Ethnic Boundaries

บทความชิ้นนี้มุ่งใช้วิธีวิจัยในทางมานุษยวิทยาเพื่อเข้าใจอัตลักษณ์มลายูปตานีผ่านการศึกษาการให้ความหมายของคนมลายูปตานีพลัดถิ่นที่เดินทางเข้ามาทำงานในกรุงเทพ โดยพิจารณาถึงการสร้างอัตลักษณ์ผ่านการขีดเส้นแบ่งพรมแดนทางชาติพันธุ์ (ethnic boundaries) ที่สร้างความหมายของความเป็นเราไปพร้อมๆ กับบ่งชี้ให้เห็นความแตกต่างกับความเป็นเขาในอาณาบริเวณต่างๆ อาทิเช่น รสนิยม รสชาติอาหาร ความหมายของคำว่าบ้านและความตาย เป็นต้น พรมแดนดังกล่าวไม่ได้หยุดนิ่งตายตัว หากแต่ลื่นไหลไปตามการต่อรองในชีวิตประจำวันของคนพลัดถิ่น

About 30 years ago a Kyrgyz community was brought as refugees to eastern Turkey.  Before coming to Turkey, this community was living in the Central Asian steppes as a nomadic community. Their motherland was in the Pamir valleys of Afghanistan before their exodus to the Pakistan after the Saur Revolution in 1979 in Kabul. Nowadays according to the Statistical Committee of TR, the population comprises about 1720 people living in the village of Ulupamir relating to the Erjish district, Van region of Turkish Republic. This paper aims to explain the cultural and economic changes in their life after the end of the main migration process.
Keywords: Forced Migration, Ethnicity, Culture, Cultural - Economic Change

À l'Isle de France, devenue île Maurice en 1810, les projets d'abolition de l'esclavage ont fait très tôt l'objet de résistances de la part des colons, que ce soit pendant la Révolution française ou sous l'administration britannique. Cette opposition a été assez forte pour générer une mobilisation politique. Notre communication a pour objet d'analyser cette mobilisation d'un groupe qui se sent, à un moment donné, menacé : le groupe des « Blancs », en faveur duquel étaient définis les termes de classification sociale dans la société esclavagiste fondée sur la propriété — propriété des biens, propriété des hommes — va rapidement s'organiser et réagir aux transformations qui remettent en cause sa prédominance. En d'autres termes, la question est de comprendre comment l'abolition a contribué à désarticuler un ordre social et comment a été gérée cette transformation.

In this article, the author examines how Belgian Taiwanese immigrants negotiate their ethnonational identity, especially the term "Chinese" in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study finds some differences of identity negotiation and performance strategies applied by different generations of immigrants.

Livestock raiding among Northern Kenya’s pastoralists has profoundly changed in the last decades. It is commercialized, extremely violent and fought out with modern weaponry. This contribution shows that it also serves as a ploy in conflicts that aim at territorial expansion, boundary adjustments and other political considerations. These conflicts are part of Kenya’s troubled politics of decentralisation and as such they must be viewed in context with the politicized violence in Central Kenya. Yet the nexus between this political dimension and pastoralist conflicts remains obscure, and raiding is still largely portrayed as a cultural tendency. Based on data from fieldwork in East Pokot and surrounding areas in Kenya’s Central Rift Valley Province, this article explores the forces behind these dynamics.

This article illustrates how Uyghurs in the 1990s define and reinforce contemporary Uyghur national identity in relation to Xinjiang’s growing Han Chinese population. Adopting Barth’s theory of fluid and negotiable ethnic boundaries, it focuses on the notion of change. While Uyghurs are currently activating and exaggerating certain religio-cultural differences – in particular the avoidance of pork – as a means of ensuring symbolic, spatial, and social segregation from the Han, those criteria did not prevent interaction to the same extent in the past; nor do they prevent Uyghurs from making concessions when it benefits them to do so.  It is argued that it is not religio-cultural differences per se that lie at the root of increased tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, but changing social, political, and economic contexts: on the one hand, growing Uyghur perceptions of socio-economic inequalities between themselves and the Han (the ‘internal factor’) and, on the other, the vast changes within the international political arena since the late eighties (the ‘external factor’).

