A breakthrough of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries – reality or a myth? (On amnesia in ethnicity studies)

Abstract

There is universal agreement in the scholarly community on the crucial position of the book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (ed. F Barth, 1969) in the modern study of ethnicity. General consensus goes that this work has a status of a founding work that developed a theoretical paradigm and model of ethnic groups, on which the study of ethnicity draws until today. This study critically reviews this reputation. The author, drawing on the works of authors who had published their works before Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, suggests that theoretical positions proposed by Barth and his colleagues in the famous book were not at all new by that time, neither were they considered novel by contemporary readers. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries acquired the status of a ground-breaking work, founding a new era of anthropological study of ethnicity only later, and not because of the results the book really provided, but rather thanks to statements about the contribution of this work to the study of ethnicity made by its editor, F Barth in his famous ‘Introduction’. This conceptualization of the history of ethnicity studies was, thanks to the immense influence of F Barth´s book, gradually accepted and the results of all work that had been previously done in the field of ethnicity studies, was covered by amnesia, continuing until today.

Prologue – constitutive amnesia in ethnicity studies and an attempt to remedy this

From the very beginning, anthropological studies of ethnicity have been relatively far from reaching unanimity, especially over the definitions and interpretations of ethnic phenomena and processes. Yet, we can say that the discourse stands on certain, more or less generally shared and acknowledged, pillars. One of such widely recognized pillars is a strong belief in the ground-breaking impact of the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (ed. Barth, 1969a) on the formation of the discourse of the anthropological study of ethnicity. In other words, in anthropology, as in the wider context of social sciences and even beyond, there is a widely shared view that the publication of the book led to the ‘paradigm shift’ (Buchignani, 1982: 5; Wimmer, 2009: 250) and ‘the transition to a new era’ (Vermeulen-Govers, 1994: 1) in ethnicity studies; and that the publication represents ‘the key turning point in anthropological thinking about culture and ethnicity’ (Blanton, 2015: 9177). This status of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries as provoking a fundamental turn in ethnicity studies is well reflected in the often-quoted statement of Leo Despres that ethnicity studies can be divided into two epochs ‘B.B. and A.B.’ (Despres, 1975: 189), that is, Before Barth and After Barth. Such quotations might be interminably multiplied; there is a plethora of them in the literature on ethnicity.

Thus, there is nearly universal consensus on the breakthrough status of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, but the coin has another side, too – it has led to one of the largest and deepest amnesias within ethnicity studies, entailing forgetting a whole range of works, authors, interpretive frames and analytical findings. One of the principal causes of this amnesia is the fact that the book became incredibly influential – it has been listed among the most cited works on ethnicity and the most popular anthropological books in general (Eriksen, 2015: 96). Its renown and unshakeable position led readers adopt not only Barth’s ¹ theoretical argument on the nature of ethnic groups, but also Barth’s representation of the developments and state of art of the study of ethnic phenomena and processes. The growing popularity of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries made this representation virtually normative – for instance, it became part of the curriculum (and examinations) – and alternative histories of ethnicity studies were doomed to oblivion. Thus, today, the ‘breakthrough status’ of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries within the history of ethnicity studies seems indisputable, it is considered an incontestable fact. The present paper seeks to show that the reasons behind this status of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries are not necessarily associated with the model of ethnic groups and relations it presents – which was, in fact, not so original and pioneering as is generally assumed – but are grounded rather in (factually incorrect) statements written by F Barth in his famous ‘Introduction’ about the development and situation in ethnicity studies preceding the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. ²

A delayed breakthrough

As mentioned above, it is generally believed that Ethnic Groups and Boundaries presented a revolutionary and ‘paradigm-shifting’ conceptualization of ethnic relations. Such a view was first voiced relatively soon after its publication. But we also have to add that, for a long time, there was an alternative and competing view, which might have even been formulated earlier, chronologically speaking. For instance, Philip H Gulliver might be taken as a good example of such alternative evaluation of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries and its contribution. Two years after publication, he writes in his review that, although Barth’s approach to the analysis of ethnic groups is ‘worth fresh emphasis’, it ‘is scarcely the novel approach in social anthropology’ (Gulliver, 1971: 308; emphasis added), and he adds that, ‘in general this is a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion, although there is little that is theoretically new’ (Gulliver, 1971: 308; emphasis added). In a similar vein, even a year earlier, Maurice Freedman first (seemingly) approvingly writes in his review that

[O]ne finds oneself assenting to most of the propositions […] Yes: boundaries persist despite the fact that people cross them. Yes: 'vitally important social relations' may be maintained across boundaries. Yes: it is not the 'objective' cultural differences between groups that matter, but the differences that are made relevant in the situation. (Freedman, 1970: 231)

However, Freedman continues, these outcomes are only ‘vague and general’ (Freedman, 1970: 231), and he concludes rather pessimistically that to realize this ‘one does not need to read such a book’ (Freedman, 1970: 231). And similar opinions are voiced also in the following years. When in 1982 Norman Buchignani asks, ‘What was so radical about Barth’s approach that it had such an effect?’, his answer is: ‘As is the case with many so-called theoretical breakthroughs, nothing in particular’ (Buchignani, 1982: 5). And when William G Lockwood points out 2 years later that Barth ‘did succeed in […] focussing anthropological attention on the subject [of ethnicity]’ (Lockwood, 1984: 6), he does not hesitate to add that this happened despite the fact that ‘there was little in Barth’s essay that was really novel or that had not appeared in one place or another’ (Lockwood, 1984: 6; emphasis added). Still, at the very end of the 1980s, Thompson states that Barth’s:

… major contribution was to reorient anthropological thinking away from the then dominant conception of ‘ethnic groups as cultural units’ to … [a] view of ethnicity as social organization. This was much needed corrective in anthropology, but this view was already accepted in the other social sciences. (Thompson, 1989: 7–8; italics added)

And Lockwood offers another interesting observation regarding the reception of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries at the time of its appearance – he notes that ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries seems never to have been reviewed in American Anthropologist or in any of the major sociological journals in the United States’ (Lockwood, 1984: 5–6, footnote no. 2) and shows that the impact of the book in American anthropology was not immediate – to the contrary, it instead developed as a gradual and long-term process (Lockwood, 1984: 5–6, footnote no. 2). These developments may be perhaps explained by the fact that, at that time, Barth was already (considered) an author inclining clearly to British social anthropology (cf. Eriksen, 1993/2010: 53, 2015: 14, 19; Okamura, 2019: 38), but such a cold reception was not restricted to the Unites States. A similar absence of reviews can be traced in the key European anthropological and sociological journals – with the exception of the above-cited Gulliver (1971) in Man, but the actual tone of his review sharply contrasts with the present representation of the work as of having a ground-breaking impact and it documents that what we today think about the publication is far from self-evident.

Thus, it seems that we cannot legitimately assume that our perspective on Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is the same as that of Barth’s contemporaries. When the book was published, its prominent contribution was not as self-evident as it seems today. However, the not-so-enthusiastic voices weakened and became sporadic over time (cf. Nestor, 2010: 82), so today, the original, rather restrained, response has been almost completely forgotten and the breakthrough impact of Barth’s work has been recognized more or less universally.

(Barth’s presentation of) the state of ethnicity studies before Ethnic Groups and Boundaries

In his 1970 review of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Ulf Hannerz states:

The reader may find it somewhat surprising that there are rather few references to other theoretical works in this field. …. Apparently, the contributors have preferred to make a fresh start, leaving problems of theoretical integration with such studies for others to consider. (Hannerz, 1970: 133)

Hannerz thus managed to identify an important aspect of this famous publication, which is, however, rarely (if ever) mentioned – the very insufficient citing of other works relevant to the study of ethnic groups. This aspect is particularly apparent in Barth’s ‘Introduction’ (1969b) – if we bracket all the references to Barth’s own work and the contributions by the other authors of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, the whole introductory text cites only Furnivall (1944), Gjessing (1954), Goffman (1959), Leach (1967), Mitchell (1956) and Naroll (1964). The absence of any mention whatsoever of Political Systems of Highland Burma of Barth’s Cambridge mentor, Edmund R Leach (1954) ³ , is very striking, being a book considered by many a direct inspiration for Barth (cf. e.g. Eriksen, 1993/2010: 44; Lindgren, 2006: 273; Verdery, 1994: 33). Gunnar Haaland also describes the book as a ‘constant inspiration’ for the co-authors of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Haaland, in Jakoubek and Budilová, 2019a: 193) After all – 38 years later – Fredrik Barth himself considers this direct relation obvious and he explicitly states in his ‘overview of 60 years in anthropology’ in hindsight that the Bergen symposium, which resulted in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, was ‘inspired by Leach’s monograph on the Kachin (Leach, 1954)’ (Barth, 2007: 9–10). The interesting question is, why there is no such information indicated in the ‘Introduction’? Still more strikingly, only two of the above listed works are mentioned in relation to the core topic of the ‘Introduction’ and the whole edited volume, that is, in relation to ethnic groups – namely, Clyde Mitchell’s The Kalela Dance (1956), which is cited once in a modest footnote, and Raoul Naroll’s ’On Ethnic Unit Classification’ (1964).

