Constructing Transnational and Virtual Ethnic Identities: A Study of the Discourse and Networks of Ethnic Student Organisations in the USA and UK

Abstract

This paper draws on the experiences of Indian-origin groups in the USA and UK to examine transnational forms of ethnicity. It focuses specifically on ethnic organisations that are engaged in constructing transnational ethnic identities, using religion as a means for constructing new, virtually linked communities. Based on web-based data of Hindu student groups in the USA and UK, this study examines transnational ethnic identities these groups deploy on their websites, and to what extent these are similar across the USA and UK. As Hinduism is a religion with no uniform sets of practices (chosen religious texts, practices and beliefs are culturally, regionally and family dependent), it provides a good basis for examining whether the identities constructed by these groups are transnational, that is, the same elements are emphasised by groups in the two countries to construct ethnic identities that transcend the specificities of the national and local contexts. It also examines the structure of links between websites to show whether websites that appear to be nation-specific are actually linked to each other to create a transnational network. The findings of this study suggest that the study of transnationalism needs to be extended beyond the current focus on ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries to consider what happens in multiple ‘host’ countries. It also shows that organised groups promote homogenised versions of virtual ethnicity as they build transnational networks across countries.

Keywords:

• Hindu Student Groups
• Hinduism
• Transnationalism
• UK
• USA
• Virtual Ethnicity

Notes

1. UK HSG is the national network of Hindu student organisations operating on university and further education campuses around the UK. It was started in 1991 from a stall at a Hindu Marathon, but now operates in around 40 different UK institutions. The US HSG was set up in 1990 with support from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) of America. It became administratively independent in 1993 and fully independent in 2003. They currently have more than 75 chapters nationwide.

2. As the two countries may be grossly disproportionate in yielding samples, a more robust manner of assessing relationships would be to assess the agreement between the ranks of the different categories in the two countries. We also tested whether or not this agreement is significant by using a permutation test, using R statistical software package (www.r-project.org), which is a type of statistical significance test in which a reference distribution is obtained by calculating all possible test statistics. This is done by permuting the observed data points across all possible outcomes, given a set of conditions consistent with the null hypothesis.

3. In order to gather hyperlink network data, all the filtered outward links were exported to MS Excel. From those data, only links to organisations within the sample were retained for each site. The ‘within-sample’ links were combined into a summary spreadsheet in MS Excel, based on which an adjacency with cross-links between websites was created.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anjana Narayan

Anjana Narayan is an Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. Her areas of interest are ethnicity, migration, and gender. She is the co-author of Living our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian-American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Kumarian Press 2009). She is a recipient of the American Sociological Association Section on Asia and Asian America 2010 ‘Early Career Award’. She also has a postgraduate degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai (India). She was associated with a range of innovative initiatives in the field of women and development in India

Bandana Purkayastha

Bandana Purkayastha, is Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has published several books and over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters on race/gender/class, transnationalism, and human rights. Among her books are “Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World,” “Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian American women narrate their experiences” (with Anjana Narayan) and “Human Rights in Our Own Backyard: Injustice and Resistance in the US” (with Davita Glasberg and William Armaline). She has won several awards for teaching and leadership. She serves on several international and national Sociology research committees, and is associated with the Journal of South Asian Diasporas, and Gender & Society, the leading journal for gender scholarship in sociology

Sudipto Banerjee

Sudipto Banerjee received an MS and PhD in statistics from the University of Connecticut. Prior to this he received a B.Sc. (Honours) from Presidency College (now University) and an M.STAT from the Indian Statistical Institute, both in Calcutta (now called Kolkata), India. He is currently a tenured Professor of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His research focuses upon statistical modelling and analysis of geographically referenced datasets, Bayesian statistics (theory, methods and applications), statistical computing/software and the melding of numerical/physical models with observational field data. He has published over seventy peer-reviewed journal articles, several book chapters and has co-authored a book titled “Hierarchical Modelling and Analysis for Spatial Data”. He has overseen the development of several Bayesian software packages within the R statistical framework. In 2009 he received the Abdel El Sharaawi Award from the The International Environmetrics Society – accorded to a young investigator (below the age of 40) every year who has made outstanding contributions to the field of Environmetrics. In 2011 he was honoured with the Mortimer Spiegelman Award, given since 1970 by the American Public Health Association to an outstanding public health statistician below the age of forty. Sudipto is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute