Tu Casa,Mi Casa: Naturalization and Belonging among Latino Immigrants

Previous studies reach contradictory conclusions regarding the relationship between residential concentration and naturalization. This paper tackles the impasse by exploring the pathways through which immigrant communities influence individual naturalization. Specifically, this study examines naturalization among Latino immigrants using the 2006 Latino National Survey linked to county data. Multilevel model results indicate that the county concentration of naturalized co‐ethnics positively predicts individual naturalization, and this relationship operates through two channels: information dissemination and perceived belonging. Regarding the latter, Latino immigrants who live among naturalized co‐ethnics identify more strongly as “American,” and strength of American identification mediates nearly one‐half of the relationship between concentration and naturalization.     

Ausländer, Eingebürgerte und das Problem einer realistischen Zuwanderer-Integrationsbilanz

The use of the legal term “foreigner” in German official statistics and in sociological research on migration and integration is questioned. During the 1990s, naturalization has created a gap between the numbers of migrants and of foreigners. Legal and administrative factors cause an unobserved selectivity in the process of naturalization and increasingly blur the meaning of citizenship for social science purposes. Drawing on two German survey samples, the article reveals a considerably more favorable socio-economic placement of naturalized persons compared with foreigners of the same origin. Any stock-taking based on foreigners alone would exclude the most successful migrants in terms of education, labor market participation and income, and depict the participation of the immigrated population as overly deficient. An appropriate representation of naturalized people in official statistics is called for.     

The aura of tattoos: The commodification of tradition in Buscalan village,the Philippines

The present study focuses on the ongoing shift in the meaning and importance of traditional Kalinga tattoos that is happening in Buscalan village in the Philippines. The starting point for the analysis is the conception of disintegration of “the aura”, as defined by Walter Benjamin, resulting from their disembedding from time and space that is caused by technological reproducibility of the artworks. The study shows that the basis of the aura of Buscalan tattoos is their relation to a successful headhunt. At present, tattoos in Buscalan are standing on the edge, because the high popularity of the last tattoo artist who tattooed the head-hunters leads to commodification of traditional tattoos and an increase in tourism in the particular area. The study describes a two-way process of disintegration and preservation of the aura of Buscalan tattoos: on the one hand, the tradition of tattooing headhunters has disappeared, but on the other hand, the aura of tattoos is preserved thanks to audiovisual means and sharing on social networking sites. The “here and now” of the place and its tattoos is being transferred into the hyper-reality where Buscalan tattoos are gaining a new dimension     

Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history

This article begins from a perceived lack of empirical evidence in cultural studies, namely the ethnography of cultural globalization in ‘global cities’ other than those of the West. Youth culture among the upper strata of the South-Indian metropolis Bangalore is taken as an instance of how modernity is experienced and produced in the post-colonial Third World. The focus lies on the reception of Western pop music, but music is treated broadly as a practice situated in, and producing, real and imagined space. Two examples of these musical practices serve to elaborate on Indian power relations, Indian modernity and the critical geography of music.     

Health Care and Disability NGOs in Croatia: State Relations,Privatization, and Professionalism in an Emerging Field

Although nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in post-socialist countries have been under a microscope since their inception, their relations with the state are only beginning to come into focus and to be the subject of comparative and theoretical assessment. What these relationships mean to different stakeholders, whether they take trajectories similar to those in the West, and how they will be shaped by socialist legacies, are important questions to address before such relations are naturalized as “the way things are.” This paper examines NGO/state relations in the development of health care and disability services in Croatia, a nation newly admitted to membership in the European Union. The paper explores policy and institutional legacies, health care privatization, and relations with health professionals as forces affecting the financing, structure, and experience of relationships between NGOs and the post-socialist state.     

Welfare Reform and Elderly Immigrants' Naturalization: Access to Public Benefits as an Incentive for Naturalization in the United States

Welfare reform in the United States restricted non‐citizens' eligibility for public assistance programs and strengthened economic benefits from naturalization. We examine the impact of these policy changes on elderly immigrants' naturalization, considering their level of need for public benefits. Using individual data from the Current Population Survey as well as state‐level data, we employ a differences‐in‐differences approach to consider variations in time, state policy, and probability of Medicaid participation. Results show that naturalization significantly increased among elderly immigrants who were likely to participate in Medicaid, suggesting that elderly immigrants in need of Medicaid became naturalized to maintain their eligibility for public benefits after welfare reform.     

