Global Perspective

A Sociohistorical Overview

Race and ethnicity function as markers distinguishing one group from another. Language, religion, and skin color can be among the markers of distinction between groups only in societies where these traits are significant. For example, skin color cannot be a marker in societies that have no visible differences in skin color among their subpopulations.

In its earliest uses, the word race was used loosely to describe people from different nation-states, for example, the French race. However, during the late 18th century, the English began to use the concept to convey presumed “qualities and degrees of human difference.” The concept of race connotes visible physical differences such as skin color, hair texture, and cranium size among groups, differences that are then linked to nonvisible differences such as intelligence, motivation, and morality. These differences not only are passed from one generation to the next but also are believed to be immutable. Starting in the 18th century and continuing to the current time, some scientists have used one or more criteria (e.g., skin color, hair texture, size of cranium) to establish a scientific basis for race; however, these attempts have been unsuccessful. If race were a bona fide scientific category, it would be possible to classify each and every human in one and only one category of a set of categories based on specific criteria. Because this is not the case, there is a consensus among scientists that the biological variation within groups called races is often greater than the variation between races.

The word ethnicity connotes group boundaries based on factors such as geographic origin, language, religion, and identification. Self-identification is necessary but not sufficient to establish membership in an ethnic group; the group must also recognize an individual as being part of it. Although ethnicity is shaped to some extent by original heritage in terms of factors such as language and religion, ethnicity is also shaped by the economic, political, and social relations between and among groups.

Ethnic groups can be created by the process of panethnogenesis—the formation of a panethnic identity to cope with economic, political, and cultural changes experienced by politically dominated ethnic groups within the confines of a given nation-state. Examples of this phenomenon include American Indians in the United States and the Montagnard (a population of mountaineers) in the Vietnam highlands. Panethnic unity can stem from the creation of a panethnic identity, which in turn results from being treated as one monolithic entity by the dominant group in a given society.

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