Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life : Hindus and Muslims in India
I like Varshney’s book. Unlike earlier books (with the exception of Golden and Gould), he writes very clearly and coherently about his larger theoretical framework and connects his empirical analysis quite carefully to the theoretical framework.
What’s more, the basic thesis makes a lot of sense. He even makes some effort to draw out the causal mechanisms through which cross-sectarian civil society associations manage to defuse growing tensions short of violence or manage to disrupt escalating cycles of violence. In his anecdote about media coverage of his research in Aligarh and Calicut and the differences in terms of the level of paranoia in the press, he also hints at how a virtuous civil society environment can actually prevent an atmosphere of tension and potential violence from arising – although a more detailed analysis of the role of the media while riots or potential riot situations were evolving would have been very nice to see.
I think he does well initially with his argument that between-city variations in basic socioeconomic indices like wealth or income and literacy doesn’t explain anything about variations in ethnic violence. It is disconcerting that there is not a single word of mention of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom carried out in Delhi by criminal elements of the Congress Party in revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi in which 3000 people were killed. Although his focus is on Hindu-Muslim violence, this is so much larger than all the other episodes of communal violence in Delhi put together that it seems it should be taken into account in some way.
Methodologically, his attempt to bracket out questions regarding the form and operational style of the state by looking at within-country comparisons makes a lot of sense – although, given the lack of centralization of the Indian state, two out of his three pairs (Aligarh and Calicut and Lucknow and Hyderabad) actually involve significantly different modes of governance. Only the pair of Surat and Ahmedabad controls for differences in provincial as well as national government and it’s no accident, I think, that his connection of the empirical with the theoretical is weakest in that case.
In particular, when he is faced with the challenge of Surat’s having actually evolved communal violence during the 1992-93 riots, he is rather unconvincing. After having invoked the decline in Congress Party organization as Indira Gandhi eviscerated intraparty democracy as a major causative factor in the rise of ethnic violence in Gujarat, he just tosses out a claim that this decline was much less in Surat than in Ahmedabad. It’s very hard to swallow this as an explanation simply because the collapse in party organization (and often replacement by thuggery as a mode of spreading political influence) was so total on a national scale that it’s hard to understand why Surat, one of the cities with the worst municipal government in the country (at least as far as the well-off provinces like Gujarat, Punjab, and Maharashtra are concerned) would somehow buck this national trend to a degree that it would be significant in preventing communal violence.
Varshney has done a lot of work to put flesh on Putnam’s rather casually developed, throwaway notion of bridging capital (while at the same time carefully emphasizing the ethnic/sectarian dark side of bonding capital), both through a useful study of correlations and through a specification of detailed causal mechanisms.
Still, the relentless focus on civil society and on “scientifically testing a hypothesis” lead to potentially very significant omissions.
First, although Varshney has in general successfully bracketed out the role of the state through his argument that it generally responds to the imperatives of civil society and only acts in accordance with the law if political interests align with human rights and law and order, the argument is still open to specific counterexamples. In particular, it is absolutely shocking that, in his lengthy discussion of Calicut, he says almost nothing about the terribly important fact that Kerala’s provincial government has more often been not been formed by the CPM (Communist Party-Marxist); West Bengal is the only other state where this has been the case, and the CPM quite clearly played a more transformative and “left” role in Kerala than in West Bengal.
There is a throwaway paragraph on p. 152 where Varshney casually acknowledges this, but it doesn’t color his analysis at all. He focuses on the evolution of “reading rooms” before independence and on something called “civil society” afterward without anything about the tremendous role of the CPM, using state resources, in building the very civil society organizations that he is talking about. He mentions at some point that Calicut, unlike Aligarh (or almost any Indian cities), actually has a union of “head-load” porters. The only reason something seemingly so improbable by standard economic analysis is possible is the Communist government in Kerala. The Science for the People movement, which is one of the largest civil society organs in Kerala, is wholly a creation of the CPM-run state government. One could go on.
Second, in his two best-argued cases regarding lack of sectarian violence, he brings up alternative explanations, admits their strength, and then completely ignores them. In Calicut, Hindu-Muslim violence is dampened because the true conflict is Hindu upper-caste vs. lower-caste; in Lucknow, the true conflict is Shia vs. Sunni.
