It also shows that shifting claims over ethnic categories connect to broader debates surrounding authenticity, recognition, and social belonging. The anthropological study of ethnicity shows that ethnic labels are constructed, used, and understood differently by communities, political actors (both state and non-state), and scholars. Recent scholarship has criticised associations between being ‘ethnic’ and being a ‘minority’ to explore the political consequences of ethnic labels, which can serve as tools of both social change and discrimination. It highlights the ways in which groups use and embody their ethnicity as a category of their identity, and that ethnicity overlaps with related understandings of identity such as ‘Indigeneity’, ‘nationality’, and ‘tribe’. ![]() This entry shows how understandings of ethnicity have changed over time, and that both structural and affective features continue to define what ethnicity may be in any given context. Yet ‘ethnicity’ also retained associations with primordial forms of group identification, therefore gaining a prominent place within exclusivist nationalist discourses as well as mobilisations of multiculturalism around the world. This made it a potentially more accurate and productive lens through which to understand sociocultural diversity. Emerging as an important frame for anthropological research during the same time period, ethnicity was initially seen as a terminological shift away from loaded, biologically-based concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘race’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |