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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01 Jan 1996
TL;DR: The transformation of ethnic identities in the early-twentieth-century Honolulu, mainly focusing on the Korean community, was studied in this paper, where the authors showed that white supremacy ideology had exerted strong influence on the minority groups in Honolulu all the way through their immigration and settling-down process.
Abstract: This research deals with the dynamic ethnic socio-spatial relations and the transformation of ethnic identities in the early-twentieth-century Honolulu, mainly focusing on the Korean community. Against the widely spread notion that the ethnic relations of Honolulu in those days were little associated with the racist ideology which was prevalent in the contemporary mainland cities, this research shows that white-supremacy ideology had exerted strong influence on the minority groups in Honolulu all the way through their immigration and settling-down process. Although Honolulu included a balanced population among several ethnic groups and thus had no ethnic division of "majority" and "minority" in numerical sense, it witnessed an unequal power distribution along ethnic lines and an application of mainland-style racialization or ethnicization to its social structure. Clear occupational stratification and residential segregation by ethnic groups in the earlytwentieth-century Honolulu were nearly equal to situation in the mainland cities. On the basis of socio-spatial segregation, the dichotomized identity, "Local" versus "Haole," evolved. Non-white minorities not only had to compete with each other for limited urban resources or employment opportunities, but also they had to negotiate a collective strategy to cope with an unfair social structure controlled by white supremacy. The coalescence of several ethnic groups into a "Local" identity was fostered by spatial propinquity of their residential neighborhood. Mixed concentration of non-white ethnic groups in a particular place contributed to the formation of a new pan-ethnic identity. The Korean community in Honolulu, most of whose members had been firstly imported to Hawai'ian sugar plantations within the context of colonial capitalism, went through the change of identity in adjusting to the ethnically divided social structure. When the community was incorporated into the Hawai'ian version of multi-ethnic identification process, "Local" versus "Haole," its members' identity as Koreans was also transformed into the identity as Korean-Americans, within the larger construct of "Local" identity. The transformed identity was a product of on-going inter-ethnic negotiation process embedded in the non-white multi-ethnic neighborhood. CHAPTER
28 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored how Slovenian national public public television came to serve as a central site of contention where fundamental issues of identity, politics and national culture were challenged, negotiated and defined, and argued that one of the most important cultural and political institutions in the creation, maintenance and reinforcement of Slovenia's national identity was, and continues to be, national public television.
Abstract: This article illustrates how Slovenian national public television came to serve as a central site of contention where fundamental issues of identity, politics and national culture were challenged, negotiated and defined. The Slovenian case offers an interesting laboratory for an analysis of the role of journalism in creating and asserting a particular version of national identity. This article explores how Slovenian television's elites (journalists, editors and officials) articulate the importance of public television as the ‘machine that creates Slovenians’. Based on an analysis of roughly twelve interviews with journalists of Slovenian national television, I argue that one of the most important cultural and political institutions in the creation, maintenance and reinforcement of Slovenian national identity was, and continues to be, national public television.
28 citations
Cites background from "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The S..."
...[6] The importance of culture, or more precisely, literature in the creation or invention of nations, has been recognised by many scholars coming from different intellectual traditions (see Bhabha, 1990; Anderson, 1991; Hobsbawm, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Barth, 1969)....
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...The need to constitute nations discursively through the process of imaginative ideological labour has been widely acknowledged (Barth, 1969; Bhabha, 1990; Foucault, 1972; Gellner, 1983)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the effect of acculturation on responses to a selected group of environmental issues was examined and the authors suggest that environmental educators and natural resource managers need to look beyond the ethnicity and age of a person and consider the overall level of accculturation in ascertaining individual levels of environmental concern.
Abstract: This research focused on the effect levels of acculturation on responses to a selected group of environmental issues. A scale of environmental concerns was administered to forest visitors in two southern California forests. Significant differences were observed on four of the eleven issues. Overall mean differences were congruent with the study hypothesis in 9 of the 11 concerns. Level of acculturation, as measured by length of residence in the United States and the arrival age of the individual, accounted for most of the observed variation in environmental concern. The findings suggest that environmental educators and natural resource managers need to look beyond the ethnicity and age of a person and consider the overall level of acculturation in ascertaining individual levels of environmental concern.
28 citations
TL;DR: The concept of "nation-state science" was introduced by as discussed by the authors to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state.
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of “nation-state science” to describe the scientific work of ethnoracial classification that made possible the ideal of the homogenous nation-state. Swedish scientists implicitly defined their nation for Continental Europeans when they explicitly created knowledge about the “Lapps” (today's Sami/Saami). Nation was coupled to state through such ethnoracial categories, the content of which were redefined as Sweden's geopolitical power rose and fell. These shifts sparked methodological innovations to redefine the Lapp, making it a durable category whose content was plastic enough to survive paradigm shifts in political and scientific thought. Idiosyncratic Swedish concerns thus became universalized through the scientific diffusion of empirical knowledge about Lapps and generalizable anthropometric techniques to distinguish among populations. What Sweden lost during the nineteenth century in terms of geopolitical power, it gained in terms of biopower: the knowledge and control of internal populations made possible by its widely adopted anthropometric innovations. Nation-state science helps unpack the interrelationships between state-building, nation-making, and scientific labor.
28 citations
Cites background from "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The S..."
...Norway’s late independence (1905) and abrupt consolidation of Norwegianness prompted harsh Sámi assimilation policies and a lasting social stigma against the identity (Eidheim 1969)....
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