An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group In the social sciences a group can be defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. By this definition, society can be viewed as a large group, though most social groups are considerably smaller of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, consisting of a common language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of, a common culture Culture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: (often including a shared religion Religion (from O.Fr. religion "religious community," from L. religionem "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods," "obligation, the bond between man and the gods" is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or more in general a set of beliefs explaining the existence of and giving meaning to the universe,) and a tradition of common ancestry (corresponding to a history of endogamy Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific ethnic group, class, or social group, rejecting others on such bases as being unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships. A Danish endogamist, for example, would require that a marriage be only with another Dane).^{[1][2] [3][4]}

Members of an ethnic group are conscious of belonging to an ethnic group; moreover ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness.^[5][6]

Processes that result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis Ethnogenesis is the process by which a group of human beings comes to be understood or to understand themselves as ethnically distinct from the wider social landscape from which their grouping emerges. By self-invention, ethnic groups are "present at their own creation", in the phrase of E. P. Thompson. This recognition of culture.

Terminology and definition

The terms "ethnicity" and "ethnic group" are derived from the Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (& word ἔθνος ethnos, normally translated as "nation." The terms refer currently to people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.

The term "ethnic" and related forms from the 14th century through the middle of the 19th century were used in English in the meaning of "pagan, heathen", as ethnikos was used as the LXX The Septuagint , or simply "LXX", referred to in critical works by the abbreviation , is the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, translated in stages between the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC in Alexandria. It was begun by the third century BC and completed before 132 BC translation of Hebrew goyim Goy is a transliterated Hebrew word which translates as "nation" or "people". Historically and up to modern times it is a synonym for Gentile or non-Jew "the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews".^[7]

The modern meaning emerged in the mid 19th century and expresses the notion of "a people" or "a nation". The term ethnicity is of 20th century coinage, attested from the 1950s. The term nationality Nationality is membership of a nation or sovereign state. Nationality can be acquired by birth within the jurisdiction of a state, by inheritance from parents, or by a process of naturalization. Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state depending on context may either be used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities. "Active citizenship" is the philosophy that citizens should work towards the betterment of their community through economic participation, public , volunteer work, and other such efforts to improve life for all citizens. In this vein, (in a sovereign state).

The modern usage of "ethnic group" further came to reflect the different kinds of encounters industrialised states have had with external groups, such as immigrants Immigration is the introduction of new people into a habitat or population. It is a biological concept and is important in population ecology, differentiated from emigration and migration and indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples are people, communities, and nations who claim a historical continuity and cultural affinity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies which sprung up on their original territories, and therefore consider themselves distinct from societies of the majority culture/s that have contested their cultural sovereignty and self-; "ethnic" thus came to stand in opposition to "national", to refer to people with distinct cultural identities who, through migration or conquest, had become subject to a state or "nation" with a different cultural mainstream.^[8] — with the first usage of the term ethnic group in 1935,^[9] and entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972.^[10][11][12]

Writing about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain Great Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island. With a population of about 61.8 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populated island on Earth. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of and the United States ^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language, Wallman notes that

The term 'ethnic' popularly connotes '[race]' in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, '[race]' most commonly means color, and 'ethnics' are the descendents of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. '[Ethnic]' is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no 'ethnics'; there are only 'ethnic relations'.^[13]

Thus, in today's everyday language, the words "ethnic" and "ethnicity" still have a ring of exotic peoples, minority issues and race relations.

Within the social sciences The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship that explore aspects of human society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences. These include: anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, international, however, the usage has become more generalized to all human groups that explicitly regard themselves and are regarded by others as culturally distinctive.^[14] Among the first to bring the term "ethnic group" into social studies was the German sociologist Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social activity, often with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare. Subject matter Max Weber Maximilian Carl Emil "Max" Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist and political economist, who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the remit of sociology itself. Weber's major works dealt with the rationalization and so-called "disenchantment" which he associated with the rise of, who defined it as:

[T]hose human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.^[15]

Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal A cultural universal is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all human cultures worldwide. Some anthropological and sociological theorists that take a cultural relativist perspective may deny the existence of cultural universals: the extent to which these universals are "cultural" in the narrow sense, or in fact is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. According to "Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, politics, and reality",^[who?] "Ethnicity is a fundamental factor in human life: it is a phenomenon inherent in human experience."^[16] Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first Fredrik Barth Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth is a Norwegian social anthropologist who has published several ethnographic books with a clear formalistic view. He is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, and has previously held professorships at the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen (where he founded the Department of Social and Eric Wolf Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology, do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups.^[17]

Conceptual history of ethnicity

According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen Thomas Hylland Eriksen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has done field work in Trinidad and Mauritius. His fields of research include identity, nationalism, globalisation and identity politics. Eriksen finished his dr. polit.-degree in 1991, and was made professor in 1995, at the age of 33. In the years 1993-2001, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.

• One is between "primordialism Primordialism can be traced philosophically to the ideas of German Romanticism, particularly in the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder. For Herder, the nation was synonymous with language group. In Herder's thinking, language was synonymous with thought, and as each language was learnt in community, then each community" and "instrumentalism In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality". In the primordialist Primordialism can be traced philosophically to the ideas of German Romanticism, particularly in the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder. For Herder, the nation was synonymous with language group. In Herder's thinking, language was synonymous with thought, and as each language was learnt in community, then each community view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond.^[18] The instrumentalist In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality approach, on the other hand, treats ethnicity primarily as an ad-hoc element of a political strategy, used as a resource for interest groups for achieving secondary goals such as, for instance, an increase in wealth, power or status.^[19][20] This debate is still an important point of reference in Political science Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior. Political scientists "see themselves engaged in revealing the relationships underlying political events and conditions. And from these revelations they attempt to construct, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.^[21]
• The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. In this view, it follows that terms or words should have a single definition and meaning". Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented as old.^[22][23] Essentialists view such identities as ontological Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, categories defining social actors, and not the result of social action.^[24][25]

According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first, by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicised forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism in the Caribbean The Caribbean is a region consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands , and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and Northern America, east of Central America, and to the north of South America and South Asia South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries on the west and the east. Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian Plate, which rises above sea level as the Indian subcontinent south of the.^[26]

Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft Gemeinschaft (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈmaɪnʃaft] ) and Gesellschaft (lit. community and society) are sociological categories introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies for two normal types of human association. (A normal type as coined by Tönnies is a purely conceptual tool to be built up logically, whereas an ideal type, as (community). Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolise power and status. This was contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then called "race The term race or racial group usually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics. The physical features commonly seen as indicating race are salient visual traits such as skin color, cranial or facial features and hair texture. Conceptions of race, as well".^[27]

Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth Thomas Fredrik Weybye Barth is a Norwegian social anthropologist who has published several ethnographic books with a clear formalistic view. He is professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University, and has previously held professorships at the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen (where he founded the Department of Social, whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from 1969 has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s.^[28] Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups. "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness of ethnic identities. Barth writes: "[...] categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories."

In 1978, anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:

... the named ethnic identities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed.^[28]

In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e.g. anthropologists, may not coincide with the self-identification of the members of that group. He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.^[28]

Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have a mercurial character.^[29] Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness".^[28] He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that (in Cohen's paraphrase) "Ethnicity ... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization.^[28] This may be why descent is sometimes a marker of ethnicity, and sometimes not: which diacritic of ethnicity is salient depends on whether people are scaling ethnic boundaries up or down, and whether they are scaling them up or down depends generally on the political situation.

"Ethnies" or ethnic categories

In order to avoid the problems of defining ethnic classification as labelling of others or as self-identification, it has been proposed^{[by whom?][year needed]} to distinguish between concepts of "ethnic categories", "ethnic networks" and "ethnic communities" or "ethnies".^[30][31]

• An "ethnic category" is a category set up by outsiders, that is, those who are not themselves members of the category, and whose members are populations that are categorised by outsiders as being distinguished by attributes of a common name or emblem, a shared cultural element and a connection to a specific territory. But, members who are ascribed to ethnic categories do not themselves have any awareness of their belonging to a common, distinctive group.

