Search Results

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.

This chapter elaborates five conclusions, all of which captures the tension between theory and experience and ‘word’ and ‘world’ in Arab democratization by noting how the ‘dogmas’ of Western transitology can be temporally, spatially, and epistemologically tested and contested. Through specific problems and themes, the chapters open up vistas for further research by looking at competing imaginings of transition to good polity in the AME. The tension which inheres in these imaginings results from the implicit and explicit contests over power, meaning, identity, resources, knowledge-making, and self-other validation. In the final analysis, these contests are themselves paradigmatic of how democratization itself cannot be anything else but an essentially contested concept.

The introductory chapter presents the main argument of the book, that the ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s is best understood as a particularly complex, but not untypical variant of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trend to reimagine communities in a national key. It gives an account of the extant scholarship on British Zionism and adapts theories of nationalism so as to provide a suitable framework of analysis for diaspora Zionism. While modernist theories of nationalism promise an integrated interpretation of what has hitherto been explained within separate compartments, their use/application also presents a methodological challenge, since Zionism though generally considered a form of nationalism is rarely thoroughly investigated within the context of theories of nationalism.

By considering recent writings on sectarianism, chapter five investigates why sect, in particular, becomes a relevant category (when it does). In the Syrian case, this means explicating the extent to which sectarian fears about existential survival came to work in tension with fantasies of multisectarian accommodation. Centered on a pair of rumors that both stimulated and exploited a sense of vulnerability justifying regime intervention, the chapter explores what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling,” the affective residual and emergent socialities that operate implicitly beneath the radar, often organizing ordinary experiences of atmosphere and situation before they are recognized explicitly. This chapter offers an account of what happens when this form of “residual sociality,” to borrow again from Williams, percolates to the surface. Eschewing the now tired debates between primordialism and social constructivism, the chapter uses Williams to advance the understanding of how interpellation works to produce attachments beyond the economic—forms of fantasy investment that, in the case of Syria, illustrate the affective gnarl and conundrums for judgment that result when the (relatively) impersonal claims of national identification chafe against sectarian communalism’s ordinary intimacies.

This chapter uses the distinction between attributes and categories to synthesize several variants of constructivism in a common framework. “Constructivists” disagree on key questions such as the speed and frequency of ethnic identity change. One set of constructivist arguments suggest that ethnic identity change takes the form of a “punctuated equilibrium” with rare moments of change followed by long stretches of stability. Others argue that ethnic identities are in a state of permanent instability. Resolving these disagreements is important, since each leads us in distinct theoretical directions. The distinction between “attributes” and “categories” of membership provides the basis for a resolution. Those variants of constructivism which imply that ethnic identities change slowly and rarely can be read as referring to changes in the underlying repertoire of descent-based attributes. Those variants which suggest that ethnic identities change frequently and quickly usually refer to the categories which can be activated from within the constraints set by our descent-based attributes. These different positions are not contradictory but refer to different components of a common process of change. The chapter builds on this synthesis to introduce a set of general, logically consistent, mechanisms by which ethnic identities change in the short and long term.

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s five main theoretical arguments. It shows how each chapter highlights the fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; examines the bureaucratic underpinning of transborder membership politics; reveals its historical nature; demonstrates the importance of the broader interstate system in determining the efficacy of the state’s transborder claims-making; and offers a deeply agentic portrayal of transborder membership politics by attending not only to the macropolitics but also to the micropolitics of identity. It also demonstrates the values and the limitations of ethnic nationalism as an analytic category by identifying the historical genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of ethnic nationalism, its variable manifestations (or lack thereof) in different policy domains and repertoires of contention, and its persistence as well as metamorphosis over time. A discussion on the future of transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization follows.

This chapter examines the theory advanced by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand stating that the Jews were a product of invention, and thus were an artificial people. In his book The Invention of the Jewish People, first published in Hebrew in 2008, Sand proposes an alternative account that traces Jewish origins to more recent times. The chapter considers the arguments for and against Sand's controversial theory and the distinctive conception of origin on which it depends. It discusses some of The Invention of the Jewish People's shortcomings, including Sand's treatment of conversion in relation to what is known in biology and linguistics as “polygenesis,” and the idea that the nation was a modern invention, citing the Jews as a classic example of premodern nationalism. Finally, it explains why some scholars embrace the constructivist approach to account for the invention of the nation and others choose primordialism.

This chapter examines the field of population genetics as an approach to the origin of the Jews. Most historians study the past by focusing on the period of time that can be documented by textual sources, the past 4,000 years or so. In the past few years, a new form of primordialism has emerged that uses DNA and the brain's evolutionary history to reconstruct demographic history, ancient social interaction, and other insights to shed light on where people come from and how they have evolved. The chapter first provides an overview of genetic history and biological approaches to the origin of the Jews before discussing what genetics research has revealed about the ancestry of the Jews, some of the criticisms hurdled against this research, and whether a genetic approach offers a viable alternative to the constructivist approach employed by many contemporary scholars to address the question of Jewish origins.

