What do you think?
Rate this book
The Ethnic Phenomenon
Van den Berghe contends that intergroup relations are reducible to individuals competing for scarce resources. While social classes are grouped according to common material interests, ethnic groups are organized by real or putative common descent--ultimately on the basis of common interests. The author argues that ethnic nepotism is, at its very foundation, biological. This new approach is expanded further, taking into account how ethnicity is responsive to a wide spectrum of environmental factors. He analytically relates his own ideological biases to the substance of his work. What results is an intensely personal book of monumental scope and admirable intellectual honesty.
318 pages, Paperback
First published May 22, 1981
5 people are currently reading
704 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 15, 2024
Pierre van den Berghe’s theory of ethnocentrism is based on the sociobiological theory of kin selection, whereby organisms evolve to behave altruistically towards their kin because the latter share genes in common, and altruism towards kin thus promotes the spread of these genes.
Van den Berghe argues that humans have evolved to behave altruistically towards, not only our close relatives, but also our distant relatives—i.e. members of the same ethnicity as ourselves.
It seems doubtful that the degree of kinship shared by coethnics would ever be sufficient to satisfy Hamilton’s rule, where, for altruism to evolve, the cost of the altruistic act to the altruist, measured in terms of reproductive success, must be outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, multiplied by the degree of relatedness between them (Brigandt, 2001).
However, unlike others developing similar ideas (e.g. Rushton 2005; On Genetic Interests), van den Berghe is agnostic on whether ethnocentrism is adaptive in modern societies, where the shared kinship of large nations or ethnic groups is, he admits, “extremely tenuous at best” (p243).
Thus, in what evolutionary psychologists call the EEA:
While ethnocentrism is thus innate, van den Berghe denies the same is true of racism.
When they did make contact, then they typically interbred and become indistinguishable within a few generations.
In ancestral environments, then, different races rarely coexisted in the same locale.
Instead, cultural markers are used to distinguish ethnicities, such as clothing (e.g. hijabs, turbans, skullcaps), bodily modification (e.g. tattoos, circumcision) and language/dialect (p33-5).
The latter are especially useful because they are hard to fake, bodily modification because it is permanent and hence represents a costly commitment to the group in accordance with Zahavi’s Handicap Principle and language because this is usually acquirable only during a critical period in infancy.
But, where different races do coexist, racism usually develops since:
Yet, where racism does develop, boundaries are especially impermeable. This explains why, unlike successive waves of European immigrants, blacks failed to assimilate into the US melting pot (p219).
Language barriers break down in a generation, as the children of immigrants learn to speak English better than they speak the cradle tongue to which they were first exposed in the family home (p258).
However, it is not possible to change one’s race, the efforts of Michael Jackson, Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal notwithstanding.
Racial Harmony?
If racial hierarchies are especially impermeable, they are also, van den Berghe claims, “peculiarly conflict-ridden and unstable” (p33).
Assimilation occurs only slowly and, even then, only among groups “similar in physical appearance and culture to the group to which it assimilates, small in proportion to the total population, of low status and territorially dispersed” (p219).
Dominant minorities (e.g. colonial rulers, ‘middleman minorities’) often perceive no social or economic advantage to assimilation and hence resist the process; while dominant majorities sometimes refuse to assimilate wholly acculturated pariah-castes, such as the ‘Dalits’ of India and, according to van den Berghe, blacks in the US.
One solution to ethnic conflict is partition into ethnostates, but, quite apart from the practical difficulties, this arguably only shifts the locus of conflict from within-state to between-state—i.e. interstate war rather than civil strife.
The fairest solution is perhaps consociationalism, where each group is proportionately represented in positions of power, and retains a veto over major decisions (e.g. the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland).
This is arguably the model to which the US is moving, with quotas replacing freedom of association or appointment on merit, and multiculturalism replacing the earlier ideal of assimilation.
The model consociationalist state is van den Berghe’s own native Belgium, where “all the linguistic, class, religious and party-political quarrels and street demonstrations have yet to produce a single fatality” (p199).
But consociationalism only seems to work among groups of similar status and, even then, is a precarious balancing act (p188-193).
Van den Berghe notes the irony that earlier writers had cited Lebanon as a model consociationalist democracy a few years before the Lebanese Civil War (p191).
His point is only strengthened by the fact that two of his own examples—the USSR and Yugoslavia—have themselves since violently fragmented.
Slavery
In the central section of the book, van den Berghe discusses such historically recurrent racial relationships as slavery, caste and colonialism.
In his chapter on slavery, applying sociobiological theory, he argues:
Van den Berghe observes:
But the imbalance of power between slave and master and men’s innate desire for promiscuity, made the sexual exploitation of slaves inevitable.
Thus, the fictive ideology of paternalism used to justify slavery often gave way to actual paternity in the next generation of slaves.
This meant that the exploitation of these slaves violated the logic of kin selection, since:
Thus, he concludes “Western slavery literally contained the genetic seeds of its own destruction”—because, where other slave systems relied on the capture or import of new slaves, the American slave system was unique, at least after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, in trying to breed slaves (p134).
Marxism
Van den Berghe synthesizes sociobiology and Marxism, arguing that class exploitation is disguised by an ideology that disguises exploitation as either:
Miscegenation
On these grounds, van den Berghe concludes:
This creates tension between the sexes within subordinate groups, an impediment to group solidarity (p76).
Modern American Intermarriage
Yet patterns of interracial dating in the US are anomalous.
Genetic data confirms that, historically, matings between white men and black women were more common than the reverse (Lind et al 2007).
But, today, black men are 2.5 times as likely to marry white women as white men are to marry black women (Fryer 2007).
Behavior geneticist Glayde Whitney concludes:
The issue is inevitably emotive. As van den Berghe observes:
Thus, in the US, the Springfield, Omaha, Tulsa and Rosewood race riots were all ignited by rumors of interracial rape, while Britain’s first race riot, the Notting Hill riot, began with an argument among an interracial couple, and her most recent race riot, the 2005 Birmingham riot, was set off by the rumor that a black girl had been raped by Asians, while the 2005 Cronulla riot in Australia, and 2024 riot in Kirkby Merseyside, were provoked by rumors local girls were being harassed by Middle Eastern men.
As a character from a Houellebecq novel observes:
References
Brigandt (2001) The homeopathy of kin selection. Politics and the Life Sciences 20: 203-215
Fryer (2007) Guess Who's Been Coming to Dinner? Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2), pp. 71-90
Johnson et al (1987) The evocative significance of kin terms in patriotic speech. pp157-174 in Reynolds, Falger and Vine (eds) The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism London: Croom Helm
Lind et al 2007 Elevated male European and female African contributions to the genomes of African American individuals. Human Genetics 120(5) 713-722
Rushton, (2005) Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory Nations and Nationalism 11(4): 489-507
Tooby & Cosmides (1989) Kin selection, genic selection and information dependent strategies Behavioral and brain sciences 12(3): 542-544
Van den Berghe argues that humans have evolved to behave altruistically towards, not only our close relatives, but also our distant relatives—i.e. members of the same ethnicity as ourselves.
It seems doubtful that the degree of kinship shared by coethnics would ever be sufficient to satisfy Hamilton’s rule, where, for altruism to evolve, the cost of the altruistic act to the altruist, measured in terms of reproductive success, must be outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, multiplied by the degree of relatedness between them (Brigandt, 2001).
However, unlike others developing similar ideas (e.g. Rushton 2005; On Genetic Interests), van den Berghe is agnostic on whether ethnocentrism is adaptive in modern societies, where the shared kinship of large nations or ethnic groups is, he admits, “extremely tenuous at best” (p243).
“Clearly, for 50 million Frenchmen or 100 million Japanese, any common kinship that they may share is highly diluted… [and] when 25 million African-Americans call each other ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, they know that they are greatly extending the meaning of these terms” (p27)Instead, he proposes that nationalism and racism may reflect the misfiring of a mechanism that evolved when our ancestors still lived in small kin-based bands (p35; Tooby and Cosmides 1989).
