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Unit 8: Race and Ethnicity

Weber maintained that ethnic groups were kunstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they Notes
were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft (community). Secondly, this belief in
shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation
resulted from the drive to monopolise power 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 described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in
social studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed
nature of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external
ascription and internal self-identification. Barth’s view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous
cultural isolates, or logical a prions to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part 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 maintained
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 as “cultural” or “tribal” when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural
systems and shared heritage, but that “ethnicity” had the added value of being able to describe the
commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern 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.
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 relation 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.
“Ethnies” or Ethnic Categories

In order to avoid the problem of defining ethnic classification as labeling of others or as self-
identification, it has been proposed to distinguish between concepts of “ethnic categories”, “ethnic
networks” and “ethnic communities” or “ethnies”.
• An “ethnic category” is a category set up by outsiders, that is, those who are not themselves
members of the category, and whose members are populations that are categorised by

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