Peoples, Cultures and Nations in Political Philosophy 9780585441696

Citation preview

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

PAUL GILBERT

EDINBURGH University Press

© Paul Gilbert, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Transferred to Digital Print 2008 Typeset in Bembo by Pioneer Associates Ltd, Perthshire, and Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1091 X (paperback) The right of Paul Gilbert to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Priface

Vll

1

Introduction

7

Part I

Concepts

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Race and Ethnicity Cultural Identity Nationality

9 32 57

Part II

Theories

77

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Cosmopolitanism, Conservatism and Liberalism Communitarianism Marxism and Postmodernism

79 101 123

Part III

Issues

145

Chapter 7

Citizenship, Immigration and Indigenous Peoples Multiculturalism Self-determination and Secession

147 167 189

Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Conclusion

210

Index

216

PREFACE

This book is intended as an introduction to a topic that has, in recent years, come to the forefront of political philosophy: how can ethnic, cultural and national groupings be accommodated into the political arrangements of states? The book reflects my own attempts to clear the ground for thinking about these highly charged problems in a cool and orderly way. Perhaps inevitably, given the times in which we live, it has turned out more polemical and impatient than I anticipated; though this will, I hope, provoke readers as much as it may exasperate them. As always I am indebted to innumerable friends and colleagues at Hull and elsewhere who have stimulated or disciplined my own reflections. I am especially grateful, however, to Matthew Festenstein and Kathleen Lennon for their valuable comments on the book in draft. My thanks, too, to my editors, Jane Feore and Nicola Carr, my copy editor Anna Claybourne, and to Chris Coulson for preparing the manuscript for publication. Unless the context indicates otherwise, 'he' and 'she' are used throughout this book without any specific implications as to gender.

Vll

INTRODUCTION

Political philosophy reflects its own times. Since the Second World War these have, until recently, been dominated by a Cold War which had two effects on the philosophical agenda. The first was to focus attention on what constitutes a just social order; is it one modelled on socialist principles or one that embodies some version of liberal democracy? In answering this question the individual is usually unproblematically conceived of as simply an undifferentiated member of the social order, albeit one occupying different possible social positions within it. Political arrangements are to be judged on whether or not the way they serve the interests of individuals so conceived secures justice. The second and indirect effect of the Cold War was, in large measure, to occlude questions about the legitimacy of states, for the practical effect of raising the question of whether existing states corresponded appropriately to the peoples within them was to threaten the fragile balance of power which prevented the Cold War from erupting into potentially catastrophic hostilities. The societies the justice of whose arrangements was debated were, then, for the most part simply assumed to be societies corresponding to established states. All this has changed with the end of the Cold War. First, the collapse of socialist states leaves liberal democracies challenged, not from within their own cultural traditions, as Marxism challenged them, but from without, by radically different social formations such as Islamic communities or aboriginal groups. Political arrangements are then judged by whether they adequately recognise and support these

1

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

alternative social formations, which may have their own standards of justice. What arrangements can deal satisfactorily with such differences? The second change is that the destabilisation of international power relations allows the legitimacy of state boundaries to be called into question and nationalist movements to flourish. What social groupings do have a good claim to their own states? These questions are among the principal concerns of contemporary political philosophy. 1 They reflect, in different ways, the issue of how certain sorts of social identity are relevant to politics. They are not questions that can be straightforwardly dealt with in terms of the interests of the undifferentiated individuals of earlier political theory, for they deal precisely with the politically relevant ways in which citizens or potential citizens are differentiated one from another. They deal with what has come to be known as 'the politics of difference'. 2 What sorts of social identity are relevant here? The politics of difference has been taken to comprise the politics consequent upon claims arising from a whole variety of differences - of gender, sexuality or physical capacity as well as of race, ethnicity, culture or nationality. Here we shall be concerned only with identities of the latter sorts. We can characterise these as identities relevant to classifYing their bearers as peoples. The former sorts of identity do not so characterise them; for a people constitutes or might constitute a complete, continuing society with its own internal differences of gender and so forth. Many kinds of political question arise concerning how different peoples, however conceived, are to be treated. These include important questions about the distribution of resources and, in particular, about what measures can adequately prevent discrimination which results in unfair distributions. They include, too, questions about how the public culture of a state, notably its education system, can accommodate differences between the peoples who may comprise its citizens. Both types of question raise philosophical issues, but they are not what we are primarily concerned with here. Rather we shall look at some issues arising from a third range of questions, which concern what political arrangements are appropriate in the light of the fact that individuals can be conceived of, and can conceive of themselves, as constituting various distinct peoples. Such questions concern, on the one hand, clearly constitutional matters such as where the boundaries of states should be drawn in terms of their populations. On the other, they concern matters less explicitly constitutional but nonetheless affecting the very general political character of a state, such as whether and, if so, in what ways the state recognises various constituent peoples,

2

INTRODUCTION

either as forming political groups or as contributing differentially to the identities of citizens as subjects of the law: does it, for example, recognise certain specific languages - and if so, how? - or does it merely permit certain individual rights in relation to unspecified languages? Both of these groups of matters raise fundamental philosophical questions. The first raises, in particular, the question of the legitimacy of a state to constitute the political organisation of the people or peoples within its boundaries, and a corollary question, the right of peoples to set up their own separate state. These questions are evidently also questions about what forms of government are just and what sorts of freedom people can reasonably enjoy- and issues regarding such freedoms arise even when the legitimacy of a state, in a strictly constitutional sense, is not under challenge, as in the second sort of political matter sketched above. It is whether people are being treated justly in the political arrangements that are made for them, and whether they can enjoy from such arrangements the freedom to which they are entitled, that concerns us when we ask how their different collective identities should be reflected in the way they are treated as members of a state. Does its legal system, for example, treat cultural minorities fairly and allow them the freedoms that members of the dominant culture have? Questions of legitimacy, justice and freedom are, of course, the staples of political philosophy: legitimacy because it is necessary if citizens are to acknowledge political obligations to the state rather than simply be coerced; justice because it is what citizens look to the state to provide, rather than order based purely on repression; and freedom because what makes one a citizen of a state, rather than a slave, is that one enjoys a full measure of freedom from the dictates of others. There are, that is to say, constitutive links between citizenship of a state and the legitimacy, justice and freedom at which the state should aim. All this is so whatever culturally specific conceptions of legitimacy, justice and freedom particular groups of people may entertain, assuming that they look to a modern state for their governance. The assumption that they do so is, however, for the most part justified by the facts; so we are not already starting off on the wrong foot in treating questions oflegitimacy,justice and freedom as fundamental to our discussion of the political arrangements appropriate to different peoples. Nor does our employment of these notions need to demand more than the barest understanding of what they amount to. Any richer conception will need to be defended to those to whom arrangements embodying it are to be applied.

3

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

This last point illustrates a more general one. We need to be concerned not only with what may seem to be appropriate political arrangements to those in a position to control them, but also with the reception such arrangements will encounter from those to whom they are applied. For example, in assessing whether some set of political arrangements treats some cultural group fairly or is oppressive to them, we should aim to put ourselves into the shoes of the governed as well as into those of the governors, with whom political philosophers often too readily identifY. This in itself will make us more sensitive to possible clashes between the cultural standpoints of each party. For, although we cannot avoid taking up some specific standpoint in determining, say, whether some political arrangements are just, to impose arrangements, however just they are themselves, may itself be, by anybody's standards, unjust. This is in many cases a cause of resentment and a ground for political claims. It is important to bear in mind whether a given philosophical approach to collective identity can support a way of successfully negotiating this problem. There is a further corollary of this point concerning the viewpoint from which political arrangements should be assessed. It is that the notion of a shared identity which creates a people can itself be taken either as one imputed to them by others or as one which they claim for themselves. Evidently political arrangements based on an identity which people do not acknowledge may be the cause of grievance. Yet, equally, arrangements which reflected a quite misguided claim to shared identity would be open to criticism. In the first part of the book we shall look at a number of different kinds of collective identity; some, like race, are imputed; others, like ethnicity, involve self-identification; while yet others, such as cultural or national identity, may be treated in the one way or the other. Our aim in the first three chapters will be to clarifY these conceptions of identity and indicate in very general terms how they might bear on political arrangements. The three chapters in the second part of the book investigate philosophical theories of political organisation and the role of the citizen. Most important among these for contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy are liberalism and communitarianism. There are different varieties of these, each with its distinctive account of how the collective identities deemed relevant can be accommodated into a suitable set of political arrangements. On the Continent, however, and where identity is studied within a framework of cultural studies rather than of philosophy more narrowly conceived, Marxist and postmodernist approaches have been influential. Why this should be and

4

INTRODUCTION

what they can offer by way of a critique of liberalism and communitarianism are explored in the final chapter of this part of the book. The third and final part aims to bring together some of the material in the other two in order to address three topics of current concern. The first is the question of who is entitled to citizenship of a state, and, in particular, what restrictions can fairly be imposed on immigration leading to citizenship. The second is how people of different cultures, whether indigenous or immigrant, can best live together within the same state: what political arrangements are conducive to this? The third concerns the point at which people who cannot or do not wish to live together are justified in seceding from the state and forming a separate one. No neat answers emerge from these discussions, and the book's conclusion counsels against expecting them. Most of the theories brought to bear have been devised for social and political circumstances widely different from those of the present day, in particular ones in which people identified themselves and each other differently from the ways that now they do. Yet how people identifY themselves is itself partly a product of philosophical theories. Political philosophy does not only reflect its own times - it changes them. NOTES 1. See for example W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995) and D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995)- works which have set the agenda for much recent political theory. 2. See for example I. M.Young,Justice and the Politics ~f Differmre (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).

5

PART I

Concepts

1 RACE AND ETHNICITY

RACIAL CATEGORIES In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad articulates, though not without authorial irony at the expense of his English narrator, Marlow, a certain stereotype of Africans: Suddenly, as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. 1 The stereotype is a racial one in that Africans are categorised as racially distinct from Conrad's European travellers in two intimately connected ways. They differ in appearance and in behaviour. The former comes into prominence because of the latter- 'a whirl of black limbs'- and the latter is perceived as different because 'incomprehensible': whether the Africans, as Marlow goes on to reflect, were 'cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell?' It is an incomprehension which results from their being located- that is to say from the Europeans locating them - in a different social world. Yet, and this is crucial, they were not inhuman ... They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was the thought of

9

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. 2 Race as a category is a way of classifYing human beings, and from this common humanity Marlow moves on to derive a subversive thought about their behaviour: 'a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you - you so remote from the night of the first ages - could comprehend'. It is a subversive thought because it suggests that there is, in fact, an option of participation in the African's social world, an option which the Europeans have rejected quite deliberately. 3 Race, then, is a way of classifYing people in terms of similarities and differences indicated by appearance and revealed in behaviour which are deemed relevant to social relations with them, and, what is more, similarities and differences which are themselves conceived of as unchangeable and conferred by birth. Racial description is a form of social categorisation, 4 that is to say, it embodies a mode of classification arrived at by classifiers acting as observers of those they classifY and classifYing them in terms independent of any that those classified might use to classifY themselves. More particularly it classifies them as, in one important sense of the word, peoples, marked out and maintained as such by reproductively transmitted physical characteristics and their longstanding behavioural concomitants. It is as peoples thus distinguished that differentiated social relationships with them and political arrangements for them are deemed appropriate. Peoples, however they are classified, are bounded collections of folk, in the sense that no one can be a member of two distinct peoples within the same classificatory system. Thus no one is deemed both black and white, mixed race classifications requiring an augmentation of racial categories, rather than the acknowledgement of dual membership. Linguistic categories are not bounded in this sense, since people can speak more than one tongue, so that language speaking per se cannot mark out distinct peoples. Peoples are, furthermore, generally assumed to be systemically bounded, (though, as we shall see, it is not always clear what this assumption rests upon). That is to say, it is assumed everyone is a member of some people or other, so that this classification of them forms a comprehensive system. Racial classification is an obvious example. Geographical location, by contrast, does not always give rise to systemically bounded collections of people, since not everyone is located somewhere in a permanent way. Nomadic peoples, for example, may travel widely and other peoples may have migrated or dispersed. This is not to say, of course, that

10

RACE AND ETHNICITY

peoples thus picked out independently of their location are thereby being categorised racially. Racial categorisation is only one way of classifYing peoples among others, each with its own system. Is there, though, any principled way of categorising people racially? One theory is that races are biological categories, analogous - or even equivalent- to biological species. The modern notion of race corresponds to the rise of scientific taxonomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in that period a variety of theories of the biological nature of races were propounded. 5 They include the conflicting views that races were actually separate species (polygenesis) or the same (monogenesis), this question turning in part upon the viability of inter-racial reproductive union. 6 It is otiose to observe that, for obvious reasons, monogenesis prevailed, but this did not settle the question of whether there are significant biological differences between so-called races and biological similarities within them. But only if there are would there be any strong reason to suppose that the superficial features of appearance or behaviour on the basis of which races are identified are non-contingently linked to differences of capacity or disposition. Only if there are differences in capacity or disposition, however, would there be a prima facie case for taking features of appearance or behaviour as relevant to the social relations between races. The short answer is that there are no significant biological differences. Of course, skin colour, to take an obvious example of a feature used to discriminate races, depends on underlying genetic factors. But there is no good evidence that the mechanisms responsible for skin colour have any effect on, say, intellectual capacity or emotional tendencies. Skin colour indicates no significant underlying characteristics at all, and this is borne out by the fact that 'black' people, commonly thought of as constituting a single race, display enormous genetic variety, indicating the lack of any unifYing factor of which their colour is somehow indicative. Genetic differences between members of the same racial category can be greater than the average difference between members of different races. 7 Clearly there are populations which diverge from each other genetically as a result of a variety of factors- mutation, geographic isolation and so forth. No doubt these populations can often be discriminated on the basis of appearance. But there seems to be no principled way of classifYing them into races, and no ground for thinking that such classifications reveal significant biological differences. This is not the place to pursue a discussion ofbiological categories.

11

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The point is that while races have evidently been thought to be biological categories the beliefs involved here are largely false. Can we simply conclude that there are no races, put the belief in them down to bad science, and leave the matter at that? THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE Unfortunately we cannot just jettison race. It is understandable that 'there is,' as Sarup reports, 'loud laughter whenever I tell black audiences that race does not exist.' 8 The reason for this is that social categorisation in racial terms continues to go on despite the fact that the science at one time used to justify it has been discredited. Race exists as an entrenched category of social differentiation which anyone is able to apply. But should they? Might it not be argued that in view of its dependence on a discredited science, racial categorisation should be abandoned and its use abjured in social description and political theorising? This is in many ways an attractive position. Robert Miles has advocated it, arguing that racial categorisation involves an ideology of racism, 9 where an ideology is taken to be a set of beliefs which provides an inaccurate representation of the world. What is needed, he argues, is, on the one hand, an explanation of how this ideology comes to be generated and reproduced, and, on the other, an accurate picture of the world to which it is applied. This will involve modes of classification other than those of race. There are, however, a number of problems with this approach. First, it is far from clear that those who deploy racial categorisations necessarily need to possess the false biological beliefs briefly exposed above. All that they need do is apply the concept of 'black' or whatever in the usual way. What may make their thinking racist is not that there are no natural kinds picked out by such concepts, but rather that they apply the concepts in a way which involves the different social treatment of those categorised as racially distinct. Such differential treatment and hence the categorisations which support it can persist after a particular set of beliefs, for example scientific ones, has been abandoned. Arguably this is already happening in the case of race, with the biological underpinnings of the category giving way to supposedly more respectable cultural ones, 10 yet without marked changes in the way the category is applied or in the social differentiation arising from it. Second, it is an illusion to suppose that we can describe the workings of society without employing the concepts that social actors

12

RACE AND ETHNICITY

themselves use, flawed as these may be. Indeed the suggestion that we should dispense with racial categories in order to counter racially based social differentiation is self-defeating. For we must use racial categories in order to describe the social differentiation they involve. There is no reason to think that we can capture the categories whose members are treated differentially in any other terms. The assumption that Miles makes is that the only concepts that are properly employable are those which pick out kinds of thing in a way independent of the concerns of the social actors who deploy them: they pick kinds out in terms of their essences. Perhaps some concepts, especially those of science, are like this. But there is no reason to think that the sorts of concept characteristically employed in social description are of this sort. There is no reason, that is to say, for us to be essentialists about such concepts, and thus about racial categories. These categories are not discovered; they are drawn for particular social purposes. And if we dissociate ourselves from racist purposes, as Miles rightly urges us to do, the new categories we may deploy are not to be thought of as necessarily different in kind from those he wishes us to abandon. They too are, we may say, socially constructed. The notion that race, like many other categories of social description, is socially constructed is now widely accepted. It is important, however, to be clear exactly what is involved in this claim. The difficulty is that different theorists use the notion differently, so that an element of stipulation is unavoidable. Social construction, as I use the term here, occurs when an item is identified through a socially motivated practice of classification, which there would be no reason to so identifY had such a practice not been adopted. It is easy to see that to regard the item in question as thus socially constructed is to abjure an essentialist view of it, for it is precisely to deny that there is a reason for identifYing it in terms of the disclosure of its essence. Now, given that racial categories do not disclose essences, it is plausible to suppose that race is socially constructed, since this supposition allows us to connect the features by which races are picked out with the practices of social differentiation that depend upon their identification. But, whereas under essentialism these practices are explained in terms of beliefs, true or false, about races, under social constructionism the fact that beliefs about races are available at all is to be explained in terms of the motives for engaging in these practices. There are two points it is necessary to note about the claim that race is a social construction as so understood. The first is that it does not imply the proposition touched on above that race does not exist.

13

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Although some social constructionists have wanted to treat all socially constructed items the way we treat, say, witches, and consign them to the realm of fictions, the mere fact of construction does not have this consequence. 11 Witches do not exist because, to put it crudely, the concept of a witch is that of one with magical powers, and no space exists in the causal realm for the operation of such powers. There are no similar tight linkages between the concept of race and our ontological beliefs. There may be a point to asserting that race does not exist, either, as we have seen, to challenge a biological view of it or to deny its ethical relevance to social treatment, but there is also a danger: namely that of overlooking the role race - and not some surrogate for it - plays in social relations. And in that case we neglect the nature of and reasons for the social construction of race. 12 The second point to note is that, on the understanding of social constructionism here presented, it does not follow that race is only as old as is its social construction. If, as we shall see, its construction is a relatively recent phenomenon it does not follow that race itself is. Whether it is will be a quite separate question depending upon the way race is constructed; and in fact it is so constructed that we want to be able to talk about the existence of races in the past, even if their existence went unrecognised and did not provide a basis for the same sorts of social differentiation as it does in modern times. Another way of putting this point is to say that certain social categories, like race, can be socially constructed without the facts about them being social facts - that is to say, facts that exist only within the context of certain social practices. 13 Facts about race are not social facts, because race is a form of social categorisation that picks people out not in terms of their place within social relations but in terms of properties independent of, though supposedly relevant to, such relations, for example putatively biological ones. What, we need to ask, is the nature of racial categorisation and how does it come about? RACISM Needless to say there are a variety of different answers to these questions, partly as a result of differences in what racism is taken to involve. For it is racism - the treatment of people differently on account of their race - which constitutes the social practice underlying the social construction of race. What is required for racism on this understanding? Was Conrad himself for example, as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe describes him, a 'bloody racist'? 14 For arguably the Africans in

14

RACE AND ETHNICITY

Heart of Darkness are presented as different in a way that would make it simply not possible to treat them as Europeans treat each other. We must remember, of course, that they are presented through the eyes of Conrad's narrator Marlow, but even through his eyes it is doubtful that they are presented as different because of their race. Cultural difference in the tribes along the Congo is certainly signalled, but when individual Africans are met with they are clearly shown as the brutalised victims of colonisation, in a way that calls to mind the words of Dr Livingstone: In reference to the status of the Africans among the nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justifY the notion that they are of a different 'breed' or 'species' from the most civilised. The African is a man with every attribute of human kind. Centuries of barbarism have had the same deteriorating effects on Africans, as Pritchard describes them to have had on certain of the Irish who were driven some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and Connaught. 15 Indeed, it is against the differential treatment of Africans on racial grounds that Conrad's book was written, following his own journey up the Congo into the colony run for the personal benefit of King Leopold II of Belgium. The horrific cruelties practised in this colony were justified on the grounds of the supposed racial difference of black Africans by, ironically, Livingstone's rescuer, H. M. Stanley. They were being exposed at the time of publication of Heart cif Darkness, and Conrad's message is of a piece with this exposure. It is, in Terry Eagleton's words, that 'Western civilisation is at base as barbarous as African society'. 16 This is not a message that supports a charge of racism, however pessimistically unfitted to oppose colonialism it may be and however questionable its representations of Africans are. What sort of treatment, then, does constitute racism? The answer which immediately comes to mind is that racists make people of another race the object of aversion and even hatred. Such feelings of 'aversive racism' 17 are held to explain the differential treatment of members of other races which manifests itself in social separation. But this, though undoubtedly a form of racism, is not the only form, since it underestimates the extent of racism even in sophisticated liberal societies where such feelings are disavowed. 18 Aversive racism may be distinguished from 'dominative racism' which manifests itself, instead, in practices like systematic exploitation and even slavery. But this again may seem too narrow to cover all cases, pervasive as it

15

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

is, for it fails to cover racism towards an economically or socially superior group. It has been suggested instead that what is common to all racism is exclusion, 19 whether from the social life of others, as in apartheid, or from their positions of economic or social advantage, as in racial exploitation. The difficulties with this account, however, are firstly that it seems too wide, and, secondly that it seems to add little to the fact of social differentiation, the racist nature of which is being scrutinised, except perhaps that the differentiation in question is unfavourable to those deemed racially different. Maybe there is little else to add, and race is a category which supposedly licences an indeterminate variety of unfavourable treatments, and can be called into play to justifY an indefinite range of social exclusions. If this is so then it is unlikely that any single explanation of racism will be forthcoming. Yet it is worth glancing at some explanatory theories, since they at least bring out what diverse sorts of factor might be involved in the construction of race, and thus how a single category can serve a variety of social purposes. One class of theories stresses the economic benefits to particular groups of a system of racial categorisation which enables them to dominate or exploit others in their own interest. Theories of this sort may take an explicitly Marxist view of race as an instrument for capitalist exploitation. 20 Support for such views is drawn from the fact that working-class people have often been conceptualised as racially different from their social superiors, as in Victorian Britain. 21 Other views may fasten more specifically upon Western imperialism as responsible for racial categorisation. Charles Mills, for example, argues that the category of non-white racial type was constructed at the beginning of the colonial period to legitimise the treatment of colonised subjects as morally and politically inferior sub-persons. They are conceived of as in, or close to, a state of nature but, unlike whites, as constitutionally incapable of fully leaving it to enter political society through a social contract. Thus they are excluded from full participation in a politics founded upon a 'racial contract' made between whites and are placed under white hegemony, in, for example, the colonial regimes about which Conrad wrote. This hegemony continues today, after its founding principles and colonial manifestations have been formally disavowed. 22 In a related view Kenan Malik argues that racial categorisation arises as a way of rationalising the persistence of social inequalities - as exemplified in slavery and colonial rule - against the paradoxical background of an Enlightenment belief in universal human equality. 23 Clearly such inequalities are to the continuing advantage of Europeans and particularly European

