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Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Mara Loveman and Peter Stamatov, with whom he is writing a paper on this subject.

References
Brubaker, Rogers (1998) Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism, in John Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, pp. 272306. New York: Cambridge University Press. DiMaggio, Paul (1997) Culture and Cognition, Annual Review of Sociology 23(1): 26387. Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

SOME CURRENT PRIORITIES FOR ETHNICIT Y STUDIES THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

University of Oslo The proliferation of ethnicity studies witnessed during the last three decades has also seen gradual shifts in research priorities. Whereas pluralism in relatively stable, often colonial contexts provided the focus and locus of many studies in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps especially in social anthropology, studies of nationalism and minorities in the context of dominant nation-states were foregrounded in the following decade. Two themes dominated the academic scene in the 1990s: multiculturalism (or culture and rights) and migration. Of course, the boundaries are not clearcut, neither between decades nor between topics and some specialities, such as the British tradition of race relations, have been a powerful presence throughout but this holds true as a general description. Accompanying this thematic change, there has also been a general theoretical movement from sociological perspectives to anthropological and even socio-psychological ones. As in other branches of the social sciences, identity has become a core term among students of ethnicity indeed, some of us would argue, they have been avant garde in this respect while earlier concerns with, say, labour markets, political systems and group integration have received comparatively less attention. As of today, studies of ethnicity, whether they concentrate on the political or the emotional dimension or both, must see it in the dual context of globalization and post-traditional society. The former implies that ethnic phenomena in particular places are likely to be inuenced by similar phenomena elsewhere, by the ubiquity of the market and of real-time

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information technology. As Peter Worsley (1984) remarked years ago, militant Tamil ethnopolitics in Sri Lanka would almost certainly have been inuenced by TV transmissions of events on the Israeli West Bank. Thus, in a sense, it is perfectly reasonable to talk about a universal grammar of identity politics, caused both by similar structural conditions and contagion. The second dimension, post-traditional society (Giddens, 1991), refers to the loss of imperative, unquestionable forms of identication and implies that identication is necessarily reexive and fraught with uncertainty. Almost everywhere, there are continuous negotiations over the proper symbolism, behaviour and even emotions that express group identity. What it entails to be a proper North Indian Brahmin, an African American, a Sami or a Yanomam is a kind of question that is both unanswerable and acute. These aspects of contemporary ethnicity, obvious today, were rarely present in research before the mid-1980s, when ethnic identity tended to be taken for granted. The constructivist views characteristic of inuential theorists like Barth (1969) in ethnicity studies and Gellner (1983) in studies of nationalism, have thus been developed further by researchers emphasizing the essential ambiguity of any form of identication, often under the inuence of feminism and/or deconstructivism. Hybridity has accordingly become something of a catchword recently. Three elds of comparative enquiry, all of them incidentally of much more general relevance than the term ethnicity studies implies, appear to be particularly fruitful in the near future, seen from my perspective as a comparativist. Social identication is and will remain a core theme in the social sciences and humanities. The degree of group integration, the kind of group that emerges at any point (ethnic, class, gender, regional . . .) and the relationship between individualism (currently an ideology of enormous power worldwide) and group loyalties are all crucial both for peoples well-being and for societal processes. In addition, what could be described as the tension between ambivalence and fundamentalism characteristic of reexive modernity remains overtheorized and understudied. Identity politics is both wider and more narrow than ethnicity: it includes non-ethnic (say, religious or gender-based) movements but excludes nonpolitical ethnicity. A tremendous force from Congo to California, identity politics has lled part of the post-Cold War ideological void and nds its expression in phenomena as diverse as revivalist Islam in Europe, American college multiculturalism, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and new school curricula in Sweden. In contrast to research on identication, identity politics is widely studied but often weakly theorized, and theoretically informed comparison is rare. Rights and discrimination. A recurring theme in the literature on ethnicity, pursuing the social conscience and liberating potential of the social sciences, concerns inequality based on ethnic distinctions. Familiar from

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many if not most polyethnic societies, such differences are often articulated through local discourses about cultural difference and counteract public ideologies of equality. To avoid ghettoization of the academic ethnicity eld, this way of delineating subject matters if not exactly this delineation is in my view advisable. Particular patterns of cultural identication and social process are rarely conned to ethnic phenomena. Subjectively experienced problems of identity are, tout court, part of the modern condition; identity politics of comparable kinds appear on both sides of the ethnicity boundary; and many different kinds of groups are subjected to unequal access to rights and resources. Unless one keeps an eye on everything which is not ethnic, there is a real danger that scholars, usually against their own intentions, end up conrming a view of the world as essentially made up of competing ethnic groups.

References
Barth, Fredrik, ed. (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Worsley, Peter (1984) The Three Worlds. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

RETHINKING RACE ROGER WALDINGER

UCLA, Los Angeles Oscar Handlin wrought an earlier revolution in US immigration historiography when he realized that the history of immigration was the history of American people, in the process, excising a large portion of the people he purported to describe. His sociological contemporaries were not guilty of the same slip; the major accounts of the 1960s sought to understand an ethnic order made up of the descendants of those who had become Americans not just by consent, but by force as well. However, the analysis proceeded as if all groups of outsiders started equally at the bottom, confronting barriers of similar sorts. More importantly, the underlying framework neglected the contrastive nature of the social identities that the immigrants and their descendants gradually absorbed. We know who we are only by reference to who we are not; likewise, for the progeny of the European immigrants, who became members of a majority that dened itself through exclusion. But the US literature was slow to acknowledge that