It is entirely possible to correctly identify civil society as a causal factor in depressing ethnic violence and still to completely miss the picture. This is because this sort of analysis is very “microcausal;” it may well be that the proximate cause of defusing tensions and disrupting cycles of violence is the work of civil society organizations, but that may simply be a convenient mechanism for the playing out of some larger imperative. In Kerala, it may be that the provincial government is committed to anti-communalism; it’s well known among the political cognoscenti (and many others) in India that it is only the left parties that are resolutely anti-communal. That commitment may manifest in creation of “bridging” civil society groups, either directly at the behest of the state, or through the provision of space by the state, which then act to disrupt potential sectarian problems.
Or it may be that in Calicut caste tensions drive the creation of Hindu-Muslim civil society organizations and in Lucknow Muslim sectarian tensions do. And then those organizations act in the way Varshney has talked about.
In either case, though, if it did play out that way, a focus on civil society would be missing the forest for the trees and missing the deep causation for the proximate causation.
In the case of his remarkable ignoring of facts that everybody knows about Kerala’s Communist government, I have to suggest that the fact that Varshney is in political science, writes in Foreign Affairs (he has a fairly insipid piece about the tensions between democracy and economic growth in India in the latest issue), is a professor at Princeton (where they actually think Woodrow Wilson was a principled friend of democracy and self-determination) must have something to do with it. I think there is an obvious political bias as well as the intellectual bias created by the dominance of naïve Toquevillian notions of civil society within political science.
What’s more, the basic thesis makes a lot of sense. He even makes some effort to draw out the causal mechanisms through which cross-sectarian civil society associations manage to defuse growing tensions short of violence or manage to disrupt escalating cycles of violence. In his anecdote about media coverage of his research in Aligarh and Calicut and the differences in terms of the level of paranoia in the press, he also hints at how a virtuous civil society environment can actually prevent an atmosphere of tension and potential violence from arising – although a more detailed analysis of the role of the media while riots or potential riot situations were evolving would have been very nice to see.
I think he does well initially with his argument that between-city variations in basic socioeconomic indices like wealth or income and literacy doesn’t explain anything about variations in ethnic violence. It is disconcerting that there is not a single word of mention of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom carried out in Delhi by criminal elements of the Congress Party in revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi in which 3000 people were killed. Although his focus is on Hindu-Muslim violence, this is so much larger than all the other episodes of communal violence in Delhi put together that it seems it should be taken into account in some way.
Methodologically, his attempt to bracket out questions regarding the form and operational style of the state by looking at within-country comparisons makes a lot of sense – although, given the lack of centralization of the Indian state, two out of his three pairs (Aligarh and Calicut and Lucknow and Hyderabad) actually involve significantly different modes of governance. Only the pair of Surat and Ahmedabad controls for differences in provincial as well as national government and it’s no accident, I think, that his connection of the empirical with the theoretical is weakest in that case.
In particular, when he is faced with the challenge of Surat’s having actually evolved communal violence during the 1992-93 riots, he is rather unconvincing. After having invoked the decline in Congress Party organization as Indira Gandhi eviscerated intraparty democracy as a major causative factor in the rise of ethnic violence in Gujarat, he just tosses out a claim that this decline was much less in Surat than in Ahmedabad. It’s very hard to swallow this as an explanation simply because the collapse in party organization (and often replacement by thuggery as a mode of spreading political influence) was so total on a national scale that it’s hard to understand why Surat, one of the cities with the worst municipal government in the country (at least as far as the well-off provinces like Gujarat, Punjab, and Maharashtra are concerned) would somehow buck this national trend to a degree that it would be significant in preventing communal violence.
Varshney has done a lot of work to put flesh on Putnam’s rather casually developed, throwaway notion of bridging capital (while at the same time carefully emphasizing the ethnic/sectarian dark side of bonding capital), both through a useful study of correlations and through a specification of detailed causal mechanisms.
Still, the relentless focus on civil society and on “scientifically testing a hypothesis” lead to potentially very significant omissions.
First, although Varshney has in general successfully bracketed out the role of the state through his argument that it generally responds to the imperatives of civil society and only acts in accordance with the law if political interests align with human rights and law and order, the argument is still open to specific counterexamples. In particular, it is absolutely shocking that, in his lengthy discussion of Calicut, he says almost nothing about the terribly important fact that Kerala’s provincial government has more often been not been formed by the CPM (Communist Party-Marxist); West Bengal is the only other state where this has been the case, and the CPM quite clearly played a more transformative and “left” role in Kerala than in West Bengal.