16

RACE AND ETHNICITY

elites, and this explains the persistence, through conceptual reshaping, of racial categories. Theories like these see domination as the principal purpose of racial categorisation and seek to locate specific beneficiaries as responsible for it. A contrasting type of theory draws on the work of Michel Foucault 24 to view race as one category among many others whereby people are subjected to a disciplinary regime in which the power to control them stems, not mainly from coercion, but from the deployment of a discourse which rationalises systematic techniques for such control. According to this type of view, the taxonomies of the Enlightenment, like that of race, are themselves instruments of disciplinary power, the order that results from their application being its manifestation. David Goldberg takes the Enlightenment project itself, then, to explain the construction of race. 25 Although there are beneficiaries there is no general answer to the question of how they benefit and no possibility of seeing racial categorisation as merely an instrument fashioned for their advantage. In this vein, however, the role of the state may be emphasised as institutionalising racial categories to achieve stability and increase state power. Yet what racial categories are institutionalised is fluid and contingent upon circumstances. For example, as a result of complex socio-political causes the category of Mulatto officially disappeared in the USA in the early twentieth century. 26 A new category of Hispanic has recently arisen to undermine the resulting bipartite black/white classificatory system. Such facts point to the dependence of such systems, for all their epistemological pretensions, upon the changing requirements for the maintenance of power. There is, as I suggested earlier, no reason to assume that the power employed in the construction of race should take one single form, or that the processes involved should be uniform: perhaps a Marxist explanation may sometimes be appropriate, sometimes a Foucauldian one, and sometimes neither. 27 GROUP IDENTITIES We have deferred till now an objection to the employment of racial categories which will have suggested itself to many readers. It is that racial categorisation is wrong because it is applied to people independently of the way that they think about themselves. Conrad's Marlow, for instance, obliterates the different tribal identities of the Africans he observes in categorising them all as 'black'. The category of 'Hispanics' in the USA, to take a contemporary example, comprises people from 17

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba who may think of themselves in terms of these diverse origins, not as sharing any common racial character, especially since the inhabitants of these countries are themselves racially categorisable as Amerindian, Mulatto and so forth. Racial categories are constructed by groups sufficiently powerful, with respect to the intellectual and institutional control of such categorisations, to determine to what categories others are assigned in ways that have radical effects upon their lives and over which they have no control. That, it is objected, is the principal and original infringement of freedom involved in racial categorisation. This objection enables us to draw a vital distinction between social categorisation, as involved in the concept of race, and group identification. 28 The latter consists in people classifYing themselves as belonging together in virtue of their shared characteristics so that they may be said to constitute a social group. Thus a social group, properly speaking, is individuated in terms of its members' way of classifYing themselves, while a category is individuated in terms of a classification employed by others. A social group is, then, in a certain sense self-conscious: it is a collection of people acknowledging their common membership, able to recognise other members and to mark them off from nonmembers. Nothing stronger than this is necessarily intended: nothing, for example, by way of internal cohesion or structure. Nonetheless, a group is more than merely a collection of people able to apply another's categorisation of them to themselves. Their acknowledgement of common membership comes to more than this, though exactly how is a subtle question. What we can say is that even if the classification involved is borrowed from others it must be made the group's own, in the sense that it functions just as if the group had devised its own classification. To put this differently: if we assume that groups, like social categories, are socially constructed (which, as we shall see, is highly plausible), the members of a group must perceive themselves to be involved in its construction. For the fact that they play a part in determining how a classification is to be applied differentiates a social group from the simple case of social categorisation, where they do not. It will now be evident that though we have treated race as simply a social category its status can, in some circumstances, be ambiguous. People who are categorised as 'black' by others may identifY themselves as 'black' and thereby form a social group. The processes of group identification consequent upon such racial categorisation are instructive. Those categorised together will be treated similarly and the recognition of this can lead to an acknowledgement of something in common

18

RACE AND ETHNICITY

by way of shared experience, interests and so forth. If, as is likely, the experience is of oppression in some form and the interest is in removing it, then the basis on which the group members are oppressed - namely race - will be that which they see as collecting them together into a group. 29 Consciousness of this kind - 'black consciousness', for example - may be a necessary condition for effective collective action against oppression. This provides a further objection to the denial of the existence of race discussed earlier: for such a denial may also obstruct the very group formation that is necessary to combat the injustices consequent upon racial categorisation. How, though, can a category like 'blackness', which is used to relegate its members to an inferior position, be used by them as an acceptable criterion of group identification? Clearly a rejection of the assumptions used to justifY their relegation is required, and different forms of 'black consciousness', for example, can in different circumstances proceed to build group identification by appeal to different features of 'black' experience. Negritude was a cultural movement initiated with this intention in the 1930s by the Martini can poet Aime Cesaire. 30 Its aim was to oppose the European picture of black people as uncivilised and to recover for them an African culture, which, the movement's proponents believed, would reveal an essential Africanness in which black people could unite with pride. This model of 'black consciousness', which manifested itself politically in Pan-Africanism, has been opposed recently by, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, on account of its essentialism, which led to a fancifully homogenised presentation of African culture. Appiah holds that: the very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism; the notion of Pan-Africanism was founded on the notion of the African, which in turn was founded not on any genuine cultural commonality, but on the very European concept of the Negro ... Simply put, the overdetermined course of cultural nationalism in Africa has been to make real the imaginary identities to which Europe has subjected usY Paul Gilroy, who concurs in these criticisms, has offered an alternative picture, which aims, for political reasons, to preserve 'black consciousness' but to ground group identification in 'black' people's common cultural response to the experience of slavery, a response that is open to development in the light of their continuing oppression. 32 Sophisticated as Gilroy's account 1s, however, arguably it is to be preferred to 19

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Cesaire's only because it is itself a response to quite different historical circumstances from the colonial ones that Cesaire faced, so that the essentialist categories of colonialism are no longer relevant to shaping black consciousness. If this is so it illustrates how a variety of supposedly shared characteristics can contribute to identification with a similarly grounded group. What is required is that these characteristics be ones valued by the group, even if the features which bind the group, such as racial ones, are not. Not all social categorisation leads to group identification because it may not lead to similarities of experience within categorial boundaries. The elaborate systems of racial categorisation in Brazil and other parts of South America, which reflect the variable mix of people of Amerindian, European and African origins do not, by and large, give rise to self-conscious racially distinct groups since, although racially distinguished individuals are treated differently, there are wide variations of social experience within racial categories and little segregation. Where group identification can and does, by contrast, run along racial lines, members of one's own group are not seen as the members of another are. Their appearance and behaviour are not attended to, even if they are the basis for group identification, for their appearance and behaviour are seen as similar and familiar. The reactions of fellow members to oneself reciprocate these attitudes, so that one is, so to speak, drawn into the group, not excluded from it, and along with this goes the making of assumptions about shared experience, interests and so forth which give rise to group identification. It should not be thought however that the fact that a group is constituted by its members' self-identifications implies that membership of the group is optional. If people's freedom is infringed by a failure to acknowledge their own group identifications, then this is not because these identifications necessarily reflect the way in which they choose as individuals to group themselves. Some groups may have this optional character, but others will be constructed, just as social categories are, in a way that leaves no choice as to membership: if I have the qualifYing characteristics then I shall be deemed a member willy-nilly. That this can happen depends, of course, upon the power of the group as a whole. Sufficient disinclination on the part of individuals to bear its name may undermine that power and change the character of the group or destroy it utterly. But this fact does nothing to show that membership is optional all along. It raises the question, in consequence, of what sort of freedom is infringed by social categorisation if apparently similar processes of classification of some individuals 20

RACE AND ETHNICITY

by others can be involved in group identification. The answer must lie in the claims of people collectively to determine the way they classifY themselves. The question of what sorts of groups can mount such claims and what their political ramifications are will preoccupy us in the next two and a half chapters. ETHNICITY We are now in a position to introduce a notion of central importance to the subject matter of this book - ethnicity. It is a notion, we should notice, of which different accounts have been given. Some older theorists33 distinguish ethnicity from race simply on the grounds that ethnicity involves cultural rather than physical differentiation. In neither case is group identification held to be required, so that so-called 'ethnic groups' are not necessarily groups, as we have been understanding the term, rather than categories. Most recent theorists, however, following Max Weber, 34 take ethnic groups to require group identification. Many do not, however, take them to be groups where there needs be actual common kinship between the members, again following Weber in holding that only a beli~f in common descent is necessary. This seems in danger of confusing two conditions: the first, which is surely necessary for ethnicity as ordinarily understood, is that membership of an ethnic group is transmitted by birth; the second, which is not, is that members should share some common biological origin. Recent theorists also tend to agree with older ones in making culture an individuating feature. This, as we shall see, is potentially misleading. We can perhaps agree that ethnic identification is focused upon a presumed common culture. That is what we saw in the cases of 'black consciousness' discussed in the preceding section. But in these cases it is race, not culture, that actually individuates the social groups so formed. It would be unduly restrictive to rule out such groups as these from the class of ethnic groups. Indeed it seems that because ethnicity, unlike race, requires group identification it is preferable to call them ethnic rather than racial groups. Ethnicity, understood as membership of a suitably sized social group transmitted by birth, provides a quite different criterion for the existence of a people from race, since an ethnic group, unlike a racial category, has to be a people in the eyes of its own members, not just in the eyes of others. This creates some doubt as to whether we are justified in supposing that ethnic groups are systemically bounded, as peoples are generally assumed to be. For there seems as yet no reason to suppose

21

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

that everyone should identity themselves as members of ethnic groups, not just because some individuals are ignorant of their membership, but because not all societies may provide for group identification along ethnic lines. In some, people might identity themselves quite differently, so that ethnic groups do not form a comprehensive system. There can be no doubting the fact, however, that a great many people do identity themselves as members of ethnic groups, and the question arises as to what is involved in this. An ethnic group has a name for itself- indeed this is often viewed as a necessary condition of its existence 35 - and this fact provides strong evidence that ethnic groups are socially constructed and, furthermore, socially constructed by their members. It would be implausible to suppose that people simply notice some feature that they shared, a common culture say, and on that basis applied a name to themselves quite independently of it forming part of some socially motivated practice of classification. Many ways of drawing ethnic boundaries will be possible given the sorts of similarity neighbouring peoples will share and the differences that will exist within any people. Which ones are selected to delimit the ethnic group is socially motivated, in the sense that it depends upon the preferences of its members about with whom they should think of themselves as sharing group membership and the common name that goes with it. Whether Hispanics, to take an example mentioned earlier, are to think of thernselves as constituting a single ethnic group depends upon whether their common language is taken as a bond which outweighs differences of culture and experience. A particularly influential social constructionist account of ethnicity has been that of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth. 36 Barth wishes to emphasise the point that what is constructed in the formation or maintenance of an ethnic group is a boundary between members of the group and others. The requirement that membership be recognisable as such implies that non-members should also be recognisable as such. One mechanism involved here is the social categorisation of others outside the group, although, since the formation of one group is not commonly a process carried on in isolation from that of others, the determination of boundaries between groups will usually be a matter transacted between them. 37 Some groups will be in more powerful positions to control the process than others. A 'black' ethnicity, for example, would have been inconceivable without the racial categorisation that excluded 'black' people from European ethnic groups. What Barth wishes to stress, however, is that it is the boundaries so determined which are crucial to the identity of the ethnic group

22

RACE AND ETHNICITY

rather than the common characteristics - the 'cultural stuff' as he calls it - which group identification focuses on. These cultural characteristics can change over time, as in the developing conceptions of black culture underpinning a continuing black ethnicity which we discussed earlier; or they can vary, as the conceptions held by different members of the group may vary. 38 It is this last point concerning the mutability and variability of an ethnic group's 'cultural stuff' that demonstrates why it is misleading to view ethnic groups as individuated by their cultures. We need to look instead at the scope of the group, which may in reality be determined by other factors, so that a common culture serves as a focus for group identification rather than being what generates the boundaries of the group. In some cases these may be fixed as the extent of certain social relationships, though it is important not to inflate what people with a common ethnicity have in common. A group is not necessarily a community in any of the many senses of this term, and an ethnic group need not involve any privileged social relationships. It may, for instance, exist as a group even when its members are widely dispersed among other groups so that such relationships are impossible even though group identification persists and the group is reproduced, perhaps exogamously. It is, furthermore, important to notice that ethnic distinctions may exist within communities: communities, at least in the weak sense of collections of people marked off by social relationships within them that do not extend beyond, obviously need not coincide with ethnic groups, and, as we shall see, communities in the stronger sense of people possessing a common purpose and mutual concern need not either. The kinds of argument there may be for recognising ethnic groups in political arrangements are, therefore, different from those for recognising communities. PRIMORDIALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM To assert that ethnic groups are social constructions, maintained by their members' acts of group identification, does not settle a dispute which has agitated theorists for several decades, namely that between so-called primordialists and those variously referred to as modernists, situationalists, or instrumentalists. The plethora of terms for those on one side of the debate suggests, as we shall shortly verifY, considerable ambiguity as to what is at issue between the parties. But we can take, for now, Jenkins's definition of a primordialist as one who believes that ethnicity is 'a fundamental, primordial aspect of human existence and

