¹ Carter Bentley, G., “Ethnicity and Practice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29:1 (1987), 24–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Nice, Richard, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 27.

⁴ Cohen, See Abner, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969);Google ScholarIdem., “Introduction: The Lesson of Ethnicity,” in Urban Ethnicity, Cohen, Abner, ed. (London: Tavistock, 1974), ix–xxiv;Google ScholarPubMed and Idem., Two-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).Google Scholar

⁵ See Epstein, A.L., Ethos and Identity (London: Tavistock, 1978).Google Scholar

⁶ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 27.

⁷ See Ortner, Sherry B., “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (1984), especially 144–57.Google Scholar

⁸ Bourdieu, , Outline of a Theory of Practice, 72Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

⁹ Bentley, , “Ethnicity and Practice,” 28 n. 5.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., 28.

¹¹ Ibid., 32–3.

¹² Maranaos are Muslims, as Bentley explains, and are a small minority (five percent nationally), long despised by the Catholic majority.

¹³ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 29.

¹⁴ Gell, Alfred, “How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation,” Man, 20:2 (1985), 273.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Gose, Peter, “Labor and the Materiality of the Sign: Beyond Dualist Theories of Culture,” Dialectical Anthropology, 13:2 (1988), 105–6.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Connell, R.W., Which Way is Up? (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 148.Google Scholar Bourdieu shares much in common with Anthony Giddens's “theory of structuration.” In this connection, see Archer's critique of the latter: Archer, Margaret S., “Morphogenesis versus Structuration,” British Journal of Sociology, 33:4 (1982), especially 466–71.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Connell, Which Way is Up?, 150 and 152. See also, Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology,” 151–2.

¹⁸ An example of this view follows: “In the absence of political institutions endowed with an effective monopoly of legitimate violence, political action proper can be exercised only by the effect of officialization and thus presupposes … a capacity socially recognized in a public authority … required in order to manipulate the collective definition of the situation in such a way as to bring it closer to the official definition of the situation and thereby to win the means of mobilizing the largest group, the opposite strategy tending to reduce the same situation to a merely private affair” (emphasis in original). This quote might easily be from Abner Cohen or Michael Banton and might refer to the strategy of an “ethnic” leader making dupes of “ethnic” followers in a swirl of heated demagoguery. But when I reveal that it comes from Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 40, we can see that his approach, if taken as it is, presents problems when applied to ethnicity, even though here Bourdieu is not talking specifically about ethnic mobilization.

¹⁹ Alice Volkman, Toby, “Great Performances: Toraja Cultural Identity in the 1970s,” American Ethnologist, 11:1 (1984), 152–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Epstein, , Ethos and Identity, 109Google Scholar and 112.

²¹ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 29.

²² Ibid., 31.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid., 39.

²⁵ Ibid., 36.

²⁶ Grillo, R.D. (“Ethnic Identity and Social Stratification on a Kampala Housing Estate,” in Urban Ethnicity, Cohen, Abner, ed. [London: Tavistock, 1974], 159–85Google Scholar) observes (p. 175) two things of importance here: that cognitive identity may be a poor predictor for actual behavior and that ethnic groups may be internally stratified, with different ethnic identity and experience obtaining between strata, but who nonetheless define themselves as possessing the same ethnic identity. What this means, then, is that understanding the “internal” practices of a specific ethnic group may not be sufficient for understanding how that group is defined and defines itself, and for understanding of that group's behavior.

²⁷ For a recent discussion of this, see Thornton, Michael C. and Taylor, Robert J., “Black American Perceptions of Black Africans,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 11:2(1988), 139–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion that includes evidence of the alienation New World blacks experience when they actually encounter Africa, see Jenkins, David, Black Zion: Africa Imagined and Real as seen by Today's Blacks (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975.Google Scholar

²⁸ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 45.

²⁹ Ibid., 38.

³⁰ Moerman, Michael, “Accomplishing Ethnicity,” in Ethnomethodology, Turner, Roy, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1968]), 57,Google Scholar 62, 65 (emphasis added).

³¹ Williams, Brackette F., “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989), 439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² “Colored” people are the descendants of the offspring of black-white sexual unions. This group originated in the days of slavery. Traditionally, its members have occupied an intermediate position in Caribbean society while distancing themselves from the black masses.

³³ Hoetink, H., “‘Race’ and Color in the Caribbean,” in Caribbean Contours, Mintz, Sidney W. and , Sally Price, eds. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 81.Google Scholar

³⁴ Mintz, Sidney W., “Labor and Ethnicity: The Caribbean Conjuncture,” in Crises in the Caribbean Basin, Tardanico, Richard, ed. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1987), 55 (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

³⁵ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 35.

