What is obvious from this brief history of the term is the fact that ‘ethnicity’ contains a multiplicity of meanings. Such a plasticity and ambiguity of the concept allows for deep misunderstandings as well as political misuses.While the concept was solely confined to the academic world this was not such a big problem. However, once it acquired legislative and institutional underpinnings through formulations such as ‘ethnic minority’ or ‘ethnic group’ it has had much more devastating effects. Institutionalized and bureaucratized definitions of the concept, such as imposing the idea that a particular individual legally belongs to an ‘ethnic minority’ or to one ‘ethnic group’, is not only the strongest possible source of reification of (always dynamic) group and individual relations, but it also becomes a form of oppression by caging individuals into involuntary associations. In such a situation cultural difference, which is by its nature changeable, flexible and fuzzy, is arrested and codified, thus preventing social change. Hence popular and legislative understandings of ethnicity are severely erroneous.This error comes from a profoundly unsociological view of cultural difference as something immobile and definite. To clarify all these historical, geographical and contemporary misuses and misunderstandings one has to explain who exactly is an ‘ethnic’, and what ethnicity stands for in contemporary sociology. Since the classics of sociological thought, with the exception of Max Weber, did not operate with the term ‘ethnic’, sociologists had to turn to anthropology and, in particular, to the seminal work of Frederik Barth (1969) in order to explain the power of cultural difference, both historically and geographically. Before Barth, cultural difference was traditionally explained from the inside out – social groups possess different cultural characteristics which make them unique and distinct (common language, lifestyle, descent, religion, physical markers, history, eating habits, etc.). Culture was perceived as something relatively or firmly stable, persistent and exact. Cultural difference was understood in terms of a group’s property (i.e., to be French is to be in possession of a distinct culture to that of the English). Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries provided nothing short of a Copernican revolution in the study of ethnicity. Barth turned the traditional understanding of cultural difference on its head. He defined and explained ethnicity from the outside in: it is not the ‘possession’ of cultural characteristics that makes social groups distinct but rather it is the social interaction with other groups that makes that difference possible,visible and socially meaningful.In Barth’s own words: ‘the critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’.
Ethnicity in a Social Context: From Minority Perspective to Cultural Identity
