Participatory destigmatization strategies among Palestinian citizens,Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi Jews in Israel

Abstract

This study examines how members of minority groups in Israel cope with stigmatization in everyday life. It focuses on working-class members of three minority groups: Palestinian Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin) and Ethiopian Jews. It reveals the use of racial, ethnic and national markers in daily processes of social inclusion and exclusion in one sociopolitical context. Palestinians, a group with a fixed external identity and a limited sphere of participation, were found to use the language of race and racism when describing stigmatizing encounters. Ethiopian Jews, the most phenotypically marked group, strictly avoided this language. For their part, Mizrahi Jews perceived the very discussion of stigmatization as stigmatizing, while often using ‘contingent detachment’ to distance themselves from negative group identities. Despite differences between the communities and the powerful role of the state in establishing symbolic and social boundaries, members of all three groups expressed their intention to achieve or retain avenues for participation in the larger society.     

Belonging to the nation: generational change,identity and the Chinese diaspora

This study reviews developments in the ethnic and national identity of the descendants of migrants, taking ethnic Chinese as a case study. Our core question is why, in spite of debates worldwide about identity, exclusion and rights, do minority communities continue to suffer discrimination and attacks? This question is asked in view of the growing incidence in recent years of ‘racial’ conflicts between majority and minority communities and among minorities, in both developed and developing countries. The study examines national identity from the perspective of migrants' descendants, whose national identity may be more rooted than is often thought. Concepts such as ‘new ethnicities’, ‘cultural fluidity’, and ‘new’ and ‘multiple’ identities feature in this examination. These concepts highlight identity changes across generations and the need to challenge and reinterpret the meaning of ‘nation’ and to review problems with policy initiatives designed to promote nation-building in multi-ethnic societies.     

Becoming American by becoming Muslim: strategic assimilation among second-generation Muslim American parents

ABSTRACT

Strategic assimilation describes how individuals use boundary work to construct identities which allow them to selectively maintain ties to a minority community while assimilating into the mainstream. However, scholarship that accounts for the role that minority religious identity plays in these processes is warranted. The current study fills a theoretical and empirical niche by exploring boundary work among not only racial, but religious minorities in their processes of identity construction and assimilation. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork as well as 72 in-depth interviews with Muslim Americans in Metro-Detroit, I demonstrate how upper-middle-class suburban second-generation parents actively deconstructed class, racial, and ethnic boundaries to construct boundaries around religious identity and generational identity. In so doing, they consciously crafted a de-ethnicized interpretation of Islam and hence a Muslim American identity that they saw as integral in promoting upward assimilation for themselves and their third-generation children.     

Bringing class back in: class consciousness and solidarity among Chinese migrant workers in Italy and the UK

The growing literature on international migration has a tendency to emphasize homogenous elements such as shared ethnic background, social network and cultural similarities in shaping immigrants' identity. We argue that this underestimates the differences (and sometimes conflicts) of interests between ethnic employers and migrant workers and that class needs to be brought back into the studies of ethnic relationship. Based upon findings from a series of fieldwork in Veneto, Italy and East Midlands, UK, this article contends that class consciousness has co-existed, sometimes uneasily, alongside co-ethnic and cultural relationships among Chinese migrant workers and has played an important part in the making of new Chinese communities. By analysing the perspectives of Chinese migrant workers and their relationship with co-ethnic entrepreneurs, this article illustrates complex factors behind the formation, diffusion and development of class consciousness among Chinese migrant workers.     

Immigrant transit camps ‐ The formation of dependent relations in Israeli society

In this article three approaches to define and explain negative ethnic attitudes are discussed: the anthropology of cultural misunderstanding, the sociology of how differences in group positions are justified ideologically, and the social psychology of maintaining self‐esteem through intergroup differentiation. The‐ aim is to integrate these approaches into an interdisciplinary model. Social identity theory is used as a frame for this integration. The argument developed is that ingroup values are used for intergroup differentiation and evaluation. This leads to the development of stereotypes. Stereotypes reflect misunderstanding, but also anchor social representations of a hierarchy of group positions (ethnic hierarchy). Depending on the ethnic composition of the larger society, majority and minority groups will differ in their ethnic hierarchies. Discrepancies between ethnic hierarchies will lead to ethnic tension. From the perspective developed, a number of hypotheses is derived about how changes in the socio‐economic position of minority groups will affect intergroup evaluations. Hypotheses based on the category differentiation model and the social identity model are specified with respect to the expected changes in stereotypes and intergroup discrimination of the ethnic majority and minority groups.     

Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands

The place of Yao and other ethnic minorities in official museums and histories in China, Thailand, and Vietnam shows the state’s involvement in identity politics. The museumizing of minority identities tends to endorse particular markers of difference, and simultaneously conceal both the state’s role in sanctioning particular identities and the state’s suppression of the cultural and agricultural practices that previously reproduced social difference. The discursive framework of modern nation-states contrasts with the explicit exclusion of upland populations by pre-modern polities in the region, and I argue that this apparent othering was only partly about the nonstate peoples and had as much to do with tensions among levels of the state. The Yao case suggests various entanglements of ‘tribal’ identities and the state’s projects, and indicates how anthropological theorizing about ‘peoples’ systemically failed to observe the historical role of the state in bifurcating the social and natural landscape.     

Manufacturing marginality among women and Latinos in neo-liberal America

Intersectionality is the study of how categorical distinctions made on the basis of race, class and gender interact to generate inequality, and this concept has become a primary lens by which scholars have come to model social stratification in the USA. In addition to the historically powerful interaction between race and class, gender interactions have become increasingly powerful in exacerbating class inequalities while the growing exclusion of foreigners on the basis of legal status has progressively marginalized Latinos in US society. As a result, poor whites and immigrant-origin Latinos have increasingly joined African Americans at the bottom of American society to form a new, expanded underclass.     

Immigration and Chinese reproductive behavior in Canada

This study is intended to provide an empirical testing of the minority status hypothesis with regard to the fertility behavior of Chinese immigrants to Canada. The focus is placed on the role of group or social context on actions of individuals. Factors incurred in the immigration process as explained by disruption and assimilation hypotheses are also examined. Using the multi-level contextual analysis, we have found that the relative economic insecurity that comes from minority membership and the course of immigration serves to decrease fertility of minority members, whether they are associated with a pronatalist heritage or not. However, pronatalist traditions do stimulate fecundity of Chinese immigrants as long as their relative economic status is improved and the hardship is gone.     

Ethnicity and class identity: The case of French‐ and English‐speaking Canadians*

This study addresses the racial and religious contexts of identity formation among Lebanese immigrants to the United States of America and Somali immigrants to Canada. Each enters with a different racial status: Lebanese as white; Somalis as black/visible minority. Ethnographic interviews explore the strategies of adaptation and identity development within these groups. Specifically, we compare and contrast the Lebanese and Somali experience through an analysis of ethnic relations in the country of origin, the conditions of immigration, and through accounts of their encounters and identity negotiation with the host society. We demonstrate the strategies each group implements to negotiate both race and religion in identity development. Our findings reveal that each group attempts to make their religious identity evident, however, Somali immigrants must negotiate the effects of ‘othering’ processes with both race and religion, while Lebanese immigrants build a religious identity from privileges afforded to them by virtue of their white racial status.     

Protesting headscarf ban: a path to becoming more French? A case study of ‘Mamans toutes égales’ and ‘Sorties scolaires avec nous’

Muslim protests of French headscarf policies might be expected to signify and reinforce a desire to remain apart from mainstream society. This case study of a group of Muslim mothers protesting the 2012 ‘Chatel circular’ finds the opposite. The protest reflects a positive attachment to French identity, culture and values and, in many ways, takes the form of a feminist movement. The study is based on semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation with ‘Mamans toutes égales’ and ‘Sorties scolaires avec nous’, the two main protesting groups, and others in their political environment. It describes the history of the movement, the characteristics of the activists, their attitudes towards religion, gender, and French society, and explains how the experience of protest has affected their integration into French society. It suggests policies of exclusion, such as headscarf bans, can affect processes of both inclusion and exclusion.     

Ethnicity and factionalism in Zimbabwe nationalist politics 1957–79

Four explanations of xenophobia and racism will be reviewed by confronting them with the results of empirical studies. I try to show that xenophobic and racist views of the social world are not instrumental to a fight for scarce jobs or housing. Neither is it appropriate to interpret them as a result of a culture clash that is caused by migratory movements across countries and continents. They are not mere radicalizations of the discourse of exclusion and devaluation which political and administrative elites generate and institutionalize, for example, in immigration policies. Starting from the insights of this critical review, I shall develop the hypothesis that xenophobia and racism should be seen as appeals to the pact of solidarity into which state and society have entered in modern nation‐states and which in times of intensified social conflicts seems fragile in the eyes of downwardly mobile groups. The xenophobic discourse serves not only to reassure identity when nationalistic self‐images run into crisis but is an element of a political struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society: a fight for the collective goods of the modern state.     

