They divide people vertically, cutting across many other forms of horizontal solidarity and common interest, such as those of class and environment, and control over land, agriculture, watersheds, and what some agricultural scientists call “foodshed” or the local sourcing and control of food production.
In the context of the modern state and today’s rise of corporate dominance, ethnicity is currently what “tribes” were to colonizers from the times of Ancient Rome to the British Empire. Encompassed in the Latin phrase divide et impera or “divide and rule,” tribal designations have been used to divide people according to language regardless of the historical circumstances of the peoples making up those groupings. While consolidating the power of local politicians, it divides and weakens communities against exterior threats such as incursion of international financial and commercial entities interested in capturing local markets and stripping away assets of land, water, minerals, forests and genetic heritage from local communities.
Outside of language, attributes associated with ethnic identity are largely arbitrary, selected for situational and political advantage. Most rituals and cultural elements which have been tied to particular ethnic groupings, such as the multi-day dance dramas of Nepal’s hills or particular forms of subsistence, actually transcend current language and cultural boundaries. Prior to the modern centralized state they often served to unite much larger and diverse communities and polities which transcended language.
Political leaders will subscribe to ethnicity as an easy means to consolidate power. It aggregates bonded laborers with landowners, debtors with moneylenders, and workers with financiers and factory owners, while getting votes through emotional appeals without requiring people to reflect on the underlying causes of their inequality or ascertain whether their emotion-driven responses actually address their problems.
By aggregating people though emotional rhetoric rather than prolonged education, organizing and construction of locally-based forms of solidarity and governance, ethnicity is easily co-opted by undisclosed interests. Thus it has always provided an artifice for ruling interests, both within and outside of ethnic groupings, domestically and internationally, to divert popular discontent and undermine community and class solidarity into a means for consolidating their rule.
Thereby ethnicity has served as a primary ideology of the nation state and empire, whether classical, feudal, capitalist, colonial or communist. In the present context of the global regime of finance capital, increasingly pervasive governance by multinational corporations, and the dismantling of the nation state, ethnicity is being manipulated and twisted to break people into small groups with leaders more easily cajoled and coerced to sign unfavorable treaties and contracts and give up autonomy to the rule of foreign governments, international administrators, finance banks and commerce.
The final thing is that ethnicity does not get out of the old paradigm which caused the problem in the first place. While it privileges a particular group, it ends up de-privileging and discriminating against other groups, and you are back at the same place of ethnic discrimination within a state framework. Basic inequalities, the dismantling of community and of ties to the land, the destruction of the country’s agricultural and cultural heritage, the stripping away of community and national assets, and the reasons behind these are not addressed, while the newly minted rump states and their leaders are more exposed to outside exploitation than ever before, hurrying these processes of cultural destruction rather than arresting them.
The writer is an anthropologist who studies Nepali economy and politics
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