Identity and Conflict: A Comparative Study of Language in Ethnic Conflict in Europe and Eurasia | This innovative study of language and identity in of linguistic diversity in the European Union in which language conflict is.
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Communicating to the Public: Contacts Where and when? Research Present projects Eye-tracking the news: How comment civility affects news shareability on social media research leader. Networks Rethinking Regional Studies: Far-right Eurosceptic discourses and citizen engagement research leader The Individual in Mass Dictatorships research leader. About the research I am a political scientist in the field of European Studies with an interest for democracy, political communication, and political identity.
Publications Books 1 Dutceac Segesten, A. Myth, Identity, and Conflict: Editorships 2 Dutceac Segesten, A. Centre for European Studies, Lund university. Articles 5 Bossetta, M. Political participation on Facebook during Brexit: Does user engagement on media pages stimulate engagement with campaigns?.
Journal of Language and Politics, 17, John Benjamins Publishing Company. A typology of political participation online: How citizens used Twitter to mobilize during the British general elections.
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Information Communication and Society, 20, The Eurosceptic Europeanization of public spheres: The State of an Emergent Field. Globalization and Ethnic Conflict: Beyond the Liberal — Nationalist Distinction. Participation Beyond the National?. Social Media and European Politics pp. Memory Studies in Motion: Reflections on two new research trends in the field. In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe pp.
National identity
Centre of European Studies at Lund University. External full text New window Dutceac Segesten, A. The Post-Communist Afterlife of Dissidents: The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema pp. Nationalism in Romanian Textbooks: Cultural Transformations After Communism: According to Eriksen , these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology , by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicised forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups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. Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolise power and status.
This was contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then called "race". Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth , whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the s and s. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification.
Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups. In , anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:.
In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e. He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.
According to Paul James , formations of identity were often changed and distorted by colonization, but identities are not made out of nothing:.
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Sometimes these contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and positive. Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have a mercurial character. Different approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a factor in human life and society. Hall observes, World War II was a turning point in the ethnic studies.
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The consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentianlist interpretations of ethnic groups and race. Ethnic groups came to be defined as social rather than as biological entities. Their coherence was attributed to shared myths, descent, kinship, a common place of origin, language, religion, customs and national character.
So, ethnic groups are conceived as mutable rather than stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than written in the genes. Examples of various approaches are: Ethnicity is an important means by which people may identify with a larger group. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf , do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. Members of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural continuities over time, although historians and cultural anthropologists have documented that many of the values, practices, and norms that imply continuity with the past are of relatively recent invention.
Ethnic groups differ from other social groups, such as subcultures , interest groups or social classes , because they emerge and change over historical periods centuries in a process known as ethnogenesis, a period of several generations of endogamy resulting in common ancestry which is then sometimes cast in terms of a mythological narrative of a founding figure ; ethnic identity is reinforced by reference to "boundary markers" - characteristics said to be unique to the group which set it apart from other groups.
Ethnicity theory says that race is a social category and is but one of several factors in determining ethnicity. Some other criteria include: Park in the s. This theory was preceded by over a century where biological essentialism was the dominant paradigm on race. Biological essentialism is the belief that white European races are biologically superior and other non-white races are inherently inferior.
This view arose as a way to justify slavery of Africans and genocide of the Native Americans in a society which was supposedly founded on freedom for all. This was a notion that developed slowly and came to be a preoccupation of scientists, theologians, and the public. Religious institutions asked questions about whether there had been multiple genesis's polygenesis and whether God had created lesser races of men. Many of the foremost scientists of the time took up idea of racial difference. They would inadvertently find that white Europeans were superior.
One method that was used was the measurement of cranial capacity. Ethnicity theory was based on the assimilation model. Park outlined his four steps to assimilation: Instead of explaining the marginalized status of people of color in the United States with an inherent biological inferiority, he instead said that it was a failure to assimilate into American culture that held people back.
They could be equal as long as they dropped their culture which was deficient compared to white culture. Michael Omi and Howard Winant 's theory of racial formation directly confronts both ethnicity theory's premises and practices. They argue in Racial Formation in the United States that ethnicity theory was exclusively based on the immigration patterns of a white ethnic population and did not account for the unique experiences of non-whites in this country. Or they must be stubbornly resisting dominant norms because they did not want to fit in. Omi and Winant's critique of ethnicity theory explains how looking towards a cultural defect for the source of inequality ignores the "concrete sociopolitical dynamics within which racial phenomena operate in the U.
In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner [48] and Benedict Anderson [49] see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the 17th century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided or ideally coincided with state boundaries.
Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation , developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the 19th century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation in their own nation-state.
Multi-ethnic states can be the result of two opposite events, either the recent creation of state borders at variance with traditional tribal territories, or the recent immigration of ethnic minorities into a former nation state. Examples for the first case are found throughout Africa , where countries created during decolonisation inherited arbitrary colonial borders, but also in European countries such as Belgium or United Kingdom.
Examples for the second case are countries such as Germany or the Netherlands , which were ethnically homogeneous when they attained statehood but have received significant immigration during the second half of the 20th century.
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States such as the United Kingdom , France and Switzerland comprised distinct ethnic groups from their formation and have likewise experienced substantial immigration, resulting in what has been termed " multicultural " societies especially in large cities. The states of the New World were multi-ethnic from the onset, as they were formed as colonies imposed on existing indigenous populations. In recent decades feminist scholars most notably Nira Yuval-Davis [52] have drawn attention to the fundamental ways in which women participate in the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national categories.
Though these categories are usually discussed as belonging to the public, political sphere, they are upheld within the private, family sphere to a great extent. Race and ethnicity are considered as [ by whom? Ethnicity is used as a matter of cultural identity of a group, often based on shared ancestry, language and cultural traditions, while race is applied as a pseudoscientific grouping, based on physical similarities within groups. Race is a more controversial subject than ethnicity, due to common political use of the term. It is assumed [ by whom?
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Before Weber , race and ethnicity were primarily seen as two aspects of the same thing. Around and before, the essentialist primordialist understanding of ethnicity predominated: Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of 'ethnic groups'.
In anthropologist David Craig Griffith summed up forty years of ethnographic research, arguing that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways that people from different parts of the world have been incorporated into a global economy:. The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial" and "ethnic" distinctions.
Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values.
According to Wolf, racial categories were constructed and incorporated during the period of European mercantile expansion , and ethnic groupings during the period of capitalist expansion. Writing in about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States , Wallman noted that. The term 'ethnic' popularly connotes '[race]' in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, '[race]' most commonly means color, and 'ethnics' are the descendants of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries.
In effect there are no 'ethnics'; there are only 'ethnic relations'. Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and actions by the state or its constituents. In the 20th century, people began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two ways.
According to this view, the state should not acknowledge ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka , argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural construct.
According to this view, states must recognize ethnic identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of ethnic groups can be accommodated within the boundaries of the nation-state. The 19th century saw the development of the political ideology of ethnic nationalism , when the concept of race was tied to nationalism , first by German theorists including Johann Gottfried von Herder.
Instances of societies focusing on ethnic ties, arguably to the exclusion of history or historical context, have resulted in the justification of nationalist goals. Two periods frequently cited as examples of this are the 19th century consolidation and expansion of the German Empire and the 20th century Nazi Germany. Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were only acquiring lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans.
The history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of the former USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts. Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to between them, as in other regions of the world.
Thus, the conflicts are often misleadingly labelled and characterized as civil wars when they are inter-ethnic conflicts in a multi-ethnic state. Ethnic groups in Africa number in the hundreds, each generally having its own language or dialect of a language and culture.
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Many ethnic groups and nations of Africa qualify, although some groups are of a size larger than a tribal society. These mostly originate with the Sahelian kingdoms of the medieval period, such as that of the Akan , deriving from Bonoman 11th century then the Kingdom of Ashanti 17th century. There is an abundance of ethnic groups throughout Asia , with adaptations to the climate zones of Asia, which can be Arctic, subarctic, temperate, subtropical or tropical.
The ethnic groups have adapted to mountains, deserts, grasslands, and forests. On the coasts of Asia, the ethnic groups have adopted various methods of harvest and transport. The colonization of Asia was largely ended in the 20th century, with national drives for independence and self-determination across the continent. Europe has a large number of ethnic groups; Pan and Pfeil count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities within every state they inhabit although they may form local regional majorities within a sub-national entity.
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A number of European countries, including France , [64] and Switzerland do not collect information on the ethnicity of their resident population. The largest group are the Tatars 3. Many of the smaller groups are found in the Asian part of Russia see Indigenous peoples of Siberia. An example of a largely nomadic ethnic group in Europe is the Roma , pejoratively known as Gypsies. They originated from India and speak the Romani language.
Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of , s. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Ethnicity disambiguation. It is not to be confused with the academic journal. Before the s, the Korowai people of Papua were an uncontacted people. Their population numbers no more than 3, Archaeological Biological Cultural Linguistic Social.
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