Beyond Ethnicism

The manual, Beyond Ethnicism. Exploring Racial and Ethnic Diversity for Educators, a first of its kind in Kenya, speaks to the key issues of ethnic and racial belonging that are such a key-determining factor in defining and dividing Kenyans. These two issues influence many social, economic and especially political decisions. The manual transcends the limitations of current discussions on ethnicism and racism. Questions of ethnic and racial belonging are connected to some of the deepest moral and political decisions of our time. Belonging is an emotional subject that as a country citizens should not lose capacity to discuss coherently. An educator who wanted to know how to end ethnicism and racism inspired the writing of this manual. Ethnic and racial favoritism as well as discrimination have seeped into the Kenyan education system. Educators sit in staff-rooms as members of political parties or ethnic communities and sometimes consciously or unconsciously perpetuate ethnic and racial stereotypes and prejudices. Educators find talking about ethnicism and racism difficult. They do not know where to begin yet they can recognise ethnicism and racism in learners. Sometimes they practice it themselves, favouring or discriminating learners on the basis of ethnicity or race. Educators are sometimes helpless in arresting ethnicist and racist practices in their learners or themselves, as they do not have the tools to do so. This manual is a practical resource which assists educators in contextualising ethnic and race related concerns without undermining the human rights, it also helps in creating the space for discourse amongst educators on how to combat ethnicism and racism. It asks rarely addressed critical and significant questions on the meaning of ethnic and racial belonging. The manual addresses the arresting of stereotypes and prejudice before they morph into actual discrimination and sometimes violence.

The manual, Beyond Ethnicism. Exploring Racial and Ethnic Diversity for Educators, a first of its kind in Kenya, speaks to the key issues of ethnic and racial belonging that are such a key-determining factor in defining and dividing Kenyans. These two issues influence many social, economic and especially political decisions. The manual transcends the limitations of current discussions on ethnicism and racism. Questions of ethnic and racial belonging are connected to some of the deepest moral and political decisions of our time. Belonging is an emotional subject that as a country citizens should not lose capacity to discuss coherently. An educator who wanted to know how to end ethnicism and racism inspired the writing of this manual. Ethnic and racial favoritism as well as discrimination have seeped into the Kenyan education system. Educators sit in staff-rooms as members of political parties or ethnic communities and sometimes consciously or unconsciously perpetuate ethnic and racial stereotypes and prejudices. Educators find talking about ethnicism and racism difficult. They do not know where to begin yet they can recognise ethnicism and racism in learners. Sometimes they practice it themselves, favouring or discriminating learners on the basis of ethnicity or race. Educators are sometimes helpless in arresting ethnicist and racist practices in their learners or themselves, as they do not have the tools to do so. This manual is a practical resource which assists educators in contextualising ethnic and race related concerns without undermining the human rights, it also helps in creating the space for discourse amongst educators on how to combat ethnicism and racism. It asks rarely addressed critical and significant questions on the meaning of ethnic and racial belonging. The manual addresses the arresting of stereotypes and prejudice before they morph into actual discrimination and sometimes violence.

This volume contains three sections of essays which examine the role of commemoration and public celebrations in the creation of a national identity in Habsburg lands. It also seeks to engage historians of culture and of nationalism in other geographic fields as well as colleagues who work on Habsburg Central Europe, but write about nationalism from different vantage points. There is hope that this work will help generate a dialogue, especially with colleagues who live in the regions that were analyzed. Many of the authors consider the commemorations discussed in this volume from very different points of view, as they themselves are strongly rooted in a historical context that remains much closer to the nationalism we critique.

Religious Identity and Political Destiny: 'Hindutva' in the Culture of Ethnicism is an ethnography of a contentious on-going debate about the place of religion in Indian civic life. Exploring Hindu nationalism from the varied perspectives of its critics in women's activist and Left intellectual circles, its ideologues, supporters, and sympathizers, Deepa S. Reddy locates 'Hindutva' in a broader culture of critique in which identity movements of all kinds compete for recognition, representation, and rights. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, as well as readers of ethno-nationalist movements, religion, activism, global feminisms, and all matters Indian/South Asian.

An award-winning journalist explores the culture of denial in Israeli and Palestinian societies–and its lethal consequences. Walled examines the contemporary state of mind of Israel's citizens, tracing the history of the State of Israel back to the Jewish national movement and the beginnings of Zionism. Sylvain Cypel offers a lucid analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian situation and powerfully demonstrates that the wall of protection erected in the West Bank by Israel is the most visible symptom of a society in peril. Those who are walled, Cypel argues, are first and foremost the Israelis themselves, who have chosen to ignore rather than acknowledge the existence and rights of their neighbors. Through the study of political discourse, intellectual controversy, and national institutions such as the army and the educational system, Cypel illuminates the mechanics of the culture of force that has led Israeli society into its current impasse. Walled combines historical, cultural, and sociological analysis with personal testimonies and a delightful Jewish wit, offering a cogent and gripping portrait of two peoples walled by denial: Israeli society and its "other," the Palestinians.

Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author's theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.

This history of a single town in Bohemia casts new light on nationalism in Central Europe between the Springtime of Nations in 1848 and the Cold War. Jeremy King tells the story of both German and Czech-speaking Budweis/Budæjovice, which belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918, and then to Czechoslovakia, Hitler's Third Reich, and Czechoslovakia again. Residents, at first simply "Budweisers," or Habsburg subjects with mostly local loyalties, gradually became Czechs or Germans. Who became Czech, though, and who German? What did it mean to be one or the other? In answering these questions, King shows how an epochal, region-wide contest for power found expression in Budweis/Budæjovice not only through elections but through clubs, schools, boycotts, breweries, a remarkable constitutional experiment, a couple of riots, and much more. In tracing the nationalization of politics from small and sometimes comic beginnings to the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s, he also rejects traditional interpretive frameworks. Writing not a national history but a history of nationhood, both Czech and German, King recovers a nonnational dimension to the past. Embodied locally by Budweisers and more generally by the Habsburg state, that dimension has long been blocked from view by a national rhetoric of race and ethnicity. King's Czech-Habsburg-German narrative, in addition to capturing the dynamism and complexity of Bohemian politics, participates in broader scholarly discussions concerning the nature of nationalism.