Original scientific paper
Notes on the Inter-Connections between Religion, the Church and Ethnic Identity (a Draft for a Sociological Approach)
Josip Kumpes
; Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In order to elaborate, even in rough contours, a possible (sociological) approach for examining the inter-connections between religion, the Church and ethnic identity, we must first elaborate at least the most essential theoretic-conceptional and theoretic-methodological points. Culture (for people and societies) is the source of the contact between the religious and the ethnic dimension. Although religion and ethnicity are separate categories, in the very definition of these two categories we come across common traits. Yet they are more distinct in several characteristic traits: different relations to the categories of language, culture, territoriality, different ways of diffusion and expansion, etc. In the later part of the paper the author attempts to indicate how religion, religious tradition and culture influence ethnic and national movements in modern (and postmodern) societies – i.e. he attempts to determine the role, the place, and the significance of religion in the ethnic structures of such societies. Examining the relations between religion, the Church and ethnic identity – on the basis of a brief review of some contemporary aspects – shows that a specific linkage between religious attachment and ethnicity certainly exists. The nature of this connection depends on many sociohistorical and sociocultural circumstances, which from time to time open up new problems.
Keywords
religion; the Church; ethnic identity; ethnicity
Hrčak ID:
127356
URI
Publication date:
31.12.1991.
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