ABSTRACT
Contemporary communities throughout the world currently confront issues of ethnic conflict or questioning about established sovereignties. Many researchers have commented on the tenacity of people's sense of nationality or ethnicity, which, when felt to be challenged, is often accompanied by violent emotions that can have deadly consequences. Much research demonstrates that ethnicity and ethnic identity are not fixed, but can be redefined over time and can be newly constructed. If ethnicity were situational and changeable, and its construction and reconstruction the result of political manipulation for economic gain or other political interests, an explanation for the spasmodic use of ethnicity would be found in rational behaviour for economic or political advantage. However, some writers have been perplexed by the persistence of ethnicity in the absence of obvious gain, and by the affect that is associated with it.
