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 SOCIOLOGY 200

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 Essay  Sociology

   SOCIOLOGY 200

Theory and Society

Semester 2 2002  
 
 
Lecture Overheads 6

Theorising Ethnicity

Human tendency to form groups based on common descent (real or imagined)

Generic Elements:

  1. World-view
  2. Lifestyle
Specific Elements:

  • Language
  • Religion
  • Diet
  • Economic organisation
  • Political organisation
  • Kinship organisation
  • Rituals
  • Naming practices
Race versus Ethnicity

RaceEthnicity
Inherited – Physical (?)Learned - Social
Scientific (?)Subjective
SeenFelt
ProjectedChosen
ClassificationIdentity
FixedFluid
ColonialismPost-colonialism


Ethnicity is socially bestowed, maintained and transformed

Theorising Ethnicity

  • Hyphenated Ethnicity: Recognition that one’s identity is too complex to capture in a single ethnic grouping

  • Ethnicity and the Other (Ethnicity and the Dominant Culture)

  • “The Return of Ethnicity” (Hall)

  • Ethnicity and Social Stratification

  • Ethnicity as Life Journey

  • Other Markers of Identity: Class, Age, Gender, Sexuality...

Ethnic Relations in Aotearoa

  1. “The New Zealand Project”:
    • Systematic colonisation – Wakefield
    • “Vertical slice” of British society (cf egalitarian myth)
    • No place for Maori – “fatal impact thesis”
    • MONOCULTURALISM
  2. But, Maori did not die out in the late C19th
    • Led to policies of assimilation
    • MONOCULTURALISM
  3. Post-WW2
    • Maori rural-urban drift
    • Gradual decline of assimilationist views
    • MONOCULTURALISM
  4. 1970s, 1980s
    • “Maori renaissance”
    • Land Hikoi 1975, 1979
    • Bastion Point: occupation, eviction, settlement
    • Awatere – Maori Sovereignty
    • Springbok Tour 1981
    • BI-CULTURALISM
  5. 1990s-now
    • Asian migration
    • Shipley: NZ an “Asian nation”
    • MULTICULTURALISM?
Pakeha Ethnicity

  • Invisibility of ethnicity in the dominant culture

  • Ethnicity and oppression (mobilisation for resources)

  • Problem of common descent

  • Relational concept: response to Maori Renaissance, acknowledgement of Maori history

  • Commensurate with decolonisation (formerly Britons of the South Pacific)
Being Pakeha

Peter O’Connor:

‘It labels an understanding that this land is the only land that Pakeha belong to and that Pakeha culture is uniquely shaped by the experiences of this land.’

Marilyn Waring:

‘If generations of your family have been born in Aotearoa/New Zealand to choose to call yourself European is to deliberately and consciously choose to continue the process of colonisation, not only of the tangata whenua but of all others here too.’

Peter O’Connor:

‘Because of our privileged position being Pakeha holds an enormous responsibility to ensure that all those groups who call this land home are free to live and express their lives and cultures in the best possible way.’

Shifting Relations...

Claudia Orange:

  • From a Maori society trying to find a European settler enclave

  • To a European society trying to find a place for Maori
Paul Spoonley:

Pakeha ethnicity as fulfilment of Treaty obligations

Peter O’Connor:

‘The designation Pakeha immediately recognises and validates Maori aspirations and identity.’

Pakeha & Maori:

From aestheticization to appreciation.

Immanuel Wallerstein on Racism

European world deeply racist

Anti-Semitism the major internal expression of this

Nazism too this to the extreme: the Final Solution

This ‘missed the entire point of racism within the capitalist world-economy’

Racism was not to exclude or destroy but to exploit and blame

Post-1945: assault on racism – racism a taboo language

Enter social science: attacked meaningfulness of “race”. Social measurements of social groups can’t be reduced to genetics.

2 consequences for the Pan-European world (The West):

  1. Saw themselves as integrated nations based on liberty vs the evil empire of the racist Soviets

  2. Return of sanitised racism to keep people in the system but at the bottom of the heap (in the West economic expansion and falling birth rates led to need for immigrants)
Racism and the Social Sciences

From C19th – 1945 social scientists never directly confronted racism

History:

  • Scholarly concept of historical nations (political weapon)
  • Focus on powerful modern states (UK, US, France, Germany, Italy)
  • Then less powerful European states
Economics:

  • Adam Smith: British history as universal law
  • No focus on power
  • No analysis of political-economy
  • Racism as economically rational
Political Science:

  • Fixation on constitutional issues
  • Racism issue of formal legislation
  • Analysis of comparative government (5 major Pan-European countries)
Sociology:

  • ‘The worst of all’
  • Justified white supremacy (esp. US)
  • Correcting the deviance of the underprivileged
All 4 disciplines only looked at the Pan-European world, thought of as world of civilisation & modernity.

Open University Video: Power & Vision: The West and the Rest

How Europeans see others:

“Power & vision are inseparable”

Medieval to Modern

How have Europeans viewed Others?

Medieval period:

  1. Christianity
  2. Travellers Tales (bear in mind travellers tales from Antiquity too)
  3. Antiquity
  4. Coastal maps
Lure of the East – Portuguese

European expansion & the Renaissance:
Advances in: science, maths, navigation, astronomy – harnessed to naval power

Leads to the West’s “discovery” of the “New” World

Series of tensions that are never resolved:

Explore & convert vs conquer & colonise
Noble savage vs barbarous primitive
Childlike vs warlike

Decimation of indigenous “New World” populations leads to Atlantic slave trade

Pacific – the Australian subcontinent (Captain Cook)
Question: does this video reinforce some of the processes it seeks to subvert? What about the point that the peoples of Polynesia “gave up their land”?





| Faculty of Arts | University of Auckland | Sociology | email Coordinator | Last updated: 13 September 2002