Critical Review - Kubik (1994)

Kubik raises many interesting questions in his essay Ethnicity, Cultural Identity, and the Psychology of Culture Contact. Ethnicity, he writes, "is not only a descriptive, but, in a sense, an ideologically prescriptive concept." (p.19) The idea that ethnicity is an ideology, not biological or cultural fact, is controversial, especially in a day and age in which we pride ourselves on understanding "diversity" and people's differences, of both cultural and personal nature. Yet ethnicity movements, Kubik argues, "are always a form of collective response in opposition to some other community perceived as oppressive, and as an ethnic threat." (p.32)

In particular, Kubik raises questions in my mind about the researcher's role in all of this--by calling cultures or communities a "diaspora", are we imposing on them the same sort of false, circumstance-produced "ethnicity" that Kubik so harshly critiques? Can the researcher--especially the ethnologist--somehow avoid this problem, which seems to arise from the practice of defining a culture in general (and thus implying that the culture is a certain way, when it never just is, it is always becoming)? Also, do ethnologists have a right to define other cultures when in doing so, they are imposing their own vocabularies, their own cultural baggage, onto that culture? Shouldn't cultures be defined on their own terms, in their own words and concepts (otherwise, don't we just fall into the same trap of us versus them, or them versus everyone else)? Even more confusing, how do we define the boundaries of a culture, especially if the world isn't just a bunch of binaries, or cultures sitting (ever so kindly) in perfect opposition to one another so that ethnologists may draw neat lines around where they start and end. As Kubik writes, "in reality the cultural environment of any area of the world is complex and characterized by smooth shades and transitions" (p.25).

The imagery of a smooth transition in this sense was very powerful to me--it is so easy to forget that the world isn't the simplified set of binaries we often make it out to be, but a complex palette of colors and subtle differences, in everything from culture to race to gender. It also made me realize the shallowness of recent trends promoting "diversity!" as if it were as simple as placing students of starkly different skin colors on the cover of a textbook. People's concept of "diversity" nowadays, at least in the manners and situations I have heard it, are as superficial as Kubik argues people's notion of ethnicity is--the majority of the time, we pat ourselves on the back for achieving "diversity" when really we've only suppressed it (by lumping individuals into one of three or four groups that are essential ingredients to the diversity recipe).

I was also confused and yet somewhat intrigued by Kubik's idea that "for you to be nothing cements your freedom" (p.33). Is this even possible? For what is identity, if not what a person is and is not, according to what it is and is not possible to be? Is it possible for identity to exist, then, without the existence of certain generalizations and categorizations from which identities are constructed? Is he suggesting that it would be best for identity not to exist at all (for in the end, is it not identity that oppresses or is oppressed)? After all, identity is just a bunch of comparisons (or at least, that was my impression of it) and can comparisons ever be truly objective (for even something as seemingly objective as hair color can have subjective associations, as well as the fact that the choice of what to compare in the first place is a subjective one)? I would argue then that "ethnic identity" is no different than identity in general, in that both consist of creating definitions of oneself according to pre-existing, external concepts and vocabulary. What does Kubik mean when he writes that "identities are not discussed in societies in which a living identity is in operation" and is it true then that "identity begins to be discussed from the moment it has become somebody's problem"? (p.27) If not, what purposes, besides to oppress and to fight oppression, does the process of identification, either as an individual or as part of a cultural group, serve?