Word: pattersons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With this soon-to-be-published study, Harvard Sociology professor Orlando Patterson jumps into the ethnicity fray with both feet forward. To the unmasking of the neo-conservatism of the new ethnicity spokesmen he adds a trenchant and remarkably comprehensive critique of the psychological and sociological sources of the appeal to ethnicity, and more important, shows how this appeal has traditionally translated into reactionary and implicitly fascistic social and political action...
...ballsy book, one that must have taken a great deal of courage to write. What with the comforting sentimental aura that surrounds the ethnicity vogue, Patterson admits that in writing the book, "the very attempt at criticism became a form of treachery." And since so many social scientists have succumbed to the cries for allegiance to their own ethnicities, Patterson acknowledges that his publishers (Stein and Day) fear that "it will be difficult to find anyone who is sufficiently detached to review the book fairly...
...Patterson shrugs off the possibility of a negative critical recpetion, since he knows he is breaking new ground. He opens the book by dismissing previous studies of ethnicity as too ahistorical and descriptive. And in his fourth chapter on the "Nature and Classification of Ethnic Groups," he insightfully points out work that merely dwells on "ethnic traits" is not only analytically useless, but by definition inherently conservative. By ending the issue of how the cultural symbols associated with different ethnic groups relate to their socioeconomic position and interest, such studies put up a smokescreen that prevents their readers from realizing...
...attraction of ethnicity, Patterson contends, is nothing new; it is, rather, a primordial problem. Its source lies, he argues in his introduction, in man's basic inward struggle between the "centrifugal pull of the group" and what Patterson proclaims "the noble drive towards individualism." Patterson puts his finger on a fundamental conflict between men's need to revel in their distinctiveness from other cultures--by banding together around unique cultural symbols--and their individualistic desire to strike out and forge independent identities. Patterson thus makes the daring intellectual move of taking on all the various and sundry historical forms...
...understandable, Patterson acknowledges, that the development of an atomized, impersonal, alienating modern industrial society should stimulate the yearning for these historical forms of "community." Yet Patterson points out that in their nostalgia for these various types of group life, people today mistakenly ignore how unjust and internally coercive these ethnocentric societies have been. This misguided romanticism is particularly characteristic of the modern world's nationalistic zeal, Patterson contends--and he comes down particularly hard on the use of racial mysticism in Third World nationalist movements...