The illusion of ethnic identities

Abstract

Initially, the concept of ethnicity was positioned between the ideas of race and culture, including a combination of biological and cultural traits. Even today, the idea of ethnic identity can sometimes be an updated version of the old classification of humans by race. On the other hand, each “people” tends to invest itself with a unique and privileged identity that makes it feel like a “chosen people,” destined for supremacy, either because it exercises it or because it aspires to it from its prostration. This has given rise to nationalism, wars, and massacres. The author shows how these ideas of “ethnicity” that designate peoples and races are unfounded. We must unmask, at least intellectually, this lack of foundation, restricting eponyms and demonyms only to the designation of the inhabitants of a particular territory, in order to banish ideological identities to the plane where they belong. In an analysis of ethnicity, all that remains is a combination or statistical distribution of cultural properties that are contingent, unstable, and subject to the evolution imposed on any human population by the global conditions of the world process.