Ethnicity: Strategies of Collective and Individual Impression Management

Abstract

^^nthropologists and sociologists have long considered race and ethnicity in terms of social process. However, while such a perspective has avoided the static and overly structural bias that characterized earlier biological theories, it nevertheless failed to grasp the full implications of a truly dynamic conception of these phenomena. By emphasizing acculturation and assimilation, by conceiving these processes to be evolutionary and, with rare exception, unidirectional, the sciences of man have eschewed the strategic and tactical employment of racial and ethnic identities by which groups and individuals work through situations and careers.1 Understanding of race and ethnicity has certainly been advanced by a thoroughgoing processual approach; however, further advances can be made if we widen the understanding of social process itself to include those individual and group modes which invoke, modify, qualify, or revoke racial and ethnic identities.

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