Another look at symbolic ethnicity

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Acculturation can also be used to describe changes in social environments other than immigration. For example, when recent PhDs start their teaching careers, they must acculturate from the graduate student to the junior faculty culture.

2. I follow Swidler’s (1986) conception of culture, as a summarizing term to describe the tools we use to adapt, flourish in and conquer the social and other environments in which we live.

3. I use the broad conception of symbol I learned in W. Lloyd Warner’s classes at the University of Chicago.

4. We ethnicity researchers must remember that we may have a greater vested interest in ethnicity than even the immigrants we study.

5. I also wrote a longer version of the 1979 ERS article, which added empirical observations based on what I had observed about Jewish religious behaviour (Gans 1979).

6. Much of what I learned then came from research, which is still continuing, on the changes in American Jewish life conducted by Cohen (1983, 1988).