Some of these designer drugs were originally synthesized by
academic or industrial researchers in an effort to discover more potent
derivatives with fewer side effects and shorter duration (and possibly
also because it is easier to apply for patents for new molecules) and
were later co-opted for recreational use. Other designer drugs were
prepared for the first time in clandestine laboratories.
Because the efficacy and safety of these substances have not been
thoroughly evaluated in animal and human trials, the use of some of
these drugs may result in unexpected side effects.
The development of designer drugs may be considered a subfield of drug design. The exploration of modifications to known active drugs—such as their structural analogues, stereoisomers, and derivatives—yields drugs that may differ significantly in effects from their "parent" drug (e.g., showing increased potency, or decreased side effects).
In some instances, designer drugs have similar effects to other known
drugs, but have completely dissimilar chemical structures (e.g. JWH-018 vs THC).
Despite being a very broad term, applicable to almost every synthetic
drug, it is often used to connote synthetic recreational drugs,
sometimes even those which have not been designed at all (e.g. LSD, the psychedelic side effects of which were discovered unintentionally).
In some jurisdictions, drugs that are highly similar in structure
to a prohibited drug are illegal to trade regardless of that drug's
legal status (or indeed whether or not the structurally similar analogue
has similar pharmacological effects). In other jurisdictions, their
trade is a legal grey area, making them grey market
goods. Some jurisdictions may have analogue laws which ban drugs
similar in chemical structure to other prohibited drugs, while some
designer drugs may be prohibited irrespective of the legal status of
structurally similar drugs; in both cases, their trade may take place on
the black market.
History
United States
1920s–1930s
Following the passage of the second International Opium Convention in 1925, which specifically banned morphine and the diacetylester of morphine, heroin, a number of alternative esters of morphine quickly started to be manufactured and sold. The most notable of these were dibenzoylmorphine and acetylpropionylmorphine,
which have virtually identical effects to heroin but were not covered
by the Opium Convention. This then led the Health Committee of the League of Nations
to pass several resolutions attempting to bring these new drugs under
control, ultimately leading in 1930 to the first broad analogues
provisions extending legal control to all esters of morphine, oxycodone
and hydromorphone. Another early example of what could loosely be termed designer drug use, was during the Prohibition era in the 1930s, when diethyl ether was sold and used as an alternative to illegal alcoholic beverages in a number of countries.
1960s–1970s
During
the 1960s and 1970s, a number of new synthetic hallucinogens were
introduced, with a notable example being the sale of highly potent
tablets of DOM in San Francisco in 1967.
There was little scope to prosecute people over drug analogues at this
time, with new compounds instead being added to the controlled drug
schedules one by one as they became a problem. One significant court
case from this period was in 1973, when Tim Scully and Nicholas Sand were prosecuted for making the acetyl amide of LSD, known as ALD-52.
At this time ALD-52 was not a controlled drug, but they were convicted
on the grounds that in order to make ALD-52, they would have had to be
in possession of LSD, which was illegal. The late 1970s also saw the
introduction of various analogues of phencyclidine (PCP) to the illicit market.
1980s–early 1990s
The modern use of the term designer drug was coined in the 1980s to refer to various synthetic opioid drugs, based mostly on the fentanyl molecule (such as α-methylfentanyl). The term gained widespread popularity when MDMA (ecstasy) experienced a popularity boom in the mid-1980s. When the term was coined in the 1980s, a wide range of narcotics were being sold as heroin on the black market. Many were based on fentanyl or meperidine. One, MPPP, was found in some cases to contain an impurity called MPTP, which caused brain damage that could result in a syndrome identical to late stage Parkinson's disease, from only a single dose. Other problems were highly potent fentanyl analogues that caused many accidental overdoses.
Because the government was powerless to prosecute people for
these drugs until after they had been marketed successfully, laws were
passed to give the DEA
power to emergency schedule chemicals for a year, with an optional
6-month extension, while gathering evidence to justify permanent
scheduling, as well as the analogue laws mentioned previously.
Emergency-scheduling power was used for the first time for MDMA.
In this case, the DEA scheduled MDMA as a Schedule I drug and retained
this classification after review, even though their own judge ruled that
MDMA should be classified Schedule III on the basis of its demonstrated
uses in medicine. The emergency scheduling power has subsequently been used for a variety of other drugs including 2C-B, AMT, and BZP. In 2004, a piperazine drug, TFMPP, became the first drug that had been emergency-scheduled to be denied permanent scheduling and revert to legal status.
The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw the re-emergence of methamphetamine
in the United States as a widespread public health issue, leading to
increasing controls on precursor chemicals in an attempt to cut down on
domestic manufacture of the drug. This led to several alternative
stimulant drugs emerging, the most notable ones being methcathinone and 4-methylaminorex,
but, despite attracting enough attention from authorities to provoke
legal scheduling of these compounds, their distribution was relatively
limited in extent and methamphetamine continued to dominate the illicit
synthetic stimulant market overall.
Late 1990s–2004
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a huge explosion in designer drugs being sold over the internet. The term and concept of "research chemicals" was coined by some marketers of designer drugs (in particular, of psychedelic drugs in the tryptamine and phenethylamine family). The idea was that, by selling the chemicals as for "scientific research" rather than human consumption, the intent clause of the U.S. analogue drug
laws would be avoided. Nonetheless, the DEA raided multiple suppliers,
first JLF Primary Materials, and then multiple vendors (such as RAC Research) several years later in Operation Web Tryp. This process was accelerated greatly when vendors began advertising via search engines like Google by linking their sites to searches on key words such as chemical names and terms like psychedelic or hallucinogen.
Widespread discussion of consumptive use and the sources for the
chemicals in public forums also drew the attention of the media and
authorities.
In 2004, the US Drug Enforcement Administration raided and shut
down several Internet-based research chemical vendors in an operation
called Web Tryp. With help from the authorities in India and
China, two chemical manufacturers were also closed. Many other
internet-based vendors promptly stopped doing business, even though
their products were still legal throughout much of the world.
Most substances that were sold as "research chemicals" in this
period of time are hallucinogens and bear a chemical resemblance to
drugs such as psilocybin and mescaline. As with other hallucinogens, these substances are often taken for the purposes of facilitating spiritualprocesses, mental reflection or recreation. Some research chemicals on the market were not psychoactive, but can be used as precursors in the synthesis of other potentially psychoactive substances, for example, 2C-H, which could be used to make 2C-B and 2C-I
among others. Extensive surveys of structural variations have been
conducted by pharmaceutical corporations, universities and independent
researchers over the last century, from which some of the presently
available research chemicals derive. One particularly notable researcher
is Alexander Shulgin, who presented syntheses and pharmacological explorations of hundreds of substances in the books TiHKAL and PiHKAL (co-authored with Ann Shulgin), and served as an expert witness for the defense in several court cases against manufacturers of psychoactive drugs.
The majority of chemical suppliers sold research chemicals in
bulk form as powder, not as pills, as selling in pill form would
invalidate the claims that they were being sold for non-consumptive
research. Active dosages vary widely from substance to substance,
ranging from micrograms to hundreds of milligrams, but while it is
critical for the end user to weigh doses with a precision scale, instead
of guessing ("eyeballing"), many users did not do this and this led to
many emergency room visits and several deaths, which were a prominent
factor leading to the emergency scheduling of several substances and
eventually Operation Web Tryp. Some compounds such as 2C-B and 5-Meo-DiPT
did eventually increase in popularity to the point that they were sold
in pill form to reach a wider market, and acquired popular street names
("Nexus" and "Foxy," respectively). Once a chemical reaches this kind of
popularity, it is usually just a matter of time before it is added to
the list of scheduled (i.e., illegal) drugs.
The late 1990s and early 2000s also saw the first widespread use of novel anabolic steroids by athletes in competition. Steroids had been banned by the International Olympic Committee
since 1976, but due to the large number of different anabolic agents
available for human and veterinary use, the ability of laboratories to
test for all available drugs had always lagged behind the ability of
athletes to find new compounds to use. The introduction of increasingly
formalised testing procedures, especially with the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency
in 1999, made it much more difficult for athletes to get away with
using these drugs without detection, which then led to the synthesis of
novel and potent anabolic steroid drugs such as tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), which were not detectable by the standard tests.
2005–2021
While
through recent history most designer drugs had been either opioids,
hallucinogens, or anabolic steroids, the range of possible compounds is
limited only by the scientific and patent literature, and recent years
have been characterised by a broadening of the range of compounds sold
as designer drugs. These have included a wide variety of designer
stimulants such as geranamine, mephedrone, MDPV and desoxypipradrol, several designer sedatives such as methylmethaqualone and premazepam, and designer analogues of sildenafil (Viagra), which have been reported as active compounds in "herbal" aphrodisiac products. Designer cannabinoids are another recent development, with two compounds JWH-018 and (C8)-CP 47,497 initially found in December 2008 as active components of "herbal smoking blends" sold as legal alternatives to marijuana. Subsequently, a growing range of synthetic cannabinoid agonists have continued to appear, including by 2010, novel compounds such as RCS-4, RCS-8, and AB-001,
which had never been reported in the literature, and appear to have
been invented by designer drug manufacturers themselves. Another novel
development is the use of research ligands for cosmetic rather than strictly recreational purposes, such as grey-market internet sales of the non-approved alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormonetanning drugs known as melanotan peptides.
"...what is new is the wide range
of substances now being explored, the aggressive marketing of products
that have been intentionally mislabelled, the growing use of the
internet, and the speed at which the market reacts to control measures."
Mephedrone and the cathinones marked somewhat of a turning point for designer drugs, turning them from little known, ineffective substances sold in head shops
to powerful substances able to compete with classical drugs on the
black market. Mephedrone especially experienced a somewhat meteoric rise
in popularity in 2009
and the resulting media panic resulted in its prohibition in multiple
countries. Following this there was a considerable emergence of other
cathinones which attempted to mimic the effects of mephedrone, and with a
newly attracted customer base, plenty of money to drive innovation.
Subsequently, the market rapidly expanded, with more and more
substances being detected every year. In 2009, the EMCDDA's early
warning system discovered 24 new drugs. In 2010, it found another 41; in
2011, another 49; and in 2012, there were 73 more. In 2013, a further 81 were identified:
a total of 268 new drugs in just four years. These have not been
limited to cathinones, with 35% being cannabinoids and the rest being
composed of stimulants, benzodiazepines, psychedelics, dissociatives and to a lesser extent, every other class of drugs, even ibogoids and nootropics. The largest group of drugs being monitored by the EMCDDA is synthetic cannabinoids, with 209 different synthetic cannabinoids reported between 2008 and 2021 - including 11 new cannabinoids identified for the first time in 2020.
2022–present
In the early 2020s, safety and legal difficulty of regulating peptides spurred the growth of grey-market synthetic peptide hormone vendors.
These peptides are marketed as non-recreational and sold for their
purported anti-aging, performance enhancing and cosmetic benefits, such vendors may employ medical professionals using legal ambiguity for their operations.
Terminology
Many
terms exist other than "designer drug" often depending on the context
and geographical region. For example, the term new psychoactive
substance (NPS) is more commonly used in academic settings, and in
regions such as Australia, New Zealand, and European Union, including United Kingdom (UK).
Common names
In the UK to avoid being controlled by the Medicines Act, designer drugs such as mephedrone have been described as "plant food", despite the compounds having no history of being used for these purposes.
In the US, similar descriptions ("bath salts" is the most common) have been used to describe mephedrone as well as methylone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV). Combined with labeling that they are "not for human consumption," these descriptions are an attempt to skirt the Federal Analog Act which forbids drugs that are "substantially similar" to already classified drugs from being sold for human use.
Synthetic cannabinoids are known under a variety of names including K2, Spice, Black Mamba, Bombay Blue, Genie, Zohai, Banana Cream Nuke, Krypton, and Lava Red.
They are often called "synthetic marijuana," "herbal incense," or
"herbal smoking blends" and often labeled "not for human consumption."
Safety
The safety of research chemicals is untested and little if any research has been done on the toxicology or pharmacology of most of these drugs. Few, if any, human or animal studies
have been done. Many research compounds have produced unexpected
side-effects and adverse incidents due to the lack of screening for
off-target effects prior to marketing; both bromo-dragonfly and mephedrone seem to be capable of producing pronounced vasoconstriction under some circumstances, which has resulted in several deaths, although the mechanism remains unclear. Substituted phenethylamines such as the 2C family and substituted amphetamines such as the DOx family have also caused a limited number of deaths.
Due to the recent development of many designer drugs, laws banning or
regulating their use have not been developed yet, and in recent cases
novel drugs have appeared directly in response to legislative action, to
replace a similar compound that had recently been banned.
Many of the chemicals fall under the various drug analogue legislations
in certain countries, but most countries have no general analogue act
or equivalent legislation and so novel compounds may fall outside of the
law after only minor structural modifications.
Other countries have dealt with the issue differently. In some,
the new drugs are banned as they become a concern, as in Germany,
Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. In Sweden, the police and
customs may also seize drugs that are not on the list of drugs covered
by the anti-drug laws if the police suspect that the purpose of the
holding is related to drug abuse. Following a decision by a prosecutor,
the police may destroy the seized drugs.
In Ireland, the Criminal Justice (Psychoactive Substances) Act
2010 bans substances based on their psychoactive effect, and was
introduced as a catch-all to address the time lag between new substances
appearing and their being banned individually. In the United Kingdom, the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 adopts a similar approach.
Some countries, such as Australia, have enacted generic bans but
based on chemical structure rather than psychoactive effect: if a
chemical fits a set of rules regarding substitutions and alterations of
an already-banned drug, then it too is banned.
Brazil adopted the same model as Australia, in a recent ruling from
ANVISA, which is responsible to define what constitute drugs.
A temporary class drug is a relatively new status for controlled drugs, which has been adopted in some jurisdictions, notably New Zealand and the United Kingdom,
to attempt to bring newly synthesized designer drugs under legal
control. The controlled drug legislation in these jurisdictions requires
drug scheduling decisions to follow an evidence-based process, where
the harms of the drug are assessed and reviewed so that an appropriate
legal status can be assigned. Since many designer drugs sold in recent
years have had little or no published research that could help inform
such a decision, they have been widely sold as "legal highs", often for
months, before sufficient evidence accumulates to justify placing them
on the controlled drug schedules.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify
with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that
distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a
people of a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism.
Although both organic and performative criteria characterise
ethnic groups, debate in the past has dichotomised between primordialism
and constructivism. Earlier 20th-century "Primordialists" viewed ethnic
groups as real phenomena whose distinct characteristics have endured
since the distant past. Perspectives that developed after the 1960s increasingly viewed ethnic groups as social constructs, with identity assigned by societal rules.
Terminology
The term ethnic is ultimately derived from the Greekethnos, through its adjectival form ethnikos, loaned into Latin as ethnicus. The inherited English language term for this concept is folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period.
In Early Modern English and until the mid-19th century, ethnic was used to mean heathen or pagan (in the sense of disparate "nations" which did not yet participate in the Christian ecumene), as the Septuagint used ta ethne 'the nations' to translate the Hebrew goyim "the foreign nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews". The Greek term in early antiquity (Homeric Greek) could refer to any large group, a host of men, a band of comrades as well as a swarm or flock of animals. In Classical Greek, the word took on a meaning comparable to the concept now expressed by "ethnic group", mostly translated as "nation, tribe, a unique people group"; only in Hellenistic Greek did the term tend to become further narrowed to refer to "foreign" or "barbarous" nations in particular (whence the later meaning "heathen, pagan").
In the 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of
"peculiar to a tribe, race, people or nation", in a return to the
original Greek meaning. The sense of "different cultural groups", and in
American English "tribal, racial, cultural or national minority group" arises in the 1930s to 1940s,
serving as a replacement of the term race which had earlier taken this
sense but was now becoming deprecated due to its association with
ideological racism. The abstract ethnicity
had been used as a stand-in for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now
came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character" (first recorded
1953).
The term ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Depending on context, the term nationality may be used either synonymously with ethnicity or synonymously with citizenship (in a sovereign state). The process that results in emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis, a term in use in ethnological literature since about 1950. The term may also be used with the connotation of something unique and unusually exotic
(cf. "an ethnic restaurant", etc.), generally related to cultures of
more recent immigrants, who arrived after the dominant population of an
area was established.
Depending on which source of group identity is emphasized to define membership, the following types of (often mutually overlapping) groups can be identified:
Ethno-religious, emphasizing shared affiliation with a particular religion, denomination or sect – example: Mormons, Sikhs
Ethno-cultural, emphasizing shared culture or tradition, often overlapping with other forms of ethnicity – example: Travellers
In many cases, more than one aspect determines membership: for instance, Armenian ethnicity can be defined by Armenian citizenship, having Armenian heritage, native use of the Armenian language, or membership of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Ethnography begins in classical antiquity; after early authors like Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus, Herodotus laid the foundation of both historiography and ethnography of the ancient world c. 480 BC. The Greeks had developed a concept of their own ethnicity, which they grouped under the name of Hellenes.
Although there were exceptions, such as Macedonia, which was ruled by
nobility in a way that was not typically Greek, and Sparta, which had an
unusual ruling class, the ancient Greeks generally enslaved only
non-Greeks due to their strong belief in ethnonationalism. The Greeks sometimes believed that even their lowest citizens were superior to any barbarian. In his Politics
1.2–7; 3.14, Aristotle even described barbarians as natural slaves in
contrast to the Greeks. Herodotus (8.144.2) gave a famous account of
what defined Greek (Hellenic) ethnic identity in his day, enumerating
shared descent (ὅμαιμον – homaimon, "of the same blood"),
shared language (ὁμόγλωσσον – homoglōsson, "speaking the same language"),
shared sanctuaries and sacrifices (Greek: θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι – theōn hidrumata te koina kai thusiai),
shared customs (Greek: ἤθεα ὁμότροπα – ēthea homotropa, "customs of like fashion").
Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. Many social scientists, such as anthropologistsFredrik Barth and Eric Wolf,
do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity
as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than
an essential quality inherent to human groups.
According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.
One is between "primordialism" and "instrumentalism". In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond. The instrumentalist
approach, on the other hand, treats ethnicity primarily as an ad hoc
element of a political strategy, used as a resource for interest groups
for achieving secondary goals such as, for instance, an increase in
wealth, power, or status. This debate is still an important point of reference in Political science, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.
The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism".
Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of
historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented
as old. Essentialists view such identities as ontological categories defining social actors.
According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology,
by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicized forms of
self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations.
This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism
in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large
immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism
in the Caribbean and South Asia.
Max Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft
(community). Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not
create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation
resulted from the drive to monopolize power and status. This was
contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held
that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed
from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then
called "race".
Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth,
whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from 1969 has been described as
instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the
1980s and 1990s.
Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of
ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and
renegotiated by both external ascription and internal
self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not
discontinuous cultural isolates or logical a priori to which
people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions
of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds,
replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups. "Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness
of ethnic identities. Barth writes: "...categorical
ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact,
and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and
incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite
changing participation and membership in the course of individual life
histories."
In 1978, anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the
identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists
often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:
... the named ethnic identities we
accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often
arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed.
In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic
group by outsiders, e.g. anthropologists, may not coincide with the
self-identification of the members of that group. He also described that
in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used
in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to
smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but
that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the
commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and
modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic"
identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often
colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized
peoples and nation-states.
According to Paul James, formations of identity were often changed and distorted by colonization, but identities are not made out of nothing:
Categorizations about identity,
even when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of
colonization, state formation or general modernizing processes, are
always full of tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these
contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and
positive.
Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different
markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan
Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have a mercurial
character. Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness". He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that (in Cohen's paraphrase) "Ethnicity... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization."
This may be why descent is sometimes a marker of ethnicity, and
sometimes not: which diacritic of ethnicity is salient depends on
whether people are scaling ethnic boundaries up or down, and whether
they are scaling them up or down depends generally on the political
situation.
Kanchan Chandra
rejects the expansive definitions of ethnic identity (such as those
that include common culture, common language, common history and common
territory), choosing instead to define ethnic identity narrowly as a
subset of identity categories determined by the belief of common
descent.
Jóhanna Birnir similarly defines ethnicity as "group
self-identification around a characteristic that is very difficult or
even impossible to change, such as language, race, or location."
Approaches to understanding ethnicity
Different
approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different
social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a
factor in human life and society. As Jonathan M. Hall
observes, World War II was a turning point in ethnic studies. The
consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentialist interpretations of
ethnic groups and race. Ethnic groups came to be defined as social
rather than biological entities. Their coherence was attributed to
shared myths, descent, kinship,
a common place of origin, language, religion, customs, and national
character. So, ethnic groups are conceived as mutable rather than
stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than written in the
genes.
Examples of various approaches are primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism, and instrumentalism.
"Primordialism", holds that ethnicity has existed at all
times of human history and that modern ethnic groups have historical
continuity into the far past. For them, the idea of ethnicity is closely
linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber
understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing
groups rooted by kinship and biological heritage.
"Essentialist primordialism" further holds that ethnicity is an a priori
fact of human existence, that ethnicity precedes any human social
interaction and that it is unchanged by it. This theory sees ethnic
groups as natural, not just as historical. It also has problems dealing
with the consequences of intermarriage, migration and colonization for
the composition of modern-day multi-ethnic societies.
"Kinship primordialism" holds that ethnic communities are extensions of kinship units, basically being derived by kinship or clan
ties where the choices of cultural signs (language, religion,
traditions) are made exactly to show this biological affinity. In this
way, the myths of common biological ancestry that are a defining feature
of ethnic communities are to be understood as representing actual
biological history. A problem with this view on ethnicity is that it is
more often than not the case that mythic origins of specific ethnic
groups directly contradict the known biological history of an ethnic
community.
"Geertz's primordialism", notably espoused by anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
argues that humans in general attribute an overwhelming power to
primordial human "givens" such as blood ties, language, territory, and
cultural differences. In Geertz' opinion, ethnicity is not in itself
primordial but humans perceive it as such because it is embedded in
their experience of the world.
"Perennialism" is an approach that is primarily concerned
with nationhood but tends to see nations and ethnic communities as
basically the same phenomenon. It holds that the nation, as a type of
social and political organization, is of an immemorial or "perennial"
character.
Smith (1999) distinguishes two variants: "continuous perennialism",
which claims that particular nations have existed for very long periods,
and "recurrent perennialism", which focuses on the emergence,
dissolution and reappearance of nations as a recurring aspect of human
history.
"Perpetual perennialism" holds that specific ethnic groups have existed continuously throughout history.
"Situational perennialism" holds that nations and ethnic
groups emerge, change and vanish through the course of history. This
view holds that the concept of ethnicity is a tool used by political
groups to manipulate resources such as wealth, power, territory or
status in their particular groups' interests. Accordingly, ethnicity
emerges when it is relevant as a means of furthering emergent collective
interests and changes according to political changes in society.
Examples of a perennialist interpretation of ethnicity are also found in
Barth and Seidner who see ethnicity as ever-changing boundaries between
groups of people established through ongoing social negotiation and
interaction.
"Instrumentalist perennialism", while seeing ethnicity
primarily as a versatile tool that identified different ethnics groups
and limits through time, explains ethnicity as a mechanism of social stratification,
meaning that ethnicity is the basis for a hierarchical arrangement of
individuals. According to Donald Noel, a sociologist who developed a
theory on the origin of ethnic stratification, ethnic stratification is a
"system of stratification wherein some relatively fixed group
membership (e.g., race, religion, or nationality) is used as a major
criterion for assigning social positions". Ethnic stratification is one of many different types of social stratification, including stratification based on socio-economic status, race, or gender.
According to Donald Noel, ethnic stratification will emerge only when
specific ethnic groups are brought into contact with one another, and
only when those groups are characterized by a high degree of ethnocentrism,
competition, and differential power. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to
look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture,
and to downgrade all other groups outside one's own culture. Some
sociologists, such as Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, say the
origin of ethnic stratification lies in individual dispositions of
ethnic prejudice, which relates to the theory of ethnocentrism.
Continuing with Noel's theory, some degree of differential power must
be present for the emergence of ethnic stratification. In other words,
an inequality of power among ethnic groups means "they are of such
unequal power that one is able to impose its will upon another".
In addition to differential power, a degree of competition structured
along ethnic lines is a prerequisite to ethnic stratification as well.
The different ethnic groups must be competing for some common goal, such
as power or influence, or a material interest, such as wealth or
territory. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings propose that competition
is driven by self-interest and hostility, and results in inevitable
stratification and conflict.
"Constructivism" sees both primordialist and perennialist views as basically flawed,
and rejects the notion of ethnicity as a basic human condition. It
holds that ethnic groups are only products of human social interaction,
maintained only in so far as they are maintained as valid social
constructs in societies.
"Modernist constructivism" correlates the emergence of ethnicity with the movement towards nation states beginning in the early modern period. Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm,
argue that ethnicity and notions of ethnic pride, such as nationalism,
are purely modern inventions, appearing only in the modern period of
world history. They hold that prior to this ethnic homogeneity was not
considered an ideal or necessary factor in the forging of large-scale
societies.
Ethnicity is an important means by which people may identify with a larger group. Many social scientists, such as anthropologistsFredrik Barth and Eric Wolf,
do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity
as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than
an essential quality inherent to human groups.
The process that results in emergence of such identification is called
ethnogenesis. Members of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural
continuities over time, although historians and cultural anthropologists
have documented that many of the values, practices, and norms that
imply continuity with the past are of relatively recent invention.
Ethnic groups can form a cultural mosaic in a society. That could be in a city like New York City or Trieste, but also the fallen monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
or the United States. Current topics are in particular social and
cultural differentiation, multilingualism, competing identity offers,
multiple cultural identities and the formation of Salad bowl and melting pot.Ethnic groups differ from other social groups, such as subcultures, interest groups or social classes,
because they emerge and change over historical periods (centuries) in a
process known as ethnogenesis, a period of several generations of endogamy resulting in common ancestry (which is then sometimes cast in terms of a mythological narrative of a founding figure);
ethnic identity is reinforced by reference to "boundary markers" –
characteristics said to be unique to the group which set it apart from
other groups.
Ethnicity theory in the United States
Ethnicity theory
argues that race is a social category and is only one of several
factors in determining ethnicity. Other criteria include "religion,
language, 'customs', nationality, and political identification". This theory was put forward by sociologist Robert E. Park in the 1920s. It is based on the notion of "culture".
This theory was preceded by more than 100 years during which biological essentialism
was the dominant paradigm on race. Biological essentialism is the
belief that some races, specifically White Europeans in western versions
of the paradigm, are biologically superior and other races,
specifically non-White races in western debates, are inherently
inferior. This view arose as a way to justify enslavement of African
Americans and genocide of Native Americans in a society that was
officially founded on freedom for all. This was a notion that developed
slowly and came to be a preoccupation with scientists, theologians, and
the public. Religious institutions asked questions about whether there
had been multiple creations of races (polygenesis) and whether God had
created lesser races. Many of the foremost scientists of the time took
up the idea of racial difference and found that White Europeans were
superior.
The ethnicity theory was based on the assimilation model. Park
outlined four steps to assimilation: contact, conflict, accommodation,
and assimilation. Instead of attributing the marginalized status of
people of color in the United States to their inherent biological
inferiority, he attributed it to their failure to assimilate into
American culture. They could become equal if they abandoned their
inferior cultures.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of racial formation directly confronts both the premises and the practices of ethnicity theory. They argue in Racial Formation in the United States
that the ethnicity theory was exclusively based on the immigration
patterns of the White population and did take into account the unique
experiences of non-Whites in the United States.
While Park's theory identified different stages in the immigration
process – contact, conflict, struggle, and as the last and best
response, assimilation – it did so only for White communities.
The ethnicity paradigm neglected the ways in which race can complicate a
community's interactions with social and political structures,
especially upon contact.
Assimilation – shedding the particular qualities of a native
culture for the purpose of blending in with a host culture – did not
work for some groups as a response to racism and discrimination, though
it did for others.
Once the legal barriers to achieving equality had been dismantled, the
problem of racism became the sole responsibility of already
disadvantaged communities.
It was assumed that if a Black or Latino community was not "making it"
by the standards that had been set by Whites, it was because that
community did not hold the right values or beliefs, or were stubbornly
resisting dominant norms because they did not want to fit in. Omi and
Winant's critique of ethnicity theory explains how looking to cultural
defect as the source of inequality ignores the "concrete sociopolitical
dynamics within which racial phenomena operate in the U.S." It prevents critical examination of the structural components of racism and encourages a "benign neglect" of social inequality.
In some cases, especially those involving transnational migration or
colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists
and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as
proposed by Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson
see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern
state system in the 17th century. They culminated in the rise of
"nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation
coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries.
Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined.
In the 19th century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations". Nation-states,
however, invariably include populations who have been excluded from
national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups,
consequently, will either demand inclusion based on equality or seek
autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation
in their nation-state. Under these conditionswhen people moved from one state to another,
or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national
boundaries – ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one
nation but lived in another state.
Multi-ethnic states
can be the result of two opposite events, either the recent creation of
state borders at variance with traditional tribal territories, or the
recent immigration of ethnic minorities into a former nation-state.
Examples for the first case are found throughout Africa, where countries created during decolonization inherited arbitrary colonial borders, but also in European countries such as Belgium or United Kingdom. Examples for the second case are countries such as Netherlands,
which were relatively ethnically homogeneous when they attained
statehood but have received significant immigration in the 17th century
and even more so in the second half of the 20th century. States such as
the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland
comprised distinct ethnic groups from their formation and have likewise
experienced substantial immigration, resulting in what has been termed "multicultural" societies, especially in large cities.
The states of the New World were multi-ethnic from the onset, as they were formed as colonies imposed on existing indigenous populations.
In recent decades, feminist scholars (most notably Nira Yuval-Davis)
have drawn attention to the fundamental ways in which women participate
in the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national categories.
Though these categories are usually discussed as belonging to the
public, political sphere, they are upheld within the private, family
sphere to a great extent.
It is here that women act not just as biological reproducers but also
as "cultural carriers", transmitting knowledge and enforcing behaviors
that belong to a specific collectivity.
Women also often play a significant symbolic role in conceptions of
nation or ethnicity, for example in the notion that "women and children"
constitute the kernel of a nation which must be defended in times of
conflict, or in iconic figures such as Britannia or Marianne.
Ethnicity and race
The racial diversity of Asia's ethnic groups (original caption: Asiatiska folk), Nordisk familjebok (1904)
Ethnicity is used as a matter of cultural identity of a group, often
based on shared ancestry, language, and cultural traditions, while race
is applied as a taxonomic grouping, based on physical similarities
among groups. Race is a more controversial subject than ethnicity, due
to common political use of the term.
Ramón Grosfoguel (University of California, Berkeley) argues that
"racial/ethnic identity" is one concept and concepts of race and
ethnicity cannot be used as separate and autonomous categories.
Before Weber (1864–1920), race and ethnicity were primarily seen
as two aspects of the same thing. Around 1900 and before, the
primordialist understanding of ethnicity predominated: cultural
differences between peoples were seen as being the result of inherited
traits and tendencies.
With Weber's introduction of the idea of ethnicity as a social
construct, race and ethnicity became more divided from each other.
National, religious, geographic,
linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial
groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated
genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this
kind are habitually committed when the term "race" is used in popular
parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the
term "race" altogether and speak of "ethnic groups".
In 1982, anthropologist David Craig Griffith summed up forty years of
ethnographic research, arguing that racial and ethnic categories are
symbolic markers for different ways people from different parts of the
world have been incorporated into a global economy:
The opposing interests that divide
the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial"
and "ethnic" distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different
categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating
stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher
echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the
distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories
of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor
mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their
effective values.
Writing in 1977 about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States, Wallman noted
The term "ethnic" popularly
connotes "[race]" in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter
value load. In North America, by contrast, "[race]" most commonly means
color, and "ethnics" are the descendants of relatively recent immigrants
from non-English-speaking countries. "[Ethnic]" is not a noun in
Britain. In effect there are no "ethnics"; there are only "ethnic
relations".
In the U.S., the OMB
says the definition of race as used for the purposes of the US Census
is not "scientific or anthropological" and takes into account "social
and cultural characteristics as well as ancestry", using "appropriate
scientific methodologies" that are not "primarily biological or genetic
in reference".
Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and
actions by the state or its constituents. In the 20th century, people
began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of
an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two
ways. Some, like Jürgen Habermas
and Bruce Barry, have argued that the legitimacy of modern states must
be based on a notion of political rights of autonomous individual
subjects. According to this view, the state should not acknowledge
ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political
and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka,
argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural
construct. According to this view, states must recognize ethnic
identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of
ethnic groups can be accommodated within the boundaries of the
nation-state.
The 19th century saw the development of the political ideology of ethnic nationalism, when the concept of race was tied to nationalism, first by German theorists including Johann Gottfried von Herder.
Instances of societies focusing on ethnic ties, arguably to the
exclusion of history or historical context, have resulted in the
justification of nationalist goals. Two periods frequently cited as
examples of this are the 19th-century consolidation and expansion of the
German Empire and the 20th century Nazi Germany.
Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were acquiring
only lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans. The
history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising
in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of
the USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts.
Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to
between them, as in other regions of the world. Thus, the conflicts are
often misleadingly labeled and characterized as civil wars when they are inter-ethnic conflicts in a multi-ethnic state.
Assyrians are one of the indigenous peoples of Northern Iraq.
Ethnic groups are abundant throughout Asia,
with adaptations to the climate zones of Asia, which can be the Arctic,
subarctic, temperate, subtropical or tropical. The ethnic groups have
adapted to mountains, deserts, grasslands, and forests.
On the coasts of Asia, the ethnic groups have adopted various methods of harvest and transport. Some groups are primarily hunter-gatherers, some practice transhumance
(nomadic lifestyle), others have been agrarian/rural for millennia and
others becoming industrial/urban. Some groups/countries of Asia are
completely urban, such as those in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore. The colonization of Asia was largely ended in the 20th century, with national drives for independence and self-determination across the continent.
The Basques constitute an indigenous ethnic minority in both France and Spain.Sámi family in Lapland of Finland, 1936The Irish are an ethnic group from Ireland of which 70–80 million people worldwide claim ancestry.
Europe
has a large number of ethnic groups; Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87
distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population
in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities
within every state they inhabit (although they may form local regional
majorities within a sub-national entity). The total number of national
minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people or 14%
of 770 million Europeans.
A number of European countries, including France and Switzerland, do not collect information on the ethnicity of their resident population.
An example of a largely nomadic ethnic group in Europe is the Roma, pejoratively known as Gypsies. They originated from India and speak the Romani language.
The Serbian province of Vojvodina is recognizable for its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural identity. There are some 26 ethnic groups in the province, and six languages are in official use by the provincial administration.
The indigenous people in North America are Native Americans.
During European colonization, Europeans arrived in North America. Most
Native Americans died due to Spanish diseases and other European
diseases such as smallpox during the European colonization of the Americas. The largest pan-ethnic group in the United States is White Americans. Hispanic and Latino Americans (Mexican Americans in particular) and Asian Americans have immigrated to the United States recently. In Mexico, most Mexicans are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and Native American ancestry. Some Hispanic and Latino Americans living in the United States are not mestizos.
Enslaved Africans were brought to North America from the 16th to 19th centuries during the Atlantic slave trade. Many of them were sent to the Caribbean.
Ethnic groups that live in the Caribbean are: indigenous peoples,
Africans, Indians, White Europeans, Chinese and Portuguese. The first
White Europeans to arrive in the Dominican Republic were the Spanish in 1492. The Caribbean was also colonized and discovered by the Portuguese, English, Dutch and French.
A sizeable number of people in the United States have mixed-race
identities. In 2021, the number of Americans who identified as
non-Hispanic and more than one race was 13.5 million. The number of
Hispanic Americans who identified as multiracial was 20.3 million. Over the course of the 2010s decade, there was a 127% increase in non-Hispanic Americans who identified as multiracial.
In Canada, European Canadians are the largest ethnic group. In Canada, the indigenous population is growing faster than the non-indigenous population. Most immigrants in Canada come from Asia.
The Founding of the Brazilian Fatherland, an 1899 allegorical painting depicting Brazilian statesman José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, one of the founding fathers of the country, with the flag of the Empire of Brazil and the three major ethnic groups in Brazil
In South America, although highly varying between regions, people are
commonly mixed-race, indigenous, European, black African, and to a
lesser extent also Asian.
Oceanic South Pacific islands nearing Latin America
were uninhabited when discovered by Europeans in the 16th century, with
nothing to indicate prehistoric human activity by Indigenous peoples of
the Americas or Oceania. Contemporary residents are mainly mestizos and Europeans from the Latin American countries whom administer them, although none of these islands have extensive populations. Easter Island are the only oceanic island politically associated with Latin America to have an indigenous population, the Polynesian Rapa Nui people. Their current inhabitants include indigenous Polynesians and mestizo settlers from political administrators Chile, in addition to mixed-race individuals with Polynesian and mestizo/European ancestry. The British overseas territory of Pitcairn Islands, to the west of Easter Island, have a population of approximately 50 people. They are mixed-race Euronesians who descended from an initial group of British and Tahitian
settlers in the 18th century. The islands were previously inhabited by
Polynesians; they had long abandoned Pitcairn by the time the settlers
had arrived. Norfolk Island, now an external territory
of Australia, is also believed to have been inhabited by Polynesians
prior to its initial European discovery in the 18th century. Some of
their residents are descended from mixed-race Pitcairn Islanders that
were relocated onto Norfolk due to overpopulation in 1856.
The once uninhabited Bonin Islands, later politically integrated into Japan, have a small population consisting of Japanese mainlanders and descendants of early European settlers.
Archeological findings from the 1990s suggested there was possible
prehistoric human activity by Micronesians prior to European discovery
in the 16th century.
Several political entities associated with Oceania are still uninhabited, including Baker Island, Clipperton Island, Howland Island and Jarvis Island. There were brief attempts to settle Clipperton with Mexicans and Jarvis with Native Hawaiians in the early 20th century. The Jarvis settlers were relocated from the island due to Japanese advancements during World War II, while most of the settlers on Clipperton ended up dying from starvation and murdering one and other.
The first evident ethnic group to live in Australia were the
Australian Aboriginals, a group considered related to the Melanesian
Torres Strait Islander people. Europeans, primarily from England,
arrived first in 1770.
The 2016 Census shows England and New Zealand are the next most
common countries of birth after Australia. The proportion of people born
in China and India has increased since 2011 (from 6.0 per cent to 8.3
per cent, and 5.6 per cent to 7.4 per cent, respectively).
The proportion of people identifying as being of Aboriginal or
Torres Strait Islander origin increased from 2.5 per cent of the
Australian population in 2011 to 2.8 per cent in 2016.
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