Page 159 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes The term ‘ethnic’ popularly connotes [race]’ in Britain, only less precisely, and with a
lighter value load. In North America, by contrast ‘[race]’ most commonly means color,
and ‘ethnics’ are the descendants of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-
speaking countries. ‘[Ethnic]’ is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no ‘ethnics’;
there are only ‘ethnic relations’.
Thus, in today’s everyday language, the words “ethnic” and “ethnicity” still have a ring of exotic
peoples, minority issues and race relations.

Herodotus is the first who stated the main characteristics of ethnicity in the 5th century
BC, with his famous account of what defines Greek identity, where he lists kinship.

Within the social sciences, however, the usage has become more generalized to all human groups
that explicitly regard themselves and are regarded by others as culturally distinctive. Among the
first to bring the term “ethnic group” into social studies was the German sociologist Max Weber,
who defined it as :
Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of
similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and
migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter
whether an objective blood relationship exists.
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.

Conceptual History of Ethnicity
According to Hans Adriel Handokho, 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.

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