ABSTRACT
Anyone who has read Walker Connor’s influential works knows that he is scrupulous about terminology (see Connor 1984: xiv; Connor 1987: 197; Connor 1994: 89). Connor understands that how one names a phenomenon affects how one thinks about it. I intend to be less scrupulous about terms than he is, but only in the interest of explicating a certain school of thought. The term I shall be careless with is primordialism. Walker Connor (1994: 106) does not embrace that term, on the ground that it connotes the primitivism of ethnic sentiments and a sense that so-called primordial attachments ‘will wither away as modernization progresses’.
