SOCIOLOGIA 2/2012 YEAR Volume 57 (LVII) 2012 MONTH DECEMBER ISSUE 2 S T U D I A UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ–BOLYAI SOCIOLOGIA 2 ETHNICITY IN MIGRATION. ROMANIAN IMMIGRANTS AT HOME AND ABROAD Special Issue. Guest Editors: Irina Culic and Remus Gabriel Anghel Desktop Editing Office: 51ST B.P. Hasdeu, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Phone + 40 264-40.53.52 CONTENTS IRINA CULIC, REMUS GABRIEL ANGHEL, Guest Editorsʼ Foreword for the Special Issue on “Ethnicity in Migration. Romanian Immigrants at Home and Abroad” ........................................................................................................3 REMUS GABRIEL ANGHEL, The Migration of Romanian Croats: between Ethnic and Labour Migration ...........................................................................................9 IRINA CULIC, One Hundred Years of Solitude: Romanian Immigrants in Canada..................................................................................................................................... 27 IRINA CIORNEI, The Political Incorporation of Immigrant Associations and Religious Organizations of the Romanian Residents in Spain........................ 51 GABRIEL TROC, Transnational Migration and Roma Self-Identity: Two Case Studies..................................................................................................................................... 77 CLAUDIA N. CÂMPEANU, Celebrating Crown Day after the 1990s Saxon Migration: Reconfigurations of Ethnicity in a South Transylvanian Village....................................................................................................................................101 Romanian Sociology Today MĂLINA VOICU, Religiosity and Nationalism in Post-Communist Societies: a Longitudinal Approach...............................................................................................123 ADELA FOFIU, The Romanian Version of the LIWC2001 Dictionary and Its Application for Text Analysis with Yoshikoder...................................................139 The Authors of this Issue .....................................................................................................153 STUDIA UBB SOCIOLOGIA, LVII, 2, 2012, pp. 3-8 (RECOMMENDED CITATION) ETHNICITY IN MIGRATION. ROMANIAN IMMIGRANTS AT HOME AND ABROAD Guest Editors’ Foreword IRINA CULIC1 AND REMUS GABRIEL ANGHEL2 The question of ethnicity has been for a long time central to social science scholars researching international migration3. The role of ethnicity in processes of adaptation, integration, and assimilation of immigrants in the United States captured early on the attention of urban sociologists and policy makers (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1984; Gordon, 1964). The formation of hyphenated communities, ethnic political mobilisation, and the emergence of ethnic economies within immigrant societies of the West have been constant topics of scrutiny and extensive research. Initially, the study of immigrant settlement took on the viewpoint of their eventual absorption in destination societies, influenced by notions of exclusive citizenship and political danger represented by foreigners, prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century. This approach tended to accentuate the importance of ethno-cultural bases of immigrant groups, directing the analysis around the progress of assimilation or the formation of ethnic enclaves. Present scholarship now looks at both sides of the process, bringing valuable insights into the changes in ethnic, racial, social and gender hierarchies made by immigrant presence and interaction with the local society (Ong, 1996; Jacobson, 1998). The focus on destination societies and the emphasis on ethnicity in immigrants’ incorporation are shifting studies towards events and processes taking place at origin (Brettell, 1986; Brubaker, 1998; Massey, Durand, and Malone, 2002), and towards the social space generated by immigrants, which maintain substantial and sustained relations between their home and settlement societies (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, 1994; Ong, 1999; Levitt, 2001). There is also increased interest in state politics of ethnic selection, and phenomena of large-scale ethnic migration (Groenendijk 1997; Münz and Ohliger 2003; Joppke 2005; Tsuda 2009). 1 Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeş-Bolyai University and the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, e-mail: [email protected]. 2 Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, e-mail: [email protected]. 