The Symbolic Re-Construction of Opposition

Horowitz  says that ethnic conflict has roots in ethnic comparative evaluation. While he  privileges the distinction between ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ groups, what he describes involves the totalising and oppositional assumptions and ascriptions which have been identified by other scholars as typical of protracted conflicts .  This paper shows how such totalising and oppositional division is interactively asserted, and how it is resisted. It does so without taking ethnicity as a category of analysis, but rather by exploring comparatively how respondents (categorised by class, gender, state, religion and nationality) recount such episodes in two presently peaceful societies with very similar symbolic distinctions - post-conflict Northern Ireland and the long-peaceful Irish state.  While working from the concepts of 'stigmatisation' recently reformulated by Lamont and her colleagues, it adds to her findings by showing how a distinctive type of stigmatisation is interactively produced, and how everyday responses may perpetuate or undermine its preconditions.  This allows a different, unwelcome, type of ‘resurrection’ of conflict, seen for example in the recent loyalist flags protest.  It also adds to our knowledge of the micro mechanisms and macro-conditions by which totalising divisions (often called ‘ethnic’) are made out of more permeable distinctions.