Ancestral and instrumental in the politics of ethnic and religious conflict

ABSTRACT

Ethnicity, like race, religion, and nationality, is a feature of group identity that is contested. There are literatures devoted to each, and in each there are those who see the origins of identity and affiliation in ancestry and deeply rooted affect and those who see these as socially constructed and instrumentally used by elites. Yet all recognize that the ancestral is socially constructed and that social constructions make use of existing cultural features, and that the vertical cleavages of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality dominate the horizontal ones of class. This generates implications for institutional changes, for the pursuit of extraterritorial interests, for the selection of explanatory narratives for conflict when multiple attributions are possible, for intra-communal conflict, and for policies for ethnic conflict regulation.     

The terms of the debate: Untangling language about ethnicity and ethnic movements

Theoretical debates on ethnicity suffer from a general confusion about the divergent meanings which academics ascribe to key terms. ‘Primordialist’ approaches include biological, psychological and cultural explanations, whose conflation tends to confuse proponents and critics alike. ‘Instrumentalist’ approaches conflate all ethnic movements within a profile of political opportunism, failing to recognize the varying degrees to which underlying social‐institutional incompatibilities may contribute to ethnic conflict. ‘Constructivist’ approaches vacillate between a focus on the influence of intellectual ethnic discourse and an understanding of ethnic identity as developing out of wider bodies of social experience. Greater attention to the varying contribution of ‘deep’ culture to ethnic conflict can clarify why these subschools find such differences among ethnic movements, which can indeed be understood to vary along a spectrum of political functions: at one pole, ethnic movements seek to inflate ethnic sentiment for political purposes; at the other, they seek rather to reconstruct the existing political position of a distinct cultural formation. This distinction can permit more appropriate policy‐making towards the resolution of ethnic conflict, yet raises new challenges to the biases of the researcher.     

Negotiating optimum distinctiveness: cognitive tendencies toward primordialism among Mapuche youth

In recent years primordialism, as a model for understanding people's essentialist perceptions of ethnic similarity and difference, has returned to social scientific debates with a new degree of respectability and theoretical rigour. This article provides further evidence for why primordialism is prioritized by ethnic minorities as a cognitive mechanism for maintaining group distinctiveness, drawing on data gathered among indigenous youth in Chile. In the absence of traditional cultural tenets such as indigenous language and knowledge among the majority of the sample, criteria for membership are premised on perceived essentialisms of blood and surname. The result of categorizing others under primordial terms, however, is that it facilitates a space in which individual preferences of ethnic expression and distinctiveness can be negotiated. This brings the dichotomization of primordialism and constructionism under further scrutiny, suggesting that they may be compatible in the everyday practices of social life.