Ethnic

The term "Ethnicity" redirects here. For the live album and video of the same name by Yanni, please see Ethnicity (Yanni album)
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An ethnic group is a human population whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry (Smith, 1986). Ethnic groups are also usually united by common cultural, behavioural, linguistic, or religious practices. In this sense, an ethnic group is also a cultural community.

Types of ethnic group

Members of an ethnic group generally claim a strong cultural continuity over time, although some historians and anthropologists have documented that many of the cultural practices on which various ethnic groups are based are of recent invention (Friedlander 1975, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Sider 1993). On the political front, an ethnic group is distinguished from a nation-state by the former's lack of sovereignty.

While ethnicity and race are related concepts (Abizadeh 2001), the concept of ethnicity is rooted in the idea of social groups, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal affiliation, genealogy, religious faith, language, or cultural and traditional origins, whereas race is rooted in the idea of a biological classification of Homo sapiens according to chosen genotypic and/or phenotypic traits, and a belief that such differences among human beings are of such a magnitude as to be classified by the anthropological sense of "race", i.e. subspecies.

In the United States

Collectivities of related ethnic groups are typically denoted as "ethnic". Most prominently in the US, the various Latin American ethnic groups plus the Spanish are typically collectivized as "Hispanics". The many Asian ethnic groups are similarly lumped together as "Asians". So too with the many indigenous American groups. The terms "Black" and "African American," while different, usually describe the descendants whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. Even the racial term "White American" is typically used in an ethnic sense, lumping all the various European, Middle Eastern, and North African groups together. There has been controversy among extremists on the left and right over the inclusion of various groups from the Middle East, such as Iranians, who are not "Asian" in the sense of people from East Asia or South Asia, as White. The additional factor of intermarriage and multiethnic ancestry further complicates the picture.

Categories and data on "Ancestry" in the US are compiled on the following criteria from the Census Bureau: "Ancestry refers to a person’s ethnic origin or descent, 'roots', or heritage, or the place of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States." The ancestry questionnaire is only available on a random basis to one out of six households during the census.

Read more at Wikipedia.org