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Power and Ethnicity History andAnthropology

Patrick Geary

This essay reflects on the relationship between anthropological and historical scholarship ofethnicity, picking up on themes explored by Andre Gingrich, by considering the epistemologi-cal and evidentiary limitations of social scientific and historical analysis and reconstruction.Beginning with the consideration of the pioneering transdisciplinary efforts of RobertDarnton and Clifford Geertz, it argues that many of the weaknesses ascribed to suchefforts are actually part of the nature of social scientific investigation which, in the terms ofPeter Winch, must take into account two sets of relationships: that of the relationshipbetween the scientist and the phenomena that he or she observes and the symbolic systemthat he or she shares with other scientists, which can only be understood from the socialcontext of common activity. How these two relationships challenge social scientific analysisof ethnicity are examined through a consideration of the difficulties of applying AnthonySmith’s definition of an ethnie to either Fredrik Barth’s classic essay on “Pathan Identityand its Maintenance” or Helmut Reimitz’s study of Frankish identity. It concludes thatneither anthropologists nor historians are simply describing societies as they are or as theywere but rather attempt to describe societies as witnesses within them thought they shouldbe, and we do this for our own society, not for those of the participants, past or present.

Keywords: Ethnicity; History; Anthropology

The invitation to reflect as an historian on the relationship between anthropological

and historical analysis in a volume also involving distinguished anthropologists

doing the same reminds me of a similar workshop organized at the Shelby Cullom

Davis seminar in Princeton University years ago, at which Clifford Geertz and

Correspondence to: Patrick Geary, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Einstein Drive,

Princeton, 08540, USA. Email: geary@ias.edu

History and Anthropology, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2014.933106

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

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Robert Darnton each presented papers attempting to show how historians could be

anthropologists and how anthropologists could be historians. Clifford Geertz, the

founding member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced

Study and the leading cultural anthropologist of his generation, and Robert Darnton,

a major cultural historian of the eighteenth century France, had been team-teaching

a seminar on the history of mentalities at Princeton University for some years, and

would continue to do so for over two decades.1 This event was one of the first times

that Clifford Geertz presented an early version of “Centers, Kings, and Charisma”

based on his field work in Morocco (Geertz 1983). Robert Darnton, if memory

serves, presented a paper that ended up in his collection entitled The Great Cat Massacre(Darnton 1984). This event made a lasting impression on me as a young, aspiring his-

torian even though, as I recall, not everyone was happy with either paper: some felt that

Geertz should have stuck with anthropology and that Darnton should have stuck with

history. Both were stimulating. However, in the end, the consensus seemed to be that

Geertz’s attempt to analyse a long-distant series of events gleaned from written evi-

dence rather than from personal observation and direct contact with informants

lacked specificity and context. Darnton’s attempt to provide a “thick description” of

the behaviour of eighteenth century Parisian workers was ultimately too thin to be

treated in the same manner as observed behaviour.

Today I think that both judgements were too harsh: arrogant young scholars that we

were, we failed to recognize fully the importance of the efforts of these two great intel-

lectuals or, perhaps more significantly, the inadequacy of any evidence, whether gath-

ered in the field by anthropologists or in the archive by historians, to allow for an

entirely satisfactory analysis of human society. What we were witnessing was very

much what Andre Gingrich (2014) described in his essay of the fruitful collaboration

between history and anthropology within the tradition of the École des Annales, ofwhich Robert Darnton remains a major representative in North America. As Gingrich

suggests, such an approach de-contextualized certain concepts from specific socio-cul-

tural, geographic and temporal backgrounds and developed points of comparison

across time and place. At the same time Darnton’s contribution “exoticised” the activi-

ties of eighteenth century apprentices, suggesting that they could be subjected to the

same kind of analysis applied by anthropologists to observed behaviours of very differ-

ent and distant peoples. Both scholars were quite aware of the limitations of such

experimental efforts, efforts that produced fresh ways to think about their subjects.

To be sure, there were limitations to such approaches, but the limitations of social

sciences that we perceived were not simply the result of sloppy work, insufficient the-

orization or inadequate research, but they derive from the nature of our disciplines.

