Ethnic Identities, Borderlands, and Hybridity 113several possible ecological relations between such groups, including, “very commonly,”
a situation “where two or more interspersed groups are in fact in at least partial competi-
tion within the same niche. With time, one would expect one such group to displace the
other, or an accommodation involving an increasing complementarity and interdepen-
dence to develop” (Barth 1998: 20; cf. Anthias 2001: 629). This sounds like a sketch of
circumstances from which hybridity might emerge.
Another early, less well-known contribution to this literature appeared in 1975. Donald
Horowitz was interested in the processes by which ethnic identities expand and contract,
are replaced by new ones, and can be held as multiples by one individual at one time. In
doing so, he elaborated a typology of change, divided (perhaps rather mechanically) into
two chief processes, ofdifferentiationandassimilation. The second exhibited two forms:
incorporation, in which one ethnic group simply swallows the other, andamalgamation,
in which “[t]wo or more groups...unite to form a new group, larger and different from
any of the component parts” (Horowitz 1975: 115). Following Barth, Horowitz placed
great emphasis on the role of boundaries and the ascriptive nature of ethnic identity.
His process of amalgamation, then, might contribute to a more general model of ethnic
hybridity because of its focus on merging rather than, as Barth put it, competition and
accommodation.
Central to Barth’s account of the ecology of interacting ethnic groups is his notion of
boundary, for it is the marked boundary—those features that separate one ethnic group
from all others—that establishes the interface where the groups meet and separate. In
the Barthian model, such circumstances where identity may be challenged by prolonged
and intimate intercourse between ethnic groups may serve precisely as the trigger for
sharpening those boundaries as well as the opportunity for mixture. And the conceptual
sphere of the ethnic “boundary” can likewise easily be mapped onto a physical space,
if it so happens that the ethnic groups occupy adjacent or overlapping spaces; and that
physical space may become to be seen as a “borderland.”
Since Barth’s seminal essay, much has been written about hybridity and borderlands.
Some recent studies have identified both determinative features of these concepts and
offered a critique (see Alvarez 1995; Anthias 2001; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Hutnyk
2005; St. John 2011). Hybridity has found a place in the analysis of several phenomena.
It is used in discussions of diaspora, “as the process of cultural mixing where the
diasporic arrivals adopt aspects of the host culture and rework, reform, and reconfigure
this in production of a new hybrid culture or ‘hybrid identities’.” Hybridity has also
been identified as the result of cultural exchange in contact zones, a usage that both
depends on Barth’s formulation just cited and diverges when the emphasis is placed on
“culture” (Hutnyk 2005: 81, 83–4). This application has seen wide popularity in the
notion of the “middle ground,” a contact zone between different societies where none
is dominant, and so a culture of interaction develops that borrows from and reconfigures
practices from both (White 1991; Woolf 2009, 2011: 17–19, for a briefer and more
nuanced statement; Bonnet, Chapter 22). Whether the middle ground is also a spawning
ground for a hybrid ethnic identity is a matter for debate. Urbanization, that social
space where many different groups may be thrown together, is also often regarded as a
driver and promoter of confecting hybrid ethnic identities; this was a central argument
of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s influential 1963 bookBeyond the
Melting Pot, in which case studies of immigrant groups in New York City—including