 In this way, he pointed to the fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e.g.anthropologists, may not coincide with the self-identification of the members of that group.He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had the added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies.