Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Ethnicity, nationalism, and minority rights: charting the disciplinary debates
- Part I Ethnicity and ethnic groups
- 2 Ethnicities and multiculturalisms: politics of boundaries
- 3 Ethnicity without groups
- 4 Ethnicity, class, and the 1999 Mauritian riots
- 5 Black nationalism and African American ethnicity: the case of Afrocentrism as civil religion
- Part II The state and minority claims
- Part III New directions
- Index
- References
3 - Ethnicity without groups
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Ethnicity, nationalism, and minority rights: charting the disciplinary debates
- Part I Ethnicity and ethnic groups
- 2 Ethnicities and multiculturalisms: politics of boundaries
- 3 Ethnicity without groups
- 4 Ethnicity, class, and the 1999 Mauritian riots
- 5 Black nationalism and African American ethnicity: the case of Afrocentrism as civil religion
- Part II The state and minority claims
- Part III New directions
- Index
- References
Summary
Common sense groupism
Few social science concepts would seem as basic, even indispensable, as that of group. In disciplinary terms, “group” would appear to be a core concept for sociology, political science, anthropology, demography, and social psychology. In substantive terms, it would seem to be fundamental to the study of political mobilization, cultural identity, economic interests, social class, status groups, collective action, kinship, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, multiculturalism, and minorities of every kind.
Yet despite this seeming centrality, the concept “group” has remained curiously unscrutinized in recent years. There is, to be sure, a substantial social psychological literature addressing the concept (Hamilton et al. 1998; McGrath 1984), but this has had little resonance outside that sub-discipline. Elsewhere in the social sciences, the recent literature addressing the concept “group” is sparse, especially by comparison with the immense literature on such concepts as class, identity, gender, ethnicity, or multiculturalism – topics in which the concept “group” is implicated, yet seldom analyzed its own terms. “Group” functions as a seemingly unproblematic, taken-for-granted concept, apparently in no need of particular scrutiny or explication. As a result, we tend to take for granted not only the concept “group,” but also “groups” – the putative things-in-the-world to which the concept refers.
My aim in this chapter is not to enter into conceptual or definitional casuistry about the concept of group.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Minority Rights , pp. 50 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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