Bodil Folke Frederiksen - Ethnicity, Gender and the Subversion of Nationalism

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ETHNICITY, GENDER AND THE SUBVERSION OF NATIONALISM

Ethnicity, Gender and
the Subversion of
Nationalism

edited by

FIONA WILSON
and
BODIL FOLKE FREDERIKSEN

First published 1995 by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

This edition published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1995 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN 0 7146 4155 3 (pbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ethnicity, gender, and the subversion of nationalism / edited by Fiona
Wilson and Bodil Folke Frederiksen
p. cm.
Published also as v. 6, no. 2 of The European journal of development research.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7146-4155-3 (pbk)
1. Ethnicity Developing countries. 2. Sex role Developing countries. 3. Nationalism Developing countries. 4. Women in development Developing countries. 5. Women Developing countries Social conditions. I. Wilson, Fiona. II. Frederiksen, Bodil Folke, 1943-
GN495.6.E885 1995
305.8dc20 94-43142
CIP

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on Ethnicity, Gender and the
Subversion of Nationalism of the European Journal of Development Research, Vo1.6.,
No.2, December 1994 published by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Typeset by Frank Cass, London

Contents

Fiona Wilson and Bodil Folke Frederiksen

Verena Stolcke

Fiona Wilson

Preben Kaarsholm

Karen Tranberg Hansen

Bodil Folke Frederiksen

Philip Raikes

Thomas Blom Hansen

Neil Webster

Ninna Nyberg Srensen

Introduction:
Ethnicity, Gender and the Subversion of Nationalism

FIONA WILSON and BODIL FOLKE FREDERIKSEN

THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY

The politics of identity have come to stay. For a long time social groups have made their choices and organised their lives according to dimensions of identity. In the social sciences the division of labour within academic disciplines and shifting fashions have meant that this fact has been taken up and discussed only sporadically. Anthropology, political science, and social psychology debated and researched questions of identity in the 1950s and 1960s, womens studies have been engaged with male and female identities since the 1970s, and, interestingly, the recent agenda-setting academic work on identities has been spearheaded by departments of literature, particularly in the United States.

In its short career development studies has tended to consider identity whether based on gender, religion, or ethnicity to be an obstacle to development, in so far as the discipline has pondered the subject at all. The uncritical use in development studies and development practice of concepts such as grass roots and participation indicates a wilful denial of the relevance of identity-based social difference and inequality in Third World societies.

On the other hand, questions of social collectivity and political identity have for a long time been central for those policy-makers who are accountable to nation state or local government authorities rather than to free-floating development bureaucracies. Hegemonic control by state or local authorities presupposes that the people concerned are willing to define themselves and form groups and organisations along lines of similarities often imposed from above. This is true in a colonial situation and in a complex developing society. If people do not willingly form allegiances, a great deal of violence must be expended to secure domination. Historically identities have been created in a tension between policy-oriented definitions from the outside and self-definitions. They fluctuate in accordance with local, national and global power politics; they are pragmatic and contested.

Identities spring from peoples core experience. But not from any essence. They are constructed in a strategic field with an eye to maximising possibilities of choice. They are informed by peoples perspectives and knowledge of a narrow or broader locality. The knowledge which goes into a self-defined identity is privileged. Nobody is a greater expert than yourself. You are master of your own identity. Not in the sense that it is not contested, it probably is, because there may be no space for your particular identity in a world of scarce resources. But it is privileged in the sense that you are at home in it. It is familiar; your knowledge of it has no rival. In that sense identity is the ultimate popular knowledge.

Conflicts over definitions of identity are often violent. At the personal level this stems from the hurt felt when an outsider has the power to define identity in ways which deny the individuals own expert knowledge, composed as it is of core experiences, desires and yearnings and strategic plans for life. Utopian ideas are often powerful elements in the construction, or perhaps rather the imagining of identities. They represent the reverse side of dystopian realities and may be clung to with a passion which is proportional to the distance between the experienced reality and the desired ideal. Similar points may be raised with regards to claims to a shared ethnicity.

RELATING ETHNIC AND GENDER IDENTITIES

Ethnicity has stood for a groups way of conceptualising and relating to the enveloping society. In some cases, ethnicity may be mobilised to be constitutive of the concept of a nation [Smith, 1991]. The concept welds together individuals who share history, culture and community; who have an amalgam of language, religion, and regional belonging in common; and, perhaps most critical of all, feel they come from the same stock. Somewhere, far back, they have been a kin group, clan or tribe. And as emphasised in anthropological debates about ethnicity in the 1960s, one can often understand more by focusing on the boundary of an ethnic group rather than on the cultural stuff that it encloses [Barth, 1969:15]. Most earlier discussions of ethnicity failed to explore questions of gender or the implications that follow when the imagery of genealogy, kin and clan lie at the root of ethnic identities. Useful recent literature discussing relations between gender, ethnicity and nationalism include Davin [1978], Yuval-Davis and Anthias [1989], Anthias and Yuval-Davis [1992], and Brah [1993].

Given the underlying idiom of kinship, it has been hard for ethnicity to escape from racist overtones. If group membership is perceived of as something passed on by parents to children, as a kind of birthright, then we find comparable notions to the ideology of purity of blood which, as Stolcke discusses in her contribution, underlay the socio-racial hierarchies of colonial South America. Where ideas of heritage and inheritance become intermingled in this way, issues surrounding the reproduction of the group become centrally important.

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