Paper long abstract:

Author: N. Sangmpam ( Syracuse University)

As an anthropological category, ethnicity has political and socioeconomic implications. In the post-Soviet era, it is prominently featured in both Western and non-Western countries. But its effects are still more vividly felt in non-Western countries than they are in western countries. I argue that, in contrast to North Africa, Asia, and South America, ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa contains built-in equality, whose consequences are, paradoxically not necessarily positive. Such equality results from the horizontal relationship among different sub-Saharan ethnic groups as opposed to the vertical relationship that characterizes ethnic groups in these other developing and non-western regions. The focus of the paper is to demonstrate this horizontality vs verticality.