Constructions of Europe in the run-up to the EU referendum in the UK

The paper reports findings from a focus group study on representations of Europe, conducted in England in the run-up to the UK EU referendum. Four themes were identified in the analysis: ‘cultured Europe’; ‘little Europe/global Britain’; ‘Europe as a cultural threat’; and ‘Eastern vs. Western Europe’. Analysis of these themes showed that Europe was an ambivalent identity category that could encapsulate contrary ideas such as cosmopolitanism/isolationism and cultural enrichment/undermining. Europe’s relation to Britain was also ambivalent in the data. Britain could be positioned as superior to Europe, sometimes being seen as closer to the ‘European essence’ in the context of the EU’s eastward expansion, which was seen as diluting European culture. But, Britain could also be seen as backward compared to the idea of cosmopolitan continental Europe. These different lines of argument and their ideological underpinnings are explored in the discussion of the findings.     

The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On the Cultural Significance of Europeanization

The idea of a cosmopolitan Europe is defined against a ‘national Europe’, on the one side and on the other, ‘global Europe’ where an internationalist EU-led Europe plays a major role in the world. A cosmopolitan Europe is a more accurate designation of the emerging form of Europeanization as a mediated and emergent reality of the national and the global. It is possible to conceive of European identity as a cosmopolitan identity based on a cultural logic of self-transformation rather than as a supranational identity or an official EU identity that is in a relation of tension with national identities. As a cosmopolitan identity, European identity is a form of post-national self-understanding that expresses itself within, as much as beyond, national identities.     

Giving gifts (and then taking them back): identity,reciprocity and symbolic power in the context of Athens 2004

The paper identifies discursive tropes that informed the official Greek rhetoric of the Athens Olympiad. It is argued that in order to understand these tropes, which place emphasis on the Olympics as an aspect of Neohellenic heritage, we must re‐consider the impact the Orientalist movement had on the formation of a distinctively modern Greek identity. The version of Orientalism that informed the Greek rhetoric was based on the Eurocentric belief that Hellas is the cradle of civilisation. The Western conviction that the modern Greeks (or Neohellenes) are not worthy of “their Hellenic heritage” because they are more Oriental than European is coupled with Greece’s economic and political dependency on Western resources. However, in the context of 2004 Greeks contested this power relationship with “the West”, both European and American. The Greek argument was grounded on the equation of Greek‐Hellenic cultural, with Western economic‐political, capital. Tensions characterised the Greek argument: on the one hand, the Olympics were regarded as a relational (universal) value that ought to circulate in an international reciprocal system; hence, their return to their “cradle” was deemed a form of recognition of the Hellenic (and by right of heritage, modern Greek) contribution to human civilisation. On the other hand, Greeks demanded exclusivity in their organisation. This paper follows this debate, maintaining that we can trace its foundational principles in the Greek moral, cosmological, order.     

The Boundaries of Europe: Deconstructing Three Regional Narratives

The shifting boundaries of Europe as lines of enclosure and mobility restriction in the ‘longue duree’are analysed here at the European/supranational level through the deconstruction of three regional narratives on “Europe” and its reborderings in different millennia. These narratives have had a lasting significance in identity construction and spatialities around the Mediterranean and are evidence of the historically specific and constructed nature of the boundaries of Europe, as well as the power relations involved in changing spatialities. Europe is a cultural construct that emerged around the Mediterranean in a captivating Greek myth, much earlier than the period of written history. The notion of Europe then ‘shifted’ to the northwest as a colonial cultural–religious construct of ‘Christendom’ during the Middle Ages, before nation-states emerged. Much later, European integration—in the context of globalization after the end of bipolarity—not only did not melt borders, but in fact created some new and often bizarre hierarchies supported by a bureaucratic narrative and an institutional discourse for unification after two devastating world wars. Unpacking these narratives is important in understanding sociopolitical constructions of ‘Europe’ and its boundaries, their hardening or relaxation, and criticizing essentialism, as well as commenting upon the ambivalent placing in the European Union of certain candidate and neighboring nations.     

