Ethnic group
hideAn ethnic group is a group of humans whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or presumed.
Ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness and the recognition of common cultural, linguistic, religious, behavioural ,, as indicators of contrast to other groups.
Ethnicity is an important means through which people can identify themselves. According to "Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, politics, and reality", a conference organised by Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau (April 1–3, 1992), "Ethnicity is a fundamental factor in human life: it is a phenomenon inherent in human experience." However, many social scientists, like anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf, do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups. Processes that result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis. Members of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural continuities over time. Historians and cultural anthropologists have documented, however, that often many of the values, practices, and norms that imply continuity with the past are of relatively recent invention.
According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, until recently the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates. One is between "primordialism" and "instrumentalism". In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond. The instrumentalist approach, on the other hand, treats ethnicity primarily as an ad-hoc element of a political strategy, used as a resource for interest groups for achieving secondary goals such as, for instance, an increase in wealth, power or status. This debate is still an important point of reference in Political science, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.
The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism". Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented as old. Essentialists view such identities as ontological categories defining social actors, and not themselves the result of social action.
According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology, by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicised forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism in the Caribbean and South Asia.
For more information about Ethnic group, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
News tagged with ethnic groups
Ethnic pride may boost African-American teens' mental health
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Nov 13, 2009 |
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Most adolescents who belong to an ethnic minority group wrestle not only with their self-esteem (like most teens), but also with identity issues unique to their ethnic group, such as dealing with social stigma. A new study ...
Search results for ethnic groups
New study grapples with health effects of low-intensity warfare
8 hours ago |
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For nearly two decades, Ivy Pike, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, has been studying ethnic groups in rural northern Kenya to understand how violence shapes the health of those eking out ...
Chinese-American and Korean-American women at highest risk for diabetes in pregnancy
13 hours ago |
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More than 10 percent of women of Chinese and Korean heritage may be at risk for developing diabetes during pregnancy, according to a Kaiser Permanente study of 16,000 women in Hawaii that appears in the December issue of ...
'Fighting' IED attacks with SCARE technology
Technology / Computer Sciences
Dec 10, 2009 |
4.7 / 5 (3) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Maryland researchers have developed and successfully tested new computer software and computational techniques to analyze patterns of improvised explosive device (IED) attacks ...
Genetic ancestry highly correlated with ethnic and linguistic groups in Asia
Dec 10, 2009 |
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Several genome-wide studies of human genetic diversity have been conducted on European populations. Now, for the first time, these studies have been extended to 73 Southeast Asian (SEA) and East Asian (EA) populations.
Family's inherited condition links prion diseases, Alzheimer's
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Dec 09, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A laboratory connection between Alzheimer's disease and brain-wasting diseases such as the human form of mad cow disease has moved into the clinic for what is believed to be the first time, manifesting itself ...
Researchers identify barriers to HPV vaccination uptake in low-income populations
Dec 08, 2009 |
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Results of two separate studies show lower rates of HPV vaccination in low-income populations, and identify vaccination barriers and tailored interventions that may help to increase HPV vaccine uptake rates.
Mammography use among women younger than 40 years old differ between minority populations
Dec 08, 2009 |
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Breast cancer screening guidelines generally recommend mammography begin at age 40. However, based on prior national research, an estimated 34 percent of non-Hispanic black women, 30 percent of non-Hispanic white women and ...
Experts: Colon cancer deaths could make big drop
Dec 07, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Colon cancer deaths could drop dramatically in the next decade because of better screening and treatment, according to an optimistic new prediction by top researchers.
Susceptibility predicts smoking risk among Mexican-American youth
Dec 03, 2009 |
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Whether non-smoking Mexican-American adolescents go on to experiment with smoking depends largely on their initial attitude toward the habit, researchers at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the December issue of Cancer Ep ...
Rural America more prosperous than expected
Dec 02, 2009 |
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For many people "rural" is synonymous with low incomes, limited economic opportunity, and poor schools. However, a recent study at the University of Illinois found that much of rural America is actually prosperous, ...
List of search results for ethnic groups
