Rethinking the Concept of Ethnicity. Historiographical Overview and Assessment of Contemporary “Primordialist” vs “Constructivist” Debates
Rethinking the Concept of Ethnicity. Historiographical Overview and Assessment of Contemporary “Primordialist” vs “Constructivist” Debates

Summary/Abstract: Ethnicity, or the quality of being ethnic throughout a certain historical period, is one of those themes in social sciences that seem to feed constant doubts and questions about how correctly the subject has in fact been explored on both theoretical and empirical levels. Recently some scholars, especially among anthropologists, have tended to interpret ethnicity only as a tool for scholarly analyses, devised and used by academicians. Such an interpretation is reasonable [in neo-Marxist ethnic theory, the only way to make sense of the variety of branched and subordinated ethnic terms is to view the main one among them – ethnos (literally adopted from its ancient Greek original) – as such a category of classification and an academic construct that serves analytical purposes]; it can clarify some misunderstandings in the popular ethnic lexicon which gets more complicated with each new publication on the subject. But the question about the social content of this scholarly abstraction still remains…

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