ENCICLOPÉDIA MINEIRA: Prof. Marcos Tadeu Cardoso

Um projeto do Prof. Marcos Tadeu Cardoso, um livro publicado narrando a história das principais cidades Mineiras.
Entre em contato com o prof. Marcos T. C. pelo e-mail,
marcostcj@yahoo.com.br ou mar.cj@hotmail.com Acesse seu website oficial, http://marcostadeucardoso.blogspot.com


Siga-me no twitter: Marcos_Tadeu_C

quarta-feira, 15 de junho de 2011

Blank expression
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A woman with a neutral expression

Microexpression
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A microexpression is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced. They usually occur in high-stakes situations, where people have something to lose or gain. Unlike regular facial expressions, it is difficult to fake microexpressions. Microexpressions express the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt. However in the 1990s Paul Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions not all of which are encoded in facial muscles. These emotions are amusement, contempt, embarrassment, excitement,[disambiguation needed] guilt, pride, relief, satisfaction, pleasure, and shame.[1][2] They are very brief in duration, lasting only 1/25 to 1/15 of a second.[3]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 History
* 2 Types of Microexpressions
* 3 Facial Action Coding System (FACS)
* 4 Wizards Project
* 5 In popular culture
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 External links

History

Microexpressions were first discovered by Haggard and Isaacs. In their 1966 study, Haggard and Isaacs outlined how they discovered these "micromomentary" expressions while "scanning motion picture films of psychotherapy hours, searching for indications of non-verbal communication between therapist and patient"[4]This reprint edition of Ekman and Friesen's breakthrough research on the facial expression of emotion uses scores of photographs showing emotions of surprise, fear, disgust, contempt, anger, happiness, and sadness. The authors of Unmasking the Face explain how to identify these basic emotions correctly and how to tell when people try to mask, simulate, or neutralize them.

In the 1960s, William S. Condon pioneered the study of interactions at the fraction-of-a-second level. In his famous research project, he scrutinized a four-and-a-half-second film segment frame by frame, where each frame represented 1/25th second. After studying this film segment for a year and a half, he discerned interactional micromovements, such as the wife moving her shoulder exactly as the husband's hands came up, which combined yielded microrhythms.[5]

Years after Condon's study, American psychologist John Gottman began video-recording living relationships to study how couples interact. By studying participants' facial expressions, Gottman was able to correlate expressions with which relationships would last and which would not.[6] Gottman's 2002 paper makes no claims to accuracy in terms of binary classification, and is instead a regression analysis of a two factor model where skin conductance levels and oral history narratives encodings are the only two statistically significant variables. Facial expressions using Ekman's encoding scheme were not statistically significant.[7] In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink", which was written many years after "Emotional Intelligence" already brought Gottman's work to the attention of the public, Gottman states that there are four major emotional reactions that are destructive to a marriage: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Among these four, Gottman considers contempt the most important of them all.[8]
Types of Microexpressions

* Simulated Expressions: When a micro expression is not accompanied by a genuine expression.
* Neutralized expressions: When a genuine expression is suppressed and the face remains neutral.
* Masked Expressions: When a genuine expression is completely masked by a falsified expression.[9]

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

The Facial Action Coding System or FACS is used to identify facial expression. This identifies the muscles that produce the facial expressions. To measure the muscle movements the action unit (AU) was developed. This system measures the relaxation or contraction of each individual muscle and assigns a unit. More than one muscle can be grouped into an Action Unit or the muscle may be divided into separate action units. The score consists of duration, intensity and asymmetry. This can be useful in identifying depression or measurement of pain in patients that are unable to express themselves.
Wizards Project
Main article: Wizards Project

Most people do not seem to perceive microexpressions in themselves or others. In the Wizards Project, previously called the "Diogenes Project", Drs. Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan studied the ability of people to detect deception. Of the thousands of people tested, only a select few were able to accurately detect when someone was lying. The Wizards Project researchers named these people "Truth Wizards". To date, the Wizards Project has identified just over 50 people with this ability after testing nearly 20,000 people.[10] Truth Wizards use microexpressions, among many other cues, to determine if someone is being truthful. Scientists hope by studying wizards that they can further advance the techniques used to identify deception.
In popular culture
This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivial references. (June 2010)

Microexpressions and associated science are the central premise for the 2009 television series Lie to Me, in which the main character uses his acute awareness of microexpressions to determine when someone is lying or hiding something.

They also play a central role in Robert Ludlum's posthumously published The Ambler Warning, in which the central character, Harrison Ambler, is an intelligence agent who is able to see them. Similarly, one of the main characters in Alastair Reynolds science fiction novel, Absolution Gap, Aura, can easily read microexpressions.

On Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Detective Robert Goren was adept in detecting microexpressions.
See also

* Nonverbal communication
* Body language
* Facecrime
* Facial Action Coding System

References

1. ^ Paul Ekman (1999). Basic Emotions. In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
2. ^ P. Ekman, “Facial Expressions of Emotion: an Old Controversy and New Findings”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, B335:63--69, 1992
3. ^ http://face.paulekman.com/aboutmett2.aspx
4. ^ Haggard, E. A., & Isaacs, K. S. (1966). Micro-momentary facial expressions as indicators of ego mechanisms in psychotherapy. In L. A. Gottschalk & A. H. Auerbach (Eds.), Methods of Research in Psychotherapy (pp. 154-165). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
5. ^ http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Citation/1966/10000/Sound_Film_Analysis_of_Normal_and_Pathological.5.aspx
6. ^ http://www.gottman.com/49853/Research-FAQs.html
7. ^ Gottman, J. and Levenson, R.W., (2002). A Two-Factor Model for Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce: Exploratory Analyses Using 14-Year Longitudinal Data, Family Process, 41 (1), p. 83-96
8. ^ Gladwell, Malcolm (2005). Blink, Chapter 1, Section 3, The Importance of Contempt
9. ^ Godavarthy, Sridhar. "Microexpression spotting in video using optical strain". Web. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1642. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
10. ^ Camilleri, J., Truth Wizard knows when you've been lying", Chicago Sun-Times, January 21, 2009

Sound Film Analysis of Normal and Pathological Behavior Patterns, CONDON, W. S.; OGSTON, W. D., Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 143(4):338-347, October 1966.


External links
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links. (June 2010)

* Freitas-Magalhaes' Personal Site
* Paul Ekman's Personal Site
* Dr. David Matsumoto
* Free Micro Expression Training
* J.J. Newberry, director
* Janine Driver, director
* Joe Navarro, director
* Maureen O'Sullivan's Blog
* Lying and Deceit: The Wizards Project
* Scientists Pick Out Human Lie Detectors, MSNBC.com
* Lying Is Exposed By Microexpressions We Can't Control, Science Daily, May 2006
* The Naked Face
* Facial Expressions Test based on "The Micro Expression Training Tool"
* "A Look Tells All" in Scientific American Mind October 2006
* Microexpressions Complicate Face Reading, by Medical News Today August 2007
* Deception Detection, American Psychological Association

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression"
Categories: Facial expressions | Emotion | Nonverbal communication
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Facial expression
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Photographs from the 1862 book Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine by Guillaume Duchenne. Through electric stimulation, Duchenne determined which muscles were responsible for different facial expressions. Charles Darwin would later republish some of these photographs in his own work on the subject, which compared facial expressions in humans to those in animals.

A facial expression results from one or more motions or positions of the muscles of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species. Facial expressions and their significance in the perceiver can, to some extent, vary between cultures.[1][verification needed]

Humans can adopt a facial expression to read as a voluntary action. However, because expressions are closely tied to emotion, they are more often involuntary. It can be nearly impossible to avoid expressions for certain emotions, even when it would be strongly desirable to do so;[citation needed] a person who is trying to avoid insult to an individual he or she finds highly unattractive might nevertheless show a brief expression of disgust before being able to reassume a neutral expression.[citation needed] Microexpressions are one example of this phenomenon. The close link between emotion and expression can also work in the other direction; it has been observed that voluntarily assuming an expression can actually cause the associated emotion(Schnall & Laird, 2003; Soussignan, 2002 as cited in Papa & Bonanno, 2008.

Some expressions can be accurately interpreted even between members of different species- anger and extreme contentment being the primary examples. Others, however, are difficult to interpret even in familiar individuals. For instance, disgust and fear can be tough to tell apart.[citation needed]

Because faces have only a limited range of movement, expressions rely upon fairly minuscule differences in the proportion and relative position of facial features, and reading them requires considerable sensitivity to same. Some faces are often falsely read as expressing some emotion, even when they are neutral, because their proportions naturally resemble those another face would temporarily assume when emoting.[citation needed]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Universality debate
* 2 Communication
o 2.1 Eye contact
o 2.2 Face overall
* 3 Facial expressions
* 4 The muscles of facial expression
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 External links

[edit] Universality debate
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Charles Darwin noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals:

...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.{{[href="http://www.darwin-literature.com/The_Expression_Of_The_Emotions_In_Man_And_Animals/14.html" Link]|date=May 2011}}

Still, up to the mid-20th century most anthropologists believed that facial expressions were entirely learned and could therefore differ among cultures. Studies conducted in the 1960s by Paul Ekman eventually supported Darwin's belief to a large degree.

Ekman's work on facial expressions had its starting point in the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins.[2] Ekman showed that contrary to the belief of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, facial expressions of emotion are not culturally determined, but universal across human cultures.

The South Fore people of New Guinea were chosen as subjects for one such survey. The study consisted of 189 adults and 130 children from among a very isolated population, as well as twenty three members of the culture who lived a less isolated lifestyle as a control group. Participants were told a story that described one particular emotion; they were then shown three pictures (two for children) of facial expressions and asked to match the picture which expressed the story's emotion.

While the isolated South Fore people could identify emotions with the same accuracy as the non-isolated control group, problems associated with the study include the fact that both fear and surprise were constantly misidentified. The study concluded that certain facial expressions correspond to particular emotions, regardless of cultural background, and regardless of whether or not the culture has been isolated or exposed to the mainstream.

Expressions Ekman found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[3]

More recent studies in 2009 show that people from different cultures are likely to interpret facial expressions in different ways. For example, in Canada, the surprised face can be easily mixed up for the disgusted (or sometimes scared) in Kowloon, Hong Kong.[1][verification needed]
[edit] Communication
[edit] Eye contact
See also: Eye contact

A person's face, especially their eyes, creates the most obvious and immediate cues that lead to the formation of impressions.[4] This article discusses eyes and facial expressions and the effect they have on interpersonal communication.

A person's eyes reveal much about how they are feeling, or what they are thinking. Blink rate can reveal how nervous or at ease a person may be. Research by Boston College professor Joe Tecce suggests that stress levels are revealed by blink rates. He supports his data with statistics on the relation between the blink rates of presidential candidates and their success in their races. Tecce claims that the faster blinker in the presidential debates has lost every election since 1980.[5] Though Tecce's data is interesting, it is important to recognize that non-verbal communication is multi-channeled, and focusing on only one aspect is reckless. Nervousness can also be measured by examining each candidates' perspiration, eye contact and stiffness.[6]

Eye contact is another major aspect of facial communication. Some have hypothesized that this is due to infancy, as humans are one of the few mammals who maintain regular eye contact with their mother while nursing.[7] Eye contact serves a variety of purposes. It regulates conversations, shows interest or involvement, and establishes a connection with others.

Eye contact regulates conversational turn taking, communicates involvement and interest, manifests warmth, and establishes connections with others…[and] it can command attention, be flirtatious, or seem cold and intimidating… [it] invites conversation. Lack of eye contact is usually perceived to be rude or inattentive.[6]

But different cultures have different rules for eye contact. Certain Asian cultures can perceive direct eye contact as a way to signal competitiveness, which in many situations may prove to be inappropriate. Others lower their eyes to signal respect, and similarly eye contact is avoided in Nigeria, and between men and women in Islam;[8] however, in western cultures this could be misinterpreted as lacking self-confidence.

Even beyond the idea of eye contact, eyes communicate more data than a person even consciously expresses. Pupil dilation is a significant cue to a level of excitement, pleasure, or attraction. Dilated pupils indicate greater affection or attraction, while constricted pupils send a colder signal.
[edit] Face overall

The face as a whole indicates much about human moods as well. Specific emotional states, such as happiness or sadness, are expressed through a smile or a frown, respectively. There are seven universally recognized emotions shown through facial expressions: fear, anger, surprise, contempt, disgust, happiness, and sadness. Regardless of culture, these expressions are the same. However, the same emotion from a specific facial expression may be recognized by a culture, but the same intensity of emotion may not be perceived. For example, studies have shown that Asian cultures tend to rate images of facial emotions as less intense than non-Asian cultures surveyed. This difference can be explained by display rules, which are culture-specific guidelines for behavior appropriateness. In some countries, it may be more rude to display an emotion than in another. Showing anger toward another member in a group may create problems and disharmony, but if displayed towards a competitive rival, it could create in-group cohesion.[citation needed]
[edit] Facial expressions

Some examples of feelings that can be expressed are:

* Anger
* Concentration
* Confusion
* Contempt
* Desire
* Disgust
* Excitement
* Empathy
* Fear
* Flirt
* Frustration
* Glare
* Gross
* Happiness
* Sadness
* Snarl, mainly involving the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi muscle
* Surprise
* Love

[edit] The muscles of facial expression
See also: facial muscles

* Auricularis anterior muscle
* Buccinator muscle
* Corrugator supercilii muscle
* Depressor anguli oris muscle
* Depressor labii inferioris muscle
* Depressor septi nasi muscle
* Frontalis muscle
* Levator anguli oris muscle
* Levator labii superioris alaeque nasi muscle
* Levator labii superioris muscle
* Mentalis muscle
* Modiolus muscle
* Nasalis muscle
* Orbicularis oculi muscle
* Orbicularis oris muscle
* Platysma muscle
* Procerus muscle
* Risorius muscle
* Zygomaticus major muscle
* Zygomaticus minor muscle

[edit] See also

* Affect display
* Gurn
* Facial Action Coding System, Paul Ekman
* Laughter, Gelotology, Freitas-Magalhães
* Metacommunicative competence
* Bell's Palsy
* Facial Paralysis

[edit] References

1. ^ a b Judith Burns, 14 August 2009, Facial expressions 'not global' - BBC News
2. ^ "FAQS Investigators Guide - Acknowledgements". http://www.face-and-emotion.com/dataface/facs/guide/FACSIVAk.html. Retrieved 2 September 2009.
3. ^ Matsumoto, David (1992) "More evidence for the universality of a contempt expression". Motivation and Emotion. Springer Netherlands. Volume 16, Number 4 / December, 1992. Abstract
4. ^ Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2007). The Psychology of Emotions: The Allure of Human Face. Oporto: University Fernando Pessoa Press
5. ^ “In the blink of an eye.” (October 21, 1999). Newsweek.
6. ^ a b Rothwell, J. Dan. In the Company of Others: An Introduction to Communication. United States: McGraw-Hill, 2004.
7. ^ Spitz, Rene A., and Wolf, K. M. “The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations.” Genetic Psychology Monographs. 34 (August 1946). P. 57-125.
8. ^ Caring for Patients from Different Cultures, by Geri-Ann Galanti, p. 34

[edit] External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Facial expressions

* The Naked Face, August 5, 2002. Annals of Psychology
* Facial Expressions Resources Page contains links to research concerning facial expressions
* Bell's Palsy information site Information for sufferer's of facial palsy/facial paralysis

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body language

Body language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other uses, see Body language (disambiguation).
This article needs attention from an expert on the subject. See the talk page for details. WikiProject Sociology or the Sociology Portal may be able to help recruit an expert. (November 2008)
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A study in body language.

Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely subconsciously.

John Borg attests that human communication consists of 93 percent body language and paralinguistic cues, while only 7% of communication consists of words themselves;[1] however, Albert Mehrabian, the researcher whose 1960s work is the source of these statistics, has stated that this is a misunderstanding of the findings[2] (see Misinterpretation of Mehrabian's rule). Others assert that "Research has suggested that between 60 and 70 percent of all meaning is derived from nonverbal behavior."[3]

Body language may provide clues as to the attitude or state of mind of a person. For example, it may indicate aggression, attentiveness, boredom, relaxed state, pleasure, amusement, and intoxication, among many other cues.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Understanding body language
o 1.1 Physical expression
* 2 How prevalent is non-verbal communication in humans?
* 3 Personal space
* 4 Unintentional gestures
* 5 See also
* 6 References
* 7 External links

Understanding body language

The technique of "reading" people is used frequently. For example, the idea of mirroring body language to put people at ease is commonly used in interviews. Mirroring the body language of someone else indicates that they are understood.[citation needed] It is important to note that while some indicators of emotion (e.g. smiling/laughing when happy, frowning/crying when sad) are largely universal[citation needed],[4] however in the 1990s Ekman expanded his list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions not all of which are encoded in facial muscles.[13] The newly included emotions are:

1. Amusement

2. Contempt

3. Contentment

4. Embarrassment

5. Excitement

6. Guilt

7. Pride in achievement

8. Relief

9. Satisfaction

10. Sensory pleasure

11. Shame

Body language signals may have a goal other than communication. Both people would keep this in mind. Observers limit the weight they place on non-verbal cues. Signalers clarify their signals to indicate the biological origin of their actions. Examples would include yawning (sleepiness), showing lack of interest (sexual interest/survival interest), attempts to change the topic (fight or flight drivers).
Physical expression

Physical expressions like waving, pointing, touching and slouching are all forms of nonverbal communication. The study of body movement and expression is known as kinesics. Humans move their bodies when communicating because, as research has shown[citation needed], it helps "ease the mental effort when communication is difficult." Physical expressions reveal many things about the person using them. For example, gestures can emphasize a point or relay a message, posture can reveal boredom or great interest, and touch can convey encouragement or caution.[5]

* One of the most basic and powerful body-language signals is when a person crosses his or her arms across the chest.[citation needed] This can indicate that a person is putting up an unconscious barrier between themselves and others. It can also indicate that the person's arms are cold, which would be clarified by rubbing the arms or huddling. When the overall situation is amicable, it can mean that a person is thinking deeply about what is being discussed. But in a serious or confrontational situation, it can mean that a person is expressing opposition. This is especially so if the person is leaning away from the speaker. A harsh or blank facial expression often indicates outright hostility.
* Consistent eye contact can indicate that a person is thinking positively of what the speaker is saying. It can also mean that the other person doesn't trust the speaker enough to "take their eyes off" the speaker. Lack of eye contact can indicate negativity. On the other hand, individuals with anxiety disorders are often unable to make eye contact without discomfort. Eye contact can also be a secondary and misleading gesture because cultural norms about it vary widely. If a person is looking at you, but is making the arms-across-chest signal, the eye contact could be indicative that something is bothering the person, and that he wants to talk about it. Or if while making direct eye contact, a person is fiddling with something, even while directly looking at you, it could indicate the attention is elsewhere. Also, there are three standard areas that a person will look which represent different states of being. If the person looks from one eye to the other then to the forehead, it is a sign that they are taking an authoritative position. If they move from one eye to the other then to the nose, that signals that they are engaging in what they consider to be a "level conversation" with neither party holding superiority. The last case is from one eye to the other and then down to the lips. This is a strong indication of romantic feelings.[citation needed]
* Disbelief is often indicated by averted gaze, or by touching the ear or scratching the chin. When a person is not being convinced by what someone is saying, the attention invariably wanders, and the eyes will stare away for an extended period.[citation needed]
* Boredom is indicated by the head tilting to one side, or by the eyes looking straight at the speaker but becoming slightly unfocused. A head tilt may also indicate a sore neck or Amblyopia, and unfocused eyes may indicate ocular problems in the listener.[citation needed]
* Interest can be indicated through posture or extended eye contact, such as standing and listening properly.[citation needed]
* Deceit or the act of withholding information can sometimes be indicated by touching the face during conversation. Excessive blinking is a well-known indicator of someone who is lying. Recently[when?], evidence has surfaced that the absence of blinking can also represent lying as a more reliable factor than excessive blinking. [1]

Some people use and understand body language differently, or not at all.[citation needed] Interpreting their gestures and facial expressions (or lack thereof) in the context of normal body language usually leads to misunderstandings and misinterpretations (especially if body language is given priority over spoken language). It should also be stated that people from different cultures can interpret body language in different ways.
How prevalent is non-verbal communication in humans?

