Beta Ethnicity

November 9th, 2007 Posted in Ethnicity, Alpha ethnicity, Beta ethnicity

The alpha ethnic group has everything. In isolation it approximates a biological, cultural, social, territorial and self governing unity. It is we the people and in each instance it represents the continuity of our species.

Ethnic identity only becomes significantly apparent with the contact of two (and more) parallel groups. We, within each group, become people of a special kind, differentiated from all the others.

The interactions of alpha ethnic groups are described as foreign relations–international, inter tribal, inter ethnic. Conceptualized at the group level, members in contact are thought of as agents of their ethnic formations.

The contact generates its own culture whose forms are recognized as diplomacy, war and peace, trade, treaties, travel and tourism.

In the shuffle members of one group move to and settle in the territory of another. The arrival can be via invasion or migration or trade or tourism. It can be temporary or permanent. Certainly territorial exclusivity is breached. The locus of governance becomes an issue. Historically there are a great number of processes and forms and outcomes. The Normans conquer the Saxons and all that.

In its modern form with well established nation-states migrants accept the cultural, political and economic forms of their hosts. They try to use the local language, live by the local law, use the local currency and etcetera. The members of migrant groups give up some of the elements of their own parental ethnic heritage. The old ethnic identity remains but part of the prior unitary experience it lost. We can describe this as the beta ethnic group experience.

These partial ethnic groups also can emerge from within a prior unified whole along divisive fronts: conceptual differentiation, physical separation, occupational specialization, new kinship offshoots The possibility of shifting from alpha to beta or vice versa is always offering.

In beta ethnicity the total unity of experience of a people is not met, but the ethnic identity is present or at least implied. Although these ethnic identities and formations can appear to continue for centuries, their content changes and the initial identity may be given up for another. So for example the European national identities of today trace back to separate tribal and provincial ethnicities in the past. These are now folded into the new unified modern form. Difficulty in resolving these political and cultural differences are not unusual in our experience today and they are expressed in prolonged military, police, and terror campaigns.

Even though our various concrete ethnic situations may be vastly different we all can empathize with all parties in every case. We all understand the process. But the actual setting in which we find ourselves, the specifics of our own ethnic situation, may be so riven with conflict over material, ideological, economic, territorial advantage that to see, to actually see and credit and evaluate with a benign morality, might seem (and even be) a fatal danger to self, one’s group and those we love.

Ethnicity is abstract yet personal. In the detail of cases it is unending. It is one of the pillars needed to characterize the social order of any society.

For anyone interested in following up on this subject I would suggest that they start with Shibutani, Tamotsu and Kian M. Kwan. “Ethnic Stratification, A Comparative Approach.” 1965.