OI the domi- nant culture's centrality against the rising trend toward multiculturalism (Rum- baut and Portes 2001). state: An autonomous regional structure of political, economic, and military rule with a central government authorized to make laws and use force to maintain order and defend its territory. nation-state: A political entity, located within a geographic territory with enforced borders, where the population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people. What is the Relationship of Ethnicity to the Nation? Almost all people today imagine themselves as part of a nation-state. But this has not always been the case. States-regional structures of political, economic, and military rule—have existed for thousands of years, beginning in the regions now known as modern-day Iraq, China, and India. But the nation-state is a rel- atively new development. The term signifies more than a geographic territory with borders enforced by a central government. Nation-state assumes a distinct political entity whose population shares a sense of culture, ancestry, and destiny as a people. Citizenship refers to legal membership in a nation-state. Though the term nation once was used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin, today the word nation is often used interchangeably with nation-state. Nationalism emerges when a sense of ethnic community combines with a desire to create and maintain a nation-state in a location where that sense of common destiny can be lived out (Gellner 1983; Hearn 2006; Wolf 2001). citizenship: Legal membership in a nation-state. nation: A term once used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin; now used inter- changeably with nation-state. nationalism: The desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain a nation-state. Imagined Communities and Invented Traditions Across the world over the past 200 years, people have shifted their primary associations and identifications from family, village, town, and city to an 254 CHAPTER 7 ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM guage, food, dress, immigrant history, national origin, or religion. But this usage ignores the ethnic identity of the majority. The same lack of clarity is true for our use of the terms nation, nationalism, and nation-state, all of which often blur together and at times seem indistinguishable from ethnicity. historical, mes ancestral up of people be distinct the group Ethnicity as Identity Over a lifetime, humans develop complex identities that connect to many people in many ways. We build a sense of relationship, belonging, and shared identity through connections to family, religion, hometown, language, shared history, citizenship, sports, age, gender, sexuality, education, and profession. These powerful identities influence what we eat, who we date, where we work, how we live, and even how we die. Ethnicity is one of the most powerful iden- tities that humans develop: it is a sense of connection to a group of people who we believe share a common history, culture, and (sometimes) ancestry and who are distinct from others outside the group (Ericksen 2010; Jenkins 1996). Ethnicity can be seen as a more expansive version of kinship—the culturally specific creation of relatives—only including a much larger group and extend- ing further in space and time. As we will see in this chapter, the construction of ethnicity, like kinship, is quite complicated, moving well beyond easy equa- tion with biological ancestry. In this chapter we will explore the ways ethnicity may be perceived, felt, and imagined by a group as well as the ways it may be imposed on a group by others. With the intensification of globalization and the increasing flows of people, goods, and ideas across borders, one might anticipate that the power of ethnicity to frame people's actions and to influence world events would dimin- ish. Instead, ethnicity seems to be flourishing-rising in prominence in both
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