Ethnic Boundary Making

"Ethnic Boundary Making has the makings of a classic. The author takes on a vast and important topic, provides a bold and ambitious theoretical agenda, and engages in theory development by convincingly confronting his hypotheses with data of various kinds. As he goes along, Wimmer explains the implications of his findings for a wide range of theories and debates in sociology and beyond, engaging with the best and the brightest in the multi-disciplinary literatures on ethno-racial divisions, immigration and citizenship, and group formation. This ambitious book will surely leave its mark and be widely debated." -Michele Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration "Ethnic Boundary Making summarizes a vast research program on the topic. Wimmer problematizes what others have taken for granted by showing that ethnicity is neither pre-determined and immutable, nor entirely constructed and malleable. In the end, ethnic boundaries reflect the interaction between the power of privileged groups seeking to legitimize their position and those of subordinate ones to alter, though various strategies, their own. Wimmer's vast erudition and command of empirical materials worldwide makes the book both a valuable reference point and worth arguing with." -Alejandro Portes, Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology, Princeton University "This is one of the most exciting books I have read in any social science in two decades. It offers a root-and-branch revamping of the constructivist paradigm in the study of ethnic division, infusing a field marred by national myopia and cultural parochialism, rampant moralism and stale political posturing with conceptual rigor, empirical vigor, historical depth and geographic breadth. Mating theoretical insights from Barth, Moerman and Bourdieu, Wimmer elaborates a lucid 'comparative analytic of how and why ethnicity matters.' He demonstrates its merits by taking us on a dazzling world tour of salient cases, past and present, and he rolls out sophisticated research designs suited to disentangling ethnic from other dynamics of social structuration. Ethnic Boundary Making marks a signal advance in the study of inequality, identity, and group formation, and it will cement Wimmer's place at the forefront of analytic sociology." -Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban Outcasts "The sweeping theoretical ambition of Ethnic Boundary Making is innovative and exciting; Wimmer's analytic framework enables the systematized accumulation of knowledge about ethnic boundary processes from the most diverse contexts, promising genuine theoretical advancement of this field." -American Journal of Sociology