Just over thirty years ago, Eller and Coughlan tried to retire the concept of primordialism permanently by exposing its analytical and explanatory poverty [1]. Two years later, Brubaker declared primordialism “a long-dead horse that writers on ethnicity and nationalism continue to flog” [2]. However, despite their efforts and his complaint, scholars continue to talk about it in relation to ethnicity and nationalism, with Bayar as recently as 2009 urging us to reconsider primordialism for its supposed substantial intellectual value [3]. Even before Brubaker pronounced it dead and Eller and Coughlan attempted to kill it, McKay in 1982 believed that it was possible and worthwhile to reconcile it with its rival theory, which he dubbed mobilizationist and others have called constructivist, instrumentalist, and/or circumstantialist [4]. Oddly, these exertions to salvage primordialism persist despite the fact, as Coakley and others have commented, that there are few if any actual primordialists or “authentic versions of primordialism” among scholars today [5]. Most, if not all, so-called primordialists concede that ethnic/national identities are also constructed in specific circumstances and for particular sociopolitical purposes.

Why does primordialism linger in the academy, after it has been demoted if not debunked, except out of historical curiosity? Why do some thinkers want to reconcile it, and what form would such reconciliation take? This essay examines the afterlife of primordialism, arguing that conflict between or compatibility of primordialism and opposing theories is misplaced, precisely because primordialism is not a theory at all but rather a rhetoric that ethnic and nationalist movements deploy. As rhetoric or polemic, primordialism—almost never avowing that term—does not aspire to explain anything but to achieve something. In short, as Coakley understands, it is not a “category of analysis” but instead “a category of practice”—one that scholars should definitely attend to but not one that they should adopt as a tool themselves.

The present article is a conceptual-critical essay, seeking to put the idea of primordialism in its proper historical and analytical place. It begins with a summary of the origin of the term and idea, which was an important although not revolutionary addition to the mid-twentieth-century literature on ethnic/nationalist politics and the post-colonial “integrative revolution.” It then describes how the term and idea became (mis)interpreted as a theory in alleged contrast to constructivist/instrumentalist/circumstantialist theories. Finally, it offers an exposition on how and where primordialist discourse enters into contemporary ethnicity/nationalism through a case study of primordialist appeals in modern Uzbekistan. It concludes by positing that primordialist rhetoric should be a subject of study of ethnic/nationalist mobilization but is not and should not be a theory for conceptualizing such activity.

Anyone who is familiar with the debate knows that primordialism began its life in the 1957 essay by Shils, titled “Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties” [6]. What they generally fail to appreciate is that his article was not a plea for a theory of primordialism or for a primordialist analysis of ethnicity or nationalism. Instead, as a sort of intellectual autobiography, it made a case against the notion of modern society as Gesellschaft, that is, impersonal, anonymous, disintegrated social life in contrast to true community or Gemeinschaft. There remain in modern society, he countered, a large number and variety of attachments, obligations, and identities that he labeled “primordial” because they predated present-day civil society. The choice of term was unfortunate, since “primordial” suggests both extreme antiquity—perhaps reaching back to the dawn of time—and continuity if not immutability (i.e., that these primordial ties are unchanged from their original form). Shils did not assert as much, but he did assert that they are attributed with “ineffable significance” and often experienced as involuntary, even “coercive,” by and for members of the group/nation. What he called modern “civil attachment,” often to a country or an abstract principle like citizenship or democracy, is often less salient and sometimes actually antithetical to the intensity and durability of those primordial attachments.

Shils never claimed to be offering a “theory” of primordialism; in fact, the word “primordialism” never appears in his essay. The former can also be said of the idea’s second iteration, in the famous 1963 chapter by Geertz [7]. Explicitly following Shils, Geertz wrote not about primordialism but about “primordial attachments” which entailed, as he clearly stated, the assumed givens of social life like kinship, religion, language, customs, and territory. Like Shils, he regarded “primordial bonds”—or rather, he found that members regard such bonds—as “ineffable” and “overpowering”; unlike his predecessor, he actually did use the term “primordialism,” exactly twice, once in reference to “assumed blood ties” in Africa and once in recounting a Berber elite who “preached primordialism” to locals.

