The Emergence of Ethno-Geopolitics in Post-Soviet Russia

A prominent UK-based political and historical geographer analyzes ethnogeopolitics, a new trend in Russian political discourse that is distinguished by the primary role it assigns to ethnicity (rather than the nation-state) as a geopolitical factor—i.e., recognizing formal (often poly-ethnic) ethno-national groupings on their respective ethnic spaces as important "geopolitical subjects" in their own right with a certain autonomy in world politics. After defining and otherwise setting out the differences between ethno-geopolitics and the more mainstream school of Russian geopolitics emerging after the disintegration of the USSR, the author proceeds to assess the extent to which ethno-geopolitics is shaping current Russian geopolitical thought in two critically important arenas: (1) Russia's relations with other great powers at the global level and (2) the dynamics of ethnicity (and inter-ethnic relations) within its own boundaries as well as in neighboring states. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: Y900, Z190. 71 references.     

Federal Restructuring in Ethiopia: Renegotiating Identity and Borders along the Oromo–Somali Ethnic Frontiers

When the Ethiopian state was reorganized as an ethnic federation in the 1990s, both ethnicity and governance experienced the impact of the change. Most importantly, ethnicity became the key instrument regarding entitlement, representation and state organization. For the larger ethnic groups, fitting into the new ethno‐federal structure has been relatively straightforward. In contrast, ethnic federalism has necessitated a renegotiation of identity and of statehood among several smaller communities that straddle larger ethnic groups. It has also led to the reconfiguration of centre–periphery relations. This contribution discusses how the federal restructuring of Ethiopia with the aim of matching ethnic and political boundaries led to renegotiation of identity, statehood and centre–periphery relations among several Somali and Oromo clans that share considerable ethno‐linguistic affinities.     

Factory ‘nuns’: the ethnicization of migrant labor in the making of Tibetan carpets

Many debates over migrant labor politics in contemporary China rely upon essentialist notions of ethnic identity. In contrast, I identify migrant labor politics as transnational processes through which women migrants from rural Tibet become ethnic workers. Drawing on post-colonial theories of ethnicity and on feminist literature on global capitalism, this article analyzes the uses of migrant laborers in a globalizing Tibetan carpet industry. First, I investigate the making of Tibetan carpets and the essentialist construction of ‘carpet weavers’ employed by Tibetan–Nepalese carpet factory owners, carpet dealers in New York City, and various participants in Lhasa, including party cadres, international non-government organizations (NGOs), and overseas investors. I argue that the functioning of the international carpet business relies upon the ethnicization of migrant labor, in which labor subjugation involves creating ethnic subjects and ethnicized boundaries. This form of labor commodification is driven by both an economic logic and a moral imperative for preserving or regenerating ‘ethnic culture.’ Second, through the lens of gender, I look closely at the ethnicization of migrant labor in post-socialist Lhasa, analyzing its significance for the labor force in the carpet industry. The women carpet weavers, who mostly come from Tibet's rural areas, I found, strive to reconcile their desires for female autonomy with labor positions that reduce them to strangers in the city. Some women attempt to overcome their experiences of alienation while actively engaging in the reproduction of the patriarchal family as well as in labor hierarchies at work.     

Cartoon epic heroes in indigenous Siberian revival: The meaning of ethnicity in Putin's Russia (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

This article outlines a motivation for the Russian Federation's incursion into the Crimea, which concerns the Putin administration's relationship with Russia's citizens, rather than the outside world. I use a case study from Siberia – the Sakha people's revival of their national epic, the Olongkho – to explore the possibility that Putin's behaviour during the Ukrainian crisis serves to legitimate his authority within Russia, by appealing to conceptions of ethnicity that have their roots in Soviet‐era social engineering. Rather than deducing the Putin administration's motives from the events and relationships they immediately concern, I explore motivations emerging from the configuration of values, perceptions, and conventions that shapes and reproduces social difference in Russia. The Sakha Olongkho revival shows how the perceptions of ethnicity fostered during the Soviet era have become powerful indexes of morality and authority. Individual Sakha citizens now demonstrate their identities and values through adopting a stance towards a reified conception of Sakha ethnicity expressed in their choices of recreation, fashion and consumption. Sakha ethnicity has become integrated into the process whereby hierarchical social groupings emerge within Sakha society according to their avowal of specific tastes and norms. The relatively small size of the Sakha population – which is nevertheless the dominant ethnic group in their republic, Sakha (Yakutia) – enables us to see trends affecting the rest of Russia in microcosm. Thus, I suggest that former Soviet ethnicity has become so closely woven into Russia's morality that Putin's invasions of foreign states, in the name of the ethnic Russian community, bolster his claim to be a moral person and a legitimate and authoritative national leader.     

