Ethnicity as a social construction

The conceptualization of the “ethnic” phenomena is discussed in the paper. On the one hand, a short sketch of the embededdness of concepts in the social context is given, and the migration road of the ethnicity concept is outlined. On the other hand, the usage of this concept in the scientific discourse is reconstructed. The main thesis is that the usage of this concept indicates epistemological progress reflected in altered comprehension of the phenomena, from self-understanding to being socially constructed. The most important names on that journey are recognized as being Max Weber, Fredrik Barth and Rogers Brubaker. It is stated that the main conceptualization of constructivism has already been given by Weber and that the later constructions are mere repeatitions of Weber’s formulation in a new, more comprehensive and more systematic way. Brubaker’s rejection of the group concept is discarded in this paper as being too harsh. Namely, the sociological concept of group does not automatically have essentialist meaning, although it can have it in the everyday discourse. Because of such meaning of the word in everyday discourse, it is considered that there is no sense in throwing it out of use because, in applying that logic, the large part of the sociological vocabulary would be pruned (along with the vocabulary of many other disciplines). At the end, a draft is provided for writing the history of Croatian ethnicity from the constructivist perspective