Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research (Transnationalism)

Citation preview

Diaspora, Identity and Religion

Over the last decade, concepts of diaspora and locality have gained complex new meanings in political discourse as well as in social and cultural studies. Diaspora, in particular, has acquired new meanings relating to notions such as global deterritorialization, transnational migration and cultural hybridity. This evolution seems to imply that locality is no longer a relevant point of reference for collective identities. This book, however, argues that locality has not lost its meaning entirely. It claims that, although diasporas transcend boundaries, they remain sited, and space and place thus remain important points of reference. Diaspora and locality, rather than being opposed or contradictory, are interrelated. The authors discuss the key concepts and theory, focusing on the meaning of religion both as a factor in forming diasporic social organizations, as well as in shaping and maintaining diasporic identities, and the appropriation of space and place in history. It includes up-to-date research of the Caribbean, Irish, Armenian, African and Greek diasporas. Waltraud Kokot is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg, Germany. Khachig Tölölyan is Professor of English at the Wesleyan University, USA. Carolin Alfonso is a researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

Transnationalism Series editor: Steven Vertovec University of Oxford

‘Transnationalism’ broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states. Today myriad systems of relationship, exchange and mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread across the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks. Despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), many forms of association have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common arena of activity. In some instances transnational forms and processes serve to speed-up or exacerbate historical patterns of activity, in others they represent arguably new forms of human interaction. Transnational practices and their consequent figurations of power are shaping the world of the twenty-first century. This book forms part of a series of volumes describing and analyzing a range of phenomena surrounding this field. Serving to ground theory and research on ‘globalization’, the Routledge book series on ‘Transnationalism’ offers the latest empirical studies and ground-breaking theoretical works on contemporary socioeconomic, political and cultural processes which span international boundaries. Contributions to the series are drawn from Sociology, Economics, Anthropology, Politics, Geography, International Relations, Business Studies and Cultural Studies. The series is associated with the Transnational Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council (see http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk). The series consists of two strands: Transnationalism aims to address the needs of students and teachers and these titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include: Culture and Politics in the Information Age A new politics? Edited by Frank Webster Transnational Democracy Political spaces and border crossings Edited by James Anderson

Routledge Research in Transnationalism is a forum for innovative new research intended for high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include: 1 New Transnational Social Spaces International migration and transnational companies in the early 21st century Edited by Ludger Pries 2 Transnational Muslim Politics* Reimmagining the Umma Peter G. Mandaville 3 New Approaches to Migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of home Edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser 4 Work and Migration Life and livelihoods in a globalizing world Edited by Ninna Nyberg Sorensen and Karen Fog Olwig 5 Communities across Borders New immigrants and transnational cultures Edited by Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof 6 Transnational Spaces Edited by Peter Jackson, Phil Crang and Claire Dwyer 7 The Media of Diaspora Edited by Karim H. Karim 8 Transnational Politics Turks and Kurds in Germany Eva Østergaard-Nielsen 9 Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora Edited by Bhikhu Parekh, Gurharpal Singh and Steven Vertovec 10 International Migration and Globalization Edited by Rey Koslowski 11 Gender in Transnationalism Home, longing and belonging among Moroccan migrant women Ruba Salih

12 State/Nation/Transnation Perspectives and transnationalism in the Asia–Pacific Edited by Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Katie Willis 13 Transnational Activism in Asia Problems of power and democracy Edited by Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin 14 Diaspora, Identity and Religion New directions in theory and research Edited by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso 15 Cross-border Governance in the European Union Edited by Oliver Thomas Kramsch and Barbara Hooper *Also available in paperback

Diaspora, Identity and Religion New directions in theory and research

Edited by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Diaspora, identity and religion : new directions in theory and research edited by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Emigration and immigration. 2. Ethnic relations–Political aspects. 3. Group identity. 4. Religious minorities. 5. Space and time–Social aspects. I. Kokot, Waltraud. II. Tölölyan, Khachig. III. Alfonso, Carolin, 1969– JV6091.D53 2003 304.8´09–dc22 2003021155 ISBN 0-203-40105-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34128-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30991–3 (Print Edition)

Contents

vii

Contents

List of contributors

ix

Introduction

1

W A LT R AU D K O KO T, K H A C H I G T Ö L Ö LYA N A N D C A RO L I N A L F O N S O

1

Deconstructing and comparing diasporas

9

WILLIAM SAFRAN

PART I

Politics, history and locality 2

‘Too close for comfort’: re-membering the forgotten diaspora of Irish women in England

31

33

B R E DA G R AY

3

Place, movement and identity: processes of inclusion and exclusion in a ‘Caribbean’ family

53

KAREN FOG OLWIG

4

Why locality matters: diaspora consciousness and sedentariness in the Armenian diaspora in Greece

72

S U S A N N E S C H WA L G I N

5

Past and present in the history of modern Greek diaspora

93

IANNIS HASSIOTIS

6

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora H AU K E D O R S C H

102

viii 7

Contents The invention of history in the Irish-American diaspora: myths of the Great Famine

117

A S T R I D W O N N E B E RG E R

PART II

Diasporic aspects of religion 8

Religion or culture? Concepts of identity in the Alevi diaspora

131

133

M A RT I N S Ö K E F E L D

9

A double minority: notes on the emerging Yezidi diaspora

156

ANDREAS ACKERMANN

10

A diachronic view of diaspora, the significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

170

M A RT I N B AU M A N N

11

Let it flow: economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi network

189

DIETER HALLER

Index

205

List of contributors

ix

Contributors

Andreas Ackermann is a researcher and academic leader at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Carolin Alfonso is a researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany. Martin Baumann is Professor of History of Religions at the University of Bremen, Germany. Hauke Dorsch is a researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, Germany. Breda Gray is Professor of Women’s Studies at the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, University College, Cork, Ireland. Dieter Haller is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of Europe at the University of Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Iannis Hassiotis is Professor of History at the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. Waltraud Kokot is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany. Karen Fog Olwig is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. William Safran is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Comparative Politics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Susanne Schwalgin is a researcher at the Institute for Intercultural Pedagogy, University of Münster, Germany. Martin Sökefeld is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany. Khachig Tölölyan is Professor of English at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA and editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Astrid Wonneberger is a researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg, Germany.

x

List of contributors

Introduction

1

Introduction Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

In the last decades of the twentieth century, questions of boundaries, space and mobility have become a central focus of debate in anthropology. Time-honoured approaches of fieldwork seemed to have lost their sites, social entities long held to be clearly defined by distinct boundaries of reference and/or of location, seemed to dissolve before the anthropologists’ gaze. The concept of culture – once a comfortable, if admittedly vague, reference to everything anthropologists used to study, had lost its innocence. Now ‘culture’ is seen as fraught with notions of homogeneity, boundedness and locality, implicitly denying new realities. In this context, the concept of diaspora has acquired a new and theoretically challenging position. Following Tölölyan’s (1991) programmatic statement in the first issue of the journal Diaspora, this concept has been related to a vast field of meanings, including global processes of de-territorialization, transnational migration and cultural hybridity. These notions, as opposed to more ‘rooted’ forms of identification such as ‘regions’ or ‘nations’, seemed to imply a decline of ‘locality’ as a point of reference for collective identities. A growing body of literature on space, place and the crossing of boundaries has criticized and deconstructed the general discourse of ‘rootedness’ which long dominated anthropological research and stereotyped other forms of existence as exotic exceptions or as a threat to the natural order of things (see Malkki 1992). Following these changing points of departure, the concept of ‘diaspora’, once associated with traumatic dispersal and incomplete attempts at coping with collective deficits, was now hailed as the ‘paradigmatic other’ (Tölölyan 1991:4) – occasionally even as the ‘moral better’ – of the nation state (see Clifford 1994). This, however, has created the danger of trading old myths for new. As Karen Fog Olwig (Olwig and Hastrup 1997; see also Olwig in this volume) and others have shown, the field of migration studies, particularly in the USA, is presently dominated by a terminology of mobility, transnational relations and the dissolution of local boundaries. This, however, may be more of a reflection of contemporary discourse in Western social sciences than of lived experiences of diaspora. Ethnographic close-up studies of such experiences are needed to provide a testing ground for theoretical concepts and generalizations. The chapters in this volume present a range of different case studies addressing questions of how diasporic identities are formed over time. All were presented

2

Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

and discussed as papers at the conference ‘Locality, Identity and Diaspora’1 in Hamburg, Germany (2000), although not all contributions to the conference could be included in this book. The topics of this conference, bringing together researchers from various disciplines and different regional specializations, referred to the significance of history, place, space, ritual, belief and other factors in the formation of diasporic identities. ‘Identity’, ‘locality’ and ‘religion’ emerged as common denominators of discussion. In this book, we will use these terms in a quite pragmatic fashion. Also, rather than limiting the range of contributions to one particular definition or to one type of ‘diaspora’, we have included a wide variety of case studies and different theoretical approaches.

The concept of diaspora The rising significance of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘diaspora’, as terms of selfdesignation chosen by political, artistic and intellectual elites of diasporic communities, as well as in Western academic discourse, is closely related to the increasing relevance of representations of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in international politics (see Olwig in this volume). As Tölölyan (1996) has pointed out, for many authors writing about diaspora also implies coming to terms with their own experiences of hybridity and multiple belonging. As James Clifford (1992, 1994) and others have noted, this may lead to a conceptual dilemma of how to distinguish between the concept as an analytical tool and the experience it denotes. It is an open question whether this distinction is entirely necessary, or if it is possible at all. Still, ‘diaspora’ remains widely contested, both as a term of reference and as a concept for research. Among others, James Clifford (1994) argued for a reevaluation of the term, focusing on the constructive potential of diasporas as ‘mediating cultures’ instead of implications of forced dispersal, exile and loss. In contrast, Dabag (Dabag and Platt 1993) and Safran (1991) emphasize the dangers of underestimating the ever-present forces of persecution and violent expulsion. Introducing the theoretical concepts of this volume, William Safran (Chapter 1) ironically refers to diaspora as a concept used so widely ‘that it has become an academic growth industry – not only in political science, but also in anthropology, sociology, … history and even literature.’ He argues strongly for a comparative perspective in terms of a variety of criteria. Nonetheless, certain historical cases remain paradigmatic for any definition of the concept, taking into account the specific historical conditions and experiences preceding the current proliferation of this term. The Jewish, Armenian and Greek experiences have been serving as ideal types for the formulation of definitions and categories, which may or may not include other historical and contemporary examples. Various classifications have been offered as a way of enabling systematic comparisons of diverse historical cases. As early as 1971, Abner Cohen refers to groups of long-distance traders like the Hausa as ‘trade diasporas’. In his 1997 overview,

Introduction

3

Global Diasporas, Robin Cohen posits a typology of ‘victim’, ‘trade’, ‘labour’ and ‘colonial’ diasporas, with victim diasporas serving as the prototypical core. For comparative purposes, such classifications will remain a necessary conceptual tool. Still, most historical and ethnographic cases do not fit neatly into one or the other category. The case of the Greek diaspora, as presented in Hassiotis’ chapter in more detail, may serve as an illustration. Greek enclaves or trading posts in major Western European cities of the Middle Ages, forming a paradigmatic ‘trade diaspora’, may be seen as successors of, but not deriving from, Greek colonization in antiquity. These enclaves received significant input after the fall of Constantinople, a catastrophic event characterizing a ‘victim diaspora’. Nonetheless, Greek communities in Europe and in the Black Sea region also remained important nodes in long-distance trade networks, contributing significantly to the Greek struggle of independence by making use of transnational networks and their at times considerable political influence: a case of ‘cultural diaspora’ as defined by Robin Cohen. The twentieth century saw yet another aspect of the Greek diaspora: emigration to the US and Australia and later to Western Europe changed its character towards a ‘labour diaspora’. As the Greek example shows, the concept of ‘diaspora’ cannot be usefully limited to any single type of community or historical situation. Nonetheless, some common denominators remain. In all phases, a deep symbolical (and at times organizational) relation to the ‘homeland’ – be it an independent nation-state or set in a quasimythological distant past – is maintained by reference to constructs of common language, history, culture and – central to many cases – to religion. For the Greek diaspora, language and religion have been factors in maintaining a common diasporic identity. Today, the concept of ‘diaspora’ has become an element of self-reference and political identification wherever – by access to new channels of communication, by economic exchange or physical mobility – extraterritorial groups or organizations seek political influence in their homelands or other communities of the same perceived origin, or vice versa.

Identity politics, history and locality Earlier migration studies have been characterized by models of unilinear and irrevocable movement from a place of origin to a new place of residence. Questions of integration and assimilation were central to this concept of migration, which, in the last decades, has partially been replaced by a focus on multiple identities, permanent movement and cross-border networks. Based on research among migrants from Central America and the Caribbean, Glick Schiller amd Szanton Blanc (1992, 1994, 1995, 1999) introduced a terminology of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘transmigration’ into academic discussions. Like ‘diaspora’, the concept of ‘transnationalism’ still awaits a conclusive definition. As Landolt (1997: 2) critically remarks, ‘since everything is defined as transnational, nothing in particular remains transnational’. Differing from connotations of ‘international’ and ‘multinational’, ‘transnationalism’ focuses on lasting

4

Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

relationships and repeated movements across borders, the agents being not states or nations, but individual actors or associations. Transnational relations are not an entirely new phenomenon, as Foner (1997) has shown for migrants in New York City of the nineteenth century. Still, the current dimensions of processes and networks involved are without historical precedent. For Glick Schiller et al., ‘transnationalism’ refers to processes of constructing and actively maintaining social fields across borders. These social fields are composed of relationships linking the migrants into their communities of residence, as well as those connecting them to their homelands and/or other diasporic communities. The spatial boundaries of such fields often remain diffuse, spreading forms of ‘homeland’ social organization into a kind of imagined transnational community. The actors forming such communities neither belong exclusively to Hannerz’s (2000) category of cosmopolitans, living simultaneously in two worlds, nor do they exclusively inhabit ‘third spaces’ between cultures (Bhabha 1994). Instead, the day-to-day realities of communication, exchange and reciprocity, a high degree of social cohesion and a shared repertoire of symbolic and collective representation seem to be significant for the survival of transnational communities and diasporas (Alfonso 2001; Faist 2000; Tauber 1999; Wonneberger 2001). ‘Identity’ is at least as problematic and contested a term as ‘diaspora’ and can no longer be referred to without challenge. Ever since Barth’s contribution in 1969, identity, in the shape of ethnicity, has been investigated in terms of the construction and maintenance of boundaries. The ‘essences’ of identity are seen by many anthropologists merely as the content of an ongoing process of boundary construction, being constantly re-invented and shifted according to the requirements of the situation. Nonetheless, these ‘essences’ are still deeply meaningful and existent for many of those we study and they may be put to use to stabilize existing conditions, as well as for subversive and critical purposes. This leads back to the question of locality. All authors of this volume share a great deal of the critical impetus directed at questioning essentializing notions of boundedness and the unity of ‘place’ and ‘culture’. Many have indeed been at the forefront of this critical debate. On the other hand, they do not fully subscribe to the idea that all objects and objectives of research have become entirely fluid, or that ‘locality’ has lost its meaning altogether. ‘Locality’ and ‘diaspora’ are not by necessity mutually opposed or contradictory. Indeed, we expect them to be interconnected on a theoretical, as well as on an experiential level. Despite attempts to bring ‘movement’ or ‘displacement’ together with local knowledge, it is ‘movement’ that is most often privileged with the body of anthropological theory on dispora. In Chapter 2 Breda Gray draws on accounts of Irish women migrants to London as well as non-migrant women, to consider their negotiations of mobility and belonging in diaspora. In the context of recent debates about diasporic Irishness, this paper explores the relation of gender to the imagination of transnational community formations such as ‘the Irish diaspora’. In her critical review (Chapter 3) of current theoretical approaches characterizing migration studies, Karen Fog Olwig suggests a new synthesis by examining movement, place and identity through the notion of livelihood practices. Based

Introduction

5

on ethnographic evidence on the widespread family networks of Caribbean migrants, she suggests a new approach to the study of movement, place and identity by examining the cultural construction of livelihoods in specific ethnographic contexts. Increasingly, anthropological discussions of diaspora take up methodological issues related to multi-sited fieldwork. This is also the issue in Susanne Schwalgin’s account of fieldwork in two Armenian communities in Greece (Chapter 4). Nonetheless, she also argues for a critical review of the current emphasis on multisitedness and ‘imagined’ localities and for redirecting anthropologists’ attention to people’s attachment to the physical experience of their place of residence. This section concludes with three papers on quite different aspects of history. Spatial and chronological boundaries are discussed by Iannis Hassiotis in his review of the history of the Greek diaspora. Chapter 5 critically examines current typologies of diaspora, strongly arguing for a diachronic perspective. History as a key factor in the construction of diasporic identities is adressed in Hauke Dorsch’s study (Chapter 6) of griots and their role as a powerful symbol of Afro-diasporic continuity. Griot music is thus seen as a link both to a worldwide network of Afrodiasporic connections, as well as to a mythical history of African ‘roots’. Based on fieldwork in New York and Boston, Astrid Wonneberger presents in Chapter 7 a critical discussion of myths of historical continuity in the Irish diaspora. Contested versions of history have emerged, emphasizing the particular symbolic significance of images of the Great Famine. Diasporas must be considered within their historical as well as their spatial contexts. As these papers suggest, diasporas are sited in history as well as in space – although by definition they are not bound within one location. As Tölölyan has argued, ‘the logic of the sedentary persists in the lived experience of the transnational, even if it is currently neglected in scholarship. Any diaspora is still a space of real and imagined relations between diasporic communities as well as between them and the homeland. But this space is still composed of places, of localities that are both sites of settlement and nodes in a transnational network of mobility and communication’ (forthcoming). As a matter of fact, all accepted working definitions of diaspora seem to point to the connection between diaspora and locality: diaspora ‘is about not being there’, as Martin Sökefeld puts it in this volume. Diasporas may transcend boundaries, but space, place and locality remain important points of reference, on a symbolic as well as on a physical level. The different strands of interconnectedness of diaspora, identity and locality are open for empirical research as well as for theoretical debate. Thus, despite a necessary focus on transnational networks and movement, ethnographic studies of diaspora must also not neglect the realities of sedentary diasporic life. They must critically take into account the ideological status of the celebratory anti-national rhetoric of mobility characterizing many theoretical texts on diaspora, as well as the political discourse of uprootedness and dispersal among diaspora elites. This ‘official’ model of a ‘pure’ diasporic identity, permanently endangered by threats of assimilation, must be contrasted with studies of the

6

Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

day-to-day experience of individual actors, balancing the various claims brought to them by diasporic elites, society of residence and personal situation alike.

Diasporic aspects of religion In past decades, the meaning of the term ‘diaspora’ has been extended from long established diasporas like the Jewish, Armenian or Greek experience, towards a host of new and more contested areas of reference. With this extension of meaning into the wider field of migration and transnationalism, questions of religion seem to have faded into the background. Even while preparing the conference, we still tended to underestimate the relevance of religious belief and organizations for the construction of diasporic identities. Eventually, the comparative potential of different research traditions and the wide span of ethnographic field research presented at the conference, led us to revise our perspective. Although we do not wish to limit the meaning of ‘diaspora’ once again to religious enclaves within territories of different denomination, the papers in this volume clearly emphasize the significance of religious belief, symbolic references and organizational structures in the formation of diasporic identities. Alevis in Germany form a cultural and religious minority of immigrants from Turkey. As Martin Sökefeld shows in Chapter 8, an Alevi revival began both in Turkey and in Germany in the end of the 1980s. Since then, a wave of selforganization has transformed the Alevi community in Germany. These newly formed associations struggle for a redefinition and reconstitution of Alevism and its rituals in a new and changing environment. Contesting discourses in the Alevi diaspora revolve around the significance of ‘religion’ or ‘culture’ as factors defining diasporic identities. The case of the Yezidi in Germany closely parallels this debate. They also constitute a minority in a double sense of the term. As Kurds they represent a cultural minority often prosecuted within their countries of origin. As Yezidi they form a non-muslim religious minority within the Kurdish community. Andreas Ackermann presents ethnographic evidence for the emergence of diasporic structures based on religious organization, as well as pointing to ethnographic contradictions to the rhetoric of diaspora in Chapter 9. Based on his research among Hindu communities in Trinidad, Martin Baumann (Chapter 10) distinguishes different historical phases in the formation of diasporic structures. In each phase, religious ritual, belief and organization serve as significant markers in negotiating the community’s position in relation to the resident society. The last chapter in this section takes up issues of migrants’ long-term transnational attachments to their countries of origin, challenging conventional notions of assimilation into host countries and relating them to questions of religious organization. Dieter Haller (Chapter 11) explores the local development and renegotiation of religious organizations among Sindhi in the British colony of Gibraltar, demonstrating how religion is creatively tied to local processes, as well as to global flows within the diasporic network of this Hindu merchant group. As these studies point out, a renewed interest in religious identification and practice can be observed in various social and cultural contexts, challenging the

Introduction

7

emphasis on the vanishing of religion in modernists’ discourses. A revival of religious orientations has accompanied the restructuring of post-socialist societies, to name just one example. In the context of diaspora, religion has always remained central to paradigmatic definitions, although in current theoretical discussions, the topic of religion seems to have moved into the background. A renewed focus on both sides of diasporic practice – the mobile as well as the rooted – will bring the meaning of religion back to the fore, discussing the meaning of religion both as a factor in forming diasporic social organization, as well as in shaping and maintaining diasporic identities.

Diasporic identities reconsidered Processes of identity formation never occur outside socio-political and cultural contexts. They are no mere reflection of a free play of independent actors – they always require an opposite, the ‘other’ on to which the image of the ‘self ’ is projected. If there is an end product of identity formation at all, as Avtar Brah sceptically asserts at the conference, it cannot be one homogeneous model of identity that equally serves for all members of a group. We must be as ready to ask for different and shifting levels of identity, as for conflicting and contesting designs. In the case of diaspora, the matter seems even more complex. Members of diaspora communities are confronted with a multitude of ‘others’, towards whom quite different designs of identity may be presented – be it the nation-states of residence and their different requirements, globally dispersed communities of the same diaspora, or the demands (on a symbolic or a political/economic level) of what is considered their true homeland. Any research into identity and diaspora must therefore take into account a great variety and heterogeneity of identities at any given point in time, among which ‘diaspora identity’ is only one, albeit formative, part. Even if one diaspora community still may serve as a focus of research, its transnational and global connections, the community’s history and the means of communication used to maintain it, must equally be considered. Any ethnography of diaspora must lead to a multi-sited approach, thus widening the scope of anthropolgy’s theory and methods.

Note 1 The conference was funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the University of Hamburg and the Ludwig-WünscheStiftung, Hamburg.

Bibliography Alfonso, C. (2001) ‘Kolumbianer in Miami und New York City: Transnationale Gemeinden im Vergleich’, unpublished thesis, University of Hamburg. Anthias, F. (1998) ‘Evaluating diaspora: beyond ethnicity?’, Sociology, 32(3): 557–80. Barth, F. (1969) ‘Introduction’, in F. Barth (ed.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, London: Allen & Unwin.

8

Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso

Basch, L., Glick Schiller, N. and Blanc-Szanton, C. (eds) (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, New York: Gordon and Breach. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation’, in H.K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, New York and London: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1992) ‘Travelling cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. —— (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–38. Cohen, A. (1971) ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’, in C. Meillasoux (ed.) The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, London: Oxford University Press. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Dabag, M. and Platt, K. (eds) (1993) Identität in der Fremde, Bochum: Brockmeyer. Faist, T. (2000) The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foner, N. (1997) ‘What’s new about transnationalism? New immigrants today and at the turn of the century’, Diaspora, 6(3): 355–73. Glick Schiller, N. (1999) ‘Transmigrants and nation-states: something old and something new in the US immigrant experience’, in C. Hirschmann, P. Kasinitz and J. de Wind (eds) The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992) ‘Towards a definition of transnationalism: introductory remarks and research questions’, in N. Glick Schiller, L. Basch and C. Blanc-Szanton (eds) Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered, New York: The New York Academy of Science. —— (1995) ‘From immigrant to transmigrant: theorizing transnational migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68: 48–62. Hannerz, U. (2000) ‘Transnational research’, in H.R. Bernard (ed.) Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Landolt, P. (1997) ‘Transnational communities: an overview of recent evidence from Colombia, Dominican Republic and El Salvador’. Report to the Program in Comparative and International Development, unpublished paper, Johns Hopkins University. Malkki, L. (1992) ‘National Geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 24–44. Olwig, K.F. and Hastrup, K. (eds) (1997) Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Tauber, A. (1999) ‘Armenier in Hamburg. Ethnographie einer Gemeinde in der Diaspora’, unpublished thesis, University of Hamburg. Tölölyan, K. (1991) ‘The nation-state and its others: in lieu of a preface’, Diaspora, 1(1): 3–7. —— (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora 5(1): 3–36. —— (forthcoming) The Logic of the Sedentary in Diasporic Studies. Wonneberger, A. (2001) I’m Proud to be Irish. The Construction of Ethnic Identities in the Irish Diaspora in the USA, Hamburg: Kovacs.

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

1

9

Deconstructing and comparing diasporas William Safran

What is a diaspora? Uses and misuses of a concept Decades ago, academic discussion of ethnic minorities was already in full swing. Yet few, if any, writers on the subject mentioned diaspora. One looks in vain for a treatment of that phenomenon in the works of Anderson, Brass, Enloe, Gurr, Hobsbawm, Horowitz, or many other prominent scholars of ethnicity. This neglect could be attributed to the fact that diasporas were not considered a ‘comfortable’ sociological category; it was perhaps also due to the fact that diaspora communities did not want to call attention to their ambiguous collective identity, and hence did not mobilize politically to obtain the kinds of civil and political rights normally accorded to ‘indigenous’ minorities. Today the situation is quite different. Diaspora is a concept that is being used so widely that it has become an academic growth industry – not only in political science, but also in anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, history, and even literature. At a recent conference on the subject at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the papers read was by a professor of the ‘History of Consciousness’. James Clifford, a historian dear to anthropologists, argues, in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, that ‘diasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse’ (Clifford 1994: 311). At one time, the diaspora phenomenon was ‘undertheorized’ in large part because it was applied to a very limited number of ‘transnational’ ethnic minority groups, such as Jews, Armenians, Chinese, and Indians; today, we find the opposite: according to Robin Cohen, in his recent book on ‘comparative diasporas’, the concept has been ‘overextended’, much like diasporas themselves (Cohen 1997). Khachig Tölölyan (the editor of the journal Diaspora, which began publication in 1991) reported at a conference in Paris in 1998 that authors in his journal had used the expression ‘diaspora’ to describe 38 different groups. In short, the label has been stretched to cover almost any ethnic or religious minority that is dispersed physically from its original homeland, regardless of the conditions leading to the dispersion, and regardless of whether, and to what extent, physical, cultural, or emotional links exist between the community and the home country. The application of the concept of diaspora to Armenians and other uprooted and expatriate communities has been quite legitimate. However, the indiscriminate

10

William Safran

extension of the label to almost any group of expatriates, or even to individual migrants, has denuded the concept of much of its historical meaning and led to a conflation of the term, which has made it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish diasporas from other kinds of minority communities and to reduce the concept to a useless metaphor. Diasporas, it has been said, represent ‘the leading edge of globalization’ because they are not merely minority communities; their members have moved around – that is, have emigrated from their native countries to other countries. This, of course, can be said of immigrants as such; but diasporas comprise special kinds of immigrants because they have retained a memory of, a cultural connection with, and a general orientation toward their homelands; they have institutions reflecting something of a homeland culture and/or religion; they relate in some (symbolic or practical) way to their homeland; they harbour doubts about their full acceptance by the hostland; they are committed to their survival as a distinct community; and many of them have retained a myth of return (Safran 1991; Chaliand and Rageau 1995; Cohen 1997). The concept of diaspora originally applied to Jews, because they constituted one of the first dispersed communities, if not the first one. Moreover, the Jewish diaspora remains the archetypical one in several respects: 1

2

3

4

The absence of a physical homeland for nearly two millennia, and the widespread doubts within the international community in general, and its intellectual elite in particular, whether such a homeland should exist at all. The lack of full acceptance of Jews by their host societies, even in some Western countries where they have achieved formal political and civic equality. Thus in officially philosemitic countries, such as Germany after World War II, a large proportion of the population harbours negative stereotypes about Jews, and this situation applies even in countries where few Jews are left, such as Poland and Austria. The transfer of ‘diasporic’ features on the population of the restored homeland: its international pariah status, its global loneliness, and a growing collective paranoia associated with the feeling that ‘our national existence is threatened by enemies who surround us, just as in diaspora, Jews were in most cases threatened with expulsion or annihilation in the face of the general indifference of others’ (Rubinstein 1980). The fact that diaspora seemed to be considered a ‘normal’ aspect of the Jewish condition, so that it has become part of European Christian folklore. This view has been reflected in numerous legends of the ‘wandering Jew’; and it was starkly reflected in the Nazi quatrain: Die Juden ziehn dahin, daher, ziehn übers Rote Meer; Die Wellen schlagen zu; Die Welt hat Ruh’.1

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

11

General de Gaulle was not a Nazi, or even a conscious anti-Semite; yet the theme of the Juif errant was clearly contained in his famous press conference of November 1967 that included references to ‘the Jews wandering here and there’ and ‘provoking … waves of ill will, sometimes rising, sometimes receding, in certain countries’ (French Foreign Policy 1968: 135–6). Such an attitude was not shared by enlightened, especially secular, intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet Sartre, who wrote a severe critique of anti-Semitism, denied the Jews an existential reality; for him, the identity of Jews as such was purely reactive, based on what the majority in hostland societies thought of them (Sartre 1947). What has made the Jewish diaspora unique is, above all, the fact that it was (in most cases) externally imposed, institutionalized, and ideologically and theologically sanctioned. Jews, according to the normative (Orthodox) Jewish view, were expelled ‘because of [their] sins’ – i.e., the refusal to follow Jewish religious and ethical precepts; according to the Christian view, Jews were consigned to exile and to eternal wandering because of deicide and the refusal to accept the ‘true’ faith. But the theological aspect has, it seems, now also been misappropriated and applied to the early Christians (cf. Baumann 1997). Thus the apostle Paul, in expatriating himself to Asia Minor and Greece in order to spread the gospel, created a group of proselytes who, in becoming a religious minority, have been considered ipso facto a diaspora – not because they had been dispersed from anywhere, but rather, because they were the successful objects of a message that had been disseminated. It is true that, in embracing a new faith, the early Christians had become a minority in relation to the heathen and were thus alienated from the rest of society (at least until Christianity became the official majority religion). Alienation through conversion has affected other groups as well, as, for example, the Bosnian Slavs, the ethnic Greeks, and the Bulgarians (Pomaks) who were converted to Islam. As a result of the population exchanges after World War II, the Greeks and Turks in question were diasporized; but it is doubtful whether that status can be said to apply to the Bosnian Muslims, who, after all, remained in place. If we leave aside religiously ‘minoritized’ communities and focus on expatriated ones, we conclude that there are now many more dispersed communities than existed before. In the past half century, tens of millions of people have been leaving their native countries for a variety of political and economic reasons; they may be political refugees, expellees, displaced persons, or voluntary emigrants; but unlike traditional immigrants, most of whom have left their homelands with the full intention to assimilate into the hostland culture, members of diasporas appear to be hedging their bets: they do not wish to cut themselves off completely from their homelands, and they prefer to live, as it were, ‘in two worlds’. In terms of the above-mentioned characteristics, the term diaspora can be applied, not only to the Jewish and Armenian paradigmatic types, but, inter alia, also to Kurdish, Palestinian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Sikh, Turkish, West Indian, Cuban, Tibetan, Kosovar Albanian, Croatian, and Serbian expatriate communities. The extension of the label to some other expatriate categoric groups is more problematic. It is hardly legitimate to use it to refer to the white Anglo-Saxon

12

William Safran

Protestants (WASPs) in the United States or the English civil servants in India. Diasporas do not have to be ‘ethnic’; there are religious diasporas, such as the Huguenots, Hutterites, and Tibetan Buddhists; and ideological diasporas, such as Spanish anti-fascists and eastern European anti-Communists, and even German and Austrian Nazis who have settled in South America. Is it legitimate, however, to regard as diasporas American executive officers of multinational corporations who have settled with their families in various European countries? The answer is not simple; yet it would be questionable to extend the term to an ethnic group that, rather than being oppressed or alienated within the hostland, dominates its culture, economy, politics, and society. The label diaspora has come to be used rather freely, because multiple identities are now more acceptable than they were before. Former convictions about the superiority of certain national cultures have become weakened; the claims once made for France’s mission civilisatrice, for the Nazi belief that ‘am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen’, the dogma concerning the ideological superiority of the homo sovieticus or the unmatched qualities of American democracy – all these have been undermined, in part because of the shortcomings of the societies in question, and in part because democratic and other positive values found in hostlands are now increasingly also found in the minorities’ homelands. As a consequence, members of minority communities are less apologetic about retaining their homeland culture. Such retention is in any case easier now than it has ever been before. National boundaries have become more permeable, a development that has enabled minority communities to receive infusions of culture from abroad (Taylor 1994). Many countries have abandoned the notion that political loyalty to the state requires an exclusive adherence to a unidimensional national culture. In recent years, an increasing number of societies, in welcoming immigrants, have embraced pluralism in one way or another, and their views of citizenship have become less restrictive than they had been earlier. Finally, the globalization of economic and other transactions has led to a general diffusion of literatures, languages, and lifestyles, a process that has, in turn, contributed to a homogenization of cultures. In the face of these developments, the retention of minority cultures, facilitated by a connection with an anterior ‘homeland’, provides a modicum of uniqueness, authenticity, and autonomy for the community in question, which has contributed to the maintenance of diasporas. Diaspora membership is a matter both of status and identity, and identity is relational, contextual, and time-bound. In many cases, moreover, individual notions of diaspora and homeland are figurative. Nevertheless, certain distinctions must be made. If the ‘Irish’ identity of a third- or fourth-generation American is little more than an after-dinner self-labelling (the sort of hyphenated self-identification often made by a person to make her/himself look more interesting), it is not a genuine diaspora identity. Being in a diaspora implies a tension between being in one place physically – the place where one lives and works – and thinking regularly of another place far away. In one of his famous Hebrew poems, Yehuda Halevi, the medieval Spanish-Jewish philosopher, has the following lament:

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

13

My heart is in the East, and I in the uttermost West – How can I find savor in food? How shall it be sweet to me? How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains? A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain – Seeing how precious in my eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary. Yehuda Halevi (1086–1145)

It is interesting to compare Yehuda Halevi’s notions of homeland with those of Benjamin Disraeli and Heinrich Heine. Disraeli evoked visions of the Holy Land, which he romanticized (in Alroy and other novels) and compared favourably with England, while he was a believing Anglican and a consummate English patriot who did not consider himself as living in diaspora. Was Heine in diaspora? Where was his homeland? Germany, the country of his birth and upbringing, was his cultural and emotional homeland; France was his political homeland, to which he (in part voluntarily and in part under constraint) expatriated and which became his exile and his ‘mattress grave’; and in his later years, as he reconnected with his Jewish roots, he considered the Holy Land his ancestral homeland. Yet he remained profoundly German; although he identified ideologically with the French republic, he continued to write in his native language, and the German scene remained his principal subject matter. In short, the members of a diaspora may or may not have adjusted to life in the hostland, but they have a spiritual, emotional, and/or cultural home that is outside the hostland. Whether that home is necessarily the ‘original’ homeland is a matter of controversy. It may, in fact, not be the ancestral homeland at all but rather the place where one was born and raised but that was originally a hostland, that is, a diaspora. Thus, the homeland of a West Indian resident of London may be Jamaica rather than Africa; the homeland of a Sikh resident in New York born and raised in Rajasthan may be that province rather than the Punjab; the homeland of an Armenian-American resident of California may be Lebanon rather than Armenia; and the homeland of a Jew in the United States may be Russia or Romania rather than the Land of Israel. Jews who immigrated to America between the 1880s and 1920s sang nostalgically about the shtetlakh where they had grown up.2 Vilnius was the homeland from which Jews were uprooted during the Holocaust, and about which they sang in the ghettos and concentration camps.3 It does not seem to be crucial whether that homeland was a comfortable or welcoming one. During and even after the Holocaust, Jews who had come to the United States from Germany in the 1930s and installed themselves in Washington Heights, a German-Jewish neighbourhood in New York facetiously labelled ‘the Fourth Reich’, often referred to the place where they originated as ‘bei uns daheim’. Did the Soviet Jews who were resettled in Birobidzhan regard themselves as living in a new (artificially constructed) ‘homeland’ or, rather, in a diaspora in relation to Moscow, Odessa, or Minsk? To Soviet (and post-Soviet) Jews who have ‘returned’ to Israel, Russia, the ‘hostland’ where they were born and where they grew up, may remain the object of ‘homeland’ nostalgia. They remember with a

14

William Safran

certain fondness the Russian forests, the beauty of Saint Petersburg, and aspects of the Russian (though not Soviet) way of life. Similarly, the pieds-noirs who have been ‘repatriated’ to France, their political homeland, often think nostalgically of their cities and ambiance in North Africa, which had been their home for many years and in which their families were rooted. This is especially true of Jewish rapatriés, who found that the Jacobin ideology of France had little tolerance for the kinship-based community that had defined their identity in Algeria; and it is equally true of many Moroccan Jews who ‘returned’ to Israel, their ancestral homeland, and who continue to celebrate the diaspora festival Maimuna in Jerusalem. The identification of a place of residence as a homeland or a diaspora does not necessarily depend on whether the movement from one place to another was voluntary or involuntary. Thus it is not clear whether the ethnic Germans who were expelled from Silesia and the Sudetenland after World War II and more or less forcibly returned to Germany are now living in a diaspora or in their homeland. For although Germany is indeed the ancestral homeland, Silesia has been deGermanized and hence ‘verfremdet’ in becoming a part of Poland. Yet the Silesian village remained for many expellees the place in which they grew up and the focus of their emotional orientations – in short, their true ‘home’. It is no accident that the designation used for these expellees was ‘Heimatvertriebene’. However, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s these people, although physically integrated into the Federal Republic, still pined for the ‘lost territories’, their descendants have no such nostalgia and do not think of themselves as living in a diaspora. How long can diasporic identity last? For many expatriates, homeland nostalgia is based on fond memories of extended families, ethno-religiously centred customs, rituals, and festivals celebrated within a cohesive community. For some ‘diasporans’, these memories continue to have personal meaning; their ‘diasporism’ is instrumental, insofar as they attempt to replicate aspects of homeland culture in their hostlands, as the Yoruba do, for example, in certain cities in Brazil and as many Chinese do in various hostlands (Dadrian 1996). For others, such homeland memories are fading in the face of the quotidian economic and cultural pressures of the hostland. The recreated institutions and cultural patterns do not effectively embrace them; as a result, their diasporism is merely expressive and constitutes little more than a symbolic identity. Such identity is reflected, for instance, in the tendency of many Jews who escaped from Europe before the Nazi deportations to label themselves as ‘Holocaust survivors’, and in black schoolchildren in France applying to themselves the incantation about ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’. One of the ways in which one’s attachment to the homeland is manifested in more than merely rhetorical fashion is enlistment in the military that is fighting for the homeland. But is that a reliable indicator? Heine, in a famous poem (Zwei Ritter), speaks of two patriotic Polish soldiers who fought bravely for the restoration of the political independence of their homeland but who happily escaped to France, where they continued to think of their homeland and dream of its glory. These soldiers

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

15

fochten tapfer und entkamen endlich glücklich nach Paris – leben bleiben wie das Sterben für das Vaterland, ist süß.4

Following the establishment of Israel, a number of American Jews went to that country to fight in its war of independence; but they did so, not because they wanted to settle in Israel, but out of a feeling of ethnic solidarity and (in some cases) out of a feeling of guilt for not having done enough to prevent the Holocaust. The volunteers who fought alongside the republican forces in Spain in the 1930s did so, not for reasons of ethnic solidarity, but out of ideological convictions. Are diasporas necessarily the result of oppression, or are their members always victimized by it? The Irish expatriates were the victims of the potato famine; the Jews and Armenians, of pogroms and genocide; the Indians, of poverty; the Chinese, the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, and the Cubans, of political persecution.5 But neither poverty nor oppression is necessarily perpetuated in diaspora. On the contrary, many members of the Armenian, Chinese, and Indian diasporas have become prosperous; and although the normative Jewish diaspora is ‘Exile’, with all its negative religious connotations, Jewish people in western industrialized democracies have attained a degree of comfort in their hostlands that has made many indigenous inhabitants consider them (in the words of President de Gaulle) ‘sure of [themselves] and dominating’. In fact, distinctions are increasingly made between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ diasporas – the former being galut (exile) and the latter, golah (physical diaspora) or merely tfutsot (dispersion). In short, oppression is not a sine qua non of the diaspora condition: the settlers in British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies, whether they came as merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, colonizers, or civil servants, were foreign agents and may have considered themselves in ‘diaspora’ insofar as they continued to identify with their homelands. Yet an expatriate population that has become a majority in a hostland (or host province) – the WASPs in the United States, the Québécois in Canada, and the descendants of English settlers in Australia – can hardly be considered a diaspora. Are all minority expatriate groups diasporas? Can we legitimately apply that designation to all immigrants or their descendants, even those who have been effectively integrated into the hostland and have become steeped in its culture to such an extent that the homeland culture has become remote and half-forgotten? What if an immigrant community’s orientation toward the home country – in terms of culture, religion, psychological orientation, or homeland support – has been so weakened that there is little left except a vague memory, either of gross injustice or a glorious past: is it still a diaspora? Are most of the descendants of Irish, Polish, or Italian immigrants to the United States any more a diaspora than the descendants of English, Scottish, or German settlers? Many Jews and Armenians are ‘de-diasporizing’ as their identities are gradually merged with those of the majority of the host societies of the United States and Western Europe among whom they live, especially as the markers of their uniqueness – language, religion, lifestyle, and even collective memory – weaken. Yet there are periodic

16

William Safran

‘triggering’ events, either in the homeland or the hostland, that tend to revive the diasporic identities of ethnic or religious groups, such as systematic persecution, religious intolerance, genocides, or natural disasters. A ‘homeland’ orientation is widely perceived to be the major element that distinguishes a diaspora from ordinary immigrant expatriate communities. Here a number of questions must be raised about what is home and what is diaspora. A person might be ‘home’, yet in a sort of ‘internal diaspora’. This may apply to members of the Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox hasidic sect whose members live in Israel while denying the legitimacy of that state and refusing to speak its language – are they a diaspora even in their homeland? Are Americans who ‘feel’ European in a diaspora even while they are at home? As for the ArmenianAmericans who have settled in Armenia, yet feel as if they do not fully belong to its society – are they in diaspora, or are they at home? Can one ever go home again? Does an expatriate minority community necessarily need an external home, or the concept of such a home, in order to think of itself as a diaspora? Members of ‘serial’ diasporas, who are going from one hostland to another, may keep the homeland in their consciousness, but such a homeland, if it exists at all, may be little more than a utopia to which one is not expected to ‘return’. When Yehuda Halevi got his wish and arrived in the Holy Land, he was slain by an Arab horseman. This is not the normal fate of returnees; nevertheless, the home country, in its stark reality, is never quite so good as its imagined form; often enough, ‘coming home’ results in the replacement of one nostalgia by another – and it may give rise to a longing for the diaspora, which then appears as the ‘real’ home. The homeland focus that is an aspect of diaspora identity is signalized by certain psychological and/or cultural manifestations, among them language. The use of the homeland alphabet is often a major expression of the homeland culture of a diaspora that has adopted the hostland language. This is exemplified by the fact that diaspora Jews wrote Germanic, Hispanic and Arabic languages in Hebrew script; Greek and Armenian settlers in Anatolia wrote Turkish in Greek and Armenian characters; Christians in the Levant wrote Arabic in the Syriac script; and Muslims in Spain wrote Spanish in Arabic script (Lewis 1999). Neither diasporic sentiments nor homeland strivings are necessarily expressed in the homeland language. Theodor Herzl knew no Hebrew; Eamon deValera knew no Gaelic; most diaspora Jews, including Zionists, use English, which has become a transethnic (or perhaps ethnically neutral) language. Maimonides wrote some of his most important works in Arabic. Nevertheless, Maimonides, like Yehuda Halevi, eventually returned to Palestine. In contrast, Gabriel Preil, a Jew born in Estonia, writes poetry in Hebrew but lives in the United States and has visited Israel only briefly; Nahum Goldmann, a Zionist leader who knew Hebrew well, preferred to remain in diaspora while actively promoting the reestablishment of Israel and encouraging other Jews to settle there; and Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Habad (Lubavich) Hasidic community, refused to set foot in Israel while insisting that its leaders not give up an inch of the Holy Land.

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

17

Contexts, institutions, and policies: hostland and homeland Attitudes toward homeland and hostland cannot be legislated. Yet the persistence, inculcation, exacerbation, or weakening of diaspora attitudes are reflections of the sociocultural values, institutional structures and political contexts of the homeland as well as the hostland. It seems obvious that the attraction of the homeland – and hence the diasporic identity of expatriates – becomes weak if the reality of the latter does not conform to its perceived image. In the eyes of the immigrant from southern Italy, the culture of backwardness, ‘amoral familism’, and poverty of the Mezzogiorno compared unfavourably to that of the United States, and hence was not worth remembering.6 During the 1930s, German Jews and antiNazi refugees attempted to create an ‘exile’ culture in the United States; but there was insufficient demographic density to transmit it to the next generation.7 Conversely, given the negative image of their homeland for at least a decade following World War II, German immigrants to the United States shied away from creating a distinct diaspora community in that country. The culture of the shtetl had been so effectively denigrated by Jewish immigrants to North America and Western Europe that it ceased to evoke nostalgia among their descendants despite efforts on the part of small groups to romanticize it (cf. Zborowski and Herzog 1952). Recent efforts at reviving Yiddish, the shtetl language, have had mixed success, in large part because the homeland community where it was practised was annihilated, and the context in the hostland has not been appropriate. The prospects of diaspora are heavily dependent on political and social conditions in the host country. Diasporas cannot exist without facilitating institutions; but their creation and maintenance require a demographic thickness – a sufficient number of diasporans to constitute a critical mass in urban settings. Often, institutionalization requires symbolic spaces that are substitutes for, and physical reminders of, the homeland, such as Chinatowns, Little Italies, barrios, ethnoreligious community centers, Buddhist temples, and gurdwaras. Orthodox Jews have eruvim, municipal areas within which they are permitted to walk on the Sabbath (and which are delimited by scarcely visible physical markers such as overhead wires); for the majority of observant Jews there is the Torah itself, which Heine once referred to as a ‘portable fatherland’. Substitute ‘homeland space’ now includes cyberspace, in the sense that the images, languages, cultures, histories, and problems of the homeland can be brought into the home of every family in the diaspora by the Internet. Nevertheless, it is not certain whether these features suffice for what has been called ‘a generational reproduction of homeland features in the diaspora’, such as food, music, and sociopolitical organizations.8 Such reproduction, however, tends often to be superficial, a fact that, at least in part, accounts for diaspora attempts to create (or recreate) independent homelands, as in the case of efforts by Czech, Polish, Irish diasporas in the United States after World War I and by Zionists in Europe and North America after World War II; and the current efforts by the Kurdish ‘Parliament in Exile’ in Amsterdam and Brussels. Such institutions must have a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the public authorities, lest they be used as agents of assimilation. In France, for example, the

18

William Safran

purpose of the Consistoire (set up by Napoleon) was to eradicate the diaspora identity of Jews by transforming them from members of an ethnic community to adherents, on a purely individual basis, of a religious cult; in the Soviet Union, the Yiddish language was used for the purpose of ‘de-Judaizing’ the Jews and instilling in them the proper socialist ideology; in contemporary France, publicly supported Muslim institutions have been created in the hope of stimulating the development of a ‘French’ Islam (Ternisien and Tinq 2000). In order to maintain its diasporic identity, an ethnic or religious community must have an elite that is committed to the maintenance of a diasporic culture and ideology. Unfortunately, it is difficult to generalize about the attitudes and behaviours of such elite figures in the hostland. In some cases, they are diasporic entrepreneurs, whose very elite status depends upon the continued existence of the diaspora, e.g., Court Jews and more modern variants of intercessors (shtadlanim). However, not all such elite figures maintain a ‘homeland’ orientation: in the case of Jews, ultra-Orthodox rabbis, whose myth of return is purely eschatological; rabbis of classical Reform, who attempted to eliminate all reference to, and even memory of, a ‘homeland’ outside the hostland; Marxist Jewish intellectuals, whose purely ideological vision of a messianic age is oriented neither to homeland nor hostland; and finally, those who have opted out of the Jewish community. The retention of diasporic identity depends on the political institutions, ideologies, and policies of the hostland. In principle, diasporic identity is easier to maintain in democratic countries than in authoritarian ones, for the ability of citizens to define their cultural and social spheres, including their cultural and social relations to another country, is part and parcel of personal freedom – as long as such behaviour does no harm to the hostland and does not offend its democratic values. There are, however, differences among democratic countries. For the purpose of comparison, we may distinguish between countries on the basis of their receptivity to immigrants, that is, between officially welcoming hostlands (pays d’accueil ) and those that have had a tradition of selective admission of immigrants based on kinship (in which case the hostland is the ancestral homeland). The ‘welcoming’ countries can in turn be subdivided into the following subtypes: •

•

Culturally pluralistic countries: admit immigrants and encourage them to become members of the political community, but permit them to retain their cultural particularities – Canada; United Kingdom. Culturally monolithic (or monochromatic) countries: admit immigrants and encourage them to become members of the political community, but expose them to a cultural melting pot – France, the United States (see Figure 1.1). The ‘selective’ countries can be similarly subdivided:

•

Culturally pluralistic countries: encourage immigrants to become members of the political community and tolerate the perpetuation of cultural particularities – Israel.

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora Admission criteria View of culture Pluralistic Monolithic

Generous admission not based on ascription (jus soli)

Highly selective admission based on kinship (jus sanguinis)

United Kingdom, Canada, France, United States

Israel, Switzerland Germany

19

Figure 1.1 Admission criteria and approach to culture

•

Culturally monolithic countries: distinguish between permanent ‘returnees’ and ‘guest workers’, whose entry into the political community is difficult, if not impossible – Germany.

It is a matter of controversy in which type of country diaspora identities maintain themselves more durably. In all of these host countries, at least in principle, ethnic and religious minorities may avail themselves easily enough of the freedoms of association and speech to express themselves. It may be argued that in the more generous host countries there are more numerous diaspora communities than in countries that are more restrictive in their admission policies. But there is much greater controversy about whether diaspora identity is more enduring in culturally pluralistic or in monoculturally oriented countries. On the one hand, the former are more culturally permissive and thus more likely to permit the expression of ‘otherness’, including diasporic collective identity; on the other hand, that very tolerance may make minorities feel so at home as to dissipate their cultural alienation and, hence, their diasporic identities. Conversely, culturally monochromatic countries may be so systematic in refusing to tolerate cultural diversity that minorities remain alienated from the host society, with the result that their diasporic identities are sharpened. The persistence of diasporic identity is also related to a country’s policies. Foremost among them are selective approaches to immigration and citizenship. Many countries are reluctant to admit immigrants who are not easily assimilable and who are likely to remain diasporas – in part because they contribute to the fragmentation of a society whose collective self-image is, at least ideally, that of a homogeneous one; and in part because their loyalty is often suspect. Conversely, however, diasporas may have a certain utility for the host country; they may be (1) providers of cheap labour, who are not likely to make trouble by asking for higher wages, lest they be expelled; (2) an instrument for influencing the policies of the home country; (3) convenient scapegoats around which a disgruntled majority can be mobilized – for example, Jews and Muslims (Germany, France), gypsies (Eastern Europe), Germans, Chinese, and Japanese (United States). Diaspora relations with the homeland are highly dependent on the hostland government’s foreign policy considerations. There are instances where an expatriate community would like to maintain linkages to the homeland but, for political reasons, is not permitted to do so by the hostland authorities. This applied to the Jews of Moscow during the Soviet period (especially after 1948), who were kept

20

William Safran

from maintaining contact with Israelis; it applies today to the expatriate Tibetans, whose contact with the homeland is impeded by the Chinese authorities; and to the few remaining Jewish residents of Egypt, who are not permitted to have any contact with Israel. In these cases, it is uncertain whether such a minority community can maintain itself for long as a diaspora. Conversely, hostlands may make use of diasporas (and encourage their survival) for political purposes: for example, expatriate Palestinian Arabs in Syria and Lebanon, in order to keep up pressures on Israel; Croats and other East-Central European expatriates living in the West German Federal Republic prior to 1990, supported for ideological reasons related to the Cold War; the Cuban exile community in the United States, mobilized for a continuing struggle with Fidel Castro; Jews in the United States, used to exert pressure on Israeli governments; institutions of Arab expatriates (e.g., the Institut du Monde Arabe) in France, supported by French governments in order to help it to curry favor with the Arab world. Furthermore, in countries in which ethnic or religious minorities constitute an important electoral factor, a candidate for political office may contribute to their diaspora identities by visiting their homelands and avowing support of a positive hostland–homeland relationship. For many years, a ‘balanced’ electoral slate in New York was prepared to accommodate ‘the three Is’ – minority communities whose ‘homelands’ had been Ireland, Israel, and Italy. This does not, however, support the argument that an ethnic group, including a diaspora, necessarily exerts a decisive influence on a hostland’s foreign policy (Shain 1994/5). For example, pressure by ethnic, religious, and racial minorities has not been a determining factor in the foreign policies of the United States and other major countries (the US government’s frequently cited support for Israel had more to do with the Cold War than with the ‘Jewish lobby’). Diaspora identity also depends on the sort of relationship the homeland wishes to maintain with its expatriates. For example, the early Zionists, and most of the pioneers of Israeli state-building, wished to distance themselves from diaspora Jewry and its complexes and neuroses; at the same time, Israel has depended upon the economic and political support of the diaspora and, given Israel’s international pariah status and continuing threats to its existence, has identified with the dilemma of the diaspora. Moreover, the diasporic mentality of Israeli intellectuals is reflected even in the revisionism of ‘post-Zionists’: the rejection of the founding myths of the re-established homeland. Such an exercise is diasporic in two senses: (1) it calls into question the history of Israeli nation-building as a ‘usable past’, thereby ‘revalidating’ diaspora; and (2) it propitiates the world at large, in this instance the international academic fraternity, whose professional approval is often useful for the careers of the revisionists. ‘Post-Zionism’, however, also raises questions about the Jewish nature of Israel, thereby leading to a disengagement from the diaspora.9 Occasionally, homelands use their diasporas for diplomatic and economic help; many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have come to depend on remittances from expatriates. Sometimes, however, homelands resent the interference by diasporas in their affairs, because such interference may be inspired either by pressure from hostland governments or by ideological positions of diasporans that may be more extreme than those held by homeland governments

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

21

or sectors of society – for example, interference by organizations of American Hasidic groups and of Reform Judaism in Israeli religious affairs, or interference of expatriate Turkish Islamic organizations in the homeland’s domestic policies. Finally, one must not ignore the ‘internal’ conditions of the diaspora itself. There is considerable debate about the conditions sufficient for the maintenance of a diaspora. How numerous must a group be to be properly called a diaspora? There is, first of all, the demographic dimension: there have to be enough people to constitute a critical mass for the maintenance of institutions. There must be sufficient markers of the ‘home country’ culture within an ethnic or religious minority community in order for it to be preserved. But which of these markers are absolutely necessary? For the Jews and Armenians, such crucial markers as language and religion have been weakened, yet diaspora has been maintained because the weakness of these markers has been compensated by history, memory, relatively recent traumas, and continuing problems.

Globalization Diaspora is heavily affected by changes in the international environment. Just as globalization has brought to public consciousness the porousness of political and economic systems and raised questions about traditional notions of sovereignty, so the diaspora phenomenon has forced upon democratic societies a recognition of two realities: 1

2

That a constantly growing number of people who have moved away from their homeland (‘home base’) to another country have not severed their connection with their original homeland; and that acculturation is achieved neither quickly nor totally – that becoming a member of a hostland society is not an all-or-nothing proposition. That just as a distinction is increasingly made between the state and civil society, so a distinction must be made, for the sake of personal freedom and pluralism, between political loyalty to the hostland and cultural identification and interest going beyond the hostland. In Germany, for example, such a distinction is reflected, not only in the reference to Jews as ‘unsere jüdischen Mitbürger’, which has become almost a catchphrase in that country, but also in a recent German reference to ‘unsere ausländischen Mitbürger’.10 This latter expression, used by some politicians and journalists in connection with Turkish ‘guest workers’ and their offspring, is not necessarily an oxymoron, if one defines citizenship, not in terms of ‘Volkszugehörigkeit’ or even ‘Staatsbürgerschaft’, but rather in terms of ‘Gesellschaftsangehörigkeit’, or perhaps in the classical terms of residence in a city, with the various economic and social rights and juridical protections such residence connotes. This would imply that membership in the society of a hostland is not a totalistic (or totalitarian) expectation but, rather, is based on responsible and civic – in short, loyal – social behavior, which consists of obeying the laws, paying taxes, being gainfully employed, and communicating in a civil fashion with fellow members of society.

22

William Safran

Civic behaviour presumably convinces the hostland majority that an ethnic minority is entitled to be considered, or to become, a full-fledged component of the political community. Unfortunately, such behaviour is not enough. In our imperfect world, the question whether members of a specific (non-indigenous) minority community should become full citizens or should remain in a diaspora depends upon a hostland’s view of the ‘foreignness’ of the community, which in turn is reflected in the hostland’s approach to citizenship. A country committed to jus soli tends to view immigrant minorities as future citizens and to facilitate naturalization; in response, members of such minority groups tend to become ‘de-diasporized’ within two or three generations. In contrast, a country committed to jus sanguinis, such as Switzerland and, until recently, Germany, viewed Turkish and other foreign workers as mere ‘guest workers’, to be dealt with in response to economic needs – specifically, as a buffer against business cycles (Konjunkturpuffer), and for that reason, governmental authorities perpetuated an orientation toward the homeland (Heimkehrillusion). A scholar recently remarked that ‘all foreigners are equal, but some are more equal than others, or: all foreigners possess foreign passports, but some are more foreign than others’.11 Legal immigrants are more ‘equal’ than guest workers or illegal immigrants, because they are regarded as future members of the political community of the hostland. As such, they are in a better position to build institutions to maintain their communal identities. Yet the more institutionalized an expatriate group in the hostland, the more likely it is to be integrated, to identify with hostland patterns, and to experience an attenuation of its diaspora identity. In most countries, guest workers are, by definition, not (or not expected to be) long enough in the hostland to form solid, diaspora-maintaining institutions (even if they are permitted to do so); a fortiori, illegal immigrants, given their precarious position, are even less likely to form institutions, lest they draw attention to themselves and incur the hostility of the hostland majority. To be sure, the legal status of diasporas is not the only determinant of attitudes of hostland majorities. The animus of ‘indigenous’ populations against diasporas has frequently stemmed from a variety of causes: difference in origin, fear of economic competition, and concerns about dual allegiance or questionable loyalty. Historically, most diasporas have been parts of ethnonations moving from traditional and largely agrarian societies to developing societies; or they have moved to a traditional society (often by invitation) to constitute the ‘modernizing’ leaven of that society. That has characterized the Jews in Poland, the Armenians and Greeks in the Middle East, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Indians in Africa. But many more recent diasporas do not follow that model, e.g., the Kurdish, Croatian, Cuban, Palestinian, Sikh, and Hmong expatriate communities. Both types of diasporas, as long as they remain distinctive, are likely to produce resentments in the hostland, for quite opposite reasons: the former because their cultural and educational levels are often higher than those of the majority and they are therefore perceived as a threat; and the latter because they are viewed as being a burden upon the hostland. For that reason, a specific ‘diaspora’ set of attitudes has developed, marked on the one hand by adaptability, ‘anticipatory compliance’

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

23

and submissiveness, and on the other by resilience and ‘the cultivation of ethnocentrism’ (Dadrian 1996: 111–13). Neither type of diaspora may be a politically mobilized ethnic community – that is, ‘nationalist’ in the proper sense of the term – but may become so in reaction to hostility on the part of the hostland majority and may turn its attention increasingly to the homeland, if it exists, or an imagined homeland or state (if it does not exist), as, for example, the Holy Land for Jews (before the establishment of Israel) or Khalistan for Sikhs. In any case, many hostlands fear the existence of a diasporic counter-nationalism that may serve to fragment their own national identity. Is that fear justified? Ernest Gellner speaks of four types of nationalism: (1) western liberal nationalism; (2) ethnic nationalism; (3) mature homogeneous nationalism; and (4) diaspora nationalism (O’Leary 1998: 61–2). This typology is subject to challenge: it is not clear whether all diasporas are necessarily nationalist – if nationalism is defined as a politicized ethnic community; and if so, whether it is really different from ethnic nationalism. Moreover (as Brendan O’Leary puts it), because Gellner treated nationalism as the doctrine of ‘one culture, one state’, he leaves it open to the charge that its central doctrine spells a simple choice between assimilation on the one hand, and genocide and forced expulsion or emigration on the other hand. (O’Leary 1988: 71) Most diasporas, of course, are characterized by an overlapping double orientation: toward two cultures and two states (but not necessarily two political allegiances). Whatever the source of the hostland’s fear, many immigrants, whether or not they identify themselves as belonging to diaspora communities, remain embodiments of ‘otherness’ (altérité), regardless of the fact that that their cultural ties to the homeland have weakened and their diasporic culture has developed in an independent direction. Like Jews in Europe, Maghrebis (or Beurs) in France and Indians in the United States have become objects of racial hatred, in part because of their ‘exotic’ physiognomy, and in part because of patterns of behaviour or dress that make them stand out.12 For the Jews in Eastern Europe, the identifying marks were sidecurls and shtreimels; and in Poland, even Jews who did not have these marks were not considered full members of the national community, because most Poles insisted that ‘to be Polish is to be Catholic’. For Maghrebi schoolgirls, the identifying marks have been the Islamic headscarf (foulard); and for the Indian woman, the sari and the vermillion dot in the middle of her forehead, which has provoked white teenage gangs in the United States to engage in ‘dotbusting’ attacks.13 Such treatment is not clearly related either to the ‘foreign’ culture of minorities or to their homeland connections. Many blacks in the United States consider themselves alienated and excluded, not because of their orientation toward a homeland whose location is uncertain, but because they have been the objects of racism. The ‘culture’ whose legitimation they ask for is not, therefore, one based on that of an ancestral homeland but is a complex of attitudes and behavior patterns associated with their condition in the hostland. But that is not a diasporic culture so much as one of an oppressed minority.

24

William Safran

This raises several questions. Is a diasporic identity necessary for the recognition by society at large of a person’s uniqueness or a community’s minority status? Is a diasporic identity necessary in order for a community to retain its uniqueness in the face of the homogenizing pressures of postindustrial society, as postmodernists often argue? To what extent is the recognition of such status dependent on the existence of a ‘homeland’ that nourishes a sense of difference by providing either cultural replenishment or the protecting wings of an external ‘guardian angel’?14 For years, Jews had no protecting powers, yet remained strongly diasporic; today, the Roma and Sinti have neither a ‘homeland’ external to their hostlands nor an ethnic elite that speaks for them and helps protect their rights in their places of residence, yet their diaspora identity is unchallenged. Diasporic consciousness is influenced not only by government policy but also by the treatment of minorities by the hostland society at large. Unfortunately, such influence does not produce uniform results. Holding (members of) diasporas responsible for the policies pursued by homeland governments – e.g., berating American Jews for what ‘you (or your) people are doing to the poor Palestinians’; demonizing German expatriates to the United States and Britain for the crimes of Nazi Germany; holding members of the Serbian diaspora responsible for the ethnic-cleansing policies pursued by Slobodan Milo;evic; and stereotyping members of the Palestinian diaspora collectively as terrorists may strengthen the sense of a minority’s resentment and lead to increased ‘diasporization’; but it may also have the opposite effect: in order to escape such gratuitous inculpation, members of minority groups often attempt to get out from under the diasporic embrace by assimilating culturally as quickly as possible, weakening their connections with fellow ethnics, adopting the religion of the hostland majority, and even changing their names. Escape is of course more difficult, if not impossible, where there are physiognomic impediments, as in the case of Africans, Indians and East Asians; and it is for that reason that these minorities tend to retain their diasporic identities much longer.