Sociocultural boundaries come in many forms, and crucially, are responsive to power and constantly in flux. This article focuses on the production of space and unmarked sociocultural boundaries linked to spirit mediums in a historically contested area of northeastern Thailand who are possessed by the spirits of Phaya Narin Songkhram — a key ‘Lao’ military leader of Chao Anou’s famous Vientiane revolt against Siam between 1826–28 — and those of his subordinates. Spirit mediums linked to ethnic ‘Thai’ leaders are also found to the south of this area. Through channeling and performing these historical persons, spirit mediums keep alive and reproduce group memories with space-making implications. This article also shows how the mediums’ positioning has shifted over time and varies in relation to contemporary power relations, altering the sociocultural boundaries between ethnic Lao and Thai.

This thesis attempts to relate anthropological debates about indigenous urbanization in Amazonia and the boundary-making approach from sociology with each other and with the politics of aesthetics in the specific context of Roraima, the northernmost state of the Federative Republic of Brazil. It aims to uncover how contemporary indigenous artists in Boa Vista engage with the boundaries of indigeneity in the aftermath of the demarcation of the indigenous territory of Raposa Serra do Sol. This contentious period saw the proliferation of different and conflicting notions of indigeneity and citizenship, some of these equating indigeneity strongly with territory and location. The research combines literature and document research with interviews among indigenous artists in Boa Vista and other relevant actors, and with an analysis of a selection of works of art, in an effort to find out how
indigenous artists relate to indigeneity, identity and territory. The research finds that Roraima’s contemporary indigenous artists negotiate the boundaries of indigeneity in the aftermath of the demarcation of Raposa Serra do Sol in two different ways. Firstly they challenged the existing content of the boundaries by leading modern, urban lives, and
participating in mainstream society as protagonists. Secondly, they use their artistic expression do visibilize the indigenous and to situate it in a positive light, challenging old stigma’s and negative stereotypes, while at the same time reifying aspects of the boundaries of indigeneity previously established.

Coordonné par Olivier Legros et par Tommaso Vitale, tous deux membres d’Urba-Rom, Observatoire européen des politiques en direction des groupes dits roms/tsiganes, ce numéro de Géocarrefour, qui réunit cinq contributions de jeunes chercheurs et un entretien avec un leader associatif rom kosovar, porte sur une thématique émergente : l’entre-deux des politiques publiques et des pratiques des migrants roms originaires d’Europe centrale et des Balkans dans les villes françaises et italiennes. Pourquoi ce parti pris urbain ? Tout simplement parce qu’aujourd’hui la « question rom » est surtout une question urbaine en Europe occidentale. En effet, comme tant d’autres migrants, les Roms en provenance de l’Europe centrale et des Balkans, sont attirés par les villes, en particulier les métropolesoù se concentrent désormais les opportunités, en particulier celles économiques. En outre, les controverses suscitées par la présence de migrants roms en situation précaire impliquent des acteurs urbains : riverains, comités de soutien, associations, organisations non gouvernementales, associations, formations politiques et institutions locales. Les contributions réunies dans ce dossier montrent la place primordiale des politiques publiques dans la conduite des comportements individuels et collectifs, et peut-être dans la fabrication des identités. Privilégiant l’expulsion et l’état d’exception, les politiques engagées en France et en Italie installent en effet de nombreux migrants roms dans la précarité et l’incertitude, tout en augmentant la visibilité de ces derniers dans l’espace politico-médiatique. Dans les métropoles et dans les grandes villes où la ressource foncière se fait de plus en plus rare, le processus prend un tour particulier car l’allocation des places y constitue, sans doute plus qu’ailleurs, un élément majeur de la « question rom » et de son traitement par les pouvoirs publics. La diversité des trajectoires migratoires des Roms dans les villes de France et d’Italie invite toutefois à nuancer ce constat pessimiste.

