Ethnic solidarity as interactional accomplishment: An analysis of interethnic complaints in Romanian and Hungarian focus groups

Abstract

This article examines ethnic solidarity as a phenomenon contingent on how ethnicity is formulated as a category of experience and deployed as a category of interpretation in interaction. Analysis of interethnic complaint sequences from Romanian and Hungarian group discussions — consisting of generic formulations of complaints as commonsense knowledge followed by personal experience stories offered as illustrations of the generic complaint — shows that the accomplishment of ethnic solidarity depends on the discursive practices implicated in constructing complaints by reference to commonsense knowledge or personal experience. By analyzing the discursive construction of commonsense and experience-based interethnic complaints and its implications for the achievement of group solidarity, this research extends the insights of the sociological and anthropological literature on the situational and contextual nature of ethnicity, and contributes to conversation analytic approaches to the deployment of shared knowledge and experience in interaction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.