Modernity and ethnic identity
Fragmentation and unification in Europe seen through Mauritius
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
L'Express Culture and Research (Port-Louis, Mauritius), spring 1992
[Image] What can we learn from Mauritius? In the author's opinion,
analysts of the present turbulent situation in Europe could
About this profit from a detailed look at Mauritian society. The
site fragmentation of Eastern Europe and the ongoing unification
of Western Europe are both marked by negotiations over
[Image] social identities and an uncertain relationship between
nationhood and ethnic identity. Because of peculiar
historical circumstances, Mauritians are virtually born
Relational experts in these issues, and contemporary Mauritian culture
index and society can in important ways shed light on the current
changes in Europe.
[Image]
Thematic Introduction: Fission and fusion in Europe
index
The apparently contradictory movements of social fusion and
[Image] fission, of integration and fragmentation, of
homogenisation and differentiation, which are currently
Alphabetic taking place in Western and Eastern Europe, respectively,
index are frequently described as paradoxical and puzzling. As
Western Europe is struggling to transcend the boundaries of
[Image] nationality and the nation-state, Eastern Europe is
reinventing chauvinistic nationalism and is dissolving into
Recent mutually antagonistic groups of smaller and smaller
compass. In post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia, for example, the
first minority to raise its head and demand independence
[Image] were the Slovaks, who felt that they were being dominated
by the Czechs, who responded by quickly changing the name
World of the country to the Federal Czech and Slovak Republic --
not that this improved matters much. Shortly after the
Slovak secessionist movement was a reality, it was the
Moravians' turn. Feeling that they were a junior partner in
the Czech part of the Federal Czech and Slovak Republic,
some Moravian politicians demanded sovereignty on behalf of
Moravia in order to put an end to Bohemian domination. --
Now, as if this were not enough, some "communalist"
politicians (to use a Mauritian term) in Silesia (Schlesien
in German, Slask in Polish) on the outskirts of Moravia are
now also demanding sovereignty... To the question of "how
many potential nations are there in the world", the answer
must be: infinitely many.
At the same time as this is happening in Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia is at war with itself, the Soviet Union is being
fragmented into an unknown, but growing, number of
independent entities; Anti-Semitism and gross
discrimination of Gypsies are again a common sight in
Central and Eastern Europe, and Russian-bashing (to borrow
once again from Mauritian vocabulary) has become a popular
sport all along the very long fringe of the former Soviet
Empire -- from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian.
We are also witnessing, simultaneously, an unprecedented
attempt at tight regional integration in Western Europe.
The European Community (EC), initially a European Economic
Community (EEC) of six countries, has swelled to twelve
member-countries and now insists on being more than a mere
free-trade association. Common legislation in many areas
has already been implemented, barriers of taxes and duties
are being removed as well as passport controls at national
borders -- the very symbol of the nation-state. The common
currency, the ECU, will soon be a reality (despite British
protests), and the coordination of foreign policies is
under way. Before the turn of the century, a European army
may be a reality. Indeed, the project of the European
Community, in its strongest federalist version, strongly
resembles the projects of the Stalinist Soviet Union and
Titoist Yugoslavia, if we disregard the differences between
the economic systems. All these visions aim at enabling
ethnically diverse people to live peacefully within a
unified political system, which in turn draws advantages
from the increased size of its subject population. In the
case of Stalinism, the main benefactor was the Soviet
state; in the case of the European Community it is the
large private enterprises.
Both kinds of states or political communities are
multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. It is this kind of
political organisation that Central and Eastern Europeans
are revolting against; it is the very same kind that
Western Europeans are willingly entering. A question which
has frequently been posed during this strange and
unexpected period of dramatic political change, is this:
How can such a paradoxical situation be possible? Since the
question is usually asked by Western Europeans and North
Americans, the answer is usually that Eastern Europeans are
"less developed" and "more primitive" than the westerners,
and that they too must go through a phase of violent and
chauvinist nationalism before they can sort out their
differences in a peaceful and civilised manner. After all,
the enlightened Western European analysts note, we were not
so good in the past either; just look at the Nazi period,
or the French assaults on the Algerian liberation movement,
or for that matter, the many wars being fought in the
western part of the European continent before 1945.
