On the irrelevance of ethnicity in children’s organization of their social world

Abstract

When studying the ways of structuring social life in general, and the socialization processes of children in particular, ethnicity is often taken for granted as a basic axis along which people distribute themselves into groups. Most anthropological studies describe and classify agents in ethnic terms. This articles argue that ethnicity is not always a relevant principle of order in the social fields of children, at least in the ethnographic cases studied. The article provides a critical reflection on the theoretical frameworks and methodologies based on the idea of ‘ethnic groups’ as a starting point for doing anthropological research.