A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity while others are bound by political constitutions.
The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. Its definition is contested, in part due to conflicting theoretical understandings of social and kinship structures, and also reflecting the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, ethnicity, nation or state. These terms are similarly disputed. In some cases tribes have legal recognition and some degree of political autonomy from national or federal government, but this legalistic usage of the term may conflict with anthropological definitions.
Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism.
In the social sciences, a social group is defined as two or more people who interact with one another, share similar characteristics, and collectively have a sense of unity. Regardless, social groups come in a myriad of sizes and varieties. For example, a society can be viewed as a large social group. The system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group or between social groups is known as group dynamics.
More than 96% of population of Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to one of its three autochthonous constituent peoples : Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The term constituent refers to the fact that these three ethnic groups are explicitly mentioned in the constitution, and that none of them can be considered a minority or immigrant. The most easily recognisable feature that distinguishes the three ethnic groups is their religion, with Bosniaks predominantly Muslim, Serbs predominantly Eastern Orthodox, and Croats Catholic.
The term "minority group" has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a "minority". Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.
Identity is the set of qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions that characterize a person or a group.
In anthropology, an age set is a social category or corporate social group, consisting of people of similar age, who have a common identity, maintain close ties over a prolonged period, and together pass through a series of age-related statuses. This is in contrast to an age grade, through which people pass individually over time.
In the social sciences, social groups can be categorized based on the various group dynamics that define social organization. In sociological terms, groups can fundamentally be distinguished from one another by the extent to which their nature influence individuals and how. A primary group, for instance, is a small social group whose members share close, personal, enduring relationships with one another. By contrast, a secondary group is one in which interactions are more impersonal than in a primary group and are typically based on shared interests, activities, and/or achieving a purpose outside the relationship itself.
National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language".
Collective identity or group identity is a shared sense of belonging to a group. This concept appears within a few social science fields. National identity is a simple example, though myriad groups exist which share a sense of identity. Like many social concepts or phenomena, it is constructed, not empirically defined. Its discussion within these fields is often highly academic and relates to academia itself, its history beginning in the 19th century.
The following outline is provided as an overview of topics relating to community.
Identity formation, also called identity development or identity construction, is a complex process in which humans develop a clear and unique view of themselves and of their identity.
Panethnicity is a political neologism used to group various ethnic groups together based on their related cultural origins; geographic, linguistic, religious, or 'racial' similarities are often used alone or in combination to draw panethnic boundaries. The term panethnic was used extensively during mid-twentieth century anti-colonial/national liberation movements. In the United States, Yen Le Espiritu popularized the term and coined the nominal term panethnicity in reference to Asian Americans, a racial category composed of disparate peoples having in common only their origin in the continent of Asia.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
Ethnosymbolism is a school of thought in the study of nationalism that stresses the importance of symbols, myths, values and traditions in the formation and persistence of the modern nation state.
The Dillingham Flaw is a phenomenon of faulty logic when nativists misinterpret and react negatively to the presence of immigrants in their midst. The term was coined by U.S. sociologist Vincent N. Parrillo to identify the centuries-old phenomenon.
Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme of classes and the allocation of things to the classes (classification).
Groupism is a theoretical approach in sociology that posits that conformity to the laws/norms of a group such as family, kinship, race, ethnicity, religion and nationality brings reciprocal benefits such as recognition, right, power and security. It is the principle that a person's primary or prioritised identity is that of membership in a social network. Groupists assume that individuals in a group tend to have stronger affinity and obligation to a particular group when the influence of an authority figure brings a common goal. The concept of groupism can be defined and criticized in varied ways for disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political history and philosophy. Group-ism is defined in most dictionaries as the behavior of a member of a group where they think and act as the group norm at the expense of individualism. The term originated around mid 19th century and the first known use of the word recorded was in 1851. It is a general definition often used in Indian English as the tendency to form factions in a system setting. The term had also been used for “the principles or practices of Oxford Group movement” which is now historical and rare.
