Recap

Instrumentalism

How "fluid" can race/ethnicity be?

Contrary to expectations:

• Ethnic/racial groups can change quickly (years/decades, not centuries)
  • Creoles in Louisiana, Irish Catholics, Muhajirs
• Divides between ethnic/racial groups do not depend on objective cultural difference
  • Yoruba (Ancestral Cities vs. Religion)
• People simultaneously belong to multiple ethnicities/races, not equally salient
  • Yoruba
  • Communities at home vs in diaspora

• Apparently rapid switching
  • switching groups
  • switching criteria for "difference" (stars on, stars off)

instrumentalist theory of race/ethnicity:

a constructivist theory that suggests:

1. individuals are motivated by economic and political gains

2. ethnic groups are an easy way to organize and coordinate to win elections, mobilize to improve benefits/business

3. because ethnicity is changable and shared traditions invented

4. ethnic groups change quickly as people (rationally) make them large enough to win elections/business, but small enough to maximize the benefit to each member (minimum winning coalition)

Ethnic groups can change whenever political and economic incentives change

Chewas and Tumbukas, tribal groups that differ along:

• language
• traditional dances
• traditional norms norms
• rituals
• farming practices

British South African Company: arbitrary boundary

In Malawi:

Chewas and Tumbukas are political adversaries

In Zambia:

Chewas and Tumbukas are seen as part of same ethnic group; political allies

Political usefulness of these groups (minimum winning coalition)

In Malawi:

Chewa and Tumbuka are 28 and 12 percent of population;

Big enough to organize to claim government resources

In Zambia

Chewa and Tumbuka are 7 and 4 percent of population

Too small to organize for government resources, organized around shared Nyanja language

nested cleavage: when multiple ethnic/racial identities are organized such that membership in a smaller group implies membership in a specific larger group

crosscutting cleavage: when multiple dimensions of ethnic/racial identities are organized such that membership in a group along one dimension does not imply membership in a specific group along the other dimension

overlapping cleavage: when multiple dimensions of ethnic/racial identities are organized such that membership in a group on one dimension implies membership in similarly-sized group along the other dimension

• For illustrative purposes only, not strictly true

Tension between identity and identification

Seen that ethnicity and race are socially constructed…

…but we can't just identify as anything we want.

Socially constructed \(\nRightarrow\) Race/Ethnicity is subjective

ethnic/racial identification is inter-subjective