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promise honour, wealth, jobs or influence, or they may simply offer security and stability. In stable, traditional societies, these mechanisms were rarely challenged. It is in situations of change, where old values are confronted with new ones, and where a multitude of opportunities becomes visible to the individual, that such processes are most easily seen.

The degree of belonging in a group depends on what it has to offer, both in terms of resources and in terms of sanctions. An extremely tightly integrated group offers practically everything to its members; a place of residence, political influence, a profession or its equivalent, a useful network of trustworthy contacts, a spouse and an overarching religious meaning to life. The price to pay if one opts to break out of such a group is, naturally, high; one risks losing everything, moving back to square one in one’s life. An extremely loosely integrated group, on the other hand, may offer nothing but an annual party to its members; the rest of the year, the group members must draw on their other networks of commitment and group memberships. This distinction reminds us of the fact that ethnic identity among Swedish-Americans in the Midwest is something quite different from ethnic identity among Jews in Tunisia.

ANOMALIES

Let us not forget that there are people who do not fit in. Until recently, they have received scant attention from anthropologists. This may be explained by the subject’s double heritage; the Boas school’s emphasis on the patterned, regular nature of cultural forms, and the British persistence in looking at factors contributing to the integration of societies. The truth is, of course, that neither cultures nor societies hang perfectly together. There are both centripetal (integrative) and centrifugal (divisive) forces at work in any society, from the smallest to the largest and most complex.

Since identification hinges on contrast, most social identities are of the either-or kind. One is either man or woman, either Mexican or Guatemalan, either black or white, Christian or Hindu. That is to say, in theory and according to ideologies of identity politics, that is how it is, or at least ought to be. The real world is much less well ordered.

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The population in Trinidad consists of two large ethnic categories (apart from a number of smaller ones), namely Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians. Those of African origin are Christian (Catholic or Anglican) and are associated with certain cultural values and practices such as the calypso and carnival. The Trinidadians of Indian origin are largely Hindu (but considerable numbers are also Muslim or Christian), and are associated with other cultural values and publicly visible practices such as Indian films and dance. Most Trinidadians fit into one of these large categories, but when one looks closely, few individuals are ‘typical’ representatives of their group. Among Africans, there are important variations concerning class and colour (which is socially significant in the Caribbean), and among Indians there are perhaps even greater variations following the lines of town/countryside, religion and values associated with individualism. The relative importance of ethnic membership to an individual in ‘multi-ethnic Trinidad’ varies from hardly anything to nearly everything.

In addition, several interesting, intermediate categories exist. The largest consists of the people known locally as douglas. The term comes from bhojpuri (the Hindi-related language spoken by most of the Indian immigrants to Trinidad in the nineteenth century), which means ‘bastard’. Douglas are ‘mixtures’. They have both African and Indian ancestors; usually, they have one parent of each kind. A calypso from 1960, written and performed by an artist who simply used ‘Dougla’ as his sobriquet, made explicit the frustration so many Trinidadians felt for not belonging to a clear-cut group or category. The lyrics of the song began with an imagined scenario where the authorities decided that Trinidad was a failed experiment, and that all inhabitants should be sent ‘home’ to where their ancestors came from. Some would be sent to Africa, some to India, but, as the song went ‘... what about me? They would have to split me in two’. A dougla, the singer goes on to relate, has no place to find protection if there is ethnic fighting, no parties to vote for, no football team to root for, no networks higher up in the hierarchies of society. The dougla was a non-person, an ethnic anomaly, the pangolin of ethnic classification.

All identity systems have their douglas, functioning partly like the third element in Lévi-Strauss’s binary schemes. Ethnic anomalies are those who are both-and and neither-nor. They are neither black nor white, neither Russian nor Chechnyan, or they

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are both Christian and Palestinian (like the late Edward Said), both Pakistani and English. Many years after the performance of the aforementioned calypso, Trinidadian intellectuals spoke metaphorically about the ‘douglarisation of Trinidadian society’. They meant that there was by now such a bewildering array of cultural and social mixtures in Trinidad, that it would soon no longer make sense to speak of a purely Afro or Indo way of life.

Anthropologists have explored comparable phenomena in many other societies, using concepts like hybridisation, creolisation or syncretism to describe them. Such processes of mixing create new cultural forms, help the ambiguous grey zones proliferate, and make it increasingly difficult to know where to draw the boundary between this group and that. On the one hand, it is clear the hybridisation has deeply challenged the formerly unquestioned emphasis on boundaries and group cohesion as constitutive for group cohesion. The ambiguous zones and the fuzzy frontier areas replace sharp boundaries in many cases. On the other hand, it is equally clear that boundaries are being re-created and often strengthened as a reaction to the tendencies towards their erasure and relativisation. In Mauritius, another multi-ethnic society with strong tendencies towards cultural mixing, the Catholic bishop expressed it thus; ‘Let the colours be clear and distinct for the rainbow to remain beautiful’.

Decades of intensive studies of inter-ethnic processes have shown that there is no reason a priori to assume that cultural exchanges lead to the dissolution of identity boundaries. In fact, it is often the case that the more similar people become, the more concerned they are to appear different from each other. And, one might add, the more different they try to be, the more similar they become! For there exist some standardised ways of expressing uniqueness and difference, which are recognised and globally accepted, and which make different groups comparable. In the process of rendering oneself comparable, one risks losing some of the traits that, perhaps, made one distinctive in the first place. Clothes, food, folk music and folk history are elements which recur in identity politics almost everywhere. The grammar drawn upon to express differences is becoming globally standardised.

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** *

With this paradox we shall end, although considerable parts of the vast discipline of anthropology have not even been mentioned. My ambitions in this book have been modest. I have endeavoured to give an overview, a handful of concepts from classic and current research and – perhaps most importantly – to convey that anthropology is a way of thinking. As such it is concerned with how humans make sense of their world, emphasising the power of symbols and narratives; and how social life can be regular, predictable and a source of security, emphasising the importance of trust and reciprocity. There are other anthropologies

– anthropologies of medicine, of nationalism and the state, of religion and of development, to mention but a few – but they, too, belong to the same broad tradition of thinking presented here.

Personally, I am convinced that the kind of cross-cultural, comparative thought and cultural self-reflection that anthropology offers, is of fundamental importance in a shrinking world where insider knowledge of the lives of others and a proper understanding of the experiences and ideas of others is in short supply, both among political powerholders and elsewhere. In addition, there is no doubt that anthropology is a subject which has the potential to change the lives of those who choose to enter it.

FURTHER READING

Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2002) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 2nd edition. London: Pluto.

172 What is Anthropology?

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, ed. (2003) Globalisation – Studies in Anthropology. London: Pluto.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1983 [1937]) Witchcraft, Magic and Oracles among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1956) Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon.

Firth, Raymond (1951) Elements of Social Organization. London: Watts. Fortes, Meyer and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, eds. (1940) African Political Systems.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frazer, James (1890) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan. (Published in many later editions.)

Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Gluckman, Max (1982 [1956]) Custom and Politics in Africa. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Godelier, Maurice (1999) The Enigma of the Gift. Nora Scott. Cambridge:

Polity.

Hannerz, Ulf (1992) Cultural Complexity. New York: Columbia University Press.

—— (1996) Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.

Harris, Marvin (1965) The Myth of the Sacred Cow. In Anthony Leeds and Andrew P. Vayda, eds. Man, Culture, and Animals. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science.

—— (1998) Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Headland, Thomas, Kenneth L. Pike and Marvin Harris, eds. (1990) Emics and Etics: The Insider–Outsider Debate. London: Sage.

Holy, Ladislav (1996) Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London: Pluto. Howell, Signe and Roy Willis, eds. (1989) Societies at Peace: Anthropological

Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Hviding, Edvard (1996) Guardians of Marovo Lagoon: Practice, Place and Politics in Maritime Melanesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Ingold, Tim (1994) Introduction to Social Life. In Tim Ingold, ed. Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life, pp. 735–37. London: Routledge.

Jones, Steve (1997) In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny. London: Flamingo. Kalland, Arne (1993) Whale politics and green legitimacy: A critique of the

anti-whaling campaign. Anthropology Today, vol. 9, no. 6.

Kluckhohn, Clyde (1944) Navaho Witchcraft. Cambridge, Mass.: The Peabody Museum.

—— and Alfred Kroeber (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kuper, Adam (1999) Culture. The Anthropologist’s Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Leach, Edmund R. (1954) Political Systems of Highland Burma. London: Athlone.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969 [1949]) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. Rodney Needham. London: Tavistock.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966 [1962]) The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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