Word: glazer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ethnics more, but is it because they are becoming more group conscious, and acting more like groups, or are we simply tuning in to a fact of social life that has been around since the Pharaohs chased the Jews across the pages of the Old Testament? According to Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, who in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience have collected sixteen essays by different authors on various aspects (both theoretical and empirical) of ethnicity, the world is becoming more ethnic. They claim an increasing number of people in different countries and in different situations are becoming conscious...
...EVIDENCE for their belief that these ties are binding more and more people together today, Moynihan and Glazer point to the sheer number of ethnic conflicts that have erupted in the past twenty years: Catholic and Protestant in Belfast, Walloon and Fleming in Belgium, Greek and Turk in Cyprus, black and white in the US, etc., etc. They appear depressingly correct on that point...
...those of larger, less clearly defined groups, such as "workers," or "blue collar employees." Strategically, the state fosters the growth of groups small enough to accomodate (imagine the costs if the government actually wanted to help out all workers) and small enough to feel the benefits of a concession. Glazer and Moynihan neglect to mention the relative ease with which a state can co-opt and control an oppressed and potentially troublesome group once they are convinced they must fight for their own sliver of the pie rather than join ranks with other hungry people...
...fields all the time, it must be because they perceive the world differently from the Gallo brothers. In a way it is their own fault for thinking like that. If this seems a conservative conclusion, remember that Moynihan, the utility man of the Nixon-Ford administration, and Glazer are members of the right wing of the liberal school of American sociology, representing a position somewhere to the left of Social Darwinism but way to the right of anything Marxist. They didn't end up at Harvard for nothing...
Still, just like you don't have to be Jewish to love Levi's rye bread, you don't have to agree with Glazer and Moynihan to find their collection of essays useful. The topics range from ethnic political force to the transmission of cultural heritage, the approaches run from anthropological to straight political analysis, and the regions studied include Uganda, Southeast Asia, Russia, Canada (Canada?) and India...