‘Second-order’ ethnic minorities in Asian secessionist conflicts: problems and prospects

This article provides some conceptual foundations for a special issue of Asian Ethnicity concerned with what we call ‘second-order minorities’. If secessionist conflicts involve minorities resisting abusive, assimilationist states, leading rebel groups to embark on their own nation-building efforts, how does this affect the minorities of aspiring secessionist nations? How do the minorities of secessionist groups respond to secessionism? Despite many insightful studies of secessionism and rebel ethno-nationalism, scholars have yet to explore the ways that local minorities navigate secessionist conflicts. We suggest that the relationship between secessionists and second-order minorities depends on three key factors: whether minorities are territorially concentrated or dispersed, indigenous or migrant, and nation majorities or small national minorities. These characteristics provide us some idea of the types of violence and counter-mobilization we might see among second-order minorities faced with secessionist violence. This article then previews the subsequent studies of Xinjiang, Aceh, Mindanao, and Sri Lanka, cases which capture some of the core challenges faced by second-order minorities against twin violent nation-building efforts from state and rebel forces.     

The minority identity and the idea of the ‘unity’ of the nation: the case of Hungarian minorities from Romania,Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine

A comparison analysis of the ethno-national identity of Hungarian minorities living in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine is performed in the paper, including the identifications to majority community and the relationship with Hungary, respectively.

According to the empirical results in every country, the community with the pan-Hungarian ethnocultural nation, and the identification with actual Hungary, is less important than regional Hungarianness in the minority identity of Hungarian minority members from outside the borders of Hungary. The primary in-group is the self-minority community in every country. This may be empirically grasped both on the level of the perceptions of social distances and on stereotypes toward Hungarians from Hungary and toward majority populations (Romanians, Slovaks, etc.).     

‘Pure milk’: dairy production and the discourse of purity in Mongolia

In this article I explore some of the ways in which consumer discourse related to factory-produced tarag (drinkable yogurt) reflects concerns about food safety and cultural identity in Mongolia. Providing examples of how Mongolian industrial dairy producers position products made from imported milk powder as ‘local’, ‘pure’, and ‘natural’, I contrast consumers’ views of ‘artificial’ or ‘poisonous’ milk from Inner Mongolia (China), uncertainty over the nature of Mongolian milk products, and the increasing terminological confusion brought about by dairy process standardization. This paper draws on an analysis of comments posted to Mongolian-language online news sites, in response to rumours that ‘Goyo Tarag’ – a popular yogurt beverage manufactured by Orgil Foods – might in fact be Chinese in origin.     

‘Sit in the corner and don’t eat the crayons’: postgraduates with dyslexia and the dominant ‘lexic’ discourse

The lack of cultural diversity in higher education is recognised by policy objectives and a current focus on the development of widening participation for a range of students, including those with disabilities. Amongst this group are those with dyslexia who might previously have been disenfranchised from formal education and under‐represented within it. This paper explores the personal narratives and learner histories of six postgraduates and academics with dyslexia from their earliest memories of learning to their present experiences. It examines how literacy, as a dominant form of discourse, has defined concepts of academic ability resulting in the early exclusion of these learners from formal education. It is argued that this dominant discourse can be challenged by non‐authorised, informal learning resulting in stories of resistance.     

‘No Nation of Experts’: Kustom Tattooing and the Middle-Class Body in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia

Tattooing among young middle-class people in Indonesia has increased noticeably since the late 2000s. I draw on ethnographic research in tattoo studios alongside interviews and magazine sources to locate the style known as kustom within its social and cultural context. I describe how kustom tattooing is the product of patterns of consumption centred on the body, drawing resources from a globalised, mass media-saturated environment. Indeed, consumers describe it as an important avenue for self-expression. By contrast, tattooists and those inside the scene describe kustom as a way of transcending geographical markers of identity: to be ‘anything and everything’. This article explores this tension between self-expression and the political aims of kustom. Kustom tattooing is also novel by virtue of its absolute emphasis on ‘no expertise’. It thus exposes a space where the stress on expertise and self-improvement, which characterises middle-class cultures in post-authoritarian Indonesia, gives way to creative and hybrid articulations of identity.     

