From the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to debates over multiculturalism, ethnicity has, once again, become a global preoccupation. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of ethnicity? And when and how did ethnicity become such an important area of cultural expression and identification that people are ready to die and to kill for it? Gathering the work of some of our most original thinkers, Theories of Ethnicity provides, in one convenient volume, the most probing and frequently cited considerations of such topics as the melting pot and pluralism, race and race problems, migration and marginality, assimilation and transnationalism, intermarriage, kinship and religion, boundary-construction and maintenance, and the important role of power relations for ethnicity. Contributors include such intellects as Max Weber, Carl Gustav Jung, Margaret Mead, Georg Simmel, Erik Erikson, Karl Mannheim, Fredrik Barth, and Herbert Gans. Theories of Ethnicity grounds much current sociological, cultural, and political research on ethnicity in a theoretical foundation that has heretofore been lacking, providing an important historical base for ongoing and future work on this timely subject. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Once it was anathema to speak about the content of a work of art in the wake of high modernism and formalism. Critical practice has moved beyond such limits, and today the focus on themes is the hallmark of feminist, new historicist, ethnic, and even deconstructionist approaches, though that focus may not always be openly declared...read more

Argues that Americans have more in common with each other than with their ethnic ancestors (view table of contents)