The ethinicization of public space: reasons and mechanisms of the process

The understanding of ethnicity as a situative state and process raises the question of ethinicization which constitutes the beginning or part of this process. In communities» life, circumstances may arise when ethnic identification and self-identification come to the fore and dictate behavioural strategies and practices of large masses of people. Ethinicization is a process of manifestation and, hence, mobilization of ethnicity which enters into the public space. Drawing on particular case studies, the article aims to look into the reasons for and mechanisms of the actualization of ethnicity as an important, possibly, key, factor in the regulation of public relations. The author considers some examples where ethnicity starts to define the lifestyle and behaviour patterns of a significant number of city dwellers. The demonstration of ethnicity becomes part of everyday life when ethnically marked objects and areas of relations emerge in a city. Several cases of ethnicization are considered in the article, based on the history of the Siberian resettlement-based society. Two mechanisms of this process are analyzed, namely the public policy which was sometimes built as a project and socio-economic and cultural processes in the society associated with the modernization. The meaningful public policy in the field of the ethnic (and not the confessional or estate-related) is directly connected with the First World War, when the state begins to consider both its own citizens and citizens of other states through the prism of their ethnicity and, based on this criterion, develops a system of privileges or discrimination. The Soviet leadership conducted the social engineering policy, building not only the class-oriented but also national structure of the new society. Of particular interest are the nation-building experiments carried out among the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Here, the articles deals with the case of the district city of Verhneudinsk being transformed from a purely Russian, in terms of the population and culture, city to the capital of the Buryat emerging socialist nation. This not only led to the change in the name of the city but also to some great shifts in the size and composition of its population, as well as to the formation of new models of relationships and to that of a new hinterland.

Keywords

Authors

References