Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference
About: This article is published in British Journal of Sociology.The article was published on 1970-06-01. It has received 4205 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Social organization & Ethnic group.
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TL;DR: In addition to the creation of a shared community identity, potters may have produced and reproduced other social identities that served to create arenas of division, such as gender identities as discussed by the authors, which may suggest that gender identities were created out of the way some potters, possibly women, hand modeled vessels while others, possibly men, threw vessels on a wheel.
Abstract: Between 1769 and 1834, the Spanish missions of Alta California were pluralistic communities. Faced with cultural entanglement, residents of particular missions formed communities of practice, out of which a shared social identity may have emerged. This process of colonial identity construction is illustrated by the patterned ways potters at one mission, Mission San Antonio de Padua, constructed Plainwares. Potters within this mission community selected the same local raw materials and fired ceramics in open fires. As potters participated in shared traditions of ceramic production, with regard to these steps in the manufacturing sequence, they may have created a shared social identity. In addition to the creation of a shared community identity, potters may have produced and reproduced other social identities that served to create arenas of division. For example, variability in primary forming techniques may suggest that gender identities were created out of the way some potters, possibly women, hand modeled vessels while others, possibly men, threw vessels on a wheel. Through ceramic production, potters at Mission San Antonio de Padua may have at one scale fostered a sense of belonging to the mission community, but at other scales created arenas for social distinction within the indigenous population.
39 citations
01 May 1998
TL;DR: The Sea Peoples' episode was crucial for a shift of the economic and political centre of gravity of the Mediterranean world away from the Levant and towards Greece, Africa Minor, and Italy as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: textBringing down the Hittite empire and dealing Egypt a
blow from which it never recovered, the Sea Peoples’ episode
at the end of the Bronze Age was crucial for a shift of
the economic and political centre of gravity of the Mediterranean
world away from the Levant and towards Greece,
Africa Minor, and Italy. Soon this shift was to give rise to
the splendors of archaic and classical Greece developing
into Hellenism, Carthage, Etruscan civilization, Rome, the
Roman empire, early Christianity, and, in the long run, the
emergence the modern western European civilization,
dominated by speakers of Indo-European languages, but
greatly influenced by a Levantine religion (Judaism). For
better or worse, the Sea Peoples’ episode was one of the
few major turning points in world history, comparable to
the period of the great migrations which led to the collapse
of the Roman empire, or the rise and early spread of Islam.
39 citations
01 Jan 2016
Abstract: This collection deals with an ancient institution in Eastern Polynesia called the rahui, a form of restricting access to resources and/or territories.
While tapu had been extensively discussed in the scientific literature on Oceanian anthropology, the rahui is quite absent from secondary modern literature. This situation is all the more problematic because individual actors, societies, and states in the Pacific are readapting such concepts to their current needs, such as environment regulation or cultural legitimacy. This book assembles a comprehensive collection of current works on the rahui from a legal pluralism perspective. This study as a whole underlines the new assertion of identity that has flowed from the cultural dimension of the rahui. Today, rahui have become a means for indigenous communities to be fully recognised on a political level. Some indigenous communities choose to restore the rahui in order to preserve political control of their territory or, in some cases, to get it back. For the state, better control of the rahui represents a way of asserting its legitimacy and its sovereignty, in the face of this reassertion by indigenous communities.
39 citations
01 Dec 1984
TL;DR: In the early 1930s, there were few violent demonstrations of a modern political character, that is, aimed at securing greater participation by Africans, and more specifically the small educated elite, in the governmental processes of the colonial state.
Abstract: By 1939 the European colonial powers were as firmly in control of their African territories as they ever would be. During the preceding ten years there had been few major challenges to their authority. Africans had come to accept the new political order and to obey the rules laid down by the colonial administration. The lesson had been learned that, although the colonial administration was thin on the ground, in the last resort it had overwhelming resources of power. Attempts to take advantage of the weakness of some colonial administrations during the First World War and to return to an independence based on pre-colonial political structures, though temporarily successful, had failed. Such challenges to the colonial authorities as did take place during the 1930s were made within the framework of the colonial state and were by and large limited to protest against obnoxious features of the administration; such protest took the form of riots against taxation or strikes to obtain higher wages or better conditions of service in the small colonial industrial sector. With the notable exception of French North Africa, there were few violent demonstrations of a modern political character, that is, aimed at securing greater participation by Africans, and more specifically the small educated elite, in the governmental processes of the colonial state. Nevertheless it was clear that if the educated elite accepted the status quo it was a passive not an active acceptance: they hankered after an independence, but, like the British, they saw it as a goal whose realisation was distant.
39 citations