Public policies What should be done about diasporas: should they be threatened, subtly manipulated, or simply ignored? Theoretically, there are a number of options: 1

2

Expulsion of members of diasporas to their homelands (or, in some cases, their anterior hostlands – as, during the Hitler regime, the deportation of Jews to Poland, including those Jews who were born before Poland was restored as a state); but the homeland may not wish to receive them, whether because of limited economic absorptive capacity or because the repatriates may bring back with them ‘foreign’ values that do not accord with those current in the homeland. Forcible assimilation, as practiced in Czarist Russia; but that does not accord well with democratic, pluralistic societies; and it does not work where the diaspora in question has a homeland that functions as an outside ‘protector’ (e.g., Turkey and post-Communist Russia).

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora 3 4 5 6

7

25

Extermination: since the Holocaust, however, it is not a defensible option in democratic countries, especially in present-day Europe. Cutting off all links with the homeland (e.g., overseas Tibetans), a policy that requires an effective sealing of the homeland’s frontiers. Ghettoization, cantonization, and policies of ‘reservations’; but this leads to permanent inferiorization. Refusal to grant citizenship, e.g., Latvia with respect to its Russian-speaking minority – unless the minority adopts the language of the majority. But this is difficult, especially where the minority considers its language and culture superior. Peaceful and gradual, and essentially voluntary, assimilation. Such an approach, often identified with France’s Jacobin ideology and the ‘meltingpot’ policies of the United States, has worked after a fashion, in part because of economic and cultural co-optation. If such an approach is successful, it may change the political culture of members of the minority from a preoccupation with material satisfactions to a ‘postmaterialist’ one. Precisely how this affects diasporas, however, is unclear. The non-materialist interests may be reflected in the promotion of hostland concerns, such as the environment, feminism, and disarmament; conversely, it may generate an interest in the survival or revival of their ethnic culture.

What should diasporas legitimately expect of hostlands; in short, what rights should diasporas have? Should these include socioeconomic entitlements or municipal voting rights of non-citizens? Currently, residents of a city in a state that is a member of the European Union may vote in that city’s local elections even if they are not citizens of that state, as long as they are citizens of another EU member-state. That makes them ‘alien residents’, which is not the same as members of a diaspora, for municipal status is a professional or ‘functional’ one that carries no implications regarding a person’s membership in a ‘national’ community. However, in 1999, the Italian Parliament passed a law to permit Italian citizens living outside the country – ca. 3.6 million of them in the United States and Canada – to vote in Italian national elections, an act that constitutes a kind of official legitimation of diaspora status.15 A similar policy exists with respect to expatriate Croatians and Russians; note, for instance, that Russian immigrants in the United States voted in the Duma elections in December 1999. A generation ago, the case of a naturalized US citizen voting in an Israeli election gave rise to a landmark US Supreme Court case (Afroyim v. Rusk, 1967), to a considerable extent because of an American discomfort about a sharing of citizenship. But such a discomfort has been largely dissipated with an increasingly de facto acceptance of dual citizenship. Even in France, whose republican ideology was marked by the notion of a unity of ‘nation’ and ‘state’, there is a growing acceptance of a more open and more flexible citizenship, one tied neither to birth in the country nor even to exclusive political loyalty to it, but a ‘plural citizenship’ that accommodates itself both to ‘identités de proximité’ and to ‘les liens de solidarité qui se développent au delà de l’État-nation’ (Chevallier 1999: 3–18). In 1993, Russia and Turkmenistan

26

William Safran

signed a treaty that permitted dual nationality for ethnic Russian residents of the latter. This treaty, which ‘[reassured] ethnic Slavs that they had “a fall-back position” in Russia’ (Hyman 1997: 21–3), might well serve as a model for other diasporas, especially for ‘stranded’ ones, at least in the short run, but only if the ‘protector homeland’ is powerful enough. A person may wish to remain in a diasporic condition because it gives him a degree of personal autonomy vis-à-vis his surroundings; conversely, however, he may resent the insecurity and anomie that an atomized society may force upon him, he may rebel against the depersonalization of social relations and the homogenization of culture, both of them consequences of modernization, and he may flee from his surroundings in search of a more regulated life that a tightly knit diaspora community provides for him. A sort of diaspora identity may apply to a person who is ‘out of place’ because of lifestyle, orientation, pattern of thinking – as in the case of Camus’s The Stranger, the story of a Frenchman who settled in North Africa, to whom Paris represented the absurdities of the modern condition. Similarly, a person who lives in a modern place but who resents, or believes herself to be victimized by, that place and rebels against that modernity is sometimes said to be in diaspora. Finally, ‘diaspora’ may apply to persons who have been made redundant by the ‘post-industrialization’ of the economy and who have been forced to leave their homes in search of employment elsewhere. But such persons may not have migrated from one country to another, and may not have descended from people who had been expatriated. Diaspora now includes individuals who belong to the category of ‘other’ not only because of their cultural ‘hybridity’, but for a variety of reasons. As Homi Bhabha has put it:16 The [meaning of the] new internationalism is that the move from the specific to the general, from the material to the metaphoric, is not a smooth passage of transition and transcendence. The ‘middle passage’ of contemporary culture, as with slavery itself, is a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience. Increasingly ‘national’ cultures are being produced from the perspective of disenfranchized minorities. (Bhabha 1994: 5–6) In short, diaspora has become a metaphor of discomfort, alienation, and transcendence, features that, presumably, are aspects of postmodernity; it is a metaphor helpful in defining the identity of persons who are not necessarily disenfranchized or otherwise legally disadvantaged – and who may not even focus on an anterior ‘homeland’. The examples cited here are illustrations of ‘constructivist’ approaches; they suggest that diaspora identity may be an essentially idiosyncratic creation that has little to do with ‘objective’ (or intersubjectively accepted) characteristics, so that the connection with physical expatriation and its consequences is in danger of being lost. This conceptual juggling is analogous to other kinds of conceptual manipulation. Thus, originally, ‘multiculturalism’ referred to ‘cultural pluralism’, that is, the relatively peaceful coexistence of various ethnic subcommunities, each

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

27

marked by its own specific culture, language, memories, mores, and mythologies; and each, according to Horace Kallen, deserving to be maintained because of its unique contributions to the texture of a composite ‘national’ culture (Kallen 1915). Today, multiculturalism is increasingly used (at least in the United States) to refer to racial heterogeneity and the variety of lifestyles; beyond that, it has come to refer to affirmative action policies. Kallen’s idea of cultural pluralism is a compromise between the ‘melting pot’ and the ‘salad bowl’ types of society – i.e., one in which ethnic communities are not fused but coexist within one society, adapting to one another, accepting common superordinate values, but maintaining their respective identities, which may or may not relate to, or receive ‘infusions’ from, an anterior homeland. It should be noted that in Kallen’s time, most white ‘hyphenated’ Americans did not maintain consistent cultural relations with the homelands of their ancestors (the Jewish homeland had not yet been re-established). It would seem that diaspora communities can hold out much longer in the ‘salad bowl’ kinds of societies because they can maintain contact more easily with their homelands (assuming, of course, that the homeland is willing to permit this). At this time, it is unclear whether the ‘melting pot’ model has been effectively eclipsed by the ‘salad bowl’ model, to what extent such an eclipse can be attributed to diaspora communities (as opposed to mere immigrant communities), and whether a ‘homeland’ connection is even necessary for their survival. What about future prospects for diasporas? There is little doubt that the process of massive expatriation of people will continue, both because of the growing economic disparities between homeland (or sending) countries and hostland (or receiving) countries and because of the growing ‘transnationalization’ of commerce, travel, and communications. There is, however, a set of open questions. Will the loss of political and economic sovereignty associated with these developments be paralleled by loss of authority of the state to enforce cultural uniformity and, hence, serve to strengthen the ethnocultural identity of diaspora communities? Or conversely, will the loss of sovereignty and the attendant ‘cosmopolitization’ of thought and behaviour lead to a collective cultural uncertainty that will impel a state to achieve what national coherence is left by fighting against minority cultures? Only time will tell.

Notes 1 The Jews are moving to and fro’/ across the Red Sea / the waves close over them / the world is at peace (translation: W. Kokot). 2 Cf. the Yiddish song ‘Belz, mayn shteitele Belz, mayn haymele vu ikh hob mayne kindershe yorn farbrakht’ (Belz, my little town where I spent my childhood years). 3 For example, the song ‘Vilne, Vilne, undzer heymshtot’ (‘Vilnius, our home’). 4 fought bravely and escaped / in the end, luckily, to Paris / to stay alive is just as sweet / as to die for one’s country (translation: W. Kokot). 5 Conditions of expatriation have been voluntary in the case of many Jews (as argued by Robin Cohen in Global Diasporas) and in the majority of diasporas of the past two centuries. According to more recent revisionist scholars, the potato famine has been grossly exaggerated as a cause of Irish victimhood.

28

William Safran

6 For an interpretation of the political culture of southern Italy, see Banfield 1967. 7 A case in point is the Aufbau, a weekly newspaper that began to be published by Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees in New York after 1933. Originally entirely in German, it gradually lost most of its German-speaking readership, so that from the 1960s on it continued to be published largely in English and to focus on ‘hostland’ rather than ‘homeland’ affairs. 8 Martine Hovanessian and Stephan Astourian have referred to these as reflections of ‘symbolic Armenianness’. Communication to the author. 9 Should the post-Zionists gain the upper hand and Israel became a ‘de-Judaized’ or purely secular country, its Orthodox Jewish residents might come to consider themselves in ‘diaspora’ in their own homeland. 10 Deutschland-Nachrichten, 4 June 1993 and 30 September 1994. 11 ‘Alle Ausländer sind gleich, aber manche sind gleicher als andere oder: alle Ausländer besitzen ausländische Pässe, aber manche sind “ausländischer” als andere’ (Brenninkmeijer 1998: 46). 12 As Jacques Chirac once put it (before he became president of France): ‘the Beurs are conspicuous because of their “odours and noises” ’. 13 Based on http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Diaspora/diaspora.html. 14 In 1998 there were large-scale riots against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, in large part because the host society needed a scapegoat to blame for its economic difficulties. In reaction to this, an ethnic Chinese shopkeeper is quoted as saying, ‘People tell us to leave, but we have nowhere to go. We are Indonesian, but people here don’t recognize us as Indonesian. So we have no country, no home and no guarantee of our future’ (Mydans 1998). Many ethnic Chinese Indonesians, of course, have managed to find homes elsewhere; moreover, the remaining ones will be protected by the pressures of the government of China, a powerful homeland that is concerned about their fate. 15 New York Times, 30 September 1999: 6. 16 Bhabha’s book, which refers to ‘otherness’ (p. 29) and ‘hybridity’ (p. 38), is a forest of neologisms, some of which are only vaguely intelligible.

Bibliography Bhabha, H.K (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Baumann, M. (1997) ‘Shangri-La in exile: portraying Tibetan diaspora studies and reconsidering diaspora(s)’, Diaspora, 6(3): 385–91. Banfield E.C. (1967) The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York: Free Press. Brenninkmeijer, O. (1998) ‘Internationale Kriminalität und Migration: Eine wachsende Herausforderung für die Sicherheit in Staat und Gesellschaft’, Politische Studien, 362(49): 46. Chaliand, G. and Rageau, J.-P. (1995) The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, New York: Penguin. Chevallier, J. (1999) ‘Les transformations de la citoyenneté’, Regards sur l’Actualité, 250: 3–18. Clifford, J. (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 311. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Dadrian, V.N. (1996) ‘The comparative aspects of the Armenian and Jewish cases of genocide: a sociohistorical perspective’, in A.S. Rosenbaum (ed.) Is the Holocaust Unique?, Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview, 101–35. French Foreign Policy: Official Statements, Speeches, and Communiqués, July–December 1967, New York: Ambassade de France, Service de Presse et d’Information: 135–6.

Deconstructing and comparing diaspora

29

Hyman, A. (1997) Russian Minorities in the Near Abroad, London: Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism. Kallen, H.M. (1915) ‘Democracy versus the melting pot’, The Nation, 8 and 25 February 1915; reprinted in Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924), New York: Boni & Liveright. Lewis, B. (1999) The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, New York: Schocken. Mydans, S. (1998) ‘Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia still fearful’, New York Times, 6 September. O’Leary, B. (1998) ‘Ernest Gellner’s diagnoses of nationalism: a critical overview’, in J.A. Hall (ed.) The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubinstein, A. (1980) Mi Hertsel ad Gush Emunim u-behazara [From Herzl to Gush Emunim and Back], Tel-Aviv: Schocken. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora 1(1): 83–99. Sartre, J.-P. (1947) Réflexions sur la question juive, Paris: Gallimard. Shain, Y. (1994/95) ‘Ethnic diasporas and US foreign policy’, Political Science Quarterly, 109(5): 811–41. Taylor, C. (1994) ‘The politics of recognition’, in C. Taylor and A. Gutman (eds) Multiculturalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ternisien, X. and Tinq, H. (2000) ‘Jean-Pierre Chevènement dessine les contours d’un Islam à la française’, Le Monde, 19 February: 7. Zborowski, M. and Herzog, E. (1952) Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York: Schocken.

30

William Safran

‘Too close for comfort’

Part I

Politics, history and locality

31

32

Breda Gray

‘Too close for comfort’

2

33

‘Too close for comfort’ Re-membering the forgotten diaspora of Irish women in England Breda Gray Emigration has always tended to be an enabling experience for women, more so than men (Coogan 2000: xvii) … in its own way, the story of Irish women in America since the Famine, … is as epic as any in the annals of mass migration. (Lee 2000: 20) While in the USA it seems as though Irish identity is bolstered, in England, it is diminished. (Smyth 1995 : 232)

Introduction The idea that women in the Irish diaspora thrived more than men is often attributed to their determination to escape the confining roles of ‘spinsterhood’, of housewife and/or mother in Ireland and to their improved prospects outside of Ireland (Coogan 2000; Diner 1984; Nolan 1989; O’Carroll 1990). Although North America plays a huge part in the imaginings and representations of the Irish diaspora, Britain has also been a significant destination for Irish emigrants.1 However, the geographical, political and cultural proximities of Britain and Ireland tend, as Cherry Smyth suggests, to diminish Irish identity in this important site of the Irish diaspora. This chapter starts with the assumption that it is impossible to do justice to the ‘epic’ experience of Irish women in the diaspora, without considering the specific ways in which these women constitute their lives and identities in particular locations within the diaspora. The main focus of the essay is first-generation Irish women immigrants to England in the late twentieth century. In order to pin down the theoretical usefulness of the concept of diaspora, theorists have offered schematic accounts of the defining aspects of diaspora. Some have worked to define the necessary conditions of diaspora (Safran 1991); typologies of diasporas (Cohen 1997); and arguments with a focus on relationships between home and abroad (Brah 1996; Van Hear 1998); as well as on multi-local attachments (Brah 1996; Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1993; Lavie and Swedenburg 1996). Most of

34

Breda Gray

these theorists maintain some sense of historical specificity in their analysis of diaspora, but this is often sacrificed to a concern with abstract universalisms such as the ‘migrant’ and ‘diaspora’ as figures of contemporary individual and collective identity. James Clifford (1994) argues that travel, migration and displacement, which are integral to the idea of diaspora, are theoretically analysed in unmarked ways and requests that particular attention be given to women’s experiences. Few theorists have taken up this challenge (for exceptions see Brah 1996; Anthias 1998; Nassy Brown 1998; and Fortier 2000). Although famous and not so famous Irish men are often represented as the mainstay of the Irish diaspora, Irish women’s migration as domestic servants, nurses, factory workers, nuns and in a range of professional capacities has contributed hugely to formations of the diaspora. If the concept of diaspora tends to be symbolized by masculine images of ships or prominent male figures such as John F. Kennedy, the ‘lived’ experiences of women in diaspora point to the limits of such symbols when it comes to representing an imagined diasporic community characterized by continuity of ‘tradition’ and a bounded sense of community. Because notions of continuity, authenticity, child rearing and the preservation of culture are invested in the bodies of women, the instability of the ‘Irish diaspora’ as an identifiable entity is foregrounded in their life stories. It could be argued that women tend to take on responsibility for the maintenance and generational transmission of culture because, to belong to the nation or diaspora as women, they must be seen to carry out this duty. If, as Yuval-Davis (1993), Pettman (1996), Enloe (1989) and many others have suggested, women are expected to reproduce the culture of the nation, then in diaspora, where there is an even greater fear of dilution and dissipation of culture, women may bear this burden all the more heavily. Yet, discourses of women as the carriers and preservers of tradition and culture tend to disguise or compensate for disruption and change. Womanhood, then ‘is often part of an asserted or desired, not an actual cultural continuity’ (Sanguri and Sudesh 1990: 17). Precisely because diaspora involves renegotiations of tradition and culture, many diasporic women experience themselves as failing to fulfil the exalted duty of cultural reproduction and maintenance, so there is a mismatch between expectations and experience. Emphasis on cultural reproduction varies with generation and location in the diaspora, but my focus in this chapter is on migrant women who play a critical role in the formation of diasporic communities. A history of colonial relations and ongoing conflictual negotiations in relation to Northern Ireland produce an anxiety about Irishness in England for the immigrant Irish, subsequent generations and the receiving community. At exactly the same time as continuity of identifications is disrupted by relocation in England for migrant Irish women, communal and individual desires for cultural continuity are projected onto the bodies and practices of these women. These women’s lived experiences of migration, culture and identity in diaspora are marked by a sense of cultural incommensurability and postcolonial desire for cultural survival and continuity. If continuity in diaspora is characterized by ‘creolized, syncretized, hybridized, and chronically impure cultural forms’, it is often more difficult for

‘Too close for comfort’

35

the migrant than for subsequent generations to recognize diasporic cultural continuity as ‘a determinedly nontraditional tradition …’ (Gilroy 2000: 129). This is because the migrant woman continues to live with memories of the ‘homeland’, another national past and an indeterminate cultural future through the second generation. When considering the body of research on women in the Irish diaspora since the early 1980s,2 emigration as ‘liberation’ for Irish women is a recurring theme. With few exceptions this literature concerns itself with the migrant generation and tends to privilege push/pull factors affecting emigrant women’s choices and experiences. Those who have researched Irish women in the United States in particular, have frequently concluded that these women’s experience was an emancipatory one with emigration representing a liberation from the confines and oppression of a small patriarchal and Catholic society. In the context of latetwentieth-century migration to England, Irish women are following a living tradition of women’s emigration and constitute their identities, less in relation to oppression ‘at home’ and ‘liberation’ on arrival, and more in relation to oppressive and liberatory forces in both countries of origin and destination. In their struggle to ‘find an adequate strategy with which to counter … [their particular] diasporic instability’, the Irish migrant women I interviewed found themselves ‘caught not only in-between patriarchy and “imperialism” ’ (Arrowsmith 1999: 138), but equally trapped between discourses of diasporic and nation-state bound cultures. Their accounts constitute their lives and identities between the expectations and possibilities of a transnational sense of self and a cultural belonging that is located within national places. First-generation women immigrants in the Irish diaspora in England can be seen as struggling with what Papastergiadis, following Rosenau, calls ‘turbulent belongings’. These are forms of belonging that are marked by uncertainty and an interplay between state centric and multicentric systems (Papastergiadis 2000: 102). In the latter sections of this chapter, I look at how these women articulate their ‘turbulent belongings’ and the significance of migrant women in constituting diasporic culture and identity. First, it is necessary to offer a brief overview of some of the debates regarding Irish women in the USA and Britain.

Irish women’s emigration – causes and goal rather than diasporic formation The scale of emigration from Ireland after the Great Famine in the 1840s was unequalled in Europe, with most going to the United States of America (Jackson 1963). Emigration from Ireland to the United States remained high until the 1920s, when quota systems were introduced in the US and Irish emigrants turned mainly to Britain.3 The numbers of Irish women emigrants fluctuated, but outnumbered men in many decades since the late nineteenth century. Miller et al. (1995) argue that the increased emigration of women after the Famine can be partly accounted for by the dramatic deterioration in their socio-economic status in rural areas due to the changing agricultural and industrial landscape, the dowry system and falling

36

Breda Gray

marriage rates (see also Fitzpatrick 1987; Nolan 1989; Jackson 1963). The pattern of Irish women’s emigration is different from that of most other ethnic groups because women represent a larger proportion of all migrants and most left Ireland as single women, although not always straightforwardly as a means of self-liberation. While, at first glance, emigration can be seen as an act of individual initiative, Hasia Diner (1984) argues that Irish women’s emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century was partly motivated by family loyalties. These women saw themselves as being able to support their families (of origin) better from America than in Ireland. In America, most went into domestic service where the name ‘Bridget’ became synonymous with domestic service (Diner 1984).4 While Diner argues that Irish women sought independence and economic opportunity through waged employment in the US as an alternative to marriage, Janet Nolan, who studied women’s emigration from Ireland between 1885 and 1920, argues that they emigrated, not in order to reject traditional female roles but to recover the lost status they experienced in post-Famine Ireland and with a view to marrying and establishing families.5 Miller et al. (1995: 53) in a discussion of ‘the causes and goals of Irish women’s emigration’ based on letters and memoirs, argue that perhaps they sought both ‘economic opportunity and domestic bliss in America’. Indeed, Miller et al. note that Catholic writers in Ireland and the US viewed domestic service as a good preparation for marriage. In contrast, Ide O’Carroll (1990) argues that Irish women emigrating to the United States, by opting for domestic service and factory work, were rejecting ‘family life and its inherent male power structure’ (O’Carroll 1990: 18). Women’s migration in the late nineteenth century, she suggests, provided ‘a network and a lifeline to relative freedom’, thereby providing role models for Irish women in the twentieth century. Domestic service is seen as having enabled the transition from rural to urban life for these women (Nolan 1989). Nolan argues that better health and safety conditions in domestic service freed ‘young Irish women from direct participation in the rough and tumble of laissez-faire capitalism in American cities of the time’ (ibid.: 94). These women are seen as achieving ‘social and economic modernization as women’ (ibid.: 95) and as having been ‘able to speed the assimilation of their American-born children’ by ‘learning the manners and mores of the middle class during their time in service’ (ibid.: 94). Diner suggests that these women used the strengths associated with Irish rural life to cultivate model Irish-Americans. Her argument, although thinly substantiated, is that a ‘tradition of the strong, assertive Irish woman which had its roots in Ireland’s rural economy became even more pronounced in America and its urban environment’ (Diner 1983: 66). These ‘matricentred families’, she argues, strongly shaped the American-born children of these immigrant women and many Irish-American public figures grew up in ‘female headed households’ (ibid.: 69). These assertions beg questions of the relationship between US nation building and the roles these immigrant Irish women were expected to play in producing US citizens. In Diner’s analysis, it is the migrant workplace of domestic service in the United States that offers Irish women independence, thus making the US and its labour market the site of liberation. This implicit location of women’s liberation within

‘Too close for comfort’

37

an international patriarchal capitalist labour market is problematic particularly when it is this market that partly structures national economies, the international gendered division of labour and patterns of global migration. Once returned to the Irish family, Diner argues that nineteenth-century Irish women immigrants were oppressed and put upon and were sustained only by a ‘strength’ that is characteristic of women in the rural Irish economy of that century. In the Irish family in the United States, the Irish woman performs a ‘civilizing’ role partly based on the skills learned in domestic service there. Kerby Miller et al. question whether many Irish women immigrants to the US might have ‘sometimes wondered if they had sacrificed too much on the altar of domesticity’ (Miller 1995: 61). As Janet Nolan notes, ‘[a]lthough emigration liberated a generation from a life of celibate dependency on family farms, it did not liberate them from their traditional domestic responsibilities’ (Nolan 1989: 83). The relationship between domesticity and Irish women in diaspora is a crucial one that spans their choice of work and familial obligations both in diaspora and in relation to the ‘homeland’. However, this will have to be the topic of another essay. The literature referred to so far tends to overlook emigration itself as an act that is culturally, socially and geographically displacing and to support the assumption in much of the literature that women immigrants assimilate more easily than men (Lennon et al. 1988). When the experience of displacement for the migrant is investigated and the gendered responsibility of cultural survival is factored in, it can be argued that although women immigrants appear to have integrated into their country of destination more easily than men, this appearance may come at a cost that is not always visible when looking at their lives in relation to liberation through the labour market alone. Irish women immigrants to Britain after the Famine years settled mainly in large cities. They worked in factories and mills in Lancashire and West Scotland and as domestic servants, as street vendors, or doing needlework or pub work in London (Lees 1979; Lennon et al. 1988; Walter 1989).6 Like their American counterparts in the nineteenth century, many married Irish women in London took in boarders or took part-time work to supplement the family income. Bronwen Walter notes that women have outnumbered men in the Irish-born population in London since 1841, the total being as high as 60 per cent greater in 1921 (Walter 1989: 8). After the 1930s, most Irish women’s emigration was to Britain and England in particular. Most of the research on Irish women immigrants to Britain, unlike the US, focuses on their largely disadvantaged status in a gendered migrant labour market, their experiences of anti-Irish racism and, for Catholic women, their struggles to negotiate Irish and Catholic identities in relation to both Ireland and England. The migration of Irish women became a matter of great concern for the Catholic Church after the establishment of the Republic of Ireland and was publicly acknowledged and institutionalized when, in 1942, the then Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, established the ‘Emigrant Section of the Catholic Society’. At the ceremony marking the opening of the agency, Dr McQuaid said: ‘I have entrusted to you, as your chief activity in the beginning, the care of emigrants,

38

Breda Gray

especially women and girls’ (quoted in Kelly and Nic Giolla Choille 1995: 169). One of the functions of the agency was to ‘make enquiries as to whether or not the proposed employment in Britain was suitable for Catholics’ (ibid.). At the same time, English Catholic women were advising potential Catholic Irish women emigrants in the journal Christus Rex to consult their parish priest ‘before you leave home in order to prevent accepting a job far away from a Catholic Church’ (Garrigan 1949: 50, emphasis in original). The 1950s represented the high point of Irish emigration in the twentieth century, with most emigrating to Britain. ‘At the level of the state, questions were being asked as to whether “the preparation of people for earning their livelihood abroad [should] be a national policy” ’ (Arnold 1951: 264) thereby institutionalizing emigration as a way of life in Ireland. In the 1940s, many Irish women immigrants to Britain found that the war offered them work opportunities not normally available to women. In the 1950s, the numbers working in domestic work were falling as more Irish women went into nursing, factory and clerical work in England (Lennon et al. 1988; Walter 1989). By the 1950s, about 22 per cent of Irish women worked in the professions, mainly nursing (Walter 1989). Lennon et al. (1988: 25) argue that women’s inferior status and lack of opportunity in Ireland could not be weighed against the pull of an expanding economy in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. They also observe that women played a central role in incorporating new emigrants from Ireland into British society with the help of the Catholic Church and the County Associations. Women were also involved in ‘keeping alive Irish ways and culture, for instance, organizing children’s participation in Feiseanna’7 (Lennon et al. 1988: 26). By the 1980s, despite the relative economic boom in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, recession hit again. This coincided with a backlash against the modest gains of the Irish women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.8 As the numbers emigrating escalated, mainly to England in the mid-1980s, Irish government ministers constructed emigration less in relation to necessity or loss and more as a response to the European Union’s emphasis on a migrant labour force, increased individual choice and opportunities for career advancement. In this way, emigration was renormalized through economic and individualistic discourses of the day. By the 1980s, Irish women had begun to establish a political presence in England (mainly in London) with the opening of the London Irish Women’s Centre in 1986 and establishment of other groups such as the Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group.9 Lesbians began to speak out about the conflicts between cultural and sexual identity for Irish lesbians and how these are lived in diaspora (O’Carroll and Collins 1995). For women immigrants to England, the persistence of anti-Irish racism structured the ways in which they lived and expressed their Irish identities. For example, Cherry Smith found two options open to her: One of the ways of resisting anti-Irish prejudice was to hold on to and promote an idealized picture of Ireland which feeds into the romanticized postcard version that we all know is deeply false. (Smyth 1995: 228)

‘Too close for comfort’

39

Another is give in to the pressure ‘to assimilate, to sound English, to lie low’ (Smyth 1995: 227). Irish women’s lives in England were marked in specific ways by the ongoing conflict over Northern Ireland. For example, following the IRA bombing of a Birmingham pub in 1974, Máire O’Shea notes that ‘[t]he whole Irish community in Britain was being punished, and women bore much of the brunt. They would be dragged out of bed during raids, wearing only nightwear, to face degrading sexist jibes … Some who had settled in Birmingham for many years were forced to leave’ (quoted in Rossiter 1992: 73). This necessarily truncated review of the literature on Irish women in the United States and England points to differences in emphasis in the literature relating each of these diasporic sites. Women’s positions in the English labour force are seen as both servile and offering opportunity through their recruitment into increasingly skilled work (mainly in nursing) during and after the Second World War. Although clearly offering the possibility of advancement, unlike accounts of the experience in the United States, first-generation Irish women’s experiences in the Irish diaspora in England are represented in relation to anti-Irish sentiment and practice in England. Scott Brewster notes that ‘perhaps the most problematic act of relocation is the short passage to England’ (Brewster 1999: 126) and I want to consider this assertion in some depth in the following section of this chapter by examining the accounts of Irish women migrants to England. The many proximities between Ireland and Britain, including geographic, cultural, religious and others, make the many persistent distances all the harder to acknowledge. The distances between English and Irish identities asserted by colonial and racist discourses of Irishness and through lived cultural differences grate against the proximities of geography, language and assumptions about skin colour that mark English/Irish contact zones making the reproduction of Irish culture in Britain a site of anxiety and ambivalence. Ambivalent experiences of identity and images of homeland, according to Papastergiadis, ‘put greater stress on the need for re-imagining the possibilities of belonging’ (Papastergiadis 2000: 117). The conditions of belonging or settlement within England structure the possibilities of Irish cultural reproduction across borders for many in the Irish diaspora in England. First-generation Irish women immigrants to England, the most spatially and temporally proximate section of the Irish diaspora, remind us, through their accounts of displacement, disconnection and loss, of the particular challenges of proximity in a context of unequal power relations and cultural difference. Between 1993 and 1996 I carried out research through focus group discussions and interviews with 111 Irish women, about one-third of whom had emigrated to London and Luton from the Republic of Ireland in the 1980s. The women came from a range of class, urban and rural backgrounds, with children and without, and were between the ages of 25 and 40. The study focused on what it meant to be Irish women and how this might be affected by emigration (whether they stayed or left). Although multiple themes emerged from the study, my main concern in this chapter

40

Breda Gray

is to consider two main themes, first the particularity of the experience of Irish women migrants to England in the late twentieth century and how this impacts on the diasporic formation of Irishness in England and, secondly, how the gendered business of cultural survival falls on the bodies and practices of women in a way that may undermine her sense of gendered cultural identity.

Proximities and distances in becoming ‘Irish in England’ Most of the literature on Irish women in diaspora focuses on the factors causing them to leave the homeland and their goals in emigrating. Little attention has been given to these women’s roles in constituting what has recently become known as ‘the Irish diaspora’. Although the diaspora incorporates the many generations who identify as Irish across the globe (Robinson 1990), first-generation migrant women occupy a pivotal role in the reproduction of the diaspora. The significance of immigrant women to the United States in the production of ‘Irish-American’ citizens is noted by Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan’s work discussed in an earlier section of this chapter. In this part of the chapter, I identify some of the ways in which Irish migrant women to England in the late twentieth century attempt to articulate their relationships to the production of diasporic Irish identity in England. Most of these women are conscious of cultural disruption but also the specificity of their geo-political location within the diaspora especially when compared with the diaspora in the United States. Although proximity to ‘homeland’ may enable a stronger personal connection though more frequent contact and visits, there is a sense that the diaspora in England is less visible and influential than its US counterpart. because all my family still live there [Ireland], the connection is very strong … because it’s quite easy to go home I feel that the link with Ireland is still quite strong … if I had emigrated to America, for example, I think it would be quite a different experience because you would feel much further away. (Jenny, London) In Jenny’s account, geographical proximity enables a relatively strong connection with Ireland, but for Sarah, her diasporic Irish identity in England is diminished when compared with that of the Irish in the United States. I think of how aware I am of the elections in America and with the situation in Northern Ireland, the Irish contingency in America, how vocal they are, how respected they are, how they are a force to be reckoned with and how the Irish-American identity is a more strident, prouder version of Irishness than an Irish-English identity. I mean … the Irish in America have become an identity, they are now Irish-American. The Irish in England, there is no integration and I don’t think that is an Irish problem, I think it’s an English

‘Too close for comfort’

41

problem, the English do not integrate other cultures into England. So there isn’t an Irish-English identity. (Sarah, London) The public nature of Irish identity in the United States is compared with the absence of a hyphenated diasporic Irish identity in England. While suggesting that the Irish are not integrated into England, Sarah’s account moves from a position of exclusion and distance between Irish and English cultures to one of almost unavoidable cultural proximity and inclusion. The Irish and the English are … a unit together and you can’t help getting involved in that. You come over here and you think you’re going to be an individual over here and in fact you get caught up in something that’s centuries old, we seem to make up two halves of a whole … and I don’t think we exist separately … Because somehow we seem to be cast in the shadow all the time … We are cast in the shadow a lot and we take up the shadow … I felt very much a minority when I arrived … I felt very conspicuous … my accent was very obvious, I felt I had to prove myself every time I opened my mouth, there were a lot of IRA bombs or threats of bombings around that time … (Sarah) The idea of Ireland and England as a unit suggests a kind of mutual construction that is impossible to avoid. Yet, as Sarah sees it, the relationship between the elements of this unit is affected by the dominance of one over the other. She finds herself positioned in relation to a collective minority ethnic status that is both cast in and takes up the shadow in relation to the dominant English culture. While Sollors (1986), in the context of the US, notes that ‘ethnicity is a “sacred asset” or “very desirable identity feature”, ethnic identity in Britain is a source of ambivalence’. For Sarah, it reproduces a position of subordination and denies her an individuality that she sought through emigration. Joan introduces further ambivalence into this proximate relationship between Englishness and Irishness. I have found living in this country, in London extremely difficult, I feel very alien here, I feel it to be an extremely alien culture and I find the whole thing extremely negative on the one hand and one the other hand, I feel I’ve got an enormous lot out of it … it was only a couple of years ago that I began to call myself an emigrant because it … set me apart from the culture here in a way. I’m not bloody English … I feel very separate from the whole society structure here … (Joan, London) Although Joan suggests that she has gained from leaving Ireland to live in England, she refuses any aspect of English culture as constituting any part of her diasporic identity and maintains her cultural difference through identifying as an

42

Breda Gray

‘emigrant’. Her diasporic identity is thereby constructed in relation to the act of leaving Ireland. Despite her sense of cultural alienation, Joan acknowledges that she has gained from living in England, implying that Ireland could not have provided the same opportunities. The interplay between ‘here’ and ‘there’ for the migrant is articulated by Helen, who suggests that the term ‘emigrant’ can’t be applied to English emigrants because their relationship to the world through Empire offers a more global sense of belonging than is true of Irish emigrants. She suggests that although her sense of belonging in England may be illusionary, it is something that can never be resolved and that ‘we always have to think about’. I feel like quite happy here in one sense, sometimes I think I am kidding myself about how accepted I am … I think that it is a unique situation that we always have to think about it. It’s like – are we here or are we there? English people, I really envy them and the fact that they don’t have to think about it. If they choose to emigrate it’s a very big radical step that they do it for a particular reason … it just isn’t the same thing about emigrating and then spending ten years trying to decide whether to go back or not … and they accept that they will end up here (England) most of them … they have the history of Empire behind them. So if they emigrate, they don’t see themselves as emigrating, they are going to another part of England … that might be ten thousand miles away, but they are going to create some colony there. (Helen) Helen’s account is one of many that emphasize the recurrence of questions of return for these migrant women. This produces a diasporic self-consciousness that is acute and an ‘unsettledness’ that marks many aspects of their lives. The focus on causes, goals and motivations for emigration tends to occlude the less tangible ‘turbulent belongings’ of the migrant in the diaspora. These women’s narratives suggest struggle more than liberation and a desire of individualization that is stifled by collective ethnic status in England. The diasporic subjectivities narrated in these accounts, while suggesting a desire for liberation through individualism in some cases, are marked by political and cultural relationships between their countries of origin and destination. Through the proximities of Ireland and England, Irishness and Englishness, they produce an uneasy distance that structures their diasporic belongings. The relentless individualism of Western liberalism offers a privatized model of liberation that comes into conflict with the multicultural and feminist projects of empowering oppressed groups to advance their own political aims (Honnig 1999). Although some women identified with multicultural politics of Irish ethnic identity in England, many felt that ethnicization positioned them as disadvantaged and in a subordinate relationship to the dominant English culture (Gray, forthcoming). As Ien Ang argues ‘the ethnicization of subjects in diaspora signals the impossibility of their complete nationalization within the dominant culture of the adopted new country’ (Ang 1994: 17). Multicultural policies that emphasize separate ethnic identities and accounts, such as Joan’s above, could be seen as clinging to an Irish identity in a way that might be seen as complicit

‘Too close for comfort’

43

with and reproducing ‘the effects of the divide-and-rule politics of colonial modernity and its aftermath, where categorical “ethnicity” has been produced to control and contain peoples’ (Ang 1994: 18). These developments can overlook differences within and create internal hierarchies and silences. For example, some of the women supported feminist activism in London but a few noted that this often came into conflict with dominant perceptions of what it meant to be Irish in England. The purpose of this section of the chapter has been to locate migration within diaspora as a specific and significant aspect of diasporic formation and to introduce the concept of ‘displacement’ to discussion of the Irish diaspora in England through the accounts of relatively recent migrants who are simultaneously negotiating emigration, immigration and diasporic belongings. Having established the crucial position of the migrant in the production of diasporic belongings and the specificity of this position in the context of England, in the following section I want to suggest that the body of the migrant woman takes on an even more specific role in the reproduction of the diaspora. If, as Judith Butler (1990: 139) argues ‘[g]ender is a project that has cultural survival as its end’, then women’s relationship to cultural survival in diaspora will be lived through the gender project. Questions arise of how cultural identity is to be maintained through the generations as well as how this continuity is to be recognized and by whom.

Cultural survival in diaspora – a gendered project Although some Irish women immigrants to London saw themselves as creating more possibilities for themselves as women, the ‘ “translation” of gender and sexual politics into the world of migration and resettlement’ (Bhabha 1999: 83) is fraught with difficulty and contradiction. Migrant Irish women are often caught between the liberal patriarchy of the labour market and culture in England and a liberal Irish patriarchal culture that continues to domesticate women’s roles via gendered obligations to ensure Irish cultural survival. The extent to which the migrant women assumed this cultural obligation is noteworthy. Yet, at the same time as accepting this cultural work, they were also acutely aware that the criteria for ‘authenticity’ could not be achieved in diaspora. While assuming responsibility for cultural reproduction they also accepted with it the criteria of the ‘homeland’ for identifying the ‘authenticity’ of Irish culture. This positioned them in an impossible situation as assuming responsibility for cultural reproduction in circumstances that could only produce an ‘inauthentic’ Irishness. Jenny’s account below reflects this ‘double consciousness’ when she describes her perceptions of her ‘English’ cousins when they visited her family in Ireland when she was a child. I remember people going to England or … home from England. It was so much part of the scene that I don’t think I ever wondered particularly what people did when they were over there. Like I had aunts who had been gone before I was born and they would come home with their children on holidays and things like that. But I don’t think I had any concept of what it was like to

44

Breda Gray live in Leicester or to live in Birmingham. And I looked on their children, like my cousins as English because they had such different accents and they had an urban background and all that. But it just seemed normal really. (Jenny, London)

Irishness is assumed to be defined largely by Irish accent and rural lifestyle, not features associated with second-generation Irish in England. Bernice humorously notes that her perception of being Irish and its relationship to Ireland is disrupted by her visit to the United States before she moved to London. I spent a year in the States … and if I was not Irish before I went there, I was Irish after I left. I went to Boston and I spent six months in the Irish community and then six months outside of it … and that was a real eye opener about Irish and Ireland and what people regard as Irish and how you can take about six generations beyond who still regard themselves as Irish … it’s Aran’s and tweeds and whiskey and warm beer and pub talk and Guinness … (Bernice, London) Bernice mocks the authenticity of diasporic Irish identity and culture as they move away from the immigrant generation. The array of artefacts and performances that come to constitute Irish identity in sixth-generation Irish in the US are seen as inauthentic and inappropriately insistent. Irish culture is seen as declining as it moves through the generations in the United States where, in Bernice’s view, to regard oneself as Irish involves a public display of stereotypical images and a nostalgic relationship to a place never visited. When discussing a second-generation Irish friend of hers in London, Brigid notes that ‘he calls himself a “plastic paddy” … he is not really Irish, he was brought up between the two … His parents travelled constantly between England and Ireland …’. The very condition of being ‘in-between’ is rendered inauthentic, a plastic identity that cannot but undermine cultural survival. Brigid goes on to describe the main Irish cultural and social centre in London and the images that deck the walls there. When you go along, where is that place in Camden?, the Kennedy Hall and, Oh God, you just immediately think of those three pictures, you know, Elvis, the Pope and Kennedy up on the wall. And I just cringe… (Brigid, London) These artefacts, which represent some aspects of diasporic Irish identity in England, are represented by Brigid as ‘kitsch’ and filled with inappropriate and inauthentic affect. David Lloyd defines kitsch as ‘congealed memory that expresses simultaneously the impossible desire to realize a relation to a culture only available in the form of recreation and the failure to transmit a past’ (Lloyd 1999: 91). Because Brigid feels connected to her past in Ireland she is ashamed of these icons, which represent both a desire for, and the impossibility of ever-restoring connection (Lloyd 1999). Like Brigid, most of the women’s accounts emphasize a

‘Too close for comfort’

45

confidence in the ‘authenticity’ of their own connections with Ireland and Irish identities as Irish-born when compared to second and subsequent generations in the diaspora. Yet there is an anxiety about generational continuity in their accounts. Their status as Irish women seems to rely on their ability to transmit the past and Irish culture to their own (potential) children. The migrant woman, therefore, is conscious of an expectation that she pass on her culture to her children, but is simultaneously aware of the impossibility of reproducing cultural authenticity in diaspora. the thing that bothers me most is the fact that my children are not being brought up in Ireland. That really is a great source of heartbreak for me because they are missing out on so much. (Group discussion, Anne, London) you just want their childhood to be like yours was … . You …want them to have that … (Fionnula, emphasis added) The absence of an Irish childhood for their children represents a loss and one that they are faced with having to compensate for in diaspora. By bringing up a child in London, Helen’s account suggests a sense of cultural discontinuity when she imagines how her potential children might see her: if my kids grew up here they would see me as being Irish, and having a bit of a funny accent, but they would grow up English and their kids would be English … [my mother] would have English grandchildren which she would have to deal with I suppose … maybe it’s not a tragedy, it just seems slightly sad to me … that’s all. (Group discussion, Helen, London, emphasis added) Intergenerational cultural continuity is potentially lost to Helen and her mother as she anticipates having ‘English children’. In languages of immigration, AnneMarie Fortier (1996) argues that generations become a metaphor for change as they mark the gradual degeneration of an imagined ‘original’ culture. These accounts point to diasporic Irishness ‘as a provisional and partial site of identity which must be constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated’ (Ang 1994: 18). As women in a postcolonial proximate diaspora, they can be seen in McClintock’s words, as inhabiting an ‘uninhabitable zone of ambivalence that grants them neither identity nor difference’ (McClintock 1995: 63). Their Irish pasts may lack meaning for their children whose present and future identities are uncertain. Although Papastergiadis suggests that ambivalent experiences of identity ‘put greater stress on the need for re-imagining the possibilities of belonging’ (Papastergiadis 2000: 117), this re-imagining may be less evident in the migrant generation than the second generation. One could read these women’s accounts in terms of a cultural impasse, but they are unable to look through their children’s eyes towards a different

46

Breda Gray

kind of identity that involves new forms of translation and folding of the foreign and familiar. These women’s losses and gains can be seen as announcing a new basis on which to think and live cultural identity that incorporates disruption and displacement in different ways. Second and subsequent generation Irish in England have contributed to a globalized Irish culture not least through the music of the Pogues and the plays of Martin McDonagh. Anxieties about the reproduction of a diasporic cultural identity are an aspect of women’s lives in diaspora missed by much of the literature focusing on the push, pull and liberatory effects of Irish women’s emigration. Although it is impossible for any single research project to address the multiple layers of diasporic lives, I think that the gendered reproduction of cultural identity in diaspora as it impacts upon ‘the migrant woman’ tends to be repeatedly overlooked. Although much loss and anxiety is articulated in the women’s accounts, the potential for new hybrid diasporic formations of Irishness in England are increasingly evident in the literature emerging in the 1990s. In Emma Donoghue’s short story ‘Going Back’ (1993), Cyn, Donoghue’s lesbian protagonist, asks Lou, a gay Irishman in London, ‘Were you ever asked if you agreed to be Irish? … And what happens if your try to refuse it or leave it behind? Everybody freaks out as if you’ve dumped a baby in a carrier bag at the airport’ (Donoghue 1993: 161). As Arrowsmith points out, ‘Donoghue compares the refusal of “Irishness” with the refusal of motherhood and also, by implication, the refusal of the heterosexual, reproductive matrix’ (Arrowsmith 1999: 134). This heterosexual reproductive matrix, just like gay identity, is refigured in migration as Irish women renegotiate cultural and gender and sexual identities in diaspora. John Walsh, a second-generation Irish journalist and critic in England, in his autobiography, The Falling Angels, reconfigures the constitutive dissonances between Irishness and Englishness and speaks into the loss and silences that these women articulate as he sits at his mother’s death bed in Ireland. And so I sit here, between Battersea and Galway, two poles I know with two levels of intimacy, one of them my resting place, the other my ‘true home’, though it feels as awkwardly foreign as it’s always done … I, who am not Irish, feel I’m being sucked into a new Gaelic identity. And yet I’ve spent forty-odd years growing up with this Irish strain, this Celtic gene that had invaded my English soul at a million turns. While the figure who did most to turn me into this curious hybrid lies dying beside me. I begin to remember the years I’d spent being both English and Irish, the constant switchback of my relationship with both countries, the condition of being between the two cultures my mother straddled like the consummate actress she was; hers, my father’s, my sister’s and my own endless falling between sense and sensibility, between south London and the west of Ireland. (Walsh 1999: 30–1) Fully assimilated citizenship is withheld both in England and Ireland to John because English identity is addressed to and through an Irish other and vice versa,

‘Too close for comfort’

47

preventing a ‘pure’ identification with either. Here he articulates the tensions of hybrid identities both for himself and his mother. His account does not have a celebratory tone to it but offers a perception of his mother’s straddling of two cultures that perhaps she might not identify with. His sense of ‘falling between’ cultures is understood through his mother’s ability to live between cultures. But power relations also inflect the dynamics of hybrid identity. A celebration of the hybrid person ‘if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies’, as Shohat and Stam (1994: 42) argue, ‘risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence’. There is a need to question the frame of relationships between nations, the ‘native’, the migrant and subsequent generations. The possibilities of hybridity are contained within its own mechanics – it is important that we don’t give ethical purity or theoretical privilege to these liminal figures. It is ‘the frames of representation themselves [that] need to be re-evaluated’ (Kirkland 1999: 225–6) on an ongoing basis. The geo-political context of Irish/English relations may be changing in the aftermath of the peace process, but as Fintan O’Toole notes below, there is a continued reluctance in Ireland to recognize the Irish diaspora in England. This section of the diaspora is, perhaps, still too close for comfort. On many levels, the relationship between Ireland and Britain is becoming less neurotic. The Belfast Agreement … has provided an intellectual and political framework within which conflicts over sovereignty and identity can be negotiated … But there is still one huge historic overhang, obscured by amnesia and evasion: the position of the Irish in Britain. This chapter goes some way toward remembering the Irish in England through the experiences of Irish women who emigrated to the south-east of England (mainly London) in the 1980s.

Conclusion Women’s stories are usually seen as marginal to the authoritative narratives of nation and diaspora. In the past fifteen to twenty years, historians and geographers mainly, have begun to examine the experiences of Irish women in the diaspora. Many of these analyses identify a journey into the possibilities of full personhood based on independence, individualism and a place in the labour market. This emancipatory trajectory of diaspora for Irish women may be informed by a liberal feminist discourse but needs challenging. The patriarchal structures of American and English labour markets may be different from those of rural agricultural and Catholic Ireland (of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), but different formations of patriarchy do not necessarily mean increased liberation for women. Such analyses bring with them the danger of constructing Ireland as a monolithically oppressive society, a homogeneous space that leaves no room for resistance and suggest a romance with the United States in particular and its liberatory potential. In some analyses, Irish women in diaspora are represented as having negotiated a passage from backward, uncivilized rural lifestyles to a modern, ‘universal civilization’ in the United States implicitly relegating those who remain behind to a familiar sort of colonial stasis and inferiority. If diaspora is constituted

48

Breda Gray

through movement, then non-movement is also constitutive of this concept. Constructions of the emigrant involve a positioning of the non-emigrant and ‘homeland’ in particular ways. The continued operation of the binary movement/ non-movement in the theorizing of diaspora is a topic for another essay, but is one that needs to be kept in play in any discussion of diaspora.10 The lived experiences of diaspora are affected by the geo-political structuring of diasporic communities and identities. This essay argues for a critical diasporic politics that maintains historical and political dynamics of diaspora and avoids the decontextualization and flattening out of difference. Kaplan notes that an ‘overgeneralized and utopian notion of the transnational diasporic subject’ erases the distinctions between different groups of migrants in different times and places whose migration and identities will be produced in different material circumstances (Kaplan 1996: 105). Ang draws on Gilroy to suggest that it is ‘the relation between “where you’re from” and “where you’re at” … which is constitutive of the idea of diaspora’ (Ang 1994: 10). This essay suggests that although this relationship is a central one in the lived experiences of Irish migrant women in London, their diasporic sensibilities are also structured by dominant constructions of the Irish diaspora as largely an Irish-American diaspora. As long as nation and diaspora are so closely allied to ethnic continuity through kin and ‘generation’, women’s identities and belongings will be produced through gendered roles of biological and cultural reproduction mediated through heterosexual and ethicized relationships to men. Their steps towards new possibilities in migration quickly become re-tracked into family, kin and ethnic obligations. The accounts of migrant Irish women in London suggest both a longing for and a disruption of ‘the mythical continuum between past and present’ (Papastergiadis 2000: 75). Their families of origin and children represent otherness in their migrant presents (see Bhabha 1999). Their belonging in Britain is disrupted by configurations of cultural difference allocated to the past but which cannot guide their sense of the future. The future becomes an open question that is kept open by second and subsequent generations in diaspora. Although living diasporic lives between a national past and diasporic future, migrant women may find it hard to see continuity in the ‘creolized, syncretized, hybridized, and chronically impure cultural forms’ that mark their own lives and perhaps more deeply the lives of their children. For some, this perceived absence of cultural continuity is experienced as personal (gendered) failure and as loss. Yet, as the flourishing production of Irish culture in the diaspora demonstrates, new cultural forms and identities are continuously being gained. The term diaspora in social theory tends to relate largely to the domain of the cultural. Yet, it is important to recognize the ‘ethical function of the cultural’ as it has come to play a central role in forming citizens for the modern state (Lloyd and Thomas 1998: 1). Diasporic culture can be seen as refiguring political citizenship as transnational and this essay points to some of the ways in which Irish migrant women contribute to the production of hyphenated diasporic identities for second-generation Irish in England and in the United States. The heterosexual family, although also a

‘Too close for comfort’

49

potential site of resistance in diaspora, naturalizes and reproduces a heterosexist symbolic order. Diaspora in practice is also gender in practice. Yet, in the theorization of diaspora, the empirical and symbolic heterosexism of diaspora tends to go unnoticed thereby reinforcing the naturalization of gender difference. The accounts of Irish women discussed in this essay suggest that the regulative aspects of diaspora are powerful but subtle. Most of the accounts expressed a consciousness of the geo-politics of diaspora, but were also firmly structured by expectations of biological and cultural reproduction. Though conscious of subordinating their Irish identities to a dominant English culture, the accounts suggest little consciousness of the ways in which their gender identities are defined through an obligation to reproduce culture in diasporic conditions, which they often see as thwarting their efforts. Have Irish women in diaspora, as Kerby Miller et al. (1995: 6) put it, ‘sacrificed too much on the alter of domesticity’?

Notes 1 It is estimated that the world-wide Irish diaspora is composed of some 70 million people, approximately 40 million of whom reside in America and 13 million in Britain. 2 Miller et al. (1995: 41) note that by the late 1970s ‘scarcely any historians had studied women’s roles in the history of Ireland, of Irish emigration, or of Irish America’. 3 The US Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 and the economic depression in the 1930s led to a shift away from the USA as the predominant destination for Irish emigrants. Ida O’Carroll (1990) notes that the annual inflow of Irish immigrants to the USA was about 24,000 in the 1920s but was reduced to approximately 7,000 in the 1950s. 4 In 1900, 54 per cent of all Irish-born women in the US worked as domestic servants (Nolan, 1989: 69). 5 Miller et al. (1995) note that Diner and Nolan provide little evidence to prove either assertion. 6 In 1851, 42.7 per cent of Irish women in London worked in domestic service (Lennon et al. 1988). 7 Feiseanna are competitions in Irish singing, dancing and music. 8 In 1983 a constitutional amendment was passed to enshrine the right to life of the foetus as equal to that of the mother and made it illegal to provide women in Ireland with information about abortion services in Britain as abortion was (and arguably still is) illegal in Ireland. The 1986 referendum on divorce resulted in a decision not to allow divorce in the Republic of Ireland under any circumstances. 9 Janet Nolan notes that by the early twentieth century Irish women lagged behind other female immigrants in forming women’s organizations. They did engage in selfhelp community based activities and in trade union and nationalist causes in the United States. The Catholic Church was their most important social outlet (1989: 87). 10 Although both movement and non-movement constitute the concept of diaspora, physical movement and non-movement have particular effects. For example, Janet Nolan argues that ‘the successful adaptation of these women to urban society abroad helped maintain obsolete patterns of life in rural Ireland that would have disappeared, albeit at a tremendous human cost, without that financial support. The most expendable group in post-Famine Ireland – dependent daughters and sisters – became the saviours of a society that could not have remained intact save by their emigration and their remittances’ (1989: 71).

50

Breda Gray

Bibliography Ang, I. (1994) ‘On not speaking Chinese: postmodern ethnicity and the politics of diaspora’, New Formations, 24(Winter): 1–18. Anthias, F. (1998) ‘Evaluating “diaspora”: beyond ethnicity?’, Sociology, 32(3): 557–80. Arnold, Rev. (1951) ‘Emigration: some suggestions’, Christus Rex, V(3): 260–70. Arrowsmith, A. (1999) ‘M/otherlands: literature, gender, diasporic identity’, in S. Brewster, C. Crossman, F. Becket and D. Alderson (eds) Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space, London: Routledge. Bhabha, H.K. (1999) ‘Liberalism’s sacred cow’, in S. Moller Okin (ed.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London and New York: Routledge. Brewster, S. (1999) ‘Introduction to Part III Space’, in S. Brewster, C. Crossman, F. Becket, and D. Alderson (eds) Ireland in Proximity. History, Gender, Space, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–38. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Coogan, T.P. (2000) Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora, London: Hutchinson. Diner, H. (1983) Erin’s Daughter in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Donoghue, E. (1993) ‘Going back’, in D. Bolger (ed.) Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad, Dublin: New Island Books. Enloe, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fitzpatrick, D. (1987) ‘The modernization of the Irish female’, in P. Ferguson, K. Kevin Whelan and P. O’Flanagan (eds) Rural Ireland 1600–1900: Modernization and Change, Cork: Cork University Press. —— (1996) ‘The politics of “Italians abroad”: nation, diaspora and new geographies of identity’, BSA Annual Conference, ‘Worlds of the Future’, Reading University, April. —— (1999) ‘Re-membering places and the performance of belonging(s)’, Theory Culture & Society, 16(2): 41–64. Garrigan, O.M. (1949) ‘ “So you are going to England”: an open letter to Irish girls about to emigrate’, Christus Rex, III(2): 49–57. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London and New York: Verso. —— (2000) Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. Gray, B. (1999). ‘Longings and belongings: gendered spatialities of Irishness’, Irish Studies Review, 7(2): 193–210. —— (2000a) ‘Gendering the Irish diaspora: questions of enrichment, hybridization and return’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(2): 167–85. —— (2000b) ‘From “ethnicity” to “diaspora”: 1980s emigration and “multicultural” London’, in A. Bielenberg (ed.) The Irish Diaspora, Harlow: Pearson. —— (forthcoming) ‘ “Whitely Scripts” and Irish women’s racialized belonging(s) in England’, Gender Space and Culture. Honig, B.(1999) ‘My culture made me do it’, in S. Moller Okin (ed.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jackson, J.A. (1963) The Irish in Britain, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

‘Too close for comfort’

51

Kelly, K. and Nic Giolla Choille, T. (1995) ‘Listening and learning: experiences in an emigrant advice agency’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) Irish women and Irish migration, London: Leicester University Press. Kirkland, R. (1999) ‘Questioning the frame: hybridity, Ireland and the institution’, in C. Graham and R. Kirkland (eds) Ireland and Cultural Theory: The Mechanics of Authenticity, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lavie, S. and Swedenburg, T. (eds) (1996) Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Lee, J. (2000) ‘Banished daughters of Eve’, The Sunday Tribune, 16 April: 20. Lees, L.H. (1979), Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lennon, M., McAdam, M. and O’Brien, J. (1988) Across the Water: Irish Women’s Lives in Britain, London: Virago. Lloyd, D. (1999) Ireland after History, Cork: Cork University Press. Lloyd, D. and Thomas, P. (1998) Culture and the State, New York: Routledge. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London: Routledge. Miller, K.A. with D.N. Doyle and P. Kelleher (1995) ‘ “For love and liberty”: Irish women, migration and domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) Irish Women and Irish Migration, Leicester: Leicester University Press. Nassy Brown, J. (1998) ‘Black Liverpool, Black America, and the gendering of diasporic space’, Cultural Anthropology, 13(3): 291–325. Nolan, J. (1989) Ourselves Alone: Woman’s Emigration from Ireland, 1855–1920, Lexington, KY: Univerisity Press of Kentucky. O’Carroll, I. (1990) Models for Movers: Irish Women’s Emigration to America, Dublin: Attic Press. O’Carroll, I. and Collins, E. (eds) (1995) Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twentyfirst Century, London and New York: Cassell. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Pettman, J.J. (1996) Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics, London: Routledge. Robinson, M. (1990) (former UNHCR Commissioner) Address by the President on the occasion of her inauguration, 3 December. Rossiter, A. (1992) ‘ “Between the devil and the deep blue sea”: Irish women, Catholicism and colonialism’, in G. Sahgal and N. Yuval-Davis (eds) Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain, London: Virago Press. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Sanguri, K. and Sudesh, V. (1990) ‘Recasting women: an introduction’, in K. Sanguri. and V. Sudesh (eds) Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shohat, E. and Stam, R. (1994) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, London and New York: Routledge. Smyth, C. (1995) ‘Keeping it close: experiencing emigration in England’, in I. O’Carroll and E. Collins (eds) Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-first Century, London and New York: Cassell. Sollors, W. (1986) Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Van Hear, N. (1998) New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities, London: UCL Press.

52

Breda Gray

Walter, B. (1989) Irish Women in London: The Ealing Dimension, London: LSPU. —— (1991) ‘Gender and recent migration to Britain’, in R. King (ed.) Contemporary Irish Migration, Geographical Society of Ireland Special Publication, 6: 11–20. Walsh, J. (1999) The Falling Angels: An Irish Romance, London: HarperCollins. Yuval-Davis, N. (1993) ‘Gender and nation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(4): 621–32.

