Unique cultural traits

Unique cultural traits encompass language, religion, marriage choices,

food preferences, music, dances, literature, games, and occupations.
Religion is one of the most defining traits of an ethnic group.
Members come into the group through birth and prefer marriages
between group members. There is a strong sense of loyalty, solidarity,
and varying degrees of resistance to outsiders joining the group.
Ethnic groups advocate for their own group interests by leaders
promoting certain cultural practices. Most have been involved in
conflict with another ethnic group at some point in their history.
 National origin or ancestral history
Ethnic group members look back on a common national origin or ancestral history
to create a bond among themselves. Frequently members of an ethnic group live
concentrated in a specific geographical area of the world. However, an ethnic group
differs from a family or town by having a much larger population. The Basques of
Northern Spain and Southwestern France, numbering nearly three million people,
are an excellent example of an ethnic group that remain geographically
concentrated in a region that has been their homeland for thousands of years.
Some Basques have left through time, most notably to Argentina, Mexico,
the United States, Chile, and Venezuela.
Jewish people have maintained ethnic identity although for most of
their history they have not lived in their ancient homeland in
the Middle East. Israel, the modern-day Jewish homeland, was
created after World War II (1939–45) in 1948 to provide a safe haven
for the surviving European Jews who had faced genocide by Nazi
Germany during the war. Through a common ancestral history Jews
held their ethnic identity intact for centuries even though they lived
throughout the world and Hebrew, the Jewish language, was used
mainly in religious practices. Not only do ethnic group members look
back to a common history but forward to a shared future.
In the early 2000s, ethnic groups with millions of members persist
even in the highly mobile world. Many persons identify ethnically
even as they live within a larger diverse society far from their original
homeland. For instance, Polish Americans or Danish Americans live
far from Poland or Denmark. Although they speak English and are U.S.
citizens with intentions to stay in the United States, many still think of
themselves as uniquely Polish or Danish, connected culturally and
historically to their original ethnicity.
Assimilate: To conform to the values of a new group or
country, ultimately losing one's original ethnic identity to
the new dominant culture.
Ethnic Discrimination: A major consequence of ethnic
prejudice by treating differently or favoring one ethnic
group for some arbitrary reason.
Ethnocentrism: A group feeling superior to other groups
because of physical traits or cultural differences including
religious beliefs or other long-held traditions.
Immigration: The movement of people from one country
to another intending to reside permanently in the new
country.
Scapegoating: Shifting the blame for one's own difficulties,
failures, and mistakes onto someone else, such as another
ethnic group.
Stereotyping: Defining a group with characteristics, usually
exaggerated, that supposedly apply to every member of
that group.
 Physical or race characteristics
Most people think of race as defined by physical characteristics such as skin color or
facial features. However, social scientists and anthropologists, those who study
human societies, find the term so confusing that they advocate no longer using it.
They see a group that some would call a race as having a web of many
physical and cultural traits too complex to allow physical characteristics alone to
define a single ethnic group. For example, if people with white skin are defined as a
racial group known as whites then people with black skin could be defined as a
racial group known as blacks. However whites are not an ethnic group because they
have many differing cultural traits and countries of origin. Likewise African blacks
are ethnically very different from black people of the Caribbean. Nevertheless, in
the everyday world and for the everyday man, physical characteristics often
continue to define ethnicity.
Likewise prejudice and discrimination directed at blacks in England, blacks in South
Africa, and the Australian aboriginal people are studied in the Racial Prejudice
chapter.
Viewing other ethnic groups
There are three ways in which every ethnic group in the
world views other ethnic groups.
• First, all ethnic groups are ethnocentric. Ethnocentric
means members consider their own way of life—their
culture—to be the right way, superior to all others. They
judge other groups by their own standards.
• Second, people in all groups engage in stereotyping, both stereotyping their own
group and other groups. Stereotyping means defining a group with characteristics
that supposedly apply to every member of that group. Members of an ethnic group
usually stereotype their own group in an exaggerated positive light. For example,
Norwegians and Swedes stereotype themselves as tall, strong, beautiful people
with a strong work ethic. Ethnic groups typically stereotype other groups negatively.
Exaggerated or inaccurate negative characteristics are applied to all members of the
ethnic group. Examples of common negative stereotyping are that all Italians are
part of organized crime and all Roma, more commonly known as Gypsies, steal.
Europeans stereotype Americans by saying all Americans own and carry guns.
• Third, eager to blame someone other than themselves for their troubles, people
in all ethnics groups engage in scapegoating. Scapegoating is shifting the blame for
one's own difficulties, failures, and mistakes onto someone else.