The reference to Naroll’s study holds a relatively prominent position in the ‘Introduction’ – it is cited at the very beginning of the chapter clearly to represent the general anthropological understanding of ethnic groups; it says: ‘The term ethnic group is generally understood in anthropological literature (cf. e.g. Naroll, 1964) ⁴ …’ (Barth, 1969b: 10; emphasis added). It is not clear what made Barth choose Naroll’s contribution as a typical example. But it is clear that the choice was highly problematic. There is a simple reason for that – Naroll’s study was not what Barth presented it to be; it does not articulate the anthropological understanding of ethnic groups generally shared at that time, and it does not do this at two different levels. First, Naroll did not actually deal with ethnicity. It is clear, when looking at the references Naroll uses, that he did not follow literature on ethnic processes, and he might possibly have been ignorant of its existence. The study Barth cites represented a striking exception to Naroll’s work, neither before nor after this specific publication (and the corresponding discussions) did his research focus on the question of ethnicity (cf. Otterbein, 1987). Second, as documented by Morton Fried, among others: ‘That Naroll’s endeavour [in his 1964 contribution] failed to develop a broadly satisfying answer to the problem [i.e. the definition of an ethnic unit] is obvious from the associated commentaries published with his article’ ⁵ (Fried, 1966: 527). It is worth mentioning that one of the comments was written by Edmund Leach, who – in sharp contrast to Barth’s representation of Naroll’s study – concludes his disapproving critique of Naroll by stating: ‘I would suppose that most British social anthropologist would share my views [i.e. views disapproving of Naroll’s text] on this particular issue’ (Leach, 1964: 299). But to be fair, Naroll’s approach did meet different responses in other domains of cross-societal comparative studies; nevertheless, in the domain of the study of ethnicity, it ‘met with a largely hostile response’ (Fried, 1975: 86).

It is astonishing that Barth ignored the debate between Naroll and Michael Moerman (Moerman, 1965, 1967, 1968, Naroll, 1964, 1967). In fact, Moerman was criticizing Naroll’s objectivist perspective while himself taking a subjectivist position – that is, the position that we today generally associate with Barth (cf. Conversi, 1999: 560; Isajiw, 1993: 3; Jones, 1997/2003: 59). To a great degree, the whole of Moerman’s argument is very ‘Barthian’: Moerman dismisses Naroll’s notion of ethnic group as a cultural unit, that is, as a group sharing a specific culture, since the traits indicating a cultural group such as ‘language, culture and political organization do not correlate completely’, which means that ‘the units delimited by one criterion do not coincide with the units delimited by another’ (Moerman, 1965: 1215). At the same time, cultural traits considered characteristic by members of a particular ethnic group are typically shared by its neighbours; thus, the area of their distribution far exceeds the unit they were supposed to delimit (Moerman, 1968: passim). Given the impossibility of using objective ‘cultural traits’ to determine an ethnic group, Moerman anchors his analysis in self-identification: ‘Someone is a Lue by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness’ (Moerman, 1965: 1222). Unlike Naroll, Moerman did attract very warm and positive attention with his study – after all, also Harald Eidheim cites it approvingly in his contribution to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969: 38).

In so far as could be ascertained from Eidheim’s reference, Barth must have been familiar with Moerman’s writings. It is really not clear why he omits Moerman in his ‘Introduction’ and instead chooses Naroll as (putatively) representing the anthropological perspective on ethnic groups (and that, despite the fact most of anthropologists involved in ethnicity studies rejected it). Possibly, Barth might have thought that his own approach would be more distinct when put in contrast, so he launched his presentation of the new model by a critique for which he chose Naroll as a kind of ‘straw man’ and also as a ‘stepping stone’ for his own argument. The decision definitely proved vital for ethnicity studies – since 1969, more and more authors gradually started to believe that the real state of art of ethnicity studies before the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries looked the way Barth described it – that the dominant model at that time was the one Naroll offered. So today, when an author states that: ‘Quoting a generally accepted definition of ethnic groups given by Naroll et al. (1964), Barth pointed out…’ (Guo, 2020: 12; emphasis added), hardly anybody thinks something might have gone wrong here – the majority of scholars share this perspective after all.