Thus, in what evolutionary psychologists call the EEA:
“The natural ethny in which hominids evolved for several thousand millennia probably did not exceed a couple of hundred individuals at most… [and] is thus an extended family… of near or distant kinsmen” (p25)Ethnocentrism is also vulnerable to manipulation—not least by exploitative elites who co-opt kinship terms such as ‘motherland’ and ‘brothers-in-arms’ to encourage self-sacrifice in war (p35; Johnson et al 1987), but:
“Ethnicity can be manipulated but not manufactured” (p27)Racism
“Queen Victoria could cut a motherly figure in England… but she could never hope to become anything except a foreign ruler of India.” (p62-3)
While ethnocentrism is thus innate, van den Berghe denies the same is true of racism.
“The genetic propensity is to favor kin, not those who look alike… [as] is clearly shown by the ease with which parental feelings take precedence over racial feeling in cases of racial admixture” (p240)This is because, prior to recent technological advances in transport (ships, aeroplanes), members of different races (i.e. groups distinguishable on the basis of traits like skin color) were separated from one another by the very deserts, oceans and mountain ranges that reproductively isolated them from one another and hence permitted their evolution into distinguishable races.
When they did make contact, then they typically interbred and become indistinguishable within a few generations.
In ancestral environments, then, different races rarely coexisted in the same locale.
Instead, cultural markers are used to distinguish ethnicities, such as clothing (e.g. hijabs, turbans, skullcaps), bodily modification (e.g. tattoos, circumcision) and language/dialect (p33-5).
The latter are especially useful because they are hard to fake, bodily modification because it is permanent and hence represents a costly commitment to the group in accordance with Zahavi’s Handicap Principle and language because this is usually acquirable only during a critical period in infancy.
But, where different races do coexist, racism usually develops since:
“Genetically inherited phenotypes are the easiest, most visible and most reliable predictors of group membership” (p32).Thus, racism is a recurrent reinvention, “not a Western, still less a capitalist, monopoly” (p32).
Yet, where racism does develop, boundaries are especially impermeable. This explains why, unlike successive waves of European immigrants, blacks failed to assimilate into the US melting pot (p219).
Language barriers break down in a generation, as the children of immigrants learn to speak English better than they speak the cradle tongue to which they were first exposed in the family home (p258).
However, it is not possible to change one’s race, the efforts of Michael Jackson, Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal notwithstanding.
Racial Harmony?
If racial hierarchies are especially impermeable, they are also, van den Berghe claims, “peculiarly conflict-ridden and unstable” (p33).
“There has never been a successful multiracial democracy” (p189).Yet even societies divided by ethnicity, not race, seem conflict-prone.
Assimilation occurs only slowly and, even then, only among groups “similar in physical appearance and culture to the group to which it assimilates, small in proportion to the total population, of low status and territorially dispersed” (p219).
Dominant minorities (e.g. colonial rulers, ‘middleman minorities’) often perceive no social or economic advantage to assimilation and hence resist the process; while dominant majorities sometimes refuse to assimilate wholly acculturated pariah-castes, such as the ‘Dalits’ of India and, according to van den Berghe, blacks in the US.
One solution to ethnic conflict is partition into ethnostates, but, quite apart from the practical difficulties, this arguably only shifts the locus of conflict from within-state to between-state—i.e. interstate war rather than civil strife.
The fairest solution is perhaps consociationalism, where each group is proportionately represented in positions of power, and retains a veto over major decisions (e.g. the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland).
This is arguably the model to which the US is moving, with quotas replacing freedom of association or appointment on merit, and multiculturalism replacing the earlier ideal of assimilation.
The model consociationalist state is van den Berghe’s own native Belgium, where “all the linguistic, class, religious and party-political quarrels and street demonstrations have yet to produce a single fatality” (p199).
But consociationalism only seems to work among groups of similar status and, even then, is a precarious balancing act (p188-193).
Van den Berghe notes the irony that earlier writers had cited Lebanon as a model consociationalist democracy a few years before the Lebanese Civil War (p191).
His point is only strengthened by the fact that two of his own examples—the USSR and Yugoslavia—have themselves since violently fragmented.
Slavery
In the central section of the book, van den Berghe discusses such historically recurrent racial relationships as slavery, caste and colonialism.
In his chapter on slavery, applying sociobiological theory, he argues:
“An essential feature of slave status is being torn out of one’s network of kin selection… generally… [by] forcible removal of the slave from his home group by capture” (p120).This explains why European settlers in America were less successful at enslaving Native Americans than in importing Africans across the Atlantic and anticipates the central theme of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death.