Some researchers[who?] put the level of nonverbal communication as high as 80 percent of all communication when it could be at around 50-65 percent. Different studies have found differing amounts, with some studies showing that facial communication is believed 4.3 times more often than verbal meaning, and another finding that verbal communication in a flat tone is 4 times more likely to be understood than a pure facial expression.[citation needed] Albert Mehrabian is noted for finding a 7%-38%-55% rule, supposedly denoting how much communication was conferred by words, tone, and body language. However he was only referring to cases of expressing feelings or attitudes.
Personal space
Main article: Personal space

Permitting a person to enter personal space and entering somebody else's personal space are indicators of perception of the relationship between the people. There is an intimate zone reserved for lovers, children and close family members. There is another zone used for conversations with friends, to chat with associates, and in group discussions; a further zone is reserved for strangers, newly formed groups, and new acquaintances; and a fourth zone of used for speeches, lectures, and theater; essentially, public distance is that range reserved for larger audiences.[6]
Unintentional gestures

Recently[when?], there has been huge interest in studying human behavioral clues that could be useful for developing an interactive and adaptive human-machine system. Unintentional human gestures such as making an eye rub, a chin rest, a lip touch, a nose itch, a head scratch, an ear scratch, crossing arms, and a finger lock have been found conveying some useful information in specific context. Some researchers[who?] have tried to extract such gestures in a specific context of educational applications.[citation needed] In poker games, such gestures are referred to as "tells" and are useful to players for detecting deception or behavioral patterns in an opponent(s).
See also

* Posture (psychology)
* Nonverbal communication

References

1. ^ Borg, John. Body Language: 7 Easy Lessons to Master the Silent Language. Prentice Hall life, 2008
2. ^ More or Less. BBC Radio 4. 13:30–14:00.
3. ^ Engleberg,Isa N. Working in Groups: Communication Principles and Strategies. My Communication Kit Series, 2006. page 133
4. ^ see also wiki on "Lie to Me"
5. ^ Engleberg,Isa N. Working in Groups: Communication Principles and Strategies. My Communication Kit Series, 2006. page 137
6. ^ Engleberg,Isa N. Working in Groups: Communication Principles and Strategies. My Communication Kit Series, 2006. page 140-141

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Body language

* Body language is of particular importance in large groups by Tarnow, E. published 1997
* Hess Pupil Dilation Findings: Sex or Novelty? Social Behavior and Personality , 1998 by Aboyoun, Darren C, Dabbs, James M Jr

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Category:Nonverbal communication
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The main article for this category is Nonverbal communication.
Classification: Communication: Human communication: Nonverbal communication
Subcategories

This category has the following 3 subcategories, out of 3 total.
F

*
[×] Facial expressions (24 P)

G

*
[+] Gestures (1 C, 89 P)

S

*
[+] Sign languages (13 C, 116 P)

Pages in category "Nonverbal communication"

The following 35 pages are in this category, out of 35 total. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).
B

* Body language
* Body to Body Communication

C

* Calypsis
* Chronemics

D

* Day shapes
* Discrimination testing
* Dress code

E

* Eye contact

F

* Facepalm
* Flag semaphore

H

* Haptic communication

I

* International maritime signal flags


K

* Kinesics

L

* Language acquisition through motor planning

M

* Message stick
* Metacommunicative competence
* Microexpression
* Mind-blindness

N

* Joe Navarro
* Nonverbal communication

O

* Open outcry

P

* User:Panyé El Skat-é-board-ér King-o/Status
* Paralanguage
* User:Penbat/professional boundaries


P cont.

* Personal boundaries
* Posture (psychology)
* Proxemics

R

* Regulatory focus theory
* Reply

S

* Sensory analysis
* Silent service code
* Subtle Expression
* Subtle expressions

T

* Territoriality (nonverbal communication)

W

* Writing


Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nonverbal_communication"
Categories: Human communication | Semiotics
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Merton College, Oxford
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See also Wardens of Merton College, Oxford. Merton College is also the name of a college in the London Borough of Merton.

Colleges and halls of the University of Oxford

Merton College
Merton College front quad.jpg

College name The House or College of Scholars of Merton in the University of Oxford
Motto "Qui Timet Deum Faciet Bona"
Named after Walter de Merton
Established 1264
Sister college Peterhouse, Cambridge
Warden Prof. Sir Martin Taylor
Undergraduates 302
Graduates 298
Merton College, Oxford is located in Oxford (central)

Location of Merton College within central OxfordCoordinates: 51°45′04″N 1°15′08″W / 51.751062°N 1.252109°W / 51.751062; -1.252109
Homepage
Boat Club
Merton College Chrest.svg

Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to support it. The important feature of Walter's foundation was that this "college" was to be self-governing and that the endowments were directly vested in the Warden and Fellows.[1]

By 1274 when Walter retired from royal service and made his final revisions to the college statutes, the community was consolidated at its present site in the south east corner of the city of Oxford, and a rapid programme of building commenced. The hall and the chapel and the rest of the front quad were complete before the end of the 13th century, but apart from the chapel they have all been much altered since. To most visitors, the college and its buildings are synonymous, but the history of the college can be more deeply understood if one distinguishes the history of the academic community from that of the site and buildings that they have occupied for nearly 750 years.[2] Merton is among the wealthier colleges, and as of 2006, had an estimated financial endowment of £142 million.[3]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Buildings
o 1.1 Chapel
o 1.2 Front quad and the hall
o 1.3 Mob quad
o 1.4 Fellows' quad
o 1.5 Other buildings
o 1.6 Gardens
* 2 Academic community
o 2.1 Foundation and origins
o 2.2 St Alban Hall
o 2.3 Parliamentarian sympathies in the Civil War
o 2.4 The modern academic community
* 3 Notable former Mertonians
o 3.1 Medieval
o 3.2 16th century
o 3.3 17th century
o 3.4 18th century
o 3.5 19th century
o 3.6 20th century (matriculated before 1960)
o 3.7 Contemporary (matriculated since 1960)
* 4 Grace
* 5 References
* 6 Notes
* 7 External links

[edit] Buildings

The "House of Scholars of Merton" originally had properties in Surrey (in present day Old Malden) as well as in Oxford, but it was not until the mid-1260s that Walter de Merton acquired the core of the present site in Oxford, along the south side of what was then St John's Street (now Merton Street). The college was consolidated on this site by 1274, when Walter made his final revisions to the college statutes.

The initial acquisition included the parish church of St John (which was superseded by the chapel) and three houses to the east of the church which now form the north range of Front Quad. Walter also obtained permission from the king to extend from these properties south to the old city wall to form an approximately square site. The college continued to acquire other properties as they became available on both sides of Merton Street. At one time the college owned all the land from the site of what is now Christ Church to the south eastern corner of the city. The land to the east eventually became the present day garden, while the western end was leased by Warden Rawlins in 1515 for the foundation of Corpus Christi (at an annual rent of just over £4).[4]
[edit] Chapel
Merton College from Christ Church Meadow
Merton College Chapel from just north of the Christ Church Meadow
Merton College (including chapel) viewed from the north from St Mary's Church.
Merton College as viewed from across the Christ Church Meadow to the south.
Main article: Merton College Chapel

By the late 1280s the old church of St John the Baptist had fallen into "a ruinous condition",[5] and the college accounts show that work on a new church began in about 1290. The present choir with its enormous east window was complete by 1294. The window is an important example (because it is so well dated) of how the strict geometrical conventions of the Early English Period of architecture were beginning to be relaxed at the end of the 13th century.[6] The south transept was built in the 14th century, the north transept in the early years of the 15th. The great tower was complete by 1450. The chapel replaced the parish church of St. John and continued to serve as the parish church as well as the chapel until 1891. It is for this reason that it is generally referred to as Merton Church in older documents, and that there is a north door into the street as well as doors into the college. This dual role also probably explains the enormous scale of the chapel, which in its original design was to have a nave and two aisles extending to the west.[7]

A new choral foundation was established in 2007, providing for a choir of sixteen undergraduate and graduate choral scholars singing from October 2008. The choir is directed by Peter Phillips, currently also director of the Tallis Scholars and Benjamin Nicholas, director of music at Tewkesbury Abbey

A spire from the chapel has resided in Pavilion Garden VI of the University of Virginia since 1928, when "it was given to the University to honor Jefferson's educational ideals."[8]
[edit] Front quad and the hall

The hall is the oldest surviving college building, but apart from the door with its magnificent medieval ironwork almost no trace of the ancient structure has survived the successive reconstruction efforts, first by James Wyatt in the 1790s and then again by Gilbert Scott in 1874. The hall is still used daily for meals and houses a number of important portraits. It is not usually open to visitors.

Front quad itself is probably the earliest collegiate quadrangle, but its informal, almost haphazard, pattern cannot be said to have influenced designers elsewhere. A reminder of its original domestic nature can be seen in the north east corner where one of the flagstones is marked "Well". The quad is formed of what would have been the back gardens of the three original houses that Walter acquired in the 1260s.
[edit] Mob quad
Main articles: Mob Quad and Merton College Library

Visitors to Merton are often told Mob Quad, built in the 14th century, is the oldest quadrangle of any Oxford or Cambridge college and set the pattern for future collegiate architecture, but Front Quad was certainly enclosed earlier (albeit with a less unified design) and other colleges, for example Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, can point to their own older examples.

The old library occupies the upper floor of the south and west ranges of Mob Quad, and the original archive room is still in the north east corner; it houses one of the most complete sets of college records in Europe.
[edit] Fellows' quad

The grandest quadrangle in Merton is the Fellows' Quadrangle, immediately south of the hall. The quad was the culmination of the work undertaken by Sir Henry Savile at the beginning of the 17th century. The foundation stone was laid shortly after breakfast on 13 September 1608 (as recorded in the college Register), and work was complete by September 1610 (although the battlements were added later).[9] The southern gateway is surmounted by a tower of the four Orders, probably inspired by Italian examples that Warden Savile would have seen on his European travels. The main contractors were from Yorkshire (as was Savile), John Ackroyd and John Bentley of Halifax did the stonework and Thomas Holt the timber. This group were also later employed to work on the Bodleian Library and Wadham College.[10]
[edit] Other buildings
St Alban Hall, pictured in 1837

Most of the other buildings are Victorian or later and include: St. Alban Quad (or "Stubbins"), designed by Basil Champneys,[11] built on the site of the medieval St. Alban Hall (elements of the older façade are incorporated into the part that faces onto Merton Street); the Grove building, built in 1864 by William Butterfield but "chastened" in the 1930s;[12] the buildings beyond the Fellows' Garden called "Rose Lane"; several buildings north of Merton Street, including a real tennis court, and the Old Warden's Lodgings (designed by Champneys in 1903);[11] and a new quadrangle in Holywell Street, some distance away from the college.
[edit] Gardens

The garden fills the southeastern corner of the old walled city of Oxford. The walls may be seen from Christ Church Meadows. Among other things, the gardens contain a mulberry tree planted in the early 17th century, an armillary sundial, a beautiful lawn, and the old Fellows' summer house (now a music room).
[edit] Academic community
[edit] Foundation and origins

Merton College was founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Rochester. It has a claim to be the oldest college in Oxford, although this claim is disputed between Merton College, Balliol College and University College. The substance of Merton's claim to the title of oldest College is that Merton was the first college to be provided with "statutes", a constitution governing the College set out at its founding. Merton's statutes date back to 1264, whereas neither Balliol nor University College had statutes until the 1280s. Merton was also the first to be conceived as a community of scholars working to achieve academic ends, rather than just a place for the scholars to live in.
[edit] St Alban Hall

St Alban Hall was an independent academic hall owned by the convent of Littlemore until it was purchased by Merton College in 1548 following the dissolution of the convent. It continued as a separate institution until it was finally annexed by the college in 1881.[13]
[edit] Parliamentarian sympathies in the Civil War

During the English Civil War, Merton was the only Oxford College to side with Parliament. The reason for this was Merton's annoyance with the interference of their Visitor (patron) William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Due to this, the college was moved to London at the start of the Civil War and its buildings were commandeered by the Royalists and used to house many of Charles the First's court when Oxford was used as the Royalists' capital. This included the King's French wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, who was housed in or near what is now the Queen's Room, the room above the arch between Front and Fellows' Quads.

Differences were quickly settled after the war, however, and a portrait of Charles the First hangs near the Queen's Room as a reminder of the role it played in his court.
[edit] The modern academic community

In recent years, the College has achieved high rankings in the Norrington Table and in the last eight years, Merton has been top of the Norrington table six times (St. John's came top in the 2004–05 and 2008-09 academic years). It is, thus, the most academically successful College in the last twenty years, with more First Class degrees being awarded to its students than Upper Seconds.[citation needed]

Merton, in partnership with nearby college Mansfield (see below), won the JCR Football Premier Division for the first time in their history in 2010/11, beating off competition from such college sporting powerhouses as St Catherine's, St Edmund Hall and Christ Church[14]. The side, captained by a Mertonian undergraduate, also reached the semi-finals of Cuppers only to lose out to the Blues-dominated eventual champions Worcester.[15]

Merton[16] has been Head of the River in Summer Eights once; its men's 1st VIII held the headship in 1951. Merton's women have done better in recent years, gaining the headship in Torpids in 2003 and rowing over to defend the title in 2004.

Merton's peaceful precincts are disturbed once a year by the (in)famous Time Ceremony, when students, dressed in formal sub-fusc, walk backwards around Fellows' Quad drinking port. Traditionally participants also hold candles but in recent years this practice has been dropped, and many students have now adopted the habit of linking arms and twirling around at each corner of the quad. The purpose is ostensibly to maintain the integrity of the space-time continuum during the transition from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time which occurs in the early hours of the last Sunday in October. There are two toasts associated with the ceremony, the first is "to good old times!", or "to a good old time!", whilst the second is "long live the counter-revolution!". The ceremony was invented by two undergraduates in 1971, partly as a spoof on other Oxford ceremonies, and partly to celebrate the end of the experimental period of British Standard Time from 1968 to 1971 when the UK stayed one hour ahead of GMT all year round. It is also seen by many as a protest against the abandonment of sub fusc in recent years.

Merton college admitted its first female students in 1980 (largely due to pressure from the JCR) along with other traditionalist colleges such as Christ Church, leaving Oriel as the only remaining all-male college (although Oriel has since joined Merton to admit female students). Since this time however men have predominated at Merton and it consistently has one of the highest male to female ratios of an Oxford college (around 3:2). However Merton was the second traditionally male college to elect a female Warden in 1994. Merton has traditionally had single sex accommodation for freshers, with female students going into the Rose Lane buildings and most male students going into 3 houses on Merton Street. However, this was changed in 2007, with all fresher accommodation being mixed. Merton has had a reputation for having the best food in Oxford since an old Mertonian left money specifically for the improvement of the kitchens, and this budget was further augmented during the two years when Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan studied there (1983–85).

In 2003, Merton JCR passed a motion expressing general support for student tuition fees, making it the only pro-tuition-fee student body in the UK. Merton JCR politics tends towards the apathetic, but fiercely independent of any organisation that might presume to speak for the JCR. The apathy is, in general, even greater towards OUSU (Oxford University Student Union). However, in November 2005, former Merton JCR president Alan Strickland was elected OUSU President for 2006–2007.

Merton has a long-standing sporting relationship with Mansfield College, with the colleges fielding amalgamated sports teams for nearly all major sports except rowing.

Merton is the only college in Oxford to hold a triannual winter ball, instead of the more common Commemoration ball.

In 2010, it was reported that Merton had not admitted a black student in the previous five years. A university spokeswoman commented that black students were more likely to apply for oversubscribed subjects.[17] Moreover, the University also reported that at least as of 2010, Merton had certainly admitted at least one black undergraduate since 2005.[18]

Merton also plays host to a number of drinking and dining societies, along the lines of other colleges. These include the Myrmidons and L'Ancien Régime. Merton College is also rumoured to be the college of the founding members of the alleged Haxley Society, a university-wide establishment and reportedly a chapter of Yale's similarly prestigious Gamma Gamma Phi fraternity.
[edit] Notable former Mertonians

This list of Merton Fellows and alumni is grouped into centuries; where the person's life spans more than one century, the (approximate) date of matriculation is used, and given in brackets when known. The names are alphabetical by surname within each group.

See also Former students, Fellows and current Honorary Fellows of Merton College.

[edit] Medieval

* Walter de Merton, Lord Chancellor, Bishop of Rochester (Founder)
* Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine, theologian and astronomer (1321), one of the Oxford Calculators
* William of Heytesbury, (1330), one of the Oxford Calculators
* John Dumbleton, (1338), one of the Oxford Calculators
* Richard Swineshead, (1340), one of the Oxford Calculators
* John Wycliffe, theologian (1356)
* Robert Wikeford , Archbishop of Dublin (c. 1350 )

Two additional outstanding academic figures from the early 14th century, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham have long been claimed as Merton fellows, but there is no contemporary evidence to support this claim and as Franciscans, they would have been ineligible for fellowships at Merton.[19]
[edit] 16th century

* Bishop John Jewel, theologian and Anglican divine (1535)
* Sir Thomas Bodley, diplomat, scholar, and librarian (1563)
* Sir Henry Savile, scholar and statesman (1565)
* Richard Smyth, Regius Professor of Divinity, Merton College, and first Chancellor of the University of Douai

[edit] 17th century

* John Bainbridge, astronomer (c1610)
* Admiral Robert Blake, military commander and Member of Parliament for Bridgwater (1615)
* William Harvey, physician (1645)
* Richard Steele, politician and writer (1691)
* Anthony Wood, antiquary

[edit] 18th century

* David Hartley – Member of Parliament and signatory to the Treaty of Paris
* John Graves Simcoe – Military Officer and First lieutenant governor of Upper Canada

[edit] 19th century

* Max Beerbohm, author and caricaturist (1890)
* Edmund Clerihew Bentley, inventor of the Clerihew (1894)
* F. H. Bradley, philosopher
* Mandell Creighton, historian and Bishop of London (1862)
* Lord Randolph Churchill, British statesman (1867)
* Lord Halsbury, Lord Chancellor, and compiler of the Laws of England (1842)
* George Howson, reforming headmaster (1879)
* Walter Alison Phillips, historian (1882)
* Walter Scott, classical scholar (fellow from 1879)
* F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, British statesman (1896, at Merton as a graduate)
* Frederick Soddy, radiochemist and Nobel Laureate in chemistry (1895)

[edit] 20th century (matriculated before 1960)

* Theodor Adorno, philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and art critic (1934)
* Sir Leonard Allinson, former High Commissioner in Kenya and Ambassador to UN Environment Programme (1944)
* Sir Roger Bannister, middle-distance runner and neurologist (1950)
* Sir Lennox Berkeley, composer (1922)
* Sir Basil Blackwell, bookseller and publisher (1907)
* Edmund Blunden, Professor of Poetry (1931)
* Frank Bough, broadcaster
* Robert Byron, travel writer
* John Carey, Merton Professor of English
* Leonard Cheshire, RAF pilot and philanthropist (1936)
* Michael Davie, journalist and newspaper editor
* T. S. Eliot, poet and Nobel Laureate for literature (1914)
* Northrop Frye, literary critic
* Erich S. Gruen, classical scholar (Rhodes Scholar, 1957–1960, Visiting Fellow 1974)
* Stuart Hall, cultural theorist
* Sir Hector Hetherington, Principal of the University of Glasgow
* Sir Tony Hoare, computer scientist (1952)
* Andrew Irvine, mountaineer (1921)
* Sir Jeremy Isaacs, broadcaster and impresario
* Kris Kristofferson, actor and musician
* Professor Anthony Leggett, physicist, Nobel Laureate in physics (1959)
* John Lucas, philosopher (JRF 1953, Fellow 1960)
* Louis MacNeice, poet (1926)
* Reginald Maudling, politician
* Bruce Mitchell, philologist
* Airey Neave, politician
* Terence O'Brien, British ambassador to Nepal, Burma and Indonesia
* Reynolds Price, author and professor at Duke University
* Sir George Radda, scientist
* Eric Simms, ornithologist
* Howard K. Smith, journalist and broadcaster
* Sir Peter Tapsell, Father of the House of Commons
* Professor Niko Tinbergen, ethologist (1949)
* J. R. R. Tolkien, author and Merton Professor of English (1945)
* Sir Geoffrey Vickers
* Angus Wilson, author
* Yang Xianyi, translator (1936)

[edit] Contemporary (matriculated since 1960)

* Colin Bundy, academic (1968 Rhodes Scholar)
* James Clark, author of groff and open source software developer (1982)
* John A. Claughton, Chief Master of King Edward's School, Birmingham and the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI
* Howard Davies, Director, London School of Economics
* Pat Fish (Patrick Huntrods), musician and songwriter
* Paul Foot, comedian
* David Freud, investment banker
* John Selwyn Gilbert, television writer, director and producer
* Mark Haddon, author (1981)
* Dr Adam Hart Davis, broadcaster
* Anthony Holden, writer, broadcaster, critic
* Tim Jackson, auctioneer (1983)
* Alec Jeffreys, geneticist
* Alister McGrath, scientist and theologian (1976 Domus Senior Scholar)
* Dominic Minghella, screenwriter
* John Mitchinson, writer and publisher (1982)
* Tim Mitchison, cell biologist
* John David Morley, novelist
* HIH Naruhito, Crown Prince of Japan (1982)
* Jesse Norman, MP (1981)
* John Oetjen, television and film producer (1983)
* Hugh Osmond, co-founder of Punch Taverns
* Michael Ridpath, author (1979)
* Dana Scott, logician
* Sir Howard Stringer, Chief Executive Officer of Sony, (1961, Hon. Fellow)
* Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive, Stonewall (1981)
* Michael Szonyi, Professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, (1990 Rhodes Scholar)
* Mark Thompson, broadcaster, director general of the BBC
* Rick Trainor, Principal of King's College London
* Ed Vaizey, MP for Wantage
* Professor Sir Andrew Wiles, mathematician (1971), famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem in 1994.
* Alexander Williams, animator (1986)


[edit] Grace

The college preprandial grace is always recited before formal dinners in Hall and usually by the senior postmaster present. The first two lines of the Latin text are based on verses 15 and 16 of Psalm 145.

