Editing Cornell 2000 (section)

===Ethnicity and Narrative===
According to the doc, ethnicity is a concept that will forever keep changing over time because the people are constantly changing and doing different things that could have an effect on their ethnicity. This is not just a label that people use, ethnic identities are composed of all the situations and narratives (whether they be positive or negative) that this group has had to go through. These narratives can change over the passage of time but they still hold a central influence on the group identity and helps them discover how their ethnicity ties to society as a whole
		-An example of this would be Michael Arlen tying the Armenian genocide to Armenian Identity 

*At one level, ethnic identities are labels, but they are not just labels: they have consequences and characteristics, and involve distributing things among people that can provoke or incite action
**Labels often signify deeper meanings that give them power
*Creating or assigning an ethnic identity means creating a story around what it means to be part of a particular group
**This story has a subject, action, and value that makes the group feel something, whether that feeling is good, bad, guilty, self-righteous, etc.
**The label becomes a "condensation" of that story
*Narrativization involves three steps: selection, plotting, and interpretation
**Selection: selecting the events to be used as part of the story
**Plotting: causally linking the events
**Interpretation: making claims about what the events signify and to what extent they define the group
*Narratives become ethnic when ethnic boundaries are the "key organizing principle" in these three steps
*The narrative might not be something consciously thought of by each member of the ethnic group, but it plays a prominent role in defining the ethnic category