Objectively about Barth’s (primacy in promoting a) ‘subjectivist approach’

By placing Naroll’s text in a position of a typical example of the study of ethnic groups in the ‘preceding era’, Barth created an illusion that the era was characterized by the objectivist approach. His ‘definition of the situation’ was accepted and became virtually universal. When summarizing the history of ethnicity studies, authors today tend to rely on Barth and easily state that:

…pre-Barthian anthropology … as other social sciences, tended to focus on allegedly objective traits, assuming the importance of discrete cultural features as criteria for establishing group identity. (Conversi, 1999: 559; emphasis in the original)

Barth’s representation of ethnicity studies naturally took the other side – by defining the existing discourse as objectivist, Barth managed (without having to explicitly state it) to establish himself as a pioneer and founder of the subjectivist approach. ⁶ Even though his overview fails to correspond with the reality, many scholars, or the absolute majority of them, have adopted this perspective over time and Barth became a symbol of the subjectivist turn in ethnicity studies. So today, we can read not only about ‘Barth’s crucial shift away from “objective”, “cultural” groups to “subjective”, “self-ascriptive” groups’ (Gil-White, 1999: 792), but we can also notice that statements such as ‘Barth was the first to incorporate a “subjectivist” approach to ethnicity’ (Ajtony, 2012: 44) have become quite common.

But, the situation before 1969 was different to that portrayed by Barth’s contribution. First of all, the subjectivist approach according to which ‘ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves’ (Barth, 1969b: 10) and self-identification is considered to be ‘the critical criterion of ethnic identity’ (Barth, 1969b: 24) was already well known at that time. We have seen earlier that Michael Moerman held a well-formulated subjectivist position – and that he even formulated this position as a part of critical response to Naroll. But he was not the only one. In the 1960s, this perspective was already quite common. For instance, Immanuel Wallerstein writes, in 1960, that ‘Membership in an ethnic group is a matter of social definition, an interplay of the self-definition of members and the definition of other groups’ (1960: 131). In a similar fashion, Seymour Parker writes in his 1964 study that ‘The term “ethnic identity” … refers to the evaluation of one’s membership identification with his own and other ethnic groups’ (1964: 325). Still 1 year earlier, Shibutani and Kwan state that ‘an ethnic group consists of those who conceive of themselves as being alike … and who are so regarded by others’ (1965: 47). In the same year, Joseph Bram suggests, ‘The ethnic identity of an individual is primarily a form of self-conceptualization. In his mind, the individual assigns himself to one of the known ethnic categories’ (Bram, 1965: 248; emphasis in the original). ‘Self-identification’ is a key factor for membership in an ethnic group also for Lehman (1967: 106 et passim). And John N Paden maintains, in the same vein, that ‘ethnicity is self-ascriptive’ (1967: 3), or put in a more refined, dialectical way, ‘ethnicity is a combination of in-group and out-group ascriptions’ (1967: 7). Paden even explicitly contrasts his approach to Naroll, and notes that, contrary to Naroll, who dealt with objective differences, he studies upon ‘those characteristics [of ethnic units] which are held by the groups in question to be most important’ (1967: 1), that is, he concentrates on what is socially effective (and so sees ethnic groups as a form of social organization). Also, Vreeland (1960: 86–88) and many others played with the idea of ‘subjective criteria’ based on ‘self-consciousness’. To put it shortly, at the time of his writing, Barth joined, if not the mainstream of ethnicity studies, then at least, an already fast growing and relatively integrated movement (the authors cited each other’s work). But the question is whether he was aware of the fact.

The greatest developments and sophistication in the study of ethnicity have been surely achieved in anthropology (Allen and Eade, 1997: 219; Eriksen and Jakoubek, 2019: 7). But for many reasons (cf. e.g. Buchignani, 1982: 1; Eller, 1988: 1–2), the first discipline to deal with the question of ethnicity was not anthropology but sociology. And the first school studying ethnic processes worth mentioning in this respect was the Chicago School, the members of which were associated with the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago (Lal, 1990/2018; Persons, 1987). The school received the highest acclaim with scholars such as WI Thomas, William Burgess and Robert E Park in the period between 1915 and 1930 (Bulmer, 1984: 43).

