Schuberth's text engages with positions that solidified after years of fierce controversies and laid the foundation for an anti-essentialist, discourse-critical approach. In the first part, the author examines the concepts of tribe, people, and nation in the conflict between Enlightenment and Romanticism. The second part reconstructs the development of ethnological and sociological concepts of ethnicity, moving from closed tribes to the constructed nature of ethnicity and the fluidity of ethnic identities. In the third part, Schuberth delivers a wittily written and polemical critique of culturalist thinking, which prevails especially in circles that consider themselves progressive. The concept of both personal and collective identity is not spared either.