Book review: Grounds for Difference

Grounds for Difference is an engaging and wide-ranging book, intended as a ‘sequel of sorts’ (p. 1) to Ethnicity Without Groups (2006). Grounds for Difference is less narrowly focused thematically and less polemic than that earlier book but similarly organized around questions of the political and cultural expression of social distinctions regarding race, ethnicity, language, and nation. Brubaker seeks to respond to a set of changing conditions in intellectual life: the return of attention to structural inequalities, to biology and biological basis of social distinctions, and to the role of religion in shaping other conceptions of social difference.

The book initially sets up as a relatively integrated work of general theory. It is better read, I think, as a set of theoretically informed meditations on a wide range of empirical problems and literatures, thematically connected but standing on their own. The early chapters take up the changing conditions of intellectual debate directly. The first is the most ambitious, seeking to rethink how inequalities (or ‘vertical’ forms of differentiation) are implicated in ‘horizontal’ distinctions of social difference in liberal democracies and how such connections may be institutionalized in varying ways. Brubaker argues that gender inequalities tend to be reproduced because of deep cultural assumptions about self and others. This contrasts sharply with other forms of difference such as citizenship (similarly categorical but institutionally buttressed by a nation-state system). Ethnic, racial, and religious differences are institutionally supported in still different ways with inequalities no longer enshrined in law, but nevertheless maintained through social segregation, institutions (especially incarceration in the case of race), and social networks.

Chapter 2 considers what recent shifts in biological understandings of race have meant for social science. Genomic research has rekindled interest in human variation, but not exactly as it existed in earlier eras. Brubaker traces the shift from categorical to population-based statistical understandings of race in biology, the dangers inherent in the slippage between scientific and popular understandings of race, and in misunderstandings between those interested in biological (and particularly medical) and social implications of racial difference. Chapter 3 considers language and religion as resurgent forms of social difference, ones needing more engaged thinking by sociologists. He argues that need to see language and religion as forms of ethnic identification, which should be studied together as core to understanding of nationalism and nationalist politics. Brubaker argues that these are both bases for social and cultural identification which are also central to political identities. While linguistic and religious communities are often understood to be primordial, they are increasingly chosen ones. Yet they are not the same: issues of religious difference are more enduring and more difficult to confront than those imposed by linguistic community.

The remaining chapters are more narrowly organized as commentaries on literatures and theories of race, religion, and nationalism which connect with the author’s earlier work. To my mind, the tighter focus of these chapters provides a more satisfying platform for Brubaker’s inclination to make careful conceptual distinctions the payoff rather than the starting point of analysis. Chapter 4, for instance, provides a very helpful and finely detailed walk through the various ways that the literature on nationalism has connected religion and nation. Brubaker provides the basis for a more general argument (religion and nation are both core sources of identity, social organization, and engaged projects in the world, he argues). Yet his tour through the sometimes confusing literature is itself an important intervention, as he points out that religion has been variously treated as an analogue to or substitute for nation (as with ‘civil religion’), as an explanatory factor or constituent part of nationalism, and as one form of nationalism.

Similarly, the last two substantive chapters seek to impose conceptual clarity on discussions of migration and diaspora. Brubaker cautions against trying to do too much with the concept of ‘diaspora’, arguing that social scientists should treat it first as a category of practice and only then as a category of analysis as it exists more clearly as a set of claims about the world and a way of forming allegiances than as a thing in itself. In this way, he extends his caution about ‘groupism’ in prior work:

rather than speak of ‘a diaspora’ or a ‘the diaspora’ as an entity, a bounded group, or an ethnodemographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful – and it would certainly be more precise – to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms and practices. (p. 130)

The final chapter brings a similar critical intervention to the concept of ‘nation-state’. Considered as a label for an objective reality, the concept of an autonomous and naturally bounded nation-state seems increasingly artificial in a highly mobile world, Brubaker argues that the concept is nonetheless important as an ideal (a ‘model for political, social, and cultural organization’ (p. 133), which still shapes modern realities. To make sense of this, Brubaker argues for drawing distinctions between the formal/institutional and informal/cultural aspects of belonging, and between internal and external dimensions of belonging which are important, for example, in making sense of the position of migrant populations in relation to states and networks in their home and host countries.