(Abstracts are in alphabetical order by author's last name.)

Patricia Banks
Becoming Black: Consumption of Visual Art and the Construction of Racial Identity

This paper investigates how consumption of visual art expresses and maintains the black identities of upper-middle class blacks in the New York and Atlanta metropolitan areas, two communities with large populations of black professionals and rich histories of black art patronage. I explore this question using data from 103 in-depth interviews with middle-class blacks about how their racial identity relates to the art displayed in their homes, and the art that they encounter in other spaces such as museums and galleries. I apply theory from research on cultural consumption and middle-class blacks to cast light on how consumption of visual art shapes, and is shaped by, individual (how they define themselves) and collective (how they define blacks as a group) black identities. I specifically argue that art is tied to six dimensions of black identity: self-categorization, shared fate, collective identity story, group story, ideology, and cultural property (Ashmore, Deaux et al. 2004). These dimensions are tied to art in the following ways: self-categorization describes how art makes participants conscious of, and is used to signal black identities. Shared fate describes how consuming “black” art is tied to participants’ feelings of attachment to other blacks. Collective identity story describes how participants interpret art as illustrating their specific black experiences. Group story describes how participants interpret art as illustrating the collective narrative of blacks. Ideology describes how art shapes and expresses participants’ ideas about the group position of blacks. The last dimension, cultural property, describes how participants view blacks as having special “ownership” of “black” art.

Jovonne J. Bickerstaff
Moi, francais(e)?The Assertion of Social Identity as Response to Hegemonic Representations amongst Second Generation French of Sub-Saharan African Descent in Paris

This paper explores how ethnic, national and racial identifications are used by second-generation immigrants in France to respond to the boundaries erected by hegemonic representations of “French” in the larger society. Specifically, drawing on a series of depth interviews and focus groups with French born young adults (18-30) of Sub-Saharan African Descent in Paris, the paper examines how assertions of social identity reflected individual responses to social representations of who was or could be considered French. These different perceptions were manifested in three types of responses to hegemonic representations – acceptance, accommodation and challenge – which corresponded to variations in the primacy given to identifying as French as compared to identifying by immigrant nationality (solely African), hybrid nationality (French/African or African/French) and/or race affiliations (Black French). I argue that claiming French as an affiliation is particularly significant for this population because it is a contested identification. Despite intrinsic inclusion in formal bounds of French as nationality, the salience of its social representations as purely European, white and Christian, casts this population – of extra-European origins, black and/or Muslim – as outsider or other. Moreover, the socio-political context established by French Republican universal ideology, in refusing acknowledge affiliations other than nationality as legitimate in the public sphere, provides few opportunities for the modification of these boundaries outside of presentations of self. Drawing on social psychological constructs of Social Identity Theory (e.g. Tajfel 1978) and Social Representations Theory (e.g. Moscovici, 1976), the paper suggests that the identities individuals assert in response to social representational boundaries reflect their subjective beliefs about intercultural relations and opportunities in the social environment. In this particular instance, different responses to hegemonic representations of French are related to perceptions about and approaches to the achieving full social integration for this population in mainstream society.

John Davenport
Bywater Historic District: Preservation, Gentrification, and Racialized Boundaries

This study addresses the racialized boundaries of New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood through a critical examination of the relational dynamics between processes of gentrification and historic preservation. Central to the landmark case of Plessey vs. Ferguson, which set the legal precedent for Jim Crow segregation in the South, and the historical home to many of New Orleans’ noted Free Persons of Color, the issue of race has long played a role in the lives of Bywater residents - of which currently 70% are predominantly low income African Americans. Designated a local Historic District in 1993 based upon the neighborhood’s vernacular architecture, Bywater has witnessed intensified housing rehabilitation in recent decades. Architectural fetishism is a mechanism by which the speculative interests of the gentry are brought into alignment with the goals of the preservationist. When transcribed onto Bywater’s urban landscape amidst pre-existing inequities, historic overlays serve to further exacerbate class structuration by heightening awareness among differing factions along spatial lines. A broader scale analysis reveals a fragmenting of the Historic District into two bounded spaces and two respective communities: a relatively owner occupied residential area south of St Claude Avenue and a predominantly renter occupied appendage to the north. This tension finds its most cogent expression along the ‘neutral ground’ of St Claude Avenue, a normative neighborhood boundary which is reflexively racialized in relation to the Historic District’s delineation. Utilized as an amenity space for the daily activities of low income residents this ‘neutral ground’ is both a contested space and a signifier of the underlying chasm between residents rich in cultural capital and an underclass with few visual signs of such. Materials supporting this argument include: resident interviews, planning commission study, historic overlay map, neighborhood association meeting/newsletters, neighborhood profile, and cultural landscape analysis/photography.