The Aripae o's Landscape: Local Control Within Global Reality

The Aripae o are maroon descendants living in the Lower Caura region of Bol var state, Venezuela. A product of an earlier process of globalization that gave rise to the Atlantic slave trade, present-day Aripae o continue to resist any outside influence, intervention, or penetration that could spur sociocultural relations of inequality and (in)difference. Although they are consciously aware of the sociocultural disparities inherent in the modern world capitalist system, this does not imply that they are necessarily against the globalizing tendencies of modernity. Rather, their desire is to have direct participation and control over the resources that they consider important for their cultural production, representation, and reproduction. Through the utilization of the concept of "landscape" as an integrated and yet polysemic cultural repertoire, the aim of this article is to demonstrate that the Aripae o's commitment to their traditional way of life still incorporates their appreciation of modernity and globalization.     

Coming conferences and call for papers

This paper examines the popularity of lithography in late 19th century China and relates the cultural significance of this new mass medium to the construction of modernity within China's semi‐colonial experience. In contrast to woodblock illustrations, which had been widely circulated in China for more than a millennium, lithography fundamentally changed the way images are understood; they now emphasized and visualized change, the novel and the particular. The paper also analyses some pictures selected from the famous lithographic journal Dianshizhai to demonstrate a prominent realist desire. While Chinese readers desired to comprehend the basic forms and patterns of the new world objectively through these pictures, they also subjectively identified with the acts of seeing portrayed in these lithographs, desiring to see and be seen. I argue that while the oscillation between the desire for objective details and subjective identification gives lithography an extremely rich hermeneutic space, this new form of visual representation also helped stabilize the uncertainty and threat of modernity.     

Environmental determinism as Orientalism: The geo-political ecology of crisis in the Middle East

From ‘Resource Curse’ to ‘Climate Conflict’, more and more analyses of the current crisis in the Middle East start their reasoning from geo-physical or natural conditions as determinants of social life. Paradoxically, despite its resource riches giving rise to conflict, the region's ecology is portrayed as fragile, alien and hostile. This imperial oriental imagination, assumes that a scarce nature is mismanaged by societies and states overall incapable of negotiating modernity. This precarious, crisis driven environment is now pushed to the edge by the effects of climate change with looming desertification and weather extremes and a scramble for shrinking oil reserves threatening to make the region all but inhabitable. This article suggests that this environmental oriental determinism in Middle East can be overcome by entering political ecology into the register of historical sociological analysis. Re-socialising and historicising nature-society relations avoids reifying the Cartesian nature/society divide, offering historical sociology a better toolkit to navigate the current crisis. Vice-versa, it argues that political ecology can benefit from recognising the role of geopolitical relations in the social reproduction nature.     

MODERN TIMES: RELIGION,CONSECRATION AND THE STATE IN BOURDIEU

Bourdieu held that the state in modernity has become the primary agent of consecration, ‘the legitimation and naturalization of social difference’, a function formerly performed largely by religion. After clarifying the role of ‘religion’ in Bourdieu's work, this paper brings two empirical issues into dialogue with his ideas: social fragmentation in late-modernity, and the relation between temporalization and social structures in medieval and early-modern charity. His view that religion is anachronistic, that it was left behind by modernization misses its continuing, even increasing, importance. He overemphasized the centrality and authority of the state in modernity and distinguished too sharply between pre-modern gifting and modern market relations. Once these limitations are mitigated, Bourdieu's analysis can be redirected to account for the importance of religion as an agent of consecration globally today.     

