Peoplehood

Peoplehood refers to the inclusionary and involuntary identity of a territorially based group with a putatively distinct way of life. A general concept, it encompasses groups usually classified separately under the categories “race,” “ethnicity,” and “nation,” thereby implying a grouping larger than kinship but smaller than humanity. Peoplehood is characterized by both common descent—a shared sense of genealogy and geography—and contemporary commonality such as language, religion, culture, and/or consciousness. As a self-reflexive identity or internal conviction of a group, it is distinct from a population, which connotes an aggregate or an analytical category with externally defined attributes. Peoplehood often supersedes religious, class, and local identity to become a fundamental mode of identity in modern life. The term appears in the work of several scholars working independently, including Immanuel Wallerstein, Rogers Smith, and John Lie.

Most discussions of race, ethnicity, and nation dispense considerable effort in analytically distinguishing among the three. Racial categorization frequently appeals to biological distinction (or perceptions to that effect), and ethnic differentiation often depends on social or cultural difference. Yet in fact, the dividing line between the natural and the social turns out to be spurious; racial groups rely on achieved characteristics, and ethnic groups rely on ascriptive features. Furthermore, racial characteristics are frequently conflated with both the national and the ethnic. These categorical distinctions also fail to make adequate sense of the historically contingent definitions and developments. The concept of peoplehood seeks to supersede these conceptual confusions by asserting unifying elements in the classification of humans. Thus, peoplehood is at once rooted in both the natural and the social.

The concept of peoplehood is fundamentally a modern phenomenon. In the premodern world, the major categories of social distinction were not racial, ethnic, or national; rather, status, religion, and locality (e.g., village, region) were the major modes of distinction and identification. For example, one identified as a peasant, a Christian, or a villager rather than as a White person or a French person. The classification of humans in terms of peoplehood arose in early modern Europe and spread to the rest of the world.