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Ethnicity is fundamentally linked to a group’s shared identity, which includes culture, religion, language, nationality, ancestry, and other factors. It represents a shared cultural history that has resulted in similar world-views, values, and ideals. For many people around the world, ethnicity provides meaning and purpose to their daily lives. Individuals accept their ethnic identity based on their belonging to a collective group and participation in its traditions, the most central of which appear to be shared language and religion.
Contemporary Understandings of Ethnicity: What is an Ethnic Group?
Ethnicity enables people to identify with a collective we and to belong to a group with defined boundaries. Groups can be powerful, and they can use that power to obtain resources. Between us and them, there is a divide. Other groups, or they, may be viewed as suspect or potentially dangerous to our power. This type of thinking results in social issues. Ethnicity is frequently used by groups as a political and economic tool.Ethnicity can shift over time as a result of exposure and interactions. This is referred to as ethnogenesis. The development of African American ethnicity, for example, is the result of ethnogenesis. Ethnicity in today’s African Americans is a result of the multitude of African languages, religions, and social systems of slaves gradually evolving through forced assimilation, continuing after freedom, through the civil rights movement, and into the present day.
What is a nation state?
A nation state is a form of government in which people who share a common identity live within a country with well-defined borders and a single government. It is a geographical, political, and cultural organisation system. Furthermore, the government, the physical boundaries of the state/country, and people’s belief in their interconnectedness hold a nation state together.
State and nation are the fundamental components of a nation state. The state is the governing body, which encompasses all laws, government officials, and physical boundaries. The nation, on the other hand, refers to people. It is fuelled by the widespread belief that all citizens of the country are interconnected.
Furthermore, nation states typically share a common national culture, which is accomplished through shared history, language, education, and holidays.
The entire population of a nation state pledges allegiance to the national culture in an ideal nation state. As a result, we can state that this population is homogeneous. Furthermore, every citizen of the country is a permanent resident of the country. There are no such things as pure nation states. Japan and Iceland are two countries that come close to being pure nation states.
Ethnicity vs. Race vs. Nationality
Many people confuse ethnicity, race, and even nationality, but they are not and have never been synonyms. Ethnicity is based on shared history and culture, whereas race has always been based on physical or phenotypical characteristics. Nationality can encompass a variety of ethnicities.
The term “race” is overly complicated and problematic. While scholars and governments have used the term to identify people based on physical characteristics, particularly skin colour, there are significant differences among races. Many races have more genetic diversity within them than between them. Race is, at its core, the result of generations of exposure to varying degrees of sunlight. The fact that the same races have developed spontaneously in different geographical areas adds to the problems with using race to identify people.
The country of citizenship is referred to as a person’s nationality. An individual’s nationality may or may not play a role in how they identify ethnically. A member of the Ojibwa tribe, for example, may identify as an American because they are an American citizen, but they do not consider that identity to be part of their ethnicity.
Understanding nation and civil society
The state was associated with both political society and civil society as a type of political community in classical thought, whereas modern thought distinguished the nation state as a political society from civil society as a type of economic society. As a result, the state and civil society are contrasted in modern thought.
Civil society, according to Antonio Gramsci, is the primary locus of political activity because it is where “identity formation, ideological struggle, intellectual activities, and the construction of hegemony” take place, and it is the nexus connecting the economic and political spheres.Gramsci distinguishes “political society” as arising from the collective actions of civil society from the notion of the state as a polity. He claimed that politics was not a “one-way process of political management,” but that the activities of civil organisations conditioned the activities of political parties and state institutions, which in turn conditioned them.
Conclusion
The rise of modern nationalism in India, as in many other colonies, is inextricably linked to the anti-colonial movement. During the struggle against colonialism, people began to realise their unity.The feeling of oppression under colonialism provided a common bond that united many disparate groups. However, each class and group experienced colonialism in different ways, had different experiences, and had different ideas about freedom.
