本书为研究民族主义的名著，共有8章，包括“什么是族群性”、“族群性分类：我们和他们”、“文化不同的社会组织”、“族群认同和意识”、“历史中的族群性”、“民族主义”、“少数民族与国家”、“跨越族群”等。

Managing ethnic nationalism within the People's Republic of China has become increasingly challenging. As new reforms widen economic disparities between minorities and the Han majority, even the most assimilated of minorities, the Zhuang, have begun to demand special treatment from the central government. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially recognized the sixteen million Zhuang as China's largest minority nationality in the early 1950s, granting them regional autonomy. Prior to this, however, the Zhuang did not share a common ethnic identity. Katherine Palmer Kaup explores why the CCP in effect created the Zhuang nationality. Why did it launch a massive propaganda campaign to increase nationality consciousness? How is the party now responding to the Zhuang's assertive political demands?This pioneering study unveils the unique culture of the Zhuang people, showing at the same time the CCP's skillful balancing of ethnic and regional loyalties over the past 50 years to integrate the diversity of China's ethnic mosaic.

《族群与边界》是一部族群研究的典范性著作，标志着族群研究的一个新的时代。 本书是巴斯主编的一本论文集，书中巴斯及其他学者把族群互动作为讨论的中心并研究族群认同的互联性以及族群边界和文化认同问题。同时提出并实践了族群研究的一种新方法，即通过不同人类群体的持续的协商和接触来解决边界问题。《族群与边界》开启了人类学关于族群、族群认同等问题的广泛讨论，延续至今。

When originally published in Norway, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries marked the transition to a new era of ethnic studies. Today this much-cited classic is regarded as the seminal volume from which stems much current anthropological thinking about ethnicity. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries opens with Barth’s invaluable thirty-page essay that introduces students to important theoretical issues in the analysis of ethnic groups. Following is a collection of seven essays—the results of a symposium involving a small group of Scandinavian social anthropologists—intended to illustrate the application of Barth’s analytical viewpoints to different sides of the problems of polyethnic organization in various ethnographic areas, including Norway, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Afghanistan, and Laos.

现代社会日益增长的多元文化组织和结构，带未了诸多新的议题和挑战，例如在种族和民族上占少数的群体，越来越要求社会对其自有的文化身份加以承认和支持。本书所阐述的，正是这些少数文化群体的权利和现状。本书讨论了多元文化政治中的一些核心问题，如少数群体的语言权、群体代表制、土地要求、联邦制和独立等等。这些问题往往在当代自由主义理论中被有意或无意地忽视了。 1996年，本书夺得加拿大政治学学会和美国政治学学会的两项大奖，正如查尔斯·泰勒在《美国政治学评论》中称赞的那样， “在有关多元文化主义的当代讨论中，这是一本十分重要、不可取代的著作。”