Contrary to the above-mentioned anthropologists, virtually all of whom have been ignored as Barth’s predecessors, the fact that the Chicago School did actually inspire Barth has been mentioned by several authors. The Barth-Chicago School association is, however, relatively problematic. Although Barth studied in Chicago between 1946 and 1949, ‘interestingly enough’, Eriksen notes, ‘Barth … had no contact with group [studying ethnic processes] during his studies’ (Eriksen, 2015: 10). Barth’s link to the Chicago School had really (and ironically enough) nothing to do with ethnicity studies. The real source of inspiration for Barth was Erving Goffman (Cohen, 1994: 59; Eriksen, 2015: 10; Jenkins, 1994: 204; Paine, 1974: 4). Yet the inspiration was limited to the general methodological approach and interpretative schema and was not related to the very study of ethnicity. And even this source of inspiration came only ‘years later, upon reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959)’ (Eriksen, in Carey, 2015). So, it could be said that Barth’s conceptualization of ethnic groups was inspired by the Chicago School only indirectly and relatively late.

But is it really the case? What if the link between Barth and the Chicago School was, in fact, much stronger than we have tended to think? It is only recently that Richard Jenkins has written openly about Barth’s approach in the study of ethnicity, that ‘some of [principles] he appears to have borrowed from a 1948 paper by Everett Hughes’ ⁷ (Jenkins, 2015: 14; see also 2008: 210, 2016: 412). We could find many parallels and possible borrowings, but it is the following part that is worth inspecting:

An ethnic group is not one because of the degree of measurable or observable difference from other groups; it is an ethnic group, on the contrary, because the people in it and the people out of it know that it is one; because the ins and the outs talk, feel and act as if it were a separate group. (Hughes, 1948/1952 ⁸ : 156; emphasis in the original)

In the case of Goffman, there is only a correspondence in the general approach. But here, we can clearly identify a correspondence in the definition of ethnic group – and the correspondence is both close and striking. And it seems that Jenkins was not the first one to notice. Already in 1979, Walter L Williams and Thomas French observe that specialists studying ethnicity ‘have increasingly accepted the perceptions of the group itself in defining ethnic status’ – and they cite both Williams and French (1979: 217); so it is likely that the link between the two authors was simply forgotten after some time.

The principle of defining ethnic groups on the basis of self-ascription of its members and ascription by others, which is today associated with Barth, was also used by (American) sociologists of the 1940s well beyond the confines of the Chicago School. A relatively clear formulation of the principle can be found in the ‘Yankee City’ series (1941–1959) by Lloyd W Warner and his collaborators. It was the first volume of this work that was long (but falsely) considered to contain the first appearance of the substantive ‘ethnicity’ ⁹ (cf. Sollors, 1986: 23; 1996: x). And already, in this first volume published in 1941, we can read that ‘An individual was classified as belonging to a specific ethnic group if (1) he considered himself or was considered by the Yankee City community as a member of the group’ (Warner and Lunt, 1941: 211). Also, the third volume, which appeared 2 years later, contains the same statement: ‘The term ethnic [i.e. a member of an ethnic group] refers to any individual who considers himself, or is considered, to be a member of a group’ (Warner and Srole, 1945: 28).

To put it briefly, the ‘subjectivist’ approach, which has typically been associated with Barth, was applied to the study of ethnic groups much earlier than Barth, but also long before Naroll’s text. And this happened in sociology, not anthropology.

(Allegedly) ‘traditional proposition’: a race = a culture = a language

When Barth depicts the state of the art of ethnicity studies, he also states that Naroll’s – allegedly representative, at least for anthropology – definition of ethnic group ‘is not so far removed in content from the traditional proposition that a race = a culture = a language’ ¹⁰ (1969b: 11). That is, according to Barth, anthropologists ‘traditionally’ assumed correlation or isomorphy between units defined by culture, language, (religion, etc.), whose ‘bearer’ – a metaphor used by Naroll – was a particular society, the members of which professed some specific identity. It is not clear what Barth takes as ‘traditional’ – for instance, as we have already seen, Moerman opens his critique of Naroll’s suggestion that ethnic group and cultural unit should correspond, by arguing precisely the opposite: traits indicating a cultural group such as ‘language, culture and political organization do not correlate completely’, so that ‘the units delimited by one criterion do not coincide with the units delimited by another’ (1965: 1215). And we should not forget about ‘a famous dictum of Leach … that the boundaries of society and the boundaries of culture cannot be treated as coincident’ (Tambiah, 2002: 110, note 60; Leach, 1954: 48–49, 281–282). So maybe Barth was talking about older authors of the preceding generations, those who were writing about ‘tribes’. So, let us look at these ‘traditional’ authors.

