A Prolegomenon

It may very well be that this chapter has been written with expectations in mind that cannot be fulfilled within its compass. Yet it will serve a purpose only to the extent that its sights are set high. It represents a gamble more than a project, a reflection on research more than an exposition of current knowledge on the subject of that unique form of collective cultural identity^[2] and political culture in Zairean society known as 'ethnicity'. I will therefore strive systematically to avoid two pitfalls. The first would be to treat ethnicity as a given gauge by which individuals may be assigned to communities and communities to 'organic' wholes deemed meaningful, operational, and eventually able to be manipulated by an outside power.^[3] The second would be to direct the study to practitioners or adherents of a theory which reduces social problems to being merely the proving grounds for the refinement of or disputing of an abstract theoretical paradigm.

Theorizing in the past two decades has been all too often engaged in for theory's sake alone, which, in the terms of any of the conditioning theories—neo-marxism, structuralism, Freudian psychoanalysis—has meant that the beauty and the coherence of the theoretical construction have had to be kept out of the sight and grasp of the social actors. The latter have been thus reduced to being raw material for one theoretical system or another and have ceased to attract the attention of the researcher, who, in his struggle against empiricism, has produced a world without humanity.^[4] In such situations, knowledge, as that which produces rationalization in Weber's sense of the word, and which is also a product of it, presents itself as an instrument for imposing an order upon the world so as to circumvent what is unforeseeable in human conduct and to impose structuring identities on individuals so that they might be shaped in accordance with norms established for their 'optimal' use.^[5] These formulas, be they associated with the Left or the Right, are developed without regard to contradicting reality, if not in contempt of it, and they operate according to the twin projections of, first, a theoretical model built according to the logical assumptions and the historical experience of a particular society and, therefore, not applicable in terms of what is described for other societies, and, second, the belief in the necessity, or at least the inevitability, of the homogenization of social actors, thereby in fact aggravating their actual alienation.

Without wishing to involve myself here in the debate over the dilemma which

Dawe touches on in saying, 'human agency becomes human bondage because of the very nature of human agency'^[6] , I do believe it is necessary to emphasize the dual nature of ethnicity as both structure and process. As a cultural identity and consciousness laden with possibilities for political mobilization and as a discourse which arranges collective memory as a basis for political action,^[7] ethnicity is a specific form of historically grounded relationships between individuals. It is comprised of numerous human relationships of a political nature, giving structure as it itself is structured. It has its roots in a collective identity drawing on two complementary images structured by Darwinian conceptions of the evolution of society. One of these is the notion of a necessary solidarity and an inevitable specificity which link together the descendants of a common ancestor. The other stresses the historical competition between communities, a competition which selectively reinforces their identifying traits, thereby seemingly transforming social characteristics into hereditary biological law.^[8] If these relationships take root in existing consciousness and culture, they profoundly transform them, giving rise to the largely autonomous process which, acting as the apparent basis of political mobilization, intertwines with either current or emergent socioeconomic class relationships. We may paraphrase E. P. Thompson's comments on class to say that ethnicity 'cannot be defined abstractly in isolation but only in terms of relationship with other [ethnic groups]; and ultimately the definition can only be made in the medium of time-that-is, action and reaction, change and conflict . . . [the ethnic group] itself is not a thing, it is a happening'.^[9] Or, as Lonsdale has stressed, it is an unending thing, as there is no specific institution, such as the nation state, to arrest it and appropriate it.^[10]

It seems to me unnecessarily restrictive to consider the dynamic relationship of 'action and reaction, change and conflict' solely within a framework of limits set by relationships between ethnic groups or even between 'cultural identities'. It is more appropriate, I suggest, to view this relationship in the context of a greater whole in which the notion of structure reassumes its rightful place as a universal given, ordering the relationships between inequality, solidarity, and competition. Three axes order all concrete manifestations of this structure: gender, cultural identity, and class identity. The groups or communities organized along one of these axes, or in accordance with a combination of them, never act alone on the socio-political scene, but act and react only in response to other groups and institutions. As a principle of political action, the invocation and acceptance of a culturally based ethnic identity inevitably serve to create the ordering and/or restructuring of other cultural identities on the same basis, eventually leading to the shaping of a wider political culture which imposes ethnic discourse as the appropriate means of expressing social conflicts.^[11] As a function of the political and socio-economic stakes at a given historical moment, a political culture grows which favours, and eventually legitimizes, one or another axis of the inequality/ solidarity structure. Every industrial society appears, therefore, to be operating within a political culture of confrontation between, on the one side, cultural identity—originating in the confusion of the historical community with the biological community, or vice versa, as is indicated in terms such as 'nation', 'region', 'ethnic group'^[12] —and, on the other side, class identity.^[13] Not only has no industrial society (or one undertaking industrialization) been left unaffected by the dialectical tensions inherent in the inequality/solidarity structure, but it would appear, moreover, that confrontation is in fact necessary to these societies in order that their development as collective assumed identities should succeed. There is, however, no absolute historical rule to go by. In certain historical situations, as in the Soviet Union for example, the discourse of class conflict is

used to express all social conflicts. In other instances, as in western societies for example, it is discourse based on a grammar of cultural and/or biological identity which serves the same purpose.

Anti-Semitism, that almost indispensable ingredient of modern western nationalism, seems to me to provide an excellent example of the functioning of this dialectic. Once set off culturally, the Jew is transformed into a biologically specific stereotyped being who is depicted and perceived as a threat to society, perhaps even in spite of himself. The vices which have been ascribed to 'the Jew' have served to heighten the 'national' society's self-esteem and pride in its own perceived virtues and, by the same token, have served to turn the society into a quasi-biological community confronting an internal enemy. In an economy which is becoming internationalized, the political 'advantages' of having an internal enemy present are obvious.

At the same time, moreover, to the Jew have been attributed bourgeois virtues transformed into biological vices. This process allows class conflict to be channelled into the language and practice of racial conflict, thus strengthening the bonds linking national identity to the safeguarding of a healthy marriage between the state and national capital. It is also typical of the popular democratic countries that alleged Jewish evils should be those associated with the bureaucracy and that the State should take the place of Capital for the role it plays in imagined Jewish conspiracies. If it is often presumed that all 'capitalist' Jews are inherently bourgeois, so every 'socialist' Jew is presumed in anti-Semitic discourse to be a bureaucrat and an intellectual. Just as Jews in the first category are branded as the deicidal people, those of the second category are denounced as imperialists.

However, these dominant forms of discourse are neither necessarily permanent nor culturally determined. Class discourse plays an important part in the expression of gender relations and even of regional identities in the post-industrial West, while in the socialist countries, nationalist discourse and, hence, anti-Semitism, is supplanting class discourse.