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2001 1: 251EthnicitiesVeit Bader

Culture and Identity: Contesting Constructivism

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Culture and identityContesting constructivism

VEIT BADER

University of Amsterdam,The Netherlands

INTRODUCTION

Living in increasingly multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious cities inpostmigration contexts provides opportunities and risks to different gener-ations of majority and minority inhabitants. It also poses challenges forsocial scientists, political philosophers and, obviously, for politics. More andmore theorists are convinced that processes of incorporating an everincreasing diversity of migrants into so-called postmodern societies neces-sitate a fundamental rethinking of crucial concepts like culture, ethnicity,community and identity. They also seem to believe that only differentialist,discourse theoretical or constructivist paradigms are appropriate frames inwhich to analyse the rapid dynamics of crosscutting cultural recreations,language crossings, contextualized constructions of communitites, shifting,hybrid, creolized, hyphenated, diasporic, transnational, multiple or minimalselves or identities.

We are all constructivists now. The critical anthropological endeavourhad started as a productive criticism of ‘primordialist’, ‘naturalist’, ‘essen-tialist’ concepts of a static, stable, homogeneous, shared, authentic, pure,apolitical culture necessarily coupled to one ‘people’ defined by ‘racial’ or‘ethnic descent’. By moving ‘from culture to ethnicity’ it had analysed situ-ationally specific mechanisms of drawing, maintaining and redrawing ethnicboundaries. This first paradigm shift of the 1960s, prominently connectedwith the writings of Barth, has been followed by a second shift, the con-structivist turn from the early 1980s, which still dominates the field. Con-structivists have merged ethnicity with identity completely, focusing ondiscourses and processes of identity-definition. Criticism of spatialized,

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ethnicist, culturalist, essentialist or reified concepts of culture, of communityand of identity directly enforces constructivism upon us as the only viable,critical or defensible alternative approach, or so it seems. Such a new con-sensus (Baumann, 1999: 87, 96) to ‘write and research against culture’(Caglar, 1997; see also Clifford, 1988; Keesing, 1994; Abu-Lughod, 1993;Turner, 1993; Friedman, 1997; Nederveen Pieterse, 1995; Werbner, 1997,and many others) is stimulated and re-enforced by a variety of fashionableapproaches in philosophy, the social sciences and literary criticism like post-structuralism, postmarxism, discourse theory, cultural studies, deconstruc-tivism. For two reasons it is time, in my view, to criticize the reigningparadigm of constructivism in ethnic studies. First, it survives by fighting astrawman. Who, for God’s sake, is still defending ‘essentialism’ in a strictsense in our field? Where does ‘Professor I.M. Norm, Chair of EssentialistSocial Science’ (Baumann, 1999: 86) reign? By doing this, the constructivistcritique excludes more productive alternatives in theory and research.Second, it is increasingly misleading and counterproductive. Constructivismhas trouble in explaining what good social scientists, even constructivistones, actually do and if they only do what they say (see later), they turn outto be bad researchers.

In this debate, I challenge this new constructivist consensus. In my criti-cism, I focus on the following key issues. Compared with constructivism,critical realism as a philosophy of science presents, in my view, a betteralternative for elucidating the epistemological and ontological status of con-cepts and theories (section 1). Constructivism as a sociological or anthropo-logical theory tends to dissolve culture(s) (i) into narrative discourses, (ii)into processes, and (iii) into identities. This triple reduction (section 2) pre-vents rich descriptions and adequate explanations of processes of culturalchange, of community formation and identity definition. Concepts andtheories which clearly distinguish between perspectives of cultural change,perspectives of group- or community-formation and perspectives of(re)definitions of identities provide more successful strategies and methodsfor historical and comparative research. Constructivism also has somecounterproductive consequences for practical politics (section 3): ‘strategicessentialism’, for example, does not help to resolve practical dilemmas, ittends simply to reintroduce liberal myopia into the debate on affirmativeaction policies and on group representation. Moreover, as a moral philos-ophy, constructivism is explicitly opposed to any concept of cultural rightsfor specific groups. It ends up in a self-contradictory criticism of all norma-tive notions of individual autonomy.1

In contesting constructivism, I apply the method of exemplary criticism,choosing Gerd Baumann’s (1996) study, Contesting Culture: Discourses ofIdentity in Multi-ethnic London as a basis for my critique. I have chosenBaumann’s book for three reasons. It is a rich and well-researchedanthropological study of Southall, the ‘most densely populated multiethnic

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ghetto of London’. It explicitly tries to demonstrate the superiority of thenew constructivist consensus in concept and theory formation. And it coversnot only descriptive and explanatory issues, but political and moral issuesas well.

Baumann’s (1996) analysis of culture, community and identity in this‘immigrant ghetto’ numbering ‘some 60,000 people of internally highlydiverse South Asian, Afro-Caribbean, English and various other ethnic ornational backgrounds’ (p. 9) explicitly opposes the paradigm of communitystudies focusing on isolated communities and their ‘autonomous’ culture. Inanalysing ‘what is Southall culture?’ (p. 31), Baumann combines four differ-ent analytic angles. In chapter 3, ‘A shared Southall culture?’, Baumannshows that the (inevitably shared) bounded public spaces of Southall areshaped most distinctively by South Asian ‘Southallians’; that all communi-ties, however defined, share some economic commonalities (living in anarea of the city with very high unemployment figures and extremely scarcepublic resources); and that intense civic competition is fostered along com-munity lines defined on ethnic and religious criteria familiar from the domi-nant discourse. Chapter 4, ‘The dominant discourse applied: self-evident‘communities of culture’, introduces these communities one by one andshows when and how Southallians themselves identify with the five com-munities. These processes of identification are based on a mix of the ‘racial’divisions between Asians, Caribbeans and whites and on religious criteria:the Sikh, Hindu and Muslim community, the Afro-Caribbean community,the ‘Irish without community’, and the ‘English without culture’ who, bynon-whites, are said to form a white community. ‘Children, like adults, tendto endorse the view of cultures as the stable, collective, and distinctive pos-sessions of communities’ (p. 34), but they also distinguish among many sub-communities along lines of cultural and class differentiation, a distinctionwhich already introduces empirical doubts about the adequacy of the equa-tion of culture with community. Chapter 5, ‘The dominant discourse denied:community as creation, culture as process’, pursues these doubts by showinghow Southallians try to disengage from the equation of culture andcommunity. The Sikhs create caste communities, the Hindus a culture ofencompassment, the Muslims a multicultural community of Islam, the Afro-Caribbeans engage in four different strategies to find an Afro-Caribbeanculture, and whites engage in three strategies in the absence of culture andcommunity: forging bonds, sharing loyalties, and even endorsing personalidentification with ‘other’ communities. Chapter 6, ‘Culture and communityas terms of cultural contestation’, analyses three sets of evidence: young-sters create an Asian culture which reaches across the religious divides andthe traditional boundaries of cultural practices; local socialists and femin-ists criticizing such an Asian culture, propose the political project of unify-ing all former migrants in a comprehensive black community; while localand ecumenical interfaith networks question the boundaries of all religious

