Post-Migration Ethnicity

In understanding the facts and forces of ethnicity, social scientists have come to a new but challenging consensus; ethnic solidarities are neither natural nor even historically stable. Their analysis must therefore take leave of all essentializing assumptions. Yet this antiessentialist consensus needs to be translated from the level of programmatic ideas to that of empirical and up-to-date case studies. Only these can show how constructed identities can motivate real, and sometimes violent, collective action.

To succeed in de-essentializing ethnicity, the enquiry takes its cue from the classic three C's that have guided the study of ethnic processes throughout: cohesion, commitments, and comparison. In explaining ethnic cohesion, the contributors show how, far from being determined by biological facts, ethnicity is continually re-conceived and re-made within a framework of power relationships. In treating of ethnic, national, and religious distinctions. Grasping the old nettle of cross-ethnic commercially reliable guide to de-essentializing the study of ethnicity in all its established concerns.