Chapter 9 of Rynkiewich’s Soul, Self, and Society reflects on caste, class, and ethnicity. What are caste, class, and ethnicity? Caste is the system of arranging society into groups according to their ranks. At the same time, the class can be referred to as an outstanding category. Ethnicity can be defined by an ethnic group, whereby an ethnic group relates to common features such as dialect, faith, and civilization.
Rynkiewich calls into question whether ethnicity is inborn or is it a belief created by society. He conducts brief research on these two questions and concludes that ethnicity is created by society (Rynkiewich, 2019). He argues that ethnicity is a relationship created by the commanding group in society and thrashed out to the outvoted in the society. He cited that ethnic identity does not fully depend on its ethnic group; it has to interlink with other groups.
He gives an example of the caste of India as the most powerful chain of command in the world, having four main categories obtained from the Hindu creation myth of the sacrifice of Purusha, about the man from space whom they believe his body produced all the things in the world as well as the four main classes in the caste system which has over one thousand individuals in every caste.
Classes give people a mental image of social order. To accomplish this, class ranks people according to their cultural, economic, and lifestyle elements (Rynkiewich, 2019). And therefore, within this mental map, people try to join teams of the same class in different sectors. However, within these sets of institutions, people always choose one of these classes to lay their major sense of identity.
America is a land whose largest percentage is comprised of immigrants who introduced a foreign ethnicity to America (Rynkiewich, 2019). However, some of these ethnic groups did come as a result of survival from the age of group immigration but a new communal form. In most instances, immigrants have lost their native language and most indigenous beliefs. However, they have continuously reformed their differences in a number of ways, not because of conservativism but because these ethnic groups are true interest teams whose members have the same economic and political concerns. He concludes that a race is a conceptualization that lacks the responsiveness of biological relations in terms of blood and genes. He believes that it is ideally set up depending on people’s notions and views.
Reference
Rynkiewich, M. (2019). Soul, self, and society: A postmodern anthropology for mission in a postcolonial world. Wipf and Stock Publishers.