In understanding the epistemological horizons of what we do when we practice a

social science, I continue to be inspired by the reflections of Peter Winch, whose

short Idea of a Social Science (1958) provides a still-valuable reflection on what we

do when we attempt to understand human societies (Winch 1958). Winch may have

been dismissed by some, including Ernst Gellner, as “profoundly mistaken” (Gellner

1970);2 however, I believe that an attempt to dismiss him so easily is fundamentally

misguided. As Winch argued, the disciplines of the social and the natural sciences

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are essentially and qualitatively different. To understand the work of a natural scientist,

he wrote, “we must take account of two sets of relations: first, his relation to the

phenomena which he investigates; second, his relation to his fellow-scientists”

(Winch 1958, 84). While one tends to concentrate on the first set, that is, his relation-

ship to the phenomena he investigates, equally important is the “pre-existing mode of

communication in the use of which rules are already being observed,” that is, the sym-

bolic system that he shares with other scientists, which can only be understood from

the social context of common activity (Winch 1958, 84). Social scientists, of course,

are also embedded in pre-existing modes of communication and the rules of the

game as played by their colleagues. However, the social scientist, whether historian

or anthropologist, must take into consideration a second set of relations: in addition

to the investigator’s relationship to his or her subjects and his or her relationship to

fellow scientists, the social scientist must also take into account the fact that the behav-

iour one is studying is carried out in accordance to another set of rules, those of the

society or culture being observed. The essential subjectivity of the socially and culturally

situated social scientist observer thus encounters the essential subjectivity of the socially

and culturally situated subject of investigation.

For Wench, this double subjectivity did not mean that social scientific research was

either impossible or that, because of this subjectivity, it was a pseudo-science. It simply

meant that one must understand clearly that social scientific research is qualitatively

different from what goes on in the natural and physical sciences. In essence, Winch,

as a Wittgensteinian, understood the double subjectivity of social scientific investi-

gation, which is essentially cultural and is carried on in the complex interrelationships

of two cultures: that of the observer and that of the observed.

Attempts by social historians to understand cultural and social phenomena of the

past present classic examples of this double subjectivity, and nowhere is this more

the case than in the topic we have been asked to address, namely, the place of power

and ethnicity in a cross-cultural perspective. The study of ethnicity is meaningful

only within specific contexts of contemporary social and political discourse. The termi-

nology is anything but innocent, carrying with it complex and poorly analysed baggage

from both modern social scientific and ethnographic literature but even more from

contemporary lived experience. What this means is that we cannot study “ethnicity”

as though it were some ahistorical, objective category susceptible to comparison and

evaluation across time and space. To do so takes into account only the first subjectivity

of science: that of the symbolic system that the social scientist (or historian) shares with

other scientists, which can only be understood from the social context of common

activity.

It is precisely this context that Daniel Varisco addresses in his own essay on Clifford

Geertz (Varisco 2005).3 He wrote, “His overview of social history is said to flow from

experience among Muslims in villages and towns. But surely the order here should be

reversed, even if accepted as rhetorical flair. Geertz knew Weber’s spin on Islam before

he ever sat down with a Muslim as informant. He found Ricoeur before he stumbled

upon Ibn Khaldun. As a broadly trained scholar in Western intellectual history, he

entered the field not with a tabula rasa to be inscribed by the locals but with a

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proudly acknowledged set of Ivy [be] League [red] interpretive baggage.” Varisco goes

on to say that this applies to all ethnographers: “We enter the field of conscious and

unconscious models ‘for’, ‘of’, and even ‘against’ …Our interpretative frame—like a

genetic code—is borne with us, not born in the field” (Varisco 2005).

