Hal B. Levine

Urbanization in Papua New Guinea : a study of ambivalent townsmen

Acknowledgements Map 1. Introduction 2. Urban development and form 3. Migration and the urban population 4. Security: primary social relationships in town 5. Social idioms in the wider urban field 6. Formal institutions in the wider urban field 7. Comparisons and conclusions List of references Index.

Making sense of Jewish ethnicity: Identification patterns of New Zealanders of mixed parentage

Abstract Modern social life is sometimes characterized as ‘post‐traditional’, an environment where personal identity is continually reconstructed. Concepts of ethnic identity on the other hand usually evoke some notion of tradition, continuity with the past, and intersubjectivity. This article discusses the personal accounts of Jewishness given by a sample of New Zealanders with ‘mixed’ (Jewish and gentile) backgrounds. It explores and analyses their use of themes that come from both modernity and Jewish tradition and defines the different types of identification implicit in their accounts. Particular attention is paid to how these kinds of identification are transmitted, because the literature (on both Jewishness and ethnicity in general) contains debates about the persistence of different expressions of identity. I conclude that a substantial dispersal of Jewish identity has occurred in New Zealand which apparently contradictory theoretical positions are useful in explaining. This suggests that a more h...

Divergent paths, the pursuit of cultural recognition in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT Stimulated by a recent government ban on kosher slaughter (shechita), and a whale stranding involving Ngāti Toa near Wellington, the author compares the quests of Indigenous and minority groups for cultural rights in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Observing Māori and Jews navigating in the contexts of the Treaty of Waitangi and human rights legislation, this paper provides concrete ethnographic examples that highlight how such claims articulate with the political and legal contexts in this Antipodean nation.

The secular ideology of jewish ethnicity in NEW Zealand

Gans (1979) and Alba (1990) have argued that ethnicity in white America is becoming increasingly “symbolic” as the social structural factors which supported group solidarity become eroded by the forces of modernity. Jewish ethnicity has been fundamentally affected by these forces which have lessened occupational and social concentration and the cultural distinctiveness of Jews. In an era when personal identity is continually reconstructed and idiosyncratically defined, a countervailing ideology of civil Judaism has developed which stresses the survival and solidarity of the Jewish people in such a “posttraditional” environment. This paper examines the meaningfulness of the themes of secular Judaism to a sample of New Zealand Jews who were interviewed at length about the nature of their Jewish identity. Secular Judaism seems to have had a very small impact upon them. I suggest that the difference between New Zealand and the United States and Australia, where secular Judaism is seen as an important ideological force, can be accounted for by the position of New Zealand’s small, mobile and markedly unobtrusive Jewish community, in a society which has been described as being aggressively secular and egalitarian.