There is a throwaway paragraph on p. 152 where Varshney casually acknowledges this, but it doesn’t color his analysis at all. He focuses on the evolution of “reading rooms” before independence and on something called “civil society” afterward without anything about the tremendous role of the CPM, using state resources, in building the very civil society organizations that he is talking about. He mentions at some point that Calicut, unlike Aligarh (or almost any Indian cities), actually has a union of “head-load” porters. The only reason something seemingly so improbable by standard economic analysis is possible is the Communist government in Kerala. The Science for the People movement, which is one of the largest civil society organs in Kerala, is wholly a creation of the CPM-run state government. One could go on.
Second, in his two best-argued cases regarding lack of sectarian violence, he brings up alternative explanations, admits their strength, and then completely ignores them. In Calicut, Hindu-Muslim violence is dampened because the true conflict is Hindu upper-caste vs. lower-caste; in Lucknow, the true conflict is Shia vs. Sunni.
It is entirely possible to correctly identify civil society as a causal factor in depressing ethnic violence and still to completely miss the picture. This is because this sort of analysis is very “microcausal;” it may well be that the proximate cause of defusing tensions and disrupting cycles of violence is the work of civil society organizations, but that may simply be a convenient mechanism for the playing out of some larger imperative. In Kerala, it may be that the provincial government is committed to anti-communalism; it’s well known among the political cognoscenti (and many others) in India that it is only the left parties that are resolutely anti-communal. That commitment may manifest in creation of “bridging” civil society groups, either directly at the behest of the state, or through the provision of space by the state, which then act to disrupt potential sectarian problems.
Or it may be that in Calicut caste tensions drive the creation of Hindu-Muslim civil society organizations and in Lucknow Muslim sectarian tensions do. And then those organizations act in the way Varshney has talked about.
In either case, though, if it did play out that way, a focus on civil society would be missing the forest for the trees and missing the deep causation for the proximate causation.
In the case of his remarkable ignoring of facts that everybody knows about Kerala’s Communist government, I have to suggest that the fact that Varshney is in political science, writes in Foreign Affairs (he has a fairly insipid piece about the tensions between democracy and economic growth in India in the latest issue), is a professor at Princeton (where they actually think Woodrow Wilson was a principled friend of democracy and self-determination) must have something to do with it. I think there is an obvious political bias as well as the intellectual bias created by the dominance of naïve Toquevillian notions of civil society within political science.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Reaching for My Gun
In the spirit of Nazi litterateur Hans Johst, I feel impelled to say, “When I hear the words ‘Deleuze’ and ‘Guattari,’ I reach for my gun.” “Nomadology” and “rhizomatic” engender very similar feelings as well.
I found this article useful primarily as a reminder of why I would never have dreamt of going into anthropology. I could find in it nothing but the most banal of conclusions dressed up with pretentious language and irrelevant references.
In fact, if the author were not so blinded by the rhetorical style of her field, she might have managed to say a few interesting things; she came at least within a stone’s throw of addressing important ideas relating to refugees.
Refugees (those who are not “internally displaced,” but have actually crossed a border) are subjected to an odd multiple displacement. First, they have left their “place,” and insofar as their actual home and home community has meaning to them they are displaced not just physically but emotionally. Second, they are living in a different country, where their legal status is sometimes clearly categorized and sometimes extremely unclear but is almost never the same as that of a native citizen of the country.
This second displacement is a highly nontrivial one, with huge ramifications in their daily lives, and it is based on a division (into nation-states that exercise control over ingress and egress, and nationalities for individuals, which give them the right to be certain places and not others), though it has been thoroughly naturalized by the practices of the last 50 to 150 years (depending on which part of the world), is not just an artificial construct but one whose construction one could see as a well-defined process with clear points of demarcation created by specific policies.
Orwell wrote about this construction penetratingly in one of his columns for the left-wing weekly Tribune (12 May 1944, http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440512.html).
Taking aim at the then-conventional wisdom about the “disappearance of frontiers” and ever-increasing intercourse between nations, he said,
“Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult.”
…
“All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe’s Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.”
As he pointed out, it was not only the rise of borders and the policing of same that cut people off from one another; inventions that supposedly further communication can do the same:
“It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite.”
National media like the radio help to create national ways of thinking and viewing the world, which then helps to divide people by nationality.
Admittedly, Orwell was among the most brilliant political writers in English; still, the fact that he could say more of use, and more clearly, about this issue in a couple of paragraphs than Malkki could in her whole article is telling.
Analogizing from the highly constructed nature of this second displacement, it is worth probing the constructedness of the first. Are notions of traditional “place” in part a construct imposed on “primitive” refugees by, among others, sophisticated Western academics? I know very little more about that question than I did before I read the article.
