Ethnicity

Ethnicity, system of definition of people who consider themselves or are considered by others to share common characteristics that are different from the other people in any society. Ethnicity, based on the Greek term ethnos, is frequently distinguished from race, although ethnic groups may share racial characteristics. However, there may exist different ethnic groups within the same race. Attachment to ethnicity, as distinct from attachment to race, may arise in several different ways. First, culturally patterned forms of behaviour by which individuals satisfy their needs may bring them closer to some people rather than others. Second, the similarities between members of an ethnic group may be based on physical characteristics as much as cultural characteristics, to create a “consciousness of kind”. Third, similarity of cultural behaviour may be seen as a sign of cultural relatedness.

In social anthropology, “ethnicity” is a term that has been used to describe the nature of social interaction between different human groups. By the 1970s it had popular usage in anthropological literature. The concept gained currency in anthropology at the time partly in response to the political situation in the world: increased migration, growth of multicultural societies, and the assertion of different identities. In anthropological literature there have been several different approaches to the study of ethnicity, which tend to define the term in different ways and according to different criteria. There have been three principal approaches: the primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist approaches. Sociobiology has been crucial in shaping the primordialist approaches. Its main exponent, Pierre van den Berghe, uses the notions of “inclusive fitness” and “reciprocity” to explain ethnic phenomena. Inclusive fitness describes the effect of altruistic behaviour in reducing individual fitness (that is, one’s genetic transmission to the next generation) and at the same time increasing group fitness (by helping more of one’s relatives to reproduce, thus transmitting—albeit indirectly—more of one’s own genes). This tendency to favour kin over non-kin is called kin-selection or nepotism. Reciprocity is cooperation between individuals when nepotism would be impossible and could enhance individual inclusive fitness. Thus, in general, ethnicity is defined as a comprehensive form of natural selection. Soviet and Russian anthropology are particularly associated with primordialism, for example, in the writings of Yulian Vladimiyovich Bromley.

Instrumentalist approaches, notably that of Donald Horowitz in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985), in the anthropological study of ethnicity have argued that claims to ethnicity were the result of manipulation of symbols, history, and political myths by social elites and leaders in their pursuit of advantages of power.

The most famous constructivist theories are associated with the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth. He defined ethnicity as a label that classifies a person in terms of his or her identity, determined by origin and background, as well as a form of social organization maintained by marking boundaries between who is included and who is not. However, these boundaries can change, and can for example, expand or contract to include or exclude people, depending on different situations. The nature of ethnicity is therefore ever-changing.