Despite the fact that ethnicity is an important principle of social organization in Canada, there are very few studies that attempt to describe and analyse how it operates at different levels and in different parts of the social system. In this paper we suggest ways that might lead to a clearer understanding of the significance of ethnicity in the country and its communities. In its relevance to research, this paper is both methodological and programmatic. We hope that it will provide fruitful suggestions for research and for the clearer formulation of problems for study.
Students in the field of ethnic studies seldom consider more than one ethnic group or category at a time. Where the group selected for study forms an autonomous community, we get an exhaustive account of the group and its relations with the “outside world,” rather like the account of an individual's life history. Even where the people who are being studied make up a large element in our population and are dispersed both geographically and socially, there is a tendency to follow the same procedure and to deal with what is really a category as though it were an autonomous, discrete group; the picture we get is of individuals of such and such an ethnic group (as though their only identity were an ethnic one) and their relations with outsiders. This procedure is comparable to making an analysis of a small group by taking each individual in turn and describing him exhaustively without taking into account the structure of the group itself.