Shamanism,Sorcery and Cannibalism: The Incorporation of Power in the Magical Cult of Buai1

This article explores aspects of bodily belief and embodiment among the people of the Lelet Plateau of central New Ireland (Papua New Guinea). Far from being merely a surface upon which power relations are inscribed, as is suggested by some Western theory, the body, for the Lelet, is a central and active site for the appropriation of power. Power can be incorporated into the body through ingestion of substances, and acts of power over others can involve incorporation of their vital organs. Such acts of incorporation, whether to obtain power or to wield it, denote the significance of the boundaries of the body. I examine these conceptions of power as they occur in Lelet belief and in the practices of the shamanistic magical cult called Buai that has been imported from other parts of New Ireland and New Britain. This article examines the acts of incorporation and ideas of embodiment that are deployed in this cult and in the powerful forms of cannibalistic sorcery associated with it. I focus upon bodily practices through detailed ethnography in order to elucidate the complexity of the Lelet's understanding of their world.     

The geopolitics of the Irish-Catholic parish in nineteenth-century Montreal

Irish Catholics in nineteenth-century Montreal, as a minority within a larger French-Catholic population, encountered a cultural environment very different from that experienced by their compatriots in most cities of eastern North America. In contrast with the more typical situation in which the majority position of Irish Catholics enabled them to exercise leadership in local Catholic affairs, in Montreal they had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to obtain churches and parishes they could call their own. Diocesan and parish records demonstrate that these struggles, in particular the controversy created by the subdivision of the extensive parish of Notre Dame in the late 1860s were defining events in the formulation of Irish-Catholic ethnic consciousness in Montreal. Constructivist interpretations of ethnicity have drawn attention to the way in which conflictual (and less frequently accommodative) relations among groups contribute to the formation and preservation of ethnicities. Drawing on this approach, it is argued that religious institutions acted as catalysts for debates that encouraged Montreal's Irish Catholics to define themselves in relation to the French-Catholic majority. These debates had an important territorial dimension and ultimately led to the entrenchment of ethnic boundaries in the urban landscape through the creation of separate parishes for the two groups.     

A Theory of Ethnic Group Boundaries

Abstract. Despite widespread agreement that ethnic boundaries are malleable rather than fixed, theories of ethnicity and collective action have been unable to adequately explain why individuals choose to mobilise collectively within particular boundaries rather than others. The boundaries of groups engaging in ethnic collective action are always taken for granted at some level rather than problematised. This leads to an undesirable reification of ethnic groups as actors. The theory presented in this article integrates a social psychological view of motivation with a rational choice view of action to provide a systematic way of predicting the boundary location of ethnic groups that begin to mobilise in societies undergoing modernising structural change. It first focuses on the link between cooperation and altruism in small communities. It then predicts how altruistic preferences, in conjunction with structural factors and rational behaviour, will generate boundaries for larger-scale ethnic collective action that transcends yet incorporates such communities. The theory's predictions are then applied to explain the location of group boundaries in four very prominent cases of ethnicity ‘creation’ and collective action in this century.     

Ethnic Performance and the State in Laos: The Boun Greh Annual Festival of the Khmou

Following the 1975 revolution, the Laotian statesmen adopted a modernising discourse that targeted “backward” traditions as undesirable. But since the 1990s, authorities have mitigated this standpoint, distinguishing “good” from “bad” traditions according to their compatibility with the program of national development, and professing their will to (re)instate the former as suitable expressions of culture in a multi-ethnic nation. This is manifest everywhere from the National Constitution to TV shows and ethnic catalogues. This paper analyses the implementation of these principles through the case of the boun greh New Year festival, an invented ethnic tradition of the Khmou, the largest ethnic minority in Laos. The article demonstrates that this implementation has consequentially implied the adoption of a grammar of national ethnicity; that this official framework paradoxically allows the Khmou to articulate demands for better recognition of their group; and that this process does not mute expressions of “cultural intimacy” at variance with this matrix. The official frame of ethnicity has been eventually adopted by the Khmou, but this state effect has multiplied the layers of expressed ethnicity: it cannot be equated with a unilateral regimentation that would deprive the Khmou of their agency.     

