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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Dissertation•
16 May 2016
TL;DR: This paper explored the ways in which a Chinese civilizing project intervened powerfully in cultural and social change in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang from the 1870s through the 1930s and demonstrated that the efforts of officials following an ideology of domination and transformation rooted in the Chinese Classics changed the ways that people associated with each other and defined themselves and how Muslims understood their place in history and in global space.
Abstract: This dissertation concerns the ways in which a Chinese civilizing project intervened powerfully in cultural and social change in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang from the 1870s through the 1930s. I demonstrate that the efforts of officials following an ideology of domination and transformation rooted in the Chinese Classics changed the ways that people associated with each other and defined themselves and how Muslims understood their place in history and in global space. Chinese power is central to the history of modern Xinjiang and to the Uyghur people, not only because the Chinese center has dominated the area as a periphery, but because of the ways in which that power intervened in society and culture on the local level. The processes and ramifications of the Chinese government in late-Qing and early Republican Xinjiang demonstrates strong parallels with colonialism in the context of European empire. This dissertation does not focus on the question of typology, however, but instead draws on methods from colonial history to explore the dynamics of a linguistically and religiously heterogeneous society. In order to do so, I draw on local archival documents in Chinese and Turkic and place them into dialogue with the broader Turkic-language textual record. This dissertation thus proceeds from the inception of the ideology that drove the civilizing project, through its social ramifications, to the innovations that emerged in Islamicate literature and history in Xinjiang in this period.
33 citations
Dissertation•
01 May 2020
TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic study of contemporary Liverpool-Yemeni life based on fifteen months of fieldwork during 2017 and 2018 is presented, focusing on the constructions and performances of everyday Liverpool-yemeni identities among the post-migration generation who continuously negotiate the diasporic tension of "roots" and "routes".
Abstract: British-Yemenis have received little attention, scholarly or otherwise, in the contemporary context of the UK. Similarly, there are few ethnographically-informed studies focusing on contemporary Liverpool despite the region’s rich histories of migration and its numerous diaspora groups. Addressing these gaps, this thesis presents an ethnographic study of contemporary Liverpool-Yemeni life based on fifteen months of fieldwork during 2017 and 2018. The focus is primarily upon the constructions and performances of everyday Liverpool-Yemeni identities among the post-migration generation who continuously negotiate the diasporic tension of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. Adapting Gerd Baumann’s framework of ‘the multicultural triangle’ to account for dimensions of translocality, Liverpool-Yemenis’ multiple belongings are explored along ethnic, national/local, and religious lines.
The key finding of the thesis is that while second-generation Liverpool-Yemenis largely do not mobilise politically as an ethno-national ‘community’ to enact change in the homeland, ‘Yemeniness’ nonetheless retains salience in the production and performances of an aesthetic diaspora, which is rooted in the translocal family beyond the gaze of the institutions of wider society, yet also negotiated alongside multiple other belongings.
While subjective ‘Yemeniness’ is rarely politicised, the milieu of L8 with its long history within Liverpool as a multi-ethnic locality provides an important, alternative space of belonging and engagement beyond family networks. In the context of this neighbourhood, processes of organic hybridisation and practices of demotic cosmopolitanism give rise to increasingly confident articulations of ‘Scouse-Yemeniness’.
Additionally, Islam and Muslim identifications are more often articulated as inseparable from participants’ subjective ‘Yemeniness’. Yemen and Yemeni culture are instead reclaimed as legitimately ‘Islamic’, particularly against perceived Saudi antagonisms. Islam is also seen to provide a shared, but not de-culturated, form of belonging extending beyond ethnic ties in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood.
33 citations
Cites background from "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The S..."
...Nonetheless, it is perhaps the seminal work of Barth (1969) which has most greatly influenced constructivist understandings of ethnicity as he locates it in the processes of boundary making rather than the ‘cultural stuff that it encloses’ (Barth, 1998: 15, reprint of original edn.)....