23

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

self-consciousness, essentially unchanging and unchangeable'. 39 If primordialism is true then it follows immediately that ethnic groups do form a comprehensive system. For then people everywhere and always will identifY themselves ethnically, whether this is the result of some socio-biological imperative40 or, in Geertz's words, of 'the "givens" ... of social existence' ,41 such as loyalty to kin. Without primordialism in one of its forms there is, as indicated earlier, no obvious reason to suppose that ethnic groups do form a system of peoples. It should be evident that it is wrong to suppose, however, as many theorists do, 42 that primordialism contrasts with social constructionism. If an ethnic group is identified only through a socially motivated practice of classification then this is quite compatible with that kind of practice itself being an unchanging feature of human life, motivated by some fundamental human drives for group identification of the appropriate kind. What may have suggested otherwise is that while race can pre-exist its construction as a category, ethnic groups cannot, since the processes of self-identification which construct them are also those which bring them into existence as social entities. But primordialists need only deny the modernity of this type of identification, while insisting on its necessity for individuating peoples as ethnic groups, to rebut the charge of essentialism. However, it is necessary to unpack the various contrasts that can be drawn between primordialism and its opponents. We have just noticed one - the contrast with modernism, which is the view that certain sorts of people, and here ethnic groups, are a specifically modern phenomenon: 'a new word' - ethnicity- 'reflects a new reality.' 43 According to this view it is an illusion to suppose that the same social forms are timeless, as Conrad's Marlow for example does, as he tells his travelogue by the Thames and reflects, 'darkness was here yesterday' 44 -likening the inhabitants of pre-Roman times to those of the Congo nearly two millennia later. One modernist argument is, instead, that ethnicity is generated by a modern form of identification that results either from the breakdown of traditional hierarchies that conferred identities on people 45 or from 'the difficult problems that arise from having to live with difference' 46 - a situation produced by modern population movements. The processes involved in ethnic group identification seem, however, to require no modern rootlessness or dislocation to be intelligible. A distinct kind of modernist argument holds that it is only in the modern period that ethnic groups with hereditary membership appear, as for example the 'tribes' recognised and partly created by colonialists with racial assumptions about human

24

RACE AND ETHNICITY

groupings_47 Prior to this, analogous social groups permitted more fluid membership with possibilities for voluntary reclassification. This is a more plausible story. We do not need to accept its details to recognise the need to look at the specific situation in which each ethnic group is constructed rather than to assume a blanket story like primordialism. Situationalism, so-called, may be thought of as a more general theory than modernism, holding only that ethnicity is not a constant aspect of social life but a feature that it presents in some situations and not others. Situationalism is often equated with instrumentalism, 48 that is to say with the view that ethnic groups are formed and maintained to serve particular social ends, principally economic and political ones, so that unless people are in a situation in which ethnicity will serve such ends it will not be appealed to in group formation; other kinds of social groupings, self-conscious classes say, may be created instead. But what exactly does instrumentalism contrast with when it is opposed to primordialism? One suggestion is that 'the primordialist view of the ethnie [that is, the ethnic group] would be that it exists largely for its own sake', 49 rather than for some further ends. Presumably this means that group members identifY themselves as such because they find the existence of group membership valuable in itself, and not just for some additional benefits which it brings them.Yet it is hard to see why this distinction between different sorts of social motivation for ethnic identification should go along with the distinction between an unchanging feature of life and an historically contextualised one. A possible reason draws on the suggestion that instrumentalists neglect the 'overpowering emotional and non-rational quality' of ethnic bonds, which are 'recurrent and largely inexplicable'. 50 But not only has Jenkins rightly pointed out that 'there is no necessary contradiction between instrumental manipulation, and sentiment', 51 it also seems that emotions may explain individual attachment to the group while the ends it serves make plain the group's character and boundaries. Primordialists and instrumentalists here appear to pass each other by in actually explaining different phenomena. A similar situation concerns the claim that primordial attachments are given, not adopted for tactical reasons. Arguably this simply spells out the nature of ethnic membership which, as we have seen, is given rather than chosen. It need contradict no instrumentalist explanation of the shape of the ethnic groups commanding such attachments. Again, the givenness of ethnic membership, which concerns the limitations on individual choice in the formation

25

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

of social identity, needs distinguishing from the claim that what ethnic groups there are must be treated as given, as somehow inexplicable. It is only the latter that instrumentalists need to deny. What I suggest, then, is that primordialism is best understood as holding both that ethnicity is a recurrent feature of human social organisation independent of the particular circumstances people are in, and that it draws on deep-seated human attachments. Situationalists - including modernists - deny the first, holding that ethnicity is invoked only in certain situations. But they do not need to deny the second. Instrumentalists need deny neither, holding only that which ethnicity is invoked is to be explained in terms of the ends its invocation serves. On this understanding the primordialist/instrumentalist contrast posits a false dichotomy, though it is worth noting that if primordialism is rejected then a resort to instrumentalism is attractive, for the phenomenon of ethnicity can then be explained on a case-bycase basis. Conversely, if it can be so explained, then the generalities of primordialism are likely to seem otiose. The debate is indeed an intellectual mire, with the disputants often at cross-purposes and invariably oversimplifYing the variety of possible positions on both sides. Before we leave, however, we should note one last pair of distinctions whose importance will emerge only later. Instrumentalists are often accused of having an over-rationalistic, means/ ends view of the construction of ethnicity. s2 Yet, it may be claimed, people do not consciously shape their ethnic groups. Rather they unconsciously do so through identifying with others who share their experience of life. An instrumentalist can accept the importance of unconscious processes and still go on to ask what purposes are served by such identifications. The conscious/unconscious distinction is related to another, between individually and collectively controlled constructions. Instrumentalists need not think of an ethnic group as created by a number of individuals with common interests who choose to pursue them through the formation or maintenance of such a group. Instrumentalists can, instead, take the purposes served by the construction of the group to be those of the group as a whole (or at least of some dominant part of it) so that there is no reason to think that individual members could formulate and pursue them. And, furthermore, the purposes they do avow may be self-deceptive. The exploitative ends of a group - of Conrad's white colonists, sayare not redeemed by avowals of higher purposes.

26

RACE AND ETHNICITY

POLITICAL RECOGNITION OF ETHNIC GROUPS The debate over primordialism and instrumentalism" is relevant to the question of whether ethnic groups as such have a claim to some sort of political recognition - an issue to which, in different forms and applications, we shall be returning throughout this book. We can see now, however, that primordialism creates a presumption in favour of recognition which instrumentalism does not. For if ethnic groups really are basic units of social organisation and the objects of deep attachments which ensure their continuity, then political arrangements which ignore them are likely to prove ineffectual. There seems no reason to think that this form of social organisation has stronger political claims than any other without the primordialist assumptions, which, it must be noted, do not confer superior value on such a form, merely superior viability. If the factual basis of primordialism is disputed, then the ethical standing of ethnicity as a principle of political organisation may be called into question. Since this principle is likely to involve the social categorisation and exclusion of others, it may be thought that its dangers are at least as prominent as its advantages in providing a nexus for social attachment. For without the assumptions of primordialism we can always ask why such attachments, valuable as they may be, should be directed upon ethnic groups rather than upon some other sort. An instrumentalist account of ethnic groups, which, I have suggested, is highly plausible in explaining their specific forms and development, focuses attention upon the particular purposes served by them. In that case we shall assess the claims of individual ethnic groups in the light of their ethical character as revealed by these purposes. How, though, are we to classifY such purposes in order to arrive at an ethical assessment of the groups which have them? Although no doubt in almost all cases the identifications which fonn one group and those which form another will have a mutual impact, we can usefully oversimplifY matters by distinguishing ethnic groups which largely exist independently of the social categorisations that others make of them, and those which exist largely by virtue of such categorisations -by virtue, we may say, of the group's reaction to them. Let us start, then, by considering categorisation-independent or, as I shall call them, nonreactive groups. Non-reactive ethnic groups may exist for a wide variety of reasons, not all of which are of any ethical relevance. We can very roughly distinguish two kinds of case: groups constituted by a 27

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

common interest, fairly narrowly conceived, and groups constituted by a common culture. The latter, to be investigated more fully in the next chapter, involve ethnic group identification for reasons of common language, customs and so on, which will no doubt show up more sharply by contrast with the different languages and customs of others. The reasons for group formation in these circumstances must, however, involve more than mere boundary marking: for example, the desire for richer social relationships with co-culturalists - the desire, to use the notion to be developed later, to form not only a group but a community. Yet while the relationships entered into of trust, reciprocity and so forth, may have an ethically favourable character, other people will, of necessity, be excluded from them. And this may or may not be ethically justifiable. The case for political recognition may turn on whether it is. This can be seen more clearly by looking at ethnic groups constituted by common interests. Here we can distinguish between interests members share by virtue of the environment they and only they find themselves in, and the interests they share in contrast with the interests of others in the same environment. In the former case, others in the environment are not excluded and this ethically favourable aspect of the community the group may form counts in favour of group recognition. In the latter case, there are some common interests whose pursuit clearly militates against recognition. An ethnic group formed, for example, to dominate others, as in colonial contexts, scarcely has a good claim, however admirable its internal relationships. The whites of the American southern states formed, perhaps, in this position, as Allen has argued,s 3 a 'white race' (in our terms a white ethnic group), bringing together the otherwise conflicting interests of various white people in order to sustain the institution of black slavery. Other shared interests which exclude others may not have such a morally repugnant character, but they should still be viewed with scepticism as grounding a claim for ethnic group recognition. If we look by contrast at reactive ethnic groups we can view their formation in many cases as attempts to right the wrongs by, for example, dominative groups; and thus we can view them as having a good claim to recognition, which furthers their chance of success. This, however, it may be objected, is an undesirably ad hoc response. It addresses itself to the question of what rights should be accorded to groups given the circumstances they find themselves in, not to the question of what rights they have in virtue of being ethnic groups. We will have cause later to see what argument there might be for recognising ethnic

28

RACE AND ETHNICITY

groups whether or not they are actually being dominated (or, for that matter, in a dominant position). For now, though, we may notice some varieties of reactive interest-based ethnic groups, recalling the differences between types of wrong brought about through social categorisation which we observed in discussing racism. Anti-dominative ethnic groups may be brought together around resistance either to injustice, caused by exploitation say, or to the denial of freedom, as in slavery, colonial rule or more subtle attacks upon autonomy. Antiaversive groups may be seen as united in resistance to the denial of respect, or to the lack of freedom to enter social relationships with another group which arises from the denial of respect. We may note, however, that an ethnic group can be culture- rather than interest-based and yet be reactive. For a social categorisation that fails to acknowledge cultural distinctiveness may itself trigger group identification that focuses on precisely this distinctiveness. This expresses a demand for recognition, though that such recognition should be accorded does not follow simply from the facts as stated. It depends, as mentioned earlier, on a consideration of the kind of culture-based group that results from them. This is as perilous as it is unavoidable, as is illustrated by the way Conrad's colonists blur over the ethnic distinctiveness of the different African tribes along the Congo because they see simply something uniformly unworthy of moral consideration. Against this intolerance and unirnaginativeness Conrad subversively discerns cultural continuities between peoples which should lead us to treat the claims of others to equal recognition with sympathy. In the next chapter we shall investigate what such culturally-based claims are founded on. NOTES 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart if Darkness [1902] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 51. 2. Ibid. pp. 51-2. 3. An option that the colonist Kurtz, to whose station Marlow is travelling, has taken up by going native. 4. Cp. R. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 22-3. 5. SeeM. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), chs 2-4. 6. See R.Young, Colonial Desire (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 9. 7. See S. Jones, In The Blood (London: Flamingo, 1996), ch. 4. 8. M. Sarup, Education and the Ideologies of Racism (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentha1n, 1991), p. 18. 9. Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989).

