Gerald M. Sider

Culture and class in anthropology and history : a Newfoundland illustration

In this book Gerald Sider rebuilds theories of class and class struggle, at the same time rethinking and making significant the concept of culture. Rooted in the history of the last two centuries of daily life in the maritime villages of Newfoundland and Labrador, the book develops an historical anthropology that interweaves ordinary moments, spectacular customs, and social confrontations, as well as exploring the role of folk culture in daily life, state politics, and labour domination. It also presents an original analysis of merchant capital, the often unexamined context of a great many anthropological studies, and a key factor in the integration of the hinterlands with regional and global economic systems.

When Parrots Learn to Talk, and Why They Can't: Domination, Deception, and Self-Deception in Indian-White Relations

If the expansion and consolidation of state power simply undermined, homogenized, and ultimately destroyed the distinctive societies and ethnic groups in its grasp, as various acculturation or melting-pot theories would have it, the world would long ago have run out of its supply of diverse ways of life, a supply presumably created in the dawn of human time. To the contrary, state power must not only destroy but also generate cultural differentiation—and do so not only between different nation states, and between states and their political and economic colonies, but in the center of its grasp as well. The historical career of ethnic peoples can thus best be understood in the context of forces that both give a people birth and simultaneously seek to take their lives.

Identity as history ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis and Ethnocide in the Southeastern United States

(1994). Identity as history ethnohistory, Ethnogenesis and Ethnocide in the Southeastern United States. Identities: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 109-122.

Lumbee Indian cultural nationalism and ethnogenesis

ConclusionsIn both cultural and political nationalism we find people attempting to make their own history from within, but at the same time seeking to move beyond the conditions imposed upon them. Because oppression is not just political and economic, but cultural as well, cultural nationalism is a liberating force. Through cultural nationalism, the Lumbee seek to generate their own culture, in contradistinction to the culture that flows from their oppressed position.But the liberating potential of cultural nationalism is only partial in the presence of political and economic exploitation. Cultural nationalism provides an abstract cultural unification of the Lumbee, and it calls for political and economic equality between Lumbee and Whites. Implicit in Lumbee cultural unification is internal socio-economic equality, but as their cultural nationalism seeks to move from self-definition to self-determination, it says nothing explicit about this.The absence of a specific program for internal social and economic transformations, in the direction of establishing equality, makes it possible for cultural nationalism to be based on an alliance between the emerging Lumbee elite and the Lumbee working class. The rise of the Tuscarora movement points to the likelihood that this alliance will be short-lived.A contradiction has appeared: at the same time that cultural nationalism, by generating not just pride but collective pride, functions to hold the Lumbee together culturally, it also functions to widen class divisions. It is too early to predict how this contradiction will be resolved, but its centrality indicates that the future political development of the Lumbee will lie in its resolution. Either cultural nationalism will move in the direction of a program of social equality, which would yield cultural unification and enhance the sense of political and economic reality, or it seems likely that cultural nationalism will do what white oppression could not — it will split the Lumbee apart and reinforce the penetration of the Lumbee community by national and multinational corporations.An alliance between cultural and political nationalism, based on the collectivization of Lumbee resources and the expansion of the cultural content of cultural nationalism to include recognition of the dynamics of class formation, seems to be necessary to permit the Lumbee to enjoy the right to make their own history. Such an alliance would entail a greater transformation of the cultural than the political nationalist position. This could occur with the ethnic elite backing cultural nationalism, since the elite witness the continual looting of their people under the aegis of the large corporations that they help bring in, and/or it could occur as their political power is eroded by the continual attacks of the political nationalists. As the only significant accumulators of capital among the Lumbee, however small, their role in an alliance would then lie in their participation in the initial founding of a socialist sub-economy. It could well be argued that this is asking the ethnic elite to commit suicide as a class. Yet the choice seems to be between that outcome, however arrived at, and abandoning communal identity.The split between cultural and political nationalism is basically a class antagonism. If the cultural nationalists win this struggle, the only answer — paradoxically — to the pressing material needs and problems of the poorer Lumbee may well turn out to be an abandonment of their cultural identity as Lumbee in a straightforward lower class alliance within the larger nation-state. Should the political nationalists become the dominant power among the Lumbee then perhaps sufficient economic and political self-determination might be established to provide the basis for a nontrivialized Lumbee Indian culture. The poignancy of this inversion of the intent and the effect of cultural nationalism can only be realized by appreciating the deep and genuine cultural concern — whether also opportunistic or not — of most Lumbee cultural nationalists.There are, in the usual view, two options open to a people such as the Lumbee. The first is stagnation, clinging to their roots and changing as little as possible: preservation with continued impoverishment as the likely price. The second is “progress” or “economic development,” with the attendant major increase in assimilationist pressures brought about by the increased penetration of the dominant state: modest material betterment at the price of major cultural decline.{su11} Cultural nationalism resists the first option as an obvious affront to collective pride. It also, however, eventually resists the second option, being opposed not just to the debasement of culture but also to its destruction. Whatever its present strength, it thus has no future.The absence of ethnogenesis from this usual array of options reflects not just a limited anthropological or ethnic nationalist vision, but the real limitations of capitalism. Fundamental to capitalist economic processes are regional inequalities.{su12} As has been well demonstrated, these regional inequalities generate nationalism,{su13} they do not, however, create nationalities. The precondition for the ethnogenetic formation of viable nations from submerged and dominated minority peoples — for a world that culture not only symbolizes, but creates — is the kind of regional equality and communal material foundation conceivable under socialism.

The Contradictions of Transnational Migration: A Discussion

I would like to begm my comments with a simple but crucial point, most forcefully called to our attention by John Berger and Jean Mohr’s marvelously poetic and analytically insightful book-A Seventh Man. This book looked at “guest workers” in northern Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s. One out of seven persons in the manual labor force in the industrial countries of northern Europe at that time was not a citizen of the country in which helshe worked, but a more or less temporary migrant from north Africa, the eastern Mediterranean or southern Europe. What Berger emphasized’ is that the remittances that migrant workers sent or brought back, however substantial in appearance and however important to the maintenance of the people left behind, did not come anywhere close to the actual costs, for the home country or region, of producing and reproducing these workers. I quote Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack: