Page 178 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 8: Race and Ethnicity

• Difference between caste and ethnicity lies in the fact that caste is ascribed by birth. hence, it Notes
remains immutable or natural. Ethnicity can also be ascribed, determined by birth in a given
ethnic community, and its characteristics, including language, religion, styles of life, etc.
• “Sons of the Soil” movement, the one presently seen in Maharashtra under the leadership of
Shiv Sena and its splinter group, conversion, migration, territoriality, dual labour market,
ethnic division of labour (for example, in Assam and Punjab) have all accelerated ethnicization
of economic and political interests and aspirations, cleavages and conflicts.
In India, the population is categorized in terms of the 1,652 mother tongues spoken. Indian
society is traditionally divided into castes or clans, not ethnicities, and these categories have
had no official status since Independence in 1947, except for the scheduled castes and tribes
which remain registered for the purpose of positive discrimination.
• Documentation is accumulating indicating that ethnic minorities are retaining their identity
in contrast to those that have become assimilated into the larger cultural and social systems.
A considerable proportion of the literature analyzes the nature and problems of inter-group
relations between a minority and the larger society when the minority desires acceptance;
but there is limited resource material available which contributes to an understanding of the
forces that operate in the relationships between groups that want to retain their identity and
the majority society.
• An ethnic group is a group of people whose members are identified through a common trait.
This can, but does not have to, include an idea of common heritage, a common culture, a
shared language or dialect. The group’s ethos or ideology may also stress common ancestry
and religion, as opposed to an ethnic minority group which refers to race. The process that
results in the emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis. Some ethnic groups are
marked by little more than a common name.
• Hostile attitudes towards immigrants should be determined first of all by national
identification. However, to the extent that majorities cognitively equate the national and
their ethnic group, ethnic identification should mediate the impact of national identification
on xenophobia for majorities, but not for minorities. This prediction of a moderated mediation
should reveal that for majorities, but not for minorities, identification with the superordinate
category does not directly predict discrimination, but that it is mediated by subgroup
identification.
• In the Anglo-Saxon countries, majority groups themselves are former immigrant groups. In
the U.S. sample, we distinguished European immigrants (Dominant majority group) from
African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian and Hispanic Americans who were categorized as Subordinate
minorities. In Canada, European immigrants (mostly but not exclusively from British descent)
were classified as the majority group, with the exception of the French Canadians who were
assigned the subordinate minority status, togather with a small number of more recent
immigrants.
• A series of regression analyses were performed in order to test the second prediction that a
positive relationship between subgroup and superordinate identities should be observed for
majorities, and that this relationship should be less positive for minorities. First, within each
of the nine national contexts, the majority and the minority groups were analysed separately.
Ethnic identification was the dependent variable, and national identification was entered
into the regression equation as the main independent variable, along with the control variables
of age, sex and education level.
• An interaction term was computed as the product of subgroup status (minority or majority)
and national identification. In order to test the null hypothesis that regression coefficients
were the same across minority and majority groups, the interaction term was entered in the

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