Ethnicity and Nation

IGCSE Global Perspectives

Ethnic group / Ethnicity

• A group that is set apart from others because of its national origin or distinctive cultural patterns.

• Ethnicity ‘refers to the cultural practices and outlooks of a given community of people that set them apart from others’.

• Ethnicity is a wholly social phenomenon, learned through processes of socialization and central to many in the formation of individual and social identities.

Nation

• A nation is a body of people who share a real or imagined common history, culture, language or ethnic origin.

• From the Latin nation (tribe, race), the term ‘nation’ is usually taken to mean a group of people united by culture, language, traditions and common interest.

Imagined communities

• Benedict Anderson argued that nations were "imagined communities" because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion", and traced their origins back to vernacular print journalism, which by its very nature was limited with linguistic zones and addressed a common audience.

Birth of the concept of “nation” during the French Revolution

• The concept of nation (both political and cultural) as we understand it today, i.e. as a basically political notion, emerges around the end of the 18th century and coincides with the end of the Ancien Régime.

• At the time, the first solid theoretical formulations of the nation occur and are applied in concrete political demands like the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

• The political nation, used in the domains of international law and politics is the political subjects which exerts the political sovereignty of a democratic state.

• The cultural nation is a sociological or ideological concept, which is more subjective and ambiguous in its meanings than the political nation.

The cultural nation can roughly be defined as a community of people with certain common cultural features, which are ethically or politically relevant to them.

National identity

• A national identity is a form of imaginative identification with the nation as expressed through symbols and discourses.

• Thus, nations are not only political formations but also systems of cultural representation whereby national identity is continually re-produced through discursive action.

Defining nation

• The first requirement for the definition is that the characteristics should be shared—a group of people with nothing in common cannot be a nation.

• Because they are shared, the national population also has a degree of uniformity and homogeneity.

• And finally, at least some of the characteristics must be exclusive—to distinguish the nation from neighbouring nations.

Various theories on ethnicity have been developed since the beginning of the twentieth century.

• Primordial or perennial definitionCommon descentCommon languageCommon cultureCommon history

• Definition by social constructionismVoluntary definitions (will)Nations as imagined or invented