Wikidata talk:Nationality
Please expand[edit]
This topic pop ups every once in a while and has done so in the past too. Please expand with links to previous discussions and maybe a good description of the problem. Multichill (talk) 11:25, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
First Nations[edit]
The term “First Nations People” (First Nations (Q392316)), which I understand to be originally Canadian, is gaining use for indigenous/aboriginal/native people in other countries, such as Australia. What constitutes a “nation” in this context?
In Australian Aboriginal traditional culture, a person may belong to a small kinship group (band? sept?) which is part of a larger kinship group (sept? clan? tribe?) which may also share a dialect, or be part of a larger dialect group, which in turn is a part of a language and cultural group (tribe? nation?).
(Some feel terms like band, clan, and tribe to be culturally inappropriate, others maintain that excluding them is a kind of pointed revisionism that ignores historical sources.)
To to complicate matters, pre-colonial east-coast aboriginals would have self-identified as either coastal people or hinterland people within a certain river catchment or of the land between given rivers, though their language was mutually intelligible. For example, the Eora (Eora (Q257174)) and Dharug/Darruk (Darug people (Q1166813)), or Darkinyung (Darkinjung people (Q5223662)) and “Awabakal” (Awabakal people (Q2874654)). (Awabakal may have originally denoted a small band, but in modern times is applied more broadly; the best term for the central-coast lakes people is debated.). In contrast, the inhabitants of neighbouring river systems were more separate. There is historical evidence from colonial times that speakers of Dharuk and Darkingyung languages could not understand each other. Though their religion, culture and language had a common basis, cultural exchange would have been limited (trade, border disputes, rare intermarriage), and there wasn't a wide east-coast confederacy or “nation”.
As modern aboriginal people try to reconstruct or recapture their heritage after generations of dispossession, displacement, and language loss, self-identification turns to ancestry. A style of introduction that has recently become popular in the media is “Soandso, a proud Wiradjuri and Dharug man”. Those media mentions are citable as references, and may become part of the historical record. Soandso may also have a large portion of English and Irish ancestry, but in the context of aboriginal affairs that is less pertinent. Does that count as “nationality”? “ethnicity”? Do we have or need a separate property for ancestry?
Ethnic group does wide duty from super-sovereign-state down to smaller regional dialect groups and subcultures, and out to globally dispersed diasporas. Nationality, like tribe, clan, or sept, implies a more definite hierarchical level. I'd love to have ontologies for groups of humans (group of humans (Q16334295)) that could be applied across tribal, feudal and modern societies. Don't forget there are also relations apart from kinship, language, and culture – such as allegiance, fealty, and vassalage; political, religious, philosophical, and military. Ask yourself dear reader, when you picture “nationality”, are you thinking a broad ethnos, a state within a federation, something else?