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"cultural boundaries"
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Borderlands in science
This article is a personal reflection on borderlands as a professional home. Researchers who find themselves beyond their home discipline, i.e., the one in which they have been credentialed, have tried to assign terms for their location and its psychological ramifications. Defying an intellectual lane is to traverse a boundary that is constricted by a paradigm and a way of looking at and framing research problems. There is a rich body of the literature that explores scientific specialization, problem choice, and the meaning of community in research. Indeed, science consists of mainland where we must spend most of our professional time preserving our existence and building our careers. Borderlands are communities, typically marginalized, where researchers can collectively rethink, challenge, bond, and concoct something not possible before.
Journal Article
Ethno-anthropological and psychological analysis of modern inter-ethnic relations in the Fergana Valley
This study provides an ethno-anthropological analysis of contemporary inter-ethnic relations in the Fergana Valley, focusing on the complex interplay between cultural identity, ethnicity and intergroup dynamics within this historically diverse region. The Fergana Valley, situated at the crossroads of Central Asia, has long been a melting pot of ethnic groups, including Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and other minority communities. This article examines how socio-cultural boundaries and ethnic identities shape everyday interactions, influence social cohesion and at times, lead to tensions. Using a combination of qualitative ethnographic fieldwork, historical documentation and in-depth interviews, this research investigates the lived experiences of various ethnic communities in the Valley, analyzing how these groups navigate and negotiate their ethnic identities. The findings reveal both the enduring cultural bonds that facilitate inter-ethnic harmony and the socio-political factors that may exacerbate divisions. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of how ethnicity is constructed and performed in Central Asia and offers insights into the factors that promote or hinder sustainable inter-ethnic relationships in multi-ethnic regions.
Journal Article
Spatial and Temporal Limits of the Casas Grandes Tradition: A View from the Fronteras Valley
This article revises the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Casas Grandes tradition associated with northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, based on new data collected in neighboring northeastern Sonora. The Casas Grandes tradition attained its greatest extent during the Medio period (AD 1200–1450/1500) followed by a dramatic demographic and political collapse. Hunter-gatherer groups subsequently occupied most of northwest Chihuahua. Data from the Fronteras Valley, Sonora, presents an alternative scenario, with a clear pattern of cultural continuity from the eleventh century to the colonial period in which sedentary farmers occupied the same landscapes and occasionally the same villages. These observations contribute to our understanding of the spread and subsequent demise of the Casas Grandes tradition in hinterland regions. For the Fronteras Valley, we infer that immigrant groups originally introduced Casas Grandes traditions and that uneven participation in a suite of shared religious beliefs and practices was common to all the hinterlands.
Journal Article
Family Formation: an Intergenerational Comparison Subtitlte: The Relevance of Social Inequalities for Family Formation in a Transnational Migration Context
How do processes of family formation change over generations? What is the relevance of social inequalities for these processes and what kinds of strategies do family members develop to deal with them? Based on a case study of members of two generations from the same family using a biographical approach, we will demonstrate the diversity of family formation within one family. The article generates insights about the complexity of family formation processes, as previous research has shown that there is a fertility variation between and within migrant groups of different origins. The selected family is involved in a transnational migration process, originally from the former Yugoslavia, coming to Switzerland and then moving to Kosovo. Migration experiences started with the grandfathers’ seasonal work migration. The family members were affected by social inequalities based on class, gender and ethnicity that are analysed using the concept of socio-cultural boundaries. The results illustrate the ways restrictions on access to the labour market, discrimination, educational institutions and selective migration regimes influence and shape family formation processes. It reveals that members of the same family develop diverse strategies to deal with exclusion and discrimination processes comparing their positions in transnational fields. We show how these family negotiation processes are interrelated with ethnicity and class and change over the generations. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that the transmission of gender norms in this family is influenced by the experienced socio-cultural boundaries. In sum, we show the complexity of family formation processes and intergenerational changes in interaction with intersectional social inequalities that are also shaped by migration policies.
Journal Article
Cinematic city of cultural coexistence? Perspectives on intercultural encounters in New York
The paper examines how U.S.-American movies stage and convey intercultural encounters. Drawing from the case study of cinematic New York City, it tackles intercultural encounters and spaces emerging from interactions of protagonists that are staged as being ‘culturally different’. Theoretical ideas on urban encounters, interculturality, and boundaries are intertwined. A comparative analysis 17 movies reveals three key dimensions of intercultural spaces: boundary drawing, boundary crossing, and boundary commuting. As polysemous staging strategies these provide insight into how movies display everyday intercultural encounters in an urban context. The paper concludes that New York City is imagined as a place in which intercultural encounters are consciously reflected as cultural coexistence—the cinematic city serves as canvas for a culturally separated society. This finding disenchants the medially widespread urban myth of New York City being a harmonious intercultural metropolis.
Journal Article
That “Other” in Latour and Bhabha’s Politics of “Hybridity”
This article examines the concept of “hybridity” as it is utilized in Homi Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture,” and Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern.” The two authors used the concept of hybridity to explore the boundaries of human cultures, and also to express how these boundaries negotiate material and non-material agencies which form active sites of intersection that support and create identities. The article adopts an interpretative, comparative, and interdisciplinary framework, as a form of meta-textual critiquing of the two material texts. While the article argues that Latour and Bhabha’s conceptual expositions have many intersectional profundity and limitations, the proposition of the concept of hybridity by the authors provide a deep-seated framework for the interaction of the social and cultural processes.
Journal Article
The Geography of Taste: Using Yelp to Study Urban Culture
This study aims to put forth a new method to study the sociospatial boundaries by using georeferenced community-authored reviews for restaurants. In this study, we show that food choice, drink choice, and restaurant ambience can be good indicators of socioeconomic status of the ambient population in different neighborhoods. To this end, we use Yelp user reviews to distinguish different neighborhoods in terms of their food purchases and identify resultant boundaries in 10 North American metropolitan areas. This dataset includes restaurant reviews as well as a limited number of user check-ins and rating in those cities. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to select a set of potential features pertaining to food, drink and ambience from Yelp user comments for each geolocated restaurant. We then select those features which determine one’s choice of restaurant and the rating that he/she provides for that restaurant. After identifying these features, we identify neighborhoods where similar taste is practiced. We show that neighborhoods identified through our method show statistically significant differences based on demographic factors such as income, racial composition, and education. We suggest that this method helps urban planners to understand the social dynamics of contemporary cities in absence of information on service-oriented cultural characteristics of urban communities.
Journal Article
