Genetics and Ideas and Ethnic Nationalism

Jakob Ammann

What's ethnicity?

Perhaps people don't think in terms of race or ethnicity unless they're forced to by political conflict. Then their race or ethnicity is actually just a means of sorting people onto sides, or being on a side, rather than an expression of their DNA. Maybe it is entirely arbitrary.

In the case of the Amish, though, their distinct ethnic identity is intertwined with ideas that created a self-selected population bottleneck. They were Swiss-Alsatian German Mennonites that followed the teachings of Jakob Ammann. A population that goes off by itself to pursue specific ideas of the good can form a tribe around those ideas, and eventually transform into a genetically distinct group. That's the reverse of the historical examples I can think of where families merge together into one large extended family and become a tribe. Perhaps nucleating around ideas to form tribes is the only way to do it in a world dominated by nation states, and now, by corporate entities.

Here's a really nice article on this topic from the Mennonites: http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Ethnicity.