ABSTRACT
The ethnographic material presented in the symposium demonstrated that identification of individuals’ ethnic group membership might change over time and be far from clear-cut. ‘Ethnicity’ as well as ‘culture’ and other concepts have been moved from scholarly to lay discourse, so that ‘ethnicity’ exists at two levels: the level of an analyst and that of informants. The study of ethnicity – and Ethnic Groups and Boundaries confirms this – has been closely associated with social anthropology for a long time. The term ‘ethnic’ is derived from the Greek term ‘ethnos’ and has, at different times and places, been loaded with different connotations — often implying a contrast between a dominant ‘civilized’ central majority and peripheral ‘barbaric’ minorities. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries helped to settle the term ethnicity firmly as one of the main concepts of social sciences in the study of collective identities.
