Question

What are Geertz and Barth’s views on ethnicity? Which model do you think better describes your own view of your ethnic affiliation?

Answer 1

Fredrik Barth’s approach, which sees ethnic group building as a signaling system, to place it within a framework that draws from collective action and costly signaling theories. From these perspectives, ethnic signaling, although representing a costly penalty to group members, is one effective form of communication that facilitates collective management of resources.

I then identify three contexts in which the benefits of ethnic group building are likely to outweigh its signaling costs: in politically chaotic refuge and periphery zones; in the context of long-distance specialist trading groups; and within the territorial scope of failed states. I point to selected data from the Mughal and Aztec polities to illustrate how a combination of effective public goods management, in highly collective states, and the growth of highly integrated commercial economies will render ethnic group building superfluous.

Early in the 20th century, anthropologists turned to a focus on culture as a challenge to the biologically reductionist race thinking of 19th century evolutionists. This strong cultural program, promoted by Franz Boas and his followers, was influenced by a German tradition tracing its origins to Romanticists, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, and their “Aufklärer” followers of the 19th century (1). This group opposed ideas of British Enlightenment authors, such as John Locke, who argued that a society, as a commonwealth, ideally is the product of socially purposed institution building. In the Romantic reaction, society is understood less in terms of rational social action and institution building and more in terms of a people’s shared origins and history, and an emotional attachment to their culture, language, and local territory (2). Boasians drew inspiration from Romanticism to make the argument that even though there might some diffusion of culture traits across societal boundaries, still, each cultural unit or “tribe” (in the case of smaller scale societies) was understood to develop a distinct social, linguistic, and cultural configuration shared by its members. What I call a strong cultural program proved to be a source of disciplinary unity for decades but eventually proved to be problematic in the way it ignored the role of human agency in social group building.