Navigating Ethnicity: Segregation, Placemaking, and Difference

Abstract

This book review forum on David H. Kaplan's Navigating Ethnicity: Segregation, Placemaking, and Difference brings together commentaries by Pablo Bose, Jason Hackworth, and myself. These are followed by David H. Kaplan's response and engagement with his critics. As the commentaries reveal, Navigating Ethnicity is a thought-provoking and important contribution that tackles the extremely complicated terrain of ethnicity using a global perspective. The author does an exemplary job exploring the "frustrating richness" of ethnicity (p. 18). Worthy of note is that the author promises to do this "across the world" (p. 19), and, indeed, he does bring up dozens of examples of how ethnicity is manifested in multiple and different contexts. This is the most valuable element of the book, as the reader learns how the concept of ethnicity shifts across borders and between and within places. The overall conclusion from reviewers is that the book is excellent in explaining key concepts and providing informative examples of how ethnicity plays a role in everyday geographies.The commentaries that follow pick up on this theme and all agree that the social constructivist argument used by the author is a theoretical framing that stands up to most critiques. This framing moves away from essentialism, which limits ethnicity to hereditary, biology, and primordial ties, toward an understanding of ethnicity as both situational and dynamic-with individual group members sustaining and asserting their ethnic identities in uneven and differential ways, depending on the social and political environment that surrounds them. As Skop and Li (2017) contended, ethnic groups caught in this system of ascriptive categorization might be the result of a group's attempts to withstand structural disparities or to gain privileges that might otherwise be denied to them based on some other social identifiers. Kaplan's book emphasizes the role of agency while navigating the structural dynamics of ethnic identity formation, thus the title, Navigating Ethnicity. Social constructionists, like Kaplan, argue that ethnic identities can be self-claimed or externally imposed, depending on circumstances. Throughout the text, Kaplan suggests that individuals typically self-identify as a member of a particular ethnic group to assert their sense of belonging, to maximize the benefits associated with this identity, to retreat from a group to minimize the disadvantages, or to disavow an ethnic identity due to fear of persecution. The end result is examples of ethnic identity formation as an embodied process, that is often subject to segregation, exploitation, and conflict, but that is also the result of celebration, resilience, and place making.

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“…In doing so, government placemaking can trigger the strengthening of social bonding among groups and encourage various contributions from community groups, including both economic and non-economic contributions. This concept has been supported by research conducted in various cultural and geographical contexts (Chen & Qu, 2020;Dabaj & Conti, 2020;Huang et al, 2019;Skop et al, 2019).…”

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