Place, movement and identity

3

53

Place, movement and identity Processes of inclusion and exclusion in a ‘Caribbean’ family Karen Fog Olwig

Introduction The notions of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’ have helped to redirect migration research towards important new areas of inquiry. Nevertheless, I shall here argue that they may unnecessarily narrow the field of study in ways that make it difficult to grasp the breadth of experience and the complexity of socio-cultural systems found among people who have engaged in migratory movements. In recent years I have carried out life story interviews with members of global family networks of Caribbean background with a view to conducting an exploratory ethnographic study of a group of people who have engaged in a great deal of movement. In this chapter, which focuses on life stories related by family members who have moved to Canada, I shall first investigate how family members have experienced being designated as a ‘visible minority’ in Canadian society. I shall then examine the significance of the global family network as a site of relatedness and belonging within and outside Canadian society. I conclude by arguing that more broadbased ethnographic studies may allow for wider analysis of important commonalities, as well as differences, in the sort of lives people explore today, regardless of their particular place of origins. In several recent articles Ortner (1993, 1997, 1998a, 1998b) has discussed her fieldwork among old classmates from Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, from which she graduated in 1958. This research basically involved going on the turnpike ‘to look for America’, because most of Ortner’s classmates had moved away after graduating from the local high school to pursue their careers. Ortner’s research therefore entailed driving thousands of miles as she criss-crossed the United States to interview this scattered group of people, and their grown children, about the sort of lives that they had lived. The field site, in other words, was not localized in the conventional sense of having taken place in a small, local community. Rather the United States as such was the field site, Ortner’s overall purpose being to carry out an ethnographic study of American society. Indeed, Ortner suggests that the once localized, now scattered group of people that she studied constitutes a ‘standard mode of community in contemporary America’. This is because, ‘people for the most part still grow up in “communities” in the traditional sense, in towns or suburbs or neighbourhoods where people know one

54

Karen Fog Olwig

another in overlapping ways. But then they disperse, to varying degrees of geographic and social distance, and in varying moods of escape or nostalgia’ (Ortner 1998a: 417). When I became acquainted with Ortner’s research, I was myself engaged in a rather similar research project. Like Ortner, I was studying people who shared common origins in a particular place. Furthermore, these people had moved from their original place of birth for educational and occupational reasons. My field research therefore also meant travelling to persons living in many different geographic locations, most of them in modern, urban settings. Despite these striking similarities between the two research projects, most social scientists would probably perceive them as being quite different and as belonging to disparate fields of study within anthropology. This is because my project concerns persons whose common place of origin is located in the Caribbean and their travels therefore have involved the crossing of not just the political borders demarcating nation-states, but also the social and economic boundary that divides the global North from the global South. Studies of these kinds of geographical movements are categorized as migration research and they do not evoke feelings of community and belonging in mainstream society. They rather inspire notions of displacement and the emergence of diasporic or transnational identities. The way in which we classify our research is not just a matter of how we label our work, because these labels are not merely descriptive. Rather they situate our research within specific fields of inquiry that are associated with particular theoretical and analytical tools. This is apparent in Sherry Ortner’s work. She had planned a broad ethnographic study of American society. Indeed, an important driving force in her study was her conviction that ‘America is over-analyzed and under-ethnographized’ (Ortner, 1993: 412). Her ethnographic research was guided by her interest in investigating the significance of class in American society. When she discussed her project with colleagues, however, they wondered why she did not look into the importance of ethnicity, the high school in Newark being located in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. The sort of ‘community’ that she was studying, in other words, was identified as an ethnic one in American academic discourse. This academic labelling of the community coincided with the way in which the ‘natives’, the informants that Ortner interviewed, perceived themselves. Thus when she began her research she discovered that her informants often talked about the importance of their ethnic background and rarely about the significance of their being part of the mainstream of American middle-class society. At the same time, the interviews left no doubt that the informants were quite preoccupied with maintaining their middle-class status. Indeed, it was apparent that most of their geographic movements were an integral part of their desire to maintain, or improve, their middle-class status in American society. Ortner concluded that the absence of reference to class and the strong presence of ethnicity in the interviews were due to the fact that the notion of class, with its suggestion of social and economic inequality, is foreign to Americans’ perception of their society as basically egalitarian and generally middle class. Ethnicity, on the other hand, occupies a central position in the ‘folk’ as well as the ‘social science’

Place, movement and identity

55

understanding of American society. She explains, ‘I tried to ask about class. But the centrality of Jewishness to these people’s lives and talk was overwhelming. It is all over my transcripts; I was chided for not asking about it; I simply could not leave it out. If I were going to ignore this much native discourse, this much native passion, I might as well not have bothered doing fieldwork’ (Ortner, 1998a: 6). She solved the problem conveniently by interpreting ‘ethnicity’ as a means of expressing class relations, arguing that the notion of ethnicity allows for the conceptualizing of difference without evoking relations of inequality. This ethnicity of difference also roots Americans in local communities within the United States and establishes a basis for developing networks of ties with former classmates, which may be of great help in the socially and economically mobile life trajectories that most people desire. Students of migration are similarly faced with popular as well as academic notions that influence not just the sort of research questions that tend to be asked within this field, but also the kinds of answers that researchers receive to their questions. This has become particularly apparent in recent years, when the field of migration studies has undergone major transformations as new research paradigms have been introduced. Formerly, research on migration was carried out by what British sociologist Robin Cohen (1998) has termed ‘a rather conservative breed of sociologists, historians, demographers and geographers’ who investigated population movements in time and space and the movers’ integration into their new place of residence. Of late, however, research on migration has been ‘assailed by a bevy of postmodernists, novelists and scholars of cultural studies’ (ibid.: 21) who focus on experiences of border crossing and the new forms of identity to which such experiences may lead. The notions of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’ have emerged as central terms in this more recent understanding of migration, among scholars as well as migrants, in particular those migrants who are well educated and articulate. In James Clifford’s overview of the idea of diaspora, its main features are summarized as ‘a history of dispersal, myths/ memories of the homeland, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship’ (Clifford 1994: 305). Transnationalism has a somewhat different meaning and refers to the actual networks of social, economic and political ties that people develop and sustain across the political borders that separate different nation-states (for a critical discussion see Mahler 1998). Whereas diaspora denotes a largely mental state of belonging, which may be grounded in physical movements that took place many generations back, transnationalism is shaped by present-day movements between at least two nationstates and the resulting cross-border relations. Although the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism differ to the extent that they emphasize different aspects of movement and identity formation, they have tended to merge in recent academic discourse. Diaspora has thus come to connote any experience of displacement from ‘home’, just as transnationalism largely has become an ‘adjective … used to modify “Diaspora” ’ (Schwartz 1998: 197, 201). The central importance of the notions of diaspora and transnation today signals a concern with attachment to place of origin that is quite new within

56

Karen Fog Olwig

migration research. As noted, until recent years the field of migration research emphasized such aspects of the migration process as the push-pull factors that induce people to leave for various migration destinations and the processes of incorporation that migrants undergo in their new place of residence. These research issues reflect, to a great extent, concerns of the receiving countries – the causes and patterns of migration flows that shape the influx of people, and the processes whereby the newly arrived are turned into proper citizens. Studies of the migrants’ attachment to their homeland, and the transnational fields of socio-economic relations and cultural expressions of continued identification with a distant homeland, therefore seem to offer a new orientation that takes its point of departure in the migrants, and their concerns. I am not convinced that the strong foregrounding of these phenomena in migration research primarily represents a new focus on the natives’ point of view. Rather I suspect that it also reflects the fact that the notion of transnational diasporas has become a global parallel to the North American notions of race and ethnicity which today comprise a ‘dominant discourse of social difference’ (Ortner 1998b: 2). This is born out by the fact that identity issues and cultural politics, central topics in this field of research, have become a subject of major interest in Western society, not the least among intellectuals from the third world who are engaged in cultural politics. Indeed, many of the authors of the literature on transnationalism and diasporas have been subjected, themselves, to the migration experience and resultant complex identity structures that they write about. This field of study has been developed, to a great extent, within the new area of cultural studies. This area is not based on fieldwork, but rather focuses on the artistic, religious and intellectual expressions of persons who are ‘displaced’ from the area identified as their homeland (Hall 1990; Gilroy 1993; Appadurai 1996).1 In his work Arjun Appadurai points to modern diasporic public spheres, and the ‘transnationalist cultural movements’ associated with them, as constituting increasingly important fora of differentiation with significant political and social implications (Appadurai 1996: 147). The fact that such movements often evoke notions of ‘primordial sentiment’ (ibid.: 146), or ‘ideas of collective identity based on shared claims to blood, soil, or language’ (ibid.: 140), should not, according to Appadurai, lead to the conclusion that these movements are based on such forms of allegiance. Indeed, these forms are themselves cultural constructions resulting from works of the imagination, whereby certain aspects of group identities are naturalized. Thus he distinguishes between, on the one hand, ‘unmarked culture’ that refers to ‘a virtually open-ended archive of differences’ and, on the other, ‘marked culture’ where particular differences are emphasized as constituting the defining features of group identity (ibid.: 14–15). Marked culture, and the cultural differentiation in which it results, is for him, the most important subject of study. ‘Marked culture’ has also been the primary topic of study in the disciplines of sociology or anthropology. A central topic of investigation in these fields has been ethnically based political organizations established by certain migrants from their particular vantage point as actors in two different nation-states (Sutton and Chaney

Place, movement and identity

57

1987; Schiller et al. 1992; Basch et al. 1994; see also Kearney 1986 and Mahler 1998). One might question, however, whether such expressions of marked culture comprise an adequate empirical basis for a new anthropology of migration and the global modern? Sarah Mahler (1998: 82) has thus criticized research on transnational social fields for ‘yield[ing] detailed information on a limited set of activities and practices, not a clear picture of the breadth of the social field, nor of the demography or intensity of players’ participation in all the activities people engage in’. There is, in other words, a danger that it helps conceal a self-referentiality in which the imaginings of privileged workers of the imagination and cultural politics, as gestalted in highly profiled media, come to subordinate the imaginings of the less prominent workers of the imagination. This suggests that it is necessary to go beyond such public representations of culture in order to explore the less spectacular, and more private, imagined worlds. Furthermore, it is important to investigate these worlds not just as they are portrayed in books, music and films, but also as they are constructed by people at many different levels of society. Such studies must include examining the kind of social relations, emotional attachments and communities of values that people cherish, and how their lives feed on and are fed by the imagined worlds that they develop.

The field During the latter part of the 1990s I have been engaged in a research project that explores a wide range of life experiences of people who are of Caribbean background, but who have lived most or all of their lives outside their family’s place of origin in the Caribbean. The research involves members of three family networks who can trace their origins to Jamaica, Dominica and Nevis. While most individuals initially travelled to important migration destinations or areas that later came to hold major Caribbean communities, many have moved out of these areas, and members of the three family networks are now scattered in the far corners of North America and Europe as well as the Caribbean. This research, therefore, focuses on individuals who all share a tie to the Caribbean through their ancestry but whose social and economic condition and involvement in a Caribbean community inside or outside the Caribbean may vary a great deal. In this study I have found the life story interviews to constitute a valuable methodological and analytical tool.2 As narratives of life trajectories these interviews contain a great deal of information on people’s actual movements in space, their past and present engagement in various social, economic and cultural activities and the various groups which may be associated with them. More importantly in this context, the telling of life stories allows, indeed requires, persons to define and explicate to others their own fields of belonging and identification and how these fields are articulated with the socio-cultural and physical boundaries which they experience in their everyday lives. The life stories elicited through my interviews clearly did more than express the personal experiences of the interviewees. The responses also expressed the narrators’ conception of an acceptable life narrative according to the norms of their situation. These norms were themselves revealing

58

Karen Fog Olwig

of the self-image that the informants wished to project and the socio-cultural fields of identification of importance to them. I shall here focus especially on the 22 members of the family of Dominican background who were, or had been, living in Canada.3 The Caribbean background of the family members was quite apparent in the life stories that they related. All family members readily acknowledged their family origins in Dominica, although for the third generation of family members this would only be one branch of their family. Furthermore, all had visited Dominica several times and felt some sort of attachment to Dominica. The nature of this attachment, and its significance to individuals in the family network, varied a great deal, however, because of a number of factors. They include family members’ social, economic and geographical location in Canadian society, the dynamics of inter-personal relations in the family network, and the personal circumstances of life of the individuals concerned. I shall therefore argue that identity constructs among these people constitute a much more complex field of negotiations and understandings than that evoked by their public identity as an ethnic or diasporic group with its roots in the Caribbean.

Origins I was born in Dominica in [a small village …]. I was in a family of 11. I went to elementary school in the country, and to high school in Roseau. I went to a Convent High School, taught by nuns. I went there until grade 12. When I finished there were no jobs, and I wanted adventures, to see another country. So I migrated to Canada. They had a special scheme to Canada to go as helpers in a home. You had to work in a home for one year, and then you could become a citizen. I came with quite a few girls, and we settled with families. My husband-to-be also wanted to go. So we had to get married within 28 days. We married after I was here for three years. This is how Nelly4 described her move to Toronto in 1959. She was only the first in her family to travel there, and during the more than 40 years that have passed since she settled in Toronto she has been followed by an aunt and four sisters as well as several nieces and nephews who have studied there. Toronto was not the final destination for all, nor was it their first destination. Thus the aunt and one sister arrived via Great Britain where they had lived for a number of years, and two sisters had already spent three years in Jamaica, where they had studied at the university. During the late 1990s, when I did my research, many had moved on to pursue their careers or to enjoy their retirement. My interviews with the 22 family members, who had lived in Toronto, therefore took place in several different towns in Ontario, in the United States as well as in Dominica. The family’s origins in Dominica had clearly had an important impact on the individual members’ lives in Canadian society – whether or not they themselves emphasized their Caribbean origins. The older generation in the family, born in Dominica, was the most eager to identify with the Caribbean and readily called

Place, movement and identity

59

themselves ‘West Indian’ or ‘Dominican’. Thus Nelly concluded her life story by stating, ‘My roots are in Dominica, I go back every so often and have taken the children back’. During the early years of settling in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s Nelly, her sisters and their families had participated in organized Caribbean events. Furthermore, Nelly’s husband had helped found an association for Dominicans that held social functions, raised funds for various causes and organized a band for Caribana, the Caribbean carnival held in Toronto (see Nunley and Bettelheim 1988). They had not participated in such events for many years now, however, having devoted themselves to raising their families, and none of their children or grandchildren were active in organized Caribbean cultural events. Indeed, only two young men in the family participated in the Caribana, when I visited Toronto in the summer of 1997.5 Eighteen-year-old Brian was in a hip-hop float at the parade, having been invited to join the float one week before the parade took place because he was a good dancer. Devon participated in all the Caribana events, the cultural festival being a new experience for him since he had grown up in Dominica and was only temporarily in the Toronto area in order to study at a university. Several in the second generation, born outside Dominica, explained that they had had their most intensive exposure to Caribbean culture when they attended their university, because it had a large number of students from the Caribbean who organized a Caribbean club. They had not maintained their involvement in the Caribbean after their college years, however, and none of them had joined any Caribbean organizations afterwards. The second and third generation family members’ identification with the Caribbean was not self-chosen, but rather resulted from their being part of a ‘visible minority’ associated with the Caribbean. During the early 1970s the term, visible minority, emerged in Canada to designate the common problems shared by ‘non-whites’ and ‘coloureds’ because of the racism which they encountered due to their appearance. It has since become a socially accepted phrase in Canadian society. Furthermore, several federal acts as well as municipal, provincial and federal programmes have been instituted to protect the social, economic and legal status of visible minorities, now defined as ‘persons who are non-white in colour or nonCaucasian in race, other than Aboriginal people’ (Synnott and Howes 1996: 137).6 The complexity and ubiquity of an identity associated with being a visible minority is apparent in this excerpt from my interview with 20-year-old Brenda, who was born and reared in Toronto: I am the only black person in the office. The secretary is from Thailand, a girl is Italian, one is just Canadian, another is from Hungary, one is from the Czech Republic, one from the Philippines. So we have the world. [What is ‘just Canadian’?] A white person from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland. [Are you not Canadian then?]

60

Karen Fog Olwig I am Canadian. For a lot of people their background and race are more important than their nationality. We are all one family, but we are so different. I have two friends from Canada, one is Jewish and the other is Korean, and I am West Indian Canadian. [Are you really that different?] You have got the feeling that you share the same heritage, but a lot we don’t share. We have the same nation and country. A lot here has to do with race. This is a racist society – everything is part to me. I am Canadian, but not the same kind of Canadian. I bring in something you don’t bring in. [What do you bring in?] I don’t know. Different views, life style, traits. The way our family is, foods, music, beliefs, likes and dislikes. (Brenda)

In Brenda’s description of her workmates she makes clear that there are many layers of Canadianness, and that very few are entirely Canadian. Most of her workmates, for example, are not Canadian, because they come from other countries such as Thailand, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic or the Philippines. Yet, in the course of the interview it becomes clear that it is not enough to be born in Canada, because Brenda is Canadian-born, yet she is not fully Canadian. Thus only white persons from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, the oldest Atlantic provinces inhabited primarily by persons of British origin, count as full Canadians. Others will always have a dual identity as Canadian and something else, and it is not entirely clear from the interview whether all Brenda’s workmates were actually born abroad or were merely descendants of persons born in the countries mentioned. It is apparent, however, that Brenda herself is doubly removed from becoming a Canadian. Thus she is not only born to parents who come from elsewhere, but she is also non-white. She thus characterizes herself both as ‘black’ and as ‘West Indian Canadian’. She calls herself ‘black’ to distinguish herself from ‘white’ Canadians, a category that would presumably include those who have immigrated from Hungary, Italy and the Czech Republic. She describes herself as ‘West Indian Canadian’ to place herself in an ethnic category on line with her hyphenated Canadian friends who are of Jewish or Korean origin. When I asked her what these differences meant, she noted that for some people their ‘background and race’ is more important than their ‘nationality’, but emphasized that Canada is ‘a racist society’, thus indicating that for some people, such as her, others choose what is of significance. This means that she can only become partCanadian, whether or not she wants to have a hyphenated identity. When asked about this identity, she noted the different ethnic groups in Canada, each with their own heritage in the form of different kinds of food, music, life styles, family ways. She did not elaborate on what this meant to her personally, and her statement

Place, movement and identity

61

is rather official sounding, in line with the country’s official policy of multiculturalism.7 It is not surprising if Brenda’s reply is a fairly standardized one, because she has grown up in a country where notions of different sorts of cultural heritage and multiple cultural identities seem to be inculcated into children from an early age. Thus Brenda’s younger sister, Laura, explained that when they began a new school year they were expected to introduce themselves to their new classmates by telling something about themselves and their ‘background’. She added that since her mother had been born in Great Britain, she used to say that her mother was British. The claim to an English origin would probably not be credible in the wider society, considering the fact that Laura’s mother is the offspring of two black persons from Dominica. As Laura’s cousin Nicole noted in another context: ‘Society tends to look at you and ask where you are from?’ It is rather unlikely that Laura’s identity construction as a person of British origins was an act of resistance against Canadian hegemonic discourse of heritage and identity – at least not a conscious one. It may, however, have reflected a creative play on the somewhat heavy-handed heritage lessons that were taught at school. Whereas Brenda and Laura accepted, at least to a certain extent, their position in multi-cultural Canada, Nicole was rather less sanguine about her identity in Canadian society. Thus when I asked her how she identifies herself, she replied somewhat apprehensively, Do I have to identify myself in any particular way? I say I am a person. [Do you ever identify with the Caribbean?] I never say I am Caribbean. [You prefer not to have a label?] Yes, I am just me. (Nicole) Her reaction must be understood in relation her to having grown up in a small predominantly white town as the only child of a white–black marriage. In this community, being Caribbean would mean being different from everybody else and therefore an outsider in society. Yet, at a personal level, Nicole seemed to embrace her identity as a black person of Caribbean background. Thus she described the town where she lived as boring and without culture because it had only ‘the same kind of people’, i.e., ‘just mostly white’ people. She explained that she was fortunate to be of mixed background and to have family living in places with ‘lots of culture’ that she could visit and enjoy. Some of the adults had learned to take advantage of the benefits to be accrued from belonging to a ‘visible minority’. One of them was Brenda’s and Laura’s mother Georgette, whose solution to the problem of identity was that of adopting

62

Karen Fog Olwig

a strictly legal approach. Thus she insisted on her rightful place as a citizen in Canadian society and had enjoyed taking advantage of the privileges that ensue from belonging to a visible minority. At the same time, she acknowledged having a personal family heritage, which is rooted elsewhere: [How do you identify yourself in multi-cultural Canada?] I identify myself as a Canadian. Even though I was not born here, I was raised here, and I have gone to school here. I am entitled to the same opportunities workwise, educationwise. I am a visible minority, and if I can take advantage of that, I will do it. [Have you done so?] I applied to be a police officer. I was accepted because they were looking to hire people from minority. Even in construction, they needed to get more women, and I got hired for that reason. And when I was there I worked on trade shows and travelled with women, I had my picture taken. I have learned to take advantage of it. (Georgette) Her son, Brian, was one of the few in the second and third generation who embraced his black identity. He did not do so as a Canadian of Caribbean origin, however, but rather identified with African-American culture. Thus he found his role models primarily among American blacks such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parker and Maya Angelou, as well as in the Jamaican Marcus Garvey. When I asked him why no role models could be found among West Indians in Canada he replied, ‘In the US they had to work hard for their rights, here they have everything for us, and we have not learned to get together to take advantage of the system’. West Indians therefore did not project, to him, the image of political struggle and pride, which could be associated with American blacks. Nevertheless, his identity as a black did not prevent him from becoming involved in non-black ethnic events. During the previous year he had thus participated as a dancer in four cotillions, held by Philippino girls who were good friends at his school. Most family members, however, were not so keen to identify along race lines. Not only were they brought up to believe that race should not be an issue of importance, but it was quite clear that such racial identification divided the family, because some members were very light, others quite dark. Indeed, some of the family members, in the oldest generation, were light skinned, straight-haired and with grey eyes and they would most likely not be identified as part of a visible minority. When I asked them about the origins of the family, they tended to emphasize its European and Carib rather than its African background. In general, however, the older generation found in their Caribbean origin a common point of identification. Those who were born outside the Caribbean experienced more difficulty defining a singular source identity. They felt that they could not identify

Place, movement and identity

63

themselves in terms of the island of their family’s origin, having only visited this ‘home’ island briefly. Furthermore, West Indian ethnicity does not carry a positive image in Canada, as it does in the United States, for example (Waters 1999). In the United States it is common for migrants, and their descendants, to emphasize their Caribbean origins in order to differentiate themselves from American Blacks, who have become underdogs in the American ethnic hierarchy (Waters 1999). In Canada, by contrast, Caribbean people are portrayed as criminal and violent – a public perception which surfaced in connection with the staging of the Caribana while I was in Toronto. Ethnic or racial identities therefore constituted, for many family members, externally imposed categories and they did not necessarily point to socio-cultural contexts of life or sources of identification which were of immediate importance to them in their everyday life. Such frameworks were found elsewhere. I shall argue that the family constituted an important site that provided not just a sense of relatedness and identification within Canadian society, but also a central means of connecting to the common source of origins in the Caribbean. The significance of the family, and the meaning attached to it, varied a great deal, however, according to the position and personal circumstances of individual persons as well as the particular branch of the family to which they belonged.

The family as a site of belonging Studies of the Caribbean diaspora have shown that family networks extending between points of origin and migration destinations often constitute an important social context of life.8 This is very much the case in the families I have studied. Though based in particular countries and places of the world, family members travel a great deal to visit relatives. This is especially true for the first generation that moved away from the island of origin. Indeed, the older members of the families travelled so much within the family networks that it was difficult for me to keep track of them. When I interviewed Claudette, Brenda and Laura’s grandmother and Georgette’s mother, in Dominica in December 1996 she had just returned from Canada, where she had spent several months visiting family and receiving medical treatment unavailable in Dominica. Shortly after I left, all her children and grandchildren from Toronto arrived in Dominica for a Christmas holiday. And just before I arrived in Canada in July 1997 to interview Claudette’s family there, she came for another extended visit. Her branch of the family was not the only one to travel widely. Indeed, two sisters of hers, a brother and sisterin-law as well as an aunt and a niece, whom I had interviewed in Dominica, also visited the family in Canada during my short stay there. Furthermore, another sister and brother-in-law living in the New York area had visited the family in Toronto just prior to my arrival. Such visits also involved concrete help to relatives. A year previously, for example, a family member living in Dominica had spent six weeks with her daughter in Canada to help care for her new born baby. Not just people, but also words travel in family networks, especially by telephone. Thus several referred to the family grapevine as a quite fertile one. Furthermore,

64

Karen Fog Olwig

those who live in areas with a heavy concentration of Caribbean people, have found themselves in centres of communication with their island of origin. Nelly, who lives in a suburb of Toronto, explained, [T]here is always somebody coming up or down with letters, parcels etc. Always at Christmas. It is amazing how that sort of thing works. People move down and have a container, and I send a barrel in the container. Every month I send something for my sister [who has returned to Dominica]. (Nelly) Few in the generations who are once or twice removed from the Caribbean have maintained the close, personal engagement in the wider Caribbean family network of relations that the older generation displays. Usually, however, they know many or most of their relatives, having met them at home or during visits in the family network, and often they have developed ties to individual relatives with whom they have direct, personal contact. The women were most explicit about the importance of the family. They related having been helped by relatives with care of children and various other kinds of support in times of trouble. They described maintaining close ties with relatives by telephone, mail, through visits and gifts. And they characterized the family as a group of people who would always ‘be there for you’, something one could not count on as far as friends were concerned. Many young people expressed similar feelings, perhaps a reflection of family values inculcated in them by their parents. For some, the feeling that there were people who actually cared for one, was not so important at a concrete level of mutual assistance, but rather because it gave a sense of being part of a closely knit group of people for whom one’s well being mattered. Charlotte, born in Dominica but studying in a small town in Canada, saw family as providing a strong sense of being an integral part of a larger social group, even when one lived in places where one might otherwise feel rather alone: I feel closer to my family than to friends, because my entire family would get upset if something happened to a relative. The ties are so extensive, and the effects are much broader with the family, if something happens. If two in the family don’t get along it is a strain on the family. The family ties are stronger, the whole closeness, the much longer history … (Charlotte) Doug emphasized the importance of family as a source of identity, which cuts across other, predominant sources of belonging, such as ethnicity, race or local community. This was especially important to him, because he did not feel that he fits into any of these categories, being born in Toronto of racially mixed West Indian parents and raised in white neighbourhoods. Perhaps the youngsters expressed most clearly the overwhelming sense of belonging that could be experienced in relation to the family, when they described visiting the West Indies and discovered there a whole island full of relatives who

Place, movement and identity

65

took an interest in them. When I asked Nicole, what she did on her vacations in Dominica, she explained: Visit family, go on hikes, tour of the island, but mostly see family. [What family?] My grandparents and my grandmother’s family, almost the entire island is related […] [Did you know anything about your Dominican family?] I didn’t realize there were so many before I went there and spent the summer with my grandparents. Wherever I went I had to explain whose grandchild I was. It was nice. I felt totally welcomed by everyone. Everybody has something for you, fresh mangoes, lunch. (Nicole) Children might find an unconditional source of love and belonging in the family during relatively brief visits in the West Indies. Many, however, expressed awareness of the fact that, in the long run, the sense of being part of the family was conditional upon the ability to live up to certain expectations. They revolve primarily around leading a ‘moral’ and ‘responsible’ life and receiving a ‘proper’ education and holding a ‘good’ job. These expectations are important elements in the ideal of respectability which has dominated the former British West Indian societies and especially suffused the middle classes that developed after emancipation of the slaves in the nineteenth century (Wilson 1973; Olwig 1993a, 1995). Respectability was an important ideal in this family who had become closely affiliated with the middle class of Dominican society. This was particularly apparent in the life stories of the older members of family, because they tended to delete certain aspects of their life which, they felt, did not live up to the standards of respectability and therefore might raise questions about their integrity as good members of the family. Some parents proudly told about their children being married, but did not mention their getting divorced later on; some siblings forgot to mention half brothers or half sisters who had been born outside of wedlock. In some cases ties to children or siblings born out of wedlock may have been so tenuous, that the existence of these relatives actually was forgotten. In other cases, however, failing memory rather reflected the fact that these relatives were not automatically included in the family. The children of Claudette, who was her father’s eldest child born out of wedlock, felt that sometimes she had to be especially ‘included’ to be part of the family: Their father had said, ‘whatever is mine belongs to all my children, including Claudette’. But that word ‘including’ was there. There must have been times when she was not included. This was a small island. She ended up being like

66

Karen Fog Olwig a mother for her younger brothers and sisters. Still there were people around who were cruel, who would say that she did not have the same mother. It was painful for her, even now. I know they love her dearly, but someone may say something – they will have to remember to include her.

One of the most blatant failures to live up to the tenets of respectability was that of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Georgette explained, It was a major shock to all in the family. Nobody ever became pregnant out of wedlock. I felt like an outcast in the entire family [when I became pregnant …]. So I decided to leave rather than sit home and embarrass the family. […] I told them a week before I left. And when I went I had found the place myself. It was a place where I could finish school and learn about becoming a mother. It was run by Catholic nuns. (Georgette) Men seem to have had somewhat more leeway in their relations with women, but they were also expected to marry and settle down as quickly as possible. In general, however, men were more articulate about the educational and occupational aspect of respectability, and their life stories often took the form of detailed, commented curriculum vitae. Medicine, law, perhaps engineering are preferred fields of education which are regarded as leading to a good career, but a good career might also be had in government employment, nursing or teaching. Those who had not obtained what they considered a ‘good’ education, or a ‘proper’ job, often made some effort to describe the circumstances of their failure, or why what they were doing was nevertheless important. One person explained that he had done all the prerequisite coursework to enter the faculty of dentistry, but had to drop his studies to support the family, because his wife had become pregnant. He ended up doing very ‘well’ in a responsible government job. Many in the older generation found it more difficult to accept a career in the creative arts, which did not fit into this scheme of things. Doris explained, My brother is a musician, he is a good, lovely, warm, generous man. He records and has a lot of talent, ability. He records and makes music. But that career and ambition does not carry the same weight as that of being a lawyer etc. My parents were upset about that route. If you can’t be a doctor, be a priest! (Doris) Her brother explained that he had studied engineering for a while, due to pressure from his family, but dropped it in favour of a career in music. The kinds of goals and ambitions that the men staked out for themselves, and the worries that some expressed with regard to their chosen career, therefore clearly reflected the significance of the family as an important frame of reference in their life. The family constituted a main source of belonging for the persons interviewed, whether or not they explicated this. The family provided a sense of being part of

Place, movement and identity

67

a larger group of people who were concerned about one’s well being and ready to provide help whenever needed. This family was rarely activated as a group, but several family members noted the importance of weddings as occasions where one might get to know family members one had only heard about and become reacquainted with those one had not seen for years. Furthermore, the family had constituted an important, implicit frame reference in the lives that individuals had sought to live. It was apparent that even though one was born into the family, one had to earn a status of respect and acceptance within the family in order to count this family as a true source of belonging. The ability, and willingness, of individuals to live up to family ideals had a strong impact on their relationship with their place of origin in the Caribbean, and their sense of ethnicity rooted in the Caribbean. Family members who had succeeded in obtaining an education, especially in the professions, and who were generally speaking leading what the family would consider a moral, upright life, became exemplars of the ideals that the family advocated. Several of these family members had actually returned to Dominica and had become not just model citizens, but also a model for other family members. Due to their distinguished careers and fine contribution to building up the new independent nation-state of Dominica, Dominica had become a symbol of family achievement. This meant, however, that those individuals who had not so closely lived up to family ideals have become somewhat alienated from Dominica. The island has become a homeland that can be visited and cherished, but not made an actual home in everyday life. Thus when Nelly finished her life story by emphasizing her roots in Dominica she added: When my husband retired, he said that he wanted to go home to settle. But I don’t have the urge, because of the children and grandchildren. I could go for the winters. The family is close, they come up here. I would only settle if I had something to offer to the country. (Nelly)

Conclusion The family of Caribbean background that I have discussed here is in many respects quite similar to the group of former classmates that Sherry Ortner has studied. The members of both groups of people share an origin in a particular place, but have experienced a great deal of geographical mobility as they have pursued their goals and the social status and cultural values that this entailed. The class mates from Weequahic High School oriented themselves in relation to a Jewishness that one may associate with a range of factors including their having grown up in a particular local community in Newark, their being part of American middle-class society and their self-identification as Jews. It also entailed a certain sense of community that involved the organizing of reunions and the extension of help and favours important to the livelihood of the old class mates and their families (see especially Ortner 1997). The kinsmen of Caribbean background found in the family network a shared source of belonging rooted in the cultural values that had

68

Karen Fog Olwig

become a distinguishing mark of this family and made it such a respectable family on its island of origin. The family also provided a certain sense of community that involved, apart from periodic reunions at major family events, the extension of help and favours important to the livelihood of individuals. The similarities in the two groups of people become apparent when the ‘ethnic’ identities and practices of these people are interpreted in relation to the lives they have lived rather than in relation to their derivation from a particular place. Place is not in and of itself a given entity that can be used as a natural point of reference in ethnic, diasporic, or transnational identity. Rather it is constructed as people define and give meaning to a particular physical locale in the course of their lives. In this chapter I have therefore argued that the categorization of people according to place must be unpacked in order to explore the complex of social, economic and political practices and cultural values that these places entail. This has important implications for the notions of transnationalism and diaspora, which emphasize the continued importance of places of origin for people who have moved. Both the classmates from Weequahic High School in Newark and the family network of Caribbean origin can be described as ‘displaced’, and hence as diasporic, though not for the same reasons, because they typify two different meanings inherent in the notion of diaspora. In the 1965 edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘diaspora’ had one basic meaning 1 cap a: the settling of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile b: the area outside Palestine settled by Jews c: the Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel. In the 1996 edition, however, another meaning has been added: … 2 a: the breaking up and scattering of a people: MIGRATION b: people settled far from their ancestral homelands c: the place where these people live. The Jewish Americans studied by Ortner are diasporic in the first sense of being a people who, in some contexts, think of themselves as a people living outside their ancient homeland. They are also diasporic in the sense of being broken up and scattered through migration within the United States. Indeed, Ortner characterizes her former classmates as diasporic, drawing a parallel with transnational migration studies (Ortner 1997: 68, 74, 76, 78). This is a rather unusual, and somewhat provocative, way of using the term. Thus when she describes her informants as diasporic it is not to localize them outside American society, but rather to situate them squarely within contemporary American society. She does this in order to argue that non-localized ‘diasporic’ forms of community structures have emerged today when most Americans ‘live in a condition in which the totality of their relations is precisely not played out within a single geographical location and a single universe of known others’ (ibid.: 62). For Ortner’s classmates, an important community structure has developed on the basis of their common origin

Place, movement and identity

69

in the predominantly Jewish high school in Newark. Their Jewish ethnicity, based on a diasporic past, therefore allows for the emergence of a sense of community in the complex, mobile American society. It is, in other words, fully embedded in the American society where they live. This group of people therefore serves Ortner well as a study of American society today. The family network of Caribbean background studied by me are also diasporic vis-à-vis Africa in much the same terms as the Jewish people are diasporic vis-à-vis Israel, and it contains a few members who think of themselves as being diasporic in this sense of the word. In the social science literature, however, the family would more often than not be termed diasporic as a means of social classification in the sense of referring to a people that has been broken up and scattered through transnational migration. The term diasporic, as applied to these people as migrants, therefore has the questionable effect of foregrounding the supposed fractured and disembedded nature of their lives in terms of their absence from their ‘true’ place of belonging outside their country of residence. It was apparent that the family constituted an important framework of identification for individuals in part because it countered stereotyping associated with this kind of diasporic status by crosscutting ethnic and racial categories related to their foreign place of origin. This thereby allowed family members to avoid distinctions of difference and inequality that would have placed most of them in the lower rungs of the society where they lived. The notion of diaspora may point to spaces of community, such as the family network, that are of importance to these people; yet at the same time, it carries with it problematic implications of an implicit notion of natural places of belonging for these people. To label people of Caribbean background as diasporic, transnational or even as migrants mainly serves to set them apart. Furthermore, such labelling risks conceptualizing these people primarily as interesting case studies to illuminate the search for roots and identity in a fractured and ruptured world that has become such a salient issue in Western society. If, on the other hand, we chose to see such people of Caribbean background as beings seeking to fulfil family ideals that both spring from and transcend their places of origin, this may open up for us studies that are less ‘over-analyzed’ and better ‘ethnographized’. It may even allow us to investigate important commonalities in the sort of lives that different people explore today, whether they are from Newark, New Jersey, or from Dominica.

Notes 1 As Lavie and Swedenburg (1996: 18) have noted, ‘curiously, as the field of cultural studies mushooms in the US academy, its practitioners tend to view the texts of expressive culture as the privileged arenas of practice’. 2 Briefly, I initiated every interview by asking the interviewee to relate his or her life story to me. Virtually everybody responded to this request by outlining the main events in their life, although the length of this account varied from a few minutes to more than an hour. In the remainder of the interview I asked interviewees to elaborate on various points in this life story sketch and asked supplementary questions on certain issues that had come up in other interviews but which had not been touched upon in the initial life story related by the interviewee. The life story interviews therefore

70

3

4 5

6

7 8

Karen Fog Olwig allowed for a study of individuals’ movements through life; the socio-cultural order which they seek to establish in their lives, and their own particular understanding of themselves in this order. For a further discussion of the life story method in anthropology, see Watson 1976; Little 1980; Langness and Frank 1981; Peacock and Holland 1993; Caplan 1997. Six men and eleven women were interviewed in Canada in July–August, 1997. One man and four women, who had been residents of Canada for a number of years, were interviewed in Dominica in December 1997 and December 1999. One of them has since returned to Canada. Finally, one woman, who moved to the USA after a few years’ stay in Canada was interviewed in the USA, her place of residence for many years. All names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the informants. A young family member, trying to make a career in video production, was offered a job filming the parade. He declined, however, partly because he did not think it paid well enough, partly because he had been within 50 metres of a gun shot at a previous parade and was worried about similar violence this year. Apart from the visible minorities the Canadian government has also targeted women, aboriginal people and people with disabilities as disadvantaged population groups who are in need of special legislative protection and programs (Synnott and Howes 1996: 140). For a critical discussion of multiculturalism in Canada see Amit-Talai 1996. For examples see Philpott 1973; Soto 1987; Olwig 1993a, 1993b, 1999; Sørensen 1995.

Bibliography Amit-Talai, V. (1996) ‘The minority circuit: identity politics and the professionalization of ethnic activism’, in V. Amit-Talai and C. Knowles (eds) Resituating Identities: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Basch, L., Glick Schiller, N. and Szanton Blanc, C. (eds) (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, New York: Gordon and Breach. Caplan, P. (1997) ‘Introduction’, in P. Caplan (ed.) African Voices, African Lives: Personal Narratives from a Swahili Village, London: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–38. Cohen, R. (1998) ‘Cultural diasporas: the Caribbean case’, in M. Chamberlain (ed.) Caribbean Migration: Globalised Identities, London: Routledge. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Glick Schiller, N.G., Basch, L. and Blanc-Szanton, C. (eds) (1992) Toward a Transnational Perspective on Migration, New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Kearney, M. (1986) ‘From the invisible hand to visible feet: anthropological studies of migration and development’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15: 331–61. Langness, L. and Frank, G. (1981) Lives: An Anthropological Approach to Biography, Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp. Lavie, S. and Swedenburg, T. (1996) ‘Introduction: displacement, diaspora and geographies of identity’, in S. Lavie and T. Swedenburg (eds) Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Place, movement and identity

71

Little, K. (1980) ‘Explanation and individual lives: a reconsideration of life writing in anthropology’, Dialectical Anthropology, 5: 215–26. Mahler, S. (1998) ‘Theoretical and empirical contributions. Toward a research agenda for transnationalism’, in M.P. Smith and L.E. Guarnizo (eds) Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Merriam-Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1965) Springfield, MA.: G & C Merriam Company. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1996) Tenth Edition. Springfield, MA.: MerriamWebster, Incorporated. Nunley, J.W. and Bettelheim, J. (1988) Caribbean Festival Arts, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Olwig, K.F. (1993a ) Global Culture, Island Identity. Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers. —— (1993b) ‘The migration experience: Nevisian women at home and abroad’, in J. Momsen (ed.) Women and Change in the Caribbean, London: James Currey. —— (1995) ‘Cultural complexity after freedom: Nevis and beyond’, in K.F. Olwig (ed.) Small Islands, Large Questions: Society, Culture and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean, London: Frank Cass. —— (1999) ‘Narratives of the children left behind: home and identity in globalised Caribbean families’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 25(2): 267–84. Ortner, S.B. (1993) ‘Ethnography among the Newark: the class of ’58 of Weequahic High School’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 32(3): 411–29. —— (1997) ‘Fieldwork in the postcommunity’, Anthropology and Humanism, 22(1): 61–80. —— (1998a) ‘Generation X: anthropology in a media-saturated world’, Cultural Anthropology, 13(3): 414–40. —— (1998b) ‘Identities: the hidden life of class’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 54(1): 1–17. Peacock, J.L. and Holland, D.C. (1993) ‘The narrated self: life stories in process’, Ethos, 21(4): 367–83. Philpott, S.B. (1973) West Indian Migration, London: University of London Press. Schwartz, J. (1998) ‘Visions of diaspora in contemporary social science’, in U. Haxen (ed.) Jewish Studies in a New Europe, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel International Publishers. Sørensen, N.N. (1995) ‘Telling migrants apart: the experience of migrancy among Dominican locals and transnationals’, unpublished PhD dissertation in anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Soto, I.M. (1987) ‘West Indian child fostering: its role in migrant exchanges’, in C.R. Sutton and E.M. Chaney (eds) Caribbean Life in New York City: Sociocultural Dimensions, New York: Center for Migration Studies. Sutton, C.R. and Chaney, E.M. (eds) (1987) Caribbean Life in New York City: Sociocultural Dimensions, New York: Center for Migration Studies. Synnott, A. and Howes, D. (1996) ‘Canada’s visible minorities: identity and representation’, in V. Amit-Talai and C. Knowles (eds) Resituating Identities: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Waters, M.C. (1999) Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Watson, L.C. (1976) ‘Understanding a life history as a subjective document: hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives’, Ethos, 4(1): 95–131. Wilson, P. (1973) Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies in the Caribbean, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

72

4

Susanne Schwalgin

Why locality matters Diaspora consciousness and sedentariness in the Armenian diaspora in Greece Susanne Schwalgin

Introduction On a November morning I visited Ruben, who was one of the key informants for my field research on the Armenian community in Thessaloniki, Greece. Ruben was an Armenian born in that city, in his mid-thirties, not yet married, and living together with his mother. He told me that he had decided to get married and to my surprise he asked my help in arranging a marriage.1 He told me that he would prefer to marry an Armenian girl because, like most Armenians of the community, Ruben believed that Armenian identity could only be maintained and transmitted by marriage with an Armenian partner. Interethnic marriages, on the other hand, would eventually lead to a loss of identity and to the so-called ‘white genocide’: ‘white genocide’ is a popular term describing the threat of assimilation used in the dominant discourse of identity in Armenian diaspora communities all over the world. When we, together with his mother, started to discuss the pros and cons of the few potential wives living in Thessaloniki, I was surprised that ethnic origin was not the most important criterion for choosing a wife. Both of them rejected my proposal to look for a wife among the Armenians from the Republic of Armenia, who have migrated to Greece since Armenia’s independence in 1991. If at all, only a bride from Istanbul would be acceptable, they felt, since the cultural differences would be comparatively small. Furthermore, Istanbul was geographically close and a part of their family originally came from Istanbul. Ruben told me that he would marry a Greek girl from Thessaloniki rather than a woman from Armenia. Intermarriage between Armenian partners from different countries of residence was generally seen as problematic. Ruben and his mother argued that the mentalities of Armenians were strongly influenced by the localities they called home. Ruben’s mother summarized our discussion by using the Greek saying: ‘[It’s better to have] shoes from your place, even if they are patched-up’ (Papoutsia apo ton topo sou, as einai balomena). At first glance this story confirms a well-known concept: diasporic identities are informed by multiple attachments of people to places created through often contradictory experiences, memories and imaginations (Malkki 1997: 92). However, we should bear in mind that Ruben and his mother attached a higher value to the concrete experience of living locally in Greece than to the global aspect of the

Why locality matters

73

Armenian diaspora: namely the attachments formed through imagination and memory. This seems to contradict the view of diaspora identities currently discussed in anthropology.

Diaspora, multi-locality and mobility Recently, diasporas have received increasing attention both in theoretical debates concerning issues of nation states, transnationalism and globalization, and as sites of ethnographic fieldwork. The interest of diasporas for anthropologists is, on the one hand, connected with the critique of an anthropological concept of cultures as bounded and locally fixed units and, on the other hand, with a debate about the methodological consequences which arise from a de-territorialized concept of culture (Clifford 1992, 1994; Marcus 1995). In this context, diasporas are perceived as prototypes of communities with transnational networks. Identifications with imagined ‘homelands’ and ‘nation states’ as well as with de-territorialized ‘cultures’ and ‘origins’ are seen as central for the construction of diasporic identities. However, the irony lies, according to Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 11), in the fact that ‘displaced people cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places and communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality’. The self-definition of many diasporas is based on essentializing notions of unequivocally territorialized identities, for example through identification with an imagined homeland or nation-state. As Ruben’s desire to marry an Armenian wife in order to maintain and transmit Armenian identity shows, this is also the case in the Armenian diaspora in Greece. His desire reflects the dominant discourse of diaspora and identity produced by the diaspora elites, which is based on the ideal of a ‘pure’ Armenian identity and culture. This is a purity that could only be preserved if culture and identity are territorialized. In this context, diaspora is regarded as a poor substitute for a nation-state and Armenian identity is perceived as something that should be protected from the potentially destructive influences of a foreign environment. The fact that Ruben and his mother fiercely denied the possibility of a marriage with a partner from Armenia is not at odds with this idealized notion of the Armenian homeland. The degree of Armenianness is symbolized by a wide range of more or less binding markers of identity: a strong commitment to the community, efforts to preserve the Armenian language, the transmission of Armenian names as well as the foundation of a purely Armenian family. Migrants considered by the diasporists to be ‘purer’, as far as their ethnic identity is concerned, tend to give up one or more of these symbols of identity: Some of them just try to assimilate as quickly as possible. They change their names, their Christian names, something that is unthinkable for us. They learn some Greek, they forget quickly, they are seeking security. If they find Greek husbands, they’ll forget very quickly. Armenianess is in us, but not in them. (Source: field interview)

74

Susanne Schwalgin

Moreover, Armenians of the diaspora often perceived the migrants not as ‘pure’ Armenians at all, but as people with a ‘mentality’ which is deeply influenced by 80 years of communism and sovietization. However, the conflicts between Armenians of the diaspora and migrants can not be reduced to conflicting concepts of identity. Class differences play a crucial role, too. Armenians of the diaspora are legally, socially and culturally well integrated in the Greek nation-state, whereas the migrants’ living conditions are characterized by their undocumented legal status (no residence permit, no labour permit) and their difficulties to compete with other immigrants for badly paid jobs (Lazaridis 2000; Psimmenos 2000). Both the theoretical discussion of diaspora and the dominant Armenian discourse of diaspora disregard – although for different reasons – the significance of a ‘lived experience of locality’ (Brah 1996: 192) and emphasize the importance of the attachment to imagined localities for the constructions of diasporic identities Armenians in Greece seem to contradict this. If they are confronted with making personal decisions like a marriage they seem to place a higher value on the lived experience of locality. Thus, it is analytically useful to distinguish between two interrelated processes of place-making: the process of imagined place-making and of experienced place-making. Following Gupta and Ferguson (1992: 8), I understand placemaking as the process through which a locality is infused with identity and ‘emerges by the intersection of its specific involvement in a system of hierarchically structured spaces with its cultural constructions as a community or locality’. Places do not simply exist per se in a global space of relations but are constructed as ‘communities of relations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Olwig and Hastrup 1997). In this sense, the localities of Athens and Thessaloniki, where Armenians localized their communities, are part of the global as any other place in the world (Dracklé 1999: 53). The process of imagined place-making is initiated by a local diaspora elite – Armenians called them in Greek igetes (leaders) or igesia (leadership). They identify their political projects with certain localities (e.g. Armenia and recently NagornyKarabagh) that are imagined in a specific way. These imaginations refer to the global flow of meanings circulating in the Armenian diaspora that is adapted to and reacting to local conditions and needs. Furthermore, Armenian elites maintain institutionalized relationships with the elites of Armenian communities in other parts of the world as well as in Armenia itself, e.g., to co-ordinate transnational political actions. Communication is conducted by phone, fax, and in recent years e-mail as well as personal communication on world-wide meetings which are organized regularly. However, for the most Armenians living in Greece today, even for the diaspora elite itself, the process of an experienced place-making is central for their identifications as Armenians. This process is based on the personal experiences of a locality and of face-to-face social relations with members of the Armenian diaspora localized in Greece (Peters 1997: 87–92). Most Armenian families have relatives and friends living in other countries as a result of several migration flows after the flight to Greece in 1922. These relationships are sustained first and foremost by members of the first and second generation by letters and phone calls. The frequency of visits depends on the personal economic situation or the political circumstances – e.g., travelling to Armenia was nearly impossible,

Why locality matters

75

both economically unaffordable and politically complicated, until the 1960s. However, these transnational relationships hardly play any role in daily social relations or for making a livelihood in Greece. Although Armenians are traditionally perceived as a trading diaspora (Cohen 1997: 31–55) and are predominantly engaged in trade, diasporic and transnational networks do not play any role for their economic activities in Greece today. With my distinction between two coexisting processes of place-making I do not intend to establish a dichotomy between imagination and daily life experiences. Imagination and experiences of a locality influence each other. The way subjects experience locality is partially shaped by their attachments to the imagined homeland Armenia. In turn, the specific way Armenia is imagined is shaped by the experiences of being rooted in Greece. However, both processes have in common the fact that they reflect a dual or paradoxical nature which results from the awareness of multi-locality. This particular kind of awareness is described by various authors as ‘diaspora consciousness’ (e.g., Clifford 1994; Gilroy 1993; Safran 1991). Steven Vertovec (1997: 277–8) offers diaspora consciousness as one among the discernible meanings of the term ‘diaspora’ in current academic discourse. The paradoxical nature of ‘diaspora consciousness’ is constituted negatively by experiences of discrimination and exclusion (in the Armenian case, discrimination and exclusion as refugees by the Greek nation-state), and positively by reference to an historical heritage (e.g., Armenian history and culture) or contemporary cultural features (e.g., the local communities, diaspora parties) (Vertovec 1997: 281–2). According to James Clifford, diasporas must be seen as simultaneously ‘rooted and routed’. Thus, following his argumentation the ‘term diaspora is a signifier not simply of transnationality and movement but of political struggles to define the local, as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement’ (Clifford 1994). But as much as the academic discourse on diaspora emphasizes the significance of attachments to imagined homelands, it overemphasizes the importance of routes (mobility) at the expense of roots (sedentariness). Diasporas are perceived as social formations that are particularly qualified to adapt to the demands for mobility in the age of globalization: Members of diasporas are almost by definition more mobile than people who are rooted in national spaces. They are certainly more prone to international mobility and change their places of work and residence more frequently. In previous eras and still in some places, when periods of febrile nation-building take place, their cosmopolitanism was a distinct disadvantage and a source of suspicion. In the age of globalization, their language skills, familiarity with other cultures and contacts in other countries make many members of diasporas highly competitive in the international labour, service and capital market. In the context of the global cities, this applies irrespective of whether they are competing for professional advantage or in the unskilled labour market – after all, waiters or prostitutes who can address international customers in their own languages are likely to have a distinct edge over their competitors. (Cohen 1997: 169–9)

76

Susanne Schwalgin

Thus, a dichotomy between diasporas as mobile and members of nation-states as sedentary is constructed in the academic discourse on diasporas. The use of the Greek saying by Ruben’s mother ‘[It’s better to have] shoes from your place, even if they are patched up’ contradicts the view of diasporas as people on the move. On the contrary, it contains a positive image of sedentariness and expresses a superiority of locality. But can a diaspora be sedentary?

Diaspora and sedentariness The emphasis on diasporic mobility in the current scholarly, media and political discourse emerged due to the following reasons: the semantic confusion of mobility with other related terms which have a positive connotation; the positive linkage between mobility, individualism and subjectivity in US-American society; the positive value which is linked to mobility in recent discourses on globalization, transnationalism and pluralism. Another reason for the link between mobility and globalization might be that many academics writing on themes like diaspora, transnationalism, mobility and globalization are theorizing the positive effects of mobility from their own experiences as members of a diaspora and/or members of a transnational academic community. But for privileged academics, this experience of ‘being on the move’ is quite different from that of Armenian migrants who are living undocumented in Greece or for members of the diaspora communities (see Friedman 1997: 70–89 for a similar critique on the concept of hybridity and diaspora). In the context of diaspora, Tölölyan defines sedentariness as a preference for living in demarcated enclaves and ‘as a tendency to develop locally situated branches of diaspora institutions, towards which considerable loyalty is displayed; that loyalty becomes for several generations a defining manifestation of identity’ (Tölölyan 2000: 3). These institutions are built up by a certain concentration of relatively sedentary members of a diaspora, and once developed they endure even though ‘the people who build and inhabit these spaces may come and go with considerable mobility’ (ibid.). As I will show in my subsequent analysis, the discourse of the ghetto reflects this understanding of diasporic sedentariness. But thinking back to my introductory example, ‘It’s better to have shoes from your place’, we must note that Ruben’s mother did not relate place to the narrow space of the Armenian community, but to Greece. Otherwise she and Ruben would not have thought about a Greek bride. Thus, it could be argued that diasporic sedentariness is not limited to the rootedness in a certain diaspora community but contains roots to the country or locality of residence. The difference between Armenians and Greeks seems not to be the dichotomy between diasporic people as mobile and nation-state people as sedentary, but it ‘is the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here)’ (Clifford 1997: 269). How is this connection constructed, maintained and articulated? Which roles do mobility and/or sedentariness play in these processes? To examine these two questions I will analyse two powerful discourses – the discourse of the ghetto and the discourse of Armenia as examples of the conflicting and contradictory relation-

Why locality matters

77

ship of imagined and experienced processes of place-making. I will argue that mobility is not essential for the construction and maintenance of multi-local attachments by analysing some attitudes and practices of sedentariness. I will begin with a brief summary of the history and structure of the Armenian diaspora in Greece.

History and structures of the Armenian diaspora in Greece The establishment of an Armenian diaspora in Greece is seen as the result of two catastrophes: the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey committed by the YoungTurkish Government in 1915 and the war between Greece and Turkey from 1919– 22, which ended in a chaotic flight of the Greek and Armenian population of Asia Minor and a compulsory exchange of population between Greece and Turkey instigated by the League of Nations in 1923.2 The transmission of these experiences continues to be a key element in the construction of Armenian identity today. Today the Armenian communities in Greece officially has 12,000 members. The Armenian community of Athens, which is 10,000 people strong, is regarded as the centre of the hierarchically organized diaspora in Greece. The community of Thessaloniki, with 1,000 members, is the second-largest Armenian community. However, these official figures do not show how many Armenians ‘by origin’ still identify with being Armenian and/or the community’s institutions. According to my observations only one-third to a half of the official members participate more or less regularly in the events organized by the community’s institutions. Until the end of the Second World War, the living conditions of Armenians were primarily determined by their uncertain legal status as stateless refugees and the unstable economic and political situation in Greece: between 1922 and 1923 Greece, with a population of two million people had to receive approximately one million refugees from Asia Minor. After that, the great depression, the German occupation during the Second World War and the civil war which lasted until 1949 made life hard especially for urban refugees (Loizos 1999). Several waves of migration to Western Europe, the Americas, and even to Soviet Armenia, still under Stalin’s rule in 1946–7, were the result. These memories of hardship and social marginalization are still a key element of the discourse of the ghettos. The term ghetto 3 is used for the historical refugee quarters of Kokkinia, Piraeus and Fix in Athens, where approximately 60 per cent of the Armenian refugee population of Greater Athens were concentrated until the Second World War (Hassiotis 1995: 91). These refugee camps, set up by the Greek government in 1922, later developed into shanty towns. Until their demolition they can be characterized as demarcated Armenian enclaves where diasporic sedentariness started to develop and to flourish. Under conditions of poverty and hardship, the refugees built up a considerable number of churches, political, social and cultural institutions, schools, newspapers, and so on. The last huts were demolished in the late 1960s as part of a development programme of the Greek government (Antoniou 1995: 103–4). But even after the demolition of the ghetto structures, most of the Armenian institutions like churches,

78

Susanne Schwalgin

schools, clubs remained in Kokkinia and Fix. Today, the number of Armenians living in these areas is still high in comparison to other neighbourhoods; however, the majority of the inhabitants are Greeks. Even Armenians of the third and fourth generation refer to Kokkinia and Fix as the ‘most Armenian’ places of Greater Athens because of the concentration of Armenian institutions which are regarded as the heart of community. The granting of Greek citizenship to Armenians in 1968 is regarded as the starting point for a process of legal and economic integration into Greek society. The cultural, religious, historical and political similarities of the two peoples are stressed. The experience of expulsion by the Turks serves as a common point of identification which is constantly reinforced by the official rhetoric of Armenian diaspora parties and Greek politicians, especially since the emergence of the Turkish–Greek conflict in Cyprus. Nevertheless, Armenians also believe that the process of cultural assimilation, the so-called ‘white genocide’, is part and parcel of the process of legal and economic integration. Armenians of the second and following generations have difficulties in finding differences between Armenian and Greek culture or between Armenians and Greeks, as the following quote shows: We are a small minority in Greece. The differences which distinguish us from the Greeks are only artificial. That is, in terms of physiognomy, and the lifestyle is Mediterranean as well, there are no differences in religious beliefs, and the national ideology of both people is anti-Turkish. It is quite easy to assimilate. The boundary between us and the Greeks has to be constructed artificially. It is full of holes. (Source: field interview) The boundary between Armenians and Greeks is, in a way, perceived as a ‘Swiss cheese’ boundary. Beyond that, ‘white genocide’ refers to the problem that a constantly increasing number of young Armenians do not feel any more committed to Armenian identity in general and/or the community in particular. Thus, the activities of the community are primarily aimed at patching up the ever increasing number of holes in order to first and foremost bind young Armenians to the community and to its version of Armenian identity. The key factor in this process is the diaspora elite (Tölölyan 1996) of roughly 500 people in Athens and 100 people in Thessaloniki, dominating the discourse of Armenian identity. The elite is almost identical with the membership of the diaspora party ‘Dashnaktsutiun (Dashnak)’ (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) which dominates the political, cultural and social aspects of community life.4 The reasons why the Dashnak has achieved this dominant position in the Armenian diaspora in Greece and elsewhere are too complex to be presented in this chapter.5 Thus, only some brief notes about the Dashnak party are given here: the Dashnak was founded in Tbilissi, Georgia, in 1890 as a party with a nationalist and socialist orientation, strongly influenced by Russian revolutionary intellectuals. During Armenia’s first and very short independence in 1918–21, the Dashnak held power. After Armenia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, the

Why locality matters

79

party developed a fiercely anti-Communist attitude and regarded itself as the true guardian of Armenian national identity and as a government in exile (Tölölyan 1991). Besides its claim to a hegemonic position in the Armenian diaspora, the central tenets of Dashnak ideology are the willingness to sacrifice for the party, as well as to be loyal to the party and to Armenia (Tölölyan 1993). The persuasiveness of this ideology is reinforced by a wide range of rituals and norms of behaviour. Offences against the claims to loyalty are sanctioned by different means, from temporary exclusion from party meetings to definite exclusion from membership in the party. The struggle for Armenia’s national independence and for the recognition of the genocide remained the central political aims of the party during seven decades. After Armenia gained independence in 1991, the Dashnak party repatriated itself and worked hard to become a political force in the homeland, but soon tensions between the government of Levon Ter-Petrosian and the party emerged. As a result, the party was banned between 1994 and 1998. Since 1998, it has held some seats in parliament, but its political influence in Armenia is not comparable to its dominant position in the diaspora. The independence of Armenia has sparked a discussion about the party’s future role in Armenia as well as in the diaspora. At the local level of the Armenian communities in Greece, there had been dissent about this issue among party members and affiliates. Some fiercely disagreed with the party’s official decision to take part in national elections in Armenia immediately after independence. They would have preferred to focus Dashnak activities on charity work until the party gained enough reputation in Armenia to become a strong political force. Others questioned the continued existence of a diaspora political party, since the central political aim of independence had been achieved. Therefore, they would have preferred the party to be transformed into a cultural association. These internal conflicts were reinforced on the occasion of Levon Ter-Petrosian’s official visit to Greece in 1997. The party’s local leadership in Athens and Thessaloniki forbade their members to take part in any reception ceremony for the Armenian President. Although a lot of Dashnakzagans (members of the Dashnak) privately disagreed with this instruction, they publically remained loyal to the party’s line. However, loyalty to the party is today mainly a question of generation. Most young Armenians are not willing to accept the hierarchical structures and the ideology of the party. This dis-identification of the young generation is seen as another reason for the increasing process of the ‘white genocide’. The Dashnak’s present dominance results, first and foremost, from its powerful hold on almost all important institutions of the community.

The discourse of the ghetto The discourse of the ghetto reflects the contradictions in the process of placemaking and the tensions which characterized the diasporic consciousness of Armenians of the first and second generation. On the one hand, the uprooted and traumatized refugees felt the need to establish their livelihood in an environment which they experienced as hostile. On the other hand, they were influenced by a

80

Susanne Schwalgin

discourse which defined their settlement in Greece as a pathological situation, a situation that was totally at odds with the prevalent discourse of the nation state. This dominant discourse was established and projected on the refugees by different institutions and actors: the Greek government that refrained from granting them Greek citizenship until as late as 1968;6 the Greek population who perceived the refugees – even the Greek refugees from Asia Minor7 – as a potential threat to the existing social order; and the League of Nations which tried to solve the refugee problem by encouraging their ‘assimilation’ into Greek society or their ‘repatriation’ to Soviet Armenia (Nansen 1928; Société des Nations 1927; Simpson 1939). Armenia itself called on the diaspora for repatriation in 1946/47. The majority of the diaspora elite belonged to, or were affiliated with, the Dashnak party and shared its concept of identity sustained by a notion of diaspora as a ‘nation in exile’. Armenian identity in exile was seen as constantly threatened and had to be conserved in its ‘pure’ state by all means until Armenians could return to their homeland. For the Dashnak, the ‘homeland’ became more and more synonymous with the vision of an independent Armenian nation-state. Although, they never gave up their claim to the Western Armenian territories, the area where most of the refugees in Greece came from and whose incorporation into the Turkish republic in 1923 was recognized by the international community, the imagination of the place of origin was slowly changing. The concept of the ‘homeland’ became more and more synonymous with an abstract concept of a nation-state. Surprisingly few of the memories of the place of origin were transmitted to the next generation. Thus, most Armenians of the third generation did not know many details about the places of origin of their family. Apparently the power of the Dashnak elite to define the meaning of the place of origin in terms of their political ideology was extremely pervasive. As a result, the former Soviet Armenia is represented as the ‘place of origin’ of those Armenians living in the diaspora in Greece (see Bisharat 1997 for a similar process in the Palestinian diaspora). For Athenian Armenians8 of the first and second generation, even for those who have never lived in one of the ghettos, the identification with the ghettos is of great significance. Although the memories of the ghettos are a key element in the construction of Armenian identity, they did not become a part of ritualized public representations of Armenian communities in Greece. These representations are dominated by highly selective invocations of certain historical events in Armenian national history – predominant are rituals for the commemorations of the genocide (Schwalgin 2000) – and show the local elites’ preoccupation with national and non-local events as symbols of Armenian identity. However, for many Armenians the ghettos symbolize the refugees’ social, economic and legal marginalization in Greek society, as Mardiros Atamian9 remembered: Well, if you passed the river, where the street is today, there were tiny houses. Huts. Made of wood and mud. One family with three, four kids lived in a single, small room. Next to them the neighbour, next to them another one. (Source: field interview)

Why locality matters

81

In spite of the hardship the inhabitants had to endure, these ghettos are remembered as protected Armenian oases in a hostile Greek landscape. They came to symbolize the ideal of a closed, localized Armenian community with its important institutions, like churches, schools, and clubs, where the maintenance and transmission of identity was possible despite the traumatic experiences of the genocide and their uprooting as well as the hardships imposed by exile. Thus, the ghettos serve even today as a symbol of survival and pride. Mrs Takouhi, who grew up in a Greek neighbourhood, where a few dispersed Armenian families lived, characterized her childhood years as being continuously to and fro between two different worlds. On the one hand, the world of her Armenian family and, on the other hand, the Greek environment where she had to hide her Armenian origin in order not to provide a target for mockery and discrimination. The narrative about the establishment of the ghettos appears to be as contradictory as the narrative about the demolition of the ghettos, which reveals the double-edged nature of this process. On the one hand, it symbolizes the successful social, economic and legal integration of the Armenian refugees into Greek society. Integration is presented as a source of personal and collective pride as well as positive identification with locality. The children left behind the socially and economically oppressive narrow-mindedness of the ghettos. They conquered Greek space and achieved what was refused to the first and second generation, as Mr Mardiros pointed out: Mind you, at that time if two Armenian children went to grammar school they were mocked. You are Armenian, you don’t know nothing! […] Go back to your homeland. Go back to Armenia. […] Today it’s natural, my daughters went to grammar school, it was the natural thing to do. It’s just another girl from the neighbourhood who is going to school, to university. (Source: field interview) Furthermore, Mr Mardiros perceived the positive attitudes towards Armenians in Greece today as a result of the opening up of the ghettos: The youth moved out. They could have relationships with Greeks, they made them aware of our culture, they made our culture known. That’s why we started to advance, socially. (Source: field interview) However, Armenians identify the spatial dispersal of the Armenian community with an attack of the Greek government on the social integrity of their community. A process of dispersion, that was started by the Armenians themselves long before the demolition of the last huts, was fixed in time and the efforts of Armenians to achieve social and economic integration were represented as a result of external pressure. The demolition was perceived as the second dispersal of Armenians that led to the problem of maintaining an Armenian identity, especially among the younger generations.

82

Susanne Schwalgin That’s how the Greek government dispersed the Armenian element. […] They gave them houses in different areas. Not where their huts had been. They dissociated them from each other. Do you know what happened next? I tell you, in the huts, one next to the other, Armenians had no relationships with Greeks. They lived like in a ghetto. All in one place, in small houses. I knew your daughter and I got married to her. […] After they demolished it, there’s a Greek girl living next to him, a pretty one, he likes her, a pretty one or an ugly one, whatever. Love is blind, you know, and that’s how mixed marriages happened. (Source: field interview)

Thus, it is not surprising that the activities of the diaspora elite are aimed at emphasizing and patrolling the ‘social boundaries’ of community. Some Armenians ironically characterized these efforts as ‘the establishment of a ghetto in the mind’. However, most Armenians, especially of the first and second generation, believe that the ‘erosion of identity’, which started with the dissolution of the coinciding social and spatial boundaries of the community, cannot be stopped. Mr Mardiros was concerned with this danger, too: We are worried about the future of the community. One can look at it from this perspective, or another perspective, and one can say, as long as I live in a foreign country, you know, you have an erosion, a natural erosion. We try to keep this erosion as small as possible. (Source: field interview) The internal changes of the Armenian community after the dissolution of the supposedly coinciding spaces of community and locality are perceived as a process of a natural, and therefore inevitable, loss of identity. However, Armenians positively identify themselves on individual and collective levels with social and economic integration in Greek society and this is also an identification with a certain locality, more precisely with Thessaloniki or Athens. But in the context of the discourse of diaspora as exile, this positive identification with locality turns into resignation when confronted by the powerful influence of locality.

