Promoting majority culture and excluding external ethnic influences: China’s strategy for the UNESCO ‘intangible’ cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

China’s enthusiasm for having many World Heritage–listed sites is well-known as a national strategy of cultural soft power, economic development, and incorporating minority groups into the Han-dominated Chinese state. Relatively understudied are China’s efforts related to UNESCO’s lists of ‘intangible’ cultural heritage, which inscribe people’s living culture – such as dances, costumes, and songs – as world heritage. This study focuses on how some ethnic groups’ intangible culture has been objectified for the World Heritage Lists by the Chinese state. This study argues that by enlisting ethnic minorities’ culture under the name of Chinese state, the state can reinforce state borders that often run across ethnic and cultural boundaries, reducing external influences on minorities from their trans-border ethnic or cultural kin. Concomitantly, the majority’s cultural prominence is further entrenched in this process by the emphasis placed on minorities’ folklore in contrast to the Han’s culture of civilization.     

‘Mixed’ Japanese-Filipino identities under Japanese multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

The ways in which multiculturalism is debated and practiced forms an important frame for ‘mixed’ ethnic identities to take shape. In this paper, I explore how young migrants of Japanese-Filipino ‘mixed’ parentage make sense of their ethnic identities in Japan. My key findings are that dominant discourses constructing the Japanese nation as a monoracial, monolingual and monoethnic nation leave no space for diversity within the definition of ‘Japanese’, creating the necessity for alternative labels like haafu or ‘mixed roots’. Japanese multiculturalism does not provide alternative narratives of Japaneseness but preserves the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity by recognizing diversity while maintaining ethnic and racial boundaries. Lastly, these categories have not been actively questioned by my respondents. Rather, they show flexibility in adopting these various labels – haafu, ‘mixed roots’, Filipino, Firipin-jin – in different contexts.     

Ethnic entrepreneurship and the question of agency: the role of different forms of capital,and the relevance of social class

The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship has focused on structural factors, group characteristics or a combination of both when explaining the entry and/or success of different ethnic groups in/to self-employment. While the active involvement of individuals has often been noted, agency has been under-theorised, and frequently conflated with what are considered as ‘cultural’ factors. This article explores the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship by looking at how entrepreneurs access and mobilise different kinds of resources. Using a forms-of-capital approach, the article draws on qualitative data from the U.K. and Spain, and looks at how entrepreneurs mobilise cultural, social and economic resources in structural contexts that include constraining as well as enabling features. Our findings show that the entrepreneurs are active agents who play an important role in shaping ethnic businesses. However, their agency varies significantly depending on the extent to which entrepreneurs have access to different kinds of resources, which is closely linked to their socioeconomic position. The article contributes to the literature through its direct engagement with the question of agency in ethnic entrepreneurship, and by highlighting the relevance of social class in entrepreneurial processes.     

The transnational phase of Chinese organisational development in Australia

This article aims to contextualise the new phase of Chinese organisational development in Australia in the academic tradition of transnationalism, explore the concrete forms of transnational activities undertaken by overseas-oriented Chinese organisations in economic, socio-cultural and political domains and analyse their policy relevance for both China and Australia. It argues that while these transnational activities could be seen as deliberative attempts to cater to the policy imperatives of the People's Republic of China, they also have the potential of furthering the national interest of Australia, which looks to enhance its economic and political standing in Asia. Underlying the triadic interactions of the Chinese transmigrants is the situational representation of ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Westernness’, which allows them to achieve a strategic balance in addressing the policy objectives of Australia and China and accumulate the greatest amount of ethnic capital in the process. Though primarily driven by self-interest and surely not free from controversies and tensions, these new forms of Chinese organisational activism are gradually taken into account by policy-makers of both countries to develop policy responses in multiple areas.     

