Patterns of im/mobility,conflict and the re/making of identity narratives*

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the interrelationship between patterns of im/mobility on the one hand and the reconstitution of social collective identities and the related emergence or settlement of conflicts on the other. The main arguments are (1) that the im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives, a sense of belonging and relationships to ‘others’ are shaped, and vice versa, and (2) that these dynamics are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors. Mainly looking at patterns of internal mobility such as ‘traditional’ or strategic mobilities and mobilities enforced by crisis, conflict or governmental programmes and regimes, the contribution provides the conceptual background for a special issue that aims to go beyond currently predominant issues of transnational migration. Established or emerging dynamics of (non-)integration and belonging, caused by im/mobility, are analysed on a cultural and political level, which involves questions of representation, indigeneity/autochthony, political rights and access to land and other resources. Conflict situations in contexts of mobility involve changes in the social understanding and renegotiation, reconstruction or reproduction of group identities and narratives with reference to certain socio-political and historical patterns. The legitimation of rights and access to various forms of citizenship and mobility need to be understood against the backdrop of emerging or established mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups, which trigger or settle conflicts and make social identities to be constantly renegotiated.     

An intergenerational conceptualisation of Italian-Australian ethnic identity through Bourdieu and Heidegger

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a phenomenological reconceptualisation of ethnic identity. Drawing upon a case study of a family originating in Calabria, Italy, and living in Adelaide, South Australia, I consider the way in which the three generations perceive their ‘being ethnic’ across time and space. The first-generation participants were born in Italy and migrated to Australia during the 1950s; the second generation are their children; and the third generation are the children of the second generation. The findings show a widespread intergenerational identification of ethnicity as ‘being Italian’, which, however, has different meanings across the three generations. This depends on the participants’ phenomenological perceptions of being thrown into the world [Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. (J. Macquarie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Harper]. Some 40 years after Huber’s [(1977). From pasta to Pavlova: A comparative study of Italian settlers in Sydney and Griffith. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press] study about the assimilation of Italian-Australians published in her book From Pasta to Pavlova, the present paper shows a movement from pavlova to pasta, especially by the third-generation participants, who experience a sense of ethnic revival. Essential in such a shift of ethnic identity is what I refer to as institutional positionality; that is, one’s perceptions of the position of one’s ‘ethnic being in the world’. This is investigated by combining with the sociology of migration, including the Bourdieusian conceptual apparatus of capital [Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research in the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press], a Heideggerian existential theory [Heidegger, 1962]. Such a juxtaposition provides further reflexivity through a reconceptualisation that considers the role of ontology in the sociology of migration.     

Making a difference in Mogadishu? Experiences of multi-sited embeddedness among diaspora youth

ABSTRACT

Civic participation today is increasingly multi-sited, operating in, between and across specific locations. Growing numbers of people experience multi-sited embeddedness, which I understand both in the sense of belonging to and engaging in multiple communities. In this article, I focus on those who left Somalia as young children or were born to Somali parents in exile, and ask what motivates these young people to return or turn to the Somali region. What experiences shape their civic engagement and where do they engage? How does their hybrid, multi-sited or embedded sense of identity impact their engagement in several locations? And how does that engagement affect their sense of identity? The article is based on 80 in-depth interviews and four focus group discussions in Garowe, Hargeisa, Mogadishu, Oslo and the Twin Cities. Informants stayed for shorter or longer durations in the Somali region but lived for the larger part of their lives in Norway or the United States. I illustrate how young people’s civic engagement impact feelings of belonging as much as their sense of belonging influences their civic actions. In this article, I argue for non-binary ways of studying multi-sited embeddedness that do justice to diaspora youth’s everyday negotiations.     

