Liminal Social and Physical Spaces: Aspects of Identity and Socialization Patterns in a Neighborhood House

Authors

  • Alannah Berson University of British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v8i1.8614

Keywords:

gentrification, imagined communities, liminality, Goffman, Vancouver

Abstract

Vancouver, British Columbia, is a changing city with a diverse population from all over the globe. Within this metropolis are small neighborhood houses where people can find community services like conversation groups to learn English, clubs to meet new people, and daycare and preschool to care for their children. This article explores social relations in one neighborhood house. Despite the small size of the house, the members and users of the house do not necessarily identify with a larger house identity or an imagined community. Using ethnographic research, this paper examines how gentrification, imagined communities, and liminal events separate and unite different portions of the house membership via Goffmanian theory about masks, teams, and regions. It looks at the house in terms of individuals establishing team identity through space-claiming practices that reinforce mask identities. In a place and time of demographic change, this paper seeks to find out how the concept of neighbors and neighborhood membership is changing through individual and group efforts to control shared spaces.
Vol 8, No 1 (2018)

Downloads

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2018)

Section

Articles

License

By sending potential submissions to the editors, you grant The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography a royalty-free, perpetual, license to: use, reproduce, store, adapt, translate, and publicly display such submissions for any purpose.  In addition to the grant of the above license, you hereby consent to your name appearing as the contributor of any submission where applicable, and to the disclosure and/or display of such information and any other information which appears in or is associated with a submission. Further, you acknowledge and agree that The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography is not responsible for any loss, damage, or corruption that may occur to your submissions, and acknowledge and agree that any submissions you provide for display on the website will be considered non-confidential. If your manuscript is rejected, the above license is revoked, and your submission (manuscript, name, and associated documentation) will be stored only in the correspondence records of The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. You may submit your manuscript to other publications, but must withdraw if selected for publication in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Your paper itself is published using a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License that allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can‘t change them in any way or use them commercially. You retain the right to grant other permissions.