Michael Roberts, reproducing an essay that was written in 1993 for a conference in Japan and one which has appeared in Japanese in The Shinso, Jan. 1993, special edition on Nationalism Today ed. by T. Aoki, pp. 127-50; but has not seen print in English. Note that the path towards this essay was prompted by the literary piece which I drafted in 1991: “The agony and ecstasy of a pogrom: southern Lanka, July 1983.” This was reproduced in Exploring Confrontation, Reading: Harwood Academic Publications, 1994.
Victim of communal pogrom, Varanasi, 23 December 1992
Perhaps the most dominant strand in the analysis of ethnicity and nationalism within social sciences has been that which can be described as “utilitarian,” “transactionalist” or “instrumentalist.” The means:ends relationship construed in terms of economic (and thus political) advantage is the dominant principle in capitalist rationality, so this is not a matter for surprise. The instrumentalist perspective comes in several variants. In one version, favoured especially by those emerging from the social sciences in U.S.A., ethnic groups are viewed as interest groups (e.g. Paul Brass 1974 and 1991). Another version is found within the transactionalist emphasis favoured by several anthropologists who emerged from British universities, such as Fredrik Barth (1975), Freddie Bailey (1966 and 1969) and Abner Cohen (1969 and 1974). Emphasis by highlighting is my imposition today.
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Indi Samarajiva, in The Nation, 27 May 2012
