an association between diversity and exoticism

Focusing on contemporary Iranian artists and intellectuals, I examine the creation of collective identifications from an internal perspective. Drawing on research on migrant associations and ethnic and racial boundaries in Germany, the ethnographic account alternates between internal relations, member's participation in the transnational field of Iranian artists, and representative activities in the German public sphere. It explains how the members' unequal resources and varying politics of value caused a shift in the association's system of value. From a critique of assimilationism and the promotion of the value of diversity, the group came to largely comply with the system of value prevailing in the German public sphere, sustained by its intersection with the one that shapes the transnational social field of Iranian artists