Arguing with a Monument: Frederick Douglass’ Resolution of the ‘White Man Problem’ in his ‘Oration in Memory of Lincoln’

This revisionist view applies an ‘interracial turn’ lens to Frederick Douglass’ 1876 Freedmen’s Monument Speech, in which he critiqued the myth of Lincoln as ‘the liberator.’ After sketching interracial dynamics in Douglass ante bellum career, I do a close reading of visual rhetoric in this oration. Read through a history of Douglass’ complex but ultimately fecund relationships with white men, the speech constitutes a performative resolution of Douglass’ ‘white man problem,’ I argue. A historically situated reading of Douglass’ rhetoric reveals the maturity of his political thought, which calls on future audiences to reassess Douglass’ identity, and legacy. A ‘revised Douglass’ charted a path by which the United States could revise its own ‘white male problem.’ Douglass’ model is timely, given recurring episodes of interracial vio-lence, and the social and rhetorical unrest they spark. As a figure who battled racialism and lived a ‘more attractive alternative,’ Douglass provides deep legitimation for an ‘interracial turn’ in fields including American Studies, communication, ethnography, rhetorical studies, and literary criticism.     

‘Europeanness’ ‐ a new cultural battlefield?

The nation‐state is par excellence a product of ‘modernity’ in Europe. Its supercession has been trumpeted of late, hard on the heels of the fashion for post‐modernity. However, the self‐service conceptions of political identity that pertained until the end of the Cold War now need to be discarded as ethnicity and nationhood evidently become the predominant obsessions of the 1990s. Consequently, ‘Europeanness’ has become a cultural battlefield for sharply divergent views.     

Ethnic Mobilization in south Tyrol: A primordial identity in crisis

South Tyrol and the German minority are portrayed as one of the most successful forms of ethnic mobilization in Western Europe. Its distinct historic roots and the related symbolic codes of collective identity formation can be seen as a classical example for territorially‐based minority politics. On the basis of a constructivist approach the thesis is developed that the primordial collective identity, dominant in South Tyrol, has generated very particular patterns of ethnic mobilization and conflict. On the one hand, it has secured the intransigent protest of the German population fighting an enforced Italianization ‘ over decades. On the other hand, however, this firm of collective identity is simultaneously fostering the recent crisis of ethnic politics in South Tyrol. The more general argument is made that in highly modem, European‐oriented society a primordial understanding of ethnic loyalty is no longer able to provide stable patterns of social integration and political loyalty. In this respect, the South Tyrolean case is interpreted as an example of how primordial patterns of collective identity and related political mobilization tend to lose their firm base in highly modern society.     

What makes a Gael? Identity,language and ancestry in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd

Scholars know far less about ‘national identity’ than ‘nations’ and ‘nationalism’. The authors argue that the concept is sociologically important and briefly discuss its relationship with language. They examine empirically how people living in the Gàidhealtachd, the area of Scotland associated with Gaelic language and culture, whether they are Gaelic speakers or not, whether incomers or not, go about their territorial identity business. The article shows how respondents’ Gaelic identity relates to their British and Scottish identity; how people living in the Gàidhealtachd assess putative claims to a Gaelic identity based variously on language, residence and ancestry; and how they see the balance between ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ elements in Gaelic. The authors argue that to study ‘what makes a Gael?’ highlights the key role territorial identity plays in connecting social structure to social action, and also that identity provides a set of meanings and understandings through which people experience social structure and feel empowered to act.     

Beyond essentialism: negotiating Alevi identity in urban Turkey

In Turkey, the Alevi cultural ‘revival’ of the 1990s has been followed by a multifaceted identity-formation process that involves conflicting religio-cultural agendas, intersecting discourses and differing politico-ideological affiliations. Lacking a focus, this process continues to trigger an enriching public debate on Alevi identity, which has been coined an ‘enigma’ and is considered to be associated with ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’ by many. What lies beneath the veil of ambiguity has to do with the ‘anti-essentialist’ transformation of Alevism, which reaches beyond religious, cultural and political orthodoxies. As a result of diverse political loyalties, contestation of discourses on Alevi culture and identity and the equivocal character of the Alevi subject, the Alevis seem to be resisting essentialism. In urban Turkey, an anti-essentialist discourse potentially influencing Alevism, I argue, enables the Alevi self to act with a sense of reflexivity and to search for ways to avoid political, cultural or religious orthodoxies.     

