Wednesday, July 8, 2015
S2 (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
Contemporary social scientific theory holds that race and ethnicity are constructed very differently in societies with different histories of socioeconomic stratification and systems of cultural meaning. Our project addresses whether the essentialist, biological kind of thinking that colors Americans’ views of race is also present in Europeans’—and specifically Italians’—views of out-groups. Scholars have suggested it is not, arguing that Western Europeans’ essentialism is of a cultural sort, where culture rather than physical difference is believed to be the crux of group inequality and conflict.
Despite the taboo on the mention of race in Italy, however, are ideas of physical difference that are widespread in the U.S. really so foreign to Italians? And conversely, are cultural concepts of difference really so out of place in a United States whose diversity, like that of Western Europe, is now fed primarily by immigration rather than slavery and conquest?
We report on our in-depth interviews with 75 college students in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, in conjunction with interviews of 30 students in vocational schools in Milan, and interviews of over 50 undergraduates in the north-eastern United States. We describe the groups that emerge spontaneously in respondents’ comments about “us” and “them”, the characteristics attributed to the various groups, the definitions and the use of the concepts of race and ethnic group. We aim to identify which lines become the bases of group boundaries and how they are fluid or fixed, while linking these to national regimes of political and economic inclusion.
Despite the taboo on the mention of race in Italy, however, are ideas of physical difference that are widespread in the U.S. really so foreign to Italians? And conversely, are cultural concepts of difference really so out of place in a United States whose diversity, like that of Western Europe, is now fed primarily by immigration rather than slavery and conquest?
We report on our in-depth interviews with 75 college students in Milan, Bologna, and Naples, in conjunction with interviews of 30 students in vocational schools in Milan, and interviews of over 50 undergraduates in the north-eastern United States. We describe the groups that emerge spontaneously in respondents’ comments about “us” and “them”, the characteristics attributed to the various groups, the definitions and the use of the concepts of race and ethnic group. We aim to identify which lines become the bases of group boundaries and how they are fluid or fixed, while linking these to national regimes of political and economic inclusion.
