Ethnicity, Interests, and Class: Constructing explanations

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity and Identity in Politics, Policy and Practice

Proposal

Education is a highly valued public service and the most contested of public policies. Understanding education’s content and practices requires attention to the policy process. Making sense of that necessarily political policy process requires exploring citizens’ and leaders’ political behavior. For Africa, a common quick jump is to ethnic identity to explain political behavior. That explanatory strategy is problematic.
Identities matter. Sometimes. But which identities? In what circumstances? Quickly, the explanatory challenge emerges. Offering cultural identity as an explanation for individual and collective behavior poses two immediate problems. First, identities can neither be simply observed nor assumed, but rather are complex constructions and relationships and negotiated understandings that require analytic unpacking. And second, where ethnicity matters, its salience cannot be explained by ethnicity.
Before they can expect research to guide education policy, comparative educators must understand better the policy process and what drives it.
This research explores three proffered explanations for political behavior in contemporary Africa, beginning with ethnicity, followed by interests and class. My approach to exploring these perspectives is to start at the bottom. How can the ordinary events of local communities help us understand ethnicity, interests, and class as explanations for political behavior? The empirical grounding for this analysis is research on local community politics in Tanzania, including both field investigations and review of relevant research over several decades. The research strategy is to use that extended local research to explore ethnicity, interests, and class as explanations for political behavior at the larger scale.
Assessing the importance of ethnicity requires attention to the shifting salience and malleability of cultural divisions and their associated identities. Modernization research and commentary updated and legitimized the constructs of the European arrival in Africa, barbarian/civilized, now termed traditional/modern. That approach projected a post-racial society, where the ties of culture would be replaced by connections based on interest. While recourse to ethnicity to explain political behavior remains common, many authors have focused on the pluralism of interests, expected to succeed ethnicity in shaping politics and political outcomes. Exploring interests as explanation requires attention to the political and institutional contexts for interest group organization and conflict. Understanding institutions as both contested arenas for, and outcomes of, political conflict enables us to broaden the review of proposed explanations beyond ethnicity and interests to include class. From that perspective, the expectation was that as Africa was incorporated into an expanding capitalist world system, the small-scale self-sufficient pre-capitalist societies would be overwhelmed, the bulk of the rural population would be detached from the land, and ties of class would supersede those of culture.
Notwithstanding the confidence with which much of the scholarship on Africa assumed the incompatibility of ties of culture and ties of interest and class, ethnic groups, interest associations, and classes exist simultaneously and interact. Though their relative importance may vary from one place to another, none has eliminated the others. That suggests we need an explanatory framework that addresses this complexity. At the same time, in recognizing the importance of ethnicity, interests, and classes, our explanatory framework must not become an eclectic grab-bag into which we put everything we observe and in which there are no discernible patterns, nor a cover for the claim that since life is complex and since the relevant factors are many, the researcher can simply pick and choose what is to be emphasized.
This research highlights the creation and shifting salience of ethnicity and its incorporation into interest group politics, with consequences for education policy and practice. Tanzanians recognized communities based on ascriptive characteristics and reinforced by social networks and customs, and they acted in terms of those communities. Tanzanians also recognized shared interests, and they formed groups to assert, secure, and protect those interests. The research shows that the process of political institutionalization, was not a neutral evolution toward greater functional specificity and rationalization, or a displacement of ethnic identities by shared collective interests, but rather a modification of specific institutions to suit distinctly class interests. The research thus highlights the importance of context and conjunction in understanding education policy and practice and the insights to be gained by exploring intersecting explanatory frameworks.
What do we learn? First, as explanations, ethnicity and interests are both visible and partial. Neither can explain its own significance. Most often, the writing on identity politics focuses on how people organize themselves, why, and with what consequences. But beyond the assumption that ethnicity is primordial rather than constructed, ethnicity cannot explain why political leaders seek support by appealing to ethnic identity rather than to group interests or to classes. Nor can ethnicity explain the political consequences of the tension between owners and laborers. Largely concerned with governance and with conflict management and resolution, the interest group pluralism perspective can also explain political outcomes, but cannot fully capture the consequences of the declining role of merchant capital in its competition with industrialists, bankers, and bureaucrats. The class and class conflict perspective is largely concerned with social change at a broad scale. Why is (a particular) society organized and governed the way it is, and what are the (inherent and contradictory) pressures for change? That perspective insists that context and conjuncture are essential to the explanatory framework and that exploring intersections and reciprocal influences is more productive than efforts to trace linear causality. It can frame but not fully explain individual behavior.
Second, ethnicity, interests, and class are not alternative and exclusive patterns of human organization, but rather interconnected patterns. This analysis shows that as explanations, studies of ethnicity, interests, and class are responsive to different questions and operate at different levels of analysis. Each perspective is incomplete without attention to the concerns of the others and the best of each incorporates the insights of the others. The situations that energize these patterns are those of conflict, and in our contemporary era, especially conflicts over what is produced, over how that is produced, over the distribution of that produce, and, most important, over how the decisions on those issues are to be made.

Author

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University