What Geertz did maintain was that purported primordial ties were an obstacle to post-colonial nation-building projects and that their persistence could lead to political fragmentation, tribal fanaticism, or armed suppression. The one thing he never suggested was that they were “real,” uniform, and immutable; rather, he clearly stipulated that they routinely differ in type and strength. Indeed, much of the chapter was devoted to sorting patterns of relations between primordial claimants. In the final analysis, he granted that a thorough grasp of primordial forces in contemporary societies requires, ironically, “a more circumstantial tracing of the stages through which their relationship to one another passes” [7].

When Primordialism Became (Temporarily) a Theory

Sadly for scholarship on ethnicity and nationalism, the mild comments by Shils and Geertz were construed by some recipients as the outline of a theory of primordialism. There have been various definitions advanced of the reputed theory. According to Allahar, for instance, it holds that “group attachment and identity, especially in premodern or traditional societies, are natural, perhaps even biological” [8]. Coakley opines that it emphasizes social ties based on genetic relations and/or cultural similarities [5]. Most recently, Nma proposes four discrete but not necessarily independent bases or “theses” underlying primordialism, namely nationalistic (humans are naturally members of discrete communities or nations), sociobiological (members are bound blood/racial ties and endogamy), cultural (groups have distinct cultural/customary traits), and perennial (such cultural traits and the attachments to them are ancient and unchanged over time) [9]. Before any of these, McKay summarized the primordialist position succinctly in five features—(i) deterministic and static traits (ii) viewed as “fixed, involuntary, and compelling” (iii) which are or should be the primary focus on analysis (iv) which are “ineffable and only comprehensible to ‘insiders’” and (v) promote severe inter-group conflict due to their “intense emotional power” [4]. If these are truly the qualities posited by primordialism—and it seems that they are—it is not difficult to see why Eller and Coughlan considered the “theory” unscientific, lacking in explanatory value, and more often than not empirically wrong.

Insofar as there actually was or is a primordialist theory or primordialist theorists, their concerns are relatively easy to identify. In the immediate post-colonial context, and in the context of subsequent ethnic conflicts and nationalist movements (for example, in the former case Hutu/Tutsi in Rwanda or Serb/Croat/Bosnian in Yugoslavia, and in the latter case Tamils in Sri Lanka, Scots in the UK, or Basques in Spain), state unity was or is undermined by older, stubborn, and often affective sub-state identities and attachments. These allegedly primordial factors confounded nation-builders in the various states and refuted scholars and politicians who predicted and desired a transfer of loyalty and identity to higher-level and more civic ties, essentially the modern or post-colonial state. Primordialism as a theory or position was a reaction to this frustration and disappointment, which was not anticipated, proponents felt, by neutral and hopeful modernist theories of constructivism, instrumentalism, mobilizationism, or circumstantialism. Various thinkers have defined and divided these non-primordialist positions in different ways: generally speaking, constructivism contends that contemporary ethnic groups and nations are relatively new products of mass political action, without direct precedent in pre-modern times, while instrumentalism emphasizes the work of ethnic/national elites to invent and guide group identity for purposes of rational group interest, and circumstantialism more inclusively analyzes current ethnic/national identities and movements in terms of equally current social/political/economic conditions. The specific nuances of the various non-primordialist theories are not relevant for the moment. What is relevant is that they all assume, at least so far as primordialists view them, that ethnic/national groups and movements are new and calculated or intentional rather than old and natural, unconscious, or fundamentally nonrational and affective.