Conflicting archaeological evidence has generated conflicting theories about Israel’s origins. This work assembles all the theories into four categories and tests each category using computational tools borrowed from bio-mathematics. The bio-mathematical tools are models of diffusion, contagion and epidemics adjusted by various researches to study cultural transmission, ethnic borders and justice administration. The mathematical tools help reconcile known conflicting archaeological evidence and examine two aspects of the evidence that have not been considered so far: the alignment of the borders between material cultures and the conflict between sedentary and egalitarian lifestyles. Theories of immigration of pastoralist nomads passed the test.

Im südlichen Bessarabien, einer ländlichen Region im Südwesten der Ukraine, ist die ethnische Diversität der Bewohner mit großem Stolz verbunden. Die Region gehörte in den vergangenen 200 Jahren zum Russischen Reich, zu Rumänien, zur Sowjetunion und ist nun Teil der Ukraine. Der Stolz auf die ethnische Diversität stammt deshalb einerseits von der Auffassung, ethnische Unterschiede erfolgreich gegen den Assimilierungsdruck dieser Staaten bewahrt zu haben und steht andererseits auch im Widerspruch zur weitverbreiteten Vorstellung, ethnische Unterschiede müssten automatisch zu Konflikten führen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt die Formen, wie ethnische Diversität gefeiert wird und befasst sich mit der zentralen Frage, die eine sol-che Beschreibung aufwirft: Wie passt der Stolz auf ethnische Unterschiede zu einem erstarkenden Nationalismus?

Svaki je identitet situacijski konstrukt uvijek podložan promjenama koje ga preispituju i redefiniraju sukladno novoj društvenoj stvarnosti. U fokusu je ovog izlaganja hrvatski etnički identitet krajem 13. i početkom 14. stoljeća, kao posebna vrsta kolektivnog identiteta. Razmatrano razdoblje predstavlja vrijeme izgradnje bribirskih struktura moći u Dalmaciji i Hrvatskoj, u kontekstu čega načelnik roda, Pavao I. Bribirski, uzima naslov banus Hrouatorum 1287. godine (uočio Mladen Ančić). Bribirci su se pozivali na mitski kult kralja Zvonimira, što se ogleda u raznim onovremenim materijalnim ostacima s njegovim imenom. Veliku ulogu u bribirskoj ideološkoj legitimaciji imala je Legenda o smrti kralja Zvonimira, koja donosi priču o „posljednjem hrvatskom kralju“ i „nevjernim Hrvatima“. Vjerojatno je cilj tog mita bio mobilizirati hrvatsku etniju pod bribirskom vodstvom u trenutku veoma oslabljenog ugarskog kraljevskog autoriteta, zbog čega je više nego jasno kako je etnički diskurs predstavljao ključno sredstvo legitimacije moći. I nakon poraza bana Mladena II. 1322. godine, postojeći etnički diskurs ostaje društvena paradigma, samo u tada politički razlomljenom dalmatinsko-hrvatskom prostoru. Ideološki temelji postavljeni u razmatranom periodu i u narednim stoljećima čine „kamen temeljac“ hrvatskog etničkog diskursa, a mit o kralju Zvonimiru opstao je sve do danas.

Pisa followed a different evolution from other towns integrated into the Florentine State: after 1406 prominent families resorted mostly to exile instead of settling into the new capital. The study of interactions between Florentine and Pisan traders during the previous generation might contribute to explain this attitude, and private correspondences from the Archivio Datini shed an interesting light on their practices, but also on the context and meaning of binational contacts, which vary from collaboration to competition and from mutual frequentation to avoidance. Whereas examples of binational companies are known between Pisans and Florentines in Avignon, where the complementarity of legal statuses, relational and material assets could profit to both parties, the numerous Florentines settled close to the mouth of the Arno appear to have mostly lived within their community, for their professional activity as well as during their free time. However, the socio-professional and political diversity of this community should also be considered to understand the cases of local assimilation that appear to have occasionally happened.

Though scholars of ethnicity remark that religion is an important qualifying attribute for membership in an ethnic group, the nature of the relationship between religious faith and ethnic identity requires further exploration. An approach that emphasizes the importance of religious practices in forming and maintaining ethnic boundaries may offer a more complete explanation of the relationship between religion and ethnicity. This article proposes a framework for understanding how religious practices influence ethnic boundary formation and maintenance processes. I propose that religious practices may play a universalizing, negotiating, or differentiating role in influencing the formation and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. To illustrate these various roles played by religious processes, the article presents a heuristic case study of Islamic faith in boundary setting processes in Hui Muslim communities in China.

This thesis examines the lives of two ethnicities in Kyrgyzstan, their history of evolvement, territorial conditions and possibilities for inter-ethnic conflicts with the Kyrgyz majority, from the perspective of living within ethnic boundaries. For the comparative analysis I have chosen two minority groups: Kurds and Dungans. My main reason for choosing these ethnic groups in particular is their tendency to create ethnic boundary space and their involvements in inter-ethnic conflicts. (It is crucial to mention that these groups do not experience conflict with each other, but rather with other ethnic groups.) I propose that living in the village of one’s own ethnicity makes family ties stronger, preserves cultural features and helps members cope with outside problems, including interethnic conflicts. Since Kyrgyzstan is a polyethnic country, the closed ethnic communities may serve as both a source of conflict and as a shelter for minorities. My field work was conducted during the summer of 2015. I investigated why people live in specific areas, how they choose the territories they occupy, and how this relates to their everyday lives. Other questions I was interested in were: What are the particular challenges of living in an ethnically-bound community? Do community members feel discriminated against or anticipate possibilities for conflict situations among major groups and minor groups? I paid attention to these questions because closed communities and ethnic boundary space can be viewed as providing protection against possible clashes with other ethnic groups; furthermore, the sharing of culture could be seen as an advantage to living in such a community. I discovered that political and economic benefits provoke people to instigate conflict situations. However, while politics or economics are the real case for these conflicts, in the majority of cases, ethnicity functions as important kindling for causing conflict situations to flare up. Key words: identity, ethnic group, ethnic boundary, Kurds, Dungan

This PhD dissertation is about social identities, group boundaries and belonging among skilled migrants living in Finland. It is based on empirical data consisting of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. The main research question I ask is: In their process of settling in in Finland, how do skilled migrants find and define a place for themselves within the structures of their new host society? In addition, I ask questions about the strategies of identity negotiations, the role of class and ethnicity for skilled migrants’ social identities, and how skilled migrants’ group identity is defined in relation to others around them. I approach these questions from the perspective of interactionist identity theories and intersectionality.



The findings of the research are presented in four peer-reviewed articles. The main findings are firstly that despite their more privileged socio-economic situation, skilled migrants are experiencing similar issues with integrating, adapting and belonging in Finland as other migrants. They are subjected to racializing discourses, stereotypes and attitudes in much the same way as other migrants are. Secondly, while white skilled migrants are readily viewed as a ‘migrant elite’, racialized skilled migrants feel that they are perceived in the negative image of ‘the migrant’ as a non-western, non-skilled, nonprivileged subject. However, they themselves identify first and foremost as skilled migrants, a social group identity that is based largely on shared class status. Thirdly, there is a conflict between this internal group identification and how racialized skilled migrants perceive themselves to be categorized. This conflict leads to various boundary making strategies that aim at being seen in a more positive way and included in the ‘migrant elite’ category that is understood as a positive, valuable social identity in itself. Together, the findings of the articles point to the continued centrality of the intersection of class and ethnicity in the lives of skilled migrants in Finland.



