A "hollow" legacy of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries : A critique of the reading and quoting "Barth 1969"
Abstract
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth 1969a) was published half a century ago. There has long been a consensus that the influence and impact of the work was (and is) extraordinary.
This kind of assessment of Barth's work as a foundational act has made the pre-Barth study of ethnicity vanish into obscurity (everything begins with Barth) granting, at the same time, all its achievements to Barth, although a number of findings concerning the nature of ethnicity and ethnic processes that we today associate with Ethnic Groups and Boundaries were in fact formulated well before its publication - the reference "Barth 1969" turned into a sort of general umbrella reference covering all previous ethnicity studies. This tendency led to a slow transformation of the actual text published in 1969 into a symbol with a markedly loosened relation to the original content.