Ethnicity and Human Relations.

The article examines the ways in which ethnicity has entered into the pattern of human relations, sometimes thwarting them, sometimes facilitating them, but always conditioning them. "Nationality" refers to membership in a national group. However, a very large percentage- perhaps close to a third of the human species has not yet arrived at the stage of nationhood. Many of these people still live in tribal or small locality-groups, recognized as separate or distinct from other groups. "Race" is still a controversial concept, comprehensive, vague, and overlapping; indeed, some writers in recent years have felt that it should be dispensed with as a scientific tool. Yet it is an old and very powerful concept. Ethnicity "means" something for human relations only when the interactional situation receives ethnic definition-that is, when relations are ethnically described and prescribed. However distinctive may be the ethnic qualities as socio-biological traits, their influence in the contacts of people is a function of symbols. Ethnic relations are the human activities and experiences that result from the fact of, and the feeling about, ethnicity.