In answering the research question, I conclude that skilled migrants do not feel that they are accepted as full members of Finnish society or seen as equal to Finns. Belonging is therefore searched from a ‘parallel international society of Finland’ consisting of other skilled migrants and ‘internationally-minded Finns’, rather than Finnish society as a whole. As such, the research also demonstrates that ideas about what integration and belonging mean for skilled migrants are based on their own beliefs of their place within the societal whole. Rather than integrating unidirectionally into the host society in the host society’s terms, their integration is an ongoing process of negotiations between structure and agency: between the Finns’ attitudes towards immigrants and their own understandings of their value as members of an internationalizing society.

Integration has been perceived in the European Union policies as the most desired model of adaption of both migrants and refugees to the receiving societies. However, it is worth keeping in mind that there are alternative models of social coexistence worked out in non-European contexts. In this paper I discuss one of them: the separation strategy implemented by Tibetan refugees within the framework of the Indian multicultural state. I explore the major dimensions of a Tibetan diaspora’s separation: spatial (living in the settlements), institutional (creating a separate educational system), and political (refusing naturalization). I also analyse the consequences of this ‘adaption without integration’ with regard to both economic and social co-existence.

This book provides an in-depth multidisciplinary analysis of the major social and political processes affecting Hungarians in Romania after the overthrow of the Communist regime in 1989. The volume highlights the interdependence between the ethno-political strategies of minority elites and Romania's minority policy regime on the one hand, and social processes such as ethnic boundary making and ethnic stratification on the other.
The chapters combine perspectives from a variety of disciplines including political science and the sociology of ethnic relations, supported by the findings of  a broad array of empirical investigations carried out in Transylvania. It will therefore be of particular interest to scholars and students with a focus on minority politics, ethnic mobilization and nationalism, as well as researchers of ethnic relations, ethnic boundary making, social distances and ethnic inequalities.

This article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the Autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898, to interrogate current categories of ethnic boundaries used in historical and social research. It proposes an ‘archaeological’ method of investigating such boundaries in space. It conceives of the city as a field of interaction between the predominant religious groups of Muslim and Christian, and the way these groups have been represented in historical research and public memory. It also shows how understandings of ethnic boundaries were fashioned by colonial, especially British, sanitary and civic planning projects. Finally, it demonstrates how subaltern Muslim spaces, gendered places and ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods were transformed into paradigmatic cases for understanding spatial segregation in cultural terms.

This Forum contribution considers the idea of bridges and walls. It compares two cultural programmes in Granada, Andalusia, that use the concepts of 'dialogue' and 'tolerance' along with the idea of a bridge between Spain and Europe, and the Arab-Islamic world. Ethnographic data suggest that the idea of bridges and walls are not always mutually exclusive. The former can incorporate subtleties that reinforce the latter. Consolidation of either depends on how closely hegemonic and subaltern narratives align. Even when bridge at national borders reinforce the exclusion of an imagined 'Other'. Considering hegemonic processes helps to clarify the emergence of these narratives and their effects on both cross-border and local ethnic connections.

This article compares the classification of ethnic minority fiction writers in American, Dutch and German literary anthologies and literary history books for the period of 1978-2006. Using content analyses, I show that ethnic boundaries are much stronger in Dutch and German textbooks than in their American counterparts. Whereas, across the entire period, Dutch and German textbooks under-represent ethnic minority authors – relative to the share of ethnic minorities in the population – and emphasize their ethnicity, American anthologies from 1991 to 2006 over-represent ethnic minorities and classify these authors primarily in literary terms. These findings are not due to demographics alone but are also related to differences in the field of textbook publishing (United States) and the extent to which national cultural repertoires vary from moderate ethnic inclusion (Netherlands) to strong ethnic exclusion (Germany).

This is a study of ethnic boundary-making strategies promoted by Swedish migrants in Finland. The results are based on interviews with a sample of migrants in Helsinki without previous personal connection to Finland. The interviewees can be considered privileged migrants, and the study provides new information on the strategies of ethnic boundary making promoted by members of privileged ethnic groups. In Helsinki, the migrants from Sweden navigate a social field with local ethnic boundaries, including an autochthonous Swedish-speaking minority. Despite social integration in Finnish society, the migrants choose the strategy of boundary blurring, whereby the interviewees wished to question the importance of ethnic and national belonging. This choice of strategy can be explained by the ambivalence they experience in navigating the local ethnic categories and language policies. Thus, the results describe how societal structures shape individual strategies of ethnic boundary making.

