| PAUL STIRLING TOWARDS HUMANE PLURALISM? SOME PROBLEMS IN RESEARCH AND VARIABLE SHUFFLING I - A CRITICAL GLANCE AT OURSELVES "New Atlantis" implies a magnificent optimism; —the use of the social sciences,—in interdisciplinary co-operation,—to build on the basis of modern technology and urban organisation, if not a new utopia which might embrace all human cultures, at least some viable solutions of our social difficulties, on a world wide, rather than simply on a rich nations, basis. Such a hope implies the achievement of genuine social sciences, valid and able to work together. The theme of the recent immigration into the industrial towns and cities of millions of people with backgrounds sharply distinct, culturally and legally, from the natives of North-West Europe, furnishes an excellent test case. The papers here gathered together, and the conference at which they were first read, seem to me to illustrate very clearly the scale of some of the difficulties which we face both in achieving scientific conclusions which measure up at all to the complexity of what we are studying, and a fortiori in influencing the rulers of the nations towards policies for a better society. In stressing problems and difficulties, I do not in any way disparage the excellent papers in this volume; still less do I imply that we should not attempt to build a valid and useful body of social science findings. But we cannot do this if we do not face the difficulties. The very wide range of facts, problems and ideas explicit and implicit in these papers deal with three main themes, which normally appear together, but do not necessarily imply each other,—migration, minorities and race. All the migrants in this case end up as minorities in highly industrialised and sophisticated towns and cities, so we may define migration as the movement of population from relatively poor and undeveloped areas of labour surplus to wealthier, more "advanced" areas of labour shortage. Such migration usually, but not always, results in the formation of what we call ethnic minorities. Granting that there are severe problems about defining "ethnic" and "minority" in the European societies here discussed, the immigrant workers in all cases form very small proportions of the total society, except for the Italians in Switzerland. This problem can be restated as that of pluralism,—of arranging for people, who define themselves and each other as belonging to different groups with different values and loyalties on certain issues, to live side by side in relative peace and co-operation: it is worth repeating the statement by Mr. Roy Jenkins, the British Home Secretary, quoted by Lambert on p. 62. He saw integration as “not a flattening process but as equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”. Most political units, now |
| and in the past have had and still have problems of this kind, yet the assumption is widespread, even amongst scholars, that, ideally, every sovereign political unit should be linguistically and culturally homogeneous, and that every self-defining minority has the right, to some degree, to political "self determination". The third theme of the papers is race. Since race is properly a biological and not a social term, its precise meaning in this kind of context seems to vary with the assumption of the user. Two important aspects have been discussed. First, the meaning attributed in any given social situation to genetically determined visible differences in appearance, mainly skin colour, (which term I use as a convenient shorthand to include hair form and obvious facial features). Raveau has argued that it is likely that humans do react at a sub- rational level to people whose appearance is very different from their own, especially where extremes are involved. Even if true, it is obvious that socially given meanings and values still play the major role in determining relationships in such cases, and it is perfectly possible to imagine a society in which any instinctive responses were socially controlled and people attached no more significance to skin colour than native Englishmen currently attach to the colour of their hair. The extreme case here is the U.S.A., where humans sharing completely similar political institutions and almost completely a single set of culturally given meanings are nevertheless socially distinct, so that negroes form an ethnic minority solely on grounds of appearance. Although many white Europeans share, perhaps in some cases unconsciously, the idea that a dark skin means at least foreigner, and often also inferior, we do not yet have a sizeable distinct minority of native born, culturally indistinguishable coloured people. But in a generation we may well have. Since skin colour is indelible, complete integration of such minorities depends solely on effecting changes in the meaning of colour for the whole population. Secondly, race is concerned with the study of people's beliefs and assumptions about intrinsic and hereditable differences between populations in such socially relevant characteristics as intelligence, energy, cleanliness, honesty. Some northern Italians believe southerners to be of inferior stock; some British fear a decline in genetic quality through miscegenation with immigrants; some Germans still assume that foreign workers, even with white skins, are inferior specimens. Ideologies of the second kind are linked to meanings given to any signs of foreignness. Ethnic conflict of this kind does not depend on racial concepts. Religious, cultural or political labels may do equally well. Migration, pluralism and racism do occur together, and migration normally precedes the other two, though not necessarily or always. But they are |
| distinct problems. The papers in this volume attempt, with differing emphasis, to perform four tasks. First, they supply information, that is, they describe aspects of the present situation and sometimes recent relevant history, —for example, both France and Germany, unlike Britain, had a million foreign workers even before the first world war, yet the new invasions all began after 1950. Bohning's and Haddon's paper make excellent use of such information as is available. It is customary for ambitious social scientists to despise "mere" description. What is clear from this set of papers is the absence of good factual summaries. One major difficulty is the chaotic state of most statistics on this subject. Bohning has elsewhere documented in detail the wide variations in the way in which statistics are gathered and published from country to country, and simply finding out for comparative purposes numbers of migrants, let alone details of their ages, skills, earnings, lengths of stay, membership of trade unions, remittances home and so forth, is extremely laborious, and is often impossible. When we turn to such matters as the assumptions and values, said to be typical of populations or particular immigrant groups, we may legitimately ask both what precisely the author means by such statements, and what the evidence for them is. Detailed ethnography or field studies are conspicuously absent in this collection of papers. In contrast to the study of African urbanisation, where we have a number of field work studies both by the traditional field methods of social anthropologists and by surveys, there seems to be remarkably little data. Moreover, people's results are often not comparable, being concerned with different problems, conducted without reference to each other, with different techniques, and addressed to different academic audiences. The second task is more ambitious—analysis and explanation. Most social scientists would claim (wrongly in my view) that however necessary and difficult, description is relatively elementary. As scientists we should be more concerned with analyzing and explaining. The issues that such a claim raises are extremely complex, but it is frequently held to justify not only pomposity but attempts to offer theories, models and "hypotheses". The papers by Lambert and Garbett and Kapferer are good examples. Lambert, by stating that the city is the city managers, who manage among other things, housing, education and the police, relates the immigrants' "underclass" standing to the largely unintended consequences of the way these established institutions operate, automatically typifying the immigrants as deviants and excluding them from the benefits which these services confer on the natives. |
| The paper by Garbett and Kapferer has a unique place in this collection. If very little has been published about face to face relations among the minorities of labour migrants in Europe, quite a lot has been published by anthropologists among migrants in African towns. The authors were therefore invited to show what might be relevant to Europe from this field, in which they have both worked. The purpose was explicitly theoretical, and thus, I think, permits me to digress for a moment from my list of tasks. Their paper, with something of a self-confident flourish, offers nine propositions to which no one, sociologist or otherwise, could really object, and certain interesting and important recommendations for a possible approach to research. Their first point is that "push-pull" models are not adequate, not, at least, if stated in terms of relative economic rewards. Since it hardly deserves the word "model", and no one offers "push-pull" as a universal explanation, this need not detain us. Secondly, they point out that if any theory is interpreted as implying that one particular factor or circumstance fits all cases of migration to towns, then it can be shown to be false, partly because more than one factor operates in any one case, and partly because different factors operate in different cases. Agricultural systems vary in the manpower demands they make in relation to the indigenous labour supply, for example, and in the standard of living they make possible. Thirdly, individual motives for migration vary according to a whole set of complex personal circumstances and personality factors. Surprisingly, they say, “By the causes of migration we refer to the various factors which result in an individual making the decision to leave his rural home for wage employment in the town” (my italics). This emphasis is odd for sociologists, even if philosophically arguable. Fourthly, when people make decisions, they always do so in the light of what they believe at that moment to be the case, and not according to the "actual" circumstances. Fifthly, people's actions are modified by their position in a social structure, and by other people's actions towards them. Sixthly, people are dependent on their kin and friends for security against possible misfortunes, and, of course, for the elementary and essential satisfaction of social intercourse, recognition and affection. What is remarkable, and an object lesson to us all, is that they need to state these simple truths in order to refute the writings of respectable academic authors. They then turn to a summary of Philip Mayer's study of Xhosa in East London. On the basis of this, they add three more propositions, equally |