Additional excerpts

Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference

2. Tempo, identidade e memória social

Trans-Himalayan Traders: Economy, Society and Culture in Northwest Nepal

In this paper I will consider several ditt'erent ypes of ethnitication processes related to the social organization of people in multicultural workplaces.l By ethnification process I mean a series of actions which either directly or indirectly make an ethnic characterization of some individual or group a normatively and/or conventionally 'proper' description.2 Most of the social organizing I will be talking about will be the organization of face-to-face communication within various social activities. My goal here is to show how ethnicity, as one of many possible determinants of an identity, is constituted in this Upe of communication. Other types of social organizing I dealwith, e.g. job assignments, recruitment, production processes I have no direct communicative data from; rather the data I have is of people telling us how these things are carried out. What I take ethnicity to mean is, hopefully, what the people I investigate mean by it. Thus I also hope to show some aspects and uses of ethnicity as a member's concept, the type of work it does and when, how, and why it is used. The work presented here is micro-oriented and empirical. I will make some claims about the locus and functionality of ethnicity for a few of those very same people more macro-oriented investigators talk about in statistical terms. Whereas the question for more macro-oriented work is 'Who and what are the X (Swedish, Jewish, Kurdish, etc.)?', I feel my question is 'Why and how are the X?'. The distinction between macro and micro here is premised on the argument that'who and what' questions are answered by social scientists as lists of traits which are potentially infinite and can not supply necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying someone as of a certain ethnicity. Instead, the counter argument goes, the identification of a person on ethnic grounds is an accomplished iscursive matter contingent upon the referential occasion (Moerman I974; Weider & Platt 1990). Furthermore, in this view ethnicity is both a process (Barth 1969) and intersubjective

Tang's dilemma and other problems: Ethnification processes at some multicultural workplaces

Berlin's post-1989 rebuilding is used to explore the role of cultural professionals, exemplified by architects and urban planners, in the production of locality. Drawing on an analysis of architectural debates, competitions and building projects, the article traces how the model of the ‘European city’ became the dominant paradigm of urban reconstruction in the 1990s and what precisely was understood by the term ‘European city’. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the contentious notion of ‘tradition’ was mobilized as the main localizing strategy in response to intense internationalization. It shows how locality came to be constructed in contrast to other spatial-cultural units (e.g. the ‘American city’) and to particular historical layers of the city (e.g. that of the socialist era). The intense controversies over Berlin's rebuilding lucidly illustrate how the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ are symbolically constructed by actors as relational categories, where the very categories are not fixed but multilayered, value-laden, historicized, contested, repeatedly redefined and restructured.

The Cultural Production of Locality: Reclaiming the ‘European City’ in Post‐Wall Berlin

More than one million people reported their race as American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) in the 2000 U.S. census but did not do so in the 1990 census. We ask three questions. First, which subgroups had the greatest numerical growth? Second, which subgroups had the greatest proportional increase? And third, are the 2000 single-race AIANs and the 1990 AIANs the same set of people? We use full-count and high-density decennial census data; adjust for birth, death, and immigration; decompose on age, gender, Latino origin, education, and birth state; and compare the observed subgroup sizes in 2000 with the sizes expected based on 1990 counts. The largest numerical increases were among adolescent and middle-aged non-Latinos, non-Latino women, and adults with no college degree. Latinos, women, highly educated adults, and people born in Eastern states had the largest proportionate gains. The ability to report multiple races in 2000 and the new federal definition of “American Indian” may have especially affected these groups, although personal-identity changes are probably also involved. We find that thousands of new Latino AIANs reported only one race in 2000, but many 1990 AIANs reported multiple races in 2000. Thus, the 1990 AIANs and 2000 single-race AIANs are not always the same individuals.

http://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2013/CES-WP-13-02.pdf

Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference

Citations

2. Tempo, identidade e memória social

Trans-Himalayan Traders: Economy, Society and Culture in Northwest Nepal

Tang's dilemma and other problems: Ethnification processes at some multicultural workplaces

The Cultural Production of Locality: Reclaiming the ‘European City’ in Post‐Wall Berlin

More Than One Million New American Indians in 2000: Who Are They?

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