ABSTRACT
The three topics joined in this book are not new in anthropology. Each has a large and respectable literature, much of which has become classic, even outside the discipline. The contributors, however, share the conviction that we still have much to learn about the inter-relationships among them – how conflict both produces and is a product of migration, and how ethnic phenomena are interwoven with both. It is not our intent to define the slippery concept of ethnicity; indeed, most of the authors recognize that different investigators and theorists have used and will continue to use it in quite different ways (see Cohen 1978, Royce 1982, Riggs 1985). Like the concept of culture itself, ethnicity is a theoretical construct that we use to help us understand and explain certain kinds of things, events and behavior that we observe in the field.
