Nuer and Dinka Are People: Ecology, Ethnicity and Logical Possibility

A Bioarchaeological Assessment of Prehistoric Ethnicity among Early Late Intermediate Period Populations of the Azapa Valley, Chile

“…The concept of ethnicity is widely recognized as one that is both difficult to define and operationalize, even among living people. While much disagreement exists on exactly what defines ethnicity, most scholars agree that ethnic identity often involves assigning importance to perceived affinities among individuals as well as some sense of differences among groups (Barth 1970; Carter Bentley 1987;Drummond 1980;Southall 1976). Further, group affinities and differences are often expressed culturally through both material objects and shared, group-specific behavior (Carter Bentley 1987).…”

Contructivism, instrumentalism and the rise of Acholi ethnic identity in northern Uganda

“…Constructivism first overtook primordialism as a dominant paradigm of ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to such anthropologists and sociologists as Barth (1969), Cohen (1974), Southall (1976), Gellner (1987) and Glazer (1975). A major focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the construction of their perceived social reality.…”

Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communities: a symposium

“…The anthropologist Evans‐Pritchard, writing about kinship and lineages among the Nuer (), speaks in a similar way of structural amnesia as a means of creating continuity: For functional reasons, Nuer lineages vanish after six generations, by which time they cease to have a bearing on the operative political entity of the lineage. Interestingly, Southall () criticised Evans‐Pritchard's concept of ‘the Nuer nation’ in a very Andersonian way by pointing out that in a society with neither script nor state, with no common institutions nor a large‐scale division of labour, it was inconceivable for its members to imagine themselves as part of an abstract nation. (With the emergence of South Sudan as an independent state, this has changed.…”