The different uses of the concept of ethnogenesis refer to the same type of social dynamic, based on the historicity of cultural structures and forms that are more usually taken to be relatively static. The idea of ethnogenesis - or better, ethnogeneses - refers to the dynamism inherent to ethnic groups, whose social logics reveal a plasticity and adaptive capacity not always recognized by anthropological analysis. In fact, ethnogenesis was and is a continual historical process that reflects the cultural and political dynamic of societies anterior or exterior to the development of today's national States. Ethnogenesis is a constitutive part of the historical process of humanity itself and not just a fact of the present, as can be deduced, perhaps, from the surprise shown by some social researchers when faced with its contemporary effervescence.
Ethnogenesis; Ethnicity; Indigenous Peoples; Latin America