Indianism

Welcome to Anthropology of Ethnicity and Totemism!

The theme of ethnicity provides a link between kinship studies, the European reenactment of Native American cultures, and my old Mordvinian research. I am interested in all forms of ongoing ethnic revival, be it the movement for the rejuvenation of Finno-Ugric national traditions, neopaganism, infatuation with American Indians, or anti-Semitism. I believe, with Ernest Gellner, that ethnicity is for Europe what kinship is for tribal peoples. I also like Norman Ryder’s formulation that “the kinship group is an ancestor of the ethnic group and the nation” [italics are mine]. I agree with the constructivist dictum that ethnicity is not given but chosen, but no constructivist framework can explain why some Germans choose to be Lakota, the Lakotas are forced to become “Indians,” while the Jews, albeit in diaspora for 2000 years, have chosen not to chose any other ethnicities but their own. There is a great deal of social and psychological compulsion involved in the manipulation of ethnic identities, and I do not think that we can trash sociobiological studies altogether. Subjectively ethnicity is rooted in an ontological field marked by gender, age, generation, birth, marriage, and death. Objectively it is projected onto a particular territory and a particular historical moment. Like kinship categories, ethnoses form a system in which Ego occupies a focal position vis-a-vis surrounding social groups.

The study of ethnicity has been a central concern of Soviet and Russian ethnography/ethnology for many years. Its role was similar to the role of the concept of culture for American anthropology. I have published a piece that grew out of this Russian tradition. (See Ethnos-1996.doc.)

A classic problem of anthropology, namely totemism, deserves serious attention and rejuvenation, albeit with necessary revisions. Although I agree with Claude Levi-Strauss that there is a myriad of ways by which animal symbols are appropriated by humans, there seems to be a radical difference in constructing one’s identity as a German and constructing one’s identity as a Lakota-despite-the-fact-that-one-is-German. Several scholars such as Ake Hultkrantz, John Comaroff, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Gillian Feeley-Harnik effectively revisited the problem of totemism after Levi-Strauss.

In my opinion, the structuralist interpretation of totemic beliefs as a mode of classification mirroring social divisions is only partialy true. While it is doubtless not about the animality of a natural species, it is incorrect to deprive the connection between humans and animals (or between Europeans and American Indians) of any substance. Instead, one should view totemism as the sharing of humanity.

I jotted down a few thoughts on Indianism as totemism in a conference paper (see CSAA-1999.pdf), whose theme revolved around a paradox of traditional Native Americans dressing in animal costumes and representing “totemic” animals on ceremonial occasions and Europeans dressing as traditional Native Americans.

Finally, diaspora has been a subject of much talk in the past decade. It is unsually presented as an alternative to the nation-state, but its definition has never been devoid of naturalistic (primordial) allusions itself. It is still assumed that it takes a “real” ethnic group or race to leave its homeland and disperse around the globe to form a diaspora. In the case of Native Americans and Euro-Indians, the diaspora of social groups claiming connection to the American Indian heritage and feeling emotional attachment to the American land has a different history. Native American tribes were forced onto reservations but their traditional culture was exported to the global market. I call this kind of diaspora “mediaspora,” in acknoledgement of the role of the media in the construction of social identities.

In the spirit of kinship studies, I treat ethnicity, diaspora and totemism as a single system of association reflecting complex power relations.