Ambiguous 'Culture': Contrasting Interpretations of the Basque Film Ama Lur and the Relationship Between Centre and Periphery in Franco's Spain

This article focuses on the last decades of the Franco dictatorship in Spain. Two apparently distinct issues are brought together here: the discussions of the National Council of the Movement, which was dependant on Spain's single political party, regarding the possibility of defining a cultural policy to counteract separatist tendencies; and discussions of the possible interpretations of the Basque film Ama Lur (1968). Both exemplify the ideas of the authorities about how to handle the cultural dimension of the challenges represented by peripheral nationalist movements. The aim of this study is to shed light on the questions of how and to what extent attempts by the Francoist authorities to use culture as a political tool worked.     

Political constructions of a cross-community identity in a divided society: how politicians articulate Northern Irishness

ABSTRACT

A shared identity has been shown to reduce prejudice between conflicting social groups. One such common national category is the ‘Northern Irish’ identity which can be inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. This study analyses the plenary sessions of the Northern Ireland Assembly to show how the national category ‘Northern Irish’ is framed by politicians. Content analysis shows that it is used more often by centrist parties who tend to frame it positively and as part of their political viewpoint. There is also evidence of the instrumental use of this identity by unionists in line with the ingroup projection model.     

Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa

Colonial ties constitute the basis upon which Indian migration to the UK occurred. In the post-war years, while Punjabi migrants more than fulfilled the gap in expanding British industry, Indian elites also arrived to take up professional jobs. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of increasingly restrictive (and racially politicized) immigration legislation, there was a significant settlement of the so-called East African Indians, among them an important percentage of East African Gujaratis who had close links with England long before the processes of Africanisation began. Since the 1990s, those East African families also were the ‘hosts’ of a considerable number of Portuguese Indians of Gujarat origin, most of whom had been born in Mozambique during the colonial period and had lived in post-colonial Portugal. This paper will attempt to show how different experiences of intersubjectivity between colonizers and colonized in British and Portuguese African colonial contexts still constitute a source of (re)invention and pluralization of identities within post-colonial Gujarat diasporas settled in the UK. An analysis of these narratives in process will serve to underline the significance of dialectic processes of remaking colonial and post-colonial experiences in order to understand post-colonial identity formations, their ex-tensions and in-tensions, as well as the identity strategies of postcolonial subjects to deal with ‘old’ and ‘new’ multicultural dilemmas.     

Ambivalent Islam: the identity construction of Muslims under Portuguese colonial rule

This article wishes to contribute to the study of the historical processes that have been spotting Muslim populations as favourite targets for political analysis and governance. Focusing on the Portuguese archives, civil as well as military, the article tries to uncover the most conspicuous identity representations (mainly negative or ambivalent) that members of Portuguese colonial apparatus built around Muslim communities living in African colonies, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The paper shows how these culturally and politically constructed images were related to the more general strategies by which Portuguese imagined their own national identity, both as ‘European’ and as ‘coloniser’ or ‘imperial people’.

The basic assumption of this article is that policies enforced in a context of inter-ethnic and religious competition are better understood when linked to the identity strategies inherent to them. These are conceived as strategic constructions aimed at the preservation, protection and imaginary expansion of the subject, who looks for groups to be included in and out-groups to reject, exclude, aggress or eliminate. The author argues that most of the inter-ethnic relationships and conflicts, as well as the very experience of ethnicity, are born from this identity matrix.     

Homeland holidays as anchors of immigrant identity: New Year (Novy God) celebration among young Russian Israelis

ABSTRACT

The article presents the emerging forms of ethno-cultural activism among the so-called Generation 1.5 of Russian-speakers, who immigrated as older children or adolescents and came of age in Israel. It describes and interprets two episodes of the New Year’s Eve (Novy God) celebrations organized by these 1.5ers in Israel in 2015 and 2016 through the constructionist lens applied to ethnic identity in migration. The article explores the process of reinvention of homeland rituals by the children of immigrants by focusing on the emerging hybrid forms of New Year celebration in the Israeli context where, until recently, this holiday was deemed illegitimate. It examines the hybrid components of this invented (or renovated) ritual, which combines Russian-Soviet traditions with the local repertoire of Eastern Jews and other components borrowed from Orthodox and Secular Judaism. The main argument is that ritual celebrations are expressions of immigrant evolving ethnic identity, the need for empowerment, a claim for public visibility, belonging and social inclusion.     

The emergence of Alevism as an ethno-religious identity

ABSTRACT

Alevism has been regarded as a contested identity which is difficult to define because of its ‘syncretic’ character. Attempts at definition have been overwhelmed by essentialist approaches as well as different political agendas since the fifteenth-century Ottoman period. This paper aims to trace the history of Alevism with a particular focus on historical sources such as the Velāyetnāmes and the organization of ocaks and dergahs. The paper argues that we shall see Alevism as an ethno-religious identity which is formed under different social conditions and emerged through the complexities of the organization of ocaks in a vast territory encompassing different ethnic groups.     

Orgasm and the West. A history of pleasure from the sixteenth century to the present

ABSTRACT

This study analyses the experiences of exiles within international rugby union in Britain. The emphasis is on challenging existing sociological assumptions surrounding national identity and sports labour migration. Eight international rugby exiles were invited to take part in semi-structured interviews and several themes emerged. The major findings from the study demonstrate that exiles are subject to an array of cultural attachments and personal experiences which shape their national identities. As migrants, their repositioning in relation to the nation is increasingly deemed to be the norm in rugby union. However, additional influences were also shown to persist to varying degrees.     

Searching for belonging and confronting exclusion: a person-centred approach to immigrant settlement experiences in Canada

ABSTRACT

Drawing on an analysis of three immigrant narratives, this paper employs a person-centred approach to immigrant integration in Canada. It examines how immigrants interpret the inclusions/exclusions that mark their integration experience and the consequences these experiences have on their social identities and sense of belonging. Analysis demonstrates that for immigrants a sense of belonging does not grow in a linear fashion; rather, it grows, stalls, dissipates and/or flourishes in relation to the ties and identifications that immigrants are enabled to forge. Broader structural and historical forces prefigure immigrant inclusion and exclusion in Canada in ways that reflect a hierarchy of migration and belonging. We argue that a recognition of Canada’s ‘hierarchies of belonging’ and the multidimensional nature of social inclusion/exclusion complicate integration metaphors that flatten the uneven social terrain of immigrant belonging.     

Ethnic,gender and class identities of Polish migrant mothers: intersecting maternal narratives with transnationalism and integration

ABSTRACT

Based on a doctoral study of Polish migrant mothers living in Germany and the United Kingdom, this paper examines women's narratives pertinent to ethnicity, gender and social class, as well as the mutual entanglements of these dimensions. While the ethnic identity matrix often evokes dimensions of transnationalism and integration, the addition of the femininity component illustrates the diversity among contemporary Polish migrant women in Western Europe with regard to their identity practices. The analyses of transnational, translocal and cosmopolitan orientations highlight their binding to a contextualized understanding of femininity – its various markers and corollary epitome of motherhood, particularly in the Polish context. The main findings comprise an ideal-type based typology of migrant mothering, which sheds light on how mobility and gender intersect. The discussions adopt the social class lens in an attempt to focus on the implications of certain maternal and migrant identities among Polish women. By underscoring the value of both integration and transnationalism perspectives, the paper calls for additional aspects of translocality and hybridization, seeing them as noticeable social markers of the Polish female migrants’ biographies.     

Television and the making of a transnational Alevi identity

ABSTRACT

Satellite broadcasting technologies contribute a great deal to interaction across national boundaries, and in this regard satellite television is significant in the construction of a transnational public sphere for the Alevi community in Turkey and abroad. This paper addresses the role of television in the making of that transnational Alevi identity. In particular, it focuses on the flow and the programme contents of Cem TV and Yol TV, two leading Alevi channels, to demonstrate how the transnational imagination of Alevi identity corresponds to different political understandings of Aleviness.     

Hybridity,ethnicity and nationhood: legacies of interethnic war,wartime rape and the potential for bridging the ethnic divide in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Relying on the biographical narrative Leila, a girl from Bosnia and the recorded narratives by adolescents born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina we illustrate the difficulties and symbolic implications associated with negotiating hybrid identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina against the dominant post-conflict discourse based on ‘pure’ ethnicities. We argue that in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, hybrid identities are marginalized by official politics and societal structures as a legacy of the war. However, they simultaneously embody the symbolic tools through which ethnic divisions could be overcome, envisioning and recalling a multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina as a supra-national designation.     

Significant others and the importance of ancestry for Czech national identity

ABSTRACT

Nations are viewed as metaphorical families having common ancestors. Czechs, for example, share the legend about a forefather ?ech who brought his people into Czechia. Analysing the Czech ISSP 2013 data we examine how the importance of having Czech descent depends on Christian denomination, openness towards immigration, perceived commonality with ‘significant Others’, foreign-born parents, and socio-demographics. Results of the analysis suggest that Czech ancestry is less important part of national identity among younger cohorts, people living in big cities and towns, descendants of foreign-born parents, and people who are in favour of immigration from poor countries outside the EU.     

Im/mobile subjects: identity,conflict and emotion work among East Timorese Meto diaspora

ABSTRACT

Changes in situations of mobility as a result of violent conflict and displacement pose major challenges to the maintenance, mobilisation and restoration of family ties across national boundaries. Sustaining these relationships through which personal and group identities are embedded and resources for survival are provided can be emotionally and materially taxing while living in exile. This is particularly so when poor relations are perpetuated as a result of unattended and deeply rooted conflict. This paper illustrates the ways legacy of mistrust manifest in diaspora persons’ im/mobility in relation to their moral community ‘back home’. It considers the case of East Timorese Meto diasporic families against the background of widespread impunity that featured the end of the Indonesian state’s occupation of Timor-Leste, which resulted in serious disruptions of cultural and kinship ties. It starts by discussing their mobility context to elucidate the emerging narratives and strategies people employed to negotiate issues of identity and belonging. In particular, the paper reveals the emotion work of translocal mobility through the flows of material, circulating words of good deeds and physical presence, aimed at the repair and strengthening of relationships after dividing conflict.     

The construction of the Beta Israel identity

Competing narrative discourses still define the early origins of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews or black Jews of Ethiopia). A difficulty with reconstructing the past of Judaism in Ethiopia is that written records, though scarce, claim for themselves the 'unquestioned' role of narrating, controlling, containing and policing what can be said about the identities of the Beta Israel. This arrogance of written records is however constantly subverted by the oral sources of the history of the origin of the Beta Israel. The oral sources imply a multiplicity of versions of the same story, and their use in this article suggests that the question of the use of narrative discourse in attempting to name the identities of the Beta Israel in a context of social crisis is a process potentially subject to different interpretations in different historical periods.     

Indigenous identity construction: enacted upon us,or within us

ABSTRACT

This commentary essay questions, theorizes, explores and grapples with the phenomenon of the creation of racial, social and cultural identity: in childhood as Native American identity is negotiated from others; and in adulthood as Native identity is constructed from within. ‘Indigenous Identity Construction: Enacted upon Us, or Within Us?’ is a commentary piece focused around Native American identity and how it is formed both through childhood and into adulthood. I analyze and interpret my experiences and understanding of my identity formation as an indigenous person- which usually is left out of the socio-political notions of modernity. Conceptualizations from ‘othering’ racial identities are discussed along with indigenous ontologies constructed within land and water. Through metaphorically revisiting past racializing incidents this piece continues working through the idea of othering and induction into whiteness in childhood, but also focuses on how indigenous identities might be constructed and sustained in adulthood. Efforts to model the indigenous assertion of self-determination and decolonizing the mind was used to re-present thoughts on the construction of Native American identity