Ethnicity, Nationalism Flashcards
Ethnicity
- A social classification based on a common cultural heritage and selected cultural features such as language, religion, or dress
- Concept emerges from historical processes that incorporate distinct social groups into a single political structure under conditions of inequality
E.g. Fulbe identity in Northern Cameroon; Rwandan genocide - Ethnicity can be fluid, malleable, ignored, or acknowledged in different situations
Example of Fulbe identity
Fulbe identity in Guider as something that could be claimed even if not born into it, by:
Learning language
Practice religion (Islam)
Practice way of life (high culture of western Sudan)
Nationality
Nationality is a sense of identification with and loyalty to a nation-state; membership, defined by citizenship, in a geopolitical sovereign state
Nation
Groups of people believed to share the same history, culture, language, and even the same physical substance
Nation-state
An ideal political unit in which national identity and political territory coincide
Nationalism
Government’s attempts to instill a sense of nationality into the citizens of a state
Nationalism
- Sometimes groups resist attempts at ‘nation-building’
They present a different kind of identity that persists within the boundaries of the nation-state
E.g. Quebec sovereignty movement, Parti Quebecois - To try to limit this, nationalist ideologies will often incorporate some aspects of subordinate cultural groups
E.g. French and English as official languages - Sometimes there is disagreement over what kind of ‘nation’ people are trying to build
Example of post-colonial Fiji, and continued strife between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians
Nationalism in Australia
- Founded by the British as penal (exile) colony, then settler colony
- Land claimed as terra nullius
- Australian identity founded on racial and and cultural features of British colonists
- Ignored the existence of Aboriginal peoples
- Significant gain with Mabo court decision in 1992
- Similar to gain won by Aboriginal people in Canada in 2014 Supreme court decision
Nationalism in Ukraine
- April 26, 1986 nuclear reactor explosion in Ukraine
Chernobyl as key to the foundation of Ukraine as nation-state - Revised idea of citizenship – from a kind of ‘natural’ category based on birth to a kind of negotiated category Petryna calls biological citizenship, where citizenship is mediated by science and technology
- So the damaged biology of population became grounds for social membership and basis for citizenship claims and claims for compensation