▪ Abstract In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.

The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences

More than culture: Structural racism, intersectionality theory, and immigrant health

Citizenship encompasses legal status, rights, participation, and belonging. Traditionally anchored in a particular geographic and political community, citizenship evokes notions of national identity, sovereignty, and state control, but these relationships are challenged by the scope and diversity of international migration. This review considers normative and empirical debates over citizenship and bridges an informal divide between European and North American literatures. We focus on citizenship within nation-states by discussing ethnic versus civic citizenship, multiculturalism, and assimilation. Going beyond nation-state boundaries, we also look at transnational, postnational, and dual citizenships. Throughout, we identify methodological and theoretical challenges in this field, noting the need for a more dynamic and comprehensive understanding of the inter-relationships between the dimensions of citizenship and immigration.

Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State

Undocumented immigration has gained unprecedented prominence in many of the world's wealthiest nation-states. In the United States, a substantial population of undocumented youth is growing up with legal access to public education through high school, but facing legal and economic barriers to higher education, even when attaining college admission. The legal and social contradictions associated with undocumented status limit these youths’ chances for upward mobility through traditional means. Based on ethnography and in-depth interviews, this article examines the experiences of documented and undocumented children of working-class Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. Because their educational and home environments are not differentiated, undocumented youth undergo similar social incorporation processes as their documented peers early on. However, their legal protections end after high school, greatly limiting their chances for upward mobility through education. In some cases, knowledge of future barriers to college attendance leads to a decline in educational motivation. Existing assimilation theories need to be expanded to include this novel and sizeable phenomenon.

“I Can’t Go to College Because I Don’t Have Papers”: Incorporation Patterns Of Latino Undocumented Youth

This review explores contemporary processes through which immigrants are categorized into shifting racial landscapes in the new Europe. Tracing the racial genealogy of the immigrant through European and Europeanist migration studies, the successive construction of overlapping tropes of the nomad, the laborer, the uprooted victim, the hybrid cosmopolite, and the (Muslim) transmigrant are examined. This history points to the perduring problematization of the immigrant as the object of national integration. If migration studies have effectively tended to racialize migrants into a new savage slot, recent ethnographies of the immigrant experience in Europe point to ways in which immigrant and diasporic groups cross racial frontiers and enact solidarity across class and cultural lines.

/pdf/immigrant-racialization-and-the-new-savage-slot-race-3dkq61zcua.pdf

IMMIGRANT RACIALIZATION AND THE NEW SAVAGE SLOT: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 37, Number 5, December 1996 CI 1996 by The Wenne1-Gren Foundation for Anthropologi~l Research. All rights reserved OOI1-3204/96/370~:-OOO2S3.00 Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States' by Aihwa Ong This paper views cultural citizenship as a process of self-making and being-made in relation to nation-states and transnational pro­ cesses. Whereas some scholars claim that racism has been re­ placed by cultural fundamentalism in defining who belongs or does not belong in Western democracies, this essay argues that hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference intersect in a complex, contingent way to locate minorities of color from dif­ ferent class backgrounds. Comparing the experiences of rich and poor Asian immigrants to the United States, I discuss institu­ tional practices whereby nonwhite immigrants in the First World are simultaneously, though unevenly, subjected to twO processes of normalization: an ideological whitening or blackening that re­ flects dominant racial oppositions and an assessment of cultural competence based on imputed human capital and consumer power in the minority subject. Immigrants from Asia or poorer countries must daily negotiate the lines of difference established by state agencies as well as groups in civil society. A subsidiary point is that, increasingly, such modalities of citizen-making are influenced by transnational capitalism. Depending on their loca­ tions in the global economy, some immigrants of color have greater access than others to key institutions in state and civil society. Global citizenship thus-eonfers citizenship privileges in Western democracies to a degree that may help the immigrant to scale racial and cultwal heights but not to circumvent Status hi­ erarchy based on racial dUference. AIHWA ONG is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Uni­ versity of California, Berkeley IBerkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. I. She has conducted ethnographic research in Malaysia, South China, and California and is currently working on citizenship, economic restructuring and uansnational publics. She is the au­ thor of Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Facrory Women in Malaysia IAlbany: State University of New York Press, 19871 and the coeditor, with Michael G. Peletz, of Be­ witchmg Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in South­ east Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19951 and, with Don NOnioi, of Edges of Empire: Culture and Identity in Modern Chinese TransnaUonalism INew York: Routledge, in pressl. The present paper was submitted n 1 96 and accepted 18 1 96; the final version reached the Editor's office 4 1II 96. In the fall of r970, I left Malaysia and arrived as a fresh­ man in New York City. I was immediately swept up in the antiwar movement. President Nixon had just begun his secret bombing of Cambodia. Joining crowds of angry students marching down Broadway, I paIticipated in the takeover of the East Asian Institute building on the Columbia University campus. As I stood there confronting policemen in riot gear, I thought about what Southeast Asia meant to the United States. Were South­ east Asians simply an anonymous mass of people in black pajamas? Southeast Asia was a faI-off place where America was conducting a savage war against commu­ nism. American lives were being lost, and so were those of countless Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others. This rite of passage into American society was to shape my attitude towaId citizenship. As a for­ eign student I was at a disadvantage, ineligible for most loans, fellowships, and jobs. My sister, a naturalized American, could have sponsored me for a green card, but the bombing of Cambodia, symptomatic of widet disregard for my part of the world, made American citi­ zenship a difficult mo,.l issue for me. Much writing on citizenship has ignored such subjec­ tive and contradictory experiences, focusing instead on its broad legal-political aspects. For instance, Thomas Marshall (r9501 defines citizenship as a question of mo­ dernity, but he identifies it primarily in terms of the evolution of civil society and the working out of the tensions between the sovereign subject and solidarity in a nation-state. Other scholars have pointed to the con­ tradiction between democratic citizenship and capital­ ism-the opposition between abstract, universalistic rights and the inequalities engendered by market com­ petition, race, and immigration (Hall and Held r989, Potles and Rumbaut r 9901. But these approaches seldom examine how the universalistic criteria of democratic citizenship variously regulate different categories of sub­ jects or how these subjects' locatio!U>'ithin the nation­ state and within the global economy conditions the con­ struction of their citizenship. Indeed, even studies of citizenship that take into account the effects on it of capital accumulation and consumption have been con­ cerned with potential sltategies for political change to remake civil society (Yudice t995). Seldom is attention focused on the everyday processes whereby people, espe­ cially immigrants, aIe made into subjects of a particulaI nation-state. If Citizenship as Subjectification Taking an ethnographic approach, I consider Clllzen­ ship a cultural process of subject-ification,1I in the Fou­ caldian sense of self-making and being-made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration (Foucault t989, 199tl. Thus formulated, my concept of cultural cilizenship can be applied to various global con­ texts (see Ong r993, Ong and Nonini t996), but in this papel I will discu'ss the making of cultural citizens in 1. I received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Gender Roles Pro­ gram for research on Cambodian refugees and cultural citizenship. I thank Brackette Williams and Katharyn Poethig for their com­ ments on earlier drafts of the paper and Kathleen Erwin for proof­ readinR the flnal version.

David Y. H. Wu

Papers

Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making