Expanding the ‘social’ in ‘social identity’

Not enough consideration has been given by some texts in the field of ‘social identity’ to the task of defining society, which is, after all, the notion behind the first half of the field's name. For these particular texts, one very basic definition – ‘society is human interaction’ – is left to stand alone. This paper does not challenge the importance of any of the attempts by these texts (or by any other texts in the field) to describe and analyze the plethora of identities being promoted, invented, or rejected around the world. Rather, it focuses on only the ‘social’ component in ‘social identity’, arguing that the field as a whole would be stronger if all its contributors, or at least the great majority of them, granted this component a more important role. In particular, the paper offers the field three definitional possibilities it might usefully add to the ‘society is human interaction’ definition.     

我的’94

我的＇９４编者按１９９４年即将过去。此一年间发生过的许多事、出现过的许多人，都给人们留下了深刻的印象。这里，我们找到了与１９９４年一些重大事件相关的人，请他们谈谈自己的１９９４年。以此，我们愿在１９９４年的背影上为读者留下珍贵的回忆。１９９４年，真山...     

African American Adolescents’ Psychological Well-Being: The Impact of Parents’ Religious Socialization on Adolescents’ Religiosity

The dearth of research literature on the religious beliefs and practices of African American adolescents has led to increased empirical inquiry, yet a lack of research considers African American adolescents’ religious beliefs and practices as an important developmental milestone. This study explored how African American parents’ religious socialization affected youth religious experiences and served as a culturally specific strength-based asset that promotes psychological well-being. Our sample included a socioeconomically diverse sample of 154 African American families. Accounting for demographics, adolescents’ relationship and communication with God were found to be associated with a healthier psychological well-being. Additionally, parents’ religious socialization impacted the relationship between youths religious beliefs and practice and psychological well-being. Overall, results suggest that parents’ and adolescents’ religious beliefs can promote psychological well-being.     

Italian Americans in the ‘Bocce Belt’: ‘Old World’ memories and ‘New World’ identities

This essay examines the development of an ethnically and racially segregated resort landscape in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York in the twentieth century. Focusing on the history of Italian American resorts clustered primarily in Greene County, New York, it demonstrates that ethnicity continued to shape the social and cultural lives of many European immigrant New Yorkers and their families well after World War II. Ethnic resorts provided vacationers with an insulated recreational environment in which group identity and transatlantic ties – both real and imagined – could be fostered and sustained. However, the flexibility of these ethnic identities and the pervasive discrimination against African Americans at ethnic resorts in the 1940s and 1950s reveals the extent to which European Americans had largely internalized a sense of white ethnic identity by the postwar decades. The history of ethnic resorts in the Catskills sheds light on the process by which generations of European Americans in New York City negotiated these multiple ethnic, national, and racial identities.     

’95中国民俗游一览

’９５中国民俗游一览北方风情卷辽宁沈阳──民俗村大连──民俗村吉林延吉──朝鲜族村镇：观览歌舞，参与文体活动黑龙江哈尔滨──桃山猎人木星，牡丹江镜泊湖：朝鲜族瀑布村内蒙古海拉尔──呼伦贝尔草原蒙古族风情呼和浩特──四子王旗格根塔拉旅游点。达茂旗希拉穆...     

Connecting cultures: rethinking Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘ideals of education’

In 1917, Rabindranath Tagore declared, ‘There is only one history – the history of man’ [Tagore, R. (1917/2009). Nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin, p. 65]. This concept of ‘one-history’, and by extension ‘one-world’ is at the heart of his conceptualisation of what I call, education-sans-boundaries and, as I see it, one of the ways to bring a glocal unity. His goal was to establish the dignity of human relationships across boundaries. Thus, for him, local education and global education should not be two ends of a spectrum but overlapping categories instead. Moreover, the education-sans-boundaries should help in restoring the balance and harmony between man and society, knowledge and knowledge, and nation and nation. In this paper, I will explore Tagore’s relevant writings on education, with a focus on his concerted educational efforts to negotiate the boundaries of nation and geography to restore the lost rhythm. In the highly fractured times in which he lived, Tagore saw education in India was in a double-layered crisis under colonialism and growing nationalism. His was a non-dogmatic defence of harmony and principles of unity, and he tried to achieve this in his education models by going beyond the realms of collapsing of cultural differences and without sacrificing local/individual ties and that admits to no artificial boundaries – political, ideological or geographic. The present attempt, therefore, engages with Tagore’s distinct conceptualisation of open-ended education models by looking at his scholarly-and-practical efforts. It suggests that transmission of cultures has provided a ‘broad-basis’ of education in India and can offer healthy conditions for, and directions towards, building transnational/international solidarities.     

’98新春致读者

寒梅怒放，飞雪迎春。新年新刊新面目，眠族论坛》和读者见面了。测览目录，翻阅内文，变了。是的，时代变化，社会转型，反映人们思想观念的文化载体也在发生着变化。《民族论坛》在改革开放的大潮中，努力适应我国期刊产业的发展趋势，经国家新闻出版署批准，从本期起，变更为由湖南省民族事务委员会主办的双月刊。省民委党组高度重视这一变化，把它看成是进一步宣传贯彻党的民族政策，促进民族工作社会化，推动全省民族团结进步事业向纵深发展的重要契机。为此，请领导题了词，以示鼓励和鞭策；组成了编委会，以切实加强对本刊的领导；调…     

Promoting ‘American’ democracy

Dating from the Reagan presidency's ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George H.W. Bush that ‘beyond containment lies democracy’, or by George W. Bush that intervention into the Middle East promoted a ‘march to freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US foreign policy should not be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest that it is merely rhetorical cover for intervention and control, thus serving US rather than local interests. While not discarding these insights, this paper suggests that while democracy promotion may support US self-interests, so too does it uphold a US self-image by acting as an ideal around which Washington constructs its identity and worldview. Explored in relation to Latin America, it is argued that US democracy promotion – enabled by authoritarian representations of Venezuela – is central to both a US-authored Latin American identity and, in contrast, integral to challenging it. While Venezuela acts as the reverse image of freedom-loving United States and a democratically abiding Latin America, Caracas also challenges US democratic pre-eminence by extending the very notion of democracy and thereby demonstrates how both democracy and US influence more broadly are increasingly sites of contestation.     

’94中国旅游业扫描

’９４中国旅游业扫描本刊记者经过了前两年高速增长后，今年中国旅游业的形势是扎实工作，平稳推进。这是旅游权威部门的估价。其主要表现是：在一些行业不景气，许多国有企业亏损严重的形势下，旅游业以其新兴产业形象和较好经济效益脱颖而出，因而许多地区的领导人逐渐...     

Educating tomorrow’s reformists: factors affecting the development of undergraduates’ social progressivism

Researchers have unpacked the ways in which students participate in democracy through voting and other forms of civic engagement. However, very little empirical work has delved into how students develop socially progressive values, despite their unprecedented importance to young people during their years in higher education. Rooted in a rich historical context of campus demonstration spanning the past 75 years and current events in the United States, this inspection of college students’ social progressivism was grounded by Pascarella’s model of students’ learning and cognitive development, and uses OLS (ordinary least squares) regression to investigate the phenomenon. Analyzing data collected by the Cooperative and Institutional Research Program from 159 institutions across the United States, this study explored the predictive capacity of students’ interaction with influential agents of socialization and other variables central to undergraduates’ college experiences. Results indicate that socially progressive students tended to interact more with faculty outside of office hours and had a higher cumulative GPA. Additional findings and implications are discussed.     

Other identities in ethnofederations: women’s and sexual minorities’ advocacy in Belgium

This article considers the experience of the impact of ethnofederations on social identities that cut across such an ethnic divide. Based on a series of in-depth interviews focusing on the structure and operation of women’s and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movement organizations in Belgium, we demonstrate that these groups experience constraints of the dominant ethno-linguistic identity. These results in a ‘federalism disadvantage’ for identities cross-cutting the ethnic divide, the result of which is a neglect of policy competencies situated at the federal level.     

