Ethnic Identity

Ethnic Identity

An individual's feeling of belonging to a particular ethnic group.

The adjective ethnic is derived from the Greek noun ethnos, which means race, people, nation, and tribe. Although the modern term has a narrower connotation, denoting primarily people, vestiges of the older, more inclusive meaning still remain, particularly in types of discourse where the concepts of race and nationality are used interchangeably. Matters get even more complicated when the concept of identity is introduced, because, strictly speaking, a person's identity is a sum of essential attributes, and ethnicity, as researchers have asserted, is not necessarily an essential attribute of personal identity.

Students of children's ethnic identity have to work in the context of the child's developing, evolving self. Because of this fact, insights provided by studies of adult feelings of ethnic identity are not very helpful. As children mature, their perception of ethnicity undergoes profound transformation. This transformation is concomitant with cognitive development. For example, as Frances Aboud and Anna-Beth Doyle explain (Aboud and Doyle, 1983), in the stage of cognitive development which Jean Piaget named pre-operational (between the ages of 2 and 7), children show a strong tendency to identify with a group perceived as their own, while rejecting those seen as different. With the onset of the operation phase, children, who are now capable of rational thought, generally grow more tolerant toward "others," also showing empathy and understanding toward children who are viewed as different. This finding shows that the development of ethnic consciousness, although related to cognitive development, does not mirror the child's intellectual growth. However, with cognitive maturation, ethnicity, which is initially experienced as an image, or a set of physical attributes, becomes a mental construct which includes language, customs, cultural facts, and general knowledge about one's own ethnic group. Thus, to a four-year-old Mexican American child, ethnic identity is formed on the basis of his or her recognition of certain physical traits (Bernal, Knight, Ocampo, Garza, Cota, 1993). Later, as the child becomes aware of ethnicity as an idea, ethnic identity is experienced as an inner quality, or, as Aboud and Skerry note in a study that compared ethnic self-perception in kindergarten, second grade, and university students (Aboud and Skerry, 1983), internal attributes replace external attributes as the determinants of ethnic identity.

It has been assumed that the family plays a crucial role in the process of ethnic identity formation. Undeniably, family members are a traditional source of historical, cultural, and mythological information about one's own ethnic group, but, as Richard D. Alba (Alba, 1990) explains, the family's effectiveness as an inculcator of ethnic identification is, if not problematic, rather difficult to assess. Contrary to the traditional image of the father as the, so to speak, link between the child and his or her ethnic history, Alba has found that, in many cases, a child's perceived interest in his or her own ethnicity is the result of the family's wishful thinking. Defined from a psychological point of view as a mental construct, ethnic identity seems based on a set of elements which includes historical/cultural knowledge, oral traditions, and mythology. Children (and adults) often have a hard time differentiating between history and mythology. Sadly, in adults, a mythology-based ethnic identity may lead to dangerous, potentially violent, delusions, such as the idea of the "superiority" of a particular race (e.g., the Nazi myth of an "Aryan" race) or an ethnic group justifying genocide. Children's "ethnic fantasies" are more benign. For example, Erik Erikson (Erikson, 1980), in a work originally published in 1959, discusses a case of a high school student's "confabulatory reconstruction" of her origin. Born of American parents and living in Central Europe, the adolescent girl literally created a Scottish childhood, replete with copious, and precise, biographical data for herself. When confronted by Erikson, who wanted to know the purpose of this ethnic reconstruction, the young girl answered that she needed a past. Indeed, history is the key ingredient of ethnic identity, real or imagined. Significantly, the fact that ethnic identity is past-oriented renders it fragile, as it depends, to a large extent, on information that cannot be easily verified. In his seminal work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, originally published in 1922 (Weber, 1978), the sociologist Max Weber describes ethnic identity as a subjective belief: "We shall call 'ethnic groups' those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group formation; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists. Ethnic membership {Gemeinsamkeit) differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action, like the latter. In our sense ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere. On the other hand, it is primarily the political community, no matter how artificially organized, that inspires the belief in common ethnicity."

Books

Aboud, Frances E., and Anna-Beth Doyle. "The Early Development of Ethnic Identity and Attitudes." In Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission among Hispanics and Other Minorities, edited by Martha Bernal and George P. Knight. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 47-59.

Alba, Richard D. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Bernal, Martha E., George P. Knight, Katheryn A. Ocampo, Camille A. Garza, and Marya K. Cota. "Development of Mexican American Identity." In Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission among Hispanics and Other Minorities, edited by Martha Bernal and George P. Knight. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 31-46.

—— Erikson, Erik. Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. . Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.

Phinney, Jean S. "A Three-Stage Model of Ethnic Identity Development in Adolescence." In Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission among Hispanics and Other Minorities, edited by Martha Bernal and George P. Knight. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 61-79.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Vol 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Periodicals

Aboud, Frances E., and Shelagh A. Skerry. "Self and Ethnic Concepts in Relation to Ethnic Constancy." Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 15, no. 1,1983, pp. 14-26.

Hall, Thomas D., Christopher Baílalos, Elizabeth Mannebach, and Thomas Perkowitz. "Varieties of Ethnic Conflict in Global Perspective: A Review Essay." Social Science Quarterly 77, no. 2, June 1966, pp. 445-52.

Ocampo, Katheryn A., Martha E. Bernal, and George P. Knight. "Gender, Race , and Ethnicity: The Sequencing of Social Constancies." In Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission among Hispanics and Other Minorities, edited by Martha Bernal and George P. Knight. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 11-30.

Piaget, J., and A. M. Weil. "The Development in Children of the Idea of the Homeland and of Relations to Other Countries." International Social Science Journal 3, 1951, pp. 561-78.

—Zoran Minderovic