• At the level of "ethnic networks", the group begins to have a sense of collectiveness, and at this level, common myths of origin and shared cultural and biological heritage begins to emerge, at least among the élites.^[31]

• At the level of "ethnies" or "ethnic communities", the members themselves have clear conceptions of being "a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland, and some degree of solidarity, at least among the élites". That is, an ethnie is self-defined as a group, whereas ethnic categories are set up by outsiders whether or not their own members identify with the category given them.^[32]

• A "Situational Ethnicity" is an Ethnic identity that is chosen for the moment based on the social setting or situation.^[33]

Approaches to understanding ethnicity

Different approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a factor in human life and society. Examples of such approaches are: primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism and instrumentalism.

• "Primordialism", holds that ethnicity has existed at all times of human history and that modern ethnic groups have historical continuity into the far past. For them, the idea of ethnicity is closely linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing groups rooted by kinship Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage, while usage in biology includes descent and mating. Human kinship relations through marriage are commonly called " and biological heritage.
  • "Essentialist primordialism" further holds that ethnicity is an a priori fact of human existence, that ethnicity precedes any human social interaction and that it is basically unchanged by it. This theory sees ethnic groups as natural, not just as historical. This understanding does not explain how and why nations and ethnic groups seemingly appear, disappear and often reappear through history. It also has problems dealing with the consequences of intermarriage, migration and colonization for the composition of modern day multi-ethnic societies A Society or a human society is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations such as social status, roles and social networks. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions. Without an article, the term refers either to the entirety of.^[32]
  • "Kinship primordialism" holds that ethnic communities are extensions of kinship units, basically being derived by kinship or clan ties where the choices of cultural signs (language, religion, traditions) are made exactly to show this biological affinity. In this way, the myths of common biological ancestry that are a defining feature of ethnic communities are to be understood as representing actual biological history. A problem with this view on ethnicity is that it is more often than not the case that mythic origins of specific ethnic groups directly contradict the known biological history of an ethnic community.^[32]
  • "Geertz's primordialism", notably espoused by anthropologist Clifford Geertz Clifford James Geertz was a highly influential American anthropologist known mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology. He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, argues that humans in general attribute an overwhelming power to primordial human "givens" such as blood ties, language, territory, and cultural differences. In Geertz' opinion, ethnicity is not in itself primordial but humans perceive it as such because it is embedded in their experience of the world.^[32]