The contrast she draws between Hutu refugees living in a camp and those living in Kigoma township suggests the obvious point that refugees construct their own sense of identity and can do it differently based on different circumstances. One wonders whether the primary difference between the racialized and (eventually) triumphalist construction she claims to find in the camp refugees and the cosmopolitanism and “hybridity” of the town refugees is simply that living in a refugee camp is in general much like living in hell. Palestinian militance began in the refugee camps as well, but, even though there is wide variation, the constructed Palestinian narrative certainly doesn’t divide into some neat dichotomy like the one that, one can’t help suspecting, Malkki very conveniently finds in the case she has looked at.
Her criticism of the glorification of indigenism and the “re-sacralization of place” (as far as I can tell, this means nothing at all) and the pathologization of displacement is useful and interesting, although hardly startling or revelatory; it’s easy enough to find academics writing things that are extremely stupid and then criticize them. If she had developed a critique of these ideas more systematically, it might have been helpful.
Finally, it’s interesting to discover a point of contact between Ronald Reagan and Deleuze and Guattari. His statement that trees cause 80% of all pollution , while not quite of the same scope as blaming trees for all the violence of human civilization, must still be highly congenial to them.
I found this article useful primarily as a reminder of why I would never have dreamt of going into anthropology. I could find in it nothing but the most banal of conclusions dressed up with pretentious language and irrelevant references.
In fact, if the author were not so blinded by the rhetorical style of her field, she might have managed to say a few interesting things; she came at least within a stone’s throw of addressing important ideas relating to refugees.
Refugees (those who are not “internally displaced,” but have actually crossed a border) are subjected to an odd multiple displacement. First, they have left their “place,” and insofar as their actual home and home community has meaning to them they are displaced not just physically but emotionally. Second, they are living in a different country, where their legal status is sometimes clearly categorized and sometimes extremely unclear but is almost never the same as that of a native citizen of the country.
This second displacement is a highly nontrivial one, with huge ramifications in their daily lives, and it is based on a division (into nation-states that exercise control over ingress and egress, and nationalities for individuals, which give them the right to be certain places and not others), though it has been thoroughly naturalized by the practices of the last 50 to 150 years (depending on which part of the world), is not just an artificial construct but one whose construction one could see as a well-defined process with clear points of demarcation created by specific policies.
Orwell wrote about this construction penetratingly in one of his columns for the left-wing weekly Tribune (12 May 1944, http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440512.html).
Taking aim at the then-conventional wisdom about the “disappearance of frontiers” and ever-increasing intercourse between nations, he said,
“Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more difficult.”
…
“All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europe’s Jews had to stay and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote intercommunication between different countries defeats me.”
As he pointed out, it was not only the rise of borders and the policing of same that cut people off from one another; inventions that supposedly further communication can do the same:
“It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If anything, it does the opposite.”
National media like the radio help to create national ways of thinking and viewing the world, which then helps to divide people by nationality.
Admittedly, Orwell was among the most brilliant political writers in English; still, the fact that he could say more of use, and more clearly, about this issue in a couple of paragraphs than Malkki could in her whole article is telling.
Analogizing from the highly constructed nature of this second displacement, it is worth probing the constructedness of the first. Are notions of traditional “place” in part a construct imposed on “primitive” refugees by, among others, sophisticated Western academics? I know very little more about that question than I did before I read the article.
The contrast she draws between Hutu refugees living in a camp and those living in Kigoma township suggests the obvious point that refugees construct their own sense of identity and can do it differently based on different circumstances. One wonders whether the primary difference between the racialized and (eventually) triumphalist construction she claims to find in the camp refugees and the cosmopolitanism and “hybridity” of the town refugees is simply that living in a refugee camp is in general much like living in hell. Palestinian militance began in the refugee camps as well, but, even though there is wide variation, the constructed Palestinian narrative certainly doesn’t divide into some neat dichotomy like the one that, one can’t help suspecting, Malkki very conveniently finds in the case she has looked at.
Her criticism of the glorification of indigenism and the “re-sacralization of place” (as far as I can tell, this means nothing at all) and the pathologization of displacement is useful and interesting, although hardly startling or revelatory; it’s easy enough to find academics writing things that are extremely stupid and then criticize them. If she had developed a critique of these ideas more systematically, it might have been helpful.
