Metroethnicity is a portmanteau of ''
metropolitan'' and ''
ethnicity
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...
''. It is an ‘aesthetic’ or ‘lifestyle’ theory of language and
ethnicity
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...
proposed by the British sociolinguist
John C. Maher.
The theory of Metroethicity rejects cultural
essentialism
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In ''Categories'', Aristotle sim ...
, and ''heroic ethnicity'', in favour of a hybridized form of ethnicity that is utilised for aesthetic effect.
In this perspective, language should not to be viewed as an enduring ethnic essence but a lifestyle ‘accessory.’ It is portable. It functions best as an aspect of personal life-style. Metroethnicity is linked to ''Cool'' because cool is basically an aesthetic phenomenon. Cool actively disconnects the ‘natural’ linkage that is often made between ethnicity and language. Cool is both an attitude as well as a facet of personal action.
This post-ethnic stance is illustrated by a young Ainu person in northern Japan: “Well, I don’t speak Ainu…be nice to speak it…but..anyway...I speak Italian ‘cause that’s where I want to be..love Italian stuff…I’m training to be an Italian chef.” (Maher 2006). In such person-driven identity traditional language is optional -not rejected but bracketed. This view of language may be confrontational a person who insists language and ethnicity should line up. The ethnic view fosters ethnic allegiance, even orthodoxy. By contrast, "Metroethnicity is a kind of post ethnicity state whereby both we play with ethnicity (not necessarily our own) for aesthetic effect. It involves cultural crossing, self-definition made up of borrowing and bricolage of blurred ‘identities’, what one might term ‘metroethnicity’. The operating system of this metroethnicity is ‘Cool’” (Maher 2005).
References
Maher, J. C. (2005) 'Metroethnicity, Language, and the Principle of Cool'. ''International Journal of Sociology of Language'' 175/176: 83-102.
Maher, J. (2010). 'Metroethnicities and Metrolanguages'. ''The Handbook of Language and Globalization'': 575–591. Wiley-blackwell.
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