30 May 2017

Objective:

To understand constructionist approach.

To learn the differences between text books and academic papers.

Instructions:

1) Please examine the constructed cultures （Case1-Case3）in the reading assignment. By whom, for
what, and for whom were the cultural identities constructed?

2) Please point out merits and demerits of the cultural construction?

3) Please point out the weaknesses of the constructionist approach in the reading material. At least
one.

4) Please find other cultural constructions around you.

A constructionist approach assumes that ethnic and racial identities vary across space and change across
time. It assumes that societal conditions and social change—the circumstances groups encounter—drive
much of that dynamic. It also assumes that ethnic groups are actively involved in the construction and
reconstruction of identities, negotiating boundaries, asserting meanings, interpreting their own pasts,
resisting the impositions of the present, and claiming the future—but often doing so in racialized
contexts and circumstances that both shape and are shaped by their actions. Neither actions nor
circumstances alone create groups, for our actions depend on how we interpret circumstances, and
circumstances, ultimately, are the products of human actions. Ethnic and racial identities are created,
elaborated, and recreated in the interaction between the two.

The purpose of the case studies is to illustrate the diversity of the interactions that take place between
circumstances and actors, the ways those interactions construct identities, and some of the various
forms and functions that ethnicity and race assume as a result.

Case 1: The Power of Circumstances: Blacks and Indians in the United States

How did they come to be this way? How were these identities established as bases of social organization
and collective action

Part of the answer to this question involves the economic development of the US, the needs of land and
labor to fuel the drive that development, the ways those needs were met, and the steeply stratified
society that has been the ultimate result.

These groups themselves played in the process of identity construction, shaping their own identities
under conditions of subordination and powerlessness.

Comparison of these two cases, examining the construction of Black and Indian identities as a matter of
the dynamic relationship between the specific circumstances each group of people face and their own
attempts to interpret those circumstances and to claim control over their own lives.
 African Americans
Historical Background Enslaved and transported to the
United States in the 17th, 18th,
and early 19th centuries
Came from different parts of
Africa
West coast of Africa,
Senegambia in the north,
Angola in the south, inland from
coastal areas
Saw themselves not as Blacks or
Africans, but as members of
distinct and diverse groups
Slavery is a system of power. It
is an extreme form of
domination in which the master
typically exercises enormous
power over the slave, denying
American Indians
Indians were an enormously
diverse population when they
first come in contact with the
Europeans. Distinct peoples
populated what is now the
United States, speaking often
mutually unintelligible
languages, carrying very
different cultures and histories.
Collective identity, while
complex, has been reduced to
what we come to know as tribe:
Blackfeet, Oglala, Kiowa, and
Chikasaw.
In the 17th and much of the 18th
centuries, the centerpiece of
Indian-White relations in what
is now the United States was
the fur trade. Only Indians, who
still controlled most of the
interior beyond the Atlantic
fringe of White settlement, had
access to the major fur-bearing
population of the animals.
When the fur trade has come to
end, what emerged in its place
of the need labor was a demand
for land.
From the late 18th century until
early in the 20th century, the
organizing enterprise in those
relations was the forced
expulsion of Indians from their
lands and the westward march
of White settlement across the
continent.
The shift from labor to land had
some critical consequences for
the formatin of collective
identity.
 the slave not only authority
over his or her own person but
also honor within the society. In
slavery, certain persons lose
control over their bodies, their
labor, their lives, and their
fortunes.
Ethnic identities were Slavery reduced Africans to
undermined commodity: individual units of
labour available, against their
will, for sale. This fact had
certain consequences for the
group boundaries that framed
Africans' own identities.
Where ethnic concentrations
survived, African languages
were more likely to survive, as
were traditional patterns of
leadership and of cooperation
and action.
Instead of being integreated
into the economic structure of
the emergency American
society as individual workers,
Indian nations were removed en
masse from the lands White
wanted and were relocated on
less desirable lands.
Treaties
--
There was a dual aspect to the
treaty process. Many Indians
entered into it only under
extreme duress following
extended warfare and
diplomatic resistance to the
United States.
On the other hand, it was a
process that recognized Indian
groups as sovereign, if
increasingly powerless, nations.
RESULTS:
It often altered but ultimately
preserved tribal boundaries. It
left Indian communities—
impoversihed and virtually
powerless—on an assortment
of diverse and often widely
separated lands not desired by
Whites called "reservations".
Both US government policy and
the popular discussion of Indian
affairs conceived Indian
populations in largely
monolithic terms. The critical
boundary in the society at large
was the boundary between
Indians and Whites. Native
Americans themselves certianly
were aware of this and often
used the same terminology.
The Boundary of Race Slavery brought Africans into a
society in which race was a
fundamental dimension of
social organization.

Race determined social status,

life chances, and political
power.

Slavery created two categories

of human beings, free and
unfree. Although, there were
free blacks, they constituted an
exception. The fundamental
determinant of which category
an individual was assigned to
was race.

This combination of ethnic

mixing and racial subordination
had several affects. To
communicate with each other,
Africans from diverse origins
rapidly developed creole or
pidgin languages, and ultimately
adopted English.

Fashioning a community

They developed kinship

systaems, religion, customary
practices, and forms of
expressive culture such as
music, song, and storytelling

Slave quarters

The characteristics of African

themselves—the languages,
ideas, traditions, and practices
that they brought with them
from Africa—contributed a
great deal to the world the
slaves made.
The Aftermath of Slavery Whereas that identity In the 1950s and 1960s, this
conceived them as culturally pattern led to the establishment
and even biologically inferior to of significant multitribal
Whites, they asserted their communities in urban areas. It
 worth and equal capacities ass
human beings, their equality in
the eyes of God, and their right
to equal treatment and
opportunity in the land that had
held them bondage.
Jim Crow
Blacks migrating to industrial
jobs in northern cities found
themselves victims of
discrimination there as well,
being excluded from jobs,
housing markets, politics, and
other social institutions or being
allowed only
also put Indians in a political
environment very different
from the reservations, one in
which tribal identities had little
formal relevance.
By the 1960's, a supratribal
Indian politics had begun to
emerge in American cities and
among a growing number of
pan-Indian organizations that
saw the more comprehensive
Indian boundary as crucial to
their own survival...

The civil rights movements

The Racial Boundary at
Century's End
Differences and Similarities
produced important – of not
limited – changes in the lives of
some Blacks, particularly from
the South, where numerous
institutional barriers were
pulled down and Black Power
began to take on concrete
meaning in the organization of
southern society and in the
economic opportunities
available to the Black middle
class.
Both as a group and as
individuals, African Americans
have been somewhat
ambivalent about these
developments. Some believe
they indicate that at least a
number of African Americans
finally have the opportunity to
join the American mainstream
as other immigrant populations
have done.
Africans encountered economic Native Americans also
and political systems organized encountered a public culture of
along racial boundaries, a public race and a classification system
culture of race and a that conceptualized Indians in
classification system that racial terms. It is important to
note that the economic system
 treated the racial boundary as they encountered for the most
fundamental. part excluded them, having less
use for their labor than for their
lands.

It organized their subordination

along tribal lines.

Native Americans had greater

The groups involved asserted
their own conceptions of who
they are.
Blacks challenged the
inequalities and negative
implications attached to both
boundaries and position,
resisting and reshaping meaning
of their own "Blackness" in the
process. With the dehumanizing
and debilitating limits of these
contraints, Black Americans
asserted tehir version of their
identity and built a community
of their own.
freedom for such assertions
than did African Americans.
US government policy has
encouraged—on occasion
forced—Indians to leave the
tribal embrace and join the
mainstream of American
society. Some Indians have
chosen to do so; some have
resisted that pressure and
remained fully integrated into
their own tribal communities.

Case 2: Between Assertion and Assigment: Chinese Americans in Mississippi

The American Civil Wra brought an end to slavery, African Americans technically won their political
rights, and they were voting against the White power structure, but also freedom of movement,
choosing to work for other employers, and industries. They can no longer exploit the black market the
way they were able to do in the past, so they needed an alternative.

Chinese labor prevailed because they were believed to be hard workers and politically docile. As
foreigners, they could not vote and therefore wont be able to challenge current power structure.

Historical background

Early 1870's, a small but growing Chinese population had appeared in the Delta, a stretch of rich, low-
lying farmland occupying a number of countries along the eastern shore of the Mississipi River.

In 1876, White supremacists in Missisipi ousted the state government established under northern
pressure during the period of construction under the Civil War, reversed the political and economic
gains won by the Blacks, and began to put back in place a system of formal and informal controls that
would restore much of the old racial stratification system.
These developments ended the campaign to recruit Chinese workers – abandoned the cotton
plantations – began to look for opportunities on their own. What they found was a large economic
niche. A large number of them opened grocery stores that served the Black population in the towns and
cities of the Delta, and there – economically at least – flourished.

The Chinese had been sought out originally to replace Blacks in a labor system designed to serve white
interests. The position they occupied in the society certainly resembled that of the Blacks far more than
it did that of Whites. Although, the Chinese don't look Black, they did not look White, either.

Chinese were racialized as Blacks.

The sojourner orientation means that the Chinese were less concerned with their social status in
Mississipii than they might otherwise have been. Economic as opposed to social success was their goal.

Only in the 1940's and 1950's was a graduate change in orientation from sojourner to immigrant , that's
the start of the quest for racial transition.

Strategy of Racial Reassignment

Changing the White image of the Chinese

Two ways:

(1) Altering their own behavior and relationships to more closely fit White models and by

• Ending certain relationships with Blacks and emphasizing their own racial distinctiveness
• The Chinese began to put social pressure on individuals to eng Chinese- Black marriages and
friendships.
• The rest of the Chinese community ostracized Chinese men who cohabited with or married
Black women. Some of these men broke up with their partners.
• Chinese grocers moved out of living quarters, to separate houses outside of the Black
community.
• Remained differential toward Whites, asking, in effect, not necessarily to be treated as equals,
but at least to be treated as non-Blacks.

(2) developing a set of parallel institutions that could serve their own community in ways similar to the
institutions serving Whites.

• The Chinese established their own Baptist churches and missions, set up schools so that their
children no longer had to attend schools set up for Blacks, and established social clubs, youth
organizations, and even Chinese cemeteries

This multifaceted effort paid off. Growing numbers of White institutions, particularly in the small Delta
towns, gradually began to accept the Chinese. The churches were the first one to open their doors; then
came the public accommodations, such as restaurants and transportation, and eventually even schools.

By the beginning of the 1950's, nearly all of the White school systems had opened their doors to Chinese
American children.
THE CHINESE SUCCESS

1. They made clear that they were not challenging the system of racial segregation or classification
as a whole, but only their particular place in it.
2. Their business record work on their favor.
3. The White establishment that controlled the Delta had little compelling economic or political
interest in confining the Chinese to the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The economic fortunes of
its White establishment depended wholly on Black subordination, on a system of race relations
tied Blacks into sharecropping and long term debt to Whites.

Assertion at work. Once they decided to remain in the Delta, the Chinese set out to change the way
Delta society saw them. They undertook a form of ethnic reorganization. They reorganized their own
social relations and altered the norms governing those relations, in this case to make them better
conform to the expectations of Whites.

Case 3: From Thick Ethnicty to Thin: German Americans

Historical Background

Germans who came to the United Stated in the 18th and 19th centuries found themselves in the situation
dramatically different from the rigidly stratified, biracial caste system that confronted the Chinese.

German immigrants could look forward not only to sharing the riches of the New World but also, after
the founding of the United States, to full and equal citizenship. This more welcoming environment
hardly seems promising ground for the construction of an enduring ethnic identity, but Germans were
not entirely free and unconstrained.

The citizenship carried with it an expectation that Germans would shed those things—language, custom,
even identity.

19th century, fewer Germans were willing to accept the costs. German immigrants during this time
believed that the US should not only help to sustain German culture in America but also promote it as
rich and invaluable contribution to American society. Many of them set out to sustain a consciously and
culturally distinct ethnic identity.

17th century to 1815, the number of Germans moving to America was not large, numbering between
65,000 and 100,000 persons for the entire period. Reasons: religious freedom, economic opportunity,
sheer adventure of new and abundant frontiers. Most of the early German immigrants realized that this
would mean leaving much of their Germanness behind, and they were prepared to do so.

Most German immigrants were chained immigrants. They followed in the footsteps of family and friends
who had gone before them. They knew where they're going and much of what awaited them once they
arrived.

Inertia, however, is a poor foundation for an ethnic community in a world that expects and ecnourages
assimilation. These communities were small, and they had neither the resources nor the collective will
to sustain themselves.
The Germans who came to the US during this period were far from united. The Germany they came
from was not a unified country, they were unified in 1871. The migrants of the colonial period had little
sense of themselves as united people.

In the 19th century, a second and quite different wave of German immigration headed to the US. Their
numbers and diversity were such that they could find what they needed in rapidly growing German
neighborhoods and communities, they depended little on the non- German society that they were
entering.

United by a broad commonality of language, immigrants in this second wave quickly formed
organizatons of various kinds, everything from welfare groups to cultural organizations, to fire
companies.

This second wave wanted to retain their Germanness. The nationalist among them set out to restore
what they saw as a lost appreciation of German culture and heritage among earlier immigrants and their
children, and they began promoting German language and nationalist thought among Germans in the
United States.

At the heart of this movement to cultivate and preserve a distinctly German presence in the United
States was a group of liberal intellectuals known as Forty Eighters. They envigorated German cultural life
in the US, founding a series of voluntary associations, historical societies, singing groups, and other
organizations designed to foster German culture and identity.

Turnvereins were at first primarily centers of German-style sport and recreation, but they took on
broader functins. They became centers for instruction in the German language and offered adult
education classes in German politics, philosophy, and history.

Also contributing to the preservation and cultivation effort was a huge network of German language
publications.

All these preservationist activity masked an underlying trend that was moving the other way. German
ethnicity, was gradually thinning, organizing less and less of German American life despite the efforts of
its strongest supporters and the effects of cultural organizations, German language media, and schools.

Many Germans continued to put economic opportunity ahead of cultural preservation, making the
cultural sacrifices necessary to take full advantage of the economic opportunties avaialable to them.

Simply put, as the years went by and their participation in institutions of the larger society increased,
German Americans became less German and more American.

After World War I, the anti- German hysteria put an end to the cultural preservation movement. Public
school systems dropped the study of German language and literature; libraries removed German books
from their shelves. German organizations and culture quickly lost their appeal. German Americans found
themselves plastering over German language cornerstones and adopting English tranlsation of their
names. German American Bank – Liberty Bank, daschunds – liberty pups, and hamburger became
salisbury steak.
In World War II, what was left of the cultural romanticization that once had fueled the drive to sustain
German community and identity in American collided with grim horrors of Nazims, German
expansionism, the rise of Adolf Hitler.

German American ethnicity still exists, it is far thinner than it was in the 19th century. It has become
symbolic ethnicity – an identity that is invoked on occasion—on holidays or at family gathering, for
example—and that clearly has some meaning for many of those who share it but has little influence on
most people's daily lives.

Thye succeeded for a time in accomplishing their goal: to be Americans, but of an emphatically German
sort. Barring the two world wars, their ethnicity might have remained thicker, more vibrant aspect of
many Gemrna Americans' lives well into the 20th century.