Ethnic scapegoating shifts blame onto another ethnic group, a group that is unable
to adequately defend itself against the charges. In the 1930s and World War
II (1939–45) German Nazis blamed all of Germany's economic difficulties on the
Jews living in the country. In Central Africa in the early 1990s the Hutu blamed
Rwanda's economic and political problems on the Tutsi. In both cases, scapegoating
led directly to genocide (systematic destruction of a cultural, ethnic, or racial
group).
Negative stereotyping and scapegoating of entire ethnic groups is based on
inaccurate, incomplete, or oversimplified information. Such practices lead directly
to ethnic prejudice. For instance, those outside a stereotyped group become
suspicious, distrustful, and fearful of that group, perhaps because of some random
experience with one member of the group, or one piece of inaccurate information,
hence they are prejudiced against that group. They do not wish to live, go to school,
or work with any member of the stereotyped group. They are likely, if they have
power, to act out against that group in a discriminatory manner by restricting their
freedom of movement or access to an education.
 Ethnic discrimination
Ethnic discrimination involves negative actions or behaviors toward
people or groups solely because of their ethnicity. Discriminatory
actions include restrictions on job opportunities, education, religious
worship, housing, use of a particular language, and on participating in
a political process such as as holding office or voting. Ethnic
discrimination is most often carried out by a majority ethnic group
against a minority ethnic group. It may also involve two ethnic groups
relatively equal in numbers, political, and economic power.
Ethnic discrimination can involve individuals discriminating against
individuals. For example, an apartment manager refuses to rent an
apartment to a family of a certain ethnic group; an employer ignores
a job application from a person belonging to a particular ethnic group.
Ethnic discrimination can also be applied against whole ethnic groups
by laws and policies of a government or institution. The internment
(round up and placement in remote guarded camps) of Japanese
Americans during World War II by the U.S. government is an example
of discrimination against an entire ethnic group.
Degrading (attempting to make an ethnic group appear less than
human) is a common discriminatory practice. German Jews during
World War II were forced to pin yellow stars to their outer clothing to
identify themselves as Jews. With hate-filled propaganda, the Nazi
German government tried to convince the non-Jewish German
people that Jews were less than human and had no right to live. In
the early 1990s the Hutu officials of Rwanda convinced the Hutu
peasantry that members of the Tutsi ethnic group were evil beings
with tails and should be exterminated.
Genocide is the most extreme form of ethnic discrimination. About one and a half
million Armenians of southwestern Asia were the victims of a genocide carried out
between 1915 and 1918. Russian dictator Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) allowed seven
million Ukrainians to starve to death in 1932 and 1933. Nazi Germany exterminated
six million European Jews during the late 1930s and World War II. In 1970
Cambodians were murdered by Cambodian communist leader Pol Pot (1925–1998)
and his Khmer Rouge. Two million died, either executed, of starvation, or in
performing hard labor for the Khmer Rouge. Hutu exterminated up to 800,000 of
their fellow Rwandans, the Tutsi, in only a few months in 1994.
A phrase with the same meaning as genocide is ethnic
cleansing, which came into worldwide focus in the 1990s
when the media used it to describe the killing among Serbs,
Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Kosovo Albanians as the
country of Yugoslavia broke apart. Genocide is normally
supported by a government, such as the mass killing of
ethnic Kurds by Iraqi forces in 1988 under the leadership
of Saddam Hussein (1937–2006).
 Homogeneous or heterogeneous countries
An ethnically homogenous country is one that is made up almost
entirely of people from one ethnic group and that group dominates
the country. Of the world's approximately two hundred countries,
only a handful are ethnically homogeneous (of the same kind).
Examples are Japan, Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico, Norway, Finland, and
Iceland. Ninety-nine percent of Iceland's population is composed of
Icelanders. In Saudi Arabia, 90 percent of the people are of the
Eastern Hamitic Arab group.
The majority of nations have two or more ethnic groups. They are called ethnically
heterogeneous countries. In the twenty-first century, the United States is an
ethnically heterogeneous country made up of at least two hundred ethnic groups.
In some heterogeneous nations, one majority ethnic group dominates in all areas,
politics, economy, and culture, such as the United States where whites of northern
and western European ancestry have historically dominated. Minority ethnic groups
often experience prejudice and discrimination. In other countries ethnic groups
have relatively equal influence. Sometimes these groups live peacefully; in other
instances they constantly struggle to gain power over the other.
 Ethnic conflict
By the mid-twentieth century, following World War II,
countries began to gain independence from European
control, especially in Africa and Asia. More powerful ethnic
groups asserted cultural, political, and economic influence
on weaker ethnic groups, which led to resentments,
prejudicial attitudes, and discrimination. In many of these
countries, when freed from European control, long-
simmering ethnic prejudice and discrimination surfaced.
