It has become commonplace for academic works to add scare quotes around problematic terms such as ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. By flagging the objectionable quality of the terms they enclose, these supplementary marks help to denaturalise categories that might otherwise be taken at face value. This practice certainly resonates with the spirit of this book, which aims to challenge the perceived naturalness of ‘ethnicity’. Nevertheless, I have generally avoided using scare quotes in the text. This was partly a stylistic decision, given the sheer number of questionable categories that appear throughout the book. But no less significant was the difficulty of actually selecting which terms to enclose in quotation marks and which terms to leave unmarked.Footnote ¹ The concept of ethnicity itself is a case in point: even when academics append scare quotes to problematic neighbours such as ‘race’ and ‘tribe’, they allow the seemingly neutral concept of ethnicity to circulate without such warning signs. The lack of scare quotes in this book should therefore not be interpreted as an endorsement of the vocabulary printed on the page, but rather as an insistence on the problematic and provisional quality of all our categories.

For similar reasons, I have not followed the standard practice of highlighting foreign words and phrases by placing them in italics. Such stylistic separation of English from other languages tends to perpetuate the myth of ‘natural’ languages and suggests that interlingual translation is fundamentally different from intralingual translation. Yet words like ‘race’ look identical in English and French, allowing them to move across linguistic boundaries with relatively little disruption. This does not mean that ‘race’ has exactly the same meaning in English and French, of course, but it does problematise any straightforward distinction between ‘English’ and ‘French’ words. The scientific term ‘ethnos’ (borrowed from ancient Greek) has also travelled back and forth between English, French, Russian, German, and other texts without always being marked as foreign. On the flip side, there may also exist significant conceptual differences within or between communities that supposedly speak the same language. The contrast between French and Haitian applications of the term ‘ethnie’ during the 1930s and 1940s, discussed in Chapter 2, is one example of this. To avoid exaggerating interlingual differences or downplaying intralingual differences, the text is presented without any stylistic markers to distinguish what is English from what is not.