migration | antropologi.info

France: More and more muslims observe Ramadan

Published on October 16, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Europe, food and drink, migration, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Ramadan is being increasingly observed by France’s Muslim community – but also for a few French non-Muslims, afp reports. “I do it sometimes to show my support for my Muslim friends,” said Lorie, a schoolgirl in the eastern suburb of Montreuil.

The trend is especially prevalent among young adults. 88 percent of all Muslim adults in the country fasted for Ramadan – and 94 percent of those aged under 30 did, according to a recent survey in a Catholic weekly, La Vie.

French anthropologist Malek Chebel, said that the surge in interest in Ramadan “is a phenomenon we’ve been seeing for 15 or so years”.

“Essentially, it’s a phenomenon of cultural identification – French Muslims have the feeling of belonging to all other Muslims around the world,” he said. The physical rigor of observing daily fasting for a month made Ramadan a sort of macho competition among boys and young men.

Abdel Rahman Dahmane, the president of the Council of Democratic Muslims in France says that Ramadan has become a month of identification for all a community.

>> read the whole story in the Middle East Times (link updated)

SEE ALSO RAMADAN-RELATED:

Blogger Anthrogal (yes, an anthropologist in France and Muslim) has done some Ramadan-blogging

On OhMyNews, Fiza Fatima Asar gives in My Ramadan. From Pakistan to California and back again a nice description:

Ramadans are really so special in Pakistan. It is a different feeling altogether — an entirely different world. All the restaurants are closed during the day and open right before sunset when people start pouring in for iftars at their favorite restaurants, the ones that stay open all night until five in the morning. (…) When we hear someone say “the city never sleeps” we really needed to visit Karachi during Ramadan to know what that phrase really meant. Boys and young men arrange night cricket matches out in the streets with lights fixed along the street light poles and the neighborhood collected to watch the matches. These matches end right before suhur during weekends.

And she explains:

Ramadan is not just about starving and fighting your thirst. Well, I knew that before too. But in the past I thought, fine, Ramadan is also about charity, about perseverance and about patience. This year I learned more. Ramadan is really about bringing one closer to the other. Ramadan is about sharing and missing people. Ramadan is about loving the other and thanking God they are there to be with you.

>> read the whole text in OhMyNews

On GlobalVoices we learn that during Ramadan there are much more beggars on the street. These people would like to exploit this holy month as much as possible and play on the high level of religious emotions of people during this special time, Tunisian blogger Zayed writes.

Ramadan is being increasingly observed by France's Muslim community - but also for a few French non-Muslims, afp reports. "I do it sometimes to show my support for my Muslim friends," said Lorie, a schoolgirl in the eastern suburb of…

An exhibition and a movie: The French, colonialism and the construction of “the other”

Published on October 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology in the news, Europe, history, migration, Us and Them

The first temporary exhibition at Paris’s Quai Branly museum takes an ambitious look at how the West constructs its ‘other’, Mary Stevens writes in her research blog about the reconfiguration of national identity in French museums:

In the permanent exhibition it is the aesthetic qualities of the objects on display that are foregrounded; what is missing is a critical reflection on how the western aesthetic criteria which visitors are encouraged to apply have developed over time. What makes us see something as art, and why do we now judge as art objects that in the past might have been seen either as silent witnesses to social customs or indeed as curiosities? These are the questions that D’un regard l’Autre sets out to explore.

(…)

[H]airy savages carved in wood bear witness to Renaissance man’s desire to position his superior self firmly on the side of culture against nature. However, it is interesting to be reminded that in this period real-live people from other cultures were sufficiently rare in Western Europe to command wonder and a degree of respect. A life-size portrait of an Inuit couple, painted during their visit to the Danish court in the late seventeenth century provides a subtle reminder: the names of these two travellers – Pock and Kieperoch – were carefully noted by the artist. It was only in the nineteenth century that their successors would become ‘types’, documented and classified for the new sciences of anthropology and phrenology and displayed for public instruction in the new museums.

>> read the whole review of the exhibition

See also earlier on antropologi.info: Indigenous? Non-Western? Primitive? The Paris Museum Controversy

Mary Stevens has blogged a lot about multiculturalism and nationalism in France. One of the interesting recent posts is about the integration of foreign students: What image of France is presented in the introductory courses about French society?

(…) Day 2: the gastronomic map of France (lots of camembert and choucroute – not a lot of couscous and brik) place names (all Greek, Roman, Celtic or religious), family names (every single one of them belonging to the Français de souche, whoever they might be) and – to top it all – “languages, ethnic groups and cultures”. Aside from the fact that I thought ‘ethnic’ was a taboo word in French, only regional minorities get a mention and we are told authoritatively that cultural diversity has been in decline since the Revolution, or at least until a ‘recent’ upsurge in regional movements (e.g. Coriscan, Breton, Basque).

