ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses ethnicity as, an alchemic concept. It shows the analysis of ethnicity a category which tends to be overwhelmingly conceptualised as social needs to begin attend to the ways in which it incorporates and inter-relates with the natural world. The chapter draws on the project's data to investigate how the convergences between natural and social worlds appear in everyday discourses of ethnicity and ethnic meaning making and then moves to examine the possibilities of the natural and non-human to offer new and transformative routes of belonging, inclusion and attachment. The range of empirical data illuminate the ways in which it was the non-human which was richly and intimately used by participants as ways of defining and explaining their attachment to the places in which they lived. As this chapter has argued actor-network theory (ANT) extended concepts as dwelling, provide optics for analysing the intimate combinations and engagements between human and non-human things that ethnic formations alchemically bundle together.
