Ethnicity and Hierarchical Opposition

One of the particularly significant aspects of ethnicity is that it can be analyzed in terms of underlying structural oppositions. John Comaroff (1987) describes ethnicity as first and foremost a process of symbolic classification. We have seen that the Lese classification or marking of Lese-Efe relations opposes whole social groups to one another, but it also opposes the particular elements that comprise the whole. Lese-Efe relations thus turn on several oppositions that have to do with social statuses (male and female, forager and farmer, house and village/clan member) and social structural principles (marginality and incorporation, equality and inequality, masculinity and femininity).

These oppositions are expressed here in the language of anthropology, but the realities they represent are not simply the result of a perspective that assumes, for analytical and methodological purposes, that Lese and Efe society is composed of a well-patterned series of oppositions. It is true that societies everywhere place some emphasis on what D. Maybury-Lewis (1989:1) refers to as "polarities of logic or experience." Structural analyses have revealed that totalities frequently comprise a "union of opposites" (Maybury-Lewis 1989:5). These oppositions are illuminating because the Lese and the Efe, like many other people in the world, do concern themselves with antinomies in their everyday lives. But such dualistic thinking (on the part of both anthropologists and the people they study) cannot be embraced uncritically. As I have noted, to accept the sharp separations posited by informants, such as the private and public, female and male, is to embrace and enshrine the local ideologies it is our task to deconstruct.

Structural oppositions are also framed so abstractly that they can seem to stand on their own, divorced from everyday life and the hierarchies of value associated with them. One critic of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, Louis Dumont, has consistently found fault with what he considers to be an anthropological aversion to the study of hierarchy, especially the reluctance to explore the logic of hierarchy underlying

egalitarian ideology in the West. More recently, Dumont has extended his campaign for hierarchy in a criticism of the use of binary opposition in anthropological analysis. His theory of caste hierarchy turns on structural oppositions, namely, the pure and the impure, status and power (Dumont 1970). But Dumont wishes to criticize not the postulation of oppositions but the treatment of oppositions as equal to each other. Taking up the issue of right and left as polarities (Needham 1973), Dumont argues that, as with other structural oppositions, that of right and left tends to be viewed as a simple polarity or complementarity (1986:228). If right and left are considered in relation to each other as terms or poles, it is their structural equivalence that makes possible the opposition. The poles do not have equal status in relation to the whole , however, for right is, in general, socially and symbolically superior to left. The poles are not equally opposed because they are valued differently.

Such differences in value have a direct impact on how we view ethnicity, since ethnic groups can be unequally opposed rather than balanced. Following Dumont, B. Kapferer (1988) argues that many classic analyses of ethnicity are placed in an egalitarian framework. He suggests that F. Barth and Abner Cohen, among others, have drawn on Evans-Pritchard's concept of balanced segmentary opposition, a concept that is embedded in European ideas about egalitarianism in modern industrial societies. Kapferer criticizes the concept of segmentary opposition for masking an underlying inegalitarianism; he argues, for example, that although Australians appropriate a nationalist ideology of equal opposition, in doing so they create a false sense that various national or cultural identities are homogeneous, and at the same time they subordinate Asians and other immigrants of non-European descent in a hierarchy. If everyone is equivalent in the sense that they are, as individuals, homologous and thus opposable elements, and if this sort of egalitarianism is applied to whole societies or ethnic groups, then it is only a short step to racial stereotyping; for just as the categories "Vietnamese" or "Sri Lankan," for example, are naturally opposed to the category "Australian," so are all Vietnamese conceived to be like all other Vietnamese, Sri Lankans like all Sri Lankans, and so on. " 'Australian' and 'Vietnamese' are patently not equivalent units, although their phenomenal constitution is in accordance with egalitarian principles" (Kapferer 1988:197). Thus hierarchy and equality are not necessarily opposed to each other; they may actually encompass each other. In fact, Dumont argues that in the United States "race prejudice is, in a

sense, a function (a perversion) of egalitarianism" (1970:264). He goes on to say: "Where equality is affirmed, it is within a group which is hierarchized in relation to others, as in the Greek cities or, in the modern world, in British democracy and imperialism, the latter being tinged with hierarchy" (1970:265). Hierarchical relations encompass equal opposition despite egalitarian efforts to suppress them.

These criticisms of structural opposition negate neither its value in anthropological analysis nor its salience as the basis of political ideologies, but rather they lead us to consider the hierarchical nature of the oppositions underlying Lese-Efe relations. Inequality is engendered in equality, marginality in incorporation. Structural oppositions can explain the cultural logic of hierarchical social forms and practices, for the sides of any given opposition may be differentially valued. The Lese and the Efe provide a compelling ethnographic example of how ethnicity is structured by underlying oppositions and mediated in social organization. For all their differences, the Lese and the Efe remain a union of opposites.