In this paper we elaborate on the conceptual premises of studying ethnicity in an ongoing community based participatory research project (Green et al. 1995, Minkler et al. 2004, Israel etal. 2010) about the nature of substance use and access to treatment facilities in the Turkish community in Ghent (Belgium). Due to a lack of prevalence studies in ethnic and cultural minorities in Belgium and to the growing medicalization of research on substance use and mental health (Bracke, 2015), researchers often feel compelled to rely on US based epidemiological studies when grounding knowledge on the link between ethnicity and substance use (Derluyn, 2008). We argue that the bulk of US based epidemiological research suffers from crucial methodological and conceptual flaws that impel us to reconsider their usefulness in the European context. First, US community research starts out from overly simplified and static concepts of ethnicity and race as primordial analytical categories. Second, and ...

Yogyakarta selama ini dikenal sebagai kota pendidikan, di mana banyak mahasiswa dari berbagai daerah di Indonesia tinggal. Sebagaimana orang-orang migran yang datang ke daerah yang baru, para mahasiswa tersebut datang dengan membawa identitas primordial daerah asal mereka. Identitas ini seringkali menjadi latar belakang maupun penguat dalam munculnya gesekan-gesekan konflik dengan masyarakat tempatan. Fenomena ini saya lihat cukup signifikan dalam kasus mahasiswa pendatang dari Papua dan daerah Indonesia Timur di Yogyakarta. Tulisan ini ingin membuktikan bahwa stigma dan konflik masyarakat Yogyakarta terhadap mahasiswa pendatang dari Papua merupakan persoalan pembentukan batas-batas etnis di antara mahasiswa pendatang. Untuk menguji hal tersebut tulisan ini membandingkan dengan kelompok mahasiswa Kalimantan Barat yang cenderung tidak menarik perhatian masyarakat terkait konflik etnisitas. Pengujian diletakkan pada konteks keseharian para mahasiswa pendatang dengan fokus terhadap jaringan migrasi, interaksi sosial, kebahasaan dan rencana tinggal. Tulisan ini pada akhirnya ingin mencoba mengurai apa sebenarnya akar konflik etnisitas antara mahasiswa pendatang dengan masyarakat Yogyakarta yang semakin sering terjadi.

Soviet administrators used ethnicity as a tool of bureaucracy and therefore assumed it was an objectively ascribable category. This paper offers an analysis of the long term consequences the practice of ascribing an ethnic identity to everyone had in southern Bessarabia, a multiethnic and rural region in Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast. Fieldwork concentrated on the small town of Izmail and surrounding villages, inhabited by Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans, Bulgarians and Gagauz, as well as many people with ambiguous ethnic identities. Using biographical interviews, the study sought to find out how people adopted their present ethnic identity and how they learned to categorize others around them. Concluding from these interviews, five realms that were named repeatedly as the core of an ethnic identity could be distinguished: common language, common religion, common historical experience, a common stock of folklore, and the idea of a common genetic pool. For all five realms, respondents could give elaborate narratives how they shape an allegedly unique ethnic character in each group. All five realms are then analyzed as systems of signs and rules that can be combined to ever new meanings. At the same time, these systems also provide the techniques for inclusion into the ethnic group and exclusion from it. The more rigid the rules, the better ethnic boundaries can be drawn along them. This is why breaching these rules poses a challenge to the claim that ethnic identities are essential and intuitively detectable.

