Key Concepts

Overview

In this concise and accessible introduction, Steve Fenton navigates the reader through 100 years of literature on ethnicity. Drawing on a wider range of theorists and illustrations from around the world, Fenton explores and clarifies the core meanings and the shifting ground of this contested concept. He shows how race, ethnicity and nation must be regarded as distinguishable at the margins but otherwise representing a closely related set of images and realities. From here he raises the question of the centrality of ethnic difference: Does it matter? When does it matter? Is it as important as many have assumed? The answer is that its importance can only be understood within a wider context of the culturally and socially subversive consequences of late modernity and a triumphant capitalist world order. In this way, this book re-connects the discourse of ethnicity to a series of other discourses from which it has become detached.

Ethnicity will be an invaluable text for students of sociology, politics and international relations coming to the subject for the first time. It will also be enjoyed by the interested general reader, and its innovative and challenging approach will appeal to more advanced scholars of race and ethnicity.

About the Author

Steve Fenton is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bristol University.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ethnos: descent and culture communities
• Chapter 2: Discourses of Ethnicity in Three Settings: USA , UK , Malaysia
• Chapter 3: The Demise of Race: the emergence of ‘ethnic'
• Chapter 4: The Primordialism debate
• Chapter 5: Key points in the Ethnicity literature
• Chapter 6: Migration, Ethnicity and Mobilisation
• Chapter 7: Conditions of Ethnicity: Global Economy and precarious states
• Chapter 8: States, nations and the ethnic majority: a problem of modernity
• Chapter 9: Ethnicity and Modernity: General Conclusions
• Bibliography

Index

Endorsements

“Steve Fenton has given us a superb text. It is introductory in the best sense. It can be understood by students who have little or no background, but at the same time it summarizes such a large body of theoretical and empirical work that it also helps advanced students review their own opinions in the light of the latest thinking in this contentious, vitally important field. Few if any issues are as crucial as ethnicity for those who want to understand the reasons behind much of the contemporary world's fractious volatility. Few if any books serve so well to explain the phenomenon.”

— Professor Daniel Chirot, Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington

“This is a very impressive book that is much needed. Fenton looks at the constructed pictures of ethnic relations in Britain , the United States and Malaysia as they have been drawn over the past few centuries, and poses important questions about the meaning of ethnicity in the contemporary world.”

— Professor John Rex, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick

“Fenton succeeds in admirably and convincingly presenting a sociology of ethnicity which, while refusing to be a general theory of ethnicity, provides a sophisticated synthesis of the various contexts underlying ethnic discourse. Ethnicity should be as required reading for this decade as the earlier pacesetting works on ethnicity of A. D. Smith, Moynihan and Glazer, and Alba.”

— Professor Edward A. Tiryakian, Duke University