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/THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN SOCIETY

"Preface," Ethnicity, Edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. Ethnicity as a term and a subject of study is very recent. For at least 150 years liberals and socialists confidently expected the demise of ethnic, racial, and national ties and the unification of the world through international trade and mass communications. These expectations have not been realized. Instead, we are witnessing a series of explosive ethnic revivals across the globe. In Europe and the Americas ethnic movements unexpectedly surfaced from the 1960s and 1970s, in Africa and Asia they have been gaining force since the 1950s, and the demise of the former Soviet Union has encouraged ethnic conflicts and national movements to flourish throughout its territory. Since 1990 twenty new states based largely upon dominant ethnic communities have been recognized. Clearly, ethnicity, far from fading away, has now become a central issue in the social and political life of every continent. The "end of history", it seems, turns out to have ushered in the era of ethnicity. Since the 1960s scholars have increasingly come to appreciate the centrality of ethnic cleavages in the operation of states, but they have tended to underestimate the role of ethnicity as a regulative cultural and political principle in world affairs. There has also been a relative neglect of the deeper historical roots of ethnicity. A longer-term perspective reveals the significance of ethnic ties and sentiments in every period of recorded history, even when there are problems in interpreting their meaning and diffusion in our often-fragmentary records. It is these historical and comparative
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dimensions, and the shared memories and symbols through which they are activated, that lend to modern ethnic identities and antagonisms their peculiar passion and intensity, raising questions about the degree to which modernity, as is so often assumed, constitutes a radical break with the past. "The Concept of Ethnie ," Ethnicity, Ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 5-7. The key term in the field is that of ethnic group or ethnic community, but it is one for which there is no agreed stipulative or ostensive definition. The issue is complicated by the levels of incorporation which named human culture communities display. Handelman has distinguished four such levels: that of ethnic category, the loosest level of incorporation, where there is simply a perceived cultural difference between the group and outsiders, and a sense of the boundary between them. In the next stage, that of ethnic network, there is regular interaction between ethnic members such that the network can distribute resources among its members. In the ethnic association the members develop common interests and political organizations to express these at a collective, corporate level. Finally, we have the ethnic community, which possesses a permanent, physically bounded territory, over and above its political organizations; an example would be an ethnie in command of a national state (Handelman, 1977). . An ethnic group is defined here as a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialectic forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group. (Schermerhorn, 1978: 12) . In other words, ethnies habitually exhibit, albeit in varying degrees, six main features: 1. a common proper name, to identify and express the essence of the community; 2. a myth of common ancestry, a myth rather than a fact, a myth that includes the idea of a common origin in time and place and that gives an ethnie a sense of fictive 3. kinship, what Horowitz terms a super-family (Horowitz,1985: ch 2); shared historical memories, or better, shared memories of a common past or pasts,
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4. including heroes, events, and their commemoration; one or more elements of common culture, which need not be specified but normally 5. include religion, customs, or language; a link with a homeland, not necessarily its physical occupation by the ethnie, only its 6. symbolic attachment to the ancestral land, as with diaspora peoples; a sense of solidarity on the part of at least some sections of the ethnies population (A.D. Smith, 1986: ch 2). This brings out the importance of shared myths and memories in the definition of ethnies, and the subjective identification of individuals with the community; without the shared myths and memories, including myths of origin and election, and the sense of solidarity they engender, we would be speaking of an ethnic category rather than a community. The second key element is the orientation to the past: to the origins and ancestors of the community and to its historical formation, including its golden ages, the periods of its political, artistic, or spiritual greatness. The destiny of the community is bound up with its ethno-history, with its own understanding of a unique, shared past. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Anthony D. Smith. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1986, pp. 31-32. The six components of ethnie which I have isolated here afford a working definition of ethnicity, one which enables us to delimit the field from the adjacent ones of class and religious communities, and from territorial polities. In practice, some of the elements or components vary in degree of clarity, scope and intensity; myths of ancestry may be confused, historical memories may seem sketchy and the lines of cultural difference appear hazy and blurred. Nevertheless, enquiry into these six dimensions will generally reveal the extent to which we are dealing with an ethnie or an ethnic category, or simply some regional variation of an ethnie, or indeed a class or religious community or polity. Similarly, we would claim that collectivities in the process of ethnic formation will generally seek to augment their shared characteristics and differences along those of the six dimensions they appear to be deficient in in so far as this is within their power. But, then, given the important element of subjective perception, will, symbolism and communication involved, it is not impossible for would-be ethnie to develop their cultural differences, find appropriate names, re-construct an appropriate history and pedigree, or even a mythical homeland, out of the hazy memories, existing cultural
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markers and sense of shared origins and community that have given an impetus to ethnic formation in the first place. In other words, if a group of people feel they are a community, because of shared memories and an association with a territory or a myth of shared ancestry, it will not prove impossible to find a name, extend their solidarity and gradually formulate their own culture (based on separate religion, or customs, or language, or institutions or colour), so as to become an ethnie in the full sense of the term. It is, I should add, far more difficult to create an ethnic community which possesses a territory and even some element of separate culture, but little in the way of historical memories or myths of descent. Herein lies the problem of new and revolutionary would-be nations.

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