Anthropology of Migration and Multiculturalism

New Directions

Steven Vertovec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317989301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

The field of anthropology of migration and multiculturalism is booming. Throughout its hundred-odd year history, studies of migration and diverse or 'plural' societies have arguably been both marginal and central to the discipline of Anthropology. However, recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of anthropological studies concerning these topics. This has particularly been the case since the 1970s, when anthropologists developed a keen interest in the subject of ethnicity, especially in post-migration communities. Since the 1990s, migrant transnationalism has become one of the most fashionable topics. There is still much to do in research and theory surrounding this field, not least with regard to contemporary public debates around multiculturalism, immigration and 'integration' policy.

This book presents essays pointing toward a number of possible new directions – both theoretical and methodological – for anthropological inquiry into migration and multiculturalism, including innovative ways of examining diversity discourses, urban conditions, social complexities, scales of analysis, transnational marriages, entangled politics and interwoven cultures.

This book was published as a special issue of the Ethnic and Racial Studies.

An excess of alterity? Debating difference in a multicultural society

Ralph Grillo

European multi-ethnic, multicultural societies have gone through three phases in the governance of diversity. From the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, when national and racial stereotypes were at their strongest and closely linked, the principal way of dealing with ethnic/cultural difference was to abolish it. Nation-states sought to ‘nationalize’ their regions and there was an expectation that immigrants (if admitted at all, and there were often strenuous objections to admitting anyone of a different ‘racial’, ethnic, national or linguistic background) should assimilate, conform to what were perceived as relatively homogeneous national norms. By the mid-1960s, an ideology of assimilation became harder to sustain (Grillo 1998), and in a second phase, which persisted through much of the second half of the twentieth century, there was a shift to what may be called ‘integration plus’ (infra). National norms were increasingly perceived as heterogeneous, and the diversity of identities and values represented by immigrants could, it was thought, up to a point, be accommodated within a ‘multicultural’ framework. Generally, though by no means universally, and certainly not uniformly, there was growing recognition of the legitimacy of claims of immigrant/refugee/ethnic minorities to be ‘different’, certainly in the private sphere, especially around issues such as language, religion and family life, and acceptance, in public rhetoric, that negative discrimination on racial and other grounds should not be tolerated.

This assessment of a passage to an identity-benign form of integration may seem overly sanguine, and with some justice it might be argued there was no slackening of racism or xenophobia, with, in Britain, Powellism in the 1960s, the National Front in the 1970s and the British National Party [BNP] in the 1990s, illustrating their abiding presence. Nonetheless, in a multitude of ways attitudes towards ‘race’ and racism, and interethnic relations generally, changed significantly between 1960 and 1990 (Amin 2003; Gilroy 2004). By the early years of the twenty-first century, however, there was mounting evidence for what has been called a ‘cultural-diversity sceptical turn’ (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2005), or ‘backlash’ (Grillo 2003). Indeed, the period seems characterized by a European-wide moral panic about ‘difference’, apparent in populist movements (such as the BNP) which make rejection of difference a central plank in their policies, but also in wider public debates about the rights and wrongs of different ways of living and the governance of diversity.

These debates, which include diverse voices among majority and minority ethnic populations, may be observed in the speeches of politicians and religious leaders, policy statements and strategies, the media, the writings of academics, Internet discussion groups, and everyday conversations. One point of view, now widely expressed in Europe, is that immigration has led to an ‘excess of alterity’ (Sartori 2002) with countries becoming ‘too diverse’ (Goodhart 2004), and the presence of communities with values at odds with those of ‘Western’ secular society threatening social cohesion. This ‘backlash’, which some have interpreted as a return to ‘assimilationism’ (Back et al. 2002; cf. Brubaker 2001; Sivanandan 2006) is a more complex, multifaceted, multivocal phenomenon, and the primary purpose of this article is to expose this complexity by examining how certain ‘fuzzy concepts’ (Markusen 2003) – integration, multiculturalism, diversity, difference – have been deployed in debates within the UK. What emerges is a concern about governability, based on an imagined ‘strong’ multiculturalism, which it is believed permits ‘diversity’ to become ‘difference’. The essay explores the reasons behind this shift and considers the implications for contemporary academic theories of multiculturalism.

