Everyday Multiculturalism

Everyday Multiculturalism Edited by Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham Everyday Multiculturalism Also by Amanda W...

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Everyday Multiculturalism

Edited by

Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham


Also by Amanda Wise EXILE AND RETURN AMONG THE EAST TIMORESE

Also by Selvaraj Velayutham RESPONDING TO GLOBALISATION: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore TAMIL CINEMA: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry (edited ) DISSENT AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN ASIAN CITIES (co-edited )

Everyday Multiculturalism Edited by

Amanda Wise Macquarie University, Australia

and

Selvaraj Velayutham Macquarie University, Australia

Selection and editorial matter © Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham 2009 Individual chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21037–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Leela

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Contributors

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction: Multiculturalism and Everyday Life Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham

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Part I Neighbourhoods 1 Everyday Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans Amanda Wise

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2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community Greg Noble

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3 Practices of Difference: Analysing Multiculturalism in Everyday Life Giovanni Semi, Enzo Colombo, Ilenya Camozzi and Annalisa Frisina

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Part II Food 4 Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity in Malaysian Culture and Media Gaik Cheng Khoo 5 Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys Jean Duruz

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Part III Shopping 6 Brief Encounters of an Unpredictable Kind: Everyday Multiculturalism in Two London Street Markets Sophie Watson vii

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Contents

7 Street-level Cosmopolitanism: Neighbourhood Shopping Streets in Multi-ethnic Montréal Martha Radice

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Part IV Leisure 8 The Colour of Muscle: Multiculturalism at a Brooklyn Bodybuilding Gym Jamie Sherman 9 Fishing the Georges River: Cultural Diversity and Urban Environments Heather Goodall, Stephen Wearing, Denis Byrne and Allison Cadzow

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Part V Everyday Solidarities, Everyday Politics 10 ‘Rubbing Along with the Neighbours’ – Everyday Interactions in a Diverse Neighbourhood in the North of England Maria Hudson, Joan Phillips and Kathryn Ray 11 Volunteering, Social Networks, Contact Zones and Rubbish: The Case of the ‘Korean Volunteer Team’ Francis Leo Collins

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Part VI Everyday Tensions 12 We Both Eat Rice, But That’s About It: Korean and Latino Relations in Multi-ethnic Los Angeles Chong-suk Han

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13 Everyday Racism in Singapore Selvaraj Velayutham

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Index

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List of Figures 1.1 2.1 4.1 6.1 11.1 13.1

Neighbourly vegetable exchange over the back fence Dong’s origami figures Hai Peng Kopitiam’s mixed clientele Ridley Road market Korean Volunteer Team rubbish collection Singapore’s Little India

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26 59 99 128 222 256

Contributors Denis Byrne leads the research programme in culture and heritage at the Department of Environment and Climate Change NSW, in Sydney. His research has included studies in Australia and Southeast Asia. Allison Cadzow is a Senior Researcher at the University of Technology, Sydney, in environmental and gender history. She has curated museum and online exhibitions in Australian history, Vietnamese migration and environmental history. Ilenya Camozzi is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milan-Bicocca and Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main. Her scientific interests are multicultural societies, migrants’ associations, identitarian construction, the concept of recognition and the so called ‘second generation’. Her first book Lo spazio del riconoscimento: Forme di associazionismo migratorio a Milano (The Space of Recognition: Forms of Migrants’ Associations in Milan), is forthcoming. Francis Leo Collins is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His research interests revolve around the relationship between different forms of migration and changing urban spaces. He has published in Global Networks, Social and Cultural Geography, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Asia Pacific Viewpoint and Population, Space and Place. Enzo Colombo is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Sociology of Intercultural Relations at the University of Milan. He is currently doing research on youth, children of immigrants attending secondary schools in Italy, as well as on racism and the social construction of otherness. He is interested in the theoretical definition of everyday multiculturalism. On this topic, he published the book Le società multiculturali (Multicultural Societies). Jean Duruz is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. Her research, based in ethnography, x

Contributors

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reflects a continuing interest in connections of food, place, identity, cosmopolitanism and cultural border-crossing. Her publishing includes articles in Space and Culture, Society and Space, Cultural Geographies and Gastronomica. Annalisa Frisina has a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology, University of Padua. She is working on children of immigrants, everyday multiculturalism and citizenship. She wrote the book Giovani Musulmani d’Italia on Muslim youths in Italy. Heather Goodall is Professor of History at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she teaches and researches on social, indigenous and environmental history in Australia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Chong-suk Han is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University, Philadelphia. His latest research explores the ways that gay men of colour negotiate their sexual and racial identities and the implications that these identities have on sexual behaviours. His academic articles have appeared in Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Sexuality and Culture, Social Identities, Contemporary Justice Review, and Critical Sociology. Maria Hudson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, London. Her current research interests focus on labour market disadvantage, multiple identities and equality in employment and immigration and inclusion. Her recent publications include Social Cohesion in Diverse Communities, Qualitative Research on Race Discrimination Claims and The Hidden One-in-Five: Winning a Fair Deal for Britain’s Vulnerable Workers. Gaik Cheng Khoo teaches cultural studies, gender and film at the Australian National University. Her research is mainly on independent filmmaking in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia. She is also interested in issues of race, cosmopolitanism and food spaces. Her publications include Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature and co-editor (with Goh, Gabrielpillai and Holden) of Interrogating Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore. Greg Noble is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Cultural Research and the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of Western Sydney. Greg has been involved in engaged

xii Contributors

research in the broad area of multiculturalism for over 20 years. He has published widely on the relations between youth, ethnicity and inequality: see, for example, Cultures of Schooling; Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime; Bin Laden in the Suburbs and Lines in the Sand: the Cronulla Riots and the Limits of Australian Multiculturalism. Joan Phillips is a Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, London. Her research interests include gender, race, ethnicity and migration. Her recent publications include ‘The Paradox of Sex Tourism in Barbados’ (Brown Journal of World Affairs) and ‘The Friendship Patterns of Transnational Migrants: The Case of Bajan Brits and Their Friendship Patterns on “Return” to Barbados’ (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies). She is also co-author of Social Cohesion in Diverse Communities. Martha Radice is an urban anthropologist and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of social relations in four commercial streets in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of Montréal. Her interests are place and space, immigration and inter-ethnic relations and urban culture. She has also worked evaluating social inclusion in secondary schools and relations between the police and ethnic minorities in the UK. She is the author of Feeling Comfortable?: The Urban Experience of Anglo-Montréalers, co-editor with Xavier Leloup of Les nouveaux territoires de l’ethnicité and co-author of book chapters on cosmopolitanism and multicultural heritage in urban public space. Kathryn Ray is a Senior Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, London. Her research interests focus around disadvantage in the labour market and policy responses to it. Her current work looks at the employment-family interface, work retention and progression for low-paid workers and changing racisms and identities in contemporary society. She is co-editor of Gender Divisions and Working Time in the New Economy, and co-author of Social Cohesion in Diverse Communities. Giovanni Semi is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Milan. His main interests are in multicultural urban spaces, ethnic businesses and the history of qualitative methods. He’s currently writing a book on urban ethnography and carrying out fieldwork on gentrification and commodification of ethnic culture.

Contributors

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Jamie Sherman is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University working on questions of gender, race, performance and urban experience in the United States. Her dissertation fieldwork explores the relationship between bodily transformation, cultural ideals, and social experience in a hardcore bodybuilding gym in Brooklyn, New York. Selvaraj Velayutham is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University. His research interests are in the areas of migration, multiculturalism and the sociology of culture and everyday life. He is the author of Responding to Globalisation: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore; editor of Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry and co-editor (with Melissa Butcher) of Dissent and Cultural Resistance in Asia’s Cities. Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology at the Open University. She has published widely on cities, public space and multiculturalism. Her latest books include: City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters, Markets as Sites for Social Interaction: Spaces of Diversity and, with Gary Bridge, The Blackwell City Reader and the Blackwell Companion to the City. She is currently conducting research on religious cultural practices and city spaces. Stephen Wearing is an Associate Professor in Leisure and Tourism Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, specialising in Australian, European and Pacific ecotourism, volunteer tourism, outdoor education and natural resource management. Amanda Wise is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University. She has researched and published on everyday multiculturalism, racism, cities and urban space, transnational communities, and refugee studies. She is the author of Exile and Return Among the East Timorese.

Acknowledgements As ever, there were many who helped bring this collection to life. The idea for the book evolved from a conference we convened on Everyday Multiculturalism through the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University in 2006 and thus we owe our thanks to the presenters for their stimulating engagement with the theme, and to the Centre and the Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network who contributed funding to the event. The work presented here is a part of a larger study and the editors would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0662967). Selvaraj Velayutham’s work on this book has been supported by the Macquarie University New Staff Research Grants Scheme. Amanda Wise’s research was funded originally by the Australian National University, and subsequently by the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship. We would also like to acknowledge the support of Olivia Middleton and the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan. An earlier version of Jean Duruz’s chapter ‘Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys’ was published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2005) vol. 23 (London: Pion Limited), pp. 51–69. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors to this volume for their contributions, and assistance with the editorial and peer-review process.

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Introduction: Multiculturalism and Everyday Life Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham

The food court of our local suburban shopping mall is deliciously rich with everyday multicultural encounters. We live in a suburb where more than 70 languages are spoken and on a typical day a good portion of these can be heard in this food court. The food stalls include an Indian place run by Tamil speakers from South India who’ve modified their menu to encompass more North Indian dishes because most of the international students living nearby are Punjabis. Next door is a Thai place popular with everyone, and next to them a Chinese buffet, a sandwich shop owned by Chinese, a Turkish kebab house, and the usual big fast-food outlets. There is a distinct temporal rhythm to the space. On weekdays one length of tables are occupied by a group of ten or so elderly Italian men who meet there each morning to talk, debate, play cards, and generally while away the time. They buy their coffee from the Italian-themed coffee shop owned and run by local Chinese immigrants. Large-screen TVs hanging above hum with the sound of Oprah or the news. The tables in the middle are occupied by a few elderly white men (we suspect widowers living alone), usually with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Typically they’ll be sitting alone but apparently enjoying the light-touch company of others occupying this public space. There is a soup kitchen up the road so there are often homeless men occupying tables near the TVs and we’ve seen the Chinese coffee shop owners give free coffee and cake to a couple of them who come regularly. Cleaning the tables are Filipinas and our Greek neighbour who stops by our table for a chat as she cleans. Iraqi and Sudanese refugees collect runaway shopping trolleys for the big supermarket chains. Serving at the KFC counter are international students from India and China working part-time to pay for their studies. After school, Indian, Pacific Islander, Sri Lankan, Filipina, Portuguese, Polish, Lebanese, Korean, Italian, Anglo 1

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and Chinese mums and kids stop in for a bite to eat and there are as many culturally mixed families as ‘single-ethnicity’ ones. Wednesday is old-age pension day and the Anglo ladies come out en masse dressed in their best to treat themselves to lunch. Weekday lunchtimes see crowds of public servants who drop in from their nearby office building. All these groups rub along mostly peacefully but there are myriad stories to tell about the interminglings and encounters present there. It can be a site of conviviality, of light-touch rubbing along, of competition for space, everyday racism and cross-cultural discomforts, of consumption, of inter-ethnic exchange and hybridity, encounter and hospitality (Wise 2004). Far from mundane, its everydayness offers a rich array of interpretive possibility for understanding how it is we live with difference and how the mundane is experienced and is mediated by commercial, aesthetic, discursive and ideational threads big and small. This book gathers together a collection of chapters that represent a small but growing field of scholarship that we term ‘everyday multiculturalism’. Multiculturalism has traditionally been talked about from a top-down perspective as a set of policies concerned with the management and containment of diversity by nation states, with a typical focus on group-based rights and cultural maintenance, multicultural service provision, multicultural education, and attendant legislation (Kivisto 2002). The theoretical literature is dominated by macro-theoretical approaches to multicultural citizenship, the recognition of groups and distribution of group rights (Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 1995; Parekh 2000) and theories of border-making and identity construction (Nederveen Pierterse 2007; Fortier 2008). However, none of these literatures deal adequately with the everyday lived reality of cultural difference in super-diverse (Vertovec 2006) cities and spaces. The everyday multiculturalism perspective on the other hand explores how cultural diversity is experienced and negotiated on the ground in everyday situations. Some sub-themes of interest within this perspective include; habitus and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), embodiment, reciprocity, gift exchange and social solidarity (Mauss 1969, Komter 2005), affect and the senses (Rodaway 1994; Stoller 1989, 1997; Wise 2009a), humour (Billig 2005), everyday cultural exchange and transformation, everyday disjunctures and affinities (Wise 2005; 2004; 2009), cultural hybridities and ‘togetherness-in-difference’ (Ang 2001 and 2003), everyday racism and tensions (Noble 2005, Essed 1991), civility and incivility (Noble 2005, 2007), networks and gift exchange (Wise, Chapter 1 in this collection), material culture and consumption (Appadurai 1988, Miller 2001) – and how relations of power and wider discourses and politics

Introduction: Multiculturalism and Everyday Life

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interplay through all of these (Hage 2000). These encounters vary from context to context – from the workplace, to school, neighbourhood streets to public transport or parks. Some involve intimate and sustained encounters, others are more fleeting. Some involve voluntary, others involuntary, contact with difference. Despite this diversity, the common thread is that these encounters occur in ordinary spaces and situations in the ebb and flow of daily life. It is a field which builds upon on the longstanding tradition of sociology of everyday life which includes a focus on ethno-methodology, dramaturgy, everyday social order and rituals, social interactionism and the sociology of emotions. Scholars such as Simmel (1971), Elias (2000), Goffman (1967), Garfinkel (1967), Berger and Luckman (1967) and Schutz (1970) exemplify this tradition. Rich though this tradition is, this collection extends beyond the often Eurocentric and ‘colour-blind’ approach of these sociologists to explore their application in terms of diversity and interaction among the culturally different. For our purposes, we define everyday multiculturalism as a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter. It explores how social actors experience and negotiate cultural difference on the ground and how their social relations and identities are shaped and re-shaped in the process. While the focus is on the micro-sociology of everyday interaction, the everyday multiculturalism perspective does not exclude wider social, cultural and political processes. Indeed, the key to the everyday multiculturalism approach is to understand how these wider structures and discourses filter through to the realm of everyday practice, exchange and meaning making, and vice versa. Methodologically speaking, the everyday multiculturalism approach can be broadly defined as an ethnographically oriented approach drawing on the sociology of everyday life.