Finally, it’s interesting to discover a point of contact between Ronald Reagan and Deleuze and Guattari. His statement that trees cause 80% of all pollution , while not quite of the same scope as blaming trees for all the violence of human civilization, must still be highly congenial to them.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Identities in Formation
In Identities in Formation, David Laitin analyzes processes of identity formation among the Russian-speaking populations of the recently formed nations of Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin rejects the dichotomy found within the literature on identity between ‘primordialist’ (emphasizing the fixity of identities) and ‘constructivist’ (emphasizing the fluid, instrumental dimension of identity formation) conceptions of identity, arguing that a Janus-faced conception of culture is needed to capture both features of identity (p. 20). In times of change and uncertainty – such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and formation of new states – the constructivist nature of identities will be particularly important. Laitin’s main theoretical claim is that the decisions Russian-speakers in the near abroad are making about their identities – Are they Russians? Are they (e.g.) Latvians? Should they learn Latvian? Should their children? – can be analyzed through a rational choice tipping model.
The basic premise of the tipping model in Laitin’s usage is that the decision of Russian-speakers about whether to learn the titular language of their countries (which Laitin uses as a proxy for cultural assimilation) is made by weighing the potential gains of assimilation against the potential costs of assimilation, and that the payoffs of assimilation increase as more and more people adopt the titular language. Laitin argues that three primary mechanisms influence the strategic calculations concerning linguistic assimilation performed by Russian-speaking populations. First is the possibility that learning the titular language will have economic returns for the Russian-speakers in each country. Second is the extent to which in-group status is positively or negatively impacted by adopting the titular language. Third is the extent to which those Russian-speakers who do linguistically assimilate will be fully accepted by the dominant out-group with which they interact – that is, the titular population of the states in which they live.
Laitin emphasizes the fact that the four countries in his sample do not start the tipping game at the same place. The historical legacies of Russian rule have left profoundly different linguistic landscapes in each country. For instance, while one third of Russians in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian in 1989, less than one percent of Russians in Kazakhstan spoke Kazakh (p. 252). Laitin looks to the nature of elite incorporation of each country into pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia to explain these divergences. In Ukraine, treated as a ‘most-favored lord’, elites had strong incentives to adopt Russian as a means of upward mobility. In Estonia and Latvia, incorporated as ‘integralist republics’, the titular language remained dominant, yielding lower incentives for titulars to speak Russian. In Kazakhstan, incorporated as a ‘colonial republic’, there were incentives for elites to learn Russian to reap the benefits of being political mediators. These historical patterns lead Laitin to predict that Russian-speakers are most likely to assimilate in Estonia and Latvia, least likely to assimilate in Kazakhstan, with Ukraine so divided that it is difficult to predict which language will win out. Laitin also attempts to establish the ways in which Russian-speakers in the near abroad are identifying themselves, arguing that the conglomerate identity as the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) may form the basis for a broader nationalist movement among Russian-speakers abroad.
Commentary and Critique
There are many things to appreciate in Laitin’s book. First and foremost is the extraordinary effort that went into data collection, which drew on a plethora of methodological approaches: large-scale surveys, rich ethnographies, linguistic experiments, historical analysis, and content analysis of different media sources. Second is Laitin’s commitment to identifying the micro-foundations for broader macro-processes. As a whole, the book is remarkably ambitious and thorough.
Laitin is by and large convincing that decisions made by Russian-speakers about whether to invest in learning their titular language are influenced by the incentive structures with which actors are faced. Clearly many of the characters in the book based their decisions about linguistic assimilation on instrumental calculations. But if the basic premise of analyzing linguistic assimilation with the use of choice models seems plausible, I think that Laitin’s reliance on rational choice tends to underemphasize the role of power in structuring the decisions of Russian-speakers. In focusing on actors’ considerations of economic returns, in-group status, and out-group status, Laitin overlooks the extent to which the state can employ coercive measures to impose high costs on those who do not assimilate to the desired language. This tension is evident when Laitin discusses the colonial model of incorporation in Kazakhstan, which predicts that a few Kazakhs would have incentives to learn Russian to serve as political leaders. But this explanation does not account for the fact that nearly all Kazakhs eventually learned Russian.
A related gap in Laitin’s model is his treatment of state policies concerning citizenship rights enacted in each country in the first years of independence. In Laitin’s initial vignette of the Grigor’yev family in Estonia, he attributes the obsessive efforts of Liuba to learn Estonian to her deep fear that her family could be separated if they could not all meet the Estonian government’s stringent demands upon Russian-speakers for receiving citizenship (p. 5). Because Russians living in Estonia were not automatically granted Estonian citizenship, deportation to Russia – a place many Russian families in Estonia had never lived – was a looming threat in the first years of Estonian independence. In this story, the harsh citizenship policies enacted by Estonia served as a powerful incentive for Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or contend with the uncertainty of living without citizenship.