Such an analysis is, of course, crude and misinformed, and
it gives little credit to the peoples of post-Stalinist
Eastern Europe, struggling as they are to come to terms
with their own time. It is at this point that it is
tempting to apply insights from recent Mauritian history
and contemporary Mauritian society onto the European scene,
in order to show that the processes of seeming
fragmentation and unification in Eastern and Western
Europe, respectively, are really articulations of the same
pr>
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aborate on in a moment, are modernity and social identity.
Mauritius provides important cues for an understanding of
the turbulence in contemporary Europe, and I am convinced
that most Mauritians who have followed events in Europe
have a much more profound intuitive understanding of these
events than most Europeans.
Being a long-standing student of Mauritian society, and
being simultaneously engaged in the very exciting and very
uncertain processes of social change taking place in
Europe, I have found Mauritius a source of insights which
can be of extraordinary value for an understanding of the
European situation. Mauritius contains, in a very visible
and compact way, the same ambiguities and problems of
social identity as the much larger and much more complex
European continent does. The very project of building
Mauritian nationhood since 1968 brings out the same
tensions, and the same opportunities, as that negotiation
over social identities which is taking place all over
Europe today. Mauritius has also actually proven very
capable of dealing with the same problems which are
haunting large parts of the European continent today. I
shall try to show this while discussing the European
issues.
The nation-state and ethnic groups
Nationalism, which is presently at large in virulent and
destructive forms in the former Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia
and elsewhere in Europe, is a child of modernity and the
industrial revolution. Nationalism is, briefly, an ideology
which holds that the political boundaries of a state should
be congruent with the cultural boundaries of a territory;
that is, that every "people" should have its state and that
a state should only contain one "people" (cf. Gellner,
1983). Few states actually fulfill this criterion; first,
very few "peoples" have their territory entirely to
themselves, secondly, only an estimated 12 of 165
nation-states are truly homogenous states. The only
ethnically homogenous state in Europe is Iceland.
It has often been argued that nationalism has profoundly
democratic aspects, as in the case of the French
Revolution, when the revolutionaries proclaimed that the
French were a people with a shared culture which therefore
ought to have equal rights, and for this reason wished to
introduce democracy and do away with the privileges of the
aristocracy. Other aspects of French nationalism have been
less democratic, such as the insistence of the French state
to impose French language and culture on the ethnic
minorities living in the country, like the Basques and
Bretons (cf. e.g. Bourdieu, 1982). Nationalism generally
does not function in democratic and liberating ways for
subject peoples, be they within or outside of the country,
due to its stubborn insistence that it represents a people
which should encompass all those living in the country. We
need only think of the Aborigines of Australia or the Jews
of the Third Reich to acknowledge the relevance of this
point. The history of the latter is well known; the former
were either brutally exterminated, or forcefully or simply
thoughtlessly assimilated to an alien culture, with the
result that less than fifty Aboriginal languages exist
today, as compared to two hundred and fifty at the time of
European colonisation.
The nation constitutes itself in contrast to that which it
is not. Within the nation, all are postulated as being
equal, and it is in this regard nationalism has been seen
as progressive and liberating. Those who are not included
in the nation, however, are potential enemies. And they
need not be foreigners; in many cases, they are ethnic
minorities who resist assimilation into the dominant group
(cf. Eriksen, 1992b, for a full discussion). A hypothetical
Mauritian society where say, Indian Muslim (or
Franco-Mauritian, or...) culture and religion were embedded
in the state and furthered in the national media, in the
educational system and in official administration, would
contain many such potential enemies; namely, all of those
who did not associate themselves with that particular
ethnic culture. As Mauritian readers will know, arguments
along these lines were invoked by some politicians who were
against independence in the 1960s; indeed, Gaδtan Duval
threatened, on at least one occasion, that in independent
Mauritius, all women would have to wear saris. In doing so,
he extrapolated from the history of the European
nation-state, where minorities have very often been denied
elementary rights such as the right to a minority language
and a minority religion. Nationalism is, in the words of
Tom Nairn (1977), the Modern Janus: it is ambiguous in that
it creates solidarity and equality in some respects,
whereas it is bluntly chauvinist and potentially very
destructive in others.
