Ethos and Identity asks the ever-puzzling question: What is
ethnicity and how is it to be explained? In a new introduction to
this work, Athena Leoussi describes Epstein's response to this
challenging age-old query, and demonstrates why this classic volume
is of continuing importance.
Originally published thirty years ago, Ethos and Identity still
fascinates the twenty-first century reader. Epstein's volume
explains ethnic revivals of the past century, while the new
introduction discusses those that occurred after the book's
original publication, such as during the collapse of the communist
Eastern bloc in the 1990s. Epstein offers insight into other ethnic
reawakenings, such as that experienced during the late 1960s and
early 1970s after the collapse of post-colonial east Asia. Prior to
this, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, following World War II and
the establishment of the United Nations, it was expected that
ethnic identifications would be superseded by a more modern,
universalistic, rational, civic- or class-based form. This did not
occur. Instead, as nations collapsed and were reborn in new forms,
people continued to identify with their ethnicity in describing
themselves, even when their countries, at least as they knew them,
no longer existed. In short, people and their cultures live on long
after political and national boundaries have disappeared and been
redrawn. Epstein's decisive contribution to the understanding of
ethnicity proposes a "social anthropology of affect." People
incorporate the social structure of ethnicity into the makeup of
their personality and, thus, self-identification.
Ethos and Identity is sure to interest students of anthropology,
sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and ethnicity.
A. L. Epstein, anthropologist, professor, and writer, held
research fellowships and appointments at the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute in Lansaka, Northern Rhodesia, the University of
Manchester, the Australian National University in Canberra, the
University of Sussex, the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Netherlands
Institute of Advanced Studies in Wessenaar.
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