Small and ancient ethnic enclaves

[Roy]

That is interesting. I once knew of someone called Strutinski, who someone else told me, is of Polish descent. Is this name for sure Polish or is Russian or Ukrainian?

Strutinski does not sound Polish to me as our surnames don't end on -tinski but it might be distorted form of Struciński surname which sounds normal to me. It probably (distortion) happened after their arrival to USA.

[TheForeigner]

Strutinski does not sound Polish to me as our surnames don't end on -tinski but it might be distorted form of Struciński surname which sounds normal to me. It probably (distortion) happened after their arrival to USA.

I and all the people mentioned live in Romania.

[Empecinado]

Some micro-ethnicities/social groups I forgot:

Mercheros are a semi-nomadic group who live mainly in the northern half of Spain and are culturally similar to Gypsies. They are reduced in number and possibly vanishing as a distinct group. Because the men were frequently blamed for petty crime, in modern Spanish the word is associated with references to delinquent, petty thief, or hoodlum. The mercheros identify as a distinct group separate from the Gypsies.There are many theories about the social origins of mercheros, summarized as the following:
-Descendants of mechanical workers who arrived in Spain from central Europe in the 16th century;
-Descendants of peasants who lost their land in the 16th century;
-Descendants of intermarriage between the Gypsy and non-Gypsy populations;
-Descendants of Muslims who became nomads after the expulsion in the 15th century to escape persecution
-A mixture of the above.




Xuetes are a social group on the island of Majorca, descendants of Sephardic Jews who converted to Christianity in order to not be expelled. The Xuetes were stigmatized and until the first half of the 20th century, but then by the second half of that century, with the spread of religious freedom and laicism, both the social pressure and community ties eventually vanished. Nowadays, despite they small number, they are a important lobby in the business and policy of Majorca island. Most of them are Catholic and a minority returned to Judaism.

[Goujian]

There's also another group of people but they are mostly situated in northeastern Zhejiang called the 堕民 Duomin. I think they mostly disappeared as a subethnic group. I think they have a mix of ethnic origins such as Jurchen, Mongol along with southern ethnic minorities. They also had a distinctive dress

THE DUOMIN
If you think being born into a musician’s household was less than auspicious, consider the misfortune of life in a beggar’s household, and the idiosyncrasy of a government that required families register as such. In Jiangsu and Zhejiang, largely around Shaoxing and Ningbo during the Ming and Qing dynasties, lived the Duomin, the “fallen people” or “lazy people”, depending on which character was used. The closest we can come to their origins is in Zhu Yuming’s work “Trifling Talk”, in which he called them the Dapin (destitute). “In the beginning they belonged to officials’ families. Because of their crimes, the men were killed and the women were registered as beggars. The officials have supported them, while punishing their immorality and corruption, until the present time.”

Berkeley Professor and lauded Sinologist Wolfram Eberhard applied some scientific field research to the question of the Duomin’s origins, and deduced that they were “a non-Chinese ethnic group closely related to the She and the Yao,” both indigenous hill people living in scattered bands from Guangxi to Hunan. The “dog’s head” hair styles, multi-patterned skirts, and other personal cultural styles shared with the She and Yao add considerably to the case.

Whatever their origins, the fallen people were held in contempt by even the lowest Chinese commoners, to the point of not daring resist should one care to beat or otherwise ill-treat them. For all that, they were not given to begging for a living, despite their designation on imperial registrars. They could not take government examinations or become officials, and were barred in all conceivable ways from social advancement. Nonetheless, they were neither slaves nor servile tenants, and managed to serve in menial capacities such as message running, hairdressing, hawking, and that most lowly of occupations, acting.

Fitting that Sun Yat-sen freed not only the Chinese from the yoke of imperial rule, but also the Duomin from the yoke of Chinese discrimination. In March of 1912, Sun gave them full civil rights. As can be imagined, however, prejudice against them continued long after, until Mao came along and changed all equations of who was entitled to look down on whom.