The role of educational institutions in the clientization of immigrants: The Swedish case

European nations are multicultural societies. Multiculturalism is more a part of these countries' intellectual debates, however, than part of their policies and practices. The public and governmental sectors of Europe still remain monocultural. Monoculturalism, which entails the cultural hegemony of the ‘white majority’ of European societies over ‘other’ cultural groups, is a part of the systematic reproduction of an established social order. Formal education is an important means of reproduction of the monocultural order. European monoculturalism is based on an ethnocentrism that has a long tradition in the Western worldview and is institutionalized in its political, judicial, educational and bureaucratic systems. Western monoculturalism has become increasingly problematic in the face of growing multiculturalism in Europe and jeopardizes the existing social order. The integration of diverse immigrant groups into the host societies is not compatible with the reproduction of Western cultural hegemony, a hegemony through which the policy of integration is simply reduced to a political goal that limits immigrants' action to that of adjusting themselves to objective norms and rules. Monoculturally educated groups, who are supposed to help immigrants become integrated into such societies, paradoxically construct obstacles to their integration.     

Ulster Scots Identity and Culture: The Missing Voices

In recent years, the Ulster Scots cultural movement has become increasingly prominent, primarily among Protestants/unionists, in Northern Ireland. This movement is frequently seen as a form of cultural unionism that has emerged in response to sociopolitical change. Thus, Ulster Scots is typically seen as a response to the growing confidence of Irish nationalist culture and to a sense of dislocation among unionists in the face of UK devolution and changing conceptions of ‘Britishness.’ These notions reflect a potential politicisation of the movement and have led many to question the ‘authenticity’ of an Ulster Scots communal identity. In this article, we acknowledge the importance of sociopolitical conditions for the emergence of the Ulster Scots culture/identity. However, we challenge the suggestion implicit in much academic and nonacademic writing that this culture/identity is somehow contrived in response to such developments. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions, we show the significance of Ulster Scots as a means of self-understanding and identification in everyday society. Crucially, these interviews were conducted not only with political and cultural leaders (who have hitherto been the focus of Ulster Scots research), but also with ‘grass-roots’ Ulster Scots people, for whom the official movement holds varying degrees of importance. We demonstrate that Ulster Scots functions as a cultural resource not only at the macro-level of official rhetoric, but also at the micro-levels of identity formation, self-understanding, and communal consciousness. We conclude that Ulster Scots is a ‘real’ and lived experience for a self-defined community and, hence, functions similarly to any cultural identity category.     

Procedural monsters: rhetoric,commonplace and ‘heroic madness’ in video games

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on Ian Bogost’s argument that video games constitute a form of ‘procedural rhetoric’, in order to re-examine the representation of heroic madness First-Person-Shooter games. Rejecting the idea that games attempt to recreate the experience of madness to the player through linear representation, the paper instead identifies two persistent commonplace figures which appear within the genre: the monstrous double, and the reaching tentacle. While Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric allows analysis to move away from the more facile interpretations of gameplay, the paper argues that these figures also demand an account of the commonplace itself – the rhetorical ‘topic’ – which links the technical structure of gaming procedures with the tropes and figures that enable them to make sense within their wider cultural context and tradition. While the figures of the double and the tentacle purposefully draw on existing tropes and processes associated with the cultural meanings of mental health, a rhetorical analysis of their use of commonplaces suggests that they are not simply recycling older clichés, but constitute a creative ‘reobjectification’ of madness.     

Substantive signifiers? Ethnic and religious identifications among second-generation immigrants in the Netherlands

In the context of increasingly ‘culturalised’ discourses on immigrant integration in Europe, this article aims to contribute to a de-essentialised understanding of ethnic and religious identity. Based on the analysis of quantitative data, it reveals the multifarious relationship between identification and culture among second-generation Turkish and Moroccan Dutch in the Netherlands. Some instances of self-identification with nominal labels (‘Turkish’ and ‘Muslim’) appear to go hand in hand with stronger sociocultural orientations in daily life and are more substantive; others (‘Moroccan’) do not. These findings point to different social mechanisms at work in shaping identifications with certain identity labels and once more illustrate that ethnic and religious identifications do not necessarily reflect cultural ‘otherness’.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

The implications of ‘naming’ on Roma and Sinti right to education and social inclusion: an ethnography of education among a Sinti family network