藏族牧民的‘龚扎西’

在藏北草原的当雄县,有一个从上海来的年轻汉族兽医。他从一九五九年到这里工作的六年来,一直深入牧场和帐篷,跟藏族牧民在同一个木碗里抓糌粑,在同一张毡垫上坐臥,不怕脏,不嫌累,不叫苦,为广大贫苦牧民治愈了数以千计的垂危的牲畜,被誉为毛主席派来的好兽医。他,就是共产党员龚达希。     

Revisiting Fiat Regime’s Attainability of Shari’ah Objectives and Possible Futuristic Alternatives

Maqasid of Shari'ah is a millennium old theory on the higher objectives of Islamic divine law. As the discipline of Islamic economics and finance grew in politico-economic importance in the past three decades, a cathartic trend has emerged among Muslim experts to realign economic and financial practices with not merely the minimum legal requirements of religion but also the wisdom and crucial objectives of Shari'ah. An expositive example of this is the monetary economics debate of a Shari'ah consonant currency. Though vast majority of religious clerics have approbated fiat and paper currencies in strict legal terms since the 1980s, a revisionist movement since the mid-1990s seeks to counter it—some going as far as indorsing reversion to gold and silver coinage of medieval Islamic epoch of affluence. Unlike orthodox fiqhi (strict jurisprudentialism) approach that involves legalese with little leeway, Maqasid approach concerns itself with the spirit of the law. This paper operates in the exciting laboratory of Maqasidic framework to appraise the multitudinous role of fiat currency in protecting economic, political, and social public interests, prevention of harm, promotion of egalitarianism, and attainment of ultimate utopic vision of theological and spiritual demands in Shari'ah. The paper contributes, theoretically, by introducing several moral-philosophical arguments against fiat’s compatibility with Shari'ah, and, practically, by prognosticating the future course of discourse in light of advancements in technological innovations—including nascent crypto-currencies.     

‘And ever give us cause’: Understanding the investments of the ‘Ur-anthem’, ‘God Save the King/Queen’

This paper engages a close analytical reading of the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ in order to understand what the functional survival of this song tells us about the rhetorical/affective investments of national devotion in the British sense. This study asks also how the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ figure in the general definition of anthem and in the generic classification of anthems worldwide? Because of the song's international spread, and status as ‘Ur-anthem’, much may be gleaned from it as to both the nature of the speech act entailed in the prayer-type of anthem and the nature of ‘anthem quality’ more generally. ‘Anthem quality’, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as that soul stirring effect which certain combinations of music and lyrics achieve, most typically in the service of national affiliation. Theories of nation and nationalism are drawn on to frame affective relations between nation, state and citizenry as implied by, fostered by and utilized in anthems. Parodies and other derivative texts are considered in order to reach a better understanding of the sources and the pragmatic uses of anthem quality in the world today.     

‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’: A Majority Ecological Context Protects Affective Aspects of Black Identity Under Stereotype Threat

We provide evidence that stereotype threat, a phenomenon that causes stigmatized individuals to experience group-based evaluative concerns (Steele in Am Psychol 52:613–629, 1997; Whistling Vivaldi and other clues to how stereotypes affect us, W.W. Norton, New York, 2010), impacts affective aspects of Black identity as a function of majority versus minority ecological contexts. Black/African-American students, enrolled in either Africana Studies (Black ecological majority) or Psychology (Black ecological minority), completed private and public regard subscales from the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (Sellers et al. in Pers Soc Psychol Rev 2:18–39, 1998) at baseline (Time 1) and after being randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or no-threat/control condition (Time 2). In threat, participants were introduced to a ‘puzzle’ task as diagnostic of intellectual abilities, whereas in no-threat the same task was introduced as culture fair, such that people from different racial/ethnic groups had performed similarly on this task in the past. In Psychology, students under threat exhibited a simultaneous decrease and increase in private and public regard, respectively, a pattern shown in the literature to be associated with discrimination-based distress and lesser well-being in Black ecological minority environments. In contrast, Africana Studies students’ racial identity under threat remained intact. We discuss the protective effects of Africana Studies on racial identity and implications for educational reform.     

‘Chinese-Mexicans’ and ‘Blackest Asians’: Filipino American youth resisting the racial binary

This study provides a deeper understanding of the interracial connections not just between non-whites and whites, but among non-whites. Filipino American youth attending high school in New York City contended with a dominant bipolar racial discourse that marginalizes the racialized experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders. However, instead of feeling invisible or marginalized, data point to how they negotiated a black–white racial discourse to decide when and how they enter dialogues about race. Filipino youth reconceptualized this racial binary to position themselves on a continuum to form the racial ‘middle ground’ between blacks and whites. Importantly, rather than a racial hierarchy that places whites at the top, youth used discursive strategies to place themselves on a racial continuum that emphasizes the interconnectedness among racial minorities.     

