914 BOOK REVIEWS

an's intentions is observed when discussing the policy in Syria in Chapter 7. Cagaptay
Cagaptay undermining Erdog
rightly asserts that the priorities of Turkey in Syria consisted of eliminating People's Protection Units (YPG) and
Assad, whereas eliminating Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) remained at the bottom of its priority list (p. 131).
The ideological reasons for such a list of priorities, however, are again overlooked by Cagaptay.
Nevertheless, this book stands as an important contribution to the literature on International Relations and,
an, and foreign policy
more generally, on Turkish Studies. It should be of interest to scholars working on Turkey, Erdog
but also to non-scholars working on foreign relations.

Ceren Şengül
Axe "Sciences Sociales du Politique et du Droit", Centre Maurice Halbwachs (École Normale Supérieure), Paris, France

DOI: 10.1111/nana.12695

Ethnic groups and boundaries today: A legacy of

fifty years

Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen | Marek Jakoubek (eds.),

London: Routledge, 2019. 232 pp. £120.00 (hbk). Review by Jan Hladík [jan.hladik@hotmail.cz]

In the 50 years since the first publication of Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference,
the collection under the editorship of Fredrik Barth has achieved nearly canonical status. Thousands of pages have
been written with obligatory reference to “Barth 1969,” yet the whole book, a collection of seven essays, is quite
often reduced to Barth's Introduction and even that can sometimes stand only as an emptied referential note, an
“empty signifier.” This book, under the editorship of Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Marek Jakoubek, reflects on the
various ways in which Ethnic groups and boundaries has influenced the field of ethnic studies. The editors have given
each contributor substantial freedom, with Ethnic groups and boundaries playing a role as a referential point; the
result is a mixture of both theoretical approaches and topics.
The theoretical opening by the editors sets out to clarify what Barth meant in his introduction: Ethnic identity is
defined through ascription and self-ascription, not by “cultural stuff”, as Barth initially dismissed the importance of
cultural traits. Ethnicity is thus fundamentally relational: Identity is formed and fortified through a mutual contact,
and an ethnic boundary acts as a semipermeable membrane that persists despite the flow of individuals.
Several authors reflect on how the publication of Ethnic groups and boundaries shaped their understanding of
ethnicity and provided valuable historical background on changes in ethnic studies since the seventies onward.
Michael Hechter's contribution, titled “Homage to Fredrik Barth,” summarizes his research of internal colonialism
and nationalist movements in Ireland and the United Kingdom in the early seventies and his realization that it is
more a matter of social processes and not deep-rooted cultural beliefs that can stimulate and nurture ethnic con-
flicts. Both Katherine Verdery and Judith Okely also build their articles on reflections of their past researches.
Verdery, looking back on her field experiences in socialist Romania, writes about her efforts to grasp complex
forms in which ethnic identities are interwoven with national ideologies. Okely emphasizes Barth's key concept
of self-ascription in the context of marginalized sections of society (such as Gypsies and Travellers) as a vital anti-
dote to a hegemonic view of the dominant groups. Ulf Hannerz, mindful of the fluctuating nature of ethnicity,
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analyses the ambiguous relationship between ethnicity and race and suggests that despite taking them as com-
peting categories, we should try to find a common analytical ground. Anthony P. Cohen reminds us that new
approaches in ethnicity studies correlate with the rise of identity politics and collective self-affirmation of various
marginalized groups and emphasizes that one of Barth's great accomplishments was to highlight the dynamics of
the interactions between various groups instead of relying on the binding nature of cultural traits. Michael
Herzfeld and Steven Vertovec both take Barth's Introduction as a starting point for the theoretical reflections.
While Vertovec highlights the often unheeded subtitle of Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of
cultural difference, Herzfeld's essay deals with various aspects of the transition from ethnic groups to nation
states. In Barth's conception, one particular aspect of ethnic boundaries is their situationality and fluidity. In con-
trast, nation states' main goal is to strengthen the previously crossable boundaries and underline the purported
ethnocultural singularities.
Valery Tishkov reflects on a state of post-Soviet ethnic studies and the reasons why new theories growing up
from post-Barthian ethnicity studies became only slowly rooted in Russian academic discourse. Pnina Werbner rec-
ognizes Barth's innovative approach to the—as the author puts it—“constructedness of culture” and the importance
of the environmental setting in the context of ethnic boundaries but deepens his models to include a multiplicity of
identities. Werbner claims that for a better understanding of how various identities blend or collide, we need to
focus our attention on their heterogeneity and situationality. In Jeremy MacClancy's chapter, we can find one exam-
ple of what this sensitivity to situationality could look like. MacClancy researches British people living abroad as they
start to participate in anti-Brexit activism concerning their uncertain residency status. The author focuses on the pro-
cess of creating a community based on particular interests at a particular time in history and the development of the
self-perception of these groups.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen takes Creole culture and identity formation as a starting point for broader consider-
ations of culture mixing and postmodern processes of the dissolving of boundaries. Eriksen's reflections on the rela-
tive rigidity of social boundaries in Mauritian society, in contrast to flowing cultural meanings, encounter the key
aspects of delimitation of the ethnic groups. Rogers Brubaker disputes the most common interpretive framework of
Barth's essay and reminds us that the key shift in Barth's approach was from culture toward a categorization (as a
form of ascription and identification), rather than boundaries as such. Jakoubek's chapter deals with the confusion
concerning an academic legacy of Ethnic groups and boundaries and, more broadly, a confusion surrounding an ethnic-
ity as an academic concept. Loosening of the semantic contexts brought confusion about ethnicity as a conceptual
tool and as an emic category of various groups. Lost in translation was sometimes the fact that theories of ethnicity
are (or should be) merely analytical tools to examine folk models of “ethnicity,” not descriptions of objective catego-
ries “out there.” This epistemological mess often hides the fact that there is no such “ethnicity” per se, waiting in the
field for a brave researcher to be found and described. Ethnicity in academic discourse is a shared label for different
conceptualizations, and if we look closely, we find that these approaches often shared little in common. The final
chapter is an interview by Marek Jakoubek and Lenka J. Budilova with one of the key Barth's contributors, Professor
Gunnar Haaland covering a broad spectrum from his reflections on the state of Scandinavian anthropology in sixties
to the contemporary theoretical discussion on various aspects of collective identities.
The half-century since the publication of the Ethnic groups and boundaries saw both the establishment of ethnic
studies as a subdiscipline and, along with it, inevitable fragmentation. With a well-balanced mixture of personal
reflections, theoretical incursions, and contemporary research, Eriksen's and Jakoubek's book may serve both as a
critical reflection on this fundamental text and its enduring influence, a compendium of the changes that have taken
place in the past half-century in the field of ethnicity studies, and a useful overview of post-Barthian discourse and
contemporary topics.

Jan Hladík
Department of Ethnology, Charles University, Prague, Czechia