It should be apparent that, if there is such a thing as primordialist theory, it rests on some faulty assumptions. One is that constructivist (for simplicity’s sake) theories take no notice of and make no room for pre-existing cultural or affective forces; worse, it seems to presume that people could not be intensely affectively attached to newer (or at least not primordial) cultures and identities. Another is that constructivists think that modern identities, symbols, culture, etc. are made up out of thin air; quite to the contrary, the appeal of ethnicity and nationalism is often in the revival or celebration of actually-existing precursors, albeit retooled and redeployed. These assumptions, as well as primordialism’s own belief in the primacy of biological/cultural factors, are easily defeated by the case of the United States, which obviously cannot claim an identity of more than three hundred years (and strictly speaking much less) and which is more directly beholden to civic than primordial ties, such as to country (call it “patriotism” instead of nationalism), democracy, or the Constitution. (Granted, there are other, more “primordial” competitors to American identity, including White nationalism, Black nationalism, and Christian nationalism—all, for the moment, minority causes.) Likewise, primordialism also assumes that members inevitably, ineffably, and irresistibly feel the pull of primordial forces, which they often do not; contrary to primordialist Grosby’s position [10], primordial identities are not inexpungeable but are regularly expunged, downplayed, or ignored. I offer myself as an exhibit: I am a white person, an English speaker, and probably of English/Scottish descent, but I am attached emotionally to neither my race nor language and am totally indifferent too, indeed ignorant of, my ethnic/national ancestry. Undoubtedly, innumerable societies, ethnic groups, and nations have been expunged from the historical record, often absorbed into other societies/groups/nations. Worse for primordialists, as multiple commentators have pointed out, there are always many available primordial factors from which individuals and groups can choose, some of which get elevated to objects of profound organizational significance while others do not.

Ultimately, as Hale argued two decades ago, primordialist theories do not actually “adhere so strictly to such tenets” as their theories should commit them to; they “do not argue that the subjects of their studies are eternal; instead, one can certainly point to a period in time during which both groups and stones were created. As the self-avowed primordialist Van Evera remarks, ‘ethnic identities are not stamped on our genes’; but once formed, groups tend strongly to endure” [11].

At the same time, there is less distance between primordialist and constructivist thinking than is typically allowed: both “agree that identities are constructed,” and constructivists certainly accept that “group identities tend to be quite stable once created,” although this stability does and must have bases in practice [11].

If there is any last refuge of respectable primordialism, it is Smith’s “ethnosymbolism,” which Maxwell pointedly calls “primordialism for scholars who ought to know better” [12]. Across a series of publications, Smith developed his ethnosymbolism perspective, sometimes characterized as “perennialism.” The gist of his model is that present-day nations have older, often ancient progenitors; the ancestor, an ethnie in Smith’s terminology, becomes a modern nation like France or Russia. If Maxwell considers ethnosymbolism basically indistinguishable from primordialism, Ozkirimli is still more critical, branding ethnosymbolists “latter-day Romantics who suffer from a deep sense of nostalgia” [13]. In a word, according to Ozkirimli, they think that they can trace modern nations back into the past to the medieval era or earlier—which may be true for some nations but not for others. No constructivist would assert otherwise, although constructivists would add that those pre-modern raw materials for modern nations have been selected, remembered, forgotten, reinterpreted, and occasionally invented in the light of modern political experience. In other words, another failing of primordialist/ethnosymbolist thinking is anachronism or presentism, assuming that what exists today must always have existed in the same form.

Accordingly, Ozkirimli persuasively affirms that primordialists/ethnosymbolists stop the analysis exactly where it ought to start—with the processes by which older traits, ties, and identities (if they existed) are transformed into modern “national” ones. If, as many primordialists and others feel, the bedrock question is one of authenticity, of finding (and sometimes restoring) the “real” culture or identity, then Ozkirimli reminds us to ponder how a biological or cultural fact becomes authentic: Smith himself confessed that there were in any ethnic/national past multiple competing narratives and counter-narratives, alternative visions of group authenticity. If so, the question poses itself: “which one is the authentic one? Which past is distinctive, unique and truly ours? How do we learn who we are and where we are going?” [13]. Elites, intellectuals, political leaders, and such figures will always have a role in answering these queries, which means, as Ozkirimli attributes to Smith contra any recognizable primordialist approach, that ethnic or national identity is always “reinterpreted and refashioned by each generation”—a constructivist understanding if there ever was one.

