This current of thought contends that individuals act through nepotism, in doing everything to favour humans with the same genes in order to satisfy their own reproductive interest, which in certain cases obliges them to, despite everything, enter a process of reciprocity; in other words they are constrained to work with others who are genetically different, still with the goal of privileging personal interest. To prevent these collaborations from becoming too unstable, a process of coercion should be established. According to Pierre van den Berghe everyone is thus naturally racist.
A history of boundaries
The European academic world has (fortunately) seen other less contentious authors come to the fore, such as Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, Philippe Poutignat and Fredrik Barth. This Norwegian is often considered as having revolutionised the study of ethnicity. Breaking with the primordialists and substantialists that dominated the social sciences landscape during the 1960s and 1970s, he would establish an approach based on boundaries.
According to him, ethnic groups result less from culture than from social organisation. Culture is not the ‘ingredient’ that binds identities, but is rather a consequence of the setting up and the reproduction of (symbolic and social) boundaries between different groups. It should not moreover be forgotten that identities are not unchanging but evolve according to social context, and that they only exist if they are recognised by the wider community. Finally, Barth pays particular attention to the role of leaders, who might pursue very different objectives to those borne by the group.
Even if this theory was considered a major one, it was nonetheless criticised by some for what it was lacking, such as the analysis of the State as an actor limiting individual choices. But a good number of authors have subsequently rounded out, refined or modernised his arguments. More recent theories, for example, are tackling virtual ethnicity, in other words the ways in which the Internet allows the emergence of identification.
For a long time pushed to the academic background, ethnicity is thus a concept that can enable the current cultural, social and political problematics to be understood from a particular perspective. ‘Benign and positive in certain cases, it can unfortunately take on a malignant and destructive aspect in others,’ writes Marco Martiniello in the conclusion to his book. ‘The issue which the social sciences find themselves faced with when they study ethnic phenomena is to highlight the conditions that favour the expression of a harmless expression of ethnicity, those which lead to an exacerbation of ethnic affiliation resulting ethnic conflicts and those which remove any social and political meaning from ethnicity. [...] The social sciences can certainly contribute [...] to preventing other Rwandas or other Bosnias, which unfortunately cannot be totally ruled out in the contemporary economic, social and political unrest.’
