From: Journal of Social History | Date: June 22, 1996| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1996 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

It has become a common-place that ethnicity is socially constructed. The problem is to write the history which such an observation implies. To do so is to uncover precisely what notions of ethnic affiliation and solidarity obscure for people living within such constructs as well as for social scientists who deploy ethnicity as a variable. How social networks were created - and who was excluded from them - need to be examined alongside the idioms through which affiliation was expressed, in the face of complex and changing structures of power with which people were engaged.

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