ABSTRACT
In anthropology, ethnicity has been a major research focus since the 1960s and has remained so to the present day. 'The whole conception of ethnic groups is so complex and so vague that it might be good to abandon it altogether', said Max Weber, illustrating the elusive quality of ethnicity. In defining where one has come from, ethnicity provides a particular historical and social location within the present world. Ethnicity is often discussed in combination with, or in relation to, race, religion and nationhood. Sometimes, these constructs are used more or less interchangeably with ethnicity; sometimes, a distinction is made. There is quite some debate about the distinction between ethnicity and race. Self-identification as African American rather than as black – or, historically, Negro – represents a shift from race to ethnicity and the use of one or the other term would be based on nominal convention.