Armenia, ‘sacrifice’ and the commemoration of the genocide Since Armenia gained its independence in 1991, it has become more and more apparent that the discourse of diaspora as exile was losing its persuasiveness. Armenian independence did not encourage the return of Armenians from the diaspora to their cherished homeland, but it strengthened the positive identification with locality. The majority of Armenians in Greece realized that the forced exile had become a voluntary one and that they wanted to continue living in Greece even though it was now possible to return to post-Soviet, independent Armenia. Even Mr Mardiros, who expressed resignation in respect of the powerful influence

Why locality matters

83

of locality in the previous quote, defended the value of the local when his wife, Mrs Takouhi, asked him the following question during our conversation: ‘I will ask you a question, that I have asked myself, too: let’s say Armenia would be at the same economic level as Greece, would you go to live there?’ Her husband was caught between wind and water by this question and answered: ‘Why should I go to live there now? No, I can’t live there. I can’t. I don’t know. My children are still young but in my age what contribution can I offer? I can’t offer anything.’ I asked Mrs Takouhi: ‘Would you go?’ and she answered: ‘No, that’s why I tell you I feel Greek. Here I am living, here I was borne, here I grew up. I know the mentality here.’ (Source: field interview) Meanwhile Mr Mardiros found a new argument for the local: ‘Do you know Susanna, Armenia is a country without sea. If there’s no sea things become difficult.’ His wife continued to explain her emotional attachments for Armenia and Greece: ‘I am touched if I am going to Armenia. I am deeply moved, moved to tears. France for example is beautiful but it does not touch me. Armenia moves me. If I am seeing Armenian things, if I recognize that a bus has an Armenian inscription, if a street has an Armenian name, all that is moving me. But not to live there. Then, emotions cease. (she laughed) Because I adopted the mentality from here. […] Here, I am knowing the street where I have to turn off, I know this and that, I have some friends.’ Her husband added: ‘That’s not all, you change your life if you change the country. Until you will get used to it you need some years.’ (Source: field interview) This interview passage shows a set of different emotional attachments to the localities of Greece and Armenia. Home in the sense of a ‘lived experience of a locality’ (Brah 1996: 192) is Greece. Mrs Takouhi described her personal feelings of attachment to Greece as place of birth, place of living, as a place with a familiar topography where she is rooted through social relations by pointing out that she feels first and foremost Greek. Her husband expressed his attachments of feeling at home in Greece in a very different way. His first comment seems to be much more an excuse for not going to Armenia than an argument for staying in Greece: He cannot go there because he has nothing to offer – an expression which was used by many Armenians to explain to me why they stayed in the diaspora. With this explanation he referred to a key concept of Armenian identity in the diaspora: the concept of sacrifice (greek: prosfora) (Antoniou 1995: 121–378; Pattie 1997: 23–6). This concept is deeply linked to the transmission and commemoration of the genocide. Most Armenians talk about the genocide in terms of feeling a collective and individual debt to the traumatic events of loss. In their opinion everything should be done so that the genocide is not forgotten and that the process of ‘white genocide’ (assimilation) is delayed. Since the genocide and the flight

84

Susanne Schwalgin

from Asia Minor, Armenian identity cannot be taken for granted anymore but has been and can continue to be maintained only through constant activities and sacrifices, without which it would be lost in the quasi-natural process of assimilation (‘white genocide’). The notion of sacrifice includes not only sacrifices for Armenian identity but simultaneously for the family, for the local community, for the Armenian nation and for the Dashnak party. Those who were most active in Armenian politics or other community affairs, like Mr Mardiros and Mrs Takouhi, spoke in terms of sacrificing their time, energy and money for the nation. Similarly, parents who were driving their children every day to the Armenian school, which could be a very time-consuming activity, stressed that this is done in order to keep continuing a national heritage and identity. Even marrying an Armenian partner and establishing a family had been described as ‘sacrifice for the nation’ by some of my older informants and barring intermarriage as threat for the nation’s existence. Since the independence of Armenia, the obligation to support Armenia has become a key element of the concept of sacrifice. Like Mr Mardiros, most of my interlocutors pointed out that this obligation can better be fulfilled by staying in the diaspora then by going back to Armenia – a view which is at odds with the former discourse of diaspora as forced exile. Since Armenia’s independence, the discourse of diaspora started to become the subject of a process of re-definition. This process is still continuing. Diaspora is more and more identified with the positive role of mediating and lobbying for Armenian national interests. On the one hand, this positive re-definition of diaspora is tied up to a key element of the traditional discourse of diaspora: the struggle for Armenia’s independence is transformed into a struggle for the national survival of Armenia and recently Karabagh – the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan – as a second homeland and the reestablishment of its ‘pure’, pre-Soviet state. Thus, the still powerful imagination of Armenia as national homeland is perpetuated. However, a positive re-definition of diaspora offers the possibility of a positive identification with locality because a diaspora can only serve as a good mediator if it is successfully integrated in its country of residence. Another reason for feeling at home in Greece that was mentioned by Mr Mardiros does not show any reference to the discourse of diaspora or to the local Armenian community. ‘The sea’ is a key symbol of a positive identification with Greece. The sea metaphor is frequently used by Greeks to express the uniqueness of the Greek ‘life-style’ in opposition to the mentality of the population (in greek: notropies) of other countries, especially industrial countries like Germany which are supposed to produce an economically efficient but emotionally poor way of life. Thus, the sea symbolizes emotional qualities like pleasure and relaxation despite the hardships of daily routine, as well as the enjoyment of nature, good company and good food which are the constitutive elements of a positive imagination of Greece, and not only in tourist advertising. However, the different metaphors and expressions used by Mrs Takouhi and Mr Mardiros to describe their positive identification with Greece reflect the traditional concept of culture which is criticized in current social anthropological

Why locality matters

85

theory: The idea that a certain place produces and/or is inhabited by a distinctive ‘mentality’ or way of life. Furthermore, it shows that identification with an Armenian identity is first and foremost linked to a sense of belonging to a particular local community. Armenia is, as Avtar Brah put it, ‘a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is imagined as the place of “origin” ’(Brah 1996: 192). Mrs Takouhi’s very emotional description of her feelings for Armenia shows that the imaginative identification with Armenia is still significant for the construction of identity at the local level. But these emotions cease if she confronts herself with the claim to live in Armenia, because she ‘adopted the mentality from here’. Armenia is imagined first and foremost in terms of national symbols,10 as a landscape covered with national symbols, as a large open-air museum of national history. The people living there are perceived as ‘exhibits’ embodying the ‘pure’, genuine national character: If you walk around there, the words of your forefathers immediately come to your mind. That’s why I tell you, it is the duty of every Armenian to go there. Because we don’t know our race, we don’t know who we are. (Source: field interview) Even unspectacular objects of daily use like ‘Armenian inscriptions’, ‘Armenian street names’ or ‘Armenian things in general’ had an emotional effect on Mrs Takouhi. For Armenians of the diaspora, the independent Armenian state symbolizes the end of an existence as stateless refugees which they had always experienced as discriminating despite the fact that they had become Greek citizens. Especially Armenians of the first and second generation continued to see the lack of an Armenian nation state as a stigma. Since the day Armenia has become a full member of the community of nation-states, diaspora-Armenians feel liberated of the stigma of statelessness in a world based on the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Therefore, Mrs Takouhi felt deeply touched when she visited Armenia the first time after independence: When I visited Armenia for the first time in 1980 it was still Soviet [sic]. Ten years after that, in 1991 (…) I was very deeply moved as I saw our national flag at the airport. There have been three flags and, honestly, I cried. (Source: field interview) Many Armenians described similar feelings for Armenian national symbols or even for ‘Armenian things’ publicly displayed on Armenian streets or television. Thus, it is not surprising that many diaspora Armenians have become embittered by the Armenian Republic’s refusal to extend automatic citizenship to them. Many such people, while acknowledging that they do not wish to repatriate to Armenia, insist that it is their ‘right’ to receive such citizenship, to hold in addition to their Greek or other host-country citizenship.

86

Susanne Schwalgin

The increasing confrontation with the ‘real’ Armenia, due to the lifting of travel restrictions, does not necessarily change the images that Armenians of the diaspora have of it. Armenians from Greece usually go on guided tours to Armenia. These visits are organized like grand tours and inevitably include the genocide memorial in Jerewan, the opera, museums, Etschmiadzin, the religious centre of the Armenian orthodox church etc. The visitors express the emotions that develop during these visits in religious metaphors like ‘rebirth’ or ‘baptism’. They experience their contact with the ‘pure Armenia’ as an ‘infusion of identity’ which binds them to their history and identity. Furthermore, Armenians visit Armenia together with other members of their local community and coming back they share their experiences with those who could still not visit their ‘cherished homeland’. Thus, these joint visits organized by the church or other community organizations strengthen the identification with the local community as well as with the dominant imaginations of Armenia circulating in the Armenian diaspora. Ruth Klüger described the significance of Auschwitz for the visitors and survivors as follows: ‘What one meant to find there was already part of his luggage’ (‘Wer dort etwas zu finden meint, hat es wohl schon im Gepäck mitgebracht’) (Klüger 1992: 77). For Armenians of the diaspora, travelling to Armenia is often similar: The luggage they packed at home consists of ideas about ‘communities of relations’ formulated in the local Armenian community dominated by the Dashnak party and its organizations. Although these ‘communities of relations’ are constructed at the local level, they include elements which are part of the global flow of meaning in the Armenian diaspora. Travelling to Armenia can be interpreted as a selfaffirmation of this process of the already-achieved construction of meanings. As James Clifford proposes, it ‘is the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here)’ (Clifford 1997: 269). I suggest that it is the continual process of constructing a meaningful connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here). Armenia serves as a powerful materialized affirmation for the construction of Armenian identity in the diaspora communities in Greece. While travelling to Armenia does not have corrosive effects for the constructions of identity, migration from Armenia to Greece is a continuous source of disturbance for the members of the local communities. The independence of Armenia had an ironic result: While the diaspora remained sedentary, the nation-state became mobile. Since 1991, a third of the population of Armenia has left the country due to economic difficulties and the armed conflict with Azerbaijan over NagornyKarabagh. Approximately 30,000 migrants from Armenia are living in Greece today as undocumented immigrants. The relationships between the diaspora Armenians and the migrants are full of conflict. Although migrants participate to some extent in the activities of the diaspora community, they do not perceive themselves as members of the community but rather as barely tolerated guests who do not have a say. This situation is a source of perpetual bitterness. Ever since Armenia gained independence, the way ‘home’ is, at least theoretically, open to all Armenians of the diaspora. However, the majority of the diaspora Armenians in Greece came – like Mr Mardiros and Mrs Takouhi – to realize that the forced exile had become a voluntary one and that they wanted to continue living in

Why locality matters

87

Greece while remaining connected to Armenia in certain ways that did not involve repatriation. Armenian independence, the nation state they had been longing for, led to a far-reaching process of re-evaluation: concepts of diaspora, Armenian identity, the relations between diaspora and Armenia as well as the images of Armenia were subjected to scrutiny. This phase of re-definition was irritating to diaspora Armenians. The reaction of diaspora Armenians to the immigration from Armenia has to be seen in the light of this conflicting re-definition. After decades of projections from a safe distance, the homeland, embodied in the migrants, has turned on the diaspora. During the short guided tours to Armenia, the image of Armenia as the cherished homeland and of the Armenians as examples of a ‘pure’, genuine national character are widely reaffirmed. But on the daily level of community life in Greece, the migrants’ different ideas about Armenia and Armenian identity produced extremely ambivalent feelings. For example, the central aim of ‘sacrifices for the homeland’ made by diaspora Armenians is the national survival of Armenia and the re-establishment of the pre-Soviet state. The recent problems of Armenia are perceived as the result of the polluting influences of communism. From their political point of view, migration is seen as threatening the national survival and migrants as deserters or even traitors of the national homeland. While diaspora Armenians condemned the era of Soviet Armenia as pollution of the genuine national character, the ‘homing desire’ (Brah 1996) of the migrants is aimed at the idealized memory of steadily improving living conditions in Soviet Armenia in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras just before the collapse. Migrants do not interpret the independence of Armenia as a blessing, but rather as a reason for the collapse of the economy and so of the catastrophe of individual exile. They do not share the political perspective of diasporists who celebrate independence as the first step to the re-establishment of a ‘pure’, genuine homeland. Furthermore, both groups regarded themselves as the ‘real’ representatives of Armenian identity; their concepts of a ‘pure’ ethnic identity reflect a key concept of nationalist ideology: the purity of identity and culture depends on its location in geographical terms. Migrants still regard themselves as members of the Armenian nation-state, while they define diaspora as a theoretically subordinate element of this state. This corresponds with the Armenian Republic’s policies regarding the diaspora. As a result, they define themselves as the legitimate representatives of Armenian identity and deny this to the diasporists. However, diasporists’ constructions of identity are also informed by this discourse of identity which seeks legitimacy out of a national territory. The diaspora elites’ dominant concept of identity is based on the ideal of a ‘pure’ Armenian identity and culture. Diaspora is only a poor substitute for a nation-state. Diasporists believe that their diasporic situation does not allow them to reach the ideal of a ‘pure’ Armenian identity. If purity is unattainable, it can be replaced by the concept of sacrifice, which is regarded as the only way to remain as Armenian as possible under the conditions of exile. Migrants tend to take Armenian identity for granted, while diaspora Armenians believe that they have to struggle and to sacrifice themselves in order to maintain Armenian.

88

Susanne Schwalgin

It is, thus, not surprising that diaspora-Armenians show a tendency to disapprove of emigration from Armenia: No, migration is not right, for Armenia it’s not right at all. We’re dead against it and if we could see any way to send them back, that would be nice. But because so many have already come we’re thinking about ways to help them. It doesn’t shed a good light on the community but there are problems all the time. Economically speaking we can’t do a thing but in some exceptional cases, if the problem is really urgent, we do help, we can’t just stand by, coldblooded. We do our best. And if they want to return to Armenia we’ll do a lot more for them. We buy a ticket for them – but they have to leave and never return. (Source: field interview) This short passage from an interview with one member of the community’s committee in Thessaloniki contains the whole spectrum of ambivalent positions and feelings: Armenians in the diaspora feel powerless because they cannot control, let alone reverse, the flow of migrants from Armenia. From a political perspective they condemn the migration; however, from a humanitarian perspective they feel obliged to offer assistance. Furthermore, they are anxious that the migrants might have a negative influence on the good reputation of Armenians in Greece and on their well-organized community life. The key to the problem, however, is the construction of migrants, often called refugees, as a threat to the established order that can best be eliminated if they vanish. As Malkki (1997: 63) has argued, the reasons for the problem of flight/migration are not sought in the political circumstances but rather ‘within bodies and minds (and even souls) of people categorized as refugees’.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to show how processes of imagined and experienced place-making are interwoven and mutually dependent on one another. However, the limits of imagined place-making, dominated by the diasporist elites, are apparent. The discourse of diaspora as forced exile loses its power if the experience of locality is replaced by imaginations. Since Armenia gained its independence, it has become more and more apparent that the discourse of diaspora as exile was losing its persuasiveness. Armenian independence did not encourage the return of Armenians from the diaspora to their cherished homeland, but rather paradoxically strengthened positive identifications with locality. The majority of Armenians in Greece realized that the forced exile had become a voluntary one and that they wanted to continue living in Greece. Thus, the diaspora elite had to face the fact that it had to integrate the significance of locality, or lose its power to define the discourse of diaspora. Even during my field research I noticed that the discourse of diaspora had started to become the subject of a process of re-definition. This process is still

Why locality matters

89

continuing. Diaspora is more and more identified with the positive role of mediating and lobbying for Armenian national interests. On the one hand, this positive redefinition of diaspora is tied up to a key element of the traditional discourse of diaspora: the struggle for Armenia’s independence is transformed into a struggle for the national survival of Armenia and recently Karabagh as a second homeland and the re-establishment of its ‘pure’, pre-Soviet state. Thus, the still powerful imagination of Armenia as national homeland is perpetuated. However, a positive re-definition of diaspora offers the possibility of a positive identification with locality because a diaspora can only serve as a mediator if it is successfully integrated in its country of residence. Anthropologists should not ignore the significance of locality for the construction of identities, despite their excitement about diasporas as prototypes of transnational communities. However, accepting that locality matters does not entail the resurrection of a binary opposition between the local and the global. On the contrary, locality matters in a global space of relations where places are not existing per se but are constructed as ‘communities of relations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Olwig and Hastrup 1997). Experiences of social relations do play a central role for these communities of relations and thus, in the processes of the construction of locality.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Waltraud Kokot and Khachig Tölölyan for their critical reading and their fruitful comments on a previous draft of this chapter. My considerations on the importance of locality and sedentariness for identity in diaspora have been further developed in Schwalgin 2003a and 2003b.

Notes 1 For the generation of Ruben’s parents, arranged marriages called proksenia played a significant role for Armenians and Greeks. Today most people of Ruben’s age refuse proksenia as an old-fashioned institution which is at odds with the ideal of a lovematch. Ruben asked me to play the role of a proksenitria (female person who arranges marriages) exactly because of my position as an ethnographer. Like many other key informants, Ruben had a marginal position in the Armenian community of Thessaloniki, Thus, he faced difficulties in finding a trustworthy person for this delicate task. What had led him to ask me was, on the one hand the fact that I was familiar with those Armenian families in Thessaloniki which shared with Ruben the idea of the importance of an in-group-marriage. On the other hand, he was convinced that I, as an ethnographer, will deal with any kind of personal information more confidentially than other members of the Armenian community. 2 There had been only some small Armenian communities in Northern Greece before 1922 (see Hassiotis 1995). 3 The term ‘ghetto’ is used to designate the former refugee neighbourhoods to underline their character as demarcated ethnic enclaves. In other contexts these neighbourhoods are called geitonia (Greek term for neighbourhood), maxala (originally a Turkish term which is frequently used to designate traditional neighbourhoods) or just Kokkinia and Fix.

90

Susanne Schwalgin

4 The second important Armenian diaspora party, the liberal-democratic Ramgavar, plays only a marginal role in Greece today. 5 See for further information: Atamian 1955; Libaridian 1980; Nalbandian 1963. 6 Between 1923 and 1928 there had been the legal opportunity for naturalization. Only approx. 1,000 Armenians adopted Greek citizenship (Simpson 1939: 41–2). 7 Refugees of Greek origin had been discriminated against also. Native Greeks questioned the Greek identity of the newcomers, calling them ‘Tourkosporoi’ (Turkish seed) and ‘yiaourtovaptismenoi’ (yoghurt-baptisted). However, in the official rhetoric and politics of the Greek nation-state these refugees were perceived as an integral part of the nation-building process and as major contribution to Greece’s long-term socio-economic development. Thus, their integration is widely perceived as a ‘story of national success’. And today even Armenians identify themselves with this success story. Nevertheless, anthropological works have shown that descendants of the refugees still collectively identify themselves with the memories of displacement, uprooting and forced settlement. In contrast to the Armenians, the Greek refugees from Asia Minor did not articulate their nostalgic memories as a political project of return. (Kokot 1994; Hirschon 1998; Voutira 1998). 8 The discourse of the ghetto is a local narrative of Athenian Armenians, but the contradictory experiences described by the ghetto metaphor had been constructed in memory by Armenians of the first and second generation in Thessaloniki, too. Although Armenian ghettos never existed in Thessaloniki, there had been a certain spatial concentration of Armenian families in the refugee quarters as well as in proximity to the community’s institutions. Armenians from Thessaloniki share the opinion of Athenian Armenians that the dissolution of proximity is one important reason for ‘assimilation’. 9 Most quotes that illustrate the discourse of the ghetto and the discourse of Armenia are taken from an interview with a couple, Mardiros and Takouhi Atamian, who had been key informants during my field research in Athens. Mardiros Atamian was in his seventies and grew up in the ghetto of Kokkinia. His wife Takouhi was in her sixties and never lived in one of the ghettos herself until her marriage. Today they are still living in Fix, a ten-minute walk from the church and the Armenian club. Both had been very active members of different Armenian organizations affiliated with the Dashnak party – but not members of the party – for most of their lives. The opinions and experiences they shared with me during this interview were expressed similarly by many of my Armenian interlocutors. By using the titles Mr and Mrs together with the first names I am following the usual pattern of address in Greece. Such titles are not used with people of the same age as Ruben. All first names are changed. 10 Mount Ararat, the memorial for the genocide in Jerewan, the memorial and museum in Sardarapat where an important battle with the Turkish had taken place in 1918, the religious centre of the Armenian orthodox church in Etschmiadzin near Jerewan etc.

Bibliography Antoniou, P. (1995) ‘H Ellino-Armeniki Koinotita tis Athinas. Ekdoxes kai Antilipseis tis Armenikotitas mesa apo tin kathemerini symviosi me tin Elliniki koinonia’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of the Aegean, Mytilini. Atamian, S. (1955) The Armenian Community: The Historical Development of a Social and Ideological Conflict, New York: Philosophical Library. Bisharat, G. (1997) ‘Exile to compatriot: transformations in the social identity of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Why locality matters

91

Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London and New York: Routledge. Clifford, J. (1992) ‘Traveling cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. —— (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 303–8. —— (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Dracklé, D. (1999) ‘Die Rhetorik der Krise: Zur kulturellen Poetik von Politik, Bürokratie und virtueller Ökonomie in Südportugal’, unpublished manuscript, University of Hamburg. Friedman, J. (1997) ‘Global crises, the struggle for cultural identity and intellectual porkbarrelling: cosmopolitans versus locals, ethnics and nationals in an era of dehegemonisation’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds) Debating Cultural Hybridity, London: Zed Books. Gilroy, P.(1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (1992) ‘Beyond culture: space, identity, and the politics of difference’, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 6–23. Hassiotis, I. (1995) ‘Oi Armenoi tis Elladas: Istoria, Organosi, Ideologia, Koinoniki Ensomatosi’ [The Armenians of Greece: history, organisation, ideology, social integration], Istor, 8: 85–112. Hirschon, R. (1998) (1989) Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kokot, W. (1994) ‘Kognition und soziale Identität in einem Flüchtlingsviertel: Kato Toumba, Thessaloniki’, unpublished manuscript, University of Cologne. Klüger, R. (1992) Weiter leben, Göttingen: Dt. Taschenbuch Verlag. Lazaridis, G. (2000) ‘Filipino and Albanian women migrant workers in Greece: multiple layers of oppression’, in F. Anthias and G. Lazaridis (eds) (2000) Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move, Oxford and New York: Berg. Libaridian, G.J. (1980) ‘Revolution and liberation in the 1892 and 1907 programs of the Dashnaktsutiune’, in G.R. Suny (ed.) (1983) Transcaucasia: Nationalism and Social Change, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Loizos, P. (1999) ‘Ottoman half-lives: long-term perspectives on particular forced migrations’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 12(3): 237–63. Malkki, L. (1995) ‘Refugees and exile: from “refugee studies” to the national order of things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 495–524. —— (1997) ‘National geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorilization of national identity among scholars and refugees’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Marcus, G. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. Nalbandian, L. (1963) The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nansen, F. (1928) Armenia and the Near East, London: DaCapo Press (reprinted 1976). Olwig, K.F. and Hastrup, K. (eds) (1997) Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge.

92

Susanne Schwalgin

Pattie, S.P. (1997) Faith in History: Armenians Rebuilding Community, Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute. Peters, J.D. (1997) ‘Seeing bifocality: media, place, and culture’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds) Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Psimmenos, I. (2000) ‘The making of periphratic spaces: the case of Albanian undocumented female migrants in the sex industry of Athens’, in F. Anthias and G. Lazaridis (eds) (2000) Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move, Oxford and New York: Berg. Sachinian-Onnikian, L. (1999) ‘Agios Karabet, o protos tropos prosevchis ton armenikon Armenion’, ArmeNika, 10: 20–1. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homelandand return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Schwalgin, S. (2000) ‘Rituale zum Gedenkens an den Genozid. Eine Situationsanalyse’, in W. Kokot, T. Hengartner and K. Wildner (eds) Kulturwissenschaftliche Stadtforschung, Berlin: Reimer Verlag. —— (2003a) ‘ “In the Ghetto”: Prozesse der Verortnung in der armenischen Diaspora Athens’, in A. Eder and K. Vagt (eds) ‘Wir sind auch da!’: Über das Leben von und mit europäischen Großstädten, Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz. —— (2003b) ‘ “Wir werden niemals vergessen!”: Trauma, Erinnerung und Identität in der armenischen Diaspora Griechenlands’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Hamburg. Simpson, J.H. (1939) The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press. Société des Nations (1927) Plan d´établissement des réfugiés arméniens. Exposé général et documents principaux, Geneva. Tölölyan, K. (1991) ‘Exile governments in Armenian polity’, in Y. Shain (ed.) Governmentsin-Exile in Contemporary World Politics, New York and London: Routledge. —— (1993) ‘Traditionelle Identität und politischer Radikalismus in der armenischen Diaspora’, in M. Dabag and K. Platt (eds) Identität in der Fremde, Bochum: Brockmeyer. —— (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless poor in the transnational moment’, Diaspora, 5(1): 3–36. —— (2000) ‘Religions: transnational markers and vehicles of identity’, unpublished paper presented at the conference ‘Diaspora, Identity and Locality’, Hamburg, 10–13 February. Vertovec, S. (1997) ‘Three meanings of “diaspora” exemplified among South Asian religions’, Diaspora, 6(3): 277–99. Voutira, E. (1998) ‘When Greeks meet other Greeks: the long-term consequences of the Lausanne Treaty and policy issue in the contemporary Greek context’, lecture given at the conference ‘The Compulsory Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey: Assessment of the Consequences of the Treaty of Lausanne 1923 (75th Anniversary), Oxford, 17–20 September.

History of modern Greek diaspora

5

93

Past and present in the history of modern Greek diaspora Iannis Hassiotis

Until recently most of what has been written about various aspects of the history of modern Greek diaspora has been strongly coloured by their authors’ ideological or theoretical preconceptions. On the one hand, we have the older, idealistic interpretations of ‘continuity’, which, firmly entrenched in the style of traditional Greek historiography, view the historical evolution of the Hellenic diaspora as an inseparable, continuous and unbroken process, from the time of the ancient colonies to the present day (Dendias 1919; Fossey 1991). Of a similar type are those who seek the agents of the Greek migration phenomenon in areas like the ‘nature’ of the Greek ‘ethnic characteristics’ or – even worse – in the unique psychography and temperament of ‘Ulysses the Greek’. But a good many of those who avoid the trap of these ideological stereotypes still fall into other ideological and methodological snares, examining the functioning, integration, and ideology of some of the centres of the Greek diaspora either from a purely Marxist angle or on the basis of one-sided criteria, at best economyoriented (Psyroukis 1974: 288 ff.). Recent years have seen some as yet uncoordinated attempts at a comparative, and even an interdisciplinary approach. By and large, students of the Greek diaspora seem to be trying to co-ordinate their own stance with those of Western historians and social anthropologists, who have been trying over the last twenty-five years to conduct a holistic and universal rather than a comparative investigation of the phenomenon of migration and minority communities (Ikonomu 1991; Constas and Platias 1993; Bruneau 1995; Prevelakis 1994, 1996). All the same, despite widespread efforts towards an interdisciplinary treatment of the diaspora (which have undeniably broadened the range of our speculation and enriched our theoretical arsenal), some fundamental questions remain unanswered by either an exploration of the migrations of a specific ethnic group or – what is more – a comparative, interethnic study. However, the typological models presented in the international literature have in a number of cases proved incompatible with the historical facts of the Greek case. To take John Armstrong’s 1976 typological approach, for instance, most of the Greek emigrants of the early Ottoman period can by no means be described as any kind of ‘proletarian diaspora’, yet nor do they share the features of a ‘mobilized diaspora’, to which at least some of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Greek communities probably appertained (Hassiotis 1997: 85ff.). The same applies to the contemporary

94

Iannis Hassiotis

period: the working-class origin of at least some of the Greek emigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as also of the Greek Gästarbeiter in post-war Europe and those who emigrated to Canada and Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, fits in with Armstrong’s ‘proletarian’ category; yet it co-existed – at least between the second half of the nineteenth century and the post-war Greek emigrations to Africa (or even the east coast of America) – with some of the basic characteristics of the ‘mobilized diaspora’ (National Centre for Social Research 1967: 11–38; Psychogios 1986). This, coupled with other distinctive features of Greek migration, means that the Greek literature itself contains some marked divergences from the typological schemata that have been laid down at various times for the historical evolution of the Hellenic diaspora. These divergences – which may be due to imitation of some general models – are apparent not only in the efforts to confront the conceptual problem, but also in geographical specifications and the assessments of the basic milestones in the historical development of modern Greek migration; and consequently of the beginning and the various historical periods of the modern Greek diaspora. I have no illusions that this chapter is going to provide convincing answers to some of the difficult problems I have just outlined. I shall simply try, initially on the basis of the available historical data, to clarify a few points, which I hope will be of some use, at least in identifying the basic parameters of the history of modern Greek migration. When speaking today of the Greek diaspora1 we must make it quite clear that we confine ourselves strictly to the history of the modern Greek diaspora. In the main three long periods of Greek history – the ancient, the medieval/Byzantine, and the modern and contemporary period – one may not always legitimately examine the history of the Greek diaspora under the same terms. In contrast to the romantic idea that all of Greek history without exception unfolded in unbroken process, a specialized – and even more so an interdisciplinary – approach to the question of the diaspora does not permit the historian to underestimate the changes between one historical period and the next, nor above all the radical quantitative and qualitative changes that occurred over the centuries in the agents and the character of Greek migration. Thus, the modern, and to much greater extent the contemporary, Greek colonies (and up to a certain point the Armenian ones) fall into different historical categories, even when they have grown up in precisely the same places as the ancient and medieval colonies of the same name. This is true, for instance, of southern Italy and Sicily, some traditional urban centres in the Mediterranean, and some age-old trading stations on the Black Sea, chiefly in the peninsula of Crimea. But the modern Greek communities in Sicily and southern Italy (mainly in Palermo, Messina, Naples and Ancona) were really created from the mid-fifteenth century onwards (albeit in some association with the remnants of the previous Greek-Byzantine settlements in Apulia and Calabria). The same applies to the Greek villages in southern Crimea: they cannot be traced farther back than the late Middle Ages and – like other Greek centres on the Black Sea coast – acquired real continuity only from the late eighteenth century onwards. Less closely linked with the Greek colonies of the archaic and Hellenistic periods

History of modern Greek diaspora

95

is the Greek presence in the Middle East (particularly in Alexandria) and, even less, in the western Mediterranean basin, which was not really appreciable before the beginning of the eighteenth century (as happened in Algiers and Menorca) or even in the first decades of the nineteenth century (mainly in Marseilles). So there is a break in historical continuity, with substantial differences in the operation and the character of the centres of the Greek diaspora. In the first place, their demographic and cultural vigour enabled the ancient Greek colonists to strongly influence or even hellenize their indigenous neighbours. Furthermore, their general development and geographical spread often meant that for long periods of time they were in effect the native element in the countries where they had settled (as in southern Italy and the Crimean peninsula, for example, not to mention Cyprus, Ionia and the Pontus). In contrast, the modern Greek ‘colonies’ abroad have never been more than ethno-religious minorities. Even the massive Greek settlements on Corsica in the last decades of the seventeenth century, in southern Russia, the Crimea, and Bessarabia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in the northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia almost throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never remotely approached the demographic strength of the indigenous element. This is why they cannot be compared with the Greek colonies of the ancient period, and the continuity, then, of the lengthy existence of the large Grecian colonies of antiquity must also be seen as merely apparent (Hassiotis 1989: 9–24). Another point that should be clarified here is a semantic one. There is a tendency to use the word ‘diaspora’, albeit metaphorically, as a blanket term for all kinds of categories of people – not only emigrants, but miscellaneous expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, and even ethnic and racial minorities of all sorts of provenance. As a rule, the modern Greek diaspora is generally connected with that segment of the Greek people which having settled, not necessarily permanently, in countries or regions outside the ‘Greek homeland’, has continued in various ways to maintain its material, social, and above all its ideological and emotional ties with the Greek ‘national centre’. However, we also have to define precisely what we mean by ‘homeland’ and ‘national centre’; for these concepts are not the same for Greeks as they perhaps are for many other peoples, particularly for those originating from the nation-states of Western Europe.2 For a considerable period of modern Greek history, when the Hellenic state either did not exist or had not yet crystallized into its final form (i.e. from the fifteenth century to 1830 and, for a considerable proportion of the Greek people, until 1923), the notion of a ‘national territory’ must also be taken to include those parts of the Ottoman Empire that were formerly referred to as ‘the Greek east’. So, from this point of view, we should not include in the modern Greek diaspora (as some people continue to do) either the erstwhile alytrotos (unredeemed) or the so-called peripheriakos (peripheral) Hellenism corresponding to the Greek populations of northern Epirus (southern Albania), eastern Rumelia (southern Bulgaria), eastern Thrace (Turkey), Asia Minor, and Cyprus. Although, from as early as the end of the Middle Ages, it turned the Greek-speaking Orthodox element into a linguistic, religious, and ethnic minority, the change of sovereignty and of the ethnic

96

Iannis Hassiotis

composition of these regions (with the exception of Cyprus) did not completely change the enduring character that element had acquired over the preceding centuries, nor sever its continuing economic, social, and cultural links with the more southerly areas of the Greek peninsula and the rest of the Greek world as a whole. These observations still apply today, despite the definitive conclusion of the process of so-called ‘national integration’ which has identified the terms ‘homeland’ and ‘national centre’ with what is now Hellenic national territory (Hassiotis 1993: 28–34; Kitroeff 1991). Lastly, the emigration of modern Greeks to third-world countries, even when they settled in rural areas, was also radically different from the process followed by other west European peoples in modern times. The modern Greek ‘colonies’ had neither the same spread nor the same numerical strength, nor were they in any way administratively dependent on the Hellenic state (after it came into existence, of course), and they therefore never had any of the characteristics of Western colonialism (Hassiotis 1993: 49–50, 56–8, 102–3). Most of these characteristics apply to the Greek diaspora throughout the modern period. Therefore, any attempt to establish chronological boundaries in the history of the modern Greek diaspora can ultimately indicate only conventional terms – in marked contrast to the indisputable periodization between the ancient, medieval, and modern historical periods. Examples of Greek colonies may be found which straddle any periods of history one might care to propose. And the three basic motives behind emigration (economic, political, and educational) are also present at all times albeit with certain inevitable variations. However, certain factors (such as the numbers, geographical distribution, and internal functioning of the Greek communities, and their relations with the homeland and the host countries) make it possible to divide, purely conventionally, the history of modern Greek migration into three broad periods: the first covers the four centuries of Ottoman domination, from the mid-fifteenth century to the emergence of the Hellenic state in 1830; the second took its basic profile after the mid-nineteenth century and continued until just before the World War II; and the third, the period of the contemporary Greek diaspora, began in the 1940s and 1950s and more or less came to an end in the 1970s and 1980s. From a geographical point of view, most of the emigrants of the first period moved within the old, more or less known world: the Italian peninsula first of all, chiefly in the south and rather less in the centre; then, from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century spreading to the large ports and the major commercial centres of western, south-eastern, central, and eastern Europe. In this first period too, what passed for mass migration involved far smaller numbers than later movements of the population. All the same, chiefly because there was no independent Hellenic state, these early migrants remained profoundly involved in the economic, social, cultural, and political developments of the Greek world and played an important, even a leading, part in its ideological orientations (Geanakoplos 1976: 59–77). In the last decades of the eighteenth century, economic circumstances underwent an appreciable change both in the host countries and in the Greek east, bringing about the decline of some traditional centres of the Greek diaspora

History of modern Greek diaspora

97

and the emergence of others (such as Trieste, for instance, which took over from Venice), and above all changing the flow of Greek migration from west to north and north-east. Still, the economic and social changes, both in the host countries and in the homelands, had been going on since the end of the seventeenth century, if not before, and the ‘commercial’ character of at least the most typical colonies also had its roots in earlier times, in some cases even earlier than the seventeenth century. Moreover, the new centres of the Greek diaspora showed no real demographic and economic growth until the first decades of the nineteenth century. But the internal organization of the Greek communities and the framework of their relations both with the homeland and with their social surroundings and local authorities had already crystallized in the earliest stages of their existence. In some cases at least, this crystallization dated from the end or even the beginning of the sixteenth century (Prevelakis 1994). So the first essential quantitative and qualitative changes appeared or became more obvious after Greek independence. This landmark event also marked a change in direction, bringing a reverse migratory flow from the colonies and the Greek periphery into the new Hellenic centre. Some of the main factors in the Greek migrations of this period started to take specific shape only in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. There was also a perceptible change in the geographical directions the emigrants followed now: some of them continued, certainly, to head for the known commercial centres of western Europe; but the largest waves were now making for the eastern Mediterranean, southern Russia and Transcaucasia, and, above all, the New World, particularly the United States. This second period ended with World War II. Some historians regard the outbreak of the World War I as the end, and the disaster of Asia Minor Hellenism as the start of the next period in the Greek diaspora; but the fact that between 1922 and 1940 emigration overseas fell to about a quarter of the level of the previous twenty years shows that the events of 1919–22 had no serious effect on Greek migration levels, even in view of the acute housing problems and difficult living conditions in Greece caused by the massive influx of refugees (Polyzos 1947: 53 ff.). The decrease in emigration can be explained by greater demand for labour and increased work opportunities in Greece, as also by a change in immigration policy in the host countries, particularly the United States. Moreover, the numbers of Asia Minor refugees who were channelled to the United States before it closed its doors to immigrants in 1922 do not compare, even at the period of greatest movement, with the sheer volume of emigrants from the Peloponnese (Moskos 1989: 32–3). Lastly, the tripling of the number of Greeks in Australia between 1920 and 1940 was due to emigration either from the Italianheld Dodecanese (mainly Kastellorizo) or from the Ionian Islands (chiefly Cythera and Ithaca), which is to say from areas with few or no refugees from Asia Minor or anywhere else (Price 1963: 20–1; Harvey 1988: 121, 129). Only the increase in the members of the Greek communities of northern Africa, particularly Alexandria, in the 1920s could be attributed to an influx of refugees from Asia Minor, shortly before and immediately after the catastrophe of 1922 (Hassiotis 1993: 120–2). The third period, a new cycle of emigration, started in the mid-1940s, increased dramatically in the 1950s and even more in the 1960s, and more or

98

Iannis Hassiotis

less came to an end in the 1970s and 1980s. While many emigrants still made for the countries that had become popular in the previous period (Africa, the Americas, Canada, and above all Australia), over 60 per cent (and in 1963–4 up to 75 per cent) now sought work as Gästarbeiter in western Europe, particularly the Federal Republic of Germany, in countries, that is to say, which had long ceased to be a target of Greek migration. Furthermore, in this third period the growth of the Greek colonies abroad was not connected with the development of international trade, but in most cases with the rising economic prosperity of the developed nations. The emigrants’ places of origin also changed now. Whereas in the previous period the Peloponnese had made the biggest contribution to the migratory flow, particularly to the United States, it was northern Greece, and particularly Macedonia that was the principal source in the 1960s. Finally, in the post-war wave of emigration, particularly to western Europe and Australia in the 1960s, there was a marked quantitative and qualitative change regarding the sex of the emigrants. Before the War, relatively few Greek women emigrated (on average 2.5–5 per cent between 1869 and 1925); and they played a fairly marginal role in the host countries once they arrived. After the War, however (particularly from 1960 to 1976), women made up a greater proportion of emigrants (around 42 per cent) and, as they were now seeking work in the host countries to the same extent as the men and on their own account, their role was upgraded (Papamiltiades-Czeher 1957; Harvey 1988: 130). From the mid-1970s onwards, and even more so in the early 1980s, a number of new factors began to appear, inaugurating a new period in the modern Greek diaspora. Some of them are ‘internal’, namely connected with the economic and social conditions in Greece, and with the evolution of the Greek diaspora itself; others are ‘external’, arising out of more general, not exclusively Greek, considerations. Among the ‘external’ factors are the new historic challenges, which the Greek diaspora began to confront recently, particularly in the last two decades. To begin with, one may just refer to the common assimilation problems, dramatically acute in the case of the Greek-Americans of the third and fourth generations; and to continue, to the mass repatriations of the last decades (Zenelis 1982: 245–50). The phenomenon of the Greek repatriation has increased for a variety of reasons. First, there are those who had only ‘temporarily’ immigrated to western Europe in the 1960s. Then comes the ‘classic’ return home of Greek-Americans and Greek-Canadians, the ‘experimental’ return of Greek-Australian families; the last waves of the political refugees of the Civil War, the ‘proleptic’ return of Greeks from central and particularly southern Africa, and finally the ‘repatriation’ of a considerable number of the Greeks of the ex-USSR (Kassimati 1992). The collapse of the former Soviet Union, in particular, precipitated a new, massive and – which is more important – permanent repatriation of its Greek population, which may cause the end of the history of this important part of the Greek diaspora. Today in Greece the main problem is not that people are emigrating in search of work, but that returning emigrants, migrants, and refugees are having to adapt to contemporary Hellenic social, economic, cultural, and educational realities (Georgas and Papastylianou 1993).

History of modern Greek diaspora

99

All this, of course, does not mean that the tide of Modern Greek emigration is turning definitively. Consequently, the reverse trend evident today in the flood of repatriation is also to a certain extent the result of the present concurrence of international or national circumstances, combined, of course, with the irresistible factors of time. But, it may be not symptomatic that since the 1970s repatriation from various quarters has for the first time in the history of modern Greek diaspora outstripped or even minimized the annual rate of emigration. All the same, the increasing current of repatriation from western Europe has already lost its ‘national’ significance for one very important reason: because of the changing interstate and labour relations between the countries of the European Union. In view of the approach of European integration and freedom of labour and movement (without legal, administrative, or technical barriers) for the citizens of the member countries, there has been a marked change in the motivation and the traditional status of European migrants, in general. No longer will they be regarded as foreigners or even as Gästarbeiter in their host countries, but as ‘transient workers’ and equal citizens of a rather unified homeland.

Notes 1 A brief reference should be added to the use of terms. Greek language makes a rather clear distinction between paroikia and apoikia, both of which are as a rule translated in Western languages as ‘colony’. Relatively small group of emigrants, usually in an urban centre creates a paroikia; it is more in the nature of a transitory and temporary residence, and emotionally and ideologically it is heavily dependent upon the patris (homeland) or the ‘national centre’. The apoikia presupposes a larger, more systematic, and more permanent settlement, which, unlike the ancient Grecian apoikiae (colonies) or those of the modern colonial nations, was never administratively dependent on the Hellenic State. In fact the most vigorous enclaves of the modern Greek diaspora evolved as paroikies in urban centres on coasts or rivers or at the intersections of commercial land and sea routes. There are exceptions, but the apoikiae are either numerically limited (for instance, some of the emigrants who went to southern Italy at the beginning and to Corsica at the end of the seventeenth century) or geographically restricted – the relocation of the Greeks of the Crimea to Mariupol and the villages on the Sea of Azov in the late eighteenth century and, more so, the mass settlement of Pontic Greeks in rural areas of Transcaucasia and the northern Caucasus in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of twentieth century. Regardless of its numerical size and character, a Greek colony, insofar as its members were in any way organized, consist of a koinotis (community). If for any reason the members of a Greek colony in a city were in some way dissociated from each other (as happened in Vienna, for instance, at the end of the eighteenth century, when some of the Greeks were Ottoman and others were Austro-Hungarian citizens), or if the sheer volume of numbers caused practical organizational problems (as happened in some large urban centres in the United States and Australia between the Wars and particularly in the contemporary period), then there would be more than one Greek koinotites (communities) in the same city. From the very start, the koinotites aspired after official recognition by the local authorities, and they organized themselves in ‘Adelphotites’ (brotherhoods), according to their members’ occupations, the communal traditions of their native regions, and, above all, the established customary and legal status in the host country. In some cases the migration of Thessalian, Epirot, and especially Macedonian traders in the eighteenth and early

100

Iannis Hassiotis

nineteenth centuries did not lead to permanent colonies: Those ‘conquering Balkan merchants’ (according to Stoianovich’s denomination) generally confined themselves to the ‘temporary’ establishment of chiefly trading kompanies (companies) in the commercial and military crossroads along the Danube and in dozens of small towns in Hungary and Transylvania. 2 Until the beginning of the nineteenth century at least, ordinary people in the GreekOrthodox world regarded any change of residence at all, whether to another part of the Ottoman Empire or beyond its borders, as an undesirable form of expatriation. This is why the terms xenitia (foreign lands) and misemos (emigration) in folktales and folksongs and apodemia (expatriation) in the scholarly texts of the same period were used indiscriminately of both forms of departure from patris (home). All the same, the scholarly works and a good many of the surviving popular traditions from the period of Ottoman domination do make an indirect distinction between ‘internal’ expatriation within the socially and culturally familiar Ottoman-dominated east and the extremely displeasing ‘externa’ emigration to more distant and alien lands (such as the northern Balkans, for instance, southern Russia, and particularly the ‘Frankish’ west.

Bibliography Armstrong, J.A. (1976) ‘Mobilized and proletarian’, American Political Science Review, 70(2): 393–408. Bruneau, M. (ed.) (1995) Diasporas, Montpellier: Reclus. Constas, D.C. and Platias, A. (eds) (1993) Diasporas in World Politics: The Greeks in Comparative Perspective, London: Macmillan in association with The Institute of International Relations, Panteion University. Dendias, M.A. (1919) Ai ellinikai paroikiai ana ton kosmon [The Greek Colonies in the World] Athens. Fossey, J.M. (ed.) (1991) Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Hellenic Diaspora, Amsterdam: Gieben. Geanakoplos, D.J. (1976) The Diaspora Greeks: The Genesis of Modern Greek National Consciousness, Hellenism and the First Greek War of Liberation (1821–1830): Continuity and Change, Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies. Georgas, D. and Papastylianou, A. (eds) (1993) Epipolitismos Pontion kai Voreioipeiroton stin Ellada [Acculturation of Greeks from Pontus and Northern Epirus in Greece], Athens. Harvey, S. (1988) ‘Greeks in Australia: a demographic analysis’, in A. Tamis and A. Kapardis (eds) Greeks in Australia, Melbourne: Greek Orthodox Community and Church of Canberra and Districts; National Centre for Hellenic Studies and Research, La Trobe University. Hassiotis, I.K. (1989) ‘Continuity and change in the modern Greek diaspora’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, 6: 9–24. —— (1993) Episkopisi tis istorias tis neoellinikis Diasporas [A Concise History of Modern Greek Diaspora], Thessaloniki: Vanias. —— (ed.) (1997) Oi Ellines tis Rosias kai tis Sovietikis Enosis. Metoikesies kai ektopismoi, organisi kai ideologia [The Greeks of Russia and Soviet Union: Migration and Displacement, Organisation and Ideology], Thessaloniki: Kedros. Ikonomu, T.P. (1991) ‘Europas griechische Diaspora: Dimensionen einer interdisziplinären Bestandsaufnahme’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 16(3): 94–113. Kassimati, K. (ed.) (1992) Pontioi metanastes apo tin proin Sovietiki Enosi: Koinoniki kai ikonomiki tous entaxi [Pontian Immigrants from ex-USSR: Social and Economic Integration], Athens: Panteion University.

History of modern Greek diaspora

101

Kitroeff, A. (1991) ‘The transformation of homeland–diaspora relations: the Greek case in the 19th–20th centuries’, in J.M. Fossey (ed.) (1991) Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. 2, Amsterdam: Gieben. Moskos, C. (1989) Greek Americans: Struggle and Success, 2nd edn, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. National Centre for Social Research (ed.) (1967) Essays on Greek Migration, Athens: National Centre for Social Research. Papamiltiades-Czeher, C. (1957) ‘Les migrations internationales de la Grèce’, Cahiers Balkaniques, 13(I): 98–101. Polyzos, N.J. (1947) Essai sur l’immigration grecque, Paris: Libraire du Recueil Sirey. Prevelakis, G. (1994) ‘Les espaces de la diaspora hellénique et le territoire de l’état grec’, L’Espace Géographique, 3: 193–202. —— (ed.) (1996) Les Réseaux des diasporas, Nicosia: Kykem Cyprus Research Center. Price, C.A. (1963) Southern Europeans in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Psychogios, D.K. (1986) ‘Symvoli sti meleti ton dimographikon phainomenon tou 19 ou aiona’ [‘Contribution to the phenomena of emigration in the 19th century’], Epetiris Koinonikon Erevnon, 63: 133–200. Psyroukis, N. (1974) To elliniko paroikiako phaenomenon [The Greek Diasporic Phenomenon], Athens. Stoianovich, T. (1960) ‘The conquering Balkan merchant’, Journal of Economic History, 20: 234–313; reprinted 1992 in Between East and West: The Balkan and Mediterranean Worlds, Vol. 2, New Rochelle, NY: A.D. Caratzas. Zenelis, J.G. (1982) ‘A bibliographical guide on Greek Americans’, in H.J. Psomiades and A. Scourby (eds) The Greek American Community in Transition, New York: Pella Publication.

102

6

Hauke Dorsch

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora Hauke Dorsch

Recent discussions in anthropology about the concept of diaspora are theoretically interesting but lack empirical studies. This article aims to provide some ethnographic information about the African diaspora. It uncovers the role of a West African group of professional traditional musicians and historians for the construction of African migrants’ identities as well as for African-American reconstructions of lost ‘roots’ in Africa. These historians and musicians serve as a common symbol linking different layers of the African diaspora. Some years ago I asked a Malian musician living in Hamburg why he played reggae instead of the music typical for the traditional musicians – so called griots – from whom he was descended. This question – which already in the moment of asking I thought to be quite stupid – fortunately provoked a very interesting answer. He replied that whenever he played Manding music people would ask him about Arab and Spanish influences – and possibly these are existent because of historical connections. But he was looking for a musical expression of a ‘deeper African identity’ not ‘deformed’ by Islamic or European cultures. Reggae meant to him a spiritual, revolutionary music demanding the equality of races. Although reggae originated in Jamaica, in every African country one would find people claiming that they have a local rhythm, reminiscent of reggae, he said. Reggae is therefore truly Black music.1 These remarks will serve as point of departure for some observations concerning, first, the meaning of locality, especially in its imagined form of the homeland myth, second, music as a means of transporting Black identities and‚ finally, to enable an exploration of the potential usefulness of the concept of diaspora to describe the different layers of migrations of people of African origin. To explore these, I must begin by defining the word ‘griot’, because it is indeed an important link connecting different levels of the African diaspora.

Griots, roots and homelands Griots and griottes2 – male and female bards – are not only musicians but regarded as an endogamous group of artisans of communication in their societies. They are entertainers who sing, who tell stories and who play musical instruments like the kora and any instrument common in pop music. They are mediators in disputes,

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

103

masters of certain ceremonies and counsellors whose advice is generally respected. Their origins can be traced to the highly hierarchical societies of the ancient West African empires, which consisted of endogamous clans associated with certain professions. The griots would praise and – through genealogical accounts – legitimize the ruling families, but were at the same time the only ones allowed to criticize rulers in public. Today this role persists. Griots are cherished and feared, and they are used for electoral campaigns by West African politicians. As historians, they are expected to remind people of their ancestry, of events, places, migrations and traditional values which are important for shaping collective identities. The closeness to power, the ability to elevate or destroy individuals of the ruling elites through the mystical power of speech, but especially the griots’ right to claim gifts from people they praise or regard as their patrons, led to their ambiguous social status. Griots are seen both as honourable guardians of tradition and as opportunistic parasites (Hale 1998). An example for the griots’ role in maintaining ethnic identities through historical narratives is the Sunjata epic of the Manding, a sub-group of the Mande-speaking peoples of West Africa.3 The Manding trace their origin to the empire of Mali founded in the thirteenth century by a man called Sunjata Keita. The epic has a constitutive role for Manding society. Social relations between the different clans of the Manding are explained through this epic. Historical narrations of their migrations start at the time of this epic (Johnson 1986; Innes 1974). It is common in scientific literature to speak of a Mande diaspora (cf. Hale 1998 – who does not differentiate between Mande and Manding). A meaningful usage of the term is contingent on allowing for the concept of an imperial diaspora (Cohen 1997: 57). The Manding conquered the regions to the west of Mali and – after the fall of the empire – established kingdoms there. It is the griots who preserve this epic and transmit it to the Manding now scattered all over Sahelian West Africa. This is the origin of today’s griots’ role as diasporists – ‘scholars, intellectuals and artists who fashion (as well as investigate) the cultural sphere that is of such vital importance to diasporas’ (Tölölyan 1996: 31).4 There is a notion of a common homeland among the Manding. Though there is no longing for it, people regard it as a place of authenticity. The essence of Manding heritage is supposed to be guarded in the somewhat materialized form of a number of secret objects in a place called Manding Ka’aba or Kangaba in the Manding heartland located at the border of the nation-states of Mali and Guinea-Conakry. This omphalos 5 of the Manding world is visited by griots from all over West Africa in order to authenticate their historical knowledge. The whole place is – unsurprisingly – run by a griot-clan (Drame and Senn-Borloz 1992: 336; Meillassoux 1968). It is hardly surprising that griots became an important symbol for another diasporic group trying to connect itself to an ancestral homeland. In 1967 the African-American author Alex Haley – by then already famous for his edition of the autobiography of Malcolm X – travelled to West Africa in search of his African ancestry. According to his own accounts, he had been told by his aunts that he had an ancestor called Kunta Kinte, who while cutting wood for a drum was captured

104

Hauke Dorsch

and shipped into slavery. Two words this ancestor used were remembered and made it possible for Haley to locate his ancestral home: a word for a musical instrument: ‘ko’ (a corruption of ‘kora’) and a term for a place: ‘Kamby bolongo’ meaning: the river Gambia. Arriving in Gambia, Haley found out that the griot being best versed in the history of the Kinte clan was the griot Kebba Kanji Fofana living in a village called Juffure. This griot told him – accompanied, of course, by music – the whole history of the Kinte clan including the story of a Kunta Kinte, who went into the bush to cut wood for a drum and never came back again (Haley 1987). The resulting novel and TV series were a huge success not only among AfricanAmericans – but especially for them. They were immensely significant, since the Kinte story was the first well-documented genealogical link of an African-American to his African ancestors. The authenticity of Haley’s writings were soon questioned after other authors sued him for copyright infringement. Only one author, Harold Courlander, won his case, after Haley accepted, that some pages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s The African (Salzman et al. 1996: 1173f.). Alex Haley’s brother George, himself a lawyer and today the United States ambassador to The Gambia, still questions the result of that judgement, stressing that ‘it was not in him to copy other people’s work. He was able enough a writer himself ’ (Interview 14 December 1999). While he was alive, Haley defended himself against these accusations by reminding his critics that Roots was a novel combining facts and fiction (Williams 1993: 698). But his reliability weakened further after journalists and historians found out that Fofana was not a trained griot (though possibly his ancestors were) and that his expertise concerning the Kinte clan was questioned by locals. It seems that Fofana – knowing beforehand of Haley’s interest – chose to create a genealogy that would comfort his client. This act of elevating a person through ennobling his genealogy is – ironically enough – again a technique quite typical of griots. The American anthropologist Thomas Hale ends his discussion on Haley’s reliability with the somewhat compromising idea that the novelist himself acted as a griot. Haley narrated a story that, like other epics, is to be understood on the symbolic level and was meant to strengthen the solidarity of a group by linking them to their past (Hale 1998: 245ff.). These discussions notwithstanding, it is because of Haley’s search that Juffure is today one of Gambia’s main sites of tourist interest. For some African-Americans it came to be a sort of ersatz hometown – a symbol for their non-retraceable place of origin. In fact groups of African-American ‘Roots tourists’ took part in some sort of initiation ceremony in Juffure – aimed at re-naturalizing them ritualistically on the spot (Ahrens 1991). Through Haley’s novel, griots became a symbol for the possibility of reconnecting oneself to one’s African ancestry – and for some to their deeper essence – by interviewing elders. Therefore many African-Americans seem to understand ‘griot’ to be a synonym for elder, somebody who knows the past, as I was told in interviews that took place in the United States. Furthermore, griots now regularly appear as an important source in handbooks for AfricanAmericans doing genealogical research (cf. Jamison 1999; Blockson 1991). Of

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

105

course there are African-American musicians too, trying to find their musical roots in the griots’ traditions. We find books connecting the blues to West African music and comparing the social function and the image of the blues-man to that of the griot (cf. Oliver 1970; Charters 1981). There are blues and jazz musicians jamming with griots and appreciating being called ‘griots’, as did Taj Mahal.6 There are rappers (and authors of hip-hop books) comparing their verbal arts and their aim to preserve a history which contests white hegemonic historical narratives to the art and function of griots (cf. Toop 1991: 31f., Guru in the song ‘Lifesaver’).

African diaspora – the concept While African-American musicians appropriate the griots to connect their own work with ancestral West Africa, West Africans migrating to Europe or America quickly appropriate Afro-diasporan musical styles like reggae and rap. These musical forms transport messages of Blackness and exile reflecting the migrants’ experiences in a strange and often racist environment. To be confronted with the importance of the colour of one’s skin, corresponds neither with experiences at home nor with the images of open, democratic and multicultural societies which Western nations fancy themselves to be, is always startling and fosters a range of reactions. It forces African and Afro-Caribbean migrants to redefine their identity not only along lines of local belonging but also through their common Blackness. Earlier generations turned their experiences of being Black in oppressive surroundings dominated by whites, these experiences were given shape and meaning by concepts, ideologies, political and religious movements, like the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Black Hebrews, the Jamaican Rastafarians, the Antillean-African Négritude, PanAfricanism, Afrocentrism and so on. Common to most of these groups is the idea of some sort of essential Black or African identity in need of being discovered and de-colonized, an identity common to all people who share African origins, and the valuation of the whole continent of Africa as the cradle of cultural identity and possible destination of repatriation. Many of these groups compare their current situation with that of the scattered tribes of Israel, and reinterpret dominant discourses as being originally formulated by Blacks for Blacks – and being appropriated and distorted by whites for their hegemonic projects (Esedebe 1994; Dorsch 2000: 83ff.). These concepts were important for those people of the African diaspora who were deprived of their own political and religious concepts, which might have enabled them to argue for their freedom and emancipation, and who were not able to trace their origins to specific localities or ethnic groups of Africa. As a response they constructed the entire continent as their home- or motherland. Until recently there were some doubts whether the expulsions and migrations of Africans could justly be called ‘diaspora’. Therefore it might be useful to ask whether these historical experiences fit Safran’s six features of the ‘ideal type’ of a diaspora7 (Safran 1991: 83ff.). The African diaspora does conform to the first of these characteristics – a group being forcefully dispersed from one centre to two or more foreign regions (Tölölyan 1996: 12–13) – if we allow a continent to be

106

Hauke Dorsch

called a centre. Africans in the New World did retain a memory or myth about their original homeland. These memories were somewhat faint in North America, but even here ideas of a return to Africa after death were documented among slaves – the Haleys were not the only family that cherished the memory of an African ancestor (cf. Rodiger 1982). Since the eighteenth century, there were established churches bearing the qualifier ‘African’ in their names. Since that same century individuals were also trying to establish trade with Africa. In Central, and South America as well as the Caribbean, on the other hand, certain groups of slaves and maroons8 could keep their ethnic, religious or linguistic identity alive for some generations, and had a clear conception of the existence of their homeland. This conception survived despite a widespread conscious process of deculturalizing, called ‘seasoning’ in which the newly arrived slaves were forbidden to speak their languages, use their names, perform rituals or use certain musical instruments, mainly drums (Martin 1984: 16; Montilus 1982: 164ff.; Dorsch 2000: 60ff.). Nobody will deny the fact that African-Americans did not feel fully accepted by their host society, and are still alienated and insulated from it. Some AfricanAmericans – although seemingly a minority – regard their ancestral homeland as their true ideal home. That’s why ‘repatriation’ to this homeland took place from the eighteenth century onwards. The first to attempt a return were loyalists to the British crown who had fled the colonies after achieving independence as the USA, first to Canada, then to Africa. There were also maroons from Jamaica and the so-called ‘poor Blacks’ from London who went to what is now Sierra Leone. From the early nineteenth century, free Black US-Americans, informed by Black nationalist thought and supported by a strange coalition of abolitionists and slaveowners who disliked the presence of free blacks near still enslaved blacks, settled in Liberia. Afro-Brazilians settled in the harbour towns of the Bight of Benin and strongly influenced local trade, culture and politics during colonial times. After its independence in 1957, Ghana became the destination for American Pan-Africanists. Finally, Jamaican Rastafarians settled in Ethiopia on land granted by Haile Selassie I. But the idea of repatriation was – as with most diasporas – most important as ‘a myth of return’, as Safran termed it, as a means to enforce Black solidarity through cultural pride in a more positive way than through the common experience of racism (Dorsch 2000: 69ff.). It is well known to historians that African-Americans are committed to the maintenance of their homeland. This not only ‘translated into a general support of the Third World’ (Safran 1991: 90), but also led to solidarity movements, when countries like Ethiopia or Liberia – highly symbolically charged as strongholds against colonialism – were threatened by Italian or British conquest, respectively. Furthermore, African-Americans lobbied against South African apartheid. Finally, African-Americans – at least some – do relate to Africa as their homeland, as is documented in poems and pamphlets since the eighteenth century. While such ethno-communal consciousness has been mainly defined through the common experience of racism and a history of expulsion and slavery, Black activists quickly realized that a positively defined common identity would be necessary for

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

107

communal wellbeing. Beginning with Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois they stressed the importance of sympathetic identification of African-Americans with Africa (Esedebe 1994: 58ff.). After having argued for the conformity of the African-American experience to common definitions of ‘diaspora’ let me briefly discuss the history of the concept of an ‘African diaspora’. It is not known who invented this term, but its use is first documented in the 1960s among historians specializing in African history. Shepperson’s 1965 presentation led to some theorizing about the connectedness of African and African-American history. He thought of diaspora as a concept describing migrations caused by slave trade, imperialism and colonialism. His concept was somewhat misunderstood as including forced migrations only – which he did not presume. Later, historians argued for extended definitions of the concept, including pre-colonial trade migrations and post-colonial labour migrations. Furthermore, African-American scholars became increasingly interested in this concept; as a consequence of their interest African influences on American culture were more focused upon, following the Afrocentric movement in American academia. These discussions – including opponents arguing that the diaspora concept once again normalizes the history of a white group and tries to assimilate unique Black history to white experiences – are well documented in a series of compilations (cf. Kilson and Rotberg 1976; Harris 1982; Terborg-Penn et al. 1987; Lemelle and Kelley 1994; Okpewho 1999). This might appear as just another example of scholars constructing communities (a phenomenon discussed at some length during the University of Hamburg conference, where an earlier version of this paper was presented). But two hundred years of transatlantic discussion of Black intellectuals, poets and musicians who – as I mentioned earlier – compared their situation to that of the Jewish diaspora, thereby using biblical rhetoric to make their claims to an equal right to be heard in a Christian society (Gilroy 1993) should not be neglected. Moreover, we would be neglecting the fact that the term was quickly appropriated by Black political activists and is today established to a degree where rappers sing of ‘diasporan original lovers’9 – whatever that might be – and where glossy magazines are called African Diaspora. Coming back to music, we find that ideas of a cultural connectedness of AfricanAmericans to Africa are transported in many ways: musically by using instruments, tunings or rhythms which are said to be African or to resemble the sound of African instruments, through song lyrics and through fashion and life-styles transmitted on record sleeves, CD booklets, video-clips etc. Apart from the many Jamaican reggae songs on the importance of rediscovering African identity in ‘Babylon’, comparing the situation of African-Americans to the plight of the Israelites, and stressing the necessity for repatriation, there are American Afrocentric raps linking motherland motifs to memories of the great leaders of Black nationalism. These themes are reflected on albums of Afro-French or Black British musicians, too. Afro-French and Black British include, in this respect, musicians of north African or Indo-Pakistani origin, as they incorporate Afrocentric content and elements in their music and style (Gross et al.1994). Adding to this, Turkish

108

Hauke Dorsch

rappers in Germany or White musicians everywhere using Afrocentric symbolism. Taken together, these and similar other examples that could be adduced add up to what Avtar Brah appropriately calls a diaspora space (Brah 1996; Caglar 1998).

