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Unit 8: Race and Ethnicity

In 1982 anthropologist David Craig Griffith summed up forty years of ethnographic research, Notes
arguing that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways that people from
different parts of the world have been incorporated into a global economy :
The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through
appeals to “racial” and “ethnic” distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different
categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized
populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition
from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that
function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the
process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their
effective values.
According to Wolf, races were constructed and incorporated during the period of European
mercantile expansion, and ethnic groups during the period of capitalist expansion.
Often, ethnicity also connotes shared cultural, linguistic, behavioural or religious traits. For example,
to call oneself Jewish or Arab is to immediately invoke a clutch of linguistic, religious, cultural and
racial features that are held to be common within each ethnic category. Such broad ethnic categories
have also been termed macroethnicity. This distinguishes them from smaller, more subjective ethnic
features, often termed microethnicity.
In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is
linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of
ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson see nations and nationalism as
developing with the rise of the modern state system in the seventeenth century. They culminated
in the rise of “nation-states” in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or
ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and
nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism
were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were
being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought
legitimacy through their claim to represent “nations.”
Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life
for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion
on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political
separation in their own nation-state. Under these conditions—when people moved from one state
to another, or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic
groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.

8.1 Race

Most modern societies have numerous ethnic and racial groups. India, the USA, the UK, Canada,
etc., are plural societies. Economically and politically, ethnic and racial groups may perform the
same functions in a particular society, though culturally they are generally distinct from each
other. However, in reality, ethnic and racial differences are also marked by inequalities of power
and wealth, tension and conflict, and prejudice and discrimination. There are also ethnic and
racial minorities, and as such they are bound to have unequal access to opportunities and status
distinctions. Discrimination based on ethnic and racial considerations has been reported from
both highly industrialized and less industrialized societies. But ethnic or racial minorities are not
necessarily backward economically and socially. In India, some ethnic groups are minorities, but
economically they are far more ahead of the majority groups. Parsis, Christians, Sikhs are generally
better off than other groups in their respective regions.

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