Oculi omnium in te respiciunt, Domine. Tu das escam illis tempore opportuno.
Aperis manum tuam, et imples omne animal benedictione tua.
Benedicas nobis, Deus, omnibus donis quae de tua beneficentia accepturi simus.
Per Iesum Christum dominum nostrum, Amen.

Roughly translated it means:

The eyes of the world look up to thee, O Lord. Thou givest them food in due season.
Thou openest thy hand and fillest every creature with thy blessing.
Bless us, O God, with all the gifts which by thy good works we are about to receive.
Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord, Amen.

For the relevant verses of the Psalm, the Authorized Version has:

15. The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat in due season.
16. Thou openst thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.

According to an article about Graces from the University of Cambridge, a slightly different version of the Latin text of these verses is painted (apparently as a decoration) around Old Hall in Queens' College, Cambridge, and is "commonly in use at other Cambridge colleges".

By contrast with the rather long pre-prandial grace, the post-prandial grace is brief: Benedictus benedicat ("Let him who has been blessed, give blessing"). The latter grace is spoken by the senior Fellow present at the end of dinner on High Table.
[edit] References

* Bott, A. (1993). Merton College: A Short History of the Buildings. Oxford: Merton College. ISBN 0-9522314-0-9.
* Martin, G.H. & Highfield, J.R.L. (1997). A History of Merton College. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-920183-8.
* Sherwood, Jennifer; and Nikolaus Pevsner (1974). The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-071045-0.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ See Martin & Highfield, pp.1–2
2. ^ See Martin & Highfield, loc. cit.
3. ^ Oxford College Endowment Incomes, 1973-2006 (updated July 2007)
4. ^ See Bott, p.4
5. ^ Anthony Wood, quoted in Bott, p.24
6. ^ Pevsner, p.25
7. ^ See Bott, pp.24–37
8. ^ "University of Virginia: Explore the Gardens, Pavillion Garden VI". http://www.virginia.edu/virginia/.+2009-06-11. http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/gardens/gardensExplore.html. Retrieved 2009-06-11.
9. ^ Bott, p.37
10. ^ Martin & Highfield, p.163
11. ^ a b Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, M.C., The History of the University of Oxford, Volume VII, Part 2 — Oxford University Press (2000) p.755. ISBN 0-19-951017-2.
12. ^ Pevsner, op. cit., p.164
13. ^ "St Alban Hall, Library & Archives, Merton College website". http://www.merton.ox.ac.uk/aboutmerton/library4.shtml. Retrieved 20 July 2009.
14. ^ http://merton-mansfield.ouafc.com/college_tables?division_id=1
15. ^ Bush, Stephen (3 March 2011). "Worcester 5-1 Mertsfield". Oxford Student. http://oxfordstudent.com/2011/03/03/worcester-5-1-mertsfield/. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
16. ^ http://www.mertoncollegeboatclub.com
17. ^ Davis, Anna (7 December 2010). "Oxford college fails to take black students". London Evening Standard. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23904554-oxford-college-fails-to-take-black-students.do. Retrieved 8 December 2010.
18. ^ Mapstone, Sally (9 December 2010). "These figures do not show that Oxford and Cambridge discriminate". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/09/oxford-cambridge-do-not-discriminate. Retrieved 10 December 2010.
19. ^ Martin & Highfield, p.53

[edit] External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Merton College, Oxford

* Merton College website
* Merton JCR website
* Virtual tour of Merton

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United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article is about the United States of America. For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), and United States (disambiguation).
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United States of America

Flag Great Seal
Motto: In God We Trust (official)
E Pluribus Unum (traditional)
(Latin: Out of Many, One)
Anthem: "The Star-Spangled Banner"
Capital Washington, D.C.
38°53′N 77°01′W / 38.883°N 77.017°W / 38.883; -77.017
Largest city New York City
Official language(s) None at federal level[a]
National language English (de facto)[b]
Demonym American
Government Federal presidential constitutional republic
- President Barack Obama (D)
- Vice President Joe Biden (D)
- Speaker of the House John Boehner (R)
- Chief Justice John Roberts
Legislature Congress
- Upper House Senate
- Lower House House of Representatives
Independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain
- Declared July 4, 1776
- Recognized September 3, 1783
- Current constitution June 21, 1788
Area
- Total 9,826,675 km2 [1][c](3rd/4th)
3,794,101 sq mi
- Water (%) 6.76
Population
- 2010 census 308,745,538[2]
- Density 33.7/km2
87.4/sq mi
GDP (PPP) 2010 estimate
- Total $14.658 trillion[3] (1st)
- Per capita $47,123[3] (6th)
GDP (nominal) 2010 estimate
- Total $14.658 trillion[3] (1st)
- Per capita $47,132[3] (9th)
Gini (2007) 45.0[1] (44th)
HDI (2010) increase 0.902[4] (very high) (4th)
Currency United States dollar ($) (USD)
Time zone (UTC−5 to −10)
- Summer (DST) (UTC−4 to −10)
Date formats m/d/yy (AD)
Drives on the right
Internet TLD .us .gov .mil .edu
Calling code +1
^ a. English is the official language of at least 28 states—some sources give a higher figure, based on differing definitions of "official".[5] English and Hawaiian are both official languages in the state of Hawaii.

^ b. English is the de facto language of American government and the sole language spoken at home by 80% of Americans age five and older. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language.

^ c. Whether the United States or the People's Republic of China is larger is disputed. The figure given is from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook. Other sources give smaller figures. All authoritative calculations of the country's size include only the 50 states and the District of Columbia, not the territories.
^ d. The population estimate includes people whose usual residence is in the fifty states and the District of Columbia, including noncitizens. It does not include either those living in the territories, amounting to more than 4 million U.S. citizens (most in Puerto Rico), or U.S. citizens living outside the United States.

The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Caribbean and Pacific.

At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) and with over 310 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest both by land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries.[6] The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2010 GDP of $14.799 trillion (23% of nominal global GDP and 20% of global GDP at purchasing power parity).[3][7]

Indigenous peoples of Asian origin have inhabited what is now the mainland United States for many thousands of years. This Native American population was greatly reduced by disease and warfare after European contact. The United States was founded by thirteen British colonies located along the Atlantic seaboard. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed their right to self-determination and their establishment of a cooperative union. The rebellious states defeated the British Empire in the American Revolution, the first successful colonial war of independence.[8] The current United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year made the states part of a single republic with a strong federal government. The Bill of Rights, comprising ten constitutional amendments guaranteeing many fundamental civil rights and freedoms, was ratified in 1791.

Through the 19th century, the United States displaced native tribes, acquired land from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia, and annexed the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Hawaii. Disputes between the agrarian South and industrial North over the expansion of the institution of slavery and states' rights provoked the American Civil War of the 1860s. The North's victory prevented a permanent split of the country and led to the end of legal slavery in the United States. By the 1870s, the national economy was the world's largest.[9] The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a military power. It emerged from World War II as the first country with nuclear weapons and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. The country accounts for 43% of global military spending and is a leading economic, political, and cultural force in the world.[10]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Etymology
* 2 Geography, climate, and environment
* 3 History
o 3.1 Native Americans and European settlers
o 3.2 Independence and expansion
o 3.3 Civil War and industrialization
o 3.4 World War I, Great Depression, and World War II
o 3.5 Cold War and protest politics
o 3.6 Contemporary era
* 4 Government and elections
o 4.1 Parties, ideology, and politics
* 5 Political divisions
* 6 Foreign relations and military
* 7 Economy
o 7.1 Income and human development
o 7.2 Science and technology
o 7.3 Transportation
o 7.4 Energy
* 8 Demographics
* 9 Language
* 10 Religion
* 11 Education
* 12 Health
* 13 Crime and law enforcement
* 14 Culture
o 14.1 Popular media
o 14.2 Literature, philosophy, and the arts
o 14.3 Food
o 14.4 Sports
o 14.5 Measurement systems
* 15 See also
* 16 References
* 17 External links

Etymology
See also: Names for United States citizens

In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere "America" after Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci.[11] The former British colonies first used the country's modern name in the Declaration of Independence, the "unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America" adopted by the "Representatives of the united States of America" on July 4, 1776.[12] On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, which states, "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America.'" The Franco-American treaties of 1778 used "United States of North America", but from July 11, 1778, "United States of America" was used on the country's bills of exchange, and it has been the official name ever since.[13]

The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms include the "U.S.", the "USA", and "America". Colloquial names include the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States". "Columbia", a once popular name for the United States, derives from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia".

The standard way to refer to a citizen of the United States is as an "American". Though "United States" is the official appositional term, "American" and "U.S." are more commonly used to refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). "American" is rarely used in English to refer to people not connected to the United States.[14]

The phrase "United States" was originally treated as plural—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865. It became common to treat it as singular—e.g., "the United States is"—after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States".[15]
Geography, climate, and environment
Main articles: Geography of the United States, Climate of the United States, and Environment of the United States

The land area of the contiguous United States is approximately 1.9 billion acres (770 million hectares). Alaska, separated from the contiguous United States by Canada, is the largest state at 365 million acres (150 million hectares). Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, has just over 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares).[16] The United States is the world's third or fourth largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and just above or below China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted and how the total size of the United States is calculated: the CIA World Factbook gives 3,794,101 square miles (9,826,675 km2),[1] the United Nations Statistics Division gives 3,717,813 square miles (9,629,091 km2),[17] and the Encyclopædia Britannica gives 3,676,486 square miles (9,522,055 km2).[18] Including only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[19]
Satellite image showing topography of the contiguous United States

The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont. The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest. The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast. The Rocky Mountains, at the western edge of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado. Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Mojave. The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast. At 20,320 feet (6,194 m), Alaska's Mount McKinley is the tallest peak in the country and in North America. Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[20]
Yellowstone National Park

The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south. The southern tip of Florida is tropical, as is Hawaii. The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains are alpine. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Extreme weather is not uncommon—the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur within the country, mainly in the Midwest's Tornado Alley.[21]

The U.S. ecology is considered "megadiverse": about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and over 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[22] The United States is home to more than 400 mammal, 750 bird, and 500 reptile and amphibian species.[23] About 91,000 insect species have been described.[24] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 protects threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. There are fifty-eight national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[25] Altogether, the government owns 28.8% of the country's land area.[26] Most of this is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching; 2.4% is used for military purposes.[26]
History
Main article: History of the United States
Native Americans and European settlers
See also: Native Americans in the United States, European colonization of the Americas, and Thirteen Colonies

The indigenous peoples of the U.S. mainland, including Alaska Natives, are believed to have migrated from Asia, beginning between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago.[27] Some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies. After Europeans began settling the Americas, many millions of indigenous Americans died from epidemics of imported diseases such as smallpox.[28]
The Mayflower transported Pilgrims to the New World in 1620, as depicted in William Halsall's The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, 1882

In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contact with the indigenous people. On April 2, 1513, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed on what he called "La Florida"—the first documented European arrival on what would become the U.S. mainland. Spanish settlements in the region were followed by ones in the present-day southwestern United States that drew thousands through Mexico. French fur traders established outposts of New France around the Great Lakes; France eventually claimed much of the North American interior, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The first successful English settlements were the Virginia Colony in Jamestown in 1607 and the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. The 1628 chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in a wave of migration; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, about 50,000 convicts were shipped to Britain's American colonies.[29] Beginning in 1614, the Dutch settled along the lower Hudson River, including New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

In 1674, the Dutch ceded their American territory to England; the province of New Netherland was renamed New York. Many new immigrants, especially to the South, were indentured servants—some two-thirds of all Virginia immigrants between 1630 and 1680.[30] By the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were becoming the primary source of bonded labor. With the 1729 division of the Carolinas and the 1732 colonization of Georgia, the thirteen British colonies that would become the United States of America were established. All had local governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient rights of Englishmen and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism. All legalized the African slave trade. With high birth rates, low death rates, and steady immigration, the colonial population grew rapidly. The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest in both religion and religious liberty. In the French and Indian War, British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans (popularly known as "American Indians"), who were being displaced, those thirteen colonies had a population of 2.6 million in 1770, about one-third that of Britain; nearly one in five Americans were black slaves.[31] Though subject to British taxation, the American colonials had no representation in the Parliament of Great Britain.
Independence and expansion
Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull, 1817–18

Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and early 1770s led to the American Revolutionary War, fought from 1775 through 1781. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress, convening in Philadelphia, established a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Proclaiming that "all men are created equal" and endowed with "certain unalienable Rights," the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1776. That date is now celebrated annually as America's Independence Day. In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a weak confederal government that operated until 1789.

After the British defeat by American forces assisted by the French and the Spaniards, Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States and the states' sovereignty over American territory west to the Mississippi River. A constitutional convention was organized in 1787 by those wishing to establish a strong national government, with powers of taxation. The United States Constitution was ratified in 1788, and the new republic's first Senate, House of Representatives, and president—George Washington—took office in 1789. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.

Attitudes toward slavery were shifting; a clause in the Constitution protected the African slave trade only until 1808. The Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, leaving the slave states of the South as defenders of the "peculiar institution." The Second Great Awakening, beginning about 1800, made evangelicalism a force behind various social reform movements, including abolitionism.
Territorial acquisitions by date

Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of Indian Wars. The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 almost doubled the nation's size.[32] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism. A series of U.S. military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that stripped the native peoples of their land. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845. The concept of Manifest Destiny was popularized during this time.[33] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest. The U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War resulted in the 1848 cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest. The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 further spurred western migration. New railways made relocation easier for settlers and increased conflicts with Native Americans. Over a half-century, up to 40 million American bison, or buffalo, were slaughtered for skins and meat and to ease the railways' spread. The loss of the buffalo, a primary resource for the plains Indians, was an existential blow to many native cultures.
Civil War and industrialization
Battle of Gettysburg, lithograph by Currier & Ives, ca. 1863

Tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over the relationship between the state and federal governments, as well as violent conflicts over the spread of slavery into new states. Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the largely antislavery Republican Party, was elected president in 1860. Before he took office, seven slave states declared their secession—which the federal government maintained was illegal—and formed the Confederate States of America. With the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began and four more slave states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 declared slaves in the Confederacy to be free. Following the Union victory in 1865, three amendments to the U.S. Constitution ensured freedom for the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[34] made them citizens, and gave them voting rights. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power.[35] The war remains the deadliest conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers.[36]
Immigrants at Ellis Island, New York Harbor, 1902

After the war, the assassination of Lincoln radicalized Republican Reconstruction policies aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the Southern states while ensuring the rights of the newly freed slaves. The resolution of the disputed 1876 presidential election by the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction; Jim Crow laws soon disenfranchised many African Americans. In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe hastened the country's industrialization. The wave of immigration, lasting until 1929, provided labor and transformed American culture. National infrastructure development spurred economic growth. The 1867 Alaska Purchase from Russia completed the country's mainland expansion. The Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 was the last major armed conflict of the Indian Wars. In 1893, the indigenous monarchy of the Pacific Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown in a coup led by American residents; the United States annexed the archipelago in 1898. Victory in the Spanish–American War the same year demonstrated that the United States was a world power and led to the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.[37] The Philippines gained independence a half-century later; Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories.
World War I, Great Depression, and World War II
See also: American Expeditionary Forces and Military history of the United States during World War II
An abandoned farm in South Dakota during the Dust Bowl, 1936

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the United States remained neutral. Most Americans sympathized with the British and French, although many opposed intervention.[38] In 1917, the United States joined the Allies, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. After the war, the Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations. The country pursued a policy of unilateralism, verging on isolationism.[39] In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage. The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal, a range of policies increasing government intervention in the economy. The Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.
Soldiers of the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division landing in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944

The United States, effectively neutral during World War II's early stages after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers as well as the internment of Japanese Americans by the thousands.[40] Participation in the war spurred capital investment and industrial capacity. Among the major combatants, the United States was the only nation to become richer—indeed, far richer—instead of poorer because of the war.[41] Allied conferences at Bretton Woods and Yalta outlined a new system of international organizations that placed the United States and Soviet Union at the center of world affairs. As victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[42] The United States, having developed the first nuclear weapons, used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Japan surrendered on September 2, ending the war.[43]
Cold War and protest politics
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech, 1963

The United States and Soviet Union jockeyed for power after World War II during the Cold War, dominating the military affairs of Europe through NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and engaging in proxy wars in many locations. Resisting leftist land and income redistribution projects around the world, the United States often supported authoritarian governments. American troops fought Communist Chinese forces in the Korean War of 1950–53. The House Un-American Activities Committee pursued a series of investigations into suspected leftist subversion, while Senator Joseph McCarthy became the figurehead of anticommunist sentiment.

The 1961 Soviet launch of the first manned spaceflight prompted President John F. Kennedy's call for the United States to be first to land "a man on the moon", achieved in 1969. Kennedy also faced a tense nuclear showdown with Soviet forces in Cuba. Meanwhile, the United States experienced sustained economic expansion. A growing civil rights movement, symbolized and led by African Americans such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel, used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination. Following Kennedy's assassination in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, expanded a proxy war in Southeast Asia into the unsuccessful Vietnam War. A widespread countercultural movement grew, fueled by opposition to the war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others led a new wave of feminism that sought political, social, and economic equality for women.

As a result of the Watergate scandal, in 1974 Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign, to avoid being impeached on charges including obstruction of justice and abuse of power; he was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford. The Jimmy Carter administration of the late 1970s was marked by stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis. The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 heralded a rightward shift in American politics, reflected in major changes in taxation and spending priorities. His second term in office brought both the Iran-Contra scandal and significant diplomatic progress with the Soviet Union. The subsequent Soviet collapse ended the Cold War.
Contemporary era
The World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001

Under President George H. W. Bush, the United States took a lead role in the UN–sanctioned Gulf War. The longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history—from March 1991 to March 2001—encompassed the Bill Clinton administration and the dot-com bubble.[44] A civil lawsuit and sex scandal led to Clinton's impeachment in 1998, but he remained in office. The 2000 presidential election, one of the closest in American history, was resolved by a U.S. Supreme Court decision—George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, became president.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and The Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly three thousand people. In response, the Bush administration launched the global War on Terror. In October 2001, U.S. forces led an invasion of Afghanistan, removing the Taliban government and al-Qaeda training camps. Taliban insurgents continue to fight a guerrilla war. In 2002, the Bush administration began to press for regime change in Iraq on controversial grounds.[45] Lacking the support of NATO or an explicit UN mandate for military intervention, Bush organized a Coalition of the Willing; coalition forces preemptively invaded Iraq in 2003, removing dictator Saddam Hussein. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused severe destruction along much of the Gulf Coast, devastating New Orleans. On November 4, 2008, amid a global economic recession the first African American president, Barack Obama, was elected. In 2010, major health care and financial system reforms were enacted. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that year became the largest peacetime oil disaster in history.[46]
Government and elections
Main articles: Federal government of the United States, state governments of the United States, and elections in the United States
The west front of the United States Capitol, which houses the United States Congress.

The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a constitutional republic and representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[47] The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document. In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government, federal, state, and local; the local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district. There is no proportional representation at the federal level, and it is very rare at lower levels.
The south façade of the White House, home and workplace of the U.S. president.

The federal government is composed of three branches:

* Legislative: The bicameral Congress, made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives, makes federal law, declares war, approves treaties, has the power of the purse, and has the power of impeachment, by which it can remove sitting members of the government.
* Executive: The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, can veto legislative bills before they become law, and appoints the members of the Cabinet (subject to Senate approval) and other officers, who administer and enforce federal laws and policies.
* Judicial: The Supreme Court and lower federal courts, whose judges are appointed by the president with Senate approval, interpret laws and overturn those they find unconstitutional.

The west front of the United States Supreme Court Building.

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population every tenth year. As of the 2000 census, seven states have the minimum of one representative, while California, the most populous state, has fifty-three. The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one third of Senate seats are up for election every other year. The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned by state. The Supreme Court, led by the Chief Justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.

The state governments are structured in roughly similar fashion; Nebraska uniquely has a unicameral legislature. The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.

All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review, and any law ruled in violation of the Constitution is voided. The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus, and Article Three guarantees the right to a jury trial in all criminal cases. Amendments to the Constitution require the approval of three-fourths of the states. The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times; the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights.
Parties, ideology, and politics
Main articles: Politics of the United States and Political ideologies in the United States
Barack Obama taking the presidential oath of office from U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, January 20, 2009

The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history. For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote.

Within American political culture, the Republican Party is considered center-right or "conservative" and the Democratic Party is considered center-left or "liberal". The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states", are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.