• "Perennialism" holds that ethnicity is ever changing, and that while the concept of ethnicity has existed at all times, ethnic groups are generally short lived before the ethnic boundaries realign in new patterns. The opposing perennialist view holds that while ethnicity and ethnic groupings has existed throughout history, they are not part of the natural order.
  • "Perpetual perennialism" holds that specific ethnic groups have existed continuously throughout history.
  • "Situational perennialism" holds that nations and ethnic groups emerge, change and vanish through the course of history. This view holds that the concept of ethnicity is basically a tool used by political groups to manipulate resources such as wealth, power, territory or status in their particular groups' interests. Accordingly, ethnicity emerges when it is relevant as means of furthering emergent collective interests and changes according to political changes in the society. Examples of a perennialist interpretation of ethnicity are also found in Barth,and Seidner who see ethnicity as ever-changing boundaries between groups of people established through ongoing social negotiation and interaction.
  • "Instrumentalist perennialism", while seeing ethnicity primarily as a versatile tool that identified different ethnics groups and limits through time, explains ethnicity as a mechanism of social stratification In sociology and other social sciences, social stratification refers to the hierarchical arrangement of individuals into divisions of power and wealth within a society. The term most commonly relates to the socio-economic concept of class, involving the "classification of persons into groups based on shared socio-economic conditions ... a, meaning that ethnicity is the basis for a hierarchical arrangement of individuals. According to Donald Noel, a sociologist who developed a theory on the origin of ethnic stratification, ethnic stratification is a "system of stratification wherein some relatively fixed group membership (e.g., race, religion, or nationality) is utilized as a major criterion for assigning social positions".^[34] Ethnic stratification is one of many different types of social stratification, including stratification based on socio-economic status Socioeconomic status is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family’s economic and social position relative to others, based on income, education, and occupation. When analyzing a family’s SES, the household income earners' education and occupation are examined, as well as, race The term race or racial group usually refers to the categorization of humans into populations or ancestral groups on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics. The physical features commonly seen as indicating race are salient visual traits such as skin color, cranial or facial features and hair texture. Conceptions of race, as well, or gender Gender is the wide set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female. It can extend from sex to social role or gender identity. As a word, "gender" has more than one valid definition. In ordinary speech, it is used interchangeably with "sex" to denote the condition of being male or female. In the. According to Donald Noel, ethnic stratification will emerge only when specific ethnic groups are brought into contact with one another, and only when those groups are characterized by a high degree of ethnocentrism, competition, and differential power. Ethnocentrism Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one's ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one's own. The ethnocentric individual will judge other groups relative to his or her own particular ethnic group or culture, especially with concern to language, behavior, customs, and religion is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture, and to downgrade all other groups outside one’s own culture. Some sociologists, such as Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, say the origin of ethnic stratification lies in individual dispositions of ethnic prejudice, which relates to the theory of ethnocentrism.^[35] Continuing with Noel's theory, some degree of differential power must be present for the emergence of ethnic stratification. In other words, an inequality of power among ethnic groups means "they are of such unequal power that one is able to impose its will upon another".^[34] In addition to differential power, a degree of competition structured along ethnic lines is a prerequisite to ethnic stratification as well. The different ethnic groups must be competing for some common goal, such as power or influence, or a material interest, such as wealth or territory. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings propose that competition is driven by self-interest and hostility, and results in inevitable stratification and conflict Conflict is actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests. A conflict can be internal to individuals. Conflict as a concept can help explain many aspects of social life such as social disagreement, conflicts of interests, and fights between individuals, groups, or organizations. In political terms, "conflict" can refer to.^[35]

• "Constructivism" sees both primordialist and perennialist views as basically flawed,^[35] and rejects the notion of ethnicity as a basic human condition. It holds that ethnic groups are only products of human social interaction, maintained only in so far as they are maintained as valid social constructs in societies.
  • "Modernist constructivism" correlates the emergence of ethnicity with the movement towards nationstates The nation-state is a certain form of state that derives its legitimacy from serving as a sovereign entity for a nation as a sovereign territorial unit. The state is a political and geopolitical entity; the nation is a cultural and/or ethnic entity. The term "nation-state" implies that the two geographically coincide, and this beginning in the early modern period.^[36] Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, (born 9 June 1917) is a British Marxist historian and author. He had a profound influence on the understanding of European and particularly British history through his books and other writings, argue that ethnicity and notions of ethnic pride, such as nationalism, are purely modern inventions, appearing only in the modern period of world history. They hold that prior to this, ethnic homogeneity was not considered an ideal or necessary factor in the forging of large-scale societies.

Ethnicity and race

Before Weber, race and ethnicity were often seen as two aspects of the same thing. Around 1900 and before the essentialist primordialist understanding of ethnicity was predominant, cultural differences between peoples were seen as being the result of inherited traits and tendencies.^[37] This was the time when "sciences" such as phrenology Phrenology is a hypothesis stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull. It is now considered a pseudoscience. Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, the discipline was very popular in the 19th century. The principal British centre for phrenology was Edinburgh, where the Edinburgh claimed to be able to correlate cultural and behavioral traits of different populations with their outward physical characteristics, such as the shape of the skull. With Weber's introduction of ethnicity as a social construct, race and ethnicity were divided from each other. A social belief in biologically well-defined races lingered on.