Testing the Effects of Collectively Expected Durations of Migration: The Naturalization of Mexicans and Cubans

This study tests a hypothesis that Mexican foreign‐born immigrants who came to the United States for economic reasons naturalize less often than Cubans who immigrate for political reasons. It uses information from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Latino Sample, a national sample of 7,453 respondents from the 1989 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) and the 1990 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Ordinal logistic regression is used to examine the hypothesis. The results indicate that while more Mexicans plan to apply or have applied for naturalization, proportionately more Cubans than Mexicans have naturalized. Cuban political immigrants who came to the United States during the first half of the 1960s naturalize more often than their Mexican counterparts. However, the effect of ethnic identity on naturalization is mediated by a number of other predictors of naturalization such as gender, race, urban residence, socioeconomic status and acculturation.     

Mediating production and consumption: cultural capital and 'cultural workers'

This paper examines recent debates about the role of what Bourdieu termed cultural intermediaries in the formation and reproduction of the relations of cultural capital. Workers in the cultural or creative industries were given a central place in Bourdieu's schema in the creation of hierarchies of value in the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Subsequent writers about the apparent emergence of a creative economy (Lash and Urry 1994; Featherstone 1991) have given workers involved in the production and distribution of cultural goods a pivotal place in the development of late or post-modernity. More recent work (Negus 2002; Nixon and du Gay 2002) has criticized the validity and coherence of the term as it has come to be understood and called for more rigour in its definition and use. This paper adds to this debate by considering the book trade as a space in which the gap between production and consumption of cultural goods is mediated. It suggests that cultural intermediaries, as cultural workers, are engaged in the reproduction of the cultural aspects of social class by 'shoring up' their insecure position in the relations of cultural capital, rather than simply being the taste leaders of a reflexive modernity.     

Framing the Sino–US–Thai relations in the post-global economic crisis

Based on the frame analysis, this study conducted a content analysis of Thailand's two English-language newspapers, Bangkok Post and the Nation, to examine the relationships among the world's two largest economies, the United States of America and the People's Republic of China, and the emerging economy of Thailand in the wake of the subprime housing loan crisis. The study has established five generic news frames: economic consequence, human interest, morality, conflict and cooperation. It was found that such cultural values as individualism – collectivism, materialism – spiritualism and conflict – harmony have influenced the frame-building process. As a consequence of the subprime crisis, the US was portrayed as the old power waning in hegemony while China an emerging power with a fast growing economy. The Thai press played up a sound Sino–US relationship based on cooperation rather than conflict which would shape the 21st century. Thailand, where the Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997, offered morality or ethics as a remedy frame for the global economic crisis.     

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same: Mexican Naturalization before and after Welfare Reform1

During the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in the both the number and the rate of Mexican naturalization. Some have interpreted this increase as a response to changes in welfare and immigration policy surrounding the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which limited public assistance to non‐citizens, and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which may have increased the incentive to naturalize by making it more difficult for legal immigrants to sponsor their relatives for entry to the United States. This article uses Current Population Survey data from 1994/95 and 2000/01 to examine how the social and economic determinants of naturalization may have changed in order to provide insight into which explanation for the increase in naturalizations is most relevant. We find that while the proportion of Mexican immigrants who are naturalized increased during the 1990s, their determinants have remained largely the same with the exception that those with noncitizen spouses have become more likely to be naturalized in the post‐reform period. This suggests that a more cautious interpretation be taken about the relationship between the increase in naturalizations and welfare and sponsorship restrictions, particularly when regarding Mexican immigrants.     

The Kyana Corroboree: Cultural Production of Indigenous Ethnogenesis

This article analyzes the 1993 Kyana Corroboree of the Noongah Aborigines of Western Australia as a case study of the cultural production and cultural politics of ethnogenesis and indigeneity through public celebration. Kyana is a local example of how indigenous peoples globally experience "ethnic reorganization," an often inchoate, mutable process of social reproduction that encourages the survival of an ethnic group, albeit in an altered form. This article demonstrates how Noongah and Aboriginal ethnogenesis is composed of a mercurial mixture of conflict and concordance, especially in regard to aspirations toward some level of influence over the self-definition of Aboriginality and its symbolic representations.
The organization of contemporary ethnicity and the nature of current ethnic relations reflect contemporary adaptations and continually evolving identities and institutions.—Nagel and Snipp 1993, p. 225
Celebration is a "text," a vivid aesthetic creation that reflexively depicts, interprets and informs its social context. [Celebration] articulates and modifies power relations.—Manning 1983, p. 6     

