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Covering ethnicity? Or, ethnicity ascoverage?Richard Fardon aa Centre of African Studies , University of LondonPublished online: 29 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Richard Fardon (1996) Covering ethnicity? Or, ethnicity as coverage? ,Contemporary Politics, 2:1, 153-158, DOI: 10.1080/13569775.1996.10382957

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153

Covering ethnicity? Or, ethnicity as coverage?1

Richard FardonCentre of African Studies, University of London

To begin with credit where it's due: as an academic anthropologist and specialiston West Africa, most of my life is spent in the Bloomsbury area of central

London immersed in teacliing and administration. To follow day-to-day events inthe West African countries I have known best (and others I have never visited) I relyupon African visitors and the coverage provided by the media - especially print media:specialist journals, like Africa Confidential or West Africa, and the diminishing flowof African news to be found in the 'quality' daily newspapers. When organizingbusiness or diplomatic briefings through the Centre of African Studies, I am as muchreliant on journalists and consultants as academics for up-to-date reports. So I havemore admiration than criticism for the efforts ofjournalists and more daily reasonsto be grateful to them than most.

Had the journalists attended this workshop in numbers, I hope they would haveinsisted on differentiating between types of report: contrasting those of the on-the-spot specialist - whether local stringer or regional specialist with long term knowledge- with those of visiting 'crisis' reporters; and remarking the negotiation which has totake place over the report diat reaches its final consumer (whether of print, sound orimage).

Where I might want to criticize, many of the criticisms - or perhaps only observationson die state of our times - apply to anthropologists as much as they do to journalists.

Argument

Ethnicity seems to be in the air we breathe so that it becomes increasingly difficultto decide whether news reports cover the global phenomenon of ethnicity or whetherethnicity is the covering in which events are globally wrapped. I believe thisundecidability is principled; from which it follows that what we need to begin tounderstand is a world in which such unresolvable questions arise constandy in themind of every intelligent commentator but cannot in essence ever be resolved.

© Contemporary Politics, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 1996

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154 Contemporary Politics

Firstly, over the course of the twentieth century, but most startlingly since the end ofEric Hobsbawm's 'short twentieth century'2, it has become difficult to envisage actsof collective violence that are not able from some or other perspective to be deemedethnic. Some violence is still described in class terms; gender and generation aremore generally seen as axes of violence that have collective aspects. But theoverwhelming tendency is for an ethnic account to be available for collective acts ofviolence. To be against ethnic violence goes a long way towards being againstcollective violence in short.

Secondly, this suggests that while the 'melting pot* theories of assimilation ofimmigrant differences to national cultures might be discredited, 'difference' has itselfgone into the melting pot. Ethnicity democratized difference such that nations, races,tribes and so forth became sub-genera of ethnicity which is seen as a pseudo-naturalspeciation.

Thirdly, this development occurred within institutional and personal contexts highlyconducive to a conception of all collective issues in terms of identity. In aninternational context, only players credentialized as 'nation states' (howeverimprobably) got to gamble at the top tables; in interpersonal terms, various rights topersonal identity vested in understandings of history, representations of whatlanguage is, relations to place and locality and so forth became derivative of dieinalienable personal right to ethnic identity. To lack ethnic identity is thus to bedevoid of some degree of normal (late twentieth century) humanity; and to deny thecentrality of ethnic identity is symptomatic of an indefensibly low level of self-knowledge.

Attempts to challenge unitary conceptions of personal and collective identity haveemployed a vocabulary of terms such as hybridity, creolization, mongrelism and soforth. But these words describe a condition that can exist only subsequent tospeciation; as such they share the presupposition that unitary and exclusive identitieshave a prior or pristine existence. Because their reaction occurs on theepistemological terrain of essentialized identities, for most readers terms denoting'mixture' actually reinforce the normative status of the presuppositions they aredesigned to challenge and reveal how thoroughly assumptions of human speciationin terms of ethnicity have colonized notions of difference.

Fourthly, normalization of the expectation that people have ethnicity and identity,and that the two should be related, has had an effect similar to inviting everyone toexpress themselves individually: everyone has 'done their own thing' - but rather

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Covering ethnicity? Or, ethnicity as coverage? 155

similarly. At least this is the cynical impression produced by using general (or globallyrelevant) notions of identity and ethnicity to make other people's events readilycomprehensible. These events become directly comparable to those elsewhere andsimultaneous with some of them. In short, co-evalness in time and space is suggested.

Fifthly, here we encounter another indication of the epistemological air we breathe,and again it comes in the form of a characteristic dilemma. Not to suggest thatpeople(s) living in the same age are coevals can be a device to project the 'other' intoa time different from oneself.3 However, to suggest too easily that peoples are entirelycoeval is to risk imposing a hegemonic and homogenizing account of time and spacequite contrary to an argument that die parameters of local life are - at least in somedegree - locally produced. The mutually impugning arguments are, like the doubleentendre on ethnic coverage in my title, two sides of a single dilemma.

Sixthly, anthropologists and journalists translate into an idiom of ethnicity in orderto achieve comprehensibility (to themselves as the silent audience of their processof writing as much as to the eventual audience one supposes). Ethnic terms designatecollective agencies diat are brief and (presumably) correspond to (at least some)local versions. Indeed, translation into ethnicity to achieve mutual comprehensibilityproceeds from both sides in a globalizing world.

