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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Book•
01 Oct 2001
TL;DR: The authors examines the construction and articulation of (diasporic) cultural identity among the Turkish working-class youth in Kreuzberg (Little Istanbul), Berlin and suggests that the contemporary diasporic consciousness is built on two antithetical axes: particularism and universalism.
Abstract: This book examines the construction and articulation of (diasporic) cultural identity among the Turkish working-class youth in Kreuzberg (Little Istanbul), Berlin. This work primarily suggests that the contemporary diasporic consciousness is built on two antithetical axes: particularism and universalism.
100 citations
100 citations
Book•
29 Jul 2008
TL;DR: Zwitserland heeft waarschijnlijk het meest uitzonderlijke naturalisatiesysteem ter wereld: staatsburgerschap wordt toegewezen op gemeentelijk niveau en niet vanuit de centrale overheid as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Zwitserland heeft waarschijnlijk het meest uitzonderlijke naturalisatiesysteem ter wereld: staatsburgerschap wordt toegewezen op gemeentelijk niveau en niet vanuit de centrale overheid. Dit boek bestudeert naturalisatieprocessen vanuit een vergelijkend perspectief en probeert te verklaren waarom sommige gemeenten strengere regels hanteren dan anderen. Het Zwitserse voorbeeld geeft een unieke mogelijkheid om voorbij de formele staatsburgerschapmodellen te kijken.
96 citations
Cites background from "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The S..."
...One of the first researchers in the field of ethnicity and nationalism who emphasised the actors’ perceptions was Barth (1969)....
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...…the sum of ‘objective’ differences, but only those which actors themselves regard as significant […] some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied’ (Barth 1969: 14)....
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...Barth (1969) argued that a definition of identity cannot simply be imposed on a group, but has to be accepted by significant others before an identity can be said to be taken on.6 Ethnographic studies have shown that categories used by ordinary people in everyday life can differ substantially from…...
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...Another way to explain the formation of shared knowledge constitutes the exploration of the interplay between self-identification and exter- NATION AS A POLITICAL FIELD 59 nal categorisation (Barth 1969)....
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TL;DR: Culture as identity as discussed by the authors refers to the attempt to represent the person or group in terms of a reified and/or emblematized culture, a political exercise, manifest in those processes which we frequently describe as "ethnic," the components of which are referred to as "symbols."
Abstract: brief span two frequently abused words. Their abuse angers anthropologists, not because we are lexical purists, but because it threatens to steal our clothes. Culture is our business, the conceptual focus and organizing topic of our discipline. And identity: one of the buzz words of our times. In lay discourse it has become an awful portmanteau, carrying all sorts of murky cargo. I shall attempt to be resolutely empirical. Without any semantic finesse, I shall treat identity as the way(s) in which a person is, or wishes to be, known by certain others. "Culture as identity" thus refers to the attempt to represent the person or group in terms of a reified and/or emblematized culture. It is a political exercise, manifest in those processes which we frequently describe as "ethnic," the components of which are referred to as "symbols." So we cannot avoid a little more definition-just enough to know roughly what we are talking about. First, culture; then symbol; then ethnicity. These are all words which have some currency in ordinary language, and whose academic and anthropological usage is thereby considerably complicated. In anthropology, culture has gone through a succession of paradigm shifts. In the past it was used to suggest a determination of behavior; for example, that you could only think the thoughts which your culture gave you the words to verbalize-the infamous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; or, that environment, technology, economic modality shaped a congruent culture which, in turn, dictated appropriate behavior. There was then a major school of thought which treated culture as the means by which the supposedly discrete processes of social life, such as politics, economics, religion, kinship, were integrated in a manner which made them all logically consistent with each other. In this view, the individual became a mere replicate in miniature of the larger social and cultural entity. The tendency now is to treat culture much more looselyas that which aggregates people and processes, rather than integrates
96 citations