Chapter 9 begins with “primordialism” or essentialized views of race which continue to exist in post-Soviet society (including Russia) and in the Russian language. Then, we review and debunk the myth of “Russian” as the most loyal Soviet people (of all the various nationalities). This was due to the Russian Civil War when entire regions and cities changing loyalties from Bolsheviks to the Whites (Greens, SR’s, zemstvo governments, etc.) and then back again (continuously for five years). All of the anti-Bolshevik forces were supplied, armed, funded and supported by the Allied Interventionists. Meanwhile, five thousand Soviet Koreans fought for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Finally, we review the case of Gum Nam Kim and the Soviet use of Soviet Koreans to further their political relationship(s) with North Korea.

This chapter aims to demystify sectarian identity by critically examining some of the key debates and false binaries that dominate discussions of ‘sectarianism’. These include several impractical dichotomies: religion and politics; unity and division; primordialism and instrumentalism; top-down and bottom-up drivers; the role of foreign powers versus local agency. The chapter demonstrates the impossibility of these binaries and their incompatibility with the inherently multidimensional nature of sectarian dynamics. Firstly, the role of religious beliefs and doctrinal differences in sectarian dynamics will be examined. It will be argued that, like inter-group relations generally, sectarian relations are animated by a broad nexus of factors that cannot be reduced to doctrinal difference. The chapter then interrogates the dichotomization of sectarian conflict and sectarian coexistence – a binary that obscures the more common reality of sectarian irrelevance. This highlights the importance of context and of having a sufficiently broad historical scope when considering sectarian dynamics. Acontextual and ahistoric accounts routinely exaggerate the relevance/irrelevance of sectarian identity. Finally, the chapter turns to the dichotomization of top-down and bottom-up drivers and the role of foreign powers versus local agency. It will be argued that circularity not dichotomization is the better way of understanding such binaries.

The Introduction sets out the comparative framework of analysis and investigates the main patterns on church-state relations within the Orthodox commonwealth. It provides the theoretical framework of investigation before turning to the detailed analysis of each geographical and spiritual region.

Most Americans’ source for what “feud” means came from fiction, especially in the nineteenth century when interest in European antiquity was especially high. After the Civil War “feud” became a special cultural device for parsing the antebellum past from an industrial present (and future). This coincided with the federal government's (and, in a sense, the North's) declining interest in reforming the South, as well as with the new scrutiny and othering of Appalachia between the 1880s and 1910s. Applying “feud” to current events was a strategy for placing them discursively in the past in order to minimize their importance or that of their participants. The creation of Bloody Breathitt was part of this larger task of separating past from present. Eventually, even Breathitt County's own citizens conformed their memory to the parameters of the assumptions imposed upon them from the “outside world.”

This chapter presents the ways in which understandings of ethnicity and race have evolved, and what characterises the different perspectives on these social positions that are available (i.e. essentialism/ primordialism, structuralism/ circumstantialism and constructionism). In doing so, this chapter maps out what these different perspectives mean to how we make sense of the impact that ethnicity and race have in our lives, and explains why some scholars refer to ethnicity and race as background variables, while others regard them as social positions, locations or identification grounds. In doing so this chapter problematizes what previous research on the intersection of ethnicity/ race and ageing/ old age has shown as far as the understandings of ethnicity and race that inform this scholarship.

The concluding chapter revisits the themes that have already been spoken about. The author reconsiders the methodology that she employs in her study. The purpose of the work has been to see how the Mizos constructed their identity in the course of and through their relationship with power, changing notions of territoriality and engagements with their landscape, and ideas of sociality. Such themes are once again re-iterated in the concluding chapter.

This chapter examines whether the concept of human rights is compatible with indigenous religion. It begins with an overview of primordialism and its paradoxes, with particular emphasis on the emergence of human rights directed toward the rights of peoples, especially the rights of religious freedom of indigenous peoples. It then considers the emergence of the international movement of indigenous peoples and the assimilationist orientation to the rights of indigenous peoples, along with the objectification of indigenous religious claims and the link between indigenous spirituality and industrial modernity. It also discusses the role played by culturally defining public outreach and collaborative activism in mediating processes or “projects” of collective self-definition that translate to an indigenous worldview.

The wild time of the Bible’s primeval history became progressively less accessible across the nineteenth century. Many philosophers and cultural agents intended time to be flat, linear, and homogeneous. Joseph Smith disagreed, strenuously. He encouraged his followers to live a different form of time, inhabiting the past and present simultaneously, even as he was coy about his relationship to traditional Christian understandings of eternity. Smith’s effort to bind time into a sacred simultaneity famously included attempts to live anciently biblical lives, which included polygamy and apparently never-realized plans for animal sacrifice. These efforts at sacred simultaneity were intended to create and strengthen relationships between the living and the dead and to free Latter-day Saints from the prison of flat time.