Caste, race, ethnicity, nationality

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Caste, race, ethnicity, nationality

• Are cultural inventions designed to create
  boundaries around one or another imagined
  community.

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Imagined Community

• A community socially constructed and ultimately
  imagined by the people who perceive themselves as
  part of that group.

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Imagined Community

• Is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian
  face-to-face interaction between its members.
  Instead, members hold in their minds a mental
  image of their affinity.

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Benedict Anderson

• A nation "is imagined because the members of even
  the smallest nation will never know most of their
  fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,
  yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
  communion".

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• None of the categories outlined maps onto
  permanent biological subdivisions within the
  human species, although members of societies that
  employ these categories often will invoke
  nature to reinforce their legitimacy.

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Caste

• The word caste comes from the Portuguese word
  casta, meaning chaste.
• Portuguese explorers applied this word to the
  stratification systems they encountered in South
  Asia in the 15th century.

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What is a date today in Canada?
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Caste

• These societies were divided into a hierarchy of
  ranked subgroups, each of which was chaste in
  the sense that sexual and marital links across
  group boundaries were forbidden.

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• In anthropological terms, we say that these
  groups are endogamous.

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Endogamy

• Marriage within a defined social group.

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• For this reason, many anthropologists agree that
  caste is fundamentally a form of kinship.

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• This endogamy, which is enforced, means that
  membership in such groups is determined by birth
  and for life.

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• In societies where descent is regarded as a
  crucial and persistent principle almost any
  social division can become stabilized in a
  caste-like form.

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Castification

• Political process by which ethnic or other groups
  become part of a rank order of some kind,
  probably orchestrated from the top, but which
  need not result in the construction of a caste
  system.

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• The principle of descent has also played a
  central role in the identification and
  persistence of race, ethnicity and nation.
• These three categories are closely bound up with
  historical developments over the past 500 years
  that built the modern world.

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Race

• A human population category whose boundaries
  allegedly correspond to distinct sets of
  biological attributes.

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• The concept of race is biologically and
  genetically meaningless.

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• However, racial thinking persists at the
  beginning of the twenty-first century.
• This means that racial categories have their
  origins not in biology but in society.

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• Race is a culturally constructed social category
  whose members are identified on the basis of
  certain selected phenotypic features that all of
  them are said to share.

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• The end result is a highly distorted set of
  criteria that members of a society can use to
  assign people they see to one or another
  culturally defined racial category.

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• Then, members can treat racial categories as if
  they reflect biological reality, using them to
  build institutions that include or exclude
  particular culturally defined races. In this way,
  race can become real in its consequences, even
  if it has no reality in biology.

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Racialism

• Belief in the existence of biologically distinct
  races.

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Racism

• The systematic oppression of one or more socially
  defined races by another socially defined
  race.

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Ethnicity

• A principle of social classification used to
  create groups based on selected cultural features
  such as language, religion or dress.
• Ethnicity emerges from historical process that
  incorporate distinct social groups into a
  political structure under conditions of
  inequality.

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Ethnicity

• Develops as members of different groups try to
  make sense of the material constraints they
  experience within the political structure that
  confines them.
• Is the struggle between self-ascription and
  other-ascription.

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Self-Ascription

• Insiders efforts to define their own identity.

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Other-Ascription

• Outsiders efforts to define the identities of
  other groups.

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Ethnic Groups

• Social groups that are distinguished from one
  another on the basis of ethnicity.

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Colonialism

• Because ethnic groups are incorporated into the
  colony on unequal terms, many individuals in the
  colonies attempted to achieve upward mobility by
  manipulating ethnicity.

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Nation-States

• A recent invention.
• After the French Revolution, which discredited
  the right of kings, rulers needed to find a new
  basis upon which to legitimize their state
  authority.
• The solution was to root political authority in
  nations.

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Nations

• Groups of people believed to share the same
  history, culture, language, and even the same
  physical substance.

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• Nations were associated with territories, as were
  states, and a nation-state came to be viewed as
  an ideal political unit in which national
  identity and political territory coincided.

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• The building of the first nation-states is
  closely associated with the rise of capitalism
  and its related cultural institutions.

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• The ideology of the nation-state implies that
  every nation is entitled to its own state. It
  also suggests that a state containing
  heterogeneous populations might be made into a
  nation if all peoples adopt a common nationality.

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Nationality

• A sense of identification with and loyalty to the
  nation-state.

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Nationalism

• (or nation-building)
• Attempt made by government officials and state
  institutions to instill into citizens of a state
  a sense of nationality.

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What is Canadian nationalism based upon?What
institutions participate in its creation and
reproduction?
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