On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
> Theodor Shanin was interested in the difference between culture and
> ethnicity, but I wasn't sure that there was anything in it. What does it
> mean to say that they are different? Is one more real than the other? Is
> one more biological than the other?
Well in the SU, ethnicity was a legal entity. Everyone had an ethnic identity stamped on their ID card, which entailed certain rights and/or disabilities, depending on how you looked at it. How you got it basically operated on the principles of ius sanguinis citizenship law: you legally inherited your Dad's ethno-nationality, irrespective of what his genetic endowment to you might be.
So you ended up with a set-up kind of like the Austro-Hungarian empire where your Dad can move 500 miles away from your rural ethnic homeland to a cosmopolitan city and yet you still legally have his original ethnicity. It's hard not to imagine ethnicity so defined diverging from culture in the sense of what language you spoke, what clothes you wore, what religion you practiced, etc.
Michael