What is Ethnic ?
There seems to be a wide spread fear among the white majority nations that the twenty-first century will witness extensive ethnic conflicts. Professor Samuel Huttington of Harward University has been one of the eminent proponents of this veiw. While one need not underestimate the dangers of cultural conflicts, the very definition of ethnic and its manipulation by Western anthropological thought needs to be examined thoroughly.
Ethnos in Greek was used for indicating a community which need not have been a tribe or a community of civilisationaly simpler kind. The ancient city of Athens in the golden age consisted of twelve major ethnoi . They were not only equal citizens of the polis, they were also civilizationally equal insiders to its cultural mileu. However, their differences of descent, lineage, cults and wealth did not prompt them to make separate political groups within the urban and rural areas of Athens. An ethnos was consanguine group which could exert political pressure for its interests but which never thought of itself as a political entity. The best parallel to the Greek ethnos, is the Sanskrit idea of jati , which denotes a subcommunity within a larger culture, having distinct qualities on account of economic, professional or ritual differences.
The ancient Greek word , ethnos, acquired a very different connotation when it was used by modern European anthropologists and sociologists for describing civilisations under colonial domination. Ethnos, came to denote a nonEuropean, civilisationally less complicated community (as in South America, Africa or Australia), or a less technocratised society (as in Asia or China), which also objectified as the Other of the white man.
As the colonial powers had approached other cultures primarily to ensure their political subjugation, they developed a methodology of giving cultural definitions that relied, not on cultural parametres, but on political and administrative premises. Cultural was seen as means of marking out and limiting group entities. For the facility of administrators, behaviour patterns of the administered cultures were stereotyped by historians and sociologists and the colonised people were expected to behave according to these patterns. To help the maintainance of social and political status quo, it was postulated that by and large the non-European cultures were centripetal by nature and they made their people inward looking, groupish, traditional, and ritualistic. Therefore, the prime purpose of an ethnos, or a jati, was defined as preservational and promotive of culture by self-enclosure. It is no wonder that historians like A. L. Basham repeatedly asserted that caste in India was very helpful in preserving its cultural heritage, particularly in times of external invasions.
During the colonial period ethnography helped to contain and manipulate the populations, but after its end, ethnography was used to perform new funct- ions. Most colonisers succeeded in propogating that the territory held by them could not be administered by the indigenous people as they were not one nation but a conglomerate of many nations. It was postulated that the basis of nationality for the non-Europeans was the ethnos. And that every ethnic group is either actualy a nation or has the potential of becoming one, and therefore, should have its own sovereign government. So, while it was alright the British to be a nation (with all its Scottish, Welsh and other minorities) and to rule India, on their withdrawal, India had to be divided into two distinct 'ethnic' groups, India, the Hindu majority nation and Pakistan, the Muslim nation.
There have been two reasons behind the construction of this definition of ethnicity by Eurocentric anthropology. One is the belief, that culture is not primariliy a way of organising and preserving knowledge and skills of life, but is a strategy for creating power structures. The second, derived out of the first, is the view that nationalism rests upon cultural distinctions (such as language or religion) to mark out a population for a nation state. This was also the logic behind the creation of nation states in Europe through the last four centuries. Culture was their best instrument for political organisations and power hierarchies. And that is this belief which Europe (and its intellectual offspring, America ) have been busy foisting upon the rest of the world.
Long after the end of major colonial governments, ethnography is still in big business. Once an ethnos is well demarcated by the Eurocentric scholarship from the populations of the Asian or African regions, it does not take very long to convince its people that their ethnos is not just a tribe or a sub-group but a nation which should be and can be a sovereign state. If the cultural distinctions of language, religion or customs were the basis of nationalism in Europe, it should also be so for the rest of the world. (Even the modern Greeks have acccepted ethnos as a synonym for nation and ethnikismos for nationalism).
Nowadays a centripetal image of the ethnic way of life is highlighted and sometimes projected as superior and more rewarding than the centrifugal, rationalist, and open minded European societies. The mutual dependence of the ethnic groups or communites, within their broad cultural expanse is under- played and the common conceptual ground of their diversified beliefs is also pushed out view. As a result, many cultural groups, which under the precolonial order, never thought of claiming any distinct ethnic individuality on grounds of minor differences, are now being made to believe in their uniqueness and thus claim separate political identities out of the erstwhile homogenous and interactive regional populations.
The Sikhs, for instance, were always considered a sect within the general umbrella of Hinduism uptill the beginning of this century. But after the penning of Sikh history and philosophical tenets by the English historians and religiographers, it is now taken for granted, even in India, that the Sikhs are not Hindus. This recasting of the Sikh identity has contributed to the turmoil in the Punjab leading to the demand of a sovereign homeland for the Sikhs.
Similarly, the hypothetical existence of an Aryan race, that supposedly swept down from the Nordic North, first into Greece, then into Iran, and finally into India to oust from the Gangetic plains the Dravidian inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, has had a disastrous impact on modern Indian politics. Even though there is hardly any evidence of a distinct Dravidian race interms of physical anthropology, nonetheless on the basis of linguistic diffferences, the South Indian Tamils have used the Aryan-Dravidian-Divide theory to practice an aggressive Tamil nationalism that has spawned terrorist strife in Ceylon and hysterical provincialism in Tamil Nadu.
One can go on citing innumerable examples of the divisive impact of Euro- American ethnology on the sociopolitical life of colonised cultures which under Eurobrainframing have totally reconstructed their histories (now called factual accounts) in opposition to their indigenous mythic constructs. Whereas the economically weaker regions of the world are breaking into ehnically reorganised states, the technologically superior and financially stronger nations of Europe and North America have quite successfully resisted the fissiparious demands from within (such as those of the French Canadians or the native Americans, the Spanish Basques) and have progressed towards a consolidated Europe. The break up of the Soviet Union into a number of Central Asian nations has been hailed as freedom for the erstwhile ethnic groups living under the Soviet yoke. But a proposal to make half a dozen independent nations for the American Indian natives out of the territory of the USA and Canada for the sake of the utterly oppressed peoples living in the suffocating confines of Reservations will be interpreted as a plot to dismember North America.
It is obvious then, the whole construct of the ethnic is only for categorizing non-Eurogenic cultures, and that an ethnic population is entitled to sovereignty only if it exists outside the Euro-American territories. Within Euro-America it has no such rights. There, it is supposed to find a niche for itself under the grand cultural mosaic, where the white hand arranges the diverse coloured pieces into the pattern it deems best. In other words, nationalism, like older technology, is now for the cosumption of poorer nations. For the leaders in technology and economic power, there is the post-national intermixture of global commerce. At this point it may be relevant to point out that in the eyes of the so called ethnic peoples, the culture of Euro-Americans is just another ethnic group, which can more appropriately called be leuko-ethnic. If all those premises which are used to categorise an ethnos in Asia are used upon Euro-Americans, there is no reason why they can not be categorised as peoples with well demarcated behaviour patterns that which constitute the Other of the ethnic population of the world. In other words, it is also important to realise that if we persist in the present methodology of ethnic categorisation, the world will end up getting divided into two major categories, the ethnic and the leuko-ethnic. Already the signs of this divide are looming large. Perhaps the likes of Professor Huntington have already sensed this divide but are not admittting it. Their predictions of ethnic strife, are perhaps, a euphemism for an impending confrontation between the Euro-Americans and the remaining societies of the world, between the possessors of advanced technologies and the techno-havenots.
The ethnological categorisation of the nonEuropean cultures would have ended very well for the Leukoethnics, if the migration of the work force from the so called ethnic world into the West had not taken place at a very large scale. Moreover, the ever growing impact of information technologies has created new equations that are taking an unpredictable course. The "natives" are no longer out there in the lands where the white man could have borne their burden at a safe distance. They are now permanently lodged in London, New York, Paris, Chicago and in so many other bastions of Western commerce. What is worse, they have brought with them not only the cultural Other, but also a host of political conflicts that rage in their lands of origin. The redistribution of populations is taking place not only on account of the adventurous seeking greener pastures but much more so on account of populations getting displaced by war and internal strife. There are an estimated one and a half million refugees, mostly from Asian countries, now residing in Europe, says a report from the Office of the United Nations High Comm- issioner for Refugees. There is little doubt that in coming years, though the developed nations may close their doors on immigrants, they would not be able to contain the number of refugees which is going to increase as internal conflicts within the nations on their borders or even across sea straights are on the rise. Not only the wealthier nations but the the poorer ones are also going to receive refugee populations. A slow trickle of migrants from Bangladesh into India has been an irreversable trend in the last two decades. If the Sind province of Pakistan flares up very badly in the near future, refugees can even pour into India .
As the older notion of national loyalty is breaking, in the coming years people would not hesitate to apply for refugee status when the going gets tough or insecure in their motherlands. They will depend more and more on members of their community settled in better off nations to support them directly or covertly. Formatiom of NGOs at a large scale, with infotechs at their command has begun to play a major role in private and non-governmental group communication. This has rapidly brought about a politicisation of the ethnic communities who are paying less attention to updating the practices of their living cultures but more to institutionalised agitation to seek advantages within a Eurocentric cultural mileu of standardised and individualised consumerism. Power of the information technologies has provided new political strategies. The latest strategy is the tendency of the politicians to globalise local issues. Nowadays, a local issue only needs to be splashed repeatedly on the media to make it global. And if the issue concerns a regional strife, violent acts are the best means of drawing attention. As modern tastes go, acts of violence make the most media friendly news. Little wonder that terrorism is becoming increasingly popular and so called ethnic strifes like in Bosnia, or Turkey, Sri Lanka or Pakistan are getting less controlable. Terrorism now flourishes, not only because of the big ammunition trade, but because it is also the cheapest way to seize attention.
There is no escape now from evolving a new cultural anthropology for global harmony, the premises of which would have to come from nonEuroAmerican cultures. We now need to turn away from the modern habits of individualism, sensationality and mass indulgence. In this endeavour of forging new values, nothing can be more helpful than the pre-Aristotelian Greek and the Upanishadic Indian thought. These philosophies can help us to prepare a new ground through Ethical courage (arete areth), metaphysical humility (eulabeia eulabeia), self-analysis (atmanavesana), and unpossesiveness (aparigraha). More than any others, these are the values now needed to evolve new cultural constructs and balanced social structures. But more than just choosing certain values we need to revise our whole analysis of human nature and values. Contemporary disbelief in the possibility of any universal substratum for human behaviour has pushed us into a morass of private and individual choices. The consequences are obvious in the form of loneliness and emotional fragmentation that has very nearly ended all communication. As a schizophrenic move, escape is being sought in globalism which is being looked upon as physical approximation to universal behaviour. But it is not the present day globalism based on leukoethnic hegemony that can bridge the gap between so called ethnic societies, or avoid " a clash of civilisations", but an attempt to create a world culture which is affirmative of global diversity. For this we need a fresh theory of studying cultures, arts, philosophies and ways of life, that are prevalent now and those that have achieved great heights of refinement in the past. In short, what is required is a fresh theory of cultural comparison and exchange.
The comparative-culture enterprise is still not a mainstream activity and is beset with many difficulties inspite of the present day hype on pluralism and information explosion. The big talk about global culture is totally deceptive. It is becoming exceedingly obvious, that there is no real attempt at creating a new global way of life that aims to draw from all the cultures of the world. On the contrary, there is the unstated expectation that the American way of development is a model that shoud be emulated all over the world, and with the help of the latest weapon called "information highway", the Euro-American culture should engulf the entire globe.
The process of uniformising and packaging is reducing the diversity of cultural symbols into mechanical signs that function as lowest common denominators. Local cultures are reduced to a grist to be consumed by the mill of global business. Cultures are now considered useful only if they provide minor and safe variations to the monotony of mass production. They are patronised only so far they can lend themselves to appropriation by global business. The strategies of appropriation are given attractive names and justifications and propogated as paradigms of emerging cultural harmony.
For instance, in the the United States, the paradigm of the Melting Pot was once pushed very actively. The Melting Pot theory presumed that cultural diversity can easiliy be melted away to forge a harmonious life of the future of America. But this strategy was resisted by the non-white AngloSaxon components of the American society as it threatened their identity. When it created too many tensions, then a softer strategy was proposed, namely that of the Cultural Mosaic. Ostensibly the Cultural Mosaic theory was designed to protect and promote the identities of non-white societies. The anthropological thrust of this period of theorising was to revive in-depth studies of the Asian and African societies which were projected as unchanging, closed, "struct- ured", i.e., fixed identities contrasting with the dynamic, evolving and evoluting Euro-American societies. The very term "structure" (whether refering to the "deep" mental substratum or the "outer" physical organisation of societies and their behaviour), was meant to denote fixity. And the theory of the Cultural Mosaic was supposed to allow a respiteful space to the many Others, the many coloured unchanging pieces, to survive within the American continent so that the Mosaic makers could play with the coloured pieces and patternize them at their will. Whereas the Melting Pot, dealt with differences by promoting uniformity, the Mosaic theory aimed to contain them by the inverse strategy of promoting self-centeredness and structured identity of the ethnics. Nevertheless, the glorification of the ethnic, also came to a dead end, as it was found to be a backward looking, museumising and an expensively ornamental enterprise.
Fortunately for the West, the info-technologies have provided a new opening which has revived the Melting Pot theory in a new packing. It has replaced the American Continent with the globe itself, and American nationalism with hyper-Internationalism, of course, covertly taking for granted that Internationalism cannot be but just another kind of Americanism.