29

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

10. See K. Malik, The Mcatzing of Race (London: Macmillan, 1996), ch. 6. 11. Cp. E. Stein, 'Conclusion', in E. Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 341-2. 12. See L. M. Alcoff, 'Philosophy and racial identity', Radical Philosophy 75 (1996), pp. 5-14. 13. See J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 26. 14. Quoted in Ania Loomba, Colmzialism I Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 93. 15. Quoted in M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa (Harlow: Longmans, 197 4), p. 104. 16. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), p. 135. 17. The classification derives from Joel Kovel: see I. M. Young, justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), pp. 141-2. 18. See D. T. Goldberg, Racial Subjects (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 23. 19. See D. T. Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), ch. 5. 20. For example 0. C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1948). 21. See Malik, Meanil~~; of Race, pp. 91-lOO;Jones, In the Blood, pp. 173-7. 22. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). 23. Malik, Meaning (~f Race, ch. 2. 24. See Chapter 6 of the present work. 25. Goldberg, Racist Culture. 26. See P. Starr, 'Social categories and claims in the liberal state', in M. Douglas and D. Hull (eds), How Classification W!JYks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992), pp. 162-3. 27. The objection to racism implied in this section is that differential treatment is based on ethically irrelevant grounds. The political issues arising from this are those that concern how such treatment should be counteracted- by affirmative action, for example. But, since these issues do not concern political arrangements as we are understanding them here, they are not taken up in this book. 28. See Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, p. 23. 29. See Iris Marion Young's account of the relation between oppression and social groups, Justice and the Politics of Difference, ch. 2. If people are oppressed on the grounds of their (inherited) membership of a racial category then they will form an ethnic group, as I go on to use this notion. 30. See G. R. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1962). 31. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 'Out of Africa: Typologies of nativism', Yale ]oumal c~f Criticism 2 (1988), p. 164. See also Appiah, In My Father's House (New York: OUP, 1992). 32. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993). 33. For example]. Rex, Race and Etfmirity (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986), ch. 2.

30

RACE AND ETHNICITY

34. See M. Weber, 'The origin of ethnic groups' in J. Hutchinson and A. Smith (eds), Ethnicity (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 35-40. 35. For example A. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991),p.21. 36. See E Barth, 'Ethnic groups and boundaries', in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, pp. 75-82. 37. See R.Jenkins' Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1996), ch. 10. 38. As in the varied cultural characteristics regarded as crucial to Ulster Protestant identity discussed by A. P Cohen in The Symbolic Cmzstruction cif Community (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 56-7. 39. Jenkins, Rethinking Etlznicity, p. 44. 40. For example P. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1979). 41. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 259. 42. For example C. Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open UP, 1997), p. 30; T. K. Oommen, Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 3 7. 43. N. Glazer and D. P Moynihan (eds), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1975), p. 5. Anthony Smith contrasts modernism with 'perennialism' - the view that social groups of some type provide the 'essential building blocks of any conceivable new order'. See Anthony Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 5. Primordialism then, in fact, explains perennialism. 44. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 8. 45. See A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 46. S. Hall, 'Our mongrel selves', New Statesman and Society, 19 June 1992, p. 6. 47. See T. Ranger, 'The invention of tradition in colonial Africa', in E. Hobsbawm and P. Ranger (eds), The I11ventio11 (if Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 48. For example J. Rex, 'The nature of ethnicity in the project of migration', in M. Guibernau and J. Rex (eds), The Ethnicity Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 270. 49. Ibid. p. 272. 50. Ibid. p. 271. 51. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, p. 46. 52. See Jenkins, Social Identity, p. 96. 53. T. WAllen, The Invention (if the vVhite Race (New York: Verso, 1994).

31

2 CULTURAL IDENTITY

CULTURE In V. S. Naipaul's novel, A House For Mr Biswas, the hero, a Trinidadian of Indian extraction, dies at last in his own house, after a lifetime living with strangers or the family of his wife. But 'how terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it ... to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccomodated.' 1 The house -ramshackle as it is- serves as a metaphor for Mr Biswas's achievement of his own individual identity. It is an identity of great cultural complexity- that of a member of an immigrant family in a society itself diasporic, speaking English as well as Hindi, reading the Stoics, Samuel Smiles (the Victorian author of Self-Help) and English novels, and all the time attempting to avoid absorption into the regulated Brahminicallife of his wife's relations, which would be at once so easy and so unsatisfYing for him. He struggles to hold the disparate elements together, constantly resorting to irony and parody. He suffers, as others seek to impose a cultural conformity untrue to his experience. Mr Biswas may serve, as this chapter will aim to demonstrate, for an image of cultural identity in general, not just that of immigrants and cosmopolitans. But what, we may ask, is cultural identity, and how is it relevant to political arrangements? It is, we may stipulate, the identity that someone has in virtue of possessing the cultural characteristics that they do; which obviously throws us back upon the

32

CULTURAL IDENTITY

question, 'what is culture?' Culture is a notoriously slippery notion. It is surprising, then, that political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who are concerned with questions about the political relevance of culture have devoted so little attention to the concept. Their unconcern tends, as we shall see, to mask the tacit acceptance of some very questionable assumptions. But now for some distinctions. First, we need to contrast the notion of culture as a people's 'whole way of life' ,2 the totality of social practices in which they engage, with the so-called 'ideational' concept of culture as the ideas and symbols through which this life is represented and regulated. We shall follow the majority of social theorists in adopting the latter usage, since we do need to be able to distinguish culture as what guides behaviour from the patterns of behaviour which it guides. But this is because what we need to recognise as patterns of behaviour, as recognisable social practices, are those patterns that their practitioners recognise, and this depends upon the ideas of them that they have. Thus the 'whole way of life' conception of culture is, despite appearances, dependent upon the ideational one. Nonetheless the 'whole way of life' notion does force us to introduce a second distinction. It is a distinction between culture as what guides people's behaviour, and culture as what nukes them, in one supposed sense of the term, the particular people that they are. The 'whole way of life' notion was coined to capture precisely this latter idea, for it embodies a conception of a way of life as what picks out one particular people, namely as just those who are living it. This conception presents cultures as bounded wholes that correspond to the particular peoples individuated by them. This way of thinking of cultures as particularised to specific groups of people is not peculiar, however, to the 'whole way of life' notion. It is just as easy to think of ideational cultures as picking out peoples because their bodies of ideas and symbols are bounded totalities. I shall refer to cultures thus thought of as particular to peoples as 'group cultures', and to the peoples supposedly demarcated by them as 'cultural groups' .3 Cultural groups are thus conceived of as bounded and, it is assumed, systemically so, such that cultural groups are supposed to form a system in terms of which peoples can be identified and demarcated, in one understanding of the term - an understanding distinct in principle from that of races or ethnic groups - as peoples. It is important to notice that in this usage a language group or a religious group, say, is not necessarily a cultural group. For, following LeviStrauss, a group culture is taken to consist of a group's 'multiplicity of

33

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

traits, some of which it shares, in varying degrees, with nearby or distant cultures, and some of which distinguish it more or less sharply from others.' 4 One cultural group is demarcated from another by the fact that it exhibits a specific totality of such traits. It is not a group constituted by all those people possessing some given trait. People may in any case, as we noted, speak more than one language or practice no religion, so that these traits would not pick out systemically bounded groups. Now, according to this conception, cultural identity is thought of as membership of a cultural group. Its political importance is taken to arise precisely from the fact that it marks people out as members of such groups, so that the political claims arising from cultural identity are essentially claims to the continued existence of the groups which give rise to it, claims supported by reasons we shall investigate shortly. Just such a conception of culture is implicit in the use to which culture is put in the work of Will Kymlicka or Yael Tamir. Kymlicka takes 'a culture' to be 'synonymous with "a nation" or "a people that is, as an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history'. 5 Here it is the people marked out culturally that is taken, quite idiosyncratically, to be the culture. While Tamir agrees that 'two people are of the same nation if, and only if, they share the same culture', for her that culture is, rather more plausibly, 'the set of specific features that enable members of a nation to distinguish between themselves and others.' 6 In both cases cultural identity is equated with membership of a people, of which a nation is taken to be an example; that is, of a bounded group of a certain sort membership of which is, in general, incompatible with membership of other such groups. In the next section we shall go on to see how convincing such an account of cultural identity is, but we conclude this one by noticing that, despite its prevalence, it is at best optional. There is, of course, a usage of'culture' which we have not so far remarked upon, sometimes referred to as the 'humanistic' sense, which would not even tempt us to think in terms of the cultural groups currently under discussion. In this usage culture - not a culture - is what some people, cultured people, have and others lack. It is, in Matthew Arnold's words, 'to know the best that has been thought and said in the world' _7 Culture such as this is clearly located in the ideational sphere, but it is not a determinate body of ideas that marks one group off from another, for it is universal in its geographical scope and in its possible application; in principle, anyone can have some measure of it and be guided in their behaviour accordingly. It is what

34

CULTURAL IDENTITY

Mr Biswas sought to acquire in reading the Stoics and, less successfully, Shakespeare, rather than being confined to Indian epics, and it was this, in part, that made him what he was. And that has, it would seem, nothing to do with his being a member of some cultural group. INTEGRATION THEORY What are cultural groups, as we introduced them in the preceding section, and why should membership of them be thought politically important? The idea that there are such groups and that mankind, at least when not disrupted by such seemingly artificial processes as colonisation, immigration and so forth, divides up into them, derives ultimately from the German Romantic, Herder. It is Herder who is acknowledged by anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss as having originated the concept of culture by means of which they distinguish peoples culturally. For this, the concept of civilisation- connoting a set of general, universal, and transmissible abilities - had to give way to the concept of culture in its new meaning: it now signified particular lifestyles that are not transmissible.~ What results is, as we have seen, a supposed way of individuating the distinct peoples with such lifestyles. But why should we suppose that there are any social units to which such a concept of culture applies? The leading assumption behind the supposition is that particular cultures are systems of cultural traits, rather than haphazard assemblages. It is because they are systems that cultures can be individuated without arbitrariness. And what lies behind the assumption that cultures are systems is the larger one that the social groups they characterise are systems in their turn. The crucial ingredient here is that the social groups in question are inu:\?rated wholes. To include this assumption in one's thinking is to adopt what has been called an 'integration theory' 9 of society, that is to say, to hold that social groups are relatively stable as a result of their elements being integrated into a functional system, maintained by some relevant consensus among its members. It is integration theory which is embedded in the supposition that there are cultural groups of the kind under discussion. Without it there would be no apparent reason to discern groups as each sharing a common but complex culture, rather than observing a wide variety of individuals with different cultural characteristics. The classic expression and defence of integration theory is the

