Etnicita a nacionalismus

Ethnicity has been one of the main topics in the field of social anthropology since the end of the 1960s and still today remains a central subject of research. Although this book is focused particularly on contributions made by anthropology to the study of ethnicity and associated phenomena, its scope exceeds academic anthropology. Thanks to long-term terrain research and a perspective from below, anthropology gains the possibility of generating immediate findings about social life directly from the area of everyday interactions, which to a significant extent is the sphere where the phenomenon of ethnicity is born. Ethnic relationships arise and acquire significance in social situations and contacts as a kind of product of the human attempt to respond to life's demands and challenges. Social anthropology offers a unique opportunity to examine these processes in the very centre of local events, even though in order for us to acquire a complete conception of ethnicity and nationalism, it has to be complemented with historical and macro-sociological approaches.
Anthropological approaches also enable us to ascertain the ways in which people define and perceive ethnic relationships; how they speak and deliberate about their own group, other groups, and their chief characteristics; and also how their corresponding world-views are maintained, negotiated and transformed. The significance that people attribute to their membership of an ethnic group is most accessible to scientific research by means of the kind of detailed research, based on personal participation, that is the domain of anthropology. And finally, social anthropology as a comparative discipline devotes attention to both similarities and also differences between individual inter-ethnic situations and their contexts, and is therefore capable of offering a multi-layered and complex vision of ethnicity in the contemporary world.