SV: SV: SV: Kinship systems

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> > 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.
>
>  Not all Tamil Muslims would consider themselves separate from mainstream
>Tamils. It is only a fringe minority which does so, most are aware that

Mr. Abbas, perhaps you will realize that the discussion was about a
Tamil-language-speaking, Islam-religion-following, Sri-Lanka-residing
population. NOT Muslims in Tamil Nadu.

> > There is no ethnic Catholicism in America,
> > and religion is not an ethnic marker in the US. Or is it?
>
>  To the best of my knowledge, the only American Catholic President was JF
>Kennedy. The WASP - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants - do generally consider
>themselves as ethnically separate from the Catholics who are mostly
>Latinos, French and Italians.

And Irish - JFK was the prime example. The trend in the US is to have all
sorts of hyphenated Americans, based on the region of ancestral origin. But
this holds largely for Christians of various denominations. There is a
category of Muslim-Americans that intersects with that of Arab-American and
Asian-American (African-American followers of the Nation of Islam are a
separate category in themselves). A Lebanese Christian in the US would only
be an Arab-American, but not a "Christian-American".

Vidyasankar

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