Ethnogenesis (from the
Greek ethnos , "group of people" or "
nation", and
genesis , "origin, birth") is the process by which a group of human beings comes to be understood or to understand themselves as
ethnically distinct from the wider social landscape from which their grouping emerges. By self-invention, ethnic groups are "present at their own creation", in the phrase of
E. P. Thompson. This recognition of culture creation has caused some historians to place traditional
teleological nation-building narratives into the framework of
legend, when they were once uncritically accepted as historical facts.
Passive or active ethnogenesis
Ethnogenesis can occur passively, in the accumulation of markers of group identity forged through interaction with the physical environment, cultural and religious divisions between sections of a society, migrations and other processes, for which ethnic subdivision is an unintended outcome. It can occur actively, as persons deliberately and directly 'engineer' separate identities in order to attempt to solve a political problem - the preservation or imposition of certain cultural values, power relations, etc. Since the late eighteenth century such attempts have often been related to
language revival or creation of a new language, in what eventually becomes a "
national literature".
In the twentieth century, societies challenged by the obsolescence of those
narratives which previously afforded them coherence have fallen back on ethnic or racial narratives, as a means of maintaining or reaffirming their collective identity, or
polis.
Inclusive or exclusive nationalism
Ethnogenesis can be promoted to include or exclude any ethnic minority living within a certain country. In
France, the integrationalist policy of the
French Republic was inclusive; their laws stated all persons born and/or legally residing in France proper (including overseas departments and territories) were "Frenchmen". The law did not make any ethnic distinctions nor racial categories in between the "French" people. All people in France were Frenchmen and became citizens of the French Republic as far the country's law was concerned.
In
Nazi Germany during the 1930s, the Nazi Party began to define only Germans of "pure" "Aryan" stock as being qualified as German citizens in the Third Reich, and excluding Germans of Jewish religious or parental heritage under the
1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. Many
German Jews were then highly assimilated as German citizens, including some who no longer practiced
Judaism. Most German Jews fought for the Kaiser during WWI, but nonetheless the Nazis used them as scapegoats and classified the Jewish Germans as having non-German or "non-Aryan" racial origins more important than their contributions to society. The Nazis' oppressive measures against German Jews resulted in horrific events, including the killing of most German and Polish Jews, among the total number of 5 million Jews killed in the
Holocaust.
Two forms of nationalism were used in the territory of the former
Yugoslavia. After WWII in the Tito era, nationalism was appealed to for uniting
South Slav peoples. Later in the 20th century, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, leaders appealed to ancient ethnic feuds or tensions that ignited conflict between the
Serbs,
Croats and
Slovenes, as well
Bosnians,
Montenegrins and
Macedonians. The conflicts destroyed the formerly communist republic and produced the civil wars in
Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95. Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks insisted they were ethnically distinct although many communities had a long history of intermarriage. All could speak the common
Serbo-Croatian Language. People used ethnic and religious differences to gain power, and in the process broke up the long collaboration of peoples and carried out ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
Language revival
Language has been a critical asset for authenticating ethnic identities. The process of reviving an antique ethnic identity often poses an immediate language challenge, as obsolescent languages lack expressions for contemporary experiences. In Europe in the 1990s, examples of proponents of ethnic revivals were from
Celtic fringes in
Wales and nationalists in the
Basque country. Activists' attempts in the 1970s to revive the
Occitan language in southern France was a similar attempt.
Similarly, in the 19th century, the
Fennoman Grand Duchy of Finland aimed to raise the
Finnish language from peasant-status to the position of an official national language, which had been only
Swedish for some time. The Fennoman also founded the
Finnish Party to pursue their nationalist aims. The publication in 1835 of the Finnish
national epic,
Kalevala, was a founding stone of Finnish nationalism and ethnogenesis. Finnish was recognized as the
official language of Finland only in 1892. Fennomans were opposed by the
Svecomans, headed by
Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836-1911). He supported continuing the use of
Swedish as the official language (it had been a minority language used by the educated elite in government and administration.) In line with contemporary
scientific racism theories, Freudenthal believed that Finland had two "
races", one speaking Swedish and the other Finnish. The Svecomans claimed that the Swedish "Germanic race" was superior to the majority Finnish people. In Ireland, revival of Gaelic was part of the reclaiming of
Irish identity in the republic.
Language has been an important and divisive political force in
Belgium between the Dutch/Germanic
Flemings and Franco-Celtic
Walloons since the country was created in 1831.
Switzerland's polity is somewhat divided among
German-speaking "Alemmanic" or
Schweiz against the
French-speaking Romandies or Arpitians, and the
Italian/Romansh-speaking minorities in the south and east.
In Italy there were ethnological as well linguistic differences between regional groups, from the
Lombardians of the North to the
Sicilians of the south. Mountainous terrain had allowed the development of relatively isolated communities and numerous dialects before unification in the 19th century.
Religion
The set of cultural markers that accompanies each of the major
religions may become a component of distinct ethnic identities, although the do not usually exist in isolation. Ethnic definitions are subject to change over time, both within and outside groups. For example, 19th-century Europeans classified Jews and Arabs as one 'ethnic' bloc, the
Semites or
Hamites. Later the term Hamites came to be associated with
Sub-Saharan Africans instead.
Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim followers have historically been aligned with ethnicities (and later nations) speaking different languages and having different cultures. arise on the basis of the languages which followers of each religion historically favoured: (
Latin and
Greek,
Hebrew,
Sanskrit and
Arabic, respectively). The sources of religious differentiation are contested among
sociologists and among
anthropologists, as much as between the faith groups themselves.
The line between a well-defined religious
sect and a discrete ethnicity cannot be sharply defined. Sects which most observers would accept as constituting a separate ethnicity usually have, as a minimum, a firm set of rules related to maintenance of
endogamy, censuring those who 'marry-out' or who fail to raise their children in the proper faith. Examples might include:
Geography
Geographical factors can lead to both cultural and
genetic isolation from larger human societies. Groups which settle remote habitats and intermarry over generations will acquire distinctive cultural and genetic traits, evolving from cultural continuity and through interaction with their unique environmental circumstances. Ethnogenesis in these circumstances typically results in an identity that is less value-laden than one forged in contradistinction to competing populations. Particularly in
pastoral mountain peoples, social organization tends to hinge primarily on familial identification, not a wider
collective identity.
Specific cases
The Goths
Herwig Wolfram offers "a radically new explanation of the circumstances under which the
Goths were settled in
Gaul,
Spain and
Italy". Since "they dissolved at their downfall into a myth accessible to everyone" at the head of a long history of attempts to lay claim to a "Gothic" tradition, the ethnogenesis by which disparate bands came to self-identify as "Goths" is of wide interest and application. The problem is in extracting a
historical ethnography from sources that are resolutely Latin and Roman-oriented.
The Amerindian North American Southwest
With the arrival of the Spanish in southwestern North America, the
Native Americans of the
Jumanano cultural sphere underwent social changes partly in reaction, which spurred their ethnogenesis, Clayton Anderson has observed.
Ethnogenesis in the Texas plains and along the coast took two forms: a disadvantaged group identified with a stronger group and became absorbed into it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, cultural institutions were modified and in a sense reinvented. The seventeenth-century Jumanano disintegration, a collapse in part due to widespread deaths due to introduced diseases, was followed by their reintegration as
Kiowa, Nancy Hickerson has argued. Exterior stresses that produced ethnogenetic shifts preceded the arrival of the Spanish and their horse culture: recurring cycles of drought had previously forced non-kin to band together or to disband and mobilize. Inter-tribal hostilities forced weaker groups to associate with stronger ones.
Creation of the Moldovan identity in the Soviet Union
The separate
Moldovan ethnic identification was promoted under Soviet rule when the Soviet Union set up an autonomous
Moldavian ASSR in 1924. It was set apart from the
Ukrainian SSR on part of the territory between the
Dniester and
Bug rivers (
Transnistria). The scholar Charles King concluded that this action was in part a prop to Soviet propaganda and help for a potential communist revolution in Romania. At first a Moldovan ethnicity supported territorial claims to the then-Romanian territories of
Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina. After the
Soviet occupation of the two territories in 1940, potential re-unification claims were offset by the
Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The recognition of
Moldovans as a separate ethnicity, distinct from
Romanians, remains today a controversial subject. On one side, the Moldovan Parliament adopted in 2003 "The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova", which states that Moldovans and Romanians are two distinct peoples and speak two different languages, that Romanians form an ethnic minority in Moldova, and that the Republic of Moldova is the legitimate successor to the Principality of Moldavia. On the other side, Moldovans are recognized as a distinct ethnic group only by former Soviet states.
In the
2004 Moldovan census, of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) chose Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% chose Moldovan. While 40% of all
urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Romanian as their mother tongue, in the countryside barely one out of seven Romanian/Moldovan speakers indicated Romanian as his mother tongue.
Ethnogenesis in historical scholarship
Within the historical profession, the term "ethnogenesis" has been borrowed as a
neologism to explain the origins and evolution of so-called
barbarian ethnic cultures, stripped of its metaphoric connotations drawn from biology, of "natural" birth and growth. This view is closely associated with the Austrian historian
Herwig Wolfram and his followers, who argued that such ethnicity was not a matter of genuine genetic descent ("tribes"), as in
Isidore of Seville's definition of
gens.
Rather, using Reinhard Wenskus' term
Traditionskerne ("nuclei of tradition"), ethnogenesis arose from small groups of aristocratic warriors carrying ethnic traditions from place to place and generation to generation. Followers would coalesce or disband around these nuclei of tradition; ethnicities were available to those who wanted to participate in them with no requirement of being born into a "tribe". Thus questions of race and place of origin became secondary.
Proponents of ethnogenesis may claim it is the only alternative to the sort of
ethnocentric and
nationalist scholarship that is commonly seen in disputes over the origins of many ancient peoples such as the
Franks,
Goths, and
Huns. It has also been used as an alternative to the Near East's "race history" that had supported
Phoenicianism and claims to the antiquity of the variously called
Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac peoples.
See also