Emancipation or Enclosement? The Spatialization of Difference and Urban Ethnic Contestation in Colombia

Abstract: The focus of this article is a paradox inherent in the political effects of spatial claims undertaken by multicultural policies in many nation states: though territory is considered as one of the primary means of achieving autonomy and self‐determination, it is at the same time a mechanism that encloses difference. Through a combination of archival and ethnographic research I study the political effects of binding indigenous people's minority rights with indigenous reservations in Colombia. I focus on analyzing the legal ways in which an “ethnic indigenous type” has been attached to an “ethnic indigenous rural topos” in the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court. I also examine how ethnic groups in the capital city of Bogotá have questioned the multicultural ideals of indigeneity and the romantic desires of what an indigenous place should look like. Ultimately, my intention is to draw attention both analytically and politically, to the necessity of more thorough analyses of the consequences of strict forms of spatializing ethnicity.     

Symbols of Cultural Identity: A Case Study from Tanzania

Cultural expressions and their contexts of use among two groups of Maconde form a basis for a discussion of cultural reproduction and the fluidity of ethnic boundaries. The material presented here is based on ethnoarchaeological fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique. Two groups, one based in Tanzania and the other in Mozambique, both identify themselves as one group, although they use and display material culture quite differently. The arguments in the paper are concerned with understanding the highly dynamic character of ethnicity in these East African societies and an attempt to look at shifting ethnic boundaries among the groups in the Rovuma Basin, in particular, over the last centuries. Here symbols of cultural identity have been manipulated and reintroduced into new contexts, as cultures change and groups adjust to their social environment.     

Boundary mechanisms and symbolic resources: towards a process‐oriented approach to national identity*

This article argues that the classical distinction between civic and ethnic forms of national identity has proved too schematic to come to terms with the dynamic nature of social and political processes. This has caused difficulties particularly for those historians and social scientists studying particular national movements rather than concentrating on a handful of thinkers and intellectuals or taking a broadly comparative approach. As an alternative to the classical model, I propose to distinguish between, on the one hand, the mechanisms which social actors use as they reconstruct the boundaries of national identity at a particular point in time; and, on the other, the symbolic resources upon which they draw when they reconstruct these boundaries.     

A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée

This article examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary schemes for establishing a union of Mediterranean states. In 1832, Michel Chevalier set out a startling scheme that would bring to an end armed conflict in Europe through a confederation of European states and a subsequent alliance between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. His plan envisaged a vast infrastructure network of railways, canals, roads and shipping lanes that would link the major ports of the Mediterranean with Europe’s capital cities and those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The infrastructure network at the heart of Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée was conceived by him as the basis for a system of economic integration that would foster political harmony throughout Europe – anticipating by over one hundred years Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s plans for a European Union – but also between Europe and the Ottoman world. Harboured within Chevalier’s infrastructure scheme for the Mediterranean was one of the earliest and most complex nineteenth-century theories of networks ever devised. This article examines the centrality of the Mediterranean to Chevalier’s theory of networks, and explores the multiple dimensions of this complex theory, including the intimate connection he identified between networks as expressions of human creativity and the kind of unalienated human relations that would result in the end of conflict both between and within nations.     

Myths of descent: Views of the remote past,as reflected in school textbooks in contemporary Russia

Abstract

A view of the past has proved to be a valuable aspect of ethnic identity in the contemporary world. It also plays a crucial role in contemporary struggles for political, financial, territorial and cultural resources. This struggle is especially intense in unstable political environments, as various ethnic elites compete to upgrade their political status and to gain desirable benefits. In the post-Soviet world, where ethnicity is still highly politicised, myths of the remote past and glorious ancestors are often forged and disseminated as important aspects of ethno-nationalist ideologies. Instead of appreciating cultural diversity, this trend introduces new models of social division, dominance and discrimination legitimised by a ‘distinct culture’ and ‘cultural roots’. An image of the enemy is an integral element of the ideologies in question, which have explicit or implicit xenophobic connotations. The place of this type of myth and ideology in the contemporary Russian education system is analysed here.     

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non‐Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro‐active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo‐classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.     

Language,religion and the politics of difference

Language and religion are arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world. Yet there have been very few efforts to compare the two in any sustained way. I begin by aligning language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and nationhood, and by sketching five ways in which language and religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. I then identify a series of key differences between language and religion and draw out their implications for the political accommodation of cultural heterogeneity. I show that religious pluralism tends to be more intergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalised than linguistic pluralism in western liberal democracies, and I argue that religious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot is that religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the political accommodation of cultural difference – a striking reversal of the longer‐term historical process through which language had previously displaced religion as the primary focus of contention.     

Ethnicity in complex societies: Archaeological perspectives

It is often difficult to identify ethnic groups in the archaeological record, yet archaeology has much to contribute to understanding the long-term social and political dynamics of ethnicity. This review considers recent anthropological perspectives on ethnic groups and their boundaries, emphasizing the role of state formation in their creation and maintenance. It then reviews recent archaeological studies of ethnicity in complex societies and discusses current questions facing archaeological research on these topics.     

Heritage and scale: settings,boundaries and relations

While recent years have seen increasing interest in the geographies of heritage, very few scholars have interrogated the difference that scale makes. Indeed, in a world in which the nation state appears to be on the wane, the process of articulating heritage on whatever scale – whether of individuals and communities, towns and cities, regions, nations, continents or globally – becomes ever more important. Partly reflecting this crisis of the national container, researchers have sought opportunities both through processes of ‘downscaling’, towards community, family and even personal forms of heritage, as well as ‘upscaling’, towards a universal understanding of heritage. While such work has had critical impact within prescribed scalar boundaries, we need to build a theoretical understanding of what an emergent relationship between heritage and scale does within the context of dynamic power relations. This paper examines how heritage is produced and practised, consumed and experienced, managed and deployed at a variety of scales, exploring how notions of scale, territory and boundedness have a profound effect on the heritage process. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey and others, the paper considers how the heritage–scale relationship can be articulated as a process of openness, pluralism and relationality.     

Marriage Migration,Gender Transformations,and Family Values in the ‘Global Ecumene’

The metaphor of the market is a poor explanatory tool for the growth in international web-brokered marriages, between (mainly) men from rich countries and women from poor countries. States play an important role in regulating particular forms of migration including creating the ‘need’ for spousal migrants, as well as permitting their entry. The characterisation of the men who seek spouses through international agencies as powerful agents in the world system has to be mediated through understandings of the ways in which gender identities are not simple binaries that the contemporary global order is reproducing on an expanded scale. The characterisation of the women obscures the manner in which they are acting out of their own aspirations; and when a marriage is contracted, the man and woman enter into a personal relationship that cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange. These marriages involve people in negotiations about new forms of personal attachment involving intimacy, spousal roles and family relations. They are constitutive of the social networks of the ‘global ecumene’, a new kind of known world whose borders are constantly expanding. Gender relations are not constituted simply in the realm of the economic. We cannot assume family relations are merely expressions of dominant economic forms. The space of international web-brokered marriages is one in which women can be seen as active subjects in a transnational space that allows them to act outside, to certain degrees, of kinship-based power.     

Deconstructing/Reconstructing Ethnicity

Abstract. Ethnicity is here viewed as a continuum, varying widely in terms of salience, intensity and meaning, along which several types of ethnicity can be distinguished. Domination ethnicity is where a nation imposes monocultural control – it can be regarded as a form of ethnicity. Enclosure ethnicity has three variants – dormant ethnicity, cultural confinement, and inward-looking ethnicity. Competition ethnicity competes over resources of the state and development. Finally, optional ethnicity is of low intensity and is light, volitional and fluid, as in the case of ethnic entrepreneurs and symbolic ethnicity. What is considered as well are the dynamics of ethnicity, shifting from one mode to another. The politics of ethnicity is here taken up in terms of emancipation and domination. Perspectives on ethnicity are framed by the changing meanings of ethnicity over time. The final question concerns the endgames of ethnicity, or the paths of change of different types of ethnicity, and how each relates to ethnic conflict regulation.     

Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.