Gathering the work of some of our most original thinkers, Theories of Ethnicity provides, in one convenient volume, the most probing and frequently cited considerations of such topics as the melting pot and pluralism, race and race problems, migration and marginality, assimilation and transnationalism, intermarriage, kinship and religion, boundary-construction and maintenance, and the important role of power relations for ethnicity.

Werner Sollors has here brought together such intellects as Max Weber, Carl Gustav Jung, Margaret Mead, Georg Simmel, Erik Erikson, Karl Mannheim, Jean Toomer, Fredrik Barth, and Herbert Gans, and pioneering work by a host of other sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers from around the world.

Theories of Ethnicity grounds much current sociological, cultural, and political research on ethnicity in a theoretical foundation that has heretofore been lacking, thus providing an important historical base for ongoing and future work on this timely subject. For the first time, a large sampling of the most influential ethnic theory of the twentieth century is now available in a single volume.