The winner of the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama, is the 44th U.S. president. All previous presidents were men of solely European descent. The 2010 midterm elections saw the Republican Party take control of the House and make gains in the Senate, where the Democrats retain the majority. In the 112th United States Congress, the Senate comprises 51 Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and 47 Republicans; the House comprises 242 Republicans and 193 Democrats. There are 29 Republican and 20 Democratic state governors, as well as one independent.
Political divisions
Main article: U.S. state
Further information: Territorial evolution of the United States and United States territorial acquisitions

The United States is a federal union of fifty states. The original thirteen states were the successors of the thirteen colonies that rebelled against British rule. Early in the country's history, three new states were organized on territory separated from the claims of the existing states: Kentucky from Virginia; Tennessee from North Carolina; and Maine from Massachusetts. Most of the other states have been carved from territories obtained through war or purchase by the U.S. government. One set of exceptions comprises Vermont, Texas, and Hawaii: each was an independent republic before joining the union. During the American Civil War, West Virginia broke away from Virginia. The most recent state—Hawaii—achieved statehood on August 21, 1959. The states do not have the right to secede from the union.

The states compose the vast bulk of the U.S. land mass; the two other areas considered integral parts of the country are the District of Columbia, the federal district where the capital, Washington, is located; and Palmyra Atoll, an uninhabited but incorporated territory in the Pacific Ocean. The United States also possesses five major overseas territories: Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands in the Caribbean; and American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.[48] Those born in the major territories (except for American Samoa) possess U.S. citizenship.[49] American citizens residing in the territories have many of the same rights and responsibilities as citizens residing in the states; however, they are generally exempt from federal income tax, may not vote for president, and have only nonvoting representation in the U.S. Congress.[50]
Map of USA with state names 2.svg
About this image
Foreign relations and military
Main articles: Foreign policy of the United States and United States Armed Forces
British Foreign Secretary William Hague and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, May 2010

The United States exercises global economic, political, and military influence. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and New York City hosts the United Nations Headquarters. It is a member of the G8, G20, and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, Libya, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States.

The United States has a "special relationship" with the United Kingdom[51] and strong ties with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Israel. It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In 2008, the United States spent a net $25.4 billion on official development assistance, the most in the world. As a share of gross national income (GNI), however, the U.S. contribution of 0.18% ranked last among twenty-two donor states. In contrast, private overseas giving by Americans is relatively generous.[52]
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier

The president holds the title of commander-in-chief of the nation's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and the Department of the Navy in time of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[53]

Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System. American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's eleven active aircraft carriers, and Marine Expeditionary Units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[54] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[55] The extent of this global military presence has prompted some scholars to describe the United States as maintaining an "empire of bases."[56]

Total U.S. military spending in 2008, more than $600 billion, was over 41% of global military spending and greater than the next fourteen largest national military expenditures combined. The per capita spending of $1,967 was about nine times the world average; at 4% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top fifteen military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[57] The proposed base Department of Defense budget for 2011, $549 billion, is a 3.4% increase over 2010 and 85% higher than in 2001; an additional $159 billion is proposed for the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.[58] As of September 2010, the United States is scheduled to have 96,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan, and 50,000 to Iraq.[59] As of January 5, 2011, the United States had suffered 4,432 military fatalities during the Iraq War,[60] and 1,448 during the War in Afghanistan.[61]
Economy
Main article: Economy of the United States
Economic indicators
Unemployment 9.1% (May 2011) [62]
GDP growth 1.8% (1Q 2011), 2.9% (2009 – 2010) [63]
CPI inflation 3.2% (April 2010 – April 2011) [64]
Poverty 14.3% (2009) [65]
Public debt $14.34 trillion (June 9, 2011) [66]
Household net worth $54.2 trillion (4Q 2009) [67]

The United States has a capitalist mixed economy, which is fueled by abundant natural resources, a well-developed infrastructure, and high productivity.[68] According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $14.799 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and almost 21% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[3] It has the largest national GDP in the world, though it is about 5% less than the GDP of the European Union at PPP in 2008. The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[3]

The United States is the largest importer of goods and third largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2008, the total U.S. trade deficit was $696 billion.[69] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[70] In 2007, vehicles constituted both the leading import and leading export commodity.[71] Japan is the largest foreign holder of U.S. public debt, having surpassed China in early 2010.[72] The United States ranks second in the Global Competitiveness Report.[73]
Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange in New York City.

In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 55.3% of the economy, with federal government activity accounting for 24.1% and state and local government activity (including federal transfers) the remaining 20.6%.[74] The economy is postindustrial, with the service sector contributing 67.8% of GDP, though the United States remains an industrial power.[75] The leading business field by gross business receipts is wholesale and retail trade; by net income it is manufacturing.[76] Chemical products are the leading manufacturing field.[77] The United States is the third largest producer of oil in the world, as well as its largest importer.[78] It is the world's number one producer of electrical and nuclear energy, as well as liquid natural gas, sulfur, phosphates, and salt. While agriculture accounts for just under 1% of GDP,[75] the United States is the world's top producer of corn[79] and soybeans.[80] The New York Stock Exchange is the world's largest by dollar volume.[81] Coca-Cola and McDonald's are the two most recognized brands in the world.[82]

In August 2010, the American labor force comprised 154.1 million people. With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people.[62] About 12% of workers are unionized, compared to 30% in Western Europe.[83] The World Bank ranks the United States first in the ease of hiring and firing workers.[84] In 2009, the United States had the third highest labor productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[85] Compared to Europe, U.S. property and corporate income tax rates are generally higher, while labor and, particularly, consumption tax rates are lower.[86]
Income and human development
A modern middle class single family home in suburban Salinas, California.
Main article: Income in the United States
See also: Income inequality in the United States, Poverty in the United States, and Affluence in the United States

According to the United States Census Bureau, the pretax median household income in 2007 was $49,777. The median ranged from $65,469 among Asian American households to $32,584 among African American households.[65] Using purchasing power parity exchange rates, the overall median is similar to the most affluent cluster of developed nations. After declining sharply during the middle of the 20th century, poverty rates have plateaued since the early 1970s, with 11–15% of Americans below the poverty line every year, and 58.5% spending at least one year in poverty between the ages of 25 and 75.[87][88] In 2009, 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty.[65]

The U.S. welfare state is one of the least extensive in the developed world, reducing both relative poverty and absolute poverty by considerably less than the mean for rich nations,[89][90] though combined private and public social expenditures per capita are higher than in any of the Nordic countries.[91] While the American welfare state does well in reducing poverty among the elderly,[92] the young receive relatively little assistance.[93] A 2007 UNICEF study of children's well-being in twenty-one industrialized nations ranked the United States next to last.[94]

Despite strong increases in productivity, low unemployment, and low inflation, income gains since 1980 have been slower than in previous decades, less widely shared, and accompanied by increased economic insecurity. Between 1947 and 1979, real median income rose by over 80% for all classes, with the incomes of poor Americans rising faster than those of the rich.[95][96] Median household income has increased for all classes since 1980,[97] largely owing to more dual-earner households, the closing of the gender gap, and longer work hours, but growth has been slower and strongly tilted toward the very top (see graph).[89][95][98] Consequently, the share of income of the top 1%—21.8% of total reported income in 2005—has more than doubled since 1980,[99] leaving the United States with the greatest income inequality among developed nations.[89][100] The top 1% pays 27.6% of all federal taxes; the top 10% pays 54.7%.[101] Wealth, like income, is highly concentrated: The richest 10% of the adult population possesses 69.8% of the country's household wealth, the second-highest share among developed nations.[102] The top 1% possesses 33.4% of net wealth.[103]
Science and technology
A photograph from Apollo 11 of Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon
Main article: Science and technology in the United States
See also: Technological and industrial history of the United States

The United States has been a leader in scientific research and technological innovation since the late 19th century. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's laboratory developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera. Nikola Tesla pioneered alternating current, the AC motor, and radio. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford promoted the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[104]

The rise of Nazism in the 1930s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, to immigrate to the United States. During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age. The Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and computers. The United States largely developed the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Today, the bulk of research and development funding, 64%, comes from the private sector.[105] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[106] Americans possess high levels of technological consumer goods,[107] and almost half of U.S. households have broadband Internet access.[108] The country is the primary developer and grower of genetically modified food, representing half of the world's biotech crops.[109]
The Interstate Highway System, which extends 46,876 miles (75,440 km)[110]
A coal mine in Wyoming. The United States has 27% of global coal reserves.[111]
Transportation

Everyday personal transportation in the United States is dominated by the automobile driving on one of 13 million roads.[112] As of 2003, there were 759 automobiles per 1,000 Americans, compared to 472 per 1,000 inhabitants of the European Union the following year.[113] About 40% of personal vehicles are vans, SUVs, or light trucks.[114] The average American adult (accounting for all drivers and nondrivers) spends 55 minutes driving every day, traveling 29 miles (47 km).[115]

The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned, while most major airports are publicly owned. The four largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are American; Southwest Airlines is number one.[116] Of the world's thirty busiest passenger airports, sixteen are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[117] While transport of goods by rail is extensive, relatively few people use rail to travel, within or between cities.[118] Mass transit accounts for 9% of total U.S. work trips, compared to 38.8% in Europe.[119] Bicycle usage is minimal, well below European levels.[120]
Energy
See also: Energy policy of the United States

The United States energy market is 29,000 terawatt hours per year. Energy consumption per capita is 7.8 tons of oil equivalent per year, compared to Germany's 4.2 tons and Canada's 8.3 tons. In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear power and renewable energy sources.[121] The United States is the world's largest consumer of petroleum.[122] For decades, nuclear power has played a limited role relative to many other developed countries, in part due to public perception in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. In 2007, several applications for new nuclear plants were filed.[123]
Demographics
Main articles: Demographics of the United States and Americans
Largest ancestry groups by county, 2000.
Race/Ethnicity (2010)[124]
White 72.4%
Black/African American 12.6%
Asian 4.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native 0.9%
Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander 0.2%
Other 6.2%
Two or more races 2.9%
Hispanic/Latino (of any race) 16.3%

The 2010 U.S. Census reported 308,745,538 residents; the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Clock projects the country's population now to be 311,556,000,[125] including an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants.[126] The third most populous nation in the world, after China and India, the United States is the only industrialized nation in which large population increases are projected.[127] With a birth rate of 13.82 per 1,000, 30% below the world average, its population growth rate is 0.98%, significantly higher than those of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea.[128] In fiscal year 2010, over 1 million immigrants were granted legal residence,[129] most of them entered through family reunification.[129] Mexico has been the leading source of new residents for over two decades; since 1998, China, India, and the Philippines have been in the top four sending countries every year.[130]

The United States has a very diverse population—thirty-one ancestry groups have more than one million members.[131] White Americans are the largest racial group; German Americans, Irish Americans, and English Americans constitute three of the country's four largest ancestry groups.[131] African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third largest ancestry group.[131] Asian Americans are the country's second largest racial minority; the two largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans.[131] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[132] The census now includes the category "Some Other Race" for "respondents unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories; more than 19 million people were placed in this category in 2010.[132]

The population growth of Hispanic and Latino Americans (the terms are officially interchangeable) is a major demographic trend. The 50.5 million Americans of Hispanic descent[132] are identified as sharing a distinct "ethnicity" by the Census Bureau; 64% of Hispanic Americans are of Mexican descent.[133] Between 2000 and 2010, the country's Hispanic population increased 43% while the non-Hispanic population rose just 4.9%.[124] Much of this growth is from immigration; as of 2007, 12.6% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, with 54% of that figure born in Latin America.[134] Fertility is also a factor; the average Hispanic woman gives birth to 3.0 children in her lifetime, compared to 2.2 for non-Hispanic black women and 1.8 for non-Hispanic white women (below the replacement rate of 2.1).[127] Minorities (as defined by the Census Bureau, all those beside non-Hispanic, non-multiracial whites) constitute 34% of the population; they are projected to be the majority by 2042.[135]

About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (as defined by the Census Bureau, such areas include the suburbs);[1] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[136] In 2008, 273 incorporated places had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than 1 million residents, and four global cities had over 2 million (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[137] There are fifty-two metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million.[138] Of the fifty fastest-growing metro areas, forty-seven are in the West or South.[139] The metro areas of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix all grew by more than a million people between 2000 and 2008.[138]
Leading population centers view · talk · edit
Rank Core City Metro area pop.[140] Metropolitan Statistical Area Region[141]
New York City
New York City

Los Angeles
Los Angeles
1 New York City 18,897,109 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA MSA Northeast
2 Los Angeles 12,828,837 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA MSA West
3 Chicago 9,461,105 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI MSA Midwest
4 Dallas 6,371,773 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX MSA South
5 Philadelphia 5,965,343 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD MSA Northeast
6 Houston 5,946,800 Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX MSA South
7 Washington, D.C. 5,582,170 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV MSA South
8 Miami 5,564,635 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL MSA South
9 Atlanta 5,268,860 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA MSA South
10 Boston 4,552,402 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH MSA Northeast
based on the 2010 U.S. Census
Language
Main article: Languages of the United States
See also: Language Spoken at Home (U.S. Census)
Languages (2007)[142]
English (only) 225.5 million
Spanish, incl. Creole 34.5 million
Chinese 2.5 million
French, incl. Creole 2.0 million
Tagalog 1.5 million
Vietnamese 1.2 million
German 1.1 million
Korean 1.1 million

English is the de facto national language. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2007, about 226 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. Spanish, spoken by 12% of the population at home, is the second most common language and the most widely taught second language.[142][143] Some Americans advocate making English the country's official language, as it is in at least twenty-eight states.[5] Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii by state law.[144]

While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[145] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[146] Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan and Chamorro are recognized by American Samoa and Guam, respectively; Carolinian and Chamorro are recognized by the Northern Mariana Islands; Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico.
Religion
A Presbyterian church; most Americans identify as Christian.
Main article: Religion in the United States
See also: History of religion in the United States, Freedom of religion in the United States, Separation of church and state in the United States, and List of religious movements that began in the United States

The United States is officially a secular nation; the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids the establishment of any religious governance. In a 2002 study, 59% of Americans said that religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other wealthy nation.[147] According to a 2007 survey, 78.4% of adults identified themselves as Christian,[148] down from 86.4% in 1990.[149] Protestant denominations accounted for 51.3%, while Roman Catholicism, at 23.9%, was the largest individual denomination. The study categorizes white evangelicals, 26.3% of the population, as the country's largest religious cohort;[148] another study estimates evangelicals of all races at 30–35%.[150] The total reporting non-Christian religions in 2007 was 4.7%, up from 3.3% in 1990.[149] The leading non-Christian faiths were Judaism (1.7%), Buddhism (0.7%), Islam (0.6%), Hinduism (0.4%), and Unitarian Universalism (0.3%).[148] The survey also reported that 16.1% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist, or simply having no religion, up from 8.2% in 1990.[148][149]
Education
Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire is an example of a liberal arts college in America.
Main article: Education in the United States
See also: Educational attainment in the United States and Higher education in the United States

American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. Children are required in most states to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn eighteen (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at sixteen or seventeen.[151] About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[152]

The United States has many competitive private and public institutions of higher education, as well as local community colleges with open admission policies. Of Americans twenty-five and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[153] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[1][154] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[155]
Health
See also: Health care in the United States, Health care reform in the United States, and Health insurance in the United States

The United States life expectancy of 77.8 years at birth[156] is a year shorter than the overall figure in Western Europe, and three to four years lower than that of Norway, Switzerland, and Canada.[157] Over the past two decades, the country's rank in life expectancy has dropped from 11th to 42nd in the world.[158] The infant mortality rate of 6.37 per thousand likewise places the United States 42nd out of 221 countries, behind all of Western Europe.[159] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight;[160] the obesity rate, the highest in the industrialized world, has more than doubled in the last quarter-century.[161] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[162]
The Texas Medical Center in Houston, the world's largest medical center[163]

The U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, 79.8 per 1,000 women, is nearly four times that of France and five times that of Germany.[164] Abortion, legal on demand, is highly controversial. Many states ban public funding of the procedure and restrict late-term abortions, require parental notification for minors, and mandate a waiting period. While the abortion rate is falling, the abortion ratio of 241 per 1,000 live births and abortion rate of 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 remain higher than those of most Western nations.[165]

The U.S. health care system far outspends any other nation's, measured in both per capita spending and percentage of GDP.[166] The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. health care system in 2000 as first in responsiveness, but 37th in overall performance. The United States is a leader in medical innovation. In 2004, the nonindustrial sector spent three times as much as Europe per capita on biomedical research.[167]

Unlike in all other developed countries, health care coverage in the United States is not universal. In 2004, private insurance paid for 36% of personal health expenditures, private out-of-pocket payments covered 15%, and federal, state, and local governments paid for 44%.[168] In 2005, 46.6 million Americans, 15.9% of the population, were uninsured, 5.4 million more than in 2001. The main cause of this rise is the drop in the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance.[169] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[170] A 2009 study estimated that lack of insurance is associated with nearly 45,000 deaths a year.[171] In 2006, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate universal health insurance.[172] Federal legislation passed in early 2010 will create a near-universal health insurance system around the country by 2014.
Crime and law enforcement
Main articles: Law enforcement in the United States and Crime in the United States
See also: Law of the United States, Incarceration in the United States, and Capital punishment in the United States
Homicide rate2004.svg

Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police and sheriff's departments, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties. At the federal level and in almost every state, jurisprudence operates on a common law system. State courts conduct most criminal trials; federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state systems.

Among developed nations, the United States has above-average levels of violent crime and particularly high levels of gun violence and homicide.[173] In 2007, there were 5.6 murders per 100,000 persons,[174] three times the rate in neighboring Canada.[175] The U.S. homicide rate, which decreased by 42% between 1991 and 1999, has been roughly steady since.[174] Gun ownership rights are the subject of contentious political debate.

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate[176] and total prison population[177] in the world. At the start of 2008, more than 2.3 million people were incarcerated, more than one in every 100 adults.[178] The current rate is about seven times the 1980 figure.[179] African American males are jailed at about six times the rate of white males and three times the rate of Hispanic males.[176] In 2006, the U.S. incarceration rate was over three times the figure in Poland, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country with the next highest rate.[180] The country's high rate of incarceration is largely due to sentencing and drug policies.[176][181]

Though it has been abolished in most Western nations, capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and in thirty-four states. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty after a four-year moratorium, there have been more than 1,000 executions.[182] In 2006, the country had the sixth highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan.[183] In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to legislatively abolish the death penalty since the 1976 Supreme Court decision, followed by New Mexico in 2009 and Illinois in 2011.[184]
Culture
Main article: Culture of the United States
See also: Social class in the United States
American cultural icons: apple pie, baseball, and the American flag

The United States is a multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[6][185] Aside from the now small Native American and Native Hawaiian populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries.[186] The culture held in common by most Americans—mainstream American culture—is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[6][187] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[6]

According to Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions analysis, the United States has the highest individualism score of any country studied.[188] While the mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[189] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[190] The American middle and professional class has initiated many contemporary social trends such as modern feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.[191] Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree.[192] While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute.[193] Though the American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants, various studies indicate that the United States has less social mobility than Canada and the Nordic countries.[194]

Women now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees.[195] In 2007, 58% of Americans age 18 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 25% had never been married.[196] Same-sex marriage is contentious. Some states permit civil unions in lieu of marriage. Since 2003, several states have permitted gay marriage as the result of judicial or legislative action, while voters in more than a dozen states have barred the practice via referendum.
Popular media
Main articles: Cinema of the United States, Television in the United States, and Music of the United States
The Hollywood Sign

The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California. Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time.[197] American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising. The major film studios of Hollywood have produced the most commercially successful movies in history, such as Star Wars (1977) and Titanic (1997), and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.[198]

Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world,[199] and the average viewing time continues to rise, reaching five hours a day in 2006.[200] The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities. Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[201] Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, eBay, and Craigslist.[202]

The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk. More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities.[203]
Literature, philosophy, and the arts
Main articles: American literature, American philosophy, American art, and American classical music
Jack Kerouac, one of the best-known figures of the Beat Generation, a group of writers that came to prominence in the 1950s

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[204] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[205]

Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[206] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty, built upon by Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of U.S. academics. John Rawls and Robert Nozick led a revival of political philosophy.

In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The realist paintings of Thomas Eakins are now widely celebrated. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[207] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new styles, displaying a highly individualistic sensibility. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.
Times Square in New York City, part of the Broadway theater district

One of the first major promoters of American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower Manhattan entertainment complex in 1841. The team of Harrigan and Hart produced a series of popular musical comedies in New York starting in the late 1870s. In the 20th century, the modern musical form emerged on Broadway; the songs of musical theater composers such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim have become pop standards. Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel literature prize in 1936; other acclaimed U.S. dramatists include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson.

Though largely overlooked at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition; other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music. Choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham helped create modern dance, while George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were leaders in 20th century ballet. Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams. The newspaper comic strip and the comic book are both U.S. innovations. Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero, has become an American icon.[208]
Food
Main article: American cuisine

Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine uses indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers. Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American foods. Soul food, developed by African slaves, is popular around the South and among many African Americans elsewhere. Syncretic cuisines such as Louisiana creole, Cajun, and Tex-Mex are regionally important.

Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[209] Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[210] During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric intake rose 24%;[209] frequent dining at fast food outlets is associated with what public health officials call the American "obesity epidemic."[211] Highly sweetened soft drinks are widely popular; sugared beverages account for 9% of the average American's caloric intake.[212]
Sports
Main article: Sports in the United States
A college football quarterback looking to pass the ball

Baseball has been regarded as the national sport since the late 19th century, even after being eclipsed in popularity by American football. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports. College football and basketball attract large audiences. American football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport.[213] Boxing and horse racing were once the most watched individual sports, but they have been eclipsed by golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR. Soccer is played widely at the youth and amateur levels. Tennis and many outdoor sports are popular as well.

While most major U.S. sports have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, snowboarding, and cheerleading are American inventions. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact. Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The United States has won 2,301 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country,[214] and 253 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most.[215]
Measurement systems
Main article: United States customary units

The country retains United States customary units, constituted largely by British imperial units such as miles, yards, and degrees Fahrenheit. Distinct units include the U.S. gallon and U.S. pint volume measurements. Along with Burma and Liberia, the United States is one of the three countries that have not adopted the International System of Units. However, metric units are increasingly used in science, medicine, and many industrial fields.[216]
See also
Book: United States
Wikipedia Books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.

* Wikisource logo Works related to United States of America at Wikisource

Geography portal
North America portal

* Index of United States–related articles
* Outline of the United States

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206. ^ Quinn, Edward (2006). A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. Infobase, p. 361. ISBN 0-8160-6243-9. Seed, David (2009). A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, p. 76. ISBN 1-4051-4691-5. Meyers, Jeffrey (1999). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, p. 139. ISBN 0-306-80890-0.
207. ^ Brown, Milton W. (1988 1963). The Story of the Armory Show. New York: Abbeville. ISBN 0-89659-795-4.
208. ^ Daniels, Les (1998). Superman: The Complete History (1st ed.). Titan Books. p. 11. ISBN 1-85286-988-7.
209. ^ a b Klapthor, James N. (2003-08-23). "What, When, and Where Americans Eat in 2003". Institute of Food Technologists. http://www.ift.org/cms/?pid=1000496. Retrieved 2007-06-19.
210. ^ Smith, Andrew F. (2004). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–32. ISBN 0-19-515437-1. Levenstein, Harvey (2003). Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, pp. 154–55. ISBN 0-520-23439-1.
211. ^ Boslaugh, Sarah (2010). "Obesity Epidemic", in Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, ed. Roger Chapman. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 413–14. ISBN 978-0-7656-1761-3.
212. ^ "Fast Food, Central Nervous System Insulin Resistance, and Obesity". Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. American Heart Association. 2005. http://atvb.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/25/12/2451#R3-101329. Retrieved 2007-06-09. "Let's Eat Out: Americans Weigh Taste, Convenience, and Nutrition". U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib19/eib19_reportsummary.pdf. Retrieved 2007-06-09.
213. ^ Krane, David K. (2002-10-30). "Professional Football Widens Its Lead Over Baseball as Nation's Favorite Sport". Harris Interactive. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/Insights/HarrisVault8482.aspx?PID=337. Retrieved 2007-09-14. Maccambridge, Michael (2004). America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50454-0.
214. ^ "All-Time Medal Standings, 1896–2004". Information Please. http://www.infoplease.com/ipsa/A0115108.html. Retrieved 2007-06-14. "Distribution of Medals—2008 Summer Games". Fact Monster. http://www.factmonster.com/sports/olympics/2008/distribution-medals-summer-games.html. Retrieved 2008-09-02.
215. ^ "All-Time Medal Standings, 1924–2006". Information Please. http://www.infoplease.com/ipsa/A0115207.html. Retrieved 2007-06-14. "Olympic Medals". Vancouver Organizing Committee. http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-medals/. Retrieved 2010-03-02. Norway is first.
216. ^ "Appendix G: Weights and Measures". The World Factbook. CIA. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/appendix/appendix-g.html. Retrieved 2010-04-01.

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Overviews and Data

* United States entry at The World Factbook
* InfoUSA Portal to U.S. Information Agency resources
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* Demographic Highlights Statistics from the Population Reference Bureau
* The 50 States of the U.S.A. Collected informational links for each state
* United States travel guide from Wikitravel
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* U.S. Census Housing and Economic Statistics Wide-ranging data from the U.S. Census Bureau
* U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Official government site
* State Fact Sheets Population, employment, income, and farm data from the U.S. Economic Research Service
* State Energy Profiles Economic, environmental, and energy data for each state from the U.S. Energy Information Administration

History

* Historical Documents Collected by the National Center for Public Policy Research
* U.S. National Mottos: History and Constitutionality Analysis by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
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Maps

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[show]v · d · e United States (Outline)
History
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[show]v · d · eCountries and dependencies of North America
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[show] International membership
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[show]v · d · eAsia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

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[show]v · d · eOrganization of American States (OAS)
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[show]v · d · eEnglish-speaking world
Anglosphere

Dark blue: Countries and territories where English is an official language and spoken natively by a significant population.
Light blue: Countries and territories where English is an official language but less widely spoken.
Click on the coloured regions to view the related article.
English sometimes spoken here



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Regions where English is an official language but not as widely spoken
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[show]v · d · eNational personifications
Argentina: Effigies of Argentina — Armenia: Mother Armenia — Brazil: Efígie da República — Cambodia: Preah Thaong and Neang Neak — Canada: Johnny Canuck — Finland: Finnish Maiden (Suomi-neito) — France: Marianne — Germany: Deutscher Michel, Germania — Greece: Athena, "Greece" of Delacroix — Iceland: Lady of the Mountain — India: Bharat Mata — Indonesia: Ibu Pertiwi — Ireland: Ériu, Hibernia, Kathleen Ni Houlihan — Israel: Srulik — Italy: Italia Turrita — Japan: Amaterasu — Indonesia: Ibu Pertiwi (East Malaysia) — Netherlands: Netherlands Maiden — New Zealand: Zealandia — Norway: Ola Nordmann — Pakistan: Pak Watan — Philippines: Juan dela Cruz, Maria Clara — Poland: Polonia — Portugal: Efígie da República, Zé Povinho — Russia: Mother Russia — Spain: Hispania — Sweden: Mother Svea — Switzerland: Helvetia — Ukraine: Cossack Mamay — United Kingdom: Britannia, John Bull (England), Dame Wales (Wales) — United States: Brother Jonathan, Columbia, Lady Liberty, Uncle Sam, Billy Yank (northern states) / Johnny Reb (southern states)
[show]v · d · ePolitical divisions of the United States
States
Alabama · Alaska · Arizona · Arkansas · California · Colorado · Connecticut · Delaware · Florida · Georgia · Hawaii · Idaho · Illinois · Indiana · Iowa · Kansas · Kentucky · Louisiana · Maine · Maryland · Massachusetts · Michigan · Minnesota · Mississippi · Missouri · Montana · Nebraska · Nevada · New Hampshire · New Jersey · New Mexico · New York · North Carolina · North Dakota · Ohio · Oklahoma · Oregon · Pennsylvania · Rhode Island · South Carolina · South Dakota · Tennessee · Texas · Utah · Vermont · Virginia · Washington · West Virginia · Wisconsin · Wyoming
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Insular areas
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Categories: United States | Bicontinental countries | Superpowers | Northern American countries | Countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean | Countries bordering the Pacific Ocean | Countries bordering the Arctic Ocean | Federal countries | English-speaking countries and territories | G8 nations | G20 nations | Liberal democracies | States and territories established in 1776 | 1776 establishments in the United States | Member states of NATO | Member states of the United Nations
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Multiethnic society
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

A multiethnic society is one with members belonging to more than one ethnic group, in contrast to societies which are ethnically homogenous. In practice, virtually all contemporary national societies are multiethnic. One scholar argued in 1993 that fewer than 20 of the then 180 sovereign states could be said to be ethnically and nationally homogenous, where a homogenous state was defined as one in which minorities made up less than five per cent of the population.[1] Sujit Choudhry therefore argues that, "[t]he age of the ethnoculturally homogeneous state, if ever there was one, is over".[2]
[edit] See also

* Multiculturalism
* Multiracial
* Polyethnicity
Ethnic group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
"Ethnicity" redirects here. For the 2003 kayla listening album, see Ethnicity (Yanni album).
"Peoples" redirects here. For the defunct chain of department stores, see Peoples (store).

An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy.[1][2][3] "...in general it is a highly biologically self-perpetuating group sharing an interest in a homeland connected with a specific geographical area, a common language and traditions, including food preferences, and a common religious faith".[4]

Members of an ethnic group are conscious of belonging to an ethnic group; moreover ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness. Processes that result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis.
Contents

* 1 Terminology and definition
* 2 Conceptual history of ethnicity
o 2.1 "Ethnies" or ethnic categories
o 2.2 Approaches to understanding ethnicity
* 3 Ethnicity and race
* 4 Ethnicity and nation
* 5 Ethno-national conflict
* 6 Ethnicity in specific countries
o 6.1 USA
o 6.2 Europe
o 6.3 India
o 6.4 China
* 7 See also
* 8 Notes
* 9 References
* 10 External links

[edit] Terminology and definition

The terms ethnicity and ethnic group are derived from the Greek word ἔθνος ethnos, normally translated as "nation".[5] The terms refer currently to people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.

Herodotus is the first who stated the main characteristics of ethnicity in the 5th century BCE, with his famous account of what defines Greek identity, where he lists kinship (Greek: ὅμαιμον - homaimon, "of the same blood"[6]), language (Greek: ὁμόγλωσσον - homoglōsson, "speaking the same language"[7]), cults and customs (Greek: ὁμότροπον - homotropon, "of the same habits or life").[8][9][10]

The term "ethnic" and related forms from the 14th through the middle of the 19th century CE were used in English in the meaning of "pagan, heathen", as ethnikos (Greek: ἐθνικός, literally "national"[11]) was used as the LXX translation of Hebrew goyim "the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews".[12]

The modern meaning emerged in the mid 19th century and expresses the notion of "a people" or "a nation". The term ethnicity is of 20th century coinage, attested from the 1950s. The term nationality depending on context may either be used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship (in a sovereign state).

The modern usage of "ethnic group" further came to reflect the different kinds of encounters industrialised states have had with external groups, such as immigrants and indigenous peoples; "ethnic" thus came to stand in opposition to "national", to refer to people with distinct cultural identities who, through migration or conquest, had become subject to a state or "nation" with a different cultural mainstream.[13] — with the first usage of the term ethnic group in 1935,[14] and entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972.[15][16][17]

Writing about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States, in 1977 Wallman noted that

The term 'ethnic' popularly connotes '[race]' in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, '[race]' most commonly means color, and 'ethnics' are the descendents of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. '[Ethnic]' is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no 'ethnics'; there are only 'ethnic relations'.[18]

Thus, in today's everyday language, the words "ethnic" and "ethnicity" still have a ring of exotic peoples, minority issues and race relations.

Within the social sciences, however, the usage has become more generalized to all human groups that explicitly regard themselves and are regarded by others as culturally distinctive.[19] Among the first to bring the term "ethnic group" into social studies was the German sociologist Max Weber, who defined it as:

[T]hose human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.[20]

Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. According to "Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, politics, and reality",[21] "Ethnicity is a fundamental factor in human life: it is a phenomenon inherent in human experience."[22] Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf, do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups.[23]
[edit] Conceptual history of ethnicity

According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.

* One is between "primordialism" and "instrumentalism". In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond.[24] The instrumentalist approach, on the other hand, treats ethnicity primarily as an ad-hoc element of a political strategy, used as a resource for interest groups for achieving secondary goals such as, for instance, an increase in wealth, power or status.[25][26] This debate is still an important point of reference in Political science, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.[27]
* The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism". Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented as old.[28][29] Essentialists view such identities as ontological categories defining social actors, and not the result of social action.[30][31]

According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology, by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicised forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism in the Caribbean and South Asia.[32]

Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft (community). Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolise power and status. This was contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then called "race".[33]

Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth, whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from 1969 has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s.[34] Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups. "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness of ethnic identities. Barth writes: "[...] categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories."

In 1978, anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:

... the named ethnic identities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed.[34]

In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e.g. anthropologists, may not coincide with the self-identification of the members of that group. He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.[34]

Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have a mercurial character.[35] Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness".[34] He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that (in Cohen's paraphrase) "Ethnicity ... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization.[34] This may be why descent is sometimes a marker of ethnicity, and sometimes not: which diacritic of ethnicity is salient depends on whether people are scaling ethnic boundaries up or down, and whether they are scaling them up or down depends generally on the political situation.
[edit] "Ethnies" or ethnic categories

In order to avoid the problems of defining ethnic classification as labelling of others or as self-identification, it has been proposed[36] to distinguish between concepts of "ethnic categories", "ethnic networks" and "ethnic communities" or "ethnies".[37][38]

* An "ethnic category" is a category set up by outsiders, that is, those who are not themselves members of the category, and whose members are populations that are categorised by outsiders as being distinguished by attributes of a common name or emblem, a shared cultural element and a connection to a specific territory. But, members who are ascribed to ethnic categories do not themselves have any awareness of their belonging to a common, distinctive group.

* At the level of "ethnic networks", the group begins to have a sense of collectiveness, and at this level, common myths of origin and shared cultural and biological heritage begins to emerge, at least among the élites.[38]

* At the level of "ethnies" or "ethnic communities", the members themselves have clear conceptions of being "a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland, and some degree of solidarity, at least among the élites". That is, an ethnie is self-defined as a group, whereas ethnic categories are set up by outsiders whether or not their own members identify with the category given them.[39]

* A "Situational Ethnicity" is an Ethnic identity that is chosen for the moment based on the social setting or situation.[40]

[edit] Approaches to understanding ethnicity

Different approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a factor in human life and society. Examples of such approaches are: primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism and instrumentalism.

* "Primordialism", holds that ethnicity has existed at all times of human history and that modern ethnic groups have historical continuity into the far past. For them, the idea of ethnicity is closely linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing groups rooted by kinship and biological heritage.
o "Essentialist primordialism" further holds that ethnicity is an a priori fact of human existence, that ethnicity precedes any human social interaction and that it is basically unchanged by it. This theory sees ethnic groups as natural, not just as historical. This understanding does not explain how and why nations and ethnic groups seemingly appear, disappear and often reappear through history. It also has problems dealing with the consequences of intermarriage, migration and colonization for the composition of modern day multi-ethnic societies.[39]
o "Kinship primordialism" holds that ethnic communities are extensions of kinship units, basically being derived by kinship or clan ties where the choices of cultural signs (language, religion, traditions) are made exactly to show this biological affinity. In this way, the myths of common biological ancestry that are a defining feature of ethnic communities are to be understood as representing actual biological history. A problem with this view on ethnicity is that it is more often than not the case that mythic origins of specific ethnic groups directly contradict the known biological history of an ethnic community.[39]
o "Geertz's primordialism", notably espoused by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, argues that humans in general attribute an overwhelming power to primordial human "givens" such as blood ties, language, territory, and cultural differences. In Geertz' opinion, ethnicity is not in itself primordial but humans perceive it as such because it is embedded in their experience of the world.[39]

* "Perennialism" holds that ethnicity is ever changing, and that while the concept of ethnicity has existed at all times, ethnic groups are generally short lived before the ethnic boundaries realign in new patterns. The opposing perennialist view holds that while ethnicity and ethnic groupings has existed throughout history, they are not part of the natural order.
o "Perpetual perennialism" holds that specific ethnic groups have existed continuously throughout history.
o "Situational perennialism" holds that nations and ethnic groups emerge, change and vanish through the course of history. This view holds that the concept of ethnicity is basically a tool used by political groups to manipulate resources such as wealth, power, territory or status in their particular groups' interests. Accordingly, ethnicity emerges when it is relevant as means of furthering emergent collective interests and changes according to political changes in the society. Examples of a perennialist interpretation of ethnicity are also found in Barth,and Seidner who see ethnicity as ever-changing boundaries between groups of people established through ongoing social negotiation and interaction.
o "Instrumentalist perennialism", while seeing ethnicity primarily as a versatile tool that identified different ethnics groups and limits through time, explains ethnicity as a mechanism of social stratification, meaning that ethnicity is the basis for a hierarchical arrangement of individuals. According to Donald Noel, a sociologist who developed a theory on the origin of ethnic stratification, ethnic stratification is a "system of stratification wherein some relatively fixed group membership (e.g., race, religion, or nationality) is utilized as a major criterion for assigning social positions".[41] Ethnic stratification is one of many different types of social stratification, including stratification based on socio-economic status, race, or gender. According to Donald Noel, ethnic stratification will emerge only when specific ethnic groups are brought into contact with one another, and only when those groups are characterized by a high degree of ethnocentrism, competition, and differential power. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture, and to downgrade all other groups outside one’s own culture. Some sociologists, such as Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, say the origin of ethnic stratification lies in individual dispositions of ethnic prejudice, which relates to the theory of ethnocentrism.[42] Continuing with Noel's theory, some degree of differential power must be present for the emergence of ethnic stratification. In other words, an inequality of power among ethnic groups means "they are of such unequal power that one is able to impose its will upon another".[41] In addition to differential power, a degree of competition structured along ethnic lines is a prerequisite to ethnic stratification as well. The different ethnic groups must be competing for some common goal, such as power or influence, or a material interest, such as wealth or territory. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings propose that competition is driven by self-interest and hostility, and results in inevitable stratification and conflict.[42]

* "Constructivism" sees both primordialist and perennialist views as basically flawed,[42] and rejects the notion of ethnicity as a basic human condition. It holds that ethnic groups are only products of human social interaction, maintained only in so far as they are maintained as valid social constructs in societies.
o "Modernist constructivism" correlates the emergence of ethnicity with the movement towards nationstates beginning in the early modern period.[43] Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm, argue that ethnicity and notions of ethnic pride, such as nationalism, are purely modern inventions, appearing only in the modern period of world history. They hold that prior to this, ethnic homogeneity was not considered an ideal or necessary factor in the forging of large-scale societies.

[edit] Ethnicity and race

Before Weber, race and ethnicity were often seen as two aspects of the same thing. Around 1900 and before the essentialist primordialist understanding of ethnicity was predominant, cultural differences between peoples were seen as being the result of inherited traits and tendencies.[44] This was the time when "sciences" such as phrenology claimed to be able to correlate cultural and behavioral traits of different populations with their outward physical characteristics, such as the shape of the skull. With Weber's introduction of ethnicity as a social construct, race and ethnicity were divided from each other. A social belief in biologically well-defined races lingered on.

In 1950, the UNESCO statement, "The Race Question", signed by some of the internationally renowned scholars of the time (including Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc.), suggested that: "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of 'ethnic groups'."[45]

In 1982, American cultural anthropologists, summing up forty years of ethnographic research, argued that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways that people from different parts of the world have been incorporated into a global economy:

The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial" and "ethnic" distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values.[46]

According to Wolf, races were constructed and incorporated during the period of European mercantile expansion, and ethnic groups during the period of capitalist expansion.[47]

Often, ethnicity also connotes shared cultural, linguistic, behavioural or religious traits. For example, to call oneself Jewish or Arab is to immediately invoke a clutch of linguistic, religious, cultural and racial features that are held to be common within each ethnic category. Such broad ethnic categories have also been termed macroethnicity.[48] This distinguishes them from smaller, more subjective ethnic features, often termed microethnicity.[49][50]
[edit] Ethnicity and nation
Further information: Nation state and ethnic minority

In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner[51] and Benedict Anderson[52] see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the seventeenth century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation in their own nation-state.[53] Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another,[54] or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.
[edit] Ethno-national conflict
Further information: Ethnic conflict

Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and actions by the state or its constituents. In the twentieth century, people began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two ways. Some, like Jürgen Habermas and Bruce Barry, have argued that the legitimacy of modern states must be based on a notion of political rights of autonomous individual subjects. According to this view, the state should not acknowledge ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural construct. According to this view, states must recognize ethnic identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of ethnic groups can be accommodated within the boundaries of the nation-state.

