Variety is the spice of all life and ethnicity its human expression. But stripped of tolerance and respect, ethnic feelings degenerate into communal hatred and conflict. We must flee the prison we have made of our cultural diversity.
A new threat hangs over the power elites of our time. It is the threat posed by ethnicity, variously expressed as the assertion of culture, the upsurge of communalism, the revival of religion and the voice and movements of marginalised peoples, regions and nationalities. It is O affirmation of diversity, of indigenous identity, of organic rather than televised or museumised cultures. But ethnicity has a rather sinister alter ego, too. In its defiance of the modem nation-state and Northern technology, ethnicity can assume s homogeneity. Militarised, it can tear down the walls that separate identities and preach revenge and martyrdom in its drive for victory. Alas, in so doing, it loses its finer qualities of the sacred and the mystical and emphasises fundamentalist notions of religiosity and culture.
Ethnicity is a response to the excesses of the modem project to shape the whole of humanity around the three pivots of global capitalism, the State system and a global culture. That global culture is based on modem technology, pervasive communications and information systems and a universalising educational system. Most societies of the South, prior to political independence, were described as "ethnic patchworks". These, they were told, should be replaced by homogeneous and centralised nation-states that would "integrate" all diversities and cultures. Ethnicity is a power for rebuttal to this drive for modernisation which, fashioned after the Northern idea of how the world should be, almost succeeded in subjugating the immense diversity and richness of human experience. It is an affirmation of all "the others" who might have been brought under, colonised and eventually dispensed with.Ethnicity is a response to the excesses of the modem project to shape the whole of humanity around the three pivots of global capitalism, the State system and a global culture. That global culture is based on modem technology, pervasive communications and information systems and a universalising educational system. Most societies of the South, prior to political independence, were described as "ethnic patchworks". These, they were told, should be replaced by homogeneous and centralised nation-states that would "integrate" all diversities and cultures. Ethnicity is a power for rebuttal to this drive for modernisation which, fashioned after the Northern idea of how the world should be, almost succeeded in subjugating the immense diversity and richness of human experience. It is an affirmation of all "the others" who might have been brought under, colonised and eventually dispensed with.
This rebuttal to the drive for modernisation directed from the North is perhaps the most potent source of ethnicity. But there is a second source, which is located within the South. This second source of ethnicity is a response to the homogenising forces of capitalism, the nation-state and technology imported from the North and promulgated by the Southern powers.