The Translocation of Culture: Migration, Community, and the Force of Multiculturalism in History

In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations by politicians and policy makers of ‘community cohesion’ and the failure of communal leadership, following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against the critique of self-segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated ‘communities’. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual and social exchange and performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process. Classification-

The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest : the Arab Spring and Beyond

A remarkable feature of the Arab Spring and other protests that followed in Egypt, India, Botswana and the UK, among other places, has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances. This book explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the mass mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes, the apolitical silent majority, as well as enabling solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties. Comparing the North African and Middle Eastern uprisings with protest movements such as Occupy, the authors bring to bear an anthropological and sociological approach from a variety of perspectives, illuminating the debate by drawing on a wide array of disciplinary expertise.https://ecommons.aku.edu/uk_ismc_series_volumes/1003/thumbnail.jp

Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Gendered Entrepreneurship and British South Asian Women in the Culture Industries

The 200 Richest Asians Magazines 2000, 2002, 2003 construct the success of British South Asian multi-millionaires in images that foreground their masculine traits and characteristics. And yet, this paper argues, such individual success stories are merely the tip of an “entrepreneurial iceberg”. They mask the existence of clusters of immigrant enterprises concentrated in particular economic sectors and industries. These may be headed by women as well as men. While South Asian men in Britain initially dominated the food, clothing, property and IT economic enclaves, the entry of second- and third-generation migrants into professional self-employment in the media and culture industries has included a substantial number of women as well. Like other South Asian millionaires, however, to understand the rise of South Asian women media millionaires, the paper argues, we need to look beyond individual success stories to the historical formation of a growing South Asian enclave economy in the culture industries in Britain, in which women play a major role.Les deux cents Richest Asians Magazines 2000, 2002, 2003 illustrent le succès des multi-millionnaires britanniques d’Asie du sud par des figures mettant au premier plan des caractères et des traits masculins. Cependant, ce magazine n’hésite pas à dire que de telles réussites individuelles ne représentent que la pointe de l’« iceberg entrepreneurial ». Elles dissimulent l’existence de nombre d’entreprises ethniques concentrées dans certains secteurs économiques et qui peuvent être dirigées par des femmes comme par des hommes. Si les hommes d’Asie du Sud occupaient initialement les créneaux économiques de l’alimentation, du vêtement, de l’immobilier et des technologies informatiques, l’entrée des deuxième et troisième générations de migrants dans les entreprises indépendantes des média et de la culture, inclut un nombre conséquent de femmes. La multiplication des réussites économiques des femmes d’Asie du Sud dans les média, comme la réalisation d’autres grosses fortunes asiatiques, ne peut s’expliquer que par la formation historique d’une enclave économique sud-asiatique dans les entreprises de la culture en Grande-Bretagne, dans lesquelles les femmes jouent un rôle déterminant.Los dos cientos Richest Asians Magazines 2000, 2002, 2003 ilustran el éxito de los multimillonarios británicos de Asia del sur con figuras que valoran a caracteres y rasgos masculinos. Sin embargo la revista se atreve a decir que estos éxitos individuales representan solo la punta del «iceberg empresarial». Disimulan la existencia de numerosas empresas étnicas concentradas en ciertos sectores económicos y que pueden tener a su cabeza tanto una mujer como un hombre. Si los hombres de Asia del sur ocuparon en un primer tiempo ciertos segmentos del mercado como la alimentación, la confección, el sector inmobiliario y las nuevas tecnologías, las mujeres fueron más numerosas cuando la segunda y la tercera generación entraron en las empresas independientes de la información y de la cultura. Solo la formación histórica de una enclave económica surasiática de empresas culturales de Gran Bretaña, enclave en la cual las mujeres tuvieron un papel determinante, puede explicar tanto la aparición de nuevas e importantes fortunas como la multiplicación de éxitos económicos de mujeres de Asia del Sur en los medias

Diaspora identification and long-distance nationalism among Tamil migrants of diverse state origins in the UK

Accounts of Tamil long-distance nationalism have focused on Sri Lankan Tamil migrants. But the UK is also home to Tamils of non-Sri Lankan state origins. While these migrants may be nominally incorporated into a 'Tamil diaspora', they are seldom present in scholarly accounts. Framed by Werbner's (2002) conception of diasporas as 'aesthetic' and 'moral' communities, this article explores whether engagement with a Tamil diaspora and long-distance nationalism is expressed by Tamil migrants of diverse state origins. While migrants identify with an aesthetic community, 'membership' of the moral community is contested between those who hold direct experience of suffering as central to belonging, and those who imagine the boundaries of belonging more fluidly - based upon primordial understandings of essential ethnicity and a narrative of Tamil 'victimhood' that incorporates experiences of being Tamil in Sri Lanka, India and in other sites, despite obvious differences in these experiences. © 2013 Taylor & Francis

Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys: Ritual, Normativity and the Religious Imagination Among International Asian Migrant Women

This issue highlights recent ethnographic work that discloses migrant women’s creative engagements with the people and landscapes in the places they migrate to. We challenge a dominant view that construes women international migrants from Asia as docile bodies shaped and constrained by their transnational (re)productive labours. And we reject simplistic contemporary formulations of transnational migration that posit a singular, homogeneous ‘transnational social field’. Three key processes, relatively ignored and under theorised are interrogated: diaspora formation, ritual performance and changing normativities. A focus on diaspora encourages us to move beyond a political and economic analysis to consider cultural practices, continuities and discontinuities in migrants’ relationships with the people and places they travel to, as well as those left behind. A focus on ritual emphasises the significance of religious performance in the making of place and convivial sociality. A focus on normativity foregrounds the ways that people’s affective relationships are performatively reworked and transgressed within and across discrepant diasporic spaces

Multiculturalism and moderate secularism

What is sometimes talked about as the ‘post-secular’ or a ‘crisis of secularism’ is, in Western Europe, quite crucially to do with the reality of multiculturalism. By which I mean not just the fact of new ethno-religious diversity but the presence of a multiculturalist approach to this diversity, namely: the idea that equality must be extended from uniformity of treatment to include respect for difference; recognition of public/private interdependence rather than dichotomized as in classical liberalism; the public recognition and institutional accommodation of minorities; the reversal of marginalisation and a remaking of national citizenship so that all can have a sense of belonging to it. I think that equality requires that this ethno-cultural multiculturalism should be extended to include state-religion connexions in Western Europe, which I characterise as ‘moderate secularism’, based on the idea that political authority should not be subordinated to religious authority yet religion can be a public good which the state should assist in realising or utilising. I discuss here three multiculturalist approaches that contend this multiculturalising of moderate secularism is not the way forward. One excludes religious groups and secularism from the scope of multiculturalism (Kymlicka); another largely limits itself to opposing the ‘othering’ of groups such as Jews and Muslims (Jansen); and the third argues that moderate secularism is the problem not the solution (Bhargava)

Being Tamil, being Hindu:Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents’ population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus’ attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the ‘DIY’ performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings