The author intends to analyse the theory of the ethnicity of Fredrik Barth (1969) by recontextualising it in the Norwegian national ideology, which, like Finland, is the result of the combination of a successful identification with an opposite politico-cultural category, and the Nordic racial theories of the 19th century (which give rise to the representation of a national whole consisting of coexistence without merging a “ethnic majority” and “ethnic minorities”). and wonder about the ambiguity of importing such a theory into France, which ignores any categorisation by reference to a hierarchical whole (be Breton and French), in order to recognise only immutable conflict oppositions (be rabbit or Norwegian, gitan or Norwegian, Breton or French, Beur or French).