Everyday multiculturalism in the literature While this is the first collection to focus specifically on the theme, everyday multiculturalism has appeared under different guises in a range of literature in recent years. A number of scholars have begun to explore the ethical dimensions of ‘everyday mixing’. Hage, for example, suggests that multiculturalism has too often been cast as a formal doctrine of white tolerance and tool for managing and containing difference. It is, in his view, middleclass whites who do the ‘tolerating’ and for whom a cosmopolitan

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consumption of difference becomes a form of cultural capital. These he calls ‘cosmo-multiculturalists’ (1997) or ‘white cosmopolites’ (1998: 201) who, for example, can typically be found eating and admiring ‘ethnic cuisines’ and ‘culture’ as a means of acquiring and displaying cultural capital, while having little in the way of real, day-to-day inhabited interaction with ‘ethnic others’ and their mundane modes of migrant home building (1997: 145). Along with Hage, Stratton (1998) was one of the earlier writers to describe ‘everyday multiculturalism’, although he conceptualises it rather more narrowly than we do. Stratton argues that the ‘everyday’ has been narrativised in film and television as a counterpoint to official multiculturalism. However he suggests that its popular rendering has not been an entirely innocent ideal. In his view, this idealised everyday multiculturalism is a discourse which sets up an emphasis on individual personalities and interactions – rather than ethnic groups – against a backdrop of a taken-for-granted dominant culture paradigm which includes at the edges acceptable aspects of difference but only through a racialised hierarchy where a lack of visible difference and ability to speak English are the paradigms through which inclusion is represented (1998: 206). Drawing on Levinas, Stratton calls for a more ethical invocation of the everyday which resists objectification of difference and which evolves out of a recognition and experience of marginalisation. For Stratton, this is something akin to Young’s notion of creolisation, a process whereby two or more cultures merge into one (1998: 16). The ‘ordinary cosmopolitan’ may be said to exist in this realm. Pnina Werbner identifies what she terms the ‘working-class cosmopolitan’ (1999) through her research with Pakistani Muslims. She counters the prevailing stereotype of elite cosmopolitanism through her description of one transnational Pakistani’s expanding intercultural competence acquired through his employment on a diverse worksite in the Arabian Gulf. Her research subject Hajji Suleiman – a Punjabi-speaking Pakistani labour migrant – became conversant with the cultural mores of his Japanese employers in the Gulf, and the ‘the customs, habits and idiosyncrasies of Hindus, Bangladeshis, Arabs and Iraqis’ (1999: 24) with whom he worked. He was also enmeshed within a transnational network of Pakistani, Turkish and Arab Sufis and began to learn Dutch to enable him to promote his religion in Holland. These cosmopolitan encounters involve ways of talking about and negotiating cultural difference. In their groundbreaking study comparing forms of cross-cultural interaction and talk among North African workers in France with white Frenchmen, and between black and


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white American working-class men, Lamont and Aksartova (2002: 2) describe ordinary cosmopolitanism as the strategies everyday people use to bridge racial and ethnic difference. Like Hage, they counterpose upper-middle-class cosmopolitans – who ‘appreciate’ cultural difference and acquire this disposition as a form of cultural capital – with ‘ordinary cosmopolitans’. They argue that more research needs to be done to explore how ordinary people do ‘boundary work’ in everyday life, both drawing and overcoming boundaries. They were interested in exploring the everyday rhetorics that non-college-educated black and white workers draw on to counteract racism (2002: 1). Their study found distinct national patterns to the ‘everyday talk’ used to bridge cultural difference. French workers tended to draw on discourses of solidarity and egalitarianism to establish racial equivalence, while workers in the US tended to privilege discourses of meritocracy and socioeconomic success to describe what makes races equal. The ideal of ‘mixing’ embodied in notions of everyday or vernacular cosmopolitanism has been increasingly subject to policy attention. In the UK in particular, the community cohesion agenda has promoted the ideal of neighbourly mixing as a means of tackling racism and problematic race divides. The agenda has been driven forward as a result of reflections upon race riots in the 1990s and early 2000s and the London train bombings (Cantle 2001; Modood 2007). The UK government commissioned several large studies to investigate the causes of these racial tensions and develop strategies to counter them. One resulting report, The End of Parallel Lives? (Cantle 2004), argued that racially different Britons lead largely ‘parallel lives’ with little interaction or relationships across ethnic boundaries. Cantle argues that the multicultural model has until now been too focused on the maintenance of cultural difference but has not paid enough attention to producing relationships across cultural difference, leading to a situation where tensions can fester without a solid relational base to counter them. Despite its popularity in government circles, the Cantle Report (2004), as it has become known, has been subject to criticism for ‘blaming’ disadvantaged British South Asian communities for ‘not mixing’ and ‘ethnic residential clustering’, whereas white Britons who choose to live in predominantly suburban white areas are not subject to the same critique (Phillips 2006: 29). Phillips argues that Cantle’s reading of the Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots overemphasised the supposed desire for self-segregation on the part of British South Asians and a lack of willingness to ‘mix’ across difference as a causal factor for the riots. She suggests that the lack of opportunity to mix across difference was as much to do with economic disadvantage

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and persistent experiences of structural and popular racism from the white community (Phillips 2006: 28). Others have critiqued the idea that simply placing groups into a ‘contact’ situation is a panacea, as it does not address the power differentials involved, and indeed can make tensions worse. As Valentine points out, ‘contact’ is often stressful for minorities who have experienced histories of exclusion and discrimination. Even where the cross-cultural contact is civil and courteous, this does not necessarily translate to a respect for difference or signal any shift in private attitudes to otherness (Valentine 2008). Stemming from a recognition that contact in itself does not always suggest positive intercultural relations, Noble has argued we need a better means of conceptualising modes of everyday recognition (Noble 2008). While theories of recognition exist (cf: Taylor 1994; Parekh 2000; Honneth), he suggests that there is a need to focus empirically on the messy realm of everyday intermingling and explore what it means to ‘do recognition’. In particular, he was interested in exploring what kinds of encounters are experienced as forms of positive recognition by diverse young people in everyday situations. His research with Arabic-speaking youth has shown that it is often non-recognition that is valued by minority youth. That is, non-recognition in the sense that it is not always ethnicity that young people feel defines their identity. Indeed, objectification in terms of a single ethnicity is often experienced as a kind of ‘boxing in’, which excludes other identities felt to be more important, such as age, subculture, gender and so forth. He argues that everyday recognition involves recognising others in their full humanity, rather than as representatives of a particular category. Issues of legitimacy and competence overlap here in complex ways, for example situated social competency and legitimacy afforded through its recognition. Hybrid identities are a common outcome of intense cross cultural encounters. Ang (2001) suggests that mundane cross-cultural encounters such as exchanging tips on what fish to buy, or discussing the origins and uses of particular vegetables in the fruit market, can actually lead to an ‘incremental and dialogic construction of lived identities . . . [and] as subjects from multiple backgrounds negotiate their social co-existence and their mutual entanglement . . . the global and local interpenetrate one another’ (2001: 159). Identities resulting from everyday intermingling can also be deployed strategically. In their study of Arabic-speaking youth in Sydney, Noble et al. (1999) found that because Lebanese boys were the dominant ethnic group among the Arabic-speaking communities in the schools they studied, boys from other Arabic-speaking


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backgrounds such as Syrian often strategically presented themselves as Lebanese and both groups slipped between a strategic essentialism which emphasised Lebanese ethnicity, and a strategic youth-culturebased hybridity. Urban sociology has a long history of engagement with issues of race in urban contexts. The Chicago School (and those who followed) is the most obvious reference point. However in recent years human geographers have begun to engage with issues of multicultural encounter in everyday shared places. Thrift (2008: 218–9), for example, has argued that spaces of mundane encounter involving relations of kindness and compassion represent a sense of hopefulness and democratic resource. Similar arguments have been made by Amin (2002) who suggests ‘micro-publics’ such as schools, youth centres and sporting teams offer opportunities for engaged intercultural intermingling because they involve prosaic negotiations with difference and often banal transgressions across ethnic boundaries (Amin 2002: 15). Watson’s City Publics (2006) is one of the more extended explorations of everyday multicultural encounter in ordinary city spaces. Through a series of ethnographic studies she explores how difference is negotiated and performed and how power works in mundane shared spaces such as street markets, local parks and children’s playgrounds. She argues that we need to recognise that those almost ‘invisible’ marginal places are as important as the formal public spaces more typically discussed in the grand narrative of cosmopolitan contact (Watson 2006: 173). She suggests that the point is not to develop an overarching narrative of ‘what it means to live with difference’ but to explore the micro-spaces of contact which reveal much more complex and contradictory relations of inclusion, exclusion and agonistic negotiations across difference (2–3). Everyday encounters with difference in public space are often mediated by modernist regimes of planning and design. According to Sandercock (2003: 8) if we are ever to realise the ideal of a truly democratic cosmopolis, embodied in an inclusive multicultural city, a combined effort is needed involving not just planners and politicians, but local residents, social movements and a commitment to transformative planning practice with a focus on the project of intercultural co-existence. For her, such a project is not just about ‘mobilising resources and power, but also about organising hope, negotiating fears, [and] mediating collective memories of identity and belonging’ (8). Everyday racism is a concept of importance to the field. It is similarly influenced by a phenomenological approach with an emphasis on understanding the intersections between macro-discourses and

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structures and everyday practices. The concept has been developed most fully by Essed (1991, 2002) who describes it as an experience that is both direct and vicarious (2002: 208). Everyday racism, she argues, is not about extreme incidents but about mundane practices (204) by nature so embedded in routine and everyday practice that it is experienced as amorphous and difficult to explicitly identify. It involves cumulative practices, often covert and hard to pinpoint (204), but is felt and experienced persistently (208). As a result these micro-injustices become normal, fused into familiar practices (204). In the Australian context Noble has done interesting work in this area; in his article ‘The Discomfort of Strangers’ which explores experiences and impacts of racism towards Lebanese youth as manifested in practices of ‘everyday incivility’ and its effect on their sense of ontological security (Noble 2005). In the UK, Herbert et al. (2008) have explored the everyday forms of racism experienced by Ghanaians in London, particularly in the workplace, and, interestingly, their diverse responses to these experiences. They argue that these coping strategies are a relatively unexplored dimension of discrimination. Although the majority of the reference literature for the everyday multiculturalism perspective is drawn from disciplines such as sociology, human geography and cultural studies, there are insights to be drawn from social psychology on the domain of face-to-face crosscultural contact, popularly known as ‘contact theory’.1 Allport (1954: 287) highlighted four conditions that were important to more positive inter-group relations: equal status between groups; common goals; inter-group cooperation and support or sanction of the authorities, law or custom. Contrary to contact theory, an alternative view, known as ‘conflict theory’, suggests that inter-group contact can produce conflict rather than a reduction in prejudice and a more positive regard for out-groups (Hewstone and Greenland 2000: 136–7). The way in which groups may have incompatible goals and be competing for scarce resources also undermines contact theory and favours conflict theory (Hewstone and Greenland 2000: 137). Nevertheless, the conflict model of inter-group relations has not served to undermine the contact model. It challenges many of its assumptions by raising different conditions and processes that shape inter-group relations. One key insight was that prejudice tends to make those who hold such views avoid inter-group contact and that a reduction in prejudice may in fact not be a result of contact but may be a factor in determining whether there is any contact in the first place (Pettigrew 1998: 69). Another issue relates to whether or not the effects of contact can be generalised beyond any specific


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situation in which it is observed and how this might happen (Pettigrew 1998: 70). In light of such issues, Pettigrew points towards four processes that cut across the conditions in Allport’s thesis and may better serve to explain and understand how positive inter-group relations may emerge (Pettigrew 1998: 70–3): learning about out-groups that corrects negative views; positively reinforced behaviour modification that leads to attitude changes; generating affective ties, such as friendship; and in-group reappraisal of their existing norms and customs to be more inclusive of out-group worldviews. However, a purely social-psychological view brackets out important mediating factors such as material and food cultures, the senses and habitus. Wise (2009) points out that the ‘encultured’ senses, habitus and bodily hexis contribute in important ways to people’s orientation and/or disorientation (Rodaway 1994) in diverse urban spaces, and that these frame the appreciation of the qualities of such environments (Urry 2000: 79) and the cultural others in them. In her article ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism’, she explores the embodied and sensuous experience of White Anglo-Celtic senior citizens of the changes brought to their suburb by recent Chinese migration to the area and the accompanying shift in the local shopping landscape. She found that more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which long-time residents of areas transformed by immigration need to in fact re-habituate their bodies as they relate both to new urban spaces, and to newcomers culturally different from themselves. She argues that the senses and embodied habitus are deeply intertwined with memories re-experienced in the present in a situation of rapid urban change, and that this complex juxtaposition of bodies past and present influences the emotions elderly residents associate with their neighbourhood and, in this case, their Chinese neighbours. Highmore (2008) has a slightly different take on white interactions with ‘exotic’ food cultures. Highmore suggests that ‘taste and smell play an inexorable role in everyday forms of racism . . . ’ but ‘they are also central components for convivial cosmopolitan intercultural interethnic exchange’ (2008: 395–6). Arguing for the importance of exploring intercultural sensual life, he tells the story of an aggressively masculine white working-class man eating in a South Asian restaurant in London’s Brick Lane. Highmore argues that the chilli in this man’s curry has agentic qualities which mediates his engagement with his racial Other, in this case the South Asian restaurateur. The chilli becomes an agent through which this man performs his masculinity. The relationship this produces with his Asian counterpart however, is highly ambivalent; the chilli becomes an ironic marker of white working-class masculinity, but

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it is the chilli with whom he does battle and which mediates his relation to the South Asian restaurateur. As the existing literature suggests, the study of intercultural encounters and social relations is a potentially rich area of scholarship, both conceptually and empirically. It is in this intellectual spirit that we present this collection on the topic of everyday multiculturalism to further the study of how diversity is inhabited in urban spaces around the world.

Sites of encounter: a thematic overview of the book This volume brings together chapters focused on the study of living with cultural difference and diversity in everyday life, representing a range of disciplinary perspectives and geographical locations. For the sake of coherence, we have organised them thematically. The chapters by Wise, Noble and Semi et. al. explore everyday interactions in the local neighbourhood. Wise employs the concept of ‘quotidian transversality’ in her chapter to signal the everyday intercultural modes and spaces which facilitate sociality across difference in a super-diverse suburban zone. These include forms of quotidian gift exchange and reciprocity, kinship, ways of talking such as gossip networks, actor networks, place orientation and ‘crossing spaces’. Drawing on her fieldwork in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield and in Griffith, a regional Australian town, Wise introduces personalities akin to Werbner’s working-class cosmopolitans who are engaged in facilitating intercultural exchanges. She calls these personalities ‘transversal enablers’ and they produce intersectional gossip, knowledge and inter-ethnic information networks through their neighbourhood interactions across cultural difference. She found that these transversal enablers establish and smooth neighbourly encounters across difference. At the same time, Wise cautions that the cross-cultural engagement and welcome facilitated by transversal enablers are not void of power relations and may produce discomfort and tensions due to their sometimes overzealous efforts to bridge cultural divides. Noble’s chapter situates the discussion within the context of the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ in Australia, both as policy and scholarship. He argues for the importance of rescuing everyday cosmopolitanism – which he sees as an open-ness to cultural diversity, a practical relation to the plurality of cultures, and a willingness and tendency to engage with others. This ‘people-mixing’ helps produce an evolving cultural diversity in which people manage the competing demands of cultural identity and social co-existence at home, work and in leisure spaces.


