Looking beyond ethnicity: the negotiation of Chinese Muslim identity in Penang,Malaysia

The conflation of ethnic and religious identities, particularly that of Malay and Muslim, has long historical and political roots in Malaysia. Being one of the most safeguarded identity marks in Malaysia, Islam has become part of the core of Malay ethnicity and plays a prominent role in ethnic politics. Muslim converts from ethnic minorities, such as the Chinese and Indians, are therefore faced with social expectation and pressure to ‘become Malay’. This paper discusses the difficulty and improbability of Chinese Muslim identity in the previous literature and the recent development that enables the decoupling of religious and ethnic identities. By looking beyond ethnicity, the most salient social divider in Malaysia, and looking into other possibilities, such as religious identity, this paper aims to paint a picture of social relations and identification that is more complex yet flexible amongst the Chinese Muslim converts in Penang.     

Work,Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India

This ethnographic essay focuses on the relationship between religious performances and the “strong discourse” of contemporary global capitalism. It explores the subjective meaning and social significance of religious practice in the context of a rapidly expanding mass religious phenomenon in India. The narrative draws on Weber's insights on the intersections between religion and economy, phenomenological theory, performance studies, and Indian philosophy and popular culture. It shows that religion here is primarily a means of performing to and preparing for an informal economy. It gives the chance to live meaningful social lives while challenging the inequities and symbolic violence of an imposing global capitalist social ethic. Unlike exclusive formal institutions that are increasingly governed by neoliberal rationalities, the religious event provides an open and freely accessible yet challenging stage for participants to practice and prove their resolve, gifts, and sincerity. In contrast to the focus on social anomie and the reactionary characterization of contemporary religion in identity‐based arguments, this essay demonstrates that religious practice here is simultaneously a way of performing to and performing against a totalizing capitalist social order.     

Rationality,integrity, and religious behavior

Borrowing insights from philosophical discussions on the concept of integrity, we propose a framework to understand religious behavior in consumption, production, and exchange. Whereas previous economic explanations of religious behavior have focused on preferences, opportunity sets, or social pressure, we emphasize the notion of integrity defined as identity-conferring commitments. We provide a framework that not only introduces commitment and identity but includes previous explanations as special cases. We also discuss extensions of the framework in addressing the multiplicity of the dimensions of identity.     

A Wanderer in a Distant Place: Tibetan Exile Youth,Literacy, and Emotion

Among Tibetans living in exile in India, expressions of longing and sadness for family, friends and places in Tibet are not uniformly shared across members of the community. Time and distance have faded and idealized their homeland in the memories of long‐term exiles. Yet, for a segment of this community called New Arrivals, who have only relatively recently left Tibet, people and places “back home” are real and immediate. The immediacy of these ties to Chinese Tibet, however, often engenders perceptions of New Arrivals as Sinicised, backward and uneducated. This paper focuses on these New Arrivals in the enclave of McLeod Ganj, India, home to the Tibetan exile government and approximately 7,000 Tibetan exiles. In this predominately Tibetan area, the division between long‐term exiles and New Arrivals constitutes the dominant social boundary among McLeod Ganj Tibetans, a division that is most prominent among McLeod Ganj’s Tibetan youth. Drawing from community discourses, social networks and practices, and educational institutions, I analyse everyday written forms (e.g., poetry, letters, diary entries) to suggest that through these writings, New Arrival youth are constituting and reconstructing their marginalized position within the community. In an exile community where resources are limited, improving the position of New Arrivals can be challenging. Here, I suggest two approaches to the difficulties these youth face. First, re‐educating the larger Tibetan community in order to breakdown the prejudices that exist toward these new exiles. Second, refashioning the existing educational institutions for New Arrivals to better prepare them for employment in the Tibetan communities or elsewhere in India.     

Renegotiating religious transnationalism: fractures in transnational Chinese evangelicalism

In this article, I question to what extent future generations of immigrants will engage in practices of religious transnationalism through their ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English‐speaking Chinese Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both a pan‐Chinese identity and the belief that the Chinese have a special role in evangelizing the world. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded in Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous ground and propose that linguistic, geographical, generational and ideological fractures may diminish the participation of future generations of the Chinese diaspora in ethnically‐based transnational religious organizations. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation'.     

