The census categorization of ethnic identity: Between theoretical comprehensions and statistical practice
Authors: Knezevic Aleksandar , Radic Nevena 
Published: February 2017

Theoretical debates about ethnic identity during the second half of the 20th
century did not just attract attention of academic circles, but they
influenced creation of political discourse which determined public life in
almost every multinational society, regardless the level of socio-economic
development. In recent decades, many theories about ethnic identity have
emerged, especially those about ethnicity as a relatively new concept, which
caused a great deal of controversy that has been ongoing since the 1960s.
Modern demography deals with problems of great social importance, especially
when it comes to anthropological, social and political demography, whose
results often take lead in the modern political debate. In that sense, a lot
of theoretical approaches tried to emphasize the decline of importance of
traditional elements of ethnic identity, even their disappearance in favor of
supranational concepts, over the past more than half a century. However, in
practice, the opposite processes are constantly repeating and the awareness
of belonging to certain ethnic group, not only remained the important part of
social life, but its significance rapidly grew in certain periods and
societies. Ethnic and social pluralism of modern societies, together with
massive migration flows, have initiated the review of sustainability, not
only the traditional definitions of ethnic identity, but also the various
supranational concepts which have mostly emerged from ethnic identification
and legal nationality. The fear that ethno-cultural pluralism will have
negative effects on ethno-demographic differentiation increased the need for
quantitative researches of demographic characteristics of population towards
ethnic marks, also for reviewing of methodological solutions of
ethno-statistic evidence, starting from definitions, categorizations and
statistic classification, as far as the ways of collecting and publishing the
data. In that sense the censuses are considered as a base of
ethno-demographic studies of French and Serbian population, in which
different theoretical concepts of ethnic identity created two different
approaches to ethno-statistic census process. In every Serbian census from
the middle of the 19th century till today central topics were the questions
about static ethno-cultural categories of religion and about mother tongue,
while the question about ethnicity was asked in each and every census taken
after Second World War. On the other hand, although it has the longest census
tradition in Europe, the official ethno-statistic evidence of population in
France has been for a long time determined by constant rejection of ethnic
categorization and by the absence of questions about primary ethnic marks of
population. Instead, the supranational concept of legal nationality has
become the central spot while, as a feature of political integration of
immigrants in a census, the question about state of birth starts to appear.
The main dilemma regarding relations between prevailing theoretical concepts
of ethnic identity and the official statistic practice based on Serbian and
French models, still remains. Therefore, this paper shows two-way influence
of ethno-statistic categorization and the real ethnic structure, and opens a
discussion whether the ethnic identities have been defined by statistics or
the ethnic identity is the one which defines the official statistics.