Environment and Ethnicity – Lecture

• Ethnicity can mean a number of things - shared similarities with other groups. Internalisation of culture and its reproduction in social positioning. A form of imagined community drawing together individuals in a shared sense of culture rather than class. A central process in state formation. A sense of belonging to a community.
• Different to race - more focused. Ethnicity orchestrates interactions within particular contexts. Two different approaches to ethnnicity - essentialist (assumes individuals have a pre-existing inherant identity as a group). Constructivist (assumes human identities are fluid and changeable)
• Main features of ethnic group - common proper name, myth of common decent, link with a homeland, collective historical memories, one or more elements of common culture, sense of solidarity
• Colonialisation - ethnic categories essential to colonialisation.  Used anthropology and racism to justify exploitation. Ethnography constructed heirachies of power. Determined those that were pliable vs those that were resistant. Colonial constructions did not disappear but continued. Boundaries of postcolonial states included ethnic groups – led to tesions/conflict. Different groups have different relationships with the environment – used as a way to rank groups.’closeness to nature’ used as one justification to ‘modernise a group’. Development is key  process in postcolonial nation building.
• Enthnicity and the environment – 2 main features – coservationalist (close to nature) , and production relations – (ie efficient vs inefficient). Relationships b/w ethnicity and environment – access rights, control, legitimacy, justice, protection, voice, intervention (state, IO, TNC), expectation (destroyer or protector)
• Development and state/ethnic minority relations – Dev seen as form of control/coercion. Dev seen as a way of bringing ethnic  minorities deeper into state. Dev is a way that ethnic identities are constructed by the state. Dev provides a set of opportunities and goods that ethnic minorities pursue.
• Conclusion – env vital to the way that ethnicity imagined, politised and institutionalised. Ethnicity is critical to the way that the environment is imagined, politised and institutionalised. Colonial legacies have had big impact. Ethnicity shapes differentiated relationships and levels of legitimacy with the environment. Ethnicity key to environmental activism and contention.