Culture as Identity: An Anthropologist's View

Author(s): Anthony P. Cohen

Source: New Literary History , Winter, 1993, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life
(Winter, 1993), pp. 195-209
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/469278

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 Culture As Identity: An Anthropologist's View

Anthony P. Cohen

ULTURE AS IDENTITY. It is a title which includes within its

brief span two frequently abused words. Their abuse
anthropologists, not because we are lexical purists, but
it threatens to steal our clothes. Culture is our business, the
focus and organizing topic of our discipline. And identit
the buzz words of our times. In lay discourse it has bec
awful portmanteau, carrying all sorts of murky cargo.
I shall attempt to be resolutely empirical. Without any
finesse, I shall treat identity as the way(s) in which a per
wishes to be, known by certain others. "Culture as identi
refers to the attempt to represent the person or group in t
a reified and/or emblematized culture. It is a political e
manifest in those processes which we frequently describe as
the components of which are referred to as "symbols." So w
avoid a little more definition-just enough to know rough
we are talking about. First, culture; then symbol; then ethnic
These are all words which have some currency in ordin
guage, and whose academic and anthropological usage is
considerably complicated. In anthropology, culture has gone
a succession of paradigm shifts. In the past it was used t
a determination of behavior; for example, that you could on
the thoughts which your culture gave you the words to ver
the infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; or, that environment
nology, economic modality shaped a congruent culture w
turn, dictated appropriate behavior. There was then a ma
of thought which treated culture as the means by which
posedly discrete processes of social life, such as politics, econ
religion, kinship, were integrated in a manner which m
all logically consistent with each other. In this view, the ind
became a mere replicate in miniature of the larger social and
entity. The tendency now is to treat culture much more
as that which aggregates people and processes, rather than i

New Literary History, 1993, 24: 195-209

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 196 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

them. It is an important dist

than similarity among peop
to postulate a large number
clones of each other and of
important, for in ordinary
frequently to imply this.
Moreover, if culture is not s
power over people, then it
something else: if not the log
say, relations of production-t
perspective, we have come to
of interaction; or, to put it
the creation of culture, rat
are-in the contemporary jar
then it follows that we can
ingenious and powerful we m
politicization of cultural iden
acteristic to which we will return.
Culture, in this view, is the means by which we make meaning,
and with which we make the world meaningful to ourselves, and
ourselves meaningful to the world. Its vehicle is the symbol. Symbols
are quite simply carriers of meaning. To be effective, therefore,
they should be imprecise, in order that the largest possible number
of people can modulate a shared symbol to their own wills, to their
own interpretive requirements: a tightly defined symbol is pretty
useless as anything other than a purely formal sign.' Symbolism is
one of the richest veins of anthropological literature, and anything
I attempt to say about it here is bound to be the grossest simpli-
fication. All I wish the reader to keep in mind is that symbols are
inherently meaningless, they are not lexical; they do not have a
truth value. They are pragmatic devices which are invested with
meaning through social process of one kind or another. They are
potent resources in the arenas of politics and identity.
Finally, ethnicity. In some respects, this is the most difficult word
of the three since it appears to mean something--indeed, has been
imported into lay usage for this reason-but in practice means either
everything or nothing at all. When a Labor politician or a Bir-
mingham policeman says ethnic, they mean "black." When the Indian
Workers Association or the Notting Hill Carnival Committee says
ethnic, they mean "minority," usually "disadvantaged or discriminated
minority." When the racial theorist says ethnic, he refers to a rela-
tionship of blood and descent. If the word is to be anthropologically
useful, it cannot refer exclusively to any of these. Ethnicity has