Afro-diasporan identities West African migrants have told me that they usually get in touch with panAfricanist and Black nationalist ideas through music from the Americas, which is highly valued in the popular cultures of their homelands, as well as in their host countries, as expressions of modernity and fashionable urban lifestyles. It is a cultural capital that is rather easily accessible. Among African migrants in Hamburg it is – or at least was until recently – usual to wear hip-hop-inspired streetwear or the Rastafarian’s colours and dreadlocks and be attired with depictions of the African continent. Hip-hop and reggae are thus important means to spread the ideas of Black nationalism, Négritude, or Afrocentrism to a larger public. They play a crucial role in connecting the different groups of the African diaspora, but their constructions of – what Stuart Hall (1992) called – ‘the essential Black subject’, were criticized by African and Afro-diasporan intellectuals – like Hall, hooks, Gilroy, Diawara or Soyinka – for merely revaluing racist stereotypes about ‘the African’; and for their rather reactionary and misogynist tendencies. Likewise, Afrocentric representations of the ‘African motherland’ are criticized for being highly idealistic, mythical and ahistorical, as they are barely touched by current African realities. To some extent this critique was prefigured by some Afro-diasporan musicians like Sun Ra, George Clinton, or Earth, Wind and Fire, who ironized these detached homeland fantasies in their mock-mythologies of outer-space homelands, fusing Afrocentric and science fiction symbolism (Diederichsen 1998). Afro-diasporan intellectuals criticizing Black nationalist ‘ethnic absolutism’ (Gilroy 1993: 87ff.) formulated concepts of Black identity which better reflected historical and current variations, mixtures and exchanges characterizing Afrodiasporan culture. Stuart Hall (1990: 230) chose the term ‘creolization’ to describe the confluence of cultures in the Caribbean and the relations of powers that govern it, echoing Hannerz’s (1987: 546ff.) application of this concept to West African societies. Paul Gilroy showed how much the Afrocentrism of African-American authors like Asante (Asante 1988) owed to typically American concepts of ethnicity, and family values as much as earlier Black nationalistic thought owed to European nationalist thinking. Gilroy tries to counter these ideas, which he regards as being excessively concentrated on rootedness, with the diaspora concept, which he understands to favour associations of mobility as an important aspect of the African-American experience. In this context, it is interesting to note Tölölyan’s argument, again expressed in the University of Hamburg conference, that American authors and others influenced by recent American diasporic discourse tend to privilege mobility over sedentariness, in large part because the idea of mobility is integral to the American dream.

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

109

Unfortunately, recent discussions of Gilroy’s concept seem to miss this point. US authors still argue along the lines of the Herskovits–Frazier debate,10 and misunderstand Gilroy as denying links between African and African-American culture. It is argued that, especially in song and dance, African cultures influenced New World forms (Okpewho 1999: xxii). Ironically enough it is – apart from the literary tradition he canonizes – exactly in performance, especially in antiphonal structures of song and preaching where Gilroy localizes Atlantic Black identity. Far from reconstructing stable unchangeable African identities, he stresses the process of forming identity, which I found to be quite helpful. He thought of Black identity being created in musical performances. What people might comprehend to be the expression of their ‘racial’ self, he argues, is indeed produced in the call-and-response rituals in pop concerts, discotheques, but also in churches, etc. (Gilroy 1993: 102). Gilroy’s idea of socially and performatively produced identities might well be connected to theories of performance current in anthropology today (cf. Béhague 1992, 1994).

West African musicians touring the diaspora Not surprisingly, concerts of griots – like those of other West African and reggae musicians – were described by all West African migrants I have talked to, as being of crucial significance for their lives in the diaspora. (That hip-hop concerts were not mentioned may reflect the age of the interviewed, most of whom were older than 30.) In Gambia, a young man who once lived in Hamburg but was forced by German authorities to return to Gambia, told me that visiting concerts never had as great an importance in The Gambia as it had had in Germany, where they reconnect him to his home. In some European countries and the United States trading connections and religious groups like the Senegalese mourides (an Islamic mystic brotherhood) are important ways for institutionalizing diasporan networks (cf. Stoller 1996; Daum 1998). In Hamburg, organizing and of course enjoying griots’ and other West African musicians’ performances and so-called ‘African dance nights’ are the most important occasions for West Africans to come together. There they would meet people from their home towns, who live in another faraway German town but show up for the concert, they’d get the latest gossip and so on. The concerts are the occasion for brief simulations of social life at home. Of course people are eager to hear the music they know from the tapes and CDs they have at home. They find their situation mirrored in these tapes and CDs as the repertoires of most West African musicians include songs mentioning the immigrant’s situation. Furthermore, the musicians consciously evoke memories of the West African homeland. They arrange well-known songs, rhythms and harmonies, often folkloristic ones, which children learn at school, or which are performed on initiation ceremonies, wrestling contests etc. and which migrants therefore remember. Then there are lyrics mentioning places, persons and events of historical or current significance. Finally, an aural space is often created through music, using traditional instruments or citing them through samples, but also

110

Hauke Dorsch

soundscapes like sheep bleating in the compound, the muezzin calling, tea being poured in a glass and so on. An example of such recollective, nostalgic performative devices can be heard in the song ‘Ataya’ by the Senegalese hip-hop band Positive Black Soul. Ataya is a kind of green tea, which is prepared and consumed in a time-span of several hours. This tea and the ceremony of drinking might be understood as boundary markers (Barth 1969), because they are introduced to strangers as being typically West African. Drinking this tea is a favourite way of spending time and discussing events randomly, at leisure. There is rarely the time for migrants to do so. This song, then, starts with the sound of pouring tea into a glass and people chatting and thus creates an atmosphere of intimacy and relaxation which is mirrored by the text, praising the calmness this tea brings. But the highly danceable rhythm makes it clear that this song is not supposed to accompany the drinking of tea, but to remind the dancers of that world and of the virtues of their culture, even as they gyrate in an urban discotheque, be it in Africa or beyond. The performances of the musicians and audience response to them, also perform a relationship to them, also perform a relationship to the homeland. The performers are the migrants’ compatriots, but elevated to spaces inhabited by adored stars, performing the well-known rites of pop concerts (well-known, because these are televised worldwide through MTV and the like). Their status and celebrity, which extends beyond the migrants, serves to unite African and European audiences in a way that Africans and Europeans are rarely united otherwise, and does so under the aegis of the music of Africans. African spectators often climb up onto the stage to dance with the musicians or give them gifts, thus referencing and highlighting another African tradition, that of rewarding griots whose performances are enjoyed. For the duration of the concerts, the migrants experience themselves as cultural insiders, who have the power to permit or deny full participation to their European friends or neighbours in what is going on. This time it is not them who don’t know the rules and who are asked to integrate. They may now proudly remind the others: this is what we created, be thankful that you may participate. And again, they hear the stories of their ancestry and of historical places and mytho-historical figures like Sunjata Keita, which make sense to them. It is a common feature in these concerts that musicians – using a European language in order to be understood by their White audiences as well – criticize the representation of Africa in Western media where the continent is reduced to a place of warfare and poverty. They usually tell the audience that they hope to supplement that image of misery with an image of Africa’s cultural riches. Which they do – not only through music but by performing dances, introducing traditional instruments, and wearing colourful interpretations of traditional costumes etc. Griots touring the diaspora would perform the same acts and address the same subjects like ‘ordinary’ West African pop musicians, but additionally they use the opportunity of concerts to fulfil their function as counsellors, reminding the migrants of their obligations – mainly financial – towards their people at home, to work hard, not to involve themselves in criminal activities and so on. Through the praise of managers, or migrants who organized the concert or other members of

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

111

the audience who they happen to know personally, griots elevate individuals by reminding them of their great ancestry, and of the riches and honour they are supposed to acquire through their stay abroad, thereby continuing the heroic deeds of their ancestors. This praise and the evocation of historical heroes make the migrants feel connected to their ancestry and to their true identity passed on to them through their family lineage, which defines their place in ‘eternal Mande’ or some other West African empire, which is perceived as very different and much more uplifting than their actual, often chaotic situation of living in ‘Babylon’.11 Apart from performances griots, may furthermore partake in immigrants’ ceremonies on days off during the tour. The performances in concert halls offer some of the few possibilities for reenacting a customary social structure – albeit in a very limited time-span – and to adapt it to different cultural surroundings: that is, the frame of a Western-style pop concert with cultural outsiders partaking. This is why, standing in a tiny, smoky hall on a cold winter night, surrounded by European Africa enthusiasts and jazz fans could evoke the feeling, expressed by many West African immigrants: ‘It’s a place like home.’ But griots do not only visit to perform – they migrate to Europe or America. Their rationalization is the same as what earlier generations of griots used to explain their migration from rural areas to the urban centres of West Africa: that it was their duty to remind the people of their cultural heritage (Jatta 1985: 23). Malian griots living in the United States told me that they perform the accustomed roles at naming ceremonies, marriages etc., and that they played at independence celebrations of the West African community. Furthermore they made a living with bands, street music and teaching. Although they would willingly accept the role as a teacher of African culture for interested African-Americans, and could identify with the idea of a common Black identity, they did not altogether feel at ease with the African-American usage of the term ‘griot’ as synonym for ‘knowledgeable elders’. All West African griots stress that it is indispensable for their profession to be born into certain families, because the ability to perform the griot’s art is only transmitted through blood. African-American speculations of genealogical connections to griots are also not readily accepted by most griots, because a central aspect of the griots’ self-definition is that of messengers in wartime, they were never sold into slavery and so their ancestors could not have been transported to the Americas. Although the symbolic appropriation of the term by African-Americans was appreciated by griots, as it strengthened their image as respectable counsellors, knowledgeable elders and outstanding musicians and made it easier to forget the contempt of some of their compatriots towards them as a group – they would not accept their exclusivity as diasporists being threatened by the somewhat liberalized African-American definition of the term. In fact, the Malian griots understood their role in the US as an extension of their traditional function as mediators, not only for West African migrants, but for African-Americans who they saw as needing to be reconnected to their ancestral culture, and for American society as a whole – hoping to bridge with their music what they saw as the pathologically separated worlds of Black and White Americans.

112

Hauke Dorsch

Let me end with the reggae-playing migrant of griot origin whom I mentioned at the outset. We may now have reached the point where it is less surprising that somebody – coming from the heartland of the Manding world, from the ‘ancient motherland’ of the African diaspora – was in need of what he thought of as being a truly Black identity. It was after leaving home when he realized the hybrid or creolized nature of the culture of his homeland. Through this experience of a multidimensional displacement, he felt the need to construct reggae not only as Black but as African music. But this experience of a creolized identity is not dependent on migration, as is illustrated by the huge success of reggae and hiphop in Africa. Kids in cities like Dakar and even in small provincial countries like The Gambia obviously feel so much estranged from an ‘authentic’ African identity as they feel the need to reconstruct in their songs a mythical Africa reminiscent of the idealized utopia constructed by Afrocentrists. In the song ‘Return of da Djelly’ written by the Dakarois hip-hop band Positive Black Soul, the griot is celebrated as ‘a symbol of knowledge’, a teacher who teaches his audience ‘to live in harmony with the forces of nature’, and a leader who guides his people ‘to the roots you’ve never seen’, even ‘into a land of meditation’, where ‘nothing will never separate you from the motherland’.

Acknowledgements This article is based on research carried out for a dissertation at University of Hamburg since autumn 1998. Data were gathered through participant observation in Germany, the US (August–September 1999), Gambia and Senegal (October– December 1999), through interviews with Gambian, Malian and Senegalese griots and musicians touring and immigrants living in Germany and the US. Funding for this research is provided by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the University of Hamburg. I’d like to thank the following persons who patiently supported this research: in Gambia – Malamini Jobarteh, Malayan Jobarteh, Sidia Jatta, Bakary Sidibe, George W.B. Haley and the staffs at the German and US Embassies and at the National Council for Arts and Culture; in Senegal – Lilyan Kesteloot and Ibrahim Diop; in the USA – David Gilden, Balla Tounkara, Kader Tounkara, Cheikh Hamalla Diabaté, Svenja Heinrich and Maximilian Martin; and in Hamburg – Anna Barzik, Ousman Bojang, Cheikh Diop, Jürgen Jensen, Waltraud Kokot and Katrin Pfeiffer.

Notes 1 Parts of this interview were published in Dorsch 1994. I use the term Black capitalized, because it is understood here to denote a collective identity, comparable to a national or ethnic identity, not a colour. 2 The term ‘griot’ as a French term of unknown origin is not undisputed. Some authors prefer to use terms in African languages like Mandinka: jali, Bambara: diéli or Wolof: gewel, instead of a foreign term. I feel these local terms to be too closely connected to certain societies and the slightly different roles griots play in them. That is why I

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

113

think the etic term ‘griot’ to fit better to denote the symbolic role this institution took in its trans-continental expansion. Manding ethnicity – like many others – should not be understood as a static, exclusive identity, its content and borders may be differently defined, depending on situation or personae. Amselle (1990: 73ff.) shows that the borders between ethnic identities that colonial literature represented as exclusive were indeed permeable, and argues for the introduction of concepts of linked spaces corresponding to different kinds of social relations rather than the continuation of colonial ethnic maps (Amselle 1985: 11ff. Conrad and Frank 1995: 11). Often enough there exists confusion even in the scientific literature whether certain groups are to be understood as ethnic, professional, regional or clan groups. Frank (1995: 141ff.), following Amselle, argues that clan affiliations and professional identities (both of which often crossed ethnic boundaries) were stronger and less negotiable than ethnic identities. Consequently she speaks of trader, leatherworker or griot diasporas referring to dispersions and networks of the clans of these professional groups all over West Africa, who were often quite detached from the ethnic group from which they were descended. Manchuelle (1997) shows convincingly that it is possible to draw an historical line from pre-colonial migrations to today’s transnational migrations, using the West African Soninké as his example. Apart from that, he represents another good example for a quite unreflected use of the term ‘diaspora’. This place is indeed not the only one regarded as such a centre – although the best known (cf. Hoffman 1990: 47f.). Interview with Taj Mahal on 15 August 1999. He indeed does not easily accept the African-American experience to conform to his concept of diaspora (Safran 1991: 83f., 89f.). Escaped slaves who founded independent communities. Bahamadia in the song ‘Path to Rhythm’. The White American anthropologist Herskovits argued that survivals of African cultures could be discovered among Blacks in the Americas, and understood his search for Africanisms as an act of revaluing Black American culture. The Black American sociologist Frazier denied the meaning of Africanisms for Black American culture, which he saw as ‘de-Africanized’ through slavery. He suspected the search for these Africanisms to be an act of exoticism (cf. Apter 1991). This somewhat pathetic description of the functioning of griots’ praises owes a lot to Diawara, who – although he sees griots as a major obstacle for modernization in West Africa – describes his own feelings that griots evoked when he visited Mali after he taught for years in New York (Diawara 1998: 110ff.). The usage of Babylon denoting the West – taken from Rastafarians’ vocabulary – is quite common among younger Gambians – not only migrants.

Bibliography Ahrens, H.J. (1991) ‘Tourism in the Gambian villages Albreda and Juffure: a research report’, unpublished paper, State University of Leiden. Amselle, J.-L. (1985) ‘Ethnies et éspaces: pour une anthropologie topologique’, in J.-L. Amselle and E. M’Bokolo (eds) Au coeur de l’ethnie, Paris: La Découverte & Syros. —— (1990) Logiques métisses: anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs, Paris: Payot. Apter, A. (1991) ‘Herskovits’s heritage: rethinking syncretism in the African diaspora’, Diaspora, 1(3): 235–60. Asante, M.K. (1988) Afrocentricity, 7th pr. 1995, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Construction of Cultural Difference, London: Allen and Unwin.

114

Hauke Dorsch

Béhague, G.H. (1992) ‘Music performance’, in R. Bauman (ed.) Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (ed.) (1994) Music and Black Ethnicity: The Caribbean and South America, Boulder, CO: Rienner. Blockson, C.L. (1991) Black Genealogy: How to Discover Your Family’s Roots, first published 1977, Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London and New York: Routledge. Caglar, A. (1998) ‘Verordnete Rebellion: Deutsch-türkischer Rap und türkischer Pop in Berlin’, in R. Mayer and M. Terkessidis (eds) Globalkolorit, St Andrä-Wördern: Hannibal. Charters, S.B. (1981) The Roots of the Blues, London: Quartet Books. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Conrad, D.C. and. Frank, B.E. (1995) ‘Introduction: Nyamakalaya contradiction and ambiguity in Mande society’, in D.C. Conrad and B.E. Frank (eds) Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Daum, C. (1998) Les associations de Maliens en France: migration, développement et citoyenneté, Paris: Karthala. Diawara, M. (1998) In Search of Africa, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Diederichsen, D. (ed.) (1998) Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora, Multikultur, Berlin: IDVerlag. Dorsch, H. (1994) ‘Calor Humano: Schwarze Musik und die Farben der Heimat’, Infoemagazin, 9: 7f. —— (2000) Afrikanische Diaspora und ‘Black Atlantic’Einführung in Geschichte und aktuelle Diskussion, Hamburg and Münster: Lit Verlag. Drame, A. and Senn-Borloz, A. (1992) Jeliya: Etre griot et musicien aujourd’hui, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan. Esedebe, P.O. (1994) Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776–1991, 2nd edn, Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Frank, B.E. (1995) ‘Soninke garankéw and Bamana-Malinke jeliw: Mande leatherworkers, identity, and the diaspora’, in D.C. Conrad and B.E. Frank (eds) Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gross, J., McMurray, D. and Swedenburg, T. (1994) ‘Arab noise and Ramadan nights: rai, rap, and Franco-Maghrebi identity’, Diaspora, 3(1): 3–40. Hale, T.A. (1998) Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Haley, A. (1987) ‘Black history, oral history, and genealogy’, in D.K. Dunaway, and W.K. Baum (eds) Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History in co-operation with the Oral History Association. Hall, S. (1990) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in J. Rutherford (ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— (1992) ‘What is this “Black” in Black popular culture?’, in G. Dent and M. Wallace (eds) Black Popular Culture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Hannerz, U. (1987) ‘The world in creolization’, Africa, 57(4): 546–59.

Griots, roots and identity in the African diaspora

115

Harris, J.E. (ed.) (1982) Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Hoffman, B.G. (1990) The Power of Speech: Language and Social Status among Mande Griots and Nobles, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Innes, G. (1974) Sunjata: Three Mandinka Versions, London: Penguin. Jamison, S.L. (1999) Finding Your People: An African-American Guide to Discovering Your Roots, New York: Perigee Books. Jatta, S. (1985) ‘Born musicians: traditional music from The Gambia’, in G. Haydon and D. Marks (eds) Repercussions, London: Century Publications. Johnson, J.W. (1986) The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition (analytical study and translation by John William Johnson, text by Fa-Digi Sisòkò), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kilson, M.L. and Rotberg, R.I. (eds) (1976) The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Lemelle, S.J. and Kelley, R.D.G. (eds) (1994) Imagining Home, London and New York: Verso. Manchuelle, F. (1997) Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848–1960, Athens, OH and London: Ohio University Press. Martin, T. (1984) The Pan-African Connection: From Slavery to Garvey and Beyond, Dover, MA: Majority Press. Meillassoux, C. (1968) ‘Les cérémonies septennales du Kamablon de Kaaba’, Journal de la Société des Africanistes, 38: 173–82. Montilus, G.C. (1982) ‘Guinea versus Congo lands: aspects of the collective memory in Haiti’, in J.E. Harris (ed.) Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Okpewho, I. (1999) ‘Introduction’, in I. Okpewho, C. Boyce Davies and A.A. Mazrui (eds) The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Oliver, P. (1970) Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues, New York: Stein and Day. Rodiger, D.R. (1982) ‘Roots and reality: transmission of the African heritage’, The PanAfricanist, 9. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Salzman, J., Smith, D.L. and West, C. (eds) (1996) Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, New York: Macmillan. Shepperson, G. (1965) ‘The African abroad or the African diaspora’, in T.O. Ranger (ed.) Emerging Themes of African History, Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House. Stoller, P. (1996) ‘Spaces, places and fields: the politics of West African trading in New York City’s informal economy’, American Anthropologist, 98: 766–88. Terborg-Penn, R., Harley, S. and Benton Rushing, A. (eds) (1987) Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Tölölyan, K. (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora, 5(1): 3–36. Toop, D. (1991) Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop, London and New York: Serpent’s Tail. Williams, M.W. (ed.) (1993) The African American Encyclopedia, New York, London and Toronto: Marshall Cavendish.

116

Hauke Dorsch

Discography Bahamadia (1996) Kollage, Chrysalis. Guru (1995) Jazzmatazz Volume II, Chrysalis. Positive Black Soul (1995) Salaam, Island.

History in the Irish-American diaspora

7

117

The invention of history in the Irish-American diaspora Myths of the Great Famine Astrid Wonneberger

Introduction After centuries of Irish emigration to North America, about 44 million people of Irish descent live in the United States today. Like many other ethnic groups in the US, whose aim had been assimilation into the host society for a long period, Irish America began to develop a new interest in its cultural roots in the 1960s. Many people of Irish descent began to look for their ‘own’ ethnic markers in order to distinguish themselves from other groups in the US. An important role in this process of constructing ethnic boundaries plays a concept of a common history. This serves as a base upon which a common identity and group solidarity can be constructed.1 During my research on the Irish-American diaspora in the United States, which was conducted among tourists from the US in Ireland in 1997 and in New York, Boston and New Jersey in 1998 and 1999, I found that certain historical events seem to be of special importance for Irish-America. One of them is the Great Famine, which will be the subject of this article. I will start my analysis with the term ‘diaspora’ which has become very popular within the last decade and has been frequently applied to the Irish all over the world. However, the term has been intensively discussed and there is still no general agreement on how to define it, although there are some elements which are widely accepted as defining factors. For this reason, I will present the most important results of the debate and use them as an analytical background for my investigation. The next part will provide the historical background. A brief review of the history of the Famine will be compared with statements I heard during my research, either made by interviewees, or presented in popular history books on Ireland or Irish-American history. Many of these books have a tremendous influence on Irish-America, as they are known to a large readership. Many informants referred to one or even several titles during the interviews and considered them informative and accurate. Because of this influence, I used these publications, as well as other forms of public discourse on Irish-American history, some of which can be found on the Internet,2 as important sources of investigation. In the main part of the article, I will present and analyse images of the Famine popular in the Irish-American3 diaspora. Based on statements which I heard from Irish-Americans or read in Irish-American history books, I will investigate which

118

Astrid Wonneberger

aspects are of special importance for Irish-America and in which way they are to be remembered. Finally, I will give some explanations for my findings embedded in the larger context of diaspora studies.

Diaspora Maintaining a common identity is particularly important for groups who had to leave their country and now try to maintain their culture in the new environment. In the last decades, more and more such groups have been called ‘diaspora’ or used this term to label themselves, although the discussion about the features necessary to define a group as a ‘diaspora’ has not been concluded yet. However, without dealing in detail with this dispute, there are some elements which are widely accepted as defining factors: 1 2

3

4

A diaspora consists of at least two communities of one ethnic group who live outside their (real or imagined) homeland in at least two different places. A diaspora consists of a relatively large number of people who maintain a common cultural identity which they use to distinguish themselves from other groups, as well as the host society. They achieve this, for example, by referring to a common homeland, a common origin, common traditions and a concept of a common history which may be constructed and the elements of which may be selected to fit them into this concept. The country of origin takes a central place in the process of maintaining a collective memory and solidarity. This country can exist in reality or in memory, its image can be realistic or mystical. In any case, it forms the centre of a diaspora to which its members are to return eventually. In this context, it is the wish to return which is decisive, not the act of returning, although some diasporic members might in fact return. The idealization and romanticization of the image of the ‘homeland’ can provoke different means of support for the home country, including the fight for and the founding of an independent state. Diasporic communities maintain permanent contact to each other and keep up different kinds of relationships to the home country (if possible). Thus, a triangular relationship is formed and established between diaspora, host country and home country. These relations may have influence on different sides. One the one hand, the diaspora may have an impact on the policies in both home and host country, on the other hand, it is influenced by cultural features and events which take place in the surrounding environment. Therefore, their members’ ideas can be very different from those popular in their country of origin.4

The second aspect is particularly interesting for my investigation. Concepts of common traditions, a common origin and a common history always play an important role in the process of constructing ethnic boundaries in order to maintain a common identity and a feeling of solidarity in a nation state, which might be a

History in the Irish-American diaspora

119

foreign country. In order to fit historical events into the self-perception of one’s group, history and traditions are often re-invented, by emphasizing certain elements or constructing new ones, by omitting others or by presenting them in a distorted way. Thus, the construction of a common history becomes the base for a common identity (Orywal and Hackstein 1993: 599–605). This invented history can, on the one hand, serve to emphasize similarities within one’s own group and to construct boundaries to others. On the other hand, it can be used to ‘prove’ – in the context of nationalism – claims on property, special areas or entire countries, or to legitimize authority (Hobsbawm 1994: 1, 7–9). Based on these considerations, I will investigate in this article the role of the Great Famine in the life of the Irish-American diaspora today. What is known about the facts? Is this event still remembered and how? To what extent does it serve as a collective base for a common identity? Are there certain events which are considered more important than others? Are some aspects neglected or omitted? Do common perceptions of the Famine consist of ‘myths’, in the sense that the event, or parts of it, have been invented or distorted and in this form been handed down from one generation to the next, until they have become popular legendary images or nationalist bias? These questions will be addressed in the course of this chapter.

The Great Famine, 1845–18515 On the eve of the Famine, emigration was already a common part of Irish life; the number of emigrants was steadily increasing (Kissane 1995: 153; Miller 1985: 199; Davis 1997: 22). From the seventeenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, between 1.3 to 1.5 million people, half of them Protestants, had left Ireland for North America (Miller 1985: 193; Blessing 1980: 525–9; Jones 1980: 896, 904; Miller and Wagner 1994: 10). Many reasons were responsible for this development, one being the political and economic system in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Most of the land was owned by Anglo-Irish landlords, an hereditary ruling elite, whose wealth and political power was based on land. Although the majority were descendants of families who had lived in Ireland for generations, most considered themselves essentially British. Some even lived in Great Britain and managed their estates as absentee landlords. The wealth of the landowners depended on their tenant farmers, who rented and worked the land, and on farm labourers, who worked for the farmers or rented the land from them (Kissane 1995:1–7). These farmers and labourers both existed basically on subsistence level and they only got by because they had a source of cheap food available, the potato, which had been introduced to Ireland in the sixteenth century. The population became more and more dependent on this fast growing and nutritious source of food which was available almost throughout the year. At the same time the potato supported a tremendous growth of population so that the number of people living in Ireland rose from four million in 1780 to over eight million in 1845. The staple diet of the majority was the potato (Kissane 1995: 13; Happe 1987: 46).

120

Astrid Wonneberger

Partial failures of the harvest had happened several times before, for example in the 1820s, causing waves of emigration (Happe 1987: 46–7; Blessing 1980: 529; Kissane 1995: 13) Therefore, when a third of the potato crop failed again in 1845 – caused this time by the fungus Phytopthora infestans commonly called the ‘potato blight’ – the situation was not considered a crisis at first. However, when large parts of the harvest failed again in the following years, the situation became critical (Blessing 1980: 529). The first reaction of the British government was to import cheap food into Ireland – mainly Indian corn which had been bought in the United States – and to sell it cheaply or give it out for free (Kissane 1995: 27). Believing in a free market, however, they refused to interfere politically, even those politicians who wanted to challenge the ideological straitjacket in order to change the trade laws and restrict food exports from Ireland. In fact, the political discussion on that subject was very complex. However, food continued to be exported from Ireland during the Famine (Davis 1997: 19; Kissane 1995: 27, 45, 48, 54). The main problem was not that there was no food available in Ireland, but rather that farmers and tenants had no money to buy it (Kissane 1995: 27; R.E. Kennedy 1973: 28). The British government considered it best not to give out food for free for a longer period in order not to make the poor Irish population dependent on charity. For this reason, they preferred to introduce employment schemes to provide work constructing bridges, roads etc. This system failed when more and more people began to starve and left their farms to get work at these projects, which led to less cultivation and a shortage of seed. Furthermore, many were too weak to work. Therefore, after the work schemes had become more and more chaotic, they were finally stopped in summer 1847 (Kissane 1995: 48–50, 50–66, 75). In order to help out with food until the next harvest in September, the British government established soup kitchens which gave out food to over 3 million people in August 1847. When the potato harvest seemed to be normal again in September, the closing of the kitchens turned out to be disastrous because the potato blight struck again. Furthermore, a lot of land had not been cultivated, so the harvest was bound to be comparatively small from the very beginning (Kissane 1995: 75, 82–3; Davis 1997: 30–1). After the work schemes failed, the British government changed their policy: they abandoned special relief measures and, instead, transferred responsibility for relief to the Poor Law system in Ireland, i.e., the Poor Law unions and the workhouses, which were financed by the landlords. This meant – basically – that from now on, instead of the British government, the landlords were in charge of their tenants who were starving. Many of the landlords went bankrupt because they had to pay without having any income, as the farmers had stopped working the land, which led to the eviction of tenants who could not pay the rent, or to paying their passage to Canada or the United States (Kissane 1995: 75, 82–3; Davis 1997: 30–1). In some cases, where landlords tried to enforce their payments at all costs, some tenants sold their stock and crops and disappeared. Thus, the law was disregarded by both sides (Davis 1997: 28). Together with a number of private organizations, relief committees and churchbased groups, especially the Quakers, some landlords, or their wives, began to

History in the Irish-American diaspora

121

provide help by establishing soup kitchens for the local poor. Many fundraising organizations were founded all over the world, many of them in Great Britain, to collect money, import food into Ireland and help the Irish population (Davis 1997: 28, 30; Kissane 1995: 80–6, 123–8). Food exports from Ireland were affected severely during the Famine years. Much grain, for example, was diverted to home consumption to compensate for the deficiencies in the potato crop (Davis 1997: 31). Thus, altogether more food was imported into Ireland during the years of the Famine than was actually exported (Kissane 1995: 54). Yet, when the worst years were finally over, by 1850 or 1851, and potatoes were no longer affected, about one million people had died from disease and starvation, and another million had emigrated (Kissane 1995: 153; Blessing 1980: 529). The passage had become cheaper and available to many, and many people had relatives in the United States who could help pay the passage and support them in starting a new life in the States. The mass emigration that developed during the Famine became the origin of what modern historians would call a chain migration that continued until the 1920s (Kissane 1995: 153; Davis 1997: 21–37; R.E. Kennedy 1973: 27–8, 42–3). Of course, the whole event is much more complex than summarized in this section. However, the outline of the facts as sketched here should serve as a background for analysing the following concepts of the Great Famine which I heard and read about during my research in the Irish-American diaspora.

Myths of the Great Famine The importance of the Great Famine for Irish-American identity today first struck me when I asked Irish-Americans about their genealogy: my question about when their ancestors had emigrated to America, was very often answered by the statement: ‘during the Famine’. This did not seem strange until I talked to a woman who was about 74 years old and said that her father had emigrated as a baby with his family during the Famine. Counting back the years, however, I noticed that this date of emigration could not be the real one, unless her father was about 75 years older than her. Therefore, a more likely date for his emigration would be the 1880s, 1890s or early 1900s. Becoming aware of this, I looked closer at all the other interviews and found that 22 people (out of 38 altogether who said their ancestors had emigrated during the Famine) belonged to this rather unlikely category: some, like the above-mentioned, must have come much later, some gave a wrong date for the Famine from the very beginning. They said, for example, ‘they emigrated in the 1880s or 1890s, during the Famine’. Others did not know the exact date, but supposed, since their ancestors came in the nineteenth century, that they must have come during the Famine. And some gave ‘hunger’ or ‘famine’ as the reason for their ancestors’ emigration, although they had come at the beginning of the twentieth century. These examples indicate the importance of the Great Famine in the minds of many Irish-Americans today. The term ‘emigration’ is so deeply connected with ‘Famine’ that the emigration of one’s own family is cast into that scheme, especially

122

Astrid Wonneberger

if the exact dates and reasons for leaving Ireland are not known. The underlying motto is that they emigrated from Ireland, therefore, they probably came during or because of the Famine. This elucidates the central position this event holds in the collective memory of Americans of Irish descent. This central role of the Famine for Irish-American perception of history and identity can also be shown by looking closer at popular books on Irish-American history. Despite the fact that emigration was already an established factor in Irish life on the eve of the Famine and a significant number of Irish emigrants had come to North America before 1845, many authors begin their historical overview with the Great Famine or tell a story of a Famine emigrant to introduce the whole topic of the Irish in America.6 While dealing with pre-Famine emigration only very briefly or leaving it out completely, the authors describe the Famine in detail on 30 pages or more,7 thus creating an image of Irish emigration only starting in the 1840s as a result of the Famine.8 Due to this restricted presentation of pre-Famine history, little knowledge exists in the Irish-American diaspora about Irish emigration before the Famine. Even John O’Connor, the President of the Irish Famine Committee, which built the Famine Memorial in Boston in 1998, admitted, when asked to comment on the PBS series ‘The Irish in America – Long Journey Home’9: ‘I thought I knew the history, but the pre-Famine history was new to me.’ Another example is the following statement by one informant: ‘The Great Famine is the most important event in Irish history, because it created emigration in Ireland.’10 This perception of the Famine as the main – or even only – reason of Irish emigration neglects the fact that there were not only push factors responsible for Irish emigration, but pull factors as well, such as a general view of the USA as the land of opportunity with streets paved with gold. It also neglects all other causes of emigration from Ireland. For example, there were changing economic developments, particularly in the north of Ireland, causing unemployment in the linen weaving industry, which, in turn, also affected farmers, many of whom had an additional income by working as weavers. Another causal factor was the Irish inheritance system, based on primogeniture, which caused a lot of family conflicts. Furthermore, due to the lack of industry, the non-agricultural sector of the economy could not absorb the growing surplus of rural workers, after Ireland’s population had increased so tremendously in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, better agricultural techniques further reduced the number of farm labourers needed. It should also be noted that the Catholic church did not oppose emigration because it provided the opportunity for the faith to be spread out all over the world. This is why the church paid for some of the passages and in that sense induced people to leave the country (Davis 1997: 21–5, 32–3; Miller 1985:139, 152–5, 172–8; Kissane 1995: 153, 156; R.E. Kennedy 1973: 42–3, 93, 207; Happe 1987: 47; Blessing 1980: 529). All these factors are neglected when Irish emigration is explained by referring only to one of these causes. The Great Famine, however, is not only considered the central origin of

History in the Irish-American diaspora

123

emigration, it is also regarded as the basic explanation for phenomena and events which took place much later in history. For example, I read and heard the opinion that only the Famine had made the political success of the Irish in the United States possible, that without the Famine there would not have been any Kennedys and that there would never have been an American social welfare state.11 Yet, even prior to the Famine, the Irish community in Boston for example, had already been well established and was about to become a major political force (O’Connor 1995: 37, 54–5). The increasing number of emigrants during the Famine only accelerated this process. These statements show how the Famine is viewed by many Irish-Americans as the major cause and origin of Irish emigration, the origin of the success of the Irish in America and often even as the origin of the diaspora itself – a view that denies the fact that a significant number of Irish immigrants had come not only to the United States earlier, but had also begun to emigrate to other British possessions, and that the Famine was only the peak of a development which was already growing. Thus, the Great Famine became the symbol of all emigration from Ireland and of famines all over the world – which was in fact the motto of the Famine Memorial in Boston.12 Another widespread perception of the Great Famine refers to the question of who is to blame. Shortly after the Famine, the tragic event was used for the first time for political agitation. In 1860 John Mitchel of the Young Ireland Movement charged the British with mass killing and wrote: ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine.’13 He, like no other, has shaped the popular attitude towards the Famine, especially among emigrants, which still persists (Davis 1997: 16–21). I heard this slogan quite often during my research in the States. Some people even explained to me that ‘the Famine was really a plan by the British to eliminate the Irish’, and very often the Famine is referred to as the ‘Irish holocaust’ or is directly compared to it: The Great Hunger, in the minds of many of the Irish, ranks with massive injustices like slavery and the holocaust as a government-sanctioned crime against humanity.14 The importance of certain concepts of Irish-American history is particularly well revealed in discussions about popular presentations of historical events. A good example is the PBS series ‘The Irish in America – Long Journey Home’ and the emotions it aroused among many viewers, especially after the first part, which dealt mainly with the Great Famine, had been broadcast. Many people expressed their disappointment and anger about how certain historical events had been presented in some of the Irish-American newspapers all over the country. In their way of presenting the event, the makers of this documentary did not correspond with the perception of many Irish-American viewers, who obviously expected other contents and descriptions. The programme caused reactions like the following letters to the editor of popular Irish-American newspapers and magazines:

124

Astrid Wonneberger I am writing in regards to the disappointment expressed by a large part of Irish-America concerning the recent PBS series ‘The Irish in America – Long Journey Home’. Despite many positive aspects of this three-part program, there was throughout an apparent negativism ranging from cynicism to absolute inaccuracies. [...] Part one concentrated on the period of Ireland’s Great Hunger, erroneously referring to this tragedy as a famine.15 They neglected to mention that when the potato crop failed, the British exported with military escort enough food out of Ireland to feed double the Irish population. [...] They portrayed Sir Charles Trevelyan, the main administrator for England’s too-little/too-late relief programs, as a ‘deeply religious, idealistic, hard working’ gentleman. In truth, his preferred program was one of genocide with intent to clear the land of unwanted peasants for more profitable sheep and cattle. (McElligott, The Desert Shamrock, March/April 1998: 28)

‘The Irish in America’ is a hate crime of a film series. Its first segment described the Irish Holocaust from the genocidist’s perspective. It did this by concealing the core fact: the removal of Ireland’s abundant livestock, grains, processed meats, etc. [...]. (O’Sullivan in Irish Echo, 11–17 March 1998: 8) Another article summarizes some of these letters, of which dozens, maybe even hundreds, had been sent to the editors of many Irish-American papers: One writer to Irish-American magazine said, ‘the first instalment completely whitewashed England’s culpability in An Gorta Mor’.16 […] Another wrote that the film was a pro-British distortion of history. […] Dermot Mac Cormack […] said the film is ‘very much the result of deliberate editing and the puposeful omission of facts.’ […] William V. Kennedy says the film portrays the Irish as ‘happy natives living on plantations’ who, through bad luck, starve to death, and that it makes ‘no mention of the well documented shipment of food out of Ireland throughout the famine …’ (Mullin in Irish Edition, April 1998: 9) Most of the protest was directed against the series omitting the fact that the British government had continued exporting food from Ireland, instead of helping the population by providing food. This is, however, only one part of the history, as I have shown earlier. Some historians17 even believe that the total amount of food, had it not been exported, would only have helped a small part of the starving poor. Therefore, the Famine could never have been fully prevented by stopping the shipments out of Ireland. However, the most important point in all these forms of protest is that the series did not directly and only blame the British government and the landlords for planned genocide, supporting a nationalistic interpretation of the Famine which John Mitchel had started 140 years earlier.

History in the Irish-American diaspora

125

In contrast Kissane summarizes the situation as follows and presents a balanced conclusion of the role the British played in this event: The charge of genocide on the part of the British government was unjustified. The government was parsimonious in providing resources, but it certainly did not want the Irish to starve. It was, however, paralysed by doctrinaire ideology and bureaucracy, and proved incapable of formulating and implementing pragmatic policies to manage a crisis which should have been well within the capacity of the then mighty British Empire. (Kissane 1995: 171) What becomes obvious here is that the Great Famine is one of the major events in the Irish-American concept of Irish-American history. Many Irish-Americans do not share a perception of different and balanced features of the event, but prefer a nationalist and selective interpretation by overemphasizing the British government’s guilt, and by ascribing a prime importance to the Famine for Irish emigration and the Irish diaspora. Thus, it is not surprising that Irish-America puts a lot of effort into not forgetting this event: In 1996, the first Famine Memorial – or, as it was called, ‘Hunger Memorial’ – was inaugurated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1998, another followed in the city centre of Boston, one in New Jersey, and some more are planned for following years, for example in Phoenix, Manhattan, Philadelphia and Chicago (O’Hanlon, Irish Echo, 4–10 March 1998: 4; ‘Great Hunger Memorial’, The Desert Shamrock, March/April 1999: 3; Allen, The Boston Globe, 29 June 1998: B1, B3; Lowney, Irish Echo, 15–21 April 1998: 14; websites: http://www.Irishfamine.com (2.3.2000); http://www.Irishmemorial.org (2.3.2000)). Furthermore, Irish-Americans have been fighting for a long time for a stamp commemorating the event, using the following argumentation: This watershed event in Irish history with its mass starvation of over a million people and its flood of millions more to the shores of America, Australia, New Zealand, and England will never be forgotten. Bureaucratic arrogance, racism and indifference could not crush the spirit of the men and women who made their way to coffin ships, who struggled and survived, who came out to America, who fought and died for our freedom, who sacrificed to educate us, who helped to build our cities, and whose legacy is carried in our hearts, souls and faith …18 After many demonstrations, the Irish government and the US Postal Service issued a stamp in March 1999 called ‘Irish emigration stamp’ in Ireland and ‘Irish immigration stamp’ in the US. It shows an Irish vessel, a motif which caused some more protest:

126

Astrid Wonneberger The Irish stamp commemorating Irish immigration is nice, but it’s just one more time the Irish settled for less than what they wanted. The stamp should have commemorated the Famine, because that’s what caused the immigration to begin with. Oh well, this just goes along with all the other disappointments connected to the history of Ireland, past and present. (McClafferty, Irish Echo, 17–23 March 1999: 10)

The main argument here was that this picture did not really represent the Famine because it did not show starving or dying people. Here again, the Postal Service did not correspond with the prevalent Irish-American interpretation of history and, for this reason, a protest was the consequence. Currently, some IrishAmericans are demanding a new stamp.19

Conclusion To sum up, I argue that the Great Famine is considered the major (or at least one of the major) events in Irish-American history by the Irish-American diaspora. This becomes obvious considering the mere number of commemorations, established or planned memorials. The Irish-American diaspora in the USA today is very diverse, partly due to its large number of (theoretically) 44 million people who claim to be of Irish descent. Coming from different areas in Ireland, from Protestant and Catholic traditions, emigrating for various reasons and at different periods, Irish immigrants to the USA have never formed a homogeneous group of people. The catastrophic event of the Great Famine serves as an important ethnic marker for the construction of an Irish-American ethnic boundary which encompasses all descendants of Irish immigrants in the USA. However, the Famine does not cover all emigrants from Ireland and, therefore, would only represent a part of the diaspora and would only be partly suitable to create a collective memory of a common origin – if it was not cast into the general perception of an Irish-American entity. In order to create a common origin of the entire diaspora, parts of the event had to be neglected, others had to be overemphasized or re-invented. The perception of the Great Famine as the beginning and only cause of emigration in Ireland, is achieved by neglecting all other causes and ignoring the pre-Famine history. Thus, the diaspora constructs its own catastrophic origin, one of the major features of any diaspora. A collective concept of history is used as a marker for an ethnic boundary by which members of the Irish-American diaspora distinguish themselves from other immigrant groups, in order to create a common identity which all people of Irish descent could identify with, if they wish.

Notes 1 On the concepts of ethnic boundaries and ethnicity see, in particular, Barth (1969) and Orywal and Hackstein (1993).

History in the Irish-American diaspora

127

2 I am mainly referring to the following publications: Murphy and Driscoll (1974); Coffey and Golway (1997); Miller and Wagner (1994); Griffin (1981); Hoobler and Hoobler (1995); Watts (1996); Gallagher (1994). Furthermore, I used several publications of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), some of which were published on their website (http://www.aoh.com) (visited on the 10.6.1999). 3 By ‘Irish-American’ or ‘Irish-Americans’ I mean, in this article, Americans of Irish descent who were born in the USA, not Irish immigrants. I am well aware that putting all Americans of Irish descent into only one category is an oversimplification of this category’s very complex and differing attitudes towards matters that have to do with Ireland. However, certain topics, in particular concerning history, seem to be of widespread interest within Irish-America and are interpreted similarly by all groups of Americans of Irish descent, no matter whether or not they are interested in Irishness. For this reason, I make no further differentiation here. 4 See for further details Tölölyan 1996: 12–15, 23–4; Safran 1991: 83–4; Cohen 1997: IX–XII; Clifford 1995: 304–6; Sheffer 1986: 9–10, all of whom use these or very similar criteria to describe modern diasporas. 5 There are obviously different opinions among historians about the date of the Famine. All agree on the first year of 1845, but there is no conformity on the last year. For example, R.E. Kennedy 1973: 27, 42 gives the date 1845–8 because the harvest only failed partially in 1849 and 1850. Watts 1996: 24 includes the years of 1845, 1846, 1848, and 1851 in the Great Famine. Golway 1997: 22 does not give any exact date for the end of the Famine, but remarks: ‘Hunger continued to stalk the Irish poor into the new decade, but the worst of it was over by the time Victoria left’ (i.e. 1849). Blessing 1980: 529 dates it from 1845–51. These are but a few examples. 6 For example Coffey and Golway (1997); Murphy and Driscoll 1974: 5; J.P. Kennedy 1995: 6–7 7 A good example is Golway (1997) who deals with the Famine on 31 pages (pp. 2–32) while describing pre-Famine emigration on only two pages (pp. 32–3). Similar cases are Miller and Wagner (1994) and Griffin (1981). 8 R.E. Kennedy 1973: 27, 207 also criticises this popular image and stresses the importance of pre-Famine emigration from Ireland. 9 This three-part TV series was broadcast on American television in January 1998 and elicited diverse reactions from the (Irish-American) audience which will be discussed later in this article. 10 The same opinion of the Famine as the beginning of emigration from Ireland can be found in other publications, for example: McClafferty, Irish Echo, 17–23 March 1999: 10 (quoted later in this article), Uris and Uris 1978: 135; Murphy (historian of the AOH), 1903: page not given; Gallagher 1994: 138. 11 Terry Golway in Border’s Bookstore (New York City) (16 March 1998) at a public talk about Michael Coffey’s and his book The Irish in America, a companion book to the PBS series, that had just been published. 12 See Allen, The Boston Globe, 29 June 1998: B1, B3. 13 John Mitchel, ‘The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)’, New York, 1860; quoted in Davis 1997: 17 14 Nyhan, The Boston Globe, 18 March 1998: A23; other examples are: Molloy, Irish Voice, 13–19 May 1998: 4; Lowney, Irish Echo, 15–21 April 1998: 14; Rossi, Irish Edition, August 1998: 25; O’Sullivan, Irish Echo, 11–17 March 1998: 8; W.V. Kennedy, Irish Edition, April 1998: 8. 15 Here the author expresses another widespread perception: many Irish-Americans refuse to accept the term ‘Famine’ because in their view it was not a famine, as it was artificially caused. Based on this argumentation, they call it the ‘Great Hunger’ instead. 16 An Gorta Mór Irish for ‘The Great Famine’. 17 For example Austin Bourke, quoted in Davis 1997: 31 18 Ad in the Irish Edition, March 1998: 11

128

Astrid Wonneberger

19 For example the AOH whose National President Tom Gilligan expressed his demand in the Hibernian News (The New Irish Gael, March 1999: 10).

Bibliography Allen, S. (1998) ‘7,000 hail unveiling of Irish memorial’, The Boston Globe, 29 June 1998: B1, B3. Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Culture Difference, London: Allen & Unwin. Blessing, P.J. (1980) ‘Irish’, in S. Thernstrom (ed.) Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1995) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–38. Coffey, M. and Golway, T. (1997) The Irish in America, New York: Hyperion. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Davis, G. (1997) ‘The historiography of the Irish Famine’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) The Meaning of the Famine, London and Washington, DC: Leicester University Press. Gallagher, T. (1994) Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846–1847– Prelude to Hatred Poolbeg, Swords: Knocksedan House. Golway, T. (1997) ‘The Irish in America’, in M. Coffey and T. Golway (eds) The Irish in America, New York: Hyperion. ‘Great Hunger Memorial’ (1999), The Desert Shamrock, March/April 1999: 3. Griffin, W.D. (1981) A Portrait of the Irish in America, Dublin: The Academy Press. Happe, H.U. (1987) Irland und die Emigration: Die Bedeutung eines Auswanderungsphänomen, Aachener Studien Sozialwissenschaften, Vol. 4, Aachen: Rader Verlag. ‘Hibernian News’ (1999), The New Irish Gael, March 1999: 10. Hobsbawm, E. (1994) ‘Introduction: inventing traditions’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoobler, D. and Hoobler, T. (1995) The Irish American Family Album, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, M.A. (1980) ‘Scotch-Irish’, in S. Thernstrom (ed.) Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kennedy, J.P. (1995) ‘Introduction’, in D. Hoobler and T. Hoobler (eds) The Irish American Family Album, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, R.E., Jr. (1973) The Irish – Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Kennedy, W.V. (1998) ‘The Stanford incidents’, Irish Edition, April 1998: 8, 10. Kissane, N. (1995) The Irish Famine: A Documentary History, Dublin: National Library of Ireland. Lowney, J. (1998) ’Famine Memorial dedication brings together NJ Irish’, Irish Echo, 15–21 April 1998: 14. McClafferty, H. (1999) ‘Famine stamp advocates settled for less’, Irish Echo, 17–23 March 1999: 10. McElligott, E. (1998) ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Desert Shamrock, March/April 1998: 28. Miller, K.A. (1985) Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, K. and Wagner, P. (1994) Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America, London: Aurum Press.

History in the Irish-American diaspora

129

Molloy, D. (1998) ‘Famine Memorial takes on a life of its own’, Irish Voice, 13–19 May 1998: 4. Mullin, J. (1998) ‘Celtic mirror shattered’, Irish Edition, April 1998: 9. Murphy, J.P. (1903) ‘Official journal – Parade and Field Day: sketch of Ancient Order of Hibernians, Hartford’, in M. McCormack and other AOH National Historians (eds) The History of the AOH (Collection of publications by the AOH, collected for libraries of the AOH, 1989). Murphy, E. and Driscoll, T. (1974) An Album of the Irish Americans, New York: Franklin Watts. Nyhan, D. (1998) ‘A hatred born of hunger’, The Boston Globe, 18 March 1998: A23. O’Connor, T. (1995) The Boston Irish: A Political History, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. O’Hanlon, R. (1998) ‘Famine Memorial prospects rise’, Irish Echo, 4–10 March 1998: 4. Orywal, E. and Hackstein, K. (1993) ‘Ethnizität: Die Konstruktion ethnischer Wirklichkeiten’, in T. Schweizer, M. Schweizer and W. Kokot (eds) Handbuch der Ethnologie, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. O’Sullivan, M. (1998) ‘Film series a “hate crime” ’, Irish Echo, 11–17 March 1998: 8. O’Sullivan, P. (ed.) (1997) ‘The Meaning of the Famine series’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Vol. 6, London and Washington, DC: Leicester University Press. Rossi, J.P. (1998) ‘John Devoy, the greatest of the Fenians’, Irish Edition, August 1998: 25. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Sheffer, G. (1986) ‘A new field of study: modern diasporas in international politics’, in G. Sheffer (ed.) Modern Diasporas in International Politics, New York: St Martin’s Press. Tölölyan, K. (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora, 5(1): 3–36. Uris, J. and Uris, L. (1978) Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, Toronto, New York and London: Bantam Books. Watts, J.F. (1996) The Immigrant Experience, The Irish American series, New York and Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers.

130

Astrid Wonneberger

Religion or culture?

Part II

Diasporic aspects of religion

131

132

Martin Sökefeld

Religion or culture?

8

133

Religion or culture? Concepts of identity in the Alevi diaspora Martin Sökefeld

There are two things in which the whole of Alevism is comprised. These are cem and semah. Dede Hasan Kƒlavuz

Introduction This paper focuses on one of these two things which according to the Alevi Dede quoted above are at the core of Alevism: Cem. ‘Cem is the school of Alevism. Without Cem there is no Alevism,’ writes another Dede, Mehmet Yaman from Istanbul (1998: 5). In this chapter, I will explore the changes undergone by this Alevi ritual that parallel the processes of migration and the formation of diaspora. But my purpose is not a description and analysis of changing ritual. Rather I will discuss how a dispute about what Alevism means for Alevis in the diaspora or, to put it short, what Alevism is, is mirrored in discourses about cem and in the ritual practice. There is a fundamental disagreement among Alevis about what Alevism is, whether it is religion or culture. I will contrast the stereotypical representation of cem among Alevis with diasporic ritual practice and a case study of a particular cem in Hamburg. This enables me to point out a basic transformation in the character of the Alevi community. In the final part of the chapter I will discuss a general issue of conceptualizing diaspora. Frequently, the formation and development is analysed with reference to questions of ‘perpetuation and change’ that arise after the moment of migration. The case of Alevis, however, gives some hints that this is a too narrow framework and that continuity and change have to be related to a more inclusive cultural continuum of ongoing transformations which connects country of origin and diaspora. It is difficult to give a short introductory characterization of Alevism without apparently siding already with one of the two positions. One could start with a sentence like: Alevism originated as a religious minority in the power struggles which surrounded the formation of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia. However, in order to avoid the contentious adjective ‘religious’ I will characterize Alevis simply as a minority.

134

Martin Sökefeld

As followers of the Safawid order and Shah Ismail who became ruler of Persia in 1501, Alevis or Kƒzƒlba‡, as they were called that time, were fought by the Ottomans for being strongly influenced by Shiite tenets of Islam, regarded as heretic by the rulers of Anatolia. The Ottomans managed to cut off influence from Persia in eastern Anatolia and Alevism was thereby also separated from the development of mainstream Shiism.1 Today Alevis are very keen to point out their difference from the Shiites with whom they share, however, the strong reverence for Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad,2 and the twelve Imams in general. Still greater is the difference from Sunni Islam. Because Alevis do not practise the ‘five pillars’ of Islam, strict Muslims regard them as heretics (gavur). Today some Alevis dispute that Alevism forms a (however distant) branch of Islam at all. From the sixteenth century onwards Alevis were violently persecuted by the rulers of Anatolia. Consequently Alevis settled mostly in the more remote mountain areas where they formed tight communities to which outsiders were only rarely admitted. Alevis practised takiya, dissimulation. Their rituals, most importantly cem, could be practised only in secrecy. Because of the suppression they suffered at the hands of Sunni Ottoman rulers, Alevis placed great hope in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s revolution and his efforts to build a secular state in Turkey. This hope, however, was disappointed because Atatürk outlawed all religious orders and practices which did not conform with mainstream Sunni Islam by issuing the ‘tarikat ve zaviye yasasƒ’ law in 1925. This law is still valid today, so that formally Alevi rituals continue to be illegal in Turkey, although the law is no longer enforced.3 Also the violence suffered by Alevis continued in the Turkish Republic. Most notably here was the brutal suppression of a revolt of Kurdish Alevis in Dersim in 1938 (Alte 1998), but violence against Alevis carried out by right-wing political forces, by Islamists or even by the police, have also occurred recent decades.4

Cem Alevis normally do not practise the prayers (namaz, salat) prescribed for Muslims five times a day and that at least on Fridays and on special occasions should be conducted in the congregation of a mosque. ‘Alevilerin ibadeti cemdir’, Alevis use to say: ‘the prayer of Alevis is cem’. And cem is very different from namaz. According to the Oxford Turkish Dictionary, cem means crowd; the derived verb cem etmek means bring together, to collect.5 The brief description of cem I am going to provide here is the characterization normally given by Alevis also in the German diaspora. The actual practice of cem in Germany today is, however, very different from this description. Cem as it is described by Alevis is always the cem of rural areas, which is supposed to have been celebrated for centuries by the village communities. The use of the ethnographic present in the following outline of the ritual does not intend to express that cem is practised in this manner even today. Rather, it conveys that according to Alevis themselves this description portrays a kind of timeless essence of cem.

Religion or culture?

135

A cem cannot take place without a dede (literally: grandfather). The dede is the religious specialist of Alevis. Dedes belong to holy lineages, ocak, which are believed to be genealogically derived from the twelve Imams and, ultimately, from the Imam Ali. Within these lineages religious knowledge is orally transmitted. Written sources play only a minor role in Alevism. Each Alevi family has a relationship fixed by hereditary with a dede lineage, i.e., every Alevi is supposed to be a talip (student, pupil) of a dede who is his pir (saintly teacher). In small villages sometimes all families owe allegiance to the same dede. Otherwise there are two or three dedes responsible for families. It is not possible to change one’s dede, i.e., the dede is not a matter of choice. Every dede, in turn, serves a network of his talips which at times is spread over a considerable area. The dede is at least partially maintained by the endowments of his talips6 and he has the duty to visit his talips at least once a year. During these visits cem is celebrated. This means that cem normally takes place only once or a very few times each year. As implied by the meaning of the term, cem is a communal ceremony in which several families or, in the case of minor villages, the whole village community takes part. In most places there are no particular buildings in which cem celebrated. Such special buildings, the cemevi (cem house) exist only in special places such as pilgrimage centres. In ordinary villages the ceremony simply takes place in a large room of a family house. Cem is most frequently celebrated on Thursday evenings.7 Both women and men participate in cem. Entering this room, the participants remove their shoes and show their reverence of the dede. Everybody contributes something to eat as an offering to the ceremony. These offerings are presented to the dede and collected. During the ceremony, the participants sit in a circle so that ideally all people face each other and nobody has his back to another person. Before the ceremony can start, the dede has to ask the permission of the participants to officiate in the cem. Only if this permission is granted, the dede is allowed to take seat on the post (a fur-skin marking his seat), thus taking the position of ceremonial leader. In a cem, twelve duties or services (oniki hizmet ) are required. One of these is the duty of the dede, but he is supported by others like the zakir (singer and musician), the süpürgeci (sweeper, responsible for cleanliness), the kapƒcƒ (watchman, standing outside of the house, keeping watch against strangers that might approach) and the çera‰çƒ (responsible for the candles). The ritual starts with songs, prayers and the ritual lighting of a candelabra by the çera‰çƒ. After the initial phase a ritual takes place which emphasizes the function of cem as a communal ceremony. This is the görgü or dara çekmek in which the dede asks whether there are any disputes or strained relationships among those present in the cem. Popularly this ritual is today mostly referred to as halk mahkemesi (people’s court). All disputes and contraventions have to be disclosed now, either by those directly involved or by others who know about them. Those who are said to be involved in conflicts are called before the dede who inquires about what had happened and whether accusations are correct. Everybody present may act as witness. If the dede together with the community comes to the conclusion that somebody indeed has done something wrong the dede and the community discuss an appropriate punishment or compensation. The guilty person is then asked whether he or she accepts this sentence or not. He may

136

Martin Sökefeld

be asked to compensate for any damage he caused, to offer a kurban (animal sacrifice) for the community or, in most severe cases, he is ostracized from the community (dü‡kün). A person found guilty either has to accept the punishment agreed upon by the community or to leave the cem. The cem cannot proceed until either all conflicts are solved or all those persons not willing to end their disputes and to compensate have left. Alevis use to tell, with a certain pride, that in their areas no other jurisdiction other than the görgü or halk mahkemesi was known and needed.8 The ceremony continues with songs accompanied by the long-necked lute, saz, prayers and invocations of God, Ali and the Imams or other saints. Other important elements of cem are lokma (morsel), i.e., the communal meal in which all the offerings brought to a cem are distributed equally among the participants, and semah, a ritual dance of women and men which symbolizes the cycle of the universe. Singing of songs, the texts of which are frequently taken from famous historical poet-saints like Pir Sultan Abdal or Yunus Emre, takes much time during cem, as music and poetry are generally held in high esteem by Alevis. The ceremony lasts for several hours or even for a whole night. As this short outline makes clear, cem is a ritual that creates a sacred space and time in which relationships both within a village community and between a dede and his talip are affirmed and reconstituted. Thus cem almost constitutes a textbook example for a Durkheimian understanding of religion in which the social is sacralized. In the case of cem the social is sacralized in the form of communitas in Victor Turner’s sense (1995). Within the local community celebrating cem all mundane differences – in the dual sense of disputes and differences in structural positions – have to be levelled out. Cem reconstitutes not just an everyday social organization, but the ideal community among Alevis. The sacred character of the cem and its time-space has to be acknowledged by the participants, for example in that they remove their shoes and in that the participation in a cem cannot be interrupted. Whoever enters a cem has to stay until the end. In accordance with the general practice of takiya, cem was celebrated in secrecy and very few outsiders actually knew what happened during cem. However, rumours that both sexes participate and even dance in the ceremony have given rise to slander that Alevis practice indiscriminate promiscuity in cem. Slander and secrecy reinforced one another.

Change and the end of community This kind of cem is obviously a ritual which pre-supposes and renews long-standing and intimate relationships both within the village communities and between dede and talip. The village communities and the dede–talip networks can be identified as the crucial elements of Alevi social structure. The ritual developed when Alevis had taken refuge in rather remote areas, where they lived mainly among themselves. Cem reflects the dispersed, network-like and non-centralized character of Alevi communities. There is no central institutional hierarchy or organization of dedes.9 The social situation of most Alevis in Turkey today, not to speak of the diaspora, is, however, quite different. If the sort of community referred to above characterized

Religion or culture?

137

the life of Alevis in the past, we have to notice that this kind of community is only a remote reminiscence for most Alevis in the present. Of the many changes which affected Alevism migration is perhaps the most important. By the first half of the twentieth century Alevis had started to leave their villages and to move into the cities of Turkey. There were many reasons for this migration: there was search for work, for educational opportunities, but there were also political conditions forcing Alevis to leave their home areas. The latter applies particularly to Kurdish Alevis, especially from the besieged area of Dersim/ Tunceli (Firat 1997).10 This migration within Turkey disrupted both dede–talip networks and village communities. The disrupting effects of migration increased when migrants turned to foreign countries, moving especially to Germany.11 Beside migration, political changes had a deep impact on Alevism. In the early decades of the Turkish Republic most Alevis had been staunch supporters of Atatürk and his party CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People’s Party) although both Atatürk and his successors did not fulfil Alevi hopes for recognition and equal rights. From the end of the 1960s, however, Alevi youth came increasingly under the influence of Marxism and adopted radical leftist positions. Many joined militant organizations and parties subscribing to various Marxist ideologies. Coincident with this shift to the left was both a rejection of all kinds of religion in general, and heavy criticism of Alevi dedes in particular. Dedes were quite indiscriminately denounced as exploiters who lived at the expense of the people. ‘We have driven the dedes out of our villages,’ one former member of the TDKP (Türk Devrimci Komünist Partisi, Turkish Revolutionary Communist Party) told me (cf. Mandel 1992: 423). These changes affected the two central elements of Alevi social structure: both the village communities and the dede–talip networks suffered highly disruptive influences. Most Alevis in Turkey continued dissimulation as protection against possible anti-Alevi violence. Within the leftist groups of the 1970s, a new kind of takiya was practised: now Alevism was not only dissimulated in order to protect oneself, but also because religion was considered reactionary or, at best, simply irrelevant. Although there are no precise studies of the subject, it seems that the practice of Alevi religion in general and cem in particular declined considerably in the 1970s and 1980s. There are many Alevi migrants in Germany, now in their late thirties or forties, who never, or only a few times in their early childhood, witnessed a cem as described above in Turkey. Because Alevi traditions were transmitted orally, both within the dede-lingeages and from dede to talip, this means that also knowledge about Alevism among Alevis was very much in decline.

