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© 1993-2002 Kees Schilder
& Wim van Binsbergen
SUMMARY
The
papers in the present special issue of Afrika Focus are discussed
from a comparative and theoretical perspective, which highlights
the shortcomings of current approaches to African ethnicity on
two counts: the assumption that ethnicity is a colonial creation,
and the over-emphasis on political manipulation. The papers here
presented suggest that there is a case for a re-assessment of the
limits to ethnic manipulation, and the exploration of the
explanatory value of local cultures considered over considerable
time periods.
key
words: ethnicity, Africa, colonialism, culture
THE ARGUMENT
The papers
presented in this special issue on ethnicity of the review Afrika
Focus form a selection of the contributions to the
two-days’ Workshop on Ethnicity in Africa, which the editors
organised at the African Studies Centre, Leiden University,
December 12-13, 1991. While major responsibility, both
financially, logistically and conceptually, for the workshop lay
with the African Studies Centre,[1] it reflected a combined initiative from the
Netherlands Association of African Studies and its Belgian
sister, the Belgian Association of Africanists. One of our aims
was to bring together Africanist scholars working in the
Netherlands and Belgium who were either focusing on ethnicity in
their current research, or who could be persuaded to present,
from the perspective of ethnicity, research data which they had
collected with a different emphasis in mind. In this way we
sought to perpetuate a tradition which had led to inspiring
similar Dutch-Belgian encounters in 1981 and 1984.[2] Of course, our hidden
agenda was to stimulate more Dutch and Belgian colleagues to join
the international expansion of ethnic studies in recent years.
Furthermore we considered it useful to make a link, in the
programme of the Workshop, with related fields of studies which
— more than African ethnicity — had moved to the centre of
social scientists’ attention in both countries:
(a) the recent
outburst of ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe (associated with
violent conflict and the disintegration of states), and
(b) growing ethnic
tensions in Western Europe as a result of a massive influx of
migrants since the 1960s, associated with the colonial heritage
and with labour migration from the Mediterranean region.
We hoped that
African models of ethnicity could be applied to non-African
ethnic conflict situations. In order to accommodate the second
topic a lively mini-symposium on global ethnic issues was
organised within the workshop. Papers concerning non-African
topics could obviously not be included in this special issue, so
that the present selection, already kept to a minimum so as to
fit the format of this journal, is certainly not a representative
reflection of the proceedings of the Workshop itself.[3] The papers at the
workshop presented various aspects of the study of ethnicity.
They made it clear that, for the time being, ethnicity does not
constitute a main topic in Dutch and Belgian Africanist research.
They particularly reflected the paucity of theory formation
concerning ethnic processes, and the selection presented here
forms hardly an exception. From the Africanist perspective,
ethnic studies seem to constitute a vaguely defined field of
research, characterised more by a variety of themes and
explanatory factors stressed than by a unified theory. For
instance, there is still far from agreement as to the distinctive
characteristics of the ethnic group. Most commonly, authors refer
to: a shared origin or descent, a shared name, culture, religion
or language, a habitat, and the consciousness, among the
group’s members, of belonging (Isajiw 1974; Amselle 1985:
15-19). It is remarkable that the four anthropologists in our
small collection (Van Binsbergen, Tiokou, Schilder, De Boeck)
emphasise the latter feature, the self-definitional aspect of
ethnicity or ethnic identity, whereas the only
non-anthropologist, the jurist Beke, defines ethnicity only by
analytical outsider’s criteria, notably language and descent.
In such a small
collection, gaps are inevitable: the production of
ethno-histories as a strategy to enhance ethnic group
consciousness; urban ethnicity; the role of the Christian
missions, education and literacy; the role of kinship and descent
in ethnic identity formation; gender issues; the role of
ethnicity in the wave of democratisation currently flowing over
Africa.
Not so much an
omission but a matter of deliberate emphasis is the fact that
ethnic conflict is not a main topic in the papers. This
must be seen as a corrective to the increasingly popular view
that ethnicity is synonymous with conflict. It should not be
forgotten that, despite such obvious hot spots as South Africa
and the Horn, in the majority of African societies more or less
peaceful ethnic relations predominate. Nevertheless, conflict is
not totally absent in the papers: Beke, Van Binsbergen and
Schilder pay attention to the fact that ethnic mobilisation may
turn out to be a ‘political weapon’ in the struggle for
realising collective interests (defined as political goals)
within the context of the modern state.
