Post-colonialism and borderland identities

Due to its diverse nature, being an Indonesian is sometimes confusing as it entails overlapping national, ethnic and religious identity. By using a social representation approach, online survey research involving 114 Indonesians was carried out to explore these questions: How do Indonesians negotiate their ethnic, religious and national identity? What identity markers should one possess to claim being an Indonesian? And lastly, who is the nationalist? Research findings suggest that national and ethnic identity as well as ethnic and religious identity were consensual, while the relation between religious and national identity was emancipated. It is also found that being a Muslim and possessing a stronger sense of ethnic identity would increase the likelihood of being a prouder Indonesian, while being a female, living abroad for 5–10 years, being a nationalist Muslim and embracing transnational Islamic movements reduced the probability of having a stronger sense of national identity.

Democracy and Nation Formation: National Identity Change and Dual Identity in Taiwan, 1991-2011 Shiau-Chi Shen As has been the case in many newly democratized countries, the transition to democracy in Taiwan entailed nationalist competition and the aggravation of ethnic conflict. Much research has shown that national identities among the general populace have experienced radical change. The Chinese national identity no longer occupies a dominant position, while the Taiwanese national identity is rapidly rising. The popular view is that democratization provides a political space for this nascent Taiwanese identity to challenge, and eventually replace, orthodox Chinese identity. This view, however, overlooks the very important phenomenon that, especially in the stage following the democratic transition, most people held dual national identity, i.e. both Taiwanese and Chinese national identities. This phenomenon presents a puzzle to the study of national identity in Taiwan, and in general as well. Why, in the fierce confrontation between two national identities in national politics, would most people prefer to see Taiwanese and Chinese national identities as compatible and show their allegiance to both? This dissertation challenges the assumption in previous research that the nature of national identity is exclusive—that it represents an either-or choice or attitude. This assumption has led to the incorrect view that the decline of Chinese national identity and the rise of Taiwanese national identity are two sides of the same coin. Contrary to this conventional view, this study shows that the trajectory of the two identities are actually different processes which have occurred during different historical stages and in different international environments, and that they are the results of different political forces. Taiwanese national identity started to rise in the early 1990’s. Chinese national identity, however, began to decline only after 2000. The past two decades thus witnessed a great proportion of people with dual identity. This study focuses on the factors of state and politics, rather than history and ethnicity, to explain the rise of Taiwanese national identity, and also the phenomenon of dual identity. It is contended that the ethnic base of Taiwanese national identity, with its particular history and language, which has been much emphasized by many political and cultural elites, as well as scholars, constitutes only one route of nation formation. The other more important route is through political participation in the democratic regime. While democratic institutions and practices redefine the de jure territory of the state (the Republic of China), democratic citizenship provides a new base for collective self-understanding. Through participation in democratic political processes, identification with the Taiwan-wide political community is cultivated among the populace. The Taiwanese national identity engendered through this route does not challenge the ethnicity upon which the Chinese national identity is based. It thus is able to co-exist with Chinese national identity. The decline of Chinese national identity is hence not the result of the rise of Taiwanese identity, but of the rise of China. It is argued that the dominance of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the international community along with its staunch One China Principle has removed the important component of the Republic of China (ROC) from the Chinese national identity in Taiwan. Chinese unification now means the elimination of the ROC and to be ruled by the PRC. People who have identified with the ROC no longer opt for a unified great China and hence forgo their Chinese national identity. Based on the study of the phenomenon of dual identity in Taiwan, this dissertation proposes two important theoretical findings. First, contrary to the popular view among the students of nationalism and nationalist politics, it argues that democratization mitigates rather than exacerbates identity politics. Secondly, dual identity is difficult to sustain if the larger nation pursues a state that denies political autonomy to the small nation.

Following the incorporation of the unconditional right to ethnic self-determination in the FDRE Constitution, previously under oppressed ethnic groups can establish regional or zonal self-administered government. Despite its success, there are still challenges in the practical application of ethnic based federalism in Ethiopia. Within this framework, this study aims to assess the impacts of ethnic based federalism in developing national identity in Silte zone. The qualitative approach with descriptive survey study research design was employed. Interview, observation, document analysis, legal analysis, and literature were used to collect data. Thematic method of data analysis was employed. By purposive sampling out of 10 woredas and 5 town administration six woredas were selected, four institutions were selected, 48 civil servants for interview were selected, 2 federalism experts were selected as the source of data. According to the finding of the study even though ethnic based federalism results in many challenges in the process of nation building in Ethiopia it ensures partially socio- economic, political and cultural development in Silte zone. The finding of the study also indicates that beside its positive outcome ethnic based federalism results negative impacts on nation building such as decline in national identity, it erodes common values, symbols and our common identities, imbalance between ethnic identity and national identity (imbalance between components of self-rule and shared rule), it results in excessive sense of division, isolation, and frustration to have property to exogenous people in Ethiopia. In addition to these ethnic based federalism results in competition and conflicts between ethnic groups, specifically about “resources: land, water, minerals, and federal budgets and about power. To construct national identity and to mitigate drawbacks of ethnic based federalism in Silte zone the finding of the study revealed several mechanisms such as balancing self-rule(ethnic identity) and shared rule(national identity), conducting national identity plat forum (national discourse on how to construct national identity in multinational states), reforms in early schooling system and educational curriculum, legal requirement for collective rights of exogenous groups, power sharing through zoning of political and bureaucratic posts, building democratic federalism, special programs designed to bring young people together, and ideologies designed to raise consciousness about tolerance, unity, loyalty, discipline, and obedience and designing mega projects like renaissance dam to unite the people are also mechanism to balance ethnic identity and national identity in Ethiopia and in Silte zone in particular. Based on the conclusions, the following recommendations are made to resolve the negative impacts of ethnic based federalism in developing national identity in Silte, such as the Silte zonal government should balance promoting ethnic identity with national identity, and the Silte zonal government should conduct consistent national discourse or national plat forum on how to construct national identity, the Silte zonal government should build democratic federalism, there should be institutions to promote national identity parallel with ethnic identity at federal, at regional and at zonal level, there should be curriculum revision in a way to integrate common values, history and culture in education system especially at students earlier schooling age, as common working language is an instrument for nation building and constructing national identity emphasis should be given for the teaching of Amharic (it is the federal working language),the federal government should design mega projects like Renaissance dam to unify the people in Ethiopia, there should be: legal recognition for collective rights of exogenous groups, power sharing through zoning of political and bureaucratic posts, Special programs designed to bring young people together, and ideologies designed to raise consciousness about tolerance, unity, loyalty, discipline, and obedience. Keywords: ethnic federalism, national identity, federalism, ethnic identity DOI: 10.7176/IAGS/95-03 Publication date: June 30 th 2022

Many films depicting the European Middle Ages delve into issues of nation building and national identity. This is problematic for the early medieval period and for Arthurian cinema. Whether or not a historical King Arthur ever existed, nation states as we know them certainly did not, and both national and ethnic identity are difficult to discern for Britain in the early Middle Ages. This essay looks at issues of national and ethnic identity raised by three Arthurian films: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), King Arthur (2004), and The Last Legion (2007). (CAS)

The article examines the formation of national and ethnic identity in the process of ontogenesis in children from 5 to 18 years of age from the three main ethnic communities in Bulgaria - Bulgarians, Turks and Roma. Models of national and ethnic identity formation specific to children from each of the three ethnic groups are derived based on tracing children's sequential formation of certain notions/indicators (cognitive and affective/еmotional) of national and ethnic identity. In the study of the successive changes in the formation of the notion of national and ethnic identity in the process of ontogenesis, as a theoretical basis was used the concept of the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget on the stages of intellectual development. The data in the article are based on two comprehensive case studies conducted in kindergarten and secondary school (with all children attending the kindergarten and the school aged 5 to 18) in a small town with an ethnically mixed population in Bulgaria, where for centuries representatives of the three ethnic communities studied - Bulgarians, Turks and Roma - have lived in close coexistence, which is why the patterns of ethnic and national identity formation derived can be seen as typical for the town.