The preceding discussion establishes convincingly, in Allahar’s words, that “primordial attachment depends on the circumstances at hand and understands that sociopolitical identities are situational, not biological, flexible, not fixed” [8]. If so, it is hard to tell what primordialism adds to constructivist/circumstantialist theory, other than a not-entirely-needed reminder that non-state, non-civic attachments have serious force. More importantly, with this in mind together with the observation that there are few if any dedicated primordialists among scholars of ethnicity and nationalism, we are compelled to wonder: where is all the primordialism? I think that Hadfield and Coakley, writing two years apart, get it right when they explain, respectively, that those “who argue that nations are ‘timeless phenomena’ usually fall into the category of nationalists proper rather than students of nationalism” [14] and therefore that “primordialism may better be viewed as an ingredient in nationalism than an explanation of nationalism” [5].

The presence of primordialist thinking as an element of ethnicity/nationalism rather than an explanation of ethnicity/nationalism is manifest in the case of post-socialist Uzbekistan but is in no way exclusive to it. Uzbekistan is one of the Central Asian states that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, although it was recognized as a socialist republic within the USSR in 1924. Independent Uzbekistan is considered a relatively homogeneous nation-state of Uzbeks, who comprise more than 83 percent of the population, depending on the calculation of ethnic affiliations. (Even so, that obviously leaves almost one-fifth of the population that does not identify as Uzbek, including Russians, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Tatars, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, and others.) More problematically, regardless of primordialist policies of the Uzbek state, Finke reports that it is not entirely clear who or what an “Uzbek” is. The idea of “Uzbekness,” he postulates, is “flexible,” with “regional variation and the possibility of membership by voluntary decision” [15]. Accordingly, the name “Uzbek” has changed reference over time and was not adopted by the supposed ancestors of today’s Uzbeks—ancestors who “did not belong to a single named group and possibly lacked a strong sense of belonging” [15]. As for today’s Uzbeks, Finke discovers vexing regional differences in how their identity is conceived and applied. In the environs of the city of Bukhara, Uzbeks do not differentiate themselves from Tajiks and may deny an ethnic distinction, while in the Khorezm region ethnic/national boundaries (in particular against Turkmens) are stronger but in the remote eastern panhandle of the Ferghana Valley Uzbek identity is weaker; in this strip of land almost completely surrounded by Kyrgystan (see map 1), Uzbeks are so internally diverse  that some “feel closer to Tajiks than to Uzbeks of a different kind” [15], and many are actually uncertain of their “ethnic identity,” one man uttering, “I suppose I am Uzbek, but I would have to check my passport to tell you for sure” [15].

Figure 1: Central Asia.

Source: derivative of CIA map—original in public domain—licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.

In such a setting, it is unsurprising that robust identity-building would occur, as Laruelle richly documents. Since the 1990s, the Uzbekistan regime has promoted a primordialist-style, essentialist vision of Uzbek identity based on the standard tropes of “national language, national heroes and dynasties, and ‘ethnic’ cultural products or folklore that are honored as having survived centuries of oppression or the erasure of the nation”—all inevitably “constructed and reconstructed” [16]. The key qualities of this primordial Uzbekness highlight Uzbek authochthony and antiquity, harkening back to quite ancient origins and a lost “golden age.”

Long before independence, under Soviet sway, Uzbek intellectuals and authorities collected and circulated hypotheses of Uzbek roots, for instance pointing to the Shaybanid dynasty of the fifteenth or sixteenth century; for others, this date was not sufficiently old, especially as neighboring and rival groups like the Tajiks claimed earlier sources, pitting Central Asian peoples in a race toward the ever-more distant past. The country’s first post-independence president, Islam Karimov (ruled 1991 to 2016) embarked on a course of Uzbek “cultural nationalism,” formulating “a historical grand narrative as well as a wide array of national symbols whose meaning is largely understood by the population” [16], ranging from architecture to music, cinema, literature, and cuisine. In the first version of putative Uzbek ethno-national history, Karimov tried to institutionalize the identity and name of “Turkestan” (Uzbeks perceived as Turks in opposition to the Indo-European or “Aryan” peoples in some neighboring states), but this notion “did not resonate regionally” [16] and was abandoned.  The next direction was to promulgate the concept of an inherent (and ineffable and coercive?) Uzbek “spirit,” expressed in the local term Ma’naviyat (spirit/spirituality). To instill this concept, the government opened a publishing company and a television channel named for the term, created Respublika Ma’naviyat va Ma’rifat Kengashi or the Republic Center for Spiritual Propaganda, recruited scholars to produce research supporting the government’s view of Uzbek history, and placed an administrator in every higher institution of learning to oversee its teaching.

As indicated above, this idealized, essentialized history sought the most ancient possible source for the Uzbek people/nation. Part of the problem was and is that historians and other scholars conclude that Turkic peoples are not indigenous to the area but migrated (as non-sedentary nomads) from farther east; associated with this obstacle to ethnic/national primordiality is the fact that the ethnonym “Uzbek” was apparently not in use until the belated Shaybanid dynasty, which would have provided at best a 500-year pedigree. Therefore, earlier peoples, including the Kipchaks, Karluks, and Oghuz (some indisputably hailing from the eastern steppes) were embraced as, if not Uzbeks, then “ethnic ancestors of the Uzbeks” [16]. Searching for still older predecessors, some claimed the Turkic khaganate of the sixth century, but others reached beyond it to the Kang dynasty (second and first millennia BCE) and the Scythians (eighth to third century BCE)—the latter also claimed by Iranians as Indo-Europeans instead of Turks and the former fairly well established as immigrants from southern Siberia.

Simultaneously with grappling for millennia-old ancestors, Uzbek primordialist ideology also integrated more recent heroic figures, especially the late-fourteenth century conqueror Tamerlane and more generally the glorious Transoxiana period.

“Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan proclaimed itself the direct heir of Central Asia’s ‘Golden Age’ (oltin asr, which fell between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE) and claimed all philosophers, scientists, writers and Islamic thinkers who lived on the territory of present-day Uzbekistan. These thinkers are celebrated with eponymous metro stations in Tashkent, and their images appear on banknotes” [16].

Never mind, Laruelle warns, that Tamerlane was of Mongol descent. Be that as it may, this golden age also offered prestigious candidates for proto-Uzbekness like Bahouddin Naqshaband (founder of the Naqshabandi Sufi order) and the eminent philosopher Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. Meanwhile, Uzbek national pride had to suppress the contribution of other Central Asian peoples to Transoxiana’s glory, monopolizing it for themselves. And this was not the only aspect of historical heritage that needed to be denied or carefully managed: Islam was and is a likely potential primordialist attachment, but it has been comparatively marginalized for two reasons—first, there is the matter that Islam arose elsewhere and was carried by Arab invasion, and second, there is the looming threat of Islamism to the secular regime. As Laruelle phrases it, “‘Uzbekness’ remains intimately articulated with ‘Muslimness’ (musulmonchilik), but the latter is acceptable only when Uzbekified—that is, when it is seen as a national tradition, a cultural and folkloric heritage, or an architectural legacy” [16] and consequently politically defanged.

Finally, this comment reminds us of the issue of politics, key to the instrumentalist version of modernist constructivism in ethnic/nationalist studies. In Uzbekistan (but hardly only there), primordialist presentations of identity overtly “legitimate or naturalize a given configuration of political authority” [16]. Nation-building, in Western states and in new post-colonial states, has often had that very goal, evinced in the Americanizing and assimilating practices and institutions in the late-nineteenth-century United States (from the Pledge of Allegiance and patriotic holidays such as Memorial Day to organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic). Primarily, in Uzbekistan, Central Asia as a whole, and around the world, the primordialist “nationhood project is essentially statist” [16] in that the focus of attachment and loyalty is the state and its apparatus, even or especially if the state is construed as an “ethnocultural entity” founded on “the titular majority.”

