Reconceptualizing Modes of Belonging: Advancements in the Sociology of Ethnicity and Multiculturalism

Abstract

Belonging to different overlapping social circles is a condition of both the structure of modern societies and the freedom of the individual. This is a sociological common place since Georg Simmel’s famous chapter on ‘The Web of Group Affiliations’ in his Sociology (1983 [1908]).² Since Durkheim’s Social Division of Labour (1992 [1889]), we know that the relation between a society and an individual has a structural and a cultural dimension. From the beginning of the 20^th century to the post-war period, many sociological texts were characterized by the extensive reference to ‘the social’ or ‘the societal’, but did not discriminate sufficiently between cultural and social structural aspects of society. They used what Parsons and Kroeber called a ‘condensed concept of culture-and-society’ (1958: 583). In the middle of the 20^th century the clear-cut distinction between the analysis of culture and social structure became more pronounced. This distinction gave room to analyse the relation between cultural and social aspects of belonging to different social circles. In modern sociological language, the cultural and structural aspects of belonging are usually described as two aspects of group membership (Bell, 1975: 153). In order to denote group membership on the basis of culture and descent, the concept of ethnicity developed in the second part of the 20^th century (Sollors, 2001).³

At this point in history it is not, at any rate, a matter of assimilation versus ethnicity, but of assimilation and ethnicity (Yinger, 1994: 343).

I thank Susanne von Below for many comments and suggestions.