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SUMMARY:The Ordeal of Modernity:  The Cultural Politics of Ethnicity - Pro
 fessor Bruce Berman\, Smuts Visiting Research Fellow and Queen’s Univers
 ity\, Canada 
DTSTART:20130510T160000Z
DTEND:20130510T170000Z
UID:TALK45157@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Judith Weik
DESCRIPTION:Contemporary research on the development of politicized ethnic
 ity in Africa reveals it to be a modern construction in time and in relian
 ce on modern intellectual and political resources for the interpretation a
 nd reimagining of ‘ancient’ cultures and communities in modern politic
 al contexts. This derived from African incorporation into the colonial sta
 te and market that generated growing material cleavages within and between
  ethnic communities and a politics of ‘moral ethnicity’ and ‘politic
 al tribalism’ over access to the political and economic resources of mod
 ernity. Tracing the European institutional and cultural links of coloniali
 sm we find the origins of political ethnicity in the conservative reaction
  to the dramatic cultural break of secular modernity and the development o
 f the state and capitalist market that undermined the traditional moral ec
 onomy of pre-modern agrarian societies. After the revolutionary upheavals 
 of the mid-19th century\, European nationalism was increasingly ethnicized
  or\, more accurately\, racialized through inventions of tradition combini
 ng primordial volkskultur with ‘racial science’ that glorified the eth
 no-nation\, challenged revolutionary universalism and stigmatized the ethn
 ic ‘other’ as a threat to the imagined national community. These cultu
 ral and institutional forces produced in Europe and Africa strikingly simi
 lar and yet often idiosyncratic constructions of class and ethnicity based
  on local crises of moral economy and hegemony. In the contemporary epoch 
 of globalization and crisis these social forces generate a contentious glo
 bal ethnic politics of indigeneity\, migration\, and autochthony that chal
 lenges nation-states and shapes the bitterest conflicts of our time.\n\nBr
 uce Berman is the Smuts Visiting Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus of
  Political Studies and History at Queen’s University\, Canada. From 2006
  to 2012 he was Director and Principal Investigator of the Ethnicity and D
 emocratic Governance Program at Queen’s (www.queensu.ca/edg)\, funded by
  the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada that invest
 igated the relationship between ethnicity\, socio-cultural diversity and d
 emocratic development in many nations from all continents.\n
LOCATION:Lee Hall\, Wolfson College
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