In circumstances where political leadership is authoritarian, as in Uzbekistan, primordialist discourse plays a double function—not just to legitimate the state and its leaders but also “to mitigate their authoritarianism and limit the use of repressive tools by being the agenda-setter and preventing ideological contestation. Regime security now hinges on nationhood” [16]. And as we have seen, nationhood hinges on shared knowledge of and attachment to the reputed autochthonous and archaic people or nation. Laruelle is justified to conclude that ethnic/nationalist rhetoric of a primordialist flavor “serves as a technology of power” in more than one dimension. It serves the stability and integrity of the state; it serves the power of the authoritarian head of state; it serves the dominant (in this case, titular) group’s hegemony against opposition within the state, such as Islamists, Westernists, and ethnic minorities; and it serves the nation’s and state’s pride in struggles against nearby nations/states that are pursuing their own primordialist agendas. Witnesses like Maxwell detect this in the ideological struggle (to accompany the armed struggle) between Russia and Ukraine: the two sides are locked in dueling primordialisms as each advances “a primordialist and essentialist understanding of national history” [17], for instance, that Ukrainians are “really” Russians in a campaign “to deny the legitimacy of Ukrainian nationalism” [17].

Theorists of contemporary ethnicity and nationalism “need to appreciate the important work that primordialism and essentialism perform,” Suny insists in a 2001 article with the cheeky title of “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations” [18]. I heartily agree, and I think that constructivists, instrumentalists, circumstantialists, and all breeds of modernists agree and have always agreed. However, what the present essay argues is that “the important work of primordialism” is not done in analysis but in activism, not in explanation but in performance of primordialized ethnicities and nations. Indeed, we could not comprehend what transpires in Uzbekistan, or in much of the world, without appreciating the crucial work that primordialist rhetoric accomplishes.

That “primordialist” claims and the sources on which they draw are constructed—not ex nihilo but ex historia, that is, out of the raw materials that history and culture furnish—is patently clear, and few if any primordialist theorists would assert otherwise. That, whatever their autochthonous and ancient bona fides, contemporary ethnicities/nations, steered by politicians and scholars, are selected, reinterpreted, sometimes downplayed, and occasionally invented is also unquestionable. Finally, that constructed primordialism need have no less emotional valence for members than the unconstructed variety (if there is any such thing) is also true. In fact, Suny encountered just such intensity of feeling when he presented a conference paper on the construction of Armenian nationhood: not only fellow academics but the public condemned his remarks, distributed angry leaflets, attacked him in the media, and accused him of treason to the nation. His reaction in the article is wise—that as researchers and observers we should be alert to “the tension between investigations by scholars of the historical formation of ethnic, cultural, and national identities (considered subversive and dangerous by ethnonationalists), on the one hand, and the actual practice of nationalists, constructing (and simultaneously denying the constructedness of) identities, on the other” [18]. But we must remember that the tension is not between non-primordialist and primordialist theories but between theorists of ethnicity/nationalism and participants in ethnicity/nationalism.

In other words, there is not, and there never was, a primordialist “theory” of ethnic/national identity and action. There is not and never was, that is, primordialism, and, as we learned at the outset, the supposed founders of primordialism never meant any such thing. Part of the problem is converting an adjective (primordial) into a noun (primordialism); another problem is the regrettable choice of the word “primordial” in the first place, with its misleading connotations of antiquity and immutability leaving the impression of unbroken continuity. A different term with less baggage would be preferable, perhaps “antecedent” rather than “primordial,” since antecedents admittedly come before today’s state of affairs but by no means must be identical to them. (We would still have to guard against antecedents turning into some benighted “antecedentism.”)

As a last word, then, there is not so much a need for “reconciliation” between primordialism and not-primordialist theories as there is for inclusion, analysis, and critique of the primordialist rhetorics and conceits of actual ethnic and national movements. Primordialist practices and discourses, where they live, are not theories of ethnicity and nationalism but rhetorics by and for ethnic and nationalist actors.

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