Sarah Dargouth
Three Men, Different Coloured Skins, and a 7-Eleven: Exploring the Shape of Colour Lines for White Children and their Families

The initial developmental processes that influence attitudes towards ethnic/racial ‘difference’ and create boundaries within individual and collective minds are rooted early in life. The proposed paper explores the ways children develop a sense of ethno-racial boundaries, drawing on findings from a larger research study which uses ethnographic methods to explore family perspectives on poverty and economic inequality (Belle et al. 2005). Fifty families -- predominantly White/Caucasian, highly educated, with a relatively high median household income, and with children from 6-12 years of age -- were recruited from the Boston area. A series of prompts (photographs, quotes, cartoons) were presented to elicit unstructured, open-ended family discussions. One prompt presents a photograph of three men at a 7-eleven store of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. This ambiguous image was deliberately selected to stimulate families to imagine and extrapolate based on their own reactions and understandings. Discussions around this prompt allow for an investigation of the processes through which families construct boundaries in choosing to speak (or not speak) about racial/ethnic difference. The dynamics of boundaries will be discussed as operating in multiple ways: 1) ethno-racial boundaries in attitude, both through the tangible content of parental and child speech, including stereotypes and prejudicial comments, and also in the styles of parent-child interactions; 2) boundaries in socialization-- how children’s concepts of difference are structured in part through parental responses (or non-responses), which include challenges, redirection, suggestions or silence; 3) collective boundaries developing in the family system as a social space; boundaries come to be collectively established and shared at particular moments and spaces, and may temporally transmitted or challenged from one generation to the next. Implications for children’s understandings of alterity and difference will be explored, with attention to the possibility that the strength of boundaries emerges just as much through what is spoken as through what is not spoken: indirect tacit messages conveyed through ambivalence, hesitations and doubts may provide particularly potent mediums of communication that impact children’s developing outlooks and socio-moral positionings.

Andrew Deener
Culture, Cohorts, and the Construction of Community Boundaries: Explaining
the Relationship between Neighborhood Transition and Social Exclusion

The literature on boundaries pays close attention to the relationship between culture and social differentiation. While Bourdieu (1984) reinvigorated this trend, there is little attempt to take seriously his central concern about the “reflexive” relationship between symbolic differentiation and the everyday processes of social exclusion. Relying on two years of ethnographic work, census data, historical documentation,and oral histories, this case study of the Venice neighborhood in Los Angeles, California seeks to unpack the mechanics of socio-spatial exclusion by examining the relationship between culture, structure, and situated social processes. In this article I focus on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the central retail artery of the Venice neighborhood. This street serves as a “strategic research site” (Merton 1987) for examining how and why the processes of neighborhood change facilitate the construction of community boundaries. There are three sections. The first demonstrates how two different embedded neighborhood cohorts – a long standing African American community and a more recent community of store owners – frame their understandings of the history of this public space through alternative neighborhood narratives. The second illustrates the social production of a “public narrative” about this social space, and reflexively, the cultural reproduction of embedded everyday practices and performances that strengthens the street’s collective identity in tune with this public narrative. The final section considers how this public narrative mediates the processes of social exclusion, by re-examining the relatively independent effects of culture and structure on human behavior, thus pointing out a difference between “enforced exclusion” and “cultural exclusion.” Enforced exclusion is constructed through the framework of intended sanctions between insider and outsider social categories. What occurs in this case-study is “cultural exclusion,” that is, a process by which the actions of one neighborhood cohort reinforces a narrative that unintentionally triggers individuals from another neighborhood cohort to lose interest in the social space, and subsequently exclude themselves from the scene.

