fanon uses lhomme to designate a humanity that includes men and women, and
certainly this was probably Fanons intention (Bhabha).5 But given Fanons inability fully to understand
the condition of the black woman in the rest of the text, and in particular in the somewhat schematic
reading of Mayotte Capcia, the repetition of the masculine term lhomme in the conclusion risks
becoming exclusive even as he uses it to call for universal liberation.6
For a critic such as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Fanons masculinism must simply be accepted as an
integral part of his resistance to colonialism which for him is ideologically marked by the manipulation of
sexual difference and gender politics (Seshadri-Crooks 94). And it is certainly true that Fanons
androcentrism is unavoidable, but it is also true that it indicates a further uneasiness in Fanons search for
identification and use of collective terms.
Fanons humanism might, however, be seen not as a bland attempt to gloss over tensions more explicitly
probed in the rest of the text but as a site of tension itself. It is the final example of the philosophers
uncertain process of experimentation with various forms of identification, and it is not an apotheosis but
opens a further set of questions.
Neil Lazarus argues that in spite of Fanons shortcomings his work is useful because it shows that we
need a new humanism that rejects the old colonial, Eurocentric humanism, and suggests a liberationist
standpoint from which it would be possible to speak for all of humanity. But if Peau noire demonstrates
such a need, it does not posit an unproblematic humanism that occludes the need for particularism of any
sort.
Indeed, for Ato Sekyi-Oto, Fanons work can be read as a dialectical dramatic narrative (Sekyi-Oto)
that keeps alive the tension between the eccentric and the universally human. The notion of lived
experience at the heart of Fanons vision lends a rawness and an immediacy, but Fanon also looks beyond
this immediacy without losing sight of its insistent presence. The work is tense, restless and alive, then,
because it insists on an awareness of the concrete while grappling with the question of how that concrete
experience relates to greater human questions.
Max Silvermans reading of Fanon maintains this tension, since he argues that, while the conclusion opts
for a purely Sartrean form of existentialist universalism, the real tension of Peau noire lies in its attempt to
transcend any opposition between such universalism and the need for a sense of the particular. The text
does not offer a programmatic humanism, but calls for a new definition of the human that allows at the
same time for an awareness of black specificity. Its dynamism lies in its attempts to keep humanism,
negritude, as well as singular subjective experience, in play.
Perhaps Peau noire, masques blancs never resolves the question of how to articulate an appropriate form
of collective identity against colonialism, but it reveals the tensions inherent in notions both of black
specificity and universal humanity. The texts protean persona adopts one stance after another, flits
disconcertingly between negritude and universal humanism, but these shifts are symptoms of an
intellectual struggling, or perhaps refusing, to find a determinate position in this context of profound
cultural alienation. The chapter on Le Ngre et la reconnaissance suggests that what the black man
craves is recognition: Hegels master recognises his slave, but the problem for the black man is that the
white man does not recognise the black man as slave. There is no space even for conflict or opposition.
What Fanon ardently desires in Peau noire is this recognition, but the eclecticism of his anger suggests
that he has not resolved the question of how he wants both the writing self and the black man more
generally to be recognised. For Anjali Prabhu, these multiple forms of subjectivity are conceived as a
hybridised amalgamation between the universal, historical, collective I and the personal subjective
and still-in-formation I, a hybridisation that goes beyond now conventional notions of cultural
mtissage (Prabhu 201).
Yet I want to stress in addition to this that neither of these speaking subjects is as clearly specified or as
knowable as Prabhu implies: the persona seeks recognition without affirming a single identity or strategy,
and demands a relation with the other, while refusing to specify once and for all the form that such a
relation would take. The closing lines demand an ethical relationality, but this would be between one
openended consciousness and another:
Pourquoi tout simplement ne pas essayer de toucher lautre, de sentir lautre, de me rvler lautre? Ma
libert ne mest-elle donc pas donne pour difier le monde du Toi. A la fin de cet ouvrage, nous
aimerions que lon sente comme nous la dimension ouverte de toute conscience. [Why not the quite
simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself ? Was my freedom not
given to me then in order to build the world of You.
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize me, with me, the open door of every
consciousness.] (Fanon 231-32) Freedom for Fanon is bound up with a reaching out to the other, with
new forms of inter-human contact, and his thinking recommends an ethics of openness to all forms of
alterity.7 The identity of the community or solidarity that would shape the personas call for recognition
nevertheless remains open to question.
The narrating persona of Peau noire, masques blancs positions itself in diverse ways and adopts various
forms of collective identity, including those of negritude and humanism. Fanon imagines a more ethical
relationality, in which subjects would recognise their mutual differences, and he proposes this on the basis
of a sense of profound alienation. The narrating persona of Peau noire, masques blancs may privilege the
concrete effects of lived experience in determining black identity, but this is not a straightforward
autobiographical je, and it is also not one that achieves the self-knowledge that his work nevertheless
upholds. He urges a new form of contact between colonised beings, but that contact, if it is to involve the
narrating persona, must occur between protean and dynamic beings.
In this sense, though writing before a more overtly postmodern thinker such as Edouard Glissant, Fanon
anticipates the open-ended relational structures theorised in texts such as Le Discours antillais (though
without reaching the whirlwind figured in subsequent Glissantian texts such as the Tout-Monde).
Moreover, if Fanon recounts the alienation of the black man in Peau noire, masques blancs, his persona
suffers from an isolation that is distinct from that of the Antillean people he analyses. And if he is no
longer interested in analysing the psychic structures of the coloniseds alienation, in his later work on
Algerian independence Fanon again still seems to be adrift from the fantasy of community that he
unfailingly continues to promote. Memmis judgement that for all his struggles, Fanon never succeeded in
finding himself is certainly the culmination of a partially fictionalised narrative of Fanons trajectory. Yet,
whatever Fanon the man felt about his origins and identity, the voice of his work alters, develops and
recreates itself in such a way as to pluralise and deconstruct the possibility of an authentic
autobiographical self.
Finally, the alienation and pluralism of Fanons writing persona is a symptom shared with other
francophone intellectuals, frequently of the previous generation, though writing during the same period.
In his review of Janet Vaillants impressive biography of Senghor, for example, Christopher Miller
characterises the great man as a wearer of masks, and he goes on to argue that, masks, personas, and
roleplaying are all strategies consistent with a refusal to submit to the most Manichean dichotomy of
colonialism: are you French or African? (Miller 236) Senghors changing public performances would
from this point of view be deliberately subversive, though the lyric voice of the poetry expresses perhaps
a rather more traumatised divided self.
Equally, Csaire may have figured himself as a spokesperson for the people of Martinique in claiming,
ma bouche sera la bouche des malheurs qui nont pas de bouche, ma voix, la libert de celles qui
saffaissent au cachot du dsespoir [my mouth will be the mouth of those griefs which have no mouth,
my voice, the freedom of those that collapse in the dungeon of despair] (Csaire 88). But within the
same text he questions this assumed heroisme, designates it a farce, and laments his complicity with
French colonial discourse (Csaire 108).
Like Fanon, Csaires je serves by turns to speak for the oppressed black man, and to convey the poets
highly singular experience of alienation. The poetic persona of the Cahier also finishes by asserting
himself as a man, but his humanity is evoked in diverse, dynamic and endlessly evolving terms. Even
more, the Franco-Berber poet Jean Amrouche figures his writing self as Jugurtha, the King of Numidia
who struggled to free his North African people from Roman rule, a figure characterised by his expert
mimicry of others, though Jugurtha / Amrouches skilful mutations betray a figure who is at the same time
inquiet, aigu, dsesprant [worried, tense, despairing] (Amrouche 58. My translation).
Above all, this is a collection of passionate, engaged thinkers, whose conceptual and political writings are
equally engaged and contestatory, but who find that their education leaves them out of step with their
compatriots. In response, Senghor, Csaire, Amrouche, and Fanon present an eclectic voice, seizing on
the images of collective solidarity offered by negritude and humanism, and playing the role of identifying
with multiple groups, while betraying also a persistent sense of alienation and self-loss. Adopting a
variety of stances or guises, their protean writing voice conveys this dynamic, endless, and at times
anguished search for recognition.
notes:
1 I would like to thank Bart Moore-Gilbert, as well as Postcolonial Texts anonymous readers, for their
helpful advice on this article.
2 Specific is distinguised from singular here, in the sense that the specific is grounded in history
whereas the singular is a force of self-differentiation. For more on this distinction, see Hallward.
3 Lazarus refers to Christopher Miller's chapter on "Ethnicity and Ethics" in Theories of Africans.
4 In Orphe Noir, Sartre rewrites Marxs conception of the socit sans classes as the socit sans
races.
5 Bhabha adds a note at the end of his analysis of Fanon explaining his interpretation of Fanons thinking
on gender.
6 Critics have vilified Fanon for condemning Capcias story in Je suis Martiniquaise of a black womans
love for a white man while writing more sympathetically of the black mans love for a white woman
portrayed in Rn Marans Un homme pareil aux autres. See for example Berger and Sharpley-Whiting.
7 It is perhaps pertinent in this context that Nelson Maldonado Torres offers a Levinasian reading of
Fanon in his Against War.
Ethnicity, Race, Caste, Religion, creed and sect

1 Introduction
Spivak has become an authoritative voice of the post-colonial period since the publication of her essay
Can the Subaltern Speak? She has extended her discourse to a large variety of topics such as Marxism,
Feminism and Deconstruction. Spivak, the post-colonial intellectual, was born in Calcutta on 24 February
1942. She graduated from Presidency College of the University of Calcutta in 1959 with first-class degree
in English. She left India in the same year to take a Master?s degree at Cornell University in the U. S. A.
and it was followed by a year?s fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, England.
Spivak returned to the U. S. A. after the completion of the fellowship in England for taking up the
position of an Instructor at the University of Iowa. Meanwhile she completed her doctoral dissertation on
the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the research work was guided by the literary critic Paul de Man at Cornell
University, New York. At present she is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia
University, New York. Her translation of Jacques Derrida?s Of Grammatology brought international
recognition for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Spivak, through her cultural and critical theories, tried to challenge the legacy of colonialism. She refused
to admit the notion that the Western World is having an upper hand over the Third World as it is more
purified from the grossness of acute barbarism. Her critical discourse raises the issues of marginal
subjects such as the place of the subaltern women in the society and their empowerment. Though the
people could surpass the colonial rule, they are not actually free from its influences and power structures.
Morton says: The social, political and economic structures that were established during colonial rule
continued to inflect the cultural, political and economic life of Post-colonial nation states ranging from
Ireland to Algeria; from India to Pakistan and Jamaica to Mexico. In common with many anti-colonial
intellectuals, including Frantz Fanon (1925-61) and Partha Chatterje (1947 - ),
Spivak emphasizes how anti-colonial nationalism assumed a distinctively bourgeois character, and was
thus perceived by many to reproduce the social and political inequalities that were prominent under
colonial rule (1 - 2).
Spivak borrows the term subaltern? from Gramsci, to refer to the unrepresented group of people in the
society (Gramsci 55). In the Indian cultural context, the term subaltern? acquires more significance as
the people have struggled hard for Indian independence. She prefers the term subaltern? as it
encompasses the exact picture of the lower class people. Morton quotes the words of Spivak as: I like the
word subaltern for one reason. It is totally situational. Subaltern began as a description of a certain rank in
the military. The word was under censorship by Gramsci: he called Marxism monism?, and was obliged
to call the proletarian subaltern.? That word, used under duress, has been transformed into the
description of everything that doesn?t fall under strict class analysis. I like that, because it has no
theoretical rigor (46).
India is a land of varieties and vitalities. It is divided into different states in the name of class, religion,
language, ethnicity, gender and citizenship. In this scattered outlook, the condition of the subaltern is all
the more pathetic. Spivak came to the forefront of literary circle with her celebrated essay Can the
Subaltern Speak? The essay vindicates the apprehensions of women in India who practise the widow-
sacrifice known as sati1. The practice of sati in the pre-independent India was considered as part of a
barbaric culture by the Western World.
Spivak proposes a theory of subalternity in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? In this essay, she
vindicated the limitations of the subalterns, asking Can the Subaltern Speak? (283). By subaltern?
Spivak means the oppressed subjects or more generally those of inferior rank (283). She goes on to add
that In the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as
female is even more deeply in shadow (287). Spivak concludes the essay Can the Subaltern Speak? by
reiterating her standpoint that the subaltern cannot speak (308).
Her statement subaltern cannot speak has litigated flames of controversy in the post-colonial context.
Spivak?s statement is actually a onestop answer for all the questions. It is an outcome of her lifelong
search for truth and it is being formulated on the basis of socio-cultural backgrounds. The theory
formulates that the subaltern can speak but others do not have the patience to listen to them. The message
conveyed by the sender does not reach to the receiver as it is hindered by the element of noise2.
Articulation is an involuntary act by the human beings but to interpret things in the real sense takes
conscious effort on the part of the listeners. Morton clarifies the wide discrepancy between articulation
and interpretation of the subaltern women in the following words:
Spivak?s conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak is often taken out of context to mean that subaltern
women have no political agency because they cannot be represented. Such a reading is actually contrary
to the very situated theoretical framework that Spivak establishes in Can the Subaltern Speak??
Spivak would certainly not want to deny the social agency and lived existence of disempowered subaltern
women. The crucial point, however, is that these disempowered women receive their political and
discursive identities within historically determinates systems of political and economic representation (66
- 67).

2 Colonialism and Racial Subalternity

Racial discrimination began with the advent of colonialism. The European forefathers had set out their
expeditions to various countries with the purpose of establishing trade and commerce. Colonialism had a
specific game plan behind the venture. In the name of civilizing the East and purify them from barbarity,
the European forefathers imprinted their foot-marks on various countries as a source of autonomous
power. In order to carry out the administration in new colonies, the Europeans established political order
and it was executed either by force or by hegemony. The strategic plan of colonialism is described by
Walia as:
Colonialism is accompanied by exploitation, annexation and conquest. Its hegemonic power rests on
creating the binary opposition of self/other, white/black, good/evil, superior/inferior, and so on. Thus a
part of the world was able to enjoy supremacy because it convinced the rest of the world about the white
man?s burden? and his civilizing machine? (77).
The binary oppositions led to the creation of racial discrimination between the white settlers and the
natives. The so-called native elites tried to identify themselves with the white settlers and the issue
became all the more complicated. The white settlers took advantage of this situation in exploiting the
country. They joined hands in executing various programmes so as to bully the native subalterns.
In order to carry out the smooth functioning of all the activities, the white imperialists advocated the
policy of Divide and Rule.? The native elites extended their whole hearted support to the white settlers in
suppressing the insurgency of the subalterns. In the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre says:
The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they
branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture; they stuffed their mouth full
with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother
country they were sent home, white-washed (7).
As the colonies prospered in many parts of the country, the white settlers had to face stiff opposition from
the natives. In this crucial juncture, the native elites found it below their dignity to support the uprising of
the lower classes. The criterion for racial superiority or inferiority was on the basis of colour and wealth.
In order to share the qualities of European masters of colonialism, the native elites discriminated the
subalterns and joined hands with the white settlers. The society was divided on the basis of racial issues:
The world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The
originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and immense difference of ways of
life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it
is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a
given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause
is the consequence; you are rich because your are white, you are white because you are rich (Fanon 30 -
31).
The subalterns were made to believe that they belonged to an inferior race and so not fit for making any
real contribution to the society. The white settlers always emerged as champions of the superior race.
Such type of comparisons subjugated the will and aspirations of the subalterns. The white settlers very
often resorted to violence for the implementation of various policies. The imperialists acted on the
principle that offence was the best form of defence:
In the colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and
machines. In defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still
remains a foreigner The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those
who are unlike the original inhabitants, the others? (Fanon 31).
In the colonial period, the settler-native relationship could be compared to that of a master and a slave.
The natives are conscious of their rights and free will so as to be the soul masters of their land. But the
natives are treated as secondary citizens in their own land and this subjugation is made possible in the
name of racism. Indians were referred to as brown? and Africans as black.? The subalterns tried to
retaliate against the white supremacy for the sufferings that they had undergone.
Even though they tried to communicate their resentment, the authority could not have the patience to
listen to their plea. In the colonial countries, the natives suffered a lot as they were not equal with the so-
called whites and never a threat to their relentless leadership. The outcome of colonialism is that the
West? still occupies the position of an ideal state in the minds of the colonized people. Not only the lands
but their minds were also being colonized:
The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey And because he constantly refers to the
history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country.
Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his
own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves (Fanon 39 - 40).
In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft makes a distinction between colonialism and post-colonialism.
Colonialism is used to denote a period before independence and post-colonial is used to cover all the
culture affected by imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day (2). Racial
subalternity continues to evolve its repercussions even after the colonial rule. In the post-colonial studies,
the term race? has paved way for ethnicity? so as to account for human variation in terms of culture,
traditions, social patterns and ancestry (Ashcroft 207). The significance of race? is being enumerated by
Ashcroft as:
Race continues to be relevant in post-colonial theory for two reasons: first, because it is so central to the
growing power of imperial discourse during the nineteenth century, and second, because it remains a
central and unavoidable fact? of modern society that race is used as the dominant category of daily
discriminations and prejudice (207).

2.1 Post-colonialism and Subaltern Identity

Post-colonialism marks the end of colonial period and the dawn of the new era. The post-colonial period
is a significant one for the subalterns because both the nation and the people have just been relieved from
the terrible clutches of colonial rule. This period embarks on a mission to reproduce the colonial
experience of the subalterns in literary works. Post-colonialism became a hot topic of discussion in the
literary arena with special reference to the subalterns after the publication of In Other Worlds by Spivak
in 1987, The Empire Writes Back by Ashcroft in 1989, Nation and Narration by Bhabha in 1990 and
Culture and Imperialism by Said in 1993.
The earliest attempt to define post-colonialism goes back to Fanon?s The Wretched of the Earth. In
Beginning Theory, Barry sums up the views of Fanon as: The first step for colonialised people in finding
a voice and an identity is to reclaim their own past. For centuries the European colonizing power will
have devalued the nation?s past, seeing its pre-colonial era as a pre-civilized limbo, or even as a historical
void. Children, both black and white, will have been taught to see history, culture and progress as
beginning with the arrival of the Europeans. If the first step towards a post-colonial perspective is to
reclaim one?s own past, then the second is to begin to erode the colonialist ideology by which that past
had been devalued (192).
Feminist criticism has got a lot of similarities with post-colonial criticism as both of them are in search of
retrieving the past into the present. The feminist criticism had been the most isolated and least understood
of all approaches to literature. In Towards a Feminist Poetics, Elaine Showalter argues that the main
reason that made it appear like a non-linear and non-rationalistic body of writing was the feminist
weariness of rigid theorization. The feminist suspicion of theory had been based on the conviction that all
existing theories are male oriented (148). Showalter points out that the feminist fear of theory has been
helping the male critics to occupy the centre stage in literary studies. One of the important tasks of
Feminist Criticism is to reconstruct the past of women?s literature; that is, to discover and establish the
continuity of a female tradition, instead of moving from great women writer to another as the male
centered literary criticism had so far been doing (153).
Showalter undertakes such a project in her well known book A Literature of their Own: British Women
Novelists from Bronte to Lessing and identifies three prominent phases in the evolution of English
women?s writing. She describes them as feminine, feminist and female phases in women?s literature
(Showalter, Towards a Feminist Poetics 153).
All the colonialised nations of the world have a subaltern identity. It is only in the post-colonial context
that they do realize their past-subordination. It is a Herculean task for the people of the subaltern nations
to reclaim their own past. To their great chagrin, the subalterns recognize the fact that their minds are
colonized and it is very difficult to erode the colonialist ideology. The subaltern identity is the identity of
difference and the subaltern celebrates hybridity, and cultural polyvalency (Barry 198). Barry says:
The notion of the double, or divided, or fluid identity which is characteristic of the post-colonial writer
explains the great attraction which post-structuralism and deconstruction have proved to be for the post-
colonial critic. Poststructuralism is centrally concerned to show the fluid and unstable nature of the
personal and gender identity, the shifting, polyvalent?, contradictory currents of signification within
texts, and the way literature itself is a site on which ideological struggles are acted out. This mind-set is
admirably suited to expressing the numerous contradictions and multiple allegiances of which the post-
colonial writer and critic is constantly aware (195 - 196).
The term post-colonialism was rapidly undergoing changes since the Second World War. The term post-
colonial? refers to the post-independent period but in the late 1970s the term had been used by a few
literary critics to characterize the various cultural effects of colonization (Ashcroft 197). In The Empire
Writes Back, Ashcroft uses the term post-colonial to refer to all the culture affected by imperial process
from the moment of colonization to the present day (2).
The definition given by Ashcroft in The Empire Writes Back has provoked mixed responses from every
nook and cranny of the world. The authors of The Empire Writes Back are of the opinion that no society
can ever be entirely free of such effects and that contemporary forces such as globalization are evidence
of continuing control of the West over the Rest (194). The term post-colonialism? has been deliberately
hyphenated throughout the book The Empire Writes Back so as to add a stress on the discursive and
material effects of the historical fact? of colonialism, resisting an increasingly indiscriminate attention of
cultural difference and marginality of all kinds (198).
Said has the credit of initiating the discourse of post-colonialism (Ashcroft 198) whereas authors of The
Empire Writes Back appropriated and gave wide currency to the term post-colonialism? from the works
of those African, Caribbean and Indian writers, artists and social theorists who were actually engaging
the power of imperial discourse who were writing back. Spivak, the post-colonial critic, incorporated
all the original ideas behind post-colonialism and preferred the term subaltern:
Over the last decade of the nineties Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak have had a complicated and
uncertain relationship with post-colonial studies. Both, for different reasons, have come to reject the post-
colonial: Said from an aversion to any systematic theory (all of which he regards as theological?), and
Spivak in favour of what she regards as the more inclusive term subaltern (Ashcroft 198).

2.2 Third World Women and the Concept of the Other?

Feminism as a movement never had a commonly approved methodology in combating differences that
existed within the sex. British Feminism has so far been more Marxist and theoretical in orientation, with
its concern mainly with questions of representation and genealogy (Showalter, Feminist Criticism in
Wilderness 336). American Feminism, on the other hand, has been more concerned with women?s writing
and involved in the task of retrieving lost traditions of women?s literature.
Showalter points out that feminist criticism could be classified into two broad categories. One of these is
mainly concerned with women as readers and thus consumers of male texts while the other preoccupies
itself with women as writers. The former strives to change our apprehension of male texts by providing a
feminist critique? which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena.
Showalter describes the latter by the name Gynocritique? as its primary concern is with women as the
producers of textual meanings, along with the history, themes, genres and structures of literatures by
women (Showalter, Towards a Feminist Poetics 146 - 147).
Gynocritics uphold the principle of difference in their relationship with men. They have been trying to
define difference? on the basis of biology, language, psychoanalysis and culture. Showalter observes that
English, American and French feminist criticisms have been attempting to theorize difference? in various
ways. English feminist criticism stresses on oppression, the French focuses on repression and the
Americans are more concerned with expression (Showalter, Feminist Criticism in Wilderness 336).
Spivak revitalized the feminist discourse in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? In this essay, she
focuses upon some of the problems of the Third World Women. They have never been mentioned in the
international framework. Spivak?s writings reflected the background of women?s struggle and oppression
in the Third World Countries. Feminism as a theory could not take into consideration the views and
aspirations of all the women in the world. There are regional differences everywhere and the history that
has played a key role in their formation should be analyzed more vividly.
Spivak?s writings on feminism had an iconoclastic effect as she challenged some of the basic assumptions
of feminism in general. All women are not the same and there are a lot of variations existing even among
women with regard to class, colour and creed. The will and aspirations of the European women are totally
different from the women of the Asian Continent. The European women are more or less liberated from
their patriarchal dominance whereas women from the Third World Countries are struggling to cope with
the European women. It would be very difficult to create a universally agreeable female gender and the
time has now come for the people to respect the differences within the gender.
Spivak is not against feminism but her very arguments strengthen the fundamental principles of feminism.
She reiterates the fact that there are differences in the case of race, class, religion, citizenship and culture
among women. Feminism needs to concentrate on this variation that exists among women and help them
to achieve their personal goals.
In French Feminism in an International Frame, Spivak analyses the experiences of Third World Women
as being shadowed by the doctrines of French High Feminism (141). Such a point of view ignores the
crucial differences in culture, history, language and social class. In her reading of Mahasweta Devi?s short
story Breast Giver, Spivak challenges the tenants of Western Feminism. In Breast Giver Jashoda is a
typical high-class poor Brahmin woman with an ardent devotion to her husband Kangalicharan and her
numerous children. The female subaltern protagonist Jashoda challenges the assumptions of the Western
Feminism that childbirth is an unwaged domestic burden. Jashoda becomes a professional mother,
feeding the children in lieu of money for looking after her family:
Motherhood was always her way of living and keeping alive her world of countless beings. Jashoda was a
mother by profession, professional mother. Jashoda was not an amateur mamma like the daughter and
wives of the mother?s house. The world belongs to the professional. In this city, this kingdom, the
amateur beggar pickpocket-hooker has no place. Even the mongrel on the path or side-walk, the greedy
crow at the garbage don?t make room for the upstart amateur. Jashoda had taken motherhood as her
profession ( Devi 222).
In A Literary Representation of the Subaltern, Spivak analyses Jashoda?s story from a subaltern
perspective. Jashoda lives for her husband, children and Haldar family. In Marxist feminist perspective,
the logic of production-distribution values can be applied in the case of Jashoda. To her, the logic of
sexual production is her production:
The milk that is produced in one?s own body for one?s own children is a usevalue. When there is a
superfluity of use values, exchanges value arise. That which cannot be used is exchanged. As soon as the
(exchange) value of Jashoda?s milk emerges, it is appropriated. Good food and constant sexual servicing
are provided so that she can be kept in prime condition for optimum lactation. The milk she produces for
children is presumably through necessary labor. The milk that she produces for the children of her
masters? family is through surplus labor (Spivak, Literary Representation of the Subaltern 248).
By placing her story in a gender context, Jashoda?s position is that of a slave. The milk-sons abandoned
Jashoda when she was afflicted by breast cancer. She has now ceased to be of any use to the society and
she had to face a tragic end in her life without the assistance of anybody in the end.
The concept of the other? is a universal phenomenon in which the self claims to be the subject and all
the rest come under the category of the other?. The term other? is highly relative and it goes on
changing its significance according to the context. There is supremacy of male domination over women in
the society. The dominance of patriarchy has been achieved through historical forces. From the time
immemorial, the male-folk went for work and they were the bread-earners of the family. Women were
confined to the four walls of their houses, looking after their children and household duties. They never
went out for anything and as a result they lacked vigour, vitality, exuberance and mobility.
Physiologically a lot of changes do take place in the body of a woman especially when she bears a child
in her womb. The bodily changes along with the strict restriction on movement resulted in the complete
subjugation of women. This historical factor has paved the way for the treatment of women as the
other?.
In the introduction to The Second Sex, De Beauvoir speaks about the concept of the other? as: The
category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most
ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality that of a Self and the Other. This duality was
not originally attached to the division of the sexes, it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is
revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumezil on the East Indies and
Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus,
Sun- Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between God and Evil, lucky and unlucky, right
and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought (16 - 17).
Women are being treated as the other? since they are subordinated to their men. The condition of the
Third World Women is even more pathetic. They are doubly segregated; first of all from their men and
also from the white upper class. The third world women are discriminated on the basis of gender, colour
and caste. The concept of the other? comprises not only of the women of the third world but all the
unwanted people like mentally retarded, mentally derailed and people with homosexual activities. The
other? always occupies a position outside the mainstream of life and they are treated as marginals who
do not contribute anything to the welfare of the society. The psychological reason behind the treatment of
women as the other? is to subjugate them under the patriarchal dominance and utilize their servile
existence whenever needed. Wolfreys quotes Spivak as:
In the case of academic feminism the discovery is that to take the privileged male of the white race as a
norm for universal humanity is no more than a politically interested figuration. It is a trope that passes
itself off as truth and claims that woman or the racial other is merely a kind of troping of that truth of man
in the sense that they must be understood as unlike (non-identical with) it and yet with reference to it
(172).

3 Gender Subalternity and the Role of Women in the Society

The society has identified the woman as a person who belongs to the fairer sex.? It is equal to say that a
female is perceived by the society from the point of view of sex. Males and females co-exist in this
society for the harmonious growth and development of the nation. They share equal responsibilities in
supporting the family but at the same time gender difference occurs even in the family.
Females play a vital role in the reproduction process and still they are labeled as the second sex or the
weaker sex.? De Beauvoir says: Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as
relative to him: she is not regarded as an autonomous beingThe body of man makes sense in itself quite
apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems waiting in significance by itself Man can think of
himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees:
thus she is called the sex?, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being.
For him she is sex absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not
he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the
Subject, he is the Absolute she is the Other (16).
The concept of the Subject? and the Other? points to the proposition that only the males have the right
to live in this society. Males themselves cannot live in the society, so they consider women as their
supporters and treat them as secondary. It is only at this juncture that the practice of sati becomes a topic
of hot discussion.
Once the husband dies, the wife has no more role to play except to join with her husband in the funeral
pyre. It was an accepted system that prevailed in the country and it was abolished by the Britishers as part
of their White Man?s Burden?3. In India the practice of sati was very common and many women who
became part of the rituals did it out of their love for their husbands. The society has played a major role in
making sati a common phenomenon in the country so as to deny separate existence from men. Once the
Subject? is gone, the Other? cannot remain as a single entity and the widow has to join with the dead
husband in the funeral pyre for the completion of the cyclical process. In Can the Subaltern speak?
Spivak says:
As object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of
gender keeps the male dominant. If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and
cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow (287).
In the outset of gender subalternity, it is relevant to delve deep into the roles of women in the society. In
the Indian cultural scenario, the historiography failed to represent the contribution of women towards the
materialization of Indian independence. It would be now difficult to retrieve the voice of the subaltern or
trace the tyrannical process behind the subaltern classes. The issue is further complicated when they do
not have a proper history to reclaim their own past.
Women had a very limited role to play in the society as they were not allowed to think independently.
They are pleased to live with their men and they carry out a lot of household duties that come under the
category of unpaid labour. Though women are proficient in doing many jobs, they are not allowed to
make any kind of initiatives in their lives. The gendered subalterns are playing the role of mere shadows
to please their men. The role of the shadow comes to an end when the light goes out of her husband. Then
the woman has no more existence except to trace the shadow of the dead.
The original title of the essay Can the subaltern Speak? was Power, Desire, and Interest (Spivak 271).
The essay became a controversial subject of thought with Spivak?s statement the subaltern cannot
speak (308). The essay challenges the basic tenets of colonialism. Spivak substantiates her argument that
subaltern cannot speak by taking the example of widow self-immolation in India. The practice of sati
continued to flourish in the colonial India as it was seconded by the patriarchal culture which in fact made
it extremely difficult for the subaltern women to utter their thought.

3.1 Voice of Dissent in Can the Subaltern Speak?

In the highly controversial essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak rakes various issues related to sati,
the practice of widow self-immolation. It was the finest example to support the argument that the
subaltern women didn?t get the opportunity to transact their ideas and convince the society about their
dissenting voice. The Britishers were the rulers of the colonial India and they tried to abolish the age old
custom of widow sacrifice in 1829.
Sati is a Sanskrit word for widow and she becomes a good and loyal wife to her husband when she
ascends the pyre of her dead husband and unites with her husband in the act of self-immolation. The
Britishers preferred the term suttee4 instead of sati and the abolition of this evil practice was taken up by
the colonial rulers as part of their civilizing mission (Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? 297). The
message from the colonial rulers was that white men saving brown women from brown men (293). But
to their greatest disappointment, the Britishers never knew that some of the women in India really wanted
to join with their dead husbands ithe funeral pyre as a noble act of selfimmolation.
Both Dharmasastra and Rig-Veda, ancient Hindu religious texts, treat the practice of widow self-
immolation as a sacred ritual for the dead husband, rather than an act of suicide: The two moments in the
Dharmasastra that I am interested in are the discourse on sanctioned suicides and the nature of the rites
for the dead.
Framed in these two discourses, the self-immolation of widows seems an exception to the rule. The
general scriptural doctrine is that suicide is reprehensible. Room is made, however, for certain forms of
suicide which, as formulaic performance, lose the phenomenal identity of being suicide (Spivak, Can the
Subaltern Speak? 299). People carried out the practice of widow self-immolation as it was permitted in
the Dharmasastra. Spivak challenges the validity of this horrible human sacrifice by stating that this is
not the proper place for the woman to annul the proper name of suicide through the destruction of the
proper self (Can the Subaltern Speak? 300).
Self-immolation has attained a spiritual significance and the rite is highly male oriented where the
domination of patriarchy is made visible through the accomplishment of this widow sacrifice. The
practice of sati helped the males to demand respect from women. Women in the pre-independent India
played the role of a parasite. A parasite is a separate living organism like a woman and it does not have
independent existence. Once the main tree falls down, the existence of the parasite is under threat.
The tree and the parasite cease to exist at the same time. The woman is not different from the parasite.
The moment her husband dies, the woman loses her identity as an individual and regains her individuality
with her husband on the funeral pyre. Spivak is of the view that due to the religious halo behind the self-
immolation, the act of widow sacrifice cannot be considered as an act of suicide but a simulacrum of
both truth-knowledge and piety of place (Can the Subaltern Speak? 300).
The denial of self-sacrifice on the funeral pyre of her dead husband is treated with contempt and the
society will consider her as a living example of nuptial ingratitude: It is in terms of this profound ideology
of the displaced place of the female subject that the paradox of free choice comes into play By the
inexorable ideological production of the sexed subject such a death can be understood by the female
subject as an exceptional signifier of her own desire, exceeding the general rule for a widow?s conduct
(300).
In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak comes up with the contention that Sati should have been read
with martyrdom (302). A martyr does not die for himself/herself. His/her blood is spilled for the cause of
others in which s/he has no personal advantage. The women who burnt themselves as satis were martyrs.
This martyrdom was in fact a kind of protest against the society, since it failed to recognize their role in
the society along with the kith and kin of their family. British colonial administrator Edward Thompson
published his Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry in the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning in
1928.
In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak argues that Thompson has made the entire situation worse and
more complicated by stating that white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men, impose
upon those women a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice,
good-wifehood with self-immolation on the husband?s pyre (305). The British rulers in India tried to put
an end to the practice of sati so as to justify imperialism as a part of their civilizing mission:
Such a claim repeats the silencing of the Hindu woman?s voice, which is already displaced on to her dead
husband?s funeral pyre in the traditional Hindu religious codes Rather than defending the woman?s
agency, however, the British colonial administration used the body of the widow as an ideological battle-
ground for colonial power. In doing so the British were able to justify colonialism, or the systematic
exploitation and appropriation of territory, as a civilizing mission. In both the Hindu and British
discussions of widow sacrifice, the voice and political agency of the woman is thoroughly repressed from
official historical discourse and political representation (Morton 63 - 64).
In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak lashes out her stringent criticism against Edward Thompson?s
Suttee for two obvious reasons: first of all Thompson?s finessing of the word sati as faithful in the
very first sentence of the book and the second one is for Thompson?s praise for General Charles
Hervey?s stand on this subject matter that brings out the pity of a system which looked only for
prettiness and constancy in woman (305). Can the subaltern speak?? is a rhetorical question asked by
Spivak and her intention was not to invite any kind of reply but to state the impediments of the subalterns.
The essay Can the Subaltern Speak? discusses the problem of widow sacrifice in great detail and
Spivak reiterates her standpoint that subaltern cannot speak and the condition of the woman is even more
complicated. Though women obeyed the whims and fancies of their men, they had a voice within
themselves, a voice of dissent and disapproval. All women who became victims of patriarchal violence
and atrocities had something to say or they wanted to make their position clear whether they were for or
against a proposition. The historian failed to record the voice of dissent and especially that of the
subaltern women. It would be now very difficult to recover the dissenting voice of the subaltern and the
case is further complicated as they lost between colonial power structure and the Hindu religious codes:
The British government put a ban on the custom of sati, but as a result of that several women who could
have died a cruel but quick death when husbands died now have to face an agonizing slow death (Tharu
363).

3.2 Subaltern cannot Speak: A Discourse upon the Theory of Communication

Spivak?s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? provoked a flood-gate of controversies from every nook and
cranny of the world. The essay became controversial because Spivak reiterated her opinion that the
subaltern could not speak and that the condition of women was more pathetic. One of the reasons for this
controversy was the comparison of the words speak? along with talk.? Spivak regrets for the way in
which the entire concept of the essay is misconstrued by replacing the word talk? instead of speak?.
Many critics use the sentence subaltern cannot talk as against the sentence subaltern cannot speak.
(Spivak, The Spivak Reader 289).
The act of speaking and talking are completely different from each other. The act of speaking is more
active and it involves the participation of at least one listener whereas the act of talking is passive and it
can either be a soliloquy or somnambulism. Speaking comes under interpersonal communication5 and it
involves a situation in which two people try to communicate things face to face. In this type of
communication, the person can use gestures and facial expressions so as to make the communication
more effective. The element of feedback is instant and it is the most effective way of knowing that the
communication has achieved its specific objective. The act of talking comes under intra-personal
communication. It is an act of talking to oneself and such kinds of expressions are not supposed to be
heard by others. Meditation, prayer and soliloquy come under intra-personal communication.
The elements of communication include: sender, receiver, message, channel, effect, feedback and noise.
Sender is the one who sends the message and the person who receives the message is the receiver.
Message is the information that is being passed over to the receiver by the sender and the medium that is
used in communicating the message becomes the channel. Effect is the attitudinal change that is found in
the receiver as a result of getting the new information. Feedback is the response from the receiver that is
to be returned to the sender for more clarification. Context is the setting in which the process of
communication takes place which can be classified into three: Physical, Psychological and Temporal.
Physical context is the geographical setting in which the communication does take place. Psychological
context is the relationship that exists between the sender and the receiver. If there is a good rapport with
the sender and the receiver, the communication can be more effective and there will be a genuine interest
from the part of the listener towards the communication process. Temporal context refers to the time at
which the communication takes place. The last but the most important element of communication is
noise. It is said of anything that distorts / hinders / hampers / prevents the proper reception and
understanding of the message.
In her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak states that the subaltern cannot speak? by attaching a
special emphasis on the element of noise. The communication that takes place between a subaltern and a
non-subaltern is actually lost due to the element of noise. The element of noise is influenced by the racial,
cultural and socio-economic factors. The goal of communication is achieved only when the desired
message is conveyed to the receiver. Though the sender tries his / her level best, the communication is
interrupted by the element of noise. Spivak substantiates her argument in The Spivak Reader as: By
speaking I was obviously talking about a transaction between the speaker and the listener. That is what
did not happen in the case of a woman who took her own body at the moment of death to inscribe a
certain kind of understanding too weak a word a certain kind of annulment of all the presuppositions
that underlie the regulative psychobiography that writes sati.
When we act we don?t act out of thinking through details; we act in something that Derrida calls,
following Kierkegaard, the night of nonknowledge We act out of certain kinds of reflexes that come
through learning habits of mind, rather than by merely knowing something. That is the way in which her
action was inscribed in her body. And even that incredible effort to speak did not fulfil itself in a speech
act. And therefore, in a certain kind of theoretical anguish after the accounting of this, I said, the
subaltern cannot speak (289).
In an interview with the editors of The Spivak Reader, Spivak substantiates her argument that subaltern
cannot speak with an example taken from the colonial period. In Eighteenth Century, the Britishers came
into the region of Bengal, the present Bangladesh. They were surprised to see the fully developed ancient
water works (290).
The complicated water canals were equipped to check the ravishing flood. The Britishers could not
tolerate the existence of feudal system in Bengal where the feudal chiefs made the lower class people
work hard for them. With the advent of the Britishers, the feudal system was turned up-side down and the
feudal chiefs became tax collectors. As a result of constant negligence on the part of the Britishers, the
irrigation canals soon became stagnant, infested with mosquitoes, and so they started to destroy the
canals (290). The Barbaric act of the Britishers was questioned by the subaltern insurgency as they
became the constant victims of the flood. The subalterns were shattered into pieces and the Britishers
never had the patience to listen to the subalterns. The imperial government appointed a waterworks
inspector to study the entire situation in detail. He came up with a fact finding report that these
waterways had in fact been an irrigation and flood management system (291).
It is only by restoring the ancient waterways? the people can have a calm and serene life. Spivak is
speculative about the restoration of the ancient waterworks as she says: They cannot be built because the
way that they had been built was slowly, respecting the rhythm of those very young rivers, whereas the
way things would be built today would be capital-intensive, cost-efficient, and fast (The Spivak Reader
291).
Spivak?s controversial statement the subaltern cannot speak? implies a lot of inner meanings. The
subalterns have the capacity to articulate things well and they can go to any extent so as to make their
stand clear before the authorities. The real problem lies in the receiver as s/he is not ready to listen to the
sender of the message. The receiver is neither interested in listening to the message nor in a position to
decode the message of the sender. The element of noise distorts the proper reception of the message and
when a subaltern tries to speak, the dormant element of communication becomes a prominent one. It is
due to the social and economic factors that exist within a region. The psychological context hardly exists
when a subaltern tries to speak; as a result, the communicative system fails to achieve its target.
As women were tied down to the four walls of their bedrooms, they hardly had an opportunity to speak
and even when they spoke something they could not transact the proper message and convince others of
their stand. The place of the funeral pyre of her dead husband turns out to be the first and the last platform
for a woman to speak. In the roaring outburst of loss, the woman may try to speak but others won?t have
the patience to listen to her. The communication system fails when the speaker is not able to convince the
receiver. The society does not give room for the person to speak and in Can the Subaltern Speak?,
Spivak makes the point clearer when she says, There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject
can speak (307).
Mc Leod agrees: Their muteness is created by the fact that even when women uttered words, they were
still interpreted through conceptual and methodological procedures which were unable to understand their
interventions with accuracy. It is not so much that subaltern women did not speak, but rather that others
did not know how to listen, how to enter into a transaction between speaker and listener. The subaltern
cannot speak because their words cannot be properly interpreted. Hence, the silence of the female as
subaltern is the result of a failure of interpretation and not a failure of articulation (195).