Overcoming Ethnocentrism: The Role of Identity in Contingent Practice of International Public Relations

Based on literature from the contingency theory of public relations and psychocultural conflict theory, this study explored how multinational corporations (MNCs) are practicing public relations in Korea, and what contingency factors impact MNCs' stances in conflict situations. Interviews of leaders in public relations agencies whose major clients are MNCs found that "fear factor" plays a critical role in MNCs taking more accommodative stances in conflict situations. MNCs tend to move toward accommodative stances based on their fear of Korean media and local culture, regardless of the presence of 2-way symmetrical communications with publics. More specifically, accommodation seemed to be enacted through 1-way communication (i.e., local publics' claims) and MNCs' fear of media, local culture, or publics. This finding implies the following: First, 1-way communication may not always result in advocacy as is claimed in Western cultures, but may actually lead to accommodation. Second, indigenous local cultural dimensions should be explored in examining international public relations practices.     

Conjugal intimacy,gender and modernity in contemporary China

The new generation of modernity theorists have forecast the democratization of gender relations within intimate relationships in late‐modern times. Chinese society has undergone rapid and dramatic changes in its unique trajectory of political, social and economic reform. Using China as an example of a region which has been largely ignored in contemporary social theory, this article enters the debate to contest the extent to which conjugal relationships are democratized in line with modernity. We further test the assertion that modern marriages are characterized by increased self‐disclosure and communication between partners. Data from a national survey on Chinese families is analysed in relation to the level of self‐disclosure between husbands and wives; gender division of housework; household decision‐making; and home ownership. We highlight the impact of gender, cohort and location (urban, rural or migrant) on experiences of modernity and draw attention to the material, social and cultural factors which continue to shape conjugal relations in contemporary Chinese society. Based on our findings, we contest the argument that disclosing intimacy between intimate partners is a defining characteristic of modern relationships, and suggest that other social factors may condition degrees of self‐disclosure in marriage. Similarly, we question the extent to which heterosexual conjugal equality is attained: the cultural practices and values of patrilineal family organization, together with material circumstances, continue to influence marital relations in China.     

Social dynamics of the multicultural classroom

Instruction and learning are socially determined activities, where social forces such as classroom atmosphere, social feelings, cultural sentiments, prejudice and stereotyping, interpersonal relations and expectations, as well as the reflection of social reality in subject matter all have a significant influence on the effectiveness of teaching and learning. The effective "multicultural" teacher has to be concerned about each individual student, and also be sensitive to the group and cultural affiliations of each of his or her students. Intercultural relations in the classroom may be a source of knowledge and mutual enrichment between culturally diverse learners if managed proactively by teachers. Frustration, misapprehensions and intercultural conflict are a more likely outcome if teachers do not deal with diversity in a sensitive manner.     

Politics of Displacement in Guatemala

This article examines the processes and effects of displacement during the armed conflict in Guatemala. The analytical approach emphasizes the relations between space, power and culture and draws upon writers like Henry Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, de Certeau and the French army officer, Roger Trinquier. The article argues that the army, through the massive displacement of population and the organization of civil patrols, produced a dichotomous space of "villages" and "wilderness," and that the reorganization of space enabled the army to control the conflict. The spatial reorganization increased the state's capacity for surveillance, but the article also shows how displacement and the struggles over modes of reinclusion of the displaced population had wider effects on the body politic and produced new political subjects in Guatemala.     

Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War

Based on empirical research among women's antiwar organizations worldwide, the article derives a feminist oppositional standpoint on militarization and war. From this standpoint, patriarchal gender relations are seen to be intersectional with economic and ethno-national power relations in perpetuating a tendency to armed conflict in human societies. The feminism generated in antiwar activism tends to be holistic, and understands gender in patriarchy as a relation of power underpinned by coercion and violence. The cultural features of militarization and war readily perceived by women positioned in or close to armed conflict, and their sense of war as systemic and as a continuum, make its gendered nature visible. There are implications in this perspective for antiwar movements. If gender relations are one of the root causes of war, a feminist programme of gender transformation is a necessary component of the pursuit of peace.