Baumann

G. Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Notes

o

"the dominant discourse relies on equating community, culture,and ethnic identity, and its protagonists can easily reduce anybody's behaviour to a symptom of this equation."¹ (6)

o

"anthropologists have known for a century that descent is a social construction, not a biological fact."² (17)

o

"the tendency to reify the 'cultures' of ethnic minorities, to stylize pseudo-biological categories into communities, and to appeal to popular biological conceptions of culture are not difficult to substantiate in British politics and media."³ (20)

o

claims that the dominant discourse can be used by proponents across the political spectrum. In fact, it is also often used by representatives of "ethnic" minorities or "communities" for political purposes and to access government funding.⁴ (17-31)

1G. Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 6.

2G. Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 17.

3G. Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 20.

4G. Baumann, Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 17–31.