Ethnicity

Conceptual Overview

Ethnicity has been the subject of numerous debates and definitions in the past decades. The two extreme poles in defining the concept have been the essentialist and nonessentialist, or constructionist, positions. The essentialists emphasize the primordial aspect of ethnicity, in which the source of communality is to be found in the common cultural content and the shared history of the members of an ethnic group. The second group opts for a contextual and situational approach to ethnicity, in which the focus is on the construction of an imagined sameness and history in order to emphasize the markers of otherness situated in time and space.

The groundbreaking book of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, resulted in a shift toward a more nonessentialist approach to ethnicity within the social sciences. His emphasis on ethnic boundary instead of the “cultural stuff” that it encloses had a great impact on the perception of ethnicity as a dynamic construction of otherness rather than a focus on being the other. In Barth's analysis, individuals are not captured within their social and cultural settings, but are people who consciously pursue goals.

In this way, Barth offers an approach of ethnic and other social identities as somewhat fluid, situationally contingent, and contextual. Barth's focus on boundaries as a means of understanding group formation and dynamics could be compared with an influential theory in social psychology: social identity theory (SIT). Compared with Barth's emphasis on boundaries, SIT holds that individuals tend to classify themselves and others into social categories that have a significant effect on social interaction. The formation of social categories is a result of the comparisons made both inside and outside the group. In this sense, individuals' identity formation is approached from the group level and considered in opposition to the other (or rather “others”). The difference between Barth's approach and SIT is that whereas Barth emphasizes the relational and contextual aspect of ethnic formation, SIT focuses mainly on the self-definition of the group. However, Stella Nkomo and Taylor Cox observe a shift that took place at the beginning of the 1990s, when some SIT scholars started to choose the social construction approach in relation to the topic of diversity in organizations.

Coming back to the social sciences, the most recent approach with respect to ethnicity is to distance from the two mentioned extremes (essentialist and nonessentialist) and try to find a way in between: the third way. This means at the same time to accept that ethnicity has to do with certain shared patterns of culture or history, and yet to avoid considering these patterns as unchangeable and fixed essences. In this view, these shared patterns from the past are subject to change in time and in relation to a variety of locations and situations. As Stuart Hall puts it, as soon as an ethnic group lays claims to a shared past, the past undergoes transformation since the claim is situated in the present time and locality. In this way, ethnicity is both about being and becoming: being through the existence of certain cultural or historical markers of otherness, and becoming since these markers are constructed, and for that matter situated, in the present context.

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