ETHNICITY THE SOCIOLOGY OF SINISA MALESEVIC

Ethnicity as a Political Resource

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019

Global Missiology English, 2010

3 Eller moves in this direction when he writes: Ethnicity is a social and psychological process whereby individuals come to identify and affiliate with a group and some aspect(s) of its culture; ethnicity is what emerges when a person, as affiliated, completes the statement: "I am a ____ because I share ____ with my group." Ethnicity is consciousness of difference and the subjective salience of that difference. It is also mobilization around differencea camaraderie with or preference for socially-similar others (Jack David Eller, "Ethnicity, Culture And "The Past"," Michigan Quarterly Review 36.4 (Fall 1997): 552). 4 Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 12. Marcus Banks, who holds a constructivist view of ethnicity, writes: "although I am forced to use terms such as 'group', 'population' and even 'ethnic group' on occasion I am wary of the sociological reductionism involved. I do not think that ethnicity is simply a quality of groups, and for the most part I tend to treat it as an analytical tool, devised and used by academics." Marcus Banks, Ethnicity:

The Egyptian World

Ethnicity, 3: 202-13, 1976

In this paper I propose a new formulation of the concept of ethnic group that permits the recognition of such groups as having a ‘primordial’ quality, that of descent which is given by birth, while also taking their specific form as the consequence of the structure of exchanges of marriage, of goods and services, and of messages between groups. In my attempt to formulate a new social science concept for considering ethnic groups, I have found it valuable to turn to ideas drawn from a non-Western as well those from a Western intellectual tradition. Implied in this effort is a call for a less ethnocentric social science.

Since its beginnings in the Chicago school, migration research has assumed that distinguishing between various immigrant communities and autochthons is the obvious starting point for understanding ethnicity. I show that this implies a Herderian perspective on the world which naturalizes its division into a series of distinct "peoples". Three major analytical and empirical problems of this approach are discussed, on the basis of comparative anthropological research. A more promising approach is the boundary-making perspective that looks at the dynamics of the emergence and transformation of ethnic groups. Seen from this perspective, "assimilation" and "integration" appear as reversible, power-driven processes of boundary shifting, rather than the result of overcoming cultural difference and social distance. The last section discusses four research designs that are most adequate for future work along these lines. They take territories, individuals, social classes, institutional fields or event chains instead of ethnic communities as units of analysis and observation.

2009