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This final chapter summarizes the major propositions and findings of the book. It reviews the units and strategies of analysis employed throughout the empirical chapters (non-ethnic units; disentangling ethnic from non-ethnic processes); recapitulates that the boundary making approach assumes a principally open outcome of group formation processes, including the emergence of non-ethnic and non-racialized forms of categorization and association; and it reviews the major hypotheses explored empirically: that inequality along ethnic lines leads to social closure and cultural difference; that a consensus on the location and meaning of boundaries enhances their politicization and social closure along these divides. The chapter concludes by pointing out future areas of research: to understand long-term boundary dynamics from a truly comparative point of view; to investigate how inequality along ethnic lines emerges and disappears; and how precisely ethnic and other forms of boundary making relate to each other beyond the acknowledgment of their co-existence, as in the “intersectionality” approach.

The Roman Iron Age was surely a full act in the drama of Scottish history, not an interlude. Substantial social, cultural and ethnic change took place in outer Brigantia, inner Caledonia and parts of Atlantic Scotland, which gave shape to the Early Historic period. In fact, despite scholars' inclination to see the advent of native written sources as the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, it is not at all clear that this horizon marks much of a watershed in northern Britain. A reasonable case is there for the making that the period c.250 to c.650 is more coherent in social, cultural and ethnic terms than either of the two classic periods under investigation in this book.

This chapter assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21). Comparing the ethnic rhetoric of Acts 15 with ethnic rhetoric of the Salutaris Foundation inscription, it calls attention to wider negotiations of civic identity and within the context of formal public documents like this inscription. The Salutaris Foundation inscription, which contains the stipulations for a donation given by a wealthy citizen of Ephesus, provides a useful comparison with the Jerusalem council narrative in two primary ways. First, the inscription was composed within a decade or two of the likely publication of Acts and therefore offers a glimpse of a contemporaneous use of ethnic rhetoric. Second, a majority of the narrative of Acts takes place in an urban context, including in Ephesus. The Salutaris Foundation thus provides a securely dated and located example of the negotiation of identity within the city, demonstrating who had the power to influence identity claims and how such negotiations took place. Both Acts and the Salutaris Foundation leverage religious ideology in their respective forms of ethnic rhetoric in order to legitimate ethnic change, employing ancestral religious rhetoric, a shared sense of the flexibility of ethnic identity, and the authority of councils in ways that delimit the identity of contested populations and their religious activities.

Californians know they are living in the midst of historic growth and change, and they are clearly worried about it. More than 80 percent of residents said in the surveys that they expect their regions to grow either fast or modestly in population over the next ten years. This chapter looks beyond 2000 and offers some general ideas about how forces such as political distrust, racial and ethnic change, and regional diversity are likely to play out in the state's political and policy process. Some recommendations are offered that will help the state find better ways to cope with the many challenges looming before it.