Why we need anthropology:

In our examination of different historical circumstances, we have found expressions of primordial identities that reflect many different meanings and usages of primordialism. One of the biggest contributions that we might be able to make is that all of the previous literature seems to address primordial identities as tied to ethnicity, race, and nation and we include religion as well as other categories. Although these categories are mentioned as functioning in or as a primordial identities-we explore these examples in detail. This contribution comes from escaping the bounds of the modern world and looking at pre-modern world where ethnicity, and in some respects race, and nation don’t have the same symbolic power that they do today, so that identities coalesce around other factors.

Clifford Geertz’s study of internal strife in post-colonial states has demonstrated that the creation (???) of identity and interests cannot be separated. A variety of interests can form an identity. Interests change over time. Geertz maps the development of a united nationalist sentiment in post-colonial nations to break down into discreet primordial groups along language, religious, ethnic, and other ties inspired by fear of not getting what they perceive to be their fair share of the new nation. These fears mobilized groups along the newly created borders VIOLENCE!! However, identities once created become interests themselves. Those who believe in these identities become willing to sacrifice their self-interest for them.

Barth’s 1969 work on ethnic identities explored the relationship between interests and identities by focusing on boundary maintenance between groups. Barth introduces the question of historical change into the process of constructing boundaries. Historical change re: identities, identities aren’t fixed over time; the way they are not fixed over time is that people move in and out of an identity over time and the signifiers of the identity change over time. Role of boundaries in defining groups; boundaries are what they do. Boundaries are defined by the dynamics they excite around them. They structure and evolve out of interactive processes around notions of difference. More recently, Barth has argued that these boundaries need to be understood within the historical and cultural context in which they are discerned, declared, and defended.

Barth’s work has given us a lens through which to examine boundary maintenance strategies in historical record. Historians can add analysis of specific moments when identities/boundaries are being produced and as processes as change over time. Boundaries are not always understood to mean the same thing to all those living around them… a more flexible and expansive definition of boundaries. Ethnic, primordial identity awakened by the desire to draw a boundary (e.g. Hui), Define boundaries, maintenance of boundaries per Barth. Function of semiotics in boundary making. Boundary making shared symbols. Drawing boundaries as an essential part of community forming. It is when you have a border region and there is no hegemony that you have these identities knocking up against each other. It is not only casting your identity against someone else it is coming into contact with others and forcing them to identify who they are.

History is a good venue for understanding the relationship between identity negotiations and primordialist sentiment. Building on Barth’s (2000) observations, our examination of these processes in the premodern and modern world allows us to say something about how primordial identities are imagined and function in different historical and cultural contexts. Historical investigation also privileges change over time. By examining primordialist sentiment within a historical context rather than the timeless schematic that anthropology provides we can simultaneously explore the instrumental and fluid processes that influence identity formation and maintenance as well as the affective power of primordialist identities acquire once they are formed. History provides the opportunity not only to deconstruct primordialist narratives but also to examine how those primordialist narratives function in their historical circumstances. Although identities can sometimes be subject to negotiation, they also operate as powerful historical forces of stability and dynamic change. It is through historical observation that it becomes clear that primordialist narratives frequently most effectively animate interaction and action.

One reason for the importance of primordial identities in historical processes is that there is a metaphysical/religious character of primordialism in that it closes off negotiation. It is a way of bringing unquestionable truths into the world in the same way that revelation does. Like any religious truth it might function best when invisible part of he landscape.

SEMIOTIC COMMUNITIES:

What do we mean by semiotic communities? Most simply, we mean a system of signs and symbols that circulate with mutual intelligibility among a group of people who use such signs and symbols to identify themselves.

• Interaction among people in a community can only happen when this semiotic system is agreed upon. In this sense, semiotic systems are essential to determine the limits of community, and also make communication possible within the group.

• What happens when people from different primordial identities share a semiotic system?

• Moreover, can some of our more crafty characters learn to work in multiple semiotic systems?

• Having shared semiotic community allows for the creation of border. Even when shared does not mean the same thing to all primordial parties involved.

• What about competing systems within communities?

• What about our ability to understand them through the stretch of time between our place in 2003 and the internal understandings of the people we are writing about?

What outside work do we want to point to?

• Geertz discusses this, in terms of semiotic economies, and the semiotic functions of art and religion. Relationship between fact of community using these and their understanding of the way the world functions. ** This would tie into Barth’s discussion of Lakoff. Discursive in that they create a whole way of understanding things. Geertz on art says it takes understanding of worldview out into the community where it can be explored visually. No inherent aesthetic.

• Barth – boundaries can structure interaction, but the sharing of semiotic systems, at least minimally, is a precursor to such interaction.

• Abercrombie, Pathways of Memory and Power – when Aymara and Spanish can both work in some frame for narrating origins.

What as historians can we bring to the table on this point?

• Boundaries do not preexist interaction. Only through communication and experience, and over time, are boundaries negotiated and subjected to change over time.

• Close case studies can not only substantiate Barth’s claim that boundaries shift in time, but also to examine specific cases when that occurs. Can get at the dynamics of change, and point to some of the key features of change.

Sidetrip back to primordialism: Defending the boundary can be an end unto itself at a certain point. Tom suggests this could be where the instrumentalism comes back in – once the primordial identity is established, to preserve it carries the instrumental interest. The boundary itself can be part of the value-infused action.

• Series of changes that happen to boundaries that historians can study, semiotic systems are one arena in which this plays out – semiotic systems are the vocabulary for charting these changes. One element in this is to look at how boundaries are maintained for their own sake. Looking into semiotic systems more closely, in specific historical contexts, allows us to substantiate such a claim and advance it on firmer ground as an important element in boundary studies more generally. In this sense, working as historians, we can augment the understanding of boundaries as systems of interface, or even serving specific purposes, to argue that boundaries, like institutions, sometimes take on their own inertia and demand maintenance for their own sake. (sorry to ramble)

ROLE OF SEMIOTIC VOCABULARY IN DECLARING AND MAINTAINING BOUNDARIES

THEREBY SIMULTANEOUSLY ALLOWING CONTACT AND MOVEMENT ACROSS THAT BOUNDARY. BOUNDARY BECOMES A STATEMENT ABOUT A NEGOTIATED RELATIONSHIP DEPENDENT UPON EXISTENCE OF SHARED SEMIOTIC COMMUNITY

SHARED SYMBOLS

CONTESTED SYMBOLS

VOICES OF AUTHORITY

• Process of articulating boundaries, who gets to draw them, and according to what criteria.

Is this about power relations, or the ability to incite consensus and willing participation.

We are also talking about subject formation involved in the ability to give a narrative of primordial identity.

As historians, we can look at the circumstances under which competing voices of authority engage.

Frequent creation of relationships of inequality, and key question here is how one entity gets others to go along. Can this lead to equalizing, or further inequalizing relationships. Question on the table is how the authority is not only claimed but in fact achieved. Perhaps what we have to offer here are case studies in how certain individuals or groups are able to achieve such authority through semiotic manipulation. This risks a circularity, but if we begin with an agreed upon semiotic system, or contained competing systems, then we can look at how certain entities can leverage them to achieve authority. In this sense, we bring semiotics into conversation with the idea of boundaries, in that they not only delimit borders but also give them meaning.

In thinking about voices of authority within semiotic systems, thinking about memory should also be important. Being able to point to the past, or tradition, would seem to be an important aspect of gaining semiotic authority.

Examples:

David’s paper: Fight over who’s system of law is a winner. Not just made by force, but in this case by semiotic appeal to reason and justice emanating from written law and process instead of action in the streets.

Nancy’s paper: Mendicants and Seculars fighting over claim for origins of the church. Each claims tie to “authentic” Christianity as part of effort to gain authority.

COMPETITIVE TRUTH CLAIMS

Tom: Truth claims are most closely associated with assertions of primordial identity. The idea of primordial identity in Late Antique and Early Islamic communities is couched in the language of revelation, which is expressed in a shared vocabulary. This claim to revelatory truth removes the claim to primordial identity from negotiation. It also makes the boundaries that the community is proclaiming non-negotiable. Once you have non-negotiable boundaries- once they have been made real and inviolate- they can be easily crossed. In order to construct a boundary between two groups there must be a common language with which to express it. Were there no common language the two or more involved groups would not be able to perceive each other. For example, Japanese nationalism was dependent on world-wide shared set of categories before you can claim distinctiveness. Prior to this, Japan was characterized by local and household identities. This brings us back to trauma, because the sacrifices that the household owner made our the founding event. This seems to be true for other identities as well. The similarity to religion and religious practices is important, especially with respect to individual identity, where it gives the individual an orientation and defined place within the world. Tom sees a lot of identity difference generated from the inside because of the amount of splitting that happens within groups. For example early Islamic karijites and shi’ites. What drives this process? Interest or some Freudian/Geertzian understanding of identity. Maybe interest if authenticity is perceived as an interest.

