Ethnicity, Negotiating

Negotiation Strategies

Focusing on negotiations means moving away from notions of ethnic culture as a fixed and absolute entity; instead, ethnic culture is seen as an outcome of what groups choose to emphasize and negotiate in different contexts. Scholars who focus on social construction of ethnicity have promoted the idea of culture as a tool-kit or a shopping cart, which is strategically filled with smaller or larger cultural building blocks such as art, religion, language, norms, beliefs, myths, customs, food, and dress. The shape and size of the cart are influenced by the existing structural restrictions and opportunities in that context; the content is chosen by ethnic groups to negotiate the space available to them in the cart. The panethnicity literature, which describes how groups join to form larger-scale ethnic identities, also documents the strategic creation and deployment of cultural tools for constructing and mobilizing new, sit-uationally relevant, panethnic layers, such as an Asian American, Latino, or Native American identity layers. As individuals and groups contend with structural circumstances at multiple levels (local, national, global), they actively construct cultures to fit their circumstances.

The idea of selection and deployment of cultural tools suggests ethnic cultures are dynamic: They arise within situated contexts, and they are multilayered. For instance, the panethnic layer is often a nationally relevant layer that is added to the ethnic identity layers built on the basis religious, linguistic, historical, national, regional, and other cultural affiliations that may be relevant locally or globally. An individual can be a Kolkata Bengali, Indian American, and Asian American simultaneously; some of these layers, like the Asian American layer, are only relevant in the United States, whereas the other layers have local or transnational salience.

The recognition of multiple layers of ethnicity suggests that groups have to weave and reconcile many layers that may not always fit easily. For instance, being a Bengali American may not easily fit the boundaries of either an Indian or a Bangladeshi American layer (because Bengalis originate in both South Asian countries), but it would fit a panethnic South Asian American layer. Overall, ongoing negotiations to create each layer and attempts to reconcile [Page 460]multiple layers yield dynamic, fragmented yet coherent, multilayered ethnic identities.

The notion of groups using cultural tools in specific contexts also suggests that the ethnic culture is rarely practiced by all members of an ethnic group in the same way. Instead, members of ethnic groups who are positioned differently because of their gender, class, religious background, national origin, citizenship status, generation, and other social characteristics have to negotiate power differences within the ethnic group as they attempt to assert versions of culture that are best suited to their social locations. A series of coexisting versions of culture, some more hegemonic than others, emerge, exist, and fade as ethnic group members negotiate the content of culture within nuclear and extended families and local and geographically dispersed ethnic communities. Competing versions are also created, practiced, mobilized, and strengthened through the concerted efforts of organized movements that promote sets of values, versions of histories, and attitudes to challenge existing internal and external boundaries. Thus, each ethnic layer, as well as the multiple coexisting layers, is marked by internal and external negotiations of culture.

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