Democracy and Ethnography

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Democracy and Ethnography
Constructing Identities in Multicultural Liberal States

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Carol J. Greenhouse - Editor
Roshanak Kheshti - With assistance from

SUNY series in National Identities

Price: $55.50
Hardcover - 305 pages

Release Date: September 1998

ISBN10: 0-7914-3963-1
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-3963-0

Price: $29.95
Paperback - 305 pages

Release Date: September 1998

ISBN10: 0-7914-3964-X
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-3964-7

Available as a Google eBook, for other eReaders and tablet devices, Click icon below...

Summary

"In exploring the official constructions of cultural diversity in the United States and Spain, this book makes a valuable contribution to debates on multicultural policies in liberal democratic states. It brings anthropological insights on classification to bear on the pressing issues of affirmative action, immigration quotas, education, and the political organization of difference." -- John Borneman, Cornell University

"How do democracies deal with difference? This intriguing, provocative collection of essays explores how democracies accommodate the tensions between equality and diversity through a comparison of the United States and Spain. It is essential reading for scholars concerned with the challenges and dilemmas posed by multicultural societies within democratic states." -- Sally Engle Merry, Wellesley College

These ethnographic essays by scholars in anthropology, law, political science, folklore, public administration, medicine, and linguistics show contemporary connections between liberal democracy and ethnography. Each perspective explores a modern democratic site--courts, classrooms, legislatures, the media, academic professions, and bureaucratic routines. Together, they expose a contradiction--that official constructions of identity treat "differences" as both natural characteristics of individuals and the collective basis of interest groups. This contradiction hampers liberal states' efforts to acknowledge and accommodate the cultural diversity of citizens. They also show that official categories do not monopolize the available terms of understanding and identification, given the richness and flexibility of people's self-identifications outside official spheres. This recognition implies an ethnographic project at the heart of democratic change.

The book develops two national case studies, the United States and Spain. Both countries have been invoked as models of multiculturalism, but their constitutional discourse and politics take very different approaches to issues of identity. Similarly, ethnographic disciplines have been involved in the officialization of difference in both countries, in different ways. Taken together, these differences and their common roots in the twinned histories of modern liberal democracy and the social sciences, provide ethnographic, reflexive, and comparative themes as well as broader theoretical and practical implications.

Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University at Bloomington. She is the author of Praying for Justice: Faith, Hope and Community in an American Town and A Moment's Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures, and coauthor (with Barbara Yngvesson and David Engel) of Law and Community in Three American Towns.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: The Ethnography of Democracy and Difference
Carol J. Greenhouse and Davydd J. Greenwood

Part I Diversity and Equality in Liberal Debate

2. Diversity as American Cultural Category
Hervé Varenne

3. The Hypervisible and the Masked: Some Thoughts on the Mutual Embeddedness of "Race" and "Class" in the United States Now
Daniel A. Segal

4. Democracy and Cultural Difference in the Spanish Constitution of 1978
Jesús Prieto de Pedro

5. Disorderly Differences: Recognition, Accommodation, and American Law
Austin Sarat and Roger Berkowitz

Part II The Making of Official Discourses of Identity

6. American Ethnogenesis and the 1990 Census
Dvora Yanow

7. Difference from the People's Point of View
José Antonio Fernández de Rota Monter

8. Porous Borders: Discourses of Difference in Congressional Hearings on Immigration
Phyllis Pease Chock

9. To Be Basque and to Live in Basque Country: The Inequalities of Difference
Jesús Azcona

10. Acceptable Difference: The Cultural Evolution of the Model Ethnic American Citizen
Bonnie Urciuoli

Part III Official Discourses and Professional Practice

11. The Role of Folklore and Popular Culture in the Construction of Difference in Spain
Honorio M. Velasco

12. Linguistic Constructions of Difference and History in the U.S. Law School Classroom
Elizabeth Mertz

13. From Ethnography to Clinical Practice in the Construction of the Contemporary State
Josep M. Comelles

References

About the Authors

Index

Related Subjects

Democracy

34712/34713(ZL//FK)