Ethnic identity development is a process that occurs for all individuals, and weakness in ethnic identity is associated with numerous psychosocial difficulties. Security in ethnic identity can be difficult for those exposed to varying attitudes and behaviors in a multicultural society. As such, the current study examined the influence of mindfulness and self-compassion on ethnic identity development. a sample of 479 undergraduate students completed online self-report questionnaires measuring demographic information, mindfulness, self-compassion, ethnic identity status, and self-esteem. Results suggested that mindfulness and self-compassion are significant negative predictors of ethnic identity, and that self-compassion was a better predictor of ethnic identity status than was mindfulness. Self-compassion did not moderate the relationship between mindfulness and ethnic identity status, as was hypothesized. the sample included primarily Caucasian (n = 278) individuals born in the United States, which likely limited generalizability of findings. Implications of the current findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

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The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents one of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century. Within this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique position in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures. On the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from an Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to terms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a dilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community, and begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity. It is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about Self/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I consider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood in movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be internalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too have started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese identity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as alienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility of disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent to which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that has a temporal element in it. As a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular experiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by examining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir, and that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their singular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such elements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes the authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion, one’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it is not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or individuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that corresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical framework. The three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in this project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over Chinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself with others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural affiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the footbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile acceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in Chapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman conceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three situations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese American female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

<p>Denna uppsats undersöker förhållandet mellan etnisk identitet och egoidentitet hos vuxna individer. Då Sverige är mångkulturellt är detta förhållande ett viktigt forskningsområde att belysa. En kvalitativ undersökning genomfördes med nio intervjupersoner. Dessa lever i den svenska kulturen samt i en utomeuropeisk kultur. Resultatet visade att kulturen upplevdes vara en mycket viktig del av personligheten på så sätt att den etniska identiteten är en sammansvetsad del av intervjupersonernas egoidentitet. Intervjudeltagarna upplevde sig vara en blandning av de erfarna kulturerna. Majoriteten intervjudeltagare hade en fullbordad identitet, men perioder av förvirring och dilemman förekom som ett resultat av deras bikulturella livssituation. Anpassningsproblem och olika begränsningar var bidragande orsaker till dessa perioder. Studien bidrar till fördjupad kunskap om dubbeletniska vuxnas identitets- och personlighetsutveckling.</p> / <p>This essay examines the relationship between ethnic identity and ego identity among adults. Sweden is a multi cultural country and therefore this relationship is important to examine. A qualitative interview study was conducted with nine interviewees, who live in Sweden and originate from a culture outside Europe. The culture was shown to be an important part of the personality, which indicates that that ethnic identity is a part of ego identity. The interviewees experienced themself to be a mix of two cultures. A majority of the interviewees had an achieved identity, but periods of diffusion occured as a result of adaption problems and limitations. The study contributes with advanced knowledge about identity and personality development of adults.</p>

I combine approaches drawn from sociology, social psychology, and linguistic anthropology to create a unique, novel framework for the study of language, culture, and affect. The social psychological concept of affective meaning in language is measured in a single, bilingual culture and applied to the study of bilingualism, language shift, and the transmission of culture through language. The data are collected from three generations of people identifying as Cajun in South Louisiana and a small comparative sample of elderly, non-Cajuns in the Southwest. Quantitative, affective data - collected from all study participants - are bolstered by qualitative video- and audio-based data collected using anthropology-based field techniques from Cajun French/English bilingual participants, oral family histories collected from middle-aged participants, and survey data collected from high school student participants. These data and personal accounts of lives, histories, and language conception and change provide the basis for answering the following research questions: 1) When using their different languages, do bilingual speakers hold different meanings for words that have the same translated meanings? 2) Can language shift be tracked affectively? 3) Does loss of language mean loss of culture? The answer to each of these questions is yes. It is my hope that the methods developed in this study will provide the basis for future language recording and analysis and cultural preservation projects.

Bolivia's indigenous groups achieved an unprecedented level of political power in the latter half of the twentieth century. Traditional explanations for this phenomenon (elite alliances, deprivation, matter-of-time)have proven insufficient. This thesis argues that the ascendancy of Bolivia's groups can be best understood though he application of organization and social movement theories, and it uses the political economy framework as a backdrop. Data are drawn from scholarly analyses, official documents and historical texts. This thesis concludes that Bolivia's indigenous movement is not a single movement, but a coalition of many social movements. It demonstrates that ethnicity frameworks have in some cases hindered the progress of movements because of different understandings of ethnicity. Variegated interests, visions of the future, and geography, have exacerbated these differences. This thesis concludes with recommendations for strategic level policy-makers and tactical level operators.

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This thesis explores why ethnicity was introduced as the basis for the reconstitution of the Ethiopian state in 1991, examining the politicisation of ethnic identity before and after the federation of the country’s ‘nations, nationalities and peoples’ was instituted. The establishment of the modern Ethiopian empire state in the nineteenth century, and the processes of centralisation and bureaucratisation which consolidated it in the mid twentieth, provide a backdrop to an emerging concern with ‘regionalism’ amongst political circles in the 1960s and 1970s. Ethnicity operated as both resource and product of the mobilisation by which the major movements of armed opposition to the military regime of the 1970s and 1980s, later the architects of ethnic federalism, sought control of the state. Under federalism through the 1990s, political representation and territorial administration were reorganised in terms of ethnicity. A stratum of the local elite of each ethnic group was encouraged to form an ethnic organisation as a platform for executive office. Meanwhile ethnic groups and their elites responded to these new circumstances in unanticipated but calculative ways, often radically reviewing and reconstructing not only their sense of collective interest, but also the very ethnic collectives that would best serve those newlyperceived interests. The architects of ethnic federalism are influenced by a Marxist formulation of the ‘National Question’ which incorporates contradictory elements inherent in the notion of ‘granting self-determination’: the conviction that self-selected communities respond better to mobilisation ‘from within’, in their own language, by their own people; and the notion that ethnic groups are susceptible to identification, definition, and prescription ‘from above’, by a vanguard party applying a checklist of externally verifiable criteria. These two sets of assumptions correlate with tenets of instrumentalism and primordialism respectively, which are, as they stand, equally irreconcilable. An investigation of theoretical approaches to ethnicity and collective action suggests that many conflate the ‘real world’ and ‘socially constructed’ referents of the ethnic profile of an individual (the constituents of the individual state of being an ethnic x), with the fully constructed collective accomplishment which creates members of an ethnic group (conferring the social status of being an ethnic x, of which those referents are markers). Differentiating the two, and exploring the recursive relationship between them, by means of a consideration of calculative action within the framework of actors’ categories (emerging from emic knowledge systems) and shared social institutions (premised, whether their referents are ‘natural’ ‘social’ or ‘artificial’, on collective processes of ‘knowledge construction’), may improve analysis of the causes and operation of collective action associated with ethnicity and ethno-nationalism. Ethnic federalism in Ethiopia offered the prospect of a shift away from the ‘high modernism’ of that state’s past projects to ‘develop’ its people, apparently in favour of the collective perspectives of groups of its citizens. The coercive and developmental imperatives of the state that guided its implementation, however, have militated against the substantive incorporation of locally determined social institutions and knowledge.

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