In an interview on Essentialism

Your next choice is The Edge of Islam by Janet McIntosh.

This is definitely the most challenging book on my list. It’s not an easy read. Janet McIntosh is a cultural-linguistic anthropologist and she did her fieldwork in a little town in Kenya where there are two ethnic groups that she looked at, the Swahili and the Giriama. What’s really cool about it is that she shows how essentialism works in a culture that’s really different from a middle-class, developed world context. She also shows how colonial practices had effects on how people think about ethnicity. On the one hand, if you look at how people explicitly talk about these two ethnic groups, people say that it’s easy to convert to the religion of the Swahili – Islam – if you want to. All you have to do is affiliate with that group. People can do it and they’ve been doing it since the 19th century. It’s very permeable – it’s like moving from Ohio to Michigan, no big deal. But when you look, on the ground, at how people actually talk about it, most people say it just isn’t possible for a member of the Giriama group to convert to Islam. They’ll say that while they may try, they can’t really become Swahili. They’re incapable of doing that – they’re intrinsically two different groups and you can’t switch from one to the other. It has all sorts of implications for these people’s lives. So it’s an example of how essentialism actually has on-the-ground consequences in this culture. I really liked the book for that reason.

You said it was easy to convert from one to the other in principle. Why?

Because Islam is supposed to be a universal religion that anyone can claim for themselves. You’re supposed to be able to convert – there are no actual barriers. But if you ask either the Swahili or the Giriama, a lot of them say, no, it can’t be done. It’s interesting when you think about it in terms of Stephen Jay Gould, because they talk about these almost biological differences. They talk about blood, or how you’re born – that your ethnic identity is fixed at birth and it’s in your blood and you just can’t change that.

Certainly, in hearing about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, I always understood the Tutsi were taller and lighter skinned and the Hutus short and darker skinned, so that it was easy to tell who was who. But later I read Philip Gourevitch’s book and found out that in many cases, Hutu and Tutsi are indistinguishable.

Yes, it’s a way that they explain it after the fact. It’s not really the basis for distinguishing people. McIntosh talks about a similar thing. One person said, “It’s black versus Arab.” The blacks are the Giriama and the Arabs are the Swahili. But actually if you look at the people who are there, a lot of the Swahili are just as black as the so-called black Giriama. It’s not really the basis, it’s just how people talk about it.