In this lecture, I’ll discuss the concept of ethnicity, which is often regarded as a more acceptable way to understand social differences.
‘Ethnicity’ has been defined in at least three main ways.
FIRST, it has meant shared kinship between people based on a common line of descent.
In anthropology, social groups of this kind are usually referred to as endogamous
because their members maintain their genetic inheritance through exclusive interbreeding with each other.
At the beginning of human evolution, such groups would have been universal but they are ‘virtually impossible to find today.’
The anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote of the world in 1400 that
SECOND, the term ‘ethnicity’ has meant people with shared occupational roles in the division of labour.
This meaning of ethnicity is bound up with the colonial expansion of European capitalism.
On the one hand, European colonists used their knowledge of existing occupational patterns in pre-capitalist societies
to classify the population into supposedly different endogamous groups.
For example, in Rwanda, European colonial administrators transformed
differences in occupational roles between the Twas, Hutus and Tutsis into ‘imaginary ethnic distinctions’ between them.
On the other hand, the migrations which followed colonialism led some groups to either define themselves as endogamous,
or as possessing certain characteristics that distinguished them from the native people around them.
This means, in effect, that there are social processes occurring here
which are transforming /occupational/ similarities into /ethnic/ similarities.
The THIRD, and most influential definition of ethnicity, refers to a social group with a shared culture, heritage and identity.
This can include a shared ancestry, history, memories, sense of belonging and language, beliefs, values, and practices.
Ethnicity as shared culture and identity would seem to imply that, except in rare cases, everyone has an ethnicity.
However, North American sociologists used the term ‘ethnicity’ to describe people
who did not belong to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP population.
In effect, the term ‘ethnicity’ referred to members of minority groups
whose skin colour, religion or country of origin placed them outside the boundaries of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.
In fact, the term ‘ethnics,’ in the United States of the 1960s,
was described as a ‘polite term for Jews, Italians and other people regarded as inferior.
In Australia in the 1970s, governments, public servants and academics changed the language they used for immigrants
who had travelled here as part of the post-war immigration program.
They no longer referred to immigrants as ‘migrants’ or ‘new Australians.’
Instead, they referred to them as ‘members of ethnic groups.’
Ethnic groupings were seen as a key part of Australia’s multicultural society and were invited to retain and celebrate their ethnicity.
Ethnicity, in this sense, basically meant culture, and all cultures were supposed to be of equal value.
However, sociologists have pointed out that Australian-born people are rarely, if ever, seen as having an ‘ethnicity’.
Nor are groups of American, British, or English speaking New Zealand migrants.
The term ‘ethnic’ is only used to describe individuals or groups from non-English speaking cultures.
This points to an important problem with the meaning and use of the term ‘ethnicity.’
It can be used with very similar effects to the notion of ‘race.’
It can also provoke and authorise similar emotions of hostility to people who are ethnically different to oneself or one’s social group.
The Marxist thinker, Martin Baker, has called this tendency ‘new racism.
Ethnicity, to some extent, has replaced the term ‘race’ in language about social difference, but retaining some of the meaning of ‘race.’
Instead of being based on pseudo-scientific concepts of ‘race,’
the new racism is based on claims that social groups with different cultures are incompatible.
There’s an assumption that while people share a common human nature, that there are cultural groups,
whose difference is so extreme that there is no way of sharing a national identity with them.
The obvious example in Australia today is the attitude of some people to Muslims.
There’s a significant minority of Australians who see Islam as a religion that it antithetical to the cultural values they hold.
Sometimes they argue that Islam is antithetical to Christian values, and unacceptable for that reason.
At other times, the argument’s muddled up with ideas of Islam as ‘undemocratic’ or ‘uncivilised’.
The ongoing issue of asylum seekers coming to Australia is a good example of this type of ‘new racism’.
In 2001, a boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia started to sink and the Australian navy went to assist.
In the confusion and panic of the capsizing, children and adults ended up on the water.
A rumour started that the asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard to force the navy to rescue them.
Though this was soon proved to be untrue, it was printed and repeated again and again in the media.
Negative beliefs about how non-white people think and act – in other words, ‘racism’ –
made it easier to believe this story of asylum- seeker cruelty.
This kind of thinking in turn plays out in anti- immigration campaigns,
where immigrants are portrayed as a threat to established culture and identity.
It revolves around a naturalisation of ethnic characteristics,
whereby the language and religion of a group are treated as if they are natural and permanent, rather than as acquired and malleable.