Philosophies of integration | antropologi.info

Qualitative and quantitative ways of seeing (social) integration

Published on May 3, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Philosophies of integration

Suddenly, at least to me, the ESF, European Science Foundation, pops up everywhere with interesting conferences and seminars. I’ve already applied for Home, Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies, a combination of themes which matches perfectly with my research. Now, I aim for an extremely interesting seminar in Paris, which appears equally made for my research perspective, but at the same time is very challenging. The perfect match is that they want to look at two differing approaches to incorporation of immigrants in Europe (one focused on social/cultural integration the other on (anti-)discrimination measures), a comparison which is very similar to my aim of comparing the two different philosophies of social integration in (“multicultural”) Britain and (republican) France. The challenge is that their research is quantitative! Quantitative methods in the Social Sciences: Immigration and Population dynamics: Measuring Integration and Discrimination. Do they want my qualitative approach? I doubt it, but I’m going to try anyway. Besides, the precision they demand from the use of concepts is a very gratifying challenge:
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It is certainly not the aim of this seminar to find a definition that satisfies many, but rather to start from the empirical end, and see how integration is being operationalised in research (ESF).

– Not so difficult. I have my three levels of analysis which, when I come to think of it, actually is an operationalisation of my conception of social integration:

1) A microstudy of the creation of an open, cosmopolitan and democratic space: the slam/performance poetry scene, where people of all ages and of very varied social and ethnic backgrounds come together and perform their own short texts. I attempt to analyse the sessions as a prism of French society, in many ways more true to the republican ideals than the republic itself.

2) An analysis of the process of inhabitation (Ingold 2000; 2007) – how people shape the environment they live in as well as being shaped by it – in Belleville, in Northeast Paris, the cradle of Parisian slam poetry.

3) An analysis of France as inherently postcolonial (i.e. shaped by her colonial past), seen form the perspective delineated by Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (1982). (from my abstract)

The fundamental aim of the research is in fact to come a little closer to what social integration can mean in Europe today:

The overarching aim of the research project is to describe and make sense of the making of society – the social integration – in a former colonial metropolis, postcolonial Paris (and London). I understand the incorporation of newcomers – as well as of older residents – as a continuous process, where society – itself a process – is reproduced daily through everyday activities and encounters. Integration, understood as social cohesion or vivre ensemble, is thus a core concept in the project.(from my abstract)

What indicators are used and how are these believed to reflect integration as a process, but also as a state of affairs? (ESF).

Here the qualitative approach runs into serious trouble. Integration as a process, we’re good at of course, particularly since anthropology easily turns everything, including society itself into a an ongoing process. But indicators… Let’s try. What people say might be an indicator, no? I look at notions of belonging and perceptions of society among its members. I also look at who gets to voice their opinion and be heard. If, as my main hypothesis(!) says:

France is inherently postcolonial, i.e. fundamentally marked by her past and present global connection, but this fact has to a very limited degree been officially recognised. I claim that various forms of reappropriation – of space, time/history and notion of society – take place, on a conscious as well as unconscious level. Reappropriation becomes thus an important factor in postcolonial social integration.(from my abstract)

Why have these indicators been chosen, and to what extent do differences in theoretical viewpoints play a role in such choices? (ESF)

And, very good food for thought:

What are the major indicators of immigrant incorporation and how should these be operationalised in research that may be carried out at the interface of the two approaches [integration and (anti-) discrimination]? (ESF)

The last are not questions I could answer within the limit of 500 words, but definitely something to think about for my methodology chapter. The call for papers asked explicitly for main hypotheses, data, methodology and expected conclusions. Even though I love these kinds of puzzles where I have to match the answers to the questions perfectly, it’s not a way I as an anthropologist work very often. What exactly do I look for in the comparison between London and Paris?

In order to more clearly see the dynamic between the making of society and notions of belonging, I intend, in the final chapter of my PhD, to compare two different constructions of society with divergent categorisations of its inhabitants (e.g. hyphenated identity categories are common in the UK). Parallel postcolonial reappropriations take place in France and Britain, but since the two countries have distinctly different traditions of social philosophy accompanied by different histories as nation states, colonial powers and societies of immigration, the resulting perceptions of society and notions of belonging will be different. (from my abstract)

What questions do I want to answer when I look at this and that? Or, the other way around; what questions am I able to answer if my is gathered mainly through participant observation and informal conversations. In my opinion, there is no better way to investigate into the condition of society and its members that to actually look at what people do and listen to what they have to say about it. However, when I compare my approach to the specific language of quantitative approach can I understand why it’s more difficult to translate my own wordy descriptions into simple answers to direct questions… I’m not sure if this make sense yet, but it interests me and it seems relevant in order to investigate into the contributions of artful elements in anthropology that I’ve been writing about lately. And it will of course be relevant when I write my methods chapter in the autumn.

Suddenly, at least to me, the ESF, European Science Foundation, pops up everywhere with interesting conferences and seminars. I’ve already applied for Home, Migration and the City: New Narratives, New Methodologies, a combination of themes which matches perfectly with my…

Parisian performance poetry: a republican space for encounters?

Published on July 1, 2008 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Philosophies of integration, Politics, Writing

Another presentation which I blatantly will fail to give (see this post), were to take place at a conference in Oxford in about one week’s time, Encounters and Intersections: Religion, Diaspora and Ethnicities.