Crystal Marie Fleming and Professor Lorraine Roses
Black Cultural Capitalists: African American Elites and the Organization of the Arts in Boston 1918-1930

Recent scholarship has laid the groundwork for a more comprehensive theoretical model of cultural capital, yet most sociological studies have focused on the contextual nature of practices and tastes, paying little attention to cases
where cultural worlds overlap. This study examines the role played by an elite
African American organization, the League of Women in Community Service
(incorporated in 1919), in shaping African-American cultural production and
developing arenas for black musical and dramatic performance in Boston during
the era of the Harlem Renaissance. Drawing upon data from the League’s archival records, historical documents and biographies, we reveal the manner in which Boston’s Black Brahmins began to incorporate (but also to diverge from) the organizational and ideological practices of Boston’s Anglo-American cultural leaders. Building upon DiMaggio’s work on cultural entrepreneurship, we argue that the members of the LWCS were cultural capitalists who worked to construct an infrastructure for Black artistry while expanding the cultural repertoires of an integrated audience. In so doing, they advanced a multidimensional strategy, synthesizing both dominant and non-dominant cultural capital in order to transform the meaning of legitimate culture. Such discursive practices helped the LWCS bridge racial boundaries, although they may have also reified class hierarchies. In this manner we both contribute to rendering visible the complexities of African-American cultural production and reveal the processes by which black art was introduced into the mainstream.

Trinidad Gonzales
Conquest, Colonization and Intra-ethnic Mexican Relations in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1900-1930

This paper examines the characteristics and relationships between three distinct ethnic Mexican identities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (the Texas border counties of Starr, Hidalgo, Cameron and Willacy) as that area underwent United States conquest and colonization from 1900-1930. The three dominant group identities included México Texanos (a colonized transnational identity), Méxicanos (an immigrant transnational identity), and México Americanos (a colonized nationalist identity). I argue that this final phase of United States conquest and colonization included a re-construction of space and identities that affected intra-ethnic relations by creating an internal division based on citizenship. The United States government only began to strictly restrict movement across the Río Bravo/Río Grande during the México Texano Revolt of 1915. During the increasing enforcement of the border some México Texanos also served in World War I. As a consequence of these events some México Texanos re-construed their identity to México Americanos and shifted ethnic Mexican civil rights rhetoric from one focused on universal human rights to one based on United States citizenship rights. While those with México Texano and Mexicano identities differed between each other based on their histories as either conquered or immigrant people, they both continued to view the Lower Rio Grande as a “Mexican place.” México Americanos on the other hand began to view the area during the 1920s as an “American place.” Hence, some descendents of a conquered people began to accept the conquering nation as their sovereign. The rise of United States nationalism by México Americanos created a new division among ethnic Mexicans based on citizenship and a new territorial understanding. This paper provides a description of border formation, intra-ethnic relations and space analysis. Sources include documents from the Bureau of Immigration, Department of State, United States Census, Spanish and English language newspapers, LULAC Archival documents, and publications by key México Americano political leaders.

Ervin Kosta
Invisible Ethnicity: How Albanians became Italian in the pizza business

Arthur Avenue, or the “Little Italy in the Bronx,” is a stretch of few blocks of a lively shopping enclave south of Fordham Road in the Bronx. It has historically been an Italian neighborhood where today people still flock to taste the delicious ‘authentic’ Italian cuisine, in a setting abundant with Italian restaurant names and flags. However, for the past thirty years a new group of immigrants, Albanians, has been coming to the Bronx and gradually taking up businesses on Arthur Avenue, to the point where today Arthur Avenue is also perhaps the most prominent Albanian public space in the US. More and more of the names of the restaurants are in Albanian and carry Albanian as well as Italian food. From the ethnicity of workers in any food restaurant to the owners of the buildings s urrounding Arthur Avenue to the daily visitors and weekend shoppers, Albanians make up about fifty percent of all Arthur Avenue human traffic.My paper explores the dynamics of this ethnic succession where Albanians have managed to become an invisible ethnicity by partly appropriating the space while still allowing it to remain Italian. This site represents a dramatic version of a quiet succession in the Italian food industry in the whole NYC and seemingly in other big cities in the West. I aim at finding out how, historically, Albanians managed this quiet and unassuming transition by both transforming and maintaining ethnic boundaries between them and Italians, while exploiting it to carve out a market niche for themselves based on an visible/invisible status of their ethnic identity. I rely on interviews, ethnography of the site, press reviews and historical accounts of changing racial relationships in the Bronx.

