How thick is blood? The plot thickens . . .: if ethnic ...ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses99/malta/gil.pdfHow thick is blood? 791 network with Bs,I shall acquire a B identity together

How thick is blood The plotthickens if ethnic actors areprimordialists what remains of thecircumstantialistprimordialistcontroversy

Francisco J Gil-White

Abstract

An investigation of the cognitive models underlying ethnic actorsrsquo own ideasconcerning the acquisitiontransmission of an ethnic status is necessary inorder to resolve the outstanding differences between ldquoprimordialrdquo and ldquocir-cumstantialrdquo models of ethnicityThis article presents such data from a multi-ethnic area in Mongolia that found ethnic actors to be heavily primordialistand uses these data to stimulate a more cogent model of ethnicity that putsthe intuitions of both primordialists and circumstantialists on a more securefoundation Although many points made by the circumstantialists can beaccommodated in this framework the model argues that ethnic cognition isat core primordialist and ethnic actorsrsquo instrumental considerations ndash andby implication their behaviours ndash are conditioned and constrained by thisprimordialist core The implications of this model of ethnicity for ethnicprocesses are examined and data from other parts of the world are revisitedfor their relevance to its claims

Keywords Ethnicity cognition circumstantialism instrumentalism primordial-ism Mongolia

1 Introduction

I once asked a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca Mexico (a former governorof the State) whether one could become Mixtec if onersquos parents were notMixtec He looked at me as though celery stalks had suddenly begunsprouting from my head and I do believe he feared for my intelligencelsquoYou can only be Mixtec if your parents are Mixtecrsquo he said lsquowhat do youmeanrsquo Another day I asked an Ethiopian taxi-driver in Los Angeles lsquoIf

Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 22 Number 5 September 1999 pp 789ndash820copy 1999 Taylor amp Francis Ltd ISSN 0141-9870 printISSN 1466-4356 online

a child was born of Tigre parents but was immediately adopted by anOromo couple subsequently grew up among Oromo and was in everyrespect like an Oromo would he be thought of as an Oromorsquo lsquoNorsquo hereplied lsquohe would be accepted by the Oromo community but the parentswould think ldquoThis is our Tigre childrdquo He would still be Tigrersquo Andrecently my Russian teacher herself a Russian Jew told me that to her Iwas a Jew because I am descended from Jews She will not budge andmaintains this view despite being aware that (1) I have to go back aboutfour generations (perhaps more) to nd an ancestor who practisedJudaism (after that they are all Roman Catholic) (2) I did not grow upwith a Jewish identity and (3) my parents and I did not even know thatany of our ancestors were Jewish until I was about ten years old when agenealogy buff in the family uncovered this information

I suspected my Russian teacher would scoff at the circumstantialistmodel of ethnicity which maintains that ethnies are lsquoconstructedrsquo byrational actors who calculate their objective interests and then makedecisions concerning association andor political mobilization withothers I was right she found it silly I myself would be less harsh es-pecially considering that there is more to the circumstantialist view thanthe short caricature I gave her Nevertheless this article will ask and elab-orate on the following question if most people are like my Russianteacher where does this leave the circumstantialist model

Recently the circumstantialist (aka instrumentalist) model of ethnicityndash vs the primordialist model ndash has been in the ascendant However theabove anecdotes reveal that some people possess ethnobiological andtherefore lsquoprimordialistrsquo models concerning the acquisitiontransmissionof ethnic statuses This will not affect our views on ethnicity if suchmodels are not common but this study will present recent ethnographicdata from Mongolia that found primordialist models to be predominantthere These data point to very serious shortcomings in the circumstan-tialist model and also to some under-recognized strengths in the pri-mordialist view that can be formalized and operationalized in a cogentscientic model of ethnicity which I shall attempt to do With theseinsights much data from other parts of the world including some earlierput forth to support the circumstantialist position can be shown insteadto bolster these key primordialist points I propose a more sophisticatedand testable model which ts the empirical data better and combinesvaluable insights from both primordialists and circumstantialists withoutsuccumbing to the excesses of either Perhaps we can lay the controversyto rest

2 Barth and the circumstantialist model

Anthropologists once believed ethnic groups or lsquoculturesrsquo to be lsquopeoplesrsquoin a unitary sense along various dimensions lsquoascriptiversquo (labelling)

790 Francisco J Gil-White

lsquomoralrsquo (normative) and lsquoculturalrsquo (linguistic and artifactual) An ethnicgroup therefore understood itself as such was labelled by lsquoothersrsquo in likefashion had a particular and distinctive culture (including a dialect) andwhose members preferred each other to non-members (that isendogamy discrimination ingroup solidarity etc) This oversimpliesbut still captures the lsquoculture arearsquo view of ethnic groups predominant atone time as a result of the enormous inuence of British functionalism(which imagined societies as well-bounded and functionally integratedorganisms) and the adoption of Malinowskirsquos model of ethnographicwork (Levine and Campbell 1972 pp 81ndash84)

Reactions against this view began with Edmund Leachrsquos PoliticalSystems of Highland Burma (1954) followed later by Moermanrsquos workamong the Lue in Thailand (Moerman 1965 1968) These studies com-plained that ethnic identities did not map neatly to the distribution of cul-tural material and proposed a shift from lsquoobjectiversquo indicators ofgroupness such as measurable discontinuities in the distribution of arti-factual or ideational culture towards a more lsquosubjectiversquo focus that reliedheavily on the labelling processes of ethnic actors themselves This viewclimaxed in 1969 with the publication of Fredrik Barthrsquos famous intro-duction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries The argument is simple inorder to have a social identity one must meet lsquothe conditions for beingreferred to by the linguistic expression [the label] that names the iden-tityrsquo (Goodenough 1965 p 21) Thus the labelling processes of localethnic actors themselves are the only guides to the limits of the groupfor lsquothe [cultural] features that are taken into account are not the sum ofldquoobjectiverdquo differences but only those which the actors themselves regardas signicantrsquo (Barth 1969 p 14 emphasis added) Any aspects of culturenot recognized by local ethnic actors as signicant will not necessarilycovary with different ethnic labels1

Leach (1977 pp 293ndash97) had reported that people in the BurmaKachin Hills sometimes switched ethnic identity To him this was furtherevidence that the view of lsquoa societyrsquo as a lsquothingrsquo (that is a bounded whole)was wrong Barth a student of Leach documented similar behaviour inSwat Pakistan and gave a majestic theoretical framework for interpret-ing it Thus Barth had an enormous impact because his theoreticalsophistication went well beyond a cogent articulation of the subjectivistapproach

In the communities that Barth studied some individuals born into thePathan ethnic group were later in life labelling themselves lsquoBaluchrsquo ascircumstances made this advantageou s Similarly some Fur in DarfurSudan were taking up nomadism and calling themselves lsquoBaggararsquo(Haaland 1969) On the strength of these two studies Barth argued thatan ethnic status implies a particular lsquokindrsquo of actor who will thereforeeasily coordinate with others lsquoof a kindrsquo for reciprocal exchanges (Barth1969 p 15) Thus if I am an A but it is better for me to interface and

How thick is blood 791

network with Bs I shall acquire a B identity together with B ways ofbeing so as to tap into the B network Ethnic actors are rational actorswho make choices about their ethnic statuses as (ecologicaleconomicpolitical) circumstances make this instrumental With thisargument the circumstantialist ndash aka instrumentalist ndash school of ethnic-ity was born

Most scholars today would agree that Barth changed our views forever Following publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries the ideathat ethnies are in the rst instance collections of individuals sharing acommon self-ascription but with no necessary relation to any particularcultural content became accepted by all There is much controversy inethnic studies but that point a full thirty years after its initial submissionis not contested and on good empirical grounds which makes Barthrsquosachievement that rarest of anthropological accomplishments cumulativescience The debate now turns to the second part of his argument areethnic groups rational associations of self-interested actors as he claimsor are they irrational lsquoprimordialrsquo groupings governed by emotionalattachments as others maintain

Both sides of that theoretical coin and their protagonists will receivetheir full due below but note here the glaring methodological gap (theawareness of which prompted the present effort) nobody seems con-cerned with investigating the cognition of lsquoethnic recruitmentrsquo and howit affects ethnic processes This is remarkable because we all apparentlynow agree with Barthrsquos subjectivist (self-ascriptive) approach whichclaims that lsquoethniesrsquo ndash and social identities more generally ndash establishtheir boundaries from lsquothe conditions for being referred to by the lin-guistic expression that names the identityrsquo (Goodenough 1965 p 21) Ifthis is true then whatever makes a particular group lsquoethnicrsquo is that theconditions for using that grouprsquos label are lsquoethnicrsquo (as opposed to beinglsquopoliticalrsquo lsquoreligiousrsquo lsquoclub-likersquo etc cf Nagata 1981 p 111) If nothingdistinguishes lsquoethnicrsquo conditions of membership from those of othersocial identities we should stop talking about lsquoethniesrsquo immediately orrisk making empty theories

But we have not investigated this in great depth and certainly not witha methodology true to Barthrsquos crucial shift away from lsquoobjectiversquo lsquocul-turalrsquo groups to lsquosubjectiversquo lsquoself-ascriptiversquo groups However much Barthmay have insisted on the importance of the subjective perspective he didnot investigate his informantsrsquo ascriptive cognitive models but choseinstead to infer these from their behaviours This may be a serious short-coming given that the new perspective is self-consciously emic Withoutdata on the cognitive models we know neither how ethnies are thoughtof nor what kinds of membership conditions are characteristic of ethniesNeither do we know whether Barth documented switches of identity ormerely of signalling

Suppose for example that none of his lsquoPathans-turned-Baluchrsquo really


thought of themselves as Baluch and that the Baluch did not think ofthem as lsquoreal Baluchsrsquo either If this were true then the labelling changesmight simply reect the fact that some Pathans wanted to be countedtreated and evaluated as if they were Baluch ndash indeed because it wasinstrumental to network intimately with Baluchs and this required sig-nalling that they accepted Baluch standards and expectations ndash withoutthat changing their identity in their own eyes or in those of others Un-solicited remarks from Barthrsquos and Haalandrsquos informants suggest thismay have been the case lsquoHaaland was taken out to see ldquoFur who live innomad camps [that is not really Baggara]rdquo and I have heard members ofBaluch tribal sections explain that they are ldquoreally Pathanrdquo rsquo (Barth 1969p 29) I shall treat these studies in greater detail below but for now takenote that such remarks suggest that perhaps if you are born a Pathan youwill always be recognized as lsquoreally Pathanrsquo even if you take up theBaluch way of life and for practical purposes wear a Baluch lsquohatrsquo In otherwords both Pathans and Baluchs may have ethnobiolog ical models forthe acquisition and transmission of ethnic statuses which (in one senseat least) makes them primordialists

