The Ethnic Question: Census Politics in Great Britain

Abstract

In her analysis of a global data set compiled by the United Nations Statistical Division to survey the approaches to ethnic enumeration, Ann Morning (2008) finds that of the 141 countries under study, 63 % incorporate some form of ethnic enumeration though question and answer schema vary along dimensions that suggest diverse conceptualisations of race/ethnicity/indigeneity/nationality. Given the substantial number of countries that enumerate identity, it is no surprise that the academic scholarship envisions the census in a variety of ways. One of the first analytical treatments of the census appeared in Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on nationalism, Imagined Communities. The census, Anderson argues, is one of the three institutions (alongside maps and museums) that states use to create a common imagination for its subjects (Anderson 1991: 163–164). James Scott’s understanding of the census is similar – it is part of the state’s ongoing ‘project of legibility’ in which instruments of statecraft such as the census, the map, surnames, the centralisation of traffic patterns, the creation of official languages, and even scientific forestry are used to create both a geographical terrain and population with standardised characteristics that will be most efficiently monitored, counted, assessed and managed (Scott 1998: 81–82). Statistics are indeed the science of the state, as Foucault points out in his essay on governmentality. The production of statistics leads to the ‘emergence of population,’ an outcome that relies on the will of the population to itself be managed (Foucault 1991).