Alevism and cem in the diaspora The same development applies to the Alevi diaspora in Gemany. In the early 1960s the first Alevis came as ‘guest workers’ to Germany, and in the late 1970s they were joined by an increasing number of political refugees, most of them various kinds of ‘Marxists of Alevi descent’. I use this expression because most of these people probably would not have designated themselves simply as Alevis at

138

Martin Sökefeld

that time. Looking back to the 1970s, a former leftist activist explained: ‘The great majority of the members of these left and revolutionary organizations came from Alevi families, but we did not ask for that. Being fervent Marxists, religion was completely irrelevant for us.’ Most of the political migrants and refugees continued their political commitments in Germany, working in organizations like DEV YOL, D¼DF or AT¼F.12 Also non-Marxist Alevi migrants in Germany practised Alevism only to a very limited extend. In private meetings perhaps the saz was played and religious songs were sung, but there were no formal rituals, let alone celebrations of cem. In German society Alevis remained largely invisible and unrecognized. In Hamburg (this probably applies to Germany in general) cem was celebrated only after Alevis had for the first time attempted to formally organize themselves.13 The first Alevi organization in Germany was called Yurtseverler Birli‰i (YB, Union of Patriots). Having been founded originally in Munich in 1974/75, it developed branches in several cities. The branch in Hamburg was opened after fascists had killed more than 100 Alevis in the Anatolian city of Mara‡ in the end of 1978.14 In 1984 the YB organized for the first time a cem in Hamburg. This cem was very different in character from what I outlined above. Of course, it did not take place in a house in a village but in a large school hall in a suburb, and instead of only a handful of families who knew each other intimately participating, there were but several hundred people. The cem was not conducted by a dede hereditarily related to at least a considerable part of the congregation, but by a dede flown in from Turkey whom only very few people knew personally. This event was among the first public meetings of Alevis in Hamburg. As most Alevis practiced takiya, many of them were not publicly known to be Alevis. Therefore many of the participants in the cem were surprised to see neighbours and acquaintances whom they did not know were also Alevis. This cem was obviously not an intimate ritual of community as it had been celebrated in Alevi villages in Turkey. A decisive change in the organization of Alevis in Germany ocurred in 1989. In this year, a number of Alevis organized an ‘Alevi Culture Week’ which also included a celebration of cem. A few months later the organizers of the week founded the Alevi Kültür Merkezi (AKM, Alevi Culture Centre). The Alevi Culture Week and the foundation of the Alevi Culture Centre marked a decisive turn in the development of the Alevi diaspora in Germany because now, for the first time ever, an event was publicly and formally labelled as ‘Alevi’. What had happened here was a collective and organized break with takiya. It was a coming out that made Alevis for the first time recognizable as a community in Germany. A wave of foundations of Alevi organizations all over Germany and in other European countries ensued. Umbrella organizations, most importantly the ‘Federation of Alevi Communities in Germany’ (Almanya Alevi Birlikleri Federasyonu, AABF), were also established. A few months after the registration of the AKM in 1990 a faction broke away and founded another association called Hamburg Anadolu-Alevi Kültür Birli‰i (Haak Bir, Hamburg Anatolian-Alevi Culture Union).15 In subsequent years these two organizations were bound to each other in a relationship of bitter rivalry. In the

Religion or culture?

139

second half of the 1990s they competed over the question of which of the two organizations would be the first to be able to establish a community centre of its own. Although the AKM was the first to start serious efforts in this direction, Haak Bir was the first – and still today the only one – to reach that goal. In 1997 the organization was able to buy a large building, formerly housing a company. However, the financial commitments entered into by this effort put Haak Bir under great pressure. Today seven Alevi associations exist in and around Hamburg. Instead of former rivalry, the present leaders of the organizations have now taken a number of practical steps for increased cooperation. This includes the former rivals AKM and Haak Bir.

Cem: religion or culture? One could speak of an Alevi revival in Germany (and in Turkey) since 1989, but this revival was not a simple renewal of Alevism as it had been practised until a few decades ago in Turkey. Instead, it implied a serious transformation of Alevism and its rituals which can be glossed over as a ‘folklorization’. Although originally ‘religious’ rituals were practised, Alevism was reconstituted mainly as a secular culture. Most Alevi organizations in Germany have the word ‘culture’ in their names and few of the names give a hint to somebody not acquainted with Alevism that ‘Alevi culture’ could have something to do with religion. I have never heard an Alevi giving an explicit definition of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ or an explanation of the difference between the two things. Rather, the distinction is taken to be self-evident. Religion is understood to be mainly constituted by belief (inanç). Many of the former Marxists use to say things like: ‘I am atheist. I don’t believe in these things. These religious matters have no importance for me. It is old stuff. What is important for me is our culture.’ The conceptualization of religion as belief is significant because it enables the performance of rituals outside of the sphere of religion, or at least the participation of non-religious Alevis in cem without automatically practising ‘religion’. Thus, the practice of cem is not in itself a religious act. In accordance with anthropological theories of ritual after Victor Turner, Alevis describe cem as it is currently practised in Hamburg as performance, as a symbolic act. Frequently, cem is explicitly likened to drama. This is also accepted by more ‘religious minded’, believing Alevis. They, however, regret this state of affairs and contend that cem should be practised only with belief. For them, cem lacks authenticity without belief. A cem without belief is desacralized. This desacralization can be detected in a number of aspects. Many of the cems in Hamburg have taken place in a large lecture hall of the university. Here, the dede and his assistants are placed on the small stage in front of the hall whereas the other participants, sometimes more than five hundred, sit on the students’ seats which rise towards the rear of the hall. However, it is quite debatable to what extent these people are actually participants and do not only constitute an observing audience. In the spatial arrangement of the lecture hall the sacred space is very much reduced. If we take the removal of shoes as an indicator for where the

140

Martin Sökefeld

sacred space begins, it is clearly limited to the stage, for only the dede and the hizmet who enter the stage take off their shoes. The audience is then actually seated outside of the sacred space. Further, in contrast to the village cem, the participants do not individually step before the dede in order to greet him and thus acknowledge his authority. Finally, the participants are also not bound (or actually confined) by a sacred time structure of the cem. They may come and go almost as they like, many coming late and leaving early, or leaving the lecture hall to have a break or to go to the toilet. There is a certain constant level of noise because many in the audience talk with their neighbours. A very simple kind of active participation like responding to the prayers of the dede with the exclamation ‘allah allah ’ is not practised by all members of the audience. In the case of this kind of cem, Leach’s assertion that in ritual ‘there is no separate audience of listeners. The performers and the listeners are the same people’ obviously does not fully apply (Leach 1976: 45). Also the seating arrangement in rows, one behind the other, opposite the stage and the dede, reinforces the impression of a separation of audience and actors, very similar to the performance of a drama or a cultural show. Because of that arrangement quite different from the traditional circular, face-to-face arrangement, the audience is individualized rather than turned into a (sacralized) community by the performance of the ritual. Many Alevis in Hamburg describe this arrangement of cem as ‘symbolical’. Contrary to anthropological theories of ritual, however, they do not allude with this expression to the (community-building) power of symbols, but they contrast the symbolical with the real, the authentic. This kind of cem then is only symbolical. This ‘only’ symbolical character does not only refer to the character of the cem as a whole, but also to the concrete significance of particular elements of the ritual. Thus it is obvious that the question of the dede and whether there are any conflicts and misgivings among the hundreds of participants (i.e., in the audience) is only a rhetorical question which has to be asked because it is part of the ritual sequence and not because all disputes are actually expected to be solved in the cem. On the contrary, everybody knows for certain that not all people in the audience are reconciled with each other, but nobody feels compelled by the dede’s question to step forward and to disclose conflicts and problems in order to solve them. It is important to keep in mind, however, that as a cultural ideal form the cem of the villages has maintained a remarkable continuity and stability. Whenever I have asked an Alevi to describe cem he or she has given me a description of a village cem – although the person in question may never have actually attended such a traditional cem but only the contemporary cem of diaspora. The real cem, the ritual at the core of Alevism, is not what is practised in Hamburg. According to Alevi self-diagnosis, the changed, ‘only symbolical’ character of cem is not just a consequence of changed outward arrangements like the greatly increased number of participants but, more importantly, of a lack of knowledge about cem and its ritual elements among Alevis today. It is not only the lacking experience of ‘real’ cem but a general neglect or even rejection of religious education, still derived from the anti-religiosity of the leftist movements, which contributes to this perceived lack of knowledge.

Religion or culture?

141

In view of all these changes and the perceived shortcomings of cem in Hamburg today, the question arises why so many people at all join in the ritual. At first sight it seems quite surprising that hundreds of people come to every cem if many of them are not very much interested in Alevism as religion or even reject religion outright. The ongoing popularity of cem can be explained only if we understand that it has undergone a basic transformation: from an intimate, sacred ritual reconstituting community it has been turned into a public ritual affirming identity. Or, to put it differently, the community which is reconstituted by cem as it is celebrated in Hamburg is not an interactional face-to-face community, but an imagined community of symbolic cultural difference. Its intention is not only directed toward the members of the community, but also towards those outside, most importantly toward Sunnis. This kind of cem is a ‘ritual implicating others’ in Gerd Baumann’s sense (Baumann 1992). In consequence of the public affirmation of Alevi identity in the diaspora, Alevism has become a public marker of difference. To participate in a cem in Hamburg is to publicly affirm one’s difference as Alevi from other Turks. It does not mean, however, to subscribe to specific and central elements of Alevi faith or to reaffirm one’s affiliation with a religious authority. The affirmation of being Alevi is first of all the emphasis of a contrasting difference, a rejection of perceived repressive practices and ideologies of both the Turkish state and Sunni Islam. It is much less a positive difference implicating the affiliation with a certain (ritual/ religious) praxis or cultural contents.16 Within the German context the expression of this difference is significant because in German public discourse all Turks are frequently identified as Muslims. Islam has acquired a generally negative image in German society, being equated with resistance to ‘integration’, with ‘headscarf-problems’,17 ‘fundamentalism’ and the like. Alevis generally share this stereotypical equation of (Sunni) Islam with fundamentalism and danger, but they are quick to point out that they are either no Muslims at all or at least a very different kind of Muslims. The assertion of Alevism in Germany is from the Alevi point of view also an effort to make Germans understand that not all immigrants are Sunnis and – by that token – fundamentalists. For non-religious Alevis, as well as functioning as a public marker of difference, cem is at most understood as an enactment of secular values endorsed by Alevis. In this sense, a man I shall call Hüseyin, a declared atheist, drew an explicit parallel between socialism and Alevism: The essence of Alevism is Socialism itself. Because in Socialism there is companionship [yolda‡lƒk ], in Alevism there is musahiplik. In Socialism there is people’s justice, and in Alevism, in cem there is people’s justice [halk mahkemesi ] too. Many things are very similar to one another in Alevism and Socialism. I had asked him whether he perceived a biographical rupture between his earlier involvement in revolutionary politics and his current commitment to Alevi politics. Obviously, he saw no break. Indeed, the present popular use of the expression halk mahkemesi instead of görgü for the part of cem during which conflicts are solved is a

142

Martin Sökefeld

result of the attempt to re-interpret the Alevism from a leftist, socialist perspective. Hüseyin saw cem just as a kind of cultural show. According to him there is nothing sacred in the ritual. However, not all Alevis are content with this understanding of Alevism in general, and cem in particular, as simply exhibiting and affirming socialist or general humanistic values. Others demand that the religious character of the ritual should be maintained or enabled. This requires that all people who attend a cem do so with faith and concentration. One should keep silent and remain with the cem from the beginning until the end in order to avoid any rupture. People who think like that insist that a cem is very different from a cultural show and demand that every precaution is taken in order not to confuse both types of performance. No part of cem should be folklorized. An element of cem which is very suceptible to folklorization is the ritual dance semah. It is frequently emphasized that semah is not just a dance and that it should not be performed outside of the ritual sequence of cem on occasions like marriages or other secular festivities.18 Semah is regarded a central and distinctive element of Alevi culture/religion and many young Alevis took semah-lessons after Alevi associations had been founded. Young people fond of semah began to dance it everywhere, with complete disregard of the dance’s original context and significance. When I asked Hüseyin whether dancing semah was folklore for him, he replied: I am dancing semah because I dance well. Our fanatic dedes say that semah must not be danced outside of cem. Otherwise it is prohibited. Only in cem. But I say, we always dance at our weddings. Many dedes and fanatic Alevis say, you are Alevi, why do you dance (semah) at a wedding? But my son and my daughter have learned how to dance semah at weddings! Ten years ago it was all prohibited [in Turkey]. Now, as a public ritual of identity, cem offers a space for the contestation of identity, and the ritual itself becomes part of Alevi politics of identity. At stake is not only the debate on religion or culture but also the relation of being Alevi to other identifications like being Muslim, being Kurd, or being Turk. The question whether Alevism is a branch of Islam is still hotly debated among Alevis in Germany. In the Alevi Culture Centre it seems to have become a dominant view that Alevism is distinct and separate from although genealogically related with, Islam. But others continue to insist: ‘In cem we invoke “Allah, Mohammad, Ali”, how can we say that we are not Muslims?’ The relation with the Kurdish struggle for recognition became an issue already at the very first cem held in Hamburg in 1984. KOMKAR, a Kurdish political organization in Germany, sent a message of greeting on the occasion of that cem which should be read publicly in the course of the ritual. But the dede conducting the cem, who had flown in from Turkey, was very suspicious of this address. He insisted on seeing it before it was publicly read in order to be able to drop passages which deemed him too pro-Kurdish. At another cem it was fervently discussed whether Kurdish songs could be sung in the performance or not. Also,

Religion or culture?

143

the relation with the Turkish state and its national ideology became an issue in the context of cem. When the Alevi Culture Group organized the cem of the Alevi Culture Week in 1989 it was planned to invite the same dede from Turkey who had conducted the ritual in 1984. But this dede insisted that he would only lead the cem if a large portrait of Atatürk and a Turkish flag was displayed in the hall. The group which had the reputation of consisting mainly of former leftists rejected that demand and another dede was invited.19

A cem in October 1999 Beside this more general level of identification, the local level of competition between the different Alevi associations in Hamburg also invades the celebration of the ritual. This happened rather inadvertently in a cem which was staged on 30 October1999. This particular cem was part of the celebrations commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Alevi Culture Centre. In the months before the celebration an unprecedented degree of co-operation between the different Alevi associations in Hamburg had been reached. Jointly the associations organized a function in memory of the victims of Sivas and a picnic for families. Because of the better relations between the associations, exceptionally large numbers of members of other associations attended the cem. The dede invited to conduct the ritual was Mehmet Ocak from Pazarcƒk, a small town in the province of Mara‡. Many of the members of the Alevi Culture Centre come from this province. Mehmet Ocak enjoys a considerable reputation not only among these people but also among others from adjacent areas because his mother, Elif Ana, was considered a saintly women with great healing powers. Her tomb has become a centre of pilgrimage. There was only one problem with Mehmet Ocak dede: he does not belong to an ocak (his surname notwithstanding) and therefore, in the strict sense of Alevi genealogical rationality, he is not dede at all. Mehmet Ocak derives his ability to conduct cem not from genealogical descent from a holy lineage, but from the personal spiritual charisma of his mother. The issue whether a dede who is not a ‘real’ dede could be invited to conduct a cem was discussed among members of the Alevi Culture Centre. Few people expressed serious reservations. It was argued that it was better to invite a dede who did not belong to an ocak but who was widely known among Alevis in Hamburg and therefore could draw more attention and more people to the cem than to bring a ‘real’ dede whom only very few people knew. Indeed many people, also from the other associations, attended the cem. The lecture hall was crowded and the arrangement was as usual: the dede was seated on the stage, facing the audience, together with the zakir and the rehber. They were joined on the stage by the other hizmet (duties) whenever they had a function to fulfil. In this cem the rehber (‘guide’, assistant of the dede ) played a very important role. The rehber was Lütfi Kaleli, an elderly Alevi intellectual and writer from Istanbul.20 Before the cem started, Lütfi Kaleli announced the ceremony as an ‘e‰itim cemi’. E‰itim means education, formation, training. The explicit intention of this cem was education: the teaching of the ritual’s meaning and structure to the

144

Martin Sökefeld

audience. In his introduction Lütfü Kaleli contrasted the cem to be performed with a görgü cem, i.e. a full ceremony in which only musahips, that is, people fully initiated into Alevism, are allowed to take part. In contrast to this, he said: ‘Today we only want to show how cem is performed to those canlar 21 who want to learn it and who do not know.’ I think only (sadece ) is an important word here, because it constrasts the performance with what is tacitly considered a real or full cem. Significantly, the cem did not begin with halk mahkemesi, the ceremony of reconciliation. In order to achieve the didactic purpose, the course of the performance was frequently interrupted by Lütfi Kaleli who then explained what had happened so far and what was to come next. Beside the duties in the cem the songs and prayers said by Mehmet Ocak were explained as were personages, such as the Imams, invoked in these prayers. After the offerings had been symbolically presented to the dede and the lokma, the sharing of the meal among the participants, was being prepared, Lütfi Kaleli again interrupted the performance and announced: ‘Now we will present a little example of the Alevi judicial system in the cem ceremony. That is, we will have the so-called halk mahkemesi.’ He then asked whether anybody had a complaint (‡ikayet ) against anybody else in the audience. A man rose, one of the leading persons of the Alevi Culture Centre, and said that he had a complaint against the chairman of the Alevi Federation, AABF. He came to the stage and said that since his youth the chairman had been so committed to the cause of Alevis in Germany, investing all his time and never doing anything for himself, that he had not even found the time to marry. Therefore, he accused him of not being married. Obviously, this ‘complaint’ was rather intended as a – somewhat garbled – praise of the chairman and his commitment to the community. The chairman was called to the stage by Lütfi Kaleli who asked him to give his statement in order that the complaint could be dealt with. However, he was quite reluctant to discuss the question of his marriage. He said that he did not know what to say about this complaint, but that he himself had another complaint. He continued: ‘I am quite disappointed that after ten years of Alevi organizations in Hamburg we still have to celebrate cem in such an improper place like a university lecture hall. It is a pity that there are several Alevi associations now and still the Alevi Culture Centre which was founded ten years ago has no proper place of its own to celebrate cem.’ He mentioned the case of Berlin where a few weeks earlier several Alevi associations had jointly opened a cemevi (cem house) in a former church and expressed his desire that Hamburg should follow the example of Berlin. This was obviously a complaint of a different sort. The change in the course of the halk mahkemesi was explicitly acknowledged by Lütfi Kaleli, saying that the ceremony had started as a symbolical example, but now had touched upon something real and important. He recommended that the Alevi associations of Hamburg should increase their co-operation and asked the audience of the cem to give a promise (ikrar ) to support the leadership of the associations in their efforts for unity. Many people in the audience expressed their agreement by clapping hands. However, a man rose questioning the intentions of those willingly agreeing for more unity. He said: ‘Alevism is no cheap thing. If you promise unity and co-

Religion or culture?

145

operation here in the prayer (ibadet), you are bound by your solemn promise. Many of you are not members of the Alevi Culture Centre but your promise means that all of you have to become members of the Centre as it is the first and most senior Alevi organization in Hamburg.’ At that stage a member of the managing committee of Haak Bir rose and said that his association had already a very big place. He stated that it was a pity that the cem took place in the university. If the Alevi Culture Center really wished greater co-operation, they could well have come to Haak Bir and celebrated this cem in the hall of Haak Bir. Again Lütfi Kaleli tried to end the halk mahkemesi with some general remarks of recommendation, but again a man rose in the audience, a member of the Alevi Culture Centre who had been at the forefront of Alevi associations in Hamburg since the days of the Yurtseverler Birli‰i. In a very agitated voice he expressed that it was quite useless always to talk about co-operation between Haak Bir and the Alevi Culture Centre. He said: ‘It was Haak Bir that broke away from the Alevi Culture Centre and thereby ended the unity of Alevi organization in Hamburg. So, if you want co-operation you should come back! But there have been so many occasions to do so and you never did. Five years ago in a cem we debated the same and at that time you promised in halk mahkemesi that you will come back to the Alevi Culture Centre. But you did not do so. You broke your solemn promise [ikrar ]! It is futile to talk about co-operation!’ During the exchange of statements several people had been called to the stage: The author of the original complaint, the chairman of the AABF, the chairman of the Alevi Culture Centre as representative of the party accused by the second complaint, and the member of the managing committee of Haak Bir. All the persons on the stage stood in a semicircle with their heads bowed in front of the dede who remained seated on his post. The whole hearing was managed by Lütfi Kaleli who now asked the chairman of the Alevi Culture Centre again to comment upon the accusation. He explained that the different Alevi associations in Hamburg had ended their rivalry and entered a phase of serious co-operation. He mentioned the example of events organized jointly so far and added that he hoped that in future the co-operation will be even more intense. He expressed the wish that the Alevi associations of Hamburg could do something similar to what had been done in Berlin. After that no additional statement was heard. The dede issued his judgement, asking the associations to increase co-operation and to bury competition. He expressed his hope that one day the associations could indeed have a cemevi together so that in future a cem in Hamburg would not take place in the university but in a proper place. Then all witnesses left the stage and after a prayer all persons left the lecture hall in order to take lokma in the entrance hall of the building. After lokma, the cem continued with a few more songs and prayers in the lecture hall.

Interpreting the cem What had happened in this cem? The performance of the ritual was explicitly intended to be ‘symbolical’. It was announced as a ‘teaching example’. Many non-religious

146

Martin Sökefeld

Alevis say that teaching is a very important purpose and function of cem. What they have in mind is, however, not education about the meaning of the ritual and the meaning of Alevism as religion, but general teaching about norms and values, ‘about what is good for humans’, as one man expressed it. In the cem described here, in contrast, teaching was not of that secular kind but it was intended as enabling persons lacking the appropriate knowledge to learn something about cem. The structure of the performance reflected this purpose in that the ritual sequence was repeatedly interrupted by commentaries, explaining what was being done. This structure already presupposed that the performance was not a real cem in which all those present actually participated, for it took into consideration that many of the people present were unable to follow the ritual and to understand its proper meaning without such exegesis. The cem happened in an imaginary showcase and was commented upon from the outside. Rather than simply being a cem it was a presentation of what happens if a cem is performed. Therefore it was not really a problem to start without the halk mahkemesi and to accept that the attending persons were not reconciled with one another. It was also no problem to show later what happens if halk mahkemesi is performed, and to show it in a phase of the ritual were, according to its traditional structure, this particular element of cem is totally misplaced. Yet, this intention notwithstanding, the cem exemplified that a strict separation between the ‘real’ and the ‘as if ’ performance cannot be maintained. In the halk mahkemesi ‘reality’ proved to be uncontainable. The halk mahkemesi was again announced as simply an ‘example’ and it started with a rather inappropriate complaint intended only to enable the presentation of the form of performance and not to provoke an actual negotiation of serious problems. However, it gravitated, apparently inexorably, towards the most serious split within the Alevi community in Hamburg. I have said earlier that cem has changed from a ritual of face-to-face community (in the villages) to a ritual of an imagined community in diaspora. It is in cem that Alevis become visible as a community. It is no surprise then that halk mahkemesi in the diasporic cem does not negotiate problems and conflicts between individuals but, as in our case, pretences for precedence between organized communities. Behind the dispute lies the question, which of the Alevi associations in Hamburg in fact represents (in the dual sense of the word) the Alevi community of the city. Is it the Alevi Culture Centre because it was the first and original organization whereas Haak Bir originated simply as a split-off faction? Or is it Haak Bir because it possesses a proper place for the Alevi community to celebrate cem, thus offering a kind of home for the ceremony – a facility which the Alevi Culture Centre so far was unable to accomplish? The dispute is certainly not purely symbolical but has a serious material aspect. Haak Bir had taken on a considerable financial commitment in the acquisition of its building and had accrued substantial debt. It would of course be a considerable lightening of this financial burden if the obligations could be shared and the building be used by other associations too. However, a number of members of the Alevi Culture Centre expressed the sentiment: ‘Why should we solve their problem?’

Religion or culture?

147

The efforts to acquire a large building were indeed perceived as a competition between Haak Bir and the Alevi Culture Centre. It is significant that in retrospect nobody was surprised about the course which that halk mahkemesi took. Some observing the case more from the outside even hinted at the possibility that the whole thing was staged and provoked by either Haak Bir or the Alevi Culture Centre in order to put pressure on the other group. From the outside both cases seemed to be perfectly plausible. I asked whether, assuming that the ‘drama’ was indeed voluntarily provoked by one of the groups, it was staged in the context of a cem in order to give a possible solution a more binding value, being acknowledge by a dede in the solemn atmosphere of a cem. But my interlocutors rejected this possibility and argued that the important matter was a possible public acknowledgment, in front of the whole congregation. I am sure, however, that the halk mahkemesi was not planned, but developed spontaneously. It is significant, then, to note that cem also offers space for the expression of dissent. The dispute which surfaced in the halk mahkemesi was not simply a dispute between the two associations. On the contrary, the chairmen of both organizations tried to promote co-operation and to put an end to the old rivalry. They attempted to co-operate first on issues where consensus was easier and deferred the more loaded issues to the future. Both chairmen belonged to a younger generation and were not actively involved in the split of the associations and the subsequent competition. But the associations were not two homogenous blocks. Members have differing views and sometimes pulled into different directions. Sometimes people changed from one association to the other and there were even a few people with dual membership. In discussions following the cem, the question of Alevism as religion versus Alevism as culture surfaced again. Interestingly both positions share the view of cem as performance and drama. A dede in Hamburg explained to me: ‘Cem is a game, it is a drama. But all participants play together. One plays saz, another dances semah, one cleans the floor, one brings lokma, all play together.’ I asked him how this was concerning the cem described here and he answered: ‘What we do in Europe, in Hamburg or elsewhere as cem, it is OK, everything is shown, but it is not real.’ According to him, it is not real because a deep, spiritual involvement of all the participants is missing. Some dedes refuse to conduct such cems because of that lack of concentration and seriousness. A religious-minded Alevi criticized Dede Mehmet Ocak for playing saz on the subsequent night when a purely cultural event took place. According to this criticism the dede himself weakened the boundary between religion and culture by participating in both performances. A lack of seriousness in the cem was also noted by many non-religious Alevis. It was criticized because the halk mahkemesi was introduced with a quite ridiculous complaint, which, according to many, bordered on simply making fun of the ritual. Also the fact that the audience did not keep silence, that many came and went as they liked, was regretted by both religious and non-religious Alevis, for it was interpreted as a lack of respect towards Alevism, be that culture or religion. It seems that many Alevis, religious or not, are quite unhappy with the present form of cem. Non-religious Alevis too acknowledge the powerful, community-building function of the traditional cem. They like to relate that in the past all kinds of

148

Martin Sökefeld

conflicts among Alevis, including blood feuds, were solved in the ritual. But they also express the opinion that this power of cem is a matter of the past, admitting that today, under the changed contemporary circumstances, cem can only be a symbolic presentation of what once was the core of Alevism. It has become an emblem of identity constructing community symbolically, by imagination. This emblem suffices to express difference and one may use it without knowing what it originally implicated within the system of Alevi faith, just as one may wear the Imam Ali’s sword as a piece of jewellery without knowing much about the Imam. However, this emblematic practice is a serious break with the Alevi tradition because cem was always a matter of secrecy, it was not something to be displayed. The secrecy of cem is most frequently explained with the prevailing oppressive conditions in Turkey. But the dede in Hamburg gives that secrecy also a spiritual meaning: ‘The Imam Cafer said: Keep your prayer secret. Don’t show others how you pray, just pray for yourself. Why do we criticize Sunnis for doing so many things, going to the mosque, fasting in Ramadan and so on. This is between God and yourself, nobody else has to know about it.’ Here the new, public character of cem appears almost as a victory of the assimilation pressure of Sunni Islam.

Re-emphasizing religion Whereas at the level of individual members, the question whether Alevism is religion or (only) culture remains debated and undecided, at the level of institutions and outward representation religion is acquiring priority. Partly this is the case because, within the German political and societal context, religious communities are more easily recognized than ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ groups. When Germans (nonAlevis)22 inquired about Alevism, the chairman of the Alevi Cultural Centre always introduced Alevism as a religion, although he personally was quite disinterested in religion and saw Alevism more as culture. Experience has shown that a categorization as ‘religion’ is better understood and accepted, even if knowledge about that particular religion is lacking. Also, in an institutionalized context, the Alevi Culture Centre presents itself as a religious community. For instance, since nine years the Centre is part of the ‘working group on inter-faith religious instruction’ in Hamburg in which members of diverse religious communities (Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists) work for the reform of the religious instruction in Hamburg’s public schools. In this context Alevis never appear as anything other than a religious community. Such institutionalized exchange and communication with other (nonAlevi) groups happens only in a field defined as religious. A similar drift towards religion can also be observed at the highest level of Alevi organization, i.e., at the level of the AABF. In 1995 the AABF has filed an application for the legal status accorded to churches in Germany, i.e., the status of a public corporation (Körperschaft öffentlichen Rechts).23 It is wrong, however, to interpret this drift toward external self-representation as religion only as an instrumental or strategic move aiming at greater recognition within German society. Internally religion is also acquiring increasing importance. For instance, several ‘cem-houses’ (cemevi ) are being established in Germany. The one in Berlin, which is housed in a former church, has already been mentioned. A

Religion or culture?

149

second has just been constructed in Augsburg. This is a very new development because previously only Alevi ‘culture centres’ or ‘culture associations’ have been opened in Germany. At the centre and focus of the new cem houses is not culture in general but quite literally cem. Some of the former marxists are indeed recognizing the importance of religion as a basis of the continuity of Alevism. The chairman of the AABF explained to me: From Turkey we knew only associations [Vereine] as organizational model. There were no cem-houses. And maybe, because originally we came from leftist political organizations, we were also a little ashamed to represent ourselves as a religious community. Earlier, we have been seriously criticized because as democrats we have started religious work. But today we say that Alevism existed in this [religious] form for a thousand years in Anatolia, why should we reject that form and create something else now? We have learned that Christians cannot organize without churches, Muslims cannot organize without mosques and Alevis cannot organize without cem-houses. Similarily there are also discussions about the future function of dedes among Alevis in Germany. Very few of the descendants of ocak s in Germany do any kind of religious work. There are only a few young dedes in Germany because no facilities for the training of dedes exist and the old way of education within the family, transmitting knowledge from father to son, is defunct (Sökefeld 2002a).

Considering diaspora By now it has been accepted by a majority of scholars that the concept of diaspora should not be restricted to the ‘classical cases’ like Jews and Armenians but that the concept is useful for the comparative discussion of many more and diverse instances.24 Here I do not want to debate whether it is justified to designate Alevis in Germany as diaspora too, although this certainly has to be done. Supposing that Alevis in Germany can be considered a diasporic community, I want to discuss the example of Alevis in the light of a few other cases. Most authors now seem to agree that a central feature of diasporas is a triadic relationship between a community which somehow has been relocated from a place of origin, that former home land (which still may be imagined as home) and the present host country (e.g. M. Baumann 1995; Vertovec 1997). Within this framework many studies of diasporas discuss questions of preservation: How is the ‘original’ culture of a group preserved in the new, diasporic context? This question has been frequently discussed especially in cases of south Asian diasporas. Focusing on religion, Martin Baumann (1995: 22) argues that ‘in this context the preservation and perpetuation of one’s religious identity becomes a core issue’. A page later he writes about the ‘preservation and transformation of a religious tradition in a diaspora situation’ (ibid: 23). In these and other works a fundamental perpetuation seems to be presupposed, although it is emphasized that what is retained (e.g., identity, tradition, culture, religion) is of course changed and transformed. What we have to grasp is a diasporic duality of preservation and change.

150

Martin Sökefeld

Within the triadic model of diaspora the changes which are mostly focused upon are the changes starting with the movement of migration or, rather, the moment of arrival. This kind of perspective seems problematic to me in the case of Alevism. It is too restricting simply to focus on transformations affecting traditions after the arrival of Alevis in Germany. In the case of the south Asian diaspora in Britain, for instance, a central aspect of the transformation occurring in the diasporic situation is, according to Steven Vertovec (1997: 287), an ‘emergent distinction between “religion” and “culture” among diaspora groups’. Among other sources, Vertovec draws upon Knott and Khokher (1993: 596) who have found that young south Asian Muslims in Britain reflect explicitly on religion, thereby separating religion from the body of all-encompassing ‘ethnic’ traditions. In the Alevi example, this separation of culture and religion is not a transformation affecting religious (or other) traditions only after the spatial dislocation of these traditions. To understand the debate on religion versus culture among Alevis in the German diaspora we have to go back long before the beginning of worker’s migration from Turkey to Germany. The roots of this issue have already been laid by Atatürk’s politics of secularism which demanded the strict separation of religion from the political and public sphere. This secularism was very much welcomed by Alevis in the early decades of the Turkish Republic because they hoped that the separation of religion from politics would result in greater freedom for Alevis (KehlBodrogi 1988: 56ff.). After all, the earlier, intimate connection between political power and religion in the Ottoman Empire had only resulted in violent oppression of Alevis as a heterodox community. The reform intended but never completely implemented by Atatürk was only radicalized by the strict anti-religious politics of the leftist movement in the 1970s which attempted quite successfully to purge Alevi culture of all religious aspects, and which considered religion irrelevant if not dangerous. The disapproval of religion including the discontinuing of cem and the rejection of dedes that provided the basis for the present difficulties of ritual practice could be observed in the home country at the same time as the lasting process of emigration. It was perhaps intensified in Germany because, due especially to political oppression before and in the wake of the military coup of September 1980 in Turkey, many anti-religious leftist Alevis had to leave Turkey and went into exile in Germany. These changes affecting Alevism in diaspora not only originated so obviously in the pre- and extra-diasporic context of the country of origin, but also in the attempt to revitalize Alevism almost simultaneously in Turkey and Germany, although in different forms. In Turkey, there was the so called ‘explosion’ (patlama) of a debate on Alevism in the media and especially in intellectuals’ discourse which started in 1989 (Vorhoff 1995), and the movement to establish formal Alevi associations in Germany began in the same year. Both developments are of course closely related. Their difference reflects the different conditions in the political and cultural contexts of home and host countries: due to legal prohibition it was not possible to form explicit Alevi associations in Turkey, whereas in Germany the scope of Turkish media was much smaller.25 However, to a lesser degree, developments in one country were mirrored in the other. The development of new forms

Religion or culture?

151

of ritual performance is also quite similar in Turkey and Germany. Martin Stokes (1996) writes about a secularized or ‘culturalized’ cem in the Turkish town Iskenderun and I once witnessed a similar kind of ‘didactic cem’ in Istanbul in 1998 – a cem performed especially to show the ritual to a visiting group of young Germans and Alevis from Germany. I cannot go into detail about the relationship between developments among Alevis in Turkey and in Germany – much work remains to be done in this field. But already from these few remarks, it becomes clear that a model of diaspora emphasizing perpetuation and change as framed primarily in an opposition or contrast of home and host countries is too restricted. The case of Alevis I would rather conceptualize is as a broad cultural continuum of ongoing change in both home country and diaspora. Speaking simply of preservation and change (of identity, tradition, culture or whatever) is too closely related and similar to a rhetoric of essentialism which activists of diaspora so frequently like to employ and which is dangerously close to older, reifying anthropological rhetorics of culture and identity.26 In this rhetoric, in spite of all changes, something essential remains the same. After all, it seems that Hindus in Britain are still Hindus and Alevis in Germany are still Alevis. But is this simply true? The rhetoric of preservation obscures the fact that actors constantly re-constitute and re-invent (or refuse to reconstitute) in diverse ways what is imagined as simply continuing. Imagining Alevism as culture is different from imagining Alevism as religion, and there are sufficient ‘Alevis’ in Germany (probably in Turkey too) who, continuing the kind of thought which almost became hegemonic in the 1970s, argue that there is no meaningful way to imagine Alevis as forming a community at all. I use the rather lengthy expression ‘cultural continuum of ongoing change’ intentionally in order to avoid implications of boundedness, closure and persistence still so easily associated with the concept of culture.27 This cultural continuum has to be conceptualized as fundamentally open, as multi-stranded, as possessing many ‘plugs’ where other continua, originating in the contexts of both host and home country, can ‘log in’. At a micro level this continuum is constituted by the multitude of actors in their respective positions in networks and institutions producing and reproducing a variety of discourses and practices. From this perspective, a community, be it diasporic or not, cannot be taken for granted but becomes an open question. The question of community is answered by actors from a number of different points of view, leading to diverse propositions about what Alevism is. This conceptualization also allows us to take into account a multiplicity of actor’s identifications (Sökefeld 1999b). Alevis are not simply Alevis, they may practise, temporarily or continually, a host of other identifications which of course reflect upon each other. In this chapter, dealing with identifying Alevism as ‘religion’ or ‘culture’, I have shown how actors’ identifications as politically left bear upon concepts of what Alevism is. These concepts are not individual, private ideas, but they enter into public discourse and practice and contribute to the ongoing debate about how to understand and practise Alevism. The diversity of ideas and identification, related to each other in a process of contestation, becomes itself an essential aspect of Alevi culture.

152

Martin Sökefeld

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on discussions with many Alevis in Hamburg. I am very grateful for their willingness to share their views with me. Special thanks are due to Hasan Kƒlavuz and Nail Araz. I am further indebted to Waltraud Kokot and Susanne Schwalgin for carefully reading the paper and for their many valuable suggestions.

Notes 1 For an overview over the history of Alevism see Kehl-Bodrogi 1988. 2 The word ‘Alevi’ is derived from Ali. 3 In 1998 the Kemalist faction in the Turkish parliament attempted to tighten this prohibition and to increase the punishment of contraventions. 4 The most important and, among Alevis, most frequently commemorated events of the last decades are the following: in December 1978 fascist ‘Grey Wolves’ attacked houses in the town of Kahramanmara‡; in June 1993 an Alevi culture festival was attacked by Islamists in Sivas; and in March 1995 several Alevis were assassinated by unknown terrorists in the Gazi, a quarter of Istanbul; and in subsequent demonstrations more people were gunned down by police forces. 5 The word is derived from the Arabic root jama‘a, to gather, to collect, to unite, to combine. 6 In my paper I omit the Turkish plural forms -ler/-lar if only single words are quoted and use the English plural(s) in order to make reading easier. 7 For both Muslims and Alevis a day starts after sundown so that a ‘western’ Thursday evening is already Friday according to Alevi time-reckoning. 8 There is another community-building element of cem which today is frequently mentioned as an essential part of the ritual although it rarely practised. This is the rite in which two young couples enter into musahiplik or partnership for life. It is a relationship which requires partners to take great responsibility toward each other and to share virtually everything in case of need. For a discussion of musahiplik see Kehl-Bodrogi 1988: 182ff. 9 There are hierarchical relations between the different ocaks because every dede is himself the talip of another dede from another ocak. These are again personal hereditary relations between talip and pir which are not framed within a general hierarchy or organization. This is different for the Bekta‡i order of dervishes which is today generally simply counted among Alevis. About the Bekta‡i order see Birge 1937 and Mélikoff 1998. 10 Half of the villages of Tunceli have been destroyed in anti-PKK campaigns by the Turkish armed forces (Nigogosian 1996: 42). 11 For the effects of migration on the practice of Alevism in Turkey and especially musahiplik see also Naess 1988: 182. 12 For an overview over such organizations see Özcan 1989. 13 For a more complete discussion of the development of Alevi organizations in Germany and Hamburg see Sökefeld and Schwalgin 2000. 14 The fact that the designation ‘Alevi’ did not appear in the name of this organization is significant and can be seen as part of the dissimulation strategy. Also in Turkey there were no explicit Alevi associations because they are prohibited by law. 15 The reasons for this division were diverse. Explanations given range from the personal ambitions of the leader of the break-away faction to the opinion that the leaders of the original AKM were ‘atheistic’ and pro-Kurdish. 16 A striking example of this ‘emblematic Alevism’ can be found in little golden replicas of Zülfikar, the Imam Ali’s mythical sword, worn openly by many young Alevis,

Religion or culture?

17 18

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27

153

especially after new acts of violence had been committed in the 1990s. As a demonstration, young Alevis exhibited their being Alevi without knowing very much about what it could mean to be Alevi. In late 1999 I spoke with a fifteen-year-old Alevi-Kurdish boy about how he understands himself. He explained me: ‘Earlier I saw myself as a Turk or Kurd and sometimes I also said I am Alevi. But now I say only I am Alevi.’ He even spoke of Alevis as a people [Volk ]. The boy’s father was deeply involved in Alevi politics of the diaspora, and together with his family he regularly attended cem, but the boy knew virtually nothing about Alevism. For instance, he even had never heard about musahiplik before I asked him whether he could explain the concept to me. For the position of Alevis in the debate about headscarves, see Mandel 1989. ¼lhan, for example, emphasizes that semah is part of cem. He concludes: ‘Semah is not an instrument of show but a service. Therefore the dede says a prayer after semah’ (¼lhan 1998: 52, my translation). The Union of Alevi Youth in Germany (AAGB) issues the following statement on its internet homepage: ‘We do not dance semah at amusements, [cultural] nights, weddings and similar locations!’ A similar, bi-lingual reminder can be found in Anonymous 1997: 20. Mandel interprets the display of a portrait of Atatürk and a Turkish flag at a cem in Berlin in the 1980s as a part of takiya/dissimulation (Mandel 1988: 242f., 1992: 425). I regard this as an overdrawn interpretation because at least until a decade ago many older Alevis continued to hold Atatürk in high esteem, for example because of his supposedly strict secularist policy. Backhausen and Dierl (1996) show that in the late 1980s it was a common practice to display portraits of Atatürk in cem. One of the dedes conducting the cems described by Backhausen and Dierl was the same dede who refused to officiate in the cem of the Alevi Culture Group. Dressler (1999) analyses demands that some Alevi authors make of Atatürk, giving him a quasi-religious meaning and implicitly identifying him with HacƒBekta‡. Kurdish Alevis especially have, however, always been much more critical and current Alevi youth in the diaspora unanimously reject Atatürk and his nationalist ideology. Lütfi Kaleli was among those attacked by Islamists at the culture festival in Sivas, 1993. Fortunately, he could be saved. Can, meaning soul, life, beloved friend, is an form of address frequently used by Alevis to each other, especially in a ritual and formal context. Canlar is the plural form. There are now many German Alevis because among Turkish immigrants Alevis especially have acquired German citizenship. Also several Muslim communities have submitted applications for this legal status, but whereas their applications have almost immediately been rejected, the AABF’s application is being considered and it seems that the status will be granted (cf. Erbekta‡ 1998). Not only scholars but also leaders of other religious communities themselves deem it useful to expand the model of the Jewish diaspora. Thus the Pramukh Swami, head of a branch of the Swami Narayan movement in London advised his followers to ‘emulate the example of the Jews’ (Pocock 1976: 342). During the last few years an ‘explosion’ of Alevi representation in the new medium of the internet could be observed. The majority of this representation is authored from the diaspora although the condition of diaspora is rarely reflected upon in Alevi websites (Sökefeld 2002b). See Handler 1985. For the intended critique of the concept of culture see Sökefeld 1999a. Although many writers now argue against an essentialized concept of culture (for an example in the context of diaspora see Burghart 1987) the concept continues to be very prone to reified imagination.

154

Martin Sökefeld

Bibliography Alte, R. (1998) ‘Der Aufstand von Dersim 1937/38: Die Vollendung der Kolonisation Kurdistans’, in J. Hösler and W. Kessler (eds) Finis Mundi: Endzeiten und Weltenden im östlichen Europa, Stuttgart: Steiner. Anonymous (1997) ‘“Der Semah” in Bari‡: Der Frieden, Alevitisches Jugendmagazin, 1: 19–20. Backhausen, M. and Dierl, A.J. (1996) Der rituelle Gottesdienst CEM des anatolischen Alevismus, Wuppertal: Deimling. Baumann, G. (1992) ‘Ritual implicates “others”: rereading Durkheim in a plural society’, in D. de Coppet (ed.) Understanding Rituals, London: Routledge. Baumann, M. (1995) ‘Conceptualizing diaspora’, Temenos, 31: 19–35. Birge, J.K. (1937) The Bektashi Order of Dervishes, London: Luzac. Burghart, R. (1987) ‘Conclusion: the perpetuation of Hinduism in an alien cultural milieu’, in R. Burghart (ed.) Hinduism in Great Britain, London: Tavistock. Dressler, M. (1999) Die civil religion der Türkei. Kemalistische und alevitische Atatürk-Rezeption im Vergleich, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag. Erbekta‡, S. (1998) ‘Auf dem Weg zu einem Status der Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts’, Stimme der Aleviten, 26: 28–39. Firat, G. (1997) Sozioökonomischer Wandel und ethnische Identität in der kurdisch-alevitischen Region Dersim, Saarbrücken:Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik. Handler, R. (1985) ‘On dialogue and destructive analysis: problems in narrating nationalism and ethnicity’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 41: 171–82. ¼lhan, F. (1998) ‘Semah: Ritual Tanz’, Stimme der Aleviten, 26: 52–3. Kehl-Bodrogi, K. (1988) Die Kƒizƒlba‡/Aleviten, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Knott, K. and Khokher, S. (1993) ‘Religious and ethnic identity among young Muslim women in Bradford’, New Community, 19(4): 593–610. Leach, E. (1976) Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Connected, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mandel, R. (1988) ‘ “We called for manpower, but people came instead”: the foreigner problem and Turkish guestworkers in West Germany’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago. —— (1989) ‘Turkish headscarves and the “foreigner problem”: constructing difference through emblems of identity’, New German Critique, 46: 27–46. —— (1992) ‘The Alevi-Bektashi identity in a foreign context: the example of Berlin’, in A. Popovic and G. Veinstein (eds) ‘Bektachiyya: Etudes sur l’ordre mystique des Bektachis et les groups relevant de Hadji Bektach’, Revue des Etudes Islamique, 60: 419–26. Mélikoff, I. (1998) Hadji Bektach: Un mythe et ses avatars, Leiden: Brill. Naess, R. (1988) ‘Being an Alevi Muslim in south-western Anatolia and in Norway: the impact of migration on a heterodox Turkish community’, in T. Gerholm and Y.G. Lithman (eds) The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe, London: Mansell. Nigogosian, A. (1996) ‘Turkey’s Kurdish problem in the 1990s: recent trends’, in R. Olson (ed.) The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the 1990s: Its Impact on Turkey and the Middle East, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Özcan, E. (1989) Türkische Immigrantenorganisationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Die Entwicklung politischer Organisationen und politischer Orientierung unter türkischen Arbeitsimmigranten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Berlin West, Berlin: Hitit-Verlag. Pocock, D. (1976) ‘Preservation of the religious life: Hindu immigrants in England’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 10 (new series): 341–65.

Religion or culture?

155

Sökefeld, M. (1999a) ‘The concept of culture between politics and social anthropology: from difference to continuity’, Ethnologie Heute, 3. Available online: http://www.unimuenster. de/EthnologieHeute/eh3/culture.htm. —— (1999b) ‘Debating self, identity, and culture in anthropology’, Current Anthropology, 40: 417–47. —— (2002a) ‘Alevi dedes in the German diaspora: the transformation of a religious institution’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 127, 2: 163–86. —— (2002b) ‘Alevism online: re-imagining a community in virtual space’, Diaspora, 11, 1: 85–123. Sökefeld, M. and Schwalgin, S. (2000) ‘Institutions and their agents in diaspora: a comparison of Armenians in Athens and Alevis in Germany’, Transnational Communities Working Papers Series. Available online: http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working_ papers.htm. Stokes, M. (1996) ‘Ritual, identity and the state: an Alevi (Shi’a) cem ceremony’, in K.E Schulze, M. Stokes and C. Campbell (eds) Nationalism, Minorities and Diasporas. Identities and Rights in the Middle East, London: I.B. Taurus. Turner, V. (1995) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Vertovec, S. (1997) ‘Three meanings of “diaspora” exemplified among south Asian religions’, Diaspora, 6(3): 277–99. Vorhoff, K. (1995) Zwischen Glaube, Nation und neuer Gemeinschaft: Alevitische Identität in der Türkei in der Gegenwart, Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag. Yaman, M. (1998) Alevilik’te Cem: Inanç, Ibadet, Erkân, Istanbul: Ufuk Maatbasƒ.

156

9

Andreas Ackermann

A double minority Notes on the emerging Yezidi diaspora Andreas Ackermann

Introduction In recent years it has become increasingly clear that diasporic phenomena are both a theoretical and a methodological challenge to the field of ethnographic representation, especially with regard to the culture concept of the discipline. Lately, the idea of closed cultures localized in bounded territories has become obsolete due to processes of globalization as well as the constantly increasing volume and velocity of the global transmission of information. The awareness of a growing dispersion, decentring, interpenetration, and general complexity of globalized and transnational communities is reflected in anthropology as a rising concern with ‘identity’ rather than with ‘culture’. Such identities escape in part from the familiar either-or classifications and become defined more by a logic of ‘both-and’, implying not cultural wholeness anymore, but partial and overlapping identities instead (Kearney 1995: 558). Moreover, the concomitants of the global condition call for the expansion of the traditional ethnographer’s field into several fields of research. Transnational migration crosses boundaries and diaspora communities maintain multiple relationships, which is why it has been suggested that the ethnographer should conduct multi-sited research by following either people, things or ideas (Marcus 1995). The title of this chapter refers to the fact that the Yezidis, a small ethno-religious group of approximately 300,000 Kurdish-speaking (predominantly Kurmanji ) people, constitute a minority in a twofold meaning. First, as Kurds they represent an often persecuted ethnic minority within their countries of origin; second, as followers of Yezidism they are a religious minority within the Muslim majority, having often been denounced as ‘devil-worshippers’. Precisely because of these two factors a considerable number of Yezidi have had to leave their homelands in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and many of them now live in Germany. In their new country of residence, they no longer face persecution, and do not have to conceal their religious beliefs and practices. To the contrary, suddenly they have to reconstruct, practise and represent their religion according to the conditions of a modern, culturally complex society. As the Yezidis become simultaneously more urban and literate, they seek both a concept and practice of religion that cannot only be performed but also debated intellectually within the community, as well as explained to outsiders.

A double minority

157

This chapter will discuss how far these processes of changing self-representation and therefore of identity (re-)construction of the Yezidi-community in Germany can be fruitfully analysed within the framework of diaspora concepts. It is based on a preliminary analysis of material from a study on the transformation of Yezidi identity in the process of migration.1 Identity is understood as the expression of coincidence and solidarity of the individual person and the group, socially constructed rather than culturally ‘given’. The members of a group stress their ‘sameness’ by identifying themselves with characteristic qualities which can relate to language, material culture, religion, kinship, but also with gender-, age- and profession-specific characteristics (cf. Müller 1987). The notion of ‘group’ means that its members have something in common with each other, which distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other putative groups. Group identity thus refers simultaneously to both similarity and difference. The word expresses a relational idea: the opposition of one group to others or to other social entities. Because the use of the word ‘group’ expresses a distinction, it seems appropriate to focus on boundaries rather than on the cultural traditions they supposedly preserve (cf. Barth 1969). Although globalization and the development of diasporas are separate phenomena with no necessary causal connections, ‘they “go together” extraordinary well’ (Cohen 1997: 175). Diasporas are disproportionately advantaged by the many changes in technology, economic organization, modes of travel, production and communication. To the extent that travel as well as communication across long distances become easier and cheaper, more and more diaspora members can afford to keep contact on a regular base. Besides telecommunication and video technology, it is particularly the internet that becomes more important every day. As it is relatively affordable and thus available to a comparatively wide range of ‘users’, quite difficult to control by state authorities, and able to transport vast amounts of text, pictures and sounds very quickly around the globe, irrespective of national boundaries, it constitutes a major ‘technology of diasporization’ (Tölölyan). Some members of the Yezidi community increasingly make use of this technology, which is why I will argue that, although it seems too early to designate the Yezidi community as a diaspora yet, there are clear signs of its diasporization. To support my argument, I first give a short account of the traditional Yezidi identity markers, after which their situation in Germany is going to be sketched briefly. Next, I discuss which kind of diaspora conceptualization would be applicable in the Yezidi case and present evidence for diasporic developments as well as points that seem to contradict the rhetoric of diaspora.

Yezidi identity markers The Yezidis live geographically dispersed in several areas of Kurdistan,2 mostly cultivating grain, vegetables and small livestock, predominantly sheep and goats. Estimates of their numbers in Iraq vary between 100,000 and 250,000; the largest Yezidi communities are currently found in the Dihok, Mosul and Sinjar areas of northern Iraq (situated in the so-called ‘safe haven’ of the United Nations, north

158

Andreas Ackermann

of the 36th parallel).3 In the Ottoman Empire, Yezidis played an influential part in Kurdish tribal confederations, but successive persecutions reduced their numbers and drove waves of emigrants into the Caucasus, where they played a notable role in the republics of Armenia and Georgia, and where they currently number around 40,000. It seems, however, that recent nationalist developments in Georgia have made the situation for the Yezidis difficult again. As a result, more and more people from Georgia in particular seek asylum in Germany. About 5,000 Yezidis live in northern Syria, mostly in the area around Aleppo. Many of the approximately 10,000 Yezidis of eastern Turkey were by the second half of the twentieth century living in small, poor villages surrounded by hostile neighbours, and were often reduced to practising their religious and cultural rituals in secret. They have moved en masse to Europe during the 1980s, mainly to Germany, and the troubled situation in northern Iraq has prompted many prominent members of the community there to follow them.4 At present, it can be assumed that about 30,000 Yezidi live in Germany. The term ‘Yezidi’ seems to be derived from the Persian-Kurdish word ‘Azdan’, meaning ‘god’ (Dulz 2000: 3). The Yezidi see themselves as a chosen people, mainly because their origin is very special, unlike that of other peoples. They are descended from Adam’s son Shehîd b. Jerr (‘Witness, son of the Jar’): According to the tradition, Adam, irritated by Eve’s claims that all their children belonged to her, asserted that it was the father who gives life to his progeny. In order to prove this he challenged Eve to a contest. Both deposited their seed in separate jars. After nine months, Eve’s jar contained only worms and insects, but Adam’s brought forth Shehîd. The latter subsequently married a houri from Paradise, and the Yezidis are descended from this union. (Kreyenbroek 1995: 37) Yezidism as it is known today developed out of a movement representing a mystical interpretation of Islam by the ‘Adawiyya order of Sheykh ‘Adi ibn Musafir (c. 1073–1162 AD) which established itself in Kurdistan. Yezidi texts and customs, however, show that the enormous influence of Sheykh ‘Adi and his order was overlaid upon a background of more ancient beliefs, because important elements of Yezidi mythology and practice have ancient Zoroastrian roots. There are similarities between the religion of the Yezidis and that of other groups who do claim Islamic identity, such as the Alevis and the Ahl-e Haqq of Iranian Kurdistan.5 It is important to note that Yezidism is not a religion of the Book, as its holy texts have been orally transmitted over the generations and literacy was formerly forbidden to Yezidis. Allison thus termed it ‘a religion of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy’, having no single statement of faith embracing all Yezidis and no single way of praying. As such it is a belief system in a very loose sense, with many variations in practice between individuals and the geographically dispersed communities. To generalize, seven Holy Beings are venerated, chiefly Melek Tawus, the Peacock Angel (identified by some non-Yezidis with Satan). They may be incarnated in human form many times and are called khas. This institution enables

A double minority

159

the Yezidis to incorporate holy figures from other religions. Islamic figures thus venerated include Ali, the Caliph Abu Bakir and Hasan al-Basri; from Christianity, Jesus is equated with the Yezidi Sheykh Shems (the Sun). The overriding importance of avoiding pollution and sustaining purity is obvious not only in the Yezidis’ attitude towards the elements, particularly earth and fire, but also in their religious class system, which is a distinctive feature of the Yezidi community. The Yezidis are separated into two basic endogamous classes, the laymen or commoners called mirîd, and the clerics. A term of Sufi origin, the word mirîd denotes the ‘disciple’ of a Master. Generally, however, the word is used to denote those who do not belong to the clergy (Kreyenbroek 1995: 135). The community is led by the Mîr of Sheykhan, who is traditionally regarded as the earthly viceregent of Sheykh ‘Adi, and also of Melek Tawus, and his person is felt to be sacred. While the powers of the Mîr theoretically are almost unlimited – he cannot be removed and has the right to excommunicate any believer at will – internecine squabbles and harsh political realities have had the effect of detracting somewhat from his authority. The clergy is divided further into several titles. In the German dispersion only three of these – the Sheykh, Pîr, and the ‘Brother (or Sister) of the Hereafter’ – play a role in the everyday lives of most people, which is why I will concentrate on them.6 Each Yezidi – including the Sheykhs and Pîrs themselves – must have a Sheykh and Pîr. Hence every Sheykh has a number of lay families who are his mirîd or ‘followers’. He acts as a spiritual guide for them by composing prayers, or imposing taboos, and is expected to participate on their behalf in the performance of religious rites, such as those of birth, marriage and death. In return, the mirîd pay the Sheykh a certain sum of money each year, show him great respect, and to some extent obey his authority. The Pîrs’ status is supposed to be somewhat inferior to that of the Sheykhs, which is perhaps most clearly suggested by the fact that the Yezidis give their Pîr about half the amount of the dues they contribute to their Sheykh. However, some deny any such status of inequality exists and in practice a Pîr can perform most of the duties of a Sheykh if the latter is not available. Kreyenbroek notes that, while sheykhly families have names of Arabic origin – which imply descent from figures who, historically, were relatives of Sheykh Adi – families of Pîrs tend to have Kurdish names. The main reason for any difference in status between Sheykhs and Pîrs may therefore simply be one of ancestry, the Pîrs being the descendants of prominent companions or disciples of Sheykh Adi while the eponyms of the sheykhly lineages were his relatives. (Kreyenbroek 1995: 131–2) Similarly to Sheykh and Pîr, every Yezidi has to have a ‘Brother (or Sister) of the Hereafter’ (birayê or xushka akhiretê ) from a sheykhly family. During or after puberty, a man normally chooses a ‘Brother’, and a woman a ‘Sister’, but it is permitted to depart from this rule. It is believed that the ties between the two existed before this life, and will endure after it. The ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’ has certain

160

Andreas Ackermann

tasks to perform at rites of passage, and must help the layman in every way. In return, he or she receives regular offerings of money, and can expect help and service from the lay person. Another important determinant of the special character of the Yezidi community is their strict rule of endogamy. Every Yezidi has to look for a suitable partner within his or her own class, while Sheykhs and Pîrs quite often have to respect even more constricting rules with regards to the choice of spouse from specified families. If a Yezidi marries a non-Yezidi, he or she will be regarded as no longer belonging to the community. Equally, one cannot become a convert to Yezidism, one can only be born a Yezidi. Whereas the Yezidis thus constituted tightly-knit communities with clear-cut boundaries in their respective countries of origin, the process of migration has changed the points of reference for Yezidi identity quite substantially. Until recently, identification as Kurd, as member of the local community, as member of a tribe and a family had been defined fairly clearly. Even more important, being Yezidi always meant belonging to an oppressed minority, having to hide one’s religious beliefs and practices. In the new environment, however, amidst dramatically changed conditions of life, these identifications and ascriptions of identity and specified belonging increasingly make less sense. In Germany, the Yezidis are not persecuted and they do not have to hide their religious beliefs and practices. Quite the contrary, here they have to define their identity through cultural and religious markers according to the demands of a modern, culturally complex society. Thus the Yezidi community has to undergo a quite substantial transformation – from religious invisibility in the country of origin to visibility concerning ethno-religious markers in their country of residence. For the first time they face a situation in which they are not discriminated against for their religion, in fact, most Germans have never heard of it, and if they have, it is most probably because they have read Karl May (1951, 1952) during their youth, who – drawing on Layard (1849) – portrays them rather sympathetically. However, the Yezidis are – like any other immigrants – suspected of taking jobs from the locals and, because they are perceived as ‘Kurds’, become associated with guerrilla warfare, drug dealing and self-immolation by burning. Their own identification as the chosen people with strict marriage rules and the prohibition of converts additionally serves to isolate their community and tends to estrange the younger Yezidis who have been raised in Germany. In addition, the rules of class endogamy when combined with the scarcity of Yezidis in general in Germany, prevent some individuals (particularly from the priestly titles) from finding a suitable marriage partner in Germany at all. As the Yezidis become more urban and literate, particularly young members of the community express the need for a religious concept with core beliefs which can be debated intellectually within the community and at the same time explained to outsiders. In marked difference to the tradition, where only the Sheykhs and Pîrs would debate religious issues, Yezidis in Germany must be able to explain their religious concepts publicly, for example in court, when applying for asylum. In numerous cases, Yezidi have been refused asylum precisely because they were not able to do so (cf. Kulturforum der yezidischen Glaubensgemeinschaft 2000). Most

A double minority

161

mirîd hardly know anything about their religion, except for the most basic facts about Melek Tawus and some religious restrictions, particularly regarding food. Until recently, they were illiterate, thus completely depending on the clergy for information about their religion. Furthermore, because of their geographically dispersed settlements, some of them were visited by their Sheykhs and Pîrs sometimes only once a year, and quite often locally different traditions developed. As a result, most mirîd know only very little about their religion, and their children even less.7 Therefore it is not surprising that the situation of the Yezidis in dispersion has been compared to that of a sugar cube in hot water. Against the background of a widespread fear that the Yezidi identity might disappear in the course of migration, a six-point declaration has been adopted by the Civata Ruhani, the Yezidi religious council, comprising of the Mîr and the Baba Sheykh (the ‘Father Sheykh’, the leader of the Sheykhs and thus the spiritual leader of the faith), as well as several feqirs (the Yezidi religious order) and quewwals (who play sacred music during religious ceremonies), during a visit to Germany in 1997. The declaration calls for the collection of all relevant oral traditions and the forging of a written scripture, as well as the reform of some of the taboos. Referring to the latter aspect, the text states: We have to compete with other views on life and other value systems. Certain traditions and customs, which are not up to date any more, and do not belong to the core issues of our religion, will have to be reformed or have to be abandoned completely. Otherwise, the youth will set itself apart both from us and from Yezidism, as it becomes already visible in Germany. (Dengê Êzîdiyan, 6/7 1997: 60; author’s translation) According to Smart, the diaspora situation usually reinforces contact with major world cultural forces, leading to the need to express the faith in the face of universal religions and secular values. The religion needs to give an account of itself and to articulate its teachings, perhaps under some general principle – e.g., that every group is entitled to its own cultural and religious traditions, pointing to some aspect of divine truth. Such an argument of course leads away from tradition, which needed no defence. Apart from the adaptation of diasporas to host cultures, there are possibilities, inherent in cultural interfaces, of new forms, ‘betwixt and between’, constituting religions in the making (Smart 1987: 296). The process of migration seems to cause a twofold transformation of the Yezidi community: on the one hand, ‘Yezidism will change from an oral religion of orthopraxy to a scriptural religion of orthodoxy’ (Allison 2001: 50), thus homogenizing Yezidi identity. On the other hand, the beginnings of the transformation of Yezidi social structures can be observed, which may be described as ‘diasporization’ of the Yezidi community, at least as far as Germany is concerned.

Diaspora The term diaspora plays an increasingly prominent role in cultural studies and anthropology. At the same time however, ‘diaspora’ and, more specifically, ‘diaspora

162

Andreas Ackermann

community’ seem to be used more and more as a metaphoric designation to describe different categories of people (expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic minorities) as well as different peoples (Cubans and Mexicans in the USA; Pakistanis in Britain; Maghrebis in France; Turks in Germany; the Chinese in southeast Asia; Greeks, Poles, Palestinians, blacks in North America and the Caribbean; Indians and Armenians in various countries; Corsicans in Marseille and French-speaking Belgians living in communal enclaves in Wallonia) – whose common denominator is more or less the feeling of ‘not being there’ (Safran 1991: 83). Referring to Jewish communities, diaspora signified a collective trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile. Other peoples abroad who have also maintained strong collective identities have, in recent years, defined themselves as diasporas, though they were neither active agents of colonization nor passive victims of persecution. The idea of a diaspora thus varies greatly. Safran (1991) and Cohen (1997) in particular have tried to find some common ground in the various enumerations of the characteristics of a diaspora community. In combining them, one can distill the following three main attributes: 1

2 3

Dispersal from an original homeland or ‘centre’, often traumatically, to two or more foreign or ‘peripheral’ regions; alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work or in pursuit of trade; A strong (ethnic) group consciousness together with a collective memory and myth about the homeland and the desire for an eventual return; empathy for and solidarity with co-ethnic members, in other countries of settlement.

