Ethnicity

• 1. Introduction

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  Ethnicity is a group of humans who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that set them apart from other groups. The attributes vary. Language, culture, ancestry, traditions, religion, history, or even shared social treatment can all bind a group together. A French Canadian and a Mormon belong to ethnicities defined by very different things. One leans on language, the other on shared affiliation with a religion. So what actually makes an ethnicity, and who gets to decide? The word itself once meant something far stranger than it does today. It meant heathen. It meant the foreign nations outside the Christian world. The very idea that ethnic groups have always existed, unchanged since the distant past, would be challenged by scholars who came to see them as something built rather than inherited. These are the questions ahead. How groups form and dissolve, why the line between race and ethnicity blurred and then split, and how a Greek historian writing around 480 BC first tried to name what makes a people a people.

• 2. Born, Merged, Dissolved

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  Endogamy is the engine that keeps an ethnicity alive over time. A group maintained through long-term marriage within itself may carry a narrow or a broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, and some groups carry mixed ancestry entirely. Membership is not a locked door. Through assimilation, acculturation, amalgamation, language shift, intermarriage, adoption, and religious conversion, individuals or whole groups can drift from one ethnic group into another over time.

  Ethnogenesis is the name for the moment a separate ethnic identity forms. It can happen by division, when a subgroup or tribe splits off from a parent group through endogamy or physical isolation and eventually becomes its own people. It can also happen the other way. Formerly separate ethnicities can merge into a panethnicity, and may eventually fuse into a single ethnicity. The term has appeared in ethnological literature since about 1950.

  The boundary markers do the daily work of keeping a group distinct. These are characteristics said to be unique to the group, the traits that set it apart from everyone else. Ethnic groups differ from subcultures, interest groups, or social classes precisely because they emerge and change across centuries rather than years. That slow timescale, several generations of marrying within, often gets recast later as a mythological story about a single founding figure.

• 3. The Heathen Word

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  Ethnos is the Greek root of every modern use of the word ethnic, passing through the adjective ethnikos and into Latin as ethnicus. The older inherited English word for the same idea is folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period. In Homeric Greek the term could mean almost any large gathering. A host of men, a band of comrades, even a swarm or a flock of animals.

  Heathen and pagan were what ethnic meant in Early Modern English, a sense that held until the mid-19th century. The Septuagint had used ta ethne, the nations, to translate the Hebrew goyim, meaning the foreign nations, the non-Hebrews, the non-Jews. In Classical Greek the word had narrowed toward something like a nation, a tribe, a unique people group. Only in Hellenistic Greek did it tighten again to mean foreign or barbarous nations, which is how it later came to mean heathen.

  1935 is when the phrase ethnic group was first recorded, and it entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. In American English the sense of a tribal, racial, cultural, or national minority group arose in the 1930s to 1940s. It stepped in as a replacement for the word race, which had taken that meaning earlier but was being deprecated for its link to ideological racism. The abstract noun ethnicity, once a stand-in for paganism in the 18th century, took on the meaning of ethnic character only in 1953. The word can still carry a whiff of the exotic, as in the phrase an ethnic restaurant, usually pointing to cultures of more recent immigrants.

• 4. Blood Or Intelligence

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  Herodotus laid the foundation of both historiography and ethnography around 480 BC, building on earlier writers such as Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus. The Greeks had a concept of their own ethnicity and grouped themselves under the name Hellenes. Their belief in ethnic nationalism ran deep enough that they generally enslaved only non-Greeks, and they sometimes held that even their lowest citizens outranked any barbarian. In his Politics, Aristotle described barbarians as natural slaves in contrast to the Greeks.

  Homaimon, of the same blood, was the first of four things Herodotus named as the marks of Greek identity in his famous account at 8.144.2. The others were homoglosson, speaking the same language, then shared sanctuaries and sacrifices, and finally ethea homotropa, customs of like fashion. Together they form an early checklist for what makes a people one people.

  Isocrates offered a rival view in his speech Panegyricus, and it did not rest on blood at all. He wrote that Athens had so distanced the rest of mankind in thought and in speech that her pupils became the teachers of the world. The name Hellenes, he argued, suggested no longer a race but an intelligence, applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood. The disagreement between descent and culture, already alive among the Greeks, would echo for the next two thousand years.

• 5. Built, Not Given

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  Kunstlich is the word Max Weber used for ethnic groups. It means artificial, a social construct. Weber argued that ethnicity rested on a subjective belief in a shared community, a shared Gemeinschaft, and he turned the usual logic around. The belief did not create the group. The group created the belief. He held that group formation came from the drive to monopolize power and status, a direct challenge to the naturalist thinking of his time, which traced cultural and behavioral differences to inherited traits from common descent, then called race.

