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What’s It Worth to You? The Questionable Value of Instrumentalist Approaches to Ethnic Identification

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, PO Box C, Mississippi State University, Mississippi, MS 39762, USAHempel{at}soc.msstate.edu

The assertion that material interests underlie ethnic identification is central to instrumentalist approaches to ethnicity. However, recent approaches—circumstantialism and constructivism—refine instrumentalism, addressing posited shortcomings, including an examination of the contexts and conditions in which interests and identities are expressed and constructed. Nevertheless, these later approaches explicitly or implicitly reproduce instrumentalism’s basic material premise. Using survey data from the multiethnic country of Mauritius, I examine this premise by exploring the relationship between economic instrumentalism and ethnic identification within and across ethnic groups. I find limited support for an instrumentalist approach to ethnic identification as this approach explains only a modest amount of variance in ethnic identification and is insufficient for explaining the significant differences that emerge in the relationship between economic instrumentalism and ethnic identification across ethnic groups. Consequently, it is argued that current instrumentalist approaches provide a deficient account of ethnic identification and related group processes.

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