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Akin to Wise’s quotidian transversality, Noble suggests that everyday cosmopolitanism is characterised by a labour of community which involves personalities who facilitate cross-cultural interactions and, as he puts it, simply get things done across cultural difference. Unlike Werbner’s working-class cosmopolitans, the characters Noble describes are not particularly cross-culturally competent and aware in the way we typically imagine the cosmopolitan. Instead, they display a more practical orientation towards ‘getting along’ that has little to do with cultural difference at all. Semi et al.’s chapter in this volume stresses the importance of conceptualising everyday multiculturalism both as a category of analysis and as practice. For them everyday multiculturalism in practice refers to the daily, mundane, (apparently) unproblematic relations in local contexts requiring a constant ability to recognise and use differences, to construct and deconstruct boundaries, and to sustain and resist common representations of otherness. As a category of analysis it represents a specific sociological point of view oriented to detecting how difference is constructed and contested, who uses it, in what situations, to mark what kind of distinctions, for what goals, and with what results. Based on ethnographic studies of Muslim associations and ethnic neighbourhoods in Italy, their study highlights how immigrants use their cultural and religious difference in a strategic way to ‘offer an image of themselves and to forge relations they view as suitable and satisfactory according to the occasion, resources available and their own specific objectives’. The second thematic strain in this volume is around food and crosscultural interactions. Kopitiams (meaning coffee-shop in the Chinese dialect Hokkien) are found throughout Malaysia and are popular among Chinese, Indian and Malays as ‘everyday’ places to eat, catch up with friends and drink tea. According to Khoo, the kopitiam is often revered in the popular imagination and represented in the media as a cosmopolitan trans-ethnic space. Indeed, the kopitiam was a popular meeting place from the time of independence where inter-ethnic solidarities were forged and an ethnically inclusive nationalist moment was created. However, Khoo points out that in recent years, due to growing racialisation and Islamisation in Malaysia – which has rigidly divided Malaysians into Muslim and non-Muslims – the kopitiam as a cosmopolitan space that fostered inter-racial exchange has dissipated. It nonetheless remains a symbol of everyday conviviality in multiracial Malaysia. Duruz’s take on food and diversity is concerned with how ethnicity delineates and divides everyday spaces and how meanings of ethnicity

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and nation permeate everyday food cultures. Based on fieldwork in Sydney and London, her chapter examines the culinary biographies of two white women living in London and Sydney close to shopping streets known for the diversity of their ‘ethnic’ communities. She found unexpected engagements with ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ and ‘cosmopolitan identity’ which contributed to a more complex and ambivalent sense of belonging than her subjects first supposed when reflecting on their more obvious identities as ‘mainstream’ white British and Australian women. Many mundane encounters with cultural difference occur in multicultural shopping precincts. Two chapters in this collection address this theme. Watson’s contribution explores two London street markets in terms of the complexities of the intercultural encounters that occur in them. Comparing the different politics and patterns of the two markets prompts her to argue against constructing an overarching narrative of everyday multicultural encounter in favour of a localised approach which takes into account the context-specific textures of each space. She points out that in some localities traders and shoppers have accommodated the sociocultural shifts with minimal hostility and even enthusiasm and in others nostalgia for an imagined homogenous community of white working-class life has mobilised considerable hostility between the long-established working-class communities and more recent arrivals to the market. She shows how national and even international events and the wider socioeconomic climate have micro-effects on how race relations play out in local places. Radice’s chapter, meanwhile, deals with the experiences of everyday multiculturalism in multiethnic neighbourhood shopping streets in Montréal, Canada. Given Quebec’s historical struggle for sovereignty, the French-speaking province has produced lively debates around ethno-cultural diversity. Radice explores how diverse everyday users of local shopping streets engage with cultural difference in terms of consumption and interactions with culturally different others. She deploys a number of different theories of cosmopolitanism to explore how they might play out and apply to a real-life local context. Like Watson, she finds that ‘cosmopolitanism’ actually plays out quite differently in different urban settings. Leisure and sport activities offer possibilities for involuntary crosscultural contact and frequently involve situations requiring the negotiation of difference, very often of the most embodied kind. Sherman’s chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Brooklyn bodybuilding gymnasium located in a culturally diverse working-class New York neighbourhood. Taking a thoroughly embodied perspective, she begins


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her analysis by examining how members of the gym respond to cultural difference and this, she argues, oscillates between highly stereotypical and at other times fluid notions of identity. While she questions whether the common purpose of visiting the gym for ‘building muscle’ (as in many other sporting activities with a mutual goal) negates the politics and hierarchies of race and ethnicity, she does suggest that this common purpose offers moments of solidarity around the sport itself. She argues that racial and ethnic differences mark and reconcile other relationships of power Goodall et al.’s chapter has a slightly different take on the leisure theme. They explore fishing cultures among diverse migrant groups in multicultural Sydney. Based upon interviews with the diverse people who live near and use the Georges River, they explore how cultural differences are observed, embraced, inter-fused, sometimes clash, and are often peacefully negotiated among those who fish there. They show how everyday locality is performatively produced through embodied fishing practices through a three-part typology of fishing: fishing out of place (new fishing practices of migrants); fishing as a claim (performative deployments of embodied knowledge); and fishing to produce locality (where fishing can be seen as a future-oriented place-making activity). They conclude that fishing opens up a way to observe contestation over space, place and nation and also represents an embodied use of space which not only allows but is often deliberately mobilised to achieve new relationships with place and people. Everyday solidarities and politics are the subject of Hudson et al.’s and Collins’s papers. Hudson et al. present findings from their study of intra- and inter-ethnic relations among diverse residents in the neighbourhood of Moss Side in Manchester, UK. They consider the activities and social spaces that facilitate social connections as well as the barriers to social interaction. In so doing the chapter draws out the extent to which, and the reasons why, intra- and inter-ethnic social interactions matter to people. It also considers the role of creative grassroots projects in fostering positive interactions and connections, recognising how they are shaped by gender, age and class as well as migration history, ethnicity and religion. They argue that, despite government calls to end residential segregation in the name of enhancing community cohesion, spatial proximity does not necessarily result in social interactions across cultural difference. Similar themes are considered by Collins in his chapter, using the example of a group of Asian international students who formed a volunteer ‘clean-up brigade’ to pick up rubbish in the centre of Auckland,

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New Zealand. The group was an attempt to engage with the public in Auckland and to overcome racial stereotypes about ‘Asian students’. Collins suggests that there is real value in drawing attention to the smaller examples of everyday multiculturalism in contemporary cities. The volunteer team functioned to bridge the gap between Asian students and mainly white New Zealanders by creating a situation where everyday inter-ethnic encounters with members of the public, both positive and negative, could occur. The activity also established a network of friendships that are now maintained transnationally between the different localities where these individuals now reside. While many of the chapters in this collection reveal surprisingly positive encounters of the everyday kind, it remains a fact that everyday racism and inter-ethnic tensions still exist. This time, focusing on how economic relations mediate race relations, Han uses the case of Koreanowned businesses in Los Angeles and their relationships with Latino workers. He argues that the split labour market – where Korean workers are favoured over Latinos for higher-status positions – plays a significant part in shaping the nature of ethnic conflict between Koreans and Latinos in the neighbourhood more generally. The final chapter in this volume, by Velayutham, is a case-study based on the immigrant city-state of Singapore. The main racial groups in Singapore are accorded official status and are guaranteed equality under Singapore’s policy of multi-racialism. Singapore considers itself to be a racially tolerant and harmonious country and indeed the four official groups – Chinese, Malays, Indians and Others – have co-existed peacefully since its independence in 1965. However, as Velayutham argues, everyday social tensions and discomforts arising from living with cultural difference are rarely officially acknowledged. Indeed, the term racism is entirely absent from official discourse and public debate in Singapore. Drawing on Essed’s groundbreaking work (1991), he explores some of the everyday forms of racism that Indians experience in Singapore so as to document and bring to light such cases which are rarely publicly acknowledged.

Conclusions The literature outlined above and the chapters in this book represent just some of the domains in which the study of everyday life can cast new light upon how we live with difference in our diverse urban spaces. While some chapters highlight actually existing spaces and practices of productive intercultural exchange, others signal the importance of


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understanding how discomforts and tensions arise. Above all, we hope this collection of work exploring what we have termed ‘everyday multiculturalism’ reveals complexities and ambiguities hitherto unrecognised in the dominant paradigm of scholarship on multiculturalism. Focusing on the micro-politics of everyday life casts light upon the gaps of policy, upon how the theoretical ideal of multicultural citizenship plays out in situated contexts, and upon the mundane ways in which cultural difference is understood, constructed, experienced and enacted. It shows how national and international structures, discourses and politics filter down to the local, how they impact upon and are negotiated by everyday diverse actors in their relationship to one another, and reveals how cosmopolitanism is not the sole preserve of an educated elite. We hope that the chapters in the book break new ground and encourage others’ interest in this new field of research.

Note 1. Thanks to Bernard Leckning for his assistance with this section on contact theory.

References Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity’, Environment and Planning A, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 959–80. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge). Allport, G. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge MA: Addison-Wesley). Appadurai, A. (1988) (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Berger, P. and T. Luckman (1967) The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday Anchor). Billig, M. (2005) Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage). Cantle, T. (2001) Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (London: Home Office). Cantle, T. (2004) The End of Parallel Lives? The Report of the Community Cohesion Panel (London: Home Office). Elias, N. (2000) The Civilizing Process (London: Blackwell). Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (London: Sage). Essed, P. (2002) ‘Everyday Racism’, in D. Goldberg (ed.) A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (London: Blackwell). Fortier, A. M. (2008) Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (London: Routledge) Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual (Garden City: Doubleday).

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Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall). Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Sydney: Pluto Press). Hage, G. (2000) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (London: Routledge). Herbert, J., J. May, J. Wills, K. Datta, Y. Evans and C. McIlwaine (2008) ‘Multicultural Living? Experiences of Everyday Racism Among Ghanaian Migrants In London’, European Urban and Regional Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 103–17. Hewstone, M. and K. Greenland (2000) ‘Intergroup Conflict’, International Journal of Psychology, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 136–44. Highmore, B. (2008) ‘Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 29, p. 4, pp. 381–98. Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Kivisto, P. (2002) Multiculturalism in a Global Society (Oxford: Blackwell). Komter, A. (2005) Social Solidarity and the Gift (New York: Cambridge University Press). Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kymlicka, W. (2001) Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lamont, M. and S. Aksartova (2002) ‘Ordinary Cosmopolitanisms: Strategies for Bridging Racial Boundaries among Working-Class Men’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1–25. Mauss, M. (1969) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen and West). Miller, D. (2001) The Dialectics of Shopping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Modood, T. (2007) Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Cambridge: Polity Press). Noble, G., S. Poynting and P. Tabar (1999) ‘Youth, Ethnicity and the Mapping of Identities: Strategic Essentialism and Strategic Hybridity among Male Arabicspeaking Youth in South-Western Sydney’, Communal/Plural, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 29–44. Noble, G. (2007) ‘Respect and Respectability amongst Second Generation Arab and Muslim Australian Men’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 331–44. Noble, G. (2005) ‘The Discomfort of Strangers: Racism, Incivility and Ontological Security in a Relaxed and Comfortable Nation’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1/2, pp. 107–20. Noble, G. (2008) ‘ “Countless Acts of Recognition”: Young Men, Ethnicity and the Messiness of Identities in Everyday Life’, unpublished manuscript. Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Houndmills: Macmillan Press). Nederveen Pierterse, J. (2007) Ethnicities and Global Multiculture: Pants for an Octopus (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield). Pettigrew, T. F. (1998) ‘Intergroup Contact: Theory, Research and New Perspectives’, Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, pp. 65–85. Phillips, T. (2006) ‘Parallel Lives? Challenging Discourses of British Muslim Selfsegregation’, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 25–40.


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Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge). Sandercock, L. (2003) Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century (London: Continuum). Schutz, A. (1970) On Phenomenology and Social Relations, edited by H. Wagner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Simmel, G. (1971) On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by D. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Stoller, P. (1989) The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Stoller, P. (1997) Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Stratton, J. (1998) Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis (Sydney: Pluto Press). Taylor, C. (1994) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge). Urry, J. (2000) Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge). Valentine, G. (2008) ‘Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 323–37. Vertovec, S. (2006) The Emergence of Super-diversity in Britain (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford). Watson, S. (2006) City Publics: The (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (London: Routledge). Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 17–35. Werbner, P. (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitans’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23 no. 2/3, pp. 496–8. Wise, A. (2004) ‘Contact Zones: Experiences of Cultural Diversity and Rapid Neighbourhood Change among Anglo-Celtic and Long-term Elderly Residents in Ashfield’. Report published by the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, October 2004, available at www.crsi.mq.edu.au/ documents/contact-zones-report.pdf Wise, A. (2005) ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1/2, pp. 171–86. Wise, A. (forthcoming) ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism: Emotional Landscapes of Interethnic Living in Australian Suburbia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.


Part I Neighbourhoods


1 Everyday Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans Amanda Wise

This chapter is based upon a research project entitled ‘Contact Zones’ that explored what I have termed ‘everyday multiculturalism, or ‘multiculturalism from below’.1 The project focused on quotidian modes of intercultural crossing in culturally diverse localities. It aimed to identify points of affinity and disjuncture in order to better understand how, where, and why diverse Australians ‘get along’ or ‘rub along’ (Watson 2006: 2) together (or not) and how they negotiate the ‘accident’ of propinquity in shared multicultural spaces. In this chapter, I argue that there exist certain ‘everyday’ individuals I term ‘transversal enablers’ who employ and facilitate ‘transversal practices’ which, in essence, are forms of exchange and gift relation that foster everyday relationships across cultural difference in multicultural settings.

The field sites Between 2002 and 2005 the project involved in-depth qualitative research in two Australian settings; Ashfield, a multicultural suburb in Sydney, and Griffith, a mid-sized country town in regional New South Wales. With 43 per cent of its population born overseas, Ashfield is an old suburb with a large population of elderly Anglo-Celtic Australians.2 During the post-Second World War migration boom, Ashfield became home to a sizeable Italian and Greek population, and later to migrants from places such as Lebanon and the Philippines, and since the 1990s to large numbers from China and India. The Ashfield fieldwork involved ethnographic participant observation in and around the local shopping centre and high street, and in local pubs, clubs, parks and churches over a period of three years. It also included in-depth open-ended interviews 21

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with 40 residents from Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Greek, Indian and Chinese backgrounds. Griffith is a town of about 50,000 residents. There are some 70 first languages represented there and at least 40 settled communities. A citrus-farming area, Griffith was established following the First World War by Anglo-Celtic solider settlers in the 1920s who were closely followed by a large settlement of Italian migrants before and after the Second World War. In the 1970s a sizeable population of Punjabi Sikhs settled in the area, and more recently a number of Pacific Islander groups and refugees from places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan have made Griffith home. The Anglo-Celtic, Italian and Sikh communities dominate the commercial sector in town and own most of the farms in the area. The remaining communities tend to be employed as workers on these farms, and to a lesser extent work in manufacturing and retail. For the Islander and newer refugee communities, farm labouring and fruit-picking work is a key occupation, while a number work in a large chicken-processing factory on the outskirts of town. The Griffith fieldsite involved in-depth open-ended interviews with 50 residents from a range of ethnicities including Anglo-Celtic Australian, Italian, Afghan, Kurdish, Turkish, Indigenous, Tongan, Maori, Fijian, Chinese, Samoan, Cook Islander, Indian (Sikh and Hindu), and Zimbabwean backgrounds.

