h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've started this conversation in Ask, but I'm getting the sensation of going in circles as I have been all evening so I'm cross-positing this into the Forum for a wider discussion hopefully.

F19585?thread=6074109

I'd appreciate it it if you'd read the relatively small amount of backlog (up to post 11) which is when Xanatic repeated an earlier point and conceded that the definitions of all the major terms were 'not well defined' it's not Xanatic's response I'm concerned with, I'm still trying to answer my own question, which is:

What do 'ethnicity' or 'ethnic origin' actually define ( in terms of or distinct from) ideas of culture, race, religion, and nationality?

The running assumption seems to be ethnicity is a combination of some or all of those but that's about as far as we got.

Will the forum do better?

Clive

I have always thought that ethnicity was a particularly distasteful word, that related to history.

If I was born in Ausralia, and raised in Australia then by rights I should be Australian - however I might have a large appreciation of Irish culture from my parents, with a bit of Scots from my grandfather.

What's my ethnicity - White British ? Because my parents were born there ? White Australian ?

Now change the countries to India and England - ethnicity is a way of asking where did you come from.

yes, and importantly (at least in official circles) ethnicity is a self identification. So it is something which is subjectively self labelled and as such effectively removes any validity to any supposed definition or criteria.

And that little thought on the subject comes just as I have completed an update script for our database to make the key distinction on ethnicity between 'Not Known' and 'Refused'. 'Refused' meaning they were asked but declined, whereas 'Not Known' means we didn't ask which is naughty. Apparently.

BTW Clive, I quite like the idea 'cross-positing', think I'll have to nick that

Yeah I'm interested in that aspect too.

I've got responses in the ask thread that ethnicity is just a PC for saying 'racial', 'cultural' or 'religious' background, but my feeling is it's more complex than that, but nailing down a definition it seems is eluding most and the consensus thus far in the other thread is that it's something like or composed of culture (and this is relevant especially immigrants)

I've enjoyed SWLs responces so far the most as they seem to be engaging with my problem at the same kind of level, and I agree with them so far that it seems ethnic differences are somewhat trivial, so it's interesting that you also frame it Mckay as distasteful.

Hi Ictoan,

Yeah I'm picking up the self-identification theme too, which like you say makes it subjective not objective, which explains the difficulty in finding the operating assumption about what *it* is (as distinct from the list of other kinds of categories I've already listed, to which one might also add linguistics.)

Well now that Mckay has put it like that, I suppose it does look a bit distasteful. As in, asking a non-white person "where do you come from?" and then, when they reply "Basingstoke", asking again "but what ethnicity are you?". It does kind of imply that they don't belong.

and conversly that is exactly how some self-identifiers use it.
E.g British Asian - says my nationality/citizenship is British but I ain't from round here (originally).

Although I think in that specific case although the official category of 'British Asian' might be used to define along genetic origins (in which case why not label us all 'African') but which has been taken by various communities as a self identifier of their community social and cultural values rather than their genetic makeup (although still strongly tied to it).

As a matter of interest I just this moment re-registered as an organ donor. I had a card ages ago but now in the era of the internet it's a web-based directory.

And guess what I had to enter in - my ethnicity.

Helpfully it had an FAQ attached called "why do we need to know" and I though this might prove informative.

------------


'Why do you need to know my ethnic origin?'

Donated organs are a precious resource and it is vital that each organ is given to the most suitable recipient and that each patient, in so far as is possible, is provided with equal access to available organs.

Organs are matched by blood group and tissue type. The better the match, the greater the chance of a successful outcome. Transplants are more likely to be successful when the donor and patient are from the same ethnic group, because they are likely to be a better match.

A few people with rare tissue types will only be able to accept an organ from someone of the same ethnic origin, so it is important that we have donors from all ethnic groups. Collecting and analysing this information will help us to monitor whether any particular groups are under-represented on the register and to tailor our campaign to reach such groups.

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The interest bits from the pint of view of this discussion is, forget all the stuff about nationality, culture, religion and language etc., ethnic groups are in this instance separated by blood group and tissue type so ultimately genetic makeup.


