Joane Nagel

Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture

Identity and culture are two of the basic building blocks of ethnicity. Through the construction of identity and culture, individuals and groups attempt to address the problematics of ethnic boundaries and meaning. Ethnicity is best understood as a dynamic, constantly evolving property of both individual identity and group organization. The construction of ethnic identity and culture is the result of both structure and agency—a dialectic played out by ethnic groups and the larger society. Ethnicity is the product of actions undertaken by ethnic groups as they shape and reshape their self-definition and culture; however, ethnicity is also constructed by external social, economic, and political processes and actors as they shape and reshape ethnic categories and definitions. This paper specifies several ways ethnic identity and culture are created and recreated in modern societies. Particular attention is paid to processes of ethnic identity formation and transformation, and to the purposes served by the production of culture—namely, the creation of collective meaning, the construction of community through mythology and history, and the creation of symbolic bases for ethnic mobilization.

Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930

Current discussions of the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the bureaucratization of American public education in the later 19th century do not offer effective explanations of the expansion of the educational system in the first place. Enrollments were high much earlier than these explanations suggest and were probably higher in rural than in urban settings. We argue that the spread of public education, especially in the North and West, took place through a series of nation-building social movements having partly religious and partly political forms. We see these movements as reflecting the involvement and success of American society in the world exchange economy and the dominance of parallel religious ideologies. State-level data are used to show both the absence of positive effects of urban industrialism on enrollments and some suggestive effects of evangelical Protestantism and 19th-century Republicanism.

Ethnic Mobilization in New and Old States: An Extension of the Competition Model

Ethnic mobilization simultaneously divides and unites the worlds states. The common threat of internal division posed by subnational movements is a widely faced challenge shared by a diverse array of countries around the world. The rise of ethnic politics since the Second World War is best understood when ethnic mobilization is seen as a process of emergent group interests rather than simply the manifestation of primordial sentiments. This paper examines five essentially similar processes in both new and old states: urbanization, increased scales of organization, expansion of secondary and tertiary economic sectors, expansion of the political sector, and emergence of supranational organizations. Instead of reducing ethnic differences in favor of national-level identities, these development processes promote ethnic mobilization by increasing economic and political competition and organizing it on the basis of ethnicity.

American Indian activism : Alcatraz to the longest walk

The American Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island was the catalyst for a more generalized movement in which Native Americans from across the country have sought redress of grievances as they continue their struggle for survival and sovereignty. In this volume, some of the dominant scholars in the field join to chronicle and analyze Native American activism of the 1960s and 1970s. The book also provides extended background and historical analysis of the Alcatraz takeover and discusses its place in contemporary Indian activism.

Ethnic reorganization: American Indian social, economic, political, and cultural strategies for survival

Abstract In this article, we argue that there is an important, but as yet unidentified, process involved in the maintenance and reconstruction of ethnic identity. We call this process ‘ethnic reorganization’. We argue that this process is useful for understanding the ethnic survival of indigenous peoples in colonized societies, as well as for illuminating the processes of ethnic renascence among both indigenous and immigrant groups. We find it especially useful in accounting for both the persistence and the transformation of American Indian ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic reorganization occurs when an ethnic minority undergoes a reorganization of its social structure, redefinition of ethnic group boundaries, or some other change in response to pressures or demands imposed by the dominant culture. From this viewpoint, ethnic reorganization is a mechanism that facilitates ethnic group survival, albeit in a modified form. We specify several types of ethnic reorganization. These include: social reorgan...

Intersecting identities and global climate change

This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and national identities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vulnerabilities to disasters suggests that women are more vulnerable than men to many meteorological disasters related to climate change, specifically flooding and drought. This is because of their relative poverty, economic activities (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governing womens modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contemporary links between masculinity and the military in environmental politics, polar research and large-scale strategies for managing risk, including from climate change, suggests that men and their perspectives have more influence over climate change policies because of their historical domination of science and government. I expect that masculinist identities, cultures and militarised institutions will tend to favour large-scale remedies, such as geoengineering, minimise mitigation strategies, such as reducing energy use, and emphasise ‘security’ problems of global climate change.

CLIMATE CHANGE, PUBLIC OPINION, AND THE MILITARY SECURITY COMPLEX

For social scientists conducting climate change research and collaborating with climate science experts from the natural sciences, the American public’s persistent skepticism about the impending disastrous consequences of anthropogenic climate change is perplexing and exasperating. The broad and increasing degree of expert consensus about this global threat only seems to further entrench disbelief among a significant and growing proportion of the U.S. population. McCright and Dunlap’s research here and elsewhere (Dunlap and McCright 2008; McCright 2010) on the features of the U.S. population (party affiliation, personal efficacy, trust in science, informedness, gender) linked to attitudes toward climate change raise questions about how unique is the U.S. public’s view of scientific information generally and climate change in particular (see also Kellstedt, Zahran, and Vedlitz 2008). During the period from 2005 to 2008, World Values Survey (WVS) researchers asked random samples of 82,992 respondents in 57 countries how serious they felt was “global warming or the greenhouse effect.” The majority of respondents (89.3 percent) reported that the problem was very serious (59.5 percent) or somewhat serious (29.8 percent) and a very small percent (10.6 percent) reported that the problem was not very serious (8.5 percent) or not serious at all (2.1 percent). When respondents from the ten industrial countries surveyed were asked this question, an even greater majority (93.3 percent) reported that the problem was very serious (61.9 percent) or somewhat serious (31.4 percent) and fewer than one-tenth of industrial country respondents felt the problem was not very serious (5.8 percent) or not serious at all (0.9 percent). Americans were part of the WVS in 2006 and of the 1,213 who responded, four-fifths reported that the problem was very serious (49.5 percent) or somewhat serious (32.0 percent) and approximately one-fifth (19.6 percent) reported the problem was not very serious (13.3 percent) or not serious at all (6.3 percent). The WVS results confirm that Americans report lower levels of concern about global warming than their international counterparts, although in 2006 when they were surveyed they were not wildly out of line with global opinion. Four years later, U.S. concerns about climate change as a serious problem had declined markedly. The 2010 Gallup poll of Americans used by McCright and Dunlap found that “almost half of those polled (48 percent) believe that the portrayal of climate change is ‘generally exaggerated’ and only 32 percent saw it as a serious potential threat to their lives” (Gallup 2010).

The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War

There is an intimate connection linking gender, sexuality, and war: calls to arms by men to defend women and children, intense camaraderie of men in arms, men’s sustained and vigorous resistance to military service by women and homosexuals, mass rape and sexual servitude in warfare, survival sex by refugees and non-combatants in war zones, sexual commerce surrounding military bases and in’ rest and recreation’ destinations (Mosse 1996; Johnson 2000; Moon 1997; Sturdevant/Stoltzfus 1992; Enloe 1990, 2007). There also are the sexualized depictions of both sides in armed conflicts: from ‘our’ men who are honorable and virile, to ‘their’ men who are perverted and/or impotent; from ‘our’ women who are virtuous and vulnerable, to ‘their’ women who are promiscuous and treacherous (Ducat 2004; Goldstein 2001); and there is the phallic discourse of ‘war talk’: from weaponry — guns, bullets, missiles, and bombs, to military campaigns — assaults, penetration, conquest, and surrender (Cohn 1993; Cooke/Wollacott 1993). Just as there is a military-industrial complex that depends on war for profits and growth, war-making depends on a military-sexual complex to recruit, motivate, and retain military personnel (Hartung 2001; Nagel 1998, 2003).

SEXUALIZING THE SOCIALOGICAL: Queering and Querying the Intimate Substructure of Social Life

This presidential address explores the sexual substructure of everyday life.1 I focus on the intimate connections among sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Masculinist heterosexuality is a central component of the bedrock upon which ethinic boundaries rest; and feminism, unruly female sexuality, and homosexuality are three cracks in that foundation. To illustrate the usefulness of understanding the sexualized dimensions of racial and ethnic relations, and social life in general, I provide four examples of the importance of considering sexuality in race, ethinicity, and nationalism: sex and nationalism, sex and urban residential segregation, sex and conquest, and sex and race. In all four sections, I attempt to reveal the sexual substructure of social life. Moreover, I urge sociologists to consider sexuality and the role of sexual systems in their own research.

Warmest extreme year in U.S. history alters thermal requirements for tree phenology

The frequency of extreme warm years is increasing across the majority of the planet. Shifts in plant phenology in response to extreme years can influence plant survival, productivity, and synchrony with pollinators/herbivores. Despite extensive work on plant phenological responses to climate change, little is known about responses to extreme warm years, particularly at the intraspecific level. Here we investigate 43 populations of white ash trees (Fraxinus americana) from throughout the species range that were all grown in a common garden. We compared the timing of leaf emergence during the warmest year in U.S. history (2012) with relatively non-extreme years. We show that (a) leaf emergence among white ash populations was accelerated by 21 days on average during the extreme warm year of 2012 relative to non-extreme years; (b) rank order for the timing of leaf emergence was maintained among populations across extreme and non-extreme years, with southern populations emerging earlier than northern populations; (c) greater amounts of warming units accumulated prior to leaf emergence during the extreme warm year relative to non-extreme years, and this constrained the potential for even earlier leaf emergence by an average of 9 days among populations; and (d) the extreme warm year reduced the reliability of a relevant phenological model for white ash by producing a consistent bias toward earlier predicted leaf emergence relative to observations. These results demonstrate a critical need to better understand how extreme warm years will impact tree phenology, particularly at the intraspecific level.