Precisely the same observation must be made when considering the study of ethnic

groups. Contemporary social science is very concerned with the question of ethnicity,

race and the relationship between such categories and the mobilization of such charac-

teristics in the exercise of power. While sociologists pay at least lip-service to the clas-

sical Greek origins of the term ethnos, their presentist concerns naturally lead to a

definition of ethnos that is ahistorical and generalizable across time. Consider the some-

what convoluted argument of Anthony Smith in The Ethnic Origins of Nations; after abrief nod to Homer, Pindar and Herodotus to establish that ethnos “would appear to be

more suited to cultural rather than biological or kinship differences” (Smith 1986), he

then suggests that the closest parallel to the Greek usage is the modern French term

ethnie, (a neologism, of course, simply derived from the Greek word) whose character-

istics are derived from meanings “conferred by a number of men and women over

some generations on certain cultural, spatial and temporal properties of their inter-

action and shared experiences.”He goes on to argue that “as men and women interpret

and express their collective experiences (including their conflicts) within any grouping

or population thrown together by circumstances, these interpretations and expressions

are crystallized over time and handed on to the next generations who modify them,

according to their own experiences and interactions.” The result, ultimately, is that

“the features of any ethnie, whatever its distant origins, take on a binding, exterior

quality for any member of a generation, independent of their perceptions and will;

they possess a quality of historicity that itself becomes an integral part of subsequent

ethnic interpretations and expressions” (Smith 1986, 22). Characteristics of these

ethnies are, for Smith, first, a name; second, a myth of common descent; third, a

shared history; fourth, a distinctive shared culture; fifth, an association with a specific

territory; and finally, a sense of solidarity.

Within this extended definition of ethnic group, I would point out a number of

assumptions critical for the contemporary study of ethnicity, but that present serious

problems for historians when they attempt to make sense of the distant past and prob-

ably for anthropologists who attempt to make sense of the distant present. First is the

assumption that this definition is universal. This may seem a self-evident assumption,

but frankly it demands demonstration. If we assume that ethnies exist and have always

existed in the terms that Smith defines them, then we will inevitably look for evidence

of them and, as we all know, if one looks hard enough for something one will find it,

even if it is not there. Second, he assumes that the features of any ethnie are binding: inother words, membership of an ethnie is an ascribed and ineludible fact, however cul-

turally produced, from which one cannot escape.

This may all seem fine, but such assumptions, I would argue, are part of the rule

system that Wench described as the first subjectivity of social science: they are part

of “the symbolic system that he shares with other scientists which can only be under-

stood from the social context of common activity.” Social scientists look for ethnic

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groups, and not surprisingly find them. Where, after all, would ethnography be without

ethnie to investigate? This more specifically means that in the context of historical

research into ethnicity, the discovery in our sources of a vocabulary that seems

prima facie to resonate with our (or Smith’s) assumptions of what an ethnie is supposedto be will be taken as evidence of its actual existence.

The problem with such an approach lies precisely in Winch’s second subjectivity, the

rules of the society or culture being observed. When the subjectivity of the scholarly

community is confused with or substituted for the subjectivity of the society being

observed, one encounters the problem that Viennese medievalist Philippe Buc has so

eloquently warned of in his The Danger of Ritual (2001). Social-scientific models,

which have developed out of ongoing intellectual debate in the Western European

intellectual tradition, a tradition much more ancient than the putative birth of anthro-

pology or of European colonialism but which reaches back to at least the fifth century,

are anything but value-neutral analytic categories. By way of example, Buc examines the

Geertzian model of ritual as he presents it in the Balinese theatre state, in which ritual,

not the state, had priority and, in Geertz’s words, “Power served pomp, not pomp

power” (Geertz 1980, 13).4 But, as Buc points out, this way of reading public ritual,

which medievalists and early modernists have found so attractive, in part because it

rejects the early modern European devotion to the primacy of power politics, is

hardly something Geertz simply discovered in Bali. Geertz freely acknowledges the

influence on his work of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. Thus, in Buc’s

words, “… ideas of liturgical kingship, Eucharistic lore, and social bodies all converged

in the German tradition, and then traveled to the New World, to return to Europe

through Geertz and further gild German conceptions” (Buc 2001, 229). Far from

exotic models of human behaviour that could be decontextualized and applied to Euro-

pean society, these were models developed over centuries of European reflection on

their own society, rendered exotic by the anthropologist, and then reintroduced

under a different guise into European discourse.

Careful anthropologists and ethnographers are, of course, aware of this problem and

in theory at least, overcome it through their fieldwork (although as Professor Varisco

has also pointed out, the appeal to fieldwork may be a rhetorical device intended to still

scepticism rather than a genuine source of insight) (Varisco 2005).5 Historians do not

have access to informants to whom we can pose specific questions: we must work from

texts that were not intended to describe social organization or structures, and still less

to provide future social scientists insight into the rules of the authors’ societies. In this

paper I would like to take two examples, one from anthropology, one from early Euro-

pean history, to examine the problem of applying categories such as ethnie across time

and space, in order to reflect on the risks of attempting to interpret historical evidence

as though it were the kind of evidence used by ethnographers and anthropologists to

understand social groupings.

I begin with Fredrik Barth’s classic essay on “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance”,

an essay that is all the more poignant since the world that it described in 1969 has been

utterly destroyed by four decades of invasion and war (Barth 1969).6 Barth’s article, and

even more his introduction to the volume in which it appeared, has become a classic of

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ethnic studies, and what he terms the “native model” of the Pashtun or Pathan was

based on years of fieldwork in the region of the Swat Valley in the 1950s (Barth

1956a, 1956b, 1959).

This “native model” fits but poorly into Anthony Smith’s six-point definition of an

ethnie: essentially he states that Pathan identity is associated with three characteristics:

patrilineal descent, Islam, and Pathan custom. The last of these emphasizes male auton-

omy and equality, self-expression and aggressiveness summarized as a particular form

of honour. But of course, he goes on to observe that “this ‘native model’ need not be a

truly adequate representation of empirical facts”, and adds that Pathan custom can be

depicted in central institutions of Pathan life that combine central value orientations by

which performance and excellence can be judged. These include hospitality (melmastia,the honorable use of material goods); councils ( jurga, the honorable pursuit of publicaffairs); and seclusion (purdah, the honorable organization of domestic life). Perform-

ance of this custom is ultimately the essential maker of Pathan identity: “He is a Pathan

who does Pashto, not merely who speaks Pashto.”

But of course, as he develops his description of Pathan identity and behaviour in

relationship to Pathan neighbors, Barth observes that these values are generally

shared by surrounding peoples, and differing border relationships, political and econ-

omic structures and ecological niches allow for very different ethnic border crossings:

in the South, where Pathan segmentary descent groups encountered centrally organized

Baluch tribes, he found an assimilation of Pathan groups into Baluch groups, but not

vice versa. To the West, Pathan pastoral nomads competed with Persian-speaking

Hazara and, in the 1950s, Pathans extended their control as landowners controlling

Persian-speaking serfs. In the Indus plain to the East, long characterized by centralized

governments, Pathans necessarily abandoned the behavioural patterns associated with

Pathan culture in order to participate in the political and economic realities of the

region. Finally, to the North, Kohistani society, very similar in organization and

values to those of the Pathans, became an alternative identity for Pathans from the

lower valleys who lost their land or were threatened by economic pressure to be

forced into dependent status.

Barth’s contrasting of one set of self-ascribed characteristics with a variety of ways of

consummating identity and even shifting identity under changing conditions presents

the impossibility, it seems to me, of establishing a simple model of ethnic identity by

which an external observer can classify ethnic groups. Specific situations, including

ecological niche, political organization, economic activity and neighbouring ethnic

and political possibilities seemed, in this case, to determine how actors might choose

the labels by which they and, ultimately, others, might identity them. Moreover, the

right to claim who was or was not a Pashtun was an issue of continuing dispute: Thus

the proverb, “He is a Pathan who does Pashto, not merely who speaks Pashto”, was

not so much an established fact as a claim made against those who still considered

themselves Pashtuns in the Indus valley as well as increasingly Persianized Pashtuns in

Kabul. In the Swat valley itself, Pathan meant at once the dominant stratum internally

and, externally, the whole population in contrast with other non-Pashto-speaking

regions. Thus considered, identity becomes less a binding identity than, to use a term

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employed by Walter Pohl, a strategy, both of distinction and, when appropriate, of

assimilation.

Following the Soviet invasion and war, the rise of the Taliban and then the American

invasion and ongoing warfare in the region, Barth’s description may seem as distant from

contemporary reality as that of Clovis’s Franks from modern French (or Franken).

