Although the term ‘ethnicity’ has its roots in the Greek term ethnos/ethnikos, which was commonly used to describe pagans, that is non-Hellenic and, later, non-Jewish (Gentile) or non-Christian, second-class peoples, its academic and popular use is fairly modern.
Sociologically speaking, the term was coined by D. Riesman in 1953 and it gained wider use only during the 1960s and 1970s. However, from its inception ethnicity has remained a ‘hot potato’ of sociology. Although the term was coined to make sense of a specific form of cultural difference, it acquired a rather different set of meanings. While the Anglo-American tradition adopted ‘ethnicity’ mostly as a substitute for minority groups within a larger society of the nation-state, the European tradition regularly opted to use ethnicity as a synonym for nationhood defined historically by descent or territory. At the same time both traditions shared a joint aim to replace what had become a popular, but heavily compromised (due to the Nazi experiment), concept of ‘race’. Nevertheless, popular discourses, in both Europe and North America, have ‘racialized’ the concept of ethnicity, that is ‘race’ was largely preserved (in its quasi-biological sense) and has only now been used interchangeably with ‘ethnicity’.
Furthermore, the collapse of the colonial world in the 1950s and 1960s has brought even more confusion on questions of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity. The homelands of former European colonizers have become populated with new, post-colonial immigrants, who are visibly different. Following the consolidation of North American popular and legislative discourse these groups have also become defined as ‘ethnic’, thus simultaneously preserving old definitions of historical ethnicity by descent or territory (i.e., Welsh, Flamans,Walloons, etc.) while adding the new definition of ethnicity as an immigrant minority (i.e., Pakistani,West Indian, Sri Lankan, etc.). The fall of communism and the break up of the Soviet-style federations along ‘ethnic’ lines and the emergence of ‘ethnic cleansing’ policies in the Balkans and Caucasus have further complicated these definitional issues.
With the wars on former Yugoslav soil, extensive and influential mass media coverage of ‘ethnic conflict’ has seen the term ‘ethnic’ degenerate into a synonym for tribal, primitive, barbaric and backward. Finally, the ever-increasing influx of asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants to Western Europe,North America and Australia,who do not necessarily express visible or significant physical, cultural or religious differences to their hosts, together with their uncertain legal status (i.e., waiting for a decision on asylum), has relegated the term ‘ethnic’ to a quasi-legislative domain. In this context, the term ‘ethnicity’ often refers again to non citizens who inhabit ‘our land’, just as it did in the days of ancient Greece and Judea; that is, to second-class peoples.
Kurdish Music the Identity of an Ethnic Culture
