Originally Posted by agtoau

You obviously did not reflect on what I had written. Let me try once more. The point is, the dictionary meanings that you cite are NOT applied consistently and across the board. "Ethnic" is the Westerner's terminology that has been imposed on the 'other' peoples. By assigning the label "ethnic" to the 'other' the effect is to immediately position the Western frame as the standard by which the 'other' is to be measured and evaluated. So, by adhering strictly to the dictionary meaning of the terms you run the risk of missing the forest for the trees.

There is a racist and/or imperial patina to the term "ethnic" as it is used today. I already gave you the example of the cuisines. There are good examples of this in other areas. Notice, how, for instance, musics from the non-Western, non-white regions are often categorised under "ethnic music." Then there are "ethnic" fashions. Have you come across French and Italian and American fashions so referred to? Why do you think that is the case?

Your analogies about African-Americans etc are misplaced. African-American is a label the blacks in America chose for themselves, it wasn't imposed on them. The term "ethnic" is a label imposed on us by the white Western world, and the Indians have mindlessly imbibed it.

That India is diverse and that there are different ethnicities that make for the Indian populations are well-known facts. But ethnicity does not correspond to culture and cuisine. To give you one example, Maharasthrians come in different ethnicities but Maharashtrian cuisine does not map to any one ethnicity - there's the Kolhapuri cuisine, the Malwani cuisine, the Bombay cuisine and so on.

Bottomline: we have homegrown terms to categorise and describe our diverse cultural artifacts without having to seek recourse to the term "ethnic."