1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910783194903321

Titolo

Census and identity : the politics of race, ethnicity, and language in national census / / editors, David I. Kertzer, Dominique Arel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002

ISBN

1-107-12473-5

1-280-95577-5

0-511-35128-3

0-511-04194-2

0-511-15550-6

0-511-56145-8

0-511-60604-4

0-511-04461-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xi, 210 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

New perspectives on anthropological and social demography ; ; 1

Disciplina

306.2

Soggetti

Census

Race

Ethnicity

Linguistic demography

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power / David I. Kertzer, Dominique Arel -- Racial categorization and censuses / Melissa Nobles -- Ethnic categorizations in censuses : comparative observations from Israel, Canada, and the United States / Calvin Goldscheider -- Language categories in censuses : backward- or forward-looking? / Dominique Arel -- Resistance to identity categorization in France / Alain Blum -- On counting, categorizing, and violence in Burundi and Rwanda / Peter Uvin -- Identity counts : the Soviet legacy and the census in Uzbekistan / David Abramson.

Sommario/riassunto

The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses examines the ways that states have attempted to pigeon-hole the people within their boundaries into racial, ethnic, and language



categories. These attempts, whether through American efforts to divide the US population into mutually exclusive racial categories, or through the Soviet system of inscribing nationality categories on internal passports, have important implications not only for people's own identities and life chances, but for national political and social processes as well. The book reviews the history of these categorizing efforts by the state, and offers a theoretical context for examining them, illustrating the case with studies from a range of  countries.