SV: SV: Kinship systems

[V.C.Vijayaraghavan]

From: "N. Ganesan" <naga_ganesan at HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 2:39 PM
Subject: SV: SV: Kinship systems


> >But as I pointed out above: "ethnic/ethnos" in the modern sense of the
word
> >cannot and should not be confused with "race" in the modern sense. That's
> >all.
>
> I agree fully. Have seen many academic literature that use
> "ethnic" in this sense. Gonds speak a Dravidian language,
> and so I called them Dravidians, as their kinship too happens
> to be Dravidian in nature.

If Gonds are ethnic Dravidian because they speak a language of the dravidian
group of languages, then Bengalis are the same ethnic group as French since
both of them are in the same family group.

But, even in Lars Fosse's example, 3 ethnic groups of Bosnians were and are
at each other's throats on the basis of their ethnicity even though they
spoke almost identical serbo-croat language.

This shows that neither the language family nor the same language can be the
marker of ethnicity. Closer to Taminadu, Tamil Muslims in Srilanka speak the
same language as the rest of the Tamils, but they are classified as a
separate ethnic group - on their own request.

"Language family" like Dravidian, Indo-European, Uralic, is only an analytic
convenience and it should not be used to define ethnicities