In 1950, the UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations established on 16 November 1945. Its stated purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of statement, "The Race Question", signed by some of the internationally renowned scholars of the time (including Ashley Montagu Montague Francis Ashley Montagu , was a British-American anthropologist and humanist who popularized issues such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, of the UNESCO statement The Race Question. As a young man he changed his name to "Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu" and went by &, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc.), suggested that: "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of 'ethnic groups'."^[38]

In 1982, American cultural anthropologists, summing up forty years of ethnographic research, argued that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways that people from different parts of the world have been incorporated into a global economy:

The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial" and "ethnic" distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values.

According to Wolf, races were constructed and incorporated during the period of European mercantile expansion, and ethnic groups during the period of capitalist expansion.^[39]

Often, ethnicity also connotes shared cultural, linguistic, behavioural or religious traits. For example, to call oneself Jewish or Arab is to immediately invoke a clutch of linguistic, religious, cultural and racial features that are held to be common within each ethnic category. Such broad ethnic categories have also been termed macroethnicity.^[40] This distinguishes them from smaller, more subjective ethnic features, often termed microethnicity.^[41][42]

Ethnicity and nation

In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner^[43] and Benedict Anderson^[44] see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the seventeenth century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation in their own nation-state.^[45] Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another,^[46] or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.

Ethno-national conflict

Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and actions by the state or its constituents. In the twentieth century, people began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two ways. Some, like Jürgen Habermas and Bruce Barry, have argued that the legitimacy of modern states must be based on a notion of political rights of autonomous individual subjects. According to this view, the state should not acknowledge ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural construct. According to this view, states must recognize ethnic identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of ethnic groups can be accommodated within the boundaries of the nation-state.

The nineteenth century saw the development of the political ideology of ethnic nationalism, when the concept of race was tied to nationalism, first by German theorists including Johann Gottfried von Herder. Instances of societies focusing on ethnic ties, arguably to the exclusion of history or historical context, have resulted in the justification of nationalist goals. Two periods frequently cited as examples of this are the nineteenth century consolidation and expansion of the German Empire and the twentieth century Third (Greater German) Reich. Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were only acquiring lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans. The history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of the former USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts. Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to between them, as in other regions of the world. Thus, the conflicts are often misleadingly labelled and characterized as civil wars when they are inter-ethnic conflicts in a multi-ethnic state.

Ethnicity in specific countries

USA

In the United States of America, the term "ethnic" carries a much broader meaning than how it is commonly used in some other countries. Ethnicity usually refers to collectives of related groups, having more to do with morphology, specifically skin color, rather than political boundaries. The word "nationality" is more commonly used for this purpose (e.g. Italian, Mexican, French, Russian, Japanese, etc. are nationalities). Most prominently in the U.S., Latin American descended populations are grouped in a "Hispanic" or "Latino" ethnicity. The many previously designated Oriental ethnic groups are now classified as the Asian racial group for the census.

The terms "Black" and "African American", while different, are both used as ethnic categories in the US. In the late 1980s, the term "African American", was posited as the most appropriate and politically correct race designation.^[47] While it was intended as a shift away from the racial inequities of America's past often associated with the historical views of the "Black race", it largely became a simple replacement for the terms Black, Colored, Negro and the like, referring to any individual of dark skin color regardless of geographical descent. Likewise, Light-skinned Americans from Africa are not considered "African American". Many African Americans are multiracial. More than half of African Americans also have European ancestry equivalent to one great-grandparent, and 5 percent have Native American ancestry equivalent to one great-grandparent.^[48]

The term "White" generally describes people whose ancestry can be traced to Europe (including other European-settled countries in the Americas, Australasia and South Africa among others) and who now live in the United States. Middle Easterners may sometimes also be included in the "white" category. This includes people from Southwest Asia and North Africa, as well as the Arab nations, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. All the aforementioned are categorized as part of the "White" racial group, as per US Census categorization. This category has been split into two groups: Hispanics and non-Hispanics (e.g. White non-Hispanic and White Hispanic.) Although people from East Asia may typically have light skin, they are not considered "white" due to their mongoloid origin, which reflects upon the socially-constructed nature of racial groups.

Europe

Europe has a large number of ethnic groups; Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities within every state they inhabit (althought they may form local regional majorities within a sub-national entity). The total number of national minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people, or 14% of 770 million Europeans.^[49]

A number of European countries, including France,^[50] and Switzerland do not collect information on the ethnicity of their resident population.