  Fredrik Barth pushed further than Weber in his 1969 work Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, credited with spreading the term across social studies in the 1980s and 1990s. For Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated, shaped from outside by ascription and from inside by self-identification. He rejected the idea of ethnic groups as discontinuous cultural isolates that people naturally belong to. He wrote that ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact, and information, but instead involve social processes of exclusion and incorporation that keep categories distinct even as membership changes across individual lives.

  Ronald Cohen sharpened the warning in 1978. He claimed that the named ethnic identities social scientists accept as basic givens are often arbitrarily, or even inaccurately, imposed. An outsider's label, such as an anthropologist's, may not match how a group identifies itself. Cohen called ethnicity a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and agreed with Joan Vincent that ethnic boundaries have a mercurial character. They can be narrowed or broadened depending on the needs of political mobilization. Whether descent counts as a marker, he suggested, depends on whether people are scaling their boundaries up or down, which in turn depends on the political situation.

• 6. The American Argument

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  Robert E. Park put forward ethnicity theory in the 1920s, arguing that race is only one social category among several in determining ethnicity, alongside religion, language, customs, nationality, and political identification. It was built on the notion of culture, and it followed more than a hundred years in which biological essentialism had been the dominant paradigm on race. That older belief held some races biologically superior and others inherently inferior, a notion used to justify the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of Native Americans in a society officially founded on freedom for all.

  Four steps to assimilation structured Park's model. Contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Instead of blaming the marginalized status of people of colour on inherent inferiority, he blamed their failure to assimilate into American culture. Equality, in this view, would come if they abandoned what he treated as inferior cultures.

  Michael Omi and Howard Winant confronted that theory directly in Racial Formation in the United States. They argued the ethnicity model was based exclusively on the immigration patterns of the White population and ignored the unique experiences of non-Whites. Park's stages, they pointed out, were drawn only from White communities. Assimilation, shedding a native culture to blend into a host culture, worked for some groups and not for others. Once legal barriers to equality fell, the burden of racism shifted onto already disadvantaged communities, and the failure of a Black or Latino community to make it by White standards was read as a defect in its values. Omi and Winant called this a benign neglect of social inequality, one that ignores the structural components of racism.

• 7. Race And Nation

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  1950 saw the UNESCO statement The Race Question, signed by renowned scholars including Ashley Montagu, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, and Julian Huxley. It declared that national, religious, geographic, linguistic, and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups, and that the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because the word race was so often misused, the statement urged dropping it altogether and speaking instead of ethnic groups.

  David Craig Griffith, writing in 1982, summarized forty years of ethnographic research and tied racial and ethnic categories to economics. He argued that appeals to racial and ethnic distinctions allocate workers to different rungs on the labor market, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels. Capitalism did not create the distinctions, but the process of labor mobilization under it gave those distinctions their effective values. Eric Wolf placed the two in sequence. Racial categories were constructed during European mercantile expansion, ethnic groupings during capitalist expansion.

  Nira Yuval-Davis and other feminist scholars drew attention to women's place in all of this. Ethnic and national categories are usually discussed as belonging to the public, political sphere, yet they are upheld largely within the private, family sphere. Women act there not only as biological reproducers but as cultural carriers, transmitting knowledge and enforcing behaviors. They also serve as symbols, in the notion that women and children form the kernel of a nation to be defended, or in iconic figures such as Britannia or Marianne. When ethnic ties get pushed to the exclusion of historical context, the results turn dangerous, as in the 19th-century expansion of the German Empire and in 20th-century Nazi Germany, each promoting the idea that it was acquiring only lands always inhabited by ethnic Germans.

• 8. A World Of Peoples

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  Over 3,000 ethnic groups and more than 2,000 languages make Africa the most ethnically and linguistically diverse continent, spread across 54 countries. Those languages fall into families such as Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan, and most groups hold to distinct cultural traditions. The numbers elsewhere are striking too. India alone has more than 2,000 distinct ethnic groups, while Indonesia has more than 600 across the 17,000 islands of its archipelago.

  87 distinct peoples of Europe were counted by Pan and Pfeil in 2004. Of those, 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 are minorities in every state they inhabit. National minorities across Europe number an estimated 105 million people, about 14% of 770 million Europeans. France and Switzerland do not collect information on the ethnicity of their residents. The Serbian province of Vojvodina holds some 26 ethnic groups and six languages in official use, while the Roma, who originated in India and speak the Romani language, remain a largely nomadic people there.

  The Pacific tells stories of islands filled and emptied and filled again. The Pitcairn Islands hold roughly 50 people, mixed-race Euronesians descended from British and Tahitian settlers of the 18th century, on islands that Polynesians had long abandoned before they arrived. On Clipperton Island, a brief attempt to settle Mexicans in the early 20th century ended with most settlers dying of starvation. Norfolk Island, now an external territory of Australia, took in mixed-race Pitcairn Islanders relocated there in 1856 because of overpopulation. And on the Australian mainland, Aboriginal peoples have occupied the continent for more than 50,000 years, long before Captain James Cook charted the east coast in 1770.