Confronting the consequences of centuries of massive migration all over the globe, anthropologists are now recognizing that their task is not only to study culture, but also, and perhaps more urgently, to study how people with different cultural backgrounds behave towards one another: how they attempt to preserve, annihilate, exaggerate, or ignore their similarities and differences. One aspect of this concern, amply demonstrated in the literature in the past few years, is an interest in ethnicity - that is, in the ways in which people conceptualize and utilize symbols of cultural distinctiveness.

This book is about the changing meaning of ethnicity among first- and second- generation Voltaic immigrants in Ghana. It is an attempt to study ethnicity independently of the processes of migration and urbanization. As valuable as many studies of ethnicity in Africa have been, their wider applicability has sometimes been limited by a lack of analytic separation of these variables. In hindsight - having written the rest of this book before completing this introduction - the distinction between the study of migration and the study of ethnicity has enabled me to reconsider the relationship between ethnicity and cultural variation. Models of ethnicity based only on the study of first-generation migrants - as are many derived from Africa - tend to obscure important aspects of ethnicity, because they confuse the consequences of migration and urbanization with the nature of ethnicity.