ABSTRACT
This declaration follows May (2001) and Smith (1991) in conceiving of ethnicity as “a sense of continuity” across generations; “shared memories;” and a sense of common destiny (p. 25). The genealogy of ethnicity as an inherited characteristic distinguishes it from the more generic term “culture,” which need not involve intergenerational transmission. Yet, ethnicity is transforming in the global period. Three signifi cant changes are transpiring: the de-territorialization of ethnicity; the unprecedented rate and scope of human migration; and the accelerating cross-cultural contacts arising in what Appadurai (2003) refers to as global cultural fl ows of the ethnoscape, “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and persons” (p. 32). As intermarriages in these diversifying ethnoscapes become more common, it is less easy to ground ethnicity in simple genealogies or historical territorial connections.
