Search Results

When asked what is best or worst about Scotland, one minority places more emphasis on racism, the other on freedom, the friendliness of majority Scots, and the relatively low numbers of ethnic minorities. English immigrants complain the most about Scottish bigotry and racism; ethnic Pakistanis strongly praise freedom and friendliness; and ethnic Pakistanis feel alienated by high concentrations of minorities.

Students frequently come to classes about new religious movements disinclined to take them seriously as legitimate religions. Borrowing from literature about race and diversity in the classroom and using Peter Elbow's description of methodological doubt and methodological belief as analytical tools, this chapter discusses strategies for overcoming student resistance to taking NRMs seriously as religions. It is argued that the rigorous cultivation of methodological belief as an approach to the study of NRMs offers an effective way to dissipate some negative effects of stereotypes of NRMs and develop adequate descriptions of them. Advocating a rhetorical model of teaching, the chapter provides examples of active learning assignments and offers suggestions about course design that can make the politics of representation of NRMs a continuing topic for class discussions.

Control typically is conceived of as a set of conscious responses to an activated goal and the subsequent attempts at goal pursuit. Control includes the self-regulatory steps one initiates by conscious willing to address a selected goal and to allow one to pursue that goal. However, these attempts to compensate for a desired end state that is not yet achieved are not limited to conscious acts of deliberation, planning, and the resulting behavior. Implicit cognition plays an important role in preparing the individual to act, in allowing the individual both to detect goal-relevant stimuli in the environment and to process goal-relevant stimuli in a fashion that will facilitate goal achievement and shield one from distractions that could potentially derail attempts at self-control. Such automatic thought includes processes of spreading activation and inhibition as well as attentional selectivity. Evidence in support of such automatic processes of self-control is provided from the domain of stereotype control and the preconscious cognitive operations that result when one attempts to regulate the goal to be egalitarian and non-stereotypic in one's dealings with others.

This chapter presents a brief overview of John Calvin’s life and the stereotypes that surround many assessments of that life. The usefulness of such stereotypes is questioned, for they can not only impede the study of Calvin the man but they also can cloud one’s understanding of Calvin’s influence in American culture, one that can be traced not only through the positive appropriations of the Calvinist tradition but also through the ways in which even people who reject that tradition end up wrestling with the fruits of Calvin’s influence. There then follows a short narrative tracing the movement of Calvinism from Europe to the New World. Finally, there is a brief introduction to the contents of the book through a brief summary of each of the chapters.

This chapter defends an account of stereotypes, according to which stereotypes are (reliable or unreliable) widely-held associations of an attribute(s) and a social group. A conception of prejudice is advanced and put together with the foregoing to produce a definition of prejudicial stereotype. It is argued that (reliable) stereotypes are an essential heuristic in the making of credibility judgements in testimonial exchanges. There is, however, an ever-present risk that the stereotypes on which we rely are prejudicial, producing testimonial injustice. The wrong of testimonial injustice is analysed: someone is undermined in their capacity as a giver of knowledge.

Two types of critics oppose any role for identity in democratic politics. On one hand, identity quietists are advocates of multiculturalism who believe that multicultural principles can be applied without recourse to identity assessments. On the other hand, identity sceptics raise deep reservations about identity claims and therefore strongly oppose a form of politics, such as multiculturalism, which takes seriously identity claims. This chapter focuses on the failures of identity quietism using the debates over legally recognizing Muslim religious arbitration in the context of Canadian multiculturalism. It shows that when identity is not assessed in an open, direct, and structured manner, it is likely to be assessed implicitly and thereby remain open to the risk that racial stereotyping and democratic alienation will characterize assessments. The chapter rebuts identity quietism and outlines the four varieties of identity scepticism addressed in subsequent chapters.

This chapter presents a framework for thinking about intergroup relations that can be immediately useful to people who are confronted with these issues in their daily lives. It suggests that downward spirals in intergroup relations are a product of egosystem motivational dynamics, and that ecosystem dynamics can create upward spirals in intergroup relations. In doing so, the chapter does not advocate abandoning attempts to change stereotypes and prejudice, or alter power and status relations; rather, it seeks to explore where individuals caught in these processes have leverage to create positive dynamics in their intergroup relations.

This chapter explores how the phantasmagoria of the Muslim is drawn from certain culinary and dietary habits, most clearly stereotyped in the meat eater or butcher. This stereotype manifests in the explanations of three separate members of three different communities: Jain, Rajput, and Dalit. While they share membership in the city's middle class, these communities differentiate themselves in their relation to diet and other practices. Stereotypes always carry a kernel of truth, as their power lies primarily in the psychological material they can evoke. In the pogrom, they work as residues of individual subjective experiences that became articulated collectively. When this residue takes on a stable form by being projected onto the Muslim, that figure becomes an embodiment of the most pronounced form of perceived threat, and a danger that appears confined to this figure, controllable despite its blurred and shifting nature.

This chapter examines the role of stereotypes in enhancing or reducing the accuracy of person perception. It points out that relying on an inaccurate stereotype will usually reduce accuracy of person perception and this may help explain why many social scientists seem to assume that any influence of a stereotype on person perception is something bad and biased that leads people astray. However, as Chapter 17 showed, stereotype accuracy is one of the largest effects in social psychology. This raises the question: Will relying on accurate stereotypes enhance or reduce the accuracy of person perception? This chapter’s answer is: It depends. The chapter identifies three different situations on which the answer depends: When people have vividly clear, credible, relevant individuating information, they usually (though not always) should rely on it and ignore their stereotypes; when people have ambiguous or only partially informative individuating information, they should rely on both their (accurate) stereotype and the individuating information; and when people have no individuating information, relying on their (accurate) stereotype will maximize the accuracy of their person perception predictions. The scientific evidence is then reviewed, and, perhaps shockingly, it shows that how people integrate stereotypes and individuating information to arrive at person perception judgments approximately corresponds to what they should do to be as rational and accurate as possible. The chapter ends by introducing the Stereotype Rationality Hypothesis, which suggests that laypeople largely (though not perfectly) rely on stereotypes when doing so is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences, and they readily prefer relevant individuating information when it is most likely to lead to accurate predictions and inferences.

This chapter argues that legitimacy is a double-edged sword, providing a constraint not only on discrimination, but also on resistance that might lead injustice to be challenged. The chapter is structured as follows. First, it outlines accounts that see discrimination between groups as almost inevitable products of our group nature, and then challenge this view. This leads into a discussion of how legitimacy and the content of group identity (norms and stereotypes) form bases by which discrimination may be constrained. It considers evidence from four domains to provide empirical support for the legitimacy constraint argument: (1) social stereotyping, (2) in-group bias and discrimination, (3) emotion-based forms of prejudice (specifically intergroup schadenfreude), and (4) perceptions of group (in)justice. Finally, the chapter considers how reconciliation fits into this social identity analysis of intergroup conflict tempered by legitimacy constraints, and indeed how it can add to it.

This chapter discusses the way song fragments function in the work of four novelists: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Christina Stead, and Charles Dickens. It considers silencing, particularly of women, as an aspect of fragmentation. It shows that women have long been associated with silence, despite having a cultural stereotype of garrulousness. The chapter also determines that intertexts empower the reader due to the ‘multi-accentuality’ of cultural texts and practices.

This introduction touches on themes that recur throughout the book, exploring the binary concepts of sexuality and gender often present in Western society and others, whether they stem from conflicting scientific studies or essentialized notions prevalent in popular culture. Starting from the perspective that gender and sexuality are social constructions often realized in performance, examples focus on concepts and stereotypes that relate to masculinity in the dance world, especially those of “choreophobia” (ambivalence about dance as a potentially negative force), homophobia, and the related concept of “effeminophobia.”

The chapter considers the different ways in which Southeast Asian American youth may use local varieties of English to negotiate ideologies of race and Asianness in the production of identity. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnoracially diverse California high school, the chapter shows how two high school girls, both refugees from Laos, navigate conflicting ideologies of Asian immigrant youth as model minorities on the one hand and as dangerous gangsters on the other. Each girl's style was produced linguistically neither in their native language nor in an ethnically distinctive “Asian American English” but through a positive or negative orientation to the linguistic resources of African American Vernacular English and youth slang. The vast diversity of Asian Americans as a panethnic category and the complexity of their identity practices and performances demands richer and more contextually nuanced theorizing of the relationship between language and identity.

This chapter examines the ways in which stereotypes of Asian Americans emerge as resources for Asian Americans. Drawing on theories and methods in linguistic anthropology, this chapter reveals how metapragmatic stereotypes are circulating resources that can be creatively recontextualized in interaction. It analyzes video‐recorded interactions among Southeast Asian American teenagers as they reappropriate Asian American stereotypes to: 1) position themselves and others relative to stereotypes; 2) construct stereotyping as an oppressive practice to resist or as an interactional resource to celebrate; and 3) bring about interactional effects from widely circulating stereotypes (e.g., Asian American storeowner) that are different from those from locally circulating typifications (e.g., Asian American minivan driver). This chapter reveals how stereotypes can be creatively recontextualized in interaction, incorporated into people's lives to various effects, and sought out as a means of identifying and imagining oneself, others, and connections between individuals and groups.