72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST summing up his effort to infuse a new sense of rigour in conceptualising these phenomena, that "not only should the conceptual distinction between state and nation be adhered to, but the distinction between nation and ethnic too is crucial" - the latter difference being that "a nation is a territorially anchored cultural community in its ancestr al or adopted homeland; (while an) ethnic is a nation or part of a nation dissociated from or marginalized in its homeland". The potential for conflict between the demands of ethnicity and nationality in Oommen's framework, could be resolved in the notion of citizenship. Oommen interprets citizenship, seemingly a simple, uni-dimensional concept, as a more complex principle: as a status that nationalities and ethnics are entitled to and as a set of duties that they are obliged to fulfil. Oommen's arguments carry a depth and gravity of reasoning, though certain reservations could arise over his approach. Several of the strategies adopted by political campaigners working for national rights have at times bordered on artifice. The legitimacy of these practices could be judged, ideally speaking, only within the context of the times. Social science research in casting a retrospective eye at these complex processes, normally stakes out a clear position in terms of intent - it clearly specifies whether the object is to arrive at a descriptive account, or to prescribe certain standards to which political practice should conform. In sociological terms, this distinction is honoured in the effort to differentiate between the "positive" and the "normative" approaches. This appears to be a problematic area of Oommen's work, a region of unstated intentions. Descriptions of empirical reality and assessments of how well they respond to theoretical concepts, alternate with prescriptive forays, as when he denounces the use of race and religion as criteria of nationality, but upholds the central importance of language. A number of questions arise: if the concepts of citizenship, nationality and ethnicity have often been conflated, or subsumed one within the other in the past, could it be because their actual evolution as categories has been closely interlinked? Reality in other words, has never followed the tight conceptual distinctions that sociological theory has sought to impose. In their practical dimensions, these concepts have intermingled freely, undergone rapid and successive mutation. The political application of these concepts indeed, has provided much of the inherent dynamic to the modern process of nation formation. In seeking a theoretically pristine position, in other words, is Oommen