Ethnicity and Nationalism - Assignment Example

Instrumentalist views, on the other hand, aim to understand why these ascriptive identities arise among people and how they are attached to different sets of people. They believe that it occurs due to the present nature of the state which is broken up and consists of different groups of people. Primordialists study the claims about determinacy of races by racists whereas instrumentalists study language, tribe, race, religion etc. In the modern nations that have been created today after many nations gaining their independence, it has become imperative for every government to ensure that a homogenous set of people reside there in order to maintain uniformity as well as unity.

Because they needed a literate workforce, modern societies preferred consensus among the people. This further helped to bring about peace and harmony among different groups of people by involving understanding. Nationalism refers to a comprehension among various individuals living under the purview of a single nation; ethnicity, on the other hand, refers to the race of each human being, and the roots or the land that he and his forefathers originated from. These aspects are as different from each other as is a balloon from a rubber tree.

This means that the rubber tree may belong to a particular piece of land or territory, however, the balloon may be manufactured anywhere after extracting the rubber and taking it elsewhere where there are means enough to produce balloons. Primordialists believe that people are born with certain identities and that is how they may be classified for the rest of their life. This belief falls short when it comes to people that migrate or are born in families that may not be subordinate to their culture.

Over the years, a human being adapts a number of attributes to himself; he may learn a different language, may reside in a different nation or even marry into a different family from his culture or race altogether. All of this makes a big difference in his life as he is not the same person from his roots anymore. The generations born after him, bit by bit, catch on to some more tendencies of his, thus leading to the formation of a different ascriptive identity altogether.