Weakly theorized, lacking even an agreed definition, ethnicity has joined the list of deconstructed concepts in anthropology. This article argues that an escape from the nihilistic excesses of deconstructionism is possible if ethnicity is ‘re-located’ from the narrow space it inhabits in current theories (social, cultural or psychological) to the active interface between the mind, society and culture. Two bodies of case material (from urban Papua New Guinea and New Zealand) are presented here in an attempt to demonstrate that, firstly, ethnicity is the product of an empirically available activity, classifying people according to their origins, and secondly a great deal of cultural and symbolic content accretes to these classifications. When ethnicity becomes subject to the elaborations of cultural or identity politics it often develops into a focus of symbolic contestation. The symbolic and ideological elaborations of ethnicity present analysts with phenomena analytically separate from ethnic classification itself.