One may argue that even if true these are all mere window-dressingquibbles that subtract nothing from Barthrsquos rational-choice argumentwhile conceding its most fundamental points But I doubt that they aresupercial quibbles if Barthrsquos most original argument ndash that ethnic sta-tuses are interpreted by ethnic actors as signals of lsquokindrsquo ndash is in generalcorrect as I suspect it is A lsquonatural kindsrsquo ethnotheory of ethnicity wouldprobably think of such lsquokindsrsquo as biologically inherited and thereforeinalienable because this is how humans in general think about naturalliving kinds (Gil-White 1999) If so the general tendency would probablybe to make it impossible in most parts of the world to signal that one isnow a different lsquokindrsquo of actor by appropriating an ethnic label one wasnot lsquoborn withrsquo (for example try to imagine a Croat waking up one dayand deciding to call himself lsquoa Serbrsquo) If these arguments are good enoughat least to provoke then the study of ethnicity may benet greatly froma cross-cultural investigation of the cognitive models that underliepeoplersquos ideas for the acquisition and transmission of ethnic statuses

To underscore the last point I shall now present cognitive data fromWestern Mongolia It is necessary to bear in mind that the data belowhave few pretensions They are not offered as a demonstration of any-thing beyond the study area itself ndash that would require a cross-culturalreplication of this methodology But they nevertheless have severalvirtues (1) they exemplify the kind of cognitive work that has beenmissing (2) their nature seriously challenges the circumstantialist modelas it currently stands suggesting that it needs rethinking and (3) theyinspire a new model of ethnicity with fresh predictions amenable toempirical tests which I explore after presentation of the data Thus thesedata are here to stimulate a new way of thinking about ethnicity that may


be fruitful and to exemplify one way of investigating the questions butthey are entirely insufcient as a conrmation of the ideas advancedfurther below

3 A report on the Mongol cognition of ethnic boundaries

Field site

My study population consists in the main of Torguud nomadic pastoral-ists Torguuds are a small Mongol ethnic group in Western MongoliaThey move around in the district of Bulgan Sum in Hovd provinceRepublic of Mongolia In winter they are not far away from the districtlsquocentrersquo which includes a town lying by the Bulgan river This town hasca 2500 inhabitants The land is quite fertile on the banks of the riverand the sedentary residents of the lsquocityrsquo grow all manner of fruits and veg-etables in their small horticultural gardens Another 2500 people makea living as farmers beyond the town and are considered as part of thedistrict lsquocentrersquo Beyond these lies the steppe where a total of about 5000nomads eke out a living The Bangyakhan clan with whom I workedwinters in one of the Bulgan riverrsquos two large ood-plain valleys someway from the town and spreads out over an area of about 140 km2During this time male herders make regular two-week trips to the Gobior to the nearby hills where the snow is less thick and the sparse grassmore accessible A few move around with their entire household Theyalso assist their livestockrsquos diet with hay made in late AugustSeptemberIn the summer months they move to the highlands in the Altai mountainrange changing their location constantly as pastures become depleted They may make as many as ten migrations in a four-month period Thesehighland summer pastures are very green high-altitude forest-steppecriss-crossed by innumerable glacial rivers and streams It was in thislovely setting while living with the pastoralists that the research wascarried outThe site is practically located on a double border to the northlies the provincial border separating Hovd from Bayn Oumllgii to the Westlies the international border separating Hovd in Mongolia from Xinjiangin China Apart from Torguuds there are other Mongol ethnic groups inthe area as well as a large Kazakh population the biggest local ethniccontrast being that between Mongols and Kazakhs There are sedentaryand nomadic individuals in all the local ethnic groups such that there isno sharp ethnically based economicecological differentiation Neither isthere any noticeable ethnic socio-economic ranking as everybody is poor

Methods

A short questionnaire was administered verbally to fty-nine subjectschosen randomly in the sense that systematic patterns of inclusion were


consciously avoided But it is a non-random sample because difcultterrain long-distances and slow transportation (horseback) make prox-imity to the researcher and the likelihood of inclusion in the samplehighly correlated However I doubt that spatial proximity to myself andideas about ethnicity also correlated A possible lsquoconfoundrsquo is that familymembers might tend to agree with each other in which case the effectivenumber of data points is less than what it seems As it turned outhowever knowing how one individual responded was in general a poorpredictor of how that personrsquos close-kin would respond which suggeststhat family background is not an important causal variable So eventhough my sample is less than ideal it is far from meaningless The ques-tionnaire was as follows

Question 1 If the father is Kazakh and the mother Mongol what isthe ethnicity of the childQuestion 2 The father is Kazakh the mother Mongol but everybodyaround the family is Mongol and the child has never even seen aKazakh outside of the father The child will learn Mongol customs andlanguage What is the ethnicity of this childQuestion 3 A Kazakh couple have a child that they do not want Theygive it in adoption to a Mongol couple when the child is only a yearold Around the Mongol family there are only Mongols and the childgrows up never meeting a single Kazakh Since he was a baby whenadopted he knows nothing and thinks that his biological father andmother are the Mongol adopters He grows up learning Mongolcustoms and language What is the ethnicity of this child2

Simple real-time genealogy diagrams whose logic was explainedbefore asking the questions assisted the representation of the questionsThe procedure was the same for all interviewees (excepting idiosyncraticclarications) The emphases shown above were used sociolinguisticallyin the verbal rendering

Whenever (1) people changed their sequence of answers under cross-examination (not very common but it did happen) (2) both the rstsequence and the second revealed consistent models and (3) I was nothighly condent that I could discern which one they really believed Ierred against my preferred hypothesis by recording the less primordial-ist of the two sequences of answers

Results and discussion

The results shown in Table 1 are summarized as followsResults for Question 1 show that Mongols (like other pastoralists) are

patrilineal (Khazanov 1994 p 143) However this usually refers to clanand sub-clan ascription and material inheritance here we see that fathers


also transmit ethnic ascription The question was lsquoopenrsquo in that they werenot forced to choose among predetermined options (lsquohalf-breedrsquo wastheir idea) but in another sense it was forced by presuming that childrenare born with an ethnic status However if actors are circumstantialistsperhaps they should object that lsquoit dependsrsquo and explain what it dependson No such answer was ever given

The formulation of Question 2 presumes the opposite ethnic as-cription will depend on circumstances of enculturation ndash which in thisquestion are quite extreme The lsquobutrsquo was highly emphasized socio-linguistically by raising my voice along with my index nger whilemaking big eyes that looked straight into the intervieweersquos in what I hopewas an ominous expression This was to draw close attention to a set ofcircumstances absent in the rst question that might make the answer tothe second different in fact implying that this was the answer I expected(because I wanted to create a bias against my favoured hypothesis)However the overwhelming majority of respondents were unfazed bythis implication and insisted that the child in the second question wasKazakh

Question 3 is perhaps the most extreme circumstantialist scenario pos-sible If respondents insist this child is also Kazakh they will be sayingthat one can be Kazakh and not know it More than half responded inthis way For them apparently the child will take the biological fatherrsquosethnicity no matter what This is interesting because here the child hastwo fathers one of whom he never knew If the latter is the one thatmatters for ethnic ascription the underlying model is extremely primor-dialist

A post-interview cross-examination always sought to discover whythey had answered in the way that they had This was to see if they hada rule or could produce one and also where necessary to point out whatappeared to be an inconsistent rule at work (a practice which on theassumption that peoplersquos cognitive models are consistent reveals to bothresearcher and subject that one or more of the questions have been mis-understood) I found a consciously held biopatrilineal rule a child takesthe biological fatherrsquos ethnic status often stated in so many words andquite automatically The majority had a rather strong version answering


Table 1 Ascription appearance vs descent

Answer Question 1 Question 2 Question 3

Child is Kazakh 56 94 49 83 35 59Child is Mongol 0 10 17 24 41Child is erliiz(lsquohalf-breedrsquo) 3 6 0 0Total 59 100 59 100 59 100

N = 59

lsquoKazakh Kazakh Kazakhrsquo I followed this up with an especially strongchallenge in the cross-examination For example lsquoDo you mean thatculture and language donrsquot matter at all In Question 3 the boy doesnrsquoteven know he is Kazakhrsquo to which they would often respond with somevariant of lsquoThatrsquos right the only thing that matters is the ethnicity of thetoumlrcoumln aav (lsquobirth fatherrsquo)The kid may not know it but he is still KazakhIt doesnrsquot matterrsquo

Mongol-Kazakh intermarriages simply do not happen in my eld-sitearea though some occur in Ulaanbaatar Thus if my informants didalready have a rule governing transmissionacquisition of ethnic statusesthey were applying it to questions they had perhaps never consideredbefore in much the same manner that one may apply grammatical rulesto decode sentences one has never seen The answers therefore probablyreveal deep structure rather than the extraction of non-grammatical (nonrule-like) phenomenological patterns extracted from memory This hasthe disadvantage that one cannot test the relevance of the rule for actualbehaviour by recording the ethnic statuses of the offspring of Kazakh-Mongol marriages However intermarriages between two Mongol ethnies(such as Oriankhai and Torguud) though rare do occur I encounteredtwo such intermarriages both of them Torguud husbands with Oriankhaiand Khalkha wives respectively In each case (1) the parents said the chil-dren were Torguud (2) they agreed instantaneously and (3) the answerwas automatic with no reection given to the matter Asked why they didnot respond that it was because the children were being brought up in aTorguud environment (which was certainly the case) but lsquobecause thefather is Torguudrsquo This suggests that Mongols do indeed behave in amanner consistent with the answers they gave

Table 2 has family heads (ezen) only It is sex-biased and a smallersample But a t-test by sex for the larger sample revealed no signicantdifference between the sexes3 The ezen sample has the advantage thatthe effects of kin bias are greatly reduced since there are fewer close-kinamong ezen

The trends are all the same and the percentages quite similar(although the difference between those who answered lsquoKazakhrsquo andlsquoMongolrsquo to Question 3 is not signicant with such a small sample)


Table 2 Household heads only


Child is Kazakh 15 100 13 87 8 53Child is Mongol 0 2 13 7 47Child is erliiz(lsquohalf-breedrsquo) 0 0 0Total 15 100 15 100 15 100

N = 15

Finally I must add that these data probably underestimate thenumbers of primordialists In the context of an interview the effect is suchthat when interviewed alone the interviewees are more likely to give cir-cumstantialist answers I interpret this as a task demand respondentswhen alone were intimidated by my overt implications that the answershould be circumstantialist When asked in a group on the contrary theyagreed with the lsquorightrsquo answer from their peersrsquo perspective The secondsituation has greater ecological validity because ethnic ascriptions arepublic behaviours People do not decide in the privacy of their minds tocall someone a Mongol or a Kazakh they commit themselves publicly tothese labelling processes

The models

The following simple taxonomy is useful the sequence lsquoKazakh KazakhKazakhrsquo corresponds to a lsquohardrsquo primordialist Ethnic Transmission andAcquisition Model [ETAM] These respondents assign a lsquoKazakhrsquo ethnicstatus to the biological child of a Kazakh no matter what the circum-stances The sequence lsquoKazakh Kazakh Mongolrsquo corresponds to a lsquosoftrsquoprimordialist ETAM For these respondents ties of blood are paramountbut truly extreme circumstances allow them to bend the primordial cri-terion The sequence lsquoKazakh Mongol Mongolrsquo is that of a lsquosoftrsquo cir-cumstantialist ndash one who believes that childhood enculturation will affectethnic status

A category that does not appear in the data because the instrument isnot designed to pick it up is lsquohardrsquo circumstantialist This model allowsfor a fully enculturated adult Kazakh say to rationally decide to becomeMongol and to succeed on the basis of this decision I did not concernmyself with it because I was trying to see if a much weaker circumstan-tial criterion could operate I reasoned that questions about rationalchoices would be moot if walking and talking like an A from a very earlyage ndash plus being unaware of being of B descent ndash did not change peoplersquosopinions about their lsquotruersquo ethnic status if they were informed about thebiological facts Hard circumstantialists are thus collapsed into the lsquosoftcircumstantialistrsquo category and I do not know how many of these arelsquohardrsquo But even if all of them were this would still leave us with less than


Table 3 Ethnic Transmission and Acquisition Models [ETAMs]

Model Proportion Proportion among primordialists

Hard primordialist 59 71Soft Primordialist 25 29Soft circumstantialist 17Total 101

Total has rounding error

a fth of respondents espousing a non-primordialist position If one addsthe reasonable expectation that some will not be hard circumstantialiststhis evidence looks bad for the rational-choice model Cross-examinationrevealed that hard circumstantialists certainly do exist at least tworespondents t this description But an accurate determination of thismodelrsquos relative frequency must await further research

The most important point is this Given that most respondents havestrict primordial models ndash that is to say nothing can change onersquos Kazakhstatus if the biological father is Kazakh ndash an individual Kazakhrsquos claim toMongol status would fall on deaf ears Two questions remain to be inves-tigated (1) are most ethnic communities around the world characterizedby similar distributions of ETAMs and (2) does this limit peoplersquosability to make residentialinteractionalsignalling choices such that whatBarth found in Swat is an interesting special case rather than the normI hypothesize that the answer to both questions is yes and shall reviewfurther below indirect evidence to bolster my prejudice

4 Broader implications of these results

The need for cognitive research

Social facts (such as onersquos prestige onersquos name or onersquos ethnicity) are notthings that one obtains independently of others but rather in coordinationwith them Even in prestige where individual striving is usually necessaryI still cannot unilaterally make myself a lsquohigh-prestigersquo person others mustagree treat me with deference and allow me the asymmetries that willturn me into a high-prestige person In other words others must decidethat my achievements full the criteria of a high-prestige person and Ihave no control over those criteria Nor can I unilaterally change myname for example unless others cooperate by using my new name

individuals may be able to make just one or more than one claimand nd groups more or less willing to recognize their claim or claimsThis constraint is sometimes forgotten The individual can make anyclaim he or she wants to but to have any effect a claim must be rec-ognized (Heather 1996)

Barthrsquos argument concerning ethnicity was in this spirit of course Ashe remarked (1994 p 11) his views were explicitly lsquoconstructivistrsquo cri-teria of membership in the actorsrsquo minds are what create ethnic (andother) social boundaries so it is these criteria that dene the group (cfBarth 1969 p 15)

Since sound theoretical arguments suggest humans should be con-formists (Boyd and Richerson 1985 ch 7 Henrich and Boyd 1998) andmuch evidence from psychology gives this prejudice empirical support


(for example the entire literature on lsquopluralistic ignorancersquo Miller andMcFarland 1991) it follows that the performative entailments of anascriptive cognitive model enjoying a simple plurality will quickly get sta-bilized at a very high frequency (other things being equal) This is Barthrsquossubjectivist perspective with a twist If most others think that it sufcesfor me to decide my lsquoethnicityrsquo and announce it then circumstantialistsof the rational-choice school will be correct If most others think that itsufces for me to learn some cultural habits and publicly display a fewcultural markers and these conceptions correspond to how outsideobservers parse the cultural world into dichotomous units then theculture-area perspective on ethnic groups will be largely correct On theother hand if most others will accept an ethnic label lsquoXrsquo only for personsbiologically descended from individuals so labelled primordialists willhave scored their most important point The majoritarian model of mem-bership criteria ndash as such criteria are held for third parties ndash denes thesocial boundary A cognitive investigation of ethnicity is thus virtuallydemanded by the shift to subjectivism that Barth engineered

Social categorization theory and research have taught us that there ispersonality-based identity (lsquopersonalrsquo identity) and categoricalascrip-tive or lsquogrouprsquo identity Likewise there are two kinds of attraction (Hogg1992) personal attraction (caused by the personality of another) andsocial attraction (caused by the group-membership of another throughthe prototyped stereotype attached to such membership) However thistheory takes the (contextless) process of categorization itself to be de-cisive (Turner et al 1987) and proposes no theory about the differentkinds of lsquogroupsrsquo with which people can identify There are many kindsof group identities ethnic kinship political religious gender class racialregional Each creates an ingroup (where ego is member) and an out-group and therefore a social boundary by stipulating certain conditionsthat members must satisfy in order to be such But psychologists have ingeneral treated all group identities and ingroupoutgroup cleavages asresulting from the same general stereotype-formation process (forexample Bar-Tal et al 1989 LeyensYzerbytSchadron 1994)4 Howeverwe are probably equipped with specialized psychologies (plural) toprocess the different kinds of social boundaries that recur in the socialworld Group identities are probably lsquodomain-specicrsquo like most otheraspects of human cognition (Symons 1992 Tooby amp Cosmides 1992) Ifso membership conditions in one domain (political groups) may well bedifferent from those in another (ethnic groups)

If ethnic categories conceptually delimit what our cognition sees aslsquonatural kindsrsquo I would expect the categories to require necessary andsufcient conditions of membership even if governed by Roschian prop-erties on the lsquoinsidersquo (Gil-White 1999 see Lakoff 1987 for an extendeddiscussion of Eleanor Rochrsquos research) In the case of Jews for examplehaving a Jewish mother seems to ful l both necessary and sufcient


conditions for being a lsquoreal Jewrsquo (see Chervyakov et al 1997 for evidencethat Jewish descent is both necessary and sufcient) One may still be abad example of a Jew if one is an atheist but nevertheless a lsquoreal Jewrsquo(contrast this with a man who has converted to and practises Judaism butwhose parents are Irish would he still be a Jew if after some time of prac-tising Judaism he became an atheist)

Of course social-behavioural outputs certainly almost always rest onpsychologies more complex than mere categorical structure However ifcategorical thinking in a particular domain is important then this is theplace to begin for the broad categorical features of cognitive models willconstrain the hypothesis-space and the perception-space of actors(Quine 1960 Bloom 1993) making them more susceptible to the acqui-sition of certain ideas than others concerning the lsquoobjectsrsquo so categorized(Boyd and Richerson 1985 Tooby and Cosmides 1992 Boyer 1994) Onthese basic biases and through the selective acquisition of ideas moreelaborate cultural models to reason about these lsquoobjectsrsquo tend to result

The deepest implications of this perspective on things may be statedthus

(1) If the nature of a social boundary (ie the particular type of con-ditions members must satisfy in the contrasting groups) implicate theinsider and outsider as particular kinds of agents then these percep-tions probably inuence behaviour such that interactions within andacross one type of social boundary are different from those within andacross another type(2) Furthermore if there is something recurrent about certain humanagglomerations everywhere that makes us identify some groupings andlump them together as lsquoethnicrsquo the world over then there must be someconstant psychological features leading humans everywhere to organ-ize themselves into groups with lsquoethnicrsquo criteria of membership(3) Finally if we perceive the behaviour of such units to have somedeep similarities regardless of where they occur then the psychologywhich produces these social units must also signicantly inuence thebehaviours of their members

The results reported above should make us uncomfortable with cir-cumstantialism as it now stands and desirous of a cross-cultural cognitiveempirical effort We need to know whether ethnic actors themselves per-ceive the ethnic world through a primordial (circumstantial) lens andhow this affects their behaviour If in most communities the majoritariancognitive model is primordialist (circumstantialist) and such models sig-nicantly affect behaviour then it follows that ethnic groups and theprocesses underlying them will be signicantly primordialist (circum-stantialist) Given that understanding the distribution of ETAMs is thekey to many of the issues under contention and practically mandated by


Barthrsquos conceptual innovations it is remarkable that barely any cognitivework in this area exists

A rmer footing for the primordialist position

The primordialist tradition begins with Shils (1957) and Geertz (1963 pp112ndash13) and was elaborated later by other writers (Isaacs 1975 Stack1986 Grosby 1994) It claims that certain kinds of attachments lsquoprimor-dialrsquo attachments are felt towards co-ethnics because of who they are cat-egorically (usually co-biological descendants from a primary group) andnot necessarily as a result of interaction with them Patterns of interac-tion follow the categorical cleavages and not the other way round (cfTilley 1997) Ascription here is not really a matter of choice much lessrational choice but of tradition and the emotions evoked by perceptionsof common ancestry Thus what motivates the behaviour of ethnic actorsis not some calculation of their interests but rather the history that bindsthem as they themselves perceive this history

