ABSTRACT
For many decades now, sociologists have been chasing what Isaacs (1975: 30) called the ‘snowman of ethnicity’, otherwise first made known to us by Francis Bacon as ‘idols of the tribe’. This creature, ethnicity, is as elusive and slippery as it is complex. A plausible starting point for our discourse on the subject is Weber (1992: 389), who sees an ethnic group as one whose members ‘entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonisation and migration’, adding that ‘it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists’ (emphases added). The strength of Weber’s definition lies in its embodiment of an interplay between the objective and the subjective, perhaps analytically favouring the latter – one’s belief or construction.