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communities by positing an overarching community of all ‘people of faith’.In the first two chapters, and in the conclusion, Baumann draws conceptualand theoretical consequences of his study with respect to culture, com-munity and identity from an avowedly constructivist perspective.

My method of criticizing Baumann’s book as an example of constructivismhas, needless to say, its own limitations, particularly in a short debate likethis. Focusing on its common core, I cannot deal with the different varietiesof constructivism. Without irritating name dropping, I cannot demonstratethat my criticism is representative and, thus, have to trust readers’ knowledgeto check whether my charges are to the point or miss their target. I cannotexplicate critical realism as an alternative philosophy of science, nor the usesof such an approach in our field. In this regard I have to hope that readerswill pick up some of my highly selective references in order to become moreconversant with this still not adequately received position. Still, I hope thatmy criticism is controversial enough to trigger a critical debate.

1 ‘ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF CONCEPTS’:ESSENTIALISM – CONSTRUCTIVISM – CRITICAL REALISM

Social scientists normally – and rightly so – do not bother with the epistemo-logical or ontological status of concepts and theories. The followingmetatheoretical remarks would be superfluous if constructivists themselveshad not seduced us into discussions about ‘the ontological premises’(Caglar, 1997: 171) of the term culture.

Ethnographers’ uses of the word culture have established one essential point ofconsensus: culture is not a real thing, but an abstract and purely analyticalnotion. It does not cause behaviour, but summarizes an abstraction from it, andis thus neither normative nor predictive. . . . [Culture thus] exists only insofar asit is performed, and even then its ontological status is that of a pointedlyanalytical abstraction. (Baumann, 1996: 11, 203ff., 1997: 211, 212, 214)

Such passing remarks are widespread amongst constructivists. There is agrowing consensus, at least amongst critical social scientists, that culturesare not unchanging, immutable, ultra-stable, homogeneous, shared orincommensurable, let alone natural things – no one really defends essen-tialism. But this consensus does not proceed as far as to suggest, as con-structivists assert, that cultures are therefore not ‘real’, or are only ‘abstractand purely analytical notions’, ‘useful fictions’, that have no ‘causal’ or ‘nor-mative’ powers. The layered, complex ontology of critical realism can, in myview, clarify the existence of culture without falling prey to essentializing,naturalizing or ‘reifying’ culture:

• all concepts and theories are social constructions. Epistemologicalrelativity is part and parcel of critical realism: all knowledge,

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including scientific knowledge is inevitably historically and sociallyembedded, falsifiable knowledge (transitive dimension) but this doesnot mean – as extreme lingualism, nominalism or constructivistidealism has it – that ‘structures’ or ‘causes’ do not ‘exist’ and wouldbe social constructions as well (intransitive dimension).2

• structures – both natural and social ones – themselves can change. Tosay that culture exists does not imply that culture would beunchangeable, immutable; that it would be natural, based onsupposedly biological or ‘racial’ distinctions. Anti-essentialistconstructivists, rightly, criticize discourses which appeal tosupposedly ‘natural’ distinctions in order ‘to explain “cultural”differences’ (Baumann, 1995: 3), but they have difficulty in copingwith the enigmatic ‘second nature’ of objectified, crystallized humaninteractions and social relations.3 Languages, as well as cultures, are,obviously, not natural things but they do have some structure andsome logic of their own. Recognizing that linguistic or culturaltraditions and continuities ‘exist’ should not be mistaken forcommitting the sin of reifying cultures. Stating that only linguistic orcultural change is real, that traditions or continuities are purelyabstract notions, easily leads to a complete neglect of the actualdegrees of continuity and coherence (see section 2.2).

• structures need not be conceived of as essences and culture does notexist a priori (Caglar, 1997: 174). We do not have to define people‘ontologically before they are described as doing anything’ (Parkin,1993: 91) to be able to analyse how cultures structurate practices. Inunderstanding the existence or reality of linguistic skills or capacities,it is as misleading to call them essences as it is to say that only‘performances’ are real (Baumann, 1996: 14). On this basis, skillswould be only abstract, purely analytical notions or useful fictions(Christis, 1998: 283–94).4 For an adequate understanding of langue, itis as misleading to call it the essence or substance of parole as it ismisleading to say that only speech-acts exist and that grammar,semantic coherence and continuity are only abstract, analyticalnotions.

• The neglect of the causal capacities of culture (or language) tostructurate cultural practices (or speech acts) can best be understoodas an abstract overreaction against cultural (or linguistic)determinism in which actors are reduced to cultural (or linguistic)‘dupes’ (Baumann, 1996: 204, 1999: 24ff. vs the ‘photocopy machine’producing ‘identical copies’ or ‘clones’, p. 132). The desire to bring‘agency’ back in (Baumann, 1996: 1) should not seduceanthropologists into voluntarism and creatio ex nihilo. The one-sidedstress in the constructivist philosophy of language (Derrida, Cavell

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and others) on transformational activity and pragmatics should notmake us blind to the fact that we need structures and competencesfor any transformational activity. The causal power of cultures toinfluence or ‘shape’, not ‘determine’,5 cultural practices should,however, be clearly distinguished from ‘predictive powers’. Actualpractices do not take place in closed systems; in all open systems wehave to deal with a multiplicity of causes (e.g. not one, but morecrosscutting, existing cultures) and a multiplicity of effectspreventing strong predictions. Neglecting the normative power ofcultures or languages runs against one of the most basic insights ofWittgenstein’s philosophy of rules.6

2 CULTURE AS ‘DISCOURSE’, ‘PROCESS’ AND IDENTIT Y?

As a consequence of the radicalization of the constructivist shift not much,if anything, is left from a critical perspective on culture. Radical construc-tivists like Caglar disassociate culture from all space, time and history. GerdBaumann, as a more moderate, less outspoken constructivist, concludes hisContesting Culture more inconclusively by opting for ‘a consistent revalida-tion of culture as an analytical concept’:

Even when focusing on an analysis of discourses, rather than reified cultures,the idea of culture remains essential in order to locate the articulation of thedifferent discursive competences we find. (1996: 203ff.)