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 197

become a mode of action

decision people make to depi
the bearers of a certain cult
purpose are almost invariably
life, rather than from elaborate ceremonial or ritual occasions.
Ethnicity has become the politicization of culture.2 Thus, it is in
part a claim to a particular culture, with all that that entails. But
such claims are rarely neutral. The statement made in Ethiopia, "I
am Oromo"-or in Northern Ireland, "He's a Prod"-is clearly not
merely descriptive: it has an added value, either negative or positive,
depending on who is speaking and to whom.
I referred just now to the entailments of cultural claims. One
aspect of the charged nature of cultural identity is that in claiming
one, you do not merely associate yourself with a set of characteristics:
you also distance yourself from others. This is not to say that contrast
is the conscious motivation for such claims, as some writers have
argued,3 but it is implicit and is understood, the more so the more
highly charged the situation may be. Cultural identity also entails
a patrimoine and a history, or the acknowledged need to create these.
It is in the expression of all of these entailments that symbolism
becomes crucial.
If the ethnic card is played in identity, it is not, then, like
announcing nationality. Ethnicity is not a juridical matter, carryin
legal rights and obligations. It is a political claim, which entai
political and moral rights and obligations. Please note that I us
the word nationality, not nationhood--since, as we know, nationhoo
may also be a statement of claim, and is one which is often ma
to emphasize the circumstances of its denial. The putative "natio
hood" of Scotland, or of "the Jewish People," is the axiomatic premis
for claims, say, to nationality, or to the legitimacy of Israel's occu-
pation of so-called Judaea and Sumaria. But these are utterly di
ferent from the argument made by Hong Kong Chinese regardin
their entitlement to a British passport; or from that of the British
government concerning sovereignty and the Malvinas. The on
nationality, is an argument about legal status. The other, nationhoo
is a claim about the character and integrity of one's cultural identity
They may well coincide in a process which Orvar Lofgren describes
as "the nationalization of culture" in which attempts are made
forge a distinctive identity, for any of a variety of strategic reason
His example is the creation of the national symbols and consciousne
of "Swedishness" in late-nineteenth century Sweden. Some othe
contemporary anthropological work on this issue focuses on Israel,5
Australia,6 and Czechoslovakia;' and the historian Peter Sahlins h

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 198 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ingeniously demonstrated t
national identity in the tra
dagne (France)/Cerdanya (Sp
Now, the position has been t
ethnicity -politicized cultural
is, that it is invoked only t
This position, associated prima
ethnicity studies for more
herently unsatisfactory for r
here in any detail. But suff
merely as a tactical identity,
the symbolic expression of et
draw attention to the idea that when we consult ourselves about
who we are, that entails something more than the rather ne
reflection on "who we are not." It is also a matter of autobiogra
of things we know about ourselves; of the person we believe our
to be. By the second, the symbolic expression of ethnic identit
refer you to the multivocality of ethnicity. If, instead of annou
myself as, say, Sri Lankan, I say "I am Tamil," I do not me
suggest that I am just like every other Tamil. I do not hav
sublimate myself in an anonymizing "Tamil-ness" in order to su
that Tamils have something significant in common which d
guishes them from Sinhalese. But because ethnic identity is expr
through symbols, it is possible for this internal heterogeneity
preserved, even while masked by common symbolic forms.
I put these two matters together-the self-consciousness of
nicity, and the symbolic form of ethnic identity-to suggest th
political expression of cultural identity has two distinctive regi
to which we should attend. The first is used for the appar
dogmatic statement of more or less objective doctrine: "I a
Palestinian"--and certain things will be understood as follo
from that. The second is for contentious statements which treat
ethnicity as the context of, or as an aspect of, identity with v
uncertain implications: "I am a particular Palestinian." The apparen
monolithic character of ethnic identity at the collective level t
does not preempt the continual reconstruction of ethnicity at
personal level. Ethnicity is not a dogma, although in certain c
cumstances political leaders and others may attempt to politicize i
to the point at which they can enforce it dogmatically.9 But this
comparatively rare, since ethnicity is so frequently a matter
dispute, and can only rarely command consensus for longer t
the very brief period of a specific campaign. Ethnicity has a defi
appearance but rather indefinite substance.

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 199

II
Ethnicity, then, is the politicization of culture; ethnic identity is
a politicized cultural identity. In what kinds of circumstance does
culture become politicized, intentionally put to the service of identity?
I would suggest that the minimal conditions are that people recognize
that ignorance of their culture among others acts to their detriment;
that they experience the marginalization of their culture, and their
relative powerlessness with respect to the marginalizers.'0
With ignorance of a culture goes the denial of its integrity. Because
culture is expressed symbolically, and thus has no fixed meanings,
it is often invisible to others, especially to powerful others. In his
book To Square with Genesis my colleague Alan Campbell argues that
the Brazilian government would not acknowledge the cultural des-
ecration of Amazonian Indians which followed hard in the wake

of the environmental destruction of the Amazon itself--thr

mining, highway building, and so forth-because they insiste
there was no culture there to desecrate! " This denial of, or threat
to, cultural integrity is experienced by people in all manner of ways:
through the subordination of indigenous languages-say, Tamil to
Sinhala; Breton to French; French, among Quebecois, to English;
through the denigration of their tradition (the examples are almost
limitless -Australian Aborigines; Mongolian Buryats; Basques); and
from the outright denial of their distinctiveness -say, Armenians
and most other nationalities in the Soviet Union, sectarian groups
in South Asia, and so on.
It does happen, has happened historically on a massive scale, that
such continuous denigration seems to drive people into cultural
retreat, where they either make their tradition a covert matter, or
appear to desert it in large measure. Arguably, the assimilationist
stance in American race relations prior to the emergence of the
Black Power movement had something of this character. Perhaps
the demise of Gaelic might also be seen in this way. Certainly, the
literature records similar responses among Norwegian Saami, North
American Indians, peoples throughout Francophone Africa, and so
on. Perhaps the most vivid argument in this connection has been
Edward Said's Orientalism.12 Said maintains that the Western intel-
lectual tradition created its own versions of oriental cultures which
it imposed upon oriental peoples and then denigrated, thereby
justifying the West's own domination of the Orient as an essentially
civilizing mission--the same kind of validation that accompanie
colonial expansion throughout Africa, South Asia, and, much earlier
South America. I said above that I thought this kind of reading

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 200 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

dominated cultures was mistaken-and I believe this to be because

it confuses the form of indigenous response with its substance.
thing we do know is that the historical era in which this retrea
stance prevailed came to an end emphatically during the later 19
and was replaced by an assertive stance in which the putative sti
of cultural inferiority was transformed into an emblem of it
periority-and that, really, is what lies behind the title of this p
So, from the experiential point of view, the politicization of cul
identity requires people to react against their own felt disadvan
and denigration. It seems also to occur in characteristic econ
and political circumstances. So far as the former is concern
crucial factor appears to be the relentless centralization of th
economy-that is to say, the increasing political, geographical,
conceptual distance between those who produce, and those w
control economic decision making. This distance makes more diffi
the expression of particularistic differences, and therefore negl
them. Its ignorance or contempt for such differences is buttres
by mass-marketing. The distance also means that returns f
production and investment are not merely distributed unequ
but in a way which is experienced as doubly inequitable, be
of the apparent insensitivity to it of the remote center. Hence Sco
fishermen and French sheep farmers react to decisions mad
Brussels with vehemence and an accompanying bitterness be
of the supposed ignorance behind these decisions, rather than
of their partiality. The big economy promises much to every
and is seen as delivering in a very uneven way. Therefore, w
M. Elaine Burgess, "the myth of the 'liberal expectancy' has g
way to the reality of ethnic diversity.""
The political circumstances? The need for a new kind of platfo
a novel mode of representation in the context of political cen
ization, the growth of the suprastate, the multinational. Again,
increasing remoteness of the locus of power induces particularis
identity-in regional, local, sectarian, linguistic, and class terms,
so on. The remoteness of government also requires it to have
agencies, and these, ironically, provide precedents for devolu
A Scottish office for the BBC, or for the hitherto-centralized Uni-
versities' Funding Council or whatever, provides a model for, and
suggests the appropriateness and desirability of, devolution.14 Also,
on the subject of precedent, the process of decolonization has no
objective end to it: its logic is to continue the process to a kind of
infinite federalism. Pierre van den Berghe describes ethnicity in the
industrialized world as "the last phase of imperial disintegration."
He asks, "if the Fiji Islands can be independent, why not Scotland?"'5

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 201

If Sri Lanka, why not a Ta

why not Eritrea (again)? A
there is being played out a
acknowledgement of right
cultural integrity. Cultur
commodity batted around t
is as hugely complex and ra
and unidimensional to outside observers.
Culture is represented as identity through symbols: simple
form, complex in substance because of their malleability, imprecisi
multivocality. One can easily posit the icons of a culture--tartanry
cuisine, costume, music-but what these mean is unspecifiable,
cause their meanings vary among all those who use them. Intrinsica
meaningless, then, but powerfully eloquent, so much so that t
loss or proscription may be experienced as an utter silencing of th
cultural voice. When the Inkatha militant says, "I lose my manhoo
if I cannot carry my spear," this may be a protestation not
gratuitous machismo, but of the integrity of cultural personh
however regrettable or misguided it may appear to be to other
us. This selection from everyday life of cultural items for t
representation of identity is a process which the American anthro
pologist Theodore Schwartz has called "ethnognomony."'16
He has borrowed, some might say corrupted, the term to conve
the idea of cultures putting down their own lines of demarcation-
let us call them symbolic boundaries. His own research on Admira
Islanders led him to the perceptive observation that the distin
tiveness which people attribute to their behavior may be impercep
tible to those on the other side of the line; moreover, that outsiders
might well light upon quite other elements of another peopl
behavior to emphasize their distinctiveness. But the important sug
gestion to which his argument leads us is that culture is in the ey
of the beholden rather than the beholder. This has been noted in
various ways by anthropologists for a long time: it is the significa
of the "expressive" or ritualized idiom of technical behavior
Edmund Leach referred to as an "aesthetic frill" of otherwise in-
strumental action;'" or the accomplishment of the "standard
cultural act" which Gregory Bateson saw as celebrated by the latm
through the performance of the otherwise curious Naven rite
But neither these earlier writers nor Schwartz himself followed
through the implications of their arguments sufficiently to recog
culture as the creature and product of people's own agency; a
therefore, to recognize its malleability and efficacy in the formula
management, and presentation of identity.

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 202 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

When we look at the political

gles for decolonization and t
digenous entities into the soli
repeatedly the expedient use
projection of the enlarged ic
are celebrated instances: Ny
Senghor's of "negritude"; the
Gandhi-ism with supposedly c
are not limited to the Third W
politics in which a contrived v
in a political encounter. It i
and Ranger termed, in thei
tradition.'9 I am referring h
to culture as tactic, but to c
strategy. I am referring to t
seen to be in such a conditio
loss means not just the imp
the loss of a beautiful buildi
people predicate their very id
In 1970, the Norwegian gover
its plan to dam the Alta River
the village of Masi and intrud
used by the reindeer-herdin
humance. The plan disappea
1981, the Supreme Court com
Paine to write a report on th
proposed development. He sho
of such importance in the e
further showed that, althou
minority of the total Saami
toralism was of the greatest i
culture, for a variety of rea
marginalized and stigmatized
ritory, for which they claim
the straw which broke their cultural backs. In 1982 Paine wrote,
"The proposed Alta/Kautokeino hydro scheme brings the Saami
world in Norway very close indeed to its 'to be or not to be.' The
likely consequences are so encompassing. They affect sedentary as
well as pastoralist Saami: their ecology, economy, demography and
hence their sense of self as Saami" (90).
The Supreme Court did not uphold the objections; enabling
legislation was passed; and over a lengthy period of time dramatic
protests, which mesmerized the nation, were held both in Oslo and

