Herder's Heritage and the Boundary-Making Approach: Studying Ethnicity in Immigrant Societies

Abstract

Major paradigms in immigration research, including assimilation theory, multiculturalism, and ethnic studies, take it for granted that dividing society into ethnic groups is analytically and empirically meaningful because each of these groups is characterized by a specific culture, dense networks of solidarity, and shared identity. Three major revisions of this perspective have been proposed in the comparative ethnicity literature over the past decades, leading to a renewed concern with the emergence and transformation of ethnic boundaries. In immigration research, "assimilation" and "integration" have been reconceived as potentially reversible, powerdriven processes of boundary shifting. After a synthetic summary of the major theoretical propositions of this emerging paradigm, I offer suggestions on how to bring it to fruition in future empirical research. First, major mechanisms and factors influencing the dynamics of ethnic boundary-making are specified, emphasizing the need to disentangle them from other dynamics unrelated to ethnicity. I then discuss a series of promising research designs, most based on nonethnic units of observation and analysis, that allow for a better understanding of these mechanisms and factors.This article aims to advance the conversation between students of comparative ethnicity and scholars of immigration. 1 This conversation has given rise to a new concern with ethnic boundary-making in immigrant societies. Instead of treating ethnicity as an unproblematic explanans-providing self-evident units of analysis and self-explanatory variables-the boundary-making paradigm takes ethnicity as an explanandum, as a variable outcome of specific processes to be analytically uncovered and empirically specified. The ethnic boundary-making perspective has particular advantages for the study of immigrant societies, as a number of authors have suggested recently. for inviting me to the above venues. My departmental colleagues Rogers Brubaker, Adrian Favell, and Roger Waldinger offered generous advice and criticism that I wish I had been able to take more fully into account. Wes Hiers was kind enough to carefully edit the final version (and to teach me that "that" and "which" are not the same). 1 The argument offered here draws on Wimmer (1996, from which the title is adapted) and Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002). For other critiques regarding the (ab)use of the concept of ethnicity, see Bowen (1996) and Brubaker (2004:Ch. 1) for conflict research, Brubaker (2004:Ch. 2) for studies on collective identity, and Steinberg (1981) for immigration studies.

An Evaluation of Ethnicity Research in Developmental Psychology: Critiques and Recommendations

“…Thus, primordialism means that one's deepest sense of belonging is not freely chosen or based on common laws but inherited and based on sharing the same blood [Berlin, 1980]. DP students of ethnicity have, probably unknowingly, often been enticed into Herder's ''garden'' [Wimmer, 2009[Wimmer, , 2013. They start with the unproven conjecture that individuals know a priori their ethnicity.…”

Notes on a cultural sociology of immigrant incorporation

“…Sociological research tends to neglect overarching group memberships and instead focus on ethnic group boundaries -their construction, maintenance and relationships to inequality and processes of social exclusion (c.f. Alba and Nee, 2003;Alba, 2005;Wimmer, 2008Wimmer, , 2009Massey and Sá nchez, 2010;Kroneberg and Wimmer, 2012).…”

The ambiguities of political opportunity: political claims-making of Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York City

“…Most variants of assimilation theory also take the ethnic differentiation of migrants as given (for examples see the critique in Wimmer, 2009). Although new variants of assimilation theory acknowledge that ethnic differentiations are not something that is only "imported" with the immigrants but "that can be created in response to conditions and out of cultural materials in the host society" (Alba and Nee, 1997, 833), they provide little leverage how this creation of ethnic difference would occur, what shape it would take, and what the relevant variables are.…”