Chris Blattman

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Ethnic politics doesn’t deserve its bad name?

“If you are born poor, you may die rich. But your ethnic group is fixed.”… So goes the “primordialist” way of thinking about ethnic identity. According to it, each of us belongs to one and only one ethnic group, that group membership remains fixed over a lifetime, and it is passed down intact across generations.

…The term “constructivism” is a post-facto label imposed, not on a unified theory, but on a disparate collection of critical insights that shoot down primordialist assumptions. Constructivists agree on the basic idea that individuals have multiple ethnic identities that can change endogenously to political and economic processes.

…For too many years, the central debate in the study of ethnic identities has been between constructivism and primordialism. This is by now a stale debate that no longer generates theoretically productive insights… This book is an attempt to shift the debate to the more interesting and theoretically fertile disagreements, often implicit, between variants of constructivism, and the stakes of these disagreements for our theories.

The theoretical arguments proposed in this book challenge the bad name that ethnic diversity appears to have acquired in social scientific literature on its effects… According to previous theories of “ethnicity,” politics and economics, ethnic diversity and its analogs, typically produce regimes that are less stable, less democratic, less well-governed, less peaceful, poorer, and marked by slower rates of economic growth than regimes in which the population is ethnically homogeneous.

…“Ethnicity” may well have a bad name, but at least according to the arguments made in this book it does not appear to deserve it.

That is Kanchan Chandra in her introduction to a new book on ethnic politics. The full draft manuscript is here.

One Response

  1. Thanks for the link! As I have not heard about Chandra before, I really appreciate it (apparently, the isolation of Her Majesty Island’s grad schools might not be that splendid, after all).

    On the other hand, having just read two of her old papers (or more likely one paper and a repetition of her framework/argument for a book chapter), they leave me rather unsettled. (Is this really all the theory has got? Seriously? Half a century after Barth – and we solely re-classify databases of ethnicity according to the perfect criterion of “stickiness”? I must have missed the punchline – or a memo – somewhere. I would honestly love to hear/read e.g. Brubaker’s or Eriksen’s critique of her papers. Not to mention some gaps in her bibliography. Anthropo-logos, anyone?) Looking forward to reading the book though.

    P. S.: I am sorry for the grumpy rant, I have just failed majestically on my today’s dissertation writing bit.

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