ABSTRACT
While the importance of the ethnic mosaic pattern in the Middle East has long been recognized, the significance of ethnicity as a social force in the twentieth century is now questioned. At the urban level in particular, several writers have suggested a tendency to the disintegration of ethnic clusters as part of a movement towards a new social organization based on socio-economic class structure (Adam 1974; Baer 1964; Churchill 1967; Clark and Costello 1973; De Planhol 1959). Implicit in this argument is the assumption that these ethnic clusters were themselves originally established independently of economic status, that is that they were a reflection primarily of the social organization of ethnic groups and their social relations with their host society. Recent studies in the geography of ethnic groups outside the Middle East, however, have suggested that ethnic population patterns may be largely determined by the economic status of the ethnic group; that ethnic concentration may be a by-product of the concentration of persons of the same economic status (Lee 1973). Such an explanation upsets the simple dichotomy between ethnicity and economic status invoked above. It demands a reinvestigation of the significance of ethnicity and its relationship to economic status in determining the distribution of minority groups in the Middle East. This paper presents some observations on this relationship based on the writer’s work on the settlement of Armenian refugees in Syria and Lebanon between 1915 and 1939.
