Primordial Identities Research Articles

Paul R. Brass. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison. New Delhi: Sage Publications. 1991. x+358 pages. Hardbound. Indian Rupees 325.00

This book is a collection of nine essays. Except for the last chapter, all the essays were written between 1978 and 1990 and are extentions of an earlier work, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (Cambridge University Press) published by the author in 1974. Two main arguments constitute the theme of the book. First, that ethnicity and nationalism are social and political constructions of modern conditions rather than reflections of primordial identities. Second, that both these constructions are related to the role of a centralising state. They depend upon the kinds of alliances that are made between the state and the regional or other non-dominant élites. As such, ethnicity and nationalism are seen as the outcome of interactions between the state leadership and the élites from non-dominant ethnic groups, especially the groups on the peripheries of such states.

State Bastardisation And Terrorism In Nigeria: A Discourse

Abstract This paper seeks to unearth and analyse the variables which promote and sustain primordial groups’ identities and their linkages to the emergence and sustenance of terrorist groups in Nigeria. Grounded in the pluralist theory of sovereignty, the study adopts historical research design. It relies solely on data from secondary sources, which are presented qualitatively, and the finding is analysed using content analysis techniques. The study reveals that the promotion of primordial identities above national identity for political advantage by the political elites leads to state bastardisation in Nigeria. Besides, it identifies the apostolical promotion of some neoliberal values without corresponding citizenship education, as responsible for the emergence of Boko Haram and other such groups that challenge the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Nigerian state. It also questions the continuous promotion of religion in the public domain in a secular state and concludes that genuine integration policy is an urgent imperative. The study recommends that ethno-religious politics be buried; religion should be returned to the private lives of the citizenry. Besides, citizenship education and societal development should be prioritised in order to strengthen the state, and weaken the capacity of primordial groups to challenge the Nigerian State with violent outbursts.

The depoliticisation of two competing nationalisms and the introduction of democratic Meritopianism as a possible way out for Ethiopia

ABSTRACT This article is a critical appraisal of the development and performance of two competing nationalisms – Ethiopian and ethnic nationalisms. It assesses why the current system espoused by ethnic politics is a danger to peaceful and harmonious co-existence and state survival and what should be done about it. It starts with the identification of a problem: if the Ethiopian version of federalism continues to be applied within the context of politicisation of ethnicity it will always be a source of ethnic hostility by generating ethnic grievances of real or perceived injustices. Both variants of nationalism are threats to the continuation of the state and the achievement of viable development. After a politico-historical comparative analysis based on observation and secondary data of Ethiopian nationalism (the thesis) and ethnic nationalism (the anti-thesis), a third individual based democratic Meritopianism (the synthesis) rooted in universal human values like individual rights rather than the politicisation of primordial identities is suggested.

Beyond Sovereign Reason: Issues and Contestations in Contemporary African Identity

AbstractIssues of collective identity discourses and integration in Africa often face competing national and primordial identities. We explore multilayered integrative mechanisms that have become constitutive of collective African identity. We examine the nature of this identity taking a modern constructivist view of Africa's encounter with Europe. But we also address basic anthropological concerns, focusing on present and future prospects and seeking to understand how this identity is shaped by international politics or synchronized with local political units.

The Thirsty Village

Water is the most precious resource of humanity, yet life sustaining water is becoming scarce especially for the marginal sections of society as corporate greed and unscrupulous powers pollute and commodify this gift of nature. This article is the case study of a multi-caste, plural religious and multiethnic village in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Here, Hindustan Zinc mines have played a critical role in this region’s environment and destroyed the ground water and natural water bodies making the once abundant supply of water a distant memory. I demonstrate how the distribution and control of water reflect existing and evolving power dynamics. This power field is rooted in historically derived inequalities based on caste, religion and primordial identities, as well as historical factors of shifting loci of power. The transition from a feudal to a capitalist democracy has created a power flux that is reflected in the lived reality of day-to-day life, in the people’s struggle for survival and for access to the now scarce resource of water.

Hubungan Muslim dan non-Muslim dalam Kerangka Inklusivisme

When a society grows and the needs of its members increase, the relation between them and other people—who possess various primordial identities—will be impossibly avoided. This social relation will potentially bring about friction among different groups existed in the society. Islam has established a number of rules concerning the relationship of Muslims and other religious adherents. Although the regulations have been firmly settled, the controversy among the Muslims themselves—in dealing with their relation with the non-Muslims—is often inevitable. The issue of relation with other people of different religions has become contentiously debatable topic among the Muslim academics. The debate has subsequently brought about the emergence of different ideological inclinations within the Muslim society. This ideological preference emerges through such number of “appearances” as moderates, radicals, liberals, traditionalists, and modernists. Each group possesses its own perception along with its arguments about the issue. This article seeks to explain the pattern of Muslims and non-Muslims relation in the light of more moderate and contextual approach. This is so why that Muslims should constantly prioritize inclusive behavior and reciprocally sincere interreligious dialogue with their non-Muslim fellows.

Separatism, the Arab uprisings and the legacies of lost territorial autonomy

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the origins of separatist conflicts by examining the Arab uprisings of 2011. Given the internal fractionalization of Arab polities and the artificiality of their borders, many anticipated that Arab states would disintegrate. In fact, separatist conflicts only arose in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The paper combines fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis (FS/QCA) and within-case process tracing of individual cases to identify the key causal factors that generated these conflicts. It finds that separatist conflicts occurred when there was a conjunction of two conditions: (1) severe crisis during the uprising; and (2) the prior existence of failed state-building efforts and defunct states since the end of the First World War. It also shows that oil production enhances state cohesion at some times but at others motivates and catalyzes separatist gambits. This finding suggests that current conflicts are not about primordial identities or ancient hatred. Rather, they represent efforts to reinstate forms of self-rule and independence lost during the 20th century. This emphasizes the need for a macro-social, institutional approach to civil wars that can explain how historical legacies constrain or impel actors to pursue different strategies and mount different claims on the state.

BAY‘AH: IDEOLOGI PEMERSATU DAN NEGOSIASI MASYARAKAT DI RUANG PUBLIK

Abstract: This article aims to analyse the rise of bay‘a. It is often perceived of the seed of early civilised society after passing through a series of negotiation involving primordial and territorial interests. Theoretically, ba‘ya is a form of relationship between religion and the state that integrate citizens regardless their race, ethnicity and colour in a public space. This article argues that Islam appears to be the pioneer of the concept of unity in public space, which was always in a state of competition leading to tensions and conflicts on the ground of primordial identities. The bay‘a was exactly a response to such tension on public space. It promotes “awareness of plurality” to combat horizontal conflict between race and ethics. In the global context, this awareness is part of the argument of legal pluralism to analyse several primordial interests, and also to prevent social conflict. So, plural identities can be unified by Islam through bay‘a as a concept whose realization is able to unify plural society in public domains.

Social construction of capabilities and intersectional complexities in a Tamil village

India is an ethnographic museum, well-known for its national motto of “unity in diversity”. It is a country of diverse hierarchies where the social reality is intersected by the varied grades of caste and class, among others. Against this backdrop, this article conceptualises the intersections of primordial identities. The concept of intersection underscores how diverse social positions interact in a Tamil village in India. As intersectionality is “the mutually constitutive relations among social identities” (Shields 2008), the interactions of caste, class, and gender in education are conceptualised to understand the formation of capabilities.

Romanticising Legal Pluralism Through Religious Revival in Democratic Nigeria: Crusaders, Criminals, and Casualties

The two epochal events that have shaped Nigeria’s socio-cultural, economic and political contexts are colonialism and the military authoritarian regimes. The former resulted in the emergence of post-colonial elites including the latter, with efficacy to effectively popularise, mobilise and manipulate primordial identities in their struggle over the control of public resources. The later militarised the Nigerian polity along primordial considerations to the detriment of national cohesion, integration and unity. One of the mechanisms used to execute this task is the deployment of legal pluralism as instrument of inclusion or exclusion. Hence, in deploying legal pluralism they are scaling up their tendencies to not only legitimise their instruments of control, but also legalise the resort to primordial identities. The paper relied on secondary materials in arguing that though the Nigeria’s Legal Systems have been influenced by customary and English jurisprudences, the curiously re-emergence of the Sharia debate and several other proselytised narratives are continuation of elites’ contestations. It is further argued that the state of insecurity is the translation or metamorphosis of the undercurrent in these social conflicts that finds expression in the activities of perpetrators of violence (crusaders or criminals). The resultant consequences of violence conflicts in Nigeria are seen in the country’s democracy and development challenges that manifest deaths, injuries, destitutions, displacements, disruptions, and destructions. As response to this menace, state and non-state institutions should be strengthened and encouraged in the promotion of understanding, tolerance, forgiveness, brotherliness, justice, fair-play and dialogue. Equally, efforts towards depleting the support base of sponsors of identity-driven programmes must be intensified by consolidating measures aimed at national orientation, patriotism and oneness. This is achievable through virile civil society organisations, labour unions, professional bodies, media and academia.

