Living the multicultural city: acceptance,belonging and young identities in the city of Leicester,England

Drawing upon research conducted with young people in the city of Leicester, England, this paper explores what it means for those from black and minority ethnic communities, particularly more recent arrivals, to live within and adapt to specific multicultural urban contexts. After introducing prevailing racisms and accommodations, the paper examines how forms of belonging are expressed, re-produced and negotiated through the spatial trajectories of everyday life. This includes the value of emerging versions of place through community, religious practice as a form of social capital, the importance of routine, and the construction of multifaceted identities. Such experiences relate to contingent hierarchies of acceptance and legitimacy, histories of settlement, economic marginalization, as well as gendered and generational roles. These young people negotiate everyday life and belonging by retaining, extending and forging local and trans-national ties; highlighting the relationship between socio-spatial positions, everyday practice and identity formation.     

‘It was all about independence’: loss,division and rejuvenation amongst the East Timorese in Melbourne

In this article I explore some of the changes that have occurred in the East‐Timorese community in Melbourne following independence. The focus of the paper is on the process of identification and how there has been a move from a collective identity towards social identity. Through contemporary anthropological conceptualisations of (collective) identity and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and social field, I explore how divergence in pre‐independence activism has led to parallel experiences of lost community and renewed feelings of belonging, and how the community is gradually moving from a focus on the homeland towards an emphasis on the community in exile.     

Equality and exclusion: ‘Racism’ in a Swedish town

Research on racism is prolific but ethnographic studies of what could be termed racism in everyday local social life are much less common. The article examines local Swedish classifications of difference and belonging in relation to meaning of racism and considers how ideologies of equality relate to forms of exclusion and racist expressions. The aim is to discuss the articulation of distinctions of exclusion and inclusion in everyday contexts through the presence of the refugee Other. The material is based on fieldwork conducted during the first half of the 1990s in a small town in central Sweden. The establishment of a refugee reception center in the town had concrete and symbolic repercussions on the local residents, making people's sense of belonging and processes of exclusion more openly conflictual.     

Community Life and Discourses among Fiji Islanders in Kantō, Japan

This article examines how Fiji Islanders of diverse ethnic backgrounds living in Japan's Kantō area reflect on and constitute community life in the diaspora. While they occasionally refer to the ‘community’ and speak about its social value, get-togethers of significant numbers occur infrequently. Ultimately, a Fijian-centred community is virtually absent in the everyday lives of Japan-based Fiji Islanders. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Tokyo Metropolis and its neighbouring prefectures, this contribution suggests that for Fiji Islanders in Kantō, talking about ‘community’ serves two particular purposes: on the one hand community discourses create an emotional bond, both among the migrants and between the migrants and their place of origin. At the same time, discourses on the relevance of the community without undergoing efforts to maintain it, serve as strategies of navigating self and belonging in a critical and reflexive way. As migrants’ social lives are complex and shaped by numerous economic, spatial, and individual disjunctures, Kantō Fiji Islanders contextually configure and extend their social relations with regard to their socio-cultural heritage, their place of residence in Japan, their gaikokujin (foreigner) status, and their life-work cycles.     

The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs: Performance and Participation of Hospitalized Older People

Like all social actors, older people draw on cultural meanings to perform identity. However, when advanced aging brings loss of status as full persons, particularly when it is associated with sickness and dependency, older people can be deemed unsuitable for active medical treatment and care. In addition, loss of status may make it difficult for older people to influence how they and their needs and wants are identified, and how their future life (or death) is conceived. This article discusses how some older people who are admitted to hospital as acute medical emergencies participate in staff's discursive practices to establish a positive clinical identity. By lying low and effacing their distinctiveness as individuals and as social beings, some older people are able to maintain their inclusion in positive medical categories. The article argues that older people are committed to their inclusion in the medical domain because their association with positive medical categories helps them keep at bay the inchoate, the dark at the bottom of the stairs.     

Negotiating Individualist and Collectivist Futures: Emerging Subjectivities and Social Forms in Papua New Guinean High Schools

This article explains the academic disengagement of a critical mass of high school students in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as resulting in part from emerging personal subjectivities and new social networks. Based on a year of ethnographic research in 1994–95, the article describes the authority these young people attributed to their own perceptions of the limited opportunity structures facing them and to the idealized village-based egalitarian student identity being circulated through peer networks. As such, it illuminates the educational implications of youth culture, and demonstrates how local and global processes are mediated through the social fields of high schools.     

Contesting the ‘model minority’: racialization,youth culture and ‘British Chinese’/‘Oriental’ nights

While racialized youth are often central in debates on citizenship, multiculturalism and belonging, those ascribed as ‘British Chinese’ are constructed as model minorities, lacking a hybridized culture but insulated from racism, and thus invisible in these discussions. This article argues, however, that the model minority discourse is itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that revives ‘yellow peril’ discourses on the capacities of particular ‘Oriental’ bodies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young people challenge these constructions, by drawing on popular culture to organize and participate in what they call ‘British Chinese’ and, more provocatively, ‘Oriental’ nightlife spaces. It analyses how through these spaces participants forge a sense of identity that allows them to reimagine themselves as racialized subjects. It demonstrates how these spaces constitute transient sites of experimental belonging, facilitating new cultural politics and social identifications that at once contest reified conceptions of British Chineseness yet also create new exclusions.     

Autonomy and Leadership: Political Formations among the Ashéninka of Peruvian Amazonia

This article examines notions of hierarchy and leadership among Ashéninka people in Peruvian Amazonia. It considers the apparent disjunction between individuals' preference for a peaceful and autonomous everyday existence and the Ashéninka's renowned ability to form large-scale cooperative groups under powerful leaders. Responding to recent anthropological writings that recognise the variability of political forms both across and within Amazonian societies, the article focuses on the social and political preoccupations that can be seen to underlie both social forms among the Ashéninka. It argues that individuals believe that peaceful social reproduction is best achieved by acting independently and respecting the autonomy of others but that aggregation and differentiation remain an option in circumstances where individual action would be ineffectual. The article also examines how the Ashéninka use outsiders as effective organisers that also symbolise the problems of coercive power.     

Notes and news

Some anthropologists perceive an increasing nationalisation or even globalisation of cultures and identities. Others, however, stress that in many places villagers assert their right to a local identity. This article discusses how the inhabitants of the Dutch island of Texel have renegotiated and articulated their identity within the context of processes of nation building and state formation in the Netherlands. It aims to show that nationalisation of culture and localisation of identity are inextricably intertwined.     

Eradicating multiple invasive species on inhabited islands: the next big step in island restoration?

Invasive species are the greatest threat to island ecosystems, which harbour nearly half the world’s endangered biodiversity. However, eradication is more feasible on islands than on continents. We present a global analysis of 1,224 successful eradications of invasive plants and animals on 808 islands. Most involve single vertebrate species on uninhabited islands, but plant and invertebrate eradications occur more often on inhabited islands. Inhabited islands are often highly modified and support numerous introduced species. Consequently, targeting a single invasive species can be ineffective or counterproductive. The impacts of other pests will continue and, in some cases, be exacerbated. The presence of people also creates regulatory, logistical and socio-political constraints. Real or perceived health risks to inhabitants, pets and livestock may restrict the use of some eradication tools, and communities or individuals sometimes oppose eradication. Despite such challenges, managing invasive species is vital to conserve and restore the unique biodiversity of many inhabited islands, and to maintain or improve the welfare and livelihoods of island residents. We present a brief case study of the Juan Fernández Archipelago, Chile, and discuss the feasibility of eradicating large suites of invasive plants and animals from inhabited islands while managing other invaders for which eradication is not feasible or desirable. Eradications must be planned to account for species interactions. Monitoring and contingency plans must detect and address any ‘surprise effects’. Above all, it is important that the local community derives social, cultural and/or economic benefits, and that people support and are engaged in the restoration effort.     

Ethnic identity on display: West Indian youth and the creation of ethnic boundaries in high school

The black immigrant population in New York City has grown exponentially since 1990, such that West Indians now compose the majority of the black population in several neighbourhoods. This article examines how this ethnic density manifests among youth in high school, and how it has influenced ethnic identity formation among second-generation West Indians. My findings are based on twenty-four interviews and eight months of participant observation in two Brooklyn high schools from 2003 to 2004. The results show that in both schools, Caribbean island identities have become a ‘cool’ commodity within peer groups. Further, although it was important to express pride in one's island identity, these young people often blurred their national origin boundaries by drawing on Jamaican popular culture as way of projecting a unified ‘West Indian identity’. The research also uncovers evidence of a de-stigmatization of Haitianness as a way to incorporate them as cultural insiders into the larger Caribbean collective.     

'Representing' British Muslims: the strategic dimension to identity construction

This article explores how Muslim identity is constructed in different ways by two groups of political activists in Britain. At the heart of our investigation is an interest in how these different definitions of Muslim identity are organized to promote different forms of political action. We pay particular attention to how these groups employ the same Islamic concept, da'wah (the injunction to invite people to Islam), and show that it only gains meaning when invoked and deployed in the context of practical argumentation. That is, the meaning of such concepts is not a fixed given but highly contingent upon the contrasting strategic concerns of those claiming to represent the community. While these points have a general applicability, they are particularly important in the analysis of Muslim political activity. For too long, the ahistorical essentialist assumptions of 'Orientalism' have obscured the fundamentally contested and strategically constructed nature of Muslim identity.     

Biographies for Artistic and Social Intervention: A Youth-Driven Project

This article discusses how biographical materials may be used in youth arts education projects to develop new methodologies and approaches that can stimulate artistic and social intervention in contemporary urban communities, thus changing the field of arts education policy at the community level. Through their creation of Artistic Society Projects, a group of young people from the arts education project Bando à Parte: Youth Cultures, Arts and Social Inclusion (O Teatrão, Coimbra, Portugal) have created a voice that may be used to transform their own communities. The starting points for this transformation are the young peoples’ biographical paths. The influence of youth on education policy may be strategically understood in the context of formal and nonformal school curricula. How can youth use their biographies to develop specific contributions both to change in individual behaviors and to social change in urban communities, influencing arts education policies to instigate action? The exploration of these processes through the work of artistic creation, inspired by collected biographical materials, represents a contribution to ongoing reflection on the issues of memory, identity, youth resistance, and community change in urban settings, influencing the ways in which arts education policy is understood and implemented.     

National identity and social inclusion

In terms of our national identity, who we are and are judged to be in a particular context depends on how well our claims are regarded by those around us. Being considered not ‘one of us’ means being an outsider whether one wants to be or not. National identity may lead ultimately to social inclusion or exclusion. Using mainly 2005 survey data, this paper explores cultural markers such as ethnicity, birthplace, residence, accent and ancestry regarding claims to be ‘Scottish’. It shows that being born in Scotland enables people to make claims and to have them accepted. Claims to be Scottish by a white and a non-white person on the basis of various markers are received in much the same way. The cultural markers which people use to judge claims represent the raw materials of identity differences with the potential to become the basis of social exclusion under appropriate conditions.     

‘The muck of the past’: revolution,social transformation,and the Maoists in India

This article analyses revolutionary social change by exploring how people attempt to create a radically different future by taking action in the present, and the challenges that beset this transformation. Examining the relationship between the future, the present, and the past, the article takes the case of the spread of armed underground Maoist guerrillas in India to ask two questions: First, why does India hang on to this form of utopianism when the rest of the world appears to have abandoned it? Second, how and why does the ‘muck of the past’ influence the production of a radically different future? In answering these questions, this article suggests that for both processes of radical social change and our theories of them, we need to reinsert our analyses of politico‐economic conditions into our ideologies of social change.     

‘We've got team spirit!’: ethnic community building and Japanese American youth basketball leagues

This article examines the role co-ethnic youth basketball leagues play in shaping ethnic community among third- and fourth-generation Japanese American youth. With dwindling rates of Japanese immigration, increased rates of out-marriage, and fewer cultural hubs available, finding a thriving ethnic community has become a particular challenge for later-generation Japanese Americans. Drawing from ethnographic data, I argue that even among highly ‘assimilated’ Japanese Americans, youth basketball leagues serve as an active space for constructing and preserving ethnic community and social networks. I demonstrate how through social, cultural, and spatial interactions facilitated by sports, some Japanese Americans have found a sense of ethnic ‘connectedness’ within basketball leagues while performing their own renditions of ethnic identity that is simultaneously attentive to fluid local and global connections. These findings illuminate the role and importance of sport through which Japanese Americans challenges the racial contours of American-ness and belonging while claiming their place, locally, nationally, and transnationally.     

Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

Abstract

This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women's Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space.

The focus of this account is on migrant women's agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity.

AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification.     

Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual

Following the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity shape the experience and expectations of national-level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intra-and interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented by ethnographers.     

Nationalism and Belonging in India,Pakistan and South Central Asia: Some Comparative Observations

The criteria invoked in the definition of national identity are commonly derived from contexts other than those of the nation-state itself—most notably those of territoriality, language/culture, kinship/descent and religion. It therefore follows that in seeking to understand the kind of identity or belongingness invoked in a particular instance of national ideology it is necessary to explore not only the kind of nation-state envisaged, but also those non-national forms of belonging or community from which the national ideology may itself be historically derived. In this paper I seek to develop this argument by comparing some of the principal forms of nationalism found in India, Pakistan and Central Asia. I pay particular attention to the importance of the concept qawm, which in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, is used to refer to a wide variety of groups to which people owe allegiance. Such usages alert us to the important fact that the nation, as ‘imagined community’, may have its origins as a political movement among sentiments and allegiances which draw on pre-modern social arrangements and are in tension with ‘nationalist’ exclusivism. Even when the nation (as nation-state) has been secured, so-called ‘nationalist’ revivalism, while taking the nation for granted, may in fact appeal to sentiments of a different kind.