4 Conclusion
In Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak propounds her theory of subalternity. The crux of her theory is that
the subalterns cannot speak.? The tenets of the theory became controversial as they were interpreted with
false conviction. Spivak?s theory of subalternity does not admit the concept that subaltern cannot talk.
Spivak has attached a special significance to the term speak? in her essay. By speaking, Spivak means
transaction between speaker and receiver. When the subalterns try to speak, the message that they try to
communicate becomes totally distorted. It happens in a continuous process because others are not ready
to listen to them. As people turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the subalterns, communication system fails and
no transaction takes place. The subalterns are not able to have transactions with others because of the
disparity that exists in the society.
The subalterns were subjected to the colonial rule and only the colonizer had the voice. The entire concept
of voice? is determined by the subject? and the category of the other? does not have a voice of his/her
own. After the colonial rule, the subalterns were again subordinated to the elite upper class. The subaltern
women continue to suffer and there is little scope for further improvement. In an interview with the
editors of The Spivak Reader, Spivak further explains the controversial statement the subaltern cannot
speak? as: It means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to
be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act. That?s what it had meant, and anguish
marked the spot (292).
Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, the editors of Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, have done a
tremendous job in gathering the works of the women writers with a special emphasis on their lives and
limitations. The pathetic plight of a widow is recalled as:
Once the husband dies, the torture of his wife begins, as if the messengers of the death god Yama
themselves have come to take away her soul. None of her relatives will touch her to take her ornaments
off her body. That task is assigned to three women from the barber caste. Their number varies from three
to six. No sooner does the husband breathe his last than those female fiends literally jump all over her and
violently tear all the ornaments from her nose, ears, etc. In that rush, the delicate bones of the nose and
ears are sometimes broken. Sometimes while plucking the ornaments from her hair, tufts of hair are also
plucked off. If she is wearing any gold or silver ornaments, these cruel women never have the patience to
take them off one by one: they pin her hands down on the ground and try to break the bangles with a large
stone. Why, these callous women torture even a six or seven year old girl, who doesn?t even know
what a husband means when she becomes a widow! (Tharu 359).
Spivak?s theory of subalternity is still relevant as people suffer in the name of gender, class and creed. As
change is the only permanent thing in the world, the subalterns should continue to make their position
clear before the authorities. It is only when the authorities heed to the pleas of the subalterns that the new
dawn of life may be enjoyed by the subalterns in its fullness.
Notes
1 Sati: An act of self-immolation by a woman in the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Dharmasastra and
Rg-Veda, ancient Hindu religious texts, treat sati as a ritual rather than an act of suicide.
2 Noise: One of the elements of Communication. It is the element that disturbs the communication
process.
3 White Man?s Burden: The Britishers came to India for trade and commerce but during their stay they
took it as their mission to civilize the natives. The civilizing mission is referred to as White Man?s
Burden.?
4 Suttee: The conventional transcription of the Sanskrit word for the widow would be sati. The early
colonial British transcribed it as suttee and Edward Thompson, British colonial administrator, published
his work on the widow self-immolation in 1928 under the title Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical
Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning.
5 Interpersonal Communication: It is one of the types of Communication in which two people try to
communicate without the intervention of any machine. The other types of Communication include:
Intrapersonal, Group, Public and Mass Communication.
Intersection of Ethnicity with Nation and Gender

A. Ethnicity's intersection with nation through Caribbean instances

Introduction
Contemporary Caribbean immigrants defy scholarly and popular conceptions of who Blacks are in
America. The observations and generalizations sociologists made in the past about an undifferentiated
Black population; the dichotomy between immigrants and racial minorities; and the widely held belief
that ethnicity is only meaningful to Whites -- all no longer make sense.
Even more, Caribbean immigrants present a formidable and necessary challenge to the existing models of
ethnic adaptation in race relations research -- the most dominant of which is the assimilation perspective
(Hirschman 1983). This essay aims to show that the assimilation perspective has, not only failed to
consider immigrant and ethnic adaptation among people of color, but has also constrained sociological
investigations of ethnicity among Blacks historically which has resulted in a seriously flawed interpretive
framework. With the recent increase in the foreign-born Black population, sociologists can no longer
understand ethnicity exclusively in the framework of White immigrants; nor can we continue to think of
race as the most essential characteristic of Blacks in the United States. Black does not necessarily equal
African- American anymore.

Assimilation and Cultural Deficiency -- The Building Blocks of a Perspective

Best expressed in the work of Robert Park, the assimilation model was originally characterized as a
natural evolutionary process. "Assimilation is the process ... in which persons and groups acquire the
memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups and by sharing their experience and
history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life (Park and Burgess 1924:735)." In the most
general sense, the model held that as immigrants and ethnics became acculturated -- took on values,
customs, language, manner, and dress of the majority White population -- they would achieve entry into
the major institutions and mainstream society.
In Assimilation in American Life, Milton Gordon (1964) distinguished three ideologies of assimilation:
the melting pot, Anglo-conformity, and cultural pluralism. Yet, despite all the modifications, racial
minorities have been incorporated by analogy only.
The idea of a melting pot neglects the power imbalance and inequality among racial and ethnic groups
altogether; and the legacy of cultural deficiency among Blacks questions the premise of the cultural
pluralism perspective, where all groups retain their distinctiveness characterized by their religious
practices, family structure, lifestyle, and cultural values (Glazer and Moynihan 1963). The assumption
that Blacks had lost all vestiges of their original African cultures and, unlike European immigrants, had
no cultural tradition -- and thus no ethnic status -- dominated the race relations perspective (McKee
1993). Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) note, Whites are seen as variegated in terms of group
identities, but all Blacks look alike. So, even the cultural pluralism perspective proves to be inadequate
in that it fails to recognize the basis and variability of Black culture.
In addition, as Marilyn Halter (1993) argues in Between Race and Ethnicity, one of the biggest failures of
all American assimilation theory is that race, if discussed at all, is treated either as a derivative of
ethnicity or the terms are used interchangeably, as if they were the same (see Gordon 1964; Handlin 1973;
Higham 1975; Kallen 1924; Smith 1991). Classic assimilationist theory when applied to Blacks, as it has
been to rural Southern Blacks following the Great Migration, depicts them as if they were no different
from European peasants arriving in northern cities (Banfield 1974; Glazer 1971; Handlin 1962; Lieberson
1980; Kristol 1966; Reid 1939; Wirth 1928). The experience of slavery and its legacy of institutionalized
inequality is stressed as being a special, but not insurmountable, obstacle to the Black population in the
adaptation process.
Underlying the application of this paradigm to racially defined groups are debates about the definition of
an ethnic group. The very origins of the terms ethnicity and ethnic group lay outside the experiences of
racial minorities.
W. Lloyd Warner (1945), who was perhaps the first to use the term ethnicity, distinguished between ethnic
groups, which he saw as characterized by cultural differences, and racial groups, characterized
substantially by physical differences. Since then sociologists have been unable to resolve the dilemma of
acknowledging the effect of racial discrimination on the experience of Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in this
country without essentializing race. Those who use the broad definition of ethnic group (that is, one that
includes racial groups) argue that the experiences of people defined as nonwhite are essentially similar to
the experiences of White groups (Glazer 1971; Nagel 1994; Sollors 1989; Sowell 1981). On the other
hand, analysts such as Halter (1993), who prefer the narrower definition of ethnic group, maintain that
what often occurs is that the European or White ethnics become the norm.
Furthermore, in Understanding Everyday Racism, Philomena Essed (1991) argues that the substitution of
ethnicity for race as a basis of categorization is accompanied by an increasing unwillingness among the
dominant group to accept responsibility for the problems of racism (see also, McKee 1993).
Arguably the dilemma of fitting Black ethnics into the sociology of race and ethnicity stems from one
primary theoretical limitation of the assimilation perspective -- the failure to recognize ethnic differences
among Blacks. Not only is the paradigm based exclusively on the framework of European (White)
ethnicity, but Blacks are seen within this construct as simply another ethnic group (Halter 1993; Omi and
Winant 1994; Zephir 1996). Like society itself, the sociological discourse on ethnicity reveals a biracial
rather than a multicultural mode of analysis; and with rare exceptions sociological theories of ethnicity
are not very interested in ethnicity among Blacks.

Ethnic Identity among Black Immigrants

Despite the lack of an interpretive framework, scholars have begun to piece together a perspective on
Black ethnicity that in many ways operates very differently for Caribbean immigrants than the
assimilation perspective would suggest. Recent scholarship suggests that for Caribbean immigrants, race
and ethnicity have very different meanings, acculturation is not the desired or ultimate end, and social
mobility and the preservation of ethnicity are not at all antithetical (Bonnet 1990; Foner 1987; Fouron
1987; Kasinitz 1992; Waters 1994).
The most significant and consistent interpretation of the adaptation of Caribbean immigrants concerns the
fundamental difference from the experience of White immigrants because of the effect of race. Without
minimizing the extent of rabid anti-immigrant bias in this country, it is now clear that racial minorities
have encountered a different kind rather than a different degree of prejudice than White ethnic groups
have faced. This fact is very well captured in David Roedigers (1994) essay on White ethnics in America.
He notes that as European immigrants made the transition from the Irish in America or the Poles in
America to Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans, they also became White Americans. In fact, they
chose and even struggled to be recognized as White (Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991; Waters 1990).
However, Caribbean immigrants perceive a status loss when they assimilate or become Black American.
Coming from societies where they constitute the racial majority, where Blacks are in positions of
leadership and authority, and where the social meaning of race is influenced by color and class
distinctions, the ascription of a minority status is perceived as a step down (Bryce- Laporte 1972; Kasinitz
1992; Laguerre 1984; Vickerman 1994; Woldemikael 1989). "If White immigrants," as Philip Kasinitz
(1992) remarks, "tend to gain status by becoming American -- by assimilating into a higher status group --
Black immigrants may actually lose status if they lose their cultural distinctiveness."
In American Odyssey, Michel Laguerre (1984) points out that for Haitian immigrants, the racial barrier
adds a dimension to the everyday problems other immigrants usually face. Suddenly, skin color becomes
a problem, and one that cannot be overcome. Whether light-skinned or dark skinned, intellectual or
illiterate, former military officer or civilian, city dweller or country folk -- the Haitian immigrant is first,
foremost, and remains Black. Similarly, Nancy Foner (1985, 1987) describes how Jamaicans in New York
cling to their Jamaicanness with the realization that assimilation with Black Americans would mean
being stigmatized as part of a group which has a low status in American society.
Flore Zephir (1996) reinforces previous findings that ethnic distinctiveness is the credo of Caribbean
immigrants in Haitian Immigrants in Black America (See Bryce-Laporte 1972; Buchanan 1979, 1983,
1987; Fontaine 1976; Fouron 1987; Glick-Schiller 1975, 1977; Laguerre 1984; Woldemikael 1985a,
1985b, 1989). Her study of Haitians in New York City reveals that the decision to maintain themselves as
a distinct ethnic group is a conscious one. She describes how Caribbean immigrants tend to use their
ethnicity and cultural distinctiveness as a situational response, an accommodation tactic to increase their
chances of making it in their new environment, or as a means of resistance to the subordinate status
imposed on them by the American system.
On second-generation Caribbean Blacks, Mary Waters (1994) has begun to explore the intersections of
race, ethnicity, and class in the development of racial and ethnic identity. In short, Waters found the
relationship between social mobility and ethnicity for Black immigrants is exactly opposite what it is for
White immigrants. For Black immigrants, the more socially mobile they are, the more they cling to their
ethnic identity as a hedge against their racial identity.

Conclusion
The number of empirical and theoretical questions about Black immigrants alone requires sociologists to
expand the discourse on race and ethnicity. How are we to understand ethnic differences among Blacks?
Is the incorporation of Black immigrants different from white immigrants because of racial
discrimination? How do these differences fit the existing models of incorporation in immigration
research? Over time, do they become just another hyphenated American ethnic group or just Black
Americans? What effect does race have on the ethnic options of America's contemporary immigrants and
their children? How sociologists specializing in the area of race and ethnicity deal with the study of
Caribbean immigrants will help us gauge whether or not we have truly abandoned the race relations
perspective so many have identified as a failure (Back 1963; Blauner 1972; Fendrich and Sloan 1966;
Hughes 1963; Lyman 1972; Omi and Winant 1994; McKee 1993; Van den Berghe 1967).
The emergent significance of Caribbean ethnicity challenges sociologists to abandon, once and for all, a
deficiency paradigm, a dichotomy between White immigrants and racial minorities, and an assimilation
perspective that is inadequate for the interpretation of race and ethnicity in the post-Civil Rights
Movement era. If sociology's neglect of ethnicity among Blacks is only the unintentional effect of the
application of a paradigm based on White ethnic history to a racially defined group, the growing
population of non-European immigrants provides ample subjects for empirical research. Given the recent
interest in the construction of Whiteness, to ignore the construction and diversity of Blackness is at the
very least, neglectful. Coco Fusco reminds her readers that racial identities are not only Black, Latino,
Asian, Native American and so on; they are also White.
B. Intersection of Ethnicity with gender

Abstract
This article argues for a reconceptualization of the intersections of race, gender and class as simultaneous
processes of identity, institutional and social practice in order to redress the lack of attention to these
intersections in feminist organization studies. Grounding my argument on a brief critique of white liberal
feminism from the perspective of women of colour, I examine other feminist frameworks beyond the
dominant liberal paradigm and identify their possible contributions to the study of intersections in
organization theory and practice.
Specifically, I propose theoretical and methodological interventions for researching and practicing more
forcefully and intentionally the simultaneity of race, gender and class in organizations, including
researching and publicizing the hidden stories at the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, nation
and sexuality; identifying, untangling and changing the differential impact of everyday practices in
organizations and identifying and linking internal organizational processes with external societal
processes. I conclude with some reflections on the possible implications of these proposals for each of us,
scholars and practitioners of gender and organization.

Keywords: intersections, race, gender, class, organization studies and change

Introduction
The intersections of race, class and gender are an accepted reality in the fields of women studies, feminist
theory and literary criticism (Bannerji, 1992; Belkhir, 2000; Bhavnani, 2001; Bredstrm, 2006; DuCille,
1994; Friedman, 1998; Knapp, 2005; Ludvig, 2006; McCall, 2005; Phoenix and Pattynama, 2006; Weber,
2001; Yuval-Davis, 2006) .
1 In fact, intersection, or intersectionality, has become such a popular subject that scholars who pioneered
and contributed to its status as a topic of academic scholarship are now concerned about how this
conceptualization has been taken up, as, for example, in the commodification of Black womanhood
(DuCille, 1994, p. 603) Black women having become the preferred representative of gender and race
intersections in the USA (Christian, 1987, 1989a, 1989b; Collins, 1986, 1989, 2000a; DuCille, 1994;
hooks, 1984, 1989, 1994). Others argue that work at the intersections of race, class and gender is still
underdeveloped (Belkhir et al., 2000; Kalantzis, 1990; Meisenhelder, 2000).
In the field of organization studies and organizational change there is little evidence that the importance
of these intersections is acknowledged. Few scholars, in particular in the USA, advocate the inclusion of
race in mainstream organization theorizing (for exceptions see Alderfer, 1990; Alderfer and Thomas,
1988; Cox, 1990; Cox and Nkomo, 1990; Nkomo, 1992), even though the inclusion of more sophisticated
perspectives on gender has gained ground (Alvesson and Billing, 1997; Cals and Smircich, 1992a,
1996a, 2006; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Ely, 1999; Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Ely et al., 2003; Martin,
2001; Martin and Collinson, 2002; Mills and Tancred, 1992).
Fewer scholars still address the intersections of race and gender (Bell and Nkomo, 1992; Bell et al., 1993;
Nkomo and Cox, 1989, 1996; Proudford and Smith, 2003; Turner and Shuter, 2004); race, ethnicity and
gender (Ferdman, 1999) or race, class and gender (Acker, 1999a; Adib and Guerrier, 2003; Cals and
Smircich, 1996b; Holvino, 1993, 1994b, 1996; Marks, 2001; Munro, 2001). In the field of organization
development and change, the silence on these intersections is outstanding, even within the discourse of
managing diversity (Cox, 1993; Cross et al., 1994; Thomas, 1991, 1992, 1999).
Why has it been so difficult to take up the intersections of class, gender and race as a matter of course in
organizational theory and practice? My point of departure is the experiences of women of colour and the
women of colours critique of white feminist theory, a critical stance with a long history of advocating
and studying these intersections.
I use the term women of colour to focus on the commonalities among Native American, Latina, Asian
and Black/African American women, who share a status and an experience as racio-ethnic minorities in
the USA. As a woman of colour born and raised in Puerto Rico, educated in the USA and practicing
organization development globally, I have a personal and professional interest in the topic as there is no
better point of entry into a critique or reflection than ones own experience (Bannerji, 1992, p. 67).
I remember and redeploy this critique in order to revisit organization theory and practice and draw new
conclusions about its (in)ability to address all women. My purpose is to reconceptualize the intersections
of race, gender and class as simultaneous processes of identity, institutional and social practice,
suggesting ways in which this reconceptualization can support new theory-making, research and practice
in organizational studies, including bringing to a close the modern impulse to search for a meta-narrative
that attempts to integrate race, gender and class (Sacks, 1989).
In the first section I offer a framing for these arguments. I review four themes representing the experience
of women of colour and the difference that attending to these experiences has made in feminist theorizing
when posing challenges to liberal feminism, whose claims to speak for all women had silenced,
even to the present, the fundamental simultaneity of gender, race and class in work and other social
processes. My own history as a woman of colour, told through the voices of others before me, is part of
this framing, because there is no place where women of colour can enter that does not consider the
intersections of race-ethnicity, gender and class (Giddings, 1984).
In the second section I draw from other feminist theoretical frameworks that are explicit in considering
intersections of gender, race, class and beyond. I explore each of these frameworkssocialist,
poststructuralist and transnational feminism to gather their insights and identify possibilities for
intersectional organizational analyses.
Drawing from these insights, in the third section I propose a theoretical and a methodological intervention
for researching and practicing the simultaneity of race, gender and class in organizations more forcefully
and intentionally. I conclude with some reflections on possible implications of these proposals for each of
us, scholars and practitioners of gender and organization.

The critique of feminism by women of colour: intersectionalitys long history

As early as 1974 the Combahee River Collective recognized that the struggle of Black women was a
unified struggle against race, gender and class inequality articulated in A black feminist statement: [We
are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as
our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major
systems of oppression are interlocking ... we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to
combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. (Hull et al., 1982, p. 13)
But, as Sandoval documents, a hegemonic feminist theory based on the experience of white women had
developed. This theory, liberal feminism, suppressed, intentionally or not, the theorizing and practice of
women of colour and the recognition of the contributions of an original, eccentric and coalitional cohort
of U.S. feminists of color (2000, p. 42).
One outcome of both first wave US feminisms in the 19th century and the second wave womens
movement, which grew during the 1970s and 1980s, was that women of colour were rendered invisible
and their concerns and experiences were disappeared. Barbara Smith (Smith and Mansbridge, 2000, p.
32) points to a variety of factors that contributed to feminism becoming all white: a lack of
consciousness in white womens organizations, fears of breaking ranks in the Black community, the lack
of support for Black lesbian leadership and political conservatism, which weakened the power of Black
feminism.
Important differences between white women and women of colours theories emerged, which led to
different paths in the theorizing and practice of gender at the intersection of race and class. The
scholarship documenting these differences is extensive, particularly from Black and Chicana feminists
(Collins, 1986, 1989, 2000a; Garcia, 1989; Hull et al., 1982; King, 1988; Sandoval, 2000; Walker, 1983).
While some, in particular socialist feminists, tried to respond to this critique, the white feminist
movement overall failed to successfully address it (Breines, 2002).
This failure, in turn, overdetermined the lack of attention to the intersections of race, class and gender in
organizational theory and research, even when feminist analyses have been deployed, for most of these
analyses were drawn from white womens feminist theorizing. Below I summarize four themes
articulating major differences between white women and women of colour theorizing the signs of a
lived experience of difference (Sandoval, 2000, p. 46). A different consciousness and a different way of
knowing
The distinctive set of experiences that arise from their political and economic status living in the
interstices of complex subordinate positions on dimensions of race, gender and class create the
conditions of possibility for a different standpoint for women of colour (Collins, 1989, 2000a): not
white, not male, not economically privileged an in between. Others have referred to this unique
perspective of women of colour as a third gender category (Sandoval, 1991), multiple consciousness
(King, 1988), triple jeopardy (Ward, 2004), oppositional consciousness (Sandoval, 1991, 2000), mestiza
and borderlands (Anzalda, 1987), a bridge (Rushin, 1981), a crossroads (Rojas, 1989) and interstitial
feminism (Prez, 1999). I liken this position to a kind of belonging and not belonging, a both/and
orientation that allows women of colour to be members of a particular group (of colour, women) and at
the same time stand apart from it as the outsider within (Collins, 1986, p. 40).
Hurtado calls it a shifting consciousness ... the ability of many women of colour to shift from one groups
perception of social reality to another and at times, to be able simultaneously to perceive multiple social
realities without losing their sense of self-coherence. (1996b, p. 384) This position, in turn, creates a
specific relationship to knowledge and knowledge production. It is informed by knowledge that expresses
and validates oppression, while, at the same time, it also documents and encourages resistance to
oppression (Collins, 2000b; Hurtado, 1996b).
This places women of colour in a unique position to document the maneuvers necessary to obtain and
generate knowledge ... [a] unique knowledge that can be gleaned from the interstices of multiple and
stigmatized social identities (Hurtado, 1996b, p. 375).
Successful marginality (p. 376) gets converted into knowledge by various mechanisms: learning to use
anger appropriately; finding a voice in a balancing act between silence and outspokenness; gaining
strength by withdrawing from men; tactically shifting ones consciousness to interpret the world from
multiple identities and expressing oneself in multiple tongues with the ability to talk to different
audiences and in different genres (Hurtado, 1996b).
Theory itself comes to be questioned, partly as a challenge to the apparatus and institutions of theory-
making that silence the perspective of women of colour (Christian, 1987; Crenshaw, 1991; DuCille, 1994)
and partly as a way of connecting to their communities of origin, which are in many instances working
class and non-academic (hooks, 2000).
Feminist writing by women of colour is different in style and content. For example, there is a mixing of
different genres such as poetry, critical essays, short stories, letters, memoirs, and the production of
knowledge itself is less tied to the academy (Lorde, 1984; Moraga and Anzalda, 1981/1983; Morales,
1998). The call is to create theory that uses race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis,
theories that cross borders [and] blur boundaries new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods
(Anzalda, 1990, pp. xxvxxvi).

Women of colour have always worked

African American, Asian, Latina and other women of colour have always worked and been seen as
workers. African American domestic servants, Chinese immigrants sold as prostitutes, Puerto Rican union
organizers in the early 1900s, slavery, indentured, agricultural, factory work and low paying work are just
a few examples (Amott and Matthaei, 1991; Collins, 2000a; DuBois and Ruiz, 1990; Glenn, 1985;
Higginbotham and Romero, 1997; Segura, 1989). Thus, for many women of colour, white feminisms
division between a public and a private sphere does not represent their reality. For example, the demands
by white feminists to have the role of housewife in the private sphere recognized and to gain access to
work in the public sphere (outside the home) have not been a priority for women of colour. On the
contrary, being able to stay at home and being supported by a husbands paycheck is considered a luxury
that only affluent white women have (Glenn, 1988; Romero, 1992, 1997a; Williams, 2000).
Instead, women of colours demands have focused on improving their working conditions and
opportunities, as they have been generally confined to secondary labour markets and to positions at the
bottom of the organizational hierarchy. AfterWorldWar II, for example, Black women experienced
economic gains even when they were employed in the worst paid jobs in the war industry and in the more
dangerous and monotonous jobs in factories and offices that white women rejected. These new jobs
allowed them to leave the world of domestic service and increase their autonomy and wages (Amott and
Matthaei, 1991).
Another illustration of the different relationships that white women and women of colour have to their
material and economic realities is the complex interaction between paid and unpaid work in the lives of
women of colour and how it plays out in their communities. For example, because poor and working class
women of colour do not have the same political and economic means as white middle-class women, their
reproductive labour frequently extends outside the boundaries of the nuclear family into the larger
community the third shift (Romero, 1997b, p. 241).
Community work becomes, for many women of colour, away of meeting a variety of needs for the
welfare and safety of their families such as sharing resources, improving inadequate public services and
accessing networks for paid work. But because conceptualizations of community work, volunteerism
and activism have been dominated by the circumstances and experience of middle class and affluent
white women, the leadership roles, contributions and reasons for engaging in community work of
working class women of colour have often been relegated and remained unexplored (Hardy-Fanta, 1993;
Pardo, 1997).
This different relationship to the material world also produces a different way of thinking, because there
is a connection between what one does and how one thinks (Collins, 1989, p. 748). If you eats these
dinners and dont cook em, if you wears these clothes and dont buy or iron them, then you might start
thinking that the fairy or some spirit did all that.... Black folks dont have no time to be thinking like that
(John Langston Gwaltney, in Collins, 1989, pp. 7489). Because of the prevalence of people of colour in
lower echelon jobs, which restricts their economic opportunities and status, it is difficult to clearly
separate the racial story from the class story in the lives of women of colour.
The experience of class for women of colour is not separate, but an integral part of their experience of
race and gender and vice versa. As DuBois and Ruiz (1990, p. xiii) remind us, the history of women
cannot be studied without considering both race and class ... [and] working-class culture cannot really be
understood without reference to gender and race. Men are not the enemy and family is not necessarily
the problem
The role of the family in sustaining women of colour against racism has meant that women of colour do
not define men as the oppressor and do not experience family as the most oppressive institution in their
lives. While many women of colour critique the nuclear family and its patriarchal and heterosexual
structure and ideologies, Black women and Latinas have also come to regard the family as a space where
the values of their community are transmitted and strategies to survive a racist system are taught. Instead
of being experienced as oppressive, family is experienced as a haven from the hostile environment of
work and society, sometimes even serving as a support system that contributes to their upward mobility
(Bell and Nkomo, 2001; Higginbotham and Weber, 1992; Romero, 1997b).
The experience of racism also leads many women of colour to prioritize race as the starting point of their
self-definition and social position, as white racism treats all Blacks alike. Thus, women of colour join
men of colour in one anti-racist struggle of survival and social change. Furthermore, because race and
class are frequently conflated, as when the term Black welfare mother is used to signify all Black
women, women of colour may struggle against racism, even if it means relegating gender issues (Jones
and Shorter- Gooden, 2003; Reynolds, 1997).
The relationship between women and men of colour is the area in which feminists of colour have made
fewer inroads ... because intergroup ethnic/racial conflict creates the need for little-questioned solidarity
in order to survive (Hurtado, 1996b, p. 381). Many Latin American, African and other Third World
women have chosen to identify first with liberation and anti-imperialistic struggles, joining in solidarity
with men against a common oppressor, rather than seeing essentialized men as their oppressor. We are
fighting for our people; they [white women] are fighting for their individual rights (Mndez-Negrete,
1999, p. 40). This unique experience, in between woman and of colour, fighting racism and sexism,
provides an opportunity for women of colour to reconfigure their subjectivity in relation to a multiplicity
of others and not just white men (Alarcn, 1990; Breines, 2002; Harnois, 2005).

White women are privileged too

Many white women, especially middle-class and affluent white women, have enjoyed the freedom to
pursue professional opportunities because women of colour, in their roles as workers, have looked after
their homes and their children. In these situations, white women have openly exploited women of colour
as domestic workers and organizational assistants. They have used their racial and class privilege to
sustain their social power and status and diminish the identity, social position and options of working
class women of colour (Glenn, 1986; Hochschild, 2000; Reynolds, 1997; Rollins, 1985).
In organizations, this special place for white women only translates into a tendency by white women to
collaborate with white privilege and white men, while women of colour oppose it and confront them
(Brazaitis, 2004; Frost, 1980). Working class womens demands for equality, on the other hand, are
tempered by their greater fear of family instability and potential poverty in divorce.
White women have also benefited from their whiteness in a racist and heterosexist system. For example,
by virtue of being the desirable mothers of the white mans progeny, a group dynamic unfolds where
white men relate to white women through seduction and to women of colour through rejection
(Hurtado, 1989, 1996a).
While white womens femininity is exalted and their virginity protected, women of colours sexuality is
demonized and their femininity degraded or exoticized (Carby, 1985; Hurtado, 1999; Lu, 1997; Smith,
1989, 1990). Christensen (1997) explores how this positioning of white women in relation to white men
hinders their ability to engage in anti-racist and class struggles, as many white heterosexual womens
middle and affluent class status is a product of the privileges derived from their relation to their fathers,
husbands, lovers and organizational male mentors.
Affluent white heterosexual women may collude with white men in the private sphere while fighting the
male oppressor in the public one. They feel so free to attack their men because of their relationship
to white men in powerful social positions (Williams, 2000, p. 170). By contrast, white lesbians and
lesbians of colour, because of their lack of alignment with heterosexist privilege, are less likely to
participate in the dynamics of seduction and have been able to forge alliances with women of colour out
of this different relation with white men (Hurtado, 1999).
I have reviewed some significant differences in how women of colour and white women have
experienced and understood their feminisms because of the way they have attended (or not) to the
intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality. Yet, in spite of this critique and the contributions of
women of colour to understanding the complexity of gender in its racialized, classed and sexual
dimensions, a liberal white feminist paradigm continues to dominate organizational research (Ely, 1999).
For example, the emphasis on women managers dominant in this literature continues to focus on
achieving individual rights for women, privileging gender over race, class, ethnicity and other dimensions
of difference.
Furthermore, the liberal feminist paradigm in organization studies has extrapolated the experience of
certain white, middle-class, heterosexual women to all women, so that issues that mostly impacted on
them, such as barriers to advancement due to problems of workfamily balance become normative and
assumed to be central problems for most women in organizations (Cals and Smircich, 2006).
This whitewash dilemma has characterized women in management and womens leadership research in
particular (Betters-Reed and Moore, 1995, p. 24), while in the organization change literature it has
translated into a change agenda of equal access and opportunities for women where men are the standard,
leaving unchallenged dominant cultural assumptions such as hierarchy, meritocracy and individualism
that reproduce inequality and oppression.
Even when the radical/cultural critique surfaced within feminism in the 1970s and later on influenced
some organizational literature, its focus on universal patriarchy as the primary structure of womens
oppression limited our ability to account for the concrete ways in which race, sexuality and class,
differentiate the experience and the situation of diverse women in organizations.
Moreover, despite radical feminisms goal of eliminating inequality more generally, privileged white
womens voices continued to dominate organizational discourse (Cals and Smircich, 2006; Calvert and
Ramsey, 1992, 1996).

