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This chapter offers a new taxonomy of how actors draw ethnic boundaries and how they can attempt to make them relevant. It distinguishes between five main strategies of boundary making: to redraw a boundary by either expanding or limiting the range of people included in one’s own ethnic category; to modify existing boundaries by challenging the hierarchical ordering of ethnic categories, or by changing one’s own position within a boundary system, or by emphasizing other, non-ethnic forms of belonging. The second part of the chapter outlines the main means to enforce ethnic boundaries, including through discourse and symbols, everyday or legal discrimination, political mobilization, and violence. This taxonomy of strategies and means of boundary making claims to be exhaustive and accommodates a considerable number of historical and contemporary cases both from the developed and the developing world. It aims at overcoming the fragmentation of the literature along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines and prepares the ground for an agency-rich comparative model of ethnic boundary making offered in chapter 4.

Primordialist and constructivist authors have debated the nature of ethnicity “as such” and therefore failed to explain why its characteristics vary so dramatically across cases, displaying different degrees of social closure, political salience, cultural distinctiveness and historical stability. This chapter introduces a multi-level process theory to understand how these characteristics are generated and transformed over time. The theory assumes that ethnic boundaries are the outcome of the classificatory struggles and negotiations between actors situated in a social field. Three characteristics of a field—the institutional order, distribution of power and political networks—determine which actors will adopt which strategy of ethnic boundary making. The chapter then discusses under which conditions a shared understanding of the location and meaning of these boundaries will emerge. The nature of this consensus explains degrees of closure, salience, cultural differentiation and stability of an ethnic boundary. A final section identifies endogenous and exogenous mechanisms of change.

This introductory chapter gives a short and succinct summary of the main propositions of the boundary making approach advanced in this book and outlines its intellectual genealogy that includes the work of Max Weber, Fredrik Barth, and Pierre Bourdieu as well as more recent developments in the sociology and anthropology of boundary making. The second part summarizes individual chapters.

Major paradigms in immigration research, including assimilation theory, multi-culturalism, and ethnic studies, take it for granted that dividing society into ethnic groups is analytically and empirically meaningful because each of these groups is characterized by a specific culture, dense networks of solidarity, and shared identity. Three major revisions of this perspective have been proposed in the comparative ethnicity literature over the past decades, leading to a renewed concern with the emergence and transformation of ethnic boundaries. In immigration research, “assimilation” and “integration” have been reconceived as potentially reversible, power driven processes of boundary shifting. After a synthetic summary of the major theoretical propositions of this emerging paradigm, this chapter offers suggestions on how to bring it to fruition in future empirical research. First, major mechanisms and factors influencing the dynamics of ethnic boundary-making are specified, emphasizing the need to disentangle them from non-ethnic processes. The chapter finally discusses a series of promising research designs, most based on non-ethnic units of observation and analysis, that allow for a better understanding of these mechanisms and factors. Some of these research designs are used in the empirical investigations of the following chapters.

Does ethnicity determine the formation of groups in immigrant societies? Multiculturalism and radical constructivism give opposing answers to this question. This chapter provides an empirical contribution to the debate by looking at patterns of group formation on the level of social categories and personal networks in the immigrant neighbourhoods of Basel, Berne, and Zurich. The chapter finds that ethno-national or racial categories are secondary principles of classification only and that the main boundaries are drawn between old-established residents of the neighbourhood (of different ethnic backgrounds) and newcomers, mostly recently arrived immigrant cohorts from the Balkans or the developing world. The social boundaries in the friendship networks of neighbourhood residents largely conform to this mode of classification. The chapter concludes by hinting at how this world view prepared the ground for the rise of a xenophobic, populist party in Switzerland.

This final chapter summarizes the major propositions and findings of the book. It reviews the units and strategies of analysis employed throughout the empirical chapters (non-ethnic units; disentangling ethnic from non-ethnic processes); recapitulates that the boundary making approach assumes a principally open outcome of group formation processes, including the emergence of non-ethnic and non-racialized forms of categorization and association; and it reviews the major hypotheses explored empirically: that inequality along ethnic lines leads to social closure and cultural difference; that a consensus on the location and meaning of boundaries enhances their politicization and social closure along these divides. The chapter concludes by pointing out future areas of research: to understand long-term boundary dynamics from a truly comparative point of view; to investigate how inequality along ethnic lines emerges and disappears; and how precisely ethnic and other forms of boundary making relate to each other beyond the acknowledgment of their co-existence, as in the “intersectionality” approach.

This chapter examines how immigrant women accommodate themselves to the various demands of low-wage, low-status service jobs by engaging in “boundary making,” processes that circumscribe and redefine the performance of “dirty work.” Boundary making refers to material and symbolic processes in which providers of low-wage work impose limitations on its performance while redefining the work as skillful and important. Dirty work is defined as physical labor that involves cleaning and caring for the human body, its products, and its environs. The chapter first provides an overview of certified nursing assistants (CNAs) who provide elder care in the United States before exploring how immigrants working as CNAs make meaning of work that is often construed as dirty work. Using data from fieldwork in three California nursing homes, the chapter shows how CNAs try to bring some measure of dignity to a low-wage, low-status job, and shape their identity formation as workers and immigrants within constraining institutional contexts.

This chapter turns to the subject of boundary making and political authority in the context of jihad and the borderlands. Combining political and legal history, it explores how the presence of a jurisdictional border between the Domain of Islam and the Domain of War informed the jurists' evaluation of the social contract between Muslims and dhimmis. The chapter adds another aspect to the relationship between social change and the development of law by discussing how the vagueness of “the border,” the instability of life in the borderlands, and the changeability of identity created complicated legal questions. The notions of the ahd al-dhimma as a social contract and as a legal category were integral to jurists' understanding of the political order, Islam, and the rights and obligations of Muslims.

This chapter examines the Turkish state's organizational response to the insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). It begins with an overview of Turkey's creation of special regions to combat rebels and how special rule separated the experience of these units from the rest of the country. It then considers administrative redistricting practices within this special region and shows that these administrative arrangements were designed to increase state presence in the target territory. It also discusses the state's decision to relinquish control over rural areas and how it depopulated the countryside to deprive insurgents of logistical support. It argues that special administrative solutions consolidated a contentious universe and resulted in boundary making.

This chapter presents an overview of the establishment of Umayyad authority in al-Andalus during the ninth and tenth centuries. It examines how political identity is expressed in religious terms and how the political and religious authorities worked together in determining who was an insider or an outsider to the Muslim community. Particularly, the principles of Umayyad dynastic legitimacy and authority, as well as the regime's exercise of power, structured Umayyad rule and the political culture of al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries. The chapter aims to provide a political context for understanding social and legal boundary making in al-Andalus, as well as to elaborate the role played by the ruling dynasty in defining political community.

As part of a material turn, organizational scholars increasingly pay attention to nonhuman agents, the things and stuff of organizing. These nonhuman agents are often discussed without consideration of difference. To encourage a more nuanced conversation about agency and the human/nonhuman divide, this chapter analyzes PRU’s boundary-making practices—the organization’s continuous decisions about who or what can act, especially in violent ways. It shows that these practices are gendered, raced, and sexualized, and they emerge as such while PRU members grapple with Title IX reporting processes. Importantly, statements and texts about violence—both forms of discourse—are considered to be agentic when they uphold whiteness. In contrast, their capacity to act is minimized when they challenge systemic racism or identify patterns of violence. Though some scholars are concerned that discourse has become too muscular, this chapter shows that the agency of discourse—when considered in proximity to Title IX and sexual violence—is far from uniformly too forceful. Drawing on scholarship rarely read among organizational scholars, this chapter issues a caution: Theories that minimize the supposedly bulging biceps of discourse may keep a violent status quo in place.

This chapter examines the ways the state built new boundaries among immigrants. It analyzes the four population categories recorded on state household registers—metropolitan, rural, and floating bannermen, and civilian commoners—as well as the unregistered population. Through land allocation, the state assigned these population categories differentiated entitlements. Each metropolitan banner household received twice as much land as a rural banner household did. Floating bannermen and civilian commoners had no entitlement to land and could only work as tenants and laborers. Moreover, the state purposefully used population registration to manipulate the entitlements of its subject population, as it intentionally left a large size of unregistered population outside of the system. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the distribution of registered land ownership among the four population categories a half century after the initial settlement, showing the enduring inequality created by state land allocation.

This essay explores the political and discursive mechanisms Brazilian writer Da Cunha employs to build a historical past for Brazil in the Amazon, while simultaneously discrediting Bolivia and Peru’s territorial demands on the Acre region in Amazonia. Building his argument on boundary-making history, cartographical data, and nationalistic feelings, Torres argues that Da Cunha crafts a compelling case for Brazil’s rightful purchase of Acre and expansion of its frontiers in two ways. Firstly, Da Cunha identifies the value of the Amazon, whether as a political, economic, or even symbolic capital that can be utilized to lay the grounds for a diplomatic defense, and therefore lawfulness of their territorial claims. Secondly, Torres goes on to argue that Da Cunha is aware of the decisive nature of his mission for the mapping of a terrain visited only by local Indians and Peruvian rubber tappers. This consciousness leads him to compose a history for Brazil in the Amazon with the intention of nationalizing the territory; in other words, to turn an abstract and alien place into one concrete narrative in which the uprooted nation is reunited and homogenized under a common and shared identity.

When the phenomenon of coloured rain struck Kerala in 2001, the ambivalences and contradictions in the explanation provided by the researchers from the Centre for Earth Science Studies raised public ire. Following this, the scientific public sphere was transformed into a channel for scientific communication between different groups of researchers who attempted to solve the mystery. In this context a group of researchers proposed that the red colour of the rain was due to biological cells of meteoric origin, against the biologists’ argument that the reason was algal and fungal spores. Skilfully promoting their findings with the help of global media, these researchers surpassed the hierarchies of science. By examining the controversy, the chapter highlights the role of media in helping scientists and the public to engage with a wide range of scientific explanations that were proposed, discussed, and falsified or accepted through a complex deliberative process.