Page "Ethnic group" Paragraph 21

Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth, whose " Ethnic Groups and Boundaries " from 1969 has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of ethnicity.

To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification.

Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong.

He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups.

" Ethnic Groups and Boundaries ", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness of ethnic identities.

Barth writes: "[...] categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories.