Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks(Oxford Studies in Culture and Politics)

It is hard to avoid seeing ethnicity, race, or nationality wherever one looks. Differences in education, income, and health are often patterned along ethnic or racial lines. But how do we disentangle discrimmation and preferences for certain groups from the everyday working of labor markets and educational institutions or privileging family members or those with similar educational backgrounds? Drawing on a boundary-making perspective first championed by anthropologist Fredrick Barth, Andreas Wimmer introduces a new comparative theory of ethnicity. It explains precisely how and why ethnicity matters in certain societies and contexts but not in others, and why it is sometimes associated with inequality and exclusion, with political and public debate, with closely-held identity, while in other cases ethnicity, race and nationhood do not structure the allocation of resources, invite little political passion, and represent secondary aspects of individual identity. Wimmer argues that when ethnic and racial differences matter they matter because of institutional incentives, differences in power, and pre-existing social networks. Wimmer first provides a broad overview of different ethnic configurations around the world, outlines the new theory, and proposes a set of research designs based on non-ethnic units of observation. Next, he draws on these methods to demonstrate how the utility of the boundary-making approach through a qualitative study of immigrant ethnicity in Switzerland, a network analysis of racial and ethnic boundaries of U.S. college students on Facebook, and a statistical analysis of cultural values in the European Union.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Herder's Heritage 2. Strategies and Means 3. Conflict and Consensus 4. Categorization struggles 5. Network Boundaries 6. Culture and Closure Conclusions Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Andreas Wimmer is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of Politics at Princeton University. His research is aimed at understanding the dynamics of nation-state formation, ethnic boundary making and political conflict from a comparative perspective. He is author of Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflicts: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge, 2002) and Waves of War: Nationalism and Ethnic Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge 2012) and his articles have been published by the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, World Politics, Sociological Theory and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. Professor Wimmer's work has won best article awards from the Comparative Historical, Political, Cultural, and Theory sections of the American Sociological Association as well as the Thyssen Prize for Best Article in the Social Sciences.

Review :
"Ethnic Boundary Making has the makings of a classic. The author takes on a vast and important topic, provides a bold and ambitious theoretical agenda, and engages in theory development by convincingly confronting his hypotheses with data of various kinds. As he goes along, Wimmer explains the implications of his findings for a wide range of theories and debates in sociology and beyond, engaging with the best and the brightest in the multi-disciplinary literatures on ethno-racial divisions, immigration and citizenship, and group formation. This ambitious book will surely leave its mark and be widely debated." -Michele Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration "Ethnic Boundary Making summarizes a vast research program on the topic. Wimmer problematizes what others have taken for granted by showing that ethnicity is neither pre-determined and immutable, nor entirely constructed and malleable. In the end, ethnic boundaries reflect the interaction between the power of privileged groups seeking to legitimize their position and those of subordinate ones to alter, though various strategies, their own. Wimmer's vast erudition and command of empirical materials worldwide makes the book both a valuable reference point and worth arguing with." -Alejandro Portes, Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology, Princeton University "This is one of the most exciting books I have read in any social science in two decades. It offers a root-and-branch revamping of the constructivist paradigm in the study of ethnic division, infusing a field marred by national myopia and cultural parochialism, rampant moralism and stale political posturing with conceptual rigor, empirical vigor, historical depth and geographic breadth. Mating theoretical insights from Barth, Moerman and Bourdieu, Wimmer elaborates a lucid 'comparative analytic of how and why ethnicity matters.' He demonstrates its merits by taking us on a dazzling world tour of salient cases, past and present, and he rolls out sophisticated research designs suited to disentangling ethnic from other dynamics of social structuration. Ethnic Boundary Making marks a signal advance in the study of inequality, identity, and group formation, and it will cement Wimmer's place at the forefront of analytic sociology." -Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban Outcasts "The sweeping theoretical ambition of Ethnic Boundary Making is innovative and exciting; Wimmer's analytic framework enables the systematized accumulation of knowledge about ethnic boundary processes from the most diverse contexts, promising genuine theoretical advancement of this field." -American Journal of Sociology