Ethnicity and its forms: an approach to a complex model of ethnic belonging

Abstract

One of the main challenges of current sociology of ethnic relations is to achieve an accurate understanding of the dynamic of ethnicity and to build a theoretical model of its functioning. Decades after the neglecting of the biological paradigm of race as a scientific basis for research in this area, new theoretical work is needed towards a non-essentialist categorization of ethnicity. Beyond the perennial debate between primordialists and instrumentalists on the nature of ethnic identity, this is supposed to be the only way of forging a more complex understanding of the cultural reproduction of minority groups.