This paper examines the self-descriptions of twenty-one people living on one of several Haudenosaunee (a.k.a. Six Nations or Iroquois) reservations in western New York. The open-ended interviews revealed an underlying theme - the spatial base of the reservation. It is not only a land base, but also a historical and spiritual base upon which the majority of the interviewees described their identities. This study examined how Native people described their ethnic or cultural identities. Ethnic or cultural identity, for the purpose here, is different than national or racial identity. Racial identity is a broader category, categorizing people into just a few groups, sometimes using a partially genetic basis that is often argued. It is problematic as the definition gets stretched, such as the current controversy over multiracial identification for the U.S. Census. National identity uses temporal political boundaries, which sometimes change with external pressures. Examples here would be the creation of Israel or the segmentation of the USSR. Ethnic identity will straddle those concepts. Ethnic identity is a lived experience. One can remain a Native person regardless of place of residence or significant genetic bloodline (I am speaking of enrollment here, where a person may be enrolled due to direct lineage, although different Nations may have blood quantum requirements). Ethnic/cultural identity, then, is defined as a norm of familial and community ties within a network of similar cultural values and societal behaviors. This is a qualitative study using interviews. The interviewees consisted of twelve persons over the age of fifty, six males and six females, and nine teens, four males and five females. The decision to interview two separate age groups was made in order to explore possible differences between them. Both males and females were interviewed to see if there were any differences based on gender. These were open-ended interviews, generated from the initial question of "How would you describe yourself? If I were to say, Mr. ABC is . . . how would [End Page 635] finish that sentence?" The intent was to avoid leading the individual toward any particular identifier - age, gender, ethnicity, and so on, when mentioned, were introduced by the interviewee. This technique was used to understand what meaning people give to the language they use and to avoid imposing others' conceptions. The interview data were analyzed from a sociological perspective on community. The findings seem to fit closely with the classical theories of community, particularly those of Tonnies and his concept of Gemeinschaft. According to this concept, human relations are intimate, enduring and members are relatively immobile in a physical or social way (Bell and Newby, 1974). Kinship, neighborhood and friendship are correlates of community. As the interviewees referred to their respective reservations, connecting aspects of duties, responsibilities and concerns were expressed. It was a sense of kinship or relatedness to the community that was the basis for their more specific descriptions of their place or role in communities. Social, political, economic, and spiritual aspects of their lives were linked to this relationship to their communities. Each of these aspects is explored in the analysis that follows. Nearly all of the interviewees spoke about their respective reservations and the boundaries or space it represented for them. The boundaries of the reservation meant more than a space to reside. The relationship to the reservation was indicated in many dimensions of their identities. One aspect was residency, which was introduced in simple statements such as "I was born here" or "I was raised here." Others simply referred to their reservation as "here" and saw everywhere else as "outside" or "off" the reservation. The reservation was a place to conduct ceremonies and social events, a place to maintain cultural identity. Both elders and teenagers talked about their responsibilities around learning the specific songs or speeches or carrying out the duties associated with ceremonies. Some of the comments were broader, relating their commitment to "my people" or "our community," and the sense that it...

Conflicts between groups in Indonesia continue to occur, and diverse studies have attempted to find solutions. As one of the efforts to find these solutions, this research focuses on national identity development as a long-term effort to establish an inclusive national identity to reduce conflict between groups. This study aimed to provide an overview of the national identity development process implemented in public and private elementary schools. The data collection methods employed were observation, interviews, and document analysis. Coding analysis is applied to sort the data and generate themes for the findings. The empirical findings and discussion generate the following conclusions: First, efforts to develop a national identity in public and private elementary schools run comprehensively through cognitive aspects (thoughts, understanding, and principles), affective aspects (attitudes and appreciation), and behavioral aspects (actions and habits). These three aspects are well implemented in the school’s vision, curriculum, subject matter, learning process, non-academic activities, and social life. Second, there are kinds of national identities such as national symbols, religious identity, ethnic identity, and environmental identity. However, national identity and religious identity are boldly emphasized. This is to anticipate the tension between national identity and religious identity, which might stimulate conflict between identities. Therefore, national and religious identities are socialized as two unified identities. Finally, the success rate of the development of national identity in schools varies due to various factors. However, this is a prospect for further research, especially in schools, families, and society.

