PART III
THE
SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF ETHNICITY
Elements
comprising ethnicities. Ethnicity as pre-modern, as modern, and as post-modern
(hence varied) tribal, territorial, linguistic, cul-tural, and religion-based
social configuration. Ethnic revival in response to state formation. Ethnic
groups as "mediating structures" in civil society. Ethnicity and the
communal deficit of modernity.1
Editorial Introduction
.
. . (R)eligious practice has been shaped by tribal and political loyalty. The
ancient religions of the Near East were all functions of civili-zations. Only
the God of Israel created a people.
-Franklin H. Littell2
Ethnicity,
as noted above, is kinship writ large. Though emerging from, and continuously
sustained by kinship, it draws on other emergents as well. Kinship, though
humanly constructed, is a "natural" (from L. natus -- birth)
phenomenon. Religion, on the other hand, has to do with the
"supernatural," with the mystery that transcends natural boundaries.
Yet though analytically distinguishable, as historical phenomena ethnicity and
religion tend to be intertwined and frequently inseparable.
The
study of ethnicity and religion both draw heavily on the various social
sciences. Among the social sciences, anthropology has dealt particularly with
"primitive," archaic, pre-modern and, te-chnically-speaking,
pre-"societal" peoples. After the initial glances at ethnicity and the
particularity of the "Abrahamic faiths" in the preceding chapters, it
is appropriate to turn next to the per-spec-tives supplied by this discipline.
More complex, larger scale so-cieties, which are the domain of sociology, will
be invoked in a later section in this collection.
In
the early stages of our species’ historical development, kinship and its
extensions into clan and tribe effectively substitute for the deliberative
role-based configurations that result in "society" at later
developmental stages. What we now describe as "society," nonetheless
can be seenas inchoate from the outset. Accordingly, while investigation of
kinship and its derivatives is important in its own right, it is essential as
well in evolutionary or developmental frames of reference.
Investigations
of primitive manifestations of religion often begin with totemism, with the
manner in which an object or animal serves as emblem of a clan, a phenomenon at
once communal and religious. Totemism is akin to myth, a wider, more inclusive
con-cept. Myths are the stories that serve to weave the visible and in-visible
"worlds" inhabited by early peoples into coherent cosmolo-gies,
including questions of origin, destiny, and supernatural being.
The
reader of these pages will be familiar with the fate of the totemic, mythical
and the like as social complexity emerges and advances. Myths are discredited,
yielding to more rational and abstract concepts, eventually to theology and
later to philosophy. But given the nature of the universe, and the precarious
suspension of human existence within it, contrary to some jubilant appraisals,
myth is not readily disposed of. Indeed, the secularity to which the modern
experience leads, turns out itself to entail new myths, for any cosmic judgement
or world-view we can conceive defies em-pirical verification. To be human is
inescapably to be myth-de-pendent and hence "religious."
Initially
and/or outwardly, the transformations of human exist-ence during the past two
centuries, which we call modernization, seemingly promised to deliver us
from myth-dependency. Un-covering and controlling the mechanisms of natural
determinism would enable us to gain control of our own human destiny. But the
skills of modernity cannot fully account for the consequences of the
indeterminacy inserted into the constitution of Homo sapiens, who
meanwhile remains embedded in the determinate world of nature notwithstanding.
Enter
the hermeneutical chapter in intellectual history, which meanwhile, as in a
major work cited by McLean, that of Clifford Geertz, begins to take into account
the human construction of social reality. Though humans can in some measure
transcend the determinism of nature, nonetheless as creatures in time and space,
they must create their own patterns of predictability if they are to coexist.
Without hermeneutical adaptation, the positive sciences cannot penetrate those
creative processes.
But
the reverse question must also be acknowledged. To what extent can the
transcendent apperceptions be infused and embodied into natural order or into
"natural" processes? Onto-logically, hence ideally, in the best of all
worlds, nature and super-nature are subsumed in a cosmology. But as Michael
Kogan observes in a previous chapter, "something has gone wrong" in
the human enterprise. As he briefly outlines, the call to Abraham appears as
God’s response to that aberration. Abraham is asked to leave his
"country, kindred, and . . . father’s house," and to begin anew.
But
precisely what does all this entail? Does that formula merely mean that he needs
to leave home and seek his destiny elsewhere, or is something deeper being
communicated thereby? On the surface, the former appears to be the case. A long
story unfolds. Abraham leaves and begins a new ethnos, ultimately to
become a new people in a new, as yet indefinite, land. The resulting peoplehood,
as illustrated variously in the Jewish contributions to this volume, becomes the
heart of Jewish identity.
Yet
the subsequent history emerges enigmatically. The falling away, the exile, the
Diaspora; then the rise of Christianity and still later of Islam, repeating some
of the same themes; and eventually in our own era, the precarious creation of
the modern Israeli state in an increasingly pluralist world. Where does all this
leave us?
Throughout
these pages we sense the profound pull of a world in which the archaic blending
of ethnos and religio is consummated on a larger scale. Nor is
that beckoning vision mere fantasy. Here and there in each of the three
Abrahamic stories there are pages on which that possibility glimmers. But there
also very dark pages, some being written just now, so dark that disbelief or
apocalypse can appear as the only options. Yet meanwhile, as social
differentiation continues apace, both ethnos and religio appear increasingly as
specialized sub-sets or configurations. Peace becomes possible when church and
state become sepa-rated, when "religion" is kept out of the political
compact. And for this, too, there are intimations in our stories.
But
meanwhile, back to the task at hand -- some anthro-pological perspectives,
philosophically refracted, on our enigma, with a response out of each of our
three stories -- rich material, all, as readers grope for their own solutions.
Paul Peachey
Rolling Ridge Study Retreat
Community
NOTES
1.
Original assignment to Yaker, Donders, and Bourouh.