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

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


That's my question, I'll try to set out my thinking below.


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My problem starts when I try to figure out what each of these things are and mean since they all seem to be pretty fluid, nebulous and mutable:

Cultures I think of as the acceptence and transmission and transformation of shared values. I've discussed this and I'm fairly happy with this definition as I can see how it relates to popular culture as well as traditional culture, sub and counter cultures as well as familial hierarchy and social mores and morals etc. And it is well documented that all of these things are not fixed.

Nationality is historical happenstance, I was given examples a while back of Iraqi Kurds, German Jews (circa 1940) or more recently Georgians or is it Russians) my point is we delude ourselves if we think our own prolonged nationality is immutable.

Religion: When you have Chinese Christians and British Muslims or Brazilian Zoatrians or West-Lothian 7th Day Adventists, seems to me to not be a fundamental characteristic in that it tells you something about what makes that person unique, although their beliefs can be fundamental to them and fundamentalist in nature which tells you lots about their beliefs, but not about *them* religion is something quite distinct from culture (which permits of plurality of religion - a shared value of difference - as as ignoring apostasy)

Finally race: I cannot shake the feeling that race is something which made sense a thousands years ago (The Saxons before The Angles invaded for example) but doesn't have much relevance today other than in relatively minor and superficial genetic variation concerning, skin pigmentation, eye shape, hair follicles of bone structure. Although race is seen as significant socially I can't satisfactorily make sense of it's significance, when in terms of cladistics in biology, the strictly intelligible and useful characteristic is evolution. Because all humans are one species and the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory with molecular genetics, it is no longer a trivial point to see humanity in terms of genetic similarities in populations and variance in groups, with race severely demoted in taxonomical significance and relegated to 19th century classification when terms like 'Mongoloid' and notably 'Caucasian' were coined.


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I'm researching a job with security aspects and it is stressed respect for ethnic minorities is vital, so I'm doing some research and the Home Office and counter-terrorism websites offer what I can best describe as confusing definitions.

eg - page 6, glossary of definitions
http://security.homeoffice.gov.uk/news-publications/publication-search/guidance-disasters/faith-communities?view=Binary

This seems to place ethnicity within the broader 'social culture' (which is a mix of shared, transmitted and transforming values) and is distinguished from religion but places ethnicity seemingly within self-identified origin based on inward perception. Is ethnicity really 'how you perceive yourself in relation to others?' However it commits the far greater crime of while simultaneously trying to define 'ethnicity' using phrases: "Ethnic origin", "Ethnic minority" and ethnic group" as part of the definition of what 'ethnic' is.

Seeking some sanity I turned to the OED which defines 'ethnic' as some sort of 'sub-group' or 'sub-culture' within common national and cultural traditions (thus making it an aspect of culture or nationality, I presume.)

I often look to etymology to help me work out what words mean so
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ethnic
which provides a sense of people living together (so presumably ethic groups cannot be disparate), nationality (but what is that other than a fluid concept eg Georgian or Russian? Kurd or Turk? and if ethnicity is a part of nationality - which part? How is it construed?
finally summing up ethnicity as 'peculiar to race or nation' (which?) before returning to "different cultural groups" which accords with the OED but seems to me to be stating the obvious since culture permits of sub-cultures. So by this rationale an ethnic group is just a sub-culture in much the same was as there are Goths as Emos then?

This has been preying on my mind for a while, since I was completing my PGCE and respect for races came up then and I did in vain fail to convince anyone that these were to me seemingly very unclear definitions (when challenged to name a race, I received a nationality and a religion in reply and was eventually told that race was equivalent to ethnic, which I'm pretty sure it isn't -but which brings me back to my question, what is 'ethnic' if not culture, religion, nationality, or race? or what part does it take within these defintions?

Also It's being driven by the (fairly recent) realisation that I am in fact a 2nd generation immigrant (my family are Irish by extraction - dad is 1st generation making me 2nd.)
Not that this is terribly important to me, but it does make the framing of these questions differently contextual since may people are 2nd generation immigrants and will not feel as Anglicised as I do for reasons ranging from lack of assimilation or racism (which it seems to me isn't a reaction against race per se but a pre-conceived notion of race which is subjectively powerful but objectively meaningless.

For what it's worth: I think of my nationality as British, my religion as none so culturally that puts me in, what, post-enlightenment, European. I'm probably, at a complete guess: anglo-celtic if I had to name a race, since my mother is English but my father's family is Irish as is my surname. Genetically as far as the cladists will be concerned, I'll be pretty much identical to all of you so as far a race or ethnicity are intermingled I cannot tell and don't have a good definition or understanding of how these categories apply to me personally.

