Conflicting Ethnicities: Locating the Local in the Global

Ethnicity, whether old or new has always defined and defied borders and boundaries. It is both global and local in character. It challenges the received notions of state and nation and is in turn challenged by globalisation, internationalism, multiculturalism and the overriding notions of modernity. The present collection is an edited version of some of the papers that were presented at an international conference on Ethnicity organised at OUCIP, Hyderabad. These papers focus on the changing notions of ethnicity and the challenges they pose to nation states in a world of economic and political uncertainties. Ranging from the issues of invention and reinvention of ethnicity, the studies herein cover the assertions of ethnicity in the indigenous context within a nation state, to the analysis of the ethnicity and religion in the international context. The papers bring to the fore the nature and role of state as an institution in the creation, construction accommodation and suppression of ethnicity, the imposition of nationalist discourses and the resistance from the margins, and the diverse impact of globalisation on ethnic assertions in different countries. The papers cover the role of different kinds of states — militarised, totalitarian, and democratic — in the treatment of ethnic minorities as well as the shifting goals and shuffling priorities of the ethnic groups aspiring for a stake in their respective societies indicating the fluidity of demands and the responses of the state.