SOCI 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Bantu Peoples In South Africa, Trans-Cultural Diffusion, Canadian Identity
3 May 2018
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Lecture 7: Ethnicity Boundaries and Identities
January 25th, 2018
! Persistence of ethnicity
•!Ethnicity vs. race
•!Weber:
o!Ethnicity = umbrella concept – master category. Within that, you can have ethnic
membership on the basis of characteristics like religion, language, and race
o!We can also think of it as ethnicity/race as well too if for the ethnic group, one of
their marker of membership is race
•!Ex: African Americans are a distinctive ethnic group of the black racial category – within the
black category in the US, you have many black ethnic groups
•!Weber tried to understand why do ethnic distinctions survive
•!Barth, like Weber, sees ethnic groups as a socially constructed form of organization who
forms a distinctive process.
o!He wasn’t necessarily interested in why ethnic forms; he was more interested in why
are there differences/different ethnic entities and why do they continue to exist and
survive?
! Why do ethnic distinctions survive?
•!At that time, the prevailing thought among intellectuals was that with the onset of
globalization and modernization, ethnic identity/distinctive and the meaning and important of
ethnic group membership would disappear
•! They believed so because with globalization you have increase and intense interethnic
contact between members of different groups – often times they will exchange and share
cultural artifacts like dress, customs, rituals, and so on
•!These kinds of cultural manifestations of ethnic groups would cease to be uniquely identified
with a particular ethnic group because they were shared with other populations
o!Ex: music – reggae was seen as Jamaican music. But with the globalization, you can
find reggae throughout the world
•!It’s that kind of cultural diffusion that led a lot of the scholars to thin that with this intense
contact sharing of cultural practices, ethnicity will not matter
•!We do see that some cultural practices indeed declined over time, and some disappeared.
Yet, ethnic group membership continues to be very important, and it continues to be the basis
for collective life
•!Interethnic interaction (via globalization) was supposed to end salience of ethnicity
•!Traditional dress, customs, and rituals ~ products for tourism, mass consumption
•!Some cultural practices declined, others disappeared altogether
•!But ethnic membership remains important; ethnic group still basis for collective life
! Ethnic content vs. ethnic boundaries
•!Ethnic groups defined by their boundaries, not content
o!Boundaries ~ socially constructed criteria of group membership
o!Boundaries social, not physical/territorial
o!Groups not islands
o!Identity maintenance
•!Barth argued if we really want to understand why these ethnic distinctions remain intact, we
have to look at the boundaries of these ethnic groups and not necessarily the cultural content
that is associated to particular ethnic groups. He says that ethnic groups are not necessarily
defined by the cultural artifacts produced, but what makes them distinctiveness is their
boundaries. These boundaries are defined as socially constructed criteria of group
membership.
•!Since these boundaries are social, they don’t necessarily map and correspond to physical or
territorial boundaries (although in some ethnic groups they can be), and some of these
boundaries/criteria for group membership could include some cultural artifacts or products
that we associate with being a part of a particular ethnic groups (such as language)
•!The idea here is that it’s a configuration of different criteria
o!For one ethnic group, they may have 2 or 3 boundaries that they use to define who is
an outsider and who is an insider, and other groups might have 20 boundaries that
matter for them
•!What is unique about contemporary ethnic groups is that most do not live in geographically
confined or isolated territory – they will have to get into contact with other groups especially
during trades
•!The purpose of those boundaries that determine group membership, is to help maintain ethnic
distinctiveness in the face of interethnic contact. The boundaries help to first identify and
define who’s an insider and an outsider, and secondly, it helps to regulate the types of social
interactions that are and aren't allowed between members of ethnic groups
! Boundary vs. content
•!One way to think about ethnic boundaries is to think of the group being represented by types
of vessels
•!Example: shopping cart
o!The features/shape of the shopping cart will differ
o!Features of the cart = boundaries
"!Some are shared (4 wheels), and some features are different (metal vs.
plastic)
o!Each cart has also different configurations of features that makes different shapes,
and the content that goes into these carts may or may not overlap
"!Content = culture
"!Some culture elements that overlap across the 2 ethnic groups, and some do
not
o!You can even have what we call boundary crossing, because these 2 groups share
something in common (4 wheels), members of one group can move into another
group because of this shared boundary but you can see that the movement back and
forth between these 2 groups may not necessarily dissolve the differences altogether
because there may be other things that are different
! The dynamics of intergroup relations
•!Intergroup contact requires some common ‘rules of engagement’
o!“Congruence of codes and values” (Barth 1969 :16)
•!Structuring of interaction
o!Allowed: trade (economic realm)