Diversity in place: narrations of diversity in an ethnically mixed,urban area

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the implications of representations of places as ‘diverse’, particularly for those who live in them. Arising from an interdisciplinary research project, the paper takes one neighbourhood in Manchester (Cheetham Hill) and explores some of the narratives about it produced by residents and those who have a ‘professional’ stake in the area. These are put in the context of public narratives of the area, as well as Census data. The paper examines how different types of data generate different stories and how different methodological approaches can produce varied understandings of place, which have implications for how a place comes to be known and for the potential impact on the distribution of resources. Cheetham Hill is known as ‘diverse’, or even ‘super-diverse’, but the paper examines how this label serves to obscure lived experience and inequalities and can reveal ambivalences over the ethnic difference and urban living.     

The social distance of Poles to other minorities: a study of four cities in Germany and Britain

This contribution investigates the social distance of immigrants from Poland in four Western European cities – London, Birmingham, Berlin and Munich – particularly Polish immigrants’ distance towards members of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities in their various social roles. Presenting unique data from the first wave of a longitudinal qualitative study, we first discuss the differential levels of social distance that Polish immigrants place between themselves and members of minority groups in each city. We find that respondents’ socio-demographic characteristics impact their social distance, but their education and occupation may have less of an effect than their place of origin in Poland or current place of residence and work. Moreover, these factors work differentially across the four cities. After analysing social distance with respect to three dimensions of difference – ethnicity, religion and sexuality – we find several different social-distancing mechanisms. Ultimately, we argue that social science needs to consider regional and local contexts in which social attitudes towards minorities are acquired and exercised. Similarly, we need to reflect on the group’s presumed homogeneity and on the unifying visions of the ‘host society’ as a site of migrants’ incorporation.     

The ‘new Chinatown’: the racialization of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Singapore

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese' construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.     

铸牢城市少数民族中华民族共同体意识的价值、困境及路径

大量少数民族由农村迁移至城市,既为城市的发展注入了活力,也为民族工作和城市治理带来了挑战。铸牢城市少数民族中华民族共同体意识是做好民族工作的关键,能够帮助少数民族更好地适应并融入城市生活,并有助于在城市地区进一步做好民族团结进步示范创建工作,有效破解城市治理的难题。应从完善保障城市少数民族合法权益的机制和体制,努力提高城市少数民族贫困群众的生活质量与水平,关注并及时满足城市少数民族的精神需求,充分调动和发挥城市常住少数民族群众的积极性和带头作用四个方面去铸牢城市少数民族中华民族共同体意识。     

The racialized death-politics of urban resilience governance

ABSTRACT

In the essay, ‘Necropolitics’, Achille Mbembe attends to the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death – exceptional violence that exceeds the biopolitical aim of fostering life – thus alluding to a state of emergency in which law is suspended and martial rule is brought into force. However, as several commentators have suggested, exceptional politics does not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, such as in cases where governmental and non-governmental actors are vested with powers to take strong measures against specific urban sub-populations in the name of security or order maintenance. Still, even these reworked and expanded approaches to death-politics revolve around sovereign exceptionality and the accompanying fabrication of undesirable ‘others’. Somewhat counterintuitively, the present article advances an analysis of racialized security politics issuing from the breakdown of representational, topographical boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘us’ and ‘others’. Illustrated by a case from Malmö, Sweden, it urges greater attention to how necropolitics could operate entirely outside the trope of emergency as exception. The principal argument is that urban security politics, when operating within the frame of resilience governance, involves distinctly different configurations of necropolitics, which require a critical-theoretical vocabulary outside the traditional framework of securitization.     

社会人类学的都市族群研究

从社会人类学的视角对都市族群研究进行文献综述和理论回顾,并对我国都市族群研究的可能性方向和研究方法进行探索,指出我国都市族群研究至少包括三个领域:(一)海(境)外华人在中国都市的族群认同、文化认同、国家认同表述研究;(二)少数民族融入大都市之后的族群、文化与社会认同表述研究;(三)新移民进入都市之后的族群性地域认同研究。都市族群研究内容包括认同建构研究、文化表述研究、大都市人意识与身份的形成过程研究。在研究中应注意族群内心情感问题、族群形成过程问题、认同的理性选择问题和历史记忆在认同建构中的作用问题。     

Strangers within? Russian-speakers’ migration from Latvia to London: a study in power geometry and intersectionality

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to contribute to debates on ethnic identification and migration through a focus on a specific group – Russian-speakers from the Baltic state of Latvia who have migrated to the UK. Twenty-six interviews with members of this group were gathered in London and the wider metropolitan area during 2012 and 2014. Russian-speakers represent uniquely combined configurations of ‘the other within’: in most cases, they are EU citizens with full rights; yet, some still hold non-citizens’ passports of Latvia. While in Latvian politics Russian-speakers are framed as ‘others’ whose identities are shaped by the influence of Russia, interview findings confirm that they do not display belonging to contemporary Russia. However, London is the ‘third space’ – a multicultural European metropolis – which provides new opportunities for negotiating ethnic identification. Against the background of triple ‘alienation’ (from Latvia, from Russia and from the UK), we analyse how ethnicity is narrated intersectionally with other categories such as age and class. The findings show that Russian-speaking migrants from Latvia mobilise their Europeanness and Russianness beyond alienating notions of (ethno)national identity. The paper also demonstrates that being open to ethnicity as a category of practice helps us towards a progressive conceptualisation of often overlooked dimensions of integration of intra-EU linguistic ‘others’.     

Big fat Assyrian/Syriac weddings: rituals and marriage traditions among Middle Eastern Christians in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Weddings can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ and also as ‘symbolic struggles’ since their glamour appears to be a new indicator of status for many families, especially migrant ones. A mixture of traditional as well as reinvented wedding customs serves a community searching for ethnic identity markers that can help it to embrace all of its descendants. This article presents a case study of how Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and marriage traditions that are being performed and transformed in the migratory context of Sweden over the last 50 years. Among the Middle Eastern Christians, who have been emigrating from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq since the 1960s, and which today numbers 120,000 individuals, marriage is a very serious business – a permanent union between spouses and their respective families. The purpose of the article is to analyse Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and to discuss how they have shaped the modern Assyrian/Syriac identity. It also explores how local marriages connect and reconnect migrants of this ethno-religious group(s) and how it differentiates them from their peers in the surrounding Swedish society – religiously, socially and even aesthetically.     

‘Asian fail’: Chinese Canadian men talk about race,masculinity, and the nerd stereotype

Popular representations of Asians – and especially Asian men – often stereotype them as nerds. Drawing on qualitative field studies of Chinese Canadians' beliefs about ‘authentic’ identity and of an urban ‘nerd-culture scene,’ this article examines the perceived nerdiness of Asians. Membership Categorization Analysis is used as a framework to analyze two Chinese Canadian men's self-categorizing discourses. One embraces his nerdiness but is ambivalent about his racial/ethnic identity; the other is comfortable being categorized as Asian but distances himself from what he describes as the ‘typical’ nerdy Asian male. Although orientations to their presumptive categorization as Chinese or Asian differ, both design their self-presentations to manage inferences made about them. We argue that Canadian multiculturalism complicates these processes by discursively transforming racial difference into ‘cultural diversity’. This produces systematic errors in categorization, leading to inaccurate inferences of cultural competences or stereotypes social attributes from perceptions of physical difference. Under these conditions, the linking of nerds and Asians not only constrains individual life projects but can function as the ‘benign discourse’ that hides a racial subtext, reproducing historic, anti-Asian stereotypes in a seemingly neutral guise.     

Multi-ethnic public sphere and accessible ethnic media: mapping online English-language ethnic media

The multi-ethnic public sphere requires a functioning media system that facilitates intercultural dialogue across communities. As producers of multi-ethnic voices, the role of ethnic media is important in this debate. However, studies so far have focused on ethnic media’s role within their respective communities rather than their role within broader society. Equally, theoretical debates on ethnic media as independent spheres focus on speaking by and listening to minority voices without consideration of the necessary conditions that need to be in place in order to enable these voices to be heard. This study advances Charles Husband’s notion of the ‘multi-ethnic public sphere’ by using a notion of an ‘intercultural media system’ that considers both availability and accessibility of ethnic media for a broader audience as a necessary condition to enable listening. Drawn from New America Media’s NAM National Ethnic Media Directory, the study provides a case study on the ethnic media sector in the U.S. by mapping accessible ethnic media, that is, ethnic media that produce content in English or bilingually online. The findings suggest the existence of a substantial base of accessible ethnic media with a growing interest in serving audiences beyond their respective communities.     

