Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The intellectual history of the term ‘ethnicity’ is relatively short: prior to the 1970s there was little mention of it in anthropological literature and textbooks contained no definitions of the term (Despres 1975:188; Cohen 1978:380). Since the mid-1970s the concept has acquired strategic significance within anthropological theory partly as a response to the changing †postcolonial geopolitics and the rise of ethnic minorities activism in many industrial states.
The shift has resulted in a proliferation of theories of ethnicity, explaining such diverse phenomena as social and political change, *identity formation, social conflict, *race relations, nation-building, assimilation etc.
There are three competing approaches to the understanding of ethnicity. They could be roughly categorized as primordialist, instrumentalist and constructivist. Roughly speaking, primordialist theories assert that ethnic identification is based on deep, ‘primordial’ attachments to a group or culture; instrumentalist approaches treat ethnicity as a political instrument exploited by leaders and others in pragmatic pursuit of their own interests; and constructivist approaches emphasize the contingency and fluidity of ethnic identity, treating it as something which is made in specific social and historical contexts, rather than (as in primordialist arguments) treating it as a ‘given’.
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