The conceptual framework As a key framing device in this research undertaking, the notion of the ‘contact zone’ deserves some elaboration. Mary Louise Pratt (1992) uses the term to describe the ‘space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations . . .’ Pratt in turn lifts the idea of ‘contact’ from linguistics where it is used to denote ‘the improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently’ (1992: 7). It is this twin emphasis on space of contact and everyday communicative improvisation in cross-cultural encounter that underpins my approach to uncovering the mundane strategies people employ to smooth and foster relations across difference. I term these mundane strategies forms of ‘quotidian transversality’. At the simplest level it refers to those processes that sociologists and anthropologists have typically thought of as establishing and maintaining sociality within an ethnically homogeneous sociocultural group: forms of gift exchange and reciprocity, kinship and social networks,

Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans

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ways of talking, and place orientations, for example. The notion of transversality, however, places emphasis beyond basic relations of exchange to highlight practices of interchange, in the sense of opening up and reconfiguring identities. The concept of ‘quotidian transversality’ is loosely underpinned by the notion of transversal politics, developed by Nira Yuval-Davis (YuvalDavis 1999a, 1999b). Transversal politics is an inter-group strategy to work through conflict. Initially developed by Guattari,3 transversalism was eventually developed by Italian feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and more fully by Yuval-Davis and taken up by the academic and peace activist Cynthia Cockburn (1998) who used it in her research with women’s groups in conflict zones. Cockburn and Yuval-Davis suggest that the central aspect of a transversal politics is a dialogue centred on the idea of dialogical ‘rooting’ and ‘shifting’, whereby each participant in the dialogue brings with them the rooting in their own membership and identity, while also trying to shift in order to put themselves in a situation of exchange with those who have a different membership and identity. Cockburn (1998: 9) points out that this process of rooting and shifting does not mean discarding one’s political and other sources of belonging, but neither should rooting render participants incapable of movement, of looking for connection with those among ‘the others’ with whom they might find compatible values and goals. As Yuval-Davis argues (2004: 27) ‘transversal politics is not only a dialogue in which two or more partners are negotiating a common political position, but is a process in which all the participants are mutually reconstructing themselves and the others engaged with them in it’. I employ ‘quotidian transversality’ to describe how individuals in everyday spaces use particular modes of sociality to produce or smooth interrelations across cultural difference, whether or not this difference is a conscious one. It signals the process by which local and diasporic modes of inhabitance intersect through momentary cross-cultural transgressions and displacements (Amin 2002: 15) in everyday, mundane situations. Quotidian transversality is different to hybridity or code-switching. Nor is it an assimilationist or ingegrationist notion of exchange across difference where the ‘guest’ culture merges with the dominant culture over time. Instead it highlights how cultural difference can be the basis for commensality and exchange; where identities are not left behind, but can be shifted and opened up in moments of non-hierarchical reciprocity, and are sometimes mutually reconfigured in the process.

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Adding ‘quotidian’ is an attempt to mark out slightly different territory to Yuval-Davis’s transversality, which she uses to refer to particular modes of conflict resolution. Quotidian signals the everyday, situated nature of transversal exchange which is not necessarily about conflict resolution. It can be about conflict avoidance, conflict prevention, or indeed, not about conflict at all but about interchange that consciously or unconsciously produces permeable borders of being across difference. It is through such practices that identities are not only traversed but reconfigured, and biographies are intertwined. There are certain types of people that emerged over and over again in the study. I call them ‘transversal enablers’. Transversal enablers are personalities in towns and neighbourhoods who produce what I call intersectional gossip, knowledge and inter-ethnic information networks. They are individuals who typically go out of their way to create connections between culturally different residents in their local area, workplace or other such micro-public (Amin 2002: 959). There were a number of such characters across all of my field-sites. They all had very similar outgoing and cheerful personalities, and interestingly, all were women. However their role went beyond simply creating paths for new networks to establish. Transversal enablers served a number of important functions which seemed to assist in creating threads of connection across cultural difference – for themselves, and for their local communities. They do so by engaging in and facilitating transversal practices involving gift exchange; intercultural knowledge exchange; creating opportunities for the production of cross-cultural embodied commensality; and the production of spaces of intercultural care and trust. In the next section, I elaborate a number of examples of quotidian transversality at work – mundane practices which produce transversal rooting and shifting across cultural difference, enacted or facilitated by the transversal enablers in my study.

Transversal exchanges: the gift in intercultural encounters Much has been said about transnational cultural traffic, about the circulation of material goods, indeed gifts, to facilitate sociality across extended space. This next section explores how such gift traffic – which may have transnational or diasporic roots/routes/histories (Clifford 1997) – weaves through suburban streets across cultures, borders, boundaries, and tie people together, not across space, but across difference, however momentarily. I will return to the notion of the gift economy towards the end, but for now it is worth providing Cheal’s definition. Cheal argues


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that the circulation of gifts underpins the moral economy, which he describes as a ‘system of transactions which are defined as socially desirable (i.e., moral) because through them social ties are recognized, and balanced social relationships are maintained’ (Cheal 1988: 15–19). He proposes that gifts are used to construct certain kinds of voluntary social relationships (14) and should be viewed as symbolic media for managing the emotional and interpersonal aspects of relationships. In complex and multi-fractal social systems such as super-diverse cities (Vertovec 2007), those living in close proximity are not likely to be constituted by ‘strong ties’. However in such contexts gifts have a kind of ‘freefloating’ presence within a moral economy of interpersonal relations, and facilitate types of interaction that might otherwise be only weakly institutionalised’ (Cheal 1988: 19). When Lakshmi, one of my Indian research participants, moved into her house in Ashfield, she was pleasantly surprised when Frank, her Lebanese neighbour, called over the back fence to present her with freshly picked figs from his garden in a gesture of welcome. He had seen her admiring his crop the day before. This first gift precipitated a regular exchange between them; the latest produce from their respective vegetable patches would be passed over the fence along with cooking hints to accompany unfamiliar varieties (see Figure 1.1). On Fridays Frank visited the big Sydney fruit markets to purchase fruit and vegetables in bulk for his extended family. Bringing home a large box of oranges, peaches, cucumbers or whatever, inevitably some would come Lakshmi’s way. To her delight, her arrival home from work on a Friday evening would be regularly greeted by a box on her doorstep containing a selection skimmed from the top of Frank’s bulk purchase. Not long afterwards her latest chillies or limes would end up on his side. Meanwhile, Tony, their Italian neighbour at the rear whose balcony overlooks both Lakshmi’s and Frank’s yards, had seen this exchange and eventually joined in regular three-way vegetable conversations. He gave Lakshmi some of his tomato seedlings, via Frank the Lebanese neighbour who was also given some, to grow in her yard. And from the other end of the street, curry leaves from the tree in the yard of the sister of another Indian neighbour would be offered to Lakshmi whenever a new crop arrived at their place. Marjorie, an Anglo-Celtic neighbour further down the street contributed lemons from her tree and fresh rosemary to this intercultural neighbourhood exchange. There is a long tradition of backyard vegetable growing, gifting and trading among Anglo-Celtic Australians. The gardening historian George Seddon (1994) argues that Australian gardens were somewhat

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Italian Tony’s balcony

Figs & cucumber from Lebanese neighbour end up on Laksmhi’s side

Gap in fence where exchange takes place

Lebanese Neighbour’s house

Limes & Chillies from Lakshmi’s garden travel over both fences And it all travels down Third Street

Tomato plants in Lakshmi’s garden. Grown in Tony’s green house, now in Lakshmi’s garden and Lebanese neighbour’s. Came with advice on how to grow, when to apply cow poo.

Figure 1.1 Neighbourly vegetable exchange over the back fence (photo by the author)

unique in this production and trade of surplus produce, because of their large size and the favourable climate. When I was young in the 1930s, and for several decades on either side, the function of the Australian back yard . . . could be known easily from a list of its contents. . . . There might be chooks . . . A lemon tree was nearly universal; other trees varied with climate. . . . For a few weeks, there was a gross overabundance of fruit, and much trading (‘I’ll take some of your plums if you take some of my apples next month’). (Seddon 1994: 22) Today, Australia’s backyard food is as diverse as the backgrounds of the Australians who grow it. Lemons and limes, banana trees and Lebanese cucumber, grapes and guavas, mangos and mandarins, basil and Thai mint, chillies and okra, aubergines and figs – they are as much about the sensual reconstruction of homely tastes and smells as they are about gardening. However, I argue that the flows between neighbours described above also represent a micro-moral economy that emerges through the exchange of surplus produce – surplus gifted to facilitate neighbourly


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and kin relations. Increasingly these neighbourly environments incorporate households of diverse cultural backgrounds because unlike many cities in the UK and US, Australia does not have the same scale of ethnic concentration as most neighbourhoods are home to a large number of cultural groups (Poulsen et al. 2004). Whether or not those engaged in these everyday modes of reciprocity are consciously aware that they are producing and reproducing social relations and cultural intersections is unimportant. It is also important to emphasise that what is exchanged matters. Gifts carry biographies and they have a material and sensual quality. In the narratives of exchange collected in my study, food – especially the home-grown variety – was very often accompanied by stories about cooking and family histories about when and where this or that was traditionally eaten, how to grow it, how to cook it, what you might do with it. The material, sensual and aromatic qualities of food exchanged is significant as food is as much about taste and smell (Choo 2004; Duruz 2005; Seremetakis 1996) as it is about sustenance. As Law has argued, sensory perception and memory connect the body with material culture (Law 2005: 237). So when Lakshmi eats one of Frank’s figs, or when he cooks some of her chillies, traces of the biography of these edible gifts are re-embodied in the recipient, in turn intermingling with their own sensual life-world. The taste and aromatic quality intermingle with the stories that travelled with the food, and the sentiments of reciprocity and care embodied in these gifts. Their very sensuous quality, as writers such as Rodaway (1994) have argued, works to embody stories, places and associations. Over time, such transversal exchanges have the potential to dialogically produce sensory and narrative intersections which produce the kinds of relations and networks to which Cheal refers but across cultural difference. Major religious or cultural festivals also provided opportunities for transversal crossing. The following account from Mrs Whitworth is a good example. At 75, she has lived in Ashfield, indeed, in the same street, her whole life. She lived in one house until she was 20, then married a man and moved in with him in the house across the road, where she has lived ever since. An Anglo-Celtic working-class woman now widowed, her mobility is limited to the local area and she spends her days in the local shops and going to seniors’ social groups and the local clubs. I asked her about her interactions with Chinese in the local area, especially at the shops. I talk to them. I will say a ni how (how are you), to them, to the Asian places. When it was gong xi fatt choy (Chinese New Year) in February,

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I had just heard from Mary and Edward, the Chinese couple who run the chemist, about the little red bags they give in China, with money in it. And I knew that gold was popular. So I went to Tek (the $2 discount shop, also Chinese owned) and I got some little red bags, paper ones. And I got some gold foil paper, and I cut a couple of strips and I put a few dollars in and gave to Mary and Edward and the Chinese fellow who does my massage, and the Vietnamese lady in the bread shop. So I do mix. Such exchanges can be characterised as a moral economy of placesharing and what is important in them is how the people, objects and social relations involved are made and remade, understood and re-understood in everyday transactions (Carrier 1991: 121). The reciprocities just described also create what I call local and diasporic intersections. As Mauss (1969: 11) has argued, gifts are ‘inalienable and to some extent part of persons’. And as scholars such as Miller have demonstrated (Miller 1998) objects (and in this context, the more general definition of gift) carry with them both general cultural meanings, and cultural biographies, and also take on meanings within specific personal relationships. This intersection of the cultural biography of the object and its giver, with the inter-subjective relations produced in the giving, produces narrative, embodied, material and emplaced intersections. Gifts are not just material objects, but can involve gifts of care and service as well. ‘What makes a gift is the relationship within which the transaction occurs’ (Carrier 1991: 122). What is interesting about Mrs Whitworth’s narrative is that these exchanges are with local business people involved in ‘care’ professions. One of the more difficult transitions Anglo-Celtic seniors in the Ashfield area have had to make is accepting that the old Ashfield with a community of familiar shopkeepers who ‘knew their name’ and ‘would stop for a chat’, had (at least for them) now been replaced by a largely Chinese-dominated shopping precinct on the local high street. Formerly a social milieu in which they felt a sense of belonging, many now feel quite alienated from the space. An outcome of that change in the local shops has been a sense of displacement, and among many Anglo seniors has produced quite bitter feelings towards local Chinese in general. However the local Chinese-run masseurs and chemist shop came up time and again in the interviews with Anglos as ‘islands of care’ in the local area. Although essentially involved in a commercial relationship with Mrs Whitworth, the nature of these professions is such that it is normal to ask after the health and wellbeing of the customer. In her case, this is experienced as


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a ‘space of care’ (Conradson 2003) and is reciprocated by Mrs Whitworth who deliberately reaches out across difference to engage in the gift rituals of the cultural Other.

