Movement in spaces of liminality: Chinese dance and immigrant identities

This paper explores the roles of immigrant dance in ethnic construction. It is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with a Chinese dance organization in the US Midwest. Chinese dance in the US, a transnational cultural practice, solidifies a sense of belonging among Chinese immigrants. As these immigrants make sense of what it means to be Chinese and to do Chinese dance in contemporary American society, they reinvent their collective identity while holding on to primordial understandings of ethnicity rooted in the constructed ideas of ancestry and homeland. A case study of the ethnic construction theory, this research sheds light on the paradox of embodied immigrant identities: they are constructed through cultural practices and yet often understood as primordial, transnational and yet necessarily place-bound.     

Picture perception in monkeys and pigeons: Transfer of rightside-up versus upside-down discrimination of photographic objects across conceptual categories

Monkeys and pigeons were trained to discriminate between normally oriented full frontal pictures of humans and upside-down reversals of the same pictures as stimuli. Monkeys displayed a high level of transfer to the new pictures of full frontal and rear views of humans and silhouettes, but failed to transfer to the close-up and far human faces. Pigeons showed poorer transfer to the silhouettes and higher transfer to the far human faces than did monkeys. Further transfer tests were performed with non-human pictures, including monkeys, birds, mammals, and man-made objects. Pigeons failed to transfer to the non-human pictures. This indicates that the pigeons had learned to classify the pictures based on some concrete features specific to the humans and that the transfer to the new versions of human pictures could be explained by simple stimulus generalization based on perceptual similarity. Two out of four monkeys did transfer fairly well to the non-human pictures, except for the man-made objects. High levels of transfer to the non-human natural pictures suggested that the monkeys classified the pictures on the basis of the orientation of objects represented by the pictorial displays. A preliminary report was presented by the first author (M. J.) at the 13th Congress of the International Primatological Society, Nagoya, Japan, 1990. The present research was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, No. 02301017 (principal researcher:Tadasu Oyama, Nihon University) to M. J. The monkey experiments were conducted at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, and the pigeon experiments at the Department of Psychology, Chiba University.     

Clubs of culture and capital: immigrant and second-generation incorporation in a new destination school

The influx of Latin American immigrants into the US South since the early 1990s has changed the demographic face of the region, particularly among school-aged populations where the rate of growth among Latinos has been the fastest. Despite an emerging literature addressing changing racial and ethnic relations in the New US South, relatively little research has addressed the incorporation of Latino youths within southern schools. Relying on data from a four-year ethnographic and in-depth interview study in one North Carolina town, findings suggest powerful benefits of ethnic-identity based clubs for Latino youths in new immigrant destination schools. While both Latino and African American respondents faced discrimination within their community, Latino students received more formal support at school, which helped shield them from the negative impacts of discrimination.     

The spiral of disadvantage: Ethnolinguistic discrimination,acculturative stress and health in Nahua indigenous communities in Mexico

Objectives

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that ethnic and ethnolinguistic discrimination, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) related to being Indigenous as well as different aspects of acculturative stress, are associated with poorer health and higher levels of depression among the Nahua Indigenous communities.

Materials and methods

Our quantitative survey was carried out in four different regions inhabited by the Nahua people in Mexico. Self-rated health and depression, the symptoms of PTSD, two facets of acculturative stress and ethnolinguistic discrimination were assessed by questionnaires. The data were analyzed using binary logistic regression models.

Results

The symptoms of PTSD and acculturative stress experienced in the workplace were significantly associated with a higher risk of poor self-rated health, adjusted for various socio-demographic characteristics. Acculturative stress, discouragement of language use, language avoidance and ethnolinguistic discrimination were related to a higher risk of depression and PTSD.

Discussion

Our research implies that ethnic and linguistic discrimination, acculturative stress and the memory of harm linked to being Indigenous reflected in the symptoms of PTSD, are important predictors of poorer health and depression among Nahua groups in Mexico. These adverse effects could be significantly counteracted by effective dealing with stigmatization and discrimination against Indigenous people in Mexico and by replacing strong assimilation pressures with integrational approaches that respect ethnolinguistic diversity and reduce socioeconomic marginalization.     

Being a freshie is (not) cool: stigma,capital and disgust in British Pakistani stereotypes of new subcontinental migrants

Intra-ethnic discrimination, in the form of stereotyping of recent migrants by settled ethnic minorities, has been interpreted as internalized racism, displacing stigma and negotiation of local hierarchies of belonging. Stereotypes of ‘Fresh off the Boat’ migrants construct cultural boundaries and assertions of belonging, offering clues to processes of identity-making where ethnicity is complicated by ongoing migration. In British Pakistani portrayals of ‘freshies’, this assertion of difference coexists with familial ties and a high incidence of transnational marriage. Analysis of the figure of the ‘freshie’ in internet comedy videos, combined with qualitative research material, provides insight into dynamics of cultural and social capital, immigration and sexuality through manifestations of difference, similarity and disgust. Together these not only reveal the weakness of recent migrants’ positions in structures of socio-economic and symbolic power, but the blurring of social categories, and the continuing importance of transnational kinship in negotiations of identity amongst British Pakistanis.