Ethnicity has been a key concept in anthropology and sociology for many years, yet many people still seem uncertain as to its meaning, its relevance, and its relationship to other concepts such as `race' and nationalism. In Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions the major anthropological and sociological approaches to ethnicity, covering much of the significant literature and leading authors, are outlined clearly and concisely.
Ethnicity has been a key concept in anthropology and sociology for many years, yet many people still seem uncertain as to its meaning, its relevance, and its relationship to other concepts such as `race' and nationalism. In Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions the major anthropological and sociological approaches to ethnicity, covering much of the significant literature and leading authors, are outlined clearly and concisely.
This book explores a vital but neglected chapter in the histories of nationalism, racism and science. It is the first comprehensive study of the transnational scientific community that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to classify Europe's biological races. Anthropological race classifiers produced parallel geographies, histories and hierarchies of European peoples that were crucial to the creation of national identities and to the overtly political race discourses of eugenics and popular racist ideologues. They lent nationalism the invaluable prestige of natural science, and traced the histories, conflicts and relationships of ‘national races’ back into prehistory. Racial national character stereotypes meanwhile supported competing political ideologies. The book examines the interplay between class, gender and national identity narratives and the tensions and interactions between the scientific and political agendas of classifiers. Within the elaborate transnational networks of scientific communities, for example, they had to reconcile competing national narratives.
How is ethnicity viewed by scholars of different academic disciplines? Can its emergences be compared in various regions of the world? How can it be conceptualized with specific reference to distinct historical periods? This book shows in a uniquely and innovative way the broad range of approaches to the political uses of ethnicity, both in contemporary settings and from a historical perspective. Its scope is multidisciplinary and spans across the globe. It is a suitable resource for teaching material. With its short contributions, it conveys central points of how to understand and analyze ethnicity as a political resource.
The issue of community-identity construction in Galatians is considered using two methods: first, by applying anthropological theories to the mechanism and natures of community-identity and its construction, and second, by comparing the Galatian community with another minority religious community. Asano argues that Paul's effort at identity construction is partially conditioned by his self-awareness as an autonomous apostle and by the external pressures of the significant groups elsewhere. Paul's conflict, depicted in Galatians 2 and projected upon the Galatian situation, is understood as a conflict between the ethno-centred and the 'instrumental mode' of community constructions, the latter of which is free from the constraints of core ethnic sentiment. Galatians 4.21-31 is identified as a conceptual framework (or 'recreated worldview') for the community members to be assured of their authentic existence under marginalizing pressure. This recreated worldview is ritually acted out in baptism with the egalitarian motif (Gal 3.28) to help internalize the authentic identity. Finally, Paul's letter is suggested to have functioned as a physical locus of community-identity. Thus the autographic marker (Gal 6.11) directs the attention of the audience not only to the conceptual content but to the presence of the founding apostle that the letter replaces.
In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three bilingual, bicultural psychiatric programs for Latino patients at public mental health facilities in New York City. The introduction of "cultural sensitivity" in mental health clinics, she concludes, led doctors to construct essentialized, composite versions of Latino ethnicity in their drive to treat mental illness with sensitivity. The author demonstrates that stressing Latino differences when dealing with patients resulted not in empowerment, as intended, but in the reassertion of Anglo-American standards of behavior in the guise of psychiatric categories by which Latino culture was negatively defined. For instance, doctors routinely translated their patients' beliefs in the Latino religious traditions of espiritismo and Santería into psychiatric terms, thus treating these beliefs as pathologies.Interpreting mental health care through the framework of culture and politics has potent effects on the understanding of "normality" toward which such care aspires. At the core of Medicalizing Ethnicity is the very definition of multiculturalism used by a variety of institutional settings in an attempt to mandate equality.
Today, there is new appeal in the analysis of ethnicity, not merely as innate and fixed identities or fragmented and lost identities, but rather as wounded and then creatively reclaimed. Kearney discusses international examples of cultural wounding and healing and presents two close readings of emerging ethnicities in Australia and Brazil.
In this extensively revised edition, Steve Fenton updates his concise and accessible introduction to ethnicity, drawing on new published work and recent social and historical changes. Discussing an extended range of theorists and illustrations from around the world, Fenton explores and clarifies the core meanings and the shifting ground of this contested concept. More space is given to ideas of 'threat' and 'competition' in conceptualizing ethnicity, as well as to recent issues in migration, especially increased migration to the US from Central and South America. Fenton situates ethnic identities and interest in the changing modern world, and seeks to explain the contemporary conditions of delineation along ethnic and racial lines. Without assuming the centrality of ethnic difference, this book asks: Does it matter? When does it matter? Is it as important as many have assumed? The second edition of Fenton's highly regarded Ethnicity will continue to be an invaluable text for students of sociology, politics and international relations coming to the subject for the first time. Its innovative and challenging approach will also appeal to more advanced scholars of race and ethnicity.
The essays in this volume tackle the construction and significance of race and ethnicity as boundary-making processes among diverse immigrant populations in the United States. Race and ethnicity can both unite and divide. The individual scholars contributing to this volume model, deploy, and explain notions of "borders" and "boundaries" in various ways, but collectively they emphasize the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities that are shaped, negotiated, and contested in specific contexts and situations. Constructing Borders/Crossing Boundaries also captures the range of spaces in which ethnicity and race become salient--the university, the immigrant enclave, the detention center, the work place, the nightclub, and even the trans-Atlantic passage. This interdisciplinary work features essays on a diverse range of immigrant populations from past to present and will interest scholars from across disciplines.