The problematics of this paper give me the opportunity to look at two other aspect of the space created during a slam session: the particular quality of the encounters taking place. While only a very few of the participants talked explicitly about the political and subversive character of the slam phenomenon (see previous post), many more will describe it as a quite unique place for encounters. This is thus more of a native’s point of view than what is treated in the previous post. The ways many people describe the soirées echoes in my opinion important values of the French Republic. This is the next aspect I’ll introduce in the analysis of the space created during a session. In the previous post, I looked in the direction of connections between the local socio-political environment of the city and the soirées, in this it’s the connections between the soirées and the Republic herself I postulate. These problematics will go into chapter 2 and Chapter 5 (see the outline at the end of this post). Here’s my abstract for the conference:

Parisian performance poetry: a republican space for encounters?
Cicilie Fagerlid

In this paper, I will explore the space for encounters created during Parisian slam poetry sessions. Many participants characterise this performance poetry scene as a medium for rencontres (encounters) of people of different backgrounds. The sessions are among the most mixed events one can find in France, in terms of social and ethnic background as well as age and gender. It can thus be seen as an arch expression of the French republican ideal of mixité sociale and the value of vivre ensemble (“living together” – a term with similarities to the British notion of “community cohesion”).
The performances treat a vide variety of issues, expressed with a variety of different artistic styles, from rap to French traditional poetry via experimental theatre. However, seen from a British multiculturally inspired paradigm, the issues of collective religious or ethnic identities are conspicuously absent.
I will place the poetry sessions within the socio-political geography of East Paris (a popular, bohemian and increasingly gentrified area shaped by immigration) and the French republican paradigm of social integration. The paper is based on 16 months of fieldwork in East Paris. In addition, I will draw on my previous research project on British Asians in London.

Contact details:
Cicilie Fagerlid
Department of Social Anthropology/Cultural Complexity in the New Norway
Postboks 1091 Blindern
N-0317 Oslo
Norway

Cicilie Fagerlid is working on her PhD thesis with the preliminary title Society in the Making: Post Colonial Paris and the Slam Poetry Scene. She is employed at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Complexity in the New Norway, strategic research programme, both at the University of Oslo.

Another presentation which I blatantly will fail to give (see this post), were to take place at a conference in Oxford in about one week’s time, Encounters and Intersections: Religion, Diaspora and Ethnicities.

The problematics of this paper give me…

– my research project so far (part 2): Parisian slam poetry vs British Asian ethnogenesis

Published on August 31, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Music, literature, arts..., Philosophies of integration

In the second part of my presentation, I moved on to the particular field where I hung around and conducted anthropological fieldwork proper; thus participated as I observed or vice versa. As some will already know, that field is a slam poetry scene in Paris. I’ve written about it here already, and I’ll surely return to it, so I’ve not found it worth translating that part of my presentation here. Instead, I’ll reflect a little around the comparison I’m intending to make between the slam poetry phenomenon in Paris and the cultural expressions which constituted a core element in my study in London. In the third and final part of this post, I’ll try to recall the questions I got after my presentation.
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In my MA/MPhil thesis I looked at the creation (i.e. the ethnogenesis) of a home-grown British Asian identity – thus a new way of being British –, where cultural expressions, particularly music, with influences from south Asia played an important part. Without cutting corners in my future analysis, these two artistic phenomena – the wave of British Asian music, London 1999, and the slam poetry scene, Paris 2006 – show interesting similarities and differences.

In both phenomena, people create a space where they can express themselves. I’d say that it can be described as a, more or less, free space, and it reminds me of my favourite (anarcho-)philosophical quote:

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover who we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual form the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries (Foucault 1982, “The subject and power”).

I’ve already sketched the outline of an analysis of to what degree some British Asian cosmopolitans in my study, represented attempts at such new forms of subjectivities. I think Foucault’s perspective can be a constructive approach to my Parisian field as well.

Another similarity between the two phenomena is that they were in vogue (when I did my research), seemingly just about to reach the top before they get commercialised, get too big and turn stale, with too many jump the bandwagon… The knowledge of how trends, commercial forces and bourgeoisation work probably worry participants in all such artistic waves.

On the other hand, the differences are also interesting: The slam poetry scene in Paris seems to have little to do with identity politics, and its cosmopolitan and heterogeneous (thus non ethnic/communitarian) nature is striking. All this, I find characteristic of the French society, and in contrast to the British.

I know this overview of the two fields is extremely sketchy, but this theme is not at all what I will be working on at the moment. The point has just been to justify my choice of the slam scene as suitable for a comparison with my London ethnography.

French versus Germanic national identity

Published on May 9, 2006 by cicilie Posted in Cicilie among the Parisians, Philosophies of integration

I don’t have the habit of commenting news here, but an article in Der Spiegel (English version, link by Erkan’s fielddiary) caught my attention. First I didn’t really understand what it was about; natality rate in Germany going down…? Yes, that was obviously the case, but I was soon to discover that this was not the main challenge presented in the article. Further down I read that: “German pre-schools will soon be filling up with children who are neither German nor Christian.” Got to change your naturalisation procedures then, I thought.

But as I read on, I understood that changing the way German nationality is obtained wouldn’t help: “Germans are not only dying out, but they’re slowly being replaced by non-Germans.” And so on. (“Will the German national anthem one day be sung in Turkish?”).

I should in fact have got the clue from the title “On becoming Un-German”. And curiously, I should also have got the clue from a news reportage I’d watched just a few minutes before. It was about the children born to French women and German soldiers during World War 2. The reporter said that the ideology of Nazism didn’t encourage the Germans to have relations with the French women, who contrary to the Danes and Norwegians, were seen as abâtardi (“degenerated”, from “bastard”).

A similar discourse on “Norwegians” slowly being replaced by “non-Norwegains” is present in Norway as well. One can say many things on the republican notion of French identity, but at least it’s not overtly racialised. Thus, I doubt that a text like the one in Der Spiegel could have been written in a major French newspaper.