So here we have it: ‘le mythe national’ condensed into two short days. Above all the course seeks to inculcate a closed, exclusive definition of national identity that fails to take into account any of the demographic developments of the last 200 years and indeed before.

If anyone was ever in any doubt that there is still work to be done in France in rethinking the ‘collective memory’ – or what I prefer to call the collective or social ‘imaginary’ (the latter after the philosopher Charles Taylor) – then here (with apologies for the poor quality) is the proof.

>> read the whole post: Integrating the elite: peddling national mythology

Related topics are touched in the French movie Indigènes. Mary Stevens explains:

The film tells the story of a group of North African soldiers, fighting on French soil for the liberation of France from 1943. It is explicitly geared toward the re-evaluation of national collective memory; its aim is to address the way these soldiers, who played a major role in the Liberation have been written out of (the Gaullist account) of history. And it looks set to have a major impact.

>> read the whole post: The « Indigènes » effect ?

Anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid is back in Paris and has also seen the film:

Indigene is the shameful juridical assignation used for Muslims in French North Africa. Muslims, being indigenes and not citizens like the Christians and Jews, didn’t enjoy equal rights until 1945. It’s incredible, isn’t it, in the country priding itself with the slogan libérté, égalité, fraternité?

>> read the whole review

In the permanent exhibition…

Qualitative Migration Research in Europe: New issue of “Forum Qualitative Social Research”

Published on September 11, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, fieldwork / methods, interdisciplinary, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

“Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe” is the topic of the recent issue, and most papers deal with methodolocial questions

Maren Borkert and Carla De Tona for example write about “Issues Faced by Young European Researchers in Migration and Ethnic Studies” , especially when rearching abroad as “academic migrants”:

The term academic migrant refers to European academics, like the authors of this paper, who become more and more transnational while researching migration in Europe. As migrant European researchers we move to and settle in third-countries, often having to speak a new language, and learning to adjust to new social and cultural normativities, feeling the migration’s uprooting and re-grounding and, in short, becoming “foreigners” as the people who participate to our researches (who may or may not be from our home country). Although we may not call ourselves migrants, we end up experiencing migration in similar ways to the participants of our research.

The emerging issue for us is how does this particular transnational aspect of our positionality (of researching migrants as academic migrants) influence us as researchers, the dynamics we establish with our participants and the ultimate shape of our research?

>> read the whole paper

There are also case studies about Somali migrants in Finland, Greek musicians in Germany, cultural capital during migration and Reflecting Upon Interculturality in Ethnographic Filmmaking where Laura Catalán Eraso claims that ethnographic film is still very much an under-utilised research technique. Films may illuminate the “intercultural” dynamics between minority (participant) and majority (researcher) and challenge the traditional power relations between the researcher and his/her “subjects”:

[T]he filmmaker(s) will loose authority in the film and that authority will tend to get decentralised and shared among subjects. Ways of doing this include allowing subjects to: manage the camera; choose the shots that are used: and, give feedback on the end results. These techniques, not dissimilar to those advocated in other forms of qualitative enquiry, will hopefully create new possibilities for ethnographic film by allowing space for greater equality between, and more reflection by, researchers and participants.

In the introduction, the editors remind us of that…

migration is not a new phenomenon: human beings have always been moving to other places, other regions and other countries. What is “new” is the relatively recent invention and creation of national borders and the “imagining” of nation-states (ANDERSON, 1983, pp.5-7). These ideological processes make migration “international” and thus problematise the natural behaviour of people attempting to improve their everyday lives.

>> overview over all articles in Forum: Qualitative Social Research on Qualitative Migration Research in Europe

How to do research on migration? Lots of interesting papers in the recent issue of the multilingual and interdisciplinary Open Access journal Forum: Qualitative Social Research.

"Qualitative Migration Research in Contemporary Europe" is the topic of the recent issue, and…

Interview with Arjun Appadurai: "An increasing and irrational fear of the minorities"

Published on August 9, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, cosmopolitanism, indigenous people / minorities, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

Fear of Small Numbers, the new book by Mumbai-born anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has received attention across America. He discusses why, in the age of globalisation, opening of markets, free flow of capital and liberal ideas, minorities in many countriesare facing greater hostilities than ever before.

In an interview with Rediff, he argues for “moving away from national loyalties towards urban and metropolitan loyalties, which put a premium on active tolerance and deliberate cosmopolitanism”.

He explains:

One of the basic arguments of the book is that the idea of a majority can create uncertainty about the primary identity of a nation. In the book, I call this the anxiety of incompleteness.

What I mean is that in every nation State without exception, somewhere beneath the surface is the idea that a nation is composed of a single ethnic substance, some kind of ethnic purity — and the idea of ethnic purity leads to the feeling that only people belonging to that ethnicity should be full citizens in that State.

