Diasporic Belonging: The Life-Worlds and Language Practices of Muslim Youth From Marseille

Since the 1980s, when it became clear that immigrants from France’s ex-colonies were likely to settle with their families in France, the French have repeatedly questioned the cultural compatibility of Muslim immigrants and their descendants with French Republican values. Recent security concerns about Islamic terrorism in Western countries have reinflamed this debate about French Muslims’ “assimilability,” albeit with a novel focus on the cultural affiliations of French Muslim youth, in particular. The French State and politicians are concerned about survey data showing that, even as such youth have acceded to legal citizenship, they nevertheless exhibit a greater adherence to Islamic norms and more numerous transnational links than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and may, for these reasons, pose a threat to French sovereignty. This dissertation investigates these top-down claims of French Muslim youth’s unprecedented religiosity and transnationalism, seeking to ethnographically test the veracity of such hypotheses and to offer a more nuanced, historically emplaced account of youth’s cultural identifications and practices. Based on long-term research with youth ages 13 to 30 who grew up in North, West, and East African Muslim households in Marseille’s northern housing projects, I demonstrate that such youth embody various emic forms of belonging to France, many of which stretch mainstream definitions of what constitutes Frenchness. Through ethnographic observation of these youth while they partook in Arabic classes, spent time with their peers and family, and navigated public space, this work reveals that youth more often perform local cultural belonging than are accorded French cultural citizenship, or the right to be seen and heard as French within the public sphere. I document the forms of alienation from Marseille that youth experience as a result, quite notable among them a gendered reverse migration phenomenon whereby orthodox-identified Muslim young women are planning to leave Marseille for their parents’ home countries and the Gulf States. Two further foci of the dissertation are the role of Arabic language education, both publicly provided and denominational, in shaping youth’s cultural trajectories, and also the analysis of youth’s language practices. I contend that, as diasporic youth draw upon—and play with—standard and non-standard varieties of French and Arabic, they afford the listener unique insight into where they are coming from and where they are headed, or their life-worlds and aspirations

Ideology, Media and Conflict in Political Discourse and Its Translation During the Arab Spring: Syria as a Case Study

Translation, although often invisible in the field of politics, is actually an integral part of political activity. Which texts get translated, from and into which languages is itself already a political decision (Schäffner and Bassnett, 2010: 13). Translation has recently shifted its focus from the notions of originality and equivalence to those of power and patronage. This has proven essential, especially in relation to the translation of political discourse. Samuel Butler maintains that every person’s production, whether literature, music, pictures, architecture, or anything else, is a portrait of themselves. Translation is no exception. The translator’s role is no longer perceived as a transparent means of communication that is expected to relay the exact message of the original producer of the discourse. This thesis will view translation as a rewriting of the original text, recognising the translator as an author who modifies and changes the ST according to his or her ideology, political stand, or general interests. The translator is also foremost a reader who brings his or her own judgments, imposing them upon the text, perhaps reshaping the entire political discourse. Media outlets employ certain strategies and techniques to superimpose the media outlet’s agenda and objectives onto translations, promoting certain ideological convictions and political views. This thesis examines the relationship between a number of issues in relation to ideology, media, political discourse, language, and translation. Illustrative examples are extracted from the political discourse communicated during the Arab Spring. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis and narrative theory as a theoretical framework. It also aims to detect political tools and strategies often used in political discourse production and media discourse to analyse the data circulated on the Arab Spring. It seeks to look for the ideological influence of both translator and patronage on the outcome of the translation process. The data used for analysis in this thesis is taken from the political discourse communicated during the Arab Spring, in particular the Syrian revolution. The data corpus consists of translated interviews, political articles, and political speeches. Examples of revolutionary discourse produced by protesters are also included, alongside their translations. This is a qualitative study that lists and analyses representative samples of the translated political discourse, drawing conclusions and findings conclusions that apply to most of the data found in the context of the Arab Spring

Global sport and local modernity : the case of 'professionalisation' of football in Algeria

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Cultural Anxieties and Institutional Regulation: Specialized Mental Healthcare and Immigrant Suffering in Paris, France