The nineteenth century saw the development of the political ideology of ethnic nationalism, when the concept of race was tied to nationalism, first by German theorists including Johann Gottfried von Herder. Instances of societies focusing on ethnic ties, arguably to the exclusion of history or historical context, have resulted in the justification of nationalist goals. Two periods frequently cited as examples of this are the nineteenth century consolidation and expansion of the German Empire and the twentieth century Third (Greater German) Reich. Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were only acquiring lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans. The history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of the former USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts. Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to between them, as in other regions of the world. Thus, the conflicts are often misleadingly labelled and characterized as civil wars when they are inter-ethnic conflicts in a multi-ethnic state.
[edit] Ethnicity in specific countries
[edit] USA
Main article: Race and ethnicity in the United States
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (June 2011)

In the United States of America, the term "ethnic" carries a different meaning from how it is commonly used in some other countries due to the historical and ongoing significance of racial distinctions that categorize together what might otherwise have been viewed as ethnic groups. So, for example, various ethnic, "national," or linguistic groups from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America and Indigenous America have long been aggregated as racial minority groups (currently designated as African American, Asian, Latino and Native American or American Indian, respectively). While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese Americans among Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the United States' long history as a settler, conqueror and slave society, and the concomitant formal and informal inscription of racialized groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon race a fundamental social identification role in the United States. "Ethnicity theory" in the US refers to a school of thinking on race that arose in response first to biological views of race, which underwrote some of the most extreme forms of racial social stratification, exclusion and subordination. However, in the 1960s ethnicity theory was put to service in debates among academics and policy makers regarding how to grapple with the demands and resistant (sometimes "race nationalist") political identities resulting from the great civil rights mobilizations and transformation. Ethnicity theory came to be synonymous with a liberal and neoconservative rejection or diminution of race as a fundamental feature of US social order, politics and culture. Ethnicity theorists embraced an individualist, quasi-voluntarist notion of identity, which downplayed the significance of race as structuring element in US history and society. Michael Omi and Howard Winant have argued in the their book Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s that ethnicity theory fails to grapple effectively with the meaning and material significance of race in the US and offer a theory of racial formation as an alternative view.

Ethnicity usually refers to collectives of related groups, having more to do with morphology, specifically skin color, rather than political boundaries. The word "nationality" is more commonly used for this purpose (e.g. Italian, Mexican, French, Russian, Japanese, etc. are nationalities). Most prominently in the U.S., Latin American descended populations are grouped in a "Hispanic" or "Latino" ethnicity. The many previously designated Oriental ethnic groups are now classified as the Asian racial group for the census.

The terms "Black" and "African American


Ethnic group
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"Ethnicity" redirects here. For the 2003 kayla listening album, see Ethnicity (Yanni album).
"Peoples" redirects here. For the defunct chain of department stores, see Peoples (store).

An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy.[1][2][3] "...in general it is a highly biologically self-perpetuating group sharing an interest in a homeland connected with a specific geographical area, a common language and traditions, including food preferences, and a common religious faith".[4]

Members of an ethnic group are conscious of belonging to an ethnic group; moreover ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness. Processes that result in the emergence of such identification are called ethnogenesis.
Contents

* 1 Terminology and definition
* 2 Conceptual history of ethnicity
o 2.1 "Ethnies" or ethnic categories
o 2.2 Approaches to understanding ethnicity
* 3 Ethnicity and race
* 4 Ethnicity and nation
* 5 Ethno-national conflict
* 6 Ethnicity in specific countries
o 6.1 USA
o 6.2 Europe
o 6.3 India
o 6.4 China
* 7 See also
* 8 Notes
* 9 References
* 10 External links

[edit] Terminology and definition

The terms ethnicity and ethnic group are derived from the Greek word ἔθνος ethnos, normally translated as "nation".[5] The terms refer currently to people thought to have common ancestry who share a distinctive culture.

Herodotus is the first who stated the main characteristics of ethnicity in the 5th century BCE, with his famous account of what defines Greek identity, where he lists kinship (Greek: ὅμαιμον - homaimon, "of the same blood"[6]), language (Greek: ὁμόγλωσσον - homoglōsson, "speaking the same language"[7]), cults and customs (Greek: ὁμότροπον - homotropon, "of the same habits or life").[8][9][10]

The term "ethnic" and related forms from the 14th through the middle of the 19th century CE were used in English in the meaning of "pagan, heathen", as ethnikos (Greek: ἐθνικός, literally "national"[11]) was used as the LXX translation of Hebrew goyim "the nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews".[12]

The modern meaning emerged in the mid 19th century and expresses the notion of "a people" or "a nation". The term ethnicity is of 20th century coinage, attested from the 1950s. The term nationality depending on context may either be used synonymously with ethnicity, or synonymously with citizenship (in a sovereign state).

The modern usage of "ethnic group" further came to reflect the different kinds of encounters industrialised states have had with external groups, such as immigrants and indigenous peoples; "ethnic" thus came to stand in opposition to "national", to refer to people with distinct cultural identities who, through migration or conquest, had become subject to a state or "nation" with a different cultural mainstream.[13] — with the first usage of the term ethnic group in 1935,[14] and entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972.[15][16][17]

Writing about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States, in 1977 Wallman noted that

The term 'ethnic' popularly connotes '[race]' in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, '[race]' most commonly means color, and 'ethnics' are the descendents of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. '[Ethnic]' is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no 'ethnics'; there are only 'ethnic relations'.[18]

Thus, in today's everyday language, the words "ethnic" and "ethnicity" still have a ring of exotic peoples, minority issues and race relations.

Within the social sciences, however, the usage has become more generalized to all human groups that explicitly regard themselves and are regarded by others as culturally distinctive.[19] Among the first to bring the term "ethnic group" into social studies was the German sociologist Max Weber, who defined it as:

[T]hose human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.[20]

Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. According to "Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, politics, and reality",[21] "Ethnicity is a fundamental factor in human life: it is a phenomenon inherent in human experience."[22] Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf, do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups.[23]
[edit] Conceptual history of ethnicity

According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, the study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently.

* One is between "primordialism" and "instrumentalism". In the primordialist view, the participant perceives ethnic ties collectively, as an externally given, even coercive, social bond.[24] The instrumentalist approach, on the other hand, treats ethnicity primarily as an ad-hoc element of a political strategy, used as a resource for interest groups for achieving secondary goals such as, for instance, an increase in wealth, power or status.[25][26] This debate is still an important point of reference in Political science, although most scholars' approaches fall between the two poles.[27]
* The second debate is between "constructivism" and "essentialism". Constructivists view national and ethnic identities as the product of historical forces, often recent, even when the identities are presented as old.[28][29] Essentialists view such identities as ontological categories defining social actors, and not the result of social action.[30][31]

According to Eriksen, these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology, by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicised forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism in the Caribbean and South Asia.[32]

Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct) because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft (community). Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolise power and status. This was contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then called "race".[33]

Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth, whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from 1969 has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of the term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s.[34] Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates, or logical a prioris to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with a focus on the interface between groups. "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness of ethnic identities. Barth writes: "[...] categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories."

In 1978, anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities:

... the named ethnic identities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed.[34]

In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e.g. anthropologists, may not coincide with the self-identification of the members of that group. He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states.[34]

Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have a mercurial character.[35] Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness".[34] He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that (in Cohen's paraphrase) "Ethnicity ... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization.[34] This may be why descent is sometimes a marker of ethnicity, and sometimes not: which diacritic of ethnicity is salient depends on whether people are scaling ethnic boundaries up or down, and whether they are scaling them up or down depends generally on the political situation.
[edit] "Ethnies" or ethnic categories

In order to avoid the problems of defining ethnic classification as labelling of others or as self-identification, it has been proposed[36] to distinguish between concepts of "ethnic categories", "ethnic networks" and "ethnic communities" or "ethnies".[37][38]

* An "ethnic category" is a category set up by outsiders, that is, those who are not themselves members of the category, and whose members are populations that are categorised by outsiders as being distinguished by attributes of a common name or emblem, a shared cultural element and a connection to a specific territory. But, members who are ascribed to ethnic categories do not themselves have any awareness of their belonging to a common, distinctive group.

* At the level of "ethnic networks", the group begins to have a sense of collectiveness, and at this level, common myths of origin and shared cultural and biological heritage begins to emerge, at least among the élites.[38]

* At the level of "ethnies" or "ethnic communities", the members themselves have clear conceptions of being "a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories, and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland, and some degree of solidarity, at least among the élites". That is, an ethnie is self-defined as a group, whereas ethnic categories are set up by outsiders whether or not their own members identify with the category given them.[39]

* A "Situational Ethnicity" is an Ethnic identity that is chosen for the moment based on the social setting or situation.[40]

[edit] Approaches to understanding ethnicity

Different approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a factor in human life and society. Examples of such approaches are: primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism and instrumentalism.

* "Primordialism", holds that ethnicity has existed at all times of human history and that modern ethnic groups have historical continuity into the far past. For them, the idea of ethnicity is closely linked to the idea of nations and is rooted in the pre-Weber understanding of humanity as being divided into primordially existing groups rooted by kinship and biological heritage.
o "Essentialist primordialism" further holds that ethnicity is an a priori fact of human existence, that ethnicity precedes any human social interaction and that it is basically unchanged by it. This theory sees ethnic groups as natural, not just as historical. This understanding does not explain how and why nations and ethnic groups seemingly appear, disappear and often reappear through history. It also has problems dealing with the consequences of intermarriage, migration and colonization for the composition of modern day multi-ethnic societies.[39]
o "Kinship primordialism" holds that ethnic communities are extensions of kinship units, basically being derived by kinship or clan ties where the choices of cultural signs (language, religion, traditions) are made exactly to show this biological affinity. In this way, the myths of common biological ancestry that are a defining feature of ethnic communities are to be understood as representing actual biological history. A problem with this view on ethnicity is that it is more often than not the case that mythic origins of specific ethnic groups directly contradict the known biological history of an ethnic community.[39]
o "Geertz's primordialism", notably espoused by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, argues that humans in general attribute an overwhelming power to primordial human "givens" such as blood ties, language, territory, and cultural differences. In Geertz' opinion, ethnicity is not in itself primordial but humans perceive it as such because it is embedded in their experience of the world.[39]

* "Perennialism" holds that ethnicity is ever changing, and that while the concept of ethnicity has existed at all times, ethnic groups are generally short lived before the ethnic boundaries realign in new patterns. The opposing perennialist view holds that while ethnicity and ethnic groupings has existed throughout history, they are not part of the natural order.
o "Perpetual perennialism" holds that specific ethnic groups have existed continuously throughout history.
o "Situational perennialism" holds that nations and ethnic groups emerge, change and vanish through the course of history. This view holds that the concept of ethnicity is basically a tool used by political groups to manipulate resources such as wealth, power, territory or status in their particular groups' interests. Accordingly, ethnicity emerges when it is relevant as means of furthering emergent collective interests and changes according to political changes in the society. Examples of a perennialist interpretation of ethnicity are also found in Barth,and Seidner who see ethnicity as ever-changing boundaries between groups of people established through ongoing social negotiation and interaction.
o "Instrumentalist perennialism", while seeing ethnicity primarily as a versatile tool that identified different ethnics groups and limits through time, explains ethnicity as a mechanism of social stratification, meaning that ethnicity is the basis for a hierarchical arrangement of individuals. According to Donald Noel, a sociologist who developed a theory on the origin of ethnic stratification, ethnic stratification is a "system of stratification wherein some relatively fixed group membership (e.g., race, religion, or nationality) is utilized as a major criterion for assigning social positions".[41] Ethnic stratification is one of many different types of social stratification, including stratification based on socio-economic status, race, or gender. According to Donald Noel, ethnic stratification will emerge only when specific ethnic groups are brought into contact with one another, and only when those groups are characterized by a high degree of ethnocentrism, competition, and differential power. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one's own culture, and to downgrade all other groups outside one’s own culture. Some sociologists, such as Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings, say the origin of ethnic stratification lies in individual dispositions of ethnic prejudice, which relates to the theory of ethnocentrism.[42] Continuing with Noel's theory, some degree of differential power must be present for the emergence of ethnic stratification. In other words, an inequality of power among ethnic groups means "they are of such unequal power that one is able to impose its will upon another".[41] In addition to differential power, a degree of competition structured along ethnic lines is a prerequisite to ethnic stratification as well. The different ethnic groups must be competing for some common goal, such as power or influence, or a material interest, such as wealth or territory. Lawrence Bobo and Vincent Hutchings propose that competition is driven by self-interest and hostility, and results in inevitable stratification and conflict.[42]

* "Constructivism" sees both primordialist and perennialist views as basically flawed,[42] and rejects the notion of ethnicity as a basic human condition. It holds that ethnic groups are only products of human social interaction, maintained only in so far as they are maintained as valid social constructs in societies.
o "Modernist constructivism" correlates the emergence of ethnicity with the movement towards nationstates beginning in the early modern period.[43] Proponents of this theory, such as Eric Hobsbawm, argue that ethnicity and notions of ethnic pride, such as nationalism, are purely modern inventions, appearing only in the modern period of world history. They hold that prior to this, ethnic homogeneity was not considered an ideal or necessary factor in the forging of large-scale societies.

[edit] Ethnicity and race

Before Weber, race and ethnicity were often seen as two aspects of the same thing. Around 1900 and before the essentialist primordialist understanding of ethnicity was predominant, cultural differences between peoples were seen as being the result of inherited traits and tendencies.[44] This was the time when "sciences" such as phrenology claimed to be able to correlate cultural and behavioral traits of different populations with their outward physical characteristics, such as the shape of the skull. With Weber's introduction of ethnicity as a social construct, race and ethnicity were divided from each other. A social belief in biologically well-defined races lingered on.

In 1950, the UNESCO statement, "The Race Question", signed by some of the internationally renowned scholars of the time (including Ashley Montagu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gunnar Myrdal, Julian Huxley, etc.), suggested that: "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of 'ethnic groups'."[45]

In 1982, American cultural anthropologists, summing up forty years of ethnographic research, argued that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways that people from different parts of the world have been incorporated into a global economy:

The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial" and "ethnic" distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all the distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values.[46]

According to Wolf, races were constructed and incorporated during the period of European mercantile expansion, and ethnic groups during the period of capitalist expansion.[47]

Often, ethnicity also connotes shared cultural, linguistic, behavioural or religious traits. For example, to call oneself Jewish or Arab is to immediately invoke a clutch of linguistic, religious, cultural and racial features that are held to be common within each ethnic category. Such broad ethnic categories have also been termed macroethnicity.[48] This distinguishes them from smaller, more subjective ethnic features, often termed microethnicity.[49][50]
[edit] Ethnicity and nation
Further information: Nation state and ethnic minority

In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner[51] and Benedict Anderson[52] see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the seventeenth century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion on the basis of equality, or seek autonomy, sometimes even to the extent of complete political separation in their own nation-state.[53] Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another,[54] or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.
[edit] Ethno-national conflict
Further information: Ethnic conflict

Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and actions by the state or its constituents. In the twentieth century, people began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two ways. Some, like Jürgen Habermas and Bruce Barry, have argued that the legitimacy of modern states must be based on a notion of political rights of autonomous individual subjects. According to this view, the state should not acknowledge ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural construct. According to this view, states must recognize ethnic identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of ethnic groups can be accommodated within the boundaries of the nation-state.

The nineteenth century saw the development of the political ideology of ethnic nationalism, when the concept of race was tied to nationalism, first by German theorists including Johann Gottfried von Herder. Instances of societies focusing on ethnic ties, arguably to the exclusion of history or historical context, have resulted in the justification of nationalist goals. Two periods frequently cited as examples of this are the nineteenth century consolidation and expansion of the German Empire and the twentieth century Third (Greater German) Reich. Each promoted the pan-ethnic idea that these governments were only acquiring lands that had always been inhabited by ethnic Germans. The history of late-comers to the nation-state model, such as those arising in the Near East and south-eastern Europe out of the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as well as those arising out of the former USSR, is marked by inter-ethnic conflicts. Such conflicts usually occur within multi-ethnic states, as opposed to between them, as in other regions of the world. Thus, the conflicts are often misleadingly labelled and characterized as civil wars when they are inter-ethnic conflicts in a multi-ethnic state.
[edit] Ethnicity in specific countries
[edit] USA
Main article: Race and ethnicity in the United States
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this section if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. (June 2011)

In the United States of America, the term "ethnic" carries a different meaning from how it is commonly used in some other countries due to the historical and ongoing significance of racial distinctions that categorize together what might otherwise have been viewed as ethnic groups. So, for example, various ethnic, "national," or linguistic groups from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, Latin America and Indigenous America have long been aggregated as racial minority groups (currently designated as African American, Asian, Latino and Native American or American Indian, respectively). While a sense of ethnic identity may coexist with racial identity (Chinese Americans among Asian or Irish American among European or White, for example), the United States' long history as a settler, conqueror and slave society, and the concomitant formal and informal inscription of racialized groupings into law and social stratification schemes has bestowed upon race a fundamental social identification role in the United States. "Ethnicity theory" in the US refers to a school of thinking on race that arose in response first to biological views of race, which underwrote some of the most extreme forms of racial social stratification, exclusion and subordination. However, in the 1960s ethnicity theory was put to service in debates among academics and policy makers regarding how to grapple with the demands and resistant (sometimes "race nationalist") political identities resulting from the great civil rights mobilizations and transformation. Ethnicity theory came to be synonymous with a liberal and neoconservative rejection or diminution of race as a fundamental feature of US social order, politics and culture. Ethnicity theorists embraced an individualist, quasi-voluntarist notion of identity, which downplayed the significance of race as structuring element in US history and society. Michael Omi and Howard Winant have argued in the their book Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s that ethnicity theory fails to grapple effectively with the meaning and material significance of race in the US and offer a theory of racial formation as an alternative view.

Ethnicity usually refers to collectives of related groups, having more to do with morphology, specifically skin color, rather than political boundaries. The word "nationality" is more commonly used for this purpose (e.g. Italian, Mexican, French, Russian, Japanese, etc. are nationalities). Most prominently in the U.S., Latin American descended populations are grouped in a "Hispanic" or "Latino" ethnicity. The many previously designated Oriental ethnic groups are now classified as the Asian racial group for the census.

The terms "Black" and "African American", while different, are both used as ethnic categories in the US. In the late 1980s, the term "African American", was posited as the most appropriate and politically correct race designation.[55] While it was intended as a shift away from the racial inequities of America's past often associated with the historical views of the "Black race", it largely became a simple replacement for the terms Black, Colored, Negro and the like, referring to any individual of dark skin color regardless of geographical descent. Likewise, whether light-skinned, medium-skinned or dark-Skinned, many African Americans are multiracial; although many people have the misconception and assumption that light-skinned African Americans are more mixed than others because of their lack of genetic knowledge. More than half of African Americans also have European ancestry equivalent to one great-grandparent, and 5 percent have Native American ancestry equivalent to one great-grandparent.[56]

The term "White" generally describes people whose ancestry can be traced to Europe (including other European-settled countries in the Americas, Australasia and South Africa among others) and who now live in the United States. Middle Easterners may sometimes also be included in the "white" category. This includes people from Southwest Asia and North Africa. All the aforementioned are categorized as part of the "White" racial group, as per US Census categorization. This category has been split into two groups: Hispanics and non-Hispanics (e.g. White non-Hispanic and White Hispanic.)
[edit] Europe
Main article: Ethnic groups in Europe
Further information: Classification of ethnicity in the United Kingdom and Ethnic groups in Russia

Europe has a large number of ethnic groups; Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities within every state they inhabit (although they may form local regional majorities within a sub-national entity). The total number of national minority populations in Europe is estimated at 105 million people, or 14% of 770 million Europeans.[57]

A number of European countries, including France,[58] and Switzerland do not collect information on the ethnicity of their resident population.

Russia has numerous recognized ethnic groups besides the 80% ethnic Russian majority. The largest group are the Tatars (3.8%). Many of the smaller groups are found in the Asian part of Russia (see Indigenous peoples of Siberia).
[edit] India
Main article: South Asian ethnic groups

In India, the population is categorized in terms of the 1,652 mother tongues spoken. Indian society is traditionally divided into castes or clans, not ethnicities, and these categories have had no official status since Independence in 1947, except for the scheduled castes and tribes which remain registered for the purpose of positive discrimination.
[edit] China
Main articles: List of ethnic groups in China and Ethnic minorities in China

The People's Republic of China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Han Chinese. Many of the ethnic minorities maintain their own cultures, languages and identity although many are also becoming more westernised. Han predominate demographically and politically in most areas of China, although less so in Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Han are in the minority. The one-child policy only applies to the Han.
[edit] See also

* Ancestry
* Clan
* Diaspora
* Ethnic autonomous regions
* Ethnic cleansing
* Ethnic flag
* Ethnic minority
* Ethnic nationalism
* Ethnicity and health
* Ethnocentrism
* Ethnocultural empathy
* Ethnogenesis
* Genealogy
* Genetic genealogy
* Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP)
* Identity politics
* Intersectionality
* Kinship and Descent



* List of ethnic groups
* List of indigenous peoples
* List of stateless ethnic groups
* Meta-ethnicity
* Multiculturalism
* Nation
* National minority
* National symbol
* Passing (ethnic group)
* Polyethnicity
* Population genetics
* Race and ethnicity in the United States Census
* Race (classification of human beings)
* Stateless nation
* Tribe
* Y-DNA haplogroups by ethnic groups

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Sider 1993 Lumbee Indian Histories
2. ^ Seidner,(1982), Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective, pp. 2-3
3. ^ Smith 1987 pp.21-22
4. ^ Abel, Ernest L., Arab genetic disorders: a layman's guide, McFarland, 2003, p.4
5. ^ ἔθνος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
6. ^ ὅμαιμος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
7. ^ ὁμόγλωσσος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
8. ^ ὁμότροπος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus)
9. ^ Herodotus, 8.144.2: "The kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech, and the shrines of gods and the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life."
10. ^ Athena S. Leoussi, Steven Grosby, Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, p. 115
11. ^ ἐθνικός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
12. ^ ThiE. Tonkin, M. McDonald and M. Chapman, History and Ethnicity (London 1989), pp. 11–17 (quoted in J. Hutchinson & A.D. Smith (eds.), Oxford readers: Ethnicity (Oxford 1996), pp. 18–24)
13. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Cites Sir Daniel Wilson, The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland 1851' (1863)
14. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Citing Huxley & Hadden (1935), We Europeans, pp. 136,181
15. ^ Cohen, Ronald. (1978) "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology", Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1978. 7:379-403
16. ^ Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan (1975) Ethnicity - Theory and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press
17. ^ The modern usage definition of the Oxford English Dictionary is:

a[djective]

...
2.a. Pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological. Also, pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system; hence (U.S. colloq.), foreign, exotic.
b ethnic minority (group), a group of people differentiated from the rest of the community by racial origins or cultural background, and usu. claiming or enjoying official recognition of their group identity. Also attrib.

n[oun]

...
3 A member of an ethnic group or minority. Equatorians

(Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, s.v. "ethnic, a. and n.")
18. ^ Wallman, S. "Ethnicity research in Britain", Current Anthropology, v. 18, n. 3, 1977, pp. 531–532.
19. ^ Eriksen 1993 p. 2
20. ^ Max Weber [1922]1978 Economy and Society eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischof, vol. 2 Berkeley: University of California Press, 389
21. ^[who?] in Challenges of Measuring an Ethnic World: Science, Politics and Reality : Proceedings of the Joint Canada-United States Conference on the Measurement of Ethnicity, April 1–3, 1992, Joint Canada-United States Conference on the Measurement of Ethnicity, Department of Commerce, Statistics Canada, 1993
22. ^ ", a conference organised by Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau (April 1–3, 1992) Statistics Canada
23. ^ Fredrik Barth ed. 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference; Eric Wolf 1982 Europe and the People Without History p. 381
24. ^ Geertz, Clifford, ed. (1967) Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Africa and Asia. New York: The Free Press.
25. ^ Cohen, Abner (1969) Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants in a Yoruba Town. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
26. ^ Abner Cohen (1974) Two-Dimensional Man: An essay on power and symbolism in complex society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
27. ^ J. Hutchinson & A.D. Smith (eds.), Oxford readers: Ethnicity (Oxford 1996), "Introduction", 8-9
28. ^ Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
29. ^ Ernest Gellner (1997) Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
30. ^ Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell.
31. ^ Anthony Smith (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
32. ^ T.H. Eriksen "Ethnic identity, national identity and intergroup conflict: The significance of personal experiences" in Ashmore, Jussim, Wilder (eds.): Social identity, intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction, pp. 42–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press'. 2001
33. ^ Banton, Michael. (2007) "Weber on Ethnic Communities: A critique", Nations and Nationalism 13 (1), 2007, 19–35.
34. ^ a b c d e Ronald Cohen 1978 "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 383 Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
35. ^ Joan Vincent 1974, "The Structure of Ethnicity" in Human Organization 33(4): 375-379
36. ^ In an influential 1977 paper by Don Handleman "The organization of ethnicity." Ethnic Groups 1: 187-200.
37. ^ (Smith 1999, p. 12)
38. ^ a b Delanty, Gerard & Krishan Kumar (2006) The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. SAGE. ISBN 1-41290101-4 p. 171
39. ^ a b c d (Smith 1999, p. 13)
40. ^ Introduction to Sociology, 7th edition. Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard Appelbaum, Deborah Carr
41. ^ a b Noel, Donald L. (1968). "A Theory of the Origin of Ethnic Stratification". Social Problems 16 (2): 157–172. doi:10.1525/sp.1968.16.2.03a00030.
42. ^ a b c Bobo, Lawrence; Hutchings, Vincent L. (1996). "Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer's Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context". American Sociological Review (American Sociological Association) 61 (6): 951–972. doi:10.2307/2096302. JSTOR 2096302.
43. ^ (Smith 1999, pp. 4–7)
44. ^ Banton, Michael. (2007) "Weber on Ethnic Communities: A critique", Nations and Nationalism 13 (1), 2007, 19–35.
45. ^ A. Metraux (1950) "United nations Economic and Security Council Statement by Experts on Problems of Race", American Anthropologist 53(1): 142-145)
46. ^ Griffith, David Craig, Jones's minimal: low-wage labor in the United States, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, p.222
47. ^

In this regard, distinctions of race have implications rather different from ethnic variations. Racial distinctions, such as "Indian" or "African American", are the outcome of the subjugation of populations in the course of European mercantile expansion. The term "Indian", and later "Native American", stand for the conquered populations of the New World, in disregard of any cultural or physical differences among them. "Negro", and later "African American", similarly serve as a cover term for the culturally and physically variable African, populations that furnished slaves, as well as for the slaves themselves. Indians are conquered people who could be forced to labor or pay tribute; Negroes are "hewers of wood and drawers of water", obtained in violence and put to work under coercion. These two terms thus singled out for primary attention, the historic fact that these populations were made to labor in servitude to support a new class of overlords. Simultaneously, the terms, like "white people", disregard cultural and physical differences within each large category, denying any constituent group political, economic, or ideological identity of its own.

Racial terms mirror the political process by which populations of whole continents were turned into providers of coerced surplus labor. Under capitalism, these terms did not lose their association with civil disability. They continue to invoke supposed descent from such subjugated populations so as to deny their putative descendants access to upper segments of the labor market. "Indians" and "Negroes" are thus confined to the lower ranks of the industrial army or depressed into the industrial reserve. The function of racial categories within capitalism is exclusionary. They stigmatize groups in order to exclude them from more highly paid jobs and from access to the information needed for their execution. They insulate the more advantaged workers against competition from below, making it difficult for employers to use stigmatized populations as cheaper substitutes or as strikebreakers. Finally, they weaken the ability of such groups to mobilize politically on their own behalf by forcing them back into casual employment and thereby intensifying competition among them for scarce and shifting resources.

While the categories of race serve primarily to exclude people from all but the lower echelons of the industrial army, ethnic categories express the ways that particular populations came to relate themselves to given segments of the labor market. Such categories emerge from two sources, one external to the group in question, the other internal. As each cohort entered the industrial process, outsiders were able to categorize it in terms of putative provenance and supposed affinity to particular segments of the labor market. At the same time, members of the cohort itself came to value membership in the group thus defined, as a qualification for establishing economic and political claims. Such ethnicities rarely coincided with the initial self-identification of the industrial recruits, who thought of themselves as Hanoverians or Bavarians rather than as Germans, as members of their village or their parish (okiloca) rather than as Poles, as Tonga or Yao rather than "Nyasalanders." The more comprehensive categories emerged only as particular cohorts of workers gained access to different segments of the labor market and began to treat their access as a resource to be defended both socially and politically. Such ethnicities are therefore not "primordial" social relationships. They are historical products of labor market segmentation under the capitalist mode. Eric Wolf, 1982, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. 380-381

48. ^ Maria Rostworowski, "The Incas", Peru Culture
49. ^ James Lockhart, Microethnicity in Philological ethnohistory
50. ^ Christopher Larkosh, "Je me souviens…aussi: Microethnicity and the Fragility of Memory in French-Canadian New England", TOPIA: Journal for Canadian Cultural Studies, Issue 16 (Toronto, 2006), pp. 91-108
51. ^ Gellner 2006 Nations and Nationalism Blackwell Publishing
52. ^ Anderson 2006 Imagined Communities Version
53. ^ Walter Pohl, "Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies", Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein, (Blackwell), 1998, pp 13-24, notes that historians have projected the nineteenth-century conceptions of the nation-state backwards in time, employing biological metaphors of birth and growth: "that the peoples in the Migration Period had little to do with those heroic (or sometimes brutish) clichés is now generally accepted among historians," he remarked. Early medieval peoples were far less homogeneous than often thought, and Pohl follows Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung. (Cologne and Graz) 1961, whose researches into the "ethnogenesis" of the German peoples convinced him that the idea of common origin, as expressed by Isidore of Seville Gens est multitudo ab uno principio orta ("a people is a multitude stemming from one origin") which continues in the original Etymologiae IX.2.i) "sive ab alia natione secundum propriam collectionem distincta ("or distinguished from another people by its proper ties") was a myth.
54. ^ Aihway Ong 1996 "Cultural Citizenship in the Making" in Current Anthropology 37(5)
55. ^ [http://www.answers.com/african-american Encyclopedia of Public Health, by The Gale Group, Inc]
56. ^ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, New York: Crown Publishers, 2009, pp. 20-21
57. ^ Christoph Pan, Beate Sibylle Pfeil,Minderheitenrechte in Europa. Handbuch der europäischen Volksgruppen (2002). Living-diversity.eu, English translation 2004.
58. ^ (French) article 8 de la loi Informatique et libertés, 1978: "Il est interdit de collecter ou de traiter des données à caractère personnel qui font apparaître, directement ou indirectement, les origines raciales ou ethniques, les opinions politiques, philosophiques ou religieuses ou l'appartenance syndicale des personnes, ou qui sont relatives à la santé ou à la vie sexuelle de celles-ci."

[edit] References

* Abizadeh, Arash, "Ethnicity, Race, and a Possible Humanity" World Order, 33.1 (2001): 23-34. (Article that explores the social construction of ethnicity and race.)
* Barth, Fredrik (ed). Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969
* Billinger, Michael S. (2007), "Another Look at Ethnicity as a Biological Concept: Moving Anthropology Beyond the Race Concept", Critique of Anthropology 27,1:5–35.
* Cole, C.L. "Nike’s America/ America’s Michael Jordan", Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. (New York: Suny Press, 2001).
* Dünnhaupt, Gerhard, "The Bewildering German Boundaries", in: Festschrift for P. M. Mitchell (Heidelberg: Winter 1989).
* Eysenck, H.J., Race, Education and Intelligence (London: Temple Smith, 1971) (ISBN 0-8511-7009-9)
* Hartmann, Douglas. "Notes on Midnight Basketball and the Cultural Politics of Recreation, Race and At-Risk Urban Youth", Journal of Sport and Social Issues. 25 (2001): 339-366.
* Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors, The Invention of Tradition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
* Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1993) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Pluto Press
* Levinson, David, Ethnic Groups Worldwide: A Ready Reference Handbook, Greenwood Publishing Group (1998), ISBN 9781573560191.
* Morales-Díaz, Enrique; Gabriel Aquino; & Michael Sletcher, "Ethnicity", in Michael Sletcher, ed., New England, (Westport, CT, 2004).
* Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Inc., 1986).
* Seidner, Stanley S. Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective. (Bruxelles: Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguisme1982).
* Sider, Gerald, Lumbee Indian Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
* Smith, Anthony D. (1987). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell
* Smith, Anthony D. (1999). Myths and memories of the Nation. Oxford University Press
* ^ U.S. Census Bureau State & County QuickFacts: Race.

[edit] External links
Look up nationality in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Look up nation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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* Ethnicity at the Open Directory Project
* Downloadable article: "Evidence that a West-East admixed population lived in the Tarim Basin as early as the early Bronze Age" Li et al. BMC Biology 2010, 8:15. Biomedcentral.com
* Rian.ru
* American Psychological Association's Office of Ethnic Minority Affairs
* For a listing of People Groups around the World: www.peoplegroups.org
* For a listing of People Groups in the United States and Canada: www.peoplegroups.info

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Humanities
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
The philosopher Plato by Silanion

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.

The humanities include ancient and modern languages, literature, law, history, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts such as music and theatre. The humanities that are also regarded as social sciences include technology, anthropology, area studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and linguistics. Scholars working in the humanities are sometimes described as "humanists".[1] However, that term also describes the philosophical position of humanism, which some "antihumanist" scholars in the humanities reject.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Humanities fields
o 1.1 Classics
o 1.2 History
o 1.3 Languages
o 1.4 Law
o 1.5 Literature
o 1.6 Performing arts
+ 1.6.1 Music
+ 1.6.2 Theatre
+ 1.6.3 Dance
o 1.7 Philosophy
o 1.8 Religion
o 1.9 Visual arts
+ 1.9.1 History of visual arts
+ 1.9.2 Media types
# 1.9.2.1 Drawing
# 1.9.2.2 Painting
* 2 History of the humanities
* 3 Humanities today
o 3.1 In the United States
o 3.2 In the digital age
o 3.3 Legitimation of intimacy
+ 3.3.1 Citizenship, self-reflection, and the humanities
+ 3.3.2 Truth, meaning, and the humanities
+ 3.3.3 Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge, and humanities scholarship
+ 3.3.4 Romanticization and rejection of the humanities
* 4 See also
* 5 References
* 6 External links

[edit] Humanities fields
[edit] Classics
Bust of Homer, a Greek poet

The classics, in the Western academic tradition, refer to cultures of classical antiquity, namely the Ancient Greek and Roman cultures. The study of the classics is considered one of the cornerstones of the humanities; however, its popularity declined during the 20th century. Nevertheless, the influence of classical ideas in many humanities disciplines, such as philosophy and literature, remains strong.

Outside of its traditional and academic meaning, the classics can be understood as including foundational writings from other major cultures. In other traditions, classics would refer to the Hammurabi Code and the Gilgamesh Epic from Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Vedas and Upanishads in India and various writings attributed to Confucius, Lao-tse and Chuang-tzu in China.
[edit] History

History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, societies, institutions, and any topic that has changed over time. Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. In modern academia, history is occasionally classified as a social science.
[edit] Languages

The study of individual modern and classical languages forms the backbone of modern study of the humanities.

While the scientific study of language is known as linguistics and is a social science, the study of languages is still central to the humanities. A good deal of twentieth-century and twenty-first-century philosophy has been devoted to the analysis of language and to the question of whether, as Wittgenstein claimed, many of our philosophical confusions derive from the vocabulary we use; literary theory has explored the rhetorical, associative, and ordering features of language; and historians have studied the development of languages across time. Literature, covering a variety of uses of language including prose forms (such as the novel), poetry and drama, also lies at the heart of the modern humanities curriculum. College-level programs in a foreign language usually include study of important works of the literature in that language, as well as the language itself.
[edit] Law
A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London
Main article: Law

In common parlance, law means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[2] The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules",[3] as an "interpretive concept"[4] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[5] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[6] However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social science and discipline of the humanities. Laws are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long lasting effects on the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid down or fixed[7] and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[8]
[edit] Literature
Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest acclaimed works in English literature.

"Literature" is a highly ambiguous term: at its broadest, it can mean any sequence of words that has been preserved for transmission in some form or other (including oral transmission); more narrowly, it is often used to designate imaginative works such as stories, poems, and plays; more narrowly still, it is used as an honorific and applied only to those works which are considered to have particular merit.
[edit] Performing arts

The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal, or paint, which can be molded or transformed to create some art object. Performing arts include acrobatics, busking, comedy, dance, magic, music, opera, film, juggling, marching arts, such as brass bands, and theatre.

Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft. Performers often adapt their appearance, such as with costumes and stage makeup, etc. There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists perform their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.
[edit] Music
Concert in the Mozarteum, Salzburg

Music as an academic discipline can take a number of different paths, including music performance, music education (training music teachers), musicology, music theory and composition. Undergraduate music majors generally take courses in all of these areas, while graduate students focus on a particular path. In the liberal arts tradition, music is also used to broaden skills of non-musicians by teaching skills such as concentration and listening.
[edit] Theatre

Theatre (or theater) (Greek "theatron", θέατρον) is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and pantomime.
[edit] Dance

Dance (from Old French dancier, perhaps from Frankish) generally refers to human movement either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting. Dance is also used to describe methods of non-verbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, mating dance), and motion in inanimate objects (the leaves danced in the wind). Choreography is the art of making dances, and the person who does this is called a choreographer.

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic, and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as Folk dance) to codified, virtuoso techniques such as ballet. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while Martial arts 'kata' are often compared to dances.
[edit] Philosophy
The works of Søren Kierkegaard overlap into many fields of the humanities, such as philosophy, literature, theology, psychology, music, and classical studies.

Philosophy — etymologically, the "love of wisdom" — is generally the study of problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, justification, truth, justice, right and wrong, beauty, validity, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these issues by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument, rather than experiments (Experimental philosophy being an exception).[9]

Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive term, including what have subsequently become separate disciplines, such as physics. (As Immanuel Kant noted, "Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic.")[10] Today, the main fields of philosophy are logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Still, there continues to be plenty of overlap with other disciplines; the field of semantics, for example, brings philosophy into contact with linguistics.

Since the early twentieth century, the philosophy done in universities (especially in the English-speaking parts of the world) has become much more analytic. Analytic philosophy is marked by a clear, rigorous method of inquiry that emphasizes the use of logic and more formal methods of reasoning.[11] This method of inquiry is largely indebted to the work of philosophers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
[edit] Religion
The compass in this 13th century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of creation.

New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west, particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the world, with Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being some of the earliest major faiths. In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.

Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, where he is described as a prophet (Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where he also appears as a prophet. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and comprises over half of the world's religious adherents.
[edit] Visual arts
[edit] History of visual arts
Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain by Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of Song Dynasty; fan mounted as album leaf on silk, four columns in cursive script.

The great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the ancient civilizations, such as Ancient Japan, Greece and Rome, China, India, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica.

Ancient Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (e.g., Zeus' thunderbolt).

In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths. The Renaissance saw the return to valuation of the material world, and this shift is reflected in art forms, which show the corporeality of the human body, and the three-dimensional reality of landscape.

Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
An artist's palette

Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein[12] and of unseen psychology by Freud,[13] but also by unprecedented technological development. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art.
[edit] Media types
[edit] Drawing

Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.
[edit] Painting
The Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the Western world.

Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.

Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Isaac Newton, have written their own colour theories. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalized register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C# in music, although the Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.

Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet or Anselm Kiefer. Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept; this has led some[who?] to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.
[edit] History of the humanities

In the West, the study of the humanities can be traced to ancient Greece, as the basis of a broad education for citizens. During Roman times, the concept of the seven liberal arts evolved, involving grammar, rhetoric and logic (the trivium), along with arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium).[14] These subjects formed the bulk of medieval education, with the emphasis being on the humanities as skills or "ways of doing."

A major shift occurred with the Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth century, when the humanities began to be regarded as subjects to be studied rather than practiced, with a corresponding shift away from the traditional fields into areas such as literature and history. In the 20th century, this view was in turn challenged by the postmodernist movement, which sought to redefine the humanities in more egalitarian terms suitable for a democratic society.[15]
[edit] Humanities today
[edit] In the United States
Main article: Humanities in the United States

The Humanities Indicators, unveiled in 2009 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are the first comprehensive compilation of data about the humanities in the United States, providing scholars, policymakers and the public with detailed information on humanities education from primary to higher education, the humanities workforce, humanities funding and research, and public humanities activities.[16][17] Modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities Indicators are a source of reliable benchmarks to guide analysis of the state of the humanities in the United States.

Many[weasel words] American colleges and universities believe in the notion of a broad "liberal arts education",[original research?] which requires all college students to study the humanities in addition to their specific area of study.[citation needed] The University of Chicago and Columbia University were among the first[weasel words] schools to require an extensive core curriculum in philosophy, literature, and the arts for all students.[citation needed] Other colleges with nationally recognized, required two year programs in the liberal arts are St. John's College, Saint Anselm College and Providence College. Prominent proponents of liberal arts in the United States have included Mortimer J. Adler[18] and E. D. Hirsch, Jr..

The 1980 United States Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities described the humanities in its report, The Humanities in American Life:

Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

"Increasing numbers of critics view education in the liberal arts as irrelevant" [19] or as "learning more and more about less and less" [20] which no longer prepares the students for the American job market in the face of increased competition due to more graduates .[21] After World War II, many millions of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill. Further expansion of federal education grants and loans have expanded the number of adults in the United States that have attended a college.[21] In 2003, roughly 53% of the population had some college education with 27.2% having graduated with a Bachelor's degree or higher, including 8% who graduated with a graduate degree.[22] The counter view is that "A familiarity with the body of knowledge and methods of inquiry and discovery of the arts and sciences and a capacity to integrate knowledge across experience and discipline may have far more lasting value in such a changing world than specialized techniques and training, which can quickly become outmoded." [21]
[edit] In the digital age

Researchers in the humanities have developed numerous large- and small-scale digital corpora, such as digitized collections of historical texts, along with the digital tools and methods to analyze them. Their aim is both to uncover new knowledge about corpora and to visualize research data in new and revealing ways. The field in which much of this activity occurs is called the Digital Humanities.
[edit] Legitimation of intimacy

Compared to the growing numbers of undergraduates enrolled in private and public post-secondary institutions, the percentage of enrollments and majors in the humanities is shrinking, although in absolute terms, overall enrollment in the humanities has not significantly changed (and by some measurements has actually increased slightly).[23]

The modern "crisis" facing humanities scholars in the university is multifaceted: universities in the United States in particular have adopted corporate guidelines requiring profit both from undergraduate education and from academic scholarship and research, resulting in an increased demand for academic disciplines to justify their existence based on the applicability of their disciplines to the world outside of the university. Increasing corporate emphasis on "life-long learning" has also affected the university’s role as educator and researcher.[24] Responses to those changing institutional norms, and to changing emphasis on what constitutes "useful skills" in an increasingly technological world, have varied greatly both inside and outside of the university system.
[edit] Citizenship, self-reflection, and the humanities

Since the late 19th century, a central justification for the humanities has been that it aids and encourages self-reflection, a self-reflection which in turn helps develop personal consciousness and/or an active sense of civic duty.

Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer centered the humanities’ attempt to distinguish itself from the natural sciences in humankind’s urge to understand its own experiences. This understanding, they claimed, ties like-minded people from similar cultural backgrounds together and provides a sense of cultural continuity with the philosophical past.[25]

Scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries extended that “narrative imagination”[26] to the ability to understand the records of lived experiences outside of one’s own individual social and cultural context. Through that narrative imagination, it is claimed, humanities scholars and students develop a conscience more suited to the multicultural world in which we live.[27] That conscience might take the form of a passive one that allows more effective self-reflection[28] or extend into active empathy which facilitates the dispensation of civic duties in which a responsible world citizen must engage.[27] There is disagreement, however, on the level of influence humanities study can have on an individual and whether or not the understanding produced in humanistic enterprise can guarantee an “identifiable positive effect on people.”[29]
[edit] Truth, meaning, and the humanities

The divide between humanistic study and natural sciences informs arguments of meaning in humanities as well. What distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences is not a certain subject matter, but rather the mode of approach to any question. Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena—an interpretive method of finding “truth”—rather than explaining the causality of events or uncovering the truth of the natural world.[30] Apart from its societal application, narrative imagination is an important tool in the (re)production of understood meaning in history, culture and literature.

Imagination, as part of the tool kit of artists or scholars, serves as vehicle to create meaning which invokes a response from an audience. Since a humanities scholar is always within the nexus of lived experiences, no "absolute" knowledge is theoretically possible; knowledge is instead a ceaseless procedure of inventing and reinventing the context in which a text is read. Poststructuralism has problematized an approach to the humanistic study based on questions of meaning, intentionality, and authorship.[dubious – discuss] In the wake of the death of the author proclaimed by Roland Barthes, various theoretical currents such as deconstruction and discourse analysis seek to expose the ideologies and rhetoric operative in producing both the purportedly meaningful objects and the hermeneutic subjects of humanistic study. This exposure has opened up the interpretive structures of the humanities to criticism humanities scholarship is “unscientific” and therefore unfit for inclusion in modern university curricula because of the very nature of its changing contextual meaning.[dubious – discuss]
[edit] Pleasure, the pursuit of knowledge, and humanities scholarship

Some, like Stanley Fish, have claimed that the humanities can defend themselves best by refusing to make any claims of utility.[31] (Fish may well be thinking primarily of literary study, rather than history and philosophy.) Any attempt to justify the humanities in terms of outside benefits such as social usefulness (say increased productivity) or in terms of ennobling effects on the individual (such as greater wisdom or diminished prejudice) is ungrounded, according to Fish, and simply places impossible demands on the relevant academic departments. Furthermore, critical thinking, while arguably a result of humanistic training, can be acquired in other contexts.[24] And the humanities do not even provide any more the kind of social cachet (what sociologists sometimes call "cultural capital") that was helpful to succeed in Western society before the age of mass education following World War II.

Instead, scholars like Fish suggest that the humanities offer a unique kind of pleasure, a pleasure based on the common pursuit of knowledge (even if it is only disciplinary knowledge). Such pleasure contrasts with the increasing privatization of leisure and instant gratification characteristic of Western culture; it thus meets Jürgen Habermas’ requirements for the disregard of social status and rational problematization of previously unquestioned areas necessary for an endeavor which takes place in the bourgeois public sphere. In this argument, then, only the academic pursuit of pleasure can provide a link between the private and the public realm in modern Western consumer society and strengthen that public sphere which, according to many theorists, is the foundation for modern democracy.
[edit] Romanticization and rejection of the humanities

Implicit in many of these arguments supporting the humanities are the makings of arguments against public support of the humanities. Joseph Carroll asserts that we live in a changing world, a world in which "cultural capital" is being replaced with "scientific literacy" and in which the romantic notion of a Renaissance humanities scholar is obsolete. Such arguments appeal to judgments and anxieties about the essential uselessness of the humanities, especially in an age when it is seemingly vitally important for scholars of literature, history and the arts to engage in "collaborative work with experimental scientists" or even simply to make "intelligent use of the findings from empirical science."[32] The notion that 'in today's day and age,' with its focus on the ideals of efficiency and practical utility, scholars of the humanities are becoming obsolete was perhaps summed up most powerfully in a remark that has been attributed to the artificial intelligence specialist Marvin Minsky: “With all the money that we are throwing away on humanities and art - give me that money and I will build you a better student."[33]

Minsky's faith in the superiority of technical knowledge and his reduction of the humanities scholar of today to an obsolete relic of the past supported by the tax dollars of romantics fondly recalling the days of the G.I. Bill echoes arguments put forth by scholars and cultural commentators that call themselves "post-humanists" or "transhumanists." The idea is that current trends in the scientific understanding of human beings are calling the basic category of "the human" into question. Examples of these trends are assertions by cognitive scientists that the mind is simply a computing device, by geneticists that human beings are no more than ephemeral husks used by self-propagating genes (or even memes, according to some postmodern linguists), or by bioengineers who claim that one day it may be both possible and desirable to create human-animal hybrids[citation needed]. Rather than engage with old-style humanist scholarship, transhumanists in particular tend to be more concerned with testing and altering the limits of our mental and physical capacities in fields such as cognitive science and bioengineering in order to transcend the essentially bodily limitations that have bounded humanity. Despite the criticism of humanities scholarship as obsolete, however, many of the most influential post-humanist works are profoundly engaged with film and literary criticism, history, and cultural studies as can be seen in the writings of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. And in recent years there has been a spate of books and articles re-articulating the importance of humanistic study. Examples include: Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (2001), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence (2004), Frank B. Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (2004), John Carey, What Good Are the Arts? (2006), Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (2006), Alexander Nehamas, Only A Promise Of Happiness (2007), Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (2008).
[edit] See also

* Great Books
* Great Books Programs in Canada
* Liberal Arts
* Social sciences
* Phronetic social science
* Human science
* Digital humanities
* The Two Cultures
* List of academic disciplines
* Public humanities
* "Periodic Table of Human Sciences" in Tinbergen's four questions

[edit] References

1. ^ "Humanist" Oxford English Dictionary. http://oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/89273
2. ^ Robertson, Geoffrey (2006). Crimes Against Humanity. Penguin. pp. 90. ISBN 9780141024639.
3. ^ Hart, H.L.A. (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-876122-8.
4. ^ Dworkin, Ronald (1986). Law's Empire. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-51836-5.
5. ^ Raz, Joseph (1979). The Authority of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199562687.
6. ^ Austin, John (1831). The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined.
7. ^ see Etymonline Dictionary
8. ^ see Mirriam-Webster's Dictionary
9. ^ Thomas Nagel (1987). What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, pp. 4-5.
10. ^ Kant, Immanuel (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, the first line.
11. ^ See, e.g., Brian Leiter [1] "'Analytic' philosophy today names a style of doing philosophy, not a philosophical program or a set of substantive views. Analytic philosophers, crudely speaking, aim for argumentative clarity and precision; draw freely on the tools of logic; and often identify, professionally and intellectually, more closely with the sciences and mathematics than with the humanities."
12. ^ Turney, Jon (2003-09-06). "Does time fly?". The Guardian (London). http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1035752,00.html. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
13. ^ "Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Dada". www.fordham.edu. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook36.html. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
14. ^ Levi, Albert W.; The Humanities Today, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1970.
15. ^ Walling, Donovan R.; Under Construction: The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Postmodern Schooling Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, Bloomington, Indiana, 1997.
16. ^ http://www.amacad.org/
17. ^ http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/default.aspx
18. ^ Adler, Mortimer J.; "A Guidebook to Learning: For the Lifelong Pursuit of Wisdom"
19. ^ Learning to learn from experience By Edward Cell 1984 page XI
20. ^ XI [2] Liz Coleman talk at Ted discusses what is wrong with the "integrity of liberal education" http://www.ted.com/talks/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html
21. ^ a b c Liberal Arts Education for a Global Society by Carol M. Barker Carnegie Corporation http://www.carnegie.org/sub/pubs/libarts.pdf
22. ^ "US Census Bureau, educational attainment in 2003" (PDF). http://www.census.gov/prod/2oib;jobbjjbjb004pubs/p20-550.pdf. Retrieved 2007-01-03. [dead link]
23. ^ According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total enrollment at accredited colleges and universities rose from 7.3 million to 14.7 mill undergraduates from 1970 to 2004 (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98). In that time, business graduates have risen from 115K to 311K. History and the social sciences together (grouped by the NCES) have barely increased from 155K to 156K. English has fallen from 67K to 54K, foreign languages have declined from 21K to 18K, and philosophy has increased from 8K to 11K, although the remaining liberal arts (which are unclassified) have risen from 7K to 43K.
24. ^ a b Liu, Alan. Laws of Cool, 2004.
25. ^ Dilthey, Wilhelm. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 103.
26. ^ von Wright, Moira. "Narrative imagination and taking the perspective of others," Studies in Philosophy and Education 21, 4-5 (July, 2002), 407-416.
27. ^ a b Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity.
28. ^ Harpham, Geoffrey. “Beneath and Beyond the Crisis of the Humanities,” New Literary History 36 (2005), 21-36.
29. ^ Harpham, 31.
30. ^ Dilthey, Wilhelm. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, 103.
31. ^ Fish, Stanley, http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/#more-81
32. ^ ""Theory," Anti-Theory, and Empirical Criticism," Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, eds., Lexington, Kentucky: ICUS Books, 1999, pp. 144-145. 152.
33. ^ Alan Liu, “The Future of Humanities in the Digital Age” with Roundtable Discussion « History in the Digital Age

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Literature
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Literature
Major forms

Novel · Poem · Drama
Short story · Novella
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Epic · Lyric · Drama
Romance · Satire
Tragedy · Comedy
Tragicomedy
Media

Performance (play) · Book
Techniques

Prose · Verse
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Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources (although, under circumstances unpublished sources can be exempt). Literally translated, the word literature means "acquaintance with letters" (as in the "arts and letters"). The two most basic written literary categories include fiction and non fiction.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Definitions
o 1.1 History
o 1.2 Poetry
o 1.3 Essays
o 1.4 Other prose literature
+ 1.4.1 Natural science
+ 1.4.2 Philosophy
+ 1.4.3 History
+ 1.4.4 Law
* 2 Drama
* 3 Oral literature
* 4 Other narrative forms
* 5 Genres of literature
* 6 Literary techniques
* 7 Legal status
o 7.1 UK
* 8 See also
* 9 Notes
* 10 External links

[edit] Definitions

People sometimes differentiate between "literature" and some popular forms of written work. The terms "literary fiction" and "literary merit" serve to distinguish between individual works. Critics may exclude works from the classification "literature," for example, on the grounds of bad grammar or syntax, unbelievable or disjointed story, or inconsistent characterization. Sometimes, a work may be excluded based on its prevailing subject or theme: genre fiction such as romances, crime fiction, (mystery), science fiction, horror or fantasy have all been excluded at one time or another from the literary pantheon, and depending on the dominant mode, may or may not come back into vogue.
[edit] History
Main article: History of literature
Old book bindings at the Merton College, Oxford library.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest known literary works. This Babylonian epic poem arises from stories in Sumerian. Although the Sumerian stories are older (probably dating to at least 2100 B.C.), it was probably composed around 1900 BC. The epic deals with themes of heroism, friendship, loss, and the quest for eternal life.

Different historical periods have emphasized various characteristics of literature. Early works often had an overt or covert religious or didactic purpose. Moralizing or prescriptive literature stems from such sources. The exotic nature of romance flourished from the Middle Ages onwards, whereas the Age of Reason manufactured nationalistic epics and philosophical tracts. Romanticism emphasized the popular folk literature and emotive involvement, but gave way in the 19th-century West to a phase of realism and naturalism, investigations into what is real. The 20th century brought demands for symbolism or psychological insight in the delineation and development of character.
[edit] Poetry

A poem is a composition written in verse (although verse has been equally used for epic and dramatic fiction). Poems rely heavily on imagery, precise word choice, and metaphor; they may take the form of measures consisting of patterns of stresses (metric feet) or of patterns of different-length syllables (as in classical prosody); and they may or may not utilize rhyme. One cannot readily characterize poetry precisely. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes some significant use of the formal properties of the words it uses – the properties of the written or spoken form of the words, independent of their meaning. Meter depends on syllables and on rhythms of speech; rhyme and alliteration depend on the sounds of words.

Arguably, poetry pre-dates other forms of literature. Early examples include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (dated from around 2700 B.C.), parts of the Bible, the surviving works of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In cultures based primarily on oral traditions the formal characteristics of poetry often have a mnemonic function, and important texts: legal, genealogical or moral, for example, may appear first in verse form.

Some poetry uses specific forms. Examples include the haiku, the limerick, and the sonnet. A traditional haiku written in Japanese relate to nature, contain seventeen onji (syllables), distributed over three lines in groups of five, seven, and five, and should also have a kigo, a specific word indicating a season. A limerick has five lines, with a rhyme scheme of AABBA, and line lengths of 3,3,2,2,3 stressed syllables. It traditionally has a less reverent attitude towards nature. Poetry not adhering to a formal poetic structure is called "free verse"

Language and tradition dictate some poetic norms: Persian poetry always rhymes, Greek poetry rarely rhymes, Italian or French poetry often does, English and German poetry can go either way. Perhaps the most paradigmatic style of English poetry, blank verse, as exemplified in works by Shakespeare and Milton, consists of unrhymed iambic pentameters. Some languages prefer longer lines; some shorter ones. Some of these conventions result from the ease of fitting a specific language's vocabulary and grammar into certain structures, rather than into others; for example, some languages contain more rhyming words than others, or typically have longer words. Other structural conventions come about as the result of historical accidents, where many speakers of a language associate good poetry with a verse form preferred by a particular skilled or popular poet.

Works for theatre (see below) traditionally took verse form. This has now become rare outside opera and musicals, although many would argue that the language of drama remains intrinsically poetic.

In recent years, digital poetry has arisen that takes advantage of the artistic, publishing, and synthetic qualities of digital media.
[edit] Essays

An essay consists of a discussion of a topic from an author's personal point of view, exemplified by works by Michel de Montaigne or by Charles Lamb.

'Essay' in English derives from 'attempt.' Thus, one can find open-ended, provocative and/or inconclusive essays. The term "essays" first applied to the self-reflective musings of Michel de Montaigne--even today he has a reputation as the father of this literary form.

Genres related to the essay may include:

* the memoir, telling the story of an author's life from the author's personal point of view
* the epistle: usually a formal, didactic, or elegant letter.
* works by Lady Murasaki[citation needed], the Arabic Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail, the Arabic Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, and the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong[citation needed].

Early novels in Europe did not count as significant litera perhaps because "mere" prose writing seemed easy and unimportant. It has become clear, however, that prose writing can provide aesthetic pleasure without adhering to poetic forms. Additionally, the freedom authors gain in not having to concern themselves with verse structure translates often into a more complex plot or into one richer in precise detail than one typically finds even in narrative poetry. This freedom also allows an author to experiment with many different literary and presentation styles—including poetry—in the scope of a single novel.
[edit] Other prose literature

Philosophical, historical, journalistic, legal and scientific writings are traditionally ranked as literature. They offer some of the oldest prose writings in existence; novels and prose stories earned the names "fiction" to distinguish them from factual writing or nonfiction, which writers historically have crafted in prose.
[edit] Natural science

As advances and specialization have made new scientific research inaccessible to most audiences, the "literary" nature of science writing has become less pronounced over the last two centuries. Now, science appears mostly in journals. Scientific works of Aristotle, Copernicus, and Newton still possess great value, but since the science in them has largely become outdated, they no longer serve for scientific instruction. Yet, they remain too technical to sit well in most programmes of literary study. Outside of "history of science" programmes, students rarely read such works.
[edit] Philosophy

Philosophy, too, has become an increasingly academic discipline. More of its practitioners lament this situation than occurs with the sciences; nonetheless most new philosophical work appears in academic journals. Major philosophers through history—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche—have become as canonical as any writers. Some recent philosophy works are argued to merit the title "literature", such as some of the works by Simon Blackburn; but much of it does not, and some areas, such as logic, have become extremely technical to a degree similar to that of mathematics.
[edit] History

A great deal of historical writing ranks as literature, particularly the genre known as creative nonfiction. So can a great deal of journalism, such as literary journalism. However these areas have become extremely large, and often have a primarily utilitarian purpose: to record data or convey immediate information. As a result the writing in these fields often lacks a literary quality, although it often and in its better moments has that quality. Major "literary" historians include Herodotus, Thucydides and Procopius, all of whom count as canonical literary figures.
[edit] Law

Law offers a less clear case. Some writings of Plato and Aristotle, or even the early parts of the Bible, might count as legal literature. The law tables of Hammurabi of Babylon might count. Roman civil law as codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis during the reign of Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire has a reputation as significant literature. The founding documents of many countries, including Constitutions and Law Codes, can count as literature; however, most legal writings rarely exhibit much literary merit, as they tend to be rather garrulous.
[edit] Drama

A play or drama offers another classical literary form that has continued to evolve over the years. It generally comprises chiefly dialogue between characters, and usually aims at dramatic / theatrical performance (see theatre) rather than at reading. During the 18th and 19th centuries, opera developed as a combination of poetry, drama, and music. Nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently. Shakespeare could be considered drama. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a classic romantic drama generally accepted as literature.

Greek drama exemplifies the earliest form of drama of which we have substantial knowledge. Tragedy, as a dramatic genre, developed as a performance associated with religious and civic festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known historical or mythological themes. Tragedies generally presented very serious themes. With the advent of newer technologies, scripts written for non-stage media have been added to this form. War of the Worlds (radio) in 1938 saw the advent of literature written for radio broadcast, and many works of Drama have been adapted for film or television. Conversely, television, film, and radio literature have been adapted to printed or electronic media.
[edit] Oral literature

The term oral literature refers not to written, but to oral traditions, which includes different types of epic, poetry and drama, folktales, ballads.
[edit] Other narrative forms

* Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works which originate in digital environments.
* Films, videos and broadcast soap operas have carved out a niche which often parallels the functionality of prose fiction.
* Graphic novels and comic books present stories told in a combination of sequential artwork, dialogue and text.

[edit] Genres of literature
Further information: List of literary genres

A literary genre is a category of literature.
[edit] Literary techniques
Main article: Literary technique

A literary technique or literary device can be used by works of literature in order to produce a specific effect on the reader. Literary technique is distinguished from literary genre as military tactics are from military strategy. Thus, though David Copperfield employs satire at certain moments, it belongs to the genre of comic novel, not that of satire. By contrast, Bleak House employs satire so consistently as to belong to the genre of satirical novel. In this way, use of a technique can lead to the development of a new genre, as was the case with one of the first modern novels, Pamela by Samuel Richardson, which by using the epistolary technique strengthened the tradition of the epistolary novel, a genre which had been practiced for some time already but without the same acclaim.

Literary criticism implies a critique and evaluation of a piece of literature and in some cases is used to improve a work in progress or classical piece. There are many types of literary criticism and each can be used to critique a piece in a different way or critique a different aspect of a piece.
[edit] Legal status
[edit] UK

Literary works have been protected by copyright law from unauthorised reproduction since at least 1710.[1] Literary works are defined by copyright law to mean any work, other than a dramatic or musical work, which is written, spoken or sung, and accordingly includes (a) a table or compilation (other than a database), (b) a computer program, (c) preparatory design material for a computer program, and (d) a database.

It should be noted that literary works are not limited to works of literature, but include all works expressed in print or writing (other than dramatic or musical works).[2]
[edit] See also
Book: Literature
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Books-aj.svg aj ashton 01.svg Literature portal
Main articles: Outline of literature and Index of literature articles

* Philosophy and literature

Lists

* List of authors
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Related topics

* Asemic writing
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Associations devoted to the study of language and literature

* American Council of Learned Societies (for list of member societies)
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[edit] Notes

1. ^ The Statute of Anne 1710 and the Literary Copyright Act 1842 used the term "book". However, since 1911 the statutes have referred to literary works.
2. ^ University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press [1916]

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[show]v · d · eNarrative
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