Everyday Ethnicity

This chapter explores the relationship between identity, in particular ethnic identity, and political violence. To what extent are war and violence the outcome of antagonistic identities? And once violence erupts, what impact does it have on how people identify themselves and others? There are two dominant approaches in the literature. The identity-based approach tends to regard conflict and violence as a consequence of pre-existing ethnic antagonism. Violence-based approaches, in contrast, have challenged this causality, stressing that ethnic antagonism is often the outcome of violence rather than its direct cause. The chapter argues that both are problematic in different ways: whereas identity-based theories do not take the generative power of violence seriously enough, violence-based theories run the risk of taking it too seriously and often do not pay significant attention to individual agency and people’s ability to resist violence. However, it is not only individual responses to violence that differ but attitudes towards violence can also change over time.

Chernivtsi, a contemporary town located in Western Ukraine, is perceived as one of the most multiethnic places in Ukraine. Situated in the Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands, Chernivtsi’s  ruling state and dominant national group has changed four times in its history. Since 1991, this city has been an arena for both a “Ukrainization” policy as well as the revival of national minority institutions. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chernivtsi since 2010 and explores why and when ethnicity as a category of practice matters for ordinary people. By using the methodology of the “everyday” and taking “situational” ethnicity as a major approach, for individuals in Chernivtsi, I show “Ukrainianess” becomes an unmarked, obvious and taken for granted category in daily life. Thus, the nationalizing efforts of the Ukrainian state, which since the late socialist period constantly marked “Ukrainianess” as a significant category, can be perceived as successful and other national manifestations do not pose any threat to it.

Though scholars of ethnicity remark that religion is an important qualifying attribute for membership in an ethnic group, the nature of the relationship between religious faith and ethnic identity requires further exploration. An approach that emphasizes the importance of religious practices in forming and maintaining ethnic boundaries may offer a more complete explanation of the relationship between religion and ethnicity. This article proposes a framework for understanding how religious practices influence ethnic boundary formation and maintenance processes. I propose that religious practices may play a universalizing, negotiating, or differentiating role in influencing the formation and maintenance of ethnic boundaries. To illustrate these various roles played by religious processes, the article presents a heuristic case study of Islamic faith in boundary setting processes in Hui Muslim communities in China.

This article argues that bottom–up, people-centered research which uses ethnographic and everyday approaches is crucial but underutilized in research on identity politics in Eastern Europe. In order to understand what concepts such as ethnicity and citizenship mean in the context of people’s everyday lives, it is vital to understand whether taken-for-granted political concepts are appropriate and the make-up of data such as census data. The article first introduces the methods of political ethnography and bottom–up interviews by discussing how they can be applied and their value within political science. The paper uses data gathered from interviews in Moldova and Crimea (when it was still a de jure and de facto part of Ukraine) to demonstrate the value of this approach. It shows how interview data can add significantly to the understanding of kin-state relations within political science by adding a richness of context and a bottom–up perspective that quantitative and elite-level interviews fail to provide. Lastly, the paper draws on experiences gained from research design to discuss how bottom–up research in political science can be conducted rigorously. The article argues that this approach can deepen the understanding of identity politics and kin-state relations or, more broadly, important post-communist questions such as democratization and Europeanization.

After the collapse of the communist regime, Romanian education policy has taken a turn towards Europeanization. Drawing from fieldwork data collected in the multicultural district of Cluj, I focus on diversity as an aspect of Europeanization of schooling in Romania. My findings reveal that Europeanization works symbolically rather than substantially in educational establishments enrolling a multi-ethnic student body. Although diversity is embraced discursively by teachers and staff, school practices fail to demonstrate an incorporation of diversity into the Romanian national narrative which remains marked by the old structures of ethnocentric monoculturalism and self-victimization. Explanatory factors brought into discussion refer to institutional continuity (i.e. the persistence of old habits in everyday school practices) and institutional contradiction (i.e. the coexistence of the distinctive logics of multiculturalism as difference and of integration as social justice in the delivery of educational policy for Hungarian and Roma minorities)