Primordialists have lacked theoretical sophistication (cf Nagatarsquos1981 p 89 criticism her discussion is the shining exception) Shils (1957)observed that lsquoThe attachment to another member of onersquos kinshipgroup is not just a function of interaction It is because a certain in-effable signicance is attributed to the tie of bloodrsquo But he made noattempt to operationalize lsquoineffable signicancersquo Geertz (1963) went astep further by adding to primary kinship groups those which ralliedaround (1) perceived common biological descent (2) race (a subtype ofthe former) (3) language (4) region and (5) religion but he left lsquoper-ceivedrsquo links of common descent unoperationalized and under-analysedLater entries have also failed to make primordialism something scien-tists can sink their teeth into (for example Stack 1986) although at leasttwo recent discussions (Grosby 1994 Roosens 1994) attempt to deneclearly the main concept and link it unequivocally to the descent aspectof Geertzrsquos argument ndash that is primordiality is really about perceivedcommon biological ancestry or ethnobiology (Nagata 1981 earlier gavethe clearest exposition of this point)

Primordialism has vigour yet For example Motyl (1997) argues for itscommon-sense value vs lsquoconstructivistrsquo alternatives But this is due to cir-cumstantialismrsquos failings rather than any great advances by primord-ialists

There is no coherent set of statements that permits me to straight-forwardly list the basic tenets or assumptions [of the] ldquopri-mordialistrdquo theory of ethnicity This is due to the absence of a theoryor explanation of why we should regard ethnicity as a natural primor-dial sentiment Despite this shortcoming the primordialist viewcannot be so easily dismissed (Thompson 1989 p 53 his emphasis)


Like Thompson many believe that there is something to the pri-mordialist view and that if only primordialists could summon more faithin the possibility of systematizing (or at least clarifying) their intuitionsperhaps we could investigate what that is But he is too sweeping at leastVan den Berghe (1987) has produced an explanation which whether ornot one agrees with it qualies as a bona-de theory

Circumstantialists have responded with harsh criticism Primordialistsare charged with defending an lsquounscienticrsquo lsquounsociologicalrsquo and evenlsquoracistrsquo concept (Eller and Coughlan 1993 in an especially supercialarticle) However some disagreements are straw-man fabrications by thecircumstantialists who caricature primordialism and make it harder toexplore its strengths For example they often (wilfully) fail to distinguishbetween what an ethnic group is to its members psychologically and theobjective reasons why such groups may form (cf Grosby 1994) As aresult primordialists (who often do make this particular distinctionrather clearly) are caricatured as maintaining that ethnic groups areobjectively primordial and therefore eternally permanent and imperviousto modication by circumstances as well as having impermeable bound-aries (eg Bonacich 1980 Lemarchand 1986 p 188 Eller and Coughlan1993) In the same breath primordialists are often charged with lsquonatu-ralizingrsquo ethnicity (for example Eller and Coughlan 1993 Jenkins 1996)

Such criticisms are in a sense unfair because they do not attempt to putthe opposing views on their best footing before debunking them [cfTilleyrsquos (1997) criticism of Eller and Coughlan (1993)] In the rst placethey attempt to paint primordialists as analytical naturalizers rather thananalysts of naturalizers and this is pure rhetoric To insist that actors per-ceive co-ethnics as sharing biological descent is to describe the mannerin which individuals cognize the ethnies they participate in It does notsay that new ethnic groups cannot arise in place of old ones which dis-appear nor is it incompatible with this idea (It does however commit itsdefenders to qualied statements about the maximum thresholds on therate of ethnogenesi s and ethnic boundary change That is if ethnic actorsbelieve that membership is a matter of shared biological descent changesin the boundaries of ethnic groups will happen on inter- rather than intra-generationa l timescales Van den Berghe 1987 p 27) And if primordial-ists have implied that there may be something lsquonaturalrsquo about ethnicgroup formation it is unclear how this automatically disqualies theirviews lsquonaturalrsquo and lsquowrongrsquo are not synonymous and the data will judgeBesides to advance self-interest as the motivation behind ethnic groupformation is no less lsquonaturalizingrsquo it merely posits a different kind ofnature

That said perhaps primordialists deserve these criticisms after allsince they have failed to operational ize adequately and test their viewswhich are neither unoperationalizable nor untestable the way many pri-mordialists themselves believe The results reported here suggest a


reasonable scientic basis for a defensible primordialism which I for-mulate as a few hypotheses

Hypothesis 1 a majority of ethnic actors will possess ethnobiolog icalETAMs

Hypothesis 2 if 1 is true this will affect ethnic actorsrsquo perceptions oftheir ldquointerestsrdquo as well as their motivations for pursuing them vis-agrave-vis interests and motivations evaluated with respect to other kinds ofgroup boundaries By extension it will affect behaviour

Hypothesis 3 a basic primordial model is part of our innate psychol-ogy (Gil-White 1998)

Hypothesis 4 if 3 is true it will act as a built-in bias affecting the cul-turaldevelopmental elaboration of the basic model (in terms of cul-turally transmitted rules about what can and cannot be done withethnic statuses) There will thus be a non-random distribution of eth-notheories of ethnicity with a tendency towards rather inexible pri-mordial ETAMs (the Mongol case reported here supports thehypothesis but obviously it does not sufce)

A rmer footing for the circumstantialist position

Circumstantialists are not lacking in contradictions and vagueness eitherFor example what an ethnic group is (the description of a lsquomemberrsquo interms of the conditions such a person must satisfy) is often confused withemergent phenomena associated with ethnic groups (what ethnic groupsdo as groups ethnic group-cohesiveness interethnic conict ethnic sig-nalling cultural differentiation ethnic endogamy) This is an unfortunateanalytical confusion because it leads to identifying lsquoobjectsrsquo on the basisof their behaviour The causal arrow is an important theoretical andempirical matter ndash either the conception of ethnic co-members and aliensproduces ingroup cohesiveness intergroup conict and ethnic endogamyor it is these latter which provoke a categorical reformulation of actors oneither side So these issues should be carefully separated in analysis andresearch especially given that circumstantialists are committed to thesecond hypothesis (cf Nagata 1981 p 89)

For example circumstantialists often confuse explaining ethnicgroups as such with the related problem of explaining ethnic mobiliza-tion arguing as though ethnic groups regularly sprang suddenly intobeing where none existed in order to address the political interests oftheir members This view equates ethnic group formation with everyother kind of group formation and as Hechter (1986 p 19) self-critically observes this lsquois a necessary consequence of the [unelaboratedand unassisted] premise of individually self-interested actionrsquo a view


explicit ly and uncritically advocated by Banton (1994) Statements suchas these

ethnicity is an essentially modern phenomenon primarily rooted inurban settings and intimately tied up with the processes of changeintroduced by economic and political modernization Ethnic ties areforged in the competitive struggle of modern politics In so far as theyexpress traditional attachments these are constantly redened in thelight of changing conditions and in response to the political exigenciesof the moment (Lemarchand 1986 p 188 cf Wallerstein 1960 Young1976)

reveal the preoccupation with ethnic mobilization as the lsquobe all and endallrsquo of ethnicity which is so common among lsquomodernization theoryrsquo (orlsquostructuralrsquo) circumstantialists

But explaining the behaviour of say a few particular dogs in someplaces is not the same thing as explaining what dogs as a species lsquoarersquo orwhy they emerged evolutionari ly although the two questions are obvi-ously related Just as a particular dog is a dog whether or not it has learntto fetch or walk bipedally on its hind legs particular human aggregationsmay be lsquoethnicrsquo whether or not they presently exhibit ingroup solidarityand overt conict with outgroups5 If we believe that African and AsianpastoralistsAfrican and Amazonian rainforest hunter-gatherers and hor-ticulturists North American and Siberian hunter-gatherers New Guineahorticulturists Australian Aborigines organize in lsquoethniesrsquo ndash as the liter-ature suggests we do ndash then we shall need a broader theory both of ethnicgroups and their mobilization This is because in their cases (and others)urban settings were (and sometimes even are) absent and the arrival ofmodern state structures has often ended rather than initiated ethnicmobilization as in the case of the Nuer and the Dinka (Kelly 1985) andthe New Guinea ethnic groups

One has also to consider the predictions the circumstantialist modelmakes about behaviour If ethnic actors are instrumentalists then newethnic groups should follow shifting interests arising and disappearing assuddenly as do purely political or territorial alliances people should spon-taneously switch ethnic identity when it becomes convenient and it shouldbe more common for new ethnicities to spring forth around changing mate-rial interests and concerns than for ethnicities to persist in spite of costs totheir membersrsquo interests However if most ethnic actors are ethnobiologi-cal primordialists and if to ally with particular ethnic actors one mustusually share membership then many kinds of alliances of interest will beprecluded given that switching ethnicity cannot be arranged instan-taneously and at will It is also quite plausible that a primordial model ofthe ethnic world will affect peoplersquos conception of their lsquointerestsrsquo

Much evidence supports primordialist rather than circumstantialist


prejudices Individuals quite often sacrice economic self-interest forethnic group goals For example in unranked polyethnic state afterstate6 it has been the case that ethnic parties rather than class-basedparties have developed often with perfectly unreconcilable aimsNigeria by the time of independence already had Ibo Hausa andYoruba-dominated parties Guyana and Trinidad Creole and East Indianparties Sri Lanka Sinhalese and Tamil parties and Malaysia Chineseand Malay parties (Horowitz 1985 p 9) More illuminating perhaps isthe failure of explicitly and avowedly non-ethnic parties to remain suchin unranked polyethnic states especially parties of the left who have itas their central doctrine to be universalistic advocating the interests ofthe working class regardless of ethnic origin Thus it is striking that lsquoTheCommunist Party has been dominated by Ansaris in the Sudan by Sin-halese in Sri Lanka by Greeks in Cyprus and by Chinese in Malaysiarsquo(ibid pp 9ndash10) Similarly the Communist Party has been captured by dif-ferent ethnic groups in the different states of India By the Sikhs inPunjab by the Ezhava in Kerala by the Bengalis in Assam and inTripura rst by the indigenous hill people then by the Bengalis but neverboth simultaneously (ibid p 10) This is similar to the failure of Com-munist Parties in Europe to transcend ethnonational boundaries nallyresorting to nationalistic appeals in order to become electable Socialistsfor their part have fared no better In Guinea they were Fulani in theIvory Coast Beacuteteacute and in Congo Mbochi (ibid p 10) As Horowitz goeson to detail many revolts and insurgencies lsquoostensibly inspired by classideology have sometimes derived their impetus from ethnic aspirationsand apprehensions insteadrsquo such that their sole or main participants weremembers of one particular ethnic group

Such data embarrass extreme circumstantialist predictions such asPattersonrsquos (1975) lsquoWhere a plurality of allegiances involves a conictbetween class interests and other interests individuals will chooseclass allegiances over all other allegiances including ethnic allegiancersquoHe did not test this with cross-cultural data however but instead offereda single case-study which is in line with his predictions