Entertaining “Chineseness”: Chinese Singing Clubs in Contemporary Bangkok

ABSTRACT

This article explores the link between music and the construction of identity among a group of middle-class Thai-Chinese in contemporary Bangkok. Based on fieldwork conducted there, the article describes the nature, function, and activities of singing clubs that cater to middle-class Thai-Chinese singing Mandarin Chinese popular songs. Riding on the economic boom in Thailand in the early 1990s, these singing clubs have drastically increased in number since early 1994. Informed by the notion that identity is a social construct within specific historical moments, this essay focuses on a particular type of singing activity and calls attention to the importance of music as a way to understand the complex issues of overseas Chinese identity. Through an analysis of performance context, musical behavior, and music, I explore issues of “Chineseness,” and the nature of diasporic Chinese culture, against the sociopolitical climate in contemporary Thai society. I argue that identity politics are integral to understanding music and performance because the choice to participate in any type of performance is often motivated by and embedded in ethnic consciousness and group identity. This case study enhances understanding of the processes of identity formation and the multifaceted dimensions of Chinese music in a changing global context.     

Ethnic identity and race: the “double absence” and its legacy across generations among Australians of Southern Italian origin. Operationalizing institutional positionality.

The paper provides a discussion on the concept of “double absence” and its legacy among participants originating from Calabria, Italy. It illustrates the impact of such an embodied affective state in light of race-ethnic relations perceived intergenerationally. While the first generation of participants manifest a condition of feeling “absent”, the second generation present a condition of “liminality”, as a result of a socialization process between “the world” of their immigrant parents and the Australian one. The third generation, due to a perceived positive evaluation about their ethnic background, manifests its ethnicity proudly. A pivotal role is played by the amount of cultural capital accumulated by the participants, dynamics of assimilation and the exogenous pressures the participants perceived from the “common sense” of the dominant society, as Gramsci terms it. Individuals’ ethnic identity appears to be shaped by their institutional positionality, which is their ethnic perception of “being in the world”.     

Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations,alternative education,and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle-class families

This article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle-class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self-aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child-centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.     

Culturalizing politics,hyper-politicizing ‘culture’: ‘White’ vs. ‘Black Turks’ and the making of authoritarian populism in Turkey

This paper focuses on the uses and abuses of two terms, ‘White’ and ‘Black Turk’, which have been significant in the ways modern Turkish society and national identity have been defined and contested in recent decades. Initially emerging in social analysis in the 1990s, ‘White Turk’ was a metaphor for and critique of the class culture, subjectivity and worldviews of the ‘new middle classes’ in a period of rapid integration to neoliberalism and globalized capitalism. Over time, both White and Black Turks have come to be used as part of a politics of identity and a politics of authenticity to characterize who are seen as the ‘authentic self’ and inauthentic others of national identity and to assert different visions for the future of Turkish society. White Turk has been adopted as an identity by outspoken members of the media and business elite, whereas its binary opposite, Black Turk, has been appropriated by Islamist politicians of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as a metaphor to characterize the marginalization and purported oppression of their conservative Muslim constituency. As White and Black Turks were adopted as self-proclaimed identities, they provided a basis for a culturalist depiction of Turkish society, contributing over time to an increasingly divisive politics. Even though the AKP initially used the reference to White and Black Turks to appeal to specific demands for inclusion, as it increased its grip on power, it also (hyper)politicized the terms to articulate nativist claims to authenticity. In recent years, this nativist populism has been used to justify increasing authoritarianism and to delegitimize belonging and political participation of those deemed inauthentic others of the body politics.     

A veil (hijab) as a public symbol of a Muslim woman modern identity

In this article the author explains the social role of Muslim woman in a postmodern society through a public symbol of her identity--the veil. The article's thesis is that the Muslim women's manifestation of their Islamic denomination through veiling and wearing appropriate clothes (in the case of men through growing beards and wearing clothes considered appropriate for them) signifies an expression of a new, Islamic shaped identity. This is a postmodern identity based on modernity rather than a fundamental reaction to modernity. The veil, a public symbol of Muslim identity, is often given a different meaning by its observers than the person actually wearing it. Therefore, the intention of this article is to analyze the elements of a particular, postmodern identity that a Muslim woman's veil, as a public symbol, represents.     

Law and ‘race’ in the citizenship spaces of Myanmar: spatial strategies and the political subjectivity of the Burmese Chinese

As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and people's negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and authority are articulated differently from Western norms.     

The Flagbearers: Israeli Druze Women Challenge Traditional Gender Roles

This ethnographic study expands educational anthropologists' knowledge of the relationship between higher education and personal and social change in so-called traditional societies. It describes transitions in the status of Druze women in Israel brought about by the first women from the community to obtain higher education, granting new insights into women's struggles for change. The study, conducted between 1998 and 2002, explores unique processes of change compatible with Druze tradition and culture initiated by these "first women," who served as role models and struggled to pave the way for themselves and other women in the community. The findings challenge research literature that expresses disappointment with the activities and influence of educated Arab women after returning to their society, thus enriching working anthropological theories that concern the dynamics of social change brought about by educated women.