Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology

Abstract

This essay reflects on the relationship between anthropological and historical scholarship of ethnicity, picking up on themes explored by Andre Gingrich, by considering the epistemological and evidentiary limitations of social scientific and historical analysis and reconstruction. Beginning with the consideration of the pioneering transdisciplinary efforts of Robert Darnton and Clifford Geertz, it argues that many of the weaknesses ascribed to such efforts are actually part of the nature of social scientific investigation which, in the terms of Peter Winch, must take into account two sets of relationships: that of the relationship between the scientist and the phenomena that he or she observes and the symbolic system that he or she shares with other scientists, which can only be understood from the social context of common activity. How these two relationships challenge social scientific analysis of ethnicity are examined through a consideration of the difficulties of applying Anthony Smith's definition of an ethnie to either Fredrik Barth's classic essay on “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance” or Helmut Reimitz's study of Frankish identity. It concludes that neither anthropologists nor historians are simply describing societies as they are or as they were but rather attempt to describe societies as witnesses within them thought they should be, and we do this for our own society, not for those of the participants, past or present.

Keywords:

• Ethnicity
• History
• Anthropology

Notes

1 See Robert Darnton's recollections of this seminar in his New York Review of Books essay, republished in the American Historical Association's Perspectives, after Geertz's death in 2006, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0702/0702mem1.cfm (accessed 2 December 2011).

2 Cited by Hutchinson in There is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (2008).

3 Especially Chapter 1, ‘Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed Again’, 21–53.

4 Cited by Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 227.

5 Esp., 47.

6 For a reappraisal of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries 25 years later see Vermeulen and Govers (1994). For a sympathetic but somewhat critical recent appreciation of Barth's work see Brubaker (2009), esp. 29–30.

7 I am grateful to Professor Reimitz for allowing me to read his manuscript, which is forthcoming.