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Warianty tytułu
ESSENTIALISM AND ETHNICITY: THE SOCIO-COGNITIVE EXPLANATION OF REPRESENTING SOCIAL GROUPINGS
Języki publikacji
Abstrakty
The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which people represent social groups. The author shows that a prominent role in such processes is played by psychological essentialism. People represent some of their social identities as inherent qualities that are based on the sharing of a presumed 'essence': something unobservable, difficult to remove, irreversible, and causally responsible for overt behaviours. Empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folk models of society. Some authors believe that folk essentialism is necessarily connected with the presumed innateness of an essence (its biological transmission across generations). Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folk models for biology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folk sociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when it is possible to detect that a given group of people claim the innate essence of a particular folk sociology, it is always necessary to look for other features of essentialism (inherence, sharp boundaries, the immutability of identity, etc.). The article reviews some influential cognitive proposals concerning folk models of society (Astuti, Gil-White, Hirschfeld) and ethnicity, and provides arguments and empirical evidence collected in Western Ukraine in support of the claim that presumed innateness is not the constitutive part of folk models of society, let alone of psychological essentialism.
Słowa kluczowe
Rocznik
Tom
Numer
Strony
345-369
Opis fizyczny
Rodzaj publikacji
ARTICLE
Twórcy
- Martin Kanovsky, FSEV UK, Odbojarov 10/A, Bratislava 2, 820 05, Slovak Republic; http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/4498/
Bibliografia
Typ dokumentu
Bibliografia
Identyfikatory
CEJSH db identifier
09CZAAAA066312
Identyfikator YADDA
bwmeta1.element.ca8011b8-af63-3baf-a4c5-bd30cfc64d8d