Whether or not this is so, however, we at least have the ethnographic data of Barth

and his contemporaries to try to understand the population of the Swat valley 60 years

ago. Thus we are able to contemplate both the “native model” as a model and the

observations of ethnographers who, while not dismissing self-description, were able to

juxtapose it with other evidence. This, unfortunately, is absolutely impossible when

dealing with the written evidence of the Early Middle Ages.

Daniel Varisco has been able to use medieval written evidence to understand twen-

tieth century Yemenite agriculture, but this use is largely confined to vocabulary and

technology. In a sense, this is akin to what he himself described in another context:

“It is relatively easy to describe in a thick ethnographic tome how a canoe is built; it

is a different matter to explain why it is built beyond the fact that it serves a useful

purpose or what canoes seem to symbolize in the language of the people who use

them.” Once we ask questions as slippery as ethnic identity, we are far removed

from differentiating between the proper terms for peaches and plums or for building

canoes. We have extremely limited sources, all highly rhetorical and intentional.

They use what might sound at first glance like ethnic language, and we might therefore

be tempted to assume that because the words (populus, gens, natio, etc.) sound some-

thing like the vocabulary of modern ethnography, or for that matter of classical ethno-

graphy, we are able to use them to uncover the “native model” of identity. We might

even think that we can go beyond the native model and understand ethnicity in action

by following narratives in which these collectivities appear as actors, or in which appar-

ently ethnic epithets are assigned to individuals or groups in ways that seem to imply a

causal connection between group category and behaviour.

I am extremely suspicious of such attempts. Our sources are not comparable to the

data collected by the ethnographer. If anything, they are comparable to the pronounce-

ments of those exercising or claiming to exercise authority within the society. If we

want to compare medieval texts that speak of ethnic groups with contemporary

texts, we should look to official propaganda rather than to grass-roots expressions.

By way of example, let us consider briefly what we can say about Frankish identity in

the sixth century, a topic of continuing interest among early medieval historians and

one brilliantly treated by the Princeton historian Helmut Reimitz (Reimitz, forthcom-

ing).7 The Franks appear in written sources around the end of the third century and

presumably emerged as an amalgam of various groups of “barbarians” living along

the middle and lower Rhine on the border of the Roman empire. By the early sixth

century one group of Franci had taken over the remnants of Roman provincial admin-

istration in Northern Gaul, had defeated a number of their “barbarian” neighbours,

and were on the way to creating an enduring kingdom and a political and cultural syn-

thesis which would emerge centuries later as France and Germany. But who were the

Franks? What distinguished them from their Alemannic, Roman, Gothic and

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Burgundian neighbours? Were they an ethnic group, either in Smith’s sense or in the

more fluid, dynamic sense developed by Barth?

We have no access to native voices in our examination: our evidence consists exclu-

sively of writings of ecclesiastics, primary Bishop Gregory of Tours, a proud descendant

of Gallo-Roman aristocrats (although he never describes himself as Roman). Moreover,

Gregory’s writings, once considered by historians so naïve, so chaotic, and so unre-

flected that they could be used almost as the innocent jottings of a simple observer,

are now understood rightly to be highly ideological, crafted arguments designed to

present an image, not of how society was, but how it should be understood within a

Christian teleological perspective. He, in short, is no native informant. Quite the oppo-

site, as Reimitz suggests. Gregory intentionally obscured and silenced any Frankish

sense of identity in his quest to place the development of the Frankish kingdom

within a specifically Christian genealogy of Gaul (Reimitz forthcoming: Chapter 2).

What seems to be “ethnic” vocabulary certainly appears in Gregory’s writings: he

uses such terms as Franci, gens Francorum, and regnum Francorum; occasionally he

writes of a geographical Francia; he even at one point mentions a mos Francorum or

