Sophia van Noppen
Summary SANT105
Lecture 8
Lecture 8, Politics of Difference
What is identity and difference?
What is the impact of race and ethnicity on politics?
What do we mean by identity and difference?
Identity and difference often refer back to Hegel. For Hegel, identity is never closed in on itself. It is
constituted by relations, difference etc. The subject object dialect functions as terring(?) with the
negative, part of the larger process of constituting self-consciousness. Mediation. The terms in
Essence are always mere pairs of correlatives, and yet not absolutely reflected in themselves: hence
in essence the actual unity of the notion is not yet realised, but only postulated by reflection.
Essence – which is Being coming into mediation with itself through the negativity of itself – is self-
relatedness, only in so far as it is relation to an Other – this Other, however, coming to view at first
not as something which is, but as postulated and hypothesised. Being has not vanished: but, firstly,
Essence, as simple self-relation, is Being, and secondly as regards its one-sided characteristic of
immediacy, being is deposed to a mere negative, to a seeming or reflected light – Essence
accordingly is Being thus reflecting light into itself.
The Sublime (Kant).
So, in this moment of confronting this Other, this object, it feels kind a sense of other-memberment,
but finds itself in that. Double reflection. You do not flee from the negative, but the subject feels
independent and autonomous. Hegel was also influenced by slavery. Phenomenology of Spirit, the
master is in this confrontation depended on the slave to realise his own consciousness. Self-
consciousness is not the brain of natural science, not evolutionary biology but a phenomenological
concept.
The question that modernity raises is: Who is human? Who is human in the eyes of God? How do we
determine humanity? Mbembe suggest Africanity is a huge challenge for this question.
Darwin and Origin of Species based on Science and Difference. Poster -> God at the top, angels,
demons, moons, stars, kings, princes, humans, plants. For Leneas(?) this template was also
racialized. Forerunner of modernity. Morality, intellect, other modes of biology also influenced this
template. Mbembe suggest blacks have been gazed at through the white gaze.
The noble savage, premodern mobility. Modernity is as much about laws as it is about other things.
Slavery: bodies as commodities.
Dickens: noble savage and premodernity is nonsense, colonialism and slavery created conditions
that were not reflective of the concept of humanity. The white people who went to Africa, the
underclasses of the whites were sent to Africa, not white enough. But, in Africa they were white.
To be human is to be not a commodity. Commissionaires or the lower white classes tended not to
argue for African liberation but about it being bad for the colonial state etc while still being against
slavery. Also, a rise of abolitionist movements.
, Sophia van Noppen
In the early 20th century, emergence of both abolitionist and eugenics movements. Africa has always
answered these. These debates have continued their legacy, we can now see it in genetics research
and its debate. Genetics research has shown more powerfully that racial categories are socially
constructed, science not legitimate to make racial categories.
Brubaker
Wants to challenge the definition of groups. Conflict does not have to be between groups, between
nations, between ethnicities. Brubaker wants us to distinguish emic and edict analysis. Ethnopolitical
practices. You risk as a social analysis to re-enforce ethnic groups, as if they are bounded entities.
Ethnicity, race and nations should be conceptualized not as substances etc but rather ethnicity as
relational, dynamic, processual, eventual and disaggregate. Ethnicity, race and nation are not groups
but practical categories, cultural idioms, discursive frames, political projects and continguel(?)
effects. We have to attend to ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, those who benefit from creating ethnic
group. Group-making is a project. Conflict treats ethnic conflict as antagonists rather than
organizations/entrepreneur who are enacting conflict. These organizations are not always the object
or target of ethnic conflict. Coding and framing point to a cognitive process, to process events. If we
as social analysts see conflicts while looking at the leader, we do not see the desires within the
peoples. Waxing and wayning(?).
Barth
One might self-identify or be assigned an ethnic identity. Apartheid. He suggests that rather than
ethnicity being an expression of a primordial culture, people have to be recruited into an identity.
Similar to Brubaker, no primordial culture, people have to be recruited into a boundary that creates
that primordial culture. Barth emphasizes the entrepreneurial element of ethnicity or in relation to
popular will. It is not about ‘the other’ but familiar ‘others’. We should see the state as having
material power, like policy making. 3 levels
Micro: individual experiences, within the family, school, day to day experiences.
Median: locality, neighbourhood, niche. Access to goods.
Macro: Main actors here are states and groups they confront, as well as international
organizations.
Barth has been criticized for overexaggerating choice and individuals.
Seminar 5, 28th of November
Chile, neoliberalism and colonialism
Barth (ethnicity is a social process)
1. What is the main focus in this text?
His book written in 1969, ethnicity as rethinking culture and ethnic identity as a feature
of social organization, rather than a nebulous expression of culture.