When the Soviet Union broke apart in the early 1990s, ethnic groups
long suppressed by the world superpower asserted themselves not
only in eastern Europe, but Africa and Asia as well. Ethnic groups had
long been controlled by the government in Moscow, the capital of
the Soviet Union. As independent countries emerged from the old
Soviet Union, so did suppressed ethnic group rivalries. A key example
is the ethnic conflict experienced with the breakup of Yugoslavia
formerly controlled by the Soviets. Ethnic Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian
Muslims, highly distrustful of each other, vied for political control of
the region.
In 1900 there were approximately fifty countries in the world. That
number had quadrupled by the year 2000 to over two hundred.
Competition between ethnic groups over natural, economic, and
political resources threatened the unity of many countries. In some,
separatist movements developed. An ethnic separatist movement is
created when an ethnic group attempts to become politically
independent and establish a separate country. A few examples of
separatist movements include the Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka,
Chechen-Inguish in Russia.
 Immigrants from Asia
Chinese and Japanese were first brought to America in the second half of the nineteenth
century to work in mines of the west and to build railroad lines into the western United
States. Those who remained in America after their labor was no longer needed concentrated
in tight enclaves (a distinct community within a city) on the West Coast, predominantly in San
Francisco. They suffered prejudicial and discriminatory treatment in all aspects of their lives.
They were excellent workers who did not complain, took jobs white Americans considered
beneath them, and were highly self-sufficient, rarely venturing out of their communities. For
these very reasons, the public resented them. U.S. immigration laws essentially shut off
immigration from Asia by the mid-1920s. During World War II, Japanese Americans were
forced by the U.S. government to live in guarded camps hastily constructed in remote areas.
Not until 1965 was immigration open once again to Asians as the American public,
influenced by the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, had a greater sense of
equal treatment of all peoples. Although arriving from all Asian countries, the
largest groups came from Japan, China, the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam. As a
whole, Asian Americans by 2000 had good incomes as a large percentage of the
Asian American immigrant population had graduated from college. The most
serious ethnic strife for Asians existed between black Americans and Koreans and
Vietnamese. Perceiving these groups take jobs and profits, black Americans
resented both groups opening and operating businesses in black communities.
Numerous violent incidents occurred between the groups.
 Persistent and resistant to solution
Ethnic prejudice, discrimination, and conflict are difficult to manage
and often all but impossible to halt or resolve. They are deeply
imbedded into the psyche of individuals and groups. While at
different periods in history discord may subside for a time, as long as
decades, it is often just below the surface and will begin again given
the right situation. Peace accord (agreement) after peace accord has
proven inadequate. Likewise, peacekeeping forces do not solve the
problems; often, they are helpless to stop violent acts from
continuing.
Ethnic group loyalty is one of the strongest bonds between
humans. Loyalties are passed from parents to children,
generation to generation. Ethnocentric behavior,
stereotyping, and scapegoating defy rational resolutions to
prejudice, discrimination, and conflict. Often ethnic conflicts
are perceived by groups as struggles for no less than
survival of their culture.
An end to ethnic discrimination and conflict is generally achieved only with
separation of the two warring groups. Successful separatist movements result in
the formation of segregated regions with local control or entirely new countries.
Examples of successful separatist movements in recent history include the
formation of Bosnia and Croatia from the Yugoslav Federation in the 1990s and East
Timor separating from Indonesia.

Even new countries are never ethnically pure, so a minority or less successful group
is often suppressed to achieve peace. Suppression involves discriminatory actions,
which causes resentment to grow, and the suppressed group readies itself to strike
back.
One dead in Cordillera tribal war
JUL 25, 2020 8:08 AM PHT
A person died after the tribal war between Betwagan in Sadanga,
Mountain Province, and Butbut in Tinglayan, Kalinga, escalated last
Monday, July 20. 
The two tribes share a boundary, which makes a bodong or the
Cordilleran peace pact necessary, but this was broken last February.
Despite the COVID-19 crisis, the tribal war worsened this week over
water rights. 
A Betwagan resident was on his way to work on his irrigation when he
was shot and killed allegedly by members of the Butbut community. 
Those in Betwagan insisted there was no shootout. 
But the Butbut residents claimed it was those in Betwagan who
attacked them first last Monday. 
The elders of both tribes already advised their members who are still
in other areas to come home and prepare for a longer conflict. They
also asked their constituents to stock up on necessities. 
The police has intervened in the conflict, which started 4 years ago.
Thank you very much!
Questions???