Russia has numerous recognized ethnic groups besides the 80% ethnic Russian majority. The largest group are the Tatars (3.8%). Many of the smaller groups are found in the Asian part of Russia (see Indigenous peoples of Siberia).

China

The People's Republic of China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Han Chinese. Many of the ethnic minorities maintain their own cultures, languages and identity although many are also becoming more westernised. Han-Chinese predominate demographically and politically in most areas of China, although less so in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Han are still in the minority. The Han Chinese was the only ethnic group bound by the one-child policy.

India

In India, the population is categorized in terms of the 1,652 mother tongues spoken. Indian society is traditionally divided into castes or clans, not ethnicities, and these categories have had no official status since Independence in 1947, except for the scheduled castes and tribes which remain registered for the purpose of positive discrimination.

See also

Notes

1. ^ Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Sider 1993 Lumbee Indian Histories.
2. ^ Seidner,(1982), Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective, pp. 2-3
3. ^ Smith 1987^{[page needed]}
4. ^ Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (1996), p. 151 "'ethnic groups' invariably stress common ancestry or endogamy".
5. ^ "Anthropology. The study of ethnicity, minority groups, and identity," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
6. ^ Bulmer, M. (1996). "The ethnic group question in the 1991 Census of Population". in Coleman, D and Salt, J.. Ethnicity in the 1991 Census of Population. HMSO. pp. 35.
7. ^ ThiE. Tonkin, M. McDonald and M. Chapman, History and Ethnicity (London 1989), pp. 11–17 (quoted in J. Hutchinson & A.D. Smith (eds.), Oxford readers: Ethnicity (Oxford 1996), pp. 18–24)
8. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Cites Sir Daniel Wilson, The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland 1851' (1863)
9. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Citing Huxley & Hadden (1935), We Europeans, pp. 136,181
10. ^ Cohen, Ronald. (1978) "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology", Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1978. 7:379-403
11. ^ Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan (1975) Ethnicity - Theory and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press
12. ^ The modern usage definition of the Oxford English Dictionary is:

    a[djective]

    ...

    2.a. Pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological. Also, pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system; hence (U.S. colloq.), foreign, exotic.

    b ethnic minority (group), a group of people differentiated from the rest of the community by racial origins or cultural background, and usu. claiming or enjoying official recognition of their group identity. Also attrib.

    n[oun]

    ...

    3 A member of an ethnic group or minority. orig. U.S.

    (Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, s.v. "ethnic, a. and n.")

13. ^ Wallman, S. "Ethnicity research in Britain", Current Anthropology, v. 18, n. 3, 1977, pp. 531–532.
14. ^ Eriksen 1993 p. 2
15. ^ Max Weber [1922]1978 Economy and Society eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischof, vol. 2 Berkeley: University of California Press, 389
16. ^ ", a conference organised by Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau (April 1–3, 1992) Statistics Canada
17. ^ Fredrik Barth ed. 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference; Eric Wolf 1982 Europe and the People Without History p. 381
18. ^ Geertz, Clifford, ed. (1967) Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Africa and Asia. New York: The Free Press.
19. ^ Cohen, Abner (1969) Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in a Yoruba Town. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
20. ^ Abner Cohen (1974) Two-Dimensional Man: An essay on power and symbolism in complex society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
21. ^ J. Hutchinson & A.D. Smith (eds.), Oxford readers: Ethnicity (Oxford 1996), "Introduction", 8-9
22. ^ Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
23. ^ Ernest Gellner (1997) Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
24. ^ Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell.
25. ^ Anthony Smith (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
26. ^ T.H. Eriksen "Ethnic identity, national identity and intergroup conflict: The significance of personal experiences" in Ashmore, Jussim, Wilder (eds.): Social identity, intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction, pp. 42–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press'. 2001
27. ^ Banton, Michael. (2007) "Weber on Ethnic Communities: A critique", Nations and Nationalism 13 (1), 2007, 19–35.
28. ^ ^{a b c d e} Ronald Cohen 1978 "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 383 Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
29. ^ Joan Vincent 1974, "The Structure of Ethnicity" in Human Organization 33(4): 375-379
30. ^ (Smith 1999, p. 12)
31. ^ ^{a b} Delanty, Gerard & Krishan Kumar (2006) The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. SAGE. ISBN 1-41290101-4 p. 171
32. ^ ^{a b c d} (Smith 1999, p. 13)
33. ^ Introduction to Sociology, 7th edition. Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard Appelbaum, Deborah Carr
34. ^ ^{a b} Noel, Donald L. (1968). "A Theory of the Origin of Ethnic Stratification". Social Problems 16 (2): 157–172. doi:10.1525/sp.1968.16.2.03a00030.
35. ^ ^{a b c} Bobo, Lawrence; Hutchings, Vincent L. (1996). "Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer's Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context". American Sociological Review (American Sociological Association) 61 (6): 951–972. doi:10.2307/2096302. http://jstor.org/stable/2096302.
36. ^ (Smith 1999, pp. 4–7)
37. ^ Banton, Michael. (2007) "Weber on Ethnic Communities: A critique", Nations and Nationalism 13 (1), 2007, 19–35.
38. ^ A. Metraux (1950) "United nations Economic and Security Council Statement by Experts on Problems of Race", American Anthropologist 53(1): 142-145)
39. ^