Van den Berghe observes:
“All chattel slave regimes developed a legitimating ideology of paternalism” (p131).Thus, disguising exploitation as kin-selected paternal benevolence, in the American South, slaves were portrayed as childlike and incapable of independent living, and slaveholders as father-figures.
But the imbalance of power between slave and master and men’s innate desire for promiscuity, made the sexual exploitation of slaves inevitable.
Thus, the fictive ideology of paternalism used to justify slavery often gave way to actual paternity in the next generation of slaves.
This meant that the exploitation of these slaves violated the logic of kin selection, since:
“If slaves become kinsmen, you cannot exploit them without indirectly exploiting yourself” (p134)The result was:
“A close association between manumission and European ancestry. In 1850, in the US, for example, an estimated 37% of free ‘negroes’ had white ancestry, compared to about 10% of the slave population” (p132)The former were, he surmises, “presumably often blood relatives of the master who emancipated them or their ancestors” (p129).
Thus, he concludes “Western slavery literally contained the genetic seeds of its own destruction”—because, where other slave systems relied on the capture or import of new slaves, the American slave system was unique, at least after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, in trying to breed slaves (p134).
Marxism
Van den Berghe synthesizes sociobiology and Marxism, arguing that class exploitation is disguised by an ideology that disguises exploitation as either:
1) Kin-selected altruism—i.e. king as father of the nation; orHowever, contrary to orthodox Marxism, van den Berghe regards ethnic sentiments as more fundamental than class loyalty since, whereas the latter is “dependent on a commonality of interests”, the former is often “irrational” (p243).
2) Reciprocity—i.e. the social contract or democracy (p60).
“It seems a great many people care passionately whether they are ruled and exploited by members of their own ethny or foreigners” (p62)Moreover, while Marxists view control over the means of production as the ultimate factor underlying exploitation and conflict, Darwinians instead focus on conflict over access to what we might term the ‘means of reproduction’ (i.e. women):
“Blood runs thicker than money” (p243)
“The ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves” (p165).Thus, Marx, for all his radicalism, was, in his emphasis on economics rather than sex, just another Victorian sexual prude.
Miscegenation
On these grounds, van den Berghe concludes:
“Marriage, especially if it happens in both directions, that is with both men and women of both groups marrying out, is… the best measure of assimilation” (p218)Yet “concubinage is frequent in the absence of assimilation” and mostly involves dominant-group males taking partners from among subjugated females.
“Even when the conquest is relatively mild and not openly genocidal, the subordinate group… always loses more women to males of the dominant group than vice versa” (p75).This, of course, reflects the fact that, in Darwinian terms, the ultimate purpose of power is reproductive success.
“[Whereas] the men of the subordinate group are always the losers... the women of the subordinate group... frequently have the option of being reproductively successful with dominant-group males” (p27)By mating with dominant group males, women obtain access to both the greater resources they tend to possess and the ‘superior’ genes which facilitated the conquest.
“Hypergamy (mating upward for women) is a fitness enhancing strategy for women, and, therefore, subordinate-group women do not always resist being ‘taken over’ by dominant-group men” (p75)
This creates tension between the sexes within subordinate groups, an impediment to group solidarity (p76).
Modern American Intermarriage
Yet patterns of interracial dating in the US are anomalous.
Genetic data confirms that, historically, matings between white men and black women were more common than the reverse (Lind et al 2007).
But, today, black men are 2.5 times as likely to marry white women as white men are to marry black women (Fryer 2007).
Behavior geneticist Glayde Whitney concludes:
“By many traditional anthropological criteria African-Americans are now one of the dominant social groups in America—at least they are clearly dominant over whites. There is a tremendous and continuing transfer of property, land, and women from the subordinate race to the dominant race” (Race, Genetics & Society: p95)But this is difficult to square with the continued poverty of many blacks.
The issue is inevitably emotive. As van den Berghe observes:
“It is no accident that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines” (p75)This is Darwinian conflict in its most direct form.
Thus, in the US, the Springfield, Omaha, Tulsa and Rosewood race riots were all ignited by rumors of interracial rape, while Britain’s first race riot, the Notting Hill riot, began with an argument among an interracial couple, and her most recent race riot, the 2005 Birmingham riot, was set off by the rumor that a black girl had been raped by Asians, while the 2005 Cronulla riot in Australia, and 2024 riot in Kirkby Merseyside, were provoked by rumors local girls were being harassed by Middle Eastern men.
