70 Johannes Siapkas
Dynamic Ethnicities and Instrumentalism
Ethnicity was reconceptualized as dynamic and mutable from the 1960s onward. Ethnic
identity and ethnic group affiliation were conceptualized as sociopolitical vehicles mobi-
lized in certain situations in order to maximize the interests of a person or group. The
instrumentalist perspective questions the foundational assumption of the essentializing
discourses—that the cultural repertoire mirrors the inner traits of a people. From
the instrumentalist perspective, cultural expressions of ethnicity differ considerably.
Parts of the cultural repertoire are invested with meanings on a contextual basis. For
instance, in some contexts, dress indicates ethnic sentiments, for example, the contested
meanings of the fez in nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Quataert 2000), whereas
in many other contexts dress is not invested with any ethnic sentiments (cf. the section
entitled A Note on Terminology and Definitions). However, the cultural domain was
of secondary interest for the instrumentalists. Their focus shifted to the sociopolitical
domain. One major contribution of the instrumentalist perspective was that it aimed
to establish the subjective self-ascriptive understandings of ethnic identities, which
stands in contrast to the categorization of people into ethnic groups. In anthropological
terminology, the instrumentalist method is also called the emic perspective, in contrast
to the etic perspective, according to which people are categorized. This resulted in the
realization that both ethnic identities and the cultural expressions utilized to express
them are highly mutable. Furthermore, the instrumentalists concluded that ethnic
identities are expressed primarily through behavior rather than the cultural repertoire;
to have an identity is to do things in a certain way (Barth 1969: 119). Since ethnicity
is mutable, persons can also shift identities. The instrumentalists considered ethnicity,
when mobilized, as intertwined with all aspects of life. The social, economic, and
political organization of a group permeated ethnic identities. Accordingly, if a pastoralist
settled as a farmer he might also shift ethnic identity (Haaland 1969; Galatay 1982).
A general shortcoming for the instrumentalist model is the inability to explain why
people have such strong sentiments for their ethnic group. The notion of stigmatized
ethnicity was an attempt to address this. A stigmatized identity is suppressed in selected,
often public, contexts while articulated in other, often private, contexts. Stigmatized
identities are often associated with minorities and social and political disadvantages
(Eidheim 1969).
Fredrik Barth’s ethnicity studies proved to be very influential, and the instrumental-
ist perspective is occasionally equated with him. However, the situational and mutable
character of ethnicity was also emphasized by other groups of scholars. The so-called
Manchester school focused on organizational and political aspects of ethnic mobiliza-
tion. They maintained the etic perspective and focused on how ethnicity was mobilized
as a sociopolitical resource by groups. Scholars in the Manchester school paid attention
to the dynamic processes of culture manipulation (Cohen 1974). The instrumentalist
perspective was also developed by social scientists in the United States. They focused on
the contemporary social situation in the United States and tried to comprehend how and
why ethnic identities persisted beyond the melting pot (Glazer and Moynihan 1975).
Epistemologically, the most crucial difference between the essentializing discourses
and the instrumentalist perspective resides in the conceptualization of how identities are