‘The nice culture and the good behaviour’ state media and ethnic minorities in Lào Cai province,Vietnam

In the northern highlands of Vietnam, a very specific official vision of culture is at the core of the modernisation projects of Vietnam Television VTV5 (?ài Truy?n hình Vi?t Nam), a channel dedicated to educating ethnic minorities, and of the Lào Cai provincial branch of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST, B? V?n hóa, Th? thao và Du l?ch). These two state institutions jointly organise film screenings – for instance condemning the production and consumption of opium and heroin – in remote villages where they intend to modify cultural practices. These state social actors also produce films that represent what are deemed exemplary minority traditions for public consumption. Our observations of these media processes lead us to suggest that the subjects of these exogenous initiatives are adjusting strategically, activating patterns of quiet resistance to maintain their identities and subvert marginalisation.     

Bullying and victimization among majority and minority students: The role of peers’ ethnic perceptions

In this study, we investigate the associations between self-reported and victim-reported bullying and two dimensions of ethnicity (self-identification and ethnic perceptions) among non-Roma majority and Roma minority Hungarian secondary school students. Results of the meta-analysis of exponential random graph models for 12 classes (347 students, 4 schools) show that both self-declared Roma and non-Roma students are more likely to report that they bully peers they perceive as Roma compared to peers they perceive as non-Roma. This is after controlling for gender, socio-economic status, and structural characteristics of the bullying networks. Similar associations have not been found, however, analysing victims’ reports.     

‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race,Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.     

Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity: The creation of ‘silence’ in an elite sports academy

Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Building upon two existing literatures concerning the institutional dynamics of footballing traineeship, and the concept of organizational ‘silence’, the article explains how characteristics associated with surveillance mechanisms and the perpetuation of institutional norms lead to the configuration of a climate of silence. Utilizing the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, the article addresses the call for an understanding of the interplay between social actors and the confines of their structural context as an example of restrictive practice and for providing insight into the ‘how’ of silencing.     

On ‘problems and solutions’. The reproduction of problems for rural communities in Britain during the 1980s

Rural studies have long taken an interest in the problems besetting rural people, and in the ways in which these problems have been addressed by policy-makers. This paper briefly reviews the conventional analyses of problems and policy solutions in rural Britain during the 1980s and also raises the question of how rural researchers should regard the ‘problematic’ in these contexts. The move from regarding problems as the result of the structuring of opportunities to regarding them as a far more complex set of experiences and reactions to changing social, economic, political and cultural practices, raises interesting issues about the nature of power in rural lifestyles. It is argued that existing interpretative discourses of rural problems should be augmented by further study of problematic experiences relating to social constructions of belonging, feeling welcome, and cultural competence, and that the interconnected nature of power in politics, practice and discursive expectations about rural lifestyles will be an important subject for future research on these issues.     

‘Women from the catacombs of the city’: gender notions in Dutch culturist discourse

The current discourse on minorities in the Netherlands has two striking features: (1) it has been narrowed down to Muslim immigrants with Moroccan or Turkish backgrounds; (2) it focuses largely on gender-related issues. In this article, we suggest that there has been a historical switch in the focus of discourse on immigrants from structural factors such as employment and crime rates to cultural factors related mainly to the Islamic background of the immigrants concerned. We argue that currently the focus on gender-issues and integration in practice has the dual effects of excluding the minorities in question and of discursively counteracting the emancipation of Muslim women. Both points become apparent when reviewing the practical effects of the institutionalization of the gendered discourse on integration in policy efforts currently being undertaken. These effects are a negation of the autonomy of Muslim women and a form of ‘new racism’ that bears all the characteristics of Orientalism.     