The ‘importance of staying put’: third country nationals’ limited intra-EU mobility rights

The cautious approach of European Legislators towards the integration of non-EU third country nationals (TCNs), mirrored in the provisions of Long-Term Residence Directive 2003/109/EC, has brought about the creation of ‘spatial temporal waiting zones’. Migrants are confined in both place and time before being able to access the (as of yet, very limited) mobility rights conferred upon them by the Directive. Restricted mobility rights for TCNs can seriously impinge on the economic growth of the EU. This paper reveals three ‘faults’ of the current system. First, we show how TCNs already evade ‘temporal borders’ by moving across geographical ones to take up employment before being entitled to do so under the provisions of the Directive. Next, we show how formal integration in one member state (MS), paradoxically, opens the door to another MS and, third, how a second MS fights off these near-EU citizens. Finally, we observe the importance of taking the phenomenon of spatial and temporal waiting zones into account, not only when structuring intra-EU mobility policies for TCNs but also when addressing the issue of the (labour market) integration of recent arrivals: soon they too will become European long-term residents.     

‘We were forgotten’: explaining ethnic voting in Bolivia’s highlands and lowlands

With the election of Evo Morales and his party Movement to Socialism (MAS) in 2005, Bolivia has become the only country in Latin America to have an indigenous party in power. However, it is misleading to take the MAS government as representing all of Bolivia’s ethnic diversity. Its indigenous population can be classified into peoples from the Andean highlands and from the Amazonian lowlands. Research has treated the indigenous population as uniform or focused on the Andean peoples and on parties rather than voters. This paper aims to differentiate this picture by showing that variances between highland and lowland indigenous peoples started with the appearance of Homeland’s Consciousness (CONDEPA) and have increased since MAS came to power. While the highland indigenous peoples have preferred left political parties, parties with pro-indigenous agendas or which used indigenous symbolism, the lowland peoples have tended to support centre-right parties. The paper attempts to explain these differences in the voting behaviour of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples. Ethnic voting is analysed in the time span from 1985 until 2014 within a mixed-methods design.     

‘If it weren’t for rugby I’d be in prison now’: Pacific Islanders,rugby and the production of natural spaces

This paper examines the positive role of sport in building social cohesion and the accrual of social and cultural capital for many young Pasifika men. In the process, we also critique the disciplinary discourse, underpinned by bio-racism and commodification, which is enacted on the bodies of Pacific Island men in the context of post-colonial, neoliberal, Australia. This results in over-representation in the rugby codes, manual labour, the security industry, and in prison. Of specific interest to this paper are the ways in which certain spaces, and the means to occupy them, become naturalised. This naturalisation serves to obscure the actual regulatory, and at times exploitative, function of sports; instead positing them as exemplars of individualism and self-governance. In positioning neoliberalism as the reengineering, rather than simply the deregulation, of the state, sports such as rugby enact considerable disciplinary power over the bodies of a minority ethnicity. We refer to this diversion from conventional working class employment opportunities as ‘sportfare’. Qualitative data for this paper has been drawn from several independent studies engaging with Pasifika communities in Australia.     

I Do,I Don’t,I Don’t Know: A Study on Inter-religious Marriage in an Iraqi-Shi’a Muslim American Community

In living in heterogeneous Western societies, Muslim immigrant communities are surrounded by individuals from a host of different religious backgrounds. This paper examines the willingness of the Iraqi-Shi’a Muslim community of Dearborn, Michigan, to marry individuals from four different groups, namely another sub-branch of Shi’a Islam, another branch of Islam, the “people of the book” faiths, and those not part of “people of the book” faiths. The paper will test whether spending more time in the United States will make individuals more susceptible to the idea of marrying outside of their sub-branch of Twelver Shi’a Islam. In order to answer this question, the participant community has been divided into two waves, with interviews being conducted with 25 participants from each wave. The results reveal that the first wave is more interested in marrying outside of their sub-branch and religion, while the recently arrived second wave appeared more resistant to the idea of such intermarriages.