Ethnic Discourse Research Articles

Intertwining Influences on Perceptions of Risk, Pain, and Injury in Sport: A Close Study of a Chinese New Immigrant Mother–Daughter Pair

Sociological research on sport risk, pain, and injury primarily focuses on young, Western, high-performance male athletes in organized sport. In contrast, ethnic minority women’s experiences with sporting pain and injury, and risk perceptions are often underrepresented. This paper presents a close study of a Chinese new immigrant mother’s risk rationality and practices as related to her daughter’s sporting experiences in New Zealand. A conceptual framework of “neoliberal ethnic discourses of risk” was used to explore how intertwining factors of ethnicity, gender, and immigrant identity, influenced participants’ preferences for particular sports, and their perception and experiences of risk, pain, and injury. This study invites sports sociologists and organizations to consider how cultural and gendered discourses influenced Chinese new immigrant women’s sporting participation in host countries, such as New Zealand, especially why the group might be less active and more resistant to particular sports and physical activities while strongly favoring others.

Resistance from the Margins: ‘Untouchable’ Women’s Voices vis-à-vis the Gorkha Identity and the Gorkhaland Movement

Abstract One of the most conspicuous features of the Gorkhaland movement is the development of a strong sense of community that has subsumed many diverse voices within the dominant discourse of ethnicity. However, such ethno-nationalism is also problematic as it often results in the erasure of intersecting identity markers such as class, caste, and gender. In addition, the exclusive nature of the over-encompassing Nepali or Gorkha identity has led to harmful consequences for marginalized groups, particularly the lower castes. This paper thus brings to the fore alternative voices and perspectives, particularly those of women who come from the margins of caste society or who have been labelled as ideological adversaries. This paper further illustrates their unique experiences and perspectives, which are often ignored in mainstream discussions about the social reality of the Gorkhaland movement.

Διαπολιτισμική Εκπαίδευση – Σκέψεις και κριτικές επισημάνσεις για το «αντικείμενο» της αναγνώρισης

The question "how to realize the goal of recognizing and acknowledging cultural differences, while avoiding the risk of reproducing stereotypes about the 'other'?" remains of major importance for the theory and practice of Intercultural Education. This question requires clarification regarding "how" exactly we conceptualize "recognition" and, respectively, define its "object". Starting from these findings, this paper deals, in a first step, with three main conceptualizations of recognition by Taylor, Honneth & Stojanov, and by Butler, examining "how" in each case the "object" of recognition and, by extension, the goal of the subject's educational process is defined. In a second step, an attempt is made to correlate the theoretical conclusions with the perspective of the recognition needs of adolescents with an immigrant background, in order to clarify that conceptualization of recognition which can meet both the needs of the subjects and the critical and emancipatory character of Intercultural Education. We conclude that the definition of the "object" of recognition in the case of adolescents with an immigrant background should have as its central reference point their efforts to form a culturally pluralistic self, through the overcoming of social distinctions and separations caused by the dominant ethnic discourse.

Revisiting Wise “Barbarians” in the Hellenistic Era

ABSTRACT: The overriding sense of civilizational superiority among Greeks was encapsulated most potently in the concept of the “barbarian,” an uneducated foreigner who could do nothing more than babble nonsense, let alone contribute to civilization. The strong distinction between Greeks and barbarians was not always perfectly dichotomous, however, as seen in the wise barbarian theme that scholarship has long tracked, particularly in connection with ethnographic works and, in the Roman era, philosophical and religious debates. Taking a decolonizing approach that also moves beyond the problematic modern categories of “philosophy” and “religion,” this article explores the wise barbarian as part of a more widespread set of ethnic discourses in the period after Herodotus (ca. 420 bce) and before Poseidonios of Apameia (ca. 50 bce). I argue that these discourses were employed not only among Greeks such as Ephoros of Kyme (ca. 350 bce), but also among subject peoples themselves, as in Bel-re’ushu (Berossos) of Babylon (ca. 300 bce), long before the Stoic Poseidonios developed his theory of primitive wisdom in the first century bce. These multivalent discourses provide important insights into ethnic relations in and around the Hellenistic era as those belonging to both hegemonic and conquered populations engaged in different strategies in order to navigate their places within an expanding world.

