ABSTRACT
In socially and culturally diverse societies, he says, somehow the coherence of an ethnic identity has to be contrived through the use of symbolism. Ethnicity was produced by the circumstances in which groups engaged with each other, not by their underlying cultures. It was ‘highly situational, not primordial’. Fredrik Barth and his colleagues were thereby enabled to evade the tricky questions about the significance and the complexities of culture to which some of their North American contemporaries were turning their attention. Many social conflicts have centred on questions about the authenticity of putative ethnicities. Arguments about whether a people are the distinct entity they are claimed to be, or have the character or cultural provenance which are claimed for them are implicated in their stigmatisation and discrimination, at worst in bloodshed. Cultural plurality and diversity, if then undervalued, began to take root. Moreover, these collectivities themselves began to diversify and fracture as competing tendencies grew within them.
