ABSTRACT
The very terms ‘ethnic leadership’ and ‘ethnic politics’ imply that what passes for politics among minority groups is qualitatively different from the politics of ‘indigenous’ groups. Analysis has often focused on the kin ties, business connections, and other such links in explaining political allegiances among immigrants and their descendants, at the cost of looking at the political issues themselves. In this chapter I argue that certain political issues are at the basis of the development of one apparently ‘ethnic’ organisation-the Indian Workers Association. Existing anthropological writing on the IWA (Desai 1963; John 1969) takes its inspiration from Bailey (e.g. 1969) with his methodological individualism, Mayer (1966) with his ‘action sets’, or Earth (1966) with his maximisation model. This chapter argues against the non-historical utilitarian approach exemplified in this early work on leadership and factions. This is not to imply that individual men, their networks, and their endeavours were of no significance in associational politics: in the next section I examine the qualities of these individuals which enabled them to achieve prominence within the organisation. The main part of the chapter, however, concentrates on the ideological issues with which the IWA has been concerned. These, rather than individual rivalries, I argue, have been the cause of three major splits within the organisation.
