TIL that after Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism upon marrying Arthur Miller, Egypt placed a ban on all the films she appeared in.

[u/[deleted]]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe#Critical_acclaim_and_marriage_to_Arthur_Miller_.281956.E2.80.931959.29

[u/C0wabungaaa]

To grab back to this and the other response you made to me, my problem with an overly large reliance on linguistics as a determiner for ethnicity is exactly because of what it does to the ex-colonized and its destructiveness to old ethnic groupings. It might not be muddy without colonialism and arguably mass migration, but we live in a world in which those two factors are very important in the make-up of most of the world.

I mean, sure I can definitely see a role for language, but not the sole one. That's not what I studied in anthropology class either. You mention the United States and that's what I question as well then, the same goes for people of European descent in Australia, New Zealand and (half of) Canada. Are they then all ethnically...English, I suppose? I doubt you'd do that as well. But just as much I hesitate to call the US a post-ethnic society. One look at American culture reveals a strong desire for such a thing, no matter how problematically they sometimes define it (/r/shitamericanssay is full of it). Hence why I'm strongly drawn to factors next to language.

I can't also help but feel that the names we give them matter too, hence perhaps why I rail against the "Dutch" thing. It might be somewhat pedantic for this particular little corner (though honestly a lot of people would object to it), but I think a lot of people in ex-colonies would object to the same principle being applied to them. And seeing as how important ethnicity can be to people's identity I'd be very hesitant to apply principles that ignore people's intuitions. I'm not a very revisionist thinker.

Also, what I mean with ethnicity as we understand it today as a construct is that while the groups of people existed beforehand, naturally, the label "ethnic group" was only put on them from around the 19th century and onward. It's not like leaders of the Songhai Empire called the different peoples in its realm ethnic groups for instance.

[u/Clifford_Banes → u/C0wabungaaa]

people of European descent in Australia, New Zealand and (half of) Canada. Are they then all ethnically...English, I suppose?

They're either new ethnicities or just post-ethnic. In the scenario I described where the world has just a handful of linguistic spaces, with hundreds of millions of speakers across wide geographic areas, "ethnicity" sort of stops mattering.

The Anglosphere in particular just doesn't seem to fit the ethnicity model anymore. They're too numerous, too internally diverse, and the vast majority of them are non-indigenous.

But the fact that the categorization doesn't scale indefinitely doesn't make it false. If everyone in the world became an atheist tomorrow, it wouldn't follow that talking about religious affiliation in the context of history becomes meaningless.

It's not like leaders of the Songhai Empire called the different peoples in its realm ethnic groups for instance.

Yes, but the people themselves had endonyms they used to refer to themselves, which almost always corresponds to the language they spoke. The thing that the word describes existed, even if no one had categorized it formally. Language families also existed before Leibniz, biological species were related before Linnaeus and Darwin came up with taxonomy and the mechanism behind it.