Seventhly, ethnic terms are proper names: not only are they highly convenient formeeting word limits, predicating subjects and objects and so forth, but proper namesalso suggest analogy between ethnography and biography. On this occasion, I meanby ethnography not the sense normal to my discipline (extended, usually written,accounts of anthropologists' local research) but a form of writing in which what theFrench call ethnics are made the agents of action.'1 (In my abuse of the term then,contemporary anthropologists would need to write anti-ethnographically in orderto avoid reification in what is conventionally called their ethnography. This wouldbe analogous to biography without the unitary subject whose life-time's developmentgives biographers their narrative thread.)

One of the advantages of translation into ethnographic - by analogy with biographic- conventions of reportage is that irrational behaviour is made, not understandablebut, predictable.Put differently, die rational incomprehensibility of some of its actionsis what gives an acting subject depth and complexity. Otherwise we are simply dealingwith a calculating cipher.Just as human individuals have been conceived as motivatedby dieir interests and by their passions, so too for ethnographic subjects. Thus, forinstance, 'belonging' for ethnographic subjects might be analogous to what 'family'

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156 Contemporary Politics

is to biographic subjects; overreaction is intrinsic to an intensity of attachment andthus always a likelihood for both types of agent. More generally, the description ofethnographic subjects by adjectives denoting personality that are used of biographicsubjects is far from accidental.

Eighthly, these ethnographic accounts provoke a highly typical range of suspicionsand distrusts; so typical, indeed, that diese doubts also should be envisaged as partof the 'ethnic' (by now I have argued 'ethnographic') air we breathe - and thereforeas normalizing features of current discourse.

Ethnic relations, it can be suggested, are really die ideological fancy dress of perfecdycomprehensible self-interest. Ethnicity is a folkloristic garment claiming rusticauthenticity but actually available locally in your branch of that global player EthnicIdentities pic. In truth ethnic identities are made up, and dieir fast-and-loose attitudeto history is not difficult to demonstrate.

Academic commentators have produced illuminating critiques of ethnicity as asymbolic disguise for other interests (economic, political or whatever), but thesecritiques have dieir own problems. If edinicity really is disguised self-interest thenthere must be a deal of bad faith about: either at work between manipulators andmanipulated or in some psychic process of collective self-delusion. Ethnic identitiesmay be something we can find globally, but is this because they are universal, becausethey are becoming globalized, or because our way of worldmaking characteristicallyorganizes the reality of other people into edinic classifications? Moreover, ethnicidentities may be made up in some respects but - in an age bent on telling us thateverydiing is more or less made up - is this particularly damaging? And if edinicitiesare invented, and if there is any sense in recognizing cultural difference, can weargue that invention is an acultural feature of all culture? It doesn't sound a veryconsistent argument.

The types of questions that arise, to reiterate, strike me as being entirely normative:they are questions intrinsic to ethnic coverage and circulate quite happily within theparameters of an ethnographic worldview to produce a comforting sense diat seriousthought is being given to pressing questions.

ConclusionThis brings me back to die potential role of an academic anthropologist - typicallystuck in his or her university office.I realize there are anthropologists outside theacademy (probably as many as within), and there are anthropologists close to the

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Covering ethnicity? Or, ethnicity as coverage? 157

epicentre of ethnic violence. I do not wish to appear to speak for anthropology or,indeed, for anthropologists but only on behalf of whatever generalizable aspectsthere might be in my own situation.

Most illuminating in the long run, I suggest, will be attempts complementary tothose of on-the-spot reporters which seek to contextualize both ethnicity (the roleof the somewhat ill-defined but ambitious master idea in the world) and the relationto it of particular ethnicities (local identities) and ethnically-based organizations inthe world.

This project lays claim to a different sort of co-evalness: dirough recognition of diesenses of local time and local space simultaneously abroad in the world, and in dieattempt to understand how these articulate contrapuntally with one another in theglobalizing system of historical arid spatial claims diat are made in the name ofcollective actors.

This is not an immediately news-worthy proposition, but a sense of- if not this then- something such must be why andiropologists occasionally allow diemselves thesense of reading through the surface of the news reports of some journalists. (Andwhy more specialist journalists know how the depth - or depthlessness - of theirown reportage is tailored to a particular communication slot.)

The challenge is not to see through the shibboleths of the age: to argue that ethnicityis not universal, or to challenge specific ethnicities by showing them self-interestedor historically contrived. Such challenges, I have argued, actually have a normalizingeffect; perversely, as a phenomenon anchored to accounts of the past, ethnicity diriveson a history of such challenges. The greater challenge is to explain how theshibboleths of the age are produced, why they convince (ethnic and outsidecommentators alike) and how the dynamic of increasing ethnic speciation isaccelerated. The problem, precisely, is to understand the superficial.

1 This version expands briefly on comments made as discussant at the Forum Against EthnicViolence workshop. I have retained the discursive feel of a comment; similar views, statedat greater length, are forthcoming as: '"Crossed destinies": the entangled histories of WestAfrican ethnic and national identities' in the Proceedings of the 1995 Conference of theCentre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 1996, and (in French translation) inPolilique Africaine.

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158 Contemporary Politics

2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London,1994.

3 With results explored in a celebrated anthropological critique by Johannes Fabian, Timeand the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983.

4 Ethnics are usually translated as ethnic categories (having identity but little organization) orethnic groups (having both identity and organizational capacity). English lacks a singleterm that reifies a range of disparate entities in quite the same way as ethnic, but I wouldargue that ethnic does exist as a covert category in English virtually identical to its Frenchcounterpart.

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