In terms of the correspondence of societies and languages and/or cultures, but also with respect to the general debate on the originality of Barth’s approach, the following part from Nadel (1947) monograph The Nuba is also highly interesting:

What is described as ‘tribes’ in this book are groups which conceive of themselves as units … We cannot go beyond these fluid, subjective categories. They have no exact counterpart in concrete evidence… We shall meet with groups which, though they are close neighbours and possess an almost identical language and culture, do not regard themselves as one tribe … and we shall also meet with tribes which claim thus unity regardless internal cultural differentiation ... Cultural and linguistic uniformity then does not imply, and cultural and linguistic diversity … not preclude, the recognition of tribal unity. It is, in fact, easy to see that culture and language cannot provide infallible criteria of tribal identity; for culture and language admit of degrees and shades of uniformity or diversity: while tribal concept tends towards a sharper crystallization – one either is, or is not, a member of the tribe. The tribal concept thus hinges on a theory of cultural identity, which ignores or dismisses as immaterial existing variation, and ignores or disregards uniformities beyond its self-chosen boundaries. The tribe exists, not in virtue of any objective unity or likeness, but in virtue of an ideological unity, and a likeness accepted as a dogma. (Nadel, 1947: 13; emphasis in the original)

It is clear that not only does Nadel dismiss the idea of correspondence between culture, language and society/tribe; he does so – in 1947 – in a very complex and sophisticated way, anticipating many of the key premises Barth later uses to build his famous model of ethnic groups. Nadel rejects the assumption that tribal groups are characterized by a shared culture and/or language and shows that, in terms of culture and/or language, these groups do not form any objective unity, but only an ‘ideological’ unity, that is, that their uniformity is based on self-chosen (i.e. not objective) boundaries. The truth is that Nadel speaks about tribal and not ethnic groups, ¹¹ but if we bracket these differences in terminology, he formulates principles which we today tend to associate with Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in a way that is very clear and striking (and it may be worth mentioning that reference to Nadel’s The Nuba can be found in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in Eidheim’s chapter (1969: 39), not to mention the fact that the land of Nuba is located in Sudan, the site of Barth’s field research).

And Nadel’s contribution was far from isolated. Two years earlier, Meyer Fortes asks in his classic, The Dynamics of Clanship among Tallensi, in the chapter on the definition of ‘Tallensi’ (quotation marks used in the original), if the people of Talleland ‘have … any form of cultural or structural unity and singularity’. And we read:

There are … no precise linguistic or cultural boundaries between those four groups [living in Talleland]. Nor are there precise political or structural boundaries between them. They overlap with one another in every way. (Fortes, 1945: 16)

As we can see, Fortes rejects the idea that boundaries of language and culture are necessarily congruent. He even observes that the units are not divided by political or any structural boundaries, that is, the groups are not bounded units in the above-mentioned respects. Fortes anticipated Barth in another way as well – he notes that distinctions between individual groups are distinctions ‘in degree, not in kind’ (1945: 16). That is, there are no objective boundaries in any respect, even though ‘each of these groups is considered by members of the other and by its own members to be … a distinct … linguistic and cultural group’ (1945: 16). Thus, boundaries between groups are not objective and the boundary markers are – to use Barth’s phrasing – only those features ‘which the actors themselves regard as significant’ (Barth, 1969b: 14). It is therefore clear that Fortes, as well as Nadel, adopted the same assumption that tribes are social and not cultural units. To use Barth’s phrasing, by concentrating on what is socially effective, tribes are, for them, a form of social organization (as are later ethnic groups for Barth).

To look behind the area of Africa and to give an example related to another continent, let us examine the way Elisabeth Colson defined the Mahak Indians of the Pacific Northwest in 1953:

The Makah are not distinguished from other peoples by their physical appearance. They are not distinguished as a group by the possession of a common language or a common culture. They are not … a segregated group, isolated from contacts with those who are not considered to be members of the tribe. Nevertheless, the Makah themselves are perfectly certain about who are to be considered members of their group. … I am using Makah as defined by people who bear that title, and not with reference to any idea of physical, cultural or linguistic homogeneity. (Colson, 1953: 61)

As we can see, Colson revokes, in the very same vein as Nadel and Fortese, the ‘traditional’ equation that race = culture = language 16 years before Barth criticizes it. The Makah are not objectively distinct, both membership criteria and boundaries are determined ‘subjectively’.