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...Wimmer (2013) takes a sociological-Barthian approach stressing the importance of boundary making, and Jenkins (2008) calls for a more fluid understanding based on social-anthropological models which incorporate stability and change simultaneously....
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TL;DR: A counter-narrative that questions and critiques the totalizing concept of nation, which blinds its people to the multiple connections with those outside its borders is proposed in this paper.
Abstract: tional entities of all kinds and the advent of transnational markets have shaken us into an awareness that cultural configurations have always ignored real and imaginary sovereign boundaries. The American South, we now should see, is in many ways the northern rim of the Caribbean - especially the coastal states of Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. As such, alongside Mexico and the northern shores of Central and South America, the area embraces the islands that are usually the only thing one thinks of when the word "Caribbean" crops up. Homi Bhabha has stated that counter-narratives of the nation "that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and conceptual - disturb those ideological maneuvers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities."1 Constituting the Caribbean world to include its center and rim(s) as a new kind of imagined community is in fact a counter-narrative that questions and critiques the totalizing concept of nation, which blinds its people to the multiple connections with those outside its borders. Of course very often national powers have a vested interest in preventing these kinds of recognitions and extensions, for they may lead to efforts at secession and attempts to form new nations - witness the opposition of both former dictator Saddam Hussein and the Turkish government to the bonding of the Kurds. In the more mundane world of "Southern-Lit-Nation" there may well be resistance to the kind of argument I am making today, as it can be read as a threat to the hegemony of the platitudes that have reigned in southern studies for decades. However, as I hope to suggest, we can better understand the local through the lens of the transnational and the global, and southern literature and culture have always transcended the physical boundaries of a geographical South. Pre-contact southern America had broad bands of differing cultures, and as conquest proceeded, they were superseded by new ones. We now remember that before the Louisiana Purchase, whose bicentennial we celebrated in 2003, New Orleans was the crown jewel of a Franco-Caribbean empire that spread French culture up the Mississippi and across
33 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the dynamics of armed mobilization and participation in non-state armed organizations in the province of South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are studied, and it is shown that individual determinants of participation are not time invariant.
Abstract: This dissertation is a study of the dynamics of armed mobilization and participation in non-state armed organizations in the province of South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It asks one of the fundamental questions of the study of violent conflict: Why do people participate in armed groups? In addressing this central question, it also addresses the inter-related questions of how do people come to participate in armed groups and who participates in these groups. I make three main arguments. First, contemporary armed mobilization is driven by two ‘macro’ factors in rural eastern DRC, the necessity to organize and provide protection to the sociopolities that constitute rural eastern Congo on one side, and the more accumulative dynamics of labour mobilization and control that have long characterized the region and have taken novel forms with the development of an economy of predation. The protective dimension in particular has often been left out in recent accounts that have focused or economic agendas of armed groups. Second, the ‘social architecture’ of armed mobilization in the region has changed to reflect the social implantation of armed organizations in rural eastern Congo, resulting from the novel roles they play in these societies and the adaptation of these societies to their presence. As a result, modes of recruitment and control reflect the multi-faceted influence that these organizations have over rural societies. Third, I argue and show that individual determinants of participation are not time invariant, they evolve over time and reflect the changes in outlook and motivations of participants that results from the social implantation of armed organizations, but also as a result of the process of participation. In order to make these arguments, I use a mixed methods approach that combines a qualitative analysis based on interviews carried out during 9 months of fieldwork in the province of South Kivu, and a quantitative analysis based on original panel data collected through a survey of 1072 individuals and 134 villages of South Kivu.
33 citations
TL;DR: In this article, concepts derived from general man-environment system (MES) models are applied to the specific problem of nomadic sedentarization, focusing on the manner in which residential mobility ma...
Abstract: Concepts derived from general man-environment system (MES) models are applied to the specific problem of nomadic sedentarization. The analysis focuses on the manner in which residential mobility ma...
33 citations