- Focus on boundaries (Fredrik Barth)

- Concentration on these attitudinal boundary mechanisms affords three major

advantages:
-- Because ethnicity is defined by boundaries, both the cultural and the biological
content of the group can alter as long as the boundary mechanism are maintained.
-- Although Barth points out that his boundaries may have territorial counterparts,
he emphasises that ethnic groups are "not merely or necessarily based on the
occupationof exclusive territories."
-- That approach facilitates consideration of other ethnic phenomena, exotic from
the modern European, such as the use of languages as alternative codes rather than
ethnic identifying symbols or prescriptive communication media.

- Comparison to "strangers": Groups use that to define themselves (not by

mentioning their own characteristics, but by exclusion) Anthropological historians
are obliged to confront this fact which is in Barth's approach.

- Emile Benveniste: "The ethnic group often constituted an antithetical duality

with the opposed ethnic group."

- Where, in practice, ethnicity and religion have coincided, groups exhibit the
following characteristics: peculiar linguistic features associated with sacral
identity, a high degree of endogamy, symbolic border guards auch as peculiar
architectıre, dress, and manners.

INFO: According to the boundary theory, lower-class people are not able to
constitute a group that is persistently conscious of its identity as an ethnic
collectivity.
REASON: Incomplete lower-class occupational pyramid does not provide an elite with
the communications and bargaining skills needed to legitimise the boundary
mechanisms of the class, thereby ensuring its distinct identity within a large
polity.

- Once the occupational pyramid has become complete enough to enable a group to
engage in consious bargaining about its position in the polity rather than
incoherent submission to manipulation by the dominant elite, ethnic identification
is possible.

SYMBOL, MYTH, AND COMMUNICATION

- Primary characteristics of ethnic boundaries is attitudinal.
- Most often symbolic boundary mechanisms are words.
- Consider Yiddish rejected words because they were roots in Latin. For example,
seganon (to bless) was rejected as it was coming from Latin signare (to make the
sign of the cross)
- Verbal symbolic devices safeguarded group identity against penetration of
Christian concepts.
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