ABSTRACT
Humanists have not analyzed as closely as they should the concept of ethnicity. By and large, this task has been left to scholars in the fields of history, political science, and sociology. This essay, therefore, may appear to offer a novel view of the subject. Scholars, teachers, and writers in the fields of literature, philosophy, and theology do have resources to bring to bear upon the realities of ethnicity, not only as these have affected human life in the past, but primarily as these affect the present—and promise to affect the future—under the rubric of the “new ethnicity.” These resources have not yet been fully differentiated and sharpened. Scholars in the humanities commonly work upon literary texts, public rituals and liturgies, manners, mores, and ethical practices. The empirical clarity available to social scientists is theirs only at secondhand. But what they can do—and what this essay undertakes—is to ferret out the ways by which the daily realities of ethnicity are felt and perceived in ordinary experience, and to establish the worldviews within which such experiences are daily understood.
