What makes a minority?ANN ARBOR—How does a minority come to be? That’s the question tackled in “The Construction of Minorities: Cases for Comparison Across Time and Around the World” published by the University of Michigan Press. The essays included range across six or seven centuries and several continents.

“All of these essays are about the ways that formal, public distinctions are constructed,” says editor Raymond Grew, professor emeritus of history at the U-M. “And all reveal the operation of an almost manic logic, whereby differences—once they have been socially or politically defined—take on a life of their own.”

In his introduction, Grew writes “minority is a loaded term; and its meaning is always culture-bound. Despite their diversity, these essays have in common a recognition that minorities everywhere are socially constructed. Repetition and conflict rather than nature made difference seem natural.”

Not only are minority issues of race, color, sexual preference, and gender discussed, but so is illness. “Sick people may have much in common, but that is not enough to make them a group,” writes Claudine Herzlich, author of “Illness and Self in Society.”

Kim Scheppele, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, proposes five characteristics that mark minorities—insularity, narrativity, modality, inevitability, and juridicality. “Once a group is defined as subordinate and subject to special provisions,” Grew writes, “the sense of difference tends to be reinforced by social discrimination, spatial separation, or legislation in a process that is reciprocal, involving responses within the minority as well as the larger society. Thus, the society’s categorizers—census-takers, linguists, and social scientists as well as religious leaders and politicians—play an important role even when more direct applications of power are limited or muffled. In this process the minority is likely to become more cohesive and to develop its own self-definition.”

The works included in this book demonstrate the processes that produce minorities revealing much about how specific societies have functioned and about how selective memories of their past have helped to shape them.

Among the contributors are the following U-M faculty members: David D. Bien, professor emeritus of history; Juan R.I. Cole, professor of history; Todd Endelman, professor of modern Jewish history; Raymond Grew, professor emeritus of history; Earl Lewis, dean of the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies; Sabine MacCormack, the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Professor for the Study of Human Understanding; and Ann L. Stoler, professor of anthropology.

“The Construction of Minorities: Cases for Comparison Across Time and Around the World”Kim ScheppeleJuan R.I. Cole