So having failed to understand myself in these terms I'm really struggling to work out based on the information that's out there what ethnic is and therefore how one is respectful of ethnicity.

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So, to repeat my quandry:

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


Ask H2G2 - it's over to you.....



Clive.

If it says ethnic on a job application, it essentially just mean non-white people. You could start trying to do some big analysis on it like you have, but in this case that seems be what they really mean.

In this case, it really doesn't matter what the dictionary definition is, it's what people perceive 'race' and 'ethnicity' to mean and how the terms are popularly understood.

Either term is a signifier of 'other'. I would disagree that it would necessarily mean non-white as the UK has seen a significant influx of Poles, Romanians, Slavs etc in the last few years; all of whom are regarded as having different ethnic origins.

In many ways and to many people 'ethnic' is the polite, politically correct way of saying 'race'.

It's not the application, it's part of the behaviours and roles I'm expected to perform. which I researching ahead of my interview.

The actual phrasing if you are interested is:


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"Respect for Race and Diversity:

Understand other people's view and take them into account. Is tactful and diplomatic when dealing with people, treating them with dignity and respect at all times. Understands and is sensitive to social, cultural and racial differences."

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Under the command of 'understanding' I went to research counter-terrorism online (the job is related to this) and was directed to documents such as the one from the home office I linked to which was one example of where the confusion about what terms like race, culture and ethnicity was prominent.

I appreciate I may be over-intellectualising this, but this is something I've been thinking about in truth for a while and this is just the latest thing which prompted me to ask the question.

Yes saying non-white was too simple a version. Non-WASP would probably be a better description.

Ethnicity just refers to a persons religious, cultural and racial background. They´re asking you to keep these differences in mind when dealing with people. I don´t know what kind of job it is, but for example that you realize you can´t expect a middle eastern woman walking through customs to take off her headscarf or even talk to her without her husband present.

I agree SWL, I don't think this is indicative of non-whiteness as Xanatic proposed, because as as you point out with I think correctly, Poles, Romanians and other European UK immigrants are white but considered to have different ethnic origins. I thought of another category by the way which is linguistic, the Germanic languages and the Slavic languages are quite different, extending to their derivatives, but there's nothing apart from time and effort learning Polish for example - does make me ethnically polish. I don't reckon it would so is language part of ethnicity or not - just another aspect of this question.

Really that just brings me back to my question, what is about Poles, Romanians or Slavs which is ethnic?

I think you're onto something about how ethic is popularly used and possibly popularly misunderstood, that's certainly an impression I got when I was challenging my PGCE group to name a race and I got a lot of nonsense back which was about neither races nor ethnicity, but I'm struck by this suggestion that ethnic is just what is perceived both about "the other" and inwardly about one's self or one's associates.

It seems a very subjective notion, which may be okay but is that what ethnicity really is - subjective?

I just can't nail this down in my own mind what this means - and you seem to be saying that ethic is just what other people think, so presumably it has the same status as an opinion, say, about the weather or politics.

But that doesn't strike me as correct either....


Back to thinking....

The word ethnicity has a proper meaning. Saying someone is ethnic however is just a meaningless term.

Thanks Xanatic

>>Ethnicity just refers to a persons religious, cultural and racial background<<

This precisely what I'm try to explore and satisfy myself with.

If that's so, can I say ethnicity is nothing other than those things or is not anything over and above them. Put another way, a person's ethnicity can be described purely in terms of religious affiliation, cultural practices (headscarfs, marriages, death rituals etc) and race - whatever that means - which I'm not precisely clear about either.

That´s essentially what ethnicity means. Look at Charlize Theron and Nelson Mandela. Both South Africans, but of different ethnicities.

let me clear about that, sorry I'm not trying to describe a person as "ethnic", if that's the sen I conferred that was an error.

I meant since it applies in words like 'ethnicity', 'ethnic group', 'ethnic origin', I was trying to get a greater understanding about what is is that "ethnic" refers to.


Ethnicity since you mentioned it in the OED is the fact or state of belonging to to a social group with common national or cultural tradition.

which extends the confusion I think becase it's saying "ethnic" is a fact or a state of being, not a perception, so it must refer to some 'thing' by that defintion and it identifies culture and nationality.