Alternatives to the liberal framework: the contribution of other feminist theories

In this section, I explore other feminist theoretical frameworks socialist,poststructuralist and
transnational and assess their possible contributions for addressing the intersections of race, gender
and class in organizational theory and practice. My summaries do not capture the richness and complexity
of each framework; others have already done that work (Alvesson and Billing, 1997; Bulbeck, 1998;
Cals and Smircich, 1996a, 2006; Ely and Meyerson, 2000; Ferguson, n.d.; Jaggar, 1983; Jaggar and
Rothenberg, 1978; Martin, 2003; Sandoval, 2000; Tong, 1989). My purpose rather is to highlight the
possibilities that these theories open up for intersectional analyses because they already contain,
implicitly or explicitly, conceptualizations of these intersections.
Considering these frameworks historically, it is no surprise that the moment has arrived for the voices of
women of colour to be heard, for more people in the world have been claiming recognition and gender
theorization has increasingly addressed these claims. Yet, the often-assumed novelty of intersectionalities
notwithstanding, we must remember that it has been a slow road for those who since the 1970s advocated
an integration of the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation in feminist theory and
practice.
The early works just discussed were grounded in the material and experiential analyses of women of
colour situations, regardless of identification with specific feminist frameworks (Alarcn, 1990;
Anzalda, 1987, 1990; Anzalda and Keating, 2002; Brewer, 1993; Crenshaw, 1991; Hurtado, 1996a,
2003; King, 1988; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Lorde, 1984; Lugones, 2003; Lugones and Spelman,
1983; Mohanty, 1991a, 1991b, 2003b; Smith, 1999; Springer, 2001). Their early impetus gave way to
many concerns in socialist feminism and is well represented in more recent transnational feminist
theorizing.
Socialist feminism understands class, race, gender and sexuality as interlocking roots of inequality
(Jaggar, 1983; Wong, 1991) or interrelated processes of womens oppression (Acker, 1999b, 2006; Tong,
1989). By paying attention to both patriarchy and capitalism as related structures of domination, it
emphasizes that structural, material and historical processes must be studied in their complexity and in
their various manifestations, leading to a multi-issue feminism with the goal of restructuring
organizations for all, not just for women.
The sexual division of labour characteristic of capitalist society is seen as a fundamental pillar of
womens oppression, including the gender structure of the labour market that positions men and women
in different jobs, different industries, with different salaries and in unequal sex-based patterns of
employment and sex-segregated workplaces (Barber, 1992; Hartmann, 1987; Reskin and Roos, 1987).
But these patterns are also reproduced between different groups of women. For example, comparative
studies of women in different jobs, industries and organizational levels reveal patterns of occupational
segregation and wage inequality in which women of colour predominate in the lower paid positions and
white women in the managerial, higher paid jobs (Acker, 2004; Browne, 2000; Glenn, 2001).
Gender is seen as a historically determined difference that can never be studied in isolation from other
social processes such as race, ethnicity and class. This historical specificity has contributed to
understanding the different experiences of women of various races, ethnicities and classes and how the
structure of work has impacted on women and men differentially through time (Amott and Matthaei,
1991).
For example, Scherzer (2003) analyses nursing as a key site to examine the intersection of race, gender
and class. Her historical account of the disciplinary practices that created nursing as a raced and classed
stratified type of women work shows how these interacting processes not only shape the occupational
structure of nursing and nurses identities, but also create conflicts and inequalities between different
groups of nursing workers. Her analysis confirms that gender is raced and classed and that these processes
are accomplished through concrete practices that are never independent of each other but always
organizationally and historically specific.
Particular attention has been given to documenting and analysing the experience of white working women
such as waitresses and cleaning women (Ehrenreich, 1999, 2001; Paules, 1991) and of women of colours
work as domestics (Glenn, 1985, 1986, 1988, 2001; Rollins, 1985; Romero, 1992, 1997a).
These studies reveal, once again, important differences between white and women of colour. While
domestic service provided white women with opportunities for mobility into other occupations, domestic
service for women of colour has been an occupational ghetto (Glenn, 1988, p. 57). Asian, Latina and
Black women have struggled nonetheless to redefine this occupation, which typifies pre-industrial work,
hard physical labour and degraded status, in order to find some semblance of autonomy, control and
dignity (Glenn, 2001; Romero, 1997a).
In general, there are two major contributions that socialist feminism makes to the study of intersections of
race, gender and class in organizations: firstly, it focuses on class as an important dimension of
differences and of unequal relations of power among women; and secondly, it incorporates concrete
accounts of women of different races, ethnicities and classes in work organizations.
However, despite socialist feminisms strong advocacy for addressing intersections of race, class and
gender, developing a way to frame organizational research from these simultaneous processes has been
more elusive (Acker, 1999a, 1999b, 2006).
Acker (2006) examines this problematic in detail and argues for a reconceptualization of class as
gendered and racialized processes, to be studied in its concrete practices in an economy that includes
production, reproduction, distribution and unpaid labour. Thus, when studying the intersections of race,
gender and class in organizations from a socialist feminist framework, we must ask questions such as:
who cleans for the cleaning lady who cleans for the managerial woman and how did it come to be that
way? (Scully and Holvino, 1999).

Poststructuralist feminism. Many feminist appropriations of poststructuralism emphasize language,

textual analysis, theory-making and the discourses that constitute men and women as different the
other of a discursive, binary pair. Yet some argue that gender analyses must not only take into account
the subjective and symbolic dimensions of gender, but also its material and structural implications
because it is through discourse that material power is exercised and that power relations are established
and perpetuated (Gavey, 1997, p. 54).
Thus, gender is understood both as a category of analysis and a social relation of domination that is
historically produced and always specific (Flax, 1987; Scott, 1988). More interested in the
accomplishment of particular subjectivities than in any essential properties), a feminist poststructuralist
analysis would explore intersectionalities of race, gender, class and sexualities, as the ever-mobile
intersections are constituted and replicate classed, gendered, racialized and sexualized subjectivities and
arrangements.
Such an approach to studying intersections brings us to examining how gender constructions and
performances may be different along dimensions of race, class, ethnicity and sexual identity and to what
effect (Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 1990; Salih, 2004; Sensoy and DiAngelo, 2006). It would also have us read
how these different identities are understood, produced, performed and mutually construct one another,
when arriving at intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality (Collins, 2000b, p. 156).
While a focus on gender has dominated poststructuralist feminist appropriations in organizational studies
(Cals and Smircich, 1992b, 1993; Martin, 1990; Metcalfe and Linstead, 2003), some have also paid
attention to representations of race and gender in the organizational literature. For example,
representations of Latinas and Asian women as docile and manually agile, justifying the belief that they
make good factory workers and poor managers, have been analysed (Cals, 1992; Holvino, 1993).
These images are in stark contrast with images of white women managers perceived as innocent,
feminine, bright and driven (Brazaitis, 2004; Morrison, 1987) or of Black women managers perceived as
strong, self-sufficient and care-taking (Bell and Nkomo, 2001; Dumas, 1985). Others have focused on the
accomplishment of masculinities, including its classed and racialized aspects, in the daily interactions and
micro-practices of organizations. These studies demonstrate that gender identities of organizational actors
are shifting and contradictory (Cheng, 1996; Gonzalez, 1996; Mirand, 1997; Stecopoulos and Uebel,
1997).
Altogether, a poststructuralist feminist framework makes three important contributions to studying the
intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality in organizations. Firstly, it leads to an understanding of
subjectivities in organizations as multiple, unstable and inessential (Gamson and Moon, 2004).
Secondly, in analyses of representations, it offers a detailed description and critique of dominant
organizational practices in relation to their raced, classed and gendered discourses and knowledge effects.
It also reveals the creation of alternative spaces for other ways of thinking and doing organizations that
flow from deconstructing the written and the social text. Thirdly, it calls for the researchers reflexive
stance, which demands that those involved in studying intersectionalities problematize their own social
location at the intersection about which they seek to produce knowledge (Lykes, 1997).
Transnational/postcolonial/Third World feminisms consolidate, redeploy and expand the important
critique of white feminism by women of colour, restating their insistence on the intersections of race,
gender, class and sexuality, as reviewed earlier here, but also going beyond these. Specifically, these
analyses have emerged out of disruptions and complex oppositions to other social change movements,
such as national liberation movements dominated by men; feminist movements dominated by white
western women; Eurocentric academic discourses that privilege theory over activism; movements that
privilege heterosexuality; and Marxist analyses of class that make invisible women of colour and non-
western women (Guy-Sheftall, 1995; Hurtado, 2000; Mohanty, 1991b, 2003b; Narayan and Harding,
2000).
Thus, postcolonial/transnational feminisms, now embraced both by Third and First World feminists, bring
us to the present. In particular, the urgency and importance of a transnational feminist framework comes
to the fore in the context of globalization. Women throughout the world consider a need for organizing
and building alliances based on recognizing and theorizing their differences, not only their similarities,
and thus going beyond the naive global sisterhood of the 1960s and the global feminism of the 1990s
(Mendoza, 2002).
From these perspectives, gender, class, race, sexuality and nation are seen as complex social processes
and discursive constructions that need to be challenged at the same time that they are strategically
deployed to question dominant western paradigms (Mohanty, 2003a; Spivak, 1988, 1990). These analyses
take further the socialist and poststructuralist feminist attention to the historically and contextually
specific material and discursive practices, to include nation, ethnicity and culture as important axes of
study.
One of the major contributions of transnational feminists is to study the role of the state in circumscribing
the daily lives and survival struggles of women of colour, which reveals its co-implication as an important
institution in a complex nexus of power and domination that is gendered, patriarchal, racialized and
(hetero)sexualized (Mendoza, 2002; Mohanty, 1997). Additive models captured in arithmetic metaphors
like double oppression and multiple jeopardy (King, 1988) give way to more nuanced images like a
matrix of domination (Collins, 2000a; Martinez, 2000), border crossing (Anzalda, 1987, 1990;
Mendez and Wolf, 2001) and cross-border existence (Hurtado, 1999). These metaphors signal an
attempt to dismantle hierarchies of oppression and instead articulate and explore complex positionalities
and contradictory subjectivities.
Altogether, theorizing the intersections of race, gender and class is at the core of
postcolonial/transnational feminism in the following important ways: a focus on the simultaneity of
oppressions; a goal of understanding and rewriting history from the social locations of women of colour;
a recognition and interest in women of colours agency; attention to the role of the state and the
interrelations between colonialism, racism and gender in women of colours lives and a recognition of the
importance and difficulty of forging womens alliances for change (Mohanty, 1991a; Otis, 2001;
Sampaio, 2004). Emerging, thus, from within this matrix of gendered, racialized, sexualized and
international relations of power, as well as from the experiences and perspectives of women of colour in
the context of a new global capitalism, I explore three potential contributions of transnational/postcolonial
feminism to the study of the intersections of race, gender and class in organizations.
Firstly, race, gender and class are embedded in other social and complex relations that include the nation-
state and sexuality (Briggs, 1998; Holvino, 2003; Kempadoo, 2001; Mendoza, 2002; Mir et al., 1999).
More than ever, today these relations are global, making necessary a specific goal of postcolonial
feminism to study the processes of colonization and globalization and their differential impact on women
and men in developed and developing countries.
For example, the loss of income for women in North Carolina has much to do with globalization
processes in the textile industry such as moving off-shore jobs to cheap labour capitals like Tegucigalpa.
Simultaneously, moving jobs off-shore creates limited opportunities for young Honduran women while
displacing local men from work.
These decisions are made in corporate boardrooms composed mostly of white men and executed by white
women executives breaking glass ceilings in the USA and other multinational headquarters, who are
themselves suffering from the stress of balancing work and childcare needs. Filipina and other migrant
women end up working for these people to relieve the care deficit needs in the FirstWorld and to the
detriment of their own children and families in the Third (Acker, 2004; Adler and Izraeli, 1994; Cals and
Smircich, 1993; Hochschild, 2000; Parreas, 2002; Wichterich, 2000). In this way, there is no separation
between domestic and global struggles and processes and how they manifest themselves in different
aspects of organizational life (Fernandez-Kelly, 1994).
Secondly, race, gender, class, nation and sexuality are recognized as sites of heterogeneous subject
positions and complex and shifting dimensions of individual and collective identity. For example, in their
study of narratives of migrant women in hotel work, Adib and Guerrier (2003) illustrate how interactions
and identities are complicated when the interlocking (p. 413) of gender with nationality, race, ethnicity
and class is considered. Studying the implications of these complex positionalities allows for
reconceptualizing coalition-building across diverse national, gender and racial groups for organizational
change (Barvosa-Carter, 1999; Ferguson, 1998; Kurtz, 2002).
Thirdly, it is especially important to resist constructions about the other that represent them as victims
without agency (Cals and Smircich, 1999; Mohanty, 2003a). Intersections of race, gender and class are
embodied in postcolonial subjects; those who have been traditionally silenced and relegated speak back,
affirming their own agency and representing themselves beyond the traditional disempowering images of
the so-called oppressed, thus, it is important to study resistance, survival and agency, not just
victimization and oppression (Chio, 2005; Ong; 1987; Zavella, 1987). Further, those who claim to
represent and speak for others, that is, organizational scholars, must re-examine our/their constructions of
the other to reveal, reflexively, what these constructions say about ourselves/themselves. Race, class,
gender, nation and so on are indeed present in our own dominant scholarly voices (Briggs, 1998; Cals,
1992; Henry and Pringle, 1996; Holvino and Scully, 2001; Khan, 2005).

