Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
122
interests include minority and indigenous issues, migration, ethnicity and identity politics,
children and young people’s participation in inter-ethnic relations.
Andrea Friedli
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Defended December 2011
Ethnicity as a Capital: Construction and Mobilisation of Ethno-cultural Identity by
Tatar Youth in Tatarstan (Russia) -
(in German)
This study argues that the nation-building processes and identity politics in post-Soviet
societies should not be understood as projects led by the state and local political and ethno-
national elites alone. Strategies of ‘identity management’ can also be developed ‘from below’,
as the example of Tatar youth scenes and movements in the city of Kazan shows. The
empirical ethnographic material for this dissertation was collected during a one-year field
research in 2007-2008 and, since then, periodically until 2010. The main methods were
participant observation and semi-structured in-depth interviews with young people and adults
involved in youth movements and scenes in the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, one of
the 83 federal subjects of the Russian Federation.
The dissertation focuses on two main aspects: First, it reflects on the boundary-making
strategies of urban Tatar youth scenes that can be oriented against, for example, a perceived
Russian hegemony, cultural globalisation or the rural Tatar folk culture. It investigates the
mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion drawing on different factors, such as language,
religion and historical memory that underlie the construction of ethno-cultural collective
identity. Second, the study explains how urban Tatar youth valorise and stage ethnicity in the
public space, and how they mobilise their ethno-cultural identity in informal networks. In this
context, ethnicity is conceptualised as a (social, cultural and symbolic) capital in the terms of
Bourdieu; that is, how they are used by the Tatar youth scenes and movements in order to
maintain boundaries and to gain performativity in the public space.
Dr Andrea Friedli is currently a post-doctoral teaching and research fellow at the Seminar of
Social Anthropology, Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the
University of Fribourg/Freiburg, Switzerland. Dr Friedli is completing the publication of her
doctoral dissertation (in German language), to appear in the series ‘Freiburg Studies
in
Social Anthropology’ with LIT Publishers.
