Working Group

Nationalism & Ethnicity

Conveners: Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology, UCLA; David Laitin, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

Agenda for first meeting: January 13, 2001

This working group will focus in 2000-01 on the problem of groupness in the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Recent developments in several distinct traditions of social analysis have challenged the treatment of groups as things-in-the-world -- real, substantial entities, internally homogeneous and externally bounded, to which interests and agency are unproblematically attributed. These include social network theory; cognitive theory; rational choice, game-theoretic, and other methodologically individualist approaches; feminist theory; an emerging interest in "microhistory"; the shift from broadly structuralist to a variety of more "constructivist" theoretical stances, which tend to see groups as constructed, contingent, and fluctuating; and an emergent postmodernist theoretical sensibility that emphasizes the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed forms and clear boundaries. These developments are disparate, even contradictory. The methodological (and sometimes ontological) relationalism of network theory, for example, is opposed to the methodological (and sometimes ontological) individualism of rational choice theory; in analytical style and epistemological commitments, both are sharply and similarly opposed to postmodernist approaches. Yet these and other developments have converged in problematizing groupness and undermining axioms of stable group being.

Yet challenges to groupism have been uneven. They have been striking -- to take just one example -- in the study of class, especially in the study of the working class -- a term that is hard to use today without quotation marks or some other distancing device. But an understanding of ethnic groups, nations, even races as things-in-the-world -- as real entities and unitary actors -- continues to inform, and misinform, the study of race, ethnicity, and nationalism. Everyday talk and to a surprising extent academic writing as well casually reify racial, ethnic and national groups, speaking of "blacks" and "whites," of "the Serbs" and "the Croats," of "the Jews" and "the Palestinians" as if they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes. The social and cultural world is represented in "groupist" terms as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic or cultural blocs.

We believe that there are resources for sophisticated treatments of "groupness" in several bodies of literature with which most sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians working on race, ethnicity, and nationalism are not familiar. Engagement with these literatures, we believe, may yield analytical strategies and techniques that can help account for the considerable -- but highly variable -- power and pervasiveness of phenomena framed in racial, ethnic, or national terms, while avoiding unreflective "groupism."

We have identified four such research traditions that we will engage in our first year:

(1) cognitively oriented work in anthropology and psychology;
(2) conversation analysis (and, more broadly, research in several disciplines based on the recording and systematic study of naturalistically occurring interaction);
(3) network theory; and
(4) new institutionalist sociological theory.