ABSTRACT
One of the most dramatic transformations to occur in both popular and social science thinking on the topic of communal life involves perspectives about ascriptive communities – those based on ethnicity, religion, language, race, family background, nationality and the like. Until the late 1950s, scholars, politicians and pundits ranging from classical sociological theorists like Marx, Weber and Durkheim to progressive era reformers and Chicago School anthropologists felt that ethnic ties and the communities they created were moribund holdovers of an earlier era, mired in irrational superstition and destined to be overtaken by modern, efficient and universalistic social forms (Thomas and Znaniecki 1920; Bonacich and Modell 1980; Gold 1992a).