Less extreme instrumentalists may argue (with Hechter 1992 p 273)that class loyalties do not usually win against ethnic loyalties because theproblem of collective action is more easily solved in primordial than ininstrumental groups given that in the latter there is greater monitoringand sanctioning by peers But punishment by third parties (necessary toget rational individuals to incur costs altruistically for the sake of collec-tive action) is a public good ndash that is punishment requires the punisherto incur certain costs if others are punishing one should free-ride ontheir efforts (if one is lsquorationalrsquo see Boyd and Richerson 1992)Thus hereagain we must explain why ethnic actors forgo individual interests tocoerce each other for the purposes of collective action They are clearlynot acting as straightforward instrumentalists agrave la Economic Man


All of this is not to belittle the circumstantialist concern with lsquostruc-turalrsquo variables in ethnic mobilization it is an important topic becauseethnies do not always mobilize and not always in the same ways Cir-cumstantialists are certainly correct that perceived costs and advantagesto individuals underlie much of their behaviour and that ethnic statusesare used strategically and politically But in the light of the evidence(including the data reported here) the idea must be taken seriously thata primordialist view of the ethnic world by ethnic actors themselves mayconstrain the space in which they consider it legitimate to advance theirself-interested goals and may also inuence their choice of goals suchthat they are not all self-interested Thinking of the instrumentalism ofethnic actors as both framed and constrained by a eld of possibilitiesthat a primordialist psychology delimits may be a more reasonable andaccurate perspective on the problem

The strategic management of multiple identities is one area in which arevised circumstantialism might offer a more theoretically cogent solu-tion Hogg (1992 p 94) speaking of lsquogroupsrsquo in the broadest sense of theword remarks that the relevant social group shifts with circumstancesEthnicity would appear to be no exception Several authors have pointedout that people often have more than one ethnic identity where suchidentities are organized in a concentric arrangement lsquoEthnicity is aset of descent-based cultural identiers used to assign persons to group-ings that expand and contract in inverse relation to the scale of inclu-siveness and exclusiveness of the membershiprsquo (Cohen 1978 p 387)

Many authors echo this sentiment and add that ethnic actors will givesalience to whichever of these identities is most relevant in particular cir-cumstances where relevance is a matter of segmentary opposition agrave laEvans-Pritchard (1968) (for example Moerman 1965 Horowitz 1975 pp118ndash19 Keyes 1976 pp 206ndash7) Others argue more generally that avail-able ethnic statuses are used strategically or politically but avoid anarrow focus on segmentary opposition (Royce 1982 pp 184ndash215 Nagel1993) Ethnic actors according to this view will lsquoput on the ethnic hatrsquobest serving their purposes in particular circumstances

For instance in contexts of opposition to other Mongol ethnies Tor-guuds may want to emphasize their Torguud identity But Torguuds arealso Mongols and in contexts of opposition to Kazakhs they may wantto give salience to the more encompassing Mongol identity Clearly suchmanipulations do take place but if one can only choose primordiallyavailable hats from the ethnic rack we must revise our views of just howmanipulable and instrumental ethnic statuses can be (cf Nagata 1981) Inthis manner circumstantialism and primordialism can be merged into amore sophisticated view of ethnicity

We must also resist the temptation to speak of all group identities asif they were the same thing True if I am a Catholic Mexican there maybe circumstances where I want to emphasize my Catholicism (for


example with an Irishman) because there is no ethnic identity link thatI can establish But the fact remains if I am a Catholic Mexican I canbecome a Mormon Mexican if I wish I can lsquounbecomersquo Catholic But canI lsquounbecomersquo Mexican Obviously people do not usually discard andreacquire religious identities lightly but there are other group member-ships which are easily discarded It is easy enough to switch from beingDemocrat to being Republican and vice versa as circumstances and onersquosown changing ideologies make this advantageou s More than one electedofcial has in fact made the switch while in ofce and nobody appearsto think of them as wolves in sheeprsquos clothing (Newt Gingrich forinstance used to be a counterculture Democrat)

If people cannot lose and acquire ethnic statuses the way they mightother kinds of statuses or lsquoidentities rsquo the politics of ethnicity will be quali-tatively different from other kinds of politics

The problem of ethnic boundaries

How porous are ethnic boundaries How are they maintained Barth hashad an enormous inuence on our views so it is worth taking a close lookat the data that he and others have used I consider Haalandrsquos study rst(published in the same volume as Barthrsquos) because if it has received lessattention it nevertheless asks all the theoretical questions relevant hereHaaland studied agricultural Fur in the Sudan some of whom had accu-mulated enough capital in livestock that they took up nomadism in orderto protect their investment Eventually the successful ones would attachthemselves to the nomadic Baggara and intermarry with them Haalandasks

At what point does the change of identity take place When does a Furbecome Baggara Is it when he establishes himself as a nomad Is itwhen he has enough cattle to attach himself to a Baggara camp Or isthe ethnic transformation process completed only with his childrenwho have not learned Fur culture and who are not recognized asmembers of any Fur community (Haaland 1969 p 65)

He decided to resolve his theoretical questions in terms of standardsof evaluation rather than what he called lsquopersonality changersquo and con-cluded that the Fur became Baggara as soon as they took up nomadismbecause other Fur evaluated their performance by nomad standards

Unfortunately for this thesis Haaland gives only one anecdote to sub-stantiate his claim that sedentary Fur who visited nomadic Fur wereoffended rst by the (typically Fur) reserved behaviour of the newnomads and secondly by the concomitant lack of open-arm hospitalitythat they had grown accustomed to expect from the Baggara Even thesemeagre two-data points are questionable for they expressed themselves


thus lsquoThis was not the way one should be received by a nomadrsquo (Haaland1969 p 70) For the sake of argument if we assume the two informantsare representative the fact nevertheless remains that the offendingnomads in question were not called lsquoBaggararsquo there was merely a com-plaint that they should behave like good nomads if they were going tolive that way By choosing to focus on standards of performance evalua-tion (certainly of immense relevance to ethnicity) Haaland perhapsunwittingly ceased to make the issue lsquoidentityrsquo which was ostensibly thepoint of his investigation (see above quote) He tells us that any similar-ities between just-nomadized Fur and the Baggara resulted from adap-tive constraints in the nomadic lifestyle these Fur nomads hadassimilated neither Baggara culture nor language and apparently con-sidered themselves Fur (certainly they retained and practised Fur stan-dards of performance) Other Fur apparently agreed Haaland rst learntof these new nomads when one of his informants among the sedentaryFur asked him lsquowhether I wanted to visit Fur people who live in nomadcampsrsquo (Haaland 1969 p 68 emphasis added) There is no evidence ofascriptive change here which suggests an afrmative to Haalandrsquos lastquestion in the quote above where ethnic ascription is concerned onlyin the next generation can a lineage make the transition from the Fur tothe Baggara

Barth argued as though Pathans were choosing lsquoto becomersquo BaluchPerhaps this is merely a failure to distinguish membership in an ethniefrom other social structures Some sections of some Baluch tribes havetraditions of incorporation exible enough to admit new members fromother ethnies Many Pathans had been incorporated into the Marri tribewhose sections all had such traditions But note

Of the three main branches of the Marri the Ghazani contains sub-sections of various origins the Loharanis are half constituted by theShiranis tracing descent from the Pathan tribe of that name and theBijaranis are regarded as predominantly of Pathan origin Among theBijaranis the Powadhi section has had the most prolic recent growth their leader is totally virtually autonomous in his relation to theBijarani leader and the growth has taken place so predominantlythrough incorporation of Pathans that it is referred to as ldquoPathanrdquo byother Marris though it is uniformly Baluch-speaking (Barth 1963)

This shows that members of an ethnic group can join en bloc the polit-ical structures of another and acquire their culture without losing theiroriginal identity This should not have misled Barth who elsewhere hadnoticed Kohistanis incorporating themselves into Pathan political struc-tures (as serfs to the Pathans) without ceasing to be Kohistanis (Barth1956) That unsolicited remarks by putative Baluchs to the effect thatthey were lsquoreally Pathanrsquo were forthcoming (Barth 1969 p 29) should


underscore the point there is both lsquoinsidersquo and lsquooutsidersquo recognition oftheir Pathan status ndash no change yet in ascription or lsquoidentityrsquo Barthrsquos con-tention that given the incompatibilities between Pathan and Baluchsocial structures incorporated Pathans have a need to absorb Baluchnorms abide by them and signal this to others is convincing (Barth 1981pp 110ndash11) The public use of the Baluch label could serve the latterpurpose but none of this requires a change in identity and his own datamake me doubt that it happened

It is of course possible even likely that several generations after theswitch people will forget the original ancestry (or discount it) and regarddescendants of incorporated Pathans as lsquoreally Baluchrsquo making move-ment of personnel across the ethnic boundary a real possibility But thisis because everybody forgot the origins there has been intermarriage orbecause several generations of ancestors who publicly call themselveslsquoBaluchrsquo means in fact that they are descended from Baluch In eithercase a primordialist model is active preventing true switches in ethnicidentity in the rst generation

Leachrsquos (1977[1954]) work in Burma which inuenced Barthrsquos theo-retical focus exhibits similar primordial nuances in his reported cases ofethnic absorption (even his choice of words seems at variance with thepoints he was supposedly making)7 I shall illustrate with one example(pp 293ndash97)

On the Nogmung Leach relying on Barnard (1925) relates that theyhad adopted the dress and language of the Shan although some stillspoke their native Jinghpaw Leach closes this case by reference to the(then) current conditions where the Nogmung might be taking up Jingh-paw again and refers to this process with the phrase lsquoThe Nogmung areprobably becoming Jinghpaw againrsquo His grammar suggests a change ofascription The Nogmung lsquobecomersquo Jinghpaw again (which implies thatfor a while they had been Shan) But in fact the Nogmung were neverJinghpaw to begin with they were Nogmung and they spoke JinghpawThere is a lsquoJinghpawrsquo tribe that also speaks Jinghpaw but this is not thecase of the Nogmung lsquoNogmungrsquo is the name for a tribe of what accord-ing to Leach is the Kachin ethnic group (which also includes the Jingh-paw tribe and many others) Perhaps Leach wrote as he did because formany outsiders lsquoJinghpawrsquo and lsquoKachinrsquo are synonymous and he wantedto contrast the Kachins (hill peoples of different sorts) with the Shans(wet rice cultivators who live in the valleys) From this perspective he issaying that the Nogmung (who are one kind of Kachin) became Shanand then became Kachin again his evidence is that they rst acquired Tai(the language of the Shan) then reacquired Jinghpaw But linguisticchange and identity change are not the same the Nogmung cannotbecome Kachin simply by speaking Jinghpaw (or Shan for that matterby speaking Tai) any more than the Irish became English when theynally adopted the language of their conquerorsAnd if it is true as Leach


suggests that after the collapse of the feudal system that made theNogmung serfs of the Shan these former serfs wished again for theirancestral language then one should be sceptical about their ever havinglost their lsquoKachinrsquo identity

His other examples are equally based on linguistic or cultural changeand are silent about identity change or suggest the opposite Only onecase appears to involve unequivocal identity change It involvesAssamese slaves who became Kachin Two points bear special mention(1) Leach thinks that there was intermarriage with their Kachin mastersand (2) from the time that they still called themselves lsquoAssamesersquo in 1824when they were made slaves by the Kachin to the time when a differentsource reported that their descendants were called Kachin (a crucialpoint) in 1925 it is a full century and three or four generations later(depending on life-expectancies and average reproductive age) Anothercase that might involve identity change concerns Kachins of the Kha-phok and Kha-lang tribes who may have become the lok hka Shan serfclass Here too between the observation of the Kachin dependants of theShan (1828) to the observation of the lok hka (1925) a full century hasgone by

Cases of ethnic absorption reported elsewhere similarly reveal theneed for intermarriage andor several generations Dinka absorbed bythe Nuer are not lsquoreal Nuerrsquo ndash they have a special name Jaang Nuer(Kelly 1985) and Jaang (or Jieng) incidentally is what the Dinka callthemselves Likewise Jok Jok a Dinka friend and anthropologist tells methat Nuer who marry into the Dinka ethnie are not considered lsquorealDinkarsquo either and are called Nuer-da which means lsquoour Nuerrsquo Howeverand this is illuminating their children (who will be descended from atleast one Dinka) will be lsquoreal Dinkarsquo He also knew of a case where aNuer couple came to live in a Dinka village under the auspices of thechief Despite the fact that they were accepted as full residential membersof the community they were always Nuer-da and most importantly sowere their children for they had no Dinka blood To my questions hecommented revealingly lsquoSome identities you can only get by bloodrsquo InYauri Northern Nigeria it is common for Gungawa to make the transi-tion into Hausa but this never happens in one generation nor do theGungawa accept foreigners into their ethnie though they will readilyaccept as Gungawa the children of foreigners who intermarry (Salamone1974 pp 109 117 236ndash37) Some Turkana in the Isiolo area Kenya rou-tinely become Samburu but this is an arduous process which requiresrst transitioning through the category Ilgira lsquoThe required amount oftime for a complete assimilation of Turkana into Samburu then seems tobe at least two generationsrsquo (Hjort 1981 emphasis added) Arabs inMalaysia successfully assimilated themselves into a Malay identity butonly by forcefully pointing out the several generations of intermarriagethat had already taken place between them and Malays (Nagata 1981)


I have found only one example of complete ethnic absorption in therst generation Interestingly it concerns Kazakhs in Xinjiang near myown eld site Bessac (1965 pp 378ndash79) reported that his informantsoften stole children from Mongols and Tibetans and adopted them butin the opinion of the thieves these children became fully Kazakh uponabsorption of Kazakh customs and initiation into Islam Note howeverthat even here this is still not a case of adults making rational choices

If one cannot complete an ethnic switch for oneself but may ensure itfor onersquos children by providing them with actual blood ties through inter-marriage this places an upper limit to the speed with which ethnogene-sis and ethnic dissolution (in its various forms see Horowitz 1975) cantake place This would make ethnic groups different from other kinds ofgroups particularly the political coalitions to which circumstantialistsbelieve ethnic groups are so similar

None of this denies the instrumental manipulations of ethnic statusesthat Barth documented For his Pathans-turned-Baluch being lsquoreallyPathanrsquo was obviously of minuscule practical signicance But it is never-theless important to clarify the cognitive framework within which theseboundary crossings are taking place ethnic actors have primordialistETAMs In Swat considerable lsquoplayingrsquo with the ethnic labels is allowedso those who wish to articulate with particular networks may use thelabels that signal the expectations associated with them But if ethnicactors are in general primordialists and also essentialists (that is onersquosethnicity implies an inalienable lsquoessencersquo Gil-White 1999) then I wouldexpect the Barthian exible signalling system to be the exception and tond that in most times and places one cannot simply lsquograbrsquo a new ethniclabel and begin interfacing with another ethnic community as a fullmember

Barth himself is equivocal about the question of primordiality admit-ting that lsquo ethnic membership is at once a question of source of originas well as of current identityrsquo (1969 p 29) Horowitz (1975 pp 113ndash14)makes a stronger primordial point but also equivocally He argues thatalthough ethnic identity is generally acquired at birth it is a matter ofdegree Some ethnic groups he says change their boundaries lsquoquicklydeliberately and noticeablyrsquo He concedes that usually changes in iden-tity lsquorequire a generation or more to accomplish by means of intermar-riage and procreationrsquo but believes that lsquoLinguistic or religiousconversion will sufce in some casesrsquo Then he says lsquoThere are ctionsabout and exceptions to the birth principle for most ethnic groups Eth-nicity thus differs from voluntary afliation not because the two aredichotomous but because they occupy different positions on a contin-uumrsquo

What exceptions Horowitz does not give any examples or citationsMoreover he does not honour his analytic denition in practice heclaims elsewhere in the piece that Sikhs started out as a religious sect but


became an ethnie as membership requirements became ethnobiologicalThis concedes what practically everybod y circumstantialist or primor-dialist has assumed ever since Weber (1978 p 389) rst offered a den-ition members of an lsquoethniersquo will represent themselves publicly as adescent group

This is important Circumstantialists and primordialists may disagreeon the interpretation but they apparently agree with the description ofethnies The literature shows that circumstantialists believe ethnies arecharacterized by public ideologies of common descent8 So both camps atleast agree on how to lsquopick outrsquo ethnic groups in the world

What ethnies lsquoarersquo then is not merely a semantic but a scientic issueIf scholars were merely divided over the proper referents of a given labelndash here lsquoethniersquo ndash the matter would be trivial and easily solved by adopt-ing a technical denition that eliminated the ambiguities But the refer-ents are not in question all scholars lsquoknow one when they see onersquo ethnicgroups are agglomerations of people who at a minimum represent them-selves as vertically reproducing historical units implying cultural lsquopeople-hoodrsquo What divides scholars is how much attention they pay to suchpublic representations and the analytical interpretation they have for theagreed set of referents9 Is the primordialism that everybody sees inethnic actorsrsquo own public representation of the ethnie merely an instru-ment of their mobilization Or is it a prism for viewing social life thatframes that life constraining the actorrsquos instrumental choices This is thecrux of the debate What comes rst mobilization or categorization MyMongolian data ndash if representative of the world ndash make me sceptical thatinstrumental choices concerning interactioncoalition can easily precedeethnic categorization

Coming back to Horowitz ags should go up when in his very own dis-cussion Sikhs go from a religious sect to an ethnie as membership getslinked with descent This suggests that in Horowitzrsquos intuitions ndash vs hisacademic denitions ndash membership in ethnic groups is not in fact lsquosome-timesrsquo a matter of religious conversion Rather the extent to which reli-gious groups abandon conversion for descent as a criterion of inclusionis also the degree to which he feels inclined to think of them as lsquoethniesrsquoThe intuitive denition of an ethnie implicitly used by Horowitz (andscholars everywhere) is therefore not fuzzy at all ndash it is not ethnie groupswhich may recruit members through descent andor religious conver-sion andor linguistic assimilation andor voluntary afliation andorpolitical integration What is fuzzy is the membership of any particularlsquoobjectrsquo in the category lsquoethniersquo This will depend on the proportion ofethnobiological primordialists in the group and in relevant outsidegroups Obviously ethnic groups have not existed since the time of AdamAn incomplete process of boundary change therefore entails that ofthose persons enjoying say group ascription A less than the over-whelming majority walk around with biological models of membership


in their heads and this group therefore may be thought of as having lessthan 100 per cent membership in the category lsquoethniersquo and thus as lsquopar-tially ethnicrsquo or as a lsquogroup undergoing ethnogenes isrsquo

The birth principle in the conception of ethnies appears to me quiteunequivocal Otherwise why are Jews controversial as an ethnie If someethnies really honoured linguistic or religious conversion for member-ship as Horowitz contends then Jews would be one of these groups Theyare controversial as an ethnie precisely because religious conversion canapparently gain an individual entry into the group

Ethnic actors themselves sometimes use overlapping labels that do notclearly delimit easily recognizable and bounded ascriptive groups andmuch has been made of this (Levine and Campbell 1972 pp 89ndash99)These are typically places where processes of ethnogenesis ethnic disso-lution or ethnic absorption (or all of them) are taking place The worldis not static If ethnic boundaries change this does not mean that ethnicgroups are lsquofakersquo nor does it make ethnic actors non-primordialist Whenprocesses of boundary-change are under way people may have morethan one simultaneous identity because they not only use their newlabels but they also retain the old ones These processes are incompatiblewith a primordialist position as advanced here only if they take place onintra-generational timescales ndash the timescales in which political organiz-ation of various sorts typically waxes and wanes By the same token ifthese changes take place only on inter-generationa l timescales they arenot compatible with a circumstantialist view that sees ethnic groupssimply and merely as one manifestation among many of political organiz-ation

Hypothesis 5 Real changes in the ethnic status of a lineage will requireeither blood ties through intermarriage several generations of instru-mental labelling or both Individual actors will not be able to effectsuch changes in status merely by changing their behaviour and pur-posefully displaying a new label

5 Conclusion

I have argued that what distinguishes ethnic groups from other kinds ofgroups is that ethnic actors conceive membership in terms of categoricaldescent biological descent from those possessing a label implying a givencultural lsquoessencersquo or lsquopeoplehood rsquo This is distinct from lsquokinshiprsquo (paceVan den Berghe 1987) which is neither necessary nor sufcient for eth-nicity because (1) with unilateral ETAMs two people sharing commondescent by kinship (for example same grandfather) could have differentethnic statuses (2) there are cases of people joining the kinship structuresof ethnic outgroups without their obtaining membership in the ethnie


(Barth 1963 Hjort 1981) and (3) the ethnic rhetoric of lsquokinshiprsquo is usuallythat of a founding father myth or end-point common-origin myth notwith the tracing of actual genealogies (that happens in what should prop-erly be called lsquokinshiprsquo lineages and clans)

