Auxilary instruments of labor: The homogenization of diversity in the discourse of ethnicity
Date
1993-05-03
Authors
Wilmsen, Edwin N.
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Abstract
In the creation of an image of national unity successful
political states employ their power of cultural hegemony to
facilitate the continual renewal of forms of involuntary
ascription, such as ethnicity, that can coexist with a
national consciousness without apparent contradiction
precisely because they are cultural, that is ascribed, and
therefore appear both natural and national from the
perspective of individuals. Continued tacit acceptance of
imposed ethnic terms for current political discourse (e.g., in
Eastern Europe, Islamic Asia, southern Africa, USA minorities)
reaffirms the established status of these terms as the most
readily available avenue for collective self-identification
and action. "So long as social practice continues to be
pursued as if ethnicity did hold the key to the structures of
inequality, the protectionism of the dominant and the
responses of the dominated alike serve to reproduce an
ethnically ordered world" (Comaroff 1987:xxx). It is
particularly important to stress this at a time' when a
philosophy of primordial ethnicity is being widely reasserted
as a form of neo-racism to justify new or continued
suppression of dispossessed ethnic groups. In this paper, I
will analyze processes of ethnicization, identity
construction, and class formation in Botswana. In ethnicity and tribalism are conflated (e.g., Vail 1989). But
tribes, as Vail's authors make abundently clear, are a product
of colonial engagement; they are essentially administrative
constructs. On the other hand, ethnicity as a central logic
emerged out of conflicts engendered in competition for favored
positions among these tribal constructs. The emergent
ethnicities were formulated out of an amalgam of preexisting
indigenous and inserted colonial partitive ideologies. A
dominant class - in colonial Africa, this was often an
ascendent 'tribal' aristocracy - defined and determined the
terms of subordinate class competition which is the seedbed of
ethnicizing processes.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 3 May 1993
Keywords
Ethnicity, Ethnicity. Botswana