Toward a Reconstitution of Ethnicity: Capitalist Expansion and Cultural Dynamics in Sudan

In this article I argue that, despite recent advances in anthropology, prevailing images of ethnicity in academic discourse overemphasize units at the expense of interconnections and tend toward ahistorical formalism. Through an examination of the dynamics of ethnic segmentation of the agricultural labor force in Sudan in this century, I seek to show that both the modem character of ethnicity as an organizing principle and the content of particular ethnic identities in Sudan emerged in the process of peripheral capitalist development. Ethnicity in these circumstances is thus fundamentally different from the ethnicity of the Sudanese past and from ethnic principles articulated elsewhere under different social conditions.