‘Controlled Disruptions’: How Ethnic Organizations Shape White Ethnic Symbolic Identities

Abstract

While connecting individual ethnic practices with global identity projects remains challenging, ethnic organizations provide a possible place where the negotiation and enactment of both occur. This article investigates how organized performances and competitions of symbolic white ethnic identity become structurally similar at a global level while also at the same time integrating disruptions at the local level. Specifically, the author argues that a hierarchy of particular Irish step dance practices emerged through controlled disruptions within and among dance academies and regulatory organizations in the social field of Irish step dance, sanctioning modified forms of Irishness believed to be most competitive in Ireland. This article examines the role that organizations play in sanctioning world models and controlling disruptions in the everyday symbolic enactment of Irish identity.

Dancing Transnationally

“…It is based on characteristics of the particular community in question and, therefore, may reflect culturally-specific religious or political affiliations (Levitt 2001). Organisational fields provide the structural framework within which other forms of international cultural flows operate (Hassrick 2012), including the pedagogies and material goods which are discussed below. Organisations, therefore, provide the "infrastructure for cultural retention" (Dunn and Ip 2008: 91) within immigrant communities.…”