SOCI 230 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Primordialism, Collective Action, Visible Minority
3 May 2018
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Lecture 8: Ethnicity Boundaries and Identities (continued)
January 30th, 2018
! 2 fixed perspectives on the nature of ethnicity & ethnic identities
•!Spectrum where at one end
•!FIXED:
o!Primordialism
o!Primary basis of a group membership
o!Ethnic identity is something you inherit
•!FLUID:
o!Circumstantialism
o!Thinks of identities as something that’s fluid
o!Importance and salience will vary
o!Ethnic identity is something quite fluid, it’s salient, and changes over time depending
on the circumstances people find themselves in
! Primordialist perspective
•!Ethnic identities are primary (i.e., basic) form of social identity
o!Most salient
o!The framework thinks of ethnic identities as something that’s very basic
o!The most fundamental way that people think about themselves is on ethnic bases
•!Identities and group ties are fixed
o!It’s determined by the unchangeable circumstances of birth
o!Basic to human life
o!Circumstances of birth
•!Ties deeply embedded in human psyche & relationships
o!Early-in-life socialization
•!Because these ties themselves were forged at a very stage in an individual’s life – very little
capacity to question their ethnic group membership so they accept it as something that’s
given or natural = this is what we mean by primordial
! Weakness of primordialism perspective
•!Ethnic identities are not the most basic/important for some individuals
o!People with weak ethnic identities
o!This particular theory wouldn’t necessarily account for people who attach little
significance to their ethnic groups
•!Can’t account for change
o!Changes within individuals over the course of their lives
o!Maybe during adolescence ethnic identities may be quite salient, and maybe as they
grow up, they start to question these identities and this notion of belonging, and then
maybe because they find themselves in a more academic environment, the student
status might be more important to them…
o!Cannot account for these individuals change in the way people self-identify over their
life course
o!Attachments across life-course
Document Summary
Strength of primordialism perspective: puzzle: why are ethnic ties so powerful? o answer: fundamental need for small-scale, face-to-face communities of meaningful interaction. Here, the primordialists think about ethnicity the same way with globalization. With modernization, the old ways we"d think of group belonging based on kinship and on irrational relationships, and yet, we have these affiliations and loyalties to particular ethnic groups based on shared blood, kinship . The primordialists would say that the importance of ethnic ties would diminish with the emergence of modernization. This didn"t happen and ethnic ties are still very important. You feel like you have a shared sisterhood/brotherhood o collective action & individual emotional attachment. These attachments tend to be much more long-lasting and deeper than other attachment (this is what the primordialists argue) o engender deep & lasting sense of connectedness. Becomes the case when groups have to compete for scarce resources.