Nationalism is, further, not a "natural" fact, although
many nationalists would have us believe that it is. Nations
are the creative inventions of humans, they are imagined
communities (Anderson, 1983). They exist only in so far as
people believe that they exist and act accordingly. --Does
a Kenyan nation exist? we may ask, knowing that Kenya
contains at least sixteen major ethnic groups with widely
different languages, customs etc. The answer is not simply
"yes" or "no": rather, the Kenyan nation exists for some
people, in some situations, when Kenyan citizens believe
that such an abstract community is relevant to their lives.
Concerning Mauritian nationhood, a similar discussion is
strongly present here -- as every Mauritian knows -- and
the answer is not a simple one here either. In 1985 a
schoolboy wrote, in an award-winning essay, that although
the Mauritian state came into existence in 1968, the idea
of Mauritianity (what I would call the Mauritian nation)
came into existence in September, 1985, namely during the
first Jeux de l'OcΘan Indien. Does the Czechoslovak nation
exist? Many of us thought so, but so many Czechoslovak
citizens disagree that we may have to reconsider.
The confusion concerning nationhood has to do with a
lacking distinction between nation and nation-state. The
latter has an objective existence, and it always proclaims
to symbolise a nation containing a large number -- if not
all -- of its citizens. The nation-state contains some of
the objective trappings of nationalism, such as a national
flag and a national anthem, a constitution, a parliament,
an educational system and a national budget. However, if
that state is not recognised as legitimate by a
sufficiently large number of citizens, we may eventually
witness the emergence of nationalisms directed against the
nation-state, which frequently have the aim of secession
and the setting up of their own nation-state. This was done
successfully by Norway in 1905, in a peaceful revolt
against Swedish hegemony. Today, nobody would seriously
doubt the existence of the Norwegian nation; before 1905,
however, many (Norwegians and others) claimed that Norway
belonged to a larger Scandinavian nation, where Denmark and
Sweden also took part. Had history taken a different turn,
the Scandinavian nation -- as a community imagined by its
members, embedded institutionally in a Scandinavian
nation-state -- might have existed today.
Unlike what is popularly believed -- indeed, unlike what is
claimed by nationalists -- nations are recent inventions
and are thus not the ancient communities they masquerade
as. This is obvious to every Mauritian, living in a country
where nationhood is visibly recent and is visibly being
invented on a day-to-day basis; we should nevertheless be
aware that the case needs not be extremely different in the
case of European nations. So there is nothing natural or
inevitable about the constitution of nations. They are the
products of modernity and industrialisation, and they are
also the imaginative creation of self-proclaimed peoples.
Before a large segment of the population became literate,
it had not struck the average French peasant that he
belonged to a French nation. He belonged to his village,
and that was it. Before one learns to read maps and
manipulate large numbers, one simply cannot imagine the
abstract community that a nation is -- containing as it
does an immense number of people whom one will never know
personally, but to whom one is expected to be loyal (see
Gellner, 1983; Anderson, 1983, on nationalism; see Goody,
1986, on the significance of literacy).
The difference between nations and ethnic groups, according
to common analytical usage today, concerns their
relationship to the state. To begin with, we can say that a
nation is an ethnic group whose leaders insist that they
ought to have their own state. However, there seem to exist
non-ethnically based nations; in other words nations such
as the Mauritian one which are not founded on an ethnic
basis. Although this is a trivial fact in Mauritius, it is
a thorny theoretical issue. We should also remember -- and
again, every Mauritian knows this -- that there are many
ethnic groups who do not insist on having their own state.
This is not an elementary truth to many Europeans, despite
the fact that there are about 10,000 ethnic groups in the
world and only 165 nation-states at the latest count. It is
inconceivable that every ethnic group, every
culture-bearing group, should have its own state, and yet
that is the very rhetoric that is tearing Central and
Eastern Europe to pieces. The former Yugoslav state was
actually remarkable in that it did not insist on the
cultural assimilation of the various ethnic groups who made
up the country, but allowed them to retain their customs,
religions and languages. Nobody had ever threatened
Slovenian identity at the time when Slovenian politicians
decided to break out of the union. Why, then, was it so
important for them to achieve full sovereignty?