And we could cite many other, similar examples. Works such as Fried (1975), Helm (1968) or Southall (1970) contain myriads of examples and references to texts published since the 1930s, which explicitly contradict Barth’s equations and they do it while drawing upon ethnographic material from all around the world. One can, therefore, hardly help thinking that Barth’s traditional proposition, a race = a culture = a language is, in fact, again only a kind of straw man – he could easily challenge it and define his approach against it, yet it did not approximate representative positions elaborated in anthropological theory for several decades by then.

As far as Barth’s ‘Introduction’ is concerned, we have been used to evaluations such as the following one written by Eriksen, saying that the ‘main original contribution of his [i.e. Barth’s] essay consisted in stressing that ethnicity identities are created from within and not by virtue of “objective” cultural differences’ (2019: 28). All the earlier works we cited in this text lead us to ask whether such representation of Barth’s contribution is really adequate.

Fredrik Barth’s ‘discovery’

Barth writes in the very first page of his ‘Introduction’ that ‘An empirical investigation of the character of ethnic boundaries, as documented in the following essays, produces two discoveries’ (1969b: 9; emphasis added). The first of these ‘discoveries’ says that ‘boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them’ (1969b: 9). The essence of this ‘discovery’ is the process of ethnic identity change. This act, that is, ethnic boundary crossings and changes in ethnic identity is the principal assumption of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries; the whole argument of the volume is based upon this assumption (Barth, 1994: 11, 2007: 10) and it also represents the hallmark of the work (Hummel, 2014: 48).

At this point, we reach a notable point. With respect to ethnic identity change, Barth managed to achieve something exceptional, something which is hard to understand retrospectively. First, he managed to make the reader believe that changes in ethnic identity constitute an extraordinary phenomenon. So we can read today, in a text written by a prominent Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, that Ethnic Groups and Boundaries deals with ‘the anomalous fact that people could change ethnic identity’ (Hannerz, 2019: 213; emphasis added). Second, Barth succeeded in creating an illusion that the assumption that ‘boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them’ has any novelty within social sciences, and that to ‘discover’ it is something extraordinary. And students of ethnic processes did accept it. Very quickly after the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries you can read that ‘Barth’s assertion that, even where stable ethnic group structures and boundaries exist, a flow of individuals between the groups can take place, opens up new possibilities in ethnic relations that have not yet been explored’ (Nagata, 1974: 332; emphasis added). For half a century, we have been used to reading statements similar to the one written by the chief author on ethnic processes, Andreas Wimmer, who considers Barth’s discovery that ‘a boundary can be stable … even if individuals shift from one side to the other’ to be a ‘substantial insight’ (Wimmer, 2013: 205).

How is it possible that Barth’s statements on the pioneering character of the 1969 volume (based on the ‘discovery’ of the possibility of changes of ethnic identity) have been accepted both in anthropology, and in other disciplines? The answer is far from simple, because Barth’s claims do not correspond with the actual state of the art at the time of his writing. First of all, changes in ethnic identity are quite common – not only in exotic locations such as Sudan, Laos or Mexico, or in remote areas of Norway. It is an ordinary everyday phenomenon, which was, and still is, common throughout the whole of history, including the history of Europe. It was so common that to ‘discover it’ the authors of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries could well have stayed home instead of departing to do fieldwork abroad. The history of Norway is full of changes in ethnic identity. Even Barth’s own Norwegian family underwent such a change since his grandfather had been Saxon (Eriksen, 2015: 3).

And there was no novelty whatsoever in depicting this process in academic literature, and this applies to anthropology in the first place. Not to repeat the fact that the phenomenon had been described by Barth’s mentor Leach (1954; Tambiah, 2002: 141), we can take a look at another classic – The Nuer by Evans-Pritchard. In this 1940 book, we can read that:

…we have seen that persons of Dinka descent form probably at least half the population of most tribes. These Dinka are either children of captives and immigrants who have been brought up as Nuer, or are themselves captives and immigrants who are residing permanently among Nuer. ... it is said ‘caa Nath’; ‘they have become Nuer’. (1940: 221; emphasis added)

Similarly, in the 1930s, that is, five years earlier, SF Nadel in his work about Nupe state and community writes about Gwari and Kakanda, who become ‘Nupe-ized’ (1935: 278, 279). Changing of tribal allegiance was a standard process also for Isaac Schapera just a couple years later (see 1938/1955: 5). Yes, Dinka become Nuer, Gwari and Kakanda become Nupe, Fur become the Baggara, Saxons and Sámi people become Norwegians and so on and so on, for many centuries, or, perhaps, thousands of years. Scholars have been aware of the phenomenon for a long time, at least certainly many years or decades before Barth. And, as the case has been proved of Evans-Pritchard, who actually only cites his Nuer informants, actors themselves knew about the process still long before them. After all, also Gunnar Haaland learnt about the phenomenon of the ‘baggarization’ of the Fur from his informants (1969: 68). It seems that the conclusion is obvious – to consider in 1969 a statement such as ‘categorical ethnic distinctions […] are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories’ a ‘discovery’ was rather unfounded.

Conclusion

With regard to Wimmer’s statement that ‘the comparative study of ethnicity rests firmly on the ground established by Fredrik Barth in his well-known (1969a) introduction to a collection of ethnographic case studies’ (Wimmer, 2008: 970–971), we can only say one thing – he is right. When Ethnic Groups and Boundaries was published in 1969, anthropological study of ethnicity had already been well under way; in sociology, the heyday of ethnicity studies started even earlier. The theoretical positions presented by Barth had been well known and published, in some cases several decades earlier. And still, Wimmer is right. The reason is that all the achievements of the study of ethnic groups before the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries were, little by little, forgotten and that it was this edited volume and, namely, Barth’s ‘Introduction’ that became the acknowledged start of virtually all relevant knowledge of the study of ethnic processes. All that came before Barth was basically buried under a deep and impenetrable amnesia.

The principal cause of this discontinuity in the study of ethnic processes lies in the fact that Barth’s work became so well-known and cited that readers finally accepted, not only the model of ethnic groups, but also the depiction of the state of the study of ethnic processes as offered by Barth in his ‘Introduction’. Barth’s depiction is essentially based upon a contrast between his own approach and virtually the whole existing anthropological tradition (to quote verbatim, ‘practically all anthropological reasoning’). So, it is Barth who, in a way, portrays himself as the ‘founding father’. And yet, as we have shown, Barth’s depiction is highly inadequate and misleading. With respect to the conceptualization of ethnic groups, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries was neither original, nor did it offer any new approach. We can only speculate today, why Barth decided to present it in this way. What we do know is that ‘Barth had not expected Ethnic Groups and Boundaries to take off so much’ (Wikan, 2019: 27; cf. also Haaland in Jakoubek and Budilová, 2019a: 191). Maybe if he had anticipated the renown and popularity his ‘Introduction’ was going to get, he would have paid much more attention to the contextualization of his position. But there is another hypothesis we cannot easily omit, that Barth was simply not properly familiar with the issue. Although it is true that Barth had written about ethnic groups earlier (Barth, 1956, 1964a, 1964b), with his approach – based on the concept of ecological niches, or on ecologic factors in the distribution of ethnic groups – he was a rather solitary figure that virtually did not follow anyone in the discourse of ethnicity studies. In fact, you would not find in this contribution any reference to works which at that time represented the (forthcoming) mainstream in the study of ethnic processes. With the one exception of the highly problematic Naroll’s study, he took the same strategy also in his ‘Introduction’. But even if we accepted the fact that Barth had not been familiar with existing research, we still cannot explain why the ‘Introduction’ fails to cite Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma or Moerman’s contributions, with which Barth was demonstrably acquainted with.

In 2019, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries marked a half century since the first publication. Two festschrifts in its honour have been published so far (Eriksen and Jakoubek, 2019; Vermeulen and Govers, 1994). ¹² And yet, the publication still provokes questions. One of the questions is what are the main reasons behind its popularity, in other words, why it has been so successful? We have sought to show that many standard answers to the question would not stand any closer examination. The only thing that is clear is the steady popularity of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. It is one of the most cited anthropological works in the last 50 years. So, we can say that, for many readers and in many respects, the book embodies and represents the field. So, questioning its popularity entails questioning the nature of the discourse. Those who write about Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, those who comment upon it and cite it, assume that its breakthrough status is indisputable. However, we have tried to show that the prestige and success of this book constitute rather a research problem in its own right, a question that has not been answered yet.