Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks, Oxford 2013
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| Introduction (open-access) |
ABSTRACT
The book introduces a new theory that overcomes
essentializing approaches to ethnicity all the while avoiding the pitfalls of
excessive constructivism. It suggests understanding ethnic/racial boundaries as
the outcome of a negotiation process between actors who pursue different
boundary making strategies, depending on institutional incentives, their
position within power hierarchies, and their pre-existing networks of alliances.
This theory contrast with mainstream approaches in the social sciences, where
ethnic groups are often treated as self-evident units of observation and ethnic
culture and solidarity as self-explanatory variables, thus overlooking the
process through which certain ethnic cleavages but not others become culturally
meaningful, politically salient, and associated with dense networks of
solidarity. By paying systematic attention to variation in the nature of ethnic
boundaries, the book also overcomes the exclusive focus on fluidity,
malleability, and contextual instability that characterizes radically
constructivist approaches. This book introduces a series of epistemological
principles, theoretical stances, research designs, and modes of interpretation
that allow to disentangle ethnic from other processes of group formation and to
assess in how far ethnic boundaries structure the allocation of resources,
invite political passion, and represent primary aspects of individual identity.
Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, several
chapters exemplify how this agenda can be realized in concrete empirical
research: on how local residents in immigrant neighborhoods draw symbolic
boundaries against each other, on the ethnic and racial composition of
friendship networks, and how ethnic closure influences the cultural values of
Europeans.