This dissertation looks at specialized mental healthcare expertise in France as a lens through which to address the institutional management and representations of cultural difference in France today. By specialized mental healthcare centers, I refer structures that provide culturally-sensitive mental health services to immigrants specifically. I identify and explore three contemporary expert approaches: namely, transcultural psychiatry, clinical medical anthropology, and ethnoclinical mediation. By providing a genealogy of specialized mental healthcare institutions, and by construing them as meta-discursive nodes --that is, as points of encounter between state, institutional, and individual ideologies--I provide an analysis of the cultural anxieties, contradictions and double-binds that arise from the opposition between a regulative, universalist republican ideology, and a field of expertise which strives to promote culturally-sensitive mental healthcare for immigrants. I argue that, as a product of the conflation of the immigrant issue : la question immigrée) and the social issue : la question sociale), immigrant suffering : Sayad, 2004) has become a medium that problematically couches immigrants\u27 difficulties -- whether they relate to mental health pathology or structural problems--in terms of cultural difference. As a result, generic cultural representations of immigrants are uncritically reproduced, making it difficult to identify and address the structural inequalities that do engender suffering

Technology, Science, and Culture: A Global Vision

The aim of the Workshop: Technology, Science, and Culture - A Global Vision is to create a discussion forum on research related to the fields of Water Science, Food Science, Intelligent Systems, Molecular Biomedicine, and Creation and Theories of Culture. The workshop is intended to discuss research on current problems, relevant methodologies, and future research streams and to create an environment for the exchange of ideas and collaboration among participants

Facebook dialect: orthographical standardisation in Romanised Lebanese-Arabic

With the advent of the internet, the new communicative opportunities afforded to millions of its users across the globe have not always come without drawbacks– and in some cases, unexpected advantages. For speakers of colloquial Arabic dialects, such as that of Lebanese colloquial Arabic, the traditional Arabic script used for writing both Classical Arabic and its associated colloquial forms was not available for use in the first programs and applications that enabled digital communication. The resulting adoption of the Roman script has persisted well beyond the availability of the Arabic script for online communication, and is considered a non-standard orthography, used for the writing of a non-standard language, offering its users both constraint (for the representation of sounds for which the Roman script is not suited) and freedom (for the writing of certain colloquial Arabic features of that the Arabic script is not suited, as well as from the generalised constraint of standard language culture). This puts the Roman script orthography of Lebanese colloquial Arabic in a unique position, where users do not have a direct standard reflex to which to refer or recourse, meaning that unlike non-standard orthographies such as those used to write English dialects, or even creole languages such as Jamaican Creole with a standard lexifier (in this case also English), there is no means by which users can tend towards (or away from) a codified, standardised manner of writing. And yet what emerges is not unbound chaos, but an effective and in many cases expressive writing that generally serves the practical (if not ideological) needs of its users well. Though the QA dialects and in particular their online CMC manifestations have been studied extensively over the past two decades, the opportunity to understand how written conventions form on a grassroots level when there is no standard reflex from which users can draw has not yet been taken advantage of. This study adopts a ‘mature’ understanding of the sociolinguistics of writing and a modern understanding of standardisation as a cultured and imposed paradigm, with which we can consider the non-standard writing of Lebanese colloquial Arabic as it is used in the city of Tripoli in Lebanon not as an orthography that is simply awaiting standardisation (or which can be expected to inevitably standardise), but rather as flexible, dynamic writing well-suited to its use outside of the standard language culture paradigm, and yet within which written conventions nevertheless can be observed, and a process of conventionalisation and its effects can be detected and described. The city of Tripoli, due to its troubled history, has a history of Facebook groups initially formed for the discussion of news not otherwise covered by mainstream media, but which have evolved over time to become discussion boards for members of the city, seeing regular Roman script writing and so serving as the first corpus for this study, alongside a series of experimental interviews conducted in Tripoli in 2016 that allow the novel comparison between spoken and written forms in a manner not yet exploited by studies of grassroots conventionalisation, allowing us to ultimately describe this process and produce novel conclusions about how conventionalisation works for non-standard orthographies untethered to a single standard form or the imposed constraints of standard ideology

