Multicultural Geography versus Multicultural Genealogy: Ancient Distinctions with Contemporary Impacts

Abstract

This paper applies the concept of ancient commonplaces developed by Julio Caro Baroja to the study of nature-nurture concepts as they are employed in thinking about ethnicity. Centering on a comparison of the racialized notions of ethnicity prevalent in the United States and the regionalized concepts of ethnicity that are now hegemonic in Spain, it argues that a much deeper history of the concepts that underlie arguments about ethnicity is necessary for a meaningful anthropological approach to the subject. The essay stresses the need to examine these concepts against the field of the movement of concepts and ideas from the apex of a society to its base and viceversa in historical and spatial context by re-considering the value of the Great Tradition-Little Tradition models of analysis created in the 1950s.