An ethnic group or ethnicity is a socially defined category
of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social,
cultural or national experience. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be
defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history,
homeland, language and/or dialect, ideology, symbolic systems such as religion,
mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, physical appearance, etc.
The largest ethnic groups in modern times comprise hundreds
of millions of individuals (Han Chinese being the largest), while the smallest
are limited to a few dozen individuals (numerous indigenous peoples worldwide).
Larger ethnic groups may be subdivided into smaller sub-groups known variously
as tribes or clans, which over time may become separate ethnic groups
themselves due to endogamy and/or physical isolation from the parent group.
Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a pan-ethnicity,
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.
Depending on which source of group identity is emphasized to
define membership, the following types of ethnic groups can be identified:
- Ethno-racial, emphasizing shared physical appearance based
on genetic origins;
- Ethno-religious, emphasizing shared affiliation with a
particular religion, denomination and/or sect;
- Ethno-linguistic, emphasizing shared language, dialect
and/or script;
- Ethno-national, emphasizing a shared polity and/or sense of
national identity;
- Ethno-regional, emphasizing a distinct local sense of
belonging stemming from relative geographic isolation.
In many cases – for instance, the sense of Jewish peoplehood
– more than one aspect determines membership.
Ethnic groups derived from the same historical founder
population often continue to speak related languages and share a similar gene
pool. By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious
conversion, it is possible for some individuals or groups to leave one ethnic
group and become part of another (except for ethnic groups emphasizing racial
purity as a key membership criterion).
Ethnicity is often used synonymously with ambiguous terms
such as nation or people.
Terminology
The term ethnic is derived from the Greek word ethnos (more
precisely, from the adjective ethnikos, which was 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 (in the sense of disparate
"nations" which did not yet participate in the Christian oikumene),
as the Septuagint used ta ethne ("the nations") to translate the
Hebrew goyim "the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews". The Greek term in
early antiquity (Homeric Greek) 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 term took on a meaning comparable to the concept now expressed by
"ethnic group", mostly translated as "nation, people"; only
in Hellenistic Greek did the term tend to become further narrowed to refer to
"foreign" or "barbarous" nations in particular (whence the
later meaning "heathen, pagan").
In the 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of
"peculiar to a race, people or nation", in a return to the original
Greek meaning. The sense of "different cultural groups", and in US
English "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 for
"paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to [be] express the
meaning of an "ethnic character" (first recorded 1953). The term
ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English
Dictionary in 1972. The term nationality depending on context may either be
used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship (in a
sovereign state). The process that results in the emergence of an ethnicity is
called ethnogenesis, a term in use in ethnological literature since about 1950.
Definitions and conceptual history
Ethnography begins in classical antiquity; after early
authors like Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus in ca. 480 BC laid
the foundation of both historiography and ethnography of the ancient world. The
Greeks at this time did not describe foreign nations but had also developed a
concept of their own "ethnicity", which they grouped under the name of
Hellenes. Herodotus gave a famous account of what defined Greek (Hellenic)
ethnic identity in his day, enumerating
- shared descent ( "of the same blood"),
- shared language ("speaking the same language")
- shared sanctuaries and sacrifices
- shared customs ("customs of like fashion").
Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to
some extent dependent on the exact definition used. According to
"Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, politics, and
reality", "Ethnicity is a
fundamental factor in human life: it is a phenomenon inherent in human
experience." 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, and not the result of social action.
According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded,
especially in anthropology, 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
and South Asia.
Max Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich
(artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they were based on a subjective
belief in shared Gemeinschaft (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".
Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik
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 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.
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.
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
(in Cohen's paraphrase) "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.
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 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.
- "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.
- "Geertz's primordialism", notably espoused by
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, 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.
- "Perennialism", an approach that is primarily
concerned with nationhood but tends to see nations and ethnic communities as
basically the same phenomenon, holds that the nation, as a type of social and
political organisation, is of an immemorial or "perennial" character.
Smith (1999) distinguishes two variants: "continuous perennialism",
which claims that particular nations have existed for very long spans of time,
and "recurrent perennialism", which focuses on the emergence,
dissolution and reappearance of nations as a recurring aspect of human history.
- "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, 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". Ethnic stratification is one of many different
types of social stratification, including stratification based on
socio-economic status, race, or gender. 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
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. 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". 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.
- "Constructivism" sees both primordialist and
perennialist views as basically flawed, 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 beginning in the
early modern period. Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm, 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 is an important means by which people may identify
with a larger group. 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. Processes that
result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis. Members
of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural continuities over time,
although historians and cultural anthropologists have documented that many of
the values, practices, and norms that imply continuity with the past are of relatively
recent invention.
Ethnic groups differ from other social groups, such as
subcultures, interest groups or social classes, because they emerge and change
over historical periods (centuries) in a process known as ethnogenesis, a period
of several generations of endogamy resulting in common ancestry (which is then
sometimes cast in terms of a mythological narrative of a founding figure);
ethnic identity is reinforced by reference to "boundary markers" -
characteristics said to be unique to the group which set it apart from other
groups.
Article Credit : http://en.wikipedia.org/
