How the “Commercialized Performance of Affiliative Race and Ethnicity” Disrupts Ethnoracial Hierarchy: Boundary Processes of Customers’ Encounter with South Asian Waitpersons in Hong Kong’s Restaurants

This study analyzes how the “commercialized performance of affiliative race and ethnicity” (CPOARAE) generates boundary processes that disrupt established ethnoracial hierarchies. The CPOARAE involves three parties: managers of a service workplace, workers lowly positioned in the ethnoracial hierarchy, and ethnoracial majority customers. The managers hire workers to carry out affiliative racial and/or ethnic performance to make customers feel that they are being served by workers who belong to highly positioned ethnoracial groups. I analyze the symbolic boundary disorientations of Han-Chinese Hongkonger customers, which result from customers’ confrontation with ethnoracial ambiguity during CPOARAEs. These boundary processes show that despite being a capitalistic product and a popular cultural practice, CPOARAEs have the potential to disrupt and remake ethnoracial hierarchy. This study’s data are primarily collected from multiple in-depth interviews with 24 customers and participant observation in several restaurants, and secondarily from interviews with managers and workers.

Live and let live? Morality in symbolic boundaries across different cultural areas

This article examines morality in taste judgements. In response to Bourdieu’s analysis of France in the 1960s, sociologists note that repertoires of moral evaluation vary across contexts. They typically highlight national variations, like Nordic egalitarianism weakens cultural boundaries, and temporal variations, with transformed values having made cultural hierarchies less defensible. The article investigates a neglected type of moral variation: contrasting cultural areas. In a study of class and culture in Stavanger, Norway, the authors combined oral interviews on taste with photo elicitation in the visual arts, literature and housing/architecture. While interviewees were often careful not to appear disdainful of other people’s tastes, and expressed ambivalence about cultural boundaries, their thoughts on housing/architecture diverged. Here, people did not hesitate to criticise other people’s taste, even to the point of ridiculing their houses. The authors discuss the implications for Lamont’s symbolic boundary perspective, which is predicated on a separation of three types of symbolic boundaries (cultural, socioeconomic, moral). Morality can both weaken and reinforce cultural boundaries, depending on the areas under investigation. In conclusion, the authors suggest ways cultural sociology may conceive of different moral modalities.

“Boundary-Maintenance” or “Boundary-Crossing”? Name-Giving Practices among Immigrants in Germany

This study investigates why some immigrants choose names for their children that are common in their home country whereas others opt for names used by natives in the host country. Drawing on the sociological literature on symbolic boundaries, the first strategy can be described as boundary-maintenance whereas the second can be classified as boundary-crossing. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and applying bivariate and multivariate methods, two broader explanations for name-giving practices are tested: (1) cultural proximity and the permeability of the symbolic boundary between home and host country; and (2) immigrants’ levels of linguistic, structural, social, and emotional integration in the host country. Overall, the theoretical model explains the differences very satisfactorily. Whilst both sets of factors proved relevant to immigrants’ name-giving practices, the immigrants’ level of integration in the host country was less important than the cultural proximity between the origin group and host country.

To Die Is Gain

This chapter locates incarceration within a broader economy of violence in the Roman world. Prison was legible, it argues, in relation to embodied scripts of honor and shame, self-mastery and slavishness, and what might be called the somatic grammar of subjugation. Among the elite, who were accustomed to bodily inviolability, imprisonment breached a key symbolic boundary that distinguished persons of honor from those subject to them. For Paul, however, as for others among the non-elite, prison was an acute instance of an all too familiar reality—namely, subjection to the mastery of more powerful men. Paul’s desire to die and be with Christ (Phil 1:23) must therefore be read alongside his vision of glorious somatic transformation, a transformation that is also and not incidentally an inversion of power relations, with Paul now sharing the sovereign glory of Christ, before whom all knees must finally bow.

Russia’s Night Wolves, Migrating Memory and Europe’s Eastern Frontier

The article examines the controversy triggered by the “Victory Tour” of Russia’s high-profile biker organization, the Night Wolves, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The tour provoked important questions about the relationship between European borders and the politics of World War II commemoration. The article argues that the international public discourse around the Night Wolves illuminates how state borders are being transformed both as hard, territorialized borders and as “soft,” symbolic boundaries. The analysis compares how print and online media in Russia, Poland, and Germany framed the Night Wolves’ tour across Europe. It emphasizes the construction of borders as a narrative project and maps the symbolic boundary-drawing strategies mobilized by various actors. It shows how cross-border commemorative tours can serve as a tool of transnational memory politics that shapes the very meaning and salience of state borders and regional divisions.

Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.

MUSICAL TASTE AND SYMBOLIC BOUNDARY-WORK IN SERBIAN SOCIETY

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between social stratification and musical taste in present-day Serbia. Following a discussion about Bourdieu’s conceptualization of taste and contemporary theoretical approaches that rehabilitate Bourdieusian heritage, the presence of homology between social positions and musical tastes is tested in Serbian society. On the basis of collected qualitative material via interview, the author examines whether music serves as a symbolic mean that is used by the interviewees to place themselves in certain social groups by drawing symbolic boundaries between them and other social groups that are associated with other musical tastes. The analysis showed that there are differences in musical tastes among respondents based on their position on the stratification scale, manifested in choices and ways of listening to music, as well as that mechanisms of classification are hidden in speech about musical tastes.

Youth citizens

This chapter describes how the study participants reported promoting participation when working with teens. There is strong evidence in the data of age serving as a symbolic boundary between a child's genuine participation (being consulted and empowered) and being consulted but not given power. The research participants in the study described their interactions with teenagers as providing participatory opportunities for them. The ways in which the study participants described their interactions with teens showed that they accepted their status as citizens. They reported listening to and consulting teens more so than younger children. They stated that they involved teens earlier and more directly in an investigation by speaking with them or meeting with them separately from their parents, by inviting them to meetings, and by communicating with them more honestly about the problems they saw in a case. While teens' participation level was reportedly higher than that of younger children, the way in which the participants perceived teens affected the degree to which workers let them participate.