Ethnicityetcetera:Social anthropological points of view

This article draws upon Barth and Geertz to offer a general anthropological model of ethnicity which emphasizes cultural differentiation constructed in the course of social interaction; which understands ethnicity as neither fixed nor unchanging; and which views ethnic identity as collective and individual, external and internal. Three main areas of anthropological debate are discussed: the primordiality versus instrumentality debate; the relationship between culture and nature; and the relationship between different levels of conceptualization such as the local, the national and the global. A number of difficulties in teaching about ethnicity from a specifically anthropological perpective are discussed. The closing section underlines the continuing importance of anthropology's constructionist point of view in challenging the essentialist common sense that ethnicity and ‘race’ are ‘natural’.