Theories Of Ethnicity

An authoritative and cutting-edge collection of theoretically grounded and empirically informed essays exploring the contemporary terrain of race and racism.

This book brings together internationally known scholars from a wide range of disciplines and theoretical traditions, all of whom have made significant contributions to the field of race and ethnic relations. As well as identifying important and persistent points of controversy, the collection reveals a complementary and multifaceted approach to theorisation. The theories represented include contributions from the perspective of sociology. These range from the established perspectives of Marx and Weber through to the more recent interventions of rational choice theory, symbolic interactionism and identity structure analysis.

Taking the possibility of change in ethnic identity into account, this book shows and dismantles the theoretical logics linking ethnic diversity to negative outcomes and processes such as democratic destabilisation, clientelism, riots and state collapse. Even more importantly, it changes the questions we can ask about the relationship between ethnicity, politics and economics.

Theories of Ethnicity provides, in one convenient volume, the most probing and frequently cited considerations of such topics as the melting pot and pluralism, race and race problems, intermarriage, kinship and religion, and much more.

Deals with ethnicity in modern Society

Perhaps no aspect of social relations has stirred more academic controversy than the subject of race and ethnicity. Theories that explain the persistence and vitality of the ethnic phenomenon--as well as commentaries on these theories--abound in sociological and anthropological literature. This study is the first, however, to critique the field as a whole. Thompson offers systematic comparisons of current theories, testing both their internal consistency and their adequacy as analytical tools. Thompson's study focuses the debate on ethnicity in a constructive and original fashion. Thompson devotes a chapter to each of the major theoretical traditions that now dominate the field of ethnicity: sociobiology, primordialism, assimilationism, world-system theory, and neo-Marxism. He describes the basic tenets of each theory and demonstrates that the facts they seek to explain are embedded within their theoretical assumptions. He attributes disagreements among the theories less to differences over facts than to the way they are interpreted within different worldviews arising from divergent philosophical and scientific presuppositions. He shows that it is not possible to critique any theory using the assumptions of another theory, arguing that theories can be internally critiqued based on the relationship between their adequacy as theories and the framework they offer for making normative choices. Thompson's study focuses the debate on ethnicity in a constructive and original fashion. The book will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students working the areas of race and ethnic relations or theoretical criticism.

"American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural trajectories.".