The articles
represent African countries as far apart as Algeria, Cameroon
(twice), Zaire, and Zambia. We regret that for practical reasons
no paper on South African ethnicity could be included, despite
the fact that such Dutch Africanists as Vernon February (1991).
The classic
distinction between a social-structural and a culturalist
approach to social reality is prominent in studies of ethnicity
in Africa, both in Holland and Belgium, and internationally.
Hitherto the former approach has been dominant. This is largely
due to the fact that within British social anthropology the study
of ethnicity started, in the 1950s (Mitchell 1956; Epstein 1958;
Gluckman 1960), as a reaction to the then prevailing
functionalism which tended heavily towards culturalism. African
societies had been conceived as isolated, integrated and
internally structured wholes: as ‘tribes’. This postulated
social unity was primarily seen as an ideological matter: it was
supposed to spring from a system of values and norms shared by
all participants — a common culture internalised by all members
of society. The classic anthropological monograph was the
principal result of this approach. However, soon the one-sided
emphasis on culture led to a reaction, mainly from the Manchester
school, claiming that it is not so much the norms and values
which direct processes of interaction, but micro-political
processes, to such an extent that the very norms and values so
stressed by the anthropology of an earlier vintage turned out to
be rather flexible and manipulative. People do not automatically
behave the way they have learned to do: they may either observe
norms or ignore or violate them, and in the process they adapt
their ideas as to whatever is right, valuable and worth pursuing.
In line with this theoretical shift, political determinism has
come to form a major tradition in the study of African ethnicity.
This
‘structuralist’ tendency in ethnicity studies is reflected in
the papers presented here in at least two respects:
(1) The
deconstruction of the ethnic group as a group. It was
realised that ‘the ethnic group’ is a mere reification (cf.
Fardon 1987). In our scholarly analysis, we should not take at
face value the absolute and a-historical meaning which African
participants attribute to their ‘ethnic group’. These
participants’ constructs do carry the suggestion that they are
static, bounded, solid and unchangeable units (and as van
Binsbergen argues in the theoretical part of his contribution
this is precisely what makes them effective), but such a
participants’ view totally ignores the historical dynamics of
ethnic identity, and the usually rather vague and blurred
boundaries which exist between sets of people designated
‘ethnic groups’.
(2) The
characterisation of ethnicity as a cultural process primarily
determined by an underlying struggle for power. People’s
ethnic consciousness is pictured as being formed in the course of
political confrontation; from this perspective, the study of
ethnicity needs to focus primarily on power, group relationships,
and structural tensions. The organisational framework for such
political struggle is the state; in other words, processes of
state formation (as well as its topical complement, state
dissociation) ‘determine’ ethnic consciousness. Historians
and anthropologists have situated the emergence of ethnic
consciousness within the framework of the colonial state and of
Christian mission. Three of our papers (Tiokou, Schilder and van
Binsbergen) study ethnicity in the framework of the state, in
Cameroon and Zambia respectively; which only leaves out de Boeck,
who studies patterns of inter-ethnic interaction at the local
level in southwestern Zaire without discussing colonial and
post-colonial state influence; and Beke, who does discuss the
state in Algeria but does not go into local culture.
What the papers
hardly do is problematise the nature and process of the
contemporary African state in itself. This is somewhat
regrettable, since far from being a fixed and static bedding for
the ethnic processes to flow through, the resilience of ethnic
phenomena both in contemporary Africa and in the world at large
appears to be intimately related to the rapid erosion of the
nation state by the combined effects of regional and local
pressures on the one hand, the global economy and changing
international and intercontinental political order on the other.
If wealth flows from the state, ethnicity provides a network to
redistribute it; if the state can no longer deliver, ethnicity
provides an increasingly important counter-structure for
security, distribution, assertion of group rights, etc.
