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    Urban - Ethnicity Cohen p1 35 PDF

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    Erika De La Cruz

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    C643, 119796 First published in 1974 by Tavistock Publications Limited ‘1 New Fetter Lane, London BCL ‘This book has been set in Modern Series 7 and was printed by Buller & Tanner Limited, ‘Frome and London © Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth 1974 SBN 422 74080 2 ‘his volume derives from material presented at a conference on “Urban Bihnicity’, sponsored by the Association of Social Anthro- pologists of the Commonwealth, held in London, 31 March to 3 April 1971. Distributed in the USA by Harper d& Row Publishers, Inc. Barnes de Noble Import Division Contents page Editor's Preface vii ABNER COHEN ix Introduction: The Lesson of Ethnicity 3. 0. wrroHEnt 1 Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnie Behaviour: An ‘Empirical Exploration voy maxnmnz 7 Ethnicity and Opportunity in Urban America BADR DAHYA 1" ‘The Nature of Pakistani Ethnicity in Industrial Cities in Britain DAVID PARKIN ne Congregational and Interpersonal Ideologies in Political ‘Ethnicity BR. D. GRILLO 159 ‘Ethnic Identity and Social Stratification on a Kampala Housing Estate BNID SCHILDEROUT 187 Ethnicity and Generational Differences among Urban Immigrants in Ghana ¥. 0. rLoyD 223 Ethnicity and the Structure of Inequality in a Nigerian Town in the Mid-19503 EDWARD M. BRUNER 251 ‘The Expression of Ethnicity in Indonesia, SHLOMO DuSHEN 281 Political Ethnicity and Cultural Ethnicity in Tsrael during the 1960s Abner Cohen, commx, A. 1065, The Social Organization of Credit in a West ‘African Cattle Market. Africa 35: 8-20. 1966, Politi of the Kola Trade. Africa 36: 18-36. — 1967. The Hause. In P. O, Lloyd ef al. (eds), The City of Ibadan, 117-21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1068. The Polities of Mysticiam in Some Local Communities in Newly Independent African States, In M. Swartz (od.), Local- level Politics, Chicago: Aldine. — 1069. Custom and Politica in Urban Africa. London: Routledge ‘& Kegan Paul; Berkeley: University of California Press. — 1969b. Political Anthropology: the Analysis of the Symbolism of Power Relations. Man 4: 217-38. — 1071. The Politios of Ritual Secrecy. Man 6: 427-48. EPSTRIN, A. L, 1958, Politica in an Urban African Community. ‘Manchester: Manchester University Press. RVANS-PRITOHARD, 3. B. 1951. Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West. vannEn, 4. & BARKER, 2. 1972. Watch Out Kids, Open Gate Books. London: Macmillan, rurets, P. 1960. The City. Harmondsworth: Penguin. OLvOKMAN, x. 1961. Anthropological Problems arising from the ‘African Indusizial Revolution. In A. Southal (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa. London: Oxford University Press, LIEDEROW, 3.6. 1969, Liberia: The Evolution of Privilege. Ithaca ‘and London: Comell University Press. Lupron, 7. & WILSON, 8. 1959. Background and Connections of ‘Top Decision-makers. Manchester University School. MAQUET, J. 1961. The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda, London: ‘Oxford University Pre Mancvse, x. 1964. One-dimensional Man. London: Sphere Books. MIToHELL, J. 0. 1956. The Kalela Dance, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Panxrw, D. 1969. Neighbours and Nationals. London: Routledge & ‘Kogan Poul. pany, 0, 1969, Political Bles, London: George Allen & Unwin. saMPsox, A. 1962, Anatomy of Britain. Now York and Evanston: Harper & Row; London: Hodder and Stoughton. © Abner Cohen 1974 xxiv J.C. Mitchell Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behaviour: ‘An Empirical Exploration Differences, supposed or real, in the customs, beliefs, and ‘practices that aro identified as characteristic of particular sets ‘of persons have long been accepted as an almost universal aspect ‘of human behaviour. The awareness of these differences has been. referred to as nationalism, as tribalism, and, more generally, as ethnicity. However, these words, when used as anthropological ‘and sociological constructs, have often led to confusion, Much of this confusion, I contend, arises out of the somewhat different epistemological bases of various notions of ethnicity. I wish to distinguish first between ‘ethnicity’ as a construct of perceptual or cognitive phenomena on the one hand, and the ‘ethnic ‘group’ as a construct of behavioural phenomena on the other; ‘and, second, between commonsense notions and analytical notions of ethnicity. ‘There has been a long tradition of anthropology in which ‘cognitive and behavioural phenomena are treated, correctly, as ‘phenomena of different types and therefore not necessarily coin- cident. Anthropologists steeped in observational fieldwork, for ‘example, frequently point to the contradictions between people's responses to items in race attitude questionnaires and the way in which those people actually behave. The same point has been made by several social psychologists and by none as cogently as by La Piere (1934). He visited a number of hotels and restaurants in America with a Chinese couple and was refused. service only once. Subsequently he sent a questionnaire to all the proprietors of these establishments, and found that 98 per cent of the hotels and 92 per cent of the owners said that they would not serve Chineso patrons. It is too simple, however, to assume that cognitive and ‘behavioural phenomena relating to the same field of activity are either entirely discrepant, or entirely coincident. In the first lace the degree of fit should be tested empirically and not it J.C. Mitchell ‘assumed a priori. In the second place the discrepancies, where they are manifest, ought ideally to be reconciled by an appro- ‘priate theory, either epistemological or substantive. In general there are not many systematic studies of both cognitive and behavioural data relating to ethnicity. Analysts tend to use ethnicity either as a structural category, that is, as ‘a general principle that illuminates the behaviour of persons in specified social situations or as # cultural phenomenon, that is, 1s a set of attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes that people hold ‘about persons identified by some appropriate ‘ethnic’ label. If tthe discrepancy between the two is taken to be unproblematie ‘then the logical relationships that may connect them will inevit- ably remain unexplored. Systematic empirical studies of both cognitive and behavioural data relating to ethnicity, if con- strued as aspects of the same basic set of phenomena, must of necessity raise questions about the relationships of both types of construct one to the other. AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF COGNITIVE AND BEHAVIOURAL ETHNICITY At is with the intention of attempting an analysis of Uis sul that I have re-examined some data bearing on ethnicity col- lected in two very different field situations in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in the 1950s. The first, which I treat as cognitive data, I collected with a formal self-completed ques- tionnaire concerned with the respondent's feeling of social dis- tance from a specified set of ethnic categories. Preliminary analysis of this material has already been published (Longton 1955; Mitchell 1956, 1962). 