And in a society like India, this is a huge problem because a certain group, in this case the Hindus, can view themselves as almost completely defining India but not totally. The problem — the incompleteness — is due to the presence of other groups, whether you call them minorities or strangers or guests or visitors.

Every Hindu Indian recognises that the land is not completely Hindu. In the book, I argue that this sense of incomplete purity does not necessarily lead to an effort to obliterate the minorities. But in many circumstances, it can lead to that. And we have seen increasing efforts in some parts of India, Gujarat in particular, to obliterate the minorities.

Thinking in the categories minority and majority is something new according to the anthropologist:

I have been interested in census statistics, how populations are actually enumerated. Apart from the question of being weak or subordinate, official enumeration is one of the ways minorities are created in the modern world.

The point here is that the idea of minority and majority was not always a part of human society. Human societies always had different groups; some were larger and some smaller; but the twin categories of minority and majority are modern phenomena.

For him as an anthropologist, he says, it is “painfully obvious that it has become culturally respectable to run down and suspect the Muslim community.”

The fear of the minorities is in his opinion “irrational”:

I believe that the radical, terrorist voices one hears in the Muslim communities in India are few and small. The average Muslim in India today has this request to the majority community: Give us the room to survive. Muslims in rural and urban India are not thinking of taking over India, but are asking whether they can live there at all.

>> read part 1 of the interview with Arjun Appadurai: The average Indian Muslim wants room to survive

>> part 2 of the interview: Indian society is still interdependent

>> review by Jeremy Ballenger: “A considered, fascinating and somewhat disturbing look at the ‘other side’ of globalisation”

SEE ALSO:

For an Anthropology of Cosmopolitanism

Interview with Benedict Anderson: “I like nationalism’s utopian elements”

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate”

Participant rather than client – anthropologist studies new refugee integration programme

Published on July 24, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, migration, Us and Them

Refugees are no longer treated as clients but as ‘participants’. They no longer receive social benefits but a salary for learning Norwegian and jobtraining. All recognised refugees in Norway have ‘the right and duty’ to attend a two year full-day Introductory Programme. Anthropologist Oddveig Nygård did fieldwork in one of these introductury centers in a small town in Western Norway.

She found that the new program on the one hand had positive effects on the relationship between refugees and the caseworkers – partly because the introductory programme allows the caseworkers to focus on other things than merely payment of benefits:

The fairly cold and bureaucratic environment of the social security office, in which the caseworkers are placed behind their desks and the refugees come to receive their social benefits, now belongs to the past. Instead, the refugees daily attend a centre where they see the caseworkers on a frequent basis. (…) The new framework has created a better basis to see the individual behind the refugee label and to obtain a more contextual image of the client. (…) The frequent encounters in more than just one setting have led to a more subtle relation between the two parties.

But the closer relationship between caseworkers and refugees creates ambiguity. There is a short step to the caseworkers being conceived of as a helper or a provider. Careworkers have to balance between care and control:

My study demonstrates how the motivation/sanction intersection of the introductory programme involves an element of control. Yet, the authority role tends to be diverted by the ‘fellow-being’ as they seem to have some empathy for the participant and his personal situation.

A drawback of the program is its focus on future planning and job acquirement, she writes. The role refugees seem most familiar with and accustomed to is the student role:

The majority of the refugee informants said they found it somewhat difficult to plan their future. (…) The main reason seems to be an expressed scepticism towards what they regard as limited job opportunities. (…) Several referred to their poor chances of getting a desirable job because they were ‘foreigners’, and some pointed to how even Norwegians face difficulties on the current labour market. Other spoke with resignation of the long process it would take to complete possible re-training and higher education. (…) As a result, the vagueness of the future planner role is likely to curb the overall role as ‘the active participant’.

She also describes her research process. As often the case, the anthropologist’s role is unclear to people in the field:

My mingling with both the caseworkers and the refugees certainly involved some challenges, probably causing some confusion as to “where I actually belonged”. I attempted to balance my involvement with the two groups by spending most time with the caseworkers during the refugees’ daily classes, and socialising with the refugees before and after classes, and in their lunch breaks. As a result, I sometimes had an unusual feeling of being a ‘social butterfly’ trying to be everyone’s ‘friend’.

At the same time, I may have been perceived as a somewhat curious element, primarily among the refugees, in the sense that that I was a young woman apparently having lots of time, and being more than willing to talk to people. I believe my relatively young age and my perceived student role may have made me less “threatening” and arguably made it easier to get in contact with people.

>> read the whole paper by Oddveig Nygård: “Between care and control: Interaction between refugees and caseworkers within the Norwegian” (pdf) (Working paper 32, Sussex Centre for Migration Research)

Refugees are no longer treated as clients but as 'participants'. They no longer receive social benefits but a salary for learning Norwegian and jobtraining. All recognised refugees in Norway have 'the right and duty' to attend a two year full-day…