Talk:Panethnicity

I recently made some changes in this article that I consider to be improvements, and--somewhat to my surprise--most have not been deleted so far. A lot more work is needed, though. I have limited time, as I have publishers waiting for manuscripts from me. If somebody else wants to work on the article, I would like to make a few suggestions. One is to keep in mind the various agendas of contributors. Ethnicity is largely a matter of myth (William McNeill coined the term "mythistory" as the title of a little book), though they often are based to varying degrees on certain objective facts. And there are always rival myths that people (and governments and political movements) try to spread and to perpetuate. Ancestry is always largely mythical. Peoples (to use another term for ethnicities/panethnicities) are always mixed, as everyone's ancestors double in number as he/she goes back another generation--or at least would double if ancestors had not married their distant or close relatives. Any group of people claiming the myth of pure descent from one male ancestor would have to admit that this would not even be theoretically possible unless the one founding father married his own daughter and then his other children married their siblings or their siblings' children. Ancestry, too, is invented more often than not. Some groups of people, as in the case of a totally isolated island, may have remained homogenous for a long time, of course, but even they were mixed in the first place. In any case, myth is important, but it should not be confused with objective fact. The commonality of language, too, tends to be a matter of opinion, considering local variations in speech even when there is a common literay language. This principle needs to be applied uniformly to all groups. There is a danger that someone with, say, an anti-pan-Han agenda will stress the falsehood on identity while nobody would bother with the same point with regard to, say, Germans, Italians, or Russians. All ethnicities are are a result of assimilation of diverse peoples. Keep in mind that people always have multiple identities and that within any large group there are some who passionately stress commonality and others who angrily deny this and assert distinctiveness. And identities shift in different ways. Most of the dominant population of the 13 English colonies in North America in 1775 apparently identified as "Englishmen," but by the next year the idea was taking hold that they were a distinct people ("panethnicity"?) or that Virginians and New Yorkers were separate peoples. Nobody seems to have asked the African-Americans or the Native Americans. During 1861-65, a lot of people seemed to feel that the South was a distinct people (a "panethnecity?). I won't dwell on more obvious examples of such shifts. Even singling some groups out as "panethnicities" can be a way of putting down their claims to be "ethnic groups" in the absence of a more comparative perspective. The examples included in the article also are so disparate as to be misleading. The term "Native American" refers to diverse peoples whose only commonality is that their ancestors (or at least some of them) were the inhabitants of the territory that happened to come within the boundaries of the USA today (or of North and South American???). In the USA, that apparently does not include many immigrants from, say, Mexico who presumably are in part of Aztec descent. But--to get to my main point--Native Americans are hardly comparable to a group of people who, on the basis of having a common language and forming the main population of a large territory that may be divided into separate sovereign states (or cutting across several sovereign states) see themselves as one, as was the case with Germans before Germany was united, Koreans, Kurds, Arabs, etc. (although in all such cases there is room to play down the commonality). Sorry for the verbosity and possible disorganization. Eleanor1944 (talk) 17:52, 25 November 2011 (UTC)