It is rooted in the conviction that a combination of sociological and psychological concepts and methods of studying ethnic identity can strengthen each other, and advance our understanding of the problem. It is not, however, my intention to present an exhaustive critical review of the literature, but rather simply to set out the basic premises uniting the different perspectives. In other words, it is difficult to talk about pure approaches, especially on the theoretical level. The boundaries between disciplines dealing with ethnic identity are quite arbitrary, and in many investigations the problems are treated from an interdisciplinary point of view. However, an abstraction of the main differences between different disciplinary approaches is needed in order to illuminate the central question of this paper, the main dimensions in the study of ethnic identity.
Ethnic identity is treated as a conceptualisation of one's membership of an ethnic group.
One of the evident advantages of the social anthropological approach, which needs to be emphasised, is its cultural, regional and historical focus. The function and expression of ethnicity is scrutinised in a definite cultural context. Thus, though we can find some parallels between the two disciplin ary approaches, generally while anthropologists describe precisely the mosaic of different ethnic identities, sociologists try to locate them within a broader social structure. So in sociological analyses ethnic identity is often used synonymously with ethnicity. Ethnicity is seen as a primordial tie which connotes unity and solidarity above and beyond internal division.