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 this article, the Toraja architectural carvings serve as vehicles for the rearticulation of assorted sets of rank, ethnic, regional, and political relationships, highlighting the complicated and often ironic relations between material culture, identity negotiation, and human agency.
Abstract: In this article I suggest that art can be more than a passive ethnic marker. Focusing on the architecturally based carvings of the Toraja of Indonesia, I argue that artistic forms are sites for the assertion, articulation, and negotiation of various hierarchical identities and relationships. I trace the contested transformation of Toraja architectural symbols of elite authority into generalized icons of Toraja ethnic identity. As I chronicle these shifts I also illustrate how Toraja architectural carvings serve as vehicles for the rearticulation of assorted sets of rank, ethnic, regional, and political relationships. A key objective in this article is to highlight the complicated and often ironic relations between material culture, identity negotiation, and human agency. Drawing on Scott (1985, 1990), I suggest that while art may serve as a weapon of the weak, it can also be a weak weapon, [identity, art, ethnicity, tourism, agency, Indonesia, Toraja]
35 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic, pragmatic analysis reveals an eminently coherent world of beliefs and attitudes with respect to perceptions of the "other", the self-perception of majority members, formulations of "the problem", and proposed solutions.
Abstract: Newspaper reports, political policy papers, and investigations by social scientists concerning issues related to the presence of a community of migrant workers in Belgium are subjected to a systematic, pragmatic analysis. The analysis reveals an eminently coherent world of beliefs and attitudes with respect to (1) perceptions of the “other,” (2) the self-perception of majority members, (3) formulations of “the problem,” and (4) proposed solutions. This world of beliefs and attitudes is shown to be centered around stable – even if vague – notions of culture, nation and state, democracy and human rights, and around related recipes for “integration” that reveal a collective psyche profoundly troubled by the very idea of diversity in society (linguistic or otherwise). Homogeneity appears to be a strict norm for average members of Belgian society, irrespective of the specific political positions they take. (Minority politics, language and ideology, pragmatics, political rhetoric, news reporting, ethnicity)
35 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the author's solution of "separate but equal" domains for scientific vs. Indigenous archaeologies misrepresents both science and Indigeneity as homogenous entities, affirms these positions as inherently dichotomized and invites comparison to some of the troubling philosophical legacies of racial segregation.
Abstract: In his recent article “Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology,” Robert McGhee questions the intellectual viability of Indigenous Archaeology as well as the contributions of Indigenous Peoples within the field of archaeology. Further, the author challenges the very notion of Indigeneity and characterizes Indigenous and scientific perspectives as mutually incompatible. I argue that the author's solution of “separate but equal” domains for scientific vs. Indigenous archaeologies misrepresents both science and Indigeneity as homogenous entities, affirms these positions as inherently dichotomized and invites comparison to some of the troubling philosophical legacies of racial segregation.
35 citations
Dissertation•
28 Oct 2013
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between identity and the conceptualisation/creation of history and heritage in migration by studying a socially excluded group in Greece, that of Albanian families, and found that the creation of heritage through domestic artefacts and embodied practices revealed identity continuities and ruptures in the diasporic realm, where the remembrance of home away from 'home' did not imply the uncritical endorsement of its heritage.
Abstract: My research explores the dialectical relationship between identity and the conceptualisation/creation of history and heritage in migration by studying a socially excluded group in Greece, that of Albanian families. Even though the Albanian community has more than twenty years of presence in the country, its stories, often invested with otherness, remain hidden in the Greek ‘mono-cultural’ landscape. In opposition to these stigmatising discourses, my study draws on movements democratising the past and calling for engagements from below by endorsing the socially constructed nature of identity and the denationalisation of memory. A nine-month fieldwork with five Albanian families took place in their domestic and neighbourhood settings in the areas of Athens and Piraeus. Based on critical ethnography, data collection was derived from participant observation, conversational interviews and participatory techniques. From an individual and family group point of view the notion of habitus led to diverse conceptions of ethnic identity, taking transnational dimensions in families’ literal and metaphorical back-and-forth movements between Greece and Albania. Jiggling between the personal and the national, history making reproduced in intergenerational narratives, to fulfil individuals’ identity requirements and shifting ideologies of the present. The creation of heritage through domestic artefacts and embodied practices, revealed identity continuities and ruptures in the diasporic realm, where the remembrance of home away from ‘home’ did not imply the uncritical endorsement of its heritage. My study concludes by underpinning the salience of the personal subject developing a reciprocal relationship with the social, the cultural and the ethnic in constructing identity, history and heritage. Different personal experiences and sociocultural backgrounds lead to different narratives of negotiating identity, history and heritage meaning, explaining notions of heterogeneity and multivocality in the same ethnic group or family.
35 citations
01 Dec 1984
TL;DR: The Second World War boosted a whole variety of social changes: the intensification of cash-crop production, the acceleration of migration of all kinds and the rapid growth of cities, the diversification of the occupational structure and, eventually, the movement of Africans into its upper echelons, and the expansion of modern education at all levels as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The history of most African countries since 1940 seems to revolve around a single event: their gaining of political independence. But this climax of nationalism must be set within those social and cultural changes of which it was so much the product and which were, in the main, confirmed in their course for at least a decade or two thereafter. The Second World War boosted a whole variety of social changes: the intensification of cash-crop production, the acceleration of migration of all kinds and the rapid growth of cities, the diversification of the occupational structure and, eventually, the movement of Africans into its upper echelons, and the expansion of modern education at all levels. All these implied changes in areas more immediately constitutive of ‘society’, namely in how people identified themselves and in their patterns of social cooperation and conflict. Now the concept of ‘social change’ is more than a mere umbrella for several parallel, probably somehow-related changes in diverse aspects of social life; it denotes the systematic transformation of a particular society. But at what level do we set ‘society’? The difficulty was that, though the prime source of these changes did not lie within them, it was still much easier, as late as the 1940s, to speak of local social systems like those of Asante or the Luo as being societies than whole colonies like the Gold Coast or Kenya. Thus the pioneering study, G. and M. Wilson's The analysis of social change (1945), took as its units of analysis these small-scale societies, even though the features of change which they described resulted from the progressive incorporation of these societies into wider units, of which the colonial social system was the most important.
35 citations