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Ethnic Stratification and Political Cleavage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2021
Extract
With different names and under different guises ethnicity is old. Despite often drastic changes in the world around it, it remains in most places a lasting vessel containing and fusing individual and collective identities. Words like traditional and primordial are so frequently used to describe it that they now seem almost synonymous with it. Little wonder. As terms deriving their force from their connotation of strong basic emotional attachment and implicit shared commitment, ‘they suggest the sources of ethnicity’s pulling power.
Resting on language, place, faith, phenotype, origin, and passages through common glory or common disaster, ethnicity encapsulates and summarizes a near infinity of spoken and unspoken clues and assumptions which serve to set apart those who know and feel them from those who do not.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1978