Any ‘we’ has to be defined in relation to that which it is not, whether it is based on gender, age, religion, citizenship, skin colour, language or ethnic identity – just to mention some of the most common criteria of social inclusion and exclusion.
In a seminal contribution to the study of ethnic relations, entitled Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), Scandinavian anthropologists showed that there was no one-to-one relationship between ethnic identity and cultural identity. Ethnic boundaries did not arise from cultural differences, but were rather the outcome of social processes of exclusion, inclusion and identification.
This approach to ethnicity, which has been applied successfully across the world, has inspired research on other forms of social exclusion and inclusion, based on e.g. religion, gender and ‘race’. However, other tools are also applied in research on the politics of identity at SAI, where Indigenous questions, postcolonial hierarchies and the racialisation of immigrant minorities are also studied.
The politics and poetics of identity can be studied from below and from above: Sometimes, the focus is on the dominant group and its bid to impose its standards and coerce subordinate populations into submission; at other times, the persepective is that of the minority or excluded group, where questions raised are of a different kind, and concern the right to autonomy, but also aspects of cultural differences that cannot be reduced to strategic competition for scarce resources.
At SAI, the study of groups, inclusion and exclusion is intimately connected to several of the other thematic clusters, notably economy and politics. Understanding group dynamics has always been essential in social anthropology, and it remains so. In addition to its intellectual significance, the field also has obvious applied potentials in a world riven by group-based conflicts.
Researchers working on the politics of identity
Research projects within the politics of identity
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