Some problems with minority concepts and a solution.

The article focuses on efforts of sociologists to establish the concept of minority groups, as a subject for sociological study. To demarcate a field of scientific enquiry, the subject under study must be defined clearly. Louis Wirth defined minorities as a group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment, and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination. There are several problems with L. Wirth's formulation. C. Wagley and M. Harris restricted the category to subordinate segments of complex state societies without providing satisfactory criteria to distinguish complex state societies from other centralized polities such as chiefdoms and stateless societies. Subsequent definitions by Wagley and Harris, R.A. Schermerhorn and Hans van Amersfoort all share Wirth's presumption that minority disadvantages ultimately derive from differences of race and ethnicity and perhaps exclude alternative approaches to their comparative study. However, four formulations of the minority concept given by the sociologists involve progressive reduction in its scope. The structural approach for the study of disadvantaged collectivities, the positions of women and immigrants in Switzerland, and of Afro-Americans in South Africa and the southern part of the U.S., 20 years back is compared. In consequence, the status and treatment of minorities in state and international law remain ambiguous. So long as the category remains undefined, and so long as minority is used to refer to various kinds of disadvantaged collectiveness, it will elude precise and inclusive definition.