But he does not give us any indication of what such a revalidated conceptof culture might look like. As an anthropologist, he seems to hide behindthe construction of ‘the dominant discourse’ in England and its ‘dialecticalrelationship’ with ‘the demotic discourse’ that he extracts from his inform-ants in Southall. The dominant discourse does not distinguish between‘culture’, ‘ethnos’ and ‘community’ as, obviously, all plausible concepts inthe social sciences have to. It also introduces untenable notions of an old,stable, unchanging, homogeneous culture shared by all ‘members’ of ‘ethniccommunities’, and it links these ‘cultural characteristics’ to ‘nature’ or ‘race’(1996: 6, 10ff. et passim, 1997: 209 et passim). This discourse is not only usedby the ethnocentrist or racist right, but, according to Baumann, also by localgovernment in its multicultural policies, by leaders of ethnic minorities inSouthall, and by his informants in specific situations. The demotic discoursecuts the links between ethnos, community and culture, and treats culturesas continually renegotiated and remade, reshaped and reinvented orinvented constructions (Baumann, 1996, 1997). It is used by informants inother contexts.

Although Baumann is at pains to distinguish the meaning of the wordculture ‘in political rhetoric’, in ‘informants’ usage’ and in ‘anthropological

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analysis’ (1997: 9) it eventually becomes plain that there is at least a kind ofselective affinity between the meaning of culture in demotic discourse andthe ethnographer’s ‘consensus’ or ‘processual truth’ (1997: 189, 195–7, 1999:26, 90–5). Of course, ethnographers have to take into account reified con-cepts of culture used in political rhetoric, by local government and ethnicelites and by their informants, but the way in which they analyse these reifi-cations is a constructivist one: ‘to treat them as data, rather than analyticalguidelines’ (Baumann and Sunier, 1995: 7). Now, in my view, neither ‘thedemotic discourse’ nor its ‘dialectical relation’ with ‘the dominant dis-course’, nor Baumann’s opaque hiding behind all these discourses and theirrelations, leave space for critical concepts of culture, either in academia orin ethnopolitics.7 The constructivist’s concept of culture suffers from athreefold reduction: it dissolves culture into discourse, into process, and intoidentity.

2.1 Culture as discourse

Culture is, needless to say, not only a contested but also a complex, multi-dimensional concept. One of its dimensions concerns the relationshipbetween culture, habits/attitudes and practices (Bader, 1995: 94ff.).However one wants to define culture, one has to take into account that prac-tices – what people actually do – are influenced by their habitus (incorpor-ated culture) and by quasi-objectivized ways of seeing and doing(predominant meaning of culture). The fashionable discourse-talk either,firstly, completely neglects habitus and ‘materialized’ culture, or, secondly,leads to an indiscriminately broad concept of ‘discourse’. The latter conceptof discourse includes not only languages, cognitive and normative frames or‘rules’, images, myths and symbols of world, society and self (‘symbolicculture’); it also includes customs, rituals, traditional ways of doing, insti-tutions and virtues (‘material culture’). Calling actions, institutions andeven power structures ‘discourses’ (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990: 9ff.; seeBaumann 1996: 10ff., 1999: 93) leaves us with a useless container conceptand we would have to reintroduce a whole variety of different levels of dis-courses. In turn, neglecting actual practices, institutions and power struc-tures would reintroduce strange versions of idealism via the backdoor.Thus, both strategies are equally counterproductive.

Baumann actually follows neither. As a good ethnographic researcher, heknows the difference between practices and discourses or conceptions. Prac-tices of cultural convergence in Southall – e.g. the celebration of Christmasby many Sikh and Hindu families or shared congregational worship onSunday (Baumann, 1995: 102ff., 1996: 179) – ‘may be observed by the ethno-grapher regardless of whether or not informants recognize it as such’ (1995:101), using methods of participant observation. To determine whether theconvergence of practices is recognized and, if so, how this is interpreted,

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requires the analysis of local discourses, of ‘explicit beliefs that go beyond theconvergence of practices’ (in this example, the different conceptions of inter-faithism). To take another well-known example: to research changing prac-tices of arranged marriages amongst South Asian migrants means not onlystudying the situationally specific opinions of different groups and gener-ations (Baumann, 1996: 150ff.; Modood et al., 1997: 317ff.), it also requiresstudying the different degrees in which those changes of opinions and con-victions have lead to changes in habitus and to changes in ‘behaviour’.8

As far as I can see, the whole dimension of habitus – as mediatingbetween cultures and practices – is absent in Baumann’s conceptual frameand in his research strategy. This may seduce him into accepting too directa relationship between changing ‘ideas’ or ‘convictions’ – e.g. socialist orfeminist ones (1996: 158ff.) – and changing cultural practices. He has identi-fied a demotic discourse but whether it actually changes cultural practicesand, if so, to what degree, is another question.

2.2 Culture as process

Baumann’s discussion of culture is dominated by simple and seeminglyirreconcilable dichotomies. On the one hand, via the dominant discourse,culture is depicted as ‘possession’ (p. 34), as ‘heritage’ (p. 99), as ‘having’(p. 6), as ‘the past’ (p. 36), as ‘structure’. On the other hand, via the demoticdiscourse and, as we have seen, by Baumann’s own ethnographic concept, allthis is criticized as ‘reification’, ‘essentialism’ or even ‘naturalism’. Culturehas to be conceived as ‘making a culture’ (p. 6), as ‘creation’ (p. 109), as‘change’ (p. 196), as ‘performance’ (pp. 160, 14); in short, as a never ending‘process’. Here I want to show, first, that Baumann’s processualist myopiais, happily, not as extreme as it could be by referring to Ayse Caglar’s white-hot writing against culture; second, that Baumann himself talks – in a self-contradictory way – as if cultural practices, customs, traditions exist,committing the sin of reification; and, third, that Baumann’s own discussionof cultural change presupposes the existence of structures.

The processualist dissolution of culture by Caglar is extreme andradical:

Creolisation and hybridisation are the most celebrated concepts used incritiques of cultures as homogenous, bounded, continuous andincommensurable wholes . . . [they are] conceived of as revolutionary antidotesto essentialist constructs of culture, identity and ethnicity. Yet these conceptsare in danger of embracing the very reifications they seek to overcome becausethey also ‘museumise’ culture as a ‘thing’ and are, thus, just a ‘confusedessentialism’. (Caglar, 1997: 172–3; quoting Friedman, 1995: 82)

Any notion of cultural continuity or reproduction is therefore outlawed.Concepts of cultural crossings, blendings, syncretism, creolization still entail

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‘diverse cultural logics and rationalities’ and thus presume ‘a prior onto-logical difference between cultures’, failing to see the ‘real processual char-acter’. Caglar’s plea to ‘disassociate culture from territory’ (p. 174) or‘spatiality’ may, on first sight, make some sense. But her attempt to dissas-sociate culture from ‘time’ and ‘history’ (p. 172) emasculates any meaning-ful notion of culture altogether, not only of ethnic or national culture, butalso of purely civil and political culture, of cultures of work or whatever.The ‘relational character’ of culture, then, seems to hang somewhereoutside time and space and any, however minimalist, notion of coherence,integration or unity of cultural practices is melted down in the heat of absol-ute heterogeneity or difference.

Baumann is not led astray as far as this. When describing different migra-tory histories of Muslim migrants from India and Pakistan, he – quitetraditionally – speaks in terms of their ‘distinctive cultural practices’ like‘funerary customs’ and ‘different marriage patterns’ (1996: 83), of ‘custom-ary injunctions collectively named the hadith or ‘tradition’ which, highlyvarying ‘across the Muslim world, are of a detail unparalleled among Sikhs,Hindus and Christians’ (p. 85). I guess the reader is presumed to think thatthese practices, customs and traditions, as well as many others, really ‘exist’and are not just reified constructs produced by a dominant, essentializingdiscourse. But if this is so, it is difficult to understand why Baumann himself,in his own descriptions and explanations as an ethnographer, would usesuch reified constructs.

In discussing convergence as an example of ‘a process of cultural change’,Baumann himself presupposes that ‘separate traditions, let us call them Aand B, come to approximate a further tradition C, originally alien to bothof them’ (1995: 100). He, rightly, seems not to be impressed by the extremeprocessualist criticism of concepts of syncretism, creolization, hybridity,crossing or blending. In fact, it would not make any sense at all to speak ofnew cultural practices of Christmas celebration by many Sikh and Hindufamilies in Southall without assuming that their old cultural practices as wellas the Christian celebration practices (with all their internal variations)really ‘existed’. Only then can it be ‘a tangible example of a convergence bytwo traditions upon practices originating with a third’ (p. 102) and the sameholds, obviously, for all other examples of crossing and emergence of newcultural practices, be they linguistic crossings (see Baumann, 1996: 154ff.;Modood et al., 1997: 308–13; Rampton, 1995) or the reinvention of Bhangra.Languages and cultures, to be identifiable and identified as such, need, at agiven time, in given spaces, at least some core or structure (e.g. some con-tinuity of grammar and semantics). This is, obviously, a precondition ofunderstanding, learning and transmitting them. It is also a precondition tomake sense of linguistic and cultural change, whether originating inside lin-guistic and cultural communities (here simply understood as the group ofcompetent speakers of the same language or of practitioners of the same

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culture) or as a result of external relations with one or more ‘other’ lan-guages or cultures; whether under conditions of rough equality or underconditions of hegemony, whether as traditionalist conservation or purifica-tion or as convergence. Continuity, to be sure, cannot be understood asnatural or normal; it has to be explained in the same way as change by refer-ring to changing economic, social, political conditions, to newly emergingrelationships and interactions, to interests and strategies of a whole varietyof individual and collective actors, and so on. Yet to explain change andremaking, reshaping, reinvention, you have to start somewhere. This doesnot mean that a given structure is primordial, immutable or whatever, butyou simply can’t explain everything at the same time. You have to get yourexplananda right! To explain how a given structure – e.g. the differentvarieties of arranged marriages in India and Pakistan – has been made andre-made and, thus, itself is the result of processes of change, is one thing. Itis quite another thing to explain how these given cultural practices thatimmigrants have brought with them are reproduced/transformed in the newpost-migration context (in different regions, cities or towns in Britain)under very different conditions.

This all may seem so obvious that I feel ashamed to restate it here. I havedone so only to show that Baumann should not be allowed to have it bothways: criticizing all structure, tradition as essentialist reifications and, at thesame time, using structure, tradition, customs, practices quite naively in hisown descriptions and explanations of change. As a practising ethnographer,he is clearly less constructivist than he professes and, in my view, it wouldbe a good idea to close the gap between what he is doing and what he issaying he is doing in explaining his epistemological and ontological positionand his theory and methods as a social scientist. Critical realism and someversion of ‘structuration of action’ theory are better candidates than con-structivism here. (For different varieties, see Bourdieu, 1982; Giddens, 1979;and Bhaskar, 1979; see also Bader, 1991: 98–101, 1995: 97ff.) Critical con-cepts of culture allow us to think of the relationship between structure andagency, langue et parole, continuity and change, structure and process,reproduction and transformation in a way which enables us to avoid thepitfalls of both structuralist stasis and extreme processualism. Calling theserelationships ‘dialectical’ (Baumann, 1996: 160) does not help much.

2.3 Culture as identity

Constructivists have trouble distinguishing between cultures and identitiesand – at least their most radical proponents – dissolve cultures into dis-courses about identity. In specific contexts of crosscutting cultures, com-munities and identities such as in Southall, a clear distinction between theperspectives of culture and identity is crucial for two reasons. First, culturalpractices may be relatively stable whereas definitions of individual and

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collective identities may change rapidly or, vice versa, definitions of ethnicor religious collective identities may be relatively stable whereas culturaland religious practices are changing (see Bader, 1995: 100; Breton et al.,1990; Hörder, 1997; Modood, 1997: 9). Second, cultural practices may serveas one of the possible bases of identity definitions but this need not be thecase (Modood et al., 1997: 332ff.). Three prominent cases show this clearly:(i) cases in which collective identity definitions are limited almost exclu-sively to the strategic pursuit of economic interests without any referenceto culture at all; (ii) cases in which collective identity definitions appeal topurely imagined cultural distinctions and/or invented histories; and (iii)cases in which movements and organizations of people which are exploited,dominated, discriminated, excluded or marginalized on the basis of ascribedcriteria protest against these practices without developing a common cul-tural identity or a new common culture (see later). However, if peopleappeal to shared cultural practices in definitions of their collective identi-ties, if they use cultural characteristics as markers, signals or symbols, thisis always a highly relational and situation-specific process of selection inwhich some cultural practices get stylized and salient. If larger than face-to-face groups try to develop collective cultural identities, this process of selec-tion and stylization not only gets more pointed, but the development ofcollective identities of these imagined communities also, inevitably, involvesprocesses of abstraction from more particularist, local, regional ethnic orreligious identities: how to make peasants into Frenchmen, immigrantsfrom many European countries into the southern part of Chile in the secondhalf of the 19th century into ‘Germans’, or (internally highly diversified)groups of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, East-Africa in Southall into ‘Asians’ or even into ‘blacks’?

In contexts of a ‘multitude of cross-cutting social and cultural cleavages’it is, thus, not enough to discuss ‘communities across (ethnic and other)cultures’ and ‘cultures across (ethnic) communities’ (Baumann, 1997). Aquestion of primary importance is whether the construction of collectiveidentities – as one of the preconditions of collective action – refers to cultureor community at all and, if so, to ethnic culture and, if so, in what ways. Pro-jects of collective identity definitions, quite generally, take place in situ-ations of competition and struggle for resources and benefits that aredefined and experienced as scarce (Bader, 1991: 112ff.). Baumann pointsout (1996: 169) that intense battle over the distribution of scarce publicresources in Southall is moulded by a local political discourse of multi-culturalism contributing to the culturalization and ethnicization of com-munities and identity-definitions (p. 162). This holds not only for theconstruction of ‘ “self-evident” communities of culture’ (ch. 4) but also forthe different ways in which ‘culture and community’ are contested (ch. 6).One specific project may be used as a case study to spell out the relationshipbetween political projects aimed at defining a purely negative collective

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conflict-identity and projects that define a positive collective identity linkedto the creation of new ‘Asian’ or ‘black cultures’: ‘On youth: assessing anddiscovering an Asian culture’ (pp. 146ff.).

To speak of an Asian culture in the sense of a unified community heritage ishighly implausible, as all Southall children know. (p. 154)

It would neglect not only the huge diversity and cleavages of class andoccupation among ‘Asians’ [see pp. 148ff.] but also of cultural and religiouspractices. (for arranged marriages, see pp. 150ff.; for ‘caste’: pp. 152ff.)

Projects to define and develop an ‘Asian culture’ or identity are oftenexperienced (by ‘community leaders’) as challenging, and also used (byfeminists and socialists) ‘to disown traditions and customs that many Sikhs,Hindus, and Muslims consider as sacrosanct’. (p. 158)

The avowal of an ‘Asian community of culture’ is characterized by youngAsians themselves ‘as a response to the classification as Asians by others, bethey white or Afro-Caribbean; an aspiration, like Afro-Caribbeans to achieve aunity within that imposed classification; and a wish, like the ‘other two cultures’symbolically to express this unity, often through music. (p. 155; see also 1997:218)

The first reason for an ‘inclusive self-categorization as Asians’, beingcategorized and discriminated by others, ‘can begin to take on a politicalsignificance. In this sense, they explain that “Asians should unite” in the face ofdiscrimination and racism, as Afro-Caribbeans are seen to have done’. (p. 155)

Such an inclusive self-categorization could remain a purely negative collectiveconflict identity and its inclusive logic would easily include other peoplediscriminated on the basis of ascribed ethnic characteristics. The second andthird reasons go beyond such a negative collective identity. Actual linguisticchange (to speak ‘Southalli’, rather than Punjabi, Urdu, or Hindi) and linguisticcrossings and, particularly, the development of Bhangra play ‘an eminent partin their expressive and symbolic peer culture’. (p. 155)

But now Bhangra has given them ‘their’ music and made them feel that they dohave an identity. No matter if they are Gujaratis, Punjabis or whatever –Bhangra is Asian music for Asians. (Dewan, 1988, quoted on p. 156)

I think people maybe felt the need to identify themselves. . . . There really is aneed to stay together and be amongst your own birds of a feather owing toracism, and Bhangra music has provided (for) that need. (Kulijt Bhamra,quoted on p. 156)

For younger kids, such a positive identification with newly developing post-migration cultural practices may not take on a political significance because‘politics is far less interesting than having fun with peers’ (p. 155) but, later on,it may become a positive collective conflict-identity. In both cases, such acollective identity is linked to a positively valued emerging culture (being‘proud’ to be ‘Asian’). As such, the new ‘Asian culture’ is immediatelyconfronted with old and well-known strategic dilemmas: . . . it must overcome

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racism within and racism without by unity. . . . [If] Asian culture and society are,as yet, also divided within, then how far should youth go in validating the rootsthey share with their parents, and how far should they turn against the internaldivisions rooted in their parents’ pre-emigration cultural heritages? (p. 157, seealso pp. 158, 160)

This case clearly demonstrates two things: (1) Self-conscious projects todevelop a purely negative collective conflict identity have to focus on ethniccategorization by dominant majorities and on the consequences of suchcategorization in societal contexts of structural inequalities. They have torefrain from any positive collective identity, from any positive reversal ofthe predominant negative evaluation of existing cultures, or from thedevelopment of new ‘common cultures’; and they have to refrain from anynotion of ‘community’ that reaches beyond the sober recognition of thecommunity of interests to fight ethnic categorization and inequality. Theirrefusal to present a positive collective identity, culture or community, theirinsistence that it should be the free choice of individuals whether they definethemselves positively as a collective ‘we’ at all and, if so, as which ‘we’ inwhich contexts, is their normative strength (at least for moral theories andcultures which value individual autonomy highly). But it may also turn outto be their political weakness, at least as long as people do not learn todevelop strong political motivations without a common culture or life-style(see Bader, 1991: 125ff.). Their political strength lies in their inclusiveness,the potential to include all people who oppose ethnic inequalities. Thereseems to exist, however, a trade off between inclusiveness and motivationalforce: the more inclusive, the less motivating.9

(2) Gerd Baumann’s study contains rich material for analysing therelationship between cultures and identities in general, and between nega-tive and positive collective identities in particular. As a consequence ofhis strategy to deconstruct culture and to dissolve it into situational identity-definitions, however, he is unable to recognize, demarcate and analyse thedifferences between these two projects to define political identities, theirmixes and shifts, and their inherent dilemmas. The perspectives of culture,identity and community become malleable, their boundaries blurred, evenanalytically. My claim is that a productive analysis of processes of identityformation requires one to distinguish clearly between perspectives ofculture(s), of identities, and, obviously, of ‘networks, organization, leader-ship’ (only misleadingly introduced as ‘community’), of mobilization ofresources, of opportunities and of the dynamics of collective action (Bader,1991). To start with, one has to resist the dissolution of a critical concept ofculture into (discourses about) identity and boundary-maintenance. Such acritical concept of culture need not be invented, it already exists (Bader, 1995:101–5; Roosens, 1994).

Such a critical realist conception of culture allows us to place discoursesabout culture within contested cultural practices, to analyse processes of

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cultural change without neglecting constraining and enabling structures,and to analyse processes of identity formation in their varying relationshipswith cultures. My claim is that it would help in bridging the gap betweenactual research practice and a constructivist self-understanding whichclearly does not fit.

3 CONSTRUCTIVISM AND DILEMMAS OF POLITICS

Constructivists may concede that essentialist or reified concepts of culture,which are clearly wrong for scientific purposes, may be right and even‘necessary’ for politics. ‘In a discourse of political contestation reificationmay be desirable, and even seem necessary to effect mobilization’(Baumann, 1996: 14, 1997: 212ff.). Here, Baumann distinguishes betweenthe discourses of sciences and the discourses or rhetorics of politics.Neither of these discourses is ‘good’ or ‘bad’/’false’ (1996: 11, 14, 20) butthey seem incompatible, separated by a huge gap (Benhabib, 1997: 93).The scientific use of culture has been nearly indistinguishable from thedemotic discourse, the use of ‘culture in ethnopolitics’ is (inevitably?)governed by the dominant discourse. It is far more concrete and‘standardized’, it ‘stresses, ideologizes, reifies, modifies, and sometimes vir-tually recreates the putatively distinctive and unique cultural heritages ofthe ethnic group that it mobilizes’ (Rothschild, 1981, quoted in Baumann,1996: 11ff.). The dominant discourse, as we have seen, is not only charac-teristic of traditionalist and preservationist organizations and leaders ofethnic/national majorities and of minorities. According to Baumann, it isalso characteristic of ‘those movements that seek to counteract civil dis-crimination by appealing to “ethnic” commonalities’ (1996: 19) and, willy-nilly ‘may reinforce the (purported) primacy of ethnicity as a principle ofsocial differentiation’ as the ‘only available basis of collective self-definition and action’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 62ff., quoted inBaumann, 1996: 20). And it is characteristic of the ‘ethnic targeting ofservices and resources’ in multicultural policies, particularly for affirmativeaction policies (p. 203ff.).

The outcome of such a diagnosis of ethnopolitics is highly ambiguous anddilemmatic. The ‘reification of ethnicity’ and the ‘reification of culture’seem to be as dangerous (see Turner, 1993, for US American identity-politics) as they are ‘necessary’. Whatever we do politically, we do it wrong.I do not want to ignore the fact that politics is fraught with dilemmas andhard choices. Yet I contend that this dilemma results from a misdescriptionof actual political discourses. It is a remarkable flaw in Baumann’s presen-tation of the dominant discourse that it seems to make no differencewhether this culture is linked to ‘biology’, ‘nature’, ‘race’ or whether such

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linkages are explicitly criticized. Even from his own sources, it is evidentthat both the local government’s multicultural policies and most so-calledethnic leaders in Southall not only want to reject ‘racism’ but also want tomaintain notions of historically developed and established cultures. Theyneed not claim, and often do not claim, that these cultures are immutableor pure to be able to demand that cultural changes should not be enforcedupon them from the outside and from above by assimilationist policies.Important differences in the actual political languages of reactionaries, con-servatives, liberals and socialists are blurred. Reactionary discourse is basedon ‘nature’ or ‘race’ (biology is destiny), whereas conservative discourse isbased on traditions and customs (history is destiny). In my view, it is highlymisleading and politically counterproductive to neglect these differences, asthe fashionable discourse about ‘new racism’ seduces us to do (see Bader,1998a; also Stolcke, 1995, for an opposite view). Fundamentalist and preser-vationist organizations and leaders of ethnic/national minorities also usesimilar essentialist and reified cultures – though in a reactive move againstassimilationist policies – but liberals and socialists need not and, increas-ingly, actually do not. At least the intelligent defenders of multiculturalismcan refer to existing cultural practices without reifying or essentializingthem as something natural or immutable. And they do insist that one shouldmake as clear as possible a distinction between ethnic inequalities andethnic differences, between cultural changes enforced upon (internallyquite diversified) minorities by assimilationist policies on the one hand, andcultural changes emerging from the ongoing cultural contests inside minori-ties, and from processes and policies of accommodation under conditions ofrough equality on the other hand (Bader, 1998b, 1998c).10

I also contend that Baumann’s presentation of this dilemma seduces usinto making the wrong choices. Thus, organizations and leaders of minori-ties are not necessarily trapped either in reifying and essentializing ethnicculture and identity by declaring internal contesters ‘aliens’ and ‘enemies’,or in being unable to organize and mobilize at all. They can avoidBaumann’s (1996) version of their fundamental dilemma:

. . . the dilemma of the two sides facing each other in Southall [‘communityleaders’ and the Southall Black Sisters – a feminist, antifundamentalistorganisation – author note] is rooted in the dominant discourse itself.Community leaders working on the premise of having to represent wholeethnic-cum-cultural communities must underpin their efforts by demanding andgaining respect for the culture concerned. This culture must be represented as amonolithic body of life-styles and convictions hallowed by custom and sharedamong all their constituents. Those, however, whose culture entails areassessment of the status quo, and implies an appreciation of culture ascontinually remade, must then be disowned. They are, in effect, declared‘aliens’ in relation to the reified culture that community leaders are supposed torepresent. . . . . The tensions . . . are an index of a dialectic that applies more

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widely between culture as reified in the dominant discourse, and cultureperformed. . . . I have sympathy for both sides, not merely because I am liberaland white, but because both sides struggle against odds determined by others.Just as the Southall Black Sisters face being cast out of the certified ethnic fold,the established community leaders face a dominant discourse that obliges themto deliver culturally homogeneous communities. (pp. 159ff.)

Organizations and leaders of minorities, having to ‘represent whole com-munities’ are not forced by some mysterious dominant discourse, nor bylocal officials, to represent their group as an ‘ethnic community’ at all. Theymay choose to represent it as ‘a religious community’ like in the Nether-lands, depending on different opportunity structures in the receivingsocieties, on contexts, fields, and policy traditions. They are not forced torepresent it ‘as a monolithic body of life-styles’. They may choose to repre-sent it as an internally highly diverse culture and demand that the wholevariety of cultural practices should be respected and protected againstillegitimate policies of assimilation. The problem is not one of an irresolvabledialectics, switching to and fro between the dominant and the demotic dis-course. It is the problem of how to organize and mobilize against externalethnic categorization and resulting ethnic inequalities and, at the same time,respect internal cultural diversity and change, and fair democratic decision-making. It is the problem of how to make the best strategic use of the exist-ing political setting, policy traditions and policies and, at the same time,trying to avoid externally imposed categorizations and other unintendedeffects. Both problems pose really hard political dilemmas but they can, atleast in principle, be resolved, whereas Baumann’s dilemma, in contrast,provides no ways out.

The first problem can only be resolved if it is recognized that: (a) bothindividual autonomy (against inside paternalism of minority organizationsand leaders) and collective autonomy (against assimilation by outsidemajorities and ‘their’ state) are legitimate claims; (b) the strategic require-ments of a certain minimal unity against outsiders (in order to preventtheir strategies of divide et impera) may constrain the articulation, rep-resentation of internal heterogeneity, or at least may constrain the formsand intensity of internal struggle; and (c) internal democratic decision-making within competing ethnic movement organizations has to be com-bined with structures enabling representative representation in local,regional or federal decision-making. Pointing only to the dangers of ethnicelites (see p. 27 with respect to Kalka, 1991, and p. 200 with respect toTurner, 1993) without at least indicating how tensions can be resolved inrelation to them, risks simply depriving minorities of their counter-elites.This myopic anti-elitism can only weaken the mobilization of all resourcesof minorities and eventually work in favour of the entrenched power-pos-itions of majorities.11

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The second problem is at least as tricky as the first one. Baumann, again,follows Kalka, Turner and many other critics of ‘ethnopolitics’, by high-lighting the negative effects of ethnic categorization by governmentalpolicies of ethnic targeting of public services and resources; by stressing thatthe institutional infrastructure of ethnopolitics tends to reproduce itself likea ‘perpetuum mobile’ (p. 27); by pointing at problems of ‘patronage andclientelism’ (p. 203) and of increased competition and rivalry betweenminorities (p. 203); at problems of the degree of representatation of organiz-ations and leaders (p. 26); at dangers of pacification as a consequence ofinstitutionalization and ‘co-optation’ (pp. 200, 27); at problems of ‘ “enclav-isation” which produce ethnic, sectarian or “fundamentalist” marginaliza-tion’ (p. 200); at problems of increasing ‘resentment’ (p. 202) and so on. Yetthese criticisms of group representation and institutionalization are asmyopic as the criticism of ethnic organizations and elites. Stressing theinherent risks and dangers of group representation and institutionalizationwithout discussing their advantages comes close to the well-known recom-mendation to abstain from these policies. This would not only weakenminority politics, it also prevents productive attempts to change the politi-cal opportunity structure, to change ‘official’ ethnopolitics in order to over-come its unintended but well known effects, or to develop alternativevarieties of democratic institutional pluralism, like ‘indirect consociational-ism’ or ‘associative democracy’ (Bader, 2001a; Hirst, 1994; Vertovec, 1999).As a consequence, we are confronted with two equally miserable alterna-tives: either to continue the American ‘ethnic pentagon’ type of ethnopoli-tics that, rightly, has an increasingly bad reputation, or to return to a liberalpolitics of difference blindness.

Constructivism, thus, contrary to its critical posture, has quite unwel-come consequences in politics. Constructivism tends to misdescribe politi-cal discourses and tends to reproduce and even reinforce a deep gapbetween scientific and political discourses instead of making productive useof scientific insights for practical politics. And it misdescribes hard politicaldilemmas as oppositions between incommensurable discourses. It leavespolitical actors with an imposed choice between dichotomized options and,thus, tends to make them less intelligent, inventive and imaginative thanthey actually are instead of helping them to find new ways out of old pat-terns of thinking and doing.

Constructivism, however, also implies serious weaknesses – well knownfrom postmodernist philosophy – when it comes to moral problems, toissues of group rights and individual autonomy. Increasingly, even univer-salist defenders of specific cultural rights, like Pogge or Kymlicka, arecharged with two crimes: reifying culture and undermining individualautonomy, not only by unreconstructed liberals but also by sensitive politi-cal philosophers (Benhabib, 1999; Waldron, 2000) and political theorists(Rosenblum, 1998). Baumann (1996) also thinks that:

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. . . a reification of culture must appear necessary . . . if the word is to serve in thecontestation of a new kind of rights: a category of rights more collective inconception than the traditionally individualist Civil Rights, but far moreexclusive in character than generally Human Rights. They are claimed, orindeed denied, on the basis of people’s membership in a collective defined by‘its culture’. (p. 13; see also p. 199: ‘quasi-groups, now defined by reifiedcultures, with collective rather than individual rights’)

I have to confine myself to two short remarks here. First, is it possible todefend specified cultural rights, e.g. language rights, without reifying andhomogenizing culture? In a detailed criticism of Will Kymlicka’s concept ofsocietal culture, Joseph Carens has shown how this can be achieved. Carens(2000) also argues that Kymlicka’s basic concept is fundamentally flawed inmany regards:

. . . it rests implicitly upon a monocultural understanding of the relationshipbetween politics and culture that impedes rather than enhances the quest for amulticultural conception of citizenship. Finally, it homogenizes culture,obscuring the multiplicity of our cultural inheritances and the complex ways inwhich they shape our contexts of choice. (pp. 56ff.; see also Benhabib, 1999:53ff.)

