THE CULTURAL CONTEXTS OF ETHNIC DIFFERENCES

Discarding simplistic conceptions of 'cultures' as bounded entities for research, recent social anthropological studies have descnbed ethnicity as those aspects of social relationships and processes in which cultural difference is communicated. This approach is endorsed here, but it is argued that it is also necessary to understand vanrations in the forms of cultural difference communicated through ethnicity. Thus, variations in the significance of cultural differences in otherwise comparable inter-ethnic situations must be understood comparatively. Drawing on the Wittgensteinian concept of language-games, the article demonstrates and discusses such vanations as they are expressed in different inter-ethnic contexts in Trinidad and Mauritius. It is argued that a concept of culture which fully acknowledges the contextual character of shared meaning in any society must be dual: culture is continuously created and re-created through intentional agency, but it is simultaneously a necessary condition for all agency to be meaningful. The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of analytical devices for dealing comparatively with cultural differences made relevant in systems of interaction. First, the strengths and limitations of a leading social anthropological perspective on ethnicity are considered. Thereafter, certain aspects of ethnicity in