Estimating Ethnic and National Identities’ Importance Amongst Immigrants Iranian Tribes

While studies on students’ ethnic identity, national identity and social mobility gained relatively good research development in Western societies, little attention has been given to other social contexts, particularly non-Western societies like China. A questionnaire (N = 570, aged 14 to 20) was conducted in a Xinjiang Class school in Southern China to examine the nexus of students’ ethnic identity, national identity and perception on social mobility. The Xinjiang Class is currently one of the most iconic preferential educational policies recruiting students from ethnic groups in Xinjiang (an ethnic minority-concentrated border region) and offering them senior secondary education in select Han-centric, senior-secondary schools in China’s central and east coast provinces. The results demonstrate that the strengthening effect of students’ ethnic identity on national identity is not obvious; students’ strong national identity contributes to their positive perception on upward social mobility. However, the widely accepted viewpoint that students’ ethnic identity has a negative influence on perception of social mobility cannot be fully supported in this case. This study enriches the extant literature by providing a combined model to explore the nuanced mechanisms between ethnic identity, national identity and students’ perception on social mobility in a multi-ethnic society and by helping to unveil the identity politics unfolded in current China’s educational sector.

<p>This dissertation reassesses the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico in 1848 by recovering the imposition of and resistance to the new national border and identities among Spanish-Mexican, mestiza, and Euro-American women from 1846 to 1941. I analyze the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico on gender roles, ethnic identity, and cultural practices by focusing on the roles of the domestic space, food culture, and material culture in dividing and bringing together women across these ethnocultural groups. By exploring the political intent and consequences of quotidian choices, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of women in the daily and domestic negotiations over national and cultural borders during the territorial period (1850-1912) and the era of early statehood (1912-1941). Using English and Spanish-language sources, this dissertation argues that Euro-American and Spanish-Mexican women continuously used their homes, housekeeping, cultural customs, and foodways to define their new statuses in the region and negotiate the new cultural, physical, and national boundaries. Euro-Americans used their own and others’ cultural practices to maintain their whiteness and to construct Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians as non-white and to define gender and class in the region. Simultaneously, Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the new physical, social, and cultural boundaries by asserting their cultural citizenship even though they were denied full citizenship.</p> <p>In the first three chapters, I study the U.S.-Mexico War and the territorial period (1846-1912) by analyzing the roles of material and food culture and the homespace in shaping each group’s constructions of whiteness, nationalism, and ethnic identity and in shaping the processes of cultural assimilation and resistance. I highlight how Euro-Americans used the newly established U.S.-Mexico border to “other” the people and practices they associated with Mexico or “savagery.” Additionally, I argue that Spanish-Mexican and Mexican American worked around gender and legal borders by engaging in trade, traveling across the international border, and inserting themselves in the political and legal activities of Euro-Americans to maintain their homespaces.</p> <p>In Chapters 4 and 5, I address how women across ethnocultural groups used cookbooks and historical memory to create their place in community, state, and national identities after Arizona and New Mexico were incorporated in 1912. Using literary and cultural studies approaches, I address the narrative spaces, such as cookbooks and pioneer histories, in which women across ethnocultural groups claimed a stake in the public memory and community identities. I argue that Euro-American women appropriated some Spanish cultural practices and celebrated the pioneer past while denying full citizenship to people of color. Simultaneously, I argue, Spanish-Mexican and American Indian women used cookbooks and/or oral histories to challenge narratives of their inferiority and to claim their cultural citizenship.</p> <p>This dissertation brings light to the persistent and continuous roles of women, the body, and the home in shaping daily politics in the region. By pushing at the edges of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history methodology to include gender studies methodology, this dissertation introduces the homespace and motherhood as gendered and raced contact zones that were sometimes used to enforce and at other times challenge U.S. territoriality. I argue that the domestic activities of women offer significant, new insight to the political narratives of settler-colonialism, gender roles, nationality, and race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This dissertation moves away from overtly political acts to the seemingly “mundane” activities of cooking, dressing, and housekeeping to broaden our understanding of the connections between political behavior and cultural practices. These gendered negotiations provide a critical history of the intimate ways U.S. colonial efforts in the American Southwest played out and shaped the current dynamics of borderlands communities.</p>

