>>> J Cuyler Page <[log in to unmask]> 24/11/99 18:47:44 >>> wrote:

"The guard expressed his opinion that I was being a smart ass, and repeated the question carefully "WHAT IS YOUR ETHNIC ORIGIN?".
Will the US ever become an ethnos, a culture ..."

Cuyler

I think this must be the point where I tell the story about the times in the market in Beijing that my wife (who is Chinese) and I (who very definitely am not) tried to convince Chinese stallholders that I was Chinese from the far northwest (hence my lack of Chinese features).  After much "you don't sound like somebody from Xinjiang" (but I've lived in Beijing since I was a child) and "you don't look so much like somebody from Xinjiang" (but I am), we would finally get them half believing that I was ... before telling them that I was in fact Australian ... which they promptly refused to believe, because nobody from Australia could speak Chinese the way I did!

So maybe ethnicity is in the mind of the beholder?

Certainly, one has to think that way when considering the question of whether certain Australians consider themselves Aboriginal or not.  Connection appears to be a tenuous thing (speaking as somebody who may be 1/8th or 1/16th Aboriginal but doesn't consider himself as having any claim whatsoever to his Aboriginal ancestry since the family buried it long ago).

Of course, our ethnicity has a significant bearing on what we perceive our heritage to be, and how we relate to the items that others declare to be heritage.

Is there a common ethnicity which dominates BP?  In Cuyler's terms, there must be ... the American!  I would venture to agree, but of course it depends on which aspect of each of our ethnicities you consider.  

david