Yet the citizenship policies that seem like such a strong motivator of behavior receive barely any attention in Laitin’s empirical analysis of the likelihood to assimilate. Contrary to Laitin’s model of choice, in Latvia and Estonia, where citizenship laws are the toughest (p. 253), the state has largely pre-empted choice by imposing severe costs upon Russian-speakers who refuse to assimilate to the titular language. To the extent that Laitin includes such state policies in his models of the tipping game, he considers them as supplementary factors in out-group status. The more restrictive the citizenship policies, the greater the stigma Russian-speakers will receive from the titular population for learning the titular language, and the lower the likelihood that Russian-speakers will learn the titular language (p. 256). But this assessment works in opposition to the commonsense notion (as well as Liuba Grigor’yev’s interpretation) that exclusive citizenship laws provided a powerful incentive to learn the titular language. Giving more attention to the role of power (especially state power) in influencing decisions about assimilation would help Laitin make more sense of the fact that many of his respondents insisted that they really did not have much choice at all.
In addition, Laitin sometimes stretches his rationalist explanation of assimilation decisions beyond its plausible limits. For instance, Laitin predicts that as compliance with titular language laws approaches 100%, some individuals will have incentives to remain monolinguistic Russian speakers in order to emerge as ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize the Russian-speaking community (p. 29, p. 249). This interpretation suggests that those who refuse to learn the titular language do so because they expect the future payoff of becoming a future leader and ‘cultural hero’ after the language cascade has happened. It seems more likely that those who remain monolingual Russian-speakers due so out of habit, personal conviction, pride, stubbornness, or old age. It is possible that such holdouts would be heralded as ‘cultural heroes’ for their actions, but I doubt their decisions would be motivated by such a far-sighted desire, as Laitin seems to think.
A more general point to draw out from the limitations of a rational choice approach to cultural identities is that it would be helpful to delineate the scope conditions under which such an approach is valid. Laitin gives off the impression that he is justifying the application of choice models to the study of culture more generally, without acknowledging the specificities of his usage, such as the fact that the state has a big role in structuring incentives, the uniqueness of language versus other cultural elements, etc.
There are also some aspects of Laitin’s rational choice account which he does not fully develop. In setting up the tipping game as a collective action problem (p. 27) in which cultural entrepreneurs play an important role, Laitin seems primed for a discussion of leadership along the lines of Calvert. But Laitin never really delivers on this promise in his empirical analyses. In order to get at this dynamic, I think Laitin would need to examine a different unit of analysis. For the most part, Laitin focuses on the level of the individual, looking at survey responses and conducting interviews with select individuals to draw generalizations about entire countries. What might be interesting to study further would be to examine the connection between political and social movements, the role of leaders, and processes of assimilation.
Another drawback of the book is that Laitin’s deductive approach seems to color many of the interpretations of his data. Laitin starts with a strong theoretical statement of the relevance for tipping models to studies of identities. Later on, it becomes clear that many of the theoretical predictions he held were not borne out by the data. For instance, in introducing the tipping game, Laitin outlines ‘competitive assimilation’ as one of the primary mechanisms driving decision-making among Russian-speakers (p. 28). However, Laitin later acknowledges that this factor seemed to play little role at all in the calculations of actors (p. 123). Laitin similarly acknowledges the lack of support for his theories about the differences between nationalism in Russian and nationalism among Russian-speakers in the near abroad (p. 319). Laitin on the whole seems to offer pretty honest admissions of the limitations of his data, but one wonders what story he would have been able to tell if he let the data speak for themselves without bringing his strong theoretical ambitions to the table. What results in the book is more or less a test of Laitin’s predictions, rather than an attempt to account for the observed outcomes. Like Fransozi, Laitin draws on a wide range of methodological tools, but his work clearly lacks the theoretical agnosticism present in Fransozi’s book.
Perhaps related to his deductive approach is Laitin’s propensity to make big predictions about future trends that seem to be based more on a desire to be provocative than on a close analysis of the data. One of Laitin’s main claims is that the concept of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) has emerged as the dominant mode of identification for the ethnic Russians living in Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin even goes so far as to suggest that this emerging identity might serve as the basis for a nationalist project, in which the Russian-speaking populations of different countries would join together to assert their common interests. Laitin acknowledges one problem with this argument – that the prevalence of the term russkoiazychnoe naselenie has actually dropped off quite steeply in the mid-1990s in favor of lumping the minority populations together as ‘Russians’. However, an additional impediment to a nationalist project built around identification with the Russian-speaking population is the fact that the usage of the phrase is quite different across different countries. In Ukraine, the term has many uses, not one of which distinguishes Russian-speakers who are ethnic Russians from the rest of the Ukrainian population. The different identity cleavages in different societies call into question the extent to which Russian-speakers will be able to mobilize around a coherent identity.
