Ethnicity, Inc.

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Since the end of the Cold War, the global resurgence of identity politics has expressed itself in a great deal of violence. But it has also had another side: a tendency for ethnic groups to behave ever more like corporations and to market their cultures, both processes being deeply inscribed in the law. The objective of this project is to investigate the conditions under which ethnic groupings seek empowerment by incorporating themselves, by deploying their sovereign legal status for economic ends, and by copyrighting their cultural practices, knowledge, designs, performances as intellectual property.In order to achieve this objective, the project undertakes a broad, comparative documentary study of manifestations of the phenomenon, glossed as "Ethnicity, Inc.", in the USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and conducts two in-depth, exemplary case studies in South Africa, where the phenomenon is growing very rapidly. The methods used combine detailed archival analysis of selected cases from across the world (using largely unpublished materials) with ethnographic fieldwork (based on participant-observation and extensive interviewing). The primary questions this project seeks to answer: Under what conditions do ethnic groups legally incorporate themselves and become businesses? By what means and mechanisms, legal and other, do they go about doing so? Is there any discernable relationship between resort to ethnic business and the presence or absence of ethnic violence? What is the effect of the commodification of cultural products and practices on the lives of those who ?own? them, on the exercise of authority over them, and, more generally, on ethnic group membership? In short, who benefits, who loses? The projected importance of the study lies in its effort to contribute to the establishment of an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the critical study of new developments in the political economy of culture and identity.