As a character from a Houellebecq novel observes:
“What is really at stake in racial struggles… is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: It is competition for the c*nts of young women (Platform: p82).Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review here
References
Brigandt (2001) The homeopathy of kin selection. Politics and the Life Sciences 20: 203-215
Fryer (2007) Guess Who's Been Coming to Dinner? Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(2), pp. 71-90
Johnson et al (1987) The evocative significance of kin terms in patriotic speech. pp157-174 in Reynolds, Falger and Vine (eds) The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism London: Croom Helm
Lind et al 2007 Elevated male European and female African contributions to the genomes of African American individuals. Human Genetics 120(5) 713-722
Rushton, (2005) Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory Nations and Nationalism 11(4): 489-507
Tooby & Cosmides (1989) Kin selection, genic selection and information dependent strategies Behavioral and brain sciences 12(3): 542-544
September 26, 2019
(...)
Just to get it out of the way: Van den Berghe is unambiguous about the fact that ‘race’ as a workable biological category, or a category to use for social attributions simply does not exist. Nevertheless, there “is no denying the reality of genetic differences in frequencies (not absolutes) of alleles between human groups.” If you get worked up because of facts like that, this book is not for you.
Before I get to the actual discussion of its 301 pages, let me first say this: The Ethnic Phenomenon is a truly first-rate piece of scholarship, setting the paradigm for the thinking about this topic. It is thorough, honest and courageous, attempting to bring some clarity in a highly emotional debate. This is not an ethics treatise, but a scientific study, including 24 pages of bibliography and a 10-page index.
At the same time, the book wants “to exorcise ethnicity by trying to understand it”. I wonder if it could have been written today, in the age of #woke and keyboard outrage. Be that as it may, this is an important book, a landmark, absolutely mandatory for everybody that seriously studies the history and the contemporary effects of colonialism, racism, nationalism and ethnicity.
First I’ll try to give the gist of Van den Berghe’s thinking. Afterwards I’ll zoom in on some tidbits I found interesting, and I’ll end with a few critical notes.
(...)
Full 2300 word review on Weighing A Pig
Just to get it out of the way: Van den Berghe is unambiguous about the fact that ‘race’ as a workable biological category, or a category to use for social attributions simply does not exist. Nevertheless, there “is no denying the reality of genetic differences in frequencies (not absolutes) of alleles between human groups.” If you get worked up because of facts like that, this book is not for you.
Before I get to the actual discussion of its 301 pages, let me first say this: The Ethnic Phenomenon is a truly first-rate piece of scholarship, setting the paradigm for the thinking about this topic. It is thorough, honest and courageous, attempting to bring some clarity in a highly emotional debate. This is not an ethics treatise, but a scientific study, including 24 pages of bibliography and a 10-page index.
At the same time, the book wants “to exorcise ethnicity by trying to understand it”. I wonder if it could have been written today, in the age of #woke and keyboard outrage. Be that as it may, this is an important book, a landmark, absolutely mandatory for everybody that seriously studies the history and the contemporary effects of colonialism, racism, nationalism and ethnicity.
First I’ll try to give the gist of Van den Berghe’s thinking. Afterwards I’ll zoom in on some tidbits I found interesting, and I’ll end with a few critical notes.
(...)
Full 2300 word review on Weighing A Pig
May 9, 2018
a criminally under-recommended book.
September 7, 2014
Comprehensive look into sociobiology/phenomenology of ethnic dominance in basic human patterns, direcetly related to the male's rule as self-deception subscriber and enforcer.
September 5, 2020
“A consociational democracy exists when the class interests of the ruling elite, in preserving a unitary multi-ethnic state, prevail over countervailing interests to break the state down into ethnic components. The consociational democracy is a special case of bourgeois democracy, a state run by a capitalist technocratic, bureaucratic elite with supposedly representative institutions, elected officials and other paraphernalia of parliamentarism.
