Search - Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific)

Making Majorities Constituting the Nation in Japan Korea China Malaysia Fiji Turkey and the United States - Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific

Majorities are made, not born. This book argues that there are no pure majorities in the Asia-Pacific region, broadly defined, nor in the West. Numerically, ethnically, politically, and culturally, societies make and mark their majorities under specific historical, political, and social circumstances. This position challenges Samuel Huntington?s...  more » influential thesis that civilizations are composed of more or less homogeneous cultures, suggesting instead that culture is as malleable as the politics that informs it.

The fourteen contributors to this volume argue that emphasis on minority/majority rights is based on uncritically accepted ideas of purity, numerical superiority, and social consensus. Emphases upon multiculturalism can become ways of masking serious political, ethnic, and class differences merely in terms of cultural difference, and affirmative-action policies can isolate, identify, and stigmatize minorities as often as they homogenize, unify, and naturalize majorities.

This book analyzes how minorities are made and marked across cultural, regional, and national boundaries from Hawai?i to Turkey, a region that encompasses extraordinarily diverse populations and political developments and that is often regarded as composed of relatively homogeneous majorities.

This volume details discourses of majority and minority, allowing exploration of a number of questions of more general concern in the humanities and social sciences, including: How does one become officially ?ethnic? in many states in Asia? How are understandings of majority and minority cultures created and shaped in specific political and historical contexts? How does the state shape the way people think of themselves? How do people resist, transform, and appropriate these official representations?  « less

Post This Book

Login | Register

ISBN-13: 9780804730488
ISBN-10: 0804730482
Publication Date: 7/1/1998
Pages: 364
Edition: 1
Rating:

  ?

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Stanford University Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

• History >> Asia >> China >> General
• History >> Asia >> Japan
• History >> Asia >> Turkey
• History >> Australia & Oceania >> Fiji
• Nonfiction >> Politics >> History & Theory
• Nonfiction >> Politics >> General
• Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Anthropology >> Cultural
• Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> General
• Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Specific Demographics >> Ethnic Studies
• Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Specific Demographics >> Minority Studies