Transversal knowledge exchange Transversal enablers also produce spaces of social exchange where questions about differing cultural practices can be asked in a safe environment. The transversal enablers in the various field-sites typically employed some kind of ritual or conversational form designed to identify everyday cultural orientations of the cultural Other. This was typically the kind of information useful to prepare the ground for future cross-cultural contact and sociality, and was in turn passed on through gossip networks to ‘prepare’ others so that their own social contact with the cultural Other would go smoothly. A Griffith participant talks of her practice of learning about the greetings and manners of cultural Others in her locality. If I think I know how to say hello in any language, I always try it. If I bungle it and make a mistake, I apologise. I’m very mindful of being respectful of . . . so not saying, ‘Oh this is me, like me, or love me’, I go and I’m very respectful, because every culture interacts. Like in some, you know, you have to bow and be . . . so I try to look in there and see if I can find out before I get to meet them, something I might need to know, and if I don’t, you know, I ask, and find out, and so it really is going in with a respectful attitude rather than going with an attitude of, ‘You’re actually here to meet me’. I’m there to meet you, so I want to know as much as I can. Anglo-Celtic woman – Griffith Note that she specifically refers to the ethical dimensions of her desire to learn how to ‘say hello’ in the other languages. She appears to be very aware of the importance of not expecting the cultural Other to simply assimilate to her way of doing things, and that there should be some level of equality in such exchange, rather than paternalism. While there has been some attention in the migration literature paid to the role intra-ethnic immigrant networks play in the settlement process (see Vasta and Kandilige 2007; Waldinger 2005), less has been said about inter-ethnic networks. We found that transversal enablers played a key role in sharing local knowledge about Australian society and suburban neighbourhoods. They would actively attempt to work out what newer comers needed, and open up networks of knowledge and

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assistance. Most commonly this had to do with local knowledge around shopping, schools and local services, and opening up friendship networks to assist new arrivals in accessing employment. A good example is this farm manager’s wife in Griffith: . . . with my husband’s job, we have a lot of people that come, not just from interstate but overseas, to work for him, and so . . . as a farm manager’s wife, I take it upon myself to, you know, go by and say, ‘Look, when you’ve got time, I’ll take you on what I call the ‘Housewives’ Tour’, so then we take them to all the bargain places, I take them to supermarkets, and if they are from another country, I show them different shopping items that are equivalent to something that I think they might need. I sit and I talk to them about, you know, just even food, but they may not be able to even prepare their family meals as they would normally, because they can’t find the ingredients. . . . so I just do things like that. Transversal enablers helped to produce knowledge networks. Gossip was often used by them to let other members of the local community know who was new, what they were like, what cultural orientations they had, and what they might need. Gluckman does highlight some of the more problematic social control aspects of gossip, where it functions as a means of social control because ‘when you gossip about your friends to other mutual friends you are demonstrating that you all belong to one set which has the duty to be interested in one another’s vices as well as virtues’ (Gluckman 1963: 313–14). While the transversal enablers for the most part shared information for positive ends, there were instances of gossip expressing disapproval over behaviour deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘culturally incompatible’. This was particularly prominent when it came to issues where a major ‘clash’ of religious or cultural values was present, such as gender codes circumscribing the behaviour of Afghani Muslim women.

Non-dominant forms of host-guest relations A further characteristic of transversal enablers was that they tended to host or facilitate gatherings involving food, song and other forms of embodied commensality, and initiated everyday rituals involving diverse members of the community. Secular or everyday rituals can function to produce some level of social solidarity and affirm social ties (Komter 2005: 121). To qualify as transversal, such everyday rituals need to incorporate diverse traditions and be open in their orientation.


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An example of everyday ritual is related by another farm manager’s wife, who has instituted a tradition of regular gatherings for her diverse farm workers. There are always cups of tea, coffee, and a biscuit, maybe some free morning, fifteen minutes, and afternoon they have afternoon tea. They have half an hour or hour lunch, and that’s it. And they always make barbecue when they finish. We always have a table there, and talk, and so on. There’s talk about family, sometimes sport, sometimes people go for a wedding, or what’s happening, about cooking, and a lot of fun with . . . a lot of girls are from Taiwan and Timor, and always happy little girls, and laughing, and bring something. They have lunch, they give us to try what they do, I bake a cake, I always give somebody some. You know, biscuits or cake, then we share. Italian (2nd-generation) farmer’s wife speaking about her culturally diverse farm workers The transversal enablers in this study appeared to be aware, at least in everyday terms, of the problems of an uneven distribution of power in a dominant culture guest/host relationship. In his book Respect, Sennett (2003) points out that for Mauss, ‘The Gift’ doesn’t have to be about equality of exchange. In Mauss’s view too much equality of exchange simply turns exchange into transaction. Yet Mauss still believed that ‘those who benefit’ from a gift, ‘must give something back, even if they do not and cannot give back an equivalent’. As Sennett points out, ‘they must do so to achieve respect in the eyes of others and their own’ (Sennett 2003: 219). Indeed, for Sennett, mutuality is the very foundation of respect because ‘if we ask nothing in return, we do not acknowledge the mutual relationship between ourselves and the person to whom we give’ (2003: 219). The transversal enablers were aware at some level about this politics of reciprocity, particularly the problems associated with a dominant culture ‘host’ being in a position of power (and sometimes paternalism) through giving without return. They would typically attempt to ensure the social situations they created for interacting with cultural Others had some kind of reciprocity involved. This extended from a stated expectation that the cultural ‘guest’ should contribute in some way to the occasion, to a more nebulous emphasis that both equally benefited from the engagement. This kind of orientation is present in the following extract from an interview with a Maori4 woman from Griffith.

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We passed by the pub, and there was this large group of men staying there who looked like they were from Sudan, and so the next day I went . . . I just thought, well, I’ll take the initiative, go down and introduce myself . . . They were new farm workers . . . just arrived. I think Christmas Eve, I drove by, they were still there. . . . So I went home, and I asked my husband what did he think of going to invite them to come to Christmas dinner? I didn’t know what they ate. It didn’t matter. They just ate whatever we did, and you know, we discussed over food, we discussed what it was they did eat . . . . . . we asked questions, and they introduced themselves, and we made a really huge effort to remember their names, and remember things they spoke about, and do you know every culture, or every country, or every group has songs or folklore, or something, so in our home, when we invite people, we often say, ‘We’ll feed you, but you have to sing for us!’ so they were more than happy to sing, and so they had a guitar and they sang, and just wonderful . . . Maori (New Zealand) woman – Griffith Her insistence that her guests ‘sing, or bring an instrument’ represents an attempt at ‘evening out’ the mutuality of the gift exchange; she provides food, they sing. While there remained many instances of ‘hosting’ or ‘welcoming’ newcomers, there was always an emphasis on encounters that had some form of reciprocity involved. Returning to the earlier discussion, experiences of embodied commensality (such as sharing food, and to a lesser extent dance and music) come up again and again in these narratives of interaction and reciprocity. Crucially, this kind of food reciprocity was not about ‘appreciating difference’ from a distance. Hage has developed a fairly robust critique of some forms of celebratory multiculturalism where a middle-class ‘cosmo-multicultural’ elite appreciate and consume cultural difference as exotica from a disengaged standpoint, while remaining at the centre with the power to decide who and what to tolerate (Hage 1997, 1998). The encounters described here were qualitatively different to this kind of stance in that they had an emphasis on mutuality and inter-subjective engagement and included interactions as much between minority community members as between minority and majority cultures. The Afghani ladies have come to my house probably once a month, and that has been wonderful.


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They first of all were a bit unsure about why I was doing it, why I was inviting them. They were a bit apprehensive. Why? What is it? What’s happening? But after a while they couldn’t wait to come, because they’d come, they’d kick off their veils and their shoes . . . I’d show them all the Australian food like pavlovas and lamingtons, sandwiches.5 Anglo-Celtic woman, early 70s – Griffith While exchanges of food and information about it are at the heart of many of these exchanges, this extract above highlights that it is not the cosmo-multiculturalist version of consuming the ‘ethnic other’. Indeed, in this instance, the Anglo-Celtic woman constructs Australian food (lamingtons and so on) as having an Anglo ‘ethnic’ identity, which she shares with the Afghani women in a situation of hospitality. Moreover, the foods she chooses to highlight – lamingtons and pavlovas – have a particular history as ‘gift plates’, brought along to share at ‘ladies gatherings’, and sold to raise funds at school fetes, for churches, scouts and other charitable activities. By highlighting these foods and including them in the regular gatherings, this woman is in a sense constructing these Afghani women into this narrative of community, interweaving the sensual and material biographies of these food items and the forms of commensality they traditionally represent, to incorporate these ‘strangers’.

Production of spaces of intercultural care The gatherings convened by the Anglo-Celtic woman above may also be characterised as producing a space of care – specifically, ‘intercultural care’. For example, helping cultural others with their English was a prominent theme in the research. This interview extract from a 90-yearold Anglo woman from Ashfield is a good example of such relations of care: Rose: Our neighbours are Lebanese, and she was sent out here to marry him at the age of 15, which I don’t approve of. Anyway she’s a lovely young woman. She has two lovely little boys, they’re seven and five. But Arabic was their natural language, and when they were tiny they didn’t hear English. Their grandparents lived here. The father in there was born here, but he’s still very Lebanese in his thinking. Twice a week the seven-year-old comes in here, and I’m teaching him to read, and we have a wonderful time.

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Interviewer: Has that helped with relationships, neighbourly relationships? Rose: Oh they’re very grateful. She brings in great plates of fruit and all that sort of thing. Interviewer: So you give them something by helping with the English? Rose: Yes, but I don’t need it, it’s just a pleasure to teach the little chap, he’s lovely. Spaces of care are shared accomplishments which Conradson defines as involving a space constituted by practices of care, where care is ‘the proactive interest of one person in the well-being of another and as the articulation of that interest (or affective stance) in practical ways’ (2003: 508). In everyday multicultural neighbourhoods, the production of such spaces and relations of care have the potential to produce intersections of mutual responsibility that reach across difference without erasing it. This is a form of everyday civitas, which is somewhat different to the identity politics-bound conceptions of official multiculturalism where each group is imagined as having defined borders.

Gift exchange and quotidian recognition The concepts of gift exchange and reciprocity flow strongly through this chapter. By ‘gift’, I refer both to exchanges of material objects, and to reciprocity of care and service (Komter 2005: 27). The exchanges discussed here are more than just transactional ones. They have an ethical dimension which might be described as ‘quotidian recognition’, as against the formalistic recognition of group identities and rights as articulated by theorists such as Taylor (1994). Hage argues that: Perhaps the foundation of all ethical practices, and certainly the foundation of any social ethics is precisely this: relating to the presence of the other as gift. [. . .] Because the other, through my desire to interact with him or her, offers me, by making it visible, my own humanity. When I interact with others and I fail to receive from them the gift of the common humanity that we share, when I fail to see them as offering such a gift, it means that I consider such others as less than human (2003: 151). The participants involved in the exchanges and interactions outlined so far all describe them as involving a great deal of pleasure in giving. This is not too far removed from what Hage describes as recognising in the


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other their ‘gift of common humanity’. These practices can be described as forms of ‘quotidian recognition’. Taylor has argued for a politics of multicultural recognition by way of a model of differential citizenship which recognises individuals and groups ‘in their distinctiveness’ (Blum 1998: 52). The notion of quotidian recognition augments Taylor’s model which has been criticised for overemphasising the promotion and maintenance of group cultural identities. Noble is critical of approaches to recognition which turn concrete others into ‘ciphers for wider categories of ethnic identity’ (Noble 2008: 4). Taylor’s conception of multicultural recognition does not deal well with the kinds of hybridised, fluid and cross-cutting identities that are produced through intercultural exchange and crossing at the level of inter-subjective engagement. However, as Young points out, following Honneth, ‘a person’s sense of dignity and worth derives from interaction with others who care for him or her, and acknowledge him or her as contributing to their own well being’ (Young 2007: 193). Honneth’s model of recognition places a good deal of emphasis on the realm of inter-subjective encounters involving relations of ‘love’ – which includes romantic love as well as the primary-care relationship between parent and child, relations within the intimate sphere, and close friendships. Following Hegel, Honneth characterises these as the pre-condition, or structural core, of all ethical life, of a capacity for recognition that carries over to the generalised Other (Honneth 1995: 107–8). Because of his emphasis on the intimate sphere, the role of encounter in his model seems to stop at the boundary of family and intimate friendship from where he leaps to much larger-scale relations of recognition in the legal, institutional or state spheres. What I would like to propose is that neighbourly cross-cultural encounters not necessarily close enough to describe as ‘friendship’ do in fact, through a relation of care, produce capacities for the recognition or acknowledgement of otherness in situational specificity. This speaks to Noble’s lament that some philosophical models effectively describe a moral ideal, but say little about how one ‘does’ recognition in situated everyday practice and whether this even entails recognising ‘difference’ in all instances. He argues that we need to ‘look at the set of practices . . . that invoke solidarity and difference in everyday life’ (see also Hage 2003: 144; Noble 2008: 5). The encounters described in this chapter then, perhaps represent no so much a philosophical ideal, but examples of how in everyday situations, subjects approximate modes of recognition in practice, and in turn how a certain ethical relation is established, and how identities are reconfigured in the process.

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The narratives presented in this chapter suggest what recognition might look like in situated contexts of everyday practice. Quotidian recognition recognises difference through everyday exchange and encounters, but also incorporates the inevitable transversal transformation of difference and the intersectional relations of care produced. Quotidian recognition might look something like this: ‘I recognise you in the moment as related to me through this loosely connected place community, but different from me, through your stories, your objects, your gifts. I am also responsible to you and you to me through this gift exchange and mutuality of care, and this carries over to how I view others of your kind.’ Spaces of care centre on an ethics of encounter (Conradson 2003: 508) involving prosaic situations which produce a feeling of mutual care. This mutual care is able to carry over beyond the moment to how subjects view abstract others – by way of a disposition of gratitude which emerges from the relations of reciprocity. This gratitude is not the lopsided gratitude of the host/guest relationship where the migrant is expected to feel eternally grateful to the Anglo hosts. The gratitude I refer to instead can be read as a bodily affect and rests on a basis of mutuality and reciprocity. Gratitude, as Simmel characterises it (Simmel 1950: 388) ‘is an ideal living on of a relation which may have ended long ago, and with it, the act of giving and receiving’. He argues that although it is a purely personal affect ‘. . . gratitude’s thousand fold ramifications throughout society make it one of the most powerful means of social cohesion’ (388). As he says, ‘it creates innumerable connections, ideal and concrete, loose and firm, among those who are filled with gratitude toward the same giver’ (388). Moreover, he argues, importantly, that it is not simply thanking a person for what they do. It can be an exchange of recognition and gratitude for another’s existence. Simmel, for this reason, calls gratitude the ‘moral memory of humankind’ and characterises it as ‘an ideal bridge which the soul comes across again and again, upon provocations too slight to throw a new bridge to the other person, it uses to come closer to them’ (388). In this way it embodies two important aspects of intercultural living, which is mutual hospitality and recognition, which together can produce a flow-on effect. These forms of reciprocity also have the capacity to produce fluid boundaries. Ien Ang sees these everyday exchanges as contributing to ‘the incremental and dialogical construction of lived identities which slowly dissolve the boundaries between the past and the future’ (2001: 11). This is akin to John Urry’s notion of ‘fluidity’ (2000: 187) of boundaries: ‘neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference


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between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes, then, social space behaves like a fluid’ (Mol and Law 1994: 643, cited in Urry 2000: 187). As Mauss and other theorists of the gift have argued, gifts are inalienable; they are, says Mauss, ‘to some extent part of persons’ (1969: 11). They are ‘inalienably linked to the giver, the gift generates and regenerates the relationship between giver and recipient’ (Carrier 1991: 125). As Carrier points out ‘Mauss’s model suggests that there is more involved than general cultural meaning. Objects derive identity or meaning from the specific personal relationships in which they are transacted’ (Carrier 1991: 132). Gifts of care and service across cultural difference help to dissolve boundaries because food, stories, song and cultural dispositions around ‘good manners’ carry with them a ‘cultural scent’ which intermingles with the affects produced in the relationship of reciprocity. In this way, the narratives of how to eat the food, who cooked it, where it came from and so on produce biographical intermingling through a space of situational care. This kind of exchange is close to what Sennett is referring to when he says ‘exchange turns people outward’ (Sennett 2003: 226), with the potential to produce a more general disposition of trust beyond the concrete to the abstract Other through creating the conditions of possibility for inter-cultural trust. Simmel argues that trust involves a degree of cognitive familiarity with the object of trust that is somewhere between total knowledge and total ignorance; ’When faced by the totally unknown, we can gamble but we cannot trust’ (Lewis and Weigert 1985: 970). This disposition emerged numerous times in the study where research participants who had received cross-cultural gestures of care extracted from the concrete other – such as an elderly Anglo woman saying ‘my Chinese neighbours are lovely because they help carry my shopping bags up the stairs of the block of flats’ – to the abstract other, in saying that ‘and so the Chinese are really great’.

