Coming from South Africa, I find ethnicity fascinating and a little scary. I remember reading ... um ... Benedict Anderson? ... on the construction of ethnicity, and finding it helpful to think of ethnicity as a symbolic construct, but not "just" a symbolic construct.

Yes, it's a very tricky concept: you can't ignore it, but you can't pin it down. Sort of like race.

One episode of the tv series Lovejoy features a jeweler(?) in London who wears a long beard and Jewish mannerisms because ``it's expected.''