Symbolic Ethnicity Research Articles

More than Pierogi and Pączki

Abstract In many urban areas in the diaspora, churches, schools, and ethnic businesses are routinely established to feed the needs of the community. One that has more than a century of history in such communities is the deli. It is the place where products, purveyors, and purchasers interact. But the Polish deli has long escaped the lens of scholars. No longer is this the case. While delis provide sustenance and Polish products to customers in the diaspora, they are also gathering places for the broader ethnic community and crucial sites of memory where people experience and exercise symbolic ethnicity. Additionally, in Ottawa and Toronto, Ontario, Canada, contrary to the deli-lost narrative, the deli has adapted and followed the movements of people out of the traditional ethnic neighborhood and into the suburbs in the two metropolitan areas.

‘The Scottish Warrior’ Drew McIntyre: celebrity-commodity, symbolic ethnicity and authenticity

ABSTRACT While domestic articulations of Scottish identity represent a shifting and complex arena for political discourse, North American articulations of Scottishness often rely on stereotypes. Enter Drew McIntyre, The Scottish Warrior of WWE fame. The performance of McIntyre’s identity has (re)deployed symbolic ethnicity as a prominent marker of his Scottishness. Symbolic identities are commonly used in professional wrestling to define and articulate performed selves as special or unique. Yet, by voluntarily drawing upon, and amplifying, iconic elements of Scottish culture, such as Tartanry and Kailyard, McIntyre’s Scottishness has become simultaneously authentic and inauthentic in nature. This discursive effect mediates the wrestling celebrity over the recognition of the individuated self. In reducing McIntyre to a series of mediated ethnic symbols, WWE produces an objectified version of McIntyre, The Scottish Warrior, which functions as a celebrity-commodity that has converted McIntyre into a product for exchange. As such, and by means of a case study of the mediascape surrounding McIntyre’s recent WWE run, this article explores how WWE use symbolic ethnicity in the construction of The Scottish Warrior as an easily communicable celebrity-commodity, unpacking the intersection of ethnicity, symbolism and (in)authenticity in the commodification of Andrew Galloway.

Symbolic Cretanness: Descendants of Cretan Muslims in Present-Day Turkey

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between second- and third-generation descendants of Cretan Muslims in Turkey and their Cretanness. It takes the public manifestations of and heightened involvement with Cretanness that have recently been taking place in Turkey as a starting point and develops a framework to elucidate the contemporary dynamics of Cretanness. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, this study reveals that Cretanness has undergone transformation for the current generations. It is characterized by the fading of certain cultural aspects, but by a parallel vocal identification with Cretanness. This dual pattern is unified under the concept “symbolic Cretanness,” inspired by Herbert Gans’ notion of “symbolic ethnicity.” The article argues that this current form of Cretanness encompasses the pursuit of visibility, an intermittent involvement with origins, and the precedence of symbols, the most significant of which is food.

“Abhorrent Zionism, Israel are not the Solution”: Dialectics of the Soviet and the National in Ego-Documents of the 1970s–80s

Drawing on late-Soviet Jewish ego-documents: memoirs, diaries and letters, primarily on a corpus of (auto)biographical essays on the life of a Leningrad journalist, the author explores her protagonists' obsessive reflections on anti-Semitism and Zionism, evoked by the acute dissonance between their sincerely internalised communist ideology of internationalism and the widespread practice of anti-Semitism, as well as between Soviet patriotism and Jewish memory, Jewish solidarity and the temptation of emigration to Israel. The study of “ordinary” people’s ego-documents not intended for publication enables one to penetrate into their inner world and to extrapolate the obtained observations onto Soviet Jewish majority; in addition, it allows to explain the position of prominent Soviet authors of Jewish origin, such as playwright and publicist Tsezar Solodar, poet and editor-in-chief of Sovetisch Heymland Aron Vergelis, author of critical popular books on Judaism Moisei Belenkii, and others, who stigmatised Judaism and Zionism. Ego-documents allow for tracing not only Soviet, but also Jewish origins of late-Soviet anti-Zionism, which went back to the position of the poor strata of shtetl society, who, while leaning towards socialism, associated Zionism with the hostile bourgeoisie. The paper partly polemicises, partly complements the existing historiography on late Soviet Jewish identity, which is based mainly on post-Soviet interviews or the émigrés’ experience and therefore tends to simplify the picture, reducing the diversity of identities, attitudes and behaviours to two binaries, either to “thin culture”/“symbolic ethnicity”, or to hidden emigration aspirations presented as natural and self-evident.

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

The sociology of white America: A teaching and learning guide

“In My Heart, I Am Cambodian”: Symbolic Ethnicity among Parents Who Adopt Transracially

Research finds that white Americans primarily draw upon ancestral ties to assert symbolic ethnicity, often relying on figurative elements to create identity. Through 47 interviews with 56 white adoptive parents, who attend culture camps, the authors find a new avenue through which whites may exercise their ethnic options: domestic and transnational transracial adoption. Drawing on their experience of parenting transracially adopted children, we find that some adoptive parents claim identification as members of their adopted children’s racial and/or ethnic group. In explaining their newly acquired ethnicity, we identify three discursive strategies deployed by adoptive parents—cultural integration, transformative inclusion, and racial diffusion. While adoption of their child’s racial and/or ethnic group identification may seem unexpected, it allows for the reframing of parents’ identity, creates notions of shared racial experience, and deepens commitment to symbolic elements. These findings have implications for contemporary understandings of white Americans’ symbolic ethnicity.

Symbolic ethnicity, cultural and linguistic landscape: remnants of ‘Little Europe’ in the Valcanale (Northeast Italy)

ABSTRACT This study investigates ‘Little Europe’, the rural, mountainous Italian region of the quadrilingual Valcanale, bordering Austria and Slovenia. The combined analysis of cultural landscape, linguistic landscape (LL) and symbolic ethnicity provides a new concept to examine multilingual regions. In this once Austrian valley, where German was the official language before WWI, Italian now dominates over minority languages, as exemplified by official signs. However, elements of the area's cultural and linguistic landscape reveal unexpected linguistic practices and visible, locatable artefacts of the Valcanale's ethnolinguistic heritage, which we assume to play a key role in the preservation of symbolic ethnicity.

Assimilation and symbolic ethnicity through the class-ethnicity nexus: a study of second-generation Indian immigrants in the U.S.A.

ABSTRACT Based on the empirical study of the immigrant Bengali community in the Kansas City U.S.A., the paper examines the assimilation and intergenerational dynamics of second-generation immigrants. The study finds that transnational parents could not socialise their children to retain their ethnic orientation and the second generation are found to be assimilating faster into the American culture. We argue that consumption of ethnic goods and services by the second-generation immigrants does not necessarily imply their adherence to ethnic culture rather it is an act of displaying ‘symbolic ethnicity’. The study further finds that by fashioning themselves as ‘exotic other’ in an era of neo-liberalisation, they are only commodifying their ethnic culture and not stalling the assimilation process. Finally, the study contends that in the racially limited diverse environment of Kansas City, the cultural capital of the middle-class families provides an ideal platform to the second generation to assimilate.

Jamaican cultural symbols as transethnic artifacts: How black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness at a Caribbean festival

This study demonstrates how black immigrants strategically deploy symbols of nationality within the context of black spaces to construct a politics of solidarity, rather than ethnic distance, with African Americans and other blacks. It draws from the ethnographic data of black craft vendors at a Caribbean festival and shows the way Jamaican cultural symbols become transethnic artifacts – racialized objects that could be adopted by black people from a range of ethnicities to signal black diasporic consciousness. This study reveals that black immigrant vendors construct boundaries of racial consciousness through transethnic artifacts in three overlapping ways: (1) by explicitly connecting Jamaica to Africa instead of privileging the Caribbean; (2) creating boundaries based on black racial consciousness instead of shared ethnicity; and (3) by prioritizing psychic income, the non-economic returns on their entrepreneurial efforts. This article argues that, within the context of the festival, the symbols that black immigrants wield to signal nationality are neither inconsequential forms of symbolic ethnicity nor are they anti-African American distancing mechanisms, but are, instead, transethnic artifacts that facilitate black place-making. This process reveals the way black immigrant vendors forge diasporic meanings of blackness, rather than foster black ethnic exceptionalism.

The route to your roots: New ethnic symbols in the age of the genome

AbstractThis study assesses the recent surge in popularity for genetic “ancestry” testing in the United States and what significance this has for Americans' use of symbolic ethnicities. Specifically, this study evaluates how commercial genetic tests allow for new engagement with a symbolic ethnicity and ethnic symbols (Gans, 1979). This study draws upon interviews, attendance of a genealogical conference and a virtual ethnography to support its arguments. The possibility of reification of ethnic, national and racial categories is discussed, alongside a discussion of the way genetic populations are technologically produced. This study draws upon the concepts of affiliative ethnicity (Jimenez, 2010); affiliative self‐fashioning (Nelson, 2008); geneticized identities (Roth & Ivemark, 2018) and Waters' Ethnic Options to argue that DTC genetic ancestry tests allow for a new type of play with ethnic symbols, resulting in cognizant engagement with symbolic ethnicities among Americans who take a genetic test with identity aspirations.

All hail DNA: the constitutive rhetoric of AncestryDNA™ advertising

ABSTRACT Although the scientific community has frequently criticized the reliability and validity of direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA testing (DTC DNA), sales continue to rise, with an estimated 26 million U.S. American customers to date. This surge speaks to a desire among U.S. consumers to fulfill a symbolic need constructed by these DTC DNA companies. Using constitutive rhetoric as a methodological lens, we unravel the ways Ancestry® constitutes consumers, ideologically and narratively, as genetic carriers of ethnic ancestry. Specifically, we analyze 17 commercials that aired on cable television in the U.S. from 2015 to 2018. We argue that Ancestry® constitutes subjects as objective harbingers of DNA who form the basis of homogenous genetic ethnic communities, which obscures the scientific constraints of DTC DNA and the sociocultural consequences of linking genetics with ancestry. Ultimately, the rhetoric within these commercials paradoxically provides U.S. Americans a resource for uniqueness—to feel differentiated from everyone else, while encouraging them to feel a sense of belonging to some greater collectivity. Ancestry® capitalizes upon the appeal of symbolic ethnicity and perpetuates the idea that ethnicity is unproblematically biological, thus enabling and constraining identification accordingly.

Kazakh first names and changing naming practices

Personal names are not just labels put on individuals, they are symbols that reflect the cultural andhistorical context and location, denote gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. Names and their displayhave a potent effect on people’sjudgments and life as well. Authors see proper names as located atbetween the world of our thoughts, beliefs and desires andthe world of our actions, institutions, and practice. Thus the study of changing first names is a way to explore social processes in urban Kazakhstan.The aim of this study is to track changes in naming practices of ethnic Kazakhs, both Kazakh-speakingand Russian-speaking, residing in Almaty. This paper include a wide review of the literature as Kazakhstani and foreign authors regarding naming traditions, changing realities in anthroponyms and theirmeaning. Paper draws upon more than 1,700 personal names collected from three generations of 61participants (students of local universities) currently residing in Almaty. Quantitative and qualitativeanalysis of the data shows the main factors that have influenced the traditional practice of naming inKazakh culture were identified. The study revealed that there is a distinct change in the choice of namesacross generations. The names became shorter, there are fewer names containing specific name suffixes(e.g., -bai, - bek, - gali/qali, -geldi/keldi, -myrza etc.) and specific Kazakh sounds, more female namesare explicitly marked for gender, etc. There are also differences in naming practices between Kazakhand Russian-speakers as well as differences in male and female name preferences. Analysis of changingnaming practices reveal current social processes of social distinction and uncover symbolic ethnicity,class, gender, religion-based cultural boundaries in Kazakhstan. The study demonstrates that examiningnames as cultural indicators and indicators of social change could be a fruitful line of inquiry for studyingsocio-cultural change.

Kazakh first names and changing naming practices

Personal names are not just labels put on individuals, they are symbols that reflect the cultural andhistorical context and location, denote gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. Names and their displayhave a potent effect on people’sjudgments and life as well. Authors see proper names as located atbetween the world of our thoughts, beliefs and desires andthe world of our actions, institutions, and practice. Thus the study of changing first names is a way to explore social processes in urban Kazakhstan.The aim of this study is to track changes in naming practices of ethnic Kazakhs, both Kazakh-speakingand Russian-speaking, residing in Almaty. This paper include a wide review of the literature as Kazakhstani and foreign authors regarding naming traditions, changing realities in anthroponyms and theirmeaning. Paper draws upon more than 1,700 personal names collected from three generations of 61participants (students of local universities) currently residing in Almaty. Quantitative and qualitativeanalysis of the data shows the main factors that have influenced the traditional practice of naming inKazakh culture were identified. The study revealed that there is a distinct change in the choice of namesacross generations. The names became shorter, there are fewer names containing specific name suffixes(e.g., -bai, - bek, - gali/qali, -geldi/keldi, -myrza etc.) and specific Kazakh sounds, more female namesare explicitly marked for gender, etc. There are also differences in naming practices between Kazakhand Russian-speakers as well as differences in male and female name preferences. Analysis of changingnaming practices reveal current social processes of social distinction and uncover symbolic ethnicity,class, gender, religion-based cultural boundaries in Kazakhstan. The study demonstrates that examiningnames as cultural indicators and indicators of social change could be a fruitful line of inquiry for studyingsocio-cultural change.

Символическая этничность казахов Западной Монголии

Символическая этничность казахов Западной Монголии

“I Don’t Do Much in the Community as an Italian, but in My Family I Do”: A Critique of Symbolic Ethnicity through a Longitudinal Study of Second-Generation Italian Australians

This paper examines second-generation Italian Australian constructions of ethnicity through longitudinal ethnographic analysis. Original data for this research were collected with second-generation...

Symbolic ethnicity and Herbert Gans: race, religion, and politics in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to assess some of Herb Gans’s influential contributions, not only in his important paper on symbolic ethnicity, but also his wider discussion of the changing role of race, ethnicity, and religion in American society. In a period spanning more than half a century, he has helped to raise key questions and to suggest avenues of research that have stimulated debates and the re-evaluation of a complex, controversial, and highly dynamic field of social science research and policy.

Another look at symbolic ethnicity

I am pleased not only that Ethnic and Racial Studies chose to remember a nearly forty-year-old article, but also that it is evidently continuing to be read. And as a researcher, I am equally please...

Scottish clan identities in America: symbolic or real?

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Herbert Gans's notion of symbolic ethnicity and his recent assertions that it is effectively at an end and little more than a label. We use research into Scottish-American clan associations to question this assertion and we seek to demonstrate that symbolic ethnicity appears to be alive and well within such diaspora organizations. The paper reports on a series of interviews conducted in 2014 with office bearers and members of clan associations and we use our findings to argue, along with other writers such as Steinberg that, when considering hyphenated ethnicity, it is important not to underestimate the power of the hyphen.

Shame and pride in second-generation German identity in Melbourne, Australia: emotions and white ethnicity

ABSTRACTAs members of an established, well-integrated, white ethnic group, second-generation Germans are largely invisible in Australian society. Given this, they are easily presumed a group for whom Gans’ notion of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ might apply. However, based on interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, this article suggests an alternative interpretation using recent literature on the role of emotions for identity. In the interviews with adult children of German immigrants in Melbourne, Australia, the notions of shame and pride in relation to ethnic identity were clearly evident. Shame often emerged in interaction with other people in Australia, and particularly in relation to Nazism and the Second World War. However, most respondents felt equally proud of their German heritage, particularly later in life. These findings suggest that ethnic identity for these second-generation Germans is a deeper, embodied experience that is similar to what Bourdieu terms habitus.

Why the hyphen? Individual and collective memories of Italianness in the United States at the intersection of class and generation

This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other.