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The Temple of Ethnicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Crawford Young
Crawford Young
Affiliation:
Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison
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Extract

In this review essay, recent significant works on the subject of comparative ethnicity are situated in the broader context of cultural pluralism as an emergent interdisciplinary field. The reasons for the crystallization of cultural pluralism as a distinctive field of inquiry are explored. The rise of ethnic studies was obviously triggered by the growing saliency of communal conflict in all regions of the world. The low visibility of such cleavages in the early postwar years may be attributed to conjunctural factors. Important long-term trends include the broadening and deepening of patterns of social communication and competition through urbanization, expanding literacy, mass media, and population movements; these processes are apt to produce heightened communal consciousness and politicization of ethnic cleavages. The great expansion in the scope of state actions raises the stakes in issues of division of the national product and domination of the state apparatus. A large consensus has emerged in the literature as to the situational, contextual, and circumstantial nature of ethnicity. Within the comparative ethnicity literature, an important division has appeared between “instrumentalists,” who stress the pursuit of collective advantage, and “primordialists,” who focus upon the assumed givens of shared culture and the psychological properties of ethnic consciousness.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , July 1983 , pp. 652 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1983

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References

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28 For an extreme version of the instrumentalist position, see Patterson (fn. 16).

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30 Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar