Exam 2 - Ch. 7 Flashcards
What is kinship
The culturally specific creation of relatives-only including a much larger group and extending further in space and time.
What is ethnicity
One of the most powerful identities that humans develop: it is a sense of connection to a group of people who we believe share a common history, culture, and (sometimes) ancestry and who are distinct from others outside the group.
Fredrik Barth (1969) Ethnicity
“social organization of cultural difference” - people construct a sense of ethnicity as they organize themselves in relation to others whom they perceive as either culturally similar/different
Jenkins (2008) Ethnicity
Seeks to understand how it is created and reinforced, how boundaries are constructed, how group identity is shaped, and how differences with others are perpetuated.
Origin Myths
A story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity. A way that ethnic identity is taught.
Ethnic Boundary Markers
Created and promoted in attempt to signify who is in a group/who is not. May include a collective name, shared cultural practices - food, clothing, and architecture, a belief in a common ancestors, association with a particular territory, a shared language/religion, and an imagination of shared physical characteristics.
Genocide
The deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group.
Ethnogenesis
When a new ethnic group may come into existence when part of an existing group splits off or two groups form a new one.
Situational Negotiation of Identity
An individual’s self identification with a particular group that can shift according to social location.
“From the Ganges to the Hudson” (1995) Johanna Lessinger
Explored the process by which a new Indian ethnic identify is created and publicly demonstrated through consumption, public festivals, and Indian immigrant media. Studied Indian ethnic identity in New York City. Little India - Jackson Heights, Queens.
“Ethnicity without Groups” (2004) Rogers Brubaker
Warns against “groupism” who studying ethnicity. Recognized that ethnicity is complicated, involving people with many perspectives, disagreements, and at times competing loyalties. Studied Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, and encourages paying attention to ethnic group-making projects.
Rwanda Genocide (1994)
In the East African Country of Rwanda. A horrific genocide involving two man groups, Hutu and Tutsi. Started with Belgian colonial government elevating Tutsi to the most influential positions in Rwandan society based on anatomy - using the flawed pseudoscience of eugenics
“Being Muslim the Bosnian Way” (1995) Tone Bringa
Began field work 1987, in diverse, Muslim Catholic village in central Bosnia. Saw significant change where Bringa village did not hate one another, to having every Muslim home be destroyed by Croat forces.
Ethnic Cleansing
Efforts of one ethnic or religious group to remove or destroy another in a particular geographic area.
Melting Pot
A metaphor used to describe the process of immigrant assimilation into the U.S dominate culture.
Assimilation
The process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups.
Multiculturalism
A pattern of ethnic relations in which new immigrants and their children enculturate into the dominant national culture and yet retain and ethnic culture.
State
An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory.
Nation-State
A political entity, located within a geography territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry and destiny as a people
Nation
A term once used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin, now used interchangeably with nation-state.
Nationalism
The desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain a nation-state
Imagined Community - Benedict Anderson (1983)
The invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlies identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never meet.