Referring to these attributes, is it possible to describe the Yezidi community as a diaspora? With regard to the first two characteristics, the Yezidis surely qualify. There can be no doubt about the fact that the Yezidis have been dispersed, mostly traumatically, from their original homeland(s) to other foreign regions, notably to Europe. And, although it seems debatable how far one can refer to a single Yezidi ‘homeland’ in a strict sense (since the Yezidis have been scattered throughout Kurdistan for a long time now), there is at least a notion of ‘Kurdistan’ as a homeland prevalent among most Yezidis, who often have supported the Kurdish struggle.8 Furthermore, one could point to the central sanctuary at Sheykh ‘Adi in northern Iraq as the symbolic location of the Yezidi homeland. Regular contributions are made by the German Yezidi community, in order to maintain the religious sites there.9 As far as a strong (ethnic) group consciousness together with a collective memory and myth about the homeland is concerned, I have already mentioned the strict rules of endogamy, as well as their shared history of persecution. Notwithstanding that many Yezidis have realized by now that it will be a long time before an eventual return to their respective areas of origin becomes possible, most of them still express the desire to go ‘back’. However, what is often overlooked in the discussions about diasporas is the last ingredient of the ‘diaspora distillate’: the empathy for and solidarity with co-ethnic members, in other countries of settlement. In this respect the Yezidis most probably

A double minority

163

do not represent a diaspora, at least not at present, simply because it seems not clear – even to the Yezidis themselves – in which other European countries Yezidi migrants live, apart from the communities in Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Georgia, with which it is very difficult to maintain regular contact. This might change soon, because – in addition to the aforementioned process of a shift from orthopraxy to orthodoxy and the forging of a binding script – there are indications of active and conscious attempts to establish Yezidi networks, mainly through the internet, which will be analysed in the next section. Therefore, it seems preferable to speak of the diasporization of the Yezidi community in Germany and other countries than Kurdistan, rather than about a full-grown diaspora, although the Yezidis themselves have started to use the term in self-reference (see next paragraph). What makes Cohen’s diaspora conceptualization especially interesting for the context of the Yezidis is his attempt to get away from the exclusively negative connotation of the term. To his comprehensive list of diaspora attributes he adds the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching diasporic life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism (Cohen 1997: 21). Against the perspective of ‘Babylon’ as a sole experience of enslavement, exile and displacement for the Jewish diaspora, Cohen presents a ‘revisionist view’, pointing to the benefits of integration into a rich and diverse alien culture. According to him, a substantial number of Judaeans adopted Babylonian names and customs; the group as a whole used the Babylonian calendar and embraced the Aramaic language. For those who wished to stay true to their roots, their enforced residence in Babylon provided an opportunity to construct and define their historical experience, to invent their tradition. Myth, folk-tales, oral history and legal records were combined into the embryonic Bible, while the earnest discussion groups at the home of charismatic figures like Jeremiah and Ezekiel (‘the prophets’) turned into rudimentary synagogues. (Cohen 1997: 4) This reading of diaspora as not only the experience of exile and displacement but also of a potential creativity perfectly fits the case of the Yezidi ‘diasporization’. In Germany, for the first time, the Yezidi community is free to live openly, to discuss and develop aspects of its religious and cultural identity. In exile, people who formerly lived scattered and without much contact in various countries are developing the notion of a common Yezidi identity. The last part of this chapter will thus briefly highlight some aspects of this ‘making of ’ the Yezidi diaspora.

Diasporization A major step in the creation of a Yezidi diaspora identity is the attempt to spread information about Yezidi culture and religion among both an interested wider public and the Yezidi themselves. Several cultural institutions have been founded in Germany in order to pursue this goal, two of which will be briefly introduced in the following: the Cultural Forum of the Yezidi Religious Community

164

Andreas Ackermann

(Kulturforum der yezidischen Glaubensgemeinschaft e.V.) in Oldenburg and the Yezidi Centre Abroad (EZiA) in Hannover.10 They try to circulate information and stimulate discussion about Yezidism, predominantly through the publication of their respective journals, Dengê Êzîdiyan (The Voice of the Yezidis ) and Roj (Sun ), a ‘periodical journal concerning Yezidian affairs’. Both feature articles – mostly in Kurdish and German, sometimes in English, Turkish and Arabic – on the history of the Yezidis, on religious texts and practices as well as reports on the recent situation of the remaining Yezidi communities in the respective homelands and in Germany, the latter is quite commonly referred to as ‘diaspora’. In an editorial, the publishers of Dengê Êzîdiyan state their aim, which is ‘to clear up the seldom researched and often misinterpreted Kurdish religion of the Yezidi, who live in Iraq, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Syria and the diaspora in Germany’ (http://www. yezidi.org/english/e_main.html (05.02.00)) [authors’ emphasis]. They continue: In Germany, the Yezidis have a historical opportunity to express freely their thoughts and feelings in writing and also the freedom to publish the same. The development of a Yezidi literature is a basic need for the identity of the Yezidis in this modern society. (…) the Yezidis need a forum for discussion and reflection on their life and problems in the context of the Yezidi-religious teachings. (…) The aim of DÊ is to foster controversy and debate. This intensive discussion about Yezidism, which was so rare in yezidish history, is a pebble contributed to the larger mosaic stone of the exhaustive and unified picture of the Yezidi-tapestry. http://www.yezidi.org/english/e_wir.html (05.02.00) Where the Oldenburg Cultural Forum could be described as oriented towards the everyday life needs of the Yezidis, for example by building the first Yezidi Community Centre in Germany (offering facilities for festivities, education courses on Yezidi culture and religion as well as death rituals), the Yezidi Centre Abroad in Hannover is dedicated to an intellectual academic debate of Yezidi affairs. A good example of this is the (rather pretentiously named) ‘First World Congress on Yezidism’, which they organized together with the German human rights organization Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker) in January 2000. Under the topic ‘The Yezidi faith community in the homeland and in exile’ they brought together academics (among them the author of this paper), human rights workers and Yezidi clerics from Germany, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Georgia, whose presentations and discussions were followed for three days by a predominantly Yezidi audience of more than 500 people (cf. Lerch 2000). The event provided an illuminating chance to witness the outline of a diaspora in the making. While one of the community leaders opened the congress with the statement: ‘We Yezidis are looking for our identity’, the occasional religious scientist and anthropologist taking part in the construction of the collective imagination of community offered some ideas about what future Yezidi religion and identity might become. Hence they were talking about ‘Yezidism, Zoroastrianism and the tradition of the Ahl-e Haqq’ and ‘Continuity and change of Yezidi identity in Germany’ respectively.

A double minority

165

The most interesting processes of diasporization, however, seems to take place on the internet. Both the Cultural Forum of the Yezidi Religious Community and the Yezidi Centre Abroad are by now present on the internet with selected articles and some basic information about Yezidism. EZiA also presents some documentation on the above-mentioned ‘First World Congress on Yezidism’, and one of its members has posted an electronic questionnaire concerning migrationspecific aspects of health problems on the net.11 In addition, Dengê Êzîdiyan features an email forum, where questions of Yezidi identity are discussed among Yezidi, Muslim Kurds and Germans, often in a rather polemical, insulting manner. Topics that draw a lot of debate and comments among obviously younger participants include arranged marriage and marriage to non-Yezidis, the origin of Yezidism (in particular, whether Yezidism is a form of Zoroastrianism), information about Yezidi holidays, as well as the reformation of traditional customs and religious practices.12 The internet could also be a starting point for the Yezidi community becoming transnational. Up to now, the occasional term ‘transnational’ has been absent in the discussion of the Yezidi diaspora, as it did not seem to apply. If transnationalism is defined as a ‘process by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement’ (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1), it becomes obvious that this definition applies only in a very limited sense to the present situation of the German Yezidi community. Although they surely would like to ‘develop and maintain multiple relations – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders’ (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1) and ‘develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously’ (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 2), they are relatively restricted in their means to do so, mainly because of the situation in their respective countries of origin. Apart from that, there is not much information about Yezidis in other parts of Europe and abroad. However, this might change in the near future and the first signs of a coming change can be discerned. Recently, a volunteer working with Yezidi refugees in Atlanta asked in the Dengê Êzîdiyan electronic forum for more information about Yezidi culture. Private communication revealed that there are at least 30–40 families living in the United States and maybe 10 families living in Canada. In the meantime, this volunteer has offered to establish contact between the author and some of the US Yezidi. If a continuing communication is going to develop involving Yezidi on both sides of the net, this could be one of the starting points for the Yezidi transnationalization of the Yezidi diaspora. Moreover, the technology of computer-mediated communication facilitates not only the spread of information among the Yezidi community, but also makes possible the presentation of similar information to a theoretically virtually unlimited nonYezidi audience as well. Looking at the user statistics, one finds an average of thirty visitors a day to the website of Dengê Êzîdiyan, these visits originate not only from Germany, Turkey, Georgia and Armenia, but also from as far as Australia, Malaysia, Yemen and Japan, to give but a few examples of the approximately eighty countries listed.13

166

Andreas Ackermann

The picture offered by this article would be distorted, if reference were restricted only to the homogenization processes of Yezidi identity. Exclusive focus on the homogenizing religious changes from orthopraxy to orthodoxy are nevertheless accompanied by other dynamics of internal differentiation and emerging social transformation within the Yezidi community. The process of migration brings to the fore several fields of tension within which Yezidi individuals as well the community as a whole have to take positions. I shall mention three: religion, politics and social structure: 1

2

3

With regard to Yezidi religion, there is a continuing debate about whether Yezidism is ‘really’ a Zoroastrian religion. There have been several answers to this question, predominantly arguing against this interpretation (for example, Kreyenbroek 1995: 60f.), but they have not been able to end the discussion. For a better understanding of this ongoing debate, one has to look at the strategic implications: if the Yezidis are indeed Zoroastrians, they would have to be considered a religion of the Book, thus gaining the same toleration under Islam as Christians and the Jews. Furthermore, as Zoroastrians they would belong to, and if accepted, would be engulfed by a much larger community of millions of followers, reaching as far as India. However, this interpretation also holds the danger of a split of the Yezidi community, because individuals who doubt the affiliation to Zoroastriansim have frequently been accused of ‘betraying the Kurdish cause’, since many Kurdish intellectuals believe Zoroastrism to be the origin of Kurdishness. This leads to the next space of contention, where the Yezidis have to situate themselves within Kurdish politics. Although most Yezidis probably do share the utopia of a ‘Free Kurdistan’, the question of political affiliation with either the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) in Turkey and Germany, or with the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Iraq, is by far more difficult to answer and burdened with often serious consequences.14 Adherence to Kurdish ethnic status and to one of these two political parties would presumably lift the status of persecuted religious minority from the Yezidis – either by promoting the ‘Kurdish common cause’, where religious differences are supposed to play no role or by propagating the notion that originally all Kurds were Yezidis before they converted to or were coerced into conversion to Islam. But such adherence would also make demands that can turn out to be rather counterproductive for the Yezidis in Germany. Furthermore, many Yezidis suspect that even in a ‘Free Kurdistan’ they would end up as a minority again. Although many Yezidi institutions try to abstain from identifying openly with one of the political parties involved, they often find themselves confronted with quite substantial pressure to join the existing networks of political influence and power. The process of diasporization also affects the social structure of the Yezidi community, especially with regard to the division between ordinary mirîd laypersons and clergy. The previously mentioned ‘First World Congress on Yezidism’ provides a good example of this transformation. Although both the

A double minority

167

Mîr and the Baba Sheykh, the political and the spiritual leader of the Yezidi, were present and engaged in the debate, the whole event was organized and controlled mainly by people who do not belong to the priestly class, who are mirîd. They are the same people who also manage the representation and imagination of Yezidism on the respective internet sites. It seems therefore that – quite similar to developments within the Alevi community, which Sökefeld has described in a recent paper (Sökefeld 1999) – the distribution of information about the Yezidis is no longer the privilege of religious professionals like the Sheykhs and Pîrs, but of people who in more traditional settings would most probably be positioned at the receiving end of lines of communication about Yezidism. They would be consumers of knowledge and representation, not producers and distributors (cf. Sökefeld 1999: 19–20).

Conclusion As I have tried to argue in this chapter, it seems too early to describe the Yezidi community in Germany as a full-fledged diaspora. Although it fulfils two prerequisites of the previously suggested diaspora concept – the dispersal from a homeland called ‘Kurdistan’ and a strong ethno-religious identity, combined with the desire to return some day, it falls short of the third, the relationship with other Yezidi communities in different countries of exile. Nevertheless I think it is justified to speak about an ongoing process of the diasporization of the Yezidis. Among the examples for such a process I have mentioned the institutionalization of the attempt to create a better understanding about Yezidi culture and religion among both an interested wider public and the Yezidis themselves. The representation of Yezidi culture and religion through the publication of journals, the creation of websites and the cooperation with academics accompanies the change from an oral religion of orthopraxy to a scriptural religion of orthodoxy, where differing local traditions become homogenized into a more binding diasporic identity. The process of migration leads to a transformation of the Yezidi community, where the religious professionals may lose their traditional privileged knowledge to a group of young Yezidi intellectuals and academics that begin to determine the future discourses about the Yezidi identity in the diaspora. It will be most interesting to observe the directions in which this process is developing. Several questions immediately rise in this respect. For example, will the distinction between commoners and the clergy lose some of its magnitude and meaning? Will the strict rules of endogamy be loosened, in order to keep the youth within the community? Furthermore, can networks be established that could be called transnational, and if so, will they exist in virtual space only or in geographical space as well? Although one can only guess at the exact outline of the Yezidi diaspora to come, there can hardly be a doubt as to its final establishment. As long as ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ constitute important markers in the political arena of a ‘multicultural’ Germany, and since academics continue to publish articles and books about and available to the Yezidis, this development seems unlikely to be reversed.

168

Andreas Ackermann

Notes 1 This study with the preliminary title ‘The meaning of diaspora: continuity and changes of Yezidi identity in Germany’ originated in the context of the study group on ‘Concepts of Meaning as Systems of Orientation’ at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut) in Essen, Germany. For more information on the study group see Rüsen (1997). 2 Territory whose majority population is Kurdish, but which is ruled by Turkey, Iran and Iraq. 3 Because of the Yezidi’s status as an oppressed minority, it is very difficult to get reliable data about their numbers and actual places of settlement. Depending if the sources draw on Yezidi organizations or governments, numbers vary considerably. The numbers given in the following go back to Kreyenbroek’s (1995) rather conservative estimates. 4 It remains to be seen whether the current situation in Iraq will encourage them to return in the near future. 5 The following is based mainly on Allison (2001) and Kreyenbroek (1995). It is important to keep in mind, however, that most information on Yezidism relates to the Yezidis in northern Iraq, particularly the area near Sheykh ‘Adi. 6 Kreyenbroek (1995: 125–43) gives a detailed account of the Yezidi social organization. 7 This became particularly apparent during the three meetings of the religious council with the local community in Hannover, Oldenburg and Bielefeld in the course of February 2000. During all sessions, the majority of questions asked by the audience always revolved around the same religious topics, predominantly concerning the origin of the name and religion of the Yezidis, the duties of the Sheykhs and Pîrs, taboos and marriage restrictions. 8 As Kurds they would be a ‘stranded minority’ in Cohen’s terminology. The term refers to groups that once were contained within states, or at least definable territories, and became separated by war or subsequent peace treaties, like the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, for example (Cohen 1997: 191). 9 In fact, German Yezidis managed to arrange a meeting of the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Paul Bremer, with Yezidi dignitaries of Northern Iraq. This initiated an ongoing discussion about the future position of the Yezidi community within Iraq (personal communication with Pîr Khidir Silêman, Celle, 10 Ocotber 2003). 10 Other important Yezidi institutions in Germany include the (PKK-oriented) Association of the Yezidis of Kurdistan (Yekitiya Ezdiyen Kurdistan) with several branch offices in major German cities and the Êzidiyan Student Community (Êzidische Studentengemeinde e.V., ÊSG) in Bielefeld. 11 http://www.uni-jena.de/~i8almi/bogen.html (31.04.00). 12 http://www.yezidi.isaja.de/forum/index.php (09.03.04). 13 http://nl.viewstat.nedstatbasic.net/cgi-bin/viewstat?name=yezidi (30.04.00). 14 For a political history of Kurdistan, see McDowall (1996).

Bibliography Allison, C. (2001) The Yezidi Oral Tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan, Richmond: Curzon Press. Barth, F. (ed.) (1969) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Construction of Cultural Difference, London: Allen & Unwin. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Dengê Êzîdiyan, 6/7 (1997) Oldenburg: Dengê Êzîdiyan Verlag. Dulz, I. (2000) ‘Die Religion der Yeziden und ihre heutige Situation in den kurdischen Gebieten des Irak’, unpublished thesis, University of Hamburg.

A double minority

169

Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992) ‘Transnationalism: a new analytic framework for understanding migration’, in N. Glick Schiller, L. Basch, and C. BlancSzanton (eds) Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, New York: The New York Academy of Science. Kearney, M. (1995) ‘The local and the global: the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 547–65. Kreyenbroek, P.G. (1995) Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Traditions, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Kulturforum der yezidischen Glaubensgemeinschaft e.V. (ed.) (2000) Menschenrechts-Situation und Asylproblematik der Yeziden, Oldenburg: Kulturforum der yezidischen Glaubensgemeinschaft e.V. Layard, H.A. (1849) Niniveh and its Remains, 2 Vols, London: Murray. Lerch, W.G. (2000) ‘Im Meer des Islams: Die Religionsgemeinschaft der Yezidi kämpft um ihr Überleben’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26, 01.02.00: 14. Marcus, G.E ( 1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. May, K. (1951 [1880/81]) Durchs wilde Kurdistan, Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag. —— (1952 [1880/81]) Durch die Wüste, Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag. McDowall, D. (1996) A Modern History of the Kurds, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Müller, K.E. (1987) Das magische Universum der Identität: Elementarformen sozialen Verhaltens – Ein ethnologischer Grundriß, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus. Rüsen, J. (1997) ‘Sinnkonzepte als lebens- und handlungsleitende Orientierungssysteme’, Jahrbuch 1996 des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Institutes, Essen Wissenschaftszentrum NRW. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–99. Smart, N. (1987) ‘The importance of diasporas’, in S. Shaked, D. Shulman, S. Stroumsa and G. Gedaliahu (eds) (1987) Gilgut: Essays on Transformation, Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Sökefeld, M. (1999) ‘Alevism online: re-imagining a community in virtual space’, paper presented at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association (DGV), Heidelberg, October.

Links Dengê Êzîdiyan. Available http://www.yezidi.org (accessed 09.03.04). Dengê Êzîdiyan Forum. Available http://www.yezidi.isaja.de/forum/index.php (accessed 09.03.04). Dengê Êzîdiyan User Statistics (in Dutch). Available http://nl.viewstat.nedstatbasic.net/ cgi-bin/viewstat?name=yezidi (accessed 09.03.04). Questionnaire concerning health aspects of Yezidi life in Germany (in German) Available http://www.uni-jena.de/~i8almi/bogen.html (accessed 09.03.04).

170

Martin Baumann

10 A diachronic view of diaspora, the significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians Martin Baumann During the 1950s, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad a proliferation of Hindu temples took place. Researcher Carolyn Prorok even spoke of an atmosphere of ‘frenetic temple building’ (Prorok 1995: 10). The construction of new temples went back to a renewed interest in ‘India’ and in Hindu bhakti devotion among the descendants of the indentured workers who had been shipped from India to the Caribbean during the nineteenth century. The temples were styled in a new architectural form, mirroring Christian churches, relying in fact, however, on a combination of known Hindu temple and assembly forms. This – in Hindu terms, innovative – temple architecture thus brought forth the ‘Trinidadian temple’ (Prorok 1991: 83), characterized by a long hall, filled with numerous rows of benches, and a raised area at the hall’s end, topped with a dome to indicate that this is where the deities reside. Of equal interest is that not only did the temples provide new homes for the transplanted gods, but they also served as places for political agitation of the Indian-based political party, the People’s Democratic Party. During the 1950s, political aims and religious concerns appeared indistinguishable, the ‘Hindu community’ being both a religious and a political body. This description relates to the third, and in our view, critical phase of the developmental scheme of five phases, which will be outlined in this chapter. It is characteristic that new architectural construction, being only one of many religious innovations during this time, coincided with a process of emancipation from the established Indian patterns. It also expressed the firm desire to both adapt to the dominant society and to acquire a respected place there. The developments also point to the fact that in specific social situations, an ethnic group’s religious belonging can become very prominent and serve as a vital marker of the group’s identity. This also implies that the importance of religion might change over time, given both national and the transnational contexts. Thus religious belonging might not be of prime importance to a migrant group all the time, but there are times in which it is quite significant and must be taken into consideration. This chapter is divided into two parts: the first points to the importance of religion in situations of migration and settlement. It argues that, although many studies of migration neglect it, religion retains or acquires considerable significance within processes of settlement, and does so despite the power of modern trends of secularization, social differentiation and individualization. Based on these

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

171

considerations, the second part takes a diachronic look at diasporic situations. A developmental scheme of diaspora is outlined which offers an overview of the history over one or two centuries of a group of people who perpetuate a recollective identification with a distant, and in many ways fictitious, geographic territory and its cultural-religious traditions. We primarily conceive of ‘diaspora’ as an analytical category. To put some flesh on the skeleton of the five phases, the processes will be illustrated by the history of Indian migrants and Hindu traditions in Trinidad. The chapter aims to combine an analytical, theoretical perspective with the use of historical-descriptive material from a case study.1

The significance of religion in processes of settlement In his 1996 book Many Religions, All Australian, the Australian sociologist Gary D. Bouma proposed a ‘theory of religious settlement’ (1996: 53–7). As Bouma and earlier Australian researchers noted (e.g. Mol 1961; Humphrey 1987; Habel 1992), the establishment of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and pagodas appeared to be an integral part of each immigrating cultural-national people coming to Australia. Be it Irish Catholics, German Lutherans, English Methodists, Scottish Presbyterians, Chinese Confucianists, Singhalese or Japanese Buddhists, Afghan Muslims and the many more who have come during the twentieth century, they all established their specific places of worship in Australia and strove to maintain their specificity. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Lutherans and Jews) migrants to Australia did not come and settle for religious reasons. Labour, opportunities for work and education, the hope for a better life and flight from oppression were, and still are, the motives. Once in Australia, however, immigrants typically gathered along religious, linguistic and regional lines and established their own religious and cultural communities. This brief excursion to Australia is neither meant to argue that similar processes are hard to trace in other continents, nor that religious bonds and attitudes should be treated as the most important force to bring migrants together and to form a community. Certainly language (e.g. Vietnamese, Gujarati), national-cultural origin (e.g. Italy, Greece) or political conviction (e.g. socialist) can be, and indeed are, binding forces that play an important role when migrants establish joint activities or integrate to form collectives. However, in most studies of migrant groups that explore the retention of their peculiarities, the factor of religion goes unmentioned. Instead, the academically invented concept of ethnicity (Dittrich and Radtke 1990; Sollors 1989) is given priority as the key factor responsible for a migrant group’s persistence and survival in the new, socio-culturally different environment. Within a short time, the concept of ethnicity has gained such prominence that other features and factors, equally important for a group’s maintenance of difference, have become relegated to second place. Even more problematic, within the social and political sciences, religion is no longer conceptualized as a possible variable. To put two hundred years of development of the European history of ideas into a nutshell in rational, scientific modernity religion is perceived as obsolete, pre-

172

Martin Baumann

modern and outdated (Seiwert 1995). Other than in studies of contemporary terrorism, the possibility that religion can have any relevance for present-day, modern societies is not taken seriously, by most social scientists. Religion is thought of as a private affair only, not as a driving force for entire groups and a significant symbol system of identification, demarcation and support. However, as indicated in the above-mentioned Australian situation (and many other cases similar to it that can be cited), living outside one’s home country has led more often than not, to an increase in the perceived value and significance of religious belonging. In a way, in the new environment, religious affiliations move from the latent to the manifest (Abramson 1979). In the mutual perception of both faith communities and secular society, a growing self-awareness of religious belonging comes to the fore among individuals and among the group as a whole. The threat of possible loss generates a new interest in cultural customs and religious beliefs, practices and values, and even more so when these features become open to question in the new social context (Thomas 1993: 187, Knott 1997: 769). Contrary to the prevailing assumptions of social scientists, in the legal and socio-culturally new context, the younger generation has not given up its parents’ religious heritage in favour of modern individualism and materialism. Although, to a certain extent, cultural features such as marriage patterns, diet, dress and skill in the home language have changed and often diminished (e.g. Pocock 1976), reference to the home country’s religion persisted. In particular, when migrants are confronted by racism and social discrimination, religion is employed to reinforce cultural particularity and to rally behind a shared identity. As Peter van der Veer observed, ‘paradoxically, migration to the lands of unbelievers strengthens the religious commitment of the migrants’ (1994: 119). The growing awareness of religious and cultural distinctiveness has led to a ‘setting up of boundaries that mark off the limits between the ethnic minority and the host society itself ’ (Taylor 1991: 208). In order to maintain one’s specific identity, boundaries are pointed out, marked, and often accentuated. Apart from the cultural-national identification, the impact of which is certainly not denied in current work, religion takes on a crucial role for the reconstruction of identity and maintenance of distinctiveness in a functional interpretation. Religion as the ‘sacralizer of identity’ ‘promotes coherence within and separation without’, as Hans Mol emphasizes (1979: 37, see also 1986: 71). As both a conceptual and emotional resource, it serves to strengthen a group’s feeling of solidarity and communal spirit. At the same time, it distinguishes the group from its surroundings, constructing boundaries of various kinds and ranges. With regard to south Asian migrants in Great Britain, Kim Knott states: ‘To a large extent, religion has become the defining characteristic for people whose initial objectives in migrating were primarily financial, educational and social’ (1997: 756). Taking these findings, it is no longer just scholars of the history of religions who (understandably) have pointed to the enduring impact of religious belonging during a group’s settlement and establishment. During the 1990s, social scientists have also begun to ‘re-discover’ the influence of religion as one factor, among others, which shapes a group’s and an individual’s strategy and means of main-

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

173

taining cultural specificity and identity. Various contributions in this volume, as well as recent studies by anthropologists and social scientists, provide ample evidence of this trend.2 To sum up: in contrast to prevailing theories of secularization and the assumed disappearance of the social importance of religion, religious symbol systems continue to exert a lasting effect on processes of settlement and group formation. Even more, their importance is not declining, but more often than not is increased. Quite a significant proportion of immigrants – but certainly not all – do become more attached to their religious heritage and engage in religious communitybuilding. In contrast to common assumptions of migration analysts, we would argue that it is the absence of the formation of religious institutions in the settlement and long-term establishment of a migrant group that would be surprising. Constructing no places of worship and forming no religious associations seem to be the exception rather than the rule; it is those cases that require an explanation, not the fact of establishing religious institutions.

Phases of diaspora and Hindu Trinidadians Among the many issues and processes observed in diasporic situations, we would like to focus on aspects of the diachronic development of a diaspora as follows. A diasporic situation does not remain the same over time. The three-directional, reciprocal relations between diaspora, country of origin and country of residence change constantly, at times slowly, at times rapidly. In contrast to the prevalent view that the nature of a diaspora group is inherently conservative and traditional, keeping out all change, it is necessary to realize that adaptive modifications take place all the time, some sought after, some reluctantly accepted. Robin Cohen thus described a diaspora – apart from its negative connotations of homesickness and oppression – as a ‘site of creativity’ (1995: 7, 1997: 4). To capture these changes, both in the diaspora group itself and in its triangular relations, we propose a phase model of diaspora. This model consists of five phases and spans 150 years in time. Its structure was inspired by proposed models of transplanting religious systems of meaning, as well as from Bouma’s ‘theory of religious settlement’.3 The separate phases should be taken as ideal types, primarily differentiated for analytical and heuristic reasons to further understanding of the complex situations involved. The model should neither be understood in strict chronological terms nor in terms of successive stages. Rather, the arrangement aims to condense and to systematize the main trends of developments. The analytically selected processes will first be stated in general, abstract terms. Subsequently, the patterns shall be briefly illustrated by reference to the history of Hindu traditions in Trinidad. In fact, the phase model was developed on the basis of studies related to the social incorporation of indentured workers from India in the Caribbean, combined with studies of German migrants and their history in Chile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4

174

Martin Baumann

Phase one The analysis The first phase, of necessity, is the migration process and the arrival in the new country. Getting along in the new environment in terms of finding employment, learning the host country’s language and specificities, coping with strangeness and homesickness are the pressing problems. Following this stage of contact and initial settlement, which can be construed as a phase in its own right, further steps are taken to arrange a new life. Eventually, measures are employed to reconstruct, even to the smallest extent, ways of social and cultural life known from home. Certainly, the basis for this reconstruction is the country of emigration. There are few relationships with the host country, mainly constituted by work. The focus of interest and identification is clearly directed towards the migrants’ own group, strengthened by experiences of feeling foreign, socially excluded and discriminated against. The family, if part of the migration process, receives primary attention. Forms of religious practice take place mainly in the home. If men are the first, and more or less the only ones, to have migrated, religious observance is hardly followed at all. The case study Colonial agents of the British Empire had recruited Indians to work on the sugarcane plantations in Trinidad. In the course of this indentured workers programme, which lasted from 1845–1917, some 144,000 Indians arrived in Trinidad. The workers had to complete a five-year work period and then could either return to India or stay in Trinidad. Most of the later ‘free Indians’ opted to stay, especially so as there was an option to exchange the return trip to India for a small plot of their own land. Thus, from the 1870s onwards, former indentured workers increasingly became residents and smallholders. The farmers founded Indian villages in the so-called ‘sugar belt’ in the west and south of Trinidad, and thus were geographically separated from the main urban area to the north. These ‘east Indians’, as they were named, strove to establish the social and cultural forms known to them from India. In modified forms, the extended family was recreated, likewise the pancayat, village jurisdiction. The caste system, however, attenuated steadily, due to the levelling of restrictions on the long ship journey and during plantation work. Only brahmins, members of the ritually highest caste, aimed, and to some degree managed, to preserve their status. It was they who, as religious authorities, increasingly monopolized the forms of devotion, ritual and doctrinal interpretation. In this respect, Peter van der Veer and Steven spoke of a ‘brahmanization of Hindu traditions’ (1991) in the Caribbean, accompanied by a marginalization of so-called popular Hindu practices and elements. Already during this early phase, transplanted Hindu traditions were modified and subject to change. Despite this refashioning:

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

175

for the Indians, religion provided psychological protection, a sense of selfworth with which to arm themselves against contempt of the society. The pundits and the imams became influential leaders of the Indian community because they could offer this kind of psychological aid. (Brereton 1981: 112)5

Phase two The analysis The second phase is characterized by processes of becoming more firmly established. The ‘myth of return’ declines, perspectives of staying for a longer term come to the fore. A proliferation of social, educational and religious institutions in one’s specific tradition can be observed. Churches, temples, mosques and other places of worship are set up and form rallying points for both religious and social gatherings. The growing up of the next generation, as well as the awareness that a return appears more and more unlikely are driving forces to establish new and enduring places for the gods. At the same time, these endeavours underscore the migrant group resistance to pressure to give up their religious-cultural heritage. Warding off assimilation, bonds with the country of origin are intensified. Typically, numerous religious authorities are invited from the migrants’ home country in order to teach and to legitimize the newly established places of devotion and worship. The focus of attention clearly rests with the country of origin. The case study In colonial Trinidad, for roughly speaking the first half of the twentieth century, Indians clearly remained at the bottom of the socio-economic-cultural ladder of society. Constituting a community of some 86,000 people in 1901 (31 per cent of the population) and some 196,000 people in 1946 (a third of the Trinidadian population), ‘Indians were considered to be separate and apart from the host society. Despite their increasing numerical strength, the Indians were regarded as an exotic group, marginal to Trinidadian society, insufficiently integrated to be a part of it’ (Brereton 1979: 177). In view of this marginalized and excluded status, those few Indians who had acquired a British-Christian education and become ‘westernized’, first formed their own societies and produced newspapers in Hindi. There, these socially upwardly mobile groups spoke out against the negative image of the ‘heathen Coolie’ and worked to acquire a more respected place in society. Among these increasingly urban, educated ‘east Indians’, a growing self-confidence led them to claim their rights and to direct their own representation. Also, from about 1910, well-versed swamis and gurus (teachers) from India visited the Caribbean, both to teach Hindu principles and to oppose Christian missionary efforts. Hindu temples were built in increasing number. During the 1930s and 1940s, interest in India intensified tremendously as the independence movement in so-called ‘motherland’ India grew strong. In public rallies and processions, Indians in

176

Martin Baumann

Trinidad sang the Indian national anthem and carried the Indian flag. ‘It was a time when Indians felt they were on the march’ (Haraksingh 1988: 119), both literally and socio-politically. The identificational focus rested distinctly on India, both with regard to political aspirations and religious-cultural bonds.6

Phase three The analysis In phase three of the developmental model of diaspora a shift of the focus of attention is observable as a crucial feature. The country of origin receives less and less attention, whereas the host country moves further to the fore. In particular, this change takes place if the rights they demand are granted to the group and socially marginalized people gradually become respected and accepted. The process may proceed as follows: some members of the group of immigrants climb the ladder of social prestige, this degree of integration into the host society often comes at the expense of earlier social and religious identity. For example, names are changed, and some people even convert to the host country’s religion. They now opt to achieve socio-political participation. This demand for participation may have already begun to be voiced by individuals during phase two. In this current phase, however, the call for participation receives support on a wider basis. In particular, an end of the social marginalization of the group is called for along with political rights, their own schools, career opportunities and a share in the resources of the society. The demand to be able to exercise rights and freedom may stir up conflict; tensions may arise with the host society. On the other hand, if these demands are conceded, an increased convergence of the (former) immigrant group with the host society takes place. These socio-political concessions nurture an increasing readiness on the part of the diaspora group to adapt and to focus on the requirements of the country of residence. In a parallel way, the shift of attention becomes relevant for the shape of religious life. Formerly tight bonds are loosened, they become optional and weaker. Instead, the diaspora group aims to create its own interpretation and contextual understanding of how religious norms and practices can be lived in the socio-cultural environment in a manner that differs from home. Only these adapted forms and contextualized interpretations ensure the heritage’s continuity and its loyal and sincere practice by the next generation. New interpretations are proposed, innovations are tried and elements of tradition are selected and reinterpreted. Both politically and religiously, the diaspora group strives to gain an increased independence from the norms and expectations posed by the (former) home country. During this phase, the ‘dilemma of the diaspora’ becomes obvious: on the one hand, the diaspora members aim to stay true and faithful to the former, traditional way of life and its cultural-religious heritage. The belief is voiced that only a conservative maintenance of the established and known customs and forms would safeguard a survival of the diaspora group’s specificity. On the other hand, members of the diaspora wish to become socio-politically integrated in the society which

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

177

they have for chosen as their permanent residence. Adaptive forms of cultural and religious expression should guarantee continuity for generations to come. It is in this phase that splits and schisms in the religious sphere mirror the ambiguous situation, especially if the group is large. Some members stress perpetuating rituals and doctrinal education in a rather conservative way, others opt to foster adaptations, changes and innovation.7 The case study With regard to Indians in Trinidad, this third phase took place during the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The happiness and pride at India’s independence in 1947 changed to a disillusionment about the country. Despite all political rhetoric, no Indian politician took a serious interest in the plight of the marginalized Indians overseas. Although Indians had lived in Trinidad for a century and constituted, with some 200,000 people, a third of the population, they still had no political or administrative representation. ‘East Indians’ still comprised by far the most illiterate and the most economically depressed ethnic group in the society.8 However, in the run-up to Trinidad’s independence in 1962, social and political concessions were granted to the ‘east Indians’ from the mid-1940s. In 1946, adult enfranchisement was extended on a general basis, including the ‘east Indians’. Similarly, Hindu marriages were officially recognized from that year. Hoping to win Indian political support, which was then much needed, the demand for Hindu and Muslim schools of their own, which had been voiced for a long time, was conceded. Last but not least, Indians were allowed to form their own political representation and parties. Bhadase Sagan Maraj (1920–71), whose life embodies the ‘ “rags to riches” success of the Brahmin caste’ (Singh 1985: 54) and who was a leader of the central Hindu organization Sanatan Dharm Maha Sabha formed in 1950, succeeded in establishing schools in the rural, Indian-based regions of Trinidad. In these schools, children were taught the English language and the usual British curriculum. According to Hindu activist Ken Parmasad, ‘the school building programme was a massive effort in self-mobilization and community service […]. The schools became the symbol of a people who through their own efforts and sacrifices, were determined to overcome the limitations of their circumstances’ (1995: 50). Unlike the previously unavoidable Christian (missionary) education, the schools now taught Hindu principles based on a ‘seven-point declaration of faith’. This declaration, named ‘Our Creed’, formed the final point of the continual process of doctrinally and ritually standardizing the heterogeneous Hindu traditions.9 In the political field, Maraj established the People’s Democratic Party, striving to gain a voice for Indians in Trinidad. The party, however, was not only plainly ethnic, i.e., Indian-based, but also overtly Hindu in orientation. The unconcealed party politics of Maraj and the numerous Brahmin priests in the newly built Hindu temples alienated the Muslim and Christian Indians, who constituted almost a third of the Indian population. The resulting split of the Indian constituency and voting along religious lines left them without any political representation for a long time.10

178

Martin Baumann

All these activities, whether on a political, educational or religious level, unmistakably showed that the focus of attention and identification had shifted decidedly. It was no longer the idealized India, but Trinidad and the improved opportunities that had become available because of the concessions that had been granted, which emerged as the prime focus of concern and identification. It was precisely during the 1950s and early 1960s that lasting innovations emerged in religious matters. Hindi society and leaders of the dominant Hindu organization created, respectively, a common ‘Prayer Book’ and ‘Creed’, both unknown in India. It was also during this time of ‘explosion of self-confidence in the Indian community’ (Parmasad 1995: 50) that a new architectural form of the Hindu temple was established. These ‘Trinidadian temples’ provided a weekly service on Sunday mornings. The participants no longer sat on the floor, but on benches, listening to a sermon and singing hymns of devotion together. The self-conscious emancipation from the Indian model was coupled with a close orientation along Christian patterns, both efforts aiming to gain respectability for the Hindu tradition in Trinidad (Prorok 1991: 82–7).

Phase four The analysis Developments in phase four of the diaspora model depend to a large extent on the responses the host society has given the diaspora group concerning their demand for participation and rights in the earlier phase. If educational and professional options are granted and those who achieve are permitted to climb up the ladder of social prestige, the process of structural adaptation and acculturation, started in phase three, continues and often accelerates. If, however, such options are not granted and demands for socio-political participation are denied despite the diaspora group’s rapprochement, reactions on the part of the diaspora group differ and range from obsequious retreat into their religious-cultural niche on the one hand, to protest and conflicts on the other. Such clashes and struggles are interpreted more often than not as cultural conflicts. Categories of foreignness, on the one hand, and legitimate belonging to the country, on the other, gain prominent positions in public disputes. Such debates, which interpret the situation as one of cultural conflict, are linked to religiouscultural symbols, norms and orientations and thus take on a increased commitment on both sides. Custodians of the society’s status quo, who are denying the sharing of social resources, demand that the diaspora group should adapt and assimilate not only structurally, but also identificationally in order to be fully accepted. In this context, the notion of diaspora can acquire a politicized meaning as it points to the diaspora group’s difference of religious-cultural identification. Members of the diaspora group, who have most often been ordinary citizens of the state of residence for a long time, refer to the country’s rights of freedom of expression and ask, or insist, that it apply to all members of the polity or the state. Alongside this struggle, changes will be observed in social and religious customs and their evaluation. The range of flexible religious practices established earlier,

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

179

varying from the traditional-conservative to the adaptive-innovative, will come under scrutiny. For example, activists who have personally visited the country of origin may, on return, strongly opt to take up traditional customs and practices. Adaptations and changes in life-style or religious observance, now being viewed as lukewarm compromises, are condemned. Furthermore, additional and new traditions may arrive in the country of residence and establish a following among the diaspora group. This and on-going adaptive innovations further enrich the religious spectrum. The case study In Trinidad, the 1950s with their structural convergence of the Indian segment and their religious innovations, were followed in the late 1960s by a period of social-political weariness and a lack of interest in religious matters. Anthropologists forecast the end of Hinduism in Trinidad, noting the perceptible decline, accelerated by an increasing inroads of Pentecostalism among rural Hindus (not among Muslims). ‘Throughout the island Hindus felt themselves to be “on the defensive” against evangelical Christian criticism. This attitude contributed to an overall sense of decline among Hindus’ (Vertovec 1992: 124).11 In the wake of the Black Power Movement, however, a self-conscious Hindu youth movement came to the fore. Students who had received their education in the Hindu schools established in the 1950s toured the Indian villages in order ‘to propagate Indian culture, to re-awake the apathetic people’.12 Furthermore, the oil boom of the 1970s and of the surplus funds it generated facilitated a Hindu revival in the late 1970s. The new wealth of Trinidadian society, which markedly delayed conflicts between the two equally strong ethnic groups of blacks and Indians (each constituting 40 per cent of the population), also enabled Indians to get better jobs and to gain both socially and religiously an increasing share in the society.13

Phase five The analysis Phase five, finally, depends on developments having taken place in the previous phase. If the host society has granted access to prestigious jobs and power, the process of structural adaptation and acculturation of the diaspora group can continue to the level of indistinguishability of its members from those of the host country. This relates to life style, educational attitudes and common ideals. In particular, as can be observed in relevant cases, members of the diaspora group identify highly with the country’s achievements, its national symbols and ideals. The country, experienced as foreign by their ancestors, has become the new home and the centre of identificational attention. This adoption of structural patterns in social and economic spheres does not entail assimilation in the religious sphere. Rather, the specificities of religion continue to be perpetuated, giving public evidence of its individuality in major

180

Martin Baumann

festivals and prestigious buildings. The alternative, debated earlier, of becoming either an assimilated member of the host society or to staying apart and keeping one’s heritage, has been resolved to a simultaneous ‘both … and’. This parallelism and convergence is shared and accepted by both the host society and the diaspora group. The case study This fifth phase of intensified socio-economic adaptation and national integration of Trinidadian Indians was, so to speak, topped in the political sphere: In 1995, the Hindu Basdeo Panday became Prime Minister of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. After exactly 150 years of presence, a member of the segment of Trinidadian society which had been down-trodden for a century was voted into the most prestigious position in society. Also, rapidly and in a manner unknown during the 1990s, Indian traditions acquired a respected place in the hitherto Christian-Black-Creole dominated public domain. No longer pejoratively categorized as ‘east Indians’, Indo-Trinidadians highly identify with Trinidad, its nation, people and land. Although stereotypes and tensions among the black and Indian sections of society have not vanished completely, the willingness to form one ‘rainbow nation’ stands out. Last but not least, this became apparent in the programme of the Indo-Trinidadian radio FM 103 (inaugurated in 1993), as manager Surujrattan Rambachan emotionally recalls: When FM 103 started official broadcasting, a significant event took place. The National Anthem of T&T [Trinidad and Tabago] was sung in Hindi and recorded with the use of the Tabla, the Harmonium, Sitar and pan. Jit Samaroo and Mungal Patasar [...] in that one act showed that national unity is possible, that cultural crossovers are possible without having to ‘give up’ our cultural traditions or values. In that one act, a veritable statement of presence, of loyalty to nation, of identity with a country’s aspirations and traditions was accomplished, FM 103 was part of this history. (Rambachan 1994: 22)14 In the religious sphere, to sum up the developments, a proliferation of new Hindu groups, organizations and movements have come to the fore since the mid1980s. The Maha Sabha is no longer the all-dominating organization. New groups and organizations such as Swaha or especially the Sathya Sai Baba movement have been able to acquire a growing membership and interest. All, except the Maha Sabha, are represented in information stalls centrally at the Divali Nagar site (near Chaguanas, west central Trinidad). The Hindu Divali festival in Autumn is celebrated on a national scale at this festival site, attracting some 10,000 visitors, and not only from the Indian fold. In fact, the Divali festival has developed into a national event on equal par with Christmas and the Muslim Id al-Fitr festival. It is also heavily commercialized, and in order to advertise and spread one’s name, businesses, banks, insurances and companies sent out greetings to the ‘Hindu

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

181

community’. During Divali time, a popular fast food company even offers ‘The Meatiest tasting Veggie Burger ever!’.15

Conclusion This rather rough phase model does not primarily present an integration model, which might be developed from there. Rather, in an ideal type and simplified way it aims to draw attention to both the complexity of a diaspora situation, constituted by tripolar relations, and possible changes occurring in these relations. Certainly the model can be sub-differentiated and be more precise in certain parts. In particular, the initial phase might be sub-differentiated, as the arrival of women and children appears to be a crucial element in a diaspora’s development. Also, developments within a diaspora group and its relations to both the host society and the (former) country and culture of origin may end in phase two or one already, as historical cases have shown.16 In addition, a diaspora group may vanish by way of acculturating and then finally assimilating structurally and religious-culturally into the host society. The case of Huguenot diasporas in various states of Europe and in the ‘New World’ and their gradual dissolution may provide an example of such an end of diaspora.17 In this contribution, only one trend of development has been delineated, as an invitation to conceptualize divergent developments in phases four and five in succeeding models, based on other experiences and histories. Finally, in due course, a sixth phase is likely to ensue, as in the Trinidadian case the increasing interest in the Sai Baba and other Indian Hindu traditions points to processes of ‘re-diasporization’. Learning from the Caribbean is not the full message, however. Apart from the model’s heuristics in structural terms, the model points to the important fact that identificational differences in religious terms do not impede or prevent processes of integration and national identification. As proposed, an identificational difference can go hand in hand with a structural adaptation and acculturation. Even more, as recent studies increasingly and aggressively argue,18 involvement in cultural-religious affairs, that is participation in the activities of a diaspora temple, mosque or gurdwara, may contribute to more rapid adaption in a new context. Religious institutions provide the solid base of cultural-religious identification and it is from that base that migrant and diaspora people take actions to cope successfully with the demands of the host society.

Notes 1 The difficulty of defining ‘diaspora’ will not be dealt with here, see for this extending discussion, among others, Safran 1991, Clifford 1994, Tölölyan 1996, Cohen 1997 and Akenson 1997. Rather than defining the noun, we opt to specify the adjective ‘diasporic’ and to conceive ‘diaspora’ as a transcultural, analytical category, suitable for heuristic and comparative use. See on this, M. Baumann 2000, in detail M. Baumann 2003. 2 See, for example, social anthropologist Gerd Baumann who in his remarkable 1996 study noticed ‘an astonishingly consistent focus on religion’ by second-generation

182

3 4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11 12

Martin Baumann south Asians in Southall (London, UK) for defining and demarcating one’s ‘culture’ (1996: 101). The importance of religion was treated in wider scope and more analytical depth in Baumann’s 1999 The Multicultural Riddle, devoting Chapter 6 to ‘Religion: Baggage or Sextant?’ (pp. 69–80). In a similar study a decade earlier, Nimmi Hutnik in his research on identity markers among south Asian, West Indian and British youths had pointed out ‘that religion was an extremely important means of self-definition for the south Asian group’ (Hutnik 1985: 304). For recent highlighting of the salience of religious belonging in culturally and ethnically plural settings see, among others, Smith 1998, Warner and Wittner 1998, and Nökel 2000. See the models by Pye 1969, Berry 1980, Kaplan 1986, Mullins 1990, M. Baumann 1994, 1999. For Bouma’s observations, see 1996: 51–108. See Speckmann 1965 and Ramsoedh and Bloemberg 1995, 1999 on Indians in Dutch Guyana/Suriname, Waldmann 1982 on Germans in Chile. With regard to the social incorporation of Indians in Trinidad, see especially La Guerre 1985, Vertovec 1992, 1995, Ramesar 1994, Samaroo et al. 1995 and M. Baumann 2003. Similar to this in content is historian Haraksingh 1987: 160 and 1988: 120. See on this early phase, in addition to the above-mentioned studies, Malik 1971, Brereton 1981, 1985, Klass 1991: 14–27, Haraksingh 1993 and Laurence 1994. As for changes in the religious sphere, see van der Veer and Vertovec 1991, Vertovec 1992: 106–127 and 1996a. It should not go unmentioned that some 12 per cent to 15 per cent of the Indian population were Muslims (and still are), on Trinidadian Muslims see Hydal 1987, Prorok and Hemmasi 1993, Parmasad 1995: 51–2, Samaroo 1996. Henceforth referred to as Trinidad only, not to Trinidad and Tobago, the official nation-state. The two islands were joined administratively in 1889. Only a very few Indians and Hindus reside in Tobago. On the socio-political developments in detail, see Brereton 1979: 191, 1981: 109–11, Tikasingh 1982, Vertovec 1992: 78–86 and Ramesar 1994: 114–18, 130–7. For processes of religious institutionalization and founding of societies, see Singh 1985, Campbell 1985, Forbes 1987, Prorok 1991: 76–83, van der Veer and Vertovec 1991: 158–61, Vertovec 1992: 117–24. As for the tension between distance and closeness, both to the (former) country of origin and the country of residence Saint-Blancat 1995 is instructive. For the ‘dilemma of diaspora’, see Hettlage 1991: 20. For example, in 1946, the most illiterate group of people had been Indian women: 65.7 per cent did not know how to read and write. In contrast, only 10.1 per cent of black, 8.3 per cent of Chinese and 3.4 per cent of white women were illiterate, see Singh 1985: 48, P. Mohammed 1988: 389 and Ramesar 1994: 141. For various further socio-economic statistics, underscoring the low status and prestige of ‘east Indians’ in Trinidadian society right into the 1970s, see Malik 1971: 11–16 and Dookeran 1985. The Canadian Presbyterian Church was a leader in providing school education among the Indian population, see Samaroo 1982, C. Mohammed 1995 and Prorok 1997. For the on-going homogenization of the diverse Hindu traditions, see in detail Vertovec 1989, van der Veer and Vertovec 1991, Vertovec 1992: 108–27, the ‘Creed’ is reprinted in Vertovec 1992: 122–3. Whereas the ratio of Muslims among the Indian population remained more or less constant with some 12–15 per cent, the percentage of Hindus dropped from 84.4 per cent (1876) to 64.5 per cent (1946), mainly due to conversion to Christian denominations (esp. Presbyterianism). For the figures see Ramesar 1994: 19, 164. Forecasts of Hinduism’s dismissal were voiced, amongst others, by Schwartz 1967: 241–5 and Nevadomsky 1980, 1983: 78. Ken Parmasad in an interview with the author on 12 November 1996, St Augustine, Trinidad. For the impact of the Black Power movement on Indian ‘awakening’, see Nicholls 1971, Oxaal 1971, Ryan 1972: 366–73, Gosine 1987, Vertovec 1990a.

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

183

13 On the oil boom and Hindu revival in detail, see Vertovec 1990b, 1992: 136–61 and Klass 1991: 53–8. For the general socio-economic developments, see Ryan 1988. 14 For Basdeo Panday and on his becoming Prime Minister, see Ragoonath 1997. For the social and political incorporation of Indians, see La Guerre 1988, 1995, Yelvington 1993, Dookeran 1995. For the complexities of forming an ‘Indian identity’ among Indo-Trinidadians, see Korom 2000. 15 Advertisement by Royal Castle in Trinidad Guardian, 26 October 1996: 19. The new plurality of Hindu traditions becomes apparent not only in the display stalls at the Divali Nagar site, but also in the listing of some 40 groups and organizations in Samaroo et al. 1995: 101 and in the annual Divali supplement of the national newspaper Trinidadian Guardian. For an incipient analysis of this, see M. Baumann 2003: 219–26, Chapter 7.3. For the Sathya Sai Baba organization, see Klass 1991: 116–72. The non-Maha Sabha fold can be estimated to constitute almost a fifth of the about 265,000 Hindus in the mid-1990s. Among the entire 1.3 million population of Trinidad and Tobago, Hindus make up 23.7 per cent, Muslims 5.8 per cent, Christians in total 68.2 per cent (Roman Catholics 29.4 per cent, Anglicans 10.9 per cent, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists 7.6 per cent Seven Day Adventists 3.7 per cent Pentecostalists and Evangelicals, with a sharp increase during the 1980s, 16.6 per cent), according to the census 1990; Annual Statistical Digest 1994: 10. 16 For example, the Greek colonies in the Archaic period (8–6th century BC), which present analytically very early examples of diasporic situations, virtually shut off from their colonized region and its people in religious, cultural and social terms. For centuries, the colony’s focus of attention clearly remained with the mother-city (metropolis) in a pious relation, favouring almost no adaptations or innovations (only one exception, the cult of the oikist, the founder of the colony). In terms of the phase model, they did not go beyond phase one, see Boardman 1973, Malkin 1987 and Buckley 1996. 17 See Brandenburg 1990: 101–89, Fletcher 1992. The end of diaspora being a crucial topic in its own right can also come about by the group’s gradual reduction in size. The 2000 years history of Jews in Cochin (southwestern India) provide an instructive case of identity retention until the community’s final dissolution during the 1980s, see Katz and Goldberg 1993. 18 See, for example, Doumanis 1992, Lin 1996, Bankston and Zhou 1996, Vertovec 1996, Warner and Wittner 1998 and Nökel 2000.

Bibliography Abramson, H.J. (1979) ‘Migrants and cultural diversity: on ethnicity and religion in society’, Social Compass, 26(1): 5–29. Akenson, D.H. (1997) ‘A midrash on “galut”, “exile” and “diaspora” rhetoric’, in E.M. Crawford (ed.) The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine, Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast. Annual Statistical Digest 1946–1990 (1994) Port of Spain, Trinidad: Central Statistical Office. Bankston, C.L. and Zhou, M. (1996) ‘The ethnic church, ethnic identification, and the social adjustment of Vietnamese adolescents’, Review of Religious Review, 38(1): 18–37. Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1999) The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic and Religious Identities, London: Routledge. Baumann, M. (1994) ‘The transplantation of Buddhism to Germany: processive modes and strategies of adaptation’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 6(1): 35–61.

184

Martin Baumann

—— (1999) ‘Transplanting religious systems of meaning’, in K.-H. Pohl (ed.) Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches, Leiden: E.J. Brill. —— (2000) ‘Diaspora: genealogies of semantics and transcultural comparison’, Numen, 47(3): 313–37. —— (2003) Alte Götter in neuer Heimat. Religionswissenschaftliche Analyse zu Diaspora am Beispiel von Hindus auf Trinidad, Marburg: Diagonal. Berry, J.W. (1980) ‘Acculturation as varieties of adaptation’, in A.M. Padilla (ed.) Acculturation: Theory, Models, and Some New Findings, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Boardman, J. (1973.) The Greeks Overseas: The Archaeology of their Early Colonies and Trade, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bouma, G.D. (ed.) (1996) Many Religions, All Australian:. Religious Settlement, Identity and Cultural Diversity, Kew, Australia: The Christian Research Association. Brandenburg, I. and Brandenburg, K. (1990) Hugenotten: Geschichte eines Martyriums, Leipzig: Edition Leipzig. Brereton, B. (1979) Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1981) A History of Modern Trinidad 1783–1962, Kingston, Port of Spain and London: Heinemann. —— (1985) ‘The experience of indentureship: 1845–1917’, in J.G. La Guerre (ed.) Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians in Trinidad, 2nd edn, St Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Buckley, T. (1996) Aspects of Greek History 750–323 BC: A Source-based Approach, London and New York: Routledge. Campbell, C. (1985) ‘The east Indian revolt against missionary education 1928–1939’, in J.G. La Guerre (ed.) Calcutta to Caroni. The East Indians in Trinidad, 2nd edn, St Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Clifford, J. (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9, 3: 302–38. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Dittrich, E.J. and Radtke, F.-O. (eds) (1990) Ethnizität: Wissenschaft und Minderheiten, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Dookeran, W. (1995) ‘Business presence and civic Identity’, in B. Samaroo et al. (eds) In Celebration of 150 Years of the Indian Contribution to Trinidad and Tobago, Arima, Trinidad: D. Quentrall-Thomas. Doumanis, N. (1992) ‘Eastern orthodoxy and migrant conflict: the Greek Church schism in Australia, 1959–74’, Journal of Religious History, 17(1): 60–76. Fletscher, J. (1992) ‘The Huguenot diaspora’, Diaspora, 2(2): 251–60. Forbes, R.H. (1987) ‘Hindu organizational process in acculturative conditions: significance of the Arya Samaj experience in Trinidad’, in I.J.B. Bahadur Singh (ed.) Indians in the Caribbean, Delhi: Sterling Publication. Gosine, M. (1987) ‘Culture and ethnic participation in a social movement: the case study of the east Indians and the Black Power movement in Trinidad’, in I.J.B Bahadur Singh (ed.) Indians in the Caribbean, Delhi: Sterling Publication. Habel, N.C. (ed.) (1992) Religion and Multiculturalism in Australia: Essays in Honour of Victor C. Hayes, Adelaide: AASR. Haraksingh, K.R. (1987) ‘The Hindu experience in Trinidad’, in I.J.B Bahadur Singh (ed.) Indians in the Caribbean, Delhi: Sterling Publication. —— (1988) ‘Structure, process and Indian culture in Trinidad’, Immigrants and Minorities, 7(1): 113–22.

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

185

—— (1993) ‘English law and Indians in Trinidad’, Oñati Proceedings, 15: 61–71. Hettlage, R. (1991) ‘Diaspora: Umrisse einer soziologischen Theorie’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 16(3): 4–24. Humphrey, M. (1987) ‘Community, mosque and ethnic politics’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 23(2): 233–45. Hutnik, N. (1985) ‘Aspects of identity in a multi-ethnic society’, New Community, 12(2): 298–309. Hydal, M.M.K. (1987) ‘The religious experience of the Indians in Trinidad: the Muslim experience’, in I.J.B. Bahadur Singh (ed.) Indians in the Caribbean, Delhi: Sterling Publication. Kaplan, S. (1986) ‘The africanization of missionary Christianity: history and typology’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 16(3): 166–86. Katz, N. and Goldberg, E.S. (1993) The Last Jews of Cochin: Jewish Identity in Hindu India, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Klass, M. (1991) Singing with Sai Baba: The Politics of Revitalization in Trinidad, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Knott, K. (1997) ‘The religions of south Asian communities in Britain’, in J. Hinnells (ed.) A New Handbook of Living Religions, Cambridge: Blackwell. Korom, F.J. (2000) ‘Contested identities and the uses of tradition among Indo-Trinidadians’, in P.J. Anttonen (ed.) Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity: A Festschrift for Barbro Klein, Botkyrka, Tumba: Multicultural Centre. La Guerre, J.G. (ed.) (1985) Calcutta to Caroni. The East Indians in Trinidad, 2nd edn, St Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. —— (1988) ‘Race Relations in Trinidad and Tobago’, in S. Ryan (ed.) Trinidad and Tobago: The Independence Experience 1962–1987, St Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. —— (1995) ‘The political integration of the Indian community’, in B. Samaroo and K. Ramchand (eds) In Celebration of 150 Years of the Indian Contribution to Trinidad and Tobago, Arima, Trinidad: D. Quentrall-Thomas. Laurence, K.O. ( 1994) A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana 1875–1917, Kingston: Ian Randle Publ. and London: James Currey Publ. Lin, I. (1996) ‘Journey to the far west: Chinese Buddhism in America’, Amerasia Journal, 22, 1: 107–32. Malik, Y.K. (1971) East Indians in Trinidad: A Study of Minority Politics, London: Oxford University Press. Malkin, I. (1987) Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece, Leiden: E.J. Brill. Mohammed, C. (1995) ‘Indian education in Trinidad’, in B. Samaroo and K. Ramchand (eds) In Celebration of 150 Years of the Indian Contribution to Trinidad and Tobago, Arima, Trinidad: D. Quentrall-Thomas. Mohammed, P. (1988) ‘The “creolization” of Indian women in Trinidad’, in S. Ryan (ed.) Trinidad and Tobago: The Independence Experience 1962–1987, St Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. Mol, H. (1961) Churches of Immigrants: A Sociological Study of the Mutual Effect of Religion and Immigrant Adjustment, The Hague: Research Group for European Migration Problem Bulletin, Supplement 5. —— (1979) ‘Theory and data on the religious behaviour of migrants’, Social Compass, 26(1): 31–9.

186

Martin Baumann

—— (1986) ‘Religion and identity: a dialectical interpretation of religious phenomena’, in V.C. Hayes (ed.) Identity Issues and World Religions, Bedford Park: University Relations Unit. Mullins, M.R. (1990) ‘The transplantation of religion in comparative sociological perspective’, Japanese Religion, 16, 2: 43–62. Nevadomsky, J.J. ( 1980) ‘Changes in Hindu institutions in an alien environment’, EasternAnthropologist, 33, 1: 39–53. —— (1983) ‘Economic organization, social mobility, and changing social status among east Indians in rural Trinidad’, Ethnology, 22, 1: 43–79. Nicholls, D.G. (1971) ‘East Indians and Black Power in Trinidad’, Race, 12: 443–59. Nökel, S. (2000) ‘Migration, Islamisierung und Identitätspolitiken: Zur Bedeutung der Religiosität junger Frauen in Deutschland’, in I. Lukatis et al. (eds) Religion und Geschlechterverhältnis, Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Oxaal, I. (1971) Race and Revolutionary Consciousness: A Documentary Interpretation of the 1970 Black Power Revolt in Trinidad, Cambridge: Schenkman Publ. Parmasad, K.V. (1995) ‘Religion and the Indian community’, in B. Samaroo and K. Ramchand (eds) In Celebration of 150 Years of the Indian Contribution to Trinidad and Tobago, Arima, Trinidad: D. Quentrall-Thomas. Pocock, D.F. (1976) ‘Preservation of the religious life: Hindu immigrants in England – a Swami Narayan sect in London’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS), 10, 2: 341–65. Prorok, C. (1991) ‘Evolution of the Hindu temple in Trinidad’, Caribbean Geography, 3, 2: 73–93. —— (1997) ‘The significance of material culture in historical geography: a case study of the church as school in the diffusion of the Presbyterian mission to Trinidad’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 23, 3: 371–88. Prorok, C. and Hemmasi, M. (1993) ‘East Indian Muslims and their mosques in Trinidad: a geography of religious structures and the politics of ethnic identity’, Caribbean Geography, 4, 1: 28–48. Pye, M. (1969) ‘The transplantation of religions’, Numen, 16, 4: 234–9. Ragoonath, B. (1997) ‘An Indian prime minister for Trinidad and Tobago: how the UNC won the 1995 elections’, in F.B. Ramadar (ed.) Race Relations in Trinbago: Afro and IndoTrinbagonians, and Basdeo Panday, Queens, NY: The East Indian Diaspora Committee. Rambachan, S. (1994) ‘FM 103 stereo: peace to the Indian heart …’, Divali Nagar Souvenir Brochure, 21–2. Ramesar, M.D.S. (1994) Survivors of Another Crossing: A History of East Indians in Trinidad, 1880–1946, St Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Ramsoedh, H. and Bloemberg, L. (1995) The Institutionalization of Hinduism in Suriname and Guyana, Paramaribo: Leo Victor. —— (1999) ‘The institutionalization of Hinduism in Suriname and Guyana’, in T.S. Rukmani (ed.) Hindu Diaspora: Global Perspectives, Montreal: Concordia University. Ryan, S. (1972) Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —— (ed.) (1988) Trinidad and Tobago: The Independence Experience 1962–1987, St Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1, 1: 83–99. Saint-Blancat, C. (1995) ‘Une Diaspora Musulmane en Europe?’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 92: 9–24.

