Epistemological status

It is widely held, by social scientists as well as by lay people, that the members of human groups have an "innate" propensity to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, to delineate social boundaries and to develop stereotypes about "the other" in order to sustain and justify these boundaries. If this is indeed the case, ethnicity can be conceived of as being nearly as universal a characteristic of humanity as gender and age unlike phenomena like nationhood and nationalism, which have been so conceptualised in the academic community as to concern the modern world only (Anderson 1991, Gellner 1983). Marx and Engels held, probably correctly, that sex, age and the insideroutsider distinction were universal criteria of differentiation. If, on the other hand, ethnicity as we conceptualise it can be shown to be a product of a particular kind of society, it can of course not be regarded as an ahistorical and universal phenomenon.