Transgressive Russianness: Claiming authenticity in the Russian woman assemblage

The question of sociolinguistic authenticity has been widely researched with reference to authentic linguistic production and authentic language users. Globalization and intense language contacts have brought increased attention to the question of authenticity as it applies to what linguistic and cultural production is considered authentic and what facets of linguistic and cultural production are most salient to authenticity. The study examines the notion of authenticity in relation to the linguistic presentation of Russian womanhood by the Tajik-Russian singer Manizha in her song Russian woman . We aim to show how linguistic and cultural transgression underlying her performance prompted contestable interpretations and opened up the evaluative divide among the audience. Using Pennycook’s semiotics of transignification (Pennycook 2007), we analyze the performance at different levels (pretextual history, contextual relations, subtextual and intertextual meanings, and post-textual interpretations). We juxtapose the song, the singer’s post-performance interviews, and the viewers’ online comments in order to reveal the authenticating and deauthenticating discourses of gender and ethnicity. We have identified the opposing conceptions of Russian womanhood in the performance, both of which can be deemed authentic or inauthentic. We argue that authentication and deauthentication of this textual assemblage are driven by different ideologies and often depend on a single textual level or element. Moreover, authenticity may be recontextualized and renegotiated through discourse. The study highlights the co-existence of multiple and competing authenticies within a single multimodal performance and demonstrates how semiotics of transignification may be used to un-cover these competing ideological orientations.

Subject Peoples and Civilizational Priority: Competition among Babylonians, Egyptians, and Judeans in the Hellenistic Era

AbstractThis article proceeds on the principle that we need to decenter dominant ethnic groups—primarily Greeks and Greco-Macedonians in the early Hellenistic era—in order to understand other marginalized viewpoints and experiences, including but not limited to those of Judeans (Jews). An analysis of the Babylonian author Bel-re’ushu helps to provide a new angle on Judean (e.g., Artapanus) and Egyptian (e.g., Manetho) participation within ethnic discourses that include claims to civilizational priority. I would suggest that the rhetoric of ethnic superiority in writings by subject peoples can be viewed as a symptom of ethnic interactions and not merely as a literary response to elite Greek claims regarding the inferiority of supposedly “barbarian” peoples. So it is not always the currently hegemonic Greeks that are the principal interlocutors in these ethnic discourses.

The Founder’s Cult in Messambria Pontica

The article deals with the early history of the politeia Messambria Pontica through the prysm of the foundation myth and cult. The almost simultaneous establishment of the cult and myth to the historical founder and mythical eponumous hero-founder attested on the silver coinage of Messambria may refer to a certain need of a group of Messambrian society to present itself in a certain way at-home and abroad. The author elieves that this should be considered within the ethnic discourse between Ionians and Dorians.

¡Nakíssimo! Transnational Identities, Cultural Tourism, and the Aesthetics of Consumption in NaCo Clothing

The NaCo apparel company in Tijuana, Mexico, created a line of clothing and accessories that traded on a bilingual and bicultural identity construction in the late 1990s and 2000s. An examination of this clothing and its connection to the slang term naco reveals interesting aspects of the way national and ethnic discourses construct identity through the flow and consumption of transnational products. They are indicative of how these identities and the consumption of these products produce different identity narratives in the presence of the particular national configurations of race and ethnicity in Mexico and the United States. In an increasingly globalized world where people and cultural products move with increasing ease, NaCo products demonstrate that borders continue to exercise an enormous influence on these same products and how they are consumed. NaCo’s clothing and its consumption as a cultural act point to the enduring influence and importance of the nation, its identity narratives, and cultural codes as a locus of individual identity construction.

CONSTRUCTION OF HYBRID IDENTITY: A CRITICAL STUDY OF HANIF KUREISHI'S THE BUDHA OF SUBURBIA

This research article analyses the authorial perspective and self-reflection in Hanif Kureishi's first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia. The dominant discourses of ethnicity, race, class, and gender are examined in terms of their effects on the categories of subjectivity and identity. The analysis focuses on the novel's protagonist, Karim Amir, tracing his life journey and showing how his self-perception is shaped by forces beyond his control but is malleable thanks to his extraordinary skill of mimicry. Karim mimics white English mainstream society consciously as a way to find his place in society and unconsciously as a political gesture against the forces of colonialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on the work of theorists like Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart, Fanon and others, we see that Karim and his relatives are complex hybrids who question the assumptions underlying Cartesian concepts of identity and subjectivity. Keywords: subjectivity, identity, hybridity, mimicry, colonialism, neocolonialism, capitalism

The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough

Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.

Secularism and Ethnic Minorities: Comparative Case Studies on Ethnic, Religious, and Political Cognitions in Pakistani-Controlled Kashmir, Central Russia, Romania, and Northern Scandinavia

According to my study, “political secularism” means the separation of political power from religious institutions, while “social secularism” is a theory and endeavor to eliminate religiosity from not only public but also private life, considering it an obsolete way of thinking. I examine four case studies based on my ethnological fieldwork in Hunza (in the Pakistani-controlled Kashmir), the Middle Ural (Russia), Transylvania (Romania), and Sápmi (northern Scandinavia). I outline and compare ethnic minorities (Hunzakuts, Tatars, Szeklers, Samis) according to their historical background, contemporary social environment, relation to the majority, their political endeavors, and the role of religion(s) among them. Based on my fieldwork notes, interviews, and sociological data, I analyze the similarities and differences of ethnic complexity, terminological confusions, problems of “lived religion,” and the impact of social and political secularism. Since their religiosity differs from the majorities’ ones, I found that secularism has a complex role and reception. Political secularism is essential for defending these minorities from assimilation, but most of these minorities reject social secularism since religion is part of their multifunctional ethnic discourse space. Religiosity is part of their survival strategy. Notwithstanding, ethnic minorities’ religious institutions participate in political activity and propagate their claims for self-governance.

Migrations of Ethnonyms, Migrations of Peoples. Continuity and Change in the Ethnic Landscape around the Black Sea through the Study of Late Antique Lists of Ethnonyms

This contribution aims at highlighting the importance of the study of ethnonyms and, in particular, of lists of ethnonyms for understanding late antique discourses of ethnicity. The selected sources for this contribution are the Laterculus Veronensis (314 CE) and the Cosmographia of Julius Honorius (5th century CE). Both works consist in a series of catalogues of place names and ethnonyms, which provide invaluable material for the analysis of the ethnic vocabulary of the time. Drafted with different purposes, these texts serve to elucidate the role of ethnonyms in both the political communication and the educational system of Late Antiquity. In this context, as a cultural and geographical borderland, the area north and east of the Black Sea represents an ideal subject of studies. Its apparently frozen representation in several Late Roman sources exemplifies the dynamic between direct knowledge of the area, the persistence of centuries-old ethnographic traditions, and the agenda of the authors. The following examination will focus on a few ethnic names, such as the Vandali and the Sciri, whose transmission history evidences continuity and change of the ethnic discourse applied to the populations inhabiting this geographical area. In Late Antiquity, the Greco-Roman world experienced numerous drastic transformations that made familiar representations of the ethnic landscape increasingly outdated. The selected sources represent two different examples of the attempt of reconciliating the developments on the ground with the older but authoritative ethnographic tradition. In conclusion, these registers reveal the importance of ethnonyms within the organization of knowledge and the learning techniques of the time, as well as the political undertone of ethnic names and their lists.

Revisiting Philippine Folklore: Ba-diw as Discourse of Ethnicity in the Nonfolklorist Humanistic Lens

This ethnographic literary critique of an old Ba-diw of the Ibaloy ethnolinguistic group in Southern Benguet, Philippines, was completed by adopting a humanistic lens of a nonfolklorist with the aid of discourse analysis. Serving as a revisit to Philippine folklore, this ambitious yet novelty ethno-critique focused on the language of Ba-diw as a discourse of ethnicity and taking inspiration from the radical views of the National Artist in Literature, Bienvenido Lumbera, the research proceeded by employing the contextualist theory, setting the Ba-diw in its rightful indigenous literary and cultural background and historicity. The critique probed into the distinct ethnolinguistic heritage of the Ibaloy, after which discourse analysis was conducted to examine the grammar of the Ba-diw as both an ethnic and aesthetic expression. This grammar highlighted in the ethnographic critique is the dynamic system of the basic elements of a language consisting of lexis, syntax, semantics, phonology, and cultural load. Recognizing the Ba-diw as an indigenous oral tradition, the researcher examined its language use as an expression of the identity, ideals, aspirations, worldviews, and lifestyle of the Ibaloy ethnolinguistic group being the dominant theme henceforth, a legitimate and unique contribution to the richness of Philippine folklore.

An interreality study of race and homicide news coverage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Building on ethnic blame discourse, the social threat hypothesis, and media bias theories, this article makes a quantitative interreality comparison between homicide news coverage and homicide statistics in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—a city with one of the highest homicide rates in the United States of America. Findings reveal that Whites made up 2% of homicide victims in 2018 in Baton Rouge, but represented almost 40% of homicide victims in the news. Press releases issued by local law enforcement also overrepresented White homicide victims, as did follow-up stories. Findings on homicide suspects showed that Whites and Latinos were overrepresented, and Blacks were underrepresented.

Ernest Hemingway’s Recognition of Ideologies of White Supremacy, Colonialism, and Anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s creation of a vilified Jewish character in The Sun Also Rises (1926) has outed him as anti-Semitic. His negative treatment of the Jewish character Robert Cohn can be read as an unpleasant portrait of Jews. Putting theories of postcolonialism in conversation with the theory of performativity, I read The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a narrative that challenges racial stereotypes generated by colonial discourses of race and ethnicity. This study challenges any claims of Hemingway’s anti-Semitism by investigating his defiance of notions of white supremacy and colonialism as inspired by scientific racism and its reinforcement and legitimization of white dominance. I contend that Hemingway’s deployment of anti-Semitic language and representations serves to illustrate his recognition and subversion of the racial hierarchies perpetuated by colonialism and scientific racism. Hemingway’s novel tends to unveil and interrogate notions of white supremacy and colonialism rather than to racialize Jews.

Race, ethnicity and a post-racial/ethnic future: A philosophical reflection


 
 
 Ethnicity and racial identity formation are elements of our social world. In recent years, there has been numerous works on ethnicity and race. Both concepts are controversial in different disciplines. The controversies around these concepts have been heated up by scholars who have devoted their time to the discourse of ethnicity and race, and to understand the ascription of both concepts. Ethnicity and race have been causes of conflict, prejudice and discrimination among various ethnic and racial groups around the world. Thus, this paper is an attempt to discuss and critically reflect about race, ethnicity and a post-racial/ethnic future in line with Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze’s idea of the post-racial future.
 
 

Defining Industrial Heritage in the Indian Context

The narrative of Indian industrialization is unique, a country that is both industrializing and de-industrializing simultaneously and that is struggling in the discovery of its own identity within the myriad political, ethnic, social and economic discourses. The massive push given to industry in this contemporary era has a definitive impact on the urban landscape. The contemporary political economy is in the process of disinvestment of State assets, which are cornerstones of the narratives of Indian industrialization, their loss and comprehensive redevelopment have a significant impact on place identity in urban areas. While the idea of urban heritage conservation is very nascent, the concept of industrial heritage conservation is largely non-existent in India. The industrial timeline of India is different from the global timeline; the lack of an official definition, and therefore a lack of an official legislation, for recognition and legal protection of industrial sites in India has an impact on the perception of what constitutes Indian industrial heritage. Most industrial heritage sites are vulnerable to loss or replacement on the pretext of being considered too ordinary to be preserved. This article presents a chronological narrative of industrialization and defines a framework for identifying typologies of industrial heritage sites in the Indian context, building a case for recognizing, protecting and sustainable development.

Shen Congwen's Idealized Ethnic

Abstract This article investigates the underexamined ethnic motifs of the modern literary master Shen Congwen's 沈從文 fictional creations. In the field of Chinese literary scholarship, Shen is widely recognized as a leading figure of the May Fourth “native soil” literary tradition and is usually labeled as a “regionalist” writer. Yet as an ethnically hybrid author, Shen's ethnographically inspired, mythologizing accounts of indigenous non-Han tribes place him in a long tradition of searching for moral truths in borderland societies in Chinese literary and cultural history. The article argues that ethnicity is an important motif that runs throughout the early Shen Congwen's literary oeuvre, particularly in the Miao-themed stories that he crafted in the 1920s and 1930s. Shen idealizes non-Han peoples, particularly the Miao in southern China's borderland, as the ultimate source of moral courage and aesthetic perfection in his vision of a wholesome China. Through his ethnically themed novellas and short stories, Shen is both heir to and questions the Confucian tradition of locating a civilizational “other” in the non-Sinitic/non-Han border regions. The article further reveals how Shen embodies contradictory motifs with regard to ethnicity in China: on the one hand, he romanticizes the Miao as moral agents living freely in a timeless society, governed only by divine powers and unruly passions. On the other hand, Shen laments the historical discrimination experienced by the Miao and assumes a sober voice as he calls for ethnic equality. Simultaneously lyrical and political, Shen's ethnically themed works are significant for forming new scholarly understandings of both May Fourth literature and the broader discourse of ethnicity, which underpins the very notion of Chineseness in modern China.

Symmetry, Violence, and The Handmaiden's Queer Colonial Intimacies

Abstract The Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–45) implicates a crisis of representation in South Korean national history. Both the traumatic wounds and complex intimacies of Japan's rule over its Korean subjects were met with postcolonial suppression, censorship, and disavowal. This article examines Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, South Korea, 2016), a period film set in 1930s Korea under Japanese rule, in relation to the two nations’ fraught but interconnected colonial and postcolonial histories. By analyzing the film's explicit sexual depiction through discourses of ethnicity, gender, and nation, it argues that the lesbian sex scenes encode and eroticize latent anxieties and tensions surrounding Japan-Korea relations, making explicit the ambivalent longing and lingering identification shared between the colonizers and the colonized. Furthermore, through intertextual reference to the intertwined and imitative relations between the national cinemas of Japan and Korea—relations mediated and elided by a long history of state censorship—Park's film repudiates an essentialist South Korean identity propped up by both nationalist narratives and market liberalization policies. Through palimpsestic projection of the colonial era onto South Korea's neoliberal present, the film invites parallels between colonialism's unresolved legacy and contemporary modes of cultural production. Simultaneously, the film offers a utopian vision of a national self that surfaces—rather than suppresses—the violence and pleasure incurred in confrontations with the colonial or transnational other.

Faith, Identity and Magical Realism in Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons

This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in the contemporary Anglophone Arab narrative of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019). The study follows a methodology which combines two critical approaches to magical realism: first, a textual approach, and then a contextual one. Accordingly, the study uses key magical realist elements in Bird Summons to delineate the poetics of magical realism within the narrative, before determining the context in which magical realism functions in the narrative. Simultaneously, the study benefits from Christopher Warnes’s two strands of magical realism, ‘faith-based magical realism’ and ‘irreverent magical realism’ in providing a coherent basis for the use of magical realism in the text. This study aims at examining the significance of the magical realist narrative in articulating Arab British identity in Bird Summons. The analysis will interpret the role of magical realism in conveying and undermining the dominant ethnic and racial discourses which shape Arab British identities in Britain. The study’s findings demonstrate how the use of magical realism in the examined Anglophone Arab novel reinforces the fictional purposes of Aboulela as a hyphenated Arab, as it allows her to undermine dominant discourses on hyphenated Arab identities. At the same time, the use of magical realism allows Aboulela to (re)construct Arab British identities within her novel, apart from essentialist views of identity.