The basic premise of the tipping model in Laitin’s usage is that the decision of Russian-speakers about whether to learn the titular language of their countries (which Laitin uses as a proxy for cultural assimilation) is made by weighing the potential gains of assimilation against the potential costs of assimilation, and that the payoffs of assimilation increase as more and more people adopt the titular language. Laitin argues that three primary mechanisms influence the strategic calculations concerning linguistic assimilation performed by Russian-speaking populations. First is the possibility that learning the titular language will have economic returns for the Russian-speakers in each country. Second is the extent to which in-group status is positively or negatively impacted by adopting the titular language. Third is the extent to which those Russian-speakers who do linguistically assimilate will be fully accepted by the dominant out-group with which they interact – that is, the titular population of the states in which they live.
Laitin emphasizes the fact that the four countries in his sample do not start the tipping game at the same place. The historical legacies of Russian rule have left profoundly different linguistic landscapes in each country. For instance, while one third of Russians in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian in 1989, less than one percent of Russians in Kazakhstan spoke Kazakh (p. 252). Laitin looks to the nature of elite incorporation of each country into pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia to explain these divergences. In Ukraine, treated as a ‘most-favored lord’, elites had strong incentives to adopt Russian as a means of upward mobility. In Estonia and Latvia, incorporated as ‘integralist republics’, the titular language remained dominant, yielding lower incentives for titulars to speak Russian. In Kazakhstan, incorporated as a ‘colonial republic’, there were incentives for elites to learn Russian to reap the benefits of being political mediators. These historical patterns lead Laitin to predict that Russian-speakers are most likely to assimilate in Estonia and Latvia, least likely to assimilate in Kazakhstan, with Ukraine so divided that it is difficult to predict which language will win out. Laitin also attempts to establish the ways in which Russian-speakers in the near abroad are identifying themselves, arguing that the conglomerate identity as the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) may form the basis for a broader nationalist movement among Russian-speakers abroad.
Commentary and Critique
There are many things to appreciate in Laitin’s book. First and foremost is the extraordinary effort that went into data collection, which drew on a plethora of methodological approaches: large-scale surveys, rich ethnographies, linguistic experiments, historical analysis, and content analysis of different media sources. Second is Laitin’s commitment to identifying the micro-foundations for broader macro-processes. As a whole, the book is remarkably ambitious and thorough.
Laitin is by and large convincing that decisions made by Russian-speakers about whether to invest in learning their titular language are influenced by the incentive structures with which actors are faced. Clearly many of the characters in the book based their decisions about linguistic assimilation on instrumental calculations. But if the basic premise of analyzing linguistic assimilation with the use of choice models seems plausible, I think that Laitin’s reliance on rational choice tends to underemphasize the role of power in structuring the decisions of Russian-speakers. In focusing on actors’ considerations of economic returns, in-group status, and out-group status, Laitin overlooks the extent to which the state can employ coercive measures to impose high costs on those who do not assimilate to the desired language. This tension is evident when Laitin discusses the colonial model of incorporation in Kazakhstan, which predicts that a few Kazakhs would have incentives to learn Russian to serve as political leaders. But this explanation does not account for the fact that nearly all Kazakhs eventually learned Russian.
A related gap in Laitin’s model is his treatment of state policies concerning citizenship rights enacted in each country in the first years of independence. In Laitin’s initial vignette of the Grigor’yev family in Estonia, he attributes the obsessive efforts of Liuba to learn Estonian to her deep fear that her family could be separated if they could not all meet the Estonian government’s stringent demands upon Russian-speakers for receiving citizenship (p. 5). Because Russians living in Estonia were not automatically granted Estonian citizenship, deportation to Russia – a place many Russian families in Estonia had never lived – was a looming threat in the first years of Estonian independence. In this story, the harsh citizenship policies enacted by Estonia served as a powerful incentive for Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or contend with the uncertainty of living without citizenship.