The rational-choice version of the circumstantialist school amounts tosaying that people who do not really believe themselves to share commondescent will nevertheless participate in collective self-delusion becausepretending to share such descent is conducive to their common mobiliz-ation which is desirable as it serves common objective interests ration-ally identied The primordialist position states that (1) whatever notionsof common descent ethnic actors already have will constrain and guidetheir behaviour so that they will not easily invent new myths of commondescent where there were none in order to mobilize with relevant otherswhose interests they believe they share and (2) ethnic actors will per-ceive common interests with those with whom they already assumeshared descent

I close in the same spirit as Nagata (1981 p 111) lsquoAt the risk of takinga position on the fence it would seem that both the circumstantialist andthe primordial approaches to ethnicity can be accommodatedrsquo If thetruth is up on the fence I say lsquoperch on itrsquo Much of what circumstantial-ists focus on is important to ethnic processes But to discover the degreeand the ways in which primordialists and circumstantialists are right orwrong we need to carry out cross-cultural research on the ETAMs andsee whether such cognitive models affect behaviour This was necessaryall along to focus on the microprocesses by means of which interests areidentied statuses assigned and behavioural choices made (Bentley1987 p 26)

This is the challenge to see how a psychology of primordially denedethnicity (if there is one) produces boundaries to the eld of action inwhich individuals may rationally calculate their self-interest (to theextent that they do) andor produces biases to acquire irrationallycertain kinds of ideas (if it does) and how different historical and socialcontexts tip social processes one way or the other This is less tidy andelegant perhaps than saying people are either primordialists or circum-stantialists that they are either emotional or rational But if humanbeings are not tidy we should not tidy up after them in our theories ndashwhich does not argue against ltering the noise out of our theories butmerely against pretending that real causes are lsquonoisersquo just because theycomplicate our work

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Robert Boyd for planting the seed that made this articlepossible and to his students in the Ethnicity and Evolution seminar forvaluable discussions Allen Johnsonrsquos suggestions also proved most


helpful I thank my friends Tsoodol and Oumllzii with whom I discoveredthe methodology employed here for their kind hospitality and friend-ship And nally I thank my respondents in the Torguud Bangyakhanclan for their patient understanding and cooperation with my research

Notes

1 The subjective emphasis has since been explored by other anthropologists thoughnot always in the same ways For example Mitchell (1974) used criteria of subjectively feltlsquosocial distancersquo and this is not the same thing as label-using criteria Okamura (1981) callsit lsquothe cognitive dimension of situational ethnicityrsquo However no work on peoplersquos cognitivemodels concerning ethnicity (the basic structure of their reasoning about it) has been done2 NOTE The Mongolian word uumlndesten translated as lsquoethniersquo or lsquoethnicityrsquo is one thatlocals regularly apply for such groups as Mongols and Kazakhs It is a good match to ourown usage and even has similar polysemic ambiguities For example some informants usedit for the Mongol tribes but others preferred to refer to these with yastan which roughlytranslated is lsquotribersquo or lsquosub-ethnicrsquo groupThe applicability of uumlndesten to the Mongol lsquotribesrsquogenerated some controversy among them but not when applied to the KazakhMongolcontrast The word may sometimes be used to denote groupings that in the West are calledlsquoracesrsquo but which are also uncertainly distinguished from ethnic groups3 Question (2) dummy means males = 18 females = 16 p =86 Question (3) dummymeans males = 43 females = 39 p = 754 This affects not only the experiments they conduct but their generalizations Forexample Rodkin (1993 p 633) discusses race and limits himself to the white-black racerelationship in the US but believes it lsquoshould generalize to the construction of ethnic andgender differencesrsquo5 Despres (1975 p 196) provides the concepts of lsquoethnic populationrsquo and lsquoethnic grouprsquowhere the latter corresponds to an ethnic population politically organized However eventhis is insufcient because one can conceive of lsquodiffuse mobilizationsrsquo that occur without apolitical centre (for example many forms of discrimination selective raids directed moreoften against outgroup members in pre-state environments spontaneous urban riots) whichdo not then cease to be ethnic mobilization6 A ranked polyethnic state has different ethnic groups occupying different structuralpositions (different castes or socio-economic classes) In an unranked polyethnic state thevarious ethnic groups are well represented throughout the socio-economic structure(Horowitz 1985)7 With respect to lsquoidentityrsquo Leachrsquos use of categories is confusing to say the least Firsthe uses the phrase lsquoapparent change of cultural identityrsquo (p 40 emphasis added) and refersthe reader to the appendix (pp 293ndash7) for documentation However the appendix (whichrelies on other sources) is entitled lsquoSome documented cases of linguistic changersquo (emphasisadded) Finally the subheadings for the different cases are not linguistic but essentialist Thuswe see lsquoJinghpaw become Shanrsquo and lsquoAssamese become Jinghpawrsquo rather than lsquosuch-and-such speakers acquired such-and-such languagersquo Such essentialism suggests ethnic identityswitches but in fact the data show linguistic and cultural change and are either silent aboutidentity change or suggest the opposite Leach wrote as though he thought cultural practicelanguage and ethnic identity were coextensive but the point of his book seems to have beenamong other things to dispute this All this must make the interested reader wonder whethercircumstantialists are reading Leach and Barth or merely ritually quoting citations that theyblindly assume contain proof of the received circumstantialist wisdom8 For example Bonacich (1980) after debunking at length the notion that ethnicgroups are objectively primordial concedes lsquoTrue they are social phenomena which callupon primordial sentiments and bonds based upon common ancestryrsquo Likewise Eller and


Coughlan (1993) though they clearly think little of the primordialist position neverthelessstate lsquoIn many parts of the world but perhaps best documented in Africa new ethnic iden-tities and groups are being created which claim [emphasis added] primordial statusrsquoPatterson (1975) who presents the most extreme individualistic self-interest-maximisermodel of ethnicity nevertheless concurs that lsquoshould members subjectively assume theexistence of such ldquomythicalrdquo [primordial] bases the salient condition of ethnicity is metrsquoFinally Barth originally admitted that lsquo ethnic membership is at once a question of sourceof origin as well as of current identityrsquo (1969 p 29)9 The problem is thus akin to the controversy in the biological sciences over what alsquospeciesrsquo is All biologists agree what organismal aggregates they want to call lsquospeciesrsquo butproviding a scientic denition of such units has been difcult and continues to divide biol-ogists (Ridley 1993 ch 15) However an attempt to provide an analytical description ofspecies has given biologists insights into the natural world and also into the human brainrsquoshandling of natural categories I expect the same will be true of an even moderately success-ful effort to dene ethnicity from the analytical and causal point of view

References

BANTON M 1994 lsquoModelling ethnic and national relationsrsquo Ethnic and Racial Studiesvol 17 no 1 pp 1ndash19BARNARD J T O 1925 lsquoThe history of Putaorsquo Journal of the Royal Central Asian Societyvol XVBAR-TAL D et al (eds) 1989 Sterotyping and Prejudice New York Springer-VerlagBARTH F 1956 lsquoEcologic relationships of ethnic groups in Swat North PakistanrsquoAmerican Anthropologist vol 58 pp 1079ndash1089mdashmdash 1963 lsquoEthnic processes on the Pathan-Baluch boundaryrsquo in G Redard (ed) Indo-Iranica Wiesbadenmdashmdash (ed) 1969 Ethnic Groups and BoundariesThe Social Organization of Cultural Differ-ences Boston MA Little Brown amp Comdashmdash 1981[1969] lsquoPathan identity and its maintenancersquo in F Barth (ed) Features of Personand Society in Swat Collected Essays on Pathans Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth VolumeII London Routledge amp Kegan Paulmdashmdash 1994 lsquoEnduring and emerging issues in the analysis of ethnicityrsquo in H Vermeulen ampC Govers (eds) The Anthropology of Ethnicity Beyond lsquoEthnic Groups and BoundariesrsquoAmsterdam Het SpinhuisBENTLEY G C 1987 lsquoEthnicity and practicersquo Comparative Studies in Society History vol29 pp 24ndash25BESSAC F B 1965 lsquoCo-variation between interethnic relations and social organization inInner Asiarsquo Papers of the Michigan Academy of ScienceArts and Letters vol L Ann ArborMI University of Michigan PressBLOOM P 1993 lsquoLanguage developmentrsquo Handbook of PsycholinguisticsAcademic PressIncBONACICH E 1980 lsquoClass approaches to race and ethnicityrsquo Insurgent Sociologist vol10 pp 9ndash24BOYD R and RICHERSON P 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process Chicago ILUniversity of Chicago Pressmdashmdash 1992 lsquoPunishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizablegroupsrsquo Ethology and Sociobiology vol 13 pp 171ndash95BOYER P 1994 The Naturalness of Religious Ideas Berkeley CA University of Califor-nia PressCHERVYAKOV V GITELMAN Z and SHAPIRO V 1997 lsquoReligion and ethnicityJudaism in the ethnic consciousness of contemporary Russian Jewsrsquo Ethnic and RacialStudies vol 20 no 2 pp 280ndash305