The struggle for the state and the politics of belonging in contemporary Angola, 1975–2015

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Angola’s independence, this essay revisits key dimensions of the country’s postcolonial trajectory through the prism of the complex politics of the nationalist struggle and the first decades of self-rule. Its goal is to provide a series of reflections, mostly centred on the MPLA regime, rather than a comprehensive treatment of all political actors in Angolan politics of recent decades. It argues, firstly, that Angola’s trajectory from independence to the end of the country’s long civil war in 2002 was powerfully conditioned by the structural legacies of late colonialism, the associated intra-nationalist politics and the particular circumstances of the end of empire in 1975. To these legacies, the essay adds the (constrained, but real) choices made by Angolan decision-makers in terms of institutional consolidation, the management of the economy and state–society relations. Secondly, the essay outlines the extent to which the MPLA’s 2002 victory against UNITA in the country’s civil war did away with the fragmentation that had characterised Angolan politics since the 1960s. The clashing, indeed mutually exclusionary, nationalist projects that had jostled for control of the Angolan state were replaced by a would-be hegemonic political force with a strong sense of legitimacy and a self-defined project of postwar nation building. The key question for the contemporary study of Angola – and one that the oil-fuelled politics of the national reconstruction era provided plenty of reflection on – is the extent to which the MPLA’s postwar vision can supersede the country’s historical divisions and provide the population with both the material prosperity it yearns for and a shared understanding of belonging.     

‘Class’, ‘Race’ and Language: imagining China and the discourse on the category ‘Han’ in the writing of Marxist revolutionary Qu Qiubai (1899–1935)

This study investigates the discursive peregrinations of the ‘Han’ category in the writings of the Chinese revolutionary, theoretician and activist Qu Qiubai. In the papers he wrote at the beginning of the 1930s dealing with the questions of language and writing, the author made singular use of the concept ‘Han’ to talk about the language/writing of the ‘Han’ (Hanzi, Hanyu) as a racial or ethnic group (Hanzu). Qu elaborated a discourse which articulated and mobilized, sometimes in a contradictory manner, the ‘Han’ category both as a ‘race’ and as a social class. Going beyond the race/class dialectic, I will try to show that these texts question the territorial, cultural and ethnic boundaries of ‘China’ and its homogeneity. Following this argument, this paper demonstrates how Qu's attempt to define ‘Chinese language(s)’ helps us to elucidate the complex articulation between China as a discursive and spatial category, the ‘Han’ category, and the other nationalities in the Chinese space. By questioning the homogeneity of the linguistic identity of China, using the word zhongguohua, Qu Qiubai unveiled an unstable and fragile imaginary relative to China and its so-called majority ethnic group, the Han.     

‘Cruel necessity’: capitalism,the discourse of sympathy,and the problem of the slave trade in the age of human rights

How did Frenchmen profiting from colonial slavery respond to the emergent discourse of human rights? Le commerce de l'Amérique par Marseille (1764), a trade manual by Auguste Chambon, provides exceptional insight into the moral imagination of eighteenth-century commercial capitalists. Chambon encouraged the French to pursue slaving more aggressively. Yet rather than deny the problem of slavery, he questioned openly whether slavery violated morality, religion, and natural rights, responding to Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire from a rare Catholic-inspired perspective. Lamenting slavery as a ‘cruel necessity’ for France, Chambon enabled merchants to represent themselves as sympathetic and patriotic while preserving profits.     

Saying the ‘F word … in the nicest possible way’: augmentative communication and discourses of disability

This paper examines a case study of a severely physically disabled man, Ralph, in terms of his interaction with his carers. He communicates using various systems of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC, such as symbol boards and high-tech devices), the vocabulary for which has mostly been selected for him by others. The starting point of the paper is the assumption that disabled people have traditionally held a disempowered position in society (relative to non-disabled people), and the question asked is to what extent is Ralph further disempowered by the limited vocabulary available to him in his AAC systems, and in the way others interact with him. The paper draws on the work of Bourdieu, according to whom ‘Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power’ (1977, 648). I consider the tensions between the drive towards the empowerment of disabled individuals, as exemplified by the provision of AAC, and opposition to allowing access to certain types of vocabulary (especially expletives such as ‘the F word’), unless it is expressed in ‘the nicest possible way’.     

