Take Home Questions essays

Take Home Questions essays 1. Ethnic stratification is a rank order of groups, each made up of people with presumed common cultural or physical characteristics interacting in patterns of dominance and subordination. To begin with, all systems of ethnic stratification are products of the contact of previously separated groups. Initial contact may be in the form of conquest, annexation, voluntary immigration, or involuntary immigration. Following contact, groups engage in competition, view one another ethnocentrically, and, ultimately, one imposes its superior power over the others, emerging as the dominant group. Ethnic stratification systems are created by the movement of people across national boundaries, usually bringing with them different languages and cultural systems, or by the establishment of new political boundaries. Multiethnic societies are formed through one or a combination of several contact patterns. The first factor critical to the emergence of ethnic stratification or inequality is Conquest. Conquest is a form of contact in which people of one society subdue all or part of another society and take on the role of the dominant group. European colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries best exemplifies this pattern. The next factor to the emergence of ethnic stratification is Annexation. It is a political occurrence in which a part or possibly all of one society is incorporated into another. If a gathered society has a dominant group, then the ethnic groups within that society become subordinate at the point that sovereignty is transferred. Such annexation may occur in a peaceful or a violent manner. Following annexation, the most common patterns by which ethnic groups come into contact involve immigration. The immigration of peoples from one society to another may be either voluntary or involuntary. The chief source of ethnic heterogeneity in the United States, Canada, Australia...