Religious transnationalism,development and the construction of religious boundaries: the case of the Dera Sachkhand Ballan and the Ravidass Dharm

In this article, I examine the general assumption that transnationalism is creating new divisions and iniquitous social hierarchies. For caste‐based religious centres like the Dera Sachkhand Ballan (DSB), which is engaged in modes of subaltern religiosity among Ravidassias, transnationalism can be a powerful agent of religious and social change. By nurturing transnational networks, especially in the United Kingdom, the DSB has now emerged as the main driver of Ravidassia identity in Punjab. The material support of overseas followers has made this achievement possible for religious and social institutions in Punjab, and has enabled overseas Ravidassias to demonstrate to higher castes a sense of collective achievement. Transnationalism is thus central to the process of differentiating between the followers of the DSB and Sikhism. It also provided critical support for the birth of a new religion in 2010, the Ravidass Dharm.     

PERCEIVED RECEPTIVITY OF SOCIOLOGY FACULTY AND ADMINISTRATION TOWARD MINORITIES OF RACE,RELIGION, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS (2008 MSSA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS)

The purpose of this research was to investigate whether sociologists in particular and institutions in general are perceived to make life easier for people who are different in terms of sexual orientation, race/ethnic identity, or religious affiliations by being more accepting and supportive. A sample of 74 heads of sociology departments was surveyed. T-tests were used to determine the level of support among departments and institutions. Results indicate that sociology department chairs in public colleges, those in nonreligious programs, and those in larger institutions were generally more supportive of minorities than those in private, religious, and/or smaller institutions.     

Polarized Scientists? Exploring Political Differences about Religion and Science among U.S. Biologists and Physicists1

From the Texas textbook debate to the March for Science, visible displays of activism illuminate how deeply politicized the science‐religion interface has become. However, little is known about the extent to which scientists’ attitudes about science and religion are politicized. Using original survey data from 1,989 U.S. academic biologists and physicists, we examine the degree to which political views shape how scientists perceive the relationship between religion and science, religious authority, their personal religious identity, and views on dominant scientific theories. Findings suggest that, indeed, the science‐religion interface holds political meaning for scientists, but in different ways across the political spectrum. Specifically, for politically liberal scientists, atheism and the conflict narrative are particularly politicized belief structures, while politically conservative scientists emphasize religious identity to distinguish themselves from political liberals. Findings point to the critical role of politics in shaping scientists’ attitudes and identities, which may have implications for the scientific enterprise, both at the lab bench and in the political sphere.     

Communicatively Managing Religious Identity Difference in Parent-Child Relationships: The Role of Accommodative and Nonaccommodative Communication

Guided by Communication Accommodation Theory, we examine the communicative management of religious difference in parent-child relationships. Using survey data from emerging adults (N = 409), we found that religious difference is associated with decreases in relational satisfaction and shared family identity. Further, parents’ religious communication has the potential to promote relational well-being. Accommodative communication (religious-specific supportive communication and respecting divergent values) was associated with increases in relational satisfaction and shared family identity. Two forms of nonaccommodative communication (inappropriate self-disclosure and emphasizing divergent values) were associated with decreases with relational satisfaction and shared family identity; giving unwanted advice was associated with decreases in relational satisfaction but not shared family identity. Giving unwanted advice moderated the relationship between religious difference and relational satisfaction. Differences were also discovered between families with inter- and intrafaith parental dyads. Findings suggest theoretical and methodological contributions to family communication, religious, and intergroup research.     

Narratives of identity: Denying empathy in conservative discourses on race,class, and sexuality

Issues of identity are crucial in current political debate. This article analyses narratives of identity using three very different examples, namely colonial-settler Australia, lesbian romance genres, and the role of class in contemporary American and British politics. It explores both privileged and marginalized identity narratives and the tensions between them. For example, lesbian romance narratives are contrasted with religious right arguments against same-sex marriage. Some argue that the complex intersections, compatibilities, and differences between conflicting narratives of identity reveal a great deal about how specific concepts of identity are formed. The narratives examined do not produce explicit binary constructions of dominant and subordinate identity categories. Rather, being able to imagine (or not imagine) other narratives plays an important part in the process of constructing identities within these discourses. Narratives that foreclose empathy facilitate the denial that discrimination or subordination is taking place. Similarly, privileged narratives of identity facilitate subjects ability to think well of themselves and their treatment of others.     

