The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa
The Roots of Ethnicity: Discourse and the Politics of Language Construction in South-East Africa
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种族根源：东南非的话语和语言建构的政治
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发表时间：
1988
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通讯作者：
P. Harries
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作者：
P. Harries
非洲“现代化”进程的一部分需要将细节分类为可管理的单元。在欧洲被公认为特定领域“专家”的人们来到欧洲大陆，是为了划定边界，而这些边界由于他们以科学为基础，被认为是客观的。十九世纪的工业资产阶级坚定不移地相信实证主义，这种将科学与进步联系起来的哲学，相信这些范畴是既定的，在历史上是离散的，但却是无可争议的。他们所创造的是一个通过自然科学和人文科学而变得整洁、有序且易于理解的世界概念。同质性取代异质性；团结和理性取代了不团结和混乱。这种对科学现代化理性的信念强烈地构建了后代理解非洲社会的方式。作为这场认识论革命的一部分，语言学和民族志专家将非洲人口分为不同的群体。通过科学探究的定义，这些族群成为历史学家和其他参与非洲研究的社会科学家分析的基本单位。然而，种族分类作为审视非洲过去的一种手段的价值最近受到了严格的审视。历史学家们越来越认识到，在 19 世纪末之前，许多今天已成为具体现实的种族分歧并不存在，甚至以概念形式存在。3
Part of the process of 'modernization' in Africa entailed the classification of detail into manageable units. People who were recognized in Europe as 'experts' in specific fields descended on the continent in order to draw up borders and boundaries that were, because of their grounding in science, conceived of as objective. With an unshakable belief in positivism, the philosophy linking science with improvement, the nineteenth century industrial bourgeoisie believed these categories to be givens that were as historically discrete as they were incontrovertible. What they produced was a concept of the world rendered neat, well-ordered and understandable by the natural and human sciences. Homogeneity replaced heterogeneity; unity and reason replaced disunity and confusion. This belief in the modernizing rationality of science was strongly to structure the way in which future generations made sense of African society. As part of this epistemological revolution, experts in linguistics and ethnography classified the population of Africa into different groups. Defined by scientific enquiry, these ethnic groups became the basic unit of analysis of historians and other social scientists involved in African studies. However, the value of ethnic categorization, as a means of looking at Africa's past, has recently come under critical scrutiny. Historians are becoming increasingly aware that many of the ethnic divisions that are today a concrete reality did not exist, even in a conceptual form, before the end of the nineteenth century.3 But, while a growing