Contact zones/danger zones This last section reflects briefly upon some of the more problematic aspects of neighbourly encounters across difference. So far the chapter has explored mostly stories of positive exchange; however, a number of ‘failed encounters’ and foiled attempts at cross-cultural exchange did emerge during the research and these are worth some reflection. A further discussion of some of the issues around power relations,

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romanticism and paternalism in prescriptive ideals of neighbourliness follows. Everyday cross-cultural exchanges can be fraught when participants are unaware of some of the different cultural orientations involved. The importance of the kinds of knowledge transversal enablers can bring is apparent in a couple of examples raised by Muslim participants in the study. An Afghani woman in Griffith – fairly newly arrived as a refugee – recounted her distress at feeling she had no option due to cultural and religious differences but to withdraw from the residents of other backgrounds she had come to know when she arrived in town. She put this down to a negative experience she had when she attended a Christmas party hosted by her husband’s Italian employer where she felt a great deal of discomfort at the inappropriate (from her point of view) gender mixing and drinking involved. Fatima: Last time for Christmas party, my husband, his manager, his boss, had Christmas party in their house, their own house . . . We went to the party, but I sit around all another people, I don’t like to mix another people. So I go sit in the . . . sit alone. Interviewer: Who were the communities who were there? Which communities? Fatima: Italian people. But I see a couple of drink people, because I’m Muslim. The drink people maybe come and maybe do bad things . . . Something like that. Interviewer: And did you get to talk with the ladies? Fatima: Yes, before they start drinking (laughs). The Italian boss and his wife were obviously full of good intentions, wanting to include their new Afghani workers in their social circle and help them settle into life in Griffith. But for all the positive intentions, this is a situation which, without the appropriate cultural mediation, produced the unintended consequence of making the guests feel excluded and, in the longer term, making them feel nervous about future cross-cultural mixing. Here is the same woman talking a bit later about her views now that she has had a few bad experiences. Her early encounters with those unaware of Muslim religious taboos have made her wary of contact involving food, and alcohol in particular. Fatima: They different culture, they different people . . . now I learn, I don’t like to share with another people food or drink. Interviewer: You don’t like to share food with people from another community?


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Fatima: Yes, because another people may eat pork or dog. Chinese eat dog, Vietnamese eat dog, or drink. I can’t feel like that, I don’t know. Fatima: I share my food. I’m bringing some plate or dish or something like that, but I don’t like to eat from another dish, because I don’t know what’s in there. Interviewer: But if they tell you what’s in there, will you eat it? Fatima: Yeah. Her story emphasises the important role transversal enablers may play in preparing in advance both host and guest by ‘educating’ them on differing cultural customs that may offer points of affinity or disjuncture. In this case, the Italian boss may have felt it more appropriate perhaps to invite the Afghani woman and her husband to a lunch where alcohol was not present, rather than a high-spirited Christmas party. Conversely, many Muslims are unaware that drinking is not necessarily about getting drunk and that there are many ‘civilised’ ways of drinking socially, that also include women. Returning to the earlier discussion on gift exchange, an important point to highlight in the narrative above, however, is that despite the Afghani woman’s reticence to try the food from other groups, she emphasises that she still contributes her ‘share’ when it comes to social situations where guests bring food. While the stories recounted so far are by and large positive, there are situations where neighbourliness can be somewhat judgemental and only certain practices are tolerated. Moreover, while most people wish to feel welcomed, there is a point at which too much ‘welcome’ or neighbourliness can be experienced as paternalism, nosiness or simply too much work. Furthermore, as Valentine has argued, propinquity and urban civility in diverse spaces is not the same as having respect for difference (Valentine 2008: 332). She argues further that there are differential capacities to participate in micro-encounters of the cross-cultural kind, and that the power to tolerate is not evenly distributed (332). She also has reservations about the extent to which positive cross-cultural encounters of the everyday kind can be scaled up beyond the moment. Valentine’s scepticism of encounter and neighbourliness echoes that of Fortier who has recently argued that the UK Home Office’s recent focus on inter-ethnic ‘neighbourliness’ – which is a central plank of the government’s community cohesion strategy – is steeped in a moralistic discourse of conditional tolerance (Fortier 2008: 69–86) where the fantasy of local neighbourly love across difference (within limits) is projected onto the nation. She argues that this is in fact based upon a predominant fear of segregation, where ‘mixing was widely hailed as

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the antidote to segregation, disaffection, distrust, hate and fear, all of which results from too much sameness’ (Fortier 2008: 72). Her critique is that government-sponsored ‘mixing’ interventions and policies tend to calcify cultures within boundaries across which one should mix. She suggests that this in fact keeps the other at a distance, enclosed within their culture (74). Nonetheless, Fortier’s objections largely lie in the way mixing and propinquity are framed as discursive, moral ideals, whereas the relations of mutuality discussed in this chapter are intended to highlight instead how identities and biographies of real, lived individuals are reconfigured in the process of transversal exchange.

Conclusions An ethnographic perspective on everyday multiculturalism can help to understand the lived experience of cultural complexity inherent in what Vertovec has described as ‘super-diversity’ (2007). Far from the scare tactics of some politicians who decry the formation of ‘ethnic ghettos’ and segregated cities, on the ground there are real possibilities for non-assimilationist forms of integration to emerge. While places such as Griffith have their own internal dynamics which possibly enhance or make more obvious some of these processes, everyday interactions across cultural difference happen in every diverse locality, knitting together the here and there, the then and now, the local and diasporic. There are theorists who argue that mere co-existence in diverse cities can produce a cosmopolitan disposition – where ‘indifference to difference’ and ‘toleration’ of side-by-sideness are the most ethical form of co-inhabitance (see Donald 1999). However, as Amin (2002: 976) has argued, coming to terms with difference ‘is a matter of everyday practices . . . and it needs to be inculcated as a habit of practice (not just co-presence)’. He is cynical about the possibility of simply engineering togetherness through public space and enforced mixing through public housing and the like, arguing that it is what he calls ‘micro-publics’ where cross-cultural engagement most likely takes place: workplaces, schools, colleges, youth centres, sports clubs, community centres, community gardens, child-care facilities and local sporting teams (Amin 2002; Sandercock 2003). These are prosaic sites of interdependence, engagement and negotiation (Amin 2002: 976). I argue that the sorts of transversal practices and exchanges described in this chapter hold out similar potential. However, as Valentine notes (2008: 332), while everyday convivial encounters are important, they do not ensure a culture of tolerance. Inequalities must be recognised and addressed, and policies


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aimed at developing meaningful inter-ethnic contact also need to pay attention to building the capacity of marginalised groups to participate. The forms of mutuality in cross-cultural engagement and welcome facilitated by transversal enablers are different to the dominant-culture guest-host relations inherent in what was known in Australia as the ‘Good Neighbour Movement’. A precursor to subsequent multicultural policies, the Good Neighbour Movement was funded between the 1950s and 1970s by Australia’s Department of Immigration and operated in both cities and country towns to welcome ‘New Australians’ (as they were colloquially known) into local communities. It involved members of churches, Country Women’s’ Associations, Parents and Citizens committees, youth and returned soldiers’ organisations, Rotary clubs and many other voluntary bodies. Their original role was to welcome white British migrants, but this extended to the European migrant intake of the post-war period. Volunteers were, by and large, Anglo-Celtic Australians. Members of the movement would be tasked with welcoming new arrivals, introducing them into the local community and to local services, inviting them to social functions, explaining local laws and customs and so forth. Perhaps well intentioned, the program eventually received criticism for its paternalistic approach and the ‘culture blindness’ of the services offered. Many of the volunteers also seemed to have in mind that their role was to help the new ‘ethnics’ assimilate to ‘our way’ of doing things. Not surprisingly, the movement was eventually replaced in the mid-1970s by the model of multiculturalism and multicultural service provision Australia is more familiar with today, where culturally specific settlement services are preferred, and where possible ethnic communities themselves are considered the most effective means of delivering them. However, this legitimate shift away from ‘welcome committees’ towards the multicultural service provision model may have resulted in a perception among long-time (particularly Anglo-Celtic) Australians that they no longer had ‘permission or responsibility to care’ about their diverse co-citizens. It may be argued that this shift in responsibility of care from everyday people to the state in some ways removed the responsibility of multicultural recognition from the realm of everyday practice, refocusing it on the institutional level. While an essential step, in the process something was lost – the responsibility of everyday people to engage in modes of quotidian recognition of others. Anglo-Celtic Australians seem confused about know what ‘recognition’ should look like in practice, how they might ‘do’ it, and what role they might play.

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While I am suggesting that some of the forms of transversal exchange documented in this chapter offer some possibilities to fill this gap, a cautionary note is warranted; there also needs to be ‘permission to be left alone’, and it is important not to romanticise closed forms of community and small-town forms of surveillance. However, this is different to arguing that culturally diverse communities should live side by side without any form of intersectional engagement, care and mutuality. Further, many of the exchanges discussed here occur often as much between minority cultures as between mainstream Anglo-Celtic Australians and ‘others’, thus challenging some of the Euro-centrism that tends to dominate analyses of intercultural exchanges (Narayan 1997: 162). Power relations are always present in place sharing as are various degrees of intolerance and cross-cultural discomfort. Questions of place as representation and ideology have to be considered in dialogue with the sorts of social relations and practices discussed in this chapter. However, at a time of increasing anxieties surrounding ‘segregation’ and a supposed decline in social capital in highly diverse western cities (Phillips 2006; Putnam 2007) it is surprising how little is known about who, where, how and why people get on in multicultural suburbia, how diversity is lived on the ground, from below, in the borderlands, in contact zones. And the closer one looks, the more it becomes obvious that ‘parallel lives’ are not necessarily the prevailing norm.

Notes 1. I borrow the term ‘Working Class Cosmopolitans’ from Werbner (Werbner 1999), while ‘multiculturalism from below’ is adapted from Smith and Guarnizo’s notion of ‘transnationalism from below’ (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). 2. ‘Anglo-Celtic Australians’ is commonly used in the Australian context to denote the majority white population descended from settlers from the UK. It is a controversial term in that it excludes white Australians of continental European extraction. However it is my preferred term as it highlights the contextual complexities of whiteness. In the Australian context under the white Australia policy, to be most ‘white’ meant being of English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish ‘stock’. Only post-war were ‘whites’ from Europe accepted, and even then there was a hierarchy of whiteness with Northern Europeans at the top, and those from southern Europe, especially Greece and Italy, at the bottom. 3. For a good overview of the term transversality in Guattari’s work, see Genosko (2002). 4. Maori are the first peoples of New Zealand. 5. Pavlovas and lamingtons are typically Anglo-Australian cakes, while sandwiches, as for the English, are typical lunchtime fare. Pavlova is a


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meringue-based dessert cake often topped with strawberry and kiwi fruit. It was popularised in Australia during the 1930s and seen as quintessentially Australian. Lamingtons are small squares of sponge cake with chocolate and coconut icing, popularised around the early 1900s. They were often sold to raise funds for churches, schools, scouts etc., at what became known as ‘Lamington Drives’. The practice is dwindling in the cities, but a lamington fundraising stall is still a common sight in many Australian country towns. They are also often found served with tea at Australian citizenship ceremonies.

References Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity’, Environment & Planning A, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 959–80. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge). Blum, L. (1998) ‘Recognition, Value, and Equality: A Critique of Charles Taylor’s and Nancy Fraser’s Accounts of Multiculturalism’, Constellations, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 51–68. Carrier, J. (1991) ‘Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange’, Sociological Forum, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 119–36. Cheal, D. (1988) The Gift Economy (London: Routledge). Choo, S. (2004) ‘Eating Satay Babi: Sensory Perception of Transnational Movement’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 203–13. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Cockburn, C. (1998) The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books). Conradson, D. (2003) ‘Spaces of Care in the City: The Place of a Community Drop-in Centre’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 507–25. Donald, J. (1999) Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Duruz, J. (2005) ‘Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 51–69. Fortier, A. M. (2008) Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (London: Routledge). Genosko, G. (2002) Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum). Gluckman, M. (1963) ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 307–16. Hage, G. (1997) ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-building’, in H. Grace, G. Hage, L. Johnson, J. Langsworth and M. Symonds (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Annandale: Pluto Press). Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).

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Komter, A. E. (2005) Social Solidarity and the Gift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Law, L. (2005) ‘Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong’, in D. Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (New York: Berg). Lewis, J. D. and A. Weigert (1985) ‘Trust as a Social Reality’, Social Forces, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 967–85. Mauss, M. (1969) The Gift (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Miller, D. (ed.) (1998) Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London: University College London Press). Mol, A. and J. Law (1994) ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 641–71. Narayan, U. (1997) Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (London: Routledge). Noble, G. (2008) ‘The Textures of Recognition: Ethnicity and the Permission to be Human’, unpublished. Phillips, D. (2006) ‘Parallel Lives? Challenging Discourses of British Muslim Selfsegregation’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, vol. 24, no. 1, p. 16. Poulsen, M., R. Johnson and J. Forrest (2004) ‘Is Sydney a Divided City Ethnically?’, Australian Geographical Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 356–77. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes (London: Routledge). Putnam, R. D. (2007) ‘E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twentyfirst Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture’, Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, p. 38. Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place (London, New York: Routledge). Sandercock, L. (2003) Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the Twenty-first Century (London: Continuum). Seddon, G. (1994) ‘The Australian Back Yard’, in I. Craven, M. Gray and G. Stoneham (eds), Australian Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sennett, R. (2003) Respect: The Formation of a Character in a World of Inequality (London: Penguin). Seremetakis, C. N. (1996) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Simmel, G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. K. H. Wolff (New York: Free Press). Smith, M. P. and L. E. Guarnizo (eds) (1998) Transnationalism from Below (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers). Taylor, C. (1994) ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Urry, J. (2000) ‘Mobile Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 185–203. Valentine, G. (2008) ‘Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 321–35. Vasta, E. and L. Kandilige (2007) London the Leveller: Ghanaian Work Strategies and Community Solidarity, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper No. 52,, vol. WP-07-52, COMPAS, University of Oxford, pp. 1–32.


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Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘Super-diversity and Its Implications’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 1024–54. Waldinger, R. (2005) ‘Networds and Niches: The Continuing Significance of Ethnic Connections’, in G. C. Loury, T. Modood and S. M. Teles (eds), Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the USA and UK (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Watson, S. (2006) City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (London: Routledge). Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 17–35. Young, I. M. (2007) ‘Recognition of Love’s Labor: Considering Axel Honneth’s Feminism’, in B. van den Brink and D. Owen (eds), Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Yuval-Davis, N. (1999a) ‘Ethnicity, Gender Relations and Multiculturalism’, in R. D. Torres, L. F. Miron and J. X. Inda (eds), Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader (London: Blackwell). Yuval-Davis, N. (1999b) ‘What is “Transversal Politics”?’, Soundings: a Journal of Politics and Culture, no. 12, pp. 94–8.

2 Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community Greg Noble

The oft-proclaimed ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has entailed a raft of both theoretical and political criticisms. Theoretically, the identity focus of multiculturalism is seen to be incapable of capturing the cultural complexity of contemporary societies. Politically, as a set of policies and programmes, it is seen to be inadequate for servicing that complexity, or addressing concerns around cultural division and the desire for social cohesion. In its place, a clutch of ideas has emerged to fill this void and offer alternative visions for grappling with the consequences of diversity in an increasingly globalised world. The interest in notions of cosmopolitanism is central here because they shift the focus away from a politics of identity, which reifies categories of ethnicity, towards an ethics of cohabitation. This shift, however, has not been without its problems – cosmopolitanism has been too often constrained by its philosophical and ethical orientation, and its preoccupation with elites, and rarely used to explore the pragmatics of living with difference in diverse settings. This paper explores ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, configured as situated and strategic practices of transaction in specific contexts. It builds on the Living Diversity and Connecting Diversity reports commissioned by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) as a way of gaining a better glimpse into the cultural complexity of Australian multiculturalism as it is lived and breathed (Ang et al. 2002, 2006). These studies found evidence of strong civic engagement with cultural diversity and social issues, support for diversity and immigration, experiences of hybrid lives and community identities, and co-existing forms of ethnic and national belonging. This was significant because they were conducted during a period of critical debate about multiculturalism, when panics around 46

Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community 47

terrorism, ‘ethnic crime’ and cultural disharmony were seen to justify a conservative agenda for dismantling multicultural programmes and policies and to license increasing levels of racist vilification, especially against those of Arabic-speaking and Muslim background (Poynting et al. 2004). Against national anxieties around ‘ethnic ghettoisation’, these studies documented the extent of ‘people-mixing’ in Australian life, by which we meant several things. First, intercultural connections were occurring in diverse settings: in private and public life, in local neighbourhoods and wider social realms such as work and leisure (Ang et al. 2002). Second, the degree and nature of cultural diversity was changing and impacting on the lives of young people in particular: we found second and third-generation Australians who identified with two or more cultural heritages. Third, these young people seemed to move relatively happily between different milieux, and were also comfortable dealing with different groups in Australian society (Ang et al. 2006). In this regard Australia seems to be evincing an evolving ‘hyper-diversity’: it wasn’t just that people lived hybrid lives, or lived them in polyethnic neighbourhoods, but that complexity and its subsequent forms of interaction were of such a nature that they went beyond typical understandings of multiculturalism and corresponded to the claim that diversity was becoming more diverse. Vertovec (2006) coined the term ‘super-diversity’ to capture the proliferation of cultural differences in the United Kingdom context, and how these are woven into other forms of diversity – socioeconomic differentiation, differences of migration and settlement, regional and spatial distribution, political and cultural mobilisation, and so on. This only corresponds, however, to what has been the case in Australia for several decades. Australian multiculturalism has long been predicated on the assumption that there is considerable cultural variety within society, but that variety was understood as an array of discrete cultures which make up a colourful mosaic. What we are now seeing is a diversification of this diversity. This people-mixing and civic engagement demonstrated the contours of an emerging cosmopolitan citizenship. In the older paradigm of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism was usually seen to be an effect of the presence of people from diverse national, cultural, linguistic and religious backgrounds, a presence which is savoured by the ‘mainstream’ population – it is rarely seen as an experience of those people themselves. There have long been, however, concerns voiced by the ‘mainstream’ that some migrants ‘keep to themselves’, forming tightly knit enclaves which fail to assimilate. Yet the imperatives acting in complex

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societies mean that we can’t simply talk about cultural maintenance or integration as mutually exclusive processes. Just as many long-time Australians take up the diverse cultural goods made available by cultural diversity, so too migrants and their children take up elements of the prevailing Australian ways of life and maintain the diverse traditions and practices they have brought with them, and create new traditions and associations. Against a dominant conception of cosmopolitanism as a preserve of elites, the study demonstrated the richness of intercultural encounters in contemporary suburban settings. One of the results of this is a kind of everyday cosmopolitanism – or an open-ness to cultural diversity, a practical relation to the plurality of cultures, a willingness and tendency to engage with others. This ‘people-mixing’ helps produce an evolving cultural diversity in which people managed the competing demands of cultural identity and social co-existence at home, at work and in leisure spaces.

Reconceiving cosmopolitanism A common element of definitions of cosmopolitanism is the emphasis on an open-ness to other cultures, although there is much debate about how we view this open-ness (Vertovec and Cohen 2002). There are several overlapping problems with the conventional depictions of cosmopolitanism: it assumes the cosmopolitan is part of an elite, it configures cosmopolitanism as a series of personal attributes, it is couched in a moralistic discourse, and it doesn’t grapple with the quotidian practices that produce this open-ness. Many early discussions focused on cosmopolitanism as a characteristic of particular elites. Since then there has been interest in the extent to which this concept can be used to describe aspects of the lives of ordinary citizens, a ‘vernacular’ or ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism. Despite this shift, the original focus left a legacy of seeing the cosmopolitan as a social type, or as characterised by particular attributes as a consequences of globalisation. This is reflected in the contrasting of locals and cosmopolitans and the claim that cosmopolitans are somehow ‘above’ local cultures, a metacultural position, from which one dips in and out and between them (Hannerz 1992: 252). This serves well an argument for the cosmopolitanism of intellectual and social elites, who practice an eclectic consumption of exotic difference, but it says little about the intercultural practices of everyday life in culturally complex societies. In an increasingly globalised world, more and more people partake of a ‘banal’ cosmopolitanism that is not the preserve of elites, but a


pragmatic orientation in which engaging with people and goods from other cultures is everyday practice, and through which we assimilate those people and goods into our own lives (Werbner 1999; Szerszynski and Urry 2002). Urry (2003) challenges the idea of the cosmopolitan type, preferring to see cosmopolitanism as a cultural disposition, an intellectual and aesthetic open-ness to people, places and experiences which involves mobility, curiosity, critical self-reflexivity, diverse cultural literacies and forms of ‘network capital’ that enable people to be articulated with an array of others. The idea of cosmopolitanism as a disposition is attractive in so far as the ways we interact – or don’t interact – with ‘strangers’ poses questions about one’s habitus and the forms of intercorporeality demanded by quotidian experiences of diversity. Urry’s approach doesn’t go this far, however, and tends to revert, if implicitly, to the intellectual cosmopolitanism of Hannerz. But, more importantly, these dispositions need to be seen as the outcomes of particular social practices, not ‘cosmopolitanism’ itself. It is easy to collapse this idea of cosmopolitanism as a set of dispositions back into the social type model, as an attribute of persons. So we need to examine the practices through which attributes are habituated to account for the dispositional nature of open-ness to others. Turner and Rojek (2001: 221–5) similarly talk of ‘cosmopolitan virtue’ as a combination of irony, reflexivity, scepticism, nomadism, care for other cultures and an ecumenical commitment to dialogue with them. In other words, they see it as a series of personal capacities. They describe the ‘cosmopolitan mentality’ as ‘cool’ and ‘thin’, an abstract, qualified and detached form of belonging. However, they describe it in functional terms, as ‘a product of globalization and modernity’. While their analysis says much about contemporary societies, it reinforces the conception of cosmopolitanism as a set of moral attributes of persons. Moreover, as a function of globalisation, it elides the ensemble of social practices and relations that constitute the lived realities of cultural complexity. These practices may produce particular personality traits but it is the practices, not the attributes, which should be the point of a sociocultural analysis of cosmopolitanism. Examining these practices and relations allows us to explore the ways in which cultural complexity gets negotiated, the ways difference and sameness participate in processes of exchange: the give and take that is constitutive of an open-ness to otherness. We need to bear in mind that ‘open-ness to otherness’ doesn’t tell us much; such open-ness can only begin an encounter, it is not the encounter itself. We need to shift attention to the ongoing work of producing a sense

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of ‘being together’, local but not enclosed relations of intercommunal practice. Focusing on practices of co-existence moves away from the ‘identarian reduction’ (Yar 2004: 57) in much of multicultural theorising as a politics of recognition towards the intersubjective nature of social existence. Yar argues that such work pathologises otherness as a destructive, radical alterity rather than seeing in the other the condition of the realisation of one’s potentiality, the ‘intersubjective agreement’ that generates ‘mediating structures, shared cultural and institutional forms which reconcile subjects in common normative and practical orientations’ of solidarity (2004: 71–2). The assumption of the boundedness of identity in the politics of recognition ‘fixes’ cultural categories of being in ways that delimit, not foster, interaction (Markell 2003). The boundedness of identity politics leads to an assumption that relations of solidarity are predicated on an opposition between wider community and difference: as though community means sameness, and difference its negation. We need, then, to look at those practices that invoke solidarity and difference in everyday life (Westwood 2004: 254). This pragmatic being-together is a cosmopolitan form of ‘communality’ which is quite different to traditional notions of community. Yet neither is it the postmodern form of ‘network sociality’ which Wittel (2001) sees as ephemeral but intense, informational and technological, disembedded and emerging in the context of individualisation. It is relatively stable and yet also dynamic, fashioned out of negotiation. I don’t wish to romanticise this as ‘intercultural harmony’: the SBS reports record examples of cultural insularity within Australia, uneven levels of engagement with others and imbalances of cultural maintenance and social integration (Ang et al. 2002). Moreover, Australia is far from being free of racism: there is substantial documentation of the experiences of racial and religious vilification, especially since 11 September 2001, with local incivilities as well as forms of violence (Noble 2005). Indeed, as this paper will suggest, there is everyday cosmopolitanism and ‘everyday racism’ (Essed 1991) To avoid a romanticised view of this cosmopolitanism, and to move away from the abstract rhetoric of existing debates, we need to explore these issues in a grounded and nuanced way. Ethnographic analyses of practices of civic encounter, cohabitation and belonging are important because the debate around Australia’s diversity has been undertaken in the context of moral panic about cultural dissensus, rather than examining sites of what I call ‘unpanicked multiculturalism’: spaces of cultural complexity which don’t become subject to conflict or anxieties


regarding social fragmentation.1 This ‘unpanicked multiculturalism’, or the ways difference gets negotiated in everyday lives away from the heat of moral panic and state- and media-driven anxieties about social cohesion, provides an invaluable site for considering productive practices of intercultural co-habitation: insights which will prove valuable for the management of cultural diversity in areas of social services, education and urban planning. Panicked multiculturalism has of course been well documented (see Poynting et al. 2004) and draws on the model of moral panic developed in the work of Cohen (2002) and others (Critcher 2003; Kroker et al. 1989). Yet while ‘panic’ has been conceptually elaborated, unpanic has not. Yet unpanic is not simply the absence of panic, it is not simply places where ‘moral entrepreneurs’ such as politicians and journalists have not whipped social anxieties into a frenzy. Rather, unpanic is a production in its own right, a set of relatively stable relations and ways of intercultural being which emerge out of sustained practices of accommodation and negotiation. While our understanding of panic can be articulated though a theoretical framework, our understanding of unpanicked sites has to emerge from empirically grounded studies of these practices. This is not to fetishise the ‘ethnographic real’ (Keith 2005), but to acknowledge such analyses are important to develop a view of cosmopolitanism as forms of situated, strategic, transactional labour in contrast to those who continue to emphasise a moralised discourse of cosmopolitan virtue. Exploring the phenomenal manifestation of everyday cosmopolitanisms, the ways cultural differences get negotiated in the habitual engagements of ordinary encounters which produce ‘local liveability’ (Amin 2002: 959), help us to begin to understand how intercultural relations contribute to localised (as well as diasporic) senses of community. It means to ask what kinds of sites foster forms of intercultural belonging, what kinds of practices of exchange facilitate the continuation of these intercultural relations, and what kinds of temporalities structure these connections (Markell 2003). How and where do we capture the intimate details of everyday cosmopolitanism, and the meanings of the exchanges that occur?

The cosmopolitan intermingling of school A place that captures something of the quotidian nature of intercultural interaction that contributes to everyday cosmopolitanism is the local public primary school. I want to draw on forms of encounter that occur

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at a school in a middle-class area with an increasing array of people from other countries. One-third of local residents were born in a country in which a language other than English was the main language. China, India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia were the main source countries. In the school itself, over 60 per cent of students came from backgrounds where English is not the main language. The public school is a key site where cultural diversity has some significant bearing on the nature of social interaction and senses of local belonging. The drop-off and pick-up times before and after school, for example, are microcosms of the kinds of mobilities and flows that are seen now to typify globalised capitalism. It seems less useful then to describe school as a ‘contact zone’ than to see it as a site of intermingling, where streams of people – parents, grandparents, older siblings and other carers – converge and diverge. The temporalities and spatialities of these streams are fascinating to watch: they move, pause, aggregate and disaggregate along various lines of formation and deformation, punctuated by the rhythms and spaces of the shared school day and their own lives. People meet – sometimes by chance, sometimes by habit, sometimes by agreement – and talk about their kids, school, other families, shopping, community events, media, current affairs, and so on. They negotiate coffees, extra-curricular and social events, sporting activities, childcare, and the like; they offer to share responsibilities, such as picking up and dropping off kids, transporting them to other events and places, swapping visits by school friends, places on canteen rosters; they buy and sell things, give gifts and hand-me-downs, borrow and return objects, pass on names of tradespeople, and so on. Within these spaces and their attendant rhythms, ethnic, cultural and religious differences interweave themselves. Sometimes they are incidental to this array of activity, sometimes they are central to it. Groups of regular association gather and disperse. These may contain people who share physical or cultural similarities – those of English-speaking background, those that come from Korea or Japan, women who wear the burkha, those who attend the same church; more often they involve people-mixing in which those similarities become differences. Scholars of globalisation emphasise the flows of people, capital, commodities, information and meanings across and within nation-states (Appadurai 1990), but they often do this in very abstract terms. In the space and time of the beginning and end of the school day, these flows are material and banal but nevertheless examples of the world the globalists theorise. The milieu of the school illustrates Markell’s claim that ‘Life is given texture by countless acts of recognition’ (2003: 1), and that


these acts of recognition orient us practically. In this scene, people are recognised as Muslim or Christian, Anglo or Korean, but also as males and females, adults and children, buyers and sellers, builders and teachers, sports fans and media audiences, citizens and colleagues, friends and neighbours, and in myriad other ways. We can see here several things: the multiplicity of relations of recognition, the ‘circuits of recognition’ under which things get done; and the temporality of these processes. Central to understanding everyday cosmopolitanism is not simply an awareness of the mundane place of ethnic difference in the culturally complex societies of the 21st century, for these alone do not produce the open-ness to otherness that is usually seen as characterising cosmopolitanism. We need to examine the practices of negotiation and exchange, differentiation and coalescence in which those differences become part of the process of fashioning durable relationships. Several examples drawn from the school site will suffice here.

