970 AJS Volume 113 Number 4 (January 2008): 970–1022䉷 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0002-9602/2008/11304-0002$10.00The Making and Unmaking of EthnicBoundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory1Andreas WimmerUniversity of California, Los AngelesPrimordialist and constructivist authors have debated the nature ofethnicity “as such” and therefore failed to explain why its charac-teristics vary so dramatically across cases, displaying different de-grees of social closure, political salience, cultural distinctiveness, andhistorical stability. The author introduces a multilevel process theoryto understand how these characteristics are generated and trans-formed over time. The theory assumes that ethnic boundaries arethe outcome of the classificatory struggles and negotiations betweenactors situated in a social field. Three characteristics of a field—theinstitutional order, distribution of power, and political networks—determine which actors will adopt which strategy of ethnic boundarymaking. The author then discusses the conditions under which thesenegotiations will lead to a shared understanding of the location andmeaning of boundaries. The nature of this consensus explains theparticular characteristics of an ethnic boundary. A final section iden-tifies endogenous and exogenous mechanisms of change.TOWARD A COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY OF ETHNIC BOUNDARIESBeyond ConstructivismThe comparative study of ethnicity rests firmly on the ground establishedby Fredrik Barth (1969b) in his well-known introduction to a collection1Various versions of this article were presented at UCLA’s Department of Sociology,the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies of the University ofOsnabru¨ ck, Harvard’s Center for European Studies, the Center for Comparative Re-search of Yale University, the Association for the Study of Ethnicity at the LondonSchool of Economics, the Center for Ethnicity and Citizenship of the University ofBristol, the Department of Political Science and International Relations of UniversityCollege Dublin, and the Department of Sociology of the University of Go¨ ttingen. Forhelpful comments and challenging critiques, I should like to thank Klaus Bade, FredrikBarth, Michael Bommes, John Breuilly, Rogers Brubaker, Marian Cadogan, HartmutEsser, Jon Fox, Matteo Fumigalli, Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Philip Gorski, Wesley Hiers,John Hutchinson, Eric Kaufmann, Matthias Ko¨ nig, Sinisa Malesevic, Tariq Modood,Ethnic Boundaries971of ethnographic case studies. Barth broke away from the Herderian canonin anthropology, according to which each ethnic group represented a his-torically grown, uniquely shaped flower in the garden of human cultures.2Instead of studying each of these cultures in a separate ethnography, Barthand his collaborators observed how the boundaries between two ethnicgroups are maintained, even though their cultures might be indistinguish-able and even though individuals and groups might switch from one sideof the boundary to the other. Barth’s approach to ethnicity thus no longerresembled an exercise in Linnean taxonomy but in social ecology.Barth pioneered what later became known as “constructivism”: theclaim that ethnicity is the product of a social process rather than a culturalgiven, made and remade rather than taken for granted, chosen dependingon circumstances rather than ascribed through birth. In the following twodecades, prolonged battles emerged between devotees of this constructivistperspective and adherents to older views that were more in line withHerderian notions of the binding power of ethnicity and culture. Thisdebate has often been framed in dichotomous terms: “primordialism,”which underlined that ethnic membership was acquired through birthand thus represented a “given” characteristic of the social world, waspitted against “instrumentalism,” which maintained that individualschoose between various identities according to self-interest. “Essentialism”was opposed to “situationalism,” the former privileging the transcontex-tual stability provided by ethnic cultures while the latter showed howindividuals identify with different ethnic categories depending on the logicof the situation. “Modernists” attributed the salience of ethnicity to therise of the modern nation-state, while “perennialists” insisted that ethnicityrepresented one of the most stable principles of social organization inhuman history. Scholars who insisted on the subjectively felt reality anddeeply rooted character of ethnic “identity” argued against those for whomethnic distinctions were primarily driven by the changing “interests” ofindividual or collective actors.3Orlando Patterson, Abigail Saguy, Peter Stamatov, Paul Statham, Art Stinchcombe,Ivan Szelenyi, Yasuko Takezawa, Eddie Telles, Jennifer Todd, Sarah Zingg, and LynneZucker. Special thanks go to Miche`le Lamont, whose invitation to a conference pro-vided the initial stimulus for writing this article and who continued to support theproject through its various phases. All errors of fact and thought unfortunately remainmy sole responsibility. Direct correspondence to Andreas Wimmer, Department ofSociology, 264 Haines Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, California, 90095.E-mail: [email protected] Herder ([1784] 1968). On Herder’s influence on the contemporary study of eth-nicity see Wimmer (in press).3These binary oppositions appeared in various constellations and combinations. Inthe eyes of some, they aligned along a grand battle line separating constructivist-instrumentalist-circumstantialist-interest approaches from the essentialist-primordial-American Journal of Sociology972This article attempts to transcend these debates.4I argue that the em-pirical and analytical questions that they raise cannot be solved by def-initional ontology—by trying to find out what ethnicity “really is.” Thepast decades have produced an impressive variety of case studies in whichwe find examples that fit—and contradict—any of the positions sum-marized above, as will be shown in the following section. The definitionaldebates may have diverted our efforts away from understanding whyethnicity appears in such variable forms. While there is a substantial bodyof work illustrating the contrasting properties of ethnic, national, or racialboundaries across usually two or three examples, little has been done toexplain the entire range of empirically documented