COHEN R 1978 lsquoEthnicity problem and focus in anthropologyrsquo Annual Review of Anthro-pology vol 7 pp 379ndash403DESPRES L A 1975 lsquoToward a theory of ethnic phenomenarsquo in L A Despres (ed)Ethnicity and Resource Competition in Plural Societies The Hague Mouton pp 187ndash208ELLER J D and COUGHLAN R M 1993 lsquoThe poverty of primordialism the demysti-cation of ethnic attachmentsrsquo Ethnic and Racial Studies vol 16 no 2 pp 185ndash202EVANS-PRITCHARD E E 1968 The Nuer a Description of the Modes of Livelihood andPolitical Institutions of a Nilotic People New York Oxford University PressGEERTZ C 1963 lsquoThe integrative revolution primordial sentiments and civil politics inthe new statesrsquo in C Geertz (ed) Old Societies and New States New York Free PressGIL-WHITE F J 1999 lsquoAre Ethnic Groups ldquoSpeciesrdquo to the Human Brain Essentialismin our Cognition of some Social Categoriesrsquo unpublished manuscriptGOODENOUGH W H 1965 lsquoRethinking ldquostatusrdquo and ldquorolerdquo Towards a general modelof cultural organization of social relationshipsrsquo in P Kunstadter (ed) The Relevance ofModels for Social Anthropology London Tavistock PublicationsGROSBY S 1994 lsquoThe verdict of history the inexpungeable tie of primordiality ndash aresponse to Eller and Coughlanrsquo Ethnic and Racial Studies vol 17 no 1 pp 164ndash71HAALAND G 1969 lsquoEconomic determinants in ethnic processesrsquo in F Barth (ed) EthnicGroups and Boundaries Boston MA Little Brown and CoHEATHER P 1996 The Goths Cambridge MA BlackwellHECHTER M 1986 lsquoTheories of ethnic relationsrsquo in J J Stack (ed) The PrimordialChallenge Ethnicity in the Contemporary World New York Greenwood Press pp 13ndash24mdashmdash 1992 lsquoThe dynamics of secessionrsquo Acta Sociologica vol 35 pp 267ndash83HENRICH J and BOYD R 1998 lsquoThe evolution of conformist transmission and theemergence of between-group differencesrsquo Evolution and Human Behavior vol 19 no 4pp 215ndash41HJORT A 1981 lsquoEthnic transformation dependency and change The Ilgira Samburu ofNorthern Kenyarsquo in J G Galaty and P C Salzman (eds) Change and Development inNomadic and Pastoral Societies Leiden EJ BrillHOGG M A 1992 The Social Psychology of Group Cohesivenes From Attraction to SocialIdentity Washington Square NY New York University PressHOROWITZ D L 1975 lsquoEthnic identityrsquo in N Glazer and D P Moynihan (eds) EthnicityTheory and Experience Cambridge MA Harvard University Press pp 111ndash40mdashmdash 1985 Ethnic Groups in Conict Berkeley CA University of California PressISAACS H R 1975 lsquoBasic group identity the idols of the tribersquo in N Glazer and D PMoyniham (eds) Ethnicity Theory and Experience Cambridge MA Harvard UniversityPressJENKINS R 1996 lsquoEthnicity etcetera social anthropological points of viewrsquo Ethnic andRacial Studies vol 19 no 4 pp 807ndash22KELLY R 1985 The Nuer Conquest Structure and Development of an Expansionist SystemAnn Arbor MI University of Michigan PressKEYES C F 1976 lsquoTowards a new formulation of the concept of ethnic grouprsquo Ethnicityvol 3 pp 202ndash13KHAZANOV A 1994 Nomads and the Outside World (2nd edn) Madison WI Univer-sity of Wisconsin PressLAKOFF G 1987 Women Fire and Dangerous Things What Categories Reveal About TheMind Chicago IL University of Chicago PressLEACH E R 1977 [1954] Political Systems of Highland Burma London London Schoolof Economics and Political ScienceLEMARCHAND R 1986 lsquoEthnic violence in tropical Africarsquo in J F J Stack (ed) ThePrimordial Challenge Ethnicity in the Contemporary World New York Greenwood Presspp 185ndash205LEVINE R A and CAMPBELL D T 1972 Ethnocentrism Theories of Conict EthnicAttitudes and Group Behavior New York Wiley


LEYENS J P YZERBYT V and SCHADRON G 1994 Stereotypes and Social CognitionLondon SageMEDIN D L and ORTONY A 1989 lsquoPsychological essentialism rsquo in S Vosniadou and AOrtony (eds) Similarity and Analogical Reasoning Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPressMILLER D T and MCFARLAND C 1991 lsquoWhy social comparison goes awry the case ofpluralistic ignorancersquo in J Suls and T Ashby (eds) Social Comparison ContemporaryTheory and Research Hillsdale NJ L Erlbaum AssociatesMITCHELL J C 1974 lsquoPerceptions of ethnicity and ethnic behaviour an empirical explo-rationrsquo in A Cohen (ed) Urban Ethnicity London Tavistock publicationsMOERMAN M 1965 lsquoEthnic identication in a complex civilization Who are the LuersquoAmerican Anthropologist vol 67 pp 1215ndash1230mdashmdash 1968 lsquoBeing Lue Uses and abuses of ethnic identicationrsquo in J Helm (ed) Essays onthe Problem of Tribe Seattle WA University of Washington PressMOTYL A J 1997 lsquoReimagining Primordialism Constructing an Alternative to Construc-tivismrsquo unpublished manuscriptNAGATA J 1981 lsquoIn defense of ethnic boundaries The changing myths and charters ofMalay identityrsquo in C F Keyes (ed) Ethnic Change Seattle amp London University of Wash-ington PressNAGEL J 1993 lsquoConstructing ethnicity Creating and recreating ethnic identity andculturersquo in N Yetman (ed) Majority and Minority The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity inAmerican Life Boston MA Allyn and BaconOKAMURA J Y 1981 lsquoSituational ethnicityrsquo Ethnic and Racial Studies vol 4 no 4 pp453ndash65PATTERSON O 1975 lsquoContext and choice in ethnic allegiance a theoretical frameworkand a Caribbean case studyrsquo in N Glazer and D P Moynihan (eds) Ethnicity Theory andExperience Cambridge MA Harvard University Press pp 305ndash49QUINE W V O 1960 Word and Object Cambridge MA MIT PressRIDLEY M 1993 Evolution Boston MA Blackwell Scientic PublicationsRODKIN P C 1993 lsquoThe psychological reality of social constructionsrsquo Ethnic and RacialStudies vol 16 no 4 pp 633ndash56ROOSENS 1994 lsquoThe primordial nature of origins in migrant ethnicityrsquo in H Vermeulenand C Govers (eds) The Anthropology of Ethnicity Beyond lsquoEthnic Groups and Bound-ariesrsquo Amsterdam Het SpinhuisROYCE A P 1982 Ethnic Identity Bloomington IN Indiana University PressSALAMONE F A 1974 Persistence and Change in Ethnic and Religious Identity in YauriEmirate North-Western State Nigeria New Haven CT HRAFlex Books Human RelationsArea File IncSHILS E 1957 lsquoPrimordial personal sacred and civil tiesrsquo British Journal of Sociologyvol 8 no 2 pp 130ndash45STACK J F J 1986 lsquoEthnic mobilization in world politics the primordial perspectiversquo in JF J Stack (ed) The Primordial Challenge Ethnicity in the Contemporary World New YorkGreenwood Press pp 1ndash11SYMONS 1992 lsquoOn the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behaviorrsquo inJ H Barkow L Cosmides and J Tooby (eds) The Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychol-ogy and the Generation of Culture New York and Oxford Oxford University Presspp 137ndash62THOMPSON R H 1989 Theories of EthnicityA Critical Appraisal New York GreenwoodPressTILLEY V 1997 lsquoThe terms of the debate Untangling language about ethnicity and ethnicmovementsrsquo Ethnic and Racial Studies vol 20 no 3 pp 497ndash522TOOBY J and COSMIDES L 1992 lsquoThe psychological foundations of culturersquo In J HBarkow L Cosmides and J Tooby (eds) The Adapted Mind Evolutionary Psychology andthe Generation of Culture New York and Oxford Oxford University Press pp 627ndash37


TURNER J C et al 1987 Rediscovering The Social Group A Self-Categorization TheoryOxford and New York BlackwellVAN DEN BERGHE P 1987 [1981] The Ethnic Phenomenon Westport CT and LondonPraegerWALLERSTEIN I 1960 lsquoEthnicity and national integration in West Africarsquo CahiersdrsquoEacutetudes Africaines vol 3 no 1WEBER M 1978 Economy and SocietyAn Outline of an Interpretive Sociology BerkeleyCA University of California PressYOUNG C 1976 The Politics of Cultural Pluralism Madison WI University of WisconsinPress

FRANCISCO J GIL-WHITE is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at theUniversity of California Los AngelesADDRESS Department of Anthropology Box 951553 University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles 405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles CA 90095-1553 USA (gilwhiteuclaedu)


a child was born of Tigre parents but was immediately adopted by anOromo couple subsequently grew up among Oromo and was in everyrespect like an Oromo would he be thought of as an Oromorsquo lsquoNorsquo hereplied lsquohe would be accepted by the Oromo community but the parentswould think ldquoThis is our Tigre childrdquo He would still be Tigrersquo Andrecently my Russian teacher herself a Russian Jew told me that to her Iwas a Jew because I am descended from Jews She will not budge andmaintains this view despite being aware that (1) I have to go back aboutfour generations (perhaps more) to nd an ancestor who practisedJudaism (after that they are all Roman Catholic) (2) I did not grow upwith a Jewish identity and (3) my parents and I did not even know thatany of our ancestors were Jewish until I was about ten years old when agenealogy buff in the family uncovered this information

I suspected my Russian teacher would scoff at the circumstantialistmodel of ethnicity which maintains that ethnies are lsquoconstructedrsquo byrational actors who calculate their objective interests and then makedecisions concerning association andor political mobilization withothers I was right she found it silly I myself would be less harsh es-pecially considering that there is more to the circumstantialist view thanthe short caricature I gave her Nevertheless this article will ask and elab-orate on the following question if most people are like my Russianteacher where does this leave the circumstantialist model

Recently the circumstantialist (aka instrumentalist) model of ethnicityndash vs the primordialist model ndash has been in the ascendant However theabove anecdotes reveal that some people possess ethnobiological andtherefore lsquoprimordialistrsquo models concerning the acquisitiontransmissionof ethnic statuses This will not affect our views on ethnicity if suchmodels are not common but this study will present recent ethnographicdata from Mongolia that found primordialist models to be predominantthere These data point to very serious shortcomings in the circumstan-tialist model and also to some under-recognized strengths in the pri-mordialist view that can be formalized and operationalized in a cogentscientic model of ethnicity which I shall attempt to do With theseinsights much data from other parts of the world including some earlierput forth to support the circumstantialist position can be shown insteadto bolster these key primordialist points I propose a more sophisticatedand testable model which ts the empirical data better and combinesvaluable insights from both primordialists and circumstantialists withoutsuccumbing to the excesses of either Perhaps we can lay the controversyto rest

2 Barth and the circumstantialist model

Anthropologists once believed ethnic groups or lsquoculturesrsquo to be lsquopeoplesrsquoin a unitary sense along various dimensions lsquoascriptiversquo (labelling)



















Field site


Methods



















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References



























Field site


Methods



















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References






















Field site


Methods



















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References
















Field site


Methods



















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References












Field site


Methods



















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References


























N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References


















N = 59









N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References


















N = 15


The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References











The models






































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References








































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References































































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References



























































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References





















































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References














































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References









































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References
































































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References

























































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References





















































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References















































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References







































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References


































5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References





























5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References

























5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References



















5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References














5 Conclusion







Acknowledgements




Notes




References














Acknowledgements




Notes




References











Notes




References











References

























Documents

How thick is blood? The plot thickens . . .: if ethnic ...ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses99/malta/gil.pdfHow thick is blood? 791 network with Bs,I shall acquire a B identity together