The significance of religion and Hindu Trinidadians

187

Samaroo, B. (1982) ‘Missionary methods and local responses: the Canadian Presbyterians and the east Indian in the Caribbean’, in B. Brereton and W. Dookeran (eds) East Indians in the Caribbean: Colonialism and the Struggle for Identity, New York and London: Kraus. —— (1996) ‘Early African and east Indian Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago’, in D. Dabydeen and B. Samaroo (eds) Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Samaroo, B. and Ramchand, K. (eds) (1995) In Celebration of 150 Years of the Indian Contribution to Trinidad and Tobago, Arima, Trinidad: D. Quentrall-Thomas. Schwartz, B.M. (1967) ‘Differential socio-religious adaptation’, Social and Economic Studies, 16: 237–48 Seiwert, H. (1995) ‘Religion in der Geschichte der Moderne’, Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft, 3(1): 91–101. Singh, K. (1985) ‘Indians and the larger society’, in J.G. La Guerre (ed.) Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians in Trinidad, 2nd edn, St Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Sollors, W. (ed.) (1989) The Invention of Ethnicity, New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, G. (1998) ‘Ethnicity, religious belonging, and inter faith encounter: some survey findings from east London’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 13, 3: 333–51. Speckmann, J.D. (1965) Marriage and Kinship among the Indians of Surinam, Assen: van Gorcum. Taylor, D. (1991) ‘The role of religion and the emancipation of an ethnic minority’, in W.A.R. Shadid and P.S. van Koningsveld (eds) The Integration of Islam and Hinduism in Western Europe, Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House. Thomas, T. (1993) ‘Hindu Dharma in dispersion’, in G. Parsons (ed.) The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945, Vol. 1: Traditions, London: Routledge. Tikasingh, G. (1982) ‘Toward formulation of the Inidian view of history: the representation of Indian opinion in Trinidad, 1900–1921’, in B. Brereton and W. Dookeran (eds) East Indians in the Caribbean. Colonialism and the Struggle for Identity, New York and London: Kraus. Tölölyan, K. (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora, 5(1): 3–36. van der Veer, P.T. (1994) Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. van der Veer, P.T. and Vertovec, S. (1991) ‘Brahmanism abroad: on Caribbean Hinduism as an ethnic religion’, Ethnology, 30(2): 149–66. Vertovec, S. (1989) ‘Hinduism in diaspora: the transformation of tradition in Trinidad’, in G.D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (eds) Hinduism Reconsidered, New Delhi: Manohar. —— (1990a) ‘Religion and ethnic ideology: the Hindu youth movement in Trinidad’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13, 2: 225–49. —— (1990b) ‘Oil boom and recession in Trinidad Indian villages’, in C.G. Clarke, C. Peach and S. Vertovec (eds) South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1992) Hindu Trinidad: Religion, Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Change, London: Macmillan. —— (1995) ‘Hindus in Trinidad and Britain: ethnic religion, reification, and the politics of public space’, in P.T. van der Veer (ed.) Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. —— (1996a) ‘ “Official” and “popular” Hinduism in the Caribbean: historical and contemporary trends in Surinam, Trinidad and Guyana’, in D. Dabydeen and B. Samaroo

188

Martin Baumann

(eds) Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Caribbean, London, Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— (1996b) ‘Multiculturalism, culturalism and public incorporation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 19(1): 49–69. Waldmann, P. (1982) ‘Kulturkonflikt und Anpassungszwang. Ausgangslage und Entwicklung der deutschen Einwandererkolonien in Südchile’, in J. Stagl (ed.) Aspekte der Kultursoziologie, Berlin: Reimer Verlag. Warner, R.S. and Wittner, J.G. (eds) (1998) Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Yelvington, K.A. (ed.) (1993) Trinidad Ethnicity, London: Macmillan.

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

189

11 Let it flow Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network Dieter Haller

In her article on siting Nevisian culture, Fog Olwig (1997) mentioned that her diasporic group seemed to be everywhere but never where she did her research. Wherever she carried out her multilocal research, be it on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in New Haven, CT, Leeds, England, or in the US Virgin Islands, she met people whose siblings or children lived in another place, who themselves had thought about migrating to another place or who migrated already. The same is true for two groups I worked with during a one-year field study – a Jewish Sephardic community and approximately 600 members of the Sindhi community, both in the British crown colony of Gibraltar, both groups that are mainly merchant communities. In this chapter, I will present the example of the latter group. Due to political circumstances, no relatives of my informants – who come from a Hindu community – are living in their homeland Sindh, which nowadays belongs to Muslim Pakistan. After the partition of India in 1947, Hindu Sindhis fled their homeland into the new republic of India, while Muslims were expelled into Pakistan. Today this network straddles the globe, stretching from Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong through the Middle East to Africa and the Canary Islands, and across Britain and Europe to the USA and Latin America. The total number of the Sindhi communities outside India is estimated at 120,000–140,000 members, with the largest communities in the US (est. 50,000), Spain and Canada (est. 10,000), UK (est. 5,000–15,000), Nigeria (5,000–10,000), Hong Kong (7,500) and Singapore (5,000) (Markovits 2000: 281). Many Sindhis mainly of the merchant castes had already left Sindh decades earlier. Sindhi merchants had settled in Gibraltar as early as 1858. Nowadays, Gibraltarian Hindus form an integral part of the civil society of the colony. Many of them were born on the Rock, they went to school there, they possess a British passport, some of them have married Christian partners. But in every family there were members who were born or grown up either in Sindh or in other places, such as Bombay, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Nigerian Lagos or in Panama. Some of my Gibraltarian informants owned businesses in other spots on the globe, while other owners of local Gibraltar shops lived far away, also in Hong Kong or India. During my fieldwork in 1996/7, my informants constantly welcomed relatives from all over the world to Gibraltar, while some of the locals often visited those places abroad due to weddings, business meetings, or family events.

190

Dieter Haller

Given the fact that I wanted to carry out research on Gibraltarian Sindhis, an unusual question arose: where should I be to do that? Did I have to go to Madrid, where Ramesh Karnani was on the brink of opening a subsidiary of his father’s shop? What about cousin Gope, who studied law in London? What about Anusha, whom I met in 1996 and considered a typical ‘Gib-girl’ of Indian origin, and who in 1997 married a Sindhi from Manila, where she lives today? And mainly; what about the likes of Aunt Geetu from Bombay, who has never left India in her 64 years but who is in weekly contact with her relatives in Gibraltar, who keeps contact with the family guru in Bombay and who probably knows more about her family in ‘Gib’ than anyone else living in the colony? Family bonds amongst Sindhis are strong, they serve not only emotional, social and personal needs but also economic interests. They do so by ‘mobilizing savings, facilitating the accumulation of capital, pooling skills and ensuring employment to family members’ (Bhikhu 1994). Regular visits to other places on the globe, where the younger generation meet potential marriage partners – often during weddings of a cousin – are common. Many families have their own newsletters which they send to relatives abroad. A journal edited in Hong Kong, Bharat Ratna, creates, accentuates and maintains global communities – not to mention Sindhi chat lines on the web. Obviously, the Sindhis cannot be clearly located. Their diasporic network contrasts markedly with the dominant conception of space in ethnology. In this chapter I wish to analyse the ways diasporic groups such as the Sindhi can be approached anthropologically. I will argue that despite the claim to pursue a more mobile research methodology, in practice these claims often can not be carried out due to various circumstances that prevent the researcher from being mobile himself. I will therefore point out two possible approaches to the question of how stationary anthropological field research still can be carried out in diasporic situations. I will use the example of my research among the Sindhi of Gibraltar to show how relevant relations both to the diaspora as a whole as well as to India as the mythic land of origin are created, performed, maintained, lived and given sense locally. My argument is based on the assumption that both public discourse and counter narratives about Gibraltar, India and the diasporic network are expressions of various power struggles over spatial and social control. The following analysis is divided into four parts. Part one provides an overview of diaspora definitions. This overview shows that diasporas are mainly defined according to spatial relations; however, I will highlight a special aspect of diasporic societies that has been largely neglected by anthropologists. In part two, I will argue that this disregard is due to anthropological concepts of space and to field methodology. Though in recent times the traditional focus on space has been questioned in anthropological theory, this had little influence on the dominant methodology of fieldwork. Yet, fieldwork, which was developed

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

191

and propagated – by Malinowski among others – for research on territorially localized objects, was based on the unity of space, ethnicity and culture. The rupture of this unity by the developments mentioned in contemporary anthropology has often lead to the assumption, that mobile research practices would be an ideal way to research our ‘moving targets’ better. Favouring a pragmatic approach, however, I will argue that the focus on mobility alone leads to the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Too often the heirloom of our discipline is given away – that method, which means living with real people, listening to them carefully, discovering the discrepancies of discourse and practice, focusing on everyday life, on informal knowledge and embodied practices. In part three, based extensively on my field material, I propose two possible approaches to the issues of how the diasporic field and the methods of research can be reconciled.

Defining diasporas Currently, the most generally accepted definitions resemble those of Robin Cohen’s (1992) statement that the term ‘diaspora’ subsumes all communities living outside of their native land. Such a statement is mostly used in a non-theoretical, or at most vaguely theoretical manner. Used in this way, this term includes such various groups as migrants, exiles, refugees and transnational ethnic minorities. In various disciplines, on the other hand, different approaches are being tested for a more precise theoretical determination of the phenomenon of diaspora. In the first issue of the interdisciplinary journal Diaspora, the political scientist William Safran (1991) provides a definition with which various theoreticians have subsequently engaged. Safran’s model, which is explicitly oriented on the Jewish ‘ideal typus of the diaspora’, places decisive significance for maintenance of diasporic identity on the relationship of the diaspora community to the land of its forefathers or of its origin. In his article ‘Diasporas’, James Clifford (1994) argues that diaspora communities are above all distinguished by contrast between themselves and the norms of the nation-state in which they have settled, and also by contrast to the claims of autochthonous groups. Unlike Safran, Clifford stresses the embedding of the communities in their respective host societies, while Martin Baumann (1995) refers to the Biblical context through which the term of Greek origin was spread. For Baumann, diasporas arise from ‘a religious, often ethnic, group living as a minority outside its native land’. He sees the core of the community’s cohesion in the maintenance of religious identity. In addition, according to Baumann, while the maintenance of material and cultural connections to the native land is necessary, equally important is the development of local community structures, above all the founding of communal temples. According to my own definition, diasporas arise from spatially scattered communities which are tightly interwoven and refer to a common cultural identity; they thus demonstrate spatial, social and imaginary aspects and are subject to historical transformations.

192

Dieter Haller

The temporal components of the term diaspora and ‘diasporic identity’ are not, however, the focus of my chapter. Rather, I want to point to the relationship between space and group, a relationship which is formulated as the basis for the establishment and maintenance of cultural identity in the three approaches mentioned above – stressing, then, the relationship to the native land and/or place of residence. In Greek, diaspora means ‘sow, scatter’, referring to a number of communities which are often tightly interwoven with each other. Nonetheless, all three approaches exclude precisely this elementary spatial relationship for the organization of the network, which combines structural stability as well as a high degree of mobility of individuals. I will argue that the approaches of Safran, Clifford and Bauman neglect elementary relationships between space and community that mark diaspora communities: the relationship between the single communities. Although the Sindhi Diaspora is locally rooted, both in Gibraltar and in the lost homeland, the multiple economic, demographic, social and cultural links between the various communities around the globe and in virtual space have become a central feature of Sindhi diasporic identity. It is this diasporic relationship to space that has become a theoretical and methodological problem for a discipline like anthropology which defines itself substantially with the notion of ‘the field’.

Diasporas as a problem for anthropology Around the end of the nineteenth century the necessity of overcoming the division between data-collecting travellers, missionaries, and merchants on the one hand, and theory-making ‘armchair academics’ on the other was increasingly recognized. Rather, it became clear that theories should be tested in the field by those who had collected the data. The idea that scientists themselves should go out into the field to collect data on which theories would be derived began in biology in the 1870s (Kuklick 1997: 49) with the inauguration of field stations on the Italian and the American coasts, where living animals and plants could be investigated. It is no accident that the term ‘field’ was introduced to anthropology by a zoologist, A.C. Haddon (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 6). In the Kulturkreislehre influenced by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, in Bronislaw Malinowski’s British functionalism, in A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism, and in the Boas-School’s American cultural relativism (for example: Clark Wissler, in the Culture and Personality School, and George Peter Murdock), time and space were seen as determining dimensions of culture. Analogous to political world maps of nation-states, these traditions of cultural anthropology explicitly or implicitly defined ‘space’ as ‘cultural area’ and culture as a spatially bounded practice. In anthropological literature, localities become stages for certain phenomena. It seemed that cultural difference, historical connections, and social organization were inscribed in space. The national state, ethos and culture appeared to own their territories by some sort of inherent right.

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

193

A decisive revolution in the dominant anthropological method of data collection by third parties or specially organized expeditions was carried out in the first half of the twentieth century by such field pioneers as Franz Boas in the USA and, above all, Bronislaw Malinowski. Unique in Malinowski’s method of participatory observation is indeed the fact that the ethnologist not only collects data himself, but also exposes himself to the foreign culture for a lengthy period and experiences culture shock, which can bring the assumptions of his own native culture into question and also shed new light on the knowledge of the foreign society. While Malinowski’s personal research practice fully takes into account the mobility of his Trobriand Islanders in the context of their kula-bartering, the methodological canonization of stationary field research in the area of teaching and research pays tribute above all to the administrative requirements of colonialism. Thus, the historical and dynamic aspects of the groups investigated were largely excluded and the main emphasis was instead placed on the synchronous question as to the functioning of the society. Following Malinowski and well into the 1970s, the hegemonic definition of sedentary small societies as the suitable research object prevailed. But from time when urban ethnologists followed their rural informants to the urban centres of South Africa – in the 1950s – mobility became more and more a supplementary perspective in anthropological research. Above all, in the course of post-functional and post-structural approaches, the local limitations of ‘field’ were placed in question: urbanization, migration, transnationalism, and the new media have led to a blurring of the traditionally narrow ‘fields’. Urbanization, migration, globalization, transnational unification efforts, and the new media are now making it ever more difficult for ethnologists to continue to investigate their traditional objects as though they were isolated, holistic, smallscale units. The fact that all communities, even the most locally rooted, have connections to the outside world which connect their members ‘at home’ with those ‘abroad’, and above all exercise reciprocal influences on the construction of culture, has long been overlooked. Tribalism and indigeneity have been connected with local rootedness, diaspora with local rootlessness. The problem of the blurring of the boundaries of our fields is closely linked to more general processes within our discipline: it touches on the relationship between space and identity, culture and power. These concepts underwent a re-evaluation due to impulses from postmodern theory, with fundamental impacts on the relationship between space, stability, and cultural reproduction. Central here is the rejection of ‘culture’ as a substance with fixed characteristics. The conception of culture as a historically rooted signifying system has been increasingly viewed as problematic by American cultural anthropology since the beginning of the 1980s and therefore been rejected. Since then, people are less and less seen as spatially localized representatives of a cultural system and more and more – as Clifford (1992: 103) calls them – as ‘people of dwelling and travel’. In contrast to the classic field studies emphasizing the sedentary, ‘mobility’ became a guiding category in interpretive ethnology in the 1980s: George Marcus (1995), suggested various techniques and strategies for research into diasporic

194

Dieter Haller

situations, to take into account this conversion from the sedentary to the mobile. He suggests that these techniques should include the introduction of mobile methodological techniques as well as a strategic focus on the mobilization of knowledge, i.e., on the circulation of signs, symbols, and metaphors. This imperative of ‘following’ things, peoples and ideas raises the danger that the central advantages of participatory observation, often overlooked by other methods of data collection, might disappear – above all, the noting and discovery of informal connections, which can usually only be recognized through long-lasting eyewitness observation. Such observation is precisely the basic task of ethnology as propounded by Geertz, which has subsequently achieved hegemony, namely, the symbol hermeneutic analysis of hidden aspects of a culture by means of intensive description Moreover, emphasizing mobility does not overcome the dichotomy between the sedentary and the mobile, but rather leads to intensify it. While Hannerz (1992: 239) introduces the distinction between those communities which ‘still define themselves on the basis of territoriality’ (locals) and ‘those which carry collective signifying structures through spatially extensive networks of a transnational or even global nature’ (cosmopolitans), Appadurai (1991) situates sedentary cultures in the past and mobile cultures in the present. According to Appadurai, there was once a more stable form of spatial bonding in cultures which only became mobilized through globalization. Even though today the acceleration of the networking of more and more groups can certainly be observed, diaspora networks are not a contemporary phenomenon, but are rather often rooted in pre-national contexts. It can be observed that traditional field research as well as the postmodern about-face derive from a dichotomous reference to space. This is challenged by diasporic forms of organization, since here one is dealing with networks which transcend locality but are, however, simultaneously locally anchored and which can therefore be fathomed neither with the traditional stationary focus nor with the follow-the-imperative focus alone. Causes for the neglect of empirical research on diasporas are numerous and may more or less be explained by the fact that diasporas are frequently well-to-do elite communities. The methodological causes, however, may be found in the fact that the transformation of the closed term of field to that of the open network, seldom had consequences for specific research practices.

Towards an anthropological methodology on diasporas: researching the Sindhi network To make diasporic networks accessible to ethnological research, a questioning of the methodological practice must follow the transformation of methodological strategies, without however relinquishing postulates on which the discipline’s identity is currently based. I would like to point out two possible approaches to anthropological research on diasporas which not only take into account the perspectives of sedentariness and mobility but which were developed by empirically working field researchers

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

195

and in which the methodological postulates underpinning the discipline’s identity are maintained. I will illustrate them with my research on the Sindhis of Gibraltar. As an introduction to the first approach, I would like again to consider the network character. Diasporas are webs, and webs consist not only of fibres or ropes, but also of nodes that link them together. Diasporas, too, have nodal points, and it is at these nodal points that the common identity is maintained, modified and expressed. The first approach therefore consists of identifying and researching nodal points. In urban anthropology research on social networks was developed, in contrast to traditional neighbourhood studies (see Welz 1998). For Welz, spatial closeness is no necessary prerequisite for the maintenance of community; rather communities may be characterized by a common locality, such as a bar, a street, an institution, where group identity can be manifested. Such a locality can also be a family land or a family house, where the relatives from diasporic communities regularly return and meet, as shown in the research of Olwig and Hastrup. These points are not always fixed localized nodes. Sindhis, for example, have no access to their land of origin, for Sindh nowadays belongs to Muslim Pakistan and it is very difficult to obtain a visiting permit for Hindu Sindhis. So in the Sindhi case, identity can be manifested and exposed in several different contexts. First, they can be manifested during the multiple travel activities of diaspora Sindhis between two communities due to family events or economic activities. These travels create a network sometimes based on face-to-face relations, sometimes on second- or third-hand relationships, once at this place of the web, once at another place. A second nodal point for the global Sindhi community is Hong Kong – before and also after being handed over to China. Hong Kong is the biggest and wealthiest Sindhi community in the diasporic web, and also the most influential. The journal Bharat Ratna, is edited in Hong Kong, and here the network of volunteer correspondents from all 80 communities around the globe flow together. Bharat Ratna – which carries the subtitle Lifestyle of the Overseas Indian – is a journal for the Sindhi communities, but it not only produces and catalyzes the community of the diaspora Sindhis, it also creates an image of ‘Indian culture’ as such. Bharat Ratna constructs ‘India’ as a synonym for Sindhi culture. It is a class- and castespecific image of India, the Sindhi diaspora being a wealthy to rich community. The second approach applicable to the ethnological investigation of diaspora networks is the consideration of places as products of discourse and practice, as formulated by Foster (1999).1 Foster investigates local strategies of assimilation and rejection of global images for possible designs of living. Global circulation of media images leads to a resituating of socially and spatially defined communities in their relationship to other localities. Applied to the field of diaspora, this means investigating discourses and practices by means of which informants localize, globalize, situate and de-situate themselves. It should thus be determined how, by whom, in which contexts, and with what aims local rooting, the connection to the ‘former homeland’, or the existence of a diasporic network is created, intensified or denied.

196

Dieter Haller

This places the focus of investigation on the relation between locality as lived practice and narratives. Identifying the focal points of the informants’ lives must be combined with questioning the connection of these places to rhetorical images of globality, locality, and networks. I will illustrate both approaches with an example from my fieldwork in Gibraltar. The event, which I attended on 17 August 1996 and which was celebrated in the open-air theatre in Gibraltar’s Botanical Gardens, the Alameda, carried the name ‘Essence of India’: here, notions of locality, homeland and diaspora meaningfully intersect.

‘Essence of India’ – Indian essentials: hegemonic views on India, Gibraltar and the diaspora The celebration took place in honour of India’s Independence Day. About 85 per cent of the guests are Sindhis, amongst them many from other cities in nearby Spain and northern Morocco, such as Málaga, Torremolinos, Marbella, Fuengirola, Ceuta and Tangiers. The guests are dressed in gala, most women in beautifully coloured saris, even non-Indian women wear saris. When the evening was announced in the local newspaper, The Gibraltar Chronicle (5 August 1996), it was mentioned the evening would offer the possibility to dress in saris, salvar kameez or churidad etc. ‘to help create the perfect atmosphere’. I felt totally underdressed with my jeans and T-shirt. At the entrance of the open-air theatre, little boxes with small indian snacks such as samosas, pakoras, batatwadhas, sandwiches with green chutney, and sweet mithai were offered. Stage and entrance were decorated with Indian flags; to the left of the stage was a white sign with the map of India, painted in orange. Countless lighted candles floated on the little pond in front of the stage. In front of my seat was the row for the guests of honour, such as Mr and Mrs Haresh Budhrani, the president of the Hindu community, Judge Alcantara and his wife, mayor of Gibraltar, Minister for Finance, Peter Montegriffo, as well as Mr and Mrs Radhakeshan, owner of a local sports shop, and Mrs Chellaram, a spiritual leader of the community; next to them two little tables with snacks. President Budhrani [*1952] salutes the guests and introduces the evening, which will mainly consist of several Indian fashion shows and Indian dance events. Budhrani uses the terms Hindu community and Indian community synonymously. He mentions, that, ‘our home is THIS great city [Gibraltar], but we are also proud of OUR country [India].’ Then in newsreel style, an off-camera voice announces the death of Mahatma Gandhi. I am under the impression that this must either be an original documentary clip or the original soundtrack from the film ‘Gandhi’ with Ben Kingsley. Then, 25 little boys in white shorts with white Nehru hats and white T-shirts emblazoned with the flag of India cross the stage. Otherwise, an apparently endless fashion show choreographed by Deepak Ramchandani, who later tells me he learned about modelling from TV-Asia and countless competitions in which he himself took part. The young women parade in a large selection of saris in all colours – orange, green, blue, mauve, pink,

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

197

purple – all decorated with gold embroidery. Most of the models, all of them young people from the local Hindu community, are on the catwalk for the first time. The male models show a selection of Indian men’s fashions, primarily kurta pyjamas and sadris.2 Some wear long tunics with trousers under them. A great variety of materials were used: silk, satin, or even beige cotton. Somehow, I am upset. I learn nothing about the fashion designer of these sometimes really great clothes nor about anything else: the models strut silently and majestically across the stage, and that’s it. Once, a ‘fashion synthesis of East and West’ was announced, but I at least could not determine what was supposed to distinguish these clothes from the others presented. They all looked just as Indian as the dresses worn by the young women at the beginning. According to Insight Magazine from September, 1996, it was ‘a very colourful and sensational collection of cropped tops called cholis, long tops and flared shirts, called lengas, all adorned with wraps called chunis’. The dancing boys (the 8–12-year-olds) all wore the same tennis shoes. The tennis shoe merchant Radhakeshan probably earned a tidy sum on this. The reaction of the primarily Indian audience is not exactly overwhelming. The individual performances receive rather lukewarm applause. Only at the end – they were asked to rise and sing the Indian national anthem – did a few hurrahs provide some hint of euphoria. Six models began the anthem and the audience joined in with some hesitation and without much enthusiasm. For the finale, Deepak waved the flag of Gibraltar and one of the other dancers (the only non-Indian) waved the Indian flag.3 India and Gibraltar are the overt topics of this public celebration, but, I will argue, it tells us more about the self-representation of the local community in the diasporic web than about concrete places. Like Mr Budhrani’s integrationist politics within Gibraltar society, as evidenced in his welcome address at the ‘Essence of India’ celebration, the promotion of the multi-religious argumentation of the Satchidananda ethics, the community leadership also sends a signal to Gibraltar society: we are an integral component of the community. Hereby, the community leadership clearly attempts to situate the Sindhis as a group rooted and integrated in Gibraltar’s local culture. This effort has to be seen against a background of social, racial and legal discrimination by the military and until recently local authorities. Stressing local bonds of Sindhis is especially necessary in an age in which the political powers of Gibraltar are busy creating a national identification which is distinct from the British colonial rulers, on the one hand, and from their greedy Spanish neighbours, on the other. National identification rests on two pillars: acknowledgement of the local ethos of cultural mixture and ethnic tolerance and an expression of loyalty to the territorial community of the homeland that is potentially offensive to the majority of Gibraltar’s population. The diasporic connection raises ambivalent feelings among the latter: on the one hand, the entire community benefits economically from the diasporic connection of the Sindhis (tax revenues; from the network come most of the merchandise sold duty-free in Gibraltar). On the other hand, the network also gives rise to the suspicion that

198

Dieter Haller

Sindhis are potentially disloyal and would turn their backs on Gibraltar as soon as economic conditions worsened. You cannot count on them. The community leadership’s discourse on explicitly accentuating Gibraltar as the social, economical and political centre of Sindhi life as well as India as the seat of the spiritual essence. At the same time, the ex-nomination of diasporic bonds is directed at the community as a whole: first, in order to dispel fears of disloyalty; second, to defuse the latent envy directed against the well-to-do merchant community by the community as a whole which is suffering through economic crisis; third, to demonstrate and thereby also simultaneously to demand participation in the social and political life of the community as a whole. The president of the community, Mr Budhrani, is explicitly placing great stress on two aspects of Sindhi identity by referring to the home city Gibraltar as well as to India as the mythical land of origin – but the third aspect, however, the diasporic web, is foreclosed. Nowhere during the event, is the diasporic aspect of Sindhi identity mentioned explicitly. Nevertheless, the representation of Indian culture and heritage is decidedly diasporic in the way local Sindhis perceive themselves. Indian culture and heritage, as already formulated by the nationalist movement in the 1920s, referred to an ‘already existing Oneness’ of an essentialized India itself. ‘This [e]ssence lay in “the ideal of Indian unity”, resurrected by these nationalists, who attributed such a unity to “the Spirit of India” from time immemorial and to “the great rulers of the State” in the years before the arrival of the British’ (Bhattacharjee 1998: 167). It is exactly by referring to this oneness and essence – which in the Gibraltar context is the vision of an economically and socially successful bourgeois diasporic community of culture and spirituality – that Sindhi identity needs not to be named, because it coincides. The ‘Essence of India’ celebration reveals the essentials attributed to India through the self-representation of the local community. These essentials present, however, a diasporic vision of India as time- and context-less. First, although the Gibraltar Hindu community is entirely ethnically Sindhi, it is mainly perceived by the locals as the ‘Indians’ or ‘Hindus’, never as Sindhis. Most locals don’t even know the term ‘Sindhi’. This is not only due to local ignorance, but also to Sindhi self-representation. For example, one major shop is called ‘Pepe, el indio’, and the Gibraltar Chronicle of 23 August 1996 comments about the event: ‘The show proved to be everything that symbolizes India’ (authors emphasis ). Second, in self-representation, the community calls itself informally ‘the Hindu community’; moreover, its main institutional frame is the so called Hindu Merchant Association (italics mine). Nation and religion are interlinked here, as ‘Hindu’ is synonymized with ‘Indian’. Third, the institutionalized frame of the community is not only ‘Hindu’, it is also ‘merchant’, and it points to the bourgeois background of the way the diasporic community sees itself. The Sindhi community of Gibraltar has been in existence since 1858, when the first merchant of Hyderabad opened a business in the British colony. Since then, the community has been a predominantly merchant community which, until 1993, was institutionalized only in the economic sphere, as the Hindu

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

199

Merchant Association.4 However, this does not mean that all of the 550 members of the community belong to the group of shop owners or lawyers. In the Hindu community, both employers and employees in the colonial situation of Gibraltar today, class is linked to nationality. In 1991, only about 46 per cent of Gibraltar Sindhis possessed Gibraltarian status and/or the British nationality. More than 50 per cent are of other, mainly Indian, nationality – mostly employees from the subcontinent with the permit to stay not more than three years in Gibraltar. Fourth, the community presents itself as if caste were an irrelevant factor in social structuring. Information about representation and public discourse on castes is definitely available. Yet most informants denied the existence of a caste structure or even did not know which caste or subcaste they were in. They commonly described themselves as ‘merchants’. It is therefore not surprising, that in public events as the ‘Essence of India’ celebration, when the community acts as such, it acts as ‘the Hindu’ or ‘the Indian community’ and presents an image of India that is as time- and context-less than the representation Pandey (1990) and Bhattacharjee (1998) referred to. The contexts that remain unnamed are of course the social, political, cultural and historical contexts within which the community can be located. ‘Indian culture and the unity of India are for all Indians to possess by the sheer magic of their being Indians; it permeates their essence.’ Remember the subtitle of Bharat Ratna – Lifestyle of the Overseas Indian. The essentials of India are spirituality and culture. ‘It is possible to identify a dominant nationalist spirit in India which has been one of learning Western technology and economics while protecting the culture and spiritual essence of India (...)’ (Bhattacharjee 1998: 168). The national project, as described by Chatterjee, is one which ‘cultivate[d] the material techniques of modern civilization while retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the natural culture’ ( Chatterjee 1989: 623). The same essentialization of the East (and implicitly of the West as well) continues to be evident on the level of public representation as in the ‘Essence of India’ celebration in Alameda Gardens. Among the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie of the western Mediterranean, the national spirit translates into advancing economical and political success whilst preserving Indian culture and heritage. Diasporic Sindhis as the community I investigated in Gibraltar have done extremely well economically and contributed strongly to the local economy in general, they have become integral parts of the society at large (e.g. through intermarriages with local Catholics). In the field of local politics slowly Sindhis advance more and more. At the same time, Sindhis have cultivated ‘the essence of India’, which here I use metaphorically for all kinds of cultural activities, such as Sindhi language courses, Indian fashion shows, Indian dance groups, Yoga and Meditation groups etc. It is exactly the junction of adapting to globalized western economical patterns and of cultivating time- and context-less cultural essentials that is decidedly a diasporic quality amongst the Sindhis. There are, however competing discourses and, moreover, competing practices.

200

Dieter Haller

Competing discourses Mahesh Latvani ( born1974), came to Gibraltar at the age of eight with his mother in 1982. For Mahesh, life in the community of some 600 people primarily means life under familial and neighbourhood control. His envious gaze is directed to the life of his cousin of the same age, Anup, in Bombay. ‘In India, everything is already a lot more liberal than here,’ says Mahesh. ‘Here, the parents bring “their” time with them and impose it on us. They think India is still like it used to be. But I know my cousin and his friends the same age as I am are freer than I am! A girl cousin of mine in Bombay had three different friends in the last few years. Here, if you have a girlfriend, that’s already bad enough, but if you don’t marry her, that’s a catastrophe. Sex is taboo anyway.’ On the other hand, there are the fantasy projections of Mahesh’s mother Joty, who ‘brings her time with her’, as Mahesh says. In her narratives, India is the India she experienced or wishes for – secure individuals in the family which offers protection and control. In contrast, Europe is the world of temptations: how many young Sindhis have already married Christian girls – and then not even the first one they dated! Here, the geography of desire is reversed between mother and son: while she situates traditional life in Bombay and hopes Mahesh will finally meet his future bride at the next big wedding celebration, her son is looking forward to the technoparties of the Bombay jeunesse dorée to which Anup has already invited him. As Mahesh and Joty’s perspectives show, the topos ‘Indian’ can have different meanings than the hegemonic representative narrative. Competing images of India among the Sindhi community in Gibraltar have become more evident since the composition of the permanently residing hindus of Gibraltar has radically altered since the late 1980s in terms of gender and of class. A first shift in the composition of the Hindu community was the permanent settlement of Indian women – such as Joty – in the colony, which was not possible until the introduction of the British Nationality Act of 1981 on 1 January 1983.5 Second, earlier the employees of Indian nationality mostly working in Sindhi shops could not become permanent residents of Gibraltar and were replaced, in general after three years, by new employees from the subcontinent, through extensive patronage and client systems. This has changed, and through informal agreements between the British government and the local government, the last employees of Indian nationality could stay, but not be replaced. To illustrate the differences between Mahesh and Joty, we have to go back to the essentials of India, to religion and spirituality, and to the central nodal point of the diasporic web, to Hong Kong. In the realm of religion and spirituality, hegemonic discourse of the local community is also shaped by the bourgeois vision of the successful Hindu merchant. ‘It happens everywhere, not just here in Gibraltar,’ is a commentary which informants of all religious orientations readily utter to explain and legitimize spiritualization. But where is ‘everywhere’ for the Sindhis? A look at the global diaspora makes us notice that also with regard to spirituality the network with Hong Kong as nodal point appears uniform. In addition, the magazine Bharat Ratna is a decisive axis of

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

201

cultural flow here. The periodical is published by Mrs Sandee N. Harilela of the Hong Kong multimillionaire Harilela family. The Harilela family, too, originally comes from Sindh; and, in the diaspora communities, their story serves as a constant example of the superior merchant mentality and economic success of the Sindhis. The spiritual leader and a frequent house guest of the Harilela family for more than 40 years is Sri Swami Satchidananda,6 the same guru who co-opened the legendary Woodstock Festival in 1969 and today leads an ashram in the US state of Virginia with the name Yogaville (N.N. 1999: 27–31). Sri Swami Satchidananda has a running column in Bharat Ratna, in which he answers various religious questions and elucidates principles of his philosophy. Satchidananda’s spirituality, including above all yoga and meditation, marks the image of Hinduism in the diaspora communities, especially among the younger generation. This is particularly evident in Gibraltar, for the daughter of one of the six Harilela brothers has been living in Gibraltar since 1974 and is the wife of a local Sindhi merchant from an old family; in 1988, she brought Satchidananda to the colony, is one of his pupils, and herself trains (Sindhi and many non-Sindhi) yoga and meditation teachers – and moreover, up to now, has done so in the community’s Hindu temple. As there is no full-time local Hindu spiritual leader, it is Mrs Chellaram, the Harilela daughter, who primarily used the temple – almost daily for her yoga and meditation classes (until her Integral Yoga Centre was opened in the late 1990s).7 Local TV invites her to expert discussions on social and religious matters as the expert of the Hindu community. The religious master narrative of the Gibraltar Sindhis is highly influenced by the liberal and open bourgeois vision of Mrs. Chellaram and Satchidananda about Indian Essence. And this is explicitly against ‘narrow-minded forms of Hinduism’ and integrates the praises of God found in other religions in their own religious services. Devotees, including Mahesh, are informed that these forms of praise come from Shintos, Jews, Moslems, Christians, Buddhists, ‘Africans’, and ‘North American Indians’. If we analyze Bharat Ratna as nodal point, we see that the master narrative of religious renewal in the diasporic network is primarily located in Hong Kong. Only the participant observation reveals anything to us about the local significance of religious renewal. The master narrative limits and encloses women within a space in which they can express themselves spiritually and socially (charity). Simultaneously, it occupies the realm of spirituality in a class-specific manner and thus reproduces the class hierarchy: only young educated women from the upper class who grew up in a Western context – such as Mrs Chellaram – determine and define the space in which the Sindhis’ religiosity occurs, not the wives brought from India who speak neither Spanish nor English. The master narrative is thereby also directed against local counter-narratives developed by the underprivileged – in terms of their sex, class and probably caste – members of the Sindhi community among themselves. In contrast to Satchidananda’s open ideology, the Radha Soami Movement has many devotees among women, like Mahesh’s mother, Joty, who grew up in India, and poorer

202

Dieter Haller

Indian employees of Sindhi businesses. Radha Soami ideology is labelled narrowminded by the master narrative. On the other hand, for Radha Soami devotees, Satchidananda’s openness is equivalent with the relinquishing of Indian essentials, such as their imagined family values and food taboos. This becomes explicitly clear in the degree of observance of Hindu dietary rules. Whereas on a discursive level, both groups are fervently anti-alcohol and pro-vegetarian, in practice Radha Soamis are in general much stricter in both aspects than Satchidanandas.

Summary Well-to-do Sindhis are perhaps more clearly able to demonstrate than the underprivileged communities of labour migrants, political exiles and refugees considered by diaspora research, that in contrast to popular assumptions, diaspora cultural identity is not at all solely determined by a balancing between the homeland and the host country, but rather by the independent quality of the multiple links between individual communities. Second, the example also clearly shows that even for the economic winners of globalization, the emotional tie to a local focal point of life does not disappear in favour of rootless cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, local connections are subjected to a reinterpretation against the background of the global and cosmopolitanism bears traces of local cultural colouring. Space as the example of the diaspora community of Gibraltar Sindhis makes more than obvious, is never given but always a product of interpretation. Therefore, we need to ask why a locality (or a globality) is given a special meaning. Where Clifford, then, might ask about the significance of Gibraltar for the Sindhis, I ask how, who, in what contexts, and with what aims Sindhis and other Gibraltarians claim or deny rootedness. While others might inquire about the significance of the former homeland for the Gibraltar Sindhis, I instead inquire into the strategies by which connection is claimed or denied. And instead of asking about the significance of the relationship between the local Sindhis and the global network of the Sindhi diaspora, I suggest we should ask about the strategies which claim or deny a relationship to other communities and also about the significance of the rhetorical images of globality and locality. In brief, it is a matter of investigating those strategies by means of which visions of the local and the global are constituted within and through the nexus of (cultural and material, real and imagined) relationships which extend far beyond the given locality. Significant in this regard are the ways and means in which the dominant versions of locality and globality are reformulated and re-articulated in the light of the experience and narration of foreign experiences (Johnson 1998). The experience of physical mobility enables people like Mahesh and his mother to think of themselves as being ‘absent from somewhere else’. This experience brings people to construct certain values and projects as consciously local in certain contexts, and in other contexts to consider the same experiences as a conscious rejection of the local in favour of an imaginary cosmopolitanism.

Economy, spirituality and gender in the Sindhi Network

203

This focus leads to the formulation of a flexible methodology for which participant observation remains the core of the methodology for reasons of theory, research pragmatics, and institutional requirements. Participant observation remains the central method, with consideration of local siting strategies and the uprooting of trans-local influences. Moreover, the ethnographic method can help achieve an understanding of locality and globality beyond essentialist structures and postmodern borderlessness – namely, as a process of identification in which the general dynamics of meaning concepts become visible, as they for example reveal themselves in the most different societal contexts. The reconciliation of the global with the local by working on the significance of siting and uprooting in the network is finally also capable of investigating the collaboration of individual strategic dispositions and collective representations. And it is indeed not clear whether research can be brought to a conclusion at the originally chosen research site. However, whether it is possible for the researchers to follow the informants or not, depends on whether the discipline’s organization and the research promotion institutions have already come to take into account the transformation of the term field and also of research practice or whether they must be introduced to this.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See also Mark Johnson (1998). Short, sleeveless vests. Fieldnotes, 17 August 1996. It was not until 1993, when a Hindu temple run by a temple committee was built in Gibraltar, that the Sindhi community gave itself a religious framework. The temple was inaugurated officially on 1 March, 2000. 5 Until 1982, territorial law prevailed in Gibraltar (jus soli): anyone born in one of the British territories – as in Gibraltar for example – was automatically a British citizen, regardless of the nationality of the parents. Children of Indian parents born in Gibraltar automatically received British citizenship. In recent years, the wives of Indian workers received permission to visit their husbands for six months per calendar year; some Sindhis established their families in the neighbouring countries of Morocco and Spain. To prevent the birth of children of Indian citizens in Gibraltar (and thus the possibility of obtaining British citizenship), Indian women were deported as soon as pregnancy was detected. In rare cases, a deportation could be prevented if a doctor certified pregnancy complications and thus the inability of the mother to travel. In such cases, the parents were required to sign a declaration in advance relinquishing claim to British citizenship for the child. Since the introduction of the British Nationality Act of 1981, the practice of deporting Indian women during pregnancy has been abolished since newborns no longer automatically become British. 6 N.N.: Nalanie Chellaram, in: Gibraltar Business Network (ed.): Half the Nation, Gibraltar 1999: 27–31. 7 http://www.angelfire.com/nc/integralyogacentregb/ (11.03.2000).

Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1991) ‘Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for a transnational anthropology’, in R.G. Fox (ed.) Recapturing Anthropology, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

204

Dieter Haller

Baumann, M. (1995) ‘Conceptualizing diaspora’, Temenos, 31: 19–35. Bhattacharjee, A. (1998) ‘The habit of ex-nomination – nation, woman, and the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie’, in S.D. Gupta (ed.) A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chatterjee, P. (1989) ‘Colonialism, nationalism, and colonized women: the contest in India’, American Ethnologist, 16(4): 623. Clifford, J. (1992) ‘Travelling cultures’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler, (eds) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. —— (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 302–38. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Foster, R.J. (1999) ‘Marginal modernities: identity and locality, global media and commodity consumption’, paper presented at German-American Frontiers of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Symposium, Dölln, 25–28 March. Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (1997) ‘Discipline and practice: “the field” as site, method and location in anthropology’ in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds) Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. Johnson, M. (1998) ‘Global desirings and translocal loves: transgendering and same-sex sexualities in the southern Philippines’, American Ethnologist, 25(4): 695–711. Kuklick, H. (1997) ‘After Ishmael: the fieldwork tradition and its future’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds) Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marcus, G.E. (1995) ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, ARA 1995, 24: 95–117. Markovits, C. (2000) The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947. Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. N.N. (1999), ‘Nalanie Chellaram’, in Gibraltar Business Network (ed.) Half the Nation, Gibraltar 1999: 27–31. Olwig, K.F (1997) ‘Cultural sites: sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world’, in K.F. Olwig and K. Hastrup (eds) Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge. Olwig, K.F. and Hastrup, K. (eds) (1997) Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge. Pandey, G. (1990) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Dehli: Oxford University Press. Safran, W. (1991) ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, 1(1): 83–100. Welz, G. (1998) ‘ “Moving targets”. Feldforschung unter Mobilitätsdruck’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 94(2): 177–95.

Index

205

Index

Abramson, H.J. 172 Adawiyya order 158 ‘Adi ibn Musafir 158 admission criteria 19(Figure 1.1) African-Americans 103–4, 106–7, 111–12 Ahrens, H.J. 104 Alevi Culture Centre (AKM) 138–9, 143, 145, 146–7, 148 Alevi diaspora 133–51 Allison, C. 161 Alte, R. 134 ancestry, and Black identity 103 Ang, Ien 42–3, 48 Anglo-Irish people 119 anthropology: diasporas as problem for 192–4; research methodology 190–1, 192–6 anti-Semitism 10–11 Antoniou, P. 77, 83 Appadurai, Arjun 56, 194 Armenian diaspora 72–89; history and structures of 77–9 Armstrong, John 93, 94 Arnold, Rev. 38 Arrowsmith, A. 35, 46 Asante, M.K. 108 Asia Minor 97 assimilation: forcible 24; strategies for 195–6; voluntary 25; ‘white genocide’ 72, 78, 84 associations: Alevi 138–9, 143; Hindu Trinidadian 180; Yezidi 163–4, 165 Atamian, Mardiros 80 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 134, 143, 150 Australia 171; Greek emigrants to 97 Barth, F. 4, 110, 157 Basch, L. 57 Baumann, Gerd 141

Baumann, Martin 149, 191 Béhague, G.E. 109 belief 139 Bhabha, Homi K. 4, 26, 43, 48 Bharat Ratna (journal) 190, 195, 199, 200–1 Bhattacharjee, A. 198, 199 black identity: the African diaspora 102, 105, 108–9; in Canada 60, 62; in United States 62, 106–7 Black music 102 Black nationalism 107, 108 Blessing, P.J. 119, 120, 121, 122 Blockson, C.L. 104 Boas, Franz 193 Bouma, Gary D., theory of religious settlement 171, 173 boundaries 4 Brah, Avtar 7, 33, 74, 83, 85, 108 brahmins 174, 177 Brereton, B. 175 Brewster, Scott 39 Britain: Anglo-Irish people 119; firstgeneration Irish women immigrants in 35, 37, 38–43; and Indian workers in Trinidad 174; role in Great Famine 120–1, 124–5 Bruneau, M. 93 Budhrani, Haresh 196, 197, 198 Butler, Judith 43 Caglar, A. 108 Canada: ‘Caribbean’ family movement and identity in 53, 57–69, see also North America; United States cantonization see ghettoes careers see employment ‘Caribbean’ family, movement and identity 53, 57–69

206

Index

caste system 174; merchant castes (Sindhi) 189, 198–9 Catholic Church: and first-generation Irish women immigrants 37–8; and Irish emigration 122 cem 133, 134–6, 139–45, 151; cem-houses 148–9; interpretations of cem 145–8 Charters, S.B. 105 Chevallier, J. 25 children/childhood: of Armenian diaspora 81; of second-generation Irish 45 Christian diaspora: early Christians 11; and Hindu Trinidadians 179 citizenship: of Armenians in Greece 78, 85; host country’s policies for 19, 22; refusal of by host country 25 class (social): and Armenian diaspora 74; Armenian diaspora elite 78–9; and ethnicity 54–5; and Gibraltarian Sindhis 199, 201–2; of Greek emigrants 94; Indian caste system 174; in Yezidi community 159–60 clergy, Yezidi 159, 166–7 Clifford, James 2, 9, 33, 34, 55, 75, 76, 86, 191, 193 Cohen, Abner 2–3 Cohen, Robin 3, 9, 33, 55, 75, 103, 157, 162, 163, 173, 191 communication: in Armenian diaspora 74; internet 157, 163, 164, 165; radio 180; in Sindhi network 190; television 201; and West Indian Canadian family networks 63–4, 65 communities: Alevi 135–6, 141, 143–5, 147–9; establishment of 174, 175, 176; minority 10–11, see also associations; family Constas, D.C. and Platias, A. 93 Coogan, T.P. 33 Courlander, Harold 104 ‘creolization’ 108 Cultural Forum of the Yezidi Religious Community (Oldenberg) 163–4, 165 cultural pluralism 27 culture: of African diaspora musicians 102–3, 104–5, 107–8, 109–12; Alevi 136, 139–43, 145–8, 150; of the Armenian diaspora 78–9; Caribbean events in Canada 59; concepts of 193; conflicts of 178–9; cultural continuity 34–5, 43–7, 151; griots and the African diaspora 102–12; of homeland

16, 21, 110–12; and identity 56–7, 156, 171, 172; of Indian, and Sindhi network 195, 196–202; Irish women’s transmission of 34, 37, 43–7; oral, of Yezidis 158; and ‘otherness’ 23, see also assimilation; literacy; religion; seasoning Dabag, M. and Platt, K. 2 Dadrian, V.N. 14, 23 dance 142 Dashnak (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) 78–9, 80 Daum, C. 109 Davis, G. 120, 121, 122, 123 de Gaulle, Charles 11 dedes 135, 136, 140, 143, 147, 149 Dendias, M.A. 93 Dengê Êzîdiyan (journal) 161, 164, 165 diaspora; African 105–8; changing meanings of 68–9, 161–2, 163, 192–4; concepts of 2–3, 9–17, 14, 33–4, 95, 118–19; cultural continuity in 34–5, 43–7, 151; ‘de-diasporization’ 15; definitions of 191–2; end of 181; and migration 55, 68, 69, 73–4, 86–7, 88; mobility and globalization 75–6, 157; phases of diachronic development 173–81; and transnationalism 53, 55–6; triadic relationships of 149–51; Yezidi community as 162–7 ‘diaspora consciousness’ 75 Diaspora (journal) 1, 9 Diederichsen, D. 108 Diner, Hasia 33, 36 displacement, of first-generation women emigrants 37, 42–3 Disraeli, Benjamin 13 Dittrich, E.J. and Radtke, F.-O. 171 Divali 180–1 domestic service, first-generation Irish women immigrants in 36, 37 Dominica, family origins and Canadian identities 58–63 Donoghue, Emma 46 Dorsch, H. 105, 106 Drame, A. and Senn-Borloz, A. 103 Dulz, I. 158 economic context: of first-generation Irish women’s emigration 36–7; of Gibraltarian Sindhis 189, 198–9; of Greek migrations 97; of Irish emigration 122

Index education: of Hindu Trinidadians 175, 177, 179; of West Indian Canadians 66, 67 emancipation see liberation ‘Emigrant Section of the Catholic Society’ 37–8 emigration: Irish, and the Great Famine 119–21, 121–6; and return to homeland 42, 175, see also immigration employment: of Dominicans in Canada 58, 66–7; during the Great Famine 120; of first-generation Irish women immigrants 36, 37, 38; of Greek migrants 98, 99; of Hindu Trinidadians 174, 175; of Sindhis in Gibraltar 198–9, 200 England: Anglo-Irish people 119; firstgeneration Irish women immigrants in 38–47, see also Britain Enloe, C. 34 Esedebe, P.O. 105, 107 ‘Essence of India’ celebration 196–200 ethnic identity 41, 171; African 103; and class 54–5; German 14; Greek 95–6; Jewish 54; and race in North America 56 expatriate communities 11–12, 15–16; host country’s policies 20 exports, of food 121 expulsion 24 extermination 25 EZiA (Yezidi Centre Abroad) (Hannover) 164, 165 families: Alevi 135, 149; ancestry and Black identity 103; ‘Caribbean’ family movement and identity 53, 57–69; Gibraltarian Sindhi 190, 200, 201; and religious practice of migrants 174; in Yezidi community 159–60, see also communities; generations festivals 180–1 fieldwork: the Armenian community in Thessaloniki 72–89; methodology of 190–1, 192–6 Firat, G. 137 first-generation immigrants: Dominican immigrants to Canada 58; Irish women as 33–49 Foner, N. 4 food supply 119–21 forcible assimilation 24 foreign policies, of host countries 19–20 Fortier, Anne-Marie 45

207

Fossey, J.M. 93 Foster, R.J. 195 freedom see liberation The Gambia 109 Garrigan, O.M. 38 Gästarbeiter (guest workers) 98, 99, 137 Geanakoplos, D.J. 96 Gellner, Ernest 23 gender: and cultural displacement 37, 42–3; and cultural survival 43–7; of Greek migrants 98 generations: Dominican immigrants to Canada 58–63; Greek-born Armenians 78, 80, 81; intergenerational cultural continuity 43–7, see also families; first-generation immigrants genocide 83–4; ‘white genocide’ 72, 78, 84 geographical context: first-generation Irish women immigrants in England 30, 39; place, movement and identity 53–69 Georgas, D. and Papastylianou, A. 98 German identity 14 Germany: Alevi diaspora in 137–49, 150– 1; Yezidi community in 156, 158, 160, 164–7 ghettoes 25; Armenian 77–8, 79–82 Gibraltar Chronicle 196, 198 Gibraltarian Sindhis 189–90, 192, 195, 196–200 Gilroy, P. 33, 35, 56, 107, 108, 109 Glick Schiller, N. et al. 3, 4, 57, 165 globalization 21–4, 156 Goldmann, Nahum 16 Great Famine 117, 119–26 Greece: ancient Greek colonists 95; Armenian diaspora in 72–89; Greek diaspora 3, 93–9 griots 102–3, 104–5, 111, 112 Gross, J. et al. 107 Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 73, 74, 192 Haak Bir (Hamburg Anatolian-Alevi Culture Union) 138–9, 145, 146–7 Habel, N.C. 171 Hale, T.A. 103, 104 Halevi, Yehudi 12–13, 16 Haley, Alex 103–4 halk mahkemesi 141, 144, 146, 147 Hall, Stuart 56, 108 Hamburg (Germany) 138, 141, 142

208

Index

Hannerz, U. 4, 108, 194 Hannover (Germany) 164 Happe, H.U. 119, 120, 122 Haraksingh, K.R. 176 Harilela family 201 Harris, J.E. 107 Harvey, S. 97, 98 Hassiotis, I. 77, 93, 95, 96, 97 Heine, Heinrich 13, 14–15 Hindu Merchant Association 198–9 Hindu temples 170, 178, 201 Hindu Trinidadians 170, 171, 174, 175–6 Hindus: Sindhis as 189, 198, 200–1, see also Sindhi network history: of Armenian diaspora 77–9; the Great Famine 119–21; of modern Greek diaspora 93–9; myths and IrishAmerican identity 119, 121–6; of Yezidis 158–9 Hobsbawm, E. 119 homeland 3; and African diaspora 106, 110–12; and Armenian identity 73, 74–5, 80, 84; Dominica as 67; existence of 10; and expatriation 16, 37–8; Greek 95; griots and Black identity 102–5; and hostland 17–21; ‘original’ 13–14; return to homeland 42, 175; of Yezidi 162, see also geographical context; hostland Hong Kong 195, 200, 201 Honig, B. 42 hostland: and globalization 21–4; and homeland 17–21, see also geographical context; homeland Humphrey, M. 171 hybrid identity 46–7, 60, see also identity; multiple identity Hyman, A. 26

195, 196–200, 202; and status 12–13, 23–4; of Yezidi 161, 163–7 ideological diasporas 12 Ikonomu, T.P. 93 illegal immigrants 22 imagination: and cultural identity 55–6, 141, 146; and locality 74, 75, 85 immigration: of Dominicans to Canada 58; first-generation Irish women immigrants 33–49; host country’s policies on 19, 22 India: Indian migrants in Trinidad 170, 171, 174, 175–6; and Sindhi culture 195, 196–200 inheritance system (Ireland) 122 Innes, G. 103 institutions see associations internet communication 157, 163, 164, 165 Iraq 157 Ireland, Northern Ireland conflict 39 Irish diaspora: emigration and the Great Famine 117, 119–26; first-generation women immigrants 33–49 Irish-Americans 36, 40–1, 44, 121–6 Irish-English 40–3 Islam 134, 148, see also Alevi diaspora; Yezidi community Israel 15, 20

identity 4, 7; of African diaspora 102, 105, 108–9, 111–12; of Africans 103, 111; and Alevi ritual 141, 142, 147–8, 151; Armenian, in Greece 72, 73–5, 79–82, 85, 87; authenticity of 44–5; of ‘Caribbean’ families in Canada 53, 57–69; and culture 56–7, 156, 171, 172; German identity 14; of Hindu Trinidadians 175–6; and homeland 13–14; and hostland 21–4; hybrid identity 46–7, 60; of Irish women in England 39–43; Irish-American 121–6; multiple identity 12, 59–61; not culturally given 156, 157; political contexts of 17–21; of Sindhi network

Kaleli, Lütfi 143–4, 145 Kallen, Horace 27 Kaplan, S. 48 Kassimati, K. 98 Kearney, M. 57, 156 Kehl-Bodrogi, K. 150 Kennedy, R.E. 120, 121, 122 Kilson, M.L. and Rotberg, R.I. 107 Kirkland, R. 47 Kissane, N. 119, 120, 121, 122, 125 Kitroeff, A. 96 kitsch 44 Klüger, Ruth 86 Knott, Kim 172; and Khokher, S. 150 Kreyenbroek, P.G. 158, 159, 166

Jackson, J.A. 35 Jamison, S.L. 104 Jewish diaspora 10–11; Israel as homeland 15, 20; Soviet Jews 13–14; in the United States 54–5, 67, 68–9 Johnson, J.W. 103 Johnson, M. 202 Jones, M.A. 119

Index Kuklick, H. 192 Kurds 142; Yezidi as 156, 157, 160, 162, 166 Landolt, P. 3 language, of homeland 16, 17 Latvani, Mahesh and Joty 200 Lavie, S. 33 Layard, H.A. 160 Lazaridis, G. 74 Leach, E. 140 Lee J. 33 Lemelle, S.J. and Kelley, R.D.G. 107 Lennon, M. et al. 37, 38 lesbianism 38 liberation, Irish women’s emigration as 35, 36, 47 life narratives, of ‘Caribbean’ families 57–63 linen-weaving industry (Ireland) 122 literacy, of Yezidis 160 literature, of cultural identity 46–7 Lloyd, David 44; and Thomas, P. 48 locality: and diaspora 4, 5; identification with 82–3, 85–6; imagined and lived 74, 75; and social networks 195, 202, see also place; space ‘Locality, Identity and Diaspora’ (Conference, Hamburg 2000) 2 Loizos, P. 77 London, first-generation Irish women immigrants in 38–47 McClafferty, H. 126 McClintock, A. 45 McElligot, E. 124 McQuaid, John Charles 37–8 Mahler, Sarah 57 Maimonides 14, 16 Malinowski, Bronislaw 192, 193 Malkki, L. 72, 88 Manding society 102, 103 Maraj, Bhadase Sagan 177 Marcus, G.E. 156 marked culture 56–7 marriage: in the Alevi diaspora 144; in the Armenian diaspora 72, 84; and Irish women’s emigration 36; in the Sindhi network 190, 200; in West Indian Canadian families 65–6; in Yezidi community 160 Martin, T. 106 Marxism 138 May, Karl 160

209

Meillassoux, C. 103 ‘melting pot’ model 27 men: Irish migrants 34; West Indian Canadians 66, see also gender; women middle-class status 54, 65, 66 migration/migrants 3; and Alevism 137, 150; and Armenian diaspora 73–4, 86–7, 88; and diaspora 55, 68, 69; Greek 94, 96–7; Indian migration to Trinidad 170, 171, 174, 175–6; migrant workers in Gibraltar 199, 200; West African 105, 109, 111–12, see also emigration; immigration Miller, Kerby A. et al. 35, 36, 37, 49, 119, 122; and Wagner, P. 119 minority communities 10–11 minority status, and identity 23–4 mirîd 159, 161, 166–7 Mitchel, John 123, 124 mobility: of American diaspora 108–9; and globalization 75–6, 157; of research practice 191, 193; and sedentariness 76–7, 193–4, see also travel Mol, Hans 171, 172 Montilus, G.C. 106 Moskos, C. 97 movement: and displacement 4; and identity 53, 57–69 movement/non-movement binary 48 Müller, K.E. 157 Mullin, J. 124 multi-sited fieldwork see fieldwork multiculturalism 26–7 multiple identity 12, 59–61, see also identity music/musicians: African-American 105, 107–8; Alevi 136; griots 102–3, 104–5, 111, 112; West African migrants 109–12 Muslims 134 National Centre for Social Research (Athens) 94 nationalism 23; Black nationalism 107, 108; and diaspora 48; and Hindu Trinidadians 175–6; and homeland 84, 85, 95; and race 59–60; of Sindhis 197–8, 199 networks see diaspora Nolan, Janet 33, 36, 37 North America: concepts of race and ethnicity 56, see also Canada; United States

210

Index

Northern Ireland conflict 39 Ocak, Dede Mehmet 143, 144, 147 ocaks 135, 143, 149 O’Carroll, Ide 33, 36 O’Connor, John 122 O’Connor, T. 123 Okpewho, I. 107, 109 Oldenberg (Germany) 164 O’Leary, Brendan 23 Oliver, P. 105 Olwig, Karen Fog 1, 65, 189 oral tradition, of Yezidis 158 organizations see associations Ortner, Sherry 53–5, 56, 67, 68–9 Orywal, E. and Hackstein, K. 119 O’Shea, Máire 39 O’Sullivan, M. 124 ‘other’/‘otherness’ 7, 23 O’Toole, Fintan 47 Panday, Basdeo 180 Pandey, G. 199 Papamiltiades-Czeher, C. 98 Papastergiadis, N. 35, 39, 45, 48 Parmasad, Ken 177, 178 People’s Democratic Party (Trinidad) 170, 177 performance see music/musicians; ritual Peters, J.D. 74 Pettmann, J.J. 34 Pîrs 159 place: family as site of belonging 63–9; and global images 195–6; imagined and experienced 74, 85; movement and identity 53–69; of origin 55–6, see also locality; space places of worship 170, 175, 178, 201 Pocock, D.F. 172 political context: of Alevi migration 137–9; of Armenian diaspora 77–9; and diasporic identity 17–21; of firstgeneration Irish women immigrants in England 38; of Gibraltarian Sindhis 199; Hindu Trinidadians’ representation 177, 180; Irish American political success 123; of Irish emigration 123–6; loyalty to hostland 21–3; public policies 24–7; religion and political participation 170, 176–7; Yezidi and Kurdish politics 166, see also history Polyzos, N.J. 97 Poor Law, in Ireland 120

population growth, in Ireland 119, 122 Porok, Carolyn 170 Positive Black Soul (hip-hop band) 110 Preil, Gabriel 16 Prevelakis, G. 93, 97 Price, C.A. 97 Prorok, C. 178 Psimmenos, I. 74 Psychogios, D.K. 94 Psyroukis, N. 93 race: and ethnicity in North America 56; and nationalism 59–60 racism: anti-Irish 38–9; and visible minority in Canada 59–60 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 192 Radha Soami Movement 201–2 radio broadcasts 180 Rambachan, Surujrattan 180 Ramchandani, Deepak 196, 197 Ratzel, Friedrich 192 ‘re-diasporization’ 181 refugees: Armenian ghetto in Athens 77–8, 79–82; from Asia Minor 97 reggae 102, 108, 112 religion 6–7, 149; of Alevis 134–6, 139–43, 147–9, 150; establishment of and cultural conflict 175, 176–7, 178–9, 179–80; festivals 180–1; Hinduism in Trinidad 170, 171–3, 174–5, 177, 178, 179, 180–1; in the Sindhi network 200–2; theory of religious settlement 171, 173; Yezidism 156, 158–61, 166, see also culture religious diasporas 12, see also Alevi diaspora; Jewish diaspora repatriation 42, 98–9 research methodology 190–1, 192–6 ‘reservations’ see ghettoes rights 25, 76 ritual: cem 134–6, 139–45, 151; interpretations of cem 145–8 Robinson, M. 40 Rodiger, D.R. 106 Roj (journal) 164 rootedness 76; of African diaspora 103–5; of Sindhis 202, see also homeland Roots (Haley) 104 Rossiter, A. 39 sacrifice 83–4 Safran, William 2, 33, 105, 106, 162, 191 ‘salad bowl’ model 27 Salzman, J. et al. 104

Index Sanguri, K. and Sudesh, V. 34 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11 Satchidananda, Sri Swami 201 Schneerson, Menahem Mendel 16 schools see education Schwartz, J. 55 ‘seasoning’ 106 sedentariness/mobility binary 76–7, 193–4 Seiwert, H. 172 semah (ritual dance) 142 Shepperson, G. 107 Sheykhs 158, 159, 161 Shohat, E. and Stam, R. 47 Sindhi network 189–90, 192, 194–6 Singh, K. 177 Smart, N. 161 Smyth, Cherry 33, 38–9 social relations: and locality 195, 202; in Yezidi community 166–7, see also class; communities; families; locality socialism 141–2 Sökefeld, Martin 5, 151, 167 Sollors, W. 41, 171 Soviet Jews 13–14 space: and field methodology 190–1, 192, 202; and group 192 status: of Hindu Trinidadians 175, 177; and identity 12–13, 23–4; middle-class 54, 65, 66; in Yezidi community 160, see also citizenship; class stereotypes, negative 10 Stokes, Martin 151 Stoller, P. 109 sugar-cane plantations 174 Sutton, C.R. and Chaney, E.M. 56–7 Swedenburg, T. 33 symbolism/symbolic acts 139–40, 145–6 Synnott, A. and Howes, D. 59 talip 136 Taylor, D. 172 temples, Hindu 170, 178, 201 Ter-Petrosian, Levon 79 Terborg-Penn, R. et al. 107 Ternisien, X. and Tinq, H. 18 Thessaloniki 72 third-world countries 96 Thomas, T. 172 Tölölyan, K. 1, 2, 5, 9, 76, 78, 105, 108, 157 Toop, D. 105 trade see economic context; employment

211

traditions see culture; religion transnationalism 3–4; and diaspora 53, 55–6, 73, 165 travel: and family networks 63–4, 65; and Sindhi networks 195; to Armenian homeland 74–5, 86, see also mobility Trinidad, Hinduism in 170, 171–3, 174–5, 177, 178, 179, 180 Turkey, Alevi community in 133–4, 137, 150 Turner, Victor 136, 139 United States: black identity in 62; community, movement and identity 53–4; first-generation Irish women immigrants in 35–7; Greek emigrants to 94, 97; Irish-Americans 36, 40–1, 44, see also Canada; North America van der Veer, Peter T. 172; and Vertovec, Steven 174 Van Hear, N. 33 Vertovec, Steven 75, 149, 150, 174, 179 victim diasporas 3 visible minority 59 Vorhoff, K. 150 voting rights 25 Walsh, John 46–7 Walter, Bronwen 37, 38 Waters, M.C. 63 Weequahic High School, Newark, New Jersey (US) 53, 54, 67 Welz, G. 195 West Africans 105, 109–12 West Indian Canadians 60, see also ‘Caribbean’ family ‘white genocide’ 72, 78, 84 white people, in Canada 60 Williams, M.W. 104 Wilson, P. 65 Wissler, Clark 192 women: first-generation Irish immigrants 33–49; Greek migrants 98; in the Sindhi network 200, 201–2; in West Indian Canadian family networks 64 work see employment Yaman, Mehmet 133 YB (Yurtseverler Birli‰i) 138 Yezidi community 156–67; class system in 159–60; history of 158–9 Yuval-Davis, N. 34