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 203

in Masi itself. Robert Pain

which illuminates their metatexts to leave us in no doubt that the
issue was Saami culture itself. Let me offer you just a taste. T
Oslo protest was to be a hunger strike, held by young Saami weari
traditional dress, in a traditional Saami tent (lavvo) erected for th
purpose in the grounds of the Parliament buildings:

Wednesday, 10th October. ... The media watch and report. Particular not
is taken of the "valuable and varied 'instruction' in Saami culture" which
the strikers-with megaphone in hand-offer: communal singing, Saa
poetry, joik and historical legends. Sometimes a person steps out of
crowd, grasps one or other of the Saami group and tells him (in Saa
that he himself is a Saami-adding that this is something he had kept sec
since coming to live in Oslo.
The Saami group already shows concern lest the crowd turn in an
on the police should they come to take them (the strikers) away. Th
remind everybody that "our action is one of passive resistance. The Saam
people are a nation with strong traditions of passive resistance." ...
Thursday, 11th October. . . . In their reporting from the scene, journali
mention "black" and "silent" figures standing inside the large windo
the parliament building overlooking the tent and the milling crowd
Eidsvolls plass. The dark silhouettes are those of members of parliam
The imagery and the contrast is unmistakeable: inside the building a
dark and, for once, the politicians are not talking; outside, all is light an
life.21

The strikers were arrested and the tent was pulled down. Their
"spokesman" assured journalists that they were not going to give
up, but intended to continue their hunger strike quietly-"in the
Saami way" (198). And, indeed, this is what they did.
What has to be noted here is that it is the very everyday emblems
of their culture, by which they have been recognized and stigmatized
in the past, which they now turn against the state to denigrate it
and to proclaim their own moral cause.
The strikers shrewdly used their own symbols--lavvo, joik (ballad)
passivity-to politicize their culture and to transform the value of
their identity. As Paine put it, "Saami ethnicity was demonstrated
on a basis of self-ascription and self-advocacy" (201). As a strategy
of assertiveness, this reversal of stigma has become characteristic
during the last quarter century: blacks became "beautiful"; ladies
became "women"; Eskimos and Lapps became, respectively, Inuit
and Saami.
The imperative need to posit culture as identity can arise fr
many different circumstances. I mentioned earlier those of a p

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 204 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ception of imminent and p

attempt to reverse extreme d
is a perceived threat to the
assimilation or the blurring o
of internal differentiation
liticization of culture or trad
vides the raison d'etre of th
nations against a common ene
nature of dispute between
Zionism to the status of rel
ization" of culture as a respon
demographic and economic c
vulnerability to new kinds of
A Sinhala Village in a Time of
describes the use of a Buddh
the village temple itself (pa
had supposedly characterize
been transformed by infrastr
nology, education, the grow
and the increasing heteroge
used in this attempt to contri
from "the language of refo
historical depth. Similarly, Sp
village represented it visuall
doubtful pedigree and accu
stupa: "These are the three
it mattered little that one of
rebuilt, the second provide
children's parents, and the
had been provided with a vi
more than anything, made 'o
as an imagined community
It would be quite incorrect t
tations of identity in somewh
pression and use speaks rathe
culture and group. It is only
speak, that its bearers can g
to defend, and those to whom it is vulnerable can be made aware
of what they might otherwise damage, unwittingly or deliberately.
So far as indigenes are concerned, the iconization of culture is no
more than a means of agreeing on a very limited number and range
of symbols as a kind of lowest common denominator, which can be