Picturing social work,puzzles and passion: exploring and developing transnational professional identities

ABSTRACT

Exploring and in turn developing professional identity is a challenge faced by social work programmes, nationally and internationally. This paper developed from the authors’ shared research interest in how social workers and students of social work develop and express their professional identities. We report findings from a workshop designed to explore how a group of social workers from different countries conceptualised social work identity, including the effects of transnational and cultural contexts. Our starting point drew on theoretical concepts developed in Wiles’s research, in which the term professional identity is used to convey multiple meaning, and the method developed in Vicary’s research which uses drawing to elicit data. We found that a collective identity is shared across national boundaries albeit, and ironically, that this shared identity has components that are not cohesive and are continually being redefined. In the participants’ own words, the notion of social work identity is always just out of reach conceptually, or ‘over the horizon’. Tensions in identity were also revealed, alongside a sense of passion or deep commitment. These findings complement and add to the existing literature on exploring and developing professional identity in social work.     

Intention of activism and radicalism among Muslim and Christian youth in a marginal neighbourhood in a Spanish city / Intención de activismo y radicalismo de jóvenes musulmanes y cristianos residentes en un barrio marginal de una ciudad española

The aim of this research is to assess the intended level of religious and political activism and radicalism in a sample of Muslim and Christian youth living in a marginalised neighbourhood in a southern city in Spain. Interrelations between activism and radicalism and other psychosocial factors potentially contributing to religious and political mobilisation processes are analysed, such as group identification, self-esteem, violent disinhibition, religious extremism and perceived oppression. Important differences in religious and national identification were found. Muslims scored higher in a statistically significant way on various indicators of religious extremism. Both perceived oppression and shared ideology inside the endogroup seem to be contributing factors to having an intention of radicalism in the Muslim group where social identity anchored in religion prevails. These results point to the fact that there is a polarisation that can serve as the threshold of conflict and radical mobilisation in the critical context analysed. The results are discussed within the framework of previous research into psychology of radicalisation and terrorism.     

Social Disorganization and Parochial Control: Religious Institutions and Their Communities

Set within the framework of social disorganization theory, this article explores the relationship between social disorganization and parochial control. Specifically, this study investigates whether more disorganized communities support fewer religious institutions than less disorganized areas. It also examines the relationship between religious institutions and another type of community association: multi-issue, neighborhood-based organizations. Data are drawn from 1990 Census data, the 1991 Chicago telephone directory and local community organization directories. Findings support the idea that residential mobility and ethnic heterogeneity are negatively related to the prevalence of religious institutions whereas there is a curvilinear relationship between poverty and religious organizations. Finally, a strong relationship between the prevalence of religious institutions and the prevalence of multi-issue organizations is established.     

SYMBOLS, STORIES, AND PRACTICES: New Empirical Directions in the Study of Religious Meaning

Over the past three decades, there has been a growing interest in religion's special meaning-making function. At the same time, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the meanings evoked by religious symbols, stories, and practices are not universally shared and that they vary by social context. To date, sociologists of religion interested in the problem of shared meaning have not employed methods that can bring together diverse religious meanings and social settings in the same research design. As a result, their work has produced few empirical generalizations upon which a long-term research agenda might be built. In other subdisciplines, such as cultural sociology, researchers have employed new quantitative methods that can empirically connect variations in cultural meanings to variations in social context. This article calls for importing these methodological advances into the sociological study of religious meaning.
There is an enormous irony in the fact that God is in his heaven in the social sciences—or at least a very important section of the social sciences [sociology]—even as he seems to be vanishing from the altars. Michael Harrington, The Politics at God's Funeral     

Race,Marginalization, and Perceptions of Stress Among Workers Worldwide Post-2020

Research shows that stressful workplace changes in 2020 disproportionately impacted historically marginalized workers. However, we need more information on enduring inequalities of stress post-2020. Thus, drawing from surveys with employees working in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India (N = 5,242), we use logistic regression to explore how worker identities (race/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and social class) might matter for stress as measured through respondents' self-assessments of their own feelings of stress (“helplessness”) and states counter to stress (“self-efficacy”). Taking a sociological approach to analyze worker responses to the perceived stress scale (PSS-10), we found that historically marginalized workers (in terms of race, gender, sexual identity, and social class) reported greater feelings of stress (helplessness). However, we also found that employees identifying as racially minoritized at work and employees in India reported high self-efficacy scores on the PSS-10—a surprising relationship given that feelings of self-efficacy have been previously theorized to have an inverse relationship with stress (helplessness). Though based on a convenience sample, our research suggests that historically marginalized workers worldwide are feeling more significant amounts of stress. In addition, our findings may have implications regarding how researchers use the PSS-10 to measure stress across diverse worker groups and international contexts.     