In this paper we elaborate on the conceptual premises of studying ethnicity in an ongoing community based participatory research project (Green et al. 1995, Minkler et al. 2004, Israel etal. 2010) about the nature of substance use and access to treatment facilities in the Turkish community in Ghent (Belgium). Due to a lack of prevalence studies in ethnic and cultural minorities in Belgium and to the growing medicalization of research on substance use and mental health (Piet Bracke), researchers often feel compelled to rely on US based epidemiological studies when grounding knowledge on the link between ethnicity and substance use (Derluyn, 2008).
We argue that the bulk of US based epidemiological research suffers from crucial methodological and conceptual flaws that impel us to reconsider their usefulness in the European context. First, US community research starts out from overly simplified and static concepts of ethnicity and race as primordial analytical categories. Second, and as a consequence of the first argument, this research rarely distinguishes sufficiently between ethnic and non-ethnic determinants and mechanisms influencing substance use and access to treatment. And third, these studies often depart from methodological individualism and subordinates contextual and structural determinants and mechanisms.
This paper aims at re-evaluating (the factors and mechanisms mediating) the relation between ethnicity, the nature of substance use, access to drug treatment and at overcoming some of the gaps in existing research methods mentioned above. More specifically, this implies (1) a dynamisation and critical revision of the concept of ethnicity with a focus on ethnic boundary making practices, (2) the inclusion of non-ethnic determinants and mechanisms, and (3) the broadening of methodological individualism so as to include all levels (from meso to macro) and loci (individual, community, society) of research. Such doubled research practices (Lather, 2007) allow researchers to both analyze and impact upon unequal social outcomes.

Israel emerged as a tribal alliance in the Egyptian marches with Hatti. Four assumptions underlying the current understanding of its emergence are probably erroneous: that its origin was distinctive, located mainly in the Iron I highland, gradual, and came about through an emergent ethnicity embodied in a single shared cultural identity.

This article revisits my translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian immigration to Italy, building on the notions of ethnicization and selective ethnicity appropriation. The salience of an ethnic dimension, in the daily lives of the migrants I met, is explored with regard to collective identification, alignment with co-nationals and interactions with natives. By de-constructing migrants’ ethnicity from within, a range of expectations and strategies towards the receiving society emerges. While processes of ethnicization affect them in cognitive, discursive and practical terms, immigrants selectively draw from their ethnicity patterns, as their previous identities and lifestyles interact with the mainstream overseas. Their ethnicity – as a shared repertoire of habits, ways of life and common sense ideas, supported by a communal identity and background – can be purposefully negotiated in several respects, as they strive to negotiate better life conditions overseas. Why this occurs, under what conditions, and producing what effects, are the questions to be approached in this article. As I shall argue, ethnicity-related attitudes and behaviours raise opportunities and dilemmas both for migrants’ incorporation overseas and for their transnational connections.

A kárpátaljai magyar szórvány vizsgálata – a szórványkutatások rendszerváltás utáni reneszánsza ellenére – meglehetősen alulreprezentált volt, elsősorban esettanulmányokra koncentrálódott. 2018-ban kezdődött szórványkutatásunk komplex módon kívánta vizsgálni a kárpátaljai magyar szórványt, az ott élő egyének/családok és közösségek általános helyzetét, hétköznapi problémáit, lehetőségeit, továbbá az asszimilációs folyamatok jellemzőit. Tanulmányom e szórványkutatás, illetve jelen tematikus blokk keretezéseként igyekszik egyrészt bemutatni a szórvány fogalmát, valamint a szórvány diskurzusait általánosságban, másrészt egységes szempontok mentén betekintést nyújtani az itt élők hétköznapi boldogulási és etnikus stratégiáiba.

This article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the Autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898, to interrogate current categories of ethnic boundaries used in historical and social research. It proposes an ‘archaeological’ method of investigating such boundaries in space. It conceives of the city as a field of interaction between the predominant religious groups of Muslim and Christian, and the way these groups have been represented in historical research and public memory. It also shows how understandings of ethnic boundaries were fashioned by colonial, especially British, sanitary and civic planning projects. Finally, it demonstrates how subaltern Muslim spaces, gendered places and ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods were transformed into paradigmatic cases for understanding spatial segregation in cultural terms.