Week 5- Barker Chapter 9 (Ethnicity, Race, Nation)

Barker deconstructs thoroughly the concepts of ethnicity, race, and nation. These concepts are context-specific, fluid, and unreliable. Certainly these concepts are not "scientific". This chapter has been the most helpful to me in terms of missiology. When we minister to a group of people we cannot have in our minds that this people's culture, nation, and ethnicity are somehow eternal fixed categories. Our social worlds are constructed by mental categories, are always in flux, and are capable of amazing hybridity and transformation.