'The second set of data is presented here for the first time and concerns the ethnic composition of sets of men living together in ‘single-quarter’ type of accommo- dation in the ‘line-of-rail’ towns of Zambia at about the same time as the social-distance study was conducted. In both sets of data we are concerned basically with ‘social distance’. The first (cognitive) set of data refers to the way in which respondents perceived the ‘distance’ betwoen themselves and a number of designated ethnic categories, and therefore, by implication, the set of ‘distances’ among the ethnic categories themselves. The second set of data refers to the extent to which ‘social distance” 2 Perceptions of Ethnicity and Bthnic Behaviour is expressed by the degree to which men who have identified themselves in a social survey as belonging to a specified ethnic ‘category are propared to share residential accommodation with ‘men whom they identify as belonging to other specified ethnic categories. THE STRUCTURE OF THE COGNITIVE DATA ‘The recovery of the structure of the perception of ethnic near- nesses and distances has been described more fully elsewhere (Mitchell, forthooming). Here I merely summarize the procedure 80 a8 to make the rest of the analysis intelligible. In 1954 Miss Janet Longton and I collected data from 329 senior-grade schoolboys on a Bogardus-type ‘social distance’ ‘questionnaire. The elements in tho scalo were questions relating to whether the respondent would willingly admit @ member from an arbitrarily specified ethnic group into close kinship by marriage, into a village, to the tribal area, work with, share a ‘meal with, or allow as a visitor to his home areas. Twenty ethnic categories were used in the questionnaire. They were selected. particularly to include representatives from the major con- ‘ventional ethnographic clusters and regional areas in Zambia and Malawi, The preliminary results from this inquiry had enabled us to posit a distance-ordering of ethnic oategories from. the point of view of any particular ethnic group (Mitchell 1956, 1962), which was particularly useful in developing the notion of ethnio categorization that has played such an important part in Epstein’s work (1958) and my own. ‘Access to more advanced analytical procedures subsequently has allowed me to re-analyse the original data in a more refined ‘way.* Initially « principal components analysis of the original six social-distance items enabled me to collapse the reactions of ‘each respondent on all of the six in respect of each ethnic cate- gory to a single social-distance score. This involved weighting ‘the standardized score of each respondent on each item by a value derived from the principal components analysis, and transforming the score linearly s0 that a score of zero indicated. ‘the greatest possible closoness to the ethnic eategory involved and & score of 100 the greatest possible distance from that category. This procedure gives greater value to those social- 3 J.0. Mitchell distance items, which correlate highly with the common social- distance dimension underlying all six items, and correspond- ingly devalues those items that do not correlate very highly with this dimension. Bach respondent, then, could be given twenty ‘distance’ scores, that is, one for each of the ethnic categories involved. These distance soores may be interpreted as reflecting ‘tho social distance that each respondent perceived between him- self and each of tho ethnic categories referred to. ‘These distances, however, cannot have any objective validity. What we are interested in recovering from the data is whether or not, over all respondents, there are any regularities in the distances perceived among the ethnic categories themselves. To achieve this a set of distances among all twenty ethnic cate- gories was calculated for each respondent. For computational conveniencs these differences were squared and then summed for all respondents. The appropriate squared differences were ‘then averaged over all 325 respondents.® This meant that if, on ‘the average, respondents consistently perceived any specified ethnic category to be close to any other specified ethnic cate- gory, however distant they perceived these ethnic categories to be from themselves, then the value of the mean squared differ- ‘ences of distances in the appropriate cell inking these two etinnfe groups would be small. Equally if they perceived two ethnic categories to be distant from one another, however distant the respondents perceived these two groups to be from themselves, the value in the appropriate cell would be large. The mean squared differences in distance, therefore, contain within their totality the structure of the perceived distances from one an- other of all ethnic categories. Given a matrix of squared distances of this sort there are several procedures available by means of which the implicit structure of the distances among the ethnic groups can be recovered. ‘The method I have chosen here, hierarchical cluster- ing, has soveral advantages, The most important of these is that the procedures are very simple and are easily understood, the analysis can be presented in simple diagrammatic form, it is non-dimensional, that is, it makes no assumptions about the space in which the elements are contained, and it does not ‘assume interval-typo measurements of the relationships among ‘tho cloments ~ in fact the procedure T have employed makes 4 Perceptions of Ethnicity and Ethnic Behaviour ‘use of the ordinal relationships among the ethnic groups only. The procedure is based on that proposed by Johnson (1967), though I have modified it slightly. Basically, what the procedure does is first of all to find all ‘those pairs of elements ~ in this case ethnic categories - that are closer to one another than they are to any other element. These are then considered to be linked at the first level of the hicr- archy. It then seeks out the elements—or pairs of elements that are nearest to the pairs linked at the first level, to determine the

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