Tainted Blood: The Ambivalence of Ethnic Migration in Israel, Japan, Korea, Germany and the United States[1].

Extract

---

Tainted Blood: The Ambivalence of Ethnic Migration in Israel, Japan, Korea, Germany and the United States[1].

In Russia, everyone called me Jewish. But now that I'm in Israel, people say I'm Russian. It's painful[2]. Fast jede Art von Gemeinsamkeit und Gegensaetzlichkeit des Habitus und der Gepflogenheiten kann Anlass zu dem subjektiven Glauben werden, dass zwischen den sich anziehenden oder abstossenden Gruppen Stammverwandtschaft oder Stammfremdheit besteht. (Weber 1962:107) In public discourse and modern sociological literature, the concept of ethnicity is often treated as a category attached to persons or certain groups in a quasi-biological sense. In particular, this is the case when ethnicity is used as a substitute for race and thus inherits the Darwinian connotations of that concept. Modern thinking about genetics has a tendency to return to this type of argument. In this tradition, even social scientists have attributed certain positive or negative characteristics to whole groups.[3] Studies of immigrant groups based on survey or census data often carry a tendency to treat ethnicities as groups with certain inherent characteristics, comparable to treating collective public opinion in quantitative research. In particular, this is done in studies which rely only on one set of data limited to just one country. Critizing these tendencies, Katznelson has warned that social scientists should begin their analysis with events in the "early, fluid period of immigration, which have a determinative impact on subsequent patterns of group behaviour and not restrict their studies to the groups' behaviour patterns."(Katznelson 1973: 24) Another way for more in-depth analysis is to compare groups in a given situation in several countries.

Classical social science literature has insisted that ethnicity not be a fixed part of a person or a group, but a social construct. Thus Max Weber remarks that ethnic and national belonging share a belief character (Weber 1962:305ff) and Benedict Anderson describes nations as "imagined communities."(Anderson 1983) Indeed, Hobsbawn's idea of "invented history" has had an important influence on the literature about the construction of social reality. Still, in the literature on ethnic groups, and the discourse on ethnicity the concept of ethnic identity is often treated in a rather unflexible way. However, ethnicity and ethnic identity a term taken from the field of psychological deviance problems - are dynamic phenomena.

In much of the literature on immigration, scholars and writers are concerned with the adaptation of certain groups to a new environment, following the classical study on "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America", and its theories about family structures, "disintegration" and "social reorganization."[4] Although the dominant American perspective on ethnicity changed from a WASP-centered assimilationist perspective to form a white ethnic pluralist perspective (Alba 1990), it was always concerned with the problem of immigrant identities between the country of origin and the country of...

See the full content of this document

---