Acknowledging the European political commitment to Roma education and the research in this field, my article deals with the experience of education of a Sinti ‘minority’ (The terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ will be used in this article, according to the meaning that is given to them within Anthropology and Education studies (cf.). The inverted commas are used to note that they are categories, used with the aim of a clearer explanation for the present text but not necessarily showing the complexity of the social and cultural contexts observed) in northern Italy. The study presents an interpretation of the observations collected during 21 months of ethnographic research among a Sinti family network and in a multicultural middle school, attended by their teenage children in Trent. The ethnographic interpretations point out how the languages and communication codes used within schools partly reproduce the asymmetric power relationships that exist between Roma and Sinti ‘ethnic minorities’ and the Italian so-called majority society. The process of ‘naming’ the ‘other’ plays a crucial role in this analysis, as it shows how meanings are imposed and handled in the relationship between institutions, ‘groups’ and individuals. Consequently, this process highlights the important role of anthropologists in pointing out the ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ (The concepts of ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ were coined in 1954 by the linguist Kenneth Pike and then used by anthropologists. ‘Emic’ refers to the ‘insiders’ points of view on their cultures, and ‘etic’ refers to the ‘outsiders’ accounts on cultures that are not their own) dimensions of every culture. Furthermore, the study’s methodology testifies to the author’s choice of pursuing an ‘engaged anthropology’. Finally, the relevance of the concept of propriospect will be stressed as a means to interpret educational and cultural processes in which the subjects actively take part, with particular attention to young Sinti and their peer groups.     

The social construction of a cultural disaster: New Labour’s millennium experience

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Board project on London’s Millennium Dome exposition in the year 2000. The Dome was generally considered to be a cultural disaster in the news media and public conversation. It became a political embarrassment for Britain’s New Labour government but did not prove damaging in the 2001 general election. The article does not dispute the media’s damnation of the Dome but questions its acuity. It also questions the managerialist perspective on the Dome’s ‘failure’ whilst taking into account claims regarding a managerial ‘turnaround’ and an ‘under-reported success’. Empirical evidence and theoretical analysis concerning the political economy of the Dome’s production, its representational meanings and visitor reception provide a more complex and multidimensional explanation. Corporate sponsorship played a key role in the cultural disaster and, in this particular case study, it exemplifies social democracy’s symbolic as well as material coalescence with neo-liberalism. A distinction is made between associative and deep sponsorship that is illustrated with examples from the Dome. A typology of generous and reflexive visiting is also formulated in order to analyse the visitor data.     

POPULISM AND SPECTACLE

In On Populist Reason Ernesto Laclau proposes that the reputedly ‘empty’ rhetorical excess of populism constitutes the ontological and aesthetic ground on which the existence of an entity called ‘the people’ depends. This essay considers the tensions and affinities between the particular set of aesthetic relations that Laclau attributes to populist rhetoric, on the one hand, and the set of apparently techno-economic relations that Guy Debord describes as the logic of spectacle in The Society of the Spectacle, on the other, arguing that Laclau's conception of populism compels us to recast the ontological problem of the relation that Debord describes between the social and the spectacular in expressly aesthetic terms. Beginning from this premise, the essay contends that the ‘empty’ aesthetic conventions likewise associated with spectacular entertainment – and in particular, the staging of the relation between audience and onstage spectacle that defines the variety showcase aesthetic in this account – enact a set of tropic relations that constitutes the audience as a generalized figure of ‘the people’ in much the same terms as Laclau's rhetoric. Tracing this aesthetic logic through an especially charged performance from the history of blackface minstrelsy, the essay concludes by considering how such a staging of the relation between populism and spectacle might challenge the dominant models for understanding what constitutes ‘popular’ aesthetic form within Cultural Studies, and in the process, afford new critical insights into the formal dimension of Laclau's political logic.     

Transcending the Nation-State?: The European Commission and the (Re)-Discovery of Europe

Abstract: This article examines the process of European integration from a cultural perspective. Taking up questions posed by social scientists and European Community (EC) officials concerning the possibility of transcending nation-state and nationalism in Europe, it explores the European Commission's attempts to do this, particularly through the EC's campaigns and initiatives for forging a sense of European identity and culture at the level of popular consciousness. Following Hobsbawn and Ranger, I argue that the history of EC cultural politics provides an interesting case study of invented traditions and manufactured heritage. The political implications and problems of using culture as a vehicle for nation-building at a pan-European level are analysed. The article concludes with a critical appraisal of the concept of European identity and questions whether the EC's project for constructing a post-nationalist political order in Europe is feasible or politically desirable.     

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post‐socialist period (by which time class‐resistant post‐subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)‐socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people’s lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates – often stymied in arguments over nomenclature (‘subculture’, ‘postsubculture’, ‘neo‐tribe’) – by shifting the focus of study from ‘form’ (‘subculture’ etc.) to ‘substance’ (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the ‘whole’ rather than ‘subcultural’ lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.