Conflation of Institutional and Cultural Stereotyping in Asian Migrants' Discourse

Abstract

Younger Asian migrants—as interviewees and clients in the British institutional context—primarily view their confrontation with `white' gatekeepers as one between their ethnic minority status and the cultural dominance of the majority. By calling into play their migrant status more readily than their client status, they tend to interpret the perennial mismatch between their socioeconomic needs and the institutional processing of those needs in terms of negative cultural stereotyping, ahead of institutional stereotyping. My main focus in this paper is twofold: first, in order to explain why Asian migrants interpret institutional actions as discriminatory devices against their ethnicity, I appeal to the broader sociohistorical context surrounding the migration phenomenon itself; second, I draw attention to the structure of their accounts of cultural discrimination—discursively realized as strategies of consensus and contrast—in the context of gatekeeping encounters. By pointing out the limitations of an activity-based analysis of communicative mismatches in client-gatekeeper discourse, I argue that in order to account for minority groups' discursive practices it is essential that we supplement the pragmatic analysis of mismatches with a socio-psychological analysis of `self- and other-stereotyping' on the one hand and institutional and cultural stereotyping on the other hand.

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