This article is published in the following volume: Sanjay K. Roy and Rajatsubhra Mukhopadhyay (Eds.): Ethnicity in the East and North- East India (51-65), 2015. Gyan Publishing House: New Delhi (ISBN: 978- 81-212-1255-7). 3 What Explains the Salience of Ethnicity? Some Conceptual Clarifications Biswajit Ghosh Introduction Today, we are witnessing a series of explosive ethnic revivals across the globe. In Africa and Asia, ethnic movements have been gaining force since the 1950s. Initially, it was believed that ethnicity is found mostly in developing world because of cracks and strains in the secular sphere (Phadnis, 1989). But a few years later Rattansi (1994: 1) wrote, „The spectre that haunts the societies of the „West‟ is no longer communism, but both within and outside their frontiers, a series of racisms and ethnocentrisms‟. In Europe and America, ethnic movements unexpectedly surfaced from the 1960s. The downfall of Soviet Union has only encouraged the move. Many new nations based upon dominant ethnic affiliation have been recognised since 1990. The rise of such nations led Hutchinson and Smith to comment that „end of history‟, it seems, turns out to have ushered in the era of ethnicity‟ (1996: Preface). Ethnicity is one of the fastest growing contemporary phenomena and there are also very strong connections between globalisation and ethnicity. Like globalisation, ethnicity is both „local‟ in its claim and „universal‟ in its applications. Its fact growth on the contemporary world scene articulates the process whereby „subjectivity‟ can be demonstrated to be an instance of the objective consequences of globalisation (Poppi, 1997: 289). It is not the unexpected survival of ethnic particularism.