Abstract
It has been widely acknowledged in debates about nationalism and ethnicity that identity categories used for classifying people along the lines of culture, race, and ethnicity help to enact, that is, bring into being, the collective identities they name. However, we know little about how categories acquire their performative powers. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it proposes a conceptual framework based on concepts and insights from science and technology studies for investigating the performative powers of statistical identity categories and possibly also other domains. Second, it demonstrates, through an empirical study of two examples from Estonian and Dutch official population statistics, that statistical identity categories enact more than the groups to which they refer. We argue that they also enact national identities and notions of national belonging of majoritarian groups in the host countries. Therefore, statistical identity categories can be used as analytical lenses to study nationalism and processes of nation‐building.
Highlights
The performative powers and effects of identity categories aiming to group people along the lines of their origin or alleged national or cultural identity have long been acknowledged in the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism
We demonstrate the analytical potential of our framework by studying two identity categories in-the-making in national statistical institutes (NSIs): the “third generation migrant” and the “Caribbean Netherlands origin groups.”
Central to our argument is that identity categories used to label migrants and minorities help to enact more than the groups of people to which they refer
Summary
The performative powers and effects of identity categories aiming to group people along the lines of their origin or alleged national or cultural identity have long been acknowledged in the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism. Ancestry-based identity categories like the “third generation” enact people who have been born and raised in Estonia as “foreign” by making the place of birth of the grandparents the central criterion for the determination of who belongs to the imagined community of the Estonian nation. In this way, the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Estonia are enacted as immigrants despite the fact that none of them has ever crossed an international border: Whereas members of the third generation have been born in re-independent Estonia, members of the second generation have mostly been born in a part of the Soviet Union that became Estonia in 1991. Our analysis rather confirms Peter Geschiere's (2009) observation that origin categories promise a quick (but unfulfilled) solution to the conundrum of defining the meaning of Dutch “origin” by fixing culture to territory
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