Approaches to Ethnicity

It is possible to distinguish four major approaches and a number of subapproaches, some of which cut across the major ones. They are ethnicity conceived as a primordial phenomenon, as an epiphenomenon, as a situational phenomenon, and as a purely subjective phenomenon. The primordialist approach is the oldest in sociological and anthropological literature. It argues that ethnicity is something given – ascribed at birth and deriving from the kin structure of human society – and hence more or less fixed and permanent.

The other three approaches emerged in confutation of the primordialist view. The epiphenomenon interpretation is best represented by Michael Hechter’s theory of internal colonialism and the cultural division of labour and to a lesser extent by the writings of Edna Bonacich. Hechter divides the economic structure of society into two sectors, the centre and the periphery. The periphery consists of marginal jobs where the products are not unimportant to society, as, for example, in agricultural work, but which offer little in the form of compensation when compared to employment at the centre. It is this sector of the social structure that gives birth to ethnicity and the people concentrated in this peripheral labour area who become ethnic groups. They develop solidarity and maintain their own culture. Thus, as an epiphenomenon, ethnicity refers to minority groups only. It is something created and maintained by an uneven economy, a product of economic exploitation.

The logic of the situational approach is based on the theory of rational choice. According to this interpretation, ethnicity is something that may be relevant in some situations but not in others. Individuals may choose to be regarded as members of an ethnic group if they find it to their advantage. Perhaps the best examples of this approach are found in the work of Michael Banton, Daniel Bell, and Jeffrey Ross. Banton sees it as a rational choice for an individual in any circumstance, while Bell and Ross emphasize the political advantage of the choice of ethnic membership. Thus, for Ross, ethnicity is “a group option in which resources are mobilized for the purpose of pressuring the political system to allocate public goods for the benefit of the members of a self-differentiating collectivity.” In more general terms, it refers to the actor’s pliant assumption of ethnic identity in order to organize the meaning of his social relationships within the requirements of variously structured situations. This approach appears to have been particularly popular in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.

Perhaps the most interesting of the four approaches is the subjective one, which sees ethnicity as essentially a socio-psychological reality or a matter of perception of “us” and “them” in contradistinction to something given, which exists objectively, as it were, “out there.” This interpretation does not mean that subjectivists reject all objective aspects of ethnicity; some give them significant attention. But they tend to make them dependent on the socio-psychological experience. Two factors have stimulated the emergence of the subjectivist approach in the study of ethnicity during the past twenty years. First, Fredrik Barth’s seminal work on ethnic group boundaries, published in 1969, had a strong influence on both anthropologists and sociologists. Secondly, in American and Canadian scholarship the approach has been spurred by empirical studies of ethnic generations, particularly the third.

Barth himself took a rather extreme position: for practical purposes, he jettisoned culture from the concept of ethnicity. Ethnic boundaries for him were psychological ones, and ethnic culture and its content were irrelevant. An ethnic group thus was the result of group relations in which the boundaries were established through mutual perceptions and not by means of any objectively distinct culture. A less extreme position has been that of the “symbolic ethnicity” approach as formulated by Herbert Gans. The idea here is that ethnicity is not what it used to be: it has lost its practical everyday value and has survived at a purely symbolic level, at which it works to identify people who otherwise are acculturated and assimilated into a different, predominantly urban, American culture and society.

Another subjectivist approach to the study of ethnicity – one that appears to be connected with the postmodernist movement in contemporary thought – is constructionism. It is represented by the work of William Yancey, Michael Moerman, Susan Smith, Hanna Herzog, and to some extent Jonathan Okamura and Wsevolod Isajiw. Theoretically, this approach lies somewhere between Michel Foucault’s emphasis on construction of the metaphor and Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of practice and habitus as the basic factors shaping the structure of all social phenomena. The essential concept in this approach is that ethnicity is something being negotiated and constructed in everyday living. It is a process that continues to unfold and has much to do with the exigencies of survival. It is constructed in the course of feeding, clothing, schooling, and conversing with the family and others.