Ethnicity
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Attributes that ethnicities believe to share include language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment. Ethnicities are maintained through long-term endogamy and may have a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, with some groups having mixed genetic ancestry. Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism. It is also used interchangeably with race although not all ethnicities identify as racial groups.
By way of assimilation, acculturation, amalgamation, language shift, intermarriage, adoption and religious conversion, individuals or groups may over time shift from one ethnic group to another. Ethnic groups may be divided into subgroups or tribes, which over time may become separate ethnic groups themselves due to endogamy or physical isolation from the parent group. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a panethnicity and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity. Whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis.
Two theories exist in understanding ethnicities, mainly primordialism and constructivism. Early 20th-century primordialists viewed ethnic groups as real phenomena whose distinct characteristics have endured since the distant past. Perspectives that developed after the 1960s increasingly viewed ethnic groups as social constructs, with identity assigned by societal rules.
Terminology
The term ethnic is ultimately derived from the Greek, through its adjectival form, loaned into Latin as ethnicus. The inherited English language term for this concept is folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period.In Early Modern English and until the mid-19th century, ethnic was used to mean heathen or pagan, as the Septuagint used 'the nations' to translate the Hebrew goyim "the foreign nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews". The Greek term in early antiquity could refer to any large group, a host of men, a band of comrades as well as a swarm or flock of animals. In Classical Greek, the word took on a meaning comparable to the concept now expressed by "ethnic group", mostly translated as "nation, tribe, a unique people group"; only in Hellenistic Greek did the term tend to become further narrowed to refer to "foreign" or "barbarous" nations in particular.
In the 19th century the term came to be used in the sense of "peculiar to a tribe, race, people or nation", in a return to the original Greek meaning. The sense of "different cultural groups", and in American English "tribal, racial, cultural or national minority group" arises in the 1930s to 1940s, serving as a replacement of the term race which had earlier taken this sense but was now becoming deprecated due to its association with ideological racism. The abstract ethnicity had been used as a stand-in for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character".
The term ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Depending on context, the term nationality may be used either synonymously with ethnicity or synonymously with citizenship. The process that results in emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis, a term in use in ethnological literature since about 1950. The term may also be used with the connotation of something unique and unusually exotic, generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, who arrived after the dominant population of an area was established.
Depending on which source of group identity is emphasized to define membership, the following types of groups can be identified:
- Ethno-linguistic, emphasizing shared language, dialect example: French Canadians
- Ethno-national, emphasizing a shared polity or sense of national identityexample: Austrians
- Ethno-racial, emphasizing shared physical appearance based on phenotype example: African Americans
- Ethno-regional, emphasizing a distinct local sense of belonging stemming from relative geographic isolationexample: South Islanders of New Zealand
- Ethno-religious, emphasizing shared affiliation with a particular religion, denomination or sectexample: Mormons, Sikhs
- Ethno-cultural, emphasizing shared culture or tradition, often overlapping with other forms of ethnicityexample: Travellers
Definitions and conceptual history
begins in classical antiquity; after early authors like Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus laid the foundation of both historiography and ethnography of the ancient world. The Greeks had developed a concept of their own ethnicity, which they grouped under the name of Hellenes. Although there were exceptions, such as Macedonia, which was ruled by nobility in a way that was not typically Greek, and Sparta, which had an unusual ruling class, the ancient Greeks generally enslaved only non-Greeks due to their strong belief in ethnic nationalism. The Greeks sometimes believed that even their lowest citizens were superior to any barbarian. In his Politics 1.2–7; 3.14, Aristotle even described barbarians as natural slaves in contrast to the Greeks. Herodotus gave a famous account of what defined Greek ethnic identity in his day, enumerating- shared descent,
- shared language,
- shared sanctuaries and sacrifices,
- shared customs.
Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf, 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.
According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.
- One is between "primordialism" and "instrumentalism". In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond. The instrumentalist 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. This debate is still an important point of reference in political science, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.
- The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism". Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented as old. Essentialists view such identities as ontological categories defining social actors.
Max Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft. Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolize 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".
Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Barth, 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. 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 priori 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 the anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:
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 are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.
According to Paul James, formations of identity were often changed and distorted by colonization, but identities are not made out of nothing:
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. Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness". He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that "Ethnicity... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization." 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.
Kanchan Chandra rejects the expansive definitions of ethnic identity, choosing instead to define ethnic identity narrowly as a subset of identity categories determined by the belief of common descent. Jóhanna Birnir similarly defines ethnicity as "group self-identification around a characteristic that is very difficult or even impossible to change, such as language, race, or location."