2. In Ethnic groups and boundaries, Barth argues that we should study ‘the boundary and the
processes of recruitment’ instead of the ‘cultural stuff’. What does he mean by this?
, Sophia van Noppen
What he means is looking at how ethnicity is constructed, structured and the processes
of exclusion and inclusion, instead of what one ethnicity might contain as characteristics.
Ethnicity happens when you meet other people. Ascription and self-ascription.
3. How did postmodernists like Barth deconstruct and rethink notions of history and culture?
We broke loose from the idea of history as simply the objective source and cause of
ethnicity and saw it as a synchronic rhetoric. And rethink culture as to transcend
habitual conceptions of this thing ‘culture.’
a. How does Barth argue that one should think of ethnicity?
Ethnicity is based on experience, ascription and self-ascription. Ethnicity as the social
organization of culture difference.
b. What are Barth’s three levels of analysis and how does he use them?
Microlevel = Required to model the processes effecting experience and identities. It
focusses on persons and interpersonal interaction, the events and arenas of lives,
Median level = larger communities, state-level actors, access to welfare
Macrolevel = the state, religion, ethnic groups and organizations (MNO and NGO)
4. How is ethnicity discussed in other texts in the curriculum?
See drive document
5. How is ethnicity discussed in general?
Less fluid, an umbrella term, often assumed (like on the news), ethnicity as something
exotic. How about the Kurds, who have a nation but not a state?
What is the difference between race and ethnicity?
Common: Race includes phenotypic characteristics such as skin colour, whereas ethnicity
also encompasses cultural factors such as nationality, tribal affiliation, religion, language and
traditions of a particular group
Barth: It is not just culture that defines ethnicity, it is the difference(s) between people, the
(self-)ascription. Ethnicity does not exist when two groups are apart, but ethnicity is only
used/activated when two groups meet
Group: you share something/characteristic/feeling with others (This is ethnicity for Barth)
Brubaker: critique: group is also constructed; you do not have to be in the same group the
whole time. Groups are a process, groupness.
Race = category, something that is ascribed to you, appointed to you.
Chance
1. Where did Chance do her fieldwork, whom does she follow and what does she look at?
, Sophia van Noppen
a. Kennedy Road, South Africa, Abahlali (a national movement for people’s rights,
activist, think that the CAN forgot the ‘poor people’). She looks at shacks, and the
Slums Act, and the living politics within those shacks.
2. What is living politics?
Living politics captures how the struggle against a ‘politics of death’ continues in
historically race-based communities. By living in the people, and through mundane
activities and eventful public dramas (protests, using electricity, not being compliant
with state structures), poor people make themselves heard through their mean instead
of elite, expert means. Engaging in power, not necessarily resisting it.
3. What is the Slums Act, and how did this affect the people in Kennedy Road?
An act that says they cannot make new shacks, give shacks number, if your shack does
not have a number it gets teared down by the state, the red devils. But in the
constitution, it says that you cannot be kicked out of your house. So, the Act is in
contradiction with the constitution. People lost their house, protesting, took them to
court and the shacks won. The Slums Act made it possible for the government to
transfer people to transit camps, placing black people, separating black people from
white people.
4. How does Chance link colonialism to contemporary neoliberalism with this book? (think race
and apartheid)
Even though apartheid is gone, still separating black people from white people.
Economic gains do not serve the people in shacklands, the government does not invest
in them.
5. See Mnikelo’s statement: “When a white man lights a candle, it is supposed that he is being
romantic. When a black man lights a candle, it is supposed that he is poor.” How does fire
punctuate life in settlements, and how is this connected to race and class?
In these ways, fire, water, air and land are dynamic social relations that are intertwined
with power. Fire is used by residents of shacks for heating, a source of light and a
weapon of protests on the streets. By approaching fire as intertwined with power,
Chance illustrates how the urban poor come to inhabit political roles that transform, and
are transformed by, material life. Fires in settlements either occur because of household
accidents or deliberate political acts. Fire as a weapon was always accessible for
everyone, as they are affordable, highly mobile and they can be hidden. Fire is used as a
means of agency. Once a fire is made, it leaves chaos but the person who made the fire
is often unknown
Fire and race: Fire was also used during xenophobic attacks. The stereotyped race/class
identity of the poor is inscribed in fire as well. It is here, between life and death, that fire
draws the ultimate line of difference
6. What types of power and resistance are shown in the book and in the film?
Literature Lecture 8
F. Barth, Fredrik - Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity in The Anthropology of
Ethnicity.