Adding to the phenomena of globalisation and commercialised ethnicity, there is something much more discouraging to a comparatist. And that is an unabashed emphasis on what may be called a post-modernist 'presentism' which creates a frame of mind which in some ways harkens to the Romantics. Despite a devaluation of Humanistic anthropocentricity by recent Continental philosophies, the post-industrial societies are not willing to accept the bleak limitations of the human condition which were once taken for granted by classical cultures. The brash optimism of the ninetenth century based on fetishes like 'progress', 'utopia', or 'new frontiers', is still haunting the Euro- American cultures in the shape of globalisation and market economy. This optimism endows the present-day human achievements with a teleology that is quite at variance with the preferences of ancient cultures which are nowadays regarded as fatalistic or other-worldly.
For the modern man, studies of the past societies have often been exercises in reconstructing the past according to the prejudices of the present. History, thus, often becomes a story rewritten , a mythos retold, to serve new values. For example, in the nineteenth century, European historians thought of ancient Greek culture as the progenitor of a rationallist, scientific and democratic values that gave birth to the city states. In reality, this writing of Greek history was more to buttress the European faith in modern nation states, colonialism and the philosophy of natural sciences.1 Similarily, in order to provide a predecessor for European theatre, Greek theatre was imagined to be a logocentric performance by post-Renaissance Europe.2 To take another example, modern Indian historians in their nationalist fervour portrayed ancient India as somewhat of an egalitarian and democratic society and underplayed its acute hierarchies, while the Marxist section of Indian historians wrote on the same perid highlighting its class struggles and economic disparities. The task of the comparatist, therefore, is to make the best effort to overcome the prejudicial impact of the present and view the past in its own terms of reference. This is a tall order considering that major trend of thought nowadays propogate that all signs, including language, have no core of meaning that can survive time or the user's subjectivity.
There is not only the bias of time as a pitfall for the comparatist but also the bias of space that separates the objects of comparison. In space, the local is always evaluated as superior to the cultures beyond the territiory of the local. The Greeks looked down upon the 'barbaroi', the Indians upon the 'mlecchas' of the various kinds, while the Europeans have a history of devaluing 'natives', 'savages', 'primitives', and now the 'ethnics'. Sometimes these 'other people' are regarded as inferior in order to provide a justification for one's military, colonial or mono-polistic designs. At other times they are denigrated in cultural terms. The emphasis, in any case, is always on the differences and thus on the inferiority of the other. No wonder 'xenophobia' is a much used word, but 'xenophilia' is hardly ever used. The bias of space is agonal. New technologies not with standing, it has turned the present day cultural pluralism into a global strife as pluralism today is made to rest on promoting and asserting differences. As a result pluralism has helped more than anything else, sale of armaments and trade monopolies.
How can the comparatist overcome the two biases of time and space, of 'presentism' and 'agonism' (if these can be the names for theories that assist cultural strife and historical prejudices), to make meaningful comparisons? The task can begin only by locating a common ground between targets of comparison because commonality and not differences are the raison d'etre of communication. If communication is to be something more than exchange of goods or info-commodity, then we may benifit most from turning to an old definition of communication called 'samvada'. "Ekatrasya tu anyatra darsanam samvadah" (When a thing existing at one place, is seen at another, this phenomenon is called samvada). This is done by locating a core of vibrant similiarity between the two objects of comparison, a similarity that exists beneath all differences and which, instead of being wiped out by the individual differences, sustains itself and the differences as well. To provide a simile, it is like the consonance between two musical notes, which are always independent but are always capable of generating a mutual resonance by virtue of their common grounding in a given scale. Within our pluralism we need to explore our common scale.
The samvada theory rests upon the postulation that differences are born out of a common ground, not by themselves. In other words, the One creates the many, the Scale creates the notes. Identities are meaningful only so long as they interact , as do the musical notes in relation to one another. Cultures are vibrant only when they reveal their consonances. Otherwise, they stagnate or become violent, leading both ways to self-destruction. The comparative task needs to the fresh outlook of creating consonances , and calls for harmony, as opposed to hegemony which has been our cultural purpose for so long.
Notes
1. In his Early Greek Philosophy, first published in 1892 and reprinted till 1930, J.Burnet says, "...a new thing came into the world with early Ionian teachers ---- the thing we call science... science has never existed except among people who have come under the influence of Greeks". p 31.
2. For a detailed discussion on this refer to, Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian, Dehi : D.K.Printworld, 1994. pp 6-12.
The Eastern Anthropologist , 50: 2 . 1997 , pp 139-46.