Download People, Nation and State: The Meaning of Ethnicity and by Edward Mortimer, Robert Fine PDF

Show description

During the time of slaving, people sought refuge in ‘corporate kinship groups’ from the oppression of the state. Under colonialism, these kinships groups were conceptually expanded ‘into the construction of ethnic groups’: Peter Ekeh, ‘Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32/4, October 1990. ), Changing Identities: The Transformation of Asian and African Societies under Colonialism (Berlin: Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, 1994), pp 198–9.

Y. Mudimbe and B. Jewsiewicki (eds), History Making in Africa: History and Theory 32, 1993. E. Friedman and A. ), From PostTraditional to Post Modern? (Roskilde: IDS, 1995). The Invention of Tribalism in Zimbabwe, op. , p. 19. Mamdani writes that ‘ethnicity was never just about identity. Its two contradictory moments involved both social control and social emancipation. ’ ‘Indirect Rule’, op. , p. 223. ‘The Invention of Tradition Revisited’, op. , pp. 100–1. This was printed in The Woodstock Road Editorial: An Oxford Magazine of International Affairs 16, Hilary, 1994.

If these amounted to ethnicity, how could I claim that it was recently invented? And if they were not the ingredients of ethnicity, what identities did they underlie? Cohen’s challenge reinforces an older challenge from within Africa itself. ’ Once it has been imagined, ethnicity certainly seems primordial, and it becomes impossible to conceive of any prior identity. To claim that ethnicity did not exist in pre-colonial Africa seems like claiming that Africans had no identity at all. Of course, I would never want to assert anything so stupid or insulting, so I have increasingly realised the necessity for constructionist historians of ethnicity to offer an account of identities before it was constructed.