Abstract
Andreas Wimmer positions Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks in relation to two main strands of scholarship on ethnic boundaries, which in Wimmer’s usage subsumes racial and national boundaries. Wimmer labels the first strand “Herderianism,” referring to the type of thinking dominant in departments of “ethnic studies” and “racial studies” that views ethnic boundaries in substantialist terms and treats their existence, stability, and relevance as unquestionable and pre-analytically given. The other strand of exaggerated or “radical” constructivism considers ethnic boundaries as inherently fluid, unstable, and contested without paying much attention to their variation across temporal or spatial contexts. As an alternative to these approaches, Wimmer carves out a middle ground in the form of a “comparative analytic” designed for systematic explorations of the dynamism of ethnic boundary making processes.
In addition to the introductory and concluding chapters, Ethnic Boundary Making consists of three theoretical-conceptual chapters and three empirical chapters. Wimmer builds his analytical framework by initially forging a conceptual synthesis of Barth’s boundary metaphor, Bourdieu’s emphasis on political classification struggles, and Weber’s notion of social closure. The result is a powerful concept of boundaries that highlights their symbolic as well as practical dimensions and that only “when ways of [symbolically] seeing the world correspond to ways of [practically] acting in the world, shall we speak of a social boundary” (p. 9). On the basis of this concept, Wimmer thereafter presents two topologies, one of the modes and another of the means of boundary making. The former consists of strategies to change the symbolic location, meaning, and salience of boundaries, for example, by “expanding” or “contracting” their scope of inclusion and exclusion or challenging the hierarchical ranking of ethnic categories by “normative inversion.” The latter consists of practices imprinting classificatory schemes onto social reality, thereby transforming categories into social boundaries, by, for example, discursively describing the world in terms of ethnic categories in everyday talk as well as census forms, discrimination, cultural markers, political organization, and physical force. Finally, drawing upon these topologies, Wimmer clinches the charting of his research program by discussing the configurational variations in ethnic boundaries that needs explication—their political salience, degree of social closure, effect on cultural differentiation, and historical stability—as well as how the factors named in the book’s subtitle—institutions, power, and networks—help explain them.
Wimmer applies the comparative analytical framework of ethnic boundary making to three empirical cases. In the first he investigates patterns of association and dissociation in three Swiss urban, blue-collar, and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Wimmer finds that the most important boundary-work in these communities is not done by ethnic-national categories but by norms of decency, civility, and order that cut across ethnic lines in ways making Swiss nationals and established immigrant groups from Italy and Turkey “insiders” and more recently arrived immigrants from former Yugoslavia “outsiders.” As Wimmer points out, these insider-outsider patterns could not have been uncovered or meaningfully interpreted by a conventional Herderian analysis through which we only could have been able to see reified Swiss, Turkish, and Italian “communities.”
The second study teaches a crucially important lesson—that high degrees of racial closure and homogeneity in networks cannot be uncritically attributed to racially biased preferences of individuals. By analyzing data on the Facebook friendships of 1640 students at a private US college which exhibit the usual patterns of racial homogeneity, Wimmer demonstrates that other micro-level processes than homophilic boundary making proper may explain racially homogenous aggregate outcomes; for example, the mechanisms of reciprocity, propinquity, and balancing strongly promotes same-race friendships independent of race-based individual preferences.
In the final empirical application, Wimmer evaluates the substantialist Herderian proposition that ethnicity expresses and represents cultural differences, and that the further removed the origins of two ethnic communities, the more divergent their normative value orientations. By using European Social Survey data from 24 countries, Wimmer falsifies this proposition and shows that ethnic-cultural background only accounts for a small fraction of the variance in the values individuals hold. Moreover, the differences that do exist are better explained by political exclusion, that is, boundary closure, than cultural distance.
At times, Wimmer conflates “boundary” with “group” making (for example, p. 27). This is unfortunate because, for one thing, it may cause some readers needless confusion, and, for another, it stretches Wimmer’s theoretical-conceptual framework beyond its explanatory reach. An ethnic social boundary, including category-based individual-level identifications and affiliations, may well exist in the absence of well-developed ethnic communal identities and solidarities. And it is important to recognize that the former do not necessarily imply the latter, and that Wimmer’s treatise primarily explores and explains dynamics related to individuals identifying and acting with ethnic categories rather than ones related to the formation of collective identities and actions. This is not meant to detract from the accomplishments and contributions of Ethnic Boundary Making. On the contrary, I only mean to point out fruitful lines of future inquiry suggested by the book, because I second Michelle Lamont’s blurb that it “has the makings of a classic.” The richness of Wimmer’s theoretical, epistemological, conceptual, and methodological agenda, in conjunction with rigorous empirical documentation, have few equals in the literature. What is more, in specifying the recurring causal mechanisms that define the nature and scope of boundary making processes, as well as disentangling them from other group processes, Ethnic Boundary Making moves the tradition of analytical sociology—to which Wimmer explicitly links his research program—forward from meta-theoretical discussions towards realizing its potential for discovering and explaining aspects of social reality otherwise inaccessible or inexplicable. It should therefore serve as a benchmark and inspiration not only for scholars of race, ethnicity, and nationalism but also for anyone devoted to developing the tools of explanation and observation of the social sciences.