In a pluralist society however, where primordial attachments to ethnic collectivities compete with class affiliation, the illusion of democracy can only be maintained if the elite itself is multi-ethnic and in proportion approximating those of constituent ethnes in the general population. If that condition is not met, then the political system is perceived by the under-represented group as undemocratic, dominated by the over-represented group or groups. Proportionality at the elite level is thus a key feature of consociational democracies, for it is true proportionality that preserves the democratic fiction of representativeness and thus its own legitimacy.
If one accepts the principle of ethnic representation, then the ethnicity of a member of the ruling class contains a validation of the right to rule. An essential corollary of the ethnic proportionality of such systems is the muting of class conflicts to the extent that ethnic sentiments are politicized, class consciousness is lowered. If the main line of cleavage in a society is ethnicity or some feature of it like religion or language.
If the political game is seen primarily as an ethnic balancing act and the allocation of scarce resources, if there are no glaring disparities in ethnic representation at various class levels, it follows that the significance of class cleavages within each ethne is correspondingly decreased. Under such circumstances, the class interests of the multi-ethnic elite are best served by a system in which the more politicized ethnicity becomes, the more ethnicized the polity, the more attention is deflected from class conflicts and re-directed.”
Excerpt from “The Ethnic Phenomenon” (1981) by Pierre L. van den Berghe
In a pluralist society however, where primordial attachments to ethnic collectivities compete with class affiliation, the illusion of democracy can only be maintained if the elite itself is multi-ethnic and in proportion approximating those of constituent ethnes in the general population. If that condition is not met, then the political system is perceived by the under-represented group as undemocratic, dominated by the over-represented group or groups. Proportionality at the elite level is thus a key feature of consociational democracies, for it is true proportionality that preserves the democratic fiction of representativeness and thus its own legitimacy.
If one accepts the principle of ethnic representation, then the ethnicity of a member of the ruling class contains a validation of the right to rule. An essential corollary of the ethnic proportionality of such systems is the muting of class conflicts to the extent that ethnic sentiments are politicized, class consciousness is lowered. If the main line of cleavage in a society is ethnicity or some feature of it like religion or language.
If the political game is seen primarily as an ethnic balancing act and the allocation of scarce resources, if there are no glaring disparities in ethnic representation at various class levels, it follows that the significance of class cleavages within each ethne is correspondingly decreased. Under such circumstances, the class interests of the multi-ethnic elite are best served by a system in which the more politicized ethnicity becomes, the more ethnicized the polity, the more attention is deflected from class conflicts and re-directed.”
Excerpt from “The Ethnic Phenomenon” (1981) by Pierre L. van den Berghe
May 31, 2024
Thought-provoking analysis of ethnicity and ethnic relations as the driver of politics and society. Van Den Berghe’s argument is that humans, like all animals, seek to maximise their genetic fitness, and do so for their family too, who share their genes. The ethnic group is essentially an extended kinship network. Therefore ethnic nepotism (by everyone) and maintenance of ethnic boundaries (by socially dominant ethnicities) are rational mechanisms of ensuring genetic fitness. The view is materialist and at times quite similar in structure to Marxism, which Van Den Berghe apparently was as a younger academic, in that he views a set of social distinctions as a driver of history, and is sympathetic to the lower ranks of any given society’s ethnic dominance hierarchy. Much of the book is an elaboration of this in various case studies, such as slavery, caste, imperialism, consociationalism, assimilation and so on. This was the best part of the book - many of his anthropological and sociological discussions about ethnic markers and relations across the world are captivating.
Van Den Berghe is pessimistic about peaceful ethnic power-sharing, particularly when ethnicities view themselves as ethnicity, rather than some other kind of identification. These identities and boundaries are not static, however. Over time people in different groups interbreed to an extent that new ethnicities arise, and a new set of relations emerges. Recommended read for a serious and thoughtful look at a topic that is touched with kid gloves, if at all, in the multicultural Anglosphere.
Van Den Berghe is pessimistic about peaceful ethnic power-sharing, particularly when ethnicities view themselves as ethnicity, rather than some other kind of identification. These identities and boundaries are not static, however. Over time people in different groups interbreed to an extent that new ethnicities arise, and a new set of relations emerges. Recommended read for a serious and thoughtful look at a topic that is touched with kid gloves, if at all, in the multicultural Anglosphere.
September 6, 2025
Una perspectiva interesantísima para entender el concepto de raza y etnia
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews