Is named ethnicity to that social group, community of people, who share various characteristics and traits such as: language, culture, race, religion, music, clothing, rituals and festivals, music, among others.
Group of people who share culture, values, ancestors, uses and customs, race, among others
Meanwhile, all these shared issues that identify the members are what move them to continue to maintain the same practices as their ancestors over the years and centuries.
In other words, the people who make up an ethnic group share ancestors, common ancestors, who are the ones that formed and laid its fundamental foundations.
These were in charge of forging strong ties between the members and ensuring that they were transmitted from generation to generation.
Belonging to and defending their values and culture are undoubtedly the issues most defended by those who belong to an ethnic group.
Even that lack of respect that they can receive from other cultures is what moves them to confront those who do not accept their reality.
The communities or ethnic groups are distinguished by their physical particularity but also from a social and cultural perspective, that is, beyond the natural and physical plane, the activities and actions of the men who make up these groups cohesive by various common characteristics are deepened. .
For example, religious beliefs and practices, how they are organized socially, in groups with a matriarchal leader, or in their absence patriarchal, or under other maxims, the economic activities they carry out, what entertains them, language, what they eat, how they communicate with the rest, being all these elements that differentiate the ethnic groups.
The subsistence problems of ethnic groups today
In these times where phenomena such as globalization have caused cultural differences between peoples and nations to be minimized, or at some point eliminated, in order to speak of a single world connected by technology, among others.
Even many ethnic groups that are established in their original territories are forced by the governments of the day to abandon through violent coercion, many times, their defining and distinctive characteristics, against their will of course.
And in most cases they are forced to leave those territories, generating tremendous internal crises on the verge of being able to reach a definitive dissolution, with all the negative consequences that this can have for their accustomed members and raised under the norms and customs of the ethnic group, that suddenly, and forced, must be inserted in another cultural framework.
In many cases, these communities tend not to feel represented by the uses and customs in force in the nation in which they live and, for example, they ask for political independence and territorial autonomy.
However, it should be noted that these feelings arise especially in those states that do not recognize the aforementioned cultural particularity of the ethnic group that they possess and, for example, are forced to abandon their common practices.
On the opposite side are those multi-ethnic states that respect the demands and organizational structure of the ethnic group.
Difference between the concepts of race and ethnicity
Although the word ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the concept of race, it is worth indicating that both do not imply the same thing at all, since Ethnicity includes cultural, linguistic and religious elements, while race exclusively attends to the morphological characteristics of a social group, for example the color of its skin, the predominant physical and biological characteristics., among others.
Therefore, race corresponds to the distinctive morphological and physical traits that people who make up the same ethnic group present, while the concept of ethnicity includes other elements such as the identity of the people, culture, uses and customs, beyond the particularities that do to the physical question.
Ethnology, the science that studies ethnicities
Ethnology it is the social discipline that deals with the study and comparison of the various peoples and cultures of today and yesterday.
This discipline focuses on the analysis of the relationships between the people of a community, considering issues such as their language, religion, traditions and other elements that define the collective identity.
