Sense and Sentiment in the Study of Ethnic Politics: Rediscovering ‘Political Ethnology.’ (original) (raw)

Social scientists have a tendency to reinvent the wheel. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the study of ethnic conflict was of central concern to political scientists studying the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. During this period the central line of contention was between the so-called "primordialsts" who took the roots of ethnic identities and loyalties to lie in pre-modern attachments -or "primordial sentiments" in the words of Geertz (1963) --and others who variously argued that the identities expressed through ethnic conflict were of modern construction, that the use of ethnic identities for political mobilization was instrumental, or both. 1 By the late 1970s the "primordialist" position had been discredited by an enormous quantity of scholarship, brilliantly synthesized in . With mammoth theory-building exercise there was no longer much question that ethnic identities were at least partly "constructed" or, more importantly, that ethnic mobilization was brought about by political entrepreneurs; the only remaining questions were how, under what circumstances and what one could do about this. 2 Yet, scarcely a decade later, the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia produced an outpouring of scholarship, most of it from disciplines and subdisciplines that had never engaged the question of ethnic conflict, which did not merely 1 Young (1993: 22-24) distinguishes among primordialists, instrumentalists (in which category he places his own early work) and constructivists, whom he associates with postmodernist approaches. In my view, the school I refer to below as political ethnology, of which Young is a pre-eminent example is both instrumentalists and constructivist, whereas the narrower rational choice approach is exclusively instrumentalist, in that it takes the existence of the ethnic group as a given. 2 Even those like Anthony Smith who continued to argue for the "ethnic origins of nations" held only that ethnic entrepreneurs were constrained by the historical and cultural materials available a view he correctly identifies as an intermediate one between "perennialists" and "modernists." (Smith 1986: 18)

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