Paul Brass sees ethnicity as a powerful political resource for generating popular support in competition between political elites.Ethnic identities are not innate or given, they are social and political constructs. Moreover, they are creations of elites who draw upon, distort, and sometimes fabricate materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent, in order to protect their well being or existence, or to gain political and economic advantage for their groups and for themselves.
For Brass cultural difference becomes an object of inter-group dispute only when it represents a particular political conflict of interests. Even here, culture does not stand for authenticity of a group’s essence, since it only includes selected cultural traits, but is rather used as a source for the political mobilization of groups. Such selective mobilization of cultural difference is possible because ethnicities are variable, dynamic and fuzzy: religious attachments can change, bilingualism is rampant in today’s world, kinship ties are weakening or narrowing to include only closest relatives, massive migration diminishes feelings of attachment to the place of birth, and so on. Therefore the politicization of culture is not inevitable,rather it is determined by a set of social circumstances.What one can witness when ethnic groups are politically mobilized is not a struggle over the cultural foundations of each ethnic collective (i.e.,an ethno-nationalist claim of protecting ‘our’heritage and identity), but conflict over symbols whose contents are shaped by a changing social and political environment as well as by intentional intervention of political elites. In the period of group mobilization, traditional culture does not ‘awaken’, but is instead transformed and reduced to a few cultural markers – symbols loaded with intense political meanings.
Brass’ research on South Asia demonstrates how selected symbols such as Urdu language, cow sacrifice and Shari’a law were consciously used by Hindus and Muslim elites in political competition with each other, and with elites within their own ethnic corpus. He shows how new meanings were attached to old symbols in order to create greater inter-ethnic cohesion. However, the elite’s behaviour and the choices they make are constrained and limited by existing sets of beliefs shared by members of the group. Regardless of how influential leaders might be, they will not be followed if the ideas they promote stand in stark opposition to the collective values and principles shared by the group: the most popular Israeli leadership would quickly loose all support if it were to start preaching that all Israelis should convert to Islam, just as Pakistani leaders would if they were to argue that Kashmir should remain part of India. Nevertheless, what is crucial for Brass is that ‘the process by which elites mobilize ethnic identities simplifies those beliefs and values, distorts them, and selects those that are politically useful rather than central to the belief systems of the people in question’. To use Brass’ own example, a simple inversion of the statement ‘Hindus revere the cow’ into ‘those who revere the cow are Hindus’ illustrates an elite’s power to transform the existing cultural markers into forceful political symbols for ethno-mobilization.
Culture and political control: ethnic relations as power relations
