Singapore’s ethnic classification provides an example. The British
administration perceived the colony’s population as consisting of a wide variety
of ‘races’ including Cantonese, Hokkiens, Hylams, Khehs, Straits-born Chinese,
Malays, Sumatrans, Javanese, Buginese, Boyanese, Tamils, Malayalis, Punjabis,
Pathans, Sikhs, Sindhis, Europeans, and Eurasians. After independence, the
Singapore government fused all of these into four groups, Chinese, Malays,
Indians, and Others. Like the evidently arbitrary ‘Others’, the remaining three
categories were internally heterogeneous, but over the decades this classification
acquired a social reality, as the Singaporeans gradually accepted it and
developed a sense of (Singaporean) Indianness, Malayness, and Chineseness.
The amalgamation of these three groups has various consequences, for example,
regarding the languages of public services and instruction at school. It
exemplifies the malleability of ethnic boundaries and at the same time,
ironically, underscores the tendency of socially constructed ethnic identities to
assume an essential quality to their adherents. Singapore has been largely
successful in avoiding community strife by reducing and ordering difference.
Perhaps the administrative classification makes everyone realize that it involves
a measure of arbitrariness, which works against exaggerated essentialism.
In Singapore, as in Europe much earlier, the principal thrust of ethnic dynamics
was to create larger groups. But this is not a single march in the direction of
higher levels of ethnic integration. While Singapore created more inclusive
categories, China moved from distinguishing only four groups in addition to the
Han Chinese—Manchus, Mongolians, Tibetans, and Koreans—at the beginning
of the 20th century, to fifty-six officially recognized ethnic minorities, at the end.
Similar developments occurred in independent India. The constitution of 1950
introduced the term ‘Scheduled Tribes’, of which the government gradually
recognized more than 700. The United States and Western Europe, too,
experienced an ‘ethnic revival’, in which subnational groups were increasingly
seen as indispensable building blocks of society.
Appreciation of ethnic diversity is historically contingent. The epoch of
decolonization after World War II brought with it recategorizations, both in
newly independent states and in Western European countries where continuing
in-migration motivated new distinctions. For instance, Malaysia introduced the
category Bumiputera (literally ‘sons of the land’) to distinguish Malays and
other indigenous peoples of South East Asia from Chinese and Indian