Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper aims to explore the interface between Benedict Anderson's (1991) imagined, conceptual communities linking people who have never met and what Vered Amit (2002) called face to face communities of groups based on social practices. Communities are imagined from above but communities also negotiate their own social and spatial boundaries, often in response to these imaginations. What is imagined can only be felt if it can be socially realised. This paper will compare findings from discourse analysis of official texts with ethnographic data collected through informal interviews with over 100 Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Urumchi, the capital city of Xinjiang. It asks how these face-to-face communities are framed by the party-state and how they understand their place within the Chinese nation themselves. Specific reference to the party's concept of ethnic unity will be used to explore the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood in China. This aims to contribute to our understanding of the variety of competing self-understandings in China and how national identities are formed and negotiated at a local face-to-face level.

Preface; Chapter 01. Introduction; Part I; Chapter 02. Basic Guidelines for Doing Fieldwork; Chapter 03. Supervision and the Ethics of Doing Fieldwork; Part II; Chapter 04. The Fieldwork Experience; Chapter 05. Ethnic Groups and Communities; Part III; Chapter 06. The Vietnamese and Other Southeast Asians; Chapter 07. African Americans; Chapter 08. Japanese Americans; Chapter 09. Mexican Americans; Chapter 10. Samoan Americans; Part IV; Chapter 11. Building Trust; References; Appendix. Interview Schedule and Questionnaire Pilot Ethnic Research Training Project (1980); Index.

A major debate continues about whether immigrants receive benefits by virtue of their attachment to ethnic communities and ethnic organizations. On one side of the controversy, a large body of literature suggests that the ethnic community, which often contains resources that promote immigrants' adaptation and assimilation, actually hinders adaptation because the resources of mainstream institutions are less accessible to immigrants (often because they are also minorities). On the opposite side of the argument, critics contend that the ethnic solidarity school emphasizes the positive effects of ethnic communities and ethnic organizations on immigrant populations, while ignoring many of the negative consequences of migrants' involvement in ethnic groups and ethnic institutions.The purpose of this article is to reconsider whether ethnic communities and ethnic institutions facilitate immigrants' socio‐economic adaptation. Specifically, the study analyses the impact of ethnic organizations on public assistance utilization among South‐East Asian and Eastern European refugees in the Chicago metropolitan area in the late 1980s.The paper proceeds in five stages. As a background to the overall study, the literature on ethnic communities and ethnic organizations is reviewed. This is followed by a discussion of the development of mutual assistance associations (MAAs) in the US. Third is a concise description of the data and methods. Fourth is a presentation of the results. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.