XIII. Ethnicity

The academic repudiation of biological notions of race was significant for anthropology, as it meant the emergence of the concept of “ethnic groups” to explain human differences. As Stolcke has suggested, it implied the reification of culture, which thus potentially prolonged the naturalization of sociohistorical differences earlier contained in the European notion of biological race. (de la Cadena 28)

I want to question our contemporary use of the term “ethnicity.” I don’t like it. In Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991, Marisol de la Cadena argues that the repudiation of biological notions of race after the horrors of Nazi Germany in World War II did not eliminate the “naturalization of sociohistorical differences.” The replacement concept of “ethnic groups,” grounded in culture and not biology, still carried a lot of the same associations from the earlier concept of race. This replacement concept explained group differences with the idea that people have a propensity to reject strangers which necessarily produces hostile relations among cultures, rather than the previous idea that different races had different essential strengths and weaknesses. “Ethnicity” also had the effect of reifying or essentializing cultures—and these cultural groups very often aligned with those previously essentialized as races. I think it is worth emphasizing that ethnicity, just like race, is an irreducibly political concept—not a clean anthropological framework to describe human diversity. Drawing on Rama’s idea of the precedence of the ideal over the real, I think that concepts of ethnicity not only describe the reality of human groups but also create them.

De la Cadena questions the Peruvian colonial and then culturalist hierarchies of race but does not question to the same extent her use of the term “Indigenous.” She uses “Indigenous culture” as synonymous with “Andean culture” and uses the term Indigenous to describe various people and groups. She asserts that “indigenous culture and Indianness are not synonyms,” and takes the grassroots Cuzqueño intellectuals’ definition of Indigeneity as compatible with being Mestizo (de la Cadena 319). She does this to frame Indigeneity as relational and open to change. Still, I suspect that the concept, though in flux, carries a lot from “Indianness,” just as ethnicity carries the legacy of racial discourse (and is in dialogue with its contemporary forms), even as it seeks to redefine itself. I wonder if you agree with my criticism of ethnicity, and wonder to what extent you think the contemporary Peruvian use of the term “Indigenous” continues to carry the associations of “Indianness”?