NOTES

Elller, Jack David, 1999, From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict: An Anthropological Perspective on International Ethnic Conflict, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

ORGANIZATION

The introduction and first two chapters of this book develop the broad conceptual framework from a postmodern anthropological perspective, including an attempt to clarify terminology (ethnicity, nation, state, etc.). The remaining five chapters each critically analyze a case of regional conflict (Sri Lanka, Kurds, Rwanda-Burundi, Bosnia, and Quebec). Eller confesses and cautions that for any case "...I do not believe that a single truth exists" (xii).

RECENT CONFLICT

In the "Introduction" Eller notes a shift in the fundamental character of violent conflicts and wars--- decreasingly state-state in the northern hemisphere to increasingly state-nonstate or nonstate-nonstate, usually in the southern hemisphere, and increasingly involving ethnic groups (1).

ETHNICITY

The recent surge in ethnic conflict has surprised many who assumed that ethnicity was on the decline with modernization and that countries were fairly homogeneous or becoming so. In addition, many have lacked historical perspective and confused various terms while they have not realized the extent of ethnic diversity in the modern world, some 5,000-7,000 distinct groups (2-4).
A working definition may be extracted from Eller's discussion--- ethnicity is a subjective, variable, and adaptable group identity reflecting the interplay of we/they distinctions by both insiders and outsiders as well as their changing circumstances. The circumstances include sociocultural, economic, and political characteristics, boundaries, and relations (12-14). Thus, ethnic groups are not necessarily ancient, static, discrete or bounded, impermeable, absolute, and objective or "real" units of culture and society (15). In short, ethnicity involves the process of the emergence, social institutionalization, and political mobilization of cultural identity in response to some kind(s) of practical problem(s) such as socioeconomic discrimination, exploitation, and oppression of one group by another (also see p. 45). Ethnicity is created, a cultural construction, and ultimately it's validity does not matter factually or objectively, but primarily in terms of its meaning to the group. Questions of uniqueness, authenticity, continuity, and relevance are secondary to the symbolic importance of ethnicity and nationhood (28, 40-41)).

STATE AND NATION

Eller defines a state as "a sovereign centralized political entity with a government empowered over a territory to make laws, collect taxes, and maintain an army" (16). He asserts that with the possible exception of nation-states like Japan, Iceland, and Norway, most states are multi-ethnic and/or multi-national (19). When an ethnic group seeks self-determination, or at least some degree of political autonomy from a state [country], then it is a nation, or at least involved in nationalism or nationhood (19, 45). Thus, ethnic group, nation, and state may or may not coincide, and their relationships vary through time and space depending on the particular circumstances of each case (20).
Nationhood is often a fundamental political challenge to the monopolistic authority or power of the state, including a shift in the locus of rights. A common response of the state is forced social integration (assimilation) and forced cultural change and loss (acculturation), often to the point of cultural extinction (ethnocide). However, in the contemporary world it is increasingly difficult for a democratic state to ignore or resist an ethnic group's quest for nationhood (42). Accordingly, Eller concludes the first chapter: "Culture, despite what the claimants say, is not what is really at stake; rather, culture, a justification or code for authentic and alternative groupness, is the basis of entitlement of the group to certain other stakes and rights, which will be specific to each instance" (48).

ANTHROPOLOGY

This discipline, with its holistic analysis of culture, has a strategic role in dealing with ethnic conflict. In particular, postmodernist anthropology can expose interests, power relations, structural interconnections, factional interpretations, and local viewpoints (emic)(2). Also it problematizes the various relationships between tradition, culture, ethnicity, nation, state, politics, and conflict (4). Thus, Eller states: "The ultimate conclusion of this book is that ethnicity is no mere reflection or reflex of culture, especially traditional culture, but a complex reworking, remembering, sometimes reinvention, and always employment of culture in the light and service of present and even future considerations" (5).
For ethnic group and nation, the past is variously relevant as tradition [customs], history (remembered or recorded events and personages), myths, and resource (28-47). Anthropology has often directly, or indirectly through its appropriation, played a role in the "scientific" identification, documentation, and legitimation or validation of ethnicity and nationhood with political and other ramifications far beyond mere scholarship (29-31).
In the second chapter, Eller traces the history of changes in anthropological theory regarding concepts like culture and ethnicity which basically amounts to the addition of postmodernist perspectives as an alternative to the prior modernist ones. Perhaps the most important point that Eller raises is the suggestion that when culture is totalized, and other allegiances disregarded or subjugated, then confrontation, conflict, and violence may erupt (65).

PRIMORDIALIST VS. CIRCUMSTANTIALIST

This is a second important topic discussed in Ch. 2 (71-83). Primordialists hold that ethnicity is natural or ascribed, irrational, retrograde, and therefore pernicious (74). Circumstantialists view ethnicity as a contested process--- a product of the changing circumstances and interests of a group as a highly subjective, particularistic, contextualized, and dynamic cultural construction. They are more likely to consider ethnicity as related to issues of economics, politics, justice, and rights (79).