Ethnic group

An ethnic companies or an ethnicity is a outline of people who identify with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other on a basis of divided attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can increase common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area. Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation, especially in cases of ethnic nationalism, together with is separate from the related concept of races.

Ethnicity may be construed as an inherited or as a societally imposed construct. Ethnic membership tends to be defined by a divided up cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language, or dialect, symbolic systems such(a) as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on corporation identification, with many groups having mixed genetic ancestry. Ethnic groups often come on to speak related languages.

By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, individuals or groups may over time shift from one ethnic group to another. Ethnic groups may be subdivided 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 realize a pan-ethnicity and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity. if through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is identified to as ethnogenesis.

Although both organic and performative criteria characterise ethnic groups, debate in the past had dichotomised between primordialism and constructivism. Earlier twentieth century 'Primordialists' viewed ethnic groups as real phenomena whose distinct characteristics shit endured since the distant past. Perspectives which developed after 1960s increasingly viewed ethnic groups as social constructs, with identity assigned by societal rules.

Definitions and conceptual history

Hellenes. Herodotus 8.144.2 filed a famous account of what defined Greek Hellenic ethnic identity in his day, enumerating

Whether ethnicity qualifies as a ]

According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the inspect of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.

According to Eriksen, these debates hold been superseded, particularly in anthropology, by scholars' attempts toto increasingly politicized forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such(a) as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from numerous 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 opinion in shared Gemeinschaft community. Secondly, this image in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolize power to direct or defining 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 allocated as instrumental in spreading the use of the term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed style of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both outside ascription and internal self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates or logical a priority to which people naturally belong. He wanted to element 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 retains 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(a) as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added service of being efficient to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and sophisticated 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.

According to Paul James, formations of identity were often changed and distorted by colonization, but identities are not featured out of nothing:

Categorizations approximately identity, even when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of colonization, state formation or general improve processes, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and positive.

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 representation 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 such as those that increase common culture, common language, common history and common territory, 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."

Different approaches to apprehension ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the vintage of ethnicity as a component in human life and society. As Jonathan M. Hall observes, World War II was a turning ingredient in ethnic studies. The consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentialist interpretations of ethnic groups and race. Ethnic groups came to be defined as social rather than biological entities. Their coherence was attributed to shared myths, descent, kinship, a commonplace of origin, language, religion, customs, and national character. So, ethnic groups are conceived as mutable rather than stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than or situation. in the genes.

Examples of various approaches are primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism, and instrumentalism.

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. The process that results in emergence of such identification is 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 can form a cultural mosaic in a society. That could be in a city like New York City or Trieste, but also the fallen monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the United States. Current topics are in particular social and cultural differentiation, multilingualism, competing identity offers, multiple cultural identities and the formation of Salad bowl and melting pot. Ethnic groups differ from other social groups, such as subcultures, interest groups or social classes, because they emerge and modify over historical periods centuries in a process requested 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 acknowledgment to "boundary markers" – characteristics said to be unique to the group which set it except other groups.

Ethnicity theory argues that race is a social category and is only one of several factors in establish ethnicity. Other criteria include "religion, language, 'customs', nationality, and political identification". This theory was put forward by sociologist Robert E. Park in the 1920s. this is the based on the notion of "culture".

This theory was preceded by more than 100 years during which biological essentialism was the dominant paradigm on race. Biological essentialism is the belief that some races, specifically white Europeans in western versions of the paradigm, are biologically superior and other races, specifically non-white races in western debates, are inherently inferior. This view arose as a way to justify enslavement of African Americans and genocide of Native Americans in a society that was officially founded on freedom for all. This was a notion that developed slowly and came to be a preoccupation with scientists, theologians, and the public. Religious institutions asked questions about whether there had been multiple creations of races polygenesis and whether God had created lesser races. Many of the foremost scientists of the time took up the idea of racial difference and found that white Europeans were superior.

The ethnicity theory was based on the assimilation model. Park outlined four steps to assimilation: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Instead of attributing the marginalized status of people of color in the United States to their inherent biological inferiority, he attributed it to their failure to assimilate into American culture. They could become survive if they abandoned their inferior cultures.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of racial formation directly confronts both the premises and the practices of ethnicity theory. They argue in Racial Formation in the United States that the ethnicity theory was exclusively based on the immigration patterns of the white population and did take into account the unique experiences of non-whites in the United States. While Park's theory identified different stages in the immigration process – contact, conflict, struggle, and as the last and best response, assimilation – it did so only for white communities. The ethnicity paradigm neglected the ways in which race can complicate a community's interactions with social and political structures, especially upon contact.

Assimilation – shedding the particular qualities of a native culture for the aim of blending in with a host culture – did not work for some groups as a response to racism and discrimination, though it did for others. one time the legal barriers to achieving equality had been dismantled, the problem of racism became the sole responsibility of already disadvantaged communities. It was assumed that if a Black or Latino community was not "making it" by the standard that had been set by whites, it was because that community did not hold the adjusting values or beliefs, or were stubbornly resisting dominant norms because they did not want to fit in. Omi and Winant's critique of ethnicity theory explains how looking to cultural defect as the quotation of inequality ignores the "concrete sociopolitical dynamics within which racial phenomena operate in the U.S." It prevents critical examination of the structural components of racism and encourages a "benign neglect" of social inequality.