What do sociologists mean by ethnicity

Retrieved 24 Feb. Skip to main content. Race and Ethnicity. Search for:. Ethnicity Brief An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with one another through a common cultural heritage. Key Takeaways An ethnicity is a socially constructed category, the traits and parameters of which can change depending on the prevailing social and political context.

A situational ethnicity is an ethnic identity that is particular to a social setting or context. The various approaches to understanding ethnicity include primordialism, essentialism , perennialism, constructivism, modernism and instrumentalism. Schermerhorn, , What, then, is ethnicity? It is a synthetic term which refers to the fusion of many traits or components that belong to the nature of any ethnic group; thus ethnicity is a composite of shared values, beliefs, norms, tastes, consciousness of kind within the group, shared in-group memories and loyalties, certain structured relationships within the group, and a trend toward continuity by preferential endogamy.

Singer, , n. The other half, however, is that all of the traits of ethnicity can also vary together; and that there is a threat, real or perceived, to the unity or survival of the group, the salience of all variables will go up concurrently. This would lower the necessity to stress the singular, intimate or exclusive properties of the group. If these suppositions are correct, then both ethnicity and its components are relative to time and place…Assuming that ethnicity varies and changes its nature with alternations in social structures and the climate of opinion, this would mean that to understand it properly requires, inter alia , an enquiry belonging to the sociology of knowledge.

My analysis today rests on an assumption about conditions in the United States between the turn of the century and our own year of While the Civil War or the War Between the States was the turning point of the nineteenth century in our nation, the black revolt is the critical juncture of the twentieth; it is an interesting but probably not significant coincidence that both these decisive events came in the sixties approximately a hundred years apart.

Thus he mentions examples where societies cross certain thresholds of social conditions that precipitate qualitative differences affecting the entire field of human activity. As he puts it:. In the case of societies, soil erosion, increase in population density in limited agricultural areas, and erosion of ideologies or systems of legitimation are examples of continuous processes which may lead to discontinuous thresholds.

On the other hand, discontinuous processes, certain one-shot events profoundly change the subsequent parameters of a social system. Boulding, , Such a threshold or turning point in the on-going life of a society is like a sluice gate for social alternatives and simultaneously does three things: it shuts off some alternatives altogether, narrows other alternatives to smaller compass, and opens up new ones.

To put it in the language of athletics, it opens up a whole new ball game. But unlike the athletic metaphor the social conjuncture often changes the rules at the same time. I cannot do justice to the contrast between B.

The B. In the A. During the B. Small wonder, then, that they became known as nationality groups in distinction from other minorities like the Afro-Americans, Mexican Americans, Indians or even the Jews whose nationalistic identification with Israel was a delayed reaction.

However, in the A. Pluralistic competitive politics helped create the first label while Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm X gave currency to the second. Another striking contrast separates B. In the former, the dominant ideology was assimilationism. Popular opinion showed tolerance for European immigrants only when they were willing to give up their language and foreign customs; self-effacement was the price of acceptance. The same outlook captured the attitude of Negro leaders who opted for integration as their long-term goal—this being just one variant of assimilationism.

Hardly anyone in the B. However, in our A. Minorities of every kind are now resonating to the claims of the right to be different, authenticity, independence, autonomy, self-determination and self-sufficiency. What was less obvious at the time, though more visible to us today, is that European immigrants were losing much of their culture at the time when blacks were gaining much of theirs during the B.

Those arriving from Europe had, in each national group, a distinctive ethos on arrival—an ethos gradually lost to the extent that assimilation took hold and a substitute culture tended to replace it. Afro-Americans, on the other hand, forcibly separated from family and friends by their captors, arrived as atomized individuals without cultural ties to reinforce their need for survival.

At first they were nothing but a social category without group consciousness or social bonds. But subject to the same fate, as they were, they could not help but react in concert—in the slave revolts, the underground railroad, the clustering into religious groupings, the migrations to cities, the sharing of sentiments in music—in these and many other ways they were gradually forming an ethos of their own. Singer, , In the B. Anything short of that uniform goal would obviously be deficient, unfinished and incomplete.

Myrdal, , 11, Today in the A. But in our A. When we turn to politics we find a parallel contrast. Early arrivals like the Irish took precedence and late comers had to fight their way in. At any rate ethnicity for the voter simplified his choice where issues were complicated or took second place. Recognition politics became the norm, with the development of the balanced slate. Reichley, , With the coming of the New Deal, however, the fulcrum of power shifted to the Federal center and the last 30 to 40 years of the B.

In the meanwhile the black ethnics, flooding the cities as late-comers found their political gains retarded as both their votes and their leaders were coopted by party machines that gave major rewards to others. Paradoxically, however, the blacks thorugh a civil rights organization had brought pressure to bear in Washington even while weak at the municipal level, and through numerous Supreme Court decisions, established legal norms that would result in major gains at all local centers, provided they were enforced.

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