ABSTRACT
Challenged by Edward Said’s (1979) polemic against Orientalist essentialism, in the 1980s a significant sector of the academic community in the United States wisely set itself to the task of expunging interpretations of culture and identity founded on assumed immutable and unique essences. Without our comfortable reliance on national characters and fixed cultural traits, we—anthropologists in particular (see Clifford 1988:273)—were left with the serious problem of how to distinguish between (and within) cultures when neither unity nor continuity could be assumed. A post-Orientalist answer to this difficult quandary has come to be framed by three approaches: a focus on identities (1) as relational, rather than essential; (2) as continually being reconstructed piecemeal as a result of ongoing a historical processes, rather than being articulated as a unified totality; and (3) as subject to constant negotiation and reinvention, thus remaining contingent and unstable rather than ever becoming autonomous and fixed (see Prakash 1990:399). It is this theoretical issue, along with the related problems surrounding the invention of difference, and the very practical need to rethink pluralism in a multiethnic community like the United States that motivate this brief contribution to the study of ethnicity in the contemporary New World.