The diversity trap? Critical explorations of black male teachers’ negotiations of leadership and learning in London state schools

ABSTRACT

Black and minority ethnic teachers are significantly underrepresented in British schools. Despite increasing anxieties about Britain’s ‘diversity shortage’ among teachers, recent studies on the experiences of Black teachers generally, and Black male teachers specifically, remain rather sparse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 Black Caribbean and Black African male teachers with five or more years of experience in London schools, this article deploys Bourdieusian conceptions of organizational habitus to explore the ways in which the national ‘diversity shortage’ can lead to a local ‘diversity trap’ in state schools that limits the range of roles Black male teachers are encouraged to pursue in schools. Findings suggest that pressures for Black male teachers to serve in racialized roles as community liaisons, role models, and school-wide disciplinarians, particularly for ethno-racial minority students, have stymied the long-term progress of Black male teachers towards departmental and administrative leadership – ranks at which the diversity shortage is even more acute.     

Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development–security nexus

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the observation that, since the collapse of eastern European state socialism, the Roma have become the subject and target of Europe-wide development programs and discourses, while, at the same time, they have been problematized in terms of social, public and national security. Due to the ways in which development and security have ambiguously come together in Europe’s recent history, I will argue that the living conditions of the poorest among the Roma have not only worsened, but also, and more fundamentally, the divide between Europe’s rich and poor has become seriously racialized and almost unbridgeable. I explain how the bio- and geopolitical conditions under which development and security have merged in Europe’s engagement with the Roma have led to a situation in which the official aim of Roma-related development programs – the improvement of their living conditions and life chances – tends to result in a dreadlock.     

Super-diversity vs. assimilation: how complex diversity in majority–minority cities challenges the assumptions of assimilation

International migration changed large West European cities dramatically. In only two generations’ time, their ethnic make-up is turned upside down. Cities like Amsterdam and Brussels now are majority–minority cities: the old majority group became a minority. This new reality asks for an up-to-date perspective on assimilation and integration. In this article, I will show why grand theories like segmented and new assimilation theory no longer suffice in tackling that new reality of large cities, and I will question critically whether using the perspective of super-diversity is more pertinent for our analyses. Children of immigrants nowadays no longer integrate into the majority group, but into a large amalgam of ethnic groups. Next to the diversification of ethnic groups, we see diversification within ethnic groups in the second and third generations. I will focus on intergenerational social mobility patterns given that they are key to existing grand theories of assimilation. I will argue that super-diversity theory can only partially show us the way. To further build an alternative theoretical perspective, we also need to borrow from the intersectional approach and the integration context theory.     

An invisible minority? Return migration and ethnicity in Okinawa*

This paper examines ethnic return migration in Japan by looking at a particular case – that of people of half-Okinawan parentage returning to Okinawa, referred to in this paper as the Nisei. By going beyond conventional theories that entice people to return migrate to their ethnic homelands, I also look at issues regarding nationality and how the category of ‘Japanese’ tends to conflate race and ethnicity, thus creating boundaries as well as ‘invisible minorities’. I also explore how ethnicity and nationality intersect using this particular case and how these intersections are actually created and enabled through processes of migration. In line with this, I also discuss how ‘Japanese’ and ‘half’ are both ascribed and self-ascribed identities, and how each of these two categories delineate ‘boundaries’ and hence engage in ‘boundary-making process/es’.     

共生理论视阈下中华民族共同体建构的五维向度

中华民族共同体建构的基本逻辑是一个从"求同存异"到"聚同化异"的过程,旨在构建一个多民族休戚与共、血脉相连的共生关系与共生状态。中华民族共同体的有效建构必须赋予"共生"的理念,以责任、族际、文化、利益、命运为共生单元的建构逻辑,进而推动中华民族政治共同体、文化共同体、价值共同体、利益共同体、命运共同体的全面建构。