I also noted down what the ethic groups, as delineated by the NHS donor list are:


White - British
White - Irish
White - Other

Mixed White and Black - Caribbean
Mixed White and Black - African
Mixed White and Black - Asian
Mixed White and Black - Other

Asian or British Asian - Indian
Asian or British Asian - Pakistani
Asian or British Asian - Bangladeshi
Asian or British Asian - Other

Black or Black British - Caribbean
Black or Black British - African
Black or Black British - Other

Other - Chinese
Other - Other

Not stated.


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This gets curiouser and curiouser....

Incidentally I self-identified as white-british, although my family roots on my father's side are Irish.

<>

that is racial not ethnic....

are there no mixed race chinese/black, white or asian...oh sorry china is in asia


what about white russians from east of the urals are they not asian

So a case of 'ethnic' masquerading as 'racial'. How interesting.

Ethnicity is a way of heritage and does not relate soley to place nor is it totally about skin colour.

I have two main strands to my ethnic heritage, we all have the same origin dont we! My ethnic origin is mostly White British, but people largely see me as Black Carribean. So far so confusing.

I call myself black because in the hopeless and meaningless muddle of social intercourse about this subject its the one most people are ready to accept and able to understand without a five minute lecture using maps and other teaching aids.

Contrary to popular belief it is not asking: "where you are from"? For that people use the question "where are you *really* from"?

If they have any sense and if they arent happy with the answer they tend to simply ask it again if they abadon all sense and dont know how to ask the question they really want to ask they ask the same question with a different facial expression.

Im from Birmingham but people are always asking me where Im really from like anyone would want to pretend their from Brum? (alaways, meaning when Im far away from home)

Ethnic monitoring of various things a much better measure of how services are being usedof jobs being given out etc..etc...You could for instance employ lots of white British people while assiduously denying jobs to anyone you thought was of Irish extraction, as has happened in the not too distant past. Let properties to lots of Asian people but leave people whose parents came to England from India out in the cold.

So broadly Ethnicity is linked to culture and place so someone whose family has been in the US for generations can still be ethnically Russian-Jewish despite their nationality being Australian by naturalisation.

PS. Race does not exist it is a total falsehood put about by racists who unfortunately are real.

one love

I'll digest what you've said a bit more soberly and thoughtfully in a moment Blicky I just wanted to note down a few of my initial reactions.


1.) Ethical heritage. That's a new phrase, which supposes that what ethnicity is some sort of property can be inherited. I'm not taking you to task for that phrasing, it just it's the first tiem I've heard it used and was wondering if that's what you meant.

2.) Good point about Irish discrimination.

3.) Race does not exist.

Hmmm... I once said as much in my teacher training course (wherin some of my musing about this topic started) and was trying to say race was not important but began saying race doesn't exist and was taken to task for it.

I think I've arrived at a more reasonable position and it's this:

I was reading about palaeontology and discovered a recent move in taxonomy (the identifying and classifying of organisms) called Cladistics.

Cladistics is the hierarchical classification of species based on evolutionary ancestry. Cladistics is distinguished from other taxonomic systems because it focuses on evolution rather than similarities between species, and because it places heavy emphasis on objective, quantitative analysis.

Because evolutionary ancestry is privileged in this view, the point made above by Ictoan, about ('we are all Africans') is actually rather profound. Our evolutionary history as a species to common ancestors and the presence of genetic bottlenecks (the near extinction of the species) can explain the pattern of diversity in genetics and evolution seen in humans today. So, for example, melanin production in skin of humans in equatorial regions versus northern hemisphere is a evolutionary adaptation conveyed via genetic heritage (to return to my earlier point) and is what distinguishes black and white skin colours.

The point I'm making is that what are traditionally scene as racial features (hair, skin colour, eye shape) are just genetic quirks and it's not as if these are strictly delineated by vary gradually across populations. I guess but I think not without reason that the sheer fact of the matter of sexual reproduction amongst humans, and especially given the history of invasion, colonialism and enslavement that marks our recent past that the notion of pure races is nonsense.

The existence of continental land masses and oceans means that the actual homogeneity of genetic variables among the human global population will have large gaps between them (hence the differences between the Japanese, and the Indonesian and those on the other side of the Pacific Rim in Peru, and the converse holds were the geographical boundaries have not kept populations isolated, hence why some people can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to when the Vikings invaded Britain.

