112 Part II: Outsiders
associated with a modern worldview and the interests of the modern state.
They may have no reality for the peoples involved unless made real by fairly
recent political conditions. For example, it was a great surprise for speakers of
European languages in the eighteenth century to discover they were part of a
vast Indo-European language family that included languages of India and the
Iranian Plateau. They never had any conceptions of unity or of sharing a com-
mon history and culture, and still do not. No more so do the “Sino-Tibetans”
or the “Austronesians” or the “Austroasiatics.”
There are other collective identities that are genuinely experienced, yet are
patently recent, and they have a lesson for us. The nation of Singapore, for
instance, has existed only since 1965. Its citizens now think of themselves as
“Singaporeans,” but that is an identity that had to be consciously constructed
by the purposeful effort of the state in order to transcend older and potentially
divisive identities: Chinese, Indian, and Malay. Singaporeanness is explicitly
taught in the public schools and promoted in sophisticated public relations
campaigns such as the television music video showing a multicultural group of
young people singing “One people, one nation, one Singapore... .” Similarly,
an “Indonesian” identity emerged from a heterogeneous group of islands and
peoples during the movement to gain independence from the Dutch. Likewise,
an “Indian” identity emerged in the late nineteenth century as a part of the
early Indian nationalist movement.
The point of these examples is that these identities have been constructed
in response to particular political conditions in a particular historical period; in
this case, late colonialism and the emergence of modern states throughout the
region. Because the process is so recent, it is visible to us.
But surely, one might argue, many other identities are not recent at all but
ancient and enduring. Some people, such as the Han Chinese, developed their
collective identities many centuries ago. Just as nationalist identities were phe-
nomena of the last two centuries and were constructed in traceable ways, so,
too, have ethnic identities been constructed. But when, how, and why in each
case is a matter for historical investigation. Yet, we are accustomed to thinking
in a certain way about identities that we now refer to as “ethnic,” without real-
izing how modern the phenomenon is.The Colonial Theory of Ethnicity
During the colonial era a certain theory of ethnic groups and ethnicity
emerged. This was the tribal model of ethnicity. The tribal model assumes that
originally there were isolated tribes inhabiting a certain territory, speaking a
common language, descended from common ancestors, sharing a common cul-
ture, more or less integrated in shared social institutions, and had a characteris-
tic mode of adaptation to their environment. These traditions, according to the
tribal model, were passed largely unchanged from generation to generation,
with the result that at the point where they first encountered outsiders who were