Stray thought: a lot of the recent focus on the problems that consanguinity causes for nation-building got me to thinking: we use terms like "Iraqi Arab Shia." Well...the mapping of "Iraqi" to "American," let alone a traditional national identity like "Polish," is problematic. But what about all these "ethnic" terms? Americans think in terms of "black," "white" and now Hispanic and all the rest. I have heard Latin Americans tell me that they don't have any conception of race, and I know that's bullshit from personal experience. Arabs have told me the same, and I know that that is wrong from anecdotes an Afro-Yemeni once related about bigotry back in the homeland.

Nevertheless, the clear, axiomatic ethnic identifiers in the United States are misleading when you try and map them overseas (both in typology and emphasis). Among Americans, with the lack of extended clans in much of the nation (especially amongst the chattering class elite), between your close family and ethnicity, there aren't solid affiliations aside from church (which is often elective & ephemeral). In much of the Middle East, clan association (a patrilineage) might be more important than whether one is a "Kurd," "Arab" or "Persian." This cropped up in Afghanistan when Americans kept trying to speak of "Tajiks" and "Pashtuns" and "Uzbeks" as if these were hard & fast terms that had great salience on the ground (perhaps it was more salient that the Tajiks are not a tribal people while the Pashtuns are). The shaitan is in the details.