So can, for example, ethnicity be used to describe Kurds who have no nation-state (do you even need a state to be a nation or are you still a nation when in a diaspora? ) and if it is relate to culture the OED makes this link with tradition, when culture itself is a mix of tradition and change, so when cultures change - as they so evidently do - does ethnicity decrease and increase accordingly.

Taken SWL' point that the dictionary isn't the best place to discern the answer to my question I just want to point out saying ethnicity has a proper meaning doesn't get me very far since everywhere I've looked for an answer the definitions seem to go in circles.

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What you say about Charlize Theron and Nelson Mandela is interesting.

See I'd argue they share a nationality but let's just suppose for argument's sake that they shared a religion and maybe even had the same friends.

I tried making this point earleir about cladistics (I've been reading up about biology - actually paleontology, but the biology is what it is before it's paleotonology if you see what I mean) and it had quite abig impact on my views about race in that it's hard to see what importance race has in terms of distinguishing people when they are far and away more similar than they are different, and their differences largely genetic.

Charlize has a different set of chromosomes to Nelson, His gene for skin pigmentation is different but they are more alike than they are different.

So I'm cognitively trying to discount race as something that distinguishes us, and think it's much healthier outlook to see humanity in all it's variations as just one species.

Now I set up a pretty false framework there because Charlize and Nelson probably don't have the same social backgrounds or religion.

But that Home Office document makes a clear distinction between seeing culture and religion as identical (since there's no reason why Charlize and Nelson couldn't both be Christian, for example) it's not an intrinsic feature of ethnicity.

So that just leaves social background as the place where ethnicity lies, which is yet again another different definition social background doesn't speak to nationality but possibly to culture.

But I've been arguing all through this that cultural practices are reflections of 'what is valued' even coached as tradition or rebellion, this speaks to a set of values, and tradition, sub and counter cultures can conflict about the prestige and preference for those values.

So I'm left with ethnicity is just culture which if that's true why not just absorb it into culture and abandon ethnicity as empty referent?

Essentially ethnicity refers to a persons cultural, religious and racial background. The problem you have is because neither of those three are well defined either. It all boils down to how much difference does there need to be between things before they are considered two distinct things. Genetically speaking apples and oranges have more in common than they have different. Same goes for humans and bananas.

or to take it a stage further, ossibly into absurdity - which I want to avoid but is rendering ethnicity as a facet of culture like making an equivilancy between an "ethnic minority" the same as being "a jazz lover"

I can propose somewhat that since ethncity can be rendered as part of culture can I take that defintion and apply it to something else, like a taste in music?

That would be a state of being (belief and perception and a fact about a person) relating to a cultural tradition, not reflecting the majority, possibly deeply personal, with historical roots and which which one self-identifies with other jazz lovers.

Hoping I'm being and not

but I struggle to see ethnicity purely in terms of culture.

>>Essentially ethnicity refers to a persons cultural, religious and racial background. The problem you have is because neither of those three are well defined either.<<

I know!!!

That's where this all started.

So summing up that point: Ethnicity is an amalgam of those (ill-defined) things not a thing in it's own right?

That´s a way of putting it.

Coming at this from a different angle:

Ethnicity is important because it is more precise than 'race'. For example, a Pakistani and an Indian could be said to be the same 'race'. However, their background, culture and outlook on life could be fundamentally different. The Pakistani is likely to be Muslim, The Indian is likely to be Hindu.

Taking things further, the Pakistani could be Punjabi or Pashtun. The Pashtun is more accurately Eastern Iranian, coming from the rural & tribal lands near Iran & Afghanistan. The Punjabi comes from the fertile plains near India. Pashtuns & Punjabis speak different languages. Pashtuns are more tribal and monocultural whilst Punjabis are more educated and multicultural. A Pashtun is more likely to be religiously conservative than a Punjabi.

So, ethnicity helps define the individual far more accurately than crude racial descriptors.

Where it is important in your job, assuming it's some kind of border control position (big assumption, sorry), if you were told to expect a group of Asians, you would be faced with a multitude of possibilities. However, if you were told to expect a group of Punjabis, you would mentally 'dial up' the appropriate tools to deal with them.

I don't know if that makes any sense or is any use to you

That is useful thanks.

The job is working for the police not border security, but I take the point.

I see what you mean about ethnicity as you've framed it as being more 'precise' than race - that is interesting - correct me if I'm wrong but that does rather confirms, does it not, the sort of example that Xanatic gave where ethnicity is the combination of other characteristics.