So I think race does exist but it's at the level of genetic variation amongst the global population of our shared species and race is probably akin to sub-species, i.e able to reproduce but with markedly different genetic heritage.

But - and this is vital - it's only socially significant because it's treated as such; people discriminate because they think race matters, when I suspect they largely misunderstand what race is and hold probably cruder and more brutal stereotypes which are transmitted from the cultural norms they partake in, so racism is cultural but race is genetic.


And with this rather lengthy pre-amble in place I can kind of see why the Organ donors would screen by racial type, because of the genetics involved in match like-for-like donors, the population distribution of blood types etc.


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What still puzzles me is, if that's the case, why call it ethnicity?


Clive. <---still thinking.


P.S Did I say I'd make that a brief response?

Sorry for taxing your brain but "Ethical Heritage" was just a really, even by my low standards, really bad typo.

Agree entirely of why the weaker form of race does exist but calling it by that name gives coinage to a word that in some peoples minds signifies the stronger and nasty meaning of the word with its baggae of separateness and different qualities beyond distribution of adipose cells, blood types and such like.

Race in the way that the Tolkein or Hitler liked to use is a fantasy.

I've had breif search on different dictionary sites to see if any do but none give any clue to where the word comes from or why it has come into fashion.

I like it more race in either sense that race can be used because ethnicity is meant to invoke the idea that people choose who they are it is about what they do and not just the genetic information or where someone was born.

Now that's interesting.

So you don't think 'race' as a word can be rehabilitated?

In a quite different context I was discussing how reason should operate upon our opinions and when given a better and more convincing reason allow us to abandon previously held beliefs. The example I chose to illustrate this pint was termed by a researcher Giford as "a case for rational racism" meaning that racism doesn't work like that and peoples irrational fear of 'the other' isn't easily swayed by appeals to "the distribution of adipose cells and the like".

I do like to think though, that if such a thing as rational racism exits, that the ideas of cladistics, and the kind of analysis I outlined above (which you called " the weaker form of 'race' ") is the antidote to such a thing as rational racism and can rehabilitate it's meaning by demonstrating actually just how insignificant racial differences are in the grand scheme of biology.

I started out thinking race was not - or more correctly -ought not to be considered important; I'm pleased to say I now think I have a good reason to back up my earlier intuition.

As it applies to my quest to understand "ethnicity", in the list of categories I gave earlier (culture, language, nationality, religion and race) and because of the view I've just outlined, I'm deliberately not treating 'race' as a big part of 'ethnicity'. I think it is popularly understood that 'ethnicity' and 'race' are conflate-able, and I think that is a mistake; I also think they do frequently conflate them (see organ donor form from earlier.) However, relying as I am (again) on intuition and in search of reason, I'm trying to pin down what ethnicity is. I do not think it's the same as 'race', which in the view I'm building is not an important or informative category in which to place people.

And it's all of this (what was called in only the second post on the ask thread: "big analysis") that's brought me to try to pick apart what ethnicity is describing about someone.

re: Race; origins:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race

""people of common descent," c.1500, from M.Fr. razza "race, breed, lineage," "

but also

"Modern meaning of "one of the great divisions of mankind based on physical peculiarities" is from 1774 (though even among anthropologists there never has been an accepted classification of these). "

quite an interesting entry actually, to see how the word meaning and use has changed slightly.

Race in terms of racism essentially comes from the pre-evolution religious mindset where god created the various different races. I'm not saying it is inextrivably linked with religion, but certainly at the time of its coinage that was the leading intellectual environment and informed a lot of theories, including this one.

Now Ethnic is very interesting too:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ethnic
"Sense of "peculiar to a race or nation" is 1851, return to the word's original meaning; that of "different cultural groups" is 1935; and that of "racial, cultural or national minority group" is Amer.Eng. 1945"

although read the entry as there is more to it than that. Goes back to the 14th C apparently.

Etymology online was one of the first places I visited.

I think the key point here is that it is the post-evolution mindset: it is that that's really kicked my own thoughts about this into high gear and although it's still perfectly true to say there is no agreement among physical and cultural anthropologists, it's been my reading about cladistics opposing traditional taxonomy of observed features that's settled and greatly informed my intellectual approach to this.

Take the subtitle to Darwin's seminal text "On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life." which doesn;t mention man's lineage practically at all, the operative meaning of race in the modern understanding of that title is the genetic variance in the population without discrete boundaries (of animals) which applied to our own context of the evolutionary lineage of humanity is all that race is not 'the great divisions of mankind' circa 1774.

Regarding ethnicity, this is also where I start getting confused.

It seems to me the etymological root of 'ethnic' is connotes with ideas of 'nation', 'people' and 'kind' - of which only 'nation' in the sense of nationality is comprehensible.

The biblical 'kind' having no precise meaning; and 'people' is too close to populous and population which, whilst meaning a body of people doesn't accurately describe anything about them and in my opinion gets to far away from what ethnicity is purported to describe.

So nationality seems preferable but is itself subject to it's own set of problems for example does nationality (and hence ethnic grouping or origin) belong to nationalities with a state. Jewish diaspora esp. Germany circa 1940 and Turkish / Iraqi Kurds are possible examples where it isn't clear if nationality and ethnic group is clearly equal. Interestingly the 1851 definition switches back to culture and sets up the vacillation between whatever ethnicity is in the the contemporary era being something intrinsic or something adopted or inherited, culminating I think, based on the discussion so far on a peculiar kind of individualism rooted in self-identification. However, I'm finding as I prod and poke at this that, self -identification is so subjective as to have no actual meaning.

So this what prompts my query about whether ethnicity is being used as a sort of super- category which contains elements selected from culture, nationality, race, religion, language etc, but describes nothing other than those things. In which case, what purpose does ethnicity serve? SWL suggested it's more precise than crude ideas of race - and that may well be be what underlies it's modern usage as a catch-all for multiple meanings in that it is tailored to mean whatever is intended.

Just to take one example of the guy I shared dinner the other night, a British, Kashmiri-Sikh who (regrettably) supports Pakistan in the cricket, indicentally his caste in the Indian socal system is high

Which element of those categories is comprised in his ethnicity? Is it his British nationality, his Indian origin, his Asian race, his religion or his affiliation with neither India or Britain in supporting Pakistan (arguably that's a cultural value).

I don't see how the nationality or the culture, or the religion or the race of this lovely guy describe anything other than what they nominally describe and I don't see which of those amount to describing his ethnic group. Now he might self-identify his ethnic group as 'Kashimiri-Sikh', for example, hyphenating a region ( a sub division of nationality, I suppose) with his religion.
But since religion is not something inherent to a person anyone in principle could chose to adhere to take up the Sikh for of worship and regionality it seems to me is a fluctuating as nationality can be (if for example the disputed region of Kashmir was resolved in Pakistan's favour would he described himself as a pakistani-kashmiri-sikh, or would his ethnic group remain defiantly, Indian-Kashmiri-Sikh.)

So I struggle to see region as more informative than nationality is and, one further point if ethnicity is a combining category of self-selected descriptive categories, could he not just as well describe his ethnic minority status as: "British - Pakistani cricket supporters" if these culture and nationality are equal in the composition of ethnicity.


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I'm throwing these questions out just to try and test what 'ethnicity' is and I want to add Ictoan's post was helpful in it points out precisely the lack of clear distinction in the etymological history of these words. Although they are in a sense clearly defined, the definitions themselves don't to me seem to be categorically and definitively applied.

I think there are clearly two uses here.
There's the official use which essentially is skin colour/genetic extraction based. What do you look like and what is your genetic history.

The other is the self identifying as mentioned previously.

However, if we look at the way in which the word came about it is clearly about division. It is used as a woolly catch all for the traits or attributes of an individual which we believe sets them apart from other loosly couple definitions.

In other words it is a labelled container into which we can slot either ourselves or others so we can define them as different, but not unknown. We can look at a person of a different ancestry than ourselves and see they look different. And quite often those who look suitably different are likely to have come from a different culture simply because we are a tribil species and we all like to do things different ways. Those tribal groups have not, historically, interbred that much thus the lines of cultural difference have become equated to the lines of genetic (or superficial) difference.