Josh: Especially with Norman rulers in Sicily, there is a very strong intrumentalist approach to identity as evidenced by how Norman rulers experiment with and discard successive identities. In the later period that Josh is studying, there is an attempt (within a single generation) an attempt to project a primordial identity back onto an instrumental identity. The early Norman rulers experiment with the semiotic language of the Mediterannean. This gets replaced by the idea of the Christian monarch. Josh’s paper provides an important opportunity for the discussion of the role of memory in identity creation.

Yuri: Cossacks also give an example of a circumstantially determined and strategically embraced identity that constantly changed but is now remembered as primordial and unchanging within the new-post Soviet semiotic universe in which it is advantageous for them to be true Russians.

Nancy: University scholars in the Middle Ages emerged as a response to circumstances - i.e. the rise of towns, the rise of monarchs who needed clerks in their administrations. Being a scholar offered opportunities but also was a vulnerable position. The University of Paris formed as a guild with instrumental interests, but its justification always came from its place in the church and the French realm, which gave it access to a primordial discourse, i.e. claiming the association with Paul. This discourse was strategically employed by the university-they were capable of lying and retreating. But when this identity was threatened as by the mendicants- the primordial identity emerges-in other words, individuals espousing that identity feel threatened and become reactionary.

Corrine: What Makarias shows is the individual’s struggle over the conflict between embracing the identity of the ruling class-his employers and his social circle, versus holding onto a particularly Cypriot identity that is not the same as that embraced by Cypriot Greek peasants. This choice is complicated by the threat that the Venetians pose to Makarias Latin overlords. This may be because the Venetians don’t integrate. He’s struggling over sharing interests with the Latins. This may have something to do with religion and the Latin’s attempts to bring the Greeks over to the Latin rite. His vocabulary suggests that he is operating from a Greek cultural tradition. We still don’t know what the exact importance of his use of Romance terms-French administrative language. There may be some interesting parallels between Makarias’ situation and late antique provincial elites, who were united by paedeic culture but also gradually became more identified with their local regions. Eventually a Hellene could live under the Muslims and be culturally Greek.

David: There may be a Yankee/American national identity based on a belief in the ascendancy of dispassionate reasoned based justice that is directly opposed to the Alcade system. If partiality happens, then the Yankee’s lose the legitimacy of their claims to advancing the authority. What David does develop is a changing understanding of justice that reflects a changing understanding of which members of society matter, which in turn reflects a changing political circumstances. A primordialist understanding of law becomes a primordialist understanding of race in which Mexican and Indian identities become conflated and racialized. For a while the Californian elites are some sort of hybrid.

Warren: The conflict between San Franciscan Western European and Eastern European Jews forces the Jews to re-imagine their origins while they are imagining themselves being watched by non-Jewish Americans. There is this idea that what it means to be Jewish is outdated. What is interesting is that the primordialist aspect doesn’t come from the Temple but from the diaspora. The idea that the Eastern Jews are more Jewish seems to be developed in dialogue with the non-Jewish American population. This is also tied into the urban/rural dichotomies of modern identity. This negotiation actually does happen on a stage where they are being watched. The fact that the San Francisco Chronicle reviews the play means that there was at least some non-Jewish audience. That the production of this play has a transformative affect on identity demonstrates the power of ritual.

Isaiah: The glyph and connection to the ocean are emblems of the primordialist imaginings that are going on with Hui. Surfing is claimed as a way of life and asserting manliness for natives of Hawaii rather than a mere international sport. Surfing makes the primordial past that they are imagining tangible and present in their lived experience. Their political claims are based on their assertion of indigeniety and ownership of the land and ocean. It is this shared set of ideas-that indigeneity carries weight beyond the circle of the Hui-that makes their claims viable. In this context it is interesting that some members of the indigenous movement on Hawaii think of the Hui as thugs. They are in dialogue and tied into the dominant culture-movies/clothing, etc. They are not always opposed to the dominant . They just want a voice in what happens on their beaches. They would not be able to claim this voice without claims to indigeneity. They also express ambivalence about the use of the land which derives from the fact that the group is making money. They are engaging with the reality of being colonized in order to pursue their own interests.

Need to differentiate between primordialism as analytic strategy vs. primordialism as experienced in groups. Limit as construct for historical study. Recognizing as phenomenon experienced by communities important. Once there, governs the behavior of people because it becomes the truth that governs them. Recognizing it doesn’t make recognizing instrumentalism as wrong. Analytical category vs. element of community.