ABSTRACT
In his study of power involving two genies assumed to hide in all political systems. Guglielmo Ferrero remarks that humanity has invented only two ways of structuring mentally the origins of authority: it sees it coming either from above or from below. 1 The same can be said, with the qualifications appropriate to academic discourse, of the contemporary debate over the nature of ethnicity and nationalism. 2 Under the terms of ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’, ‘primordial’ and ‘constructed’, and other such labels, the students of ethnic and national identity typically give prominence, in their explanations, to one of the two genies that cohabit sometimes harmoniously, but often quarrel, and often succeed in involving in their quarrels the observer who meant to remain impartial.
