Schermerhorn’s pluralistic approach. A more pluralist definition of ethnicity which could be linked to the Anglo-Japanese is Schermerhorn’s (1978) definition of an ethnic group which he defines as: a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these (Xxxxxxxxxxxx, 1996, p. 281). However, Schermerhorn22 also conflates ‘race’ with ethnic group as kinship patterns, tribal affiliation and ‘phenotypical’23 features are mentioned. This could be because ‘race’ and ethnicity are so conceptually linked that the two are often conflated as Hall emphasises: The biological referent is never wholly absent from discourses of ethnicity, though it is more indirect. The more ‘ethnicity’ matters, the more its characteristics are represented as relatively fixed, inherent within a group, transmitted from generation to generation, not just by culture and education, but by biological inheritance, stabilized above all by kinship and endogamous marriage rules that ensure that the ethnic group remains genetically, and therefore, culturally ‘pure’ (Hall, 2000, p. 223). 22 This could be because the term ‘race’ had been discredited after World War II due to the destructiveness and collapse of Nazi racial doctrine, the term ethnic became commonplace in post-war Britain (Tonkin et al, 1996). This seems to suggest that the term ‘race’ had simply been replaced by the word ethnic (ibid.) but ‘its [race] conceptual framework was never destroyed’; in particular the idea that populations can be divided into discrete, largely immutable categories (Malik, 1996, p. 127). 23 In my thesis I am not drawing upon the notion of ‘phenotypical’ features because the word phenotypical is linked to biology. As my thesis is about language and cultural practices linked to ethnicities rather than fixed biological concepts, I am replacing phenotypical features with racial features. As Xxxxxxxxxxxx is talking about a collectively within a larger society, this could be loosely related to the A-Js in Japan. He gives a list of ‘symbolic elements’ which could be adapted to eliminate the idiom of race by using: language, artefacts, food, and cultural...