Investigating this discursive terrain poses problems for anthropology. The discipline’s ‘signature practice’ (Marcus 1998, p. 120) is still considered to be ethnography. Anthropologists prefer local-level fieldwork entailing detailed analyses of closely interconnected sets of institutions, discourses and practices, which through the ‘orchestration and representation (or evocation) of voice’ (Marcus 1998, p. 13) bring out the complexity and ambiguities of what, in the present case, Schierup (1996) might call ‘actually existing multiculturalism’. While ethnography of the ‘local’, excavated through fieldwork, remains crucial, when lives are ‘multi-sited’ and/or imbricated in events and processes distant from immediate experience, which nonetheless constantly impinge on them, it cannot be the discipline’s end-all it once was (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Alternative strategies are necessary. Hence the attraction of Holmes (2000) whose ‘project’ Marcus characterizes as ‘piec[ing] together the manifestations, resemblances, and appeals of certain related discourses that have made themselves present’ (1998, p. 124).

Against a background of the ethnography of the UK and other European countries (notably France and Italy), the article draws on a ‘multi-sited imaginary’ (Marcus 1998) through which certain events can be contextualized, and certain ‘texts’, sometimes written, sometimes spoken, can be analysed. Modood et al. (2006) comment that academic writing on multiculturalism has been either ‘normative’, operating at an abstract level, with the assumption that ‘philosophical reflection alone will provide philosophical solutions to the apparent problems of liberal multiculturalism’ (p. 5), or ‘institutionalist’ (in the political scientist’s sense); they seek to link and go beyond both approaches, and inter alia emphasise the importance of contextualization. Anthropologists would agree, but would also stress the importance of understanding what actually happens ‘on the ground’, a crucial aspect of which is the subjective dimension, the ideas, models, projects, definitions, discourses etc that actors bring to bear on a situation, sometimes very hesitantly, often seeking to work with (or clarify) concepts that are difficult, opaque, elusive, and with multiple contested meanings. In other words they are ‘fuzzy’, and one of anthropology’s tasks is documenting the complexities of the fuzzy concepts that people use everyday.

Integration?

Let me begin with an episode that illustrates some of these points. It occurred during a conference held in January 2005, hosted by the Runnymede Trust, to launch the UK government’s strategy, Improving Opportunity, Strengthening Society (Home Office 2005). Attended by some 500 delegates, there were workshops, plenary sessions with ministers, with the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (Trevor Phillips), and with Professor Lord Bhikhu Parekh, and a ‘Question Time’ in which a distinguished panel was quizzed by the audience.¹ One question concerned ‘integration’. A Mr S asked what he should do as a Muslim to show that he had integrated. Did it mean, for example, that he must stop praying five times a day and ‘start going to a pub during the lunch hour with my colleagues for a pint’? Panellist Sir Iqbal Sacranie (then Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain) said he too would like to know the answer, but believed that being British meant sharing some common values while not abandoning what differentiates one from others. Going to the pub, for example, ‘cannot be enforced on any other person: unless you go to the pub you can’t be a good British citizen!’ For Michelynn Laflèche (Director, Runnymede Trust) the debate about ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘integration’ had added little to understanding:

It has caused many problems in terms of how the general population understand what it is to be a diverse society, what it means to live in a society where we come from different backgrounds. We have different traditions but we also share a common space together, and how do we build that successfully? So we need to have a clear understanding of what “integration” is and a shared understanding of what that means, but it certainly doesn’t mean that one culture predominates over another, and other cultures therefore have to fit into that culture

Fiona Mactaggart (MP, then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Race Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal) claimed that the Government’s consultation document Strength in Diversity (Home Office 2004b), provided the answer: ‘You don’t have to merge cultures together, you don’t have to assimilate people into one grey mass … you can be British and Muslim and proud, and proud of both those things separately’, a point supported by other panellists. Their replies did not satisfy Mr S:

I would like to know how I can prove that I’m a Muslim and I have integrated into society. Look at me. I wear British clothes. I speak broken English but, still, I speak English and I have got a beard. That gives away my identity. Some people would recognise who I am. Now, people ask me “Why don’t you integrate?” and I say, “How do you mean?” And they can’t answer me back because I go to schools, give talks about how to deal with racist incidents and very often the teachers ask me, ‘Why don’t Muslims integrate?’ I say, “What do you mean? I pay tax. I obey the law of the land”

Fiona Mactaggart: ‘I don’t think it’s he who needs the practical suggestions, I think the people who need the practical suggestions are those who ask him to prove his integration’.

As Mr S found, there are difficulties with ‘integration’. The word appears in numerous European languages, but as Castles et al note ‘the concept continues to be controversial and hotly debated’ (2003: 3.1.1), with no agreed definition. Sometimes it is taken to mean, simply, assimilation, with immigrants ‘expected to discard their culture, traditions and language’ (ibid). Sometimes the emphasis is on ‘inclusion’ (ibid 3.1.3). After an exhaustive survey, an IMISCOE study takes that tack, defining integration as

a long lasting process of inclusion and acceptance of migrants in the core institutions, relations and statuses of the receiving society. For the migrants integration refers to a process of learning a new culture, an acquisition of rights, access to positions and statuses, a building of personal relations to members of the receiving society and a formation of feelings and belonging and identification towards the immigration society (Heckmann (ed.) 2005, p. 15).

In fact, a broader interpretation of ‘integration’ has generally prevailed in Europe similar to the definition advocated in the UK in the 1960s which characterized British policy and practice for many years. This was the so-called ‘Jenkins formula’ (Rex 1995), developed by Home Office advisers (Lester 2003) under the then minister, Roy Jenkins:

Integration is perhaps a rather loose word. I do not regard it as meaning the loss, by immigrants, of their own national characteristics and culture. I do not think we need in this country a “melting pot”, which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman … I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, coupled with cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance (Jenkins 1967, p. 267).

The key phrase was ‘coupled with cultural diversity’: the future for immigrants and the next generation was within a common public sphere of shared norms and values with equal opportunity in employment, housing, education, health and welfare, equality before the law, and protection from racism, with distinctive beliefs, values, practices, religion, language, in private. Immigrants and minority ethnic groups would be ‘Here but Different’, the motif of policy in Canada and Australia and across much of Europe, including, albeit to a lesser degree, countries like France grounded in grand Republican ideals of ‘One and Indivisible’ with (officially) no space for difference. Although philosophies may be dissimilar (Favell 1998), reality may be closer than many, in France certainly, would believe.

Integration is a ‘fuzzy concept’ which, as Mr S’s question, and the answers it received, show are capable of multiple interpretations. Equally fuzzy is ‘multiculturalism’. Consider the following, from the former British Prime Minister:

I never know, although I use the term myself occasionally, quite what people mean when they talk about multiculturalism. If they mean people living in their separate cultures and never integrating at any point together, I think that’s actually certainly not what I mean by the word and I don’t think it’s what most people would regard as sensible. So I think you can get hung up on the word, to be absolutely frank, and debating exactly what it means (Tony Blair, Press Conference, 5 August 2005, http://www.publictechnology.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3431/)

When Trevor Phillips announced (in a an interview in The Times, 3 April 2004, his desire to ‘kill off’ multiculturalism, his predecessor at the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Herman Ouseley, ‘admitted he no longer understood himself what [it] meant’. There was further evidence of confusion in a BBC/MORI poll (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/multiculturalism_poll_10_08_05.pdf) which reported that while 62 per cent of respondents thought multiculturalism ‘makes the country a better place’ (and only 21 per cent that it had been a ‘mistake and should be abandoned’), 58 per cent thought that ‘people who come to live in Britain should adopt the values of and traditions of British culture’. The survey also revealed fundamental differences within the population with 59 per cent of a Muslim sub-sample believing that ‘people who come to live in Britain should be free to live their lives by the values and traditions of their own culture’. There are, too, confused readings of what is happening elsewhere: ‘How can you possibly have a multicultural society?’, said a contributor to a BBC Website discussion (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4741753.stm/), ‘it’s a contradiction in terms. Do you ever hear France, Germany, Holland, even America being referred to as multicultural?’²

‘Sleepwalking to segregation’?

Although confusion surrounds the concepts of integration and multiculturalism it is possible to identify some significant discursive trends. Multiculturalism, says Werbner, ‘proba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Abstracts
• Introduction: New directions in the anthropology of migration and multiculturalism
• 1 An excess of alterity? Debating difference in a multicultural society
• 2 How exceptional is New York? Migration and multiculturalism in the empire city
• 3 Super-diversity and its implications
• 4 Complexity in social and cultural integration: Some analytical dimensions
• 5 Rescaling cities, cultural diversity and transnationalism: Migrants of Mardin and Essen
• 6 The two faces of transnational citizenship
• 7 Risk, trust, gender and transnational cousin marriage among British Pakistanis
• 8 Migration, assimilation and the cultural construction of identity: Navajo perspectives
• Index