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Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Mara Loveman and Peter Stamatov, with whom he

is writing a paper on this subject.

References

Brubaker, Rogers (1998) Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nat ionalism,

in John Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of

Nationalism , pp. 272306. New York: Cambridge University Press.

DiMaggio, Paul (1997) Culture and Cognition,A nnual R eview of Sociology 23(1):

26387.

Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997) Social Mindscapes: A n Invitation to Cognitive Sociology.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

SOME CURRENT PRIORITIES FOR ETHNICITY STUDIES

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

University of Oslo

The proliferation of ethnicity studies witnessed during the last threedecades has also seen gradual shifts in research priorities. Whereas plural-

ism in relat ively stable, often colonial contexts provided the focus and locus

of many studies in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps especially in social anthro-

pology, studies of nationalism and minorities in the context of dominant

nation-states were foregrounded in the following decade. Two themes

dominated the academic scene in the 1990s: multiculturalism (or culture and

rights) and migration. Of course, the boundaries are not clearcut, neither

between decades nor between topics and some specialities, such as the

British tradition of race relations, have been a powerful presence through-

out but this holds true as a general description. Accompanying this

thematic change, there has also been a general theoretical movement from

sociological perspectives to anthropological and even socio-psychological

ones. As in other branches of the social sciences, identity has become a

core term among students of ethnicity indeed, some of us would argue,

they have been avant garde in this respect while ear lier concerns with, say,

labour markets, political systems and group integration have received com-

para tively less attent ion.

As of today, studies of ethnicity, whether they concentrate on the politi-

cal or the emotional dimension or both, must see it in the dual context of globalization and post-traditional society. The former implies that ethnic

phenomena in particular places are likely to be influenced by similar

phenomena elsewhere, by the ubiquity of the market and of real-time

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information technology. As Peter Worsley (1984) remarked years ago, mili-

tant Tamil ethnopolitics in Sri Lanka would almost certainly have been

influenced by TV transmissions of events on the Israeli West Bank. Thus,

in a sense, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about a universal grammar ofidentity politics, caused both by similar structural conditions and contagion.

The second dimension, post-traditional society (G iddens, 1991), refers to

the loss of imperative, unquestionable forms of identification and implies

that identification is necessarily reflexive and fraught with uncertainty.

Almost everywhere , there are continuous negotiations over the proper sym-

bolism, behaviour and even emotions that express group identity. What it

entails to be a proper North Indian Brahmin, an African American, a Sami

or a Yanomam is a kind of question that is both unanswerable and acute.

These aspects of contemporary ethnicity, obvious today, were rarelypresent in research before the mid-1980s, when ethnic identity tended to be

taken for granted. The constructivist views characteristic of influential

theorists like Barth (1969) in ethnicity studies and Gellner (1983) in studies

of nationalism, have thus been developed further by researchers emphasiz-

ing the essential ambiguity of any form of identification, often under the

influence of feminism and/or deconstructivism. Hybridity has accordingly

become something of a catchword recently.

Three fields of comparative enquiry, all of them incidentally of much

more general relevance than the term ethnicity studies implies, appear tobe particularly fruitful in the near future, seen from my perspective as a

comparativist.

Social identification is and will remain a core theme in the social sciences

and humanities. The degree of group integration, the kind of group that

emerges at any point (ethnic, class, gender, regional . . .) and the relation-

ship between individualism (currently an ideology of enormous power

worldwide) and group loyalties are all crucial both for peoples well-being

and for societal processes. In addition, what could be described as the

tension between ambivalence and fundamentalism characteristic of reflex-

ive modernity remains overtheorized and understudied.

Identity politics is both wider and more narrow than ethnicity: it includes

non-ethnic (say, religious or gender-based) movements but excludes non-

political ethnicity. A tremendous force from Congo to California, identity

politics has filled part of the post-Cold War ideological void and finds its

expression in phenomena as diverse as revivalist Islam in Europe, Ameri-

can college multiculturalism, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and new school

curricula in Sweden. In contrast to research on identification, identity poli-

tics is widely studied but often weakly theorized, and theoretically informed

comparison is rare .Rights and discrim ination . A recurring theme in the literature on ethnic-

ity, pursuing the social conscience and liberating potential of the social

sciences, concerns inequality based on ethnic distinctions. Familiar from

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many if not most polyethnic societies, such differences are often articulated

through local discourses about cultural difference and counteract public

ideologies of equality.

To avoid ghettoization of the academic ethnicity field, this way ofdelineating subject matters if not exactly this delineation is in my view

advisable. Particular patterns of cultural identification and social process

are rare ly confined to ethnic phenomena. Subjectively experienced prob-

lems of identity are, tout court, part of the modern condition; identity poli-

tics of comparable kinds appear on both sides of the ethnicity boundary;

and many different kinds of groups are subjected to unequal access to

rights and resources. Unless one keeps an eye on everything which is not

ethnic, there is a real danger that scholars, usually against their own inten-

tions, end up confirming a view of the world as essentially made up ofcompeting ethnic groups.

References

Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1969)Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Oslo: Scandinavian U ni-

versity Press.

Gellner, Ernest (1983)Nations and Nationalism . Oxford: Blackwell.

Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity . Cambridge: Polity.

Worsley, Peter (1984) The Three Worlds. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

RETHINKING RACE

ROGER WALDINGER

UCLA,Los Angeles

Oscar Handlin wrought an earlier revolution in US immigration histori-

ography when he realized that the history of immigration was the history

of American people, in the process, excising a large port ion of the people

he purported to describe. His sociological contemporaries were not guilty

of the same slip; the major accounts of the 1960s sought to understand an

ethnic order made up of the descendants of those who had become Ameri-

cans not just by consent, but by force as well. However, the analysis

proceeded as if all groups of outsiders started equally at the bottom,

confronting barriers of similar sorts. More importantly, the underlying

framework neglected the contrastive nature of the social ident ities that the

immigrants and their descendants gradually absorbed . We know who we areonly by reference to who we are not; likewise, for the progeny of the E uro-

pean immigrants, who became members of a majority that defined itself

through exclusion. But the US literature was slow to acknowledge that

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