ethnicity
What is ethnicity?
How is ethnicity different from race?
How is ethnicity seen today?
ethnicity, a complex concept that refers to a person’s identification with a specific group of people, based on one or more shared traits, which may include ancestry, culture, language, religion, customs, and nationality. The term derives from the Greek word ethnos, which usually refers to a nation, caste, tribe, or people. Ethnicity is shaped by a variety of historical, political, social, and cultural factors through interactions between individuals and groups. On an individual level, ethnicity refers to a person’s affiliation with or affinity for a group and to the reciprocated acknowledgment of shared origins between the individual and the group. In a broader sense, ethnicity also refers to the interactions between groups, leading to the overall framing of the discourses of modern nation-states.
Traits defining ethnicity
An ethnicity is typically defined by a common culture, shared history, common ancestry, or some combination of these attributes. These traits are generally employed both to define a community as different from other groups and to foster a sense of belonging among members of that community. The terms ethnicity and nation are used interchangeably in certain contexts, especially in discussions of ethnic nationalism, which has become increasingly prominent since the early 20th century. Most scholarly surveys understand ethnicity and nation as socially constructed categories by which individuals and groups create an identity.
Because ethnic groups often base membership at least partially on a notion of shared ancestry or kinship (whether biological or fictive), some confuse the terms ethnicity and race or use them interchangeably. Though the term race was used prior to the mid-20th century to refer to what is now called ethnicity, modern scholarship distinguishes between the two concepts. Even though both can be used to categorize people into socially constructed groups, ethnicity draws on cultural elements, whereas race emphasizes physical characteristics, such as skin color, eye shape, and other phenotypic features. Language is frequently an important factor in maintaining a group’s ethnic identity, whereas shared language is not used to define race.
The history and study of ethnicity
Because ethnicity is constructed on the basis of a variable number of aspects of identity, it is difficult to trace the history of the concept. The earliest expression of ethnicity is perhaps found in the 1st millennium bce under the empires of the ancient Middle East. In the Classical Greek and Hellenistic world, ethnicity was based largely on shared descent and territory, although citizenship in many of the Greek cities was open to newcomers who did not share ancestry with the rest of the populace. Medieval European authors used the term gens (translated as people, nation, tribe, stock, family, or race) as well as natio to discuss different groups of people, although religion was of great importance as a marker of identity at the time.
The concept of ethnicity rose in prominence and political importance alongside the connected concepts of the nation and nationalism in the late 18th to early 19th century. Recognition as a distinct ethnic group was viewed as politically essential to the formation and legitimation of nation-states. Along with the political prominence of ethnicity came scholarly interest in the categorizing and defining of different groups. In the 19th century early anthropologists were among the first to investigate the relationship between ethnicity and imperialism, especially in the context of European conquests of African, Asian, and American territories. They defined ethnicity as a singular, unchanging aspect of social identity that was determined by biology. The evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin influenced anthropologists such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, who played a pivotal role in applying an evolutionary framework to human society. Such scholarship played an important part in Western imperialism in two major ways: first, the sorting of people into categories allowed administrators to enumerate the populations that they now controlled, and second, the belief that some peoples were less developed than others legitimized European and Euro-American hegemony over them, as Western culture was seen as the most advanced.
The 20th century saw a more nuanced view of ethnicity, as an object of study and as a political concept. American anthropologist Franz Boas critiqued the notion of biological determinism and the evolutionary framework of earlier anthropologists. Work done on interactions within and between groups by scholars such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Fredrik Barth showed the boundaries between peoples to be porous and malleable and showed identity to be constructed on the basis of relationships between individuals and groups. Later scholars took such critiques a step further, reconsidering the use of fixed cultural categories. During the 20th century, ethnicity gained renewed political salience, as conflicts in the latter half of the century, such as the Bosnian War (1992–95) and Rwanda genocide of 1994, brought attention to ethnic, racial, and national motivations for violence.
Ethnicity continues to hold significant social and emotional salience in the lives of individuals and nation-states into the 21st century. It remains a diverse aspect of cultural identity that is frequently intertwined with concepts such as race, nationality, and tribe. The study of ethnicity has begun to consider the history of marginalization and inequality that has accompanied development of ethnicity as a concept. Scholars widely accept that ethnic identities are fluid and shaped by historical, political, and social (rather than biological) factors. Ethnicity’s impact in the real world is also studied, with a focus on how it affects economic resource distribution and its place as a center of resistance against dominant social structures.