Frankish custom. One might be tempted to use his text therefore to draw an image

of Frankish identity by reading across the grain of Gregory’s texts, to extract the

ethnic characteristics sought by Anthony Smith. But in reality, of Smith’s categories

of an ethnie, let alone of the layered dynamic identity in the tradition of Barth, we

learn nothing. Gregory is virtually silent about the origin of the Franks, deliberately

erasing whatever may have been common beliefs about their origins, migration and

political and social structure. Of Frankish custom, other than a propensity to linger

in their cups after a meal until drunk—a topos about “barbarians” common in

Roman history and ethnography—we learn nothing. Very few individuals in Gregory’s

narrative are specifically identified as Franci, and we are never told why they are so

designated. The Frankish army, the exercitus Francorum, is composed of units identified

by other seemingly ethnic labels as much as by Franci. Gregory does not even charac-

terize any of the many Merovingian kings who fill his pages as rex Francorum: rather,while his kings rule a regnum Francorum, they are identified as simply rex, and as such

command all of the peoples in their kingdom. In sum, the apparently ethnic terminol-

ogy in Gregory is slippery, sparse, and deployed strategically, not categorically. The

matrix into which this terminology can be fitted is not the symbolic system of the

social scientist looking to understand Franks as an ethnic group, but rather lies

within a framework that derives from Gregory’s ideological programme.

Does this mean that there was no Frankish ethnic identity in the sixth century? No.

However, we have no possibility of determining whether such an identity or identities

did exist, who held them or what the contradictions, tensions and dynamic processes

within this putative identity may have been. At best we can study Franci as an ideologi-

cal construct, used strategically by authors writing about political elites acting on a

complex social and political stage. In certain situations it suited Gregory’s ideological

and propagandistic purposes to employ this idiom. Gregory does not present a

“native model” of Frankish ethnicity: he presents his own highly subjective model,

which he is offering in contradistinction to other, unarticulated and irretrievable

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models, which may, under certain conditions, have given the term Francus some

significance.

But is this really so very different from the situation presented by Barth and his

Pashtu groups? Does he, or any other ethnographer, reach the essence of an ethniein such a way that he can definitively identity those who are part of it and those

who are not, either according to “the” native model or according to an analytic cat-

egory? I think not. There is no “native model”; there are rather native models,

those of the Pashtun of the Swat valley, those of the urban and the Indus valley

Pashtun, and others as well. These models compete with the projected models of

Pashtun identity generated by their neighbours and ascribed by Kohistani or societies

of the Indus plain to some emigrants living among them. These are labels strongly

claimed and rigorously defended, but in every case, they are prescriptive rather than

descriptive: no less than Gregory’s Franci, Barth’s Pashtun are strategies, employed

situationally and ideologically. All that we can do, as historians or as anthropologists,

like Geertz and Darnton before us, is to recognize the situated, partial and essentially

subjective nature of both our subject of study and of ourselves. Some might view this

as a negative assessment of the possibilities of collaboration between the disciplines of

anthropology and history, but I would contend quite the opposite. As long as we

recognize the essential double subjectivity that characterizes the human sciences, as

long as we recognize that as a result both the worlds that our subjects create and

our analyses of these worlds are situational, malleable and limited, then we can

indeed learn from each other. Neither anthropologists nor historians are simply

describing societies as they are or as they were: we are attempting to describe societies

as our witnesses within them thought they should be, and we do this for our own

society, not those of the participants, past or present. Varisco works and writes histori-

cally, for indeed how else can one understand humans, who are essentially historical

subjects; and a Reimitz works with a deep understanding of the anthropology of iden-

tity and ethnicity, for how else could he know if what he observes in his texts is some-

thing other than a simple description of what actually was? Indeed, the only hope for

our disciplines is not that anthropology should become history or history become

anthropology, but that these two disciplines continue in dynamic relationship to

each other.

Notes

[1] See Robert Darnton’s recollections of this seminar in his New York Review of Books essay,republished in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, after Geertz’s death in

2006, http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2007/0702/0702mem1.cfm (accessed 2

December 2011).

[2] Cited by Hutchinson in There is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch(2008).

[3] Especially Chapter 1, ‘Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed Again’, 21–53.[4] Cited by Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 227.[5] Esp., 47.

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[6] For a reappraisal of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries 25 years later see Vermeulen and Govers

(1994). For a sympathetic but somewhat critical recent appreciation of Barth’s work see

Brubaker (2009), esp. 29–30.

[7] I am grateful to Professor Reimitz for allowing me to read his manuscript, which is

forthcoming.

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