35

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

functionalism of Emile Durkheim, which influenced Levi-Strauss as well as several generations of British and American anthropologists. 10 Functionalism holds that society is so organised as to maintain its own stability, so that the behaviour of individual members conduces to this end. Culture, then, as a force that guides individual behaviour, must itself have this integrative function. The model at work here is an analogy with biological organisms, which permeated German Romantic imagery and influenced Durkheim through its more empirically inclined English exponent, Herbert Spencer. Just like organisms, societies work to maintain their existence in a changing environment, and their parts - even individual members - are to be understood in terms of the way they contribute to this. But it is hard to see what there is to recommend the analogy as a model for society. There is, for example, no equivalent for societies to the theory of evolution, which is what accounts for the development of functional systems in the organic realm. 11 Any decision whether or not to adopt the model has to depend upon its explanatory productiveness. It cannot simply be assumed. In fact the productiveness of the functionalist model is not high. This is partly because, unlike organisms, social systems which constitute functional wholes are difficult or impossible to individuate. Consideration of an example from Durkheim's treatment of religion as an aspect of culture which plays its part in maintaining social stability illustrates the point. The religious rituals of Australian Aborigines, he maintained, functioned to draw members of the clans together and increase their solidarity. But in fact the life of Aborigines is lived in small hunting groups organised into tribes. The clans are widely dispersed formations playing no part in ordinary life and existing apparently only for ritual purposes. It is thus quite unclear why it is they, and not the groups or tribes, which require the solidarity supposedly maintained by religion. 12 And this goes generally for functionalist accounts. It is not clear what constitutes a single cultural system, and when we characterise it in terms of the culture of a people there is no non-circular way of individuating that people in cultural terms. 13 Despite its defects, however, the functionalist model continues to exercise an unacknowledged influence on the thinking of many Anglo-American political philosophers, particularly, though not exclusively, those of a communitarian turn of mind, of whom we shall have more to say in a later chapter. The model is at work in the sort of arguments often developed for giving recognition to cultural groups. These commonly centre on the benefits they offer the individual

36

CULTURAL IDENTITY

member, by contrast with the predicament in which she is placed as a result of her group's dissolution. Margalit and Raz, for example, offer arguments for national self-determination predicated on the value of encompassing groups with 'pervasive cultures' - their term, somewhat over-simplifYing, for what we are calling cultural groups. This value consists partly in the fact that membership of such groups 'greatly affects one's opportunities, one's ability to engage in the relationships and pursuits marked by the culture', partly in the 'brute fact that people's sense of their own identity is bound up with their sense of belonging to encompassing groups'. 'All this', the authors go on, 'is mere common sense' .14 But the relationships on which individual well-being depends are, they aver, 'culturally determined'. Perhaps so in some sense of 'culture'. But why in the group culture sense that they espouse? 15 Is not the threat to someone's identity from the loss of group membership none other than the anomie that the breakdown of social integration menaces him with in Durkheim's theory? This is far from a common-sense outcome, but an inevitable one from functionalist assumptions. This last point is also illustrated by Will Kymlicka's liberal argument for minority rights from the value of cultural membership. Here Kymlicka says he uses the term 'culture' 'to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself'. He presents no argument for supposing that there are such 'structures', but he views them as providing 'a context of choice' which determines the range of options for members of cultural communities. 'The sense of belonging to a cultural structure and history' he continues 'is often cited as a source of emotional security and personal strength. It may affect our very sense of agency. This has been recognised ... by sociologists.' 16 Again the loss of such a structure threatens to produce anomie and powerlessness because the individual's identity is seen as given by her place in it, so that when the 'mechanism' breaks down she becomes just an idle cog. 17 Kymlicka's use of the plight of American Indian groups to exemplifY the threat reinforces this interpretation of it, for it was with just such indigenous peoples prior to colonial influences that anthropologists were wont to illustrate their functionalist analyses. That functionalism is covertly at work in Kymlicka's thinking is evidenced also by his argument that national statehood is a justified demand of cultural groups because it protects their members' cultural contexts of choice. First, it is the assumption of functional wholes that enables cultural groups -which, as we saw earlier, Kymlicka identifies with nations -to be identified as what provide these contexts, rather

37

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

than more local or more wide-ranging cultures. Second, it is functionalism which dictates that the cultural groups so picked out should be the entities to which state boundaries correspond; for any smaller polity, while it may work to protect the cultural context against external threats, will not be able to preserve it as a functioning whole. It is worth noticing that it is these same functionalist assumptions which generate the sharp distinction between internally initiated and externally imposed change that is crucial to Kymlicka's nationalist argument. National statehood permits the former, but quite properly prevents the latter, for any change initiated inside the cultural group must originate from within its context of choice and hence cannot destabilise it, while any imposed from outside must draw upon a different context and is thereby bound to threaten the cultural integrity of the group. Without these covert functionalist assumptions there seems no compelling reason to suppose that such generalisations about the cultural benefits of national self-government can be sustained. 18 CONFLICT THEORY To give up integration theory is not necessarily to abandon the idea that there are cultural groups, understood as complete peoples picked out by sets of cultural characteristics; but it does require those that hold that there are such groups to give a different explanation of their existence and, in consequence, to offer a different account of cultural identity, albeit still in terms of membership of a cultural group. The kinds of account we will be looking at are those that see cultural characteristics as brought together in the construction of social groups, just as in the last chapter we looked at accounts of ethnic groups as socially constructed. On a social constructionist account the relation of a particular culture to the group it supposedly individuates is quite different from that posited by functionalism. Rather than constituting a discernible system which reflects the way that social relations within the group form a bounded totality, a culture is thought of as framed precisely with the effect of determining the boundaries of such relations. Rather, that is, than the group simply being recognised as such through its culture (which nonetheless plays a crucial role in its maintenance), people supposedly exist as a bounded group only because a culture is fashioned precisely to demarcate them from others. This leads, of course, to a different view of cultural identity. The cultural group member is not someone whose cultural identity reflects the functional system of the group as a whole, and who is necessarily

38

CULTURAL IDENTITY

threatened with internal dislocation if that system is radically disturbed. He is, instead, someone whose own cultural characteristics are not necessarily any more systematically organised than are the cultural materials through which the group is constructed. The threat to some single characteristic - the speaking of a particular language, say - may be very serious, but not because it inevitably leads to an anomie internal breakdown. Notice that this is not to deny that a group culture is internalised by group members, just as it is under functionalism. It is, that is to say, made part of a member's personal repertoire of resources for coping with the world, rather than being part of the world with which she must cope. But that it is a culture specific to a particular group is here irrelevant to this internalisation. Religion, say, is similarly internalised but is not necessarily a characteristic of any particular group culture. What then is the role of culture in the construction of a group? No simple answer can be returned; it may well vary from case to case. Yet some features are common to all. First, as noted above by Yael Tamir, group culture can serve to enable members to distinguish themselves from non-members. It would be wrong, however, to characterise the whole of a group culture as being what serves the purposes of mutual recognition. Certain aspects patently do - one thinks imrnediately of national dress and such distinctive customs of a group as are involved in greetings, meals or other habitual social interactions. But other cultural characteristics which belong to the group and which may be involved in its construction or be peculiar to it do not at all obviously so serve: a group's distinctive history, for example, need serve no public purpose of boundary demarcation. Rather it contributes to a member's sense of membership, of being part of a distinctive group. It is important to distinguish this specific way in which a culture can contribute to 'people's sense of their own identity' 19 from other cases in which a sense of identity has nothing to do with the recognition of group membership. In these cases culture gives one a sense of identity because its internalisation makes the outlook on the world which it provides one's own- an outlook, that is, with which one can identifY. There is a persistent ambiguity in such phrases as 'a sense of identity' which readily leads from the latter construction to the former, and thus reinforces the assumption that all culture is group culture. Why, we might ask at this point, should certain cultural characteristics be deployed to construct a bounded group? The general answer a social constructionist is likely to return will be in terms of the power relations which can be established or maintained by constructing this

39

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

cultural group rather than another one picked out by cultural characteristics of a different scope, or by constructing a given group by means of these cultural characteristics rather than by others. It is power relations, he will say, which are neglected in functionalist accounts of group individuation and group structure. Consider as an example the language of a group, which may seem on the surface to provide a cultural characteristic that serves for the mutual recognition of group membership. Yet, as is well known, dialects often shade off imperceptibly into each other so that it is not obvious where it can be said that one language ends and another begins. Where the boundary is drawn, and thus what groups are determined and, as a result of increasing linguistic differentiation, firmly entrenched, is often a matter of political decision and action. Thus Serbo-Croat was forged from a Croatian dialect shared with some Serbs to form a single language for the southern Slavs, and was recognised as such in the former Yugoslavia. 20 Following the Federation's disintegration the differences between supposedly distinct Serbian and Croatian languages have been emphasised. Changes in power relations have gone side by side with cultural change. To talk of power is almost inevitably to talk of conflict. It is thus unsurprising that the social constructionist account of group cultures contrasts with functionalist ones not only in rejecting integration theory but in espousing its opposite, conflict theory. Conflict theory stresses the ubiquity of change in society, rather than stability - change which results from pervasive conflicts within society for the possession of power. Marxist theories, as we shall see in a later chapter, may be regarded as a species of conflict theory. As such they have exerted a greater influence on continental philosophers than on Anglo-American ones and, through continental philosophy, on 'cultural studies', a discipline which aims to investigate the character of social groups and the identities sustained within them through their cultural productions. This, though it has an obvious relevance to the political claims of such groups and their resolution, has been largely ignored by AngloAmerican political philosophers, with the result that they commonly accept as the culture of a group what is presented as such for political purposes, without subjecting it to the sort of scrutiny that might call the claims based upon it into question. According to a conflict theory approach, however, it is unlikely that there will be some single unitary culture for a given group. Rather there will be a variety of cultural constructions resulting from contestation between conflicting interests in the formation or development of the

40

CULTURAL IDENTITY

group. N aipaul's novel A House for Mr Biswas might itself be regarded as a move in such a contestation over the construction of Trinidadian identity. The movement leading to independence from colonial rule in 1962 had been led by Eric Williams and was based on images of black identity and Judaeo-Christian conceptions of deliverance from bondage. The movement was opposed by Hindu Indians in Trinidad who feared marginalisation. Indeed Naipaul's father, the original ofMr Biswas, became the leader of a multiracial party opposing Williams. But their stance led to accusations of treachery. 21 Against this background Naipaul's novel may be seen as asserting a different conception of Trinidadian identity in the culturally polymorphous figure of its hero. Yet the claims of this conception rest upon the force of its representation in this book and elsewhere. The conception is, however, in no way a specifically nationalist one. For though it locates Trinidadian identity in a motley of ill-assorted cultural characteristics, there is no way in which these characteristics pick out some group as Trinidadians or even, perhaps, West Indians. The aim, though part of a contest over group construction, is not itself to provide the characterisation of a particular cultural group so much as to undermine the very project of providing such a characterisation. We shall turn in the remaining part of this chapter to the different ways in which cultural groups may be constructed and to the political claims that may be associated with such different constructions. LANGUAGE Naipaul's contribution to the formation of a Trinidadian cultural identity was principally a literary one, and one made in the island's official language, English. Evidently English itself could not serve to individuate a Trinidadian culture nor, as a matter of fact, could any creolised form of English. Yet it is language that is often viewed as what distinguishes one culture from another when the political claims of a distinctive cultural identity are in question. We need, then, to consider the basis for claims made on the basis of the possession of a common language. For a language may be thought to provide its speakers with their ideational culture. What are we to understand by this? In its broadest sense an ideational culture consists of people's concepts and other publicly transmissible ways of understanding the world in which they live - the 'webs of significance' which they have spun, in Clifford Geertz's phrase. 22 Publicity is important here. Culture does not consist of the private contents of individual minds, as is

41

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

sometimes implied by those who contrast the public drawing of group boundaries with the 'cultural stuff' contained therein, 23 which may vary from member to member according to their different conceptions of the group. Such differences must be public ones if they are really to be thought of as cultural. We have noticed, however, that languages can in principle be counted differently from 'webs of significance', for example when languages are fairly fully intertranslatable or when the same language conveys different understandings (as with the British and the Americans, who are supposedly divided by a common language). The assumption that there cannot be such mismatches between languages and understandings, itself derived from Herder, should not too readily be made, though the extent of it in practice will no doubt vary from case to case. In polyglot cultures, which are the norm in Africa, the scope for intertranslatability may be very high. 'Webs of significance' make understanding the world and coping with it possible. They permit the formation of beliefs and regulate behaviour in the sense of constituting bits of it as recognisably purposeful activity. They do not specify what beliefs one should have or which actions might be performed. Ideas, in the sense of beliefs, including evaluative beliefs that regulate behaviour in this normative way, make up culture in a narrower sense, which we shall come to in the next section. The 'humanistic' culture, met at the beginning of this chapter, if narrowly construed in terms of the best that is thought and said, forms a subspecies of this category. But humanistic culture is generally more widely understood to encompass the best of aesthetic productions too, in which case it includes representations, broadly conceived, that invite responses different from assent or obedience. The importance of such aesthetic, and more generally affective responses should discourage us from according too narrowly a classificatory role to the 'webs of significance' that constitute culture in the sense under discussion. With these distinctions in mind we can ask what is the basis for political claims made in respect of people's possession of their own language. Nineteenth-century attitudes to the Welsh language such as that of Matthew Arnold - 'the language of a Welshman is and must be English' 24 - led to demands that Welsh be accorded recognition and to a linguistically-based nationalist campaign for independence. Why, on the one hand, should a language be protected? Why, on the other, should it form a criterion for a separate political existence? Let us sceptically set aside those arguments touched on above, which see the

42

CULTURAL IDENTITY

loss of a language as leading to anomie breakdown. There is, however, another line which depends upon the presumption that different languages often do offer different understandings of the world. One reason adduced for the abolition ofWelsh was that it could not express the propositions of politics and science. Conversely, peculiarly expressive powers in poetry have been claimed for it. The beauties of a language, the particular pleasures that its descriptive resources and melodies can provide, these are as much a part of an understanding of the world, of capturing and coping with it, as its more narrowly classificatory regimes. They suggest the same sort of argument for protecting the language as there is for preserving works of art, namely that it extends and enriches our understanding. This does not require - though importantly it cannot rule out that others should learn the language besides its native speakers and come to enjoy its pleasures for themselves. The fact that there are those who can speak and enjoy it is enough, and their passing, like that of the last Cornish speaker, which gave 'a moment's distress' to Arnold, 25 is a loss for us all. A mode of human understanding has vanished. But there is a supplementary argument available here which stems from the way that the speaking of a language can contribute to one's individual identity. If I am who I am in virtue of my outlook on the world, as well as my active role within it, then the speaking of a language, and possibly several languages, will be part of my identity since the language shapes that outlook. The language or languages in which I am 'at home' have a particular significance here. For the pleasure I can take in language is indicative of the inlloll!cmcnt I have in the cognition of the world it gives me, and it is through such spontaneous involvement that who I am, by contrast with merely what tasks I must perform, reveals itself. It goes without saying that it is through the aesthetic potentialities of a language that such pleasures can be most keenly felt. It is crucial to grasp that these arguments in no way depend upon the speaking of a common language constituting people into a systemically bounded cultural group, nor upon the cultural identity that results from speaking it residing in membership of such a group. Perhaps, in order to protect the language, some group of speakers needs to be identified whose integrity and social relations must be preserved. The foregoing arguments are not concerned with the way that the speaking of a language might be taken to define a social group. Yet only if speaking the same language did define such a group could it serve as a criterion for some measure of political indepen-

43

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

dence or autonomy. Independent government, we should remember, is different from self-government. 26 A group can be governed separately from others without governing itself, and a given kind of group - a linguistic one, say, can govern itself without being fully separate from another - while having, that is, a linguistic minority within its borders. The arguments for independence and autonomy are different ones. The former turn presumably on the desirability of those who are governed together being able to communicate efficiently, and that depends on their having shared understandings of what they deliberate together about politically. Yet arguably this demands not a single language, but only languages sufficiently intertranslatable over the range of topics that is relevant to political deliberation, or sufficient bilingualism, or a non-native official language, as English is in many ex-colonies. The aspects in which certain languages may differ expressively, for example their aesthetic aspects, may simply not be relevant to political organisation. Self-government for a linguistic group must be argued for differently, namely from the desirability of speakers exercising control of the culture based upon their language. This may, as a matter of contingent fact, be necessary to protect the language itself. Or it may be necessary, through the direction of education and cultural production, to control the way in which its speakers are represented in its literature or other artistic manifestations. That is to say, to control the way that speaking the language confers a cultural identity by determining what are the canonical examples of the language. Certain texts and literary forms will be made part of the language's canon and others marginalised. And this, as we saw earlier, may be part of a broader process of group construction, which is contested between different protagonists. Certainly it is important that as wide as possible a range of speakers should control their language and literature; for them not to do so is to lose control of the ways their cultural identities can be framed. A particular political formation may inhibit this rather than being conduciye to it. But it is far from clear that this amounts to a general argument for language-based autonomy. Whether it does so in a particular case will depend upon the way language speakers are distributed, the kinds of control they can exercise over the canon and the likely nature of a language-based state. There is no guarantee that political autonomy would not cause more harm through cultural regimentation and repression than is experienced in its absence. And the choice of language as the basis for an area of autonomy will serve some interests, and not others. It is not neutral or natural.

44

CULTURAL IDENTITY

VALUES The culture of a collection of people may, as we saw earlier, be conceived of in terms not of a shared language but of a common body of beliefs, in particular evaluative beliefs. Let us turn, then, to the political significance of a shared ethical system, in the broadest sense of this notion as a system of norms regulating behaviour. It is worth distinguishing within an ethical system so conceived between those norms that actually figure in people's reflective thinking about what to do and those which do not or at least do so much less largely. The former we can refer to as their moral standards; the latter, to borrow a term from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as their habitus27 - their habitual dispositions to act in one way rather than another, which are acquired through socialisation within a particular section of society but which remain largely unconscious. We can see in consequence that cultural identity, in the sense pertinent to our present discussion, can be conceived of either as someone's moral standards or as their habitus. In the former case that identity may be self-declared, as when someone identifies herself through a religious affiliation that involves specific moral standards. In the latter it will typically not be, despite being recognisable for what it is by observers conversant with the relevant social nuances of class, region or whatever. In neither case does cultural identity depend upon membership of a cultural group in the now familiar ethnographic sense of a complete society systematically demarcated from others by its total culture. Thus according to a liberal view, of the sort to be discussed in a later chapter, wide variations in individual moral standards are containable within a single social group. It may, however, be argued that a group should be individuated largely by its moral standards as needing separate or self-government. Such political demands might be defended by claiming, respectively, that a common morality is needed to underpin a common law, and that the lawrnakers must be drawn from those whose moral standards underpin it. We should notice that, while political demands cannot be grounded in some shared habitus in view of its largely unconscious character, nevertheless they may be assessed through comparing declared moral standards with actual habitual dispositions. Despite declared differences in morality there may be close agreement in habitus which will make a common life possible. A group that identifies itself in terms of its moral standards may, that is to say, simply be wrong about the sources of the social cohesiveness between its members.

45

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

There is, furthermore, some cause to be suspicious of the construction of cultural groups in terms of moral standards. This stems from the fact that there are at least two kinds of reason for adhering to a standard: one, the primary and, one might say, the 'proper' reason, is that adherence to the standard leads one to act aright: the other is simply that it happens to be the standard of one's group, to which one desires to display allegiance through such adherence. The second, derivative kind of reason is clearly available only if there is a group constructed in terms of one's standards, but it is a kind of reason which can undermine the first. For conformity to the standards of the group because they are its standards can be both an intellectual and a moral vice. It is an intellectual vice if one is no longer concerned to ensure that one acts aright, a concern that demands a responsiveness to the real character of the relationships in which one is involved and the claims they make on one. It is a moral vice of narcissism and decadent self-absorption, in which concerns with who I am replace a proper concern with what I ought to be. But the identity it generates is, of course, a phoney one, a substitute for sincere and serious moral identity. It is this kind of identity that Mr Biswas repudiates in rejecting the conventionalised Hinduism of his wife's family. All this is, in theory, only a peril of group construction in terms of moral standards. In practice it is an ever-present and inescapable one. Succumbing to its temptations brings such cohesive power to a group as to induce almost all cultural group constructions to rely, in part, upon such moral standardisation. That said, the moral character of some groups is worse than that of others, and the worse it is the less their political claims for independence or autonomy will stand scrutiny. 'But', will come back the reply, 'by whose standards is their moral character being judged? Presumably by those of some other group, in which case the judgement is rooted in that other group and irrelevant to the one being judged, so that proper political assessment cannot take account of supposed moral character.' This cultural relativism has nothing to recommend it. To start with, its assumption that the moral standards which we bring to bear on our assessments are necessarily those of some cultural group or other is, as we have seen, untenable. But even if they were, the principal reason for supposing that they must be irrelevant to the group being assessed embodies a hidden functionalism. It is that the moral standards of a social group are just those needed to preserve its stability, so that any suggestion that the character of the group is morally defective is not one that can have an application within it. There may indeed be difficulties in

46

CULTURAL IDENTITY

applying such a suggestion, and there are large questions as to what it might be based upon, but a general cultural relativism grounded in functionalism is not plausible. Let us turn to groups constructed, instead, through a shared habitus, that is say through socialisation into ways of acting which are recognised as distinguishing members from non-members, even if what precisely it is that effects the distinction is not readily apparent. It is, perhaps, through these dispositions that people's characters are shapedthat what are thought of, for example, as national characters are formed. Mr Biswas himself is caught up in a conflict of such dispositions. There is, on the one hand, the fatalism of the way oflife brought from India; on the other, the individual striving that characterises the European lifestyle of the colonisers, which is overtly promoted by Samuel Smiles to whom Biswas turns in his reading. Might Mr Biswas's problems derive from the fact that groups with different modes of habitus have been mingled, where they would have been better kept politically apart? Well, that is certainly not the message of the novel, which celebrates complexity and coexistence. The opposing, conservative answer will be looked at in a later chapter. But this is not to say that differences of habitus should not be taken account of politically, to avoid, for example, undesired and undesirable cultural assimilation. Such habitus may characterise a group and, through becoming something of which they are aware, enter its members' sense of their own identity. This is one way of reading Paul Gilroy's suggestion that black people recognise themselves as having a common 'Black Atlantic' identity, founded in a common experience of the slave trade. 2 x What this gives rise to is, on the one hand, an overtly erotic and irreverently carnivalistic music and, on the other, what Gilroy calls an 'anti-productivism', which the music expresses. In the behavioural dispositions which manifest this anti-productivism, 'the black body is ... celebrated as an instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of labour'. 29 This is a different way of constructing black identity from that of negritude, as we noted in the last chapter, but it also suggests different political stances, stances which can challenge European cultural norms from within, rather than embracing a separatist black nationalism. Differences in habitus are not clearly articulable and thus cannot with confidence be made the subject of explicit ethical debate, unlike the moral standards which they underpin. Perhaps they are better regarded as different ways of understanding the world, demanding the kind of respect for diversity and illumination which the different

47

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

understandings presented by different languages provide. Policies of assimilation withhold that respect, but the kind of protection that those with a different habitus demand is not that of separate existence as a cultural group. Rather they demand the kind of freedom from domination which leading a life in accordance with one's habitus requires, and access to control of the institutions of socialisation which transmit it, for example educational ones. Habitus, unlike language speaking, cannot be prohibited, nor, unlike language again, can it be fostered, so cultural protection with respect to it is necessarily indirect and dependent upon political equality for those whose identity and self-esteem depends on it. HISTORY AND AUTHENTICITY Another body of belie£~, different from evaluative ones, which is often taken to be partly constitutive of a particular culture 30 is that which constitutes the history of a group. Here again, though, being part of some history, as an aspect of one's cultural identity, does not depend upon membership of some demarcated cultural group. History can fulfil this identity-bestowing role for a variety of reasons. It can do so through someone's identifYing himself as the descendant of certain ancestors, as a current inhabitant of a place with an historic past, or as a participant in an artistic or intellectual tradition with its own historical succession of canonical productions. Each of these may form some aspect of a single individual's cultural identity without implying membership of any cultural group. It is only if differences surface in contested constructions of a group to which political allegiance is demanded that any tension between these cultural identities need be felt. History enters individual identity because to have a sense of who one is requires being able to tell a story about oneself, and, furthermore, a story which reb.tes one to others by connecting with the stories they tell about themselves. It requires, in short, making oneself part of a shared narrative. 31 Such a narrative stretches into the past, and thereby becomes absorbed into a more general history. It is evident, though, how a group can be constructed in terms of a history that ties members into the group through engaging with and connecting together their personal narratives, so that their sense of who they are comes to depend upon membership of the group so constructed. This kind of group identification will tend to happen if their history is one in which other people cannot share, so that a system of discrete histories 48