    In this regard, distinctions of race have implications rather different from ethnic variations. Racial distinctions, such as "Indian" or "African American", are the outcome of the subjugation of populations in the course of European mercantile expansion. The term "Indian", and later "Native American", stand for the conquered populations of the New World, in disregard of any cultural or physical differences among them. "Negro", and later "African American", similarly serve as a cover term for the culturally and physically variable African, populations that furnished slaves, as well as for the slaves themselves. Indians are conquered people who could be forced to labor or pay tribute; Negroes are "hewers of wood and drawers of water", obtained in violence and put to work under coercion. These two terms thus singled out for primary attention, the historic fact that these populations were made to labor in servitude to support a new class of overlords. Simultaneously, the terms, like "white people", disregard cultural and physical differences within each large category, denying any constituent group political, economic, or ideological identity of its own.

    Racial terms mirror the political process by which populations of whole continents were turned into providers of coerced surplus labor. Under capitalism, these terms did not lose their association with civil disability. They continue to invoke supposed descent from such subjugated populations so as to deny their putative descendants access to upper segments of the labor market. "Indians" and "Negroes" are thus confined to the lower ranks of the industrial army or depressed into the industrial reserve. The function of racial categories within capitalism is exclusionary. They stigmatize groups in order to exclude them from more highly paid jobs and from access to the information needed for their execution. They insulate the more advantaged workers against competition from below, making it difficult for employers to use stigmatized populations as cheaper substitutes or as strikebreakers. Finally, they weaken the ability of such groups to mobilize politically on their own behalf by forcing them back into casual employment and thereby intensifying competition among them for scarce and shifting resources.

    While the categories of race serve primarily to exclude people from all but the lower echelons of the industrial army, ethnic categories express the ways that particular populations came to relate themselves to given segments of the labor market. Such categories emerge from two sources, one external to the group in question, the other internal. As each cohort entered the industrial process, outsiders were able to categorize it in terms of putative provenance and supposed affinity to particular segments of the labor market. At the same time, members of the cohort itself came to value membership in the group thus defined, as a qualification for establishing economic and political claims. Such ethnicities rarely coincided with the initial self-identification of the industrial recruits, who thought of themselves as Hanoverians or Bavarians rather than as Germans, as members of their village or their parish (okiloca) rather than as Poles, as Tonga or Yao rather than "Nyasalanders." The more comprehensive categories emerged only as particular cohorts of workers gained access to different segments of the labor market and began to treat their access as a resource to be defended both socially and politically. Such ethnicities are therefore not "primordial" social relationships. They are historical products of labor market segmentation under the capitalist mode. Eric Wolf, 1982, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. 380-381

