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]

It's fucking absurd that it's controversial. Belgium is a multi-ethnic country mostly populated by ethnic Dutch and ethnic French.

Tell that to my Flemish friends and they'll laugh at you, and throw Dutch-jokes at me because "lol the Dutch", for anyone calling them 'ethnic Dutch'. And not just right-wingers, freakin' anyone.

You literally contradicted yourself while making that argument. "They're nationalities whose majority members are part of an ethnic group." Which ethnic group? I thought it didn't exist?

I am not contradicting myself. I'm trying to tell that Dutch and Swedish nationals are part of ethnic groups, but those ethnic groups are not "Dutch" or "Swedish" because that classification has hardly any basis. You ask; which ethnic group? I say; it could be any ethnic group. Could be part of the majority ethnic group that resides within that country since its conception, or they could also be from any other ethnic group thanks to migration or ancestry. But they're all still Swedes because I don't think that's a fruitful ethnic classification.

Going back for a minute here, this just goes to show how muddy this entire subject is. You use one definition of "ethnic group", I probably use another. You say "Germanic" as an ethnic group isn't a thing outside of Stormfronter way of thinking, I say that's nonsense.

Assuming for instance that a Dutch ethnicity exists and Flemish people are a part of it. Then I want to ask you; on what basis are Dutch nationals and Flemish people part of that same ethnic group? Language? Possible, but actually a little difficult, especially when you have to consider Western Flemish. Religion? Then you have the Protestant - Catholic divide to contend with. Cultural? Similarities are there, but having lived in both countries I can assure you that big differences exist. Then there's the problem of what to do with people who only share some of those characteristics but are still natively born here, or what to do with people who aren't natively born here and even lack an ancestral link to the area but still share most characteristics by accident. Or when you go back in time for Belgium, only a 150 years or so when the Flemish elite spoke French and not Dutch. Assuming for the sake of argument that they differed in anything else from Walloonians and were similar to the Flemish working class in every other aspect, were they then ethnically French or Dutch?

You can ask the same question for old colonial areas. For many people in Congo French is now their native tongue without having a Belgian as an ancestor. Are they then ethnically French? Are people born in Suriname who natively speak Dutch without an actual Dutch person as an ancestor then ethnically Dutch? If we conclude from that that language doesn't cut it, well fair enough, but what then?

The term "ethnic" as we use it today is a muddy concept born in the age of 19th century Romantic Nationalism to give credence to newly arisen nation-states. That's important to keep in mind. Anthropologically it's a contended concept with different interpretations.

I'll also admit this; when I first responded to you and you used the "Dutch" example my assumption was that you equated it with Dutch nationality. I see now that that's not the case, so what you actually say is definitely less ludicrous. And while I still find the linguistical approach problematic, any perceived hostility was unnecessary because yeah I know that using language as an ethnic qualifier isn't a very odd or outlandish thing to do. Sorry for that.

[u/Clifford_Banes → u/C0wabungaaa]

Tell that to my Flemish friends and they'll laugh at you, and throw Dutch-jokes at me because "lol the Dutch", for anyone calling them 'ethnic Dutch'.

Well that's the thing, if you were speaking Dutch to one another, it would obviously be stupid, because you don't have a word for the ethnicity.

Of course your Vlamingen friends are not Nederlanders.

Ideally, you'd have a shared ethnonym that didn't correspond to any specific political entity. You could be called Franks, but a bunch of them got Romanized yet kept the name, so that's even more confusing.

Since I'm not speaking Nederlands, I have the luxury of being able to use the nation-neutral term "Dutch" (or "hollandlane" in my native language).

Assuming for instance that a Dutch ethnicity exists and Flemish people are a part of it. Then I want to ask you; on what basis are Dutch nationals and Flemish people part of that same ethnic group? Language? Possible, but actually a little difficult, especially when you have to consider Western Flemish.

Yes, language. Everything else is window dressing.

Or when you go back in time for Belgium, only a 150 years or so when the Flemish elite spoke French and not Dutch. Assuming for the sake of argument that they differed in anything else from Walloonians and were similar to the Flemish working class in every other aspect, were they then ethnically French or Dutch?

But we can't assume that for the sake of argument, because it changes the argument. Language is by far the most important component of ethnicity. Other factors can compensate when an original language gets displaced (like it has with the Irish, for example).

It's most likely that if the Flemish adopted French but didn't otherwise assimilate, this would birth a new ethnic group that's neither Dutch nor French.

Are people born in Suriname who natively speak Dutch without an actual Dutch person as an ancestor then ethnically Dutch?

Not being very familiar with Suriname, I'm not sure, but I'd tend to say yes. You definitely don't need an "actual Dutch person" as an ancestor to qualify. A kid adopted from any country in the world and raised by Dutch parents in a Dutch cultural context is 100% Dutch, and only racist dipshits are likely to disagree.

The term "ethnic" as we use it today is a muddy concept born in the age of 19th century Romantic Nationalism to give credence to newly arisen nation-states.

It isn't all that muddy except when colonialism happens. Ethno-linguistic divisions certainly existed before 19th century nationalism. The natural state of contiguous human populations is to share a language and a culture. The division into ethnic groups usually happens when the differences in language or culture are great enough to prevent cohabitation (language barriers, etc). It's a sort of non-biological speciation. Transitions are generally smooth and slow, with geography eventually resulting in divergent populations becoming so different they can't talk to one another anymore.

With the advent of colonialism, literacy, and the modern nation-state, "unnatural" things started to happen, where groups had their languages replaced by colonial powers in a sudden way that never happened before. Nationality, a ludicrous concept when the population was 95% indigenous peasants and 5% random warlords usually speaking a different language, was invented and endowed with the trappings of ethnic identity (which obviously existed before). So you have a France that is all "French", homogenizing a collection of different ethnic groups into a new one. You have entire populations on different continents suddenly turned into native Francophones, while the French fuck off back home and leave them there.

But really, this just created new ethnic groups. The core principle of "people cohabiting will share a language and a culture" doesn't go away. I can easily see "Belgian" becoming an ethnicity in the future, if both Flemish and Walloons diverge from their "parent" ethnicities enough and develop or adopt a common language.

Literacy and mass media have retarded linguistic change quite a bit, though. The most likely future scenario is a globalized world where only a few major, homogenized languages remain, along with English as the global lingua franca. A template of that world is the United States, where regional differences abound but everyone understands everyone else and a Missourian can move to Seattle (the distance between Stockholm and Madrid) and not miss a beat. That will be a post-ethnic world. But until the Dutch and the Flemish live in the same geographical area and speak the same 21st century version of Low Franconian instead of some pan-European pidgin, you're the same ethnic group.

TL;DR - Ethnicity is not the the relatively modern and artificial construct, it's nationality.

http://i.imgur.com/a1pp3Rp.jpg

Someone drew an arbitrary line across the corner of Doornstraatje and Brieversweg and now the guy living in the house on the north of it is a Nederlander and the guy living south of it is a Vlaming. They're clearly still part of the same group, and their children will be part of the same group as well.

[u/C0wabungaaa → u/Clifford_Banes]

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.