Grounds for Difference - Hardcover

Brubaker, Rogers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674743962 ISBN 13: 9780674743960

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Offering fresh perspectives on perennial questions of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and religion, Rogers Brubaker makes manifest the forces that shape the politics of diversity and multiculturalism today. In a lucid and wide-ranging analysis, he contends that three recent developments have altered the stakes and the contours of the politics of difference: the return of inequality as a central public concern, the return of biology as an asserted basis of racial and ethnic difference, and the return of religion as a key terrain of public contestation.

The cultural and discursive turn that drew students of identity away from the study of structural inequalities in recent decades has now run its course. At a moment of heightened public and scholarly concern with deepening inequality, Grounds for Difference shows how categories of difference such as race, ethnicity, and gender get built into enduring structures of inequality.

In the aftermath of the Human Genome Project, newly influential genetic understandings of human difference threaten to naturalize both difference and inequality. Brubaker critically engages the new ethnoracial naturalism and assesses how genetic perspectives have transformed understandings and practices of race and ethnicity in biomedical research, criminal forensics, popular genealogy, and identity politics.

The resurgence of public religion in recent decades likewise has major implications for how we understand the politics of difference. Brubaker explains why the most intensely contested struggles over cultural difference today tend to involve religion, confounding longstanding expectations about continued secularization.

About this title

About the Author:

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Review:

A beautifully written, well-argued, and thought-provoking engagement with a series of contemporary issues to do with difference and identity, specifically inequality, biology, culture, and politics. (Richard P. Jenkins, University of Sheffield)

This is an imposing collection that will be another milestone in the literature of ethnicity and nationalism. (Christian Joppke, University of Bern)

Grounds for Difference is a subtle, original, and comprehensive book. All the hallmarks of Brubaker’s earlier work, such as the conceptual clarity, the theoretical rigor―grounded in a well-researched and well-informed analysis―the crisp writing style, and the impeccable sociological reasoning are displayed here. There is a wealth of original ideas developed in this book that requires much careful reading and unpacking. (Sinisa Malešević H-Net Reviews)

Brubaker has once more put us in his debt, with these illuminating, tersely set out but always clearly expressed essays. This is a relatively short book, but in it Brubaker packs an enormous amount of material for reflection. (Krishnan Kumar Social Forces)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674743962
• ISBN 13: 9780674743960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240