Collective memory, coloniality and resource ownership questions: the conflict of identities in postcolonial Nigeria

The indigenous concepts of ‘public’, ‘identity’ and ‘ownership’ of natural resources in precolonial Nigeria were redefined with the evolution of the Nigerian nation state. In Eastern Nigeria, for example, the ‘public’ and ‘national identity’ revolved around small independent communities. These communities, within the ethnic space, owned the resources within their borders. However, the creation of the Nigerian state by British colonialism reconstituted ‘national identity’ and shifted ‘ownership’ from the community to the nation state. Using the framework of collective memory, the article examines identity constructions and ownership of natural resources. The article argues that while the nation state has become the dominant geospatial basis for individual and collective identity, the dynamics of power relations embedded in the Nigerian state since its creation often rehabilitates primordial identities, where communities find expression in resource control agitation. The article utilises both primary and secondary sources in its analysis. It focuses on perceptions of resource ownership among communities of South-eastern Nigeria.

Negotiation of identity and internal contradictions: the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways compared

This study explores the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways with special reference to two types of foods: daily and ancestral prayer foods. The principal focus is to illustrate the negotiation of identity through foodways as well as internal contradictions arising from this process of identity negotiation. These two groups of Peranakan Chinese are largely the product of acculturation by the local Malays through socio-cultural interactions, though the Kelantan Peranakan Chinese are also acculturated by the local Thai community. Their daily and ancestral prayer foods display contrasting identities that stem from the negotiating of their acculturated and primordial identities. The former displays a strong local cultural influence, while the latter displays a strong Chinese cultural influence. However, despite the pervasive influence of localisation in their daily foods, elements of hybridisation are visible in some occasionally prepared food items. Meanwhile, localised and hybrid food items are included in their ancestral prayer foods, which are supposed to express their primordial Chinese identity. These internal contractions illustrate the complexity of the negotiation of identity through foodways within a cross-cultural context.

Rethinking Religious Divides

Notwithstanding the considerable body of scholarship on South Asian history that has appeared over the past several decades, we still live with the image of a monolithic and alien Islam colliding with an equally monolithic Hinduism, construed as indigenous, and from the eleventh century on, politically suppressed. Such a cardboard-cutout caricature survives in much of India's tabloid media, as well as in textbooks informed by a revivalist, aggressively political strand of Hinduism, or “Hindutva.” Though useful for stoking primordial identities or mobilizing support for political agendas, this caricature thrives on a pervasive ignorance of South Asia's past. Removing such ignorance is precisely the endeavor to which academic institutions, and scholarship more generally, are properly committed.

The Àbikú Mystique — The Metaphor of Subversive Narrative in Buchi Emecheta’s

Contemporary African literature pervasively represents corporeal fragmentation; unstable and incoherent selves emerge from the collisive transcultural space of postcolonial existence. Buchi Emecheta’s 1994 novel Kehinde dramatizes the tensions between the incoherent self and the quest for self-realization. It is a novel of crossroads – of cultures and traditions – of crises of identifications variously experienced by its major characters. In this autobiographical narrative, the eponymous protagonist is engaged in intense resistance to dominant discourses and patriarchal institutions at home and in the diaspora. Kehinde assumes a heterodox nature akin to that of Soyinka’s Abiku. Abiku, a primordial presence withcomplex, multiple, and contradictory identities and accretions, social, emotional, and cultural, serves as both a resistance trope and a theoretical frame for the recovery of disarticulated female identities in Emecheta’s novel. The Abiku mystique involves the distinctive narration of fractured or subsumed identities embedded as a figuration of agency. The paradoxes of Abiku’s existence offer a conceptual space; Abiku works as a thematic, aesthetic, and narratological device which destabilizes essentialist and unified identities of postcolonial Nigerian women.

IDENTITIES AND THE STATE IN PAKISTAN: A STUDY OF MENTALITY

This paper examines Pakistan's identity as a state, a religious community, a developmental enterprise, and a primordial society. It argues that over time Pakistan's state and developmental identities have weakened while its religious and primordial identities have gained in strength. This change in the balance has grave implications for Pakistan in terms of the working of the state and its legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. There is therefore a need to rehabilitate the state and developmental identities at a functional level, which means investing in improving the quality of governance and policy planning in Pakistan over the long-term.

MULTILEVEL IDENTITY OF THE POPULATION OF THE SOUTH OF RUSSIA: THE PARITY OF THE ALL-RUSSIAN, REGIONAL AND ETHNIC COMPONENTS

The article describes the identity structure existing in public conscience of three subjects of the Russian Federation populace: in Rostov and Krasnodar regions and in the Republic of Adigeya. The authors carry out comparative analysis of the empirical data from these three South Russia subregions and demonstrate constructive identities domination in Rostov and Krasnodar respondent segment and primordial identities domination in Adigeyan segment. The authors submit that descending of interethnic tension in South Russian territories demand for local and macroregional components of territorial identity construction.