Yet the citizenship policies that seem like such a strong motivator of behavior receive barely any attention in Laitin’s empirical analysis of the likelihood to assimilate. Contrary to Laitin’s model of choice, in Latvia and Estonia, where citizenship laws are the toughest (p. 253), the state has largely pre-empted choice by imposing severe costs upon Russian-speakers who refuse to assimilate to the titular language. To the extent that Laitin includes such state policies in his models of the tipping game, he considers them as supplementary factors in out-group status. The more restrictive the citizenship policies, the greater the stigma Russian-speakers will receive from the titular population for learning the titular language, and the lower the likelihood that Russian-speakers will learn the titular language (p. 256). But this assessment works in opposition to the commonsense notion (as well as Liuba Grigor’yev’s interpretation) that exclusive citizenship laws provided a powerful incentive to learn the titular language. Giving more attention to the role of power (especially state power) in influencing decisions about assimilation would help Laitin make more sense of the fact that many of his respondents insisted that they really did not have much choice at all.
In addition, Laitin sometimes stretches his rationalist explanation of assimilation decisions beyond its plausible limits. For instance, Laitin predicts that as compliance with titular language laws approaches 100%, some individuals will have incentives to remain monolinguistic Russian speakers in order to emerge as ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilize the Russian-speaking community (p. 29, p. 249). This interpretation suggests that those who refuse to learn the titular language do so because they expect the future payoff of becoming a future leader and ‘cultural hero’ after the language cascade has happened. It seems more likely that those who remain monolingual Russian-speakers due so out of habit, personal conviction, pride, stubbornness, or old age. It is possible that such holdouts would be heralded as ‘cultural heroes’ for their actions, but I doubt their decisions would be motivated by such a far-sighted desire, as Laitin seems to think.
A more general point to draw out from the limitations of a rational choice approach to cultural identities is that it would be helpful to delineate the scope conditions under which such an approach is valid. Laitin gives off the impression that he is justifying the application of choice models to the study of culture more generally, without acknowledging the specificities of his usage, such as the fact that the state has a big role in structuring incentives, the uniqueness of language versus other cultural elements, etc.
There are also some aspects of Laitin’s rational choice account which he does not fully develop. In setting up the tipping game as a collective action problem (p. 27) in which cultural entrepreneurs play an important role, Laitin seems primed for a discussion of leadership along the lines of Calvert. But Laitin never really delivers on this promise in his empirical analyses. In order to get at this dynamic, I think Laitin would need to examine a different unit of analysis. For the most part, Laitin focuses on the level of the individual, looking at survey responses and conducting interviews with select individuals to draw generalizations about entire countries. What might be interesting to study further would be to examine the connection between political and social movements, the role of leaders, and processes of assimilation.
Another drawback of the book is that Laitin’s deductive approach seems to color many of the interpretations of his data. Laitin starts with a strong theoretical statement of the relevance for tipping models to studies of identities. Later on, it becomes clear that many of the theoretical predictions he held were not borne out by the data. For instance, in introducing the tipping game, Laitin outlines ‘competitive assimilation’ as one of the primary mechanisms driving decision-making among Russian-speakers (p. 28). However, Laitin later acknowledges that this factor seemed to play little role at all in the calculations of actors (p. 123). Laitin similarly acknowledges the lack of support for his theories about the differences between nationalism in Russian and nationalism among Russian-speakers in the near abroad (p. 319). Laitin on the whole seems to offer pretty honest admissions of the limitations of his data, but one wonders what story he would have been able to tell if he let the data speak for themselves without bringing his strong theoretical ambitions to the table. What results in the book is more or less a test of Laitin’s predictions, rather than an attempt to account for the observed outcomes. Like Fransozi, Laitin draws on a wide range of methodological tools, but his work clearly lacks the theoretical agnosticism present in Fransozi’s book.
Perhaps related to his deductive approach is Laitin’s propensity to make big predictions about future trends that seem to be based more on a desire to be provocative than on a close analysis of the data. One of Laitin’s main claims is that the concept of the ‘Russian-speaking population’ (russkoiazychnoe naselenie) has emerged as the dominant mode of identification for the ethnic Russians living in Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Laitin even goes so far as to suggest that this emerging identity might serve as the basis for a nationalist project, in which the Russian-speaking populations of different countries would join together to assert their common interests. Laitin acknowledges one problem with this argument – that the prevalence of the term russkoiazychnoe naselenie has actually dropped off quite steeply in the mid-1990s in favor of lumping the minority populations together as ‘Russians’. However, an additional impediment to a nationalist project built around identification with the Russian-speaking population is the fact that the usage of the phrase is quite different across different countries. In Ukraine, the term has many uses, not one of which distinguishes Russian-speakers who are ethnic Russians from the rest of the Ukrainian population. The different identity cleavages in different societies call into question the extent to which Russian-speakers will be able to mobilize around a coherent identity.
Monday, March 26, 2007
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