10 - Ethnicity and the boundary process in context

Summary

Ethnic categories are organisational vessels that may be given varying amounts and forms of content in different sociocultural systems. They may be of great relevance to behaviour but they need not be; they may provide all social life, or they may be relevant only in limited sectors of activity.

(Barth 1969b: 14)

Introduction

Various kinds of context are relevant to an anthropological discussion of ethnic boundary processes: the analytic context of custom and practice in the discipline; the practical context of popular and official discourse on population difference; and the social context in which ethnicity is expressed. This paper refers to all of them but treats only the last at length. It identifies a logic which extends the explanatory value of the approach illustrated by the quotation at the top of this page and reports the dimensions of context affecting ethnic relations in two inner London areas. The result is summarised in four linked propositions which suggest a general theory of boundary process and have important implications for practical policy.

For the purposes of this multi-disciplinary volume three background points may be useful. The first is that relative to other social scientists, anthropologists are seldom professionally concerned with vertical relations between ethnic groups and macro-state structures, and they rarely undertake studies of social stratification and minority status as such.