ABSTRACT
Ethnic identity and ethnicity are among the most influential concepts of the humanities. Ethnicity has also been used as an argument for legitimizing violence. It is useful to be aware of these different meanings because a deeper reflection on the split and divergence between these meanings is the only legitimate way to use the term of "ethnicity" in current social and cultural research. "Ethnicity" spread around the globe: people believed it to be an objective truth without reflecting about either its historicity. Anthropologists later on clearly identified the properties of this ideology, which in the realm of academia is labelled as the "primordialist notion of ethnicity". Probably the most important achievement of the constructivist model is the considerable flexibility of the social group identified as an "ethnic group". The construction of ethnic identities was understood most readily by looking to the ethnic boundaries and modes of boundary marking.
