Boundary making

The 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD), just like other European right-wing parties, is often reduced to an anti-immigration stance, while its potential attraction for (white and non-white) immigrants and their descendants has been mostly disregarded.

This paper empirically analyzes the motivations of AfD members with a migration background to join the party. Furthermore, I explore the political significance of the category 'migration background' for these members. Thirdly, I asked the migrant interviewees how they deal with the fact that they are in a party publicly perceived as being anti-migrant.

Theoretically, I discuss anti-plural alliances in the context of the post-migrant theory. In addition, I discuss populism and the strategy of ‘partial openings’. Lastly, I try to make sense of migrant members’ motives to join a right-wing populist/right-wing extremist party by using the concepts of established insiders, boundary making, ethnic hierarchy, status, and attitudes.

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.

This essay engages with Wimmer’s Ethnic Boundary Making to consider how cultural processes feed into inequality. It describes the strengths of the book, relates it to my early work, and draws on Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (forthcoming), to describe two types of identification processes (racialization and stigmatization) and two types of rationalization processes (standardization and evaluation) that contribute to an understanding of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries. It stresses similarities and differences between approaches and suggests possible points for convergence.

In an era wherein lack of legal status causes immigrants to be excluded from citizenship rights and privileges, subjected to state violence and stigmatized by illegalizing discourses, mobilizing to voice the grievances of the undocumented is a daunting task. I argue that precarious subjects like undocumented youth rely on forging cross- status alliances with citizen activists to sustain their political organizations. The term “cross- status” refers to the gap between activists with and without citizenship status. In effect, citizenship as a historically and politically
constructed form of privilege constitutes the main boundary that separates allies from non- allies in IYJL. In line with objectives of this volume, I adopt a broader use of relational poverty as the generalized condition of economic, cultural, social, and political precariousness that results from being excluded from citizenship as privilege. In this chapter, I draw on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork
in Chicago, in- depth interviews with IYJL members, and content analysis of speeches, organizational publications, and blog posts to study how power differentials become negotiated between citizen allies and DREAMers.
The chapter is structured as follows. First, I outline a relational perspective on the micropolitics of cross- status alliances. Second, I sketch a historical overview of the representational struggles within the DREAM movement. Third, I compare and contrast documented and undocumented perspectives on what being an ally means. Throughout, I argue that building cross- status alliances implies boundary bridging, or the process whereby power di(erentials are negotiated through the mechanisms of equalization and differentiation. Both mechanisms contribute to the social construction of the ally by making citizen supporters structural equals who remain symbolically unequal. It is precisely this mixed status of being “unequal equals” that turns potentially overpowering and privileged citizens into productive allies for DREAMers. These findings underscore the importance of adopting a relational approach to the study of political subject formation among precarious actors.

in public debates over multiculturalism in europe, islamic values and ways of life are commonly represented as incompatible with Western rights and liberties. against this background, muslim minorities have developed generally strong and stable religious identities. this paper asks when and how multicultural cities and ethnic communities give rise to strong and stable religion. taking an approach from religious boundary making as a heuristic framework, we bring together a series of five studies on the religious identities of muslim minorities. the studies compare religious group boundaries and replicate boundary making processes (cf. Wimmer, 2008) across ethnic communities and multicultural cities as comparative cases. drawing on several large-scale surveys of muslim minorities, our comparative findings illuminate the making and unmaking of religious boundaries. We conclude that strong religion is 'made in europe' as institutional rigidities and social inequalities enforce religious boundary making through social closure and cultural maintenance within ethnic communities.

Vegetarianism as a dietary practice has emerged as a site of contestation in the South Asian traditions. While vegetarianism remains a politically significant topic today with the rise of Hindutva right-wing politics, in the early period, vegetarianism and dietary practices and ethics around it played a role in boundary-making between Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In this paper, the aim is to look how major texts in these three traditions i.e., Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism conceptualize vegetarianism based on the concept of ahiṃsā (non-violence/non-injury) and employ their dietary practices and ethics as a tool of boundary-making.

Which historical lens and what scope can capture modernitys complex social, political, economic, and epistemic permutations? Using an historical interpretive lens to explore contingent moments in its making, this work seeks to describe a core dynamic within modernity. In modernity, the assertion of freedom from rooted systems of meaning ushers in radical uncertainty. In response, new certainties are constructed for guiding human action, but being grounded upon indeterminacy these are necessarily provisional and open ended. Uncertainty thus grows in proportion to the expansion of freedom and the abstraction of foundations, making the drives to know and to control insatiable. To narrate a history of this dynamic, I frame it as a series of strategies for grounding upon groundlessness: surveying and mapping, enclosing and improving; risking and insuring. This narrative is largely set in the particular soil of British history, where the discourses surrounding efforts to ground property a...

Abstract
The article addresses the relationships among various actors who are (un)involved in civic processes and the implications of these relationships for socio-cultural change in Armenian society. The article discusses protests in their relation to boundaries, namely, how protests in Armenia affect these boundaries and how the phenomena of boundary work affect protest manifestation and evolution. The analysis questions some assumptions regarding the dynamic and emancipatory nature of movements. ‘Cultural layering’ is proposed as a concept to describe the various ways that socio-cultural factors affect protests. The analysis relies on data from interviews, participant observations and online discussions, and it centers on #ElectricYerevan.
Prior and subsequent protests and secondary data on the country’s various social indicators are used to contextualize the findings.

The aim of this article is to study the experiences of highly skilled migrants from an intersectional perspective. Based on a case study of a group of skilled migrants in Finland, this article explores the interplay of various social identities and categorizations in their everyday life. I argue that although class markers are an important element in the self-defined group identification for skilled migrants, they are also subjected to intersecting social categorizations, stereotyping and assumptions based on gender, ethnicity, race and nationality, creating different experiences and belongings for different skilled migrants. Anthias’ concept of ‘translocational positionality’ is used to highlight how these intersections are highly situational, context specific and relative to other actors in the Finnish context.

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.

My name is Marie C. Grasmeier and I am a doctoral candidate at Bremen University in the field of social anthropology. The subject of my doctoral thesis is an ethnography about the occupational culture and everyday practices of the construction of occupational identities by seafarers on board internationally crewed merchant ships. This is, e.g., container ships whose crew consists of people from several countries all over the world. I investigated my research question by means of ethnographic fieldwork on board merchant vessels. I also draw on autoethnographic data (cf.: Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2015; Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011; Chang 2008; Anderson 2006) that are available to me since I, as a former merchant seafarer, have myself been a member of my research field. The following presentation is just a small part of my research findings. I will argue that former seafarers employed in shore jobs after quitting their ocean going careers retain a strong sense of belonging and underline this sense by retaining certain language, practices and behavioural patterns belonging to life at sea even in the new occupational setting. In short, my thesis is that they orchestrate what is called a "déformation professionelle" (Warnotte 1937) as a means of identity performance. Before I dig deep into theoretical considerations, I like to present an auto-ethnographic story from my working life in the maritime industry: Twelve years ago I started working as a researcher in a maritime research institute at a university. About half of the workforce of this institute were formerly active seafarers, like master mariners-this is captains-and chief engineers. The other half were scientists and 1

This paper explores the influence of political traditions on policymaking at the interface of national and transnational governance. It uncovers various dimensions of influence on boundary-setting through policy change, derived from a case study examining how Australia reconceptualised longstanding freedom of residential movement and equal treatment for citizens across the Tasman. These policymaking activities spanned boundaries across policy subsystems at the interface of both domestic and transnational arenas, in response to perceived dilemmas. This paper focuses on the enabling role of neoliberal ideations to effect an agenda driven by more covert motives. In context of bilateral economic integration, conflicting traditions created a dilemma for Australia, which sought to maintain the advantages of the free labour-market whilst minimizing the problem of granting access to social security and citizenship to those perceived to be unsuitable. I find that Australia, in resolving this dilemma, allowed neoliberal conceptions of labour as a commodity, thereby enabling traditions of exclusion and border control, to override longstanding trans-Tasman traditions.