Ethnicity

While “ethnicity”—and especially the adjective “ethnic”—have become two of the most frequently used English words of the last quarter century, there is still much confusion about their precise meaning, particularly in reference to social science definitions. This confusion may exist because ethnos—the ancient Greek term from which ethnicity derives—originally simply meant “people” or “nation,” broadly understood as referring to a human population sharing a common ancestry, language, heritage, and lifestyle, and recognizing their group membership on the basis of these criteria. Currently, however, the term ethnicity is usually correlated either to exotic tribal people or minority-majority relations, often involving problematic diversity issues.

The complex factors leading to this shift underlie the substantially different definitions of ethnicity still being debated among social scientists, which emerged from the same historical processes that also gave birth to the modern social sciences now studying ethnicity. These social sciences include psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science, and these processes involve European colonialism, on the one hand, and the social, political, and economic changes triggered by “modernization” on the other.

Western colonialism's date of birth is usually correlated to Christopher Columbus's “discovery” of the New World in 1492, a date also ushering in the period during which the foundations of European modernity became established, through the application of the new perspectives on art, science, religion, and economic and sociopolitical organizations that made the Renaissance a major turning point in the history of Western civilization. Throughout this period the English term ethnic was used rarely, and mainly to refer to “heathen” populations, not belonging to the Christian community of nations. As colonial expansion intensified contacts with a broad range of non-European populations, and as scientific advances led to a revision of traditional views about the Earth and its inhabitants, the concept of ethnicity was supplanted by that of race, which applied biology to human diversity (relating it to “inherited traits”), organized it hierarchically (on the basis of Eurocentric assumptions of superiority), and justified Western colonial imperialism because of its “civilizing mission.”