Moving forward to address the simultaneity of race, gender and class in organizations
I drawfromthe different feminist theories reviewed in the previous section in what Hurtado calls
relational dovetailing where, instead of taking-apart in an adversarial mode we make knowledge by
bringing-together in a politically conscious way (personal communication 22 February 2001) and suggest
a strategic deployment of these multiple feminist frameworks to advance the study of the simultaneity of
race, gender and class in organizations. Also referred to as tactical subjectivity (Sandoval, 2000, p. 59)
and complementary theorizing (Holland, in DuCille, 1994, p. 624), my point is to use the socialist,
poststructuralist and transnational frameworks as tactics for intervening in and transforming social
relations in organizations (Sandoval, 2000, p. 62).
Firstly, as a theoretical intervention, I suggest, a reconceptualization of gender, class and race as
simultaneous processes of identity, institutional and social practice. By processes of identity practice, I
mean the ways in which race, gender and class produce and reproduce particular identities that define
how individuals come to see themselves and how others see them in organizations. These practices cover
the gamut from well-studied early socialization practices to more pervasive societal discourses like the
cult of domesticity of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which defined a particular identity for white
middle-class women centred on wifehood and motherhood. In contrast, the identity of working class
women of colour was constructed as less than, supporting, for instance, their roles as domestic servants
(Glenn, 2001).
By processes of institutional practice, I mean the ways in which race, gender and class relations and
stratification are built into organizational structures, processes and ways of working, which seem normal
at the same time that they produce and reproduce particular relations of inequality and privilege. We can
further analyse domestic service as a particular type of institution with a particular set of interactions
between the domestic worker and her employer, a clear division of labour, poor wages and a set of
practices sustained by the lack of societal regulation of that institution (Glenn, 1985, 1986, 1988, 2001;
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001, 2002; Rollins, 1985; Romero, 1992, 1997a).
By processes of social practice, I mean the ways in which societal structures, beliefs and ways of
engaging at the societal level produce and reproduce inequalities in organizations along the axes of race,
class and gender. Analyses of reproductive labour illuminate the complex interrelation between domestic
and global market forces that result in a transnational division of the labour of care along lines of race,
gender, class, ethnicity and nationality (Glenn, 2001; Parreas, 2002). These processes need to be studied
in a double move that breaks them apart and specifies them at the same time that it connects and
articulates their relatedness.
Secondly, as a general methodological intervention, I suggest that the simultaneity of race, class and
gender, the point of departure, be expanded to include ethnicity, sexuality and nation in organizational
analyses for, as transnational feminism helps to articulate them, the explanatory value of these categories
in todays organizations can no longer be ignored. While the multiplicity of processes of identity,
institutional and social practice, their fluidity and their local and translocal links complicate the study of
intersectionality, simplification is no longer an alternative. In fact, beyond theoretical and methodological
implications there are also political implications in the institutional practices of theorizing and practicing
organization studies and organizational change. Yet, difficulties notwithstanding, I propose three specific
interventions for doing (analysing and practicing) simultaneity in organizations:

Researching and publicizing the hidden stories at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality,
ethnicity and nation
Telling the stories and articulating the narratives of organizational actors across different axes of power
and identity practices is an important intervention for changing dominant organizational discourses
because it brings to light alternative narratives that seldom find their way into mainstream accounts and
organizational mythologies (Cals and Smircich, 1999; Ely and Meyerson, 2000).
One purpose of this intervention is to help change dominant organizational narratives that privilege the
experience of white men and women and construct organizations within the liberal paradigm of maleness,
heterosexism, whiteness and western-ness. These are narratives that construct and reproduce particular
kinds of identities with particular relations and access to power.
For example, Bell and Nkomos (2001) in-depth stories of white and Black womens narratives in
corporations reveal important differences in how the two groups learn and experience race: while white
women learn to keep their distance from Blacks, to be colour blind, and to exhibit the appropriate
etiquette when in the presence of Blacks, Black women learn to arm themselves psychologically in order
to be respectable, to buffer themselves from racism and to develop courage. As they advance into
management positions, the women bring these different attitudes into every aspect of their work, from
whom they confide in and talk to, to the judgments they make about others competence, to how they
negotiate their own careers and leadership roles.
But Bell and Nkomo do not go far enough in exploring simultaneity, choosing to bring to the fore race
and gender while understudying the role of class, nation and sexuality in their subjects narratives.
Reynolds (1997), on the other hand, calls for Black women researchers to stop inquiring about the
differences between white and Black women and to start addressing the differences and diversity among
Black women. This requires that researchers find ways to continuously shift and articulate these various
differences instead of foregrounding one or the other (Buitelaar, 2006; McCall, 2005).
Considering another axis of power, Ostrander (1984) provides us with rich narratives of upper-class
women. These narratives contribute to understanding the simultaneity of race, class and gender as
experienced in the dominance of white affluent women. They remind us that the simultaneity of class,
race and gender lives also in white women (DuCille, 1994; Ely, 1995; Hearn, 1996). But this requires that
accounts of women managers also make visible their class and sexual locations, instead of just presenting
them as women managers (Marshall, 1989, 1993, 1995; Morrison, 1987; Ruderman and Ohlott, 2002).
A second purpose of telling these more complex stories is to help change the experience that
organizational members have of each other across dimensions of difference from that of a generalized
other to a concrete other (Benhabib, 1992; Cobb, 2000; Hurtado, 1999).
Womens first place of identity and political awareness is the body, says Harcourt (2001, p. 204). Seeing
and working at the intersection of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and nation allows for the
specificity of concrete bodies and histories to enter and begin reshaping organizational theory and
practice. Hegemonic, onedimensional and essentialized identities produced and reproduced through social
and organizational practices can be disrupted by the collection and dissemination of these differentiated
stories and narratives that focus on the complexity of identity-subjectivities and practices.

Identifying and untangling the differential and material impact of everyday practices in organizations
Because women is not a universal experience or category, we must identify, untangle and suggest
interventions to change the differential impact that everyday practices have for different women in
different types of organizations.
An even more focused and differentiated analysis is needed so that the complex experience of the
simultaneity of race, ethnicity and class can be understood (McCall, 2005; Smith, 1995). This type of
analysis focuses on institutional practices, how they create power and material advantages and
disadvantages for different groups and how these practices are reinforced by and relate to specific
symbolic and discursive organizational processes.
For example, Munro (2001) explores how Asian women have specific interests in the workplace based on
the structuring and restructuring of ancillary hospital work through hierarchical grading with women at
the bottom in part-time jobs, and through specific work practices that favour white women assignments in
the tasks of direct public contact and men in the tasks that require strength, and relegate Asian women to
the invisible and dirty hospital tasks of cleaning bathrooms. Ignored by the union, these practices
contradict the unions own agenda of proportionality, fair representation and self-organization, intended to
include all workers.
As Munro indicates, Any attempt to define workplace interests from an over-generalized analysis of the
labour market will run the risk of missing the specific way in which class, gender and race interconnect in
particular workplaces. (2001, p. 468)
To these effects, Acker suggests that we study regimes of inequality the historically specific patterns
of race, gender, and class relations within particular organizations through case studies that shed light on
the differential impact that class and race have on men and women (2006, p. 109). She enumerates
various forms in which these patterns can be made visible through detailed descriptions of the
characteristics of the inequality regimes in a specific organization by analysing the dimension(s) of
inequality which constitute the regime, the (in)visibility of these patterns and their legitimacy and the
practices and structures by which the inequality patterns are organizationally sustained (Acker, 1999b,
2006).

Identifying and connecting internal organizational processes with external and seemingly unrelated
societal processes to understand organizational dynamics within a broader social context and change
agenda
This intervention focuses on articulating as social practices, the relations between organizational
processes and their broader social, material and historical context. This, in turn, helps develop theory-
practice within a larger social justice agenda. Today, the social context is global and transnational, making
it imperative to map the relations of ruling among different stakeholders in a global system of work and
capital (Mohanty, 2003a, pp. 568).
The changing roles of Latinos and Latinas, who make up the majority of the workforce in the
maquiladora industry along the USMexican border, is a case in point. As the workforce reconfigures due
to globalization few men make gains as technicians and professionals, while many more jobs previously
associated with female employment at lower levels in the hierarchy go to both men and women
(Fernandez-Kelly, 1994; Holvino, 1994a). These changing roles between men and women create
dilemmas that show up in the workplaces, households and communities of these workers (Hondagneu-
Sotelo, 1992; Williams, 1988).
Without an analysis of this social context the relationship between the outside and the inside and
how these relations support and hinder change, organizational change interventions are likely to have very
limited impact. Locating organizations and their actors in their particular social contexts may also require
explicating how that context and history show up in everyday practices (Bredstrm, 2006; Britton, 2000;
Chesler and Moldenhauer- Salazar, 1998; Marks, 1999; Meisenhelder, 2000).
For example, Mendez and Wolf (2001) engage in this type of analysis by reflecting on their experience as
directors of an academic feminist programme that brought Third World women activists as interns to the
USA. They found that, despite their progressive agenda and best feminist intentions, neo-colonial
relations exerted a major impact on the programme, reproducing unequal power relations among
participants and replicating organizational micro-practices that manifested and fed such inequality.
Much can be learned from the experience in other countries, and especially the experience in so-called
Third World countries, where more comprehensive analyses of interactions between the social/societal
context and internal organizational dynamics of change are facilitated by the context itself (Cock and
Bernstein, 1988; Marks, 1999, 2001; Seidman, 1999). Dorothy Smiths (1987) institutional ethnographies
also contribute methodologically to these efforts (Chio, 2005).

Some concluding thoughts from intersectional location

Since accomplished first publication on simultaneity in 1994b, there is much work now, especially in
Europe, which supports incorporating a simultaneity perspective in organizational studies. Named by
others as intersectionality, intersections, or multiracial feminist theory (Brewer et al., 2002; Harnois,
2005; Harvey, 2005; Weber, 2001; Zinn et al., 2005), together we argue that a perspective that analyses
race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality and sexuality as simultaneous processes of identity, institutional
and social practice, brings more complete and accurate analyses, as well as better organizational and
policy change applications.
But, as much as I would like to think that, as a woman of colour, I am (like other women of colour)
uniquely positioned to do this work, claiming an advantageous standpoint from which to do simultaneity
research and practice, it is also clear that we are the less powerful in universities and have less access to
research institutions and funds. At the same time, in the minority communities we seek to represent, we
are usually less trusted or credited, as we are seen as not one of them in our own shifting class status and
identities (Khan, 2005; Mohanty, 2003a).
Our outsider within status is thus not such an advantage, for our knowledge production becomes suspect
when we are caught in between the power relations of our disciplines, research institutions and academic
practices and the communities and women we seek to give voice to through our research. Our privileged
position at the intersections is easily transformed into a deficit, making working the simultaneity of
racioenthnicity, gender, class, nationality and sexuality a much more difficult and less likely enterprise
(Collins, 2000a; Smith, 1999).
And while I would like to call for all organizational studies to be all the time articulated through an
intersectional analysis and practice, many practical questions and paradoxes remain.
For example, how do researchers gain funders interest in the narratives and stories of those who
traditionally have been left out, for who is interested in these other narratives, especially since one of the
dynamics of dominance is to silence other voices? Or how do we answer the inevitable argument that
there are always going to be voices excluded and marginalized, which stops exploration of the many
variations of the dominant and the suppressed in particular contexts?And how do we encourage and
raise the bar for those who are dominant in various dimensions of difference, in a challenge to do
research that acknowledges their own simultaneity? And further, how do we engage in inter-disciplinary
work across even greater boundaries beyond organization studies to include the review of and serious
engagement with both academic feminist and social change activist journals, where most of the current
and rich work on simultaneity can be found?
These reflections bring strength to my realization that Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al
andar Wayfarer, there is no way, you make a way by walking (Machado, 1979). Thus, I hope that as I
keep on walking, Ill be joined by others. Together we can continue to broaden the intersectional path in
organization studies.
Ethnicity and Structural Anthropology

Breefing
This unit explores the relationship between anthropology (as a discipline and a practice) and literature, in
particular, ethnic literature and its relationship to the concept of cultural diversity.
First, the history of the discipline of anthropological and ethnographic practice is placed in historical
context and then the chapter looks at how certain features of anthropology make their way into literature
proper, and eventually come to reside in the creation and interpretation of ethnic literature.

1. Introduction
The relationship between literature (its production and interpretation) and anthropology does not become
clear until we consider the notion of ethnic or multicultural literature and the attendant issue of cultural
diversity. The rather bland term literature and the more colorful subset of the category described as
ethnic or multicultural differ in more ways than the innocent-seeming inclusion of the words ethnic
or multiculturalor, for that matter, more specific descriptors such as Native American, African
American, Asian American, African, Asian, Indian, and so onwould suggest.
To call something literature is to suggest that it is the product of human imagination. To call something
ethnic literature is to imply that it originates from a particular cultural vantage point or performs work
that could be described as cultural. When seen this way the imagination can become antiquated postscript
and the culture superscript; the way opera librettos scroll behind the performers in the audiences
language with the musical performance coming between the audience and the message. Be that as it may,
both the study and the production of literature, in particular ethnic or multicultural literature necessarily
involves some aspects of anthropology. Anthropology, as a discipline, has long cast its eye toward the
realm of literature and now the reverse seems to be true as well.
Speaking of his anthropological aspirations, Bronislaw Malinowski claimed (not without some
nationalistic overtones) that Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad.,
whereas, on the other hand, some writers of ethnic literature make claims for the culturality of their
productions. Speaking of a speech she as in the process of giving, the Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko
cautioned her audience (with none-too-subtle cultural undertones) by saying that for those of you
accustomed to being taken from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult
to follow. Pueblo expression resembles something like a spiders webwith many little threads radiating
out from the center, crisscrossing one another.
As with the web, the structure emerges as it is made, and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo
people do, that meaning will be made. Obviously there is quite a bit of cross traffic between
anthropology and literature, even more so when we consider that both anthropology and literature deal in
the fluctuating currency of signs. The important questions to ask are: what kind of anthropological
approaches inform literary production and interpretation? When did they begin? What purpose do they
serve? And what effect do they have?

2. Anthropology as the Study of Man

The discipline of anthropology is by definition the study of man. In recent years what exactly study
means and what man means have been hotly debated and theorized and the discipline has grown to
include the study of linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, discourse theory, literary theory, as well as many
long looks at the politics and shape of practice. However, in its early years, not without a fair amount of
debate as well, anthropology saw itself as a social science dedicated to the systematic and scientific study
of human experience.
In the nineteenth century, and still today in some professional programs, anthropology divided itself into
four fieldsbiological anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural
anthropology. Each field took as its ground a different aspect of human existence and parsed it with tools
it developed in the process. In the case of cultural anthropology, which is the field most closely related to
literature, the disciplines signature (which set it apart from other social sciences and humanistic modes of
inquiry such as history and sociology) was that of fieldwork.
Fieldwork, pioneered by Franz Boaz, Bronislaw Malinowski, and W.H.R. Rivers among others, situated
the anthropologist within the tribe or group under observation where they were supposed to share in daily
life, make extended observations, and affect a more complete study of the group than if they did so under
the always cloudy skies of the archives. The idea was that the ethnographer would develop an inner sense
or intuition for the culture he was studying that, when treated with a rigorous chemical wash of hard
science, would yield a durable, supple and functional leather from which to craft a story of mans
makings.
Different ethnographers working in different parts of the world focused on different aspects of culture
(and when back home debated which ones were the most compelling) in order to tell different stories.
Some early ethnographers (as well as armchair anthropologists and sociologists) thought kinship was the
appropriate object of study.
Others were intrigued by tribal economic organization. Others still held the belief that religion and
ceremony contained the most complete chains of cultural amino acids, while some thought myth and
story, constituent in almost all aspects of cultural life, provided the best material. And many
anthropologists and founders of anthropology held vastly different opinions about the relationship
between their objects of study and civilization, itself a tricky concept.
Some, like amateur anthropologists Lewis Henry Morgan, John Wesley Powell, and the sociologists
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, saw primitive (read tribal/not-white) societies as precursors to
technologically advanced, socially complex western societiesuseful to study in order to see where the
west was born millennia earlier; a kind of living fossil record. While pondering the uniquely human
tendency to classify things (events, objects, experience, feelings)
Durkheim and Mauss focused on primitive classification because if we descend to the least evolved
societies known . . . . we shall find an even more general mental confusion . . . Far, then, from man
classifying spontaneously and by a sort of natural necessity, humanity in the beginning lacks the most
indispensable conditions for the classificatory function. For them and anthropologists like them, tribal
cultures were the precursors for western civilization. Difference was largely cast a matter of rudimentary
versus refined.
Franz Boaz and others partially rejected the evolutionist model and saw tribal or primitive cultures as
discrete reactions to somewhat universal phenomena that had entirely appropriate and intelligible
reactions to lifeby studying the relatively bounded tribal group (as opposed to the seemingly
unbounded and fluid west) one could see the specific cultural response and the universal human stress.
One fact derived from these [ethnographic] studies, wrote Boaz, is the relative correctness of emotions
which seem so natural to us. It is difficult for us to conceive that the feeling the father bears toward his
child should be altogether different among primitive peoples from what it is among ourselves . . . To draw
conclusions about the development of mankind as a whole we must try to divest ourselves of these
influences, and this is only possible by immersing ourselves in the spirit of primitive peoples whose
perspectives and development have almost nothing in common with our own . . . Only in this way can our
intellect, instructed and formed under the influences of our culture, attain a correct judgment of this same
culture.
What is important to carry forward from the birth of anthropology is the idea that tribal or non-western
cultures are early, sometimes imperfect, relatives to western culture and that the links as well as the
differences can be seen by the trained participant observer.
The idea of being within, that is important to carry forward into our understanding of the relationship
between anthropology and literature, because insider-ness and, conversely, outsider-ness, come up again
and again as the various products of anthropology and literature are in turn classified and categorized.

3. Myth and FolkloreThe Writing of Culture and Cultural Writing

One of the most, established, respected, and important ways in which researchers have to subpoena the
evidence of culture and cultural difference is in the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of story.
Alternately cast as folklore, myth, legend, and the like, storiesfrom incidental autobiographical tales to
centrally held foundational legends such as creation mythsare widely held as the one of the most
important repositories for the blueprint of culture.
Beginning in the nineteenth century with ethnographers and folklorists such as Edward Sapir and Franz
Boaz and continuing on in the early years of the twentieth century in the work of Paul Radin, Benjamin
Whorf, and, Claude Levi-Strauss, the analysis of narrative (and not necessarily with the advantage of
fieldwork) began in some ways to replace kinship, economics, religion, and social structure as the best
way to read the cultural blueprint. With the rise of semiotics and the work of Barthes, Bahktin, and, later,
Geertz, the idea that stories could be read as culture and that culture could be read as stories gained
dominance.
One of the earliest and most popular instances of recorded story was Henry Rowe Schoolcrafts
transcription, translation, and description of the Chant to the Fire-fly published in 1845. More folklore
than myth, the short Ojibwe childrens song was taken up and used (along with more substantial myths
and stories) to form the basis for Longfellows American epic, The Song of Hiawatha. The Chant to the
Fire-fly was taken (lightly) as a moment cultural expression and soon other Native American myths like
trickster tales, creation stories, and the like, were treated as authorless expressions of culture and cultural
difference.
When Boas was working in the early part of the twentieth century two of his graduate students, Ella
Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston produced ethnographic data that was largely comprised of story and both
went on to publish novels of their ownsuccessfully hybridizing their work as ethnographers, native
informants, and prose stylists. Both Deloria and Hurstons work was read less as individual creations or
inventions as expressions of culture performed on the page for largely non-native, non-black audiences.
Alongside these developments, which occurred largely within the confines of the anthropological
discipline, a similar kind of approach to narrative was being acted out (but less often commented on) in
the sphere of literature itself.
In the works of Proust, Joyce, and Mann, the issues of style and structure (not to mention duration) rose to
the level of equal and even greater importance than character, plot, and story. The idea was that a literary
creation should, largely through style and structure, create in the reader the same sensations that the book
sought to describe. There was a new premium placed on the attempt to reach a Longinian sublime through
language.
As Paul Fussell points out brilliantly in The Great War and Modern Memory, as a result of World War I
irony and despair rose to occupy strangely literary places and one sometimes feels that it is impossible to
find a book that does not contain irony after the armistice. This response to the calamities of modernity
and the desire to recreate the same despair and alienation in the reader that occurs in text reached its
height in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Four Quartets successfully challenge the
old romantic myths by which one used to constitute experience and recreated the fracture and
disintegration of those myths and the lives they speak to.
By the time Gertrude Stein addressed the same issues, the idea that writing could perform modernity
(itself a term that embraced western culture, its dissolution, and the hope for progress) as later ethnic
writing is expected to perform culture, was perfectly in place. Disjointedness was not just a subject, it was
an experience. She plays this out in her poem If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso where she
writes that Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance,
exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly / in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and
resemblance. For this is so . . .

4. Culture and Counter-Culture

Throughout the mid-twentieth century, as first world powers such as England, France, Spain, Portugal,
and Italy were divorced (sometimes amicably but most often not) from their colonies, and as America
experienced a number of internal revolutions regarding racemost notably the rise of the Civil Rights
movement but also the Womens movementthe idea of the mainstream and the minority gained literary
as well as political importance. Exclusion from the social and political body was also experienced, and
vocalized, in the world of literature.
Some movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, sought to discover and create a black aesthetic linked
to but different from dominant literary modes that encompassed the cultural and historical experience of
African Americans. While other cultures most notably that of Native Americans were held up as antidotes
for, as different from, the western and modern mayhem, the Marxian superstructure of white
hegemony. Prelapsidary in aspect, tribal cultures (and the literatures that could contain them) were seen as
relatively blissful alternatives to the mean business of modernity.
A part of all of these movements was the desire for the right to speak for ones culture and experience as a
way of speaking for oneself. The question was not, as Spivak asks, can the subaltern speak but rather,
would anyone listen when they did. The work of anthropologists, ethnographers, and sociologists
largely written by writers who did not belong to the group or culture under scrutiny were seen as
increasingly suspect and even manipulative. Anthropology, in some ways, grew out of colonialist
enterprises and was as suspect as those enterprises to those who had for so long been described and not
really allowed to do the describing.
Vine Deloria, Jr. famously linked the issue of alcohol abuse to the work of anthropologists, suggesting
that anthropologists, by defining a problem, largely created it. Meanwhile, within the discipline of
anthropology itselfethnography itself, as a mode of inquiry was becoming more and more carefully
theorized and while Geertz cast cultures as something that could be read, other anthropologists and
theorists of anthropology realized that doing anthropology was, in actuality, doing writing. Text
became the theater in which cultural work from both sides was being performed.
Not only that, but the standards by which literary accomplishment were measured seemed to be skewed
away from the supposed different kind of narratives that nonwestern writers might produce. The canon
was, as many wryly put it, as destructive as the cannons that used to guard the state. This sentiment was
not entirely out of place. Even as late as 1986 Saul Bellow famously asked Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?
Where is the Proust of Papua New Guinea?
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7. Ethnicity and Structural Anthropology

Allen, Paula Gunn (1992). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, pp.
311. Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press.
[This work, containing loosely related essays looks at literature, politics, culture, and tradition to infuse an
understanding of American Indian life with the claims and agendas of feminism].

Bakhtin, Mikhail (2001). Bahktin and Cultural Theory. Eds Ken Hirschkop / David Shepherd, pp. 376.
New York, NY, USA: Manchester University Press.
[A comprehensive collection of Bakhtins writings on culture and narrative].

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981); The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, pp. 444. (Trans.
Caryl Emerson / Michael Holquist). Austen, TX, USA: University of Texas Press.
[Perhaps Bakhtins most important contribution to the study of narrative and semiotics].

Barthes, Roland (1988). The Semiotic Challenge, pp. 293. (Trans. Richard Howard). New York, NY,
USA: Hill and Wang.
[This book sets out Barthes semiotic approach to society and culture as performed in his book
Mythologies].

Boaz, Franz (1894). Chinook Texts, pp. 278. Washington, D.C., USA: Government Print Office.
[This text is one of the first collections of Native American myths, legends, and oral histories].

Boaz, Franz (1964); The Central Eskimo, pp. 261. (Intro. Henry B. Collins). Lincoln, NE, USA:
University of Nebraska Press.
[This work is one of Boazs first attempts at ethnography].

Boaz, Franz et al. (1972); Anthropology in North America, pp. 378. New York, NE, USA: Kraus Reprint.
[This is a collection of essays by a number of anthropologists and ethnographers about the particular
challenges and issues attending North American anthropology].

Boaz, Franz (1974); The Aim of Ethnology. In: A Franz Boaz Reader: The Shaping of American
Anthropology, 1883-1911, pp. 354.
(Ed. George W. Stocking Jr.). Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
Chavkin, Allan (Ed.) (1999). The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, pp. 213. Tuscaloosa, AL, USA:
University of Alabama Press.
[This contains essays by major Native American and non-Native literary critics about the full scope of
Louise Erdrichs work].

Cushing, Frank Hamilton (1990). Cushing at Zuni: the correspondence and journals of Frank Hamilton
Cushing, 1879-1884, pp. 441.
(Ed. Jesse Green). Albuquerque, NM, USA: University of New Mexico Press. [This text provides raw and
previously unavailable material on Cushings ethnographic fieldwork in the Southwest].

Deloria, Ella (2006). Dakota Texts, pp. 279. Lincoln, NE, USA: University of Nebraska Press.
[This is a reprint of many of Delorias early publications of Dakota stories and ethnographic data].

Deloria, Ella (1988); Waterlily, pp. 244. Lincoln, NE, USA: University of Nebraska Press.
[This is an early example of Native American fiction and one in which Deloria tries to write a novel that
contains the cultural precepts and concepts of the Dakota].

Deloria, Vine (1974). Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties; an Indian Declaration of Independence, pp.
263. New York, NY, USA: Delacorte Press.
[In this work Vine Deloria, Jr. offers an analysis of federal Indian policy and cultural imperialism].

Deloria, Vine (1969); Custer Died for Your Sins; an Indian Manifesto, pp. 279. New York, NY, USA:
Macmillan.
[Another of Delorias assessments of institutionalized racism and public policy as well as ruminations of
American versus Indian culture].

Durkheim, Emile (2001). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, pp. 358. (Trans. Carol Cosman). New
York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
[This is Durkheims seminal work on the intersection of primitive society and religion].

Durkheim, mile / Mauss, Marcel (1963). Primitive Classification, pp. 96. (Trans. Rodney Needham).
Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
[This work contains one of the first studies on the theme and issue of classification as a necessary
component to all human cultures].
Eliot, Thomas S. (1998). The Waste Land, Prufrock, and Other Poems, pp. 49. Mineola, NY, USA: Dover
Thrift Editions.
[This volume contains Eliots most important modernist works with the exception of Four Quartets].

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. (1969). The Nuer, pp. 271. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[This is one of the foundational texts of modern British social anthropology].

Firth, Raymond (1957). Man and Culture: An evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, pp. 292.
New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
[This work places Malinowskis contributions in the context of British anthropology and historical
practice].

Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 363. New York, NY, USA: Oxford
University Press.
[This work looks at the relationship between reality and poetry through the lens of the First World War].

Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 470. New York, NY, USA: BasicBooks.
[This work lays bare Geertzs idea that cultures should be read as systems of signs and signification and
promotes the idea of thick description as a way to understand the task of the anthropologist].

Hurston, Zora Neale (1990). Mules and Men, pp. 309.

(Pref. Franz Boas, new foreword Arnold Rampersad). New York, NY, USA: Harper Perennial. [This is
Hurstons most famous work on African- American folklore with material largely collected in Florida and
the southern United States].

Hurston, Zora Neale (1995); Novels and Stories, pp. 1041. New York, NY, USA: Library of America.
[This is a complete collection of Hurstons novels and stories which draw heavily from her ethnographic
researches as Franz Boazs research assistant].

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1990). The Raw and the Cooked. (Trans. John and Doreen Weightman). Chicago,
IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
[This book is one of Levi-Strausss early contributions to the structural analysis of tribal societies].

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1966); The Savage Mind, pp. 290. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
[This is Levi-Strausss most important book that explores the idea of unconscious patterning of culture].
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1968) The Song of Hiawatha, pp. 242. New York, NY, USA: Bounty
Books.
[Longfellows most famous and enduring poem and his attempt to use Native American folklore to
construct an American epic poem].

Longinus (1984). Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism, pp. 158. New York, NY,
USA: Penguin Books.
[This work contains Longinuss famous work On the Sublime which outlines his view of poetry].

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1984). Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pp. 527. Prospect Heights, IL, USA:
Waveland Press.
[This work is Malinowskis most important work and one of the first products of modern anthropology
and ethnographic practice].

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1985); Sex and Repression in Savage Society, pp. 285. Chicago, IL, USA:
University of Chicago Press.
[This work inspects so-called universal human psychological patterning, principally Freudian theory, in
a cultural context].

Marcus, George E. / Clifford, James (Eds)

(1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, pp. 305. Berkeley, CA, USA:
University of California Press. [This excellent collection of essays highlights the increasing attention
being paid to the practice of ethnography as the creation of narrative].

Morgan, Lewis Henry

(1998). Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to
Civilization, pp. 560. London, UK: Routledge. [This is perhaps Morgans most important work on Native
American tribal social organization].

Morgan, Lewis Henry (1997); Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, pp. 590.
Lincoln, NE, USA: University of Nebraska Press.
[This is Morgans most important piece on Native American kinship].

Radin, Paul (1927). The Story of the American Indian, pp. 391. New York, NY, USA: Liveright
Publishing.
[Radin draws on his ethnographic data across North America to write a grand narrative of the growth and
decline of Native American cultures].

Sapir, Edward (1985). Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, pp. 617.
Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.
[A broad sample of Sapirs work on cultural organization and anthropological approaches to culture].

Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe

(1851). The American Indians. Their history, condition and prospects, from original notes and
manuscripts, pp. 495. Buffalo, NY, USA: G. H. Derby. [This is Schoolcrafts most comprehensive
collection of raw material and essays about Native American, primarily Algonquian, culture].

Silko, Leslie Marmon

(1996). Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective. In Yellow Woman and Beauty of
Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, New York, NY, USA: Simon and

Schuster, 48-59.
[This is a collection of essays about literature, culture, history, and contemporary issues affecting Native
Americans].

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1995). Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, pp. 334. New York,
NY, USA: Routledge.
[This work is a comprehensive collection of Spivaks most important writings in the areas of culture,
postcolonialism, deconstruction, and anthropology].

Stein, Gertrude (1985). Picasso: The Complete Writings, pp. 114. Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press.
[This is Steins collection of writings on Picasso and his paintings].

Vizenor, Gerald (Ed.)

(1993). Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, pp. 223.
Norman, OK, USA: University of Oklahoma Press. [This excellent collection of essays by a variety of
critics explores the relationship between Native American literature, Native American traditions, and
postmodernism].

Whorf, Benjamin (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, pp.
278. Cambridge, MA, USA: The M.I.T. Press.
[This work is most closely associated with the ideas of cultural and linguistic relativism].

Wong, Hertha D. Sweet (2000). Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine: A Casebook, pp. 231. New York, NY,
USA: Oxford University Press.
[This work is a collection of essays devoted to analyses of Love Medicine largely concerned with Native
American identity, culture, and politics].