Sexual Orientation,Gender, and Gender Identity Microaggressions: Toward an Intersectional Framework for Social Work Research

ABSTRACT

Professional ethics compel social workers to address all forms of discrimination and oppression. Microaggressions can contribute to health disparities for marginalized groups; yet, little is known about the frequency, mechanisms, and impact of microaggressions on sexual minorities, cisgender women, and gender minorities—particularly for those with intersecting marginalized identities. This article extends microaggression literature by exploring interrelated constructs of sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity microaggressions, and offering recommendations for future research using an intersectional lens to foster an integrated and complex understanding of microaggressions. Implications of an intersectional microaggression framework for social work education and practice are discussed.     

Neighborhood Structure,Social Organization,and Number of Short‐Term Sexual Partnerships

We examine the relationship between neighborhood structural characteristics, social organization, and the sexual partnering practices of adults. Analyses of 1990 census and 1995–1997 survey‐based data on Chicago neighborhoods and adult sexual activity reveal for men a number of neighborhood influences on sexual partnering practices. First, residential stability is negatively associated with having a short‐term sexual partner in the last year. Second, neighborhood social ties are positively associated with short‐term sexual partnering in neighborhoods with low levels of collective efficacy—the combination of cohesion and shared expectations for beneficial action among neighbors—but this effect is substantially reduced as collective efficacy increases. Moreover, neighborhood collective efficacy and social ties mediate the effect of residential stability on sexual partnering practices. Neighborhood characteristics were not associated with short‐term sexual partnering for women.     

Religious Culture and Political Action

Recent work by political sociologists and social movement theorists extend our understanding of how religious institutions contribute to expanding democracy, but nearly all analyze religious institutions as institutions; few focus directly on what religion qua religion might contribute. This article strives to illuminate the impact of religious culture per se, extending recent work on religion and democratic life by a small group of social movement scholars trained also in the sociology of religion. In examining religion's democratic impact, an explicitly cultural analysis inspired by the new approach to political culture developed by historical sociologists and cultural analysts of democracy is used to show the power of this approach and to provide a fuller theoretical account of how cultural dynamics shape political outcomes. The article examines religious institutions as generators of religious culture, presents a theoretical model of how religious cultural elements are incorporated into social movements and so shape their internal political cultures, and discusses how this in turn shapes their impact in the public realm. This model is then applied to a key site of democratic struggle: four efforts to promote social justice among low-income urban residents of the United States, including the most widespread such effort—faith-based community organizing.     

An international turn: Rebuilding Chinese temple networks in Indonesia 20 years after the Suharto era

The transnationalization of Chinese temples is producing new spatial imaginaries and adding cosmopolitan dimensions to Chinese Indonesian identities in the post-Suharto era. In 1999, the Indonesian state legally-sanctioned Chinese Popular Religion after decades of prohibition, ushering in a period of Chinese religious revival nationally backed by constitutional legitimacy. The recent emergence of transnational temple networks is providing a further form of cultural legitimacy based on symbols and statuses that circulate in a broader cosmopolitan transnational social sphere. Using case studies of three temples in Singkawang, Indonesia, each with a different form of international network, this paper shows how the transnational circulation of religious teachings, people, ideas, donations and deities can provide the raw materials for expressions of cultural identity which are locally rooted and embedded in specific ethnic politics of belonging. Forging transnational religious connections has the potential to develop into long lasting and formal institutional platforms of exchange, however, it often begins with informal, spontaneous and idiosyncratic encounters.     

Trisection of forces: gender, religion and the state--the case of state-run religious schools in Israel

This article discusses the theoretical claims that 'gender', 'religion' and 'state' are not universal nor essentialist entities, but rather contingent phenomena embedded in time, place, and changing historical circumstances. Historical analysis of social processes reveals the complex relations between the three categories, as they individually and as a whole are re/constituted as changing co-tangential and often unpredictable phenomena. One case study presented in this article that of state-run religious schools in Israel demonstrates how state, religion and gender intersect. Through the analysis presented here, we see examples of the permeable boundaries between these social categories as well as the inter-relationships and unintended consequences of the interplay between the three. Paradoxically, graduates of these schools, especially women, have evolved from being members of a marginalized - even ignored - social category, to being active participants in the religious and political life of their community and in the political struggle over state policy regarding the future of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.