Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

You may remember that in December I reviewed a talk given by Les Back at a conference I went to. Well last Thursday (22nd March 2007) I went to Goldsmith’s College in London to interview Les Back about some of the themes he raised in that talk. Les Back is best known for his work on ethnicity, racism and ethnic identities in the UK, but he was talking to me about his new book The Art of Listening which will be published this July and about the role of sociology in today’s rapidly changing society.

The interview covers issues around the media, politics, social change and challenges to sociology and can be listened to by clicking on the buttons below.

Introduction

Les talks about his new book, The Art of Listening

Les talks about how sociology can relate to our moral system

Big brother

The art of listening

The role of theory, the role of history, and individuals and structures

Dark times

To read an extract from the book just follow this link: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-11-15-back-en.html

Here is an image of the cover of The Art of Listening - look closely at the photo! If you want to pre-order a copy of Les’ new book you can of course do so - just click on the link below:

The Art of Listening

This is a link to a comment piece that appeared on The Times’ website today.  The article is about the situation of Asian (mainly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi) women brought to the UK as brides and their often vulnerable position as victims of domestic violence with few options and choices for escape.
The secret violence that challenges Britain’s Asians-TimesOnline

Hundai raises issues around Asian communities’ and the authorities’ attitudes towards domestic violence and also expectations of womens’ roles as submissive and housebound, with brides often being “imported” with the expectation that they will be more submissive than British women.

Although it does not offer a huge amount by way of hard research-based evidence this article ties together several important threads and is a must-read for anyone studying gender, ethnicity or the family.

Another example of needing to put the headlines into perspective.  The following article popped up on my desktop this morning:

BBC NEWS | UK | Unemployed ‘must learn English’

The immediate image this headline brings to mind is that the majority of unemployed people do not speak English. So then you read the article and find that the number whose poor English prevents them from finding a job is 40,000 - a large number of people - and that ethnic minority workers tend to earn 1/3 less than other people.

Sounds terrible, so I spent a few minutes thinking about it:

• although no specific link has been made, the implication is that a lack of English is depressing the earnings of ethnic minorities
• ‘earn 1/3 less than other people’ - does this mean on average across the whole workforce, or than other people in the same jobs? Is this all ethnic minority groups, or just specific groups?  We aren’t given the details, so is this another case of social class effects being mixed up with the effects of ethnicity?

Then I looked at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) website - the latest figures available state that in September 2006 1.4 million people were claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, which means that the 40,000 people the article states have problems with English make up about 3% of those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.  Given that the minority ethnic population of the UK runs at about 8% of the population, this would imply that lack of English is not as big a problem among ethnic minority groups as we might be led to believe from this article.
While it is important that people who struggle with English are helped to learn it if it will make them more employable, it does seem that this article is rather over-emphasising the scale and impact of the problem.

I was looking for examples of different forms of nationalism to illustrate the concepts for my students and came up with the following which worked well:

“Banal nationalism” - Billig (1995) - this is the idea that nationalism is something that is part of everyday life and is expressed in lots of often un-noticed ways.  For this I used a recent BBC article about a soldier’s death in Iraq - from the outside it is just an ordinary news item but it also subtly reinforces national identity - the article is about a British soldier and it is his death that is focussed on rather than the ‘number of Iraqi casualties’ also referred to.  I could just have easily used a different news item or a song - something like Three Lions or Chumbawumba’s Vindaloo.

“Exclusive Nationalism” - Dowds & Young (1996) - this is a very narrow form of nationalism, usually focussed around one ethnic group and highly resistant to change.  To demonstrate this I used a section from the BNP’s (British National Party) website, which talks about their policy on immigration - it can be found at: http://www.bnp.org.uk/policies/policies.htm

 ”Inclusive Nationalism” - Dowds & Young (1996) - this is the opposite to exclusive nationalism, people who are inclusively nationalistic have a very broad definition of what it means to be British (or any other nationality) and are happy for a national identity to include many different cultural groups.  As an example of this I used a recent article in The Sun which looked at some of the words of abuse used against children from a range of social groups and which pointed out that they were all British.  The article can be found here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007040816,00.html

The Economist’s bumper Christmas edition is always a good source of interesting articles.

Pushtunwali | Honour among them | Economist.com

This article looks at the Pushtun tribe in Afghanistan and their unique culture, the article quotes Churchill saying that “Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices … is incomprehensible to a logical mind”.

The article is actually slightly more analytical than this, looking at the ways in which a set of values and norms comes together to create a unique culture, where obligation to murder and gain revenge are balanced by obligations to hospitality and to give refuge to those seek it.

The reasons for Pushtunwali’s long survival are examined and include the remoteness of Pushtun populations as well as the meritocractic structure of social hierarchies, with status gained rather than inherited. The article also outlines the ways in which Pushtuns are negotiating their own cultural structures in relation to Islamic cultural and religious structures and pressures in Afghanistan and also in relation to the presence of US forces.

Much of the Pushtun culture is inherently repulsive to those of us from Westernised cultures because of the clash with the values that we take for granted as “right”.   At the same time it serves as a reminder that values, rather than being absolutes are culturally relative, shifting from social group to social group and shaping the behaviour of individuals.

This is a bit of fun - a video on YouTube with someone singing about being Jewish at Christmas. It’s lighthearted but it still makes you think about our cultural assumptions that everyone celebrates Christmas and also the ways in which the creation of a consumption culture has to some extent hidden the Christian religious roots of Christmas.

I eat Chinese food at Christmas

If you’re a teacher doing anything around ethnicity or religion with your students you may want to use this as a discussion starter.

“Unveiled” was a 30 minute programme broadcast on Radio 4 in which a British muslim woman explores the debate around the wearing of the veil which has been brought to the fore again over the past week by Jack Straw’s comments.

This is a sensitive programme which explores issues of ethnic, religious and national identities in a fairly thorough way. The programme material is highly relevant to any students looking at changing identities.

BBC - Radio 4 - Unveiled - 12 October 2006
follow this link to listen to the programme

This is a fascinating article looking at some of the statistics and realities for “mixed race” individuals in the UK.  The ethnic identities of children who have heritage in more than one ethnic group are rarely considered in society’s quest to neatly define people and their social and cultural characteristics (too often sociologists also fall into this trap).

While we often talk about the hybrid identities of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant ethnic groups who find themselves split between their parents’ culture and the host culture, this is another form of hybrid identity that is often ignored.  Think about all the statistics you see regarding ethnicity and educational achievement, crime, health … how often do you see statistics for individuals of mixed ethnicity?

This article points to the need to look beyond neat, distinct categories of ethnicity, as well as to the complexity of identities and the ways in which identity is defined both by a sense of belonging and a sense of “other”.

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