Such a criticism, however, does not provide the fatal blow to all norma-tive justification of cultural rights. Universalist defenders of cultural rightshave to recognize that cultural practices are contested inside the communityof practitioners and that this is one of the reasons why they continuallychange. The core of their claim is that these changing cultural practices – asnecessary contexts to make free individual choice meaningful and possibleat all – should take place under conditions of rough equality, and that theyshould be protected from enforced assimilation or annihilation. Obviously,this introduces tensions between individual autonomy and collective auton-omy, but to neglect these tensions would amount to neglecting the moralimportance of existing structural inequalities between majorities andminorities. Such a shift from models of ‘ideal worlds’ to the muddle of realworlds always has apologetic consequences.12 Purely individualist civilrights may be enough in ideal worlds – though I very much doubt even this– they are clearly deficient in all real worlds.

Second, most constructivist projects run into a strange irony. Their vehe-ment protest against essentialism, against biology, history and culture asdestiny, against reified structures, community and identity has originallybeen motivated and inspired by – usually implicit – normative notions ofindividual autonomy, agency and free choice. It has been, so to speak, anEnlightenment project of increasing individual and collective empower-ment. In the end, however, not only is any meaningful notion of collectiveautonomy of groups sacrificed on the altars of individual autonomy, indi-vidual autonomy is itself deconstructed, and any meaningful notion of

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normative integrity and individual identity is sacrificed as well on the post-modern altars of relentless deconstructive negativity.13

Notes

1 My ‘construction of constructivism’ deliberately links styles of ethnography, ofbroader anthropological and sociological theory, of philosophical epistemologyand ontology, and of moral and political theory because, in my view, the differ-ent arguments show some selective affinity. Obviously, they can be discon-nected, and they actually are disentangled by many constructivists.

2 See Bhaskar (1986: ch. 1: ‘Scientific Realism and the Aporia of ContemporaryPhilosophy’) as a condensed introduction. See, more extensively: Bhaskar(1975, 1979, 1989, 1991, 1993); Norris (1997); Putnam (1987). Unfortunately,critical realists have focused much of their attention on the philosophy ofscience and sciences, much less on social sciences (see Andrew Sayer, 1992,Tony Lawson, 1997, Jac Christis, 1998, Margaret Somers, 1988), let alone onanthropology.

3 See, for one of the many explanations: John Searle’s ‘The Construction of SocialReality’ (1995)which isclearlynota ‘constructionist’approach(Hacking,1998:51).

4 In Baumann (1999) it seems to be clear that at least the ‘dual discursive com-petence’ which is the core of the ‘new’ concept of culture, really ‘exists’. Culture‘is . . . the capacity’ (p. 138).

5 Baumann (1999) always collapses ‘shaping’ or ‘structurating’ into determining(pp. 25, 83).

6 See Humphreys (1989) for a vivid defense of causal realism.7 In his 1999 book, Baumann introduces the dominant discourse and the demotic

discourse first as ‘essentialist theory’ and ‘processualist theory’ – collapsing firstand second order concepts – before he recognizes this (p. 93) redescribing themas ‘discourses’. His own ‘theory’ of culture, which again is not presented as such,resolves into the constructivist theory of ‘viewing culture as the object of twodiscursive competences, one essentialist and one processual’ (p. 94), ‘newunderstanding of culture as a dialectical and discursive process’ (p. 96).

8 See Breton et al. (1990) and Modood et al. (1997: 332) for the importance of thedistinction between ‘say’ and ‘do’.

9 See Bader (1999b) for the motivational force of nationalism (less inclusive,more motivating) and cosmopolitanism (more inclusive, less motivating). Seealso Bader (2001b) for my criticism of the ‘strong’ trade-offs between inclu-siveness and motivating force that figure so prominently in recent writings byStreeck (1998) and Offe (1998).

10 In Baumann (1999), he seems to recognize the importance of balancing outside‘diversity’ and inside ‘pluralism’ (p. 106). A closer look, however, at his preferredversion of ‘multiculturalism’ – i.e. ‘pluralist’ versus ‘difference multiculturalism’– shows that: (i) dilemmas of multiculturalism are not really recognized; (ii) nospecific institutions and policies to address structural inequalities betweenmajorities and minorities are proposed; and (iii) pluralist multiculturalistsshould have ‘no further interest’ in ‘recognizing cultures’ (p. 117) They shouldengage in ‘breaking down cultural barriers’ (p. 122) as if it would not make any

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difference, whether this is done from the outside and under conditions of grossinequalities or from the inside. Welcome criticism of conservationist or preser-vationist legitimations and policies of multiculturalism aiming at the ‘survival’of cultures (like Taylor) does not preclude ‘justice based’, universalist legitima-tions and policies. Baumann’s ‘pluralist multiculturalism’ has nothing to say inthis regard, focused as it is on dialogical or multi-relational and situation-specific‘crosscutting’ identifications and multicultural convergence (126ff., from ‘multi-parading’ to ‘multi-relating’). Empirically, cultural change ‘inside’ minorities,obviously, does not take place under conditions of equality among contestinggroups, and the same holds for changing majority cultures and for culturalchange emerging from interactions and contests between majorities and minori-ties or different minorities. Yet this is not a good argument to neglect the theor-etical and political importance of the distinction between changes enforced byoutsiders (majorities and ‘their’ state), by inside majorities or leaders, andchanges under conditions of rough equality.

11 See Bader (1991: 246ff.) for competition among social movement organizationsand their consequences for effectiveness, democracy and matters of represen-tation; for a critique of the one-sidedness of this anti-elitism, see pp. 150ff. Thedilemmas of democratizing social movement organizations are dealt with on pp.248 –53.

12 See Kymlicka, Parekh, and Raz versus similar charges in the Boston-Reviewdebate: Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Okin, 1999). See Bader (1999d)for comparable questions of religious pluralism.

13 See Baumann (1999) for a complete replacement of ‘identity’ by identifications(pp. 137ff.). See also Wenzel (1995) and Straub (1991).

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DEBATE

VEIT BADER is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Social andPolitical Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Address:Departmentof Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstrasse 15,Amsterdam, 1012 CP, The Netherlands. [email: [email protected]]

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