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Ethnicity
April 21, 2006
However much a sense of share ethnicity created positive feeling of
belonging to an in-group, it seemed to imply total hostility and genocide
towards neighboring out-group.
Weber call ethnic groups, those human groups that entertain a subjective
belief in their common decent, because of similarities of physical type or
of customs or of both, or because of memories of colonization or
migration. This is an attempt at a comprehensive definition and it will be
useful to draw attention to some of its implication.
Weber did not believe that shared
ethnicity of itself leads to group formation. It only facilitates group
formation, particularly in the political sphere. It is political
community, however it is organized, which appeals to share ethnicity and
bring it into action.
The social dimension of identity and identification may, as we have argued
be either chosen or imposed. Political communities of all shape and size
have sought to instill in their members a sentiment of belonging and a
belief in a common destiny.
Around the late eighteenth century and
early nineteenth a process was instated which replaced old loyalties to
the lord or the monarch by loyalty to the nation.
The nation state was created as a political institution with a territorial
base, which utilized the doctrine of nationalism in its foundational
moment to generate common culture and a sense of belonging among its
members. Most of these nation states had multi-national character since
they were established through dynastic union and by conquest and
annexations. Once the nation state was created, however, whether out of
one nation or as a multi-national or imperial entity, it actively promoted
the cultural homogenization of its members and even appealed to new common
ethnicity which had be constructed in a symbolic manner.
They concepts of ethnicity and nationalism imply a certain commonality
among members of groups, the ethnic group in one case, the nation in the
other; these are constructed symbolically and presuppose the existence of
boundaries, which separate one group from another. In fact they both
emphasize minimal difference between the members of certain groups the
nation predicates continuity with the past and common decent and this is
how ethnicity is brought into nationalism.
Source: Western Balochistan
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