Tony Tian-Ren Lin
Godly Lawlessness: The Moral Logic of Undocumented Latino/a Pentecostal Christians

As Nancy Ammerman pointed out in Bible Believers (1987) “the world Fundamentalists have constructed is by definition a world in opposition“ (188). This is especially prominent in Latino Pentecostal Christians as they have opposing realities at every level of their lives. They have a home country but they are living in the U.S. They are residents, yet aliens of this nation. They are Protestants in a culture of Roman Catholic majority. They live in racial ambiguity as they do not fit into the Black/White racial dichotomy of America. They belong to a Christian tradition that has a heavy emphasis on the other-worldly yet they are part of a Pentecostal subgroup that also has a heavy emphasis on the this-worldly. Most importantly, they adhere to a denomination that requires high moral standards yet they live criminal lives through their undocumented immigrant status. This study seeks to understand the moral logic of these Christians. How do they justify their spiritual righteousness while living illegal lives? Through ethnographical research and structured interviews I articulate the theodicies they create through their religious worldview. Pentecostal Christianity offers an effective filtering system by which moral boundaries are created and ideas of rights and wrongs are grouped in religiously and morally accepted categories. In addition, their faith offers a hierarchy by which morality is systematically stratified to validate socially unacceptable and unlawful activities. I find that these Christians are constantly employing a highly sophisticated rationalization process in order to navigate through their dual and often conflicting worlds. This paper argues that the dual emphasis on the this-worldly and the other-worldly found in Pentecostal Christianity is especially suited to aid in the meaning making system of those who live culturally and morally contradictory lives.

Tracy Matsuo
“Closer Than You Think”: Traversing Boundaries in Ethno-Cultural Organizations

This paper looks at boundary bridging and crossing within ethno-specific organizations in a multicultural context. Participants in Japanese-focused organizations across Canada have noted high levels of involvement by people who are not of Japanese descent. At one cultural center, over 50% of their 3,500 members are non-Japanese. In these situations, those who are not ancestrally connected to Japan are crossing ethnic boundaries by participating in Japanese Canadian organizations: some have even become executives and board members in these organizations. This seems contrary to certain ‘common sense’ notions which hold that ethnic group members and their cultures are tightly bound together; only ethnic group members are thought to fully partake in ethnic group cultures. What does the participation of non-Japanese in these ethno-cultural organizations signify? Are we seeing a process of boundary ‘blurring’ or even boundary ‘shifting’ where a group that has historically been defined as an ethnic and especially racial ‘other’ is now being included as an ‘us’ of mainstream Canadian society? Using in-depth interviews with non-Japanese and Japanese people who are active in Japanese-focused organizations in Toronto, Canada, this paper studies the interconnected, overlapping and fluctuating boundaries of ethnic, racial and national group membership. My research has found that for some, a ‘Canadian’ identity has allowed them to participate in the Japanese Canadian community. Being a citizen in a multicultural nation gives non-Japanese the opportunity to experience different ethnic cultures. For people of Japanese descent, being a ‘Canadian’ grants them the right to freely practice their ethnic identity and culture. Yet, despite similarities in the use of a multicultural rhetoric to justify involvement in ethnic organizations, for some participants this takes on a fluid ‘cosmopolitan’ quality while for others it may validate a more rigid ethnic ‘retentionist’ orientation. The implications of this for boundary processes are discussed.

Kristin Moriah
Beyond the Mason-Dixon Line: Migrating North in 20th Century African American Literature

In early 20th century popular American literature African Americans living in the Southern United States are often portrayed using tired stereotypes that emphasize their passivity (like Huck Finn’s faithful companion, Tom), childlike dependence upon their benevolent “boss” (a la Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus), propensity for violence (as in Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman) and status as victim or other. In these instances portrayals of black Americans reveal less about life in the South during and after reconstruction than they do about mainstream fears about integration, miscegenation and modernity. It is no wonder then that African American literature from the same period, particularly in the work of James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar, reveals a particularly fraught relationship between African Americans and their homeland. Novels like “The Sport of the Gods” and “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” mirror the migration from South to North spurred by violence, racial tension and the desire to recreate oneself. However, in these novels border crossings and migrations from South to North, and sometimes South again, offer a rich opportunity read beyond the flat conceptions of life for black Americans. Thus, the border between the American North and South acts as a threshold for the expectations and fears of an entire nation. My paper will explore the ways in the physical boundaries between the North and South, especially the Mason-Dixon Line, can be read as sites of cultural anxiety and a burgeoning sense of self. Using Homi Bhabba’s claim that “it is in the emergence of the interstices- the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experience of nationness, community interested, or cultural value are negotiated”, I hope to further examine the ways in which the Mason-Dixon line, or the boundary between North and South, acts as a framework for cultural subjectivity in African American literature.

Asher Ragen
Accessing the sacred in Neo-Babylonian Temples

One of the secrets of the longevity of Mesopotamian culture, was its amazing aptitude for absorbing and acculturating foreign peoples, turning them into good Mesopotamians and bearers of the cultic and textual traditions which began in third millennium Mesopotamia and lasted until the Hellenistic period. Generally speaking, Mesopotamian culture was inclusive, and enabled Amorites, Kassites and Arameans to become the bearers of Mesopotamian tradition. But in the Neo-Babylonian period, the urban elites that controlled the Babylonian temples began to use new criteria to govern access to the temples and all that they represented. Individuals identified themselves according to a lineage system that purported to go back almost a thousand years (though we know it was an innovation). Records were kept of parentage and potential members of temple communities underwent a rigorous examination of who their parents- both mother and father- were. Time honored legal fictions such as adoption were discarded in favor of "biological" lineage. Lineage now governed physical access to the temple and its sacred precincts, as well as to the economic riches held by the temple, and the social prestige that came with belonging to the temple assembly. It even governed access to texts. The teaching of cuneiform texts to temple servants, who were "impure", was forbidden. This development was in many ways un-Mesopotamian in character, and reflected the increasing anxiety of the urban elites over their diminished role in the political environment of the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and especially the Persian empires. This development was not limited to the Babylonian heartland. In fact we find a very similar temple based society, that uses lineage and descent as a criteria for membership in the Second Temple community in Jerusalem, as described in the books of Ezra-Nehemiah. The sources used in this research are primarily the numerous cuneiform legal and economic texts form the temple archives of Uruk and Sippar, written in the 7th-4th centuries B.C.E.

Christy Rogers
Boundaries on the Reservation: Indian ‘Reform’ and 19th-Century Standardization

Legal theorists and legal geographers have explored the unresolved tension between territorial, place-based representation and numeric representation present in the American political system, and its concomitant ambivalence about political boundaries. Boundaries have been subject to further scrutiny in light of Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and the explication by geographers of the rational technology of surveying and mapping as critical components of the governmental project to construct the liberal individual. Particularly effective explications include scholarship on the Dawes Act of 1887, which granted the President of the U.S. the authority to allot, or divide and assign title to, individual parcels of land on reservations to Native Americans, who were then granted citizenship. This route to citizenship differed markedly from naturalization and emancipation, in that people were required to adopt an alien form of land tenure, social relations, living arrangements, subsistence strategies, and property rights prior to citizenship.  Some scholars have indeed noted that allotment was explicitly about rewriting gender and family roles to fit with the expectations of Christian, white, middle-class reformers. It is in this attempt to rewrite the family that I find the imposition of new boundaries, both conceptual and material, which illustrate the late 19th-century project, not just of Indian “reform,” but of national standardization in the emerging modern market economy. This paper will draw on Native American experience in the allotment period to foreground the multi-layered boundaries associated with the attempt to individualize and regulate citizens into a national political economy at the turn of the Century.

Matt Sakakeeny
American Afrobeat: Transnational, Intercultural, and Multiracial

This paper investigates the racial dynamics of "American afrobeat" performances by diverse groups of musicians playing for cosmopolitan audiences in New York City. Since the death of afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in 1997, several ensembles have formed in New York City with collective membership that cuts across racial, ethnic, and national lines. At first glance, the dizzying intersection of peoples from disparate cultural groups seems indicative of the postracial, postethnic utopia projected by Kwame Anthony Appiah, David Hollinger, and other advocates of cosmopolitanism. What emerges in practice, however, are the cleavages that mark the reception of black and white performers, particularly around the role of the lead singer. Despite the diversity of the instrumentalists, every American afrobeat band I have encountered features a West African or African American vocalist, and two of the most commercially and critically successful bands—the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra and the Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble—began as instrumental ensembles before recruiting West African singers, which I call "ambassadors of authenticity." American afrobeat performance resides within a complex web of racial signification; a racial project that at once resists binarism and fixity while perpetuating accepted equations of blackness and music. Concert sites provide a space for musicians and audiences to cross and efface social and musical boundaries, yet even in a dark, noisy nightclub where ethnic and racial markers are obscured, deeply entrenched essentialisms remain intact. This ethnography of New York City nightclubs, recording studios, and rehearsal spaces reveals how African and African American, Asian and Asian American, Latin American, and "white" instrumentalists work collaboratively and strategically to create a symbolically "African" space wherein black vocalists play a crucial role.