Ethnic constructs in antiquity: the role of power and tradition

This volume explores the theme of ethnicity and ethnogenesis in societies of the ancient world. Its starting point is the current view in the social and historical sciences of ethnicity as a subjective construct that is shaped through interaction with an ethnic 'other'. The 13 essays collected in this volume are based on the analysis of historical, epigraphic and archaeological source material and thematically range from Archaic Greece to Early Mediaeval Western Europe. Despite frequent claims by ethnic groups to the contrary, all ethnic formations are intrinsically unstable and dynamic over time. Much of this dynamism is to be understood in close association with conflict, violence and changing constellations of power. The explicit theoretical framework, together with the wide range of case-studies makes this volume indispensable for historians, archaeologists and social scientists with an interest in the ancient world.Uit dertien casestudies - van gebieden uiteenlopend van het Archaïsch Griekenland tot het vroegmiddeleeuws West-Europa - blijkt dat etnische identiteiten verbonden zijn met een traditiedragende kern in de samenleving, maar tegelijk onderhevig zijn aan een dynamiek die vaak bepaald wordt door veranderende machtsconfiguraties

Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity

This volume explores the theme of ethnicity and ethnogenesis in societies of the ancient world. Its starting point is the current view in the social and historical sciences of ethnicity as a subjective construct that is shaped through interaction with an ethnic 'other'. The 13 essays collected in this volume are based on the analysis of historical, epigraphic and archaeological source material and thematically range from Archaic Greece to Early Mediaeval Western Europe. Despite frequent claims by ethnic groups to the contrary, all ethnic formations are intrinsically unstable and dynamic over time. Much of this dynamism is to be understood in close association with conflict, violence and changing constellations of power. The explicit theoretical framework, together with the wide range of case-studies makes this volume indispensable for historians, archaeologists and social scientists with an interest in the ancient world.Uit dertien casestudies - van gebieden uiteenlopend van het Archaïsch Griekenland tot het vroegmiddeleeuws West-Europa - blijkt dat etnische identiteiten verbonden zijn met een traditiedragende kern in de samenleving, maar tegelijk onderhevig zijn aan een dynamiek die vaak bepaald wordt door veranderende machtsconfiguraties. Eerder verschenen titels in de Amsterdam Archaeological Studies en meer informatie over de serie kunt u "http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_booklist&b=series&series=1">hier vinden

The Anthropology of Security

In a post-Cold War world of political unease and economic crisis, processes of securitisation are transforming nation-states, their citizens and non-citizens in profound ways. The book shows how contemporary Europe is now home to a vast security industry which uses biometric identification systems, CCTV and quasi-military techniques to police migrants and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This is the first collection of anthropological studies of security with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on Europe. The Anthropology of Security draws together studies on the lived experiences of security and policing from the perspective of those most affected in their everyday lives. The anthropological perspectives in this volume stretch from the frontlines of policing and counter-terrorism to border control

Latin and Arabic

As linguistic systems comprising a large variety of written and oral registers including derivate “languages” and “dialects,” Latin and Arabic have been of paramount importance for the history of the Euromediterranean since Antiquity. Moreover, due to their long-term function as languages of administration, intellectual activity, and religion, they are often regarded as cultural markers of Europe and the (Arabic-)Islamic sphere respectively. This volume explores the many dimensions and ramifications of Latin-Arabic entanglement both from macro-historical as well as from micro-historical perspectives. Visions of history marked by the binary opposition of “Islam” and “the West” tend to ignore these important facets of Euromediterranean entanglement, as do historical studies that explain complex transcultural processes without giving attention to their linguistic dimension.Latein und Arabisch haben als Sprachsysteme mit einer großen Vielfalt an schriftlichen und mündlichen Registern, darunter “Sprachen” und Dialekte”, in der Geschichte des Euromediterraneums seit der Antike eine herausragende Rolle gespielt. Aufgrund ihrer lang anhaltenden Funktion als Sprachen der Administration, intellektueller Aktivität und Religion, werden sie oft als kultureller Marker Europas und der arabisch-islamischen Sphäre betrachtet. Dieser Band untersucht die vielen Facetten lateinisch-arabischer Verflechtung aus makro- und mikrohistorischer Perspektive. Er stellt die binäre Opposition von “Islam” und “dem Westen” in Frage und hebt die sprachliche Dimension christlich-muslimischer Beziehungen hervor