40. ^ Maria Rostworowski, "The Incas", Peru Culture
41. ^ James Lockhart, Microethnicity in Philological ethnohistory
42. ^ Christopher Larkosh, "Je me souviens…aussi: Microethnicity and the Fragility of Memory in French-Canadian New England", TOPIA: Journal for Canadian Cultural Studies, Issue 16 (Toronto, 2006), pp. 91-108
43. ^ Gellner 2006 Nations and Nationalism Blackwell Publishing
44. ^ Anderson 2006 Imagined Communities Verson
45. ^ Walter Pohl, "Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies", Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, (Blackwell), 1998, pp 13-24, notes that historians have projected the nineteenth-century conceptions of the nation-state backwards in time, employing biological metaphors of birth and growth: "that the peoples in the Migration Period had little to do with those heroic (or sometimes brutish) clichés is now generally accepted among historians," he remarked. Early medieval peoples were far less homogeneous than often thought, and Pohl follows Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung. (Cologne and Graz) 1961, whose researches into the "ethnogenesis" of the German peoples convinced him that the idea of common origin, as expressed by Isidore of Seville Gens est multitudo ab uno principio orta ("a people is a multitude stemming from one origin") which continues in the original Etymologiae IX.2.i) "sive ab alia natione secundum propriam collectionem distincta ("or distinguished from another people by its proper ties") was a myth.
46. ^ Aihway Ong 1996 "Cultural Citizenship in the Making" in Current Anthropology 37(5)
47. ^ Encyclopedia of Public Health, by The Gale Group, Inc
48. ^ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, New York: Crown Publishers, 2009, pp. 20-21
49. ^ Christoph Pan, Beate Sibylle Pfeil,Minderheitenrechte in Europa. Handbuch der europäischen Volksgruppen (2002). Living-diversity.eu, English translation 2004.
50. ^ (French) article 8 de la loi Informatique et libertés, 1978: "Il est interdit de collecter ou de traiter des données à caractère personnel qui font apparaître, directement ou indirectement, les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses ou l'appartenance syndicale des personnes, ou qui sont relatives à la santé ou à la vie sexuelle de celles-ci."

References

• Abizadeh, Arash, "Ethnicity, Race, and a Possible Humanity" World Order, 33.1 (2001): 23-34. (Article that explores the social construction of ethnicity and race.)
• Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969
• Billinger, Michael S. (2007), "Another Look at Ethnicity as a Biological Concept: Moving Anthropology Beyond the Race Concept", Critique of Anthropology 27,1:5–35.
• Cole, C.L. "Nike’s America/ America’s Michael Jordan", Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. (New York: Suny Press, 2001).
• Dünnhaupt, Gerhard, "The Bewildering German Boundaries", in: Festschrift for P. M. Mitchell (Heidelberg: Winter 1989).
• Eysenck, H.J., Race, Education and Intelligence (London: Temple Smith, 1971) (ISBN 0-8511-7009-9)
• Hartmann, Douglas. "Notes on Midnight Basketball and the Cultural Politics of Recreation, Race and At-Risk Urban Youth", Journal of Sport and Social Issues. 25 (2001): 339-366.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors, The Invention of Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1993) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Pluto Press
• Levinson, David, Ethnic Groups Worldwide: A Ready Reference Handbook, Greenwood Publishing Group (1998), ISBN 9781573560191.
• Morales-Díaz, Enrique; Gabriel Aquino; & Michael Sletcher, "Ethnicity", in Michael Sletcher, ed., New England, (Westport, CT, 2004).
• Omni, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Inc., 1986).
• Seidner, Stanley S. Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective. (Bruxelles: Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguisme1982).
• Sider, Gerald, Lumbee Indian Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Smith, Anthony D. (1987). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell
• Smith, Anthony D. (1999). Myths and memories of the Nation. Oxford University Press
• ^ U.S. Census Bureau State & County QuickFacts: Race.

External links

• Ethnicity at the Open Directory Project
• Downloadable article: "Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age" Li et al. BMC Biology 2010, 8:15. Biomedcentral.com
• Rian.ru
• American Psychological Association's Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs

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