International news coverage and the problems of media globalization. In search of a ‘new global‐local nexus’

A variety of counter trends seem to call the idea of a linear process of media globalization into question. Many of the arguments against it have concentrated on the growth on national media markets throughout the world or on the information gap between developed and developing countries. Amazingly, though, the topic of foreign reporting has not attained a very prominent place in the globalization debate, although numerous content analyses of international news show that foreign reporting in all media systems is usually heavily influenced by particularist views. The content level of the media globalizes much slower than technical and economic aspects of media development make us think. The system of foreign reporting is not an integrated part of the international system of political and societal relations but is still closely connected to the nation‐state. Further international and intercullural conflicts and crises might be reinforced by a growing gap between globalization and particularizalion of international mass communication. A new global‐local nexus’ is needed, based on a new culture of international media criticism and a reform of the system of foreign reporting.     

‘Pernicious aliens’ and the Mestizo Nation: Ethnicity and the shaping of collective identities in El Salvador before the second world war

At first sight, a study of Chinese and Arab immigrants in El Salvador seems to be of rather limited importance in respect to the debate on immigration and intergroup relations in a general sense. Not only the setting (a country of then 1.5 million inhabitants), but also the actors of the processes described in the present study (groups of immigrants comprising a few hundred members) seem rather marginal for the issues concerned ‐ the role ethnicity and immigration play in the formation of ethnic identity in the context of a national society in full process of formation and self‐definition.1 However, as the present study tries to demonstrate, research on these immigrant groups not only yields empirical data for a case study, but also raises questions about intergroup relations. It also offers a comparative perspective on two different minority groups and a direct comparison of mechanisms related to the formation of collective identities. The variability of these mechanisms under changing social circumstances, and also their variability in relation to different minority groups are of interest in the context of the ongoing debate about the ethnicity of minority goups within nation‐states.     

‘Us’ and ‘them’: the limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times

The neurodiversity movement claims that there are neurological differences in the human population, and that autism is a natural variation among humans – not a disease or a disorder, just ‘a difference’. A ‘politics of neurodiversity’ is based on the claim that the ‘neurodiverse’ population constitutes a political grouping comparable with those of class, gender, sexuality or race. This paper considers the limits and possibilities of neurodiverse political activism, and concludes by calling for a politics of identity that does not depend on a politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’.     

‘The smell of the place’: Managerialist culture in contemporary UK business schools

By introducing an intentionally provocative critique of managerialist regimes which typify contemporary UK business school culture, we argue that current business school management practices generate a climate of mistrust and alienation amongst academics. Such a climate is not conducive to a reformative agenda that business schools should be pursuing if they are to improve staff morale and the educational environment. Drawing on Ghoshal's ‘smell of the place’ metaphor to structure this argument, we court deliberate irony and paradox. Rather than draw on heterodox theory to inform our critique we, instead, turn relatively mainstream management and organization theory against itself. Our argument is that even when examined through orthodox lenses, managerialist practices are found wanting and contradict the precepts of much mainstream normative theory.     

‘Lady no be so’: the image of women in contemporary church posters in Nigeria

There is no doubt that churches are proliferating in Nigerian cities and church-going has become a popular culture. Mostly male, pastors are sacrosanct and unaccountable, just as their living standards far outweigh those of their members. In their domination of the contemporary Church in Nigeria, male pastors reproduce and use popular but subjective social images of women to apprehend female pastors. In terms of publicity, printed posters are the most prolific media churches employ. Yet, on these same posters, male pastors differentiate themselves and subordinate female pastors by using graphic principles of layout and visual placement of women's pictures vis-à-vis theirs. That the Church is male-dominated is clearly not in question. This paper interrogates how this domination is played out and the roles women are playing in re-presenting themselves in dominated church spaces. Using data from fieldwork, this paper analyses the image of women in Nigerian church posters, the vast collection of practices built around religious domination and the roles female pastors are playing in re-representing women in the Nigerian religious space.