[saraid216]

> I would have called those examples racism.

Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and Cougars because football teams.

A lot of people can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, for instance, but they've cheerfully gone to war over the distinction quite a few times. Is that a race war? It seems less than useful to do so.

Actually, it now occurs to me to look up the etymology of "race": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race&allowed_in_fra... I'm not sure what the Arabic ra's has to do with anything, but the earliest attestation there is 1520s. Interesting that the root similarity with other meanings is due to the way a river branches; that would never have occurred to me.

Nationalism, as I countenance it, is a 20th century phenomenon, which leaves a period of 1.5 to 4 centuries for your interest if you agree. I group nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. under the larger umbrella of tribalism, though, which may or may not be academically sane. Nationalism doesn't seem to become a thing until nation-building became a thing as a retrospective reaction to colonialism; you could call some ancient prejudices nationalism but... that doesn't feel right to me.

...I am rambling now.

[lsc]

I think that "nationalism" is generally thought to have really gained traction in the 18th century; Napoleon's France is often described as a nationalist state, and Herder (the dude credited with naming nationalism) was alive around that time. Germany started thinking about becoming Germany not that long afterwards, and did so, incidentally in France, in the 19th century.

Some people suggest that one of the reasons Napoleon was able to do so well militarily in the earlier years was this "Levée en masse" - most other countries at the time being a little hesitant to arm and train the peasantry, for fear they might demand rights. Civilization says that it's the Republic, not Nationalism that is the prerequisite for conscription, but eh.

On racism, yeah, what you are calling Tribalistic derogation - when it is based on inherited characteristics and actually ends in discrimination, functionally sounds a lot like racism, even if it happened before the term was coined.

How did that work in, say, the 16th century? I mean I'm sure that an Italian in France would face some discrimination, but would that be true of his kids? or would his kids or grand-kids be considered French even though they looked a little different?