Replication Data for: Do Rural Migrants Divide Ethnically in the City? Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence from India

Despite rapid urbanization across the global south, identity politics within rural-urban migrant communities remains understudied. Past scholarship is divided over whether village-based ethnic divisions will erode or deepen within diverse poor migrant populations. I assess these divergent predictions through ethnography and survey experiments (N=4218) among unique samples of poor migrants in India. Contra conventional expectations, I find intra-class ethnic divisions are neither uniformly transcended nor entrenched across key arenas of migrant life. Instead, I observe variation consistent with situational theories predicting ethnic divisions will be muted only in contexts triggering a common identity among migrants. I pinpoint urban employers and politicians as these triggers. Poor migrants ignore ethnic divisions when facing these elites, who perceive and treat them in class terms. However, migrants remain divided in direct interactions with each other. These bifurcated findings imply poor migrants may be available for both class-based and ethnic mobilization in the city.

尽管全球南方地区正经历快速城市化进程，但城乡移民社区内部的身份政治仍未得到充分的学术关注。既往学术研究对于“在多元化的贫困移民群体中，基于村庄身份的族群分化究竟会消解还是加剧”这一议题存在分歧。本研究以印度贫困移民的独特样本为研究对象，通过民族志研究与调查实验（样本量N=4218），对这些相悖的理论预测开展实证检验。与传统学术预期相悖，本研究发现，在移民生活的关键场域中，阶级内部的族群分化并未得到普遍消解，也未持续固化。与之相反，本研究观测到的差异与情境理论的预测高度契合：即唯有当移民群体所处的情境能够激发其共同身份认同时，族群分化才会被弱化。本研究明确指出，城市雇主与政客正是这类触发共同身份认同的情境主体。贫困移民在面对这些以阶级视角审视、对待自身的精英群体时，会暂时搁置族群分化的分歧。但在移民之间的直接互动中，族群分化的隔阂依然存续。这些二元分化的研究结果表明，城市中的贫困移民既可以被纳入基于阶级的动员体系，也可以被纳入基于族群的动员框架。