Nativity
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- For the Nativity of Jesus, see Nativity of Jesus.
- For the 2006 film, see The Nativity Story
Nativity is the general time and place of a person's birth and early years.
The term has evolved a strong association, at least in Western civilization through the influences of Christianity, to the nativity of Jesus of Nazareth, which Christians refer to simply as The Nativity.
The term is also frequently encountered – especially in iconography and names of parishes – in connection with the birth of the mother of Jesus of Nazareth herself, "the Nativity of Mary", or "the Nativity of the Virgin", although the event is not related in the canonical Gospel accounts, only in the New Testament apocryphal literature.
The term can also apply to cultural appropriation to identify the specific and general situation, as in Native land, language, political system and environment, of a person. In this sense, a person's nativity is construed (or misconstrued) to form a basis for a general impression based on national origin or ethnicity.
Nativity can be applied to abstractions like a genre such as Blues music or a particular discipline like the Scientific method.