The answer must be sought in the peculiar historical
circumstances which have led to effective Slovenian
secessionism and the recent uprise of numerous other ethnic
and nationalist movements in Europe. Whereas the Cold War
and the authoritarian Stalinist political system served to
freeze political boundaries, they are now suddenly
negotiable. Due to the strong link between political
boundaries and cultural identities bequeathed by
nationalist ideology since the early 19th century, this new
flexibility has also led to an increase in ethnic
consciousness. In many cases, the two go together. The
political leaders of people X in the Soviet Central Asia
invent their nationhood and proclaim their cultural unity;
simultaneously or a month later, they proclaim their
sovereignty as a nation-state and apply for membership in
the UN. Ironically, the very Stalinist ideology which
sought to eradicate ethnic identities and replace them with
socialist ideals, has in fact served to strengthen those
identities: through spreading literacy and through
modernising the population through industrialisation,
Stalinism laid the foundations for modern ethnic
organisation and modern nationalism in many formerly
"backward" parts of the Soviet Union. They have now read
about successful liberation movements in other parts of the
world, and have discovered that they need not always be
part of the Soviet Union; they can re-define themselves as
Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks etc. and reject those
identities proposed by the state. The Slovenians, for their
part, have discovered that they need not be Yugoslavs, and
have been quick at shedding that aspect of their social
being which suggests that they are a subject population in
a Greater Serbia (which is, rightly or wrongly, how
Slovenians tend to depict Yugoslavia).
My own approach to these problems arises from my
professional training as a social anthropologist and by my
involvement with peace research. The first question must
therefore be: How can human suffering be reduced to a
minimum in these turbulent times? The second question will
be: How can cultural survival and ethnic identity,
obviously very important to a great many people, be ensured
without a simultaneous fragmentation of the world into
thousands of little states? It seems that recent Mauritian
history gives some clues as to the answers to these
extremely important questions, and we shall return to this
in a moment.
The nostalgic yearning: Ethnicity and modernity
Not very long ago, it was commonplace among social
theorists to believe that modernisation would gradually
eradicate ethnic groups and ethnic group identity, and that
nationalism would as a consequence become a less vibrant
ideology. With the coming of meritocracy in the labour
market, of uniform education and subsequent cultural
homogenisation, the ethnic allegiance would weaken. Since
every ideology needs to deliver its goods in order to be
adhered to, and since ethnic ideologies in such a
thoroughly modernised scenario would cease to have any
goods to deliver, they would die. Or so one thought.
Actually, quite recent developments have shown the opposite
to have been the case in many places.
It was with the coming of modern education that ethnic
self-consciousness became possible at all, and it was out
of the alienation of factory work and the physical
displacement into urban faubourgs that the nostalgic
yearning for the "old times" grew. People began to read
(and write) books about their own culture, thus turning
"the culture" into a thing which they could manipulate and
use self-consciously in political action, claiming that
"this is our culture, and we demand our rights!". This is
very modern, but it is at the same time traditionalist.
Ethnically oriented politicians are not traditional, but
they are traditionalist; that is to say, they are in favour
of traditions which are to a great extent been lost. They
appeal to the nostalgia of their potential electorate,
invoking the virtues of a hazy past when the world was
still, presumedly, of one piece. One may put it like this:
One's grandparents worked the land and followed old customs
without reflecting about having "a culture": To them, they
simply did things the way things should be done. Then,
one's parents did everything in their power to shed the
impediments of tradition: They wanted to be modern and
secular, they wore Western clothes and tried to forget
their parents' rural dialect. Finally, there is the present
generation, which is alienated and uprooted, dΘracinΘe, in
search of its roots. This, in many parts of the world, is
the traditionalist generation. For example, it can be seen
among the Greenlandic Inuit ("Eskimos"), whose young
politicians have managed to make the vernacular language
the national one; it can be seen among Australian
Aborigines, who read ethnographic accounts of their
grandparents in order to reconstruct their lost tradition,
-- and then, there are the Tamils of La RΘunion, who are
inviting pundits from India to come and teach them how to
carry out "their" religious rites, which they have long
forgotten. In Mauritius, it would not be difficult to find
examples of politicians working along such lines, appealing
to the nostalgia of their potential electorate.
It is this nostalgic yearning which has set the emotions of
Central and Eastern Europeans on fire in recent years. For
over a generation, they were taught to forget the past and
become good socialists instead of adhering to tradition;
they were moved from their village communities into
anonymous factory towns; now is the time of
counter-reaction and the imaginative re-invention of the
past, which is of course always portrayed as a glorious
time, devoid of all the suffering, disease and feudal
repression which were really very widespread in the
pre-Stalinist era.
A central paradox of modernity is this. In a certain sense,
one can say that it is only after losing one's culture that
one realises its value and starts to militate for its
recognition. In Norway, the most avidly traditionalist
Saami ("Lapps", the nomadic ethnic minority in the north of
the country) are usually highly educated individuals,
settled in an apartment in the capital and working in the
Ministry of Justice or a similar place. It is easy to
dismiss such ethnic or national quests for roots as being
"inauthentic" or "contrived", but we should not
underestimate their power. The loss of innocence entailed
by modernity is a tremendous psychic shock which people
take great pains to overcome. In a context of constant
flux, change and uncertainty, ethnic and national
identities are clutched, grasped at, as something fixed and
stable. As already Marx said of modernity, "all that is
solid melts into air". Ethnic and nationalist ideologies
try to prevent the very identity of individuals from
melting into air.
As already remarked, an opposite process of unification
seems to be taking place in post-Maastricht Western Europe.
The ideologists of the new United Europe try to depict
"European culture" as one single culture at the detriment
of "national cultures" through stressing that which
Europeans presumably have in common. One tries to invent a
European nation, where Greeks presumably have something in
common with Irishmen which they do not have in common with
Turks. This requires, of course, an extensive rewriting of
history, which has frequently been written as "the destiny
of a nation", read nation-state. Now, the nation-state is
to be accorded less importance, but the boundaries against
the east and south are to be accorded greater importance.
So although the miracle of Classical philosophy and
civilisation was not actually a "European" phenomenon --
this cultural revolution took place simultaneously all
around the Eastern Mediterranean -- it must now be
described as though it were so, in order to persuade
Western Europeans that they should be loyal to the European
Community. Through the attempt at inventing a European
culture, one excludes non-Europeans. Had the scenario been
different, involving e.g. a rapprochement between Greece
and the Arab world, history would have been rewritten in an
entirely different way.
Although the ideological project of Western Europe seems
radically different from those of Eastern Europe, we see
that they have several aspects in common: They involve a
rewriting -- a re-invention -- of the past, and as a
consequence, of the present. As Immanuel Wallerstein has
recently (1991) reminded us: history is not a product of
the past, but a response to the requirements of the
present. There is no such thing as an "objective" history
book. Both processes involve the definition of self through
the Other; "that which we are not". In the case of Eastern
Europe, this has led to strong negative stereotyping and
violence.
Both processes are taking place in the confusing and
unclear geopolitical context of post-Cold War Europe, where
new alignments of groups and countries, new boundaries and
new identities are suddenly made possible. Identities,
formerly taken for granted, are now under negotiation.
People ask: Who am I? And unlike Mauritians, they believe
there is one true and objective answer to the question.
Unlike the great Edouard Maunick, they cannot understand
that one can be nΦgre par prΘference. Europeans may
therefore, in an urgent way, ask questions such as: Am I an
Estonian or a Soviet? Am I a Basque, a Spaniard or a
European? And they want clear, unambiguous answers.
These processes of change in Europe involve a formidable
negotiation over identities, and we should not be too
certain about the outcome.
Some Mauritian parallels
Although I have explicitly dealt with Europe in this
admittedly sketchy discussion of nationalism, ethnicity,
identity and modernity, Mauritian readers will have
recognised issues of crucial importance to their own
society. It is at this point that Mauritius is so
remarkable: in having a public discourse about nationhood,
ethnic identity, modernisation and social identities which
is much more sophisticated than that which can be found in
every European country. Let me therefore round off the
article by pointing out some parallels between the
centrifugal and centripetal processes in Europe and the
discourse over ethnicity and nationhood in Mauritius.