CULTURAL IDENTITY

develops, as, for example, in the case of national history. Indeed, to construct such cultural groups is to induce people to engage in just those personal narratives that mesh together into these discrete group histories. History is appealed to in attempts to establish that a group identity is an authentic one. This, as we shall see, is a notion fraught with difficulty. But there is at least one commendable aspect of the demand that a group which confers identity should be authentic, namely that its history should be a true rather than a fraudulent or seriously distorted one. This demand for truth, natural as it appears, has, however, been contested. Many political philosophers 32 seem to think that the truth of an historical narration is irrelevant if the story succeeds in constructing a cultural group to which people can give allegiance and in which they find fulfilment. But a grossly distorted history is an unsound basis for group formation. The temptation we noted in connection with groups based on shared values is succumbed to here, namely to abandon the epistemic requirements to which culture in general is answerable and embrace instead the reassuring security of membership. A myth - a story that is not taken as true, and thus enters into a personal narration not like one's history, but like one's fate- that is something that answers to different, and principally ethical, demands. But the fact that history can serve as myth is no reason to think that myth should serve as history. Similar strictures apply to the invented traditions that characterise many cultural groups. The Welsh Eistedrlfodau, for example, have become a focus for the celebration of the Welsh language and they perpetuate the medieval meetings of bards, albeit after a period of desuetude and the decay of the bardic order. But the trappings of ancient Druidism with which they are invested lack any historical provenance, being the late eighteenth-century contrivance of a Glamorgan stonemason. They are designed to locate Welsh identity in a continuous Celtic history - an identity which is thereby ethnically opposed to that of the English and rooted in Welsh language-speaking. 33 Now, as Hobsbawm has observed, the object and characteristic of 'traditions, including invented ones, is invariance' .34 The social cohesion to which they are conducive is, designedly, an unchanging one, bolstered up against the pressure of change by their fixity and repetitiveness. In this respect, Hobsbawm notes, they differ from 'customs' which can accommodate changes, while retaining continuity by finding precedents for them. It is the inflexibility of such traditions, as well as the frequent fictitiousness of their credentials, which renders them objectionable as

49

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

bases for identity. For once again such an identity will not be grounded in a narrative which takes account of how things are, with all their changes and complexities, but in a comforting illusion of things being as they ought to be. This indicates how, even when traditional practices are genuine, the demand for 'authenticity' in culture can be open to criticism. Despite the cultural mix which he celebrates as a novelist in A House For Mr Biswas, Naipaul as a reflective thinker sometimes views as worthwhile only those cultures which maintain a continuity with their origins. 35 Such a culture he finds amongst the so-called Bush Negroes of Surinam, the descendants of slaves who had escaped soon after transportation. 'No other Negro artform in the Americas', according to the art historian Philip]. C. Dark, 'of which some African traditions survive, can claim the vitality, the lack of eclecticism and the freedom from other cultural influences ofBush Negro art'. 36 But why should such continuity and cultural 'purity' improve people's political claims, even, as Naipaul seems to have thought, to nationhood? An interesting smaller-scale example in which authenticity, as so understood, is taken to be required for political claims concerns Australian Aboriginal demands for control of sacred sites. Recognition of these demands requires evidence not only of present belief and practice, but of continued and relatively unchanging use. 37 Yet this is to impose a test of authenticity- of a culture's really being people's own - that is external and divorced from the use they make of it in their current circumstances. In another mood Naipaul grasps this; for example in criticising the policies of the Congolese leader General Mobutu in opposing European influences: Mobutu says ... that he doesn't have a borrowed soul any longer; his particular black thing is 'authenticity'. Authenticity ... is rejection of the strange, the difficult, the taxing; it is despair. JH A culture is authentic in a quite different sense from this if people can themselves control it and adapt it to the world they find themselves in; if, that is to say, they can modifY their narratives and adapt the rituals in which they participate socially. Two related axes of assessment are being involved here. One is a culture's amenability to its bearers' wishes, which is incompatible with its imposing an identity upon her, as either imperialising cultures or rigidly autochthonous ones may do. The other axis is a culture's flexibility, necessary not only as we have already seen, for epistemic and ethical acceptability, but, as we can now observe, for its amenability to popular will.

50

CULTURAL IDENTITY

It is authenticity in this literal sense of self-written culture that is what cultural nationalism, and analogous political claims of cultural groups, ought to depend upon. The kind of case that might be made for such a claim can be illustrated by glancing at Timothy Brennan's study of the culture of another Caribbean country- Cuba.-'9 Brennan argues that Afro-Cuban music is, for all its cultural mix, an indi5:enous music of the Cuban people, in particular the Cuban poor. It is, he suggests, what defines them as Cubans, and it does so because they see it as their own. It is a symbol of resistance and, more precisely, of resistance to the cultural commodities marketed by American capitalism from whose consumption they are excluded. Yet Afro-Cuban music is a developing, not a static form, moving through rumba and mambo to salsa. Nor is it any way exclusive, its rhythms being constantly exported to the USA and elsewhere. The sort of socialist politics that Brennan takes this musical culture to symbolise and the values which it expresses are also exportable and thus, he implies, not open to the kinds of criticism that might be directed against the politics and values of many other cultural nationalisms. There is, then, a case for allowing that the identity associated with this culture inextricably involves group membership. It would, in this case, be a national identity, with all the political implications which that has and which we have so far skirted around. Yet it is a group identity only because membership of a group is, for particular political reasons, required in order for people to maintain control of the culture that shapes their grasp of the world. HYBRIDITY In this chapter I have outlined some of the factors that can contribute to someone's cultural identity. I wanted to argue that cultural identity does not depend upon membership of a cultural group, as if people divided up neatly into such units, and I have rejected functionalist arguments for such a view and the political positions that go with them. Their mistake is to assume that the various elements of culture do necessarily hang together in ways that serve to individuate discrete groups, or, in the cases where they do individuate such groups, that they necessarily hang together in coherent and cognitively satisfYing wholes. Rather these elements are often simply put together to individuate groups without constituting coherent wholes independently of this political function. But culture is, of course, a social product. Here I wanted to stress the way that the possession of power is bound up with the formation of cultures, and the importance of people

51

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

retaining control of their culture if it is indeed to be their own and to confer upon them identities they can properly acknowledge. This does not necessitate the existence of cultural groups in which control is vested. Insofar, however, as political action is needed to secure control, such bounded groups are likely to emerge, with all their attendant dangers of exclusion and rigidity. There are tensions here between the different requirements that culture needs to fulfil to be able to offer a satisfactory identity. Perhaps we can investigate them best by turning back to Mr Biswas and seeing how his is an example of what Stuart Hall calls 'diaspora identities', which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. One can only think here of what is uniquely- 'essentially' -Caribbean: precisely the mixes of colour, pigmentation, physiognomic type; the 'blends' of tastes that is Caribbean cuisine; the aesthetics of the 'cross-overs', of' cut and mix' ... which is the heart and soul of black music. 40 Syncretism such as this provides, Hall implies, a model of cultural identity in general that is more satisfactory than one that views it as reflecting a relatively homogeneous culture and, as such, not readily amenable to development and individual change. There is much in this with which to agree, but there are dangers of vulgarising the model. IdentifYing them may bring out what cultural identity is not, or at least should not, be. First, the celebration of 'mClange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that,' 41 of which Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is the most notorious exponent, can suggest a conception of culture as consisting of a range of commodities from which the consumer makes his selection: food, furnishings, films and funky music from all over the world. While this no doubt captures an aspect of the cultural experience of many in the contemporary world, it cannot be the whole story of their identities. To start with we cannot just choose our culture. Much of it is simply given. The language we learn as children for example; the habitus we acquire then; the facts about us around which a narrative and history must be woven. Much of this can be supplemented and changed, but it provides the unchosen background for our choices. The consequences of this should not be exaggerated. It does not entail that there is a core of one's culture which is invariant, for this may change as an indirect result of one's choices. Nor that there is any aspect of one's culture that one must simply accept. For if the

52

CULTURAL IDENTITY

question arises as to whether one should accept it then there is already the possibility of choosing otherwise. Such choices are indeed made possible by just such exposure to different cultural influences, which is why exposure is resisted by some of those opposed to Rush die's vision of cultural melange. Second, however, the picture of melange suggests that the cultural elements available are already shaped by others, as consumer products in a capitalist economy are, so that the only scope for cultural control is that of individual choice. Again this is a misleading picture, not only as to the facts but as to the politics of culture. Culture, as against the cultural products in which it is manifest, is the creation of individuals interacting socially, transmitting and receiving the elements of culture. But by the nature of these social relations some will have more power than others in determining these cultural outcomes. To gain control of one's culture is to apply this power, and this, where it occurs, is a collective rather than an individual achievement. Gaining this power may require the formation of cultural groups with organised structures of cultural control. The members of these groups may, as Bhikhu Parekh writes of the immigrant Muslims opposed to Rushdie, 'solace each other within a common fellowship and lead individually heteronomous lives within an autonomous group'. 42 It is unclear whether such a trade-off between individual choice and collective control of culture is inevitable; some degree of tension seems to be so. Third, and connectedly, the melange picture leaves no room for the idea of cultural elements coming together into a rich and complex whole: they are only the 'hotchpotch' resulting from individual choice. We do not need to embrace functionalism nor to think in terms of bounded cultural groups to formulate the notion of an identifiable culture, differentiated from others. To speak of the cultures of fifth and fourth century Athens or of Renaissance Italy, say, is to individuate cultures in this manner. For here ways of thinking and writing come together with rituals, art and architecture in ways that unite these elements into an organised whole. But participation in such cultures in no way established group identities, for their participants did not identifY themselves by reference to these cultures, which played a different and deeper role. Cultures such as these provide scope for a comprehensive and unconfused grasp of reality, rather than a merely episodic and disconnected one. It should not simply be replied that under the chaotic conditions of modernity such a unified grasp of the world has become impossible. For the desire towards it is an inescapable part of what it is for a subject of thought and action to seek epistcmic

53

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

and normative unity in her dealings with the world. It is part of what it is to have a single identity, in the way in which Mr Biswas triumphantly achieves it, though his is an individual achievement, not part of a wider social one.

NOTES 1. V S. N aipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

pp. 13-14. This notion seems to derive from Herder; see G. Jordan and C. Weedon, Cultural Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 565. I shall assume that the condition of self-identification mentioned in the last chapter is satisfied. C. Levi-Strauss, The View From ~far [1985] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)' p. 17. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 18. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 67-8. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma [1873] (London: Nelson, undated), p. 16. Levi-Strauss, View From Afar, p. 26. See R. Dahrendorf, Class at~d Class Cmfiict in bzdustrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 159. Dahrendorf attributes the insight underlying the distinction between integration or consensus and conflict or coercion theories to David Lockwood. A sophisticated example in political theory is provided by the work of Niklas Luhmann, for example The D!fferentiation of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). A recent sociobiological account is offered by W G. Runciman in The Social Animal (London: Harper Collins, 1998). Following Herbert Spencer, Talcott Parsons supposed there were laws of social evolution: see his Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectillfs (Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966). For succinct criticism of Spencerian analogies see D. Lee and H. Newby, The Problem of Socioh~~y (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 73-80. This objection is drawn from E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Theories of Primitive Rel~