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the phenomena of «ethnic» and «national» identity and to determine the vectors of their development. Research methods are based on the fundamental principles of historical and cultural analysis. The methodological core of the research is a comparative analysis of ethnic and national identities in the chronotype as complex sociocultural systems. The scientific novelty lies in the conceptualization of the ethnonational identity dichotomy through the prism of the cultural code. It is substantiated that in the conditions of modern modernization, the ratio between the ethnic and national components of identity depends on the direction of their development vectors: a) when the vectors are parallel and equally oriented (for example, one of the ethnic communities monopolizes power), there is a reduction of national identity to ethnic one; b) when the vectors are parallel, but oppositely oriented (for example, when an ethnic community seeks to recognize its right to political self-determination), national identity collides with the interests of the ethnic community, entering into confrontation with it. Conclusions. Within the framework of constructivism, the phenomenon of ethnic identity is analyzed as a social construct and the factors of deviation from this model are revealed (in particular, adaptation to the environment, acculturation, violation of the demographic balance between different groups), causing its variability. The systemic characteristics and the main conceptual components of national identity (internal and external) are analyzed, factors of the weakening of social ties due to the processes of globalization, the growth of entropy, and information expansion in society are identified. Typical models of interaction of ethnic and national identities are considered. Keywords: ethnic identity, national identity, cultural code, ethnos, nation.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY in the Americas puts texts from English and French Canada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States into a hemispheric dialogue on national and ethnic identity. Drawing on such materials as journals, personal essays, autobiography, and the testimonio, this ambitious book is as comprehensive in its treatment of autobiographical writing as in its geographical coverage.Departing from Benedict Anderson's hopeful premise that the is fundamentally inclusive, Steven V. Hunsaker maintains that national identity is more idiosyncratic, complex, and divisive than Anderson's model suggests. The fact that potential compatriots create the nation by seeing themselves as a community means that there can be no guarantee of uniformly imagined identity. Hunsaker uses works by such authors as Rigoberta Menchu, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Pierre Vallieres, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Richard Rodriguez to illustrate how different populations within a single nation children, women, indigenous groups, and minority groups challenge established collective identities and create their own senses of community.Bringing into play elements of genre studies and regional studies, the book illustrates the liberating potential of seeing a nation as the product of its citizens, but also the instability inherent in national communities imagined across race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

Turkish immigrant-origin youth in Western Europe often develop strong ethnic and weaker national identities. To advance our understanding of this pattern, we investigated the concurrent development and intergenerational transmission of both identities over time in conjunction with maternal homesickness. Our study was based on a sample of 176 Turkish mother-child dyads from Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands. Mothers (Mt1 = 38 years) reported on their identities and homesickness at T1 and children (Mt1 = 12 years) on their identities at T1 and T2. Our results showed that children’s ethnic and national identities became more incompatible over time, mother’s homesickness strengthened children’s ethnic identities, and mother’s ethnic identities in combination with high levels of homesickness weakened children’s national identities. We conclude that early adolescence is a critical time for Turkish immigrant youth’s identity development and that a focus on parental acculturative stressors can advance ethnic socialization and cultural transmission research.

The relationship between ethnic identity and national identity is of great significance in the building of a modern nation. “Homogeneous school”, “heterogeneous school” and the “theory of multiculturalism” can only lead to radical views due to their “either this or that” choice. According to China's national conditions, the Chinese nation community identity is the necessary link in the realization from ethnic identity to national identity. Only by actively constructing cultural community of Chinese nation and common community of Chinese nation destiny, can we achieve the purpose of enhancing national identity of all nationalities and maintaining national stability.

The transnational migration of Korean Chinese has experienced sustained growth over the past three decades fol-lowing China's implementation of the "Reform and Opening-up Policy." As Korean Chinese began migrating to South Korea, their patterns of mobility and living conditions underwent significant transformations, leading to the dis-ruption and reconstruction of their sense of belonging, value systems, and identity constructs. This study employs a longitudinal research design, utilizing two waves of in-depth interviews conducted over a decade (2004 and 2014), to examine the evolution of ethnic and national identities among Korean Chinese and to identify the underlying factors driving these changes. The findings reveal a complex trajectory of identity transformation: during the late 1990s, there was a noticeable weakening of ethnic identity as Koreans alongside a strengthening of national identity as Chinese. In the first half of the 21st century, despite the emergence of increasingly open and pluralistic identity formations characterized by the interplay and tension between ethnic and national identities, Korean Chinese predominantly maintain their identification as Chinese nationals. This study contributes to the understanding of the dynamic in-terplay between ethnic affiliation and national identity in the context of transnational migration, offering insights into the complex identity negotiation processes of diasporic communities.