³⁶ Ibid. 42.

³⁷ Duveen, Gerard and Lloyd, Barbara B., “The Significance of Social Identities, “British Journal of Social Psychology, 25:3 (1986), 220.Google ScholarPubMed

³⁸ Bourdieu, , Outline of a Theory of Practice, 81Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

³⁹ Isajiw, Wsevolod W., “Definitions of Ethnicity,” Ethnicity, 1:2 (1974), 122.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Barth, Fredrik (for example, “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Barth, Fredrik, ed. [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969], 117–34Google Scholar) has used the concept of boundaries in his studies of ethnicity. Here I do not wish my use of “dual boundaries” to follow his, because Barth's orientation is functionalist, in that he sees norms conforming to changing behavior, so that norms may effectively regulate behavior. The problem in his account is that he sees a natural homology between norms and behavior, and when behavior does change, norms “catch up,” as it were, with behavior to become congruent with it. See Louis Fernandez, Ronald, “Ethnicity as a Symbol System: A Theoretical Discussion Exemplified by Case Studies of Spaniards in Montreal” (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1972).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Thus the language of “categorization theory” that Bentley uses is inappropriate. The concept of categorization and ethnic categories not only denies the possibilities for human agency, but takes these categories as givens and does not query how they come to be established in the first place. This relates to the problems with Bourdieu's theory as outlined above.

⁴² For example, Maingot, Anthony P., “Relative Power and Strategic Ethnicity in Miami,” in Perspectives in Immigrant and Minority Education, Samuda, Ronald J. and Woods, Sandra L., eds. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), 36–48.Google Scholar

⁴³ Ching, Annette M.T., “Ethnicity Reconsidered, With Reference to Sugar and Society in Trinidad” (D.Phil, thesis, University of Sussex, 1985).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Bentley, , “Ethnicity and Practice,” 47 n. 35.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid., 49 n. 38.

⁴⁶ Peel, J.D.Y., “Making History: The Past in the Ijesha Present,” Man, 19:1 (1984), 112.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Hobsbawm, Eric, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2,Google Scholar 12.

⁴⁸ Turner, Victor W., The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 28.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Connerton, Paul, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),CrossRefGoogle Scholar especially ch. 2.

⁵¹ Turner, , The Forest of Symbols, 30.Google Scholar

⁵² Weismantel, M.J., Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).Google Scholar

⁵³ Khan, Aisha, ‘“What Don't Kill Does Fatten’: Food, Pollution and Affinity in Trinidad” (a paper presented to the Eighty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 11 15–19, 1989).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Although there may be a question as to whether Soraya is culturally Maranao, none exists as to whether she is ethnically Maranao. This is not so for her father: “While some of the elements of Filipino modernism he brought from Manila seemed strange to his relatives, these ideas never call into question his identity as Maranao. Reared in a traditional Maranao environment, he ‘acts Maranao’ without having to think about it. The situation is not to [sic] simple for Soraya” (Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 37). Soraya's situation is complicated because women are “repositories of value” (Ibid.) in the Maranao context, and therefore are strongly “defined” from the outside as to what a Maranao woman should be like. But, as Bentley shows, Soraya is not totally passively determined by history and context. Thus, we cannot take the reproduction of her identity for granted.

⁵⁵ This is analogous to Bourdieu's problems in empirically establishing the relationship between social class and early childhood experience. See DiMaggio, Paul, “On Pierre Bourdieu,” American Journal of Sociology, 84:6 (1979), 1468.Google Scholar DiMaggio adds in an almost offhand way: “This will raise particular problems for students of the United States, where class differences are less extreme and ethnic differences more salient than France.”

⁵⁶ Bentley, “Ethnicity and Practice,” 40–8.

⁵⁷ During 1986–87, I conducted anthropological fieldwork among female factory workers in Trinidad, investigating their social relations and the conjuncture of ethnicity, class, and gender. See Yelvington, Kevin A., “Gender and Ethnicity at Work in a Trinidadian Factory,” in Women in the Caribbean, Momsen, Janet H., ed. (London: Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, and Macmillan,Google Scholar forthcoming); and Idem., “Flirting as a Joking Relationship: Scenes from a Trinidadian Factory” (a paper presented to the Caribbean Studies Association's Fourteenth Annual Conference, Christchurch, Barbados, May 23–27, 1989).