ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the topic of children’s identifications with significant collective others – those they see as different from themselves, and those they see as the same. All of this involves the need to understand and interpret the quite complex processes of self-other categorisation that children employ. These can be seen as part of the building blocks out of which children construct their sense of nation, collective belonging and ethnic identification. Richard Jenkins (1997) argues that the boundary between ‘ethnicism’ and ‘nationalism’ is indeterminate. He defines an ethnic group broadly as based on ‘the belief shared by its members that, however distantly, they are of common descent’ (Jenkins 1997: 9-10, italics in original), and this definition can encompass national identity. We agree that the assertion of national identity is very close to the assertion of ethnicity in its demarcation of boundaries between peoples and that the assertion of both national and ethnic identity involves the symbolic construction of community (Cohen 1985). The whole of this book is, therefore, centrally concerned with ethnicity as thus broadly defined. Nevertheless, there are differences between national and ethnic identity – such as the idea that nations are bounded geographical spaces, whilst ethnicities have a more ambiguous relationship to space and place. McCrone (2002) has noted that in Britain there is a tendency for ‘national’ identities to be connected with constitutional issues and territorial politics, whereas it is often assumed that ‘ethnic’ identities refer to ‘race’ and these are typically discussed in the context of multiculturalism. Our approach differs markedly from this. We start from the assumption that children are variously enmeshed in a range of collective identifications operating at different levels, including ones that that blur the boundary between ethnicity and nationality by turning rather on questions of ‘Where do I belong?’ and ‘Who do I relate to?’. However, we use the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ separately in this chapter’s title since some of the research data we refer to here, such as the assertion of an Islamic identity, are in fact concerned with ethnicities that are not tied to the nation.