Such distinctions have been required in the past due to lack of understanding of what it all actually means and of how much genetic variance there is within the human population (not a lot as it happens). The concept of race is required for the various ideas of racial superiority and inferiority that have taken hold throughout history. They may have no grounding in reality but you can see how 'they look different, they act different' can quite easily become 'they are different'. And since the genetic/appaerance based differences coincide with cultural differences the two get conflated. I think most now see culture as something which is no innate or essential to a person due to their physical attributes - but this was not always the case. A Chinese person behaved like someone from China because the only Chinese people that were known came from China and thus had Chinese cultural attributes and behaviours. Hence why old definitions could use region and nationality in them to define a physical type.

I suppose in a way you could think of it as looking at someone and saying 'you are different to me' and defining that as a cultural and genetic base. Whereas the whole problem is the initial assumption - you are *not* different to me. We are both humans but with slightly different genetic makeup. I think that misunderstanding or false assumption is the source of the problem because there is essentially no difference. Skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, culture all these can be different between us, but they do not make you a seperate biological type to me.

>>The [...] problem is the initial assumption - you are *not* different to me. We are both humans but with slightly different genetic makeup. I think that misunderstanding or false assumption is the source of the problem because there is essentially no difference. Skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, culture all these can be different between us, but they do not make you a seperate biological type to me. <<

Exactly!

So what function does a word like ethnicity (or race) serving as a category of difference still have, once you realise this?

I'm wondering how official and beuarocratic usage can be different (and meaningful) in the sense that skin colour / genetic extraction amounts to a physical description up to and including the biological makeup of a person (or biometrics which are already among us) which an average physical anthropologist would probably recognise whilst simultaneously not applying ideas of race of ethnic group.

In the 'Ask' thread the tendency of bureaucracies to employ ethnicity and to conflate it with race was characterised as an excess of political correctness when what it is, it seems to me to be, is exceedingly inaccurate. (indeed I think racism errs on both fronts as well not just being offensive and discriminatory but offensive to reason on the matter of accuracy.)

I mentioned previously my stepping stones along this train of thought were reading The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (particularly the grasshopper's tale wherin the 'race' of a species of grasshopper are discussed much in the same terms as you Ictoan said: Those tribal groups have not, historically, interbred - it's not that these grasshoppers can;t interbreed but that they choose not to, hence the spread of the modest genetic differences, or race, which is akin to a kind of development of a sub-species.) Later came the PGCE discussion about race legislation where I tried and failed to defend my already much weakened ideas of what race was - and recently my reading about cladistics which I've repeatedly tried to describe - and with the job interview looming on Sodit approaching have completed this trajectory I've been following.

The behavioural mandate is the job description by the was is that I demonstrate a respect for race and diversity - I can certainly respect diversity and I think I've probably demonstrated more thoughtfulness than most would about what respecting these categories actually entails, however I left wondering or not I do respect race anymore because as a category of difference it has become increasingly meaningless. Do I pay it the utmost respect by being indifferent to it?

I can hardly make mention of this in the interview (I can just see how a long treatise on race, reason and evolution would go down ) and, if asked the kind of answer I'd give is ethnicity is this the different groups people assign to themselves but privately this conversation has really helped me to being sorting out my own mind about this.

"Do I pay it the utmost respect by being indifferent to it?"
No. You pay the utmost respect *to the person* by being indifferent to it initially. If it is a big issue to the person and something they want to say about themselves and be known as then by all means accept that into your model of the person and react accordingly.

And that i think is where the so called PC bandwagon has gone wrong. There seems to be an idea that we should respect the social and cultural differences and that that should be the prime factor in dealing with someone who looks or acts differently to us. I think this is also wrong. What we should respect is the person. If you do that then acceptance or tolerance of differences will come naturally.

But it isn't even acceptance really. By which I mean that I think all of a person's attributes should be dealt with equally - height, weight, skin colour, general body plan, eye colour, hair type etc etc. They are all essentially of the same character - minor physical differences.

I'm sure i read somewhere that categories below 'species' are not really used or a proper part of the taxonomical system (I'm talking conventional taxonomy not cladistics) and that 'race' was approximately the same as sub species.

But even that doesn;t work because our species is Homo Sapiens and the sub species (which again we all are) is homo sapiens sapiens. So any division into asian/caucasian etc is lower than sub-species/race.

p.s. I'm sure I've got something in there worded wrong so please forgive me if any of it comes across wrong