First, Mauritian society brings out the main ambiguities,
and difficulties, in the relationship between ethnicity and
nationalism. Mauritian politicians and intellectuals have
since independence tried to create -- yes, invent -- the
Mauritian nation. Three main ideological tendencies can be
discerned here. The first, which has been called
pluriculturalisme mauricien, depicts the Mauritian nation
as being identical with the "cultural mosaic", the discrete
traditions of the constituent groups. According to this
ideology, the cultural unity postulated by nationalism
should be sacrificed for the benefit of the cultural rights
of minorities. This tendency, which is quite influential in
Mauritius -- from the Legislative Assembly to everyday
situations -- preaches tolerance and rejects the dogmatic
nationalist idea that people ought to be culturally similar
if they are to live in the same state. A similar ideology
is sorely called for in great parts of Europe, and if it
were to gain currency, it might improve the conditions for
say, Gypsy minorities, ethnic Russians in Lithuania or for
that matter, Muslims in France.
The second tendency could be labelled the policy of the
highest common denominator (Eriksen, 1990, 1992a). Here,
the nation is construed in such a way as to create cultural
similarity without interfering with ethnic identities, and
without resulting in the dominance of one particular ethnic
group. The use of colonial symbolism in Mauritian
nationalism is one example of such a willingness to
compromise; another example was the ingenious idea to
celebrate the abolition of slavery and the arrival of
Indian indentured labourers on the very same day, thus
reconciling the two largest groups. A third example of this
line of thought was the introduction of English as a
(semi-) official language. English being a language which
is not associated with a particular ethnic group, it has
been a successful compromise (although it must be added
that its use as medium of instruction in schools is
catastrophic).
The third tendency in Mauritian nation-building attempts to
combine the two poles -- it simultaneously preaches the
virtues of unity and of diversity. By today, every serious
Mauritian ideologist tries to reconcile these apparently
contradictory requirements: In some respects, the citizens
of Mauritius must have something in common in order to
constitute a society, but in some respects, they must be
allowed to be different and adhere to specific cultural
traditions. In Mauritian newspapers, one can almost daily
read contributions to this discussion; one can similarly
walk into a lotel anywhere in the island and engage the
customers in a dialog over the same topic. It is indeed a
strange place to be for an anthropologist interested in the
relationship between ethnicity and nationalism...
This last perspective is virtually lacking in European
discourse over nationhood and identity, which usually
either neglects ethnic minority rights or accuses the state
of violence and oppression. The reason for this sad fact
has to do with the nature of European nationalism, which
squarely identifies the state with an ethnic group. So if
one is a second-generation Muslim immigrant in Britain, one
cannot conceivably be recognised as a real Briton. In this,
Mauritius is much more advanced than virtually every
European country. It should be added, nevertheless, that
there are ideologists working for the implementation of a
similar model in the European Community, where a wide
European identity does not preclude a more narrow ethnic
one: they claim that one may simultaneously be a European
and, say, a Dane or Italian. This is a trivial fact for
every Mauritian; to every European, it is certainly not. As
I write, Serbs and Croats are slaughtering each other,
fleeing their homes and seeking refuge in neighbouring
countries because their leaders insist that a country
should only contain members of one ethnic group, and if
there are still minorities, they should be accorded no
special rights.
Mauritius, too, was on the verge of civil war in the 1960s,
and its present success at containing ethnic conflict was
hardly predicted at the time, when most "experts" believed
the island would soon blow up in a bloodbath caused by
unemployment, abject poverty and ethnic hatred. The current
success of Mauritian society has a number of causes, and
both many of its politicians and its population have shown
remarkable flexibility and an unusual spirit of tolerance
(see Eriksen, 1990, 1991, 1992a, for more detailed
treatment of this). The most remarkable aspect of this
country, regarding the tension between the hegemonic claims
of the state and minority rights, consists in the great
ability at compromise and respect of others -- which has in
some way or other been present in Mauritian society ever
since the signing of the Capitulation in 1814, when the
settled Frenchmen were guaranteed that they would be
allowed to retain their culture, customs and religion.
There is in Mauritius a great awareness of the dangers
inherent in making a multi-ethnic society into an ethnic
project. It is certainly not flawless, but Mauritius
provides better solutions in these regards than virtually
every other country in the world.
Paradoxes of reconciliation
The Mauritian success creates its own problems. One, which
is a present research interest of mine as well as being a
concern to a great part of the island's population,
consists in the consequences of inter-ethnic marriages at
the level of ethnicity and identity. The proliferation of
inter-ethnic marriages is itself an indicator of relaxed
and amiable relations between the groups, and also suggests
that the cultural gap between them has diminished because
of modernisation. They now work in the same places and eat
lunch together, they watch the same programmes on national
TV (and on RFO), read the same newspapers (formerly, only a
small elite read newspapers) and their children go to
school together. However, with the widespread occurence of
inter-ethnic marriages, the end of ethnicity is close at
hand. For what of the children; what do they become? If the
answer is that they become Creoles or "population gΘnΘrale"
because this is already a "mixed" group, then the end of
ethnicity is near nonetheless. Instead of containing fairly
discrete cultural groups, Mauritius will then become a
society of people with the most diverse origins. My
"coloured" acquaintance in Rose-Hill, who counts as many as
16 nationalities among his ancestors, will then become
typical instead of being something of an exception, and
Mauritius will cease to be a multi-ethnic society. Tant
mieux? Perhaps, since such a society would not be able to
accomodate communalism and protection de montagne, and
inter-communal fighting would be impossible, although les
prΘjugΘs de couleur (de Chazal) would possibly still exist.
But let us look at it from the individual's point of view.
In dealing with the fragmentation of Eastern Europe, I have
argued the psychological importance of belonging and a
fixed identity in the face of rapid change and flux (see
Giddens, 1991, for a thorough discussion). "The end of
ethnicity" obviously entails the end of something very dear
to many people, something many are willing to make great
sacrifices in order to retain. The Stalinist dogma,
attempting as it did to instigate cultural change by
decree, was massively rejected by the subject populations
as soon as they got the opportunity to voice their opinion.
They now insisted on the right to be Poles, Czechs and
Lithuanians. Perhaps the beginning of the end of ethnicity
will entail the creation of a Mauritian people with no
divided loyalties, but the psychological cost of creating a
people with no past can be enormous. As Stalinism led to a
resurgence of ethnic sentiment in the ravaged landscapes of
Central and Eastern Europe, so does integrationism in
Western Europe already inspire a strengthening of local
ethnic identities. People are afraid of losing their past
and their sense of belonging.
The two processes of integration and fragmentation are not
opposed or mutually exclusive; they are rather like two
sides of a coin, or instances in a wavelike motion. The
current end of ethnicity, as witnessed particularly in
urban and industrial Mauritius, is therefore likely to
nourish its counterreaction in self-conscious ethnic
movements in the future, as it has done in uncertain
periods in the past (viz. e.g. the PMSD of the late 1960s
and the PSM after the 1983 rupture). The strength and
influence of these movements cannot be predicted, but in
the future they will probably be more visible than they are
presently. My personal prediction is that the process of
cultural and social amalgamation will win out in the long
run and that the "communities" as we know them today will
vanish, but that remnants of ethnic identities will remain
in certain, possibly large segments of the population.
References
Anderson, Benedict, 1983. Imagined Communities. Reflections
on
the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1982. Ce que parler veut dire. Paris:
Fayard
Eriksen, Thomas H., 1990. Communicating Cultural Difference
and
Identity. Ethnicity and Nationalism in Mauritius. Oslo:
Occasional Papers in Social Anthropology
Eriksen, Thomas, H., 1991. "Ethnicity versus Nationalism".
Journal of Peace Research, vol. 28, no. 3
Eriksen, Thomas H., 1992a. "Containing Conflict and
Transcending
Ethnicity in Mauritius", in Kumar Rupesinghe, ed.,
Governance in Multi-Ethnic Societies. London: Macmillan
Eriksen, Thomas H., 1992b. "Ethnicity and Nationalism:
Definitions and Critical Reflections". Bulletin of Peace
Proposals, vol. 18, no. 2
Gellner, Ernest, 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford:
Blackwell
Giddens, Anthony, 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity.
Cambridge:
Polity
Goody, Jack, 1986. The Interface Between the Oral and the
Written.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Nairn, Tom, 1977. The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left
Books
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 1991. Unthinking Social Science.
Cambridge: Polity
⌐Thomas Hylland Eriksen 1992
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