ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand what the usefulness might be of referring to the complicated concept of ‘we-groups’ instead of limiting ourselves to nationalism or to fundamentalism. Examples for motives underlying nationalism and other we-group processes are: mega-identities, clientelism and moral ethnicity. One remarkable feature of we-groups is the process we call switching. This means a rapid change from one frame of reference to the other. The concept of switching refers to alternations between reference frames and to moves between different more-or-less inclusive conceptions of the group’s boundary. The phenomenon of switching is an uncomfortable one in regard to essentialist theory. This is so because those ‘primordial values’, which presumably constitute by their very ‘nature’ the boundaries of ethnic groups, suddenly lose relevance. At this point, an excursion into the recurrence of essentialism might be appropriate.
