How is race synonymous with ethnicity?

Question

Where does cultural fit into ethnicity? Wouldn't some races not be of the same ethnic background or ethnicity? Thank you. i raise these questions for thought provoking scholarly answers to questions I have been exploring.

Answer 1

"Culture" and "ethnic group" can in the observable world be coextensive, but are not intrinsically related, and are less likely to be coextensive now than in the past, and less likely in the future than now.

A "culture" is usually used to mean a number of communities that share some distinctive characteristics with each other and not with those that do not belong to that culture. Historians/archaeologists, for example, talk about "Celtic culture" in the first millennium BCE, distinguishing it from non-Cletic cultures by its material artefacts, religion (esp. the role, beliefs, and power of the Druids), rules of war, political organisation, and languages. They further distinguish by time period: what separates the "Hallstatt culture" from the "La Tene" culture is the development of new technologies, the most visible effect of which was the great Celtic expansion from the Bayern/Helvetic region to most of Europe and part of Anatolia.

But "a culture" is not a precise and inflexible piece of language. We can say that there was one Celtic culture in the later 1st millennium BCE, but we can also subdivide it into "Gaulish culture", "British culture", "Galatian culture" and so on, the boundaries between these specificities reflecting the differential impact of external pressures and influences (Greek, Roman, etc) and of internal politics (the Celts were never remotely unified politically and all too often fought each other). These subdivisions share a common Celtic "ethnicity" and spoke related Celtic languages, but show differences in material artefacts, building styles, defensive structures, etc, because of history, geography and politics.

The above is not quite as scholarly as you would like but it is reasonably well-read. Below is strictly my observation and opinion.

Fast-forwarding 20-25 centuries, in the contemporary world there are some places where the culture is ethnically homogeneous, like the Hopi mesas in Arizona, everyone who lives there and by the (relatively sharply defined) social agreements of those people is ethnically Hopi. Similarly for example with the Havasupai in Havasu Canyon. Secondly, there are many places where it is substantially homogeneous but there is some admixture. For example, Portugal might reasonably be said to have one Portuguese culture. Most of the people of Portugal are ethnically Portuguese, but there are a meaningful number of mixed-blood people from former colonies (Brazil, Angola etc) and a scatter of recent immigrants from N Africa and from other EU countries. Thirdly, there are some locations where two substantially different cultures live in close proximity or even geographically intermingled, but there is little or no interbreeding and each has retained internal ethnic homogeneity, for example Sri Lanka with the Tamils and Sinhalese or Israel (pre-1967 borders) with the Jews, Druze, and Israeli Arabs. And fourthly, there are places where one can legitimately speak of there being "a" culture where diversity is an active characteristic of that culture and there is a significant level of inter-ethnic intermingling and interbreeding, such as London and New York.

It occurs to me to add that the question "who is a Celt today?" highlights the dilemnas around your question. In the 1970s I know (maybe still, I don't know) there were seven families of immigrants from Pakistan in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, who spoke Urdu and Gaelic but no English. Were they Celts because they spoke the local Celtic langauge and worked with the local Celtic people? Or not because they were Muslims, and/or because of their ethnic origin? What about people elsewhere in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, or Brittany who think of themselves as Celtic but speak only English or French?

Answer 2

American Heritage Dictionary -
race -Dictionary.com Unabridged
Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.
An ethnic group.
Anthropology. a. any of the traditional divisions of humankind, the commonest being the Caucasian, Mongoloid, and *****, characterized by supposedly distinctive and universal physical characteristics: no longer in technical use.
b. an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups.
c. a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans.
As you see, you are confusing terminology used in different areas. I think you should first make good use of a good dictionary (I give you one that I commonly use below), after that, try to make sure what each word means and what is the theoretical background of its use before you attempt to formulate your own theory.

Answer 3

Ur record is particularly proper. even though asians r smarter and larger mannerred, we have a tendency to be held again by way of the whites equivalent to in institution packages and getting increases in jobs. sooo yea, considering that this nation is white-majority, the whites placed themselves on best... (despite the fact that they declare to be treating all people same) yea asians moment cuz we are larger trained and earn more money. i consider core easterners must be subsequent. the one factor maintaining them again is might be the sterotipical view that islam is a unsafe faith. its now not. subsequent will likely be hispanics then african americans, who aren't as good trained as hispanics. local americans i might say are too few in numbers to depend.. however as historical past indicates, they had been closely discriminated by way of the whites from the founding of this nation as much as 1900