LATENT MIGRANTOPHOBIA IN REGIONAL DIMENSION: ON THE MATERIALS OF MARI EL AND MORDOVIA

The article analyzes the features of public perception of foreign labor migration in modern Russia, identified in the course of a sociological survey conducted by the authors of the article in the Republic of Mari El and the Republic of Mordovia. As a phenomenon of a global order, migration processes have their own specifics in different regions of the world. Thus, the migration situation in the countries of Western Europe, characterized by the so-called “crisis of multiculturalism”, has become widely known. The situation is fundamentally different in Russia, where the main source of labor migration is the states that were previously part of the USSR as union republics. In the presence of manifestations of migrant-phobia (latent or open) in most Russian regions, the migration situation for our country still does not have such a critical and acute character. To a large extent, its features can be traced to the example of individual subjects of the Russian Federation. In September - October 2020, the authors of this article conducted a survey of the population in the Republic of Mari El and the Republic of Mordovia. This survey was conducted within the framework of the Program of Fundamental and Applied Research on the topic “Ethnocultural Diversity of Russian Society and Strengthening the All-Russian Identity” (2020-2022). The survey showed that a significant part of the respondents view migrants as a threat to the economic security of the regions under consideration. The most effective management measures to prevent ethnopolitical and interethnic conflicts associated with migration are support for ethnic and cultural associations, interdepartmental and inter-level coordination in the implementation of state national policy, including the prevention of extremism and early warning of conflicts, as well as constant monitoring of the ethnopolitical sphere and interethnic relationships.

Citizen Responses to Ethnic Representation

Can country leaders improve citizens’ ethnic outgroup views by changing ethnic representation in government? Years of pressure from the international community calling for leaders to make particularly their cabinets more ethnically representative seems to suggest that ethnic representation—conceptualized as descriptive and substantive representation and ministerial cooperation—is key to improving citizens’ outgroup views. I argue that increasing ethnic representation influences majority and minority citizens differently; minority citizens’ outgroup views will become more favorable, while majority citizens’ views will worsen. Using a pre-registered vignette experiment with ethnic Albanians and Macedonians in North Macedonia, I show that ethnic representation does not provide the improvements in outgroup relations that many have hoped. Both groups’ affect toward and perceptions of the cabinet change somewhat, but increasing ethnic representation does not improve overall outgroup attitudes. These results suggest that ethnic representation alone does not lead to more productive interethnic relationships.

Hierarchy, Resentment, and Pride: Politics of Identity and Belonging among Mosuo, Yi, and Han in Southwest China

How do non-Han populations in China navigate the paradoxical expectations to become “proper” Chinese citizens, like the majority Han, while retaining pride in cultural practices and traditions that mark their differences? This article examines how Mosuo (otherwise known as Na) people in Southwest China have constructed the moral legitimacy of their ethnic traditions and identity through redirecting the Orientalizing gaze toward their Yi neighbors, another ethnic minority in the region. This argument, which displaces the analytical focus from the majority Han and the political state in analyses of the maintenance of ethnic boundaries, delineates how prejudice against a third-party ethnic other can serve as an important pathway for establishing cultural citizenship in the People’s Republic of China. The article ends with a discussion of the methodological significance of this lens for understanding interethnic relationships, while recognizing the challenges of examining ethnic prejudice as a site for negotiating identity and citizenship.

Beyond Ethnic Diversity: The Role of Teacher Care for Interethnic Relations

Drawing on the role of teachers for peer ecologies, we investigated whether students favored ethnically homogenous over ethnically diverse relationships, depending on classroom diversity and perceived teacher care. We specifically studied students' intra- and interethnic relationships in classrooms with different ethnic compositions, accounting for homogeneous subgroups forming on the basis of ethnicity and gender diversity (i.e., ethnic-demographic faultlines). Based on multilevel social network analyses of dyadic networks between 1299 early adolescents in 70 German fourth grade classrooms, the results indicated strong ethnic homophily, particularly driven by German students who favored ethnically homogenous dyads over mixed dyads. As anticipated, the results showed that there was more in-group bias if perceived teacher care was low rather than high. Moreover, stronger faultlines were associated with stronger in-group bias; however, this relation was moderated by teacher care: If students perceived high teacher care, they showed a higher preference for mixed-ethnic dyads, even in classrooms with strong faultlines. These findings highlight the central role of teachers as agents of positive diversity management and the need to consider contextual classroom factors other than ethnic diversity when investigating intergroup relations in schools.

Nested Nationalism

This book is a study of the politics and practices of managing national minority identifications, rights, and communities in the Soviet Union and the personal and political consequences of such efforts. Titular nationalities that had republics named after them in the USSR were comparatively privileged within the boundaries of “their” republics, but they still often chafed both at Moscow's influence over republican affairs and at broader Russian hegemony across the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, members of nontitular communities frequently complained that nationalist republican leaders sought to build titular nations on the back of minority assimilation and erasure. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, and Moscow, the book argues that Soviet nationality policies produced recursive, nested relationships between majority and minority nationalisms and national identifications in the USSR. The book pays particular attention to how these asymmetries of power played out in minority communities, following them from Azerbaijan to Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran in pursuit of the national ideas, identifications, and histories that were layered across internal and international borders. What mechanisms supported cultural development and minority identifications in communities subjected to assimilationist politics? How did separatist movements coalesce among nontitular minority activists? And how does this historicization help us to understand the tenuous space occupied by minorities in nationalizing states across contemporary Eurasia? Ranging from the early days of Soviet power to post-Soviet ethnic conflicts, the book explains how Soviet-era experiences and policies continue to shape interethnic relationships and expectations today.

Phraseological units as reflection of ethnic stereotypes in Spanish culture and professional activities

The purpose of the paper is to give an overview of phraseological means incorporating ethnic allusions in the framework of the Spanish world model as a whole and in professional activities in particular. The author proceeds from the premise that professional education of participants in international processes should attach critical importance to the awareness of the nation’s associative thinking, especially related to ethnic stereotypes, for ensuring successful interethnic relationships. The Spanish perception of their own, alongside others’, national character is exemplified by numerous ethnically coloured phraseological units. Special attention is paid to ethnically orientated idioms referring to various professional activities. The author also considers historically based motivation of ethnic allusions in the Spanish phraseology, semantic and evaluative features of the phraseological units in question.The following conclusions are made:– ethnically related allusions in the Spanish phraseological world model are distinguished by specific images and stereotypes which are determined by historical and cultural experience of native speakers;– in terms of structural modes, phraseological units with ethnonyms follow the universal patterns of set phrases ranging from word combinations to complete sentences;– evaluative connotations of such units do not always provide reliable testimony of the actual ethnic stereotypes; many ethnically coloured images in Spanish idioms look paradoxical rather than demonstrate the Spaniards’ true vision of a nation rooted in the objective background.

Interethnic Relationships in Nineteenth-Century Chinatowns

In the mid- and late-nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries evangelized urban Chinatowns, seeking not only to convert Chinatown residents to Christianity but also to provide education and related social services. This study analyzes meeting records from the Presbyterian San Jose Woman’s Board of Missions, which formed in 1874 to evangelize residents of the Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, California. Missionary women recorded details of home life in Chinatown, generating rare eyewitness accounts of material practices, including spatial use, architecture, home furnishings, eating and dining, dress and adornment, illness and death, and opium and addiction. Combined with the results of archaeological investigations, these accounts provide nuanced information about how Chinatown families negotiated the challenges of everyday life in the United States. The chapter closes with reflections on how this study of daily life in San Jose’s historic Chinatowns may contribute to transnational archaeologies of the Chinese diaspora.