Revision summary
Ethnicity is a made we-group; Barth emphasised boundaries. Salience grows with migration, elections, media, and honour-resource claims. Primordial feeling and elite organisation both operate. Weberian closure organises labour markets that Marx hoped class would unify. Indian region, caste, language, and lockdown streams illustrate.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Ethnicity is a we-group of putative common origin, culture, or language, made in interaction. Fredrik Barth stressed boundaries, not a museum of traits. The contemporary world has not melted these boundaries. Migration, democracy, and global markets have made ethnicity more politically salient.
Body
Why salience grows
- Globalisation moves people and goods while threatening local honour. Ethnicity becomes a portable identity, as Giddens’s late-modern self seeks a firm we.
- The nation-state promises civic equality and often delivers ranked citizenship. Ethnic mobilisation is a claim to recognition and resources.
- Clifford Geertz’s primordial attachments still matter in kinship and ritual. Paul Brass and instrumentalists show elites organising those attachments for party and job.
- Durkheimian effervescence in festivals and rallies turns a category into a crowd.
Forms
- Language, region, caste-as-ethnicity, tribe, and religion-as-ethnicity overlap in India.
- Diasporas and labour migrants carry ethnicity into new cities. Lockdown reverse migration also sent ethnic-regional streams home together.
- New media scale insult and solidarity faster than the old neighbourhood.
Against the old script
- Marx expected class to overtake status. Ethnic closure, in Weber’s sense, often organises the labour market instead.
- Parsons’s universalism under-predicted ethnic parties and reservations politics.
- Dependency and world-system inequalities give ethnic peripheries a material grievance, not only a song.
Risks and uses
- Salience can protect minorities and languages. It can also become exclusionary nationalism and urban riot.
- Policy that only sees class misses who is hired on the site; policy that only sees ethnicity misses class inside the group.
Explanation stated
- Salience grows because modernity multiplies contact, inequality, and political arenas in which origin-groups can be named and funded.
- It is constructed and consequential, not a return of the tribe unchanged.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD MOD[Migration democracy media] --> SAL[Growing salience] BND[Barth boundaries] --> ETH[Ethnicity] RES[Resources honour jobs] --> SAL ETH[ETH] --> SAL[SAL] CLASS[Class] --> MIX[Intertwined not replaced]
Conclusion
Ethnicity is more salient because boundaries are politically useful in markets, migrations, and elections. Barth, Weber, Geertz, and Brass explain how groups are made and mobilised. Indian language, caste, and regional streams, including lockdown returns, are living cases. Class does not replace ethnicity; the two organise each other.
Quick related
Students also ask
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How did the intellectual forces lead to the emergence of sociology ?Discuss.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q1(a)). View answer →
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Is ethnicity the same as race?
Related as ascribed we-groups. Race often biologises hierarchy; ethnicity often stresses culture and origin. In practice they intertwine.
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Does urban life dissolve ethnicity?
It can thin everyday mixing and still thicken voting, marriage, and hiring by origin.
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