The various papers
link the local rural form of ethnicity to processes in the statal
domain in various ways. Tioukou stresses the situationality of
ethnic identity: it is only one level in a hierarchical
classification of social identities which converge in each
individual. This implies that the nature of local ethnic identity
changes at the boundary of the ecological zone in which it has
emerged, to such a degree that it tends to conform to the
administrative units which were established in the colonial
period. Schilder goes into brokerage as the link between the
local society and the wider society; it goes together with ethnic
ambiguity of the brokers, notably the chiefs, who adopt the
dominant religion of the wider society without passing into the
dominant ethnic group. Van Binsbergen, while also highlighting
the role of ethnic brokers, emphasises the transformation which
selected items of the local expressive culture undergo in the
process of accommodation to the outside world; a
‘traditional’ festival is invented because the phenomenon of
the festival is an accepted element of the Zambian political
culture, and can (in a logic of commoditisation and
globalisation) easily be turned into a symbol of local group
identity.
Much recent
writing on ethnicity in Africa stresses the colonial state as the
architect of ethnic groups, via the creation of administrative
units which were subsequently labelled in ethnic terms. This
approach has emphasised the extent to which ethnic consciousness
was externally imposed in a context of unequal power relations. A
vocal exponent is Amselle (1985). In his view the advent of the
colonial state marked the introduction of ethnic identities in
Africa:
‘[Il]
n’existait rien qui ressemblat a une ethnie pendant la periode
precoloniale. Les ethnies ne procedent que de l’action du
colonisateur qui, dans sa volonte de territorialiser le continent
africain, a decoupe des entites ethniques qui ont ete elles-memes
ensuite reappropriees par les populations. Dans cette
perspective, l’“ethnie” (...) ne serait qu’un faux
archaisme de plus.’ (Amselle 1985: 23)
Before that time
the only supra-local social identities to exist derived, in
Amselle’s view, from economic, political, linguistic and
culturo-religious group formation, but not from ethnicity in its
own right. Thus Amselle radically reverses the view, current
especially outside academic circles, according to which ethnic
groups are ‘traditional’ and go back to the pre-colonial
past. Ethnic groups then appear as essentially a ‘modern’
phenomenon, which only emerged in the recent, nineteenth- and
twentieth century history of Africa. Similar views have been
presented by the contributors to Vail’s (1989) collection The
creation of tribalism in Southern Africa.
What these authors
have certainly managed to put across is the insight that ethnic
groups and ethnic identities are subject to constant change. A
Nkoya today does not have the same ethnic identity as a Nkoya a
hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago there were most
probably no people identifying as Nkoya at all (van Binsbergen
1992a). And even where we can claim a much greater time depth for
an ethnonym in itself,[4] this
does not mean that the associated ethnic identity would have the
same time depth and would have remained constant over that
period. Ethnicity is a dynamic process. It may develop
towards the stressing of ethnic identities, i.e. an increasing
hardening of ethnic boundaries articulated by distinctive
markers. Van Binsbergen mentions as a tool the ‘invention’ of
ethnic symbolism, a cultural festival, whereas Beke stresses the
role of political parties, which may function as catalysts of a
heightened and politicised ethnic solidarity in the context of
national politics. Ethnicity may, however, also develop into the
direction of ethnic boundary blurring or a weakening of ethnic
identities. This is highlighted by the articles of De Boeck and
Schilder, which pay attention to the existence of an ethnic
twilight zone, which could emerge through the adoption of
cultural traits from the wider regional society.
One obvious danger
inherent in the view that so-called ‘traditional’ groups are
colonial creations and ‘inventions’, lies in the absolute
passivity which this view attributes to the African population.
It implies that ethnicity is merely an ‘imposed identity’
projected onto Africans from the outside. This is too one-sided
to be illuminating, for a number of reasons. First, historical
research that goes beyond the colonial and mission archives and
seeks to tap oral and written African sources, has brought up too
much evidence of pre-colonial ethnic group classifications than
that these can be dismissed as mere anachronistic colonial
projections.[5] In
the same way we would not claim that the ethnonyms as used by
Caesar (1986) and Tacitus (1972) in their early descriptions of
western and central Europe were, at the time, mere colonial
inventions without a social and linguistic basis in the local
participants’ practice. And even when much of present-day
ethnicity in Africa can be shown to be of recent, colonial
origin, this should not merely be seen as imposition but also as
a local reaction to the effects of colonial and post-colonial
administration. The ethnic phenomenon also has an endogenous
source, from which the local reactions have been fed; and more
often than not this source includes the inspiration, at least,
from political and economic group distinctions in the
pre-colonial past. In other words, the ‘modern’ state has
been an important factor in twentieth-century ethnicity in
Africa, but certainly not the only one. It is our contention that
in the current discussion on the dynamics of ethnicity in Africa
the formative influence of the colonial (and post-colonial) state
is overestimated, at the expense of continuity with
pre-colonial processes of group formation. The blanket
statement that ethnic groups are ipso facto colonial
creations, is wrong: many ethnic groups in Africa have formed
before the advent of the colonial state.
