In essence, ethnic boundaries were and are not 'natural', but are formed consciously or subconsciously by a group of people and subsequently self-applied to delineate themselves as an ethnic group. Weber levelled the first serious challenge to this conception of ethnicity, stating that ethnic groupings were not self-evident and biologically inherent, but künstlich (artificial) and formed around the axis of Gemeinschaft (community) (Weber 1922).

Early anthropology held a rather opposing view, built on the foundations of social Darwinism and essentialist primordialism, theorizing that ethnic groups are a natural state of human beings rooted in racial heritage and kinship. The second is consideration that the socio-cultural boundaries by which 'ethnic groups' delineate themselves are often surprisingly insubstantial - for example, in Moerman's ethnography of the Thai Lue, he notes that they are in many ways identical to surrounding cultural groups and that 'someone is a Lue merely by virtue of believing and calling himself Lue, and of acting in ways that validate his Lueness' (Moerman 1965: 1219).

Two problems immediately arise the first being the issue of how cultural homogeny can be defined 'within a group' when it is the degree of acceptable divergence from homogeneity is itself the definition of the group. This 'ethnic group' is held as possessing a unique identity distinctive from that of other 'ethnic groups'. Ethnicity is commonly characterized as a claim to cultural consistency within a particular group of people, achievable through a combination of common history, blood, language, phenotype and/or religion. Ethnicity is often discussed without precise definition, for the most part due to complexity and nuances that are not apparent at first glance. Can nations be anything other than 'imagined communities'? Any attempt to evaluate the concept of 'nation', or the associated notions of 'nationhood' and 'nationalism' must first acknowledge the concept of 'ethnicity'.

Imagined community definition