De George A. Vos - Ethnic Identity: Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-first Century

As discussed in chapter 1, ethnic identity is in essence a past-oriented form of identity, embedded in the presumed cultural heritage of the individual or group. This form of social self-identity contrasts with a sense of belonging linked with citizenship within a political state, or present-oriented affiliations to specific groups demanding professional, occupational, or class loyalties. It also contrasts with those identities that reject both past and present in favor of a future-oriented ideological commitment to a realizable future social goal.

To know ones origin is to have not only a sense of provenience, but perhaps more importantly, a sense of continuity in which one finds the personal and social meaning of human existence to some degree. It is to know why one behaves and acts in accordance with custom. To be without a sense of continuity is to be faced with ones own death.

Extinction of a group occurs when, as a California Indian once remarked to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the bowl of custom is broken and we can no longer drink of life. Ethnicity can most readily be symbolically represented contrastively. It may involve self-consciously perceived variations in language and customs from others. It may be symbolized in affirmative ritual practices such as dramatic symbolic representations recalling past collective ordeals or days of heroic triumph. Ethnicity is explained by religious myth, since religious beliefs or myths are, in effect, very often attempts to explain group origin and group continuity.

Two alternate forms of myth occur as widespread explanations of origin among peoples of the world. These are autochthonous myths of human origin from a given sacred place and, alternatively, religious myths that dramatize the journeyan event buried in the distant past. Myths explaining origin buttress a conviction that ones group arrived here from elsewhere. Origin, in this sense, has a spatial, territorial dimension. Ones idea of social meaning is also temporal. A feeling of social belonging also obtains from moving through time or territory, both as an individual and as a member of a group and a culture. Traditions characteristically present a script for group continuity from the past into the future, carefully perpetuating factual fictions or fictional facts as links that bind generations.

Concern with origins is a concern with parentage. To know who they are, individuals and groups look back genealogically to their progenitors and possibly eponymous ancestors. Some mythologies explain how men and women descended from a primordial mating event; others explain group diversity as totemic, where human subgroups are descended from different animals or plants.

In Judeo-Christian mythology, the Tower of Babel marks the origin of linguistic diversification by punitively dividing groups from each other for their presumption to wish to reach up to the heavenly creator. Mythological explanations of origin help explain present differences between groups as well as providing the rationale for such differences.

Curiously, a number of mythological traditions indirectly reveal the converse. They are attempts by a cultural group, for the sake of present cohesion, to deny previous diversity of origin by disguising evidence of past amalgams that occurred through conquest. Greek myths excel in disguising past conflicts, including changes from matrilineal to patrilineal descent as a result of conquest, into an organized Olympic Pantheon. The book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, according to Freud, disguises the several separate tribal origins of Jews with different gods who were united in monotheistic allegiance. Genesis gives internal evidence suggesting that there occurred a blending of two or more deities (Elohim) into one Yahweh. Similarly, the Japanese mythology preserved in the Kojiki and Ni-hongi gives ancient and internal evidence that prior political conflicts were resolved religiously by producing a more unified, accommodatively organized pantheon of deities. Religion is regulation. It is purpose. It is destiny. It maintains order and prevents an entropic reversion to primal chaos. An ethnic identity exists in a moral universe.