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 205

interpreted and rendered p

themselves. Apparent unif
glosses over an uncountab
But for outsiders, it is a c
For example, the tradition
refers to their incomparably
and gatherers, or as pasto
knowledge and attitudes t
the people themselves and a
is quite simple: outsiders ca
therefore, they cannot kno
boundedness of Australian
documented both in ethno
insensitivity of the whit
consequence of contempt in
of cultural blindness in most. To us a stone is a stone; to the
Aboriginal, it conceals an ancestor. Another celebrated example is
the Inuit perception and verbal description of snow in its numerous
varieties; a skill supposedly denied to us, not just because our sight
is defective, but because our language is deficient in appropriate
descriptive terms. There is nothing peculiarly Fourth World-ish about
this: the literature on East African cattle pastoralists is full of
references to the richness of terms available to describe cattle pig-
mentation and so on.23 Closer to home, I have commented on the
extent of the vocabulary available to and created by Whalsay Islanders
in Shetland to describe the condition of the sky.24 But we should
not be thinking in terms of unique conditions. The point is that, in
the politically charged context of relations between the Fourth World
peoples and the state, any of these things are ripe for investment
culturally with political significance. Thus, the material conditions
of social life provide the means for the symbolic construction of a
cultural identity. Analogous terms of identification are available to
all groups for whom culture has become the issue.
There is an eloquent example in Harvey Feit's description of the
resistance of the James Bay Cree Indians to the appropriation of
their land for the development of a hydroelectric scheme.25 The
government's case was that the condition of the flora and fauna
would be expertly monitored by government scientists using the
most sophisticated scientific techniques available. During the 1930s
the federal and provincial governments, following typical British
colonial practice, had attempted to impose on the Misstassini-Cree
structures of leadership and representation which essentially turned

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 206 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Cree incumbents into the serv

spoke in terms of "possession,"
and provincial powers in Ca
Both extraneous "expertise
anomalous and offensive ide
natural resource stocks is met
the far less sensitive classifica
possibly be. In part this is b
structure. The Misstassini-Cre
hunting territories. Feit notes
with an average extent of 1
control, not of an owner b
significant. For the Cree, la
implies rights, including the
cannot be such a right, for th
own successors. At any time
headman-is custodian or stewa
not in ownership. Part of this
of the resource stock for fu
sponsibility for monitoring a
strategies are dictated by th
a scientist with authority over
since it denigrates indigenou
pertise; (b) ill-advised, because
relative to the Cree themselve
their future; and (c) denies t
on putative ownership, which
Displacement from the land
It deprives indigenous peopl
of their self-sufficiency. It de
whether these are sacred place
of their characteristic knowle
this rapidly disappears and tr
own environment into childlik
them into a demeaning tutelar
the dignity which inheres in
ignominy of dependency. Te
for culture which, in turn, se
Wherever one sees this kind
Saamiland, in the Torres Str
South Asian "communalism," or in Southern Africa-there seems
to be an almost irresistible inclination to explain behavior by treating
it as the product of culture: the Zulus or Yanomamo are said to

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 CULTURE AS IDENTITY 207

be warlike or aggressive; so
constrained in its thought an
system or whatever. There is
culture as a body of substant
of symbolic form which pro
dictate what is expressed or
this respect, culture is insub
shadows. It is not so much that it does not exist as that it has no
ontology: it does not exist apart from what people do, and therefore
what people do cannot be explained as its product. Culture can b
invoked as a means of representing them-as, for example, whe
it is deployed as identity. But in those circumstances it must b
regarded in the same way as any other symbolic expression: as being
inherently meaningless but capable of substantiation at the discretion
of those who use it-multireferential, multivocal, an infinitely variabl
tool.
The old saw, "when I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my
gun," has been attributed to sources as disparate as T. S. Eliot an
Hermann Goering, Bertrand Russell and Malcolm Muggeridge. Th
word culture ill-used does make me pretty angry. It is not synonymou
with ideology; it is not to be inferred from scattered shards of ancien
pottery. But my anger increases to apoplexy when I hear cultur
magnified and reified as "the culture of" a people. If we are th
agents and substantiators of our cultures, rather than their creatures
we must resist the temptation to depict culture as the monolithi
determinant of our behavior. If culture did have that character, it
would equip us with uniform rather than with identity. Culture is
a matter less for documentation than for interpretation; it is more
faithfully and sensitively depicted in metaphor than in museums.
Its intellectual fascination lies in its extraordinary versatility, which
is precisely what makes it such an eloquent representation of identity.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

NOTES

1 See Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London

18.