The example of Punjabi and Pashtun is well put, I think it's interesting that idea of 'regionality' within 'nationality'

I'm now wondering if that applies more generally.

Can the same be said of Glaswegians and or 'North' and 'South' in the UK?

And as I write that - another thought occurs, which is this: if ethnicity is defined by broader regions (within nationalities wherein cultural differences are practised) does that trend diminish as society becomes becomes more heterogeneous? So for example availability of electricity and the ability to maintain constant cold has allowed cities to develop far away from agricultural plains, because food can be preserved at distance; commuting to economic centres is more common than it was a century and a half ago because of the ability to move mass population over distance at speed.

It brings me back to a question I asked before but didn't appreciate the full implication of of; does ethnicity trend in line with the heterogeneousness of the wider culture? So, does India - a fast developing economy but still with areas where the disparity between developed and undeveloped is significant. True there are regions of poverty within developed societies but that's different from what I mean which is to compare what you said about tribal regions and fertile plains.

Is ethnicity as apparent in a UK context (among non-immigrants) as it is in the `Punjabi / Pashtun' example?

And relating to immigrants, that Punjabi / Pashtun example is relevant because the 'ethnicity' (sic regionality') travels with them and is expressed in cultural terms (of shared values).

Personally (and my previous post notwithstanding), I feel that ethnicity is overstated. So long as people are treated with dignity & respect, ethnicity is quite irrelevant. It's something that only becomes important in a negative sense.

How can I put it?

Being Scottish is important to me, but it doesn't define me. Were I to be in London or New York, Delhi or Johannesburg, I wouldn't expect to be treated any differently simply because I was Scottish. However, if I were to be treated negatively and I perceived this to be because I was Scottish, I would take great offence. So my ethnicity is something I can slip on or off like a coat.

Going back to the Asian example in a British context, it is unlikely that a Pashtun would be offended if I talked directly to his wife. But if he were to get the idea that I was deliberately not talking to his wife in order to appease what I think is the proper thing to do, he may well be offended.

The crux of the matter is that immigrants from different countries and cultures expect things to be different in the UK. They are not stupid and they are no different from you or I in that respect. We have (minor) problems in this country because well-meaning people with nothing but book knowledge go out of their way to give undue importance to what are really trivial differences.

Another example (sorry). At an awards dinner last year, the company I worked for were giving out small prizes for sales targets being hit. Most people got an M&S voucher or a filofax or somesuch. I got a bottle of whisky and a haggis. "We know how much you like your drams and your haggis". Well, I don't drink whisky and I'm never going to eat a whole 2lb haggis, but I was offended that I was stereotyped in such a way.

I think, from a practical standpoint, it would be good for you to understand the cultures of the different ethnicities. For myself when I worked with Asians, knowing the differences helped with chit chat, but you can take it too far.

If asked at interview "What do you understand the term ethnic minority to mean?" I would answer "Any group that has different cultural traditions from the majority population".

I reckon you got that about right in post 17, Elfish Gurgling Twit. Nicely put.

However I reckon, 10/4, that your award was trying to ring a few changes.
I suppose it depends on whether the haggis was a good make, the whisky a malt.

re-

ethnic is the new PC term where racial could be deemed offensive

i call a spade a spade!
i call it a shovel!

I'm not sure it's that clear Taff, my problem is that it doesn;t have a straight equivalency as you imply although I accept it may be (miss) taken as such but I don't think it's just code, as EGT's example about Pakistanis and Indians in post 15 ought to make clear: race is broader and cruder; ethnicity seems more specific, but about what I'm still, I confess, unclear.

Getting back to EGT's last post: I agree knowledge of various cultures will help. I also drawn to your conclusions about 'over-statedness' and your description of essentially 'trivial differences' . I think that also has been part of why I remain so confounded over this: it's not just the imprecision of the identity of what ethnicity is, it's the seeming triviality of it.

I'm still puzzled about whether it's possible (even desirable) to describe ethnicity in terms of culture (ethnic groups as sub-cultures; not implying inferior or subordinate but 'sub' as in subsidiary or auxiliary to culture taken as a whole.) so that, for example, the home office document I linked to above was incorrect in differentiating between culture and ethnicity when (*if*) they are one and the same thing. That's not my settled view, and verging on the controversial, but I'm trying to tease out what ethnicity is and isn't but now I'm re-stating a point I made in posts 10 and 12

Incidentally Taff, there is a difference between spades and shovels; though I forget which way round this goes: one has raised sides on the blade that stop the dirt falling of the sides.