3 Remus Gabriel Anghel received the support of the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research, grant CNCS PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0602, entitled: “Recasting Migrants’ Voices. Local Perspective on Migration, Development and Social Change in Romania”. GUEST EDITORS’ FOREWORD Ethnicity is an extensively theorized concept, and a politically contested one (Weber, 1997 [1922]; Barth, 1969; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1986; Eriksen, 1993; Kymlicka, 1995 and 2011; Balibar, 2004). Various scholars have recently questioned its explanatory power and analytical utility from different disciplinary angles. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker has repeatedly expressed discontent with the concepts of ethnicity and identity (Brubaker, 2004: 7-63). He warned against the error of taking categories of practice as analytical categories, thus assisting in reproducing and reinforcing reification, and against “groupism” - the tendency to take homogeneous and bounded groups as units of analysis of social life, charging academics’ groupism on their own political practice of identity. He concluded that questioning the unit of analysis, the ethnic group, may lead to contesting the domain of analysis, ethnicity itself. From another disciplinary standpoint, Kanchan Chandra (2006) set off to appraise the definitions and uses of ethnic identity in comparative political science. She arrived at the standpoint that ethnicity either did not matter or had not been shown to matter in explaining most outcomes researchers had attributed to it. She also proposed that this concept be replaced by empirically more appropriate ones, such as descent-based identities and identities based on sticky or visible attributes; and that the body of theories and datasets on ethnicity should be discarded and rebuilt anew on different foundations (Chandra, 2006: 422). Within migration studies, researchers increasingly found that the diverse and multi-faceted social relations immigrants develop at destination localities are often obscured by the “ethnic lens” (Glick Schiller, Çaglar, and Gulbrandsen, 2008). The focus on ethnic groups, ethnic institutions, and ethnic ties conceals the actual mechanisms of immigrant adaptation and incorporation, the construction of the distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders”, the perception of “assimilability,” the local discourse regarding immigrants, and the cultural practices structuring immigrants’ sociality (Baumann, 1996; Glick Schiller, Çaglar, and Gulbrandsen, 2008; Wimmer, 2004). Other factors such as the city scale, and their position with neoliberal processes of rescaling significantly immigrants’ pathways of settlement and transnationalism (Glick Schiller, Çaglar, and Gulbrandsen, 2008). While the decentering of the ethnic perspective has opened the space for new theorising and empirical research, we maintain that ethnicity continues to be relevant in understanding the context, course, and consequences of international migration. Embeddedness in social relations also takes the specific form of embeddedness in particular collectivities (Calhoun, 2003: 559). Though variable, ethnic belonging does shape immigrant settlement, and it is reconfigured by the relations immigrants build at destination and leave at home. Their continuing reference to the place of origin is crucial to their redefinition of the self. Distinguishing between transnational “ways of being” (actual engagement in everyday social relations and practices across borders) and “ways of belonging” (recognition and emphasis on the transnational elements of who they are), Levitt 4 GUEST EDITORS’ FOREWORD and Glick Schiller (2004) propose the possibility of simultaneity of sharing an identity while living outside the physical space of its sociality. Such a perspective requires an ample look on migration processes, which necessarily include the home society, the settlement society, and the social fields encompassing both of them, generated by immigrants’ acts. International migration always causes the rescaling of relations, spaces, and practices, and ethnicity in this context means a reconfiguration along the new territorial and symbolic boundaries (see also Wimmer, 2009). The following studies share the ample look on migration processes, allowing for the possibility that ethnic belonging appears both natural and necessary (Calhoun 2003: 559) to immigrants adapting to their new life, but also to families, communities, and groups left at home. They investigate the re-making of ethnicity, ethnic identity, and ethnic communities in and through international migration. This special issue is focused on Romanian international migration, one of the largest post-communist migrations in Western Europe. Remus Gabriel Anghel examines the case of post-communist international migration of Romanian Croats, revealing the different meanings ethnicity took for them. First, through the capitalization of language, ethnicity provided access to job openings and social ties with locals in Serbia. Following the ethnic