Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood. She brings Khanty views of their history and current life into focus, revealing multiple levels of cultural activism. She argues that anthropological theory and practice can derive from indigenous insights, and should help indigenous peoples. Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization, and regionalization. These processes incorporate suprastate and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and generations. It has been shaped by recent grass-roots mobilization, ecological activism, and religious revival, as well as older historical memory, language-based solidarity, and loyalty to a homeland. The Tenacity of Ethnicity demonstrates how at each historical turn, Siberian experiences shed new light on old debates concerning colonialism, conversion, revitalization, ethnicity, and nationalism. This volume will be important for political scientists, historians, and regional specialists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists.

The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and insidious grip of couple-normativity across changing landscapes of law, policy and everyday life in four contrasting national contexts: the UK, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal. By investigating how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has changed over time, and how it varies between places and social groups, this book provides a detailed analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe, and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. The authors develop the feminist concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ and propose the new concept of ‘intimate citizenship regime’, offering a study of intimate citizenship regimes as normative systems that have been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Against the backdrop of processes of de-patriarchalization, liberalization, pluralization and homonormalization, the ongoing potency of the couple-norm becomes ever clearer.

Galvanizing Nostalgia? explores critical questions for the survival of Russia in its nominally federal form. Will Russia fall apart along the lines of its internal republics, as did the Soviet Union? Based on cultural anthropology field and historical research in major republics of Eastern Siberia—Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia, and Tyva (Tuva)—this book highlights Indigenous concerns about self-determination. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer suggests that a fragile and disorganized dynamic of nested sovereignties has developed within Russia. Ecology activism has grown, given new threats to the environment and accelerating climate challenges, especially in the Arctic. Focus on strategically chosen republics enables comparing and contrasting interethnic relations, language politics, and the salience of gender, demography, resource competition, environmental degradation, and increased spirituality. Republics vary in their neocolonial relationships to Moscow authorities. Some local leaders, such as a politicized shaman, use nostalgia for cultural achievements to galvanize citizens. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, cultural and political revitalization have been relatively more viable, although still difficult, in areas where Siberians have their own republics.

"A welcome and brilliantly crafted overview of this field. It represents a major advance in our understanding of how ethnicity works in specific social and cultural contexts. The second edition will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers alike." - John Solomos, City University, London The first edition of Rethinking Ethnicity quickly established itself as a popular text for students of ethnicity and ethnic relations. This fully revised and updated second edition adds new material on globalization and the recent debates about whether ethnicity matters and ethnic groups actually exist. While ethnicity - as a social construct - is imagined, its effects are far from imaginary. Jenkins draws on specific examples to demonstrate the social mechanisms that construct ethnicity and the consequences for people′s experience. Drawing upon rich case study material, the book discusses such issues as: the ′myth′ of the plural society; postmodern notions of difference; the relationship between ethnicity, ′race′ and nationalism; ideology; language; violence and religion; and the everyday construction of national identity.

The Buryats are a Mongolian population in Siberian Russia, the largest indigenous minority. The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia presents the dramatic transformation in their everyday lives during the late twentieth century. The book challenges the common notion that the process of modernization during the later Soviet period created a Buryat national assertiveness rather than assimilation or support for the state.

The editors use the unique lens of the history of sports to examine ethnic experiences in North America since 1840. Comprised of 12 original essays and an Introduction, it chronicles sport as a social institution through which various ethnic and racial groups attempted to find the way to social and psychological acceptance and cultural integration. Included are chapters on Native Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Canadians, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Hispanics, and several more, showing how their sports participation also provided these communities with some measure of social mobility, self-esteem, and a shared pride.

Social scientists claim that we now live in a post-race society, where race has been replaced by 'ethnicity'. Yet racism is endemic to British society and people often think in terms of black and white. With a marked rise in the number of children from mixed parentage, there is an urgent need to challenge simplistic understandings of 'race', nation and culture, and interrogate what it means to grow up in Britain and claim a 'mixed' identity. Focusing on mixed-race and inter-ethnic families, this book not only explores current understandings of 'race', but it shows, using innovative research techniques with children, how we come to read race. What influence do photographs and television have on childrens ideas about 'race'? How do children use memories and stories to talk about racial differences within their own families? How important is the home and domestic culture in achieving a sense of belonging? Ali also considers, through data gathered from teachers and parents, broader issues relating to the effectiveness of anti-racist and multicultural teaching in schools, and parental concerns over the social mobility and social acceptability of their children. Rigorously researched, this book is the first to combine childrens accounts on 'race' and identity with contemporary cultural theory. Using fascinating case studies, it fills a major gap in this area and provides an original approach to writing on race.

What do people mean when they talk about race? Are they acknowledging a biological fact, a social reality, or a cultural identity? Is race real, or is it merely an illusion? This book brings analytical clarity to one of the most vexed topics in the social sciences today, arguing that race is no more than a social construction, unsupported in biological terms and upheld for the simple reason that we continue to believe in its reality. Deploying concepts from the sociology of knowledge, religion, social memory, and psychoanalysis, the authors consider the conditions that contribute to this persistence of belief and suggest ways in which the idea of race can free itself from outdated nineteenth-century notions of biological essentialism. By conceiving of race as something that is simultaneously real and unreal, this study generates a new conceptualization that will be required reading for scholars in this field.