Avi Shoshana
When the Hybrid Met the Therapeutic: Academic Boundaries and Everyday Lives

One of the most common concepts in current ethnic discourse and "postcolonial discourse" is "hybridity", referring to the emergence and experience of hyphenated identities, identities in-between boundaries. The space in-between boundaries, is conceptualized as being fragmental, a space that does not obey the categories of either boundary and thus seeks to distance itself from the fetishism of boundaries. In this paper I aim to problematize the relationship between the academic category of the boundary and the ‘lay-experience’ of the boundary in every day life. A case study is presented of "Arabic-Jews" who graduated from the "Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged" in Israel. At first glance, these graduates might be classified as "hybrids", as they not only straddle the Arab-Jewish borders but are also considered “gifted” by State-pedagogic authorities and thus exceptions among their own “disadvantaged” population, potentially capable of crossing the Eastern-Western and disadvantaged-advantaged cultural divides. However, the findings of 60 in-depth interviews show that although the graduates’ life-story may be considered post-modern, echoing academic conceptualizations of hybridity - graduate self-narratives retain markers of ‘modern Selfhood’. Graduate narratives depict an intense search for the "true self" and "biographical continuity", in the hope of positioning precise and solid boundaries between in and out groups and alternative healthy or ill selves. As such, the graduate self remains loyal to modern therapeutic boundaries of "depth psychology", a far cry from the calls of resistance found in the academic hybrid lexicon. My discussion will focus on the dominance of therapeutic discourse in graduate narratives, which critiques the grotesque qualities at the root of the language of hybridity, and the close relationship between nationalism, liberalism, and the language of hybridity - a relationship that I propose does not allow for the penetration of that language into everyday life. My findings call for a further examination of the gap between academic conceptualizations hybridity and the hybrid’s experience of the boundary in every day life.

Chris Vasantkumar
Ethnicity’s Entanglements: Working the Boundaries of Chinese Minority Studies

The last fifteen years have witnessed the florescence of an English language anthropological literature on the minority ethnic groups of China (shaoshu minzu). Scholars such as Louisa Schein, Ralph Litzinger and Dru Gladney have attempted to foreground the importance of ethnic boundary work to understandings of contemporary Chinese society. Gladney especially has demonstrated the importance of boundaries as opposed to any primordial content to the construction and maintenance of ethnic categories in the People’s Republic. Unfortunately, most works in this conversation have focused exclusively on ethnic boundary work, neglecting other important axes of difference (gender, class, region, population quality (renkou suzhi) to name just a few. My proposed paper draws upon both important works in this literature and upon 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a small multi-ethnic town in Gansu province in the northwest of China. This paper takes two twin processes of boundary work as its central focus. First, it argues that focusing solely on the construction and maintenance of ethnic boundaries is an insufficient basis for an understanding of social differentiation in any given context. In support of this thesis, it draws on my field research to explore the ways in which salient social categories and the boundaries they articulate in everyday practice transcend purely ethnic categories. Second the paper uses this analysis of actual practices of social difference in contemporary multi-ethnic China as a way of casting some light on the disciplinary boundary work that has gone into shaping anthropological on China’s minorities. It is especially concerned with the politics of knowledge that have resulted in a situation in which most writings on minorities are centrally concerned with ethnic difference while most writings about majorities are not.

Isaac Weiner
Constructing Boundaries: Buddhism, Hinduism, and U.S. Courts, 1848-1924

Religious difference has been central to efforts to define what it means to be American and demands scrutiny alongside such categories as race and ethnicity. In this paper, I consider the role that religious difference played in justifying exclusionist policies directed toward Asian American immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through an examination of court cases that reference Buddhism, Hinduism, or “Hindoos.” By implicitly calling into question whether adherents of these Asian religions counted as Americans, U.S. courts played a critical role in constructing boundaries around American identity, carefully circumscribing these communities and defining the limits of their participation in American society. The courts also struggled in revealing ways to delineate the boundaries of Buddhist and Hindu identity. Through close analysis of the courts’ rhetorical strategies, I excavate this process of boundary demarcation. In the cases that I analyze involving Chinese Buddhists or “Hindoos,” where “Hindoo” was used as an ethno-geographic or racial category to refer to all Asian Indians, I find that courts affirmed to a surprising extent protection of minority religious rights, though they did so only by treating the Chinese and “Hindoo” communities as distinct and separate from authentically “American” society. I also consider how the case of Hinduism is complicated by a series of passing references in nineteenth century legal decisions that suggest that even before the presence of Hindus on U.S. soil, courts had already constructed understandings of Hinduism as foreign, uncivilized, and likely immoral. One of the most intriguing aspects of this treatment is the way it reflects certain permutations of nineteenth century racial ideology. Taken together, these cases reveal the intertwining of race, religion, and culture, and illumine the critical role of state organs, such as the courts, in demarcating cultural boundaries.