2 See Robert P. B. Paine, "Norwegians and Saami: Nation-state and Fourth World,"
in Minorities and Mother-country Imagery, ed. Gerald L. Gold (St. John's, Nfld., 1984),
p. 212.
3 See, e.g., Fredrik Barth, "Introduction," in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organisation of Culture Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth (London, 1969), pp. 9-38; and
James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative

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 208 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Study of Cultures, Histories, Religion

4 See Orvar Lofgren, "The Nationa
(1989), 5-23.
5 See Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events
(Cambridge, 1990); and Robert P. B. Paine, "Masada between History and Meaning,"
paper presented to the Conference of the Canadian Historical Association (1991).
6 See Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State (Washington, D.C., 1988).
7 See Ladislav Holy, "Freedom, Nation and Personhood in Czechoslovakia" (St.
Andrews, 1990, mimeo).
8 See Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees
(Berkeley, 1989).
9 See David E. Apter, "Political Religion in the New Nations," in Old Societies and
New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York,
1963), pp. 57-104.
10 See Anthony P. Cohen, The Management of Myths: The Politics of Legitimation in
a Newfoundland Community (Manchester, 1975).
11 See Alan T. Campbell, To Square with Genesis: Causal Statements and Shamanic
Ideas in Wayapi (Edinburgh, 1989).
12 See Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978).
13 M. Elaine Burgess, "The Resurgence of Ethnicity: Myth or Reality?" Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 1 (1978), 280.
14 See Charlotte Holmes Aull, "Ethnic Nationalism in Wales: An Analysis of the
Factors Governing the Politicization of Ethnic Identity," unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
Duke University, 1978.
15 Pierre L. van den Berghe, "Ethnic Pluralism in Industrial Societies: A Special
Case?" Ethnicity, 3 (1976), 247.
16 See Theodore Schwartz, "Cultural Totemism: Ethnic Identity Primitive and
Modern," in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change, ed. George A. De Vos
and Lola Romanucci-Ross (Palo Alto, Calif., 1975), pp. 106-31.
17 Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London, 1954), p. 12.
18 See Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite
Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View, 2nd ed.
(Stanford, Calif., 1958).
19 See The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. J. Hobsbawn and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge,
1983).
20 See Robert P. B. Paine, Dam a River, Damn a People?: Saami (Lapp) Livelihood
and the Alta/Kautokeino Hydro-Electric Project and the Norwegian Parliament (Copenhagen,
1982); hereafter cited in text. See also, Odd Terje Brantenberg, "The Alta-Kautokeino
Conflict: Saami Reindeer Herding and Ethnopolitics," in Native Power: The Quest for
Autonomy and Nationhood of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Jens Brosted et al. (Bergen, 1985),
pp. 23-48.
21 Robert P. B. Paine, "Ethnodrama and the 'Fourth World': The Saami Action
Group in Norway, 1979-81," in Indigenous Peoples and the Nation-State: Fourth World
Politics in Canada, Australia and Norway, ed. Noel Dyck (St. John's, Nfld., 1985), pp.
196-97; hereafter cited in text.
22 See Jonathan Spencer, A Sinhalese Village in a Time of Trouble (Delhi, 1990), p.
69; hereafter cited in text.
23 See David Turton, "There's No Such Beast: Cattle and Colour-Naming among
the Mursi," MAN (N.S.), 15 (1980), 320-38.
24 See Anthony P. Cohen, Whalsay: Symbol, Segment and Boundary in a Shetland Island
Community (Manchester, 1987), pp. 126-32.

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CULTURE AS IDENTITY 209

25 See Harvey Feit, "Legitimation

Hydro-Electric Development," in I
26 See Robert P. B. Paine, "Tute
The White Arctic: Anthropological E
(St. John's, Nfld., 1977), pp. 249-

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