After ‘ethnicity’: Migration, identity and political economy

In an earlier article1 I have argued that British ‘African Asians’ can not legitimately be described as an ‘ethnic’ community. This argument was made by means of a critique of sections from the 4th PSI Survey. I show that the attitudinal responses of British ‘African Asians’, as evidenced in the Survey, do not reveal any special emphasis upon the components of ethnicity (religion, skin colour, ‘extra‐British’ origins, ‘racial’ grouping) specified by the Survey's authors and that parental roles in marital decision‐making, thought by the Survey's authors to be important in maintaining ‘ethnic’ boundaries, and their attitudes towards ‘mixed marriages’, are now little different from the majority of Britishers. My chief objection to the ‘ethnicity’ paradigm, incorporating the notion of ‘ethnic identities’, is that, as with all analytical concepts, it inhibits those whom it embraces from inclusion within alternative conceptions: marking individuals and communities as ‘ethnically’ special robs them of parity with their ‘non‐ethnic’ neighbours. In this article, in opposition to the current vogue for ‘ethnic’ labelling and in sympathy with Robert Miles's well‐known position, I contend that British Gujarati Hindus (who form a majority of British ‘African Asians') should be considered in the same analytical light as any other group of British citizens. The focus of the article is on those members of the Gujarati Hindu Patidar caste (commonly having the surname Patel), who settled first in East Africa and then, often not through their own choice, in Britain. I argue that their caste identity, the dynamics of their migrations and changes to their socioreligious culture are all fully explicable by non‐'ethnic’ political sociology.