It is remarkable
that four of the five papers touch on the topic of ethnic or
cultural dominance. Ethnic groups carry unequal power in a hierarchically
structured ethnic field: Arabs versus Berbers, Lozi versus
Nkoya, Fulbe versus Mundang. The authors focus on the subordinate
ethnic group, and pay to a larger or lesser degree attention to
the phenomenon of imposed self-images, which have been (partly)
internalised by the subordinate group. De Boeck and Tiokou
describe slightly different situations. The Yasa are part of a
regional ethnic field along with equal ethnic partners; in the
wider society, meanwhile, the Yasa are identified with the Bulu,
but this remains underexposed in the article. De Boeck describes
a situation where the ethnic group on which his research focuses,
the Aluund, is politically dominant, but depends on the ritual
authority of another, marginalised ethnic group: a division
between political power and healing authority.
Two articles deal
with ethnicity in a political context of Muslim dominance.
Beke and Schilder describe situations where peripheral ethnic
groups, the Berbers and Mundang respectively, adopt Islam without
passing into the dominant ethnic group. The Berbers adopted Islam
long ago, whereas the islamisation of the Mundang is only in its
initial phase. The Mundang have resisted islamisation for a long
time, because it went together with a dissociation of one’s
ethnic group of origin. This was not true for the Berbers. This
difference is due to differences in the political context. The
effective islamisation of the North African countryside goes
largely back to the 12th to 16th centuries, and was effected by
popular Sufi orders, which did not threaten local political
autonomy: wandering Sufis were incorporated into local culture,
and transformed into local saints.[6] The variant of Islam which spread over the
northern parts of Nigeria and Cameroon in the 19th and 20th
centuries was predominantly infused with the views of
state-related ulama instead of Sufis: islamisation took
place in the context of migration to Fulbe towns and villages,
and incorporation into Fulbe culture of individuals and small
kin-groups.
The political
situation has recently changed in Algeria. In post-colonial
Algeria, the Berbers are increasingly discriminated and exposed
to the pressure of arabisation. Beke discusses the recent
introduction of a multi-party system in Algeria, and the related
politicisation of ethnicity, or ethnicisation of politics. He
describes the emergence of several Berber political parties. He
shows that the interests of the party leadership are not served
by a strongly ethnic image which may deter potential voters among
the Arab population. Unfortunately, Beke does not elaborate on
the nature of the ethnic boundary between Berbers and Arabs,
which is less fixed, unchanging, and impassible than is often
thought (cf. Gellner & Micaud 1972). The Arab-Berber
distinction is rather an ideological model which is readily
available to be put forward or underscored for political purposes
(e.g. to emphasise or dissimulate political, economic, or social
contradictions in the state arenas).
Schilder shows
that national politics has a regionalist rather than an ethnic
bias. In Cameroon, the multitude of relatively small ethnic
groups have coalesced into a limited number of regional power
blocs. In other African counties, e.g. Nigeria and Kenya, these
blocs are characterised by a large degree of ethnicisation
through amalgamation: these regional political coalitions
developed into new and large-scale ethnic groups. It is well
possible that the Berbers are also the result of such a process.
This kind of ethnicisation has remained very limited in the power
bloc of North Cameroon, since conversion to Islam has not
resulted in large-scale ethnic identity change of the populations
involved.
In the literature,
the role of the elites is usually stressed in ethnicity
processes. All papers go into this social stratification aspect
of ethnicity. Van Binsbergen pays attention to the cultural
creativity potential of the Western-schooled elite members of the
Nkoya in western Zambia: they organise a ‘traditional’
cultural festival in order to enhance the position of the Nkoya
at the regional and national ethnic prestige scale. Beke points
to the role of the schooled Berber elite in organizing
‘modern’ political parties in order to enhance Berber
political influence. Tiokou refers to the emergence of a national
state elite in Cameroon, and suggests that the ethnic identities
prevalent in this poly-ethnic class-in-formation tend to be drawn
to the background. It should not be ruled out, however, that this
has more to do with political ideology than with political
practice: it is well-known that ethnic and regional
considerations have played an essential role in political
appointments (Bayart 1989; Ngayap 1983), although this has
largely been denied by the official rhetoric. In the first
decades after independence, identification along class-lines was
socially much more accepted than affiliation along ethnic lines.
The recent upsurge of ethnic tensions in Cameroon in the wake of
the introduction of multi-partyism illustrates that ethnic
identification has remained an implicit but major concern of the
national state elite.
Schilder and (to a
more limited degree) De Boeck pay attention to a different type
of elite: the chiefs. The former shows that, contrary to the
situation in (anglophone) southern Africa (see Vail 1989), the
chiefs in North Cameroon, and probably elsewhere in francophone
western Africa, are not so much foci of ethnic group
formation but centres of ethnic group integration into a Muslim
dominated, wider, politico-cultural whole. De Boeck goes into the
poly-ethnic composition of the Aluund chiefdoms rather than the
external aspects of ethnicity. The dominant ethnic group, which
delivers the chiefly title-holder, has not destroyed the ritual
sources of authority of the ‘incorporated’ ethnic groups, but
rather integrated them into the politico-ritual system of the
polity. It implies that the continued existence of the Chokwe is
at least partly based on their continued ritual power in the
Aluund chiefdoms. The ethnic distinction is thus related to
complementarity: political power excludes certain forms of ritual
authority, and vice versa. The Mundang chiefdoms, as
described by Schilder, on the other hand, are largely
mono-ethnic. The Mundang are self-sufficient in the ritual
domain; they do not depend on members of other ethnic groups, as
the Aluund do. This is due to a different historical development.
The autochthonous populations have been assimilated into the
conquering ethnic group, the Mundang: they have only
‘survived’ as distinct clans which still dominate ritual
power at the village level of society.
Political
determinism in the study of ethnicity has led to an emphasis on
the manipulation and changeability of ethnic consciousness, and
on the latter’s political aspects. More recently we have come
to ask ourselves whether there are no systematic limits to this
flexibility of the ethnic phenomenon. The papers presented here
(with the exception of Beke’s) stress the cultural, endogenous
side of ethnicity. By implication, they do not seek to
‘de-construct’, or explain away, ethnicity by reference to
reductionist explanations; they take ethnicity as a social fact,
constructed by people as all other social facts, and consider the
workings of ethnicity — more or less sui generis — in
local African societies, rather than remaining fixated on the
genesis of the ethnic phenomenon in itself. It is true, of
course, that ethnic groups are historical formations which
constantly change in response to political and economic
circumstances. However, this does not exclude the existence of a
relatively persisting core of ethnic consciousness, which has
been so much internalised by the majority of the members of a
local society that its manipulation (for the sake of political
interests) is only possible up to a point. How can we study this
a-political core without falling into culturalism,[7] in other words without representing this
‘core culture’ as a package of primordial sentiments
which exist at some exalted plane outside history, and which
presumably may be invoked to explain everything without being
explained in its turn? The question is whether it is possible to
raise the local culture to the status of an explanatory factor in
the analysis of ethnicity. This might enable us to do more
justice to the emotional overtones which ethnic identity often
carries, and which can hardly be accounted for with the
instrumentalist approaches which have hitherto dominated the
study of African ethnicity. This fundamental theoretical question
plays a more or less implicit role in several of the presented
papers. Van Binsbergen seeks to link the ‘unchangeable’ image
of ethnicity in the eyes of the participants, to its actual
variability over time: ethnic identities then appear as a
workable illusion which has become an autonomous force in social
reality. De Boeck and Schilder have a cultural focus: they
emphasise the potential of the local culture for incorporating
outside cultural elements, and look for an explanation in the
local culture itself. Schilder stresses that the local cosmology
allows for and even encourages the emergence of such ethnic
boundary blurring, whereas De Boeck explains its emergence by its
potential of solving fundamental contradictions within the local
cosmology. What is needed is a theoretical model to encompass and
explain these variations around a common theme.
This shift in
emphasis away from political manipulation advocates a
renewed attention for ethnicity outside urban situations or
outside social processes which reflect the increasing impact,
upon local social formations, of the African state and the world
economy. The discussions on the ‘crisis of the African state’
and on the uncaptured peasantry (as initiated by Hyden
1980; also cf. Hyden & Bratton 1992) have raised the question
whether ethnicity does play a role in the process of by-passing
the state which is claimed to be typical of the African
countryside in the 1980s and ’90s. Can ethnic groups provide an
alternative for the state and a mobilisation channel for rural
protest movements? Shaw (1986) would answer this question in the
affirmative. He sees the countryside as the source of a new form
of ethnicity, which is not merely a hangover from urban
ethnicity,[8] and
therefore does not have to be directed by educated urbanites or
returned urbanites. A case in point is van Binsbergen’s study
of Nkoya ethnicity, where the lack of a secure urban foothold has
always prevented the Nkoya from developing urban ethnicity except
in the context of strong urban-rural ties which reinforced the
attachment to the rural home, and where urbanites, however
prominent in contemporary ethnic expressions vis-a-vis the state
in the form of the Kazanga festival, are merely the
catalysts for a cultural revival which is predominantly
rural-based. Also Tiokou and De Boeck clearly show the existence
of a rural form of ethnicity, but they stress that it is not
articulated to ‘modern’ state processes, and thus does not
develop into a politicised form of ethnicity. Schilder’s
argument finds itself somewhere in the middle of this range:
among the Mundang, chieftainship is the locus of articulation
with the outside world, but much of Mundang ethnicity is realised
at the clan level in ways hardly dictated by the wider world.
These papers, then, call attention to cultural, a-historic, and
a-political aspects of ethnicity.
While van
Binsbergen’s argument opens up to a perspective on
globalisation and commoditisation,[9] the other papers explore the rural end of the
equation as continuity of rural culture, rather than its erosion
by, or manipulative translation towards, the outside world. By
suggesting a balance between these two perspectives, which both
call to question the earlier fixation on political manipulation,
the present collection might constitute a modest yet meaningful
addition to the literature on African ethnicity.
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politique: l’exemple des Yasa de la cote sud du Cameroun’,
in: Ethnicity in Africa, eds. van Binsbergen, W.M.J. &
Kees Schilder, special issue of Afrika Focus, 9, 1-2, 1993,
pp. 105-123
Vail, L., ed., 1989a, The creation of tribalism in
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Vail, L. 1989b, ‘Ethnicity in Southern African
history’, in Vail 1989a: 1-19.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992a, Tears of Rain:
Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia, London/New
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Schilder, special issue of Afrika Focus, 9, 1-2, 1993, pp.
16-41
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., in the press, ‘Minority
language, ethnicity and the state in two African situations: the
Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga of Botswana’, paper read at the
Workshop on Ethnicity in Africa, Leiden, December 1991;
subsequently published as: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994,
‘Minority language, ethnicity and the state in two African
situations: the Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga of Botswana’,
in: Fardon, R. & Furniss, G., ed., African languages,
development and the state, Londen etc.: Routledge, pp.
142-188.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., & G.S.C.M. Hesseling (eds),
1984, Aspecten van staat en maatschappij in Africa: Recent
Dutch and Belgian research on the African state, Leiden:
African Studies Centre.
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(eds.), 1986, State and local community in Africa/Etat et
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[1] In this connexion we gratefully
acknowledge the essential contributions from the Centre’s
director, bursar, and administrative staff in general
[2] Cf. van Binsbergen & Hesseling 1984; van Binsbergen et al. 1986.
[3] Furthermore, van
Binsbergen’s paper at the workshop (which was already in press
at the time) is not the same as his article in the present issue.
[4] As is the case for the Arabs or
the North African Berbers — ethnonyms well documented to go
back to Antiquity — or the Nigerian Maguzawa, whose name goes
back to early Arab contacts (cf. Last 1991).
[5] For
Zambia, e.g. Derricourt & Papstein 1977; Papstein 1978; van
Binsbergen 1992. For an inspiring collection covering a large
part of Africa, e.g. Chretien & Prunier 1989.
[6] Cf. Schilder 1991 and references
cited there.
[7] E.g. Geertz 1963; for an
effective critique, cf. Doornbos 1972.
[8] As has been argued
for a long time; cf. Cohen 1974.
[9] Commoditization
can be said to exist where the production of ethnic symbols in
itself takes on the objects, techniques, conventions and —
largely capitalist — logic of global processes of production,
distribution and organisation, but in an attempt to twist these
global processes to local interests; cf. Hannerz 1987; Kopytoff
1986; Colas 1992; Robertson 1990.
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