Cult Med Psychiatry. 1990 Jun; 14(2): 237-54.

On being ethnic: the politics of identity breaking and making in Canada, or, nevra on Sunday.

Lock M.

Department of Humanities and Social Studies in Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Que., Canada.

The creation of ethnically sensitive health care is a major federal and provincial government concern in Canada at present. The concept of multiculturalism is used to reinforce the notion of rights for minority groups and the Canadian mozaic is explicitly contrasted with the American melting pot. In this paper, the lives of Greek immigrant women in Montreal are used to illustrate how class and gender are as relevant to the immigrant experience as is ethnicity. It is shown how values which were central to female identify in Greece can become a liability after immigration and how the notion of Greek identity in Canada is a fluid category which is subject to repeated transformations. It is suggested that medical anthropologists who ignore the complexity of social categories and whose focus is limited to the cultural construction of illness and the expression of distress are in danger of reinforcing a notion of the "quaint ethnic," a stereotype to which the concept of multiculturalism is often reduced.