Linking Essentialist and Constructivist Ethnicity

Abstract

This article argues that the essentialist and the constructivist positions within theories of ethnicity are in fact compatible if one introduces a concept here called “internalized fluid capacities”, connoting that which is inherently (genetically) dispositional – and in that sense biologically “anticipated” – but which remains to be developed into observable social characteristics through sociocultural impact. This perspective is based on the genetic capacity to mold or “instruct” the development of an organism from its embryonic state and onwards by using prior stages as points of departure for further instructions. In this way, certain fluid capacities become imprinted in individuals and collectivities through reinforcing interaction with the ambient society. These capacities may then harden and develop into apparent “essentials”, forming a group's collective self-image. The article concludes with the suggestion that this explanatory model can be usefully applied to the debate around Swedish governmental definitions of Saamihood.

Key Words:

• Ethnicity
• Essentialist
• Constructivist
• Saami
• Anticipated capacities
• Genetic information

Notes

¹ This article has grown from the author's presentation made at the Trond Thuen seminar in Tromsö, Norway in 2010.

² For several decades a controversy has raged among molecular evolutionists concerning the question whether selective processes act even at the molecular level (as the “selectionists” maintain), or only at the organismic level (as the “neutralists” claim). The selectivist camp insists that the principles of natural selection must be operative at all levels of life, even the molecular. On the other hand, the neutralist position emphasizes the role of “molecular drift”, whereby mutations occur periodically at the molecular level, but are not forced to compete for survival with “rival” molecules within the protoplasm. See Michael R. Dietrich, “Paradox and Persuasion: Negotiating the Place of Molecular Evolution within Evolutionary Biology,” in Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 1998), pp. 85–111. For our purposes, however, there is no need to resolve this particular controversy. My main point here is simply that the development of complex structures at the organismic level surely cannot take place as a result of natural selection alone at the molecular level. There must also be an encompassing framework, driven by historical precedents and cooperative processes within the protoplasm, that together determine the formation of the genes and other organic molecules.

³ Bateson (1979) discusses how the development of bilateral symmetry in a frog is based on the polarity of the egg in relation to a line derived by the point of fertilization by the sperm on the egg's surface. Hence, even at this most early stage of ontogeny, genetic instruction refers its construction to a prior essential.

⁴ It must be the history of the development of the internal essential reference points which the genes need to act upon in controlling the developmental process of the fetus which is developing. This need not at all be an exact copy of the outward manifestation of the organism's evolutionary development in its external environment. A great deal of ink has been spilled about the fallacies of the old “recapitulationist” model, which takes as its point of departure the famous phrase by Ernst Haeckel that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (1868). No doubt Haeckel's formulation of the principle appears somewhat simplistic in the light of subsequent discoveries in the field of developmental biology, and it is surely an exaggeration to refer to it as the so-called “biogenetic law”. Yet the insight that biological organisms develop partly by means of sequentially modifying structures inherited from their ancestors is not without a grain of truth.

⁵ Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977). Gould frames the issue in terms of two main principles of evolution, which together account for the diversification of new structures in organisms: the principle of physiological and morphological addition and the principle of displacement. Addition occurs when a quite novel feature or structure emerges in the course of evolution, whereas displacement involves the reassignment in the functions of an organ or tissue from its uses in one species into a different set of functions in a descendent species. “I must emphasize”, Gould writes, “that classifications based upon addition and displacement completely exhaust the morphological description of how evolution can occur. Evolutionary changes must appear in ontogeny, and they can arise only by the introduction of new features or by the displacement of features already present. The second process produces parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny; the first does not. Together, they describe the course of morphological evolution. The continued relevance to modern biology of the great historical theme of parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny rests entirely upon the relative frequency of evolution by displacement rather than by introduction” (214, emphasis his).

⁶ I would like to thank my brother, Edward A. Beach, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, for suggesting this interesting example of an internalized fluid capacity.

⁷ Note that this change in Sweden from an individualized to a collectivized foundation for indigenous rights adumbrates the position taken by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted in 2007.

⁸ When composed in 1971, this paragraph was not gender-neutral in terminology, although Saami women were recognized to hold the reindeer herding right.

⁹ In 1998 a lawsuit was filed by 120 landowners against three Saami villages contesting their use of grazing lands owned by the plaintiffs in the territory of Nordmaling. The question was whether the Saami villages fulfilled the legal requirements of use over time and had the right to herd according to customary right. Ending a 14-year-long legal process, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled in April 2011 that the Saami reindeer herders are entitled to graze their animals in the territory of Nordmaling according to the principle of customary rights. This is the first major legal victory for the Saami after decades of defending their right to herd reindeer on privately owned lands (Sasvari & Beach 2011).