The Study of Ethnicity

Paper Summary:

This paper considers a variety of approaches to the study of ethnicity. In particular, it looks at the formalist approaches of Barth and the recent phenomenological drive towards self-conscious situational categorisation. It discusses how anthropological discussions of ethnicity in the first half of the 20th century were dominated by a conception of ethnicity as a culturally coherent bounded unit. It attempts to show that while this certainly established ethnic categories, it impeded the study of how such ethnic categories and ethnic identities are formed. It examines the usefulness of such analytic approaches to anthropology by emphasizing how the cultural differences within these units can be critical in the processes of identity formation.

From the Paper:

"Barth's (1969) radical change in approach was to emphasize what is socially effective. By doing so, he makes us see ethnic groups as a form of social organisation, and point four in the definition given above becomes most critical . In his approach, the features that he emphasises are only those that the actor marks out as distinctive. For him "ethnic categories provide an organisational vessel that may be given varying amounts and forms of content in different socio-economic areas" (Barth: 1969: 15). In many sense, Barth anticipates the post-modernist unease at the application of "our" labels to "them", Barth emphasised that ethnic identity was a matter of self-ascription and ascription by others, not ascription by the analyst."

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