The Inclusive City: Infrastructure and Public Services for the Urban Poor in Asia

The Inclusive City: Infrastructure and Public Services for the Urban Poor in Asia. Edited by Aprodicio A. Laquian, Vinod Tewari, and Lisa M. Hanley. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; and Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 341. The co-editors' concern for the plight of Asia's urban poor is not misplaced. The Asian Development Bank recently reported that 1.9 billion Asians live on less than two dollars per day and that more than 1 billion Asians live in some degree of absolute or relative poverty. Asia's poor account for three-fourths of the world's poor, and the co-editors estimate that nearly 800 million of Asia's poor live in cities and account for 34 per cent of those who live in Asia's urban areas. The challenge of serving the urban poor will grow because, according to the co-editors, by 2015 there will be 24 mega cities in the world and half of them will be in Asia. This essence of this superb and timely work is summarized in the preface's opening paragraph: Residents of cities in developing countries often lack adequate urban infrastructure, including water and sanitation, transport, solid waste collection and disposal, housing, and other basic services. In Asian cities, great efforts are being taken to make urban services available, but access to these services is often not open to everyone ... Rapidly growing slum areas and squatter communities lack even rudimentary facilities. Faced with the polarization of rich and poor people, urban authorities are faced with the challenge of how to make cities more inclusive by making infrastructure and services available to all. (p. xvii) The volume represents a collaborative effort: it was prepared under the auspices of the editorial offices of the Woodrow Wilson Center Press at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Its contents were presented at a Woodrow Wilson sponsored Forum on Urban Infrastructure and Public Service Delivery held in New Delhi, India during 24-25 June 2004. The book's twelve chapters, written by twenty-one contributors, make an essential point: Cities spur economic growth and act as the agents of cultural and political transformation. In an age of rapid globalization, urbanization erodes primordial identities and loyalties. At the same time, ... (urbanization) creates new groupings that promote exclusivity. (p. 1) The book explains that the poor are excluded and that the poverty that characterizes their lives can be defined in various ways, including, (a) insufficient income needed to meet basic needs for food, shelter, housing, educational and medical services, and (b) limited access to basic services such as potable water supply, public transportation, publicly supplied electricity and drainage and sewer facilities. With its definition of poverty in mind, the book goes on to do an excellent job of covering the skewed nature of public service deliveries throughout urban settings within Asian cities. However, one absolutely essential service that deserves more coverage is fire prevention and suppression. Fires in crowded urban slum areas (where the poor live in flammable shacks in close proximity to each other in which they cook and heat in dangerous ways) spread rapidly and dangerously. Without adequate fire suppression and prevention services, the poor stand to lose everything. The volume's contributors also point out that poverty is both relative and absolute and varying degrees of poverty require different mixes of poverty eradication and alleviation initiatives. Within Asian cities, the basic needs approach to poverty alleviation is often used and this means relying on state assistance (supplemental income) given by government to the elderly, unemployed and disabled individuals (p. 13). Poverty eradication can be promoted (at least minimally) via public policies and programmes that improve the ability of low income hawkers and cart peddlers to gain access to marketing facilities that generate additional income thereby permitting them to meet their basic needs on more sustainable bases. …

Introduction: the contradictions and ironies of elections in Africa

This introduction interrogates the popular meaning attached to elections in a liberal democracy, where they are generally regarded as expressing the political and civil rights of the citizens. It argues that contrary to this popular view, elections in Africa have become arenas where the elite contest for the consent of the people to exercise state power. The people on their part perceive elections as the entry for securing development projects to improve their material conditions. To this end, the elite employ various mechanisms such as intimidation, election fraud, and primordial identities like tribe and religion to bend election outcomes in their favour. Added to these is poverty, which is employed by the elite to reduce the people to dependency within the framework of clientelism. The result is that elections in Africa tend to confer popular consent on the exercise of state power, but only in the formal sense; in reality elections produce ‘choiceless democracies’.

The 1999 Presidential Elections in Nigeria: The Unresolved Issues

One can say with certainty that all the contradictions that had bedeviled previous democratic experiments in Nigeria were present and magnified in the February 27, 1999 election: divided loyalties, manipulation of primordial identities and loyalties, corruption and other election malpractices, lack of political discipline, and limited attention to serious structural questions.Why did Chief Olu Falae lose the election to General Olusegun Obasanjo? Several reasons can be advanced. First, Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) clearly had more money. Obasanjo was able to donate N 130 million and several cars to his party.

The 1999 Presidential Elections in Nigeria: The Unresolved Issues

One can say with certainty that all the contradictions that had bedeviled previous democratic experiments in Nigeria were present and magnified in the February 27, 1999 election: divided loyalties, manipulation of primordial identities and loyalties, corruption and other election malpractices, lack of political discipline, and limited attention to serious structural questions.Why did Chief Olu Falae lose the election to General Olusegun Obasanjo? Several reasons can be advanced. First, Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) clearly had more money. Obasanjo was able to donate N 130 million and several cars to his party.