The labour of community The first point I want to make here is that in focusing on cosmopolitanism as forms of practice rather than moral virtue we are stressing the hard work that goes into the production of connection. I want to emphasise that this work is a form of labour – not just because it is hard, nor because it is unpaid work done in the absence of social infrastructure, but because it is productive, transactional and cumulative, creating things – like ‘community’ and ‘identity’ – over a period of time. ‘Community’, as we all know, is a deeply problematic term, and I don’t want to revisit that debate. I want to draw on a notion of community which is primarily about the forms and purposes of connectedness (Frankenberg 1970: 245): the augmentation of kin and affine, the links between street and suburb, the relation to work and leisure, the ties of reciprocity, and so on. I’d like to foreground the sense of what gets done in the networks that ethnographies of communities describe, and the kinds of hard work that constitute and maintain these networks. This avoids beginning with an assumption that community entails the identification with like-selves and the exclusion of unlike-selves to explore how differences get navigated and negotiated in situated practices. Lived communities are always flawed, fragile, contested, compromised and paradoxical, but this doesn’t negate the powerful work that they do. One woman in the area around this school reflects something of the labour of community. Savitri, a woman of Indian origin who has been in Australia for 13 years and who has been involved in an enormous range

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of local activities; supervising the school band, working in the school canteen, running a number of fundraising activities for the school including an Indian Independence Day lunch, and managing the soccer, cricket and netball teams her children have played in (even though she plays no sport herself). Savitri also helps run the Hindi school in a nearby suburb. She typically ‘puts her hand up’ when others pull out. As well as these formal activities, Savitri has a keen sense of the importance of informal support services – she says the daily activity of collective care for children, especially helping out parents who work or study, is also important to a local sense of community: ‘you feel safe, secure and you feel you belong’, and in the area, ‘people are looking out for you’. She recounts a sense of achievement in what she does and describes herself as having a lot of enthusiasm for it. It is easy to offer a socio-structural explanation for her enthusiasm: she had a tertiary education in India that wasn’t recognised here and her thwarted educational capital is transferred to her voluntary activities. As a woman, she has internalised gendered roles of cultural and community reproduction. She performs a lot of unpaid labour that sustains local institutions and the local economy. She gave up a promotion in the bank she worked in because it entailed working too far away from her children, so her community work is an extension of her ethic of care and her accumulated cultural capital. Yet while such sociologically oriented explanations are valid they don’t capture what gets done. Savitri, for example, has a profound sense of civic duty and believes it is important to teach her children the value of volunteering (even though her husband constantly upbraids her for her involvements) – and talks frequently of working in a ‘team’. Savitri plays a kind of broker role for what she calls ‘the NESBs’ [people of non-English-speaking background] who are scared to participate, or feel they will be made fools of: ‘I kind of look out for them’ because they don’t yet feel ‘at home’. Having had a couple of experiences of ‘Anglo’ parents who were antagonistic towards her when she was in a managerial role, she is well aware of the kinds of problems the other ‘NESBs’ face and goes out of her way to engage in practices of inclusion and mediation because they don’t have, as she says, ‘a strong sense of belonging’. Her cosmopolitan intercultural orientation operates within a context not of idealised intercultural harmony, but in the face of local forms of racism and marginalisation. Savitri likes the trust others have placed in her, and happily places trust in those she knows and works with; she recounts several examples of locals with whom she has become close friends who insist on


their kids calling her Aunty, which she loves. Savitri expends an extraordinary amount of labour in constituting both her ethnically defined community (which crosses many suburbs) and in her local community (which crosses many ethnicities). She has a strong sense of cultural maintenance and values the work of the Hindi school, but is also committed to her Australianness: she links the Indian groups, other ‘NESBs’ and the Anglo-Australian community. As well as explaining how the Hindi school starts the day with the Australian national anthem, then the Indian anthem, she recounts stories of getting her daughter to learn Advance Australia Fair on the Euphonium with the combined help of her Australian music tutor and the teacher at the Hindi school, of organising the kids at the Hindi school to revise a Hindi song so it included ‘Oi Oi Oi’ (the Australian sporting chant, most commonly used during the Olympic Games), and so on. This is easy to dismiss as ideology, but it is important to also recognise it for the processes of bridging differences and brokering the inclusion of others. It is also easy to romanticise as good works, but Savitri is very clear about her desire to help create a localised world where she and her family, and her children in particular, can exist productively. Where her story is significant is in her role in undertaking what Putnam (2000) calls bonding and bridging.2 Savitri is important not just because she ‘represents’ the Indian groups within the area, but because she is recognised as someone with ‘bridging capital’ – knowledge of the host society and local structures and connections to those with influence, and knowledge of the diverse groups which also constitute the suburb. But Savitri’s competence is not simply to make ‘ethnic’ connections, she exhibits resources of ‘network capital’ more broadly. Significantly, recognition for Savitri thus occurs within and is conceived in terms of a process of collaboration. This recognition is based not on sameness, but on cooperative group effort that entails reciprocity and trust. Savitri has not succeeded in producing a community that is free of racism (and I certainly don’t want to romanticise this suburban community) – indeed, other locals complain that some groups, like the Koreans, don’t contribute anywhere near as much as someone like her, and keep too much to themselves – but that would be unfair to expect. What she and others like her have produced is a relatively stable set of social networks that is strategic and also constitutes what I would call intercultural community. It is an arrangement which works across ethnic boundaries to an extent that is relatively successful: it is predicated not on sameness but on connection and collaboration. It is the kind of strategic everyday

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cosmopolitanism that gets stuff done in her locale and seems to generate a collective sense of security for many people.

The strategic nature of cosmopolitanism Linda, another woman with a ‘finger in every pie’, contributed a lot of labour to local community activities, especially those based around the local primary school and sporting club. Like Savitri, she was ambivalent about the very community in which she invested hours of labour, and she was ambivalent partly because of some sense of the consequence of cultural division. But unlike Savitri, Linda was a woman of AngloAustralian background, with a work history in the corporate world (rather than professional life). She treats her community activity as a ‘job’; she likes to be organised, and to organise others. Her commitment to the local community is peculiar on another count: she has sent one child off to an elite private high school some miles away, and she will also send her other child to an elite private school when she leaves the local primary school. Yet Linda continues to invest enormous amounts of time in the local school and the local area. She worries that the different ethnic groups that attend the school don’t have enough parental involvement, and ‘don’t mix enough’, and that some groups have cultural and language problems that prevent them from fitting in more – some women who work in the canteen, for example, ‘don’t know what you mean when you ask them to prepare the sandwiches or organise a raffle’. On the other hand, there ‘isn’t any conflict’, she says, and key people within those communities know the best way to raise them in the school when they need to. The most interesting thing about Linda’s investment is what she sees ambivalently as the values of living in a culturally diverse suburb. In her job as a salesperson for a small company, she spends a lot of time in the Hills district of Sydney, famous for its lack of ethnic diversity (it has a high concentration of Anglo-Australians) and for its social conservatism (it is home to many Christian organisations). It was the site of a controversy several years ago when the local council, in the wake of a moral panic about ‘ethnic gang rape’ (see Poynting et al. 2004), rejected an application for a prayer centre from a group of Indian Muslims. Linda contrasts the tight Anglo communities of the Hills district with her own suburb. The former has what she says is a ‘much stronger community’ orientation: an orientation she obviously envies as she speaks highly of the atmosphere amongst the people she deals with there. However, she is also adamant that she sees her kids living in a multicultural


area as a plus. She wants to move even closer to the school her youngest goes to because the neighbourhood she currently lives in is too ‘insular’. The ‘blend’ in the area around the school, she says, is ‘ideal’, and she values this: ‘we’re lucky, I can appreciate other cultures’. The children benefit from this, she argues, even if they don’t have the strong community orientation of the more insular areas. The kids in the greater diversity of the school are ‘informed kids’. She couldn’t imagine an Indian Independence Day lunch happening in the schools in the Hills district where she works. In other words, Linda misses the strong community orientation of a less diverse area, but thinks the trade-off for the more worldly and tolerant experience her children get locally is more than worth it. Linda is not what Hage (1998) calls a cosmomulticulturalist, savouring exotic difference, often from afar, as a form of distinction conducted amongst middle-class whites at the expense of real intercultural interaction – a kind of ‘multiculturalism without migrants’. Nor is her cosmopolitanism a moral virtue to be romanticised. She is a pragmatist, who wants her children to survive in a culturally complex world. This kind of ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ is a strategic negotiation of pervasive difference for the purposes of co-habitation. Like Savitri, we need to examine the practices undertaken, rather than read off a virtuous nature. Certainly these practices are transactional, and involve a high degree of reciprocity and mutuality, but we should be wary of casting these in moral terms.3

The phenomenology of reciprocity This focus on the reciprocal nature of transactions reminds us of Mauss’s (1966) analysis of the gift as a particular type of social activity that enables shared, social existence because it produces relations of mutuality – the obligations to give, receive and reciprocate. Recasting intercultural encounters in terms of exchange and reciprocity, as Wise (2005) has done, shifts our understanding of the scaffolding processes of intercultural being-together at work. Two examples from the school capture the intricate details of these processes of reciprocity. Dylan and Namil, two eight-year-old boys who attend the school I’ve just described, swap lunches. Dylan is of longstanding, English-speaking Australian heritage; Namil arrived from Sri Lanka when he was four. They spend a lot of time together both at school and in their leisure time. Dylan exchanges a beef sausage

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for Namil’s curry puff, and each is happy as they sit together eating. What’s going on in this utterly banal moment of school lunch? Not the ‘culinary distinction’ of cosmomulticulturalism; there may be something of this, but it’s not the most important thing. It is rather the ‘exploratory gestures’ (Cohen, cited by Hannerz 1992: 70) of cultural transaction. It is the exchange itself that is significant, and the cementing of a bond of friendship – this is just one moment in other forms of entanglement in which cultural difference is sometimes significant, sometimes not. At some distance from the critique of the culinary cosmopolitanism of middle-class elites, there is a broader recognition of the social and cultural importance of food in creating cultural meaning, social bonds and senses of personal identity. As Berking (1999: 65) argues, food-sharing is a basic form of solidarity and interdependence – evidenced in hospitality laws towards strangers, ritualised meal-taking and the like. Another example: when Dylan had his birthday, he invited a boy who is new to the school – Dong, who arrived from Korea with his family only recently and who spoke very little English. He was seated next to Dylan in class with and the two struck up a relation: Dylan helped Dong with his work and took a keen interest in his progress. At some point Dong showed Dylan the little origami figures he makes, and over time gave several to Dylan. In response, Dylan invited Dong to his birthday party. For a present, Dong gave Dylan a framed set of origami figures of little people from around the world in national and historical costume that he made himself (Figure 2.1). This is significant both because of the labour of the gift as an objectification of interpersonal bonds (Noble 2004), and because of the significance of the image as a representation of intercultural unity. The figures reflect some cultural and historical stereotypes, of course, but express a kind of gift of what Hannerz calls ‘the global ecumene’ (1992: 217) beyond the meeting of two ethnicities. Further illustrating this gesture, Dong included a brief letter to Dylan that thanked him for being his ‘first Australia friend’, and offered further lessons in origami. Dylan invited Dong to his home; Dong took a gift of origami paper, and the two spent the afternoon making figures (and henceforth spend the occasional moment at school doing the same). Dong teaches Dylan new skills and enjoys the occasion to try out his English. At times both boys worked on their own version of the same origami figure, and sometimes they worked together on the same object; at other times Dylan helped out Dong in trying to articulate some instruction. These were not isolated gestures, then, but implicated in an ongoing process of reciprocity.


Figure 2.1

Dong’s origami figures (photo by the author)

Now my point is not to use this story as a celebration of intercultural harmony, but to illustrate the processes of exchange that bring into being everyday cosmopolitanism as a practical negotiation of ‘being together’. I call this intercultural community – a sharedness of meanings and practices among consociates in particular spaces and times – but bearing in mind that we have to struggle against a romanticised notion of community as bounded and harmonious that has been well-critiqued in the humanities and social sciences. I am more interested in the practices that bring people into relation with each other, and thereby bring differences into relations of reciprocity. Wise (2005) calls these moments ‘hopeful intercultural encounters’ against the usual emphasis on moments of tension. She describes the kinds of misunderstandings that occur in shared places such as shopping centres, misunderstandings which produce resentment; but she also describes other exchanges that work towards mutuality, and the creation of relations of recognition and reciprocity which get over or around misunderstandings to produce co-existence in the local by managing intercultural relations as interpersonal ones. Against the popular tendency to talk about multiculturalism in terms of reified and essentialised communities, we need to remember that culture is a process, not a thing – it is constituted out of practice (Friedman 1995: 81) for ‘getting things done’, as the ethnomethodologists would say. Inter-ethnic encounters similarly involve getting things done, There is nothing automatic about cultural sharing, as Hannerz (1992: 44)

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reminds us: its accomplishment is always problematic. Yet it’s the ‘going about things’ that enables reciprocal cultural flows, the mutual give and take of a micro-cultural setting. These are not just instrumental transactions but involve investments that contribute to the sense of cohabitation in everyday cosmopolitanism. These practices also entail processes of recognition which are not simply about ethnicity per se, but are complex and mutual forms of acknowledgement of worth and competence. The question of temporality is absolutely crucial here, because these are durable relations built over time (Markell 2003: 10). But my main point is this: cultural difference is inseparable from the nature of this interaction, yet recognition is not reducible to some fixed notion of cultural identity. There is recognition of each child or adult in terms of their different accomplishments, competencies that become the basis of a process of exchange. But they are engaged in a shared endeavour that is itself an act of recognition – we are doing this and we are doing it together.

Conclusion Cosmopolitanism is what Urry calls global fluid; it gets around obstacles and thus is crucial to what he calls the dialectic of mobilities and moorings (2003: 42, 133, 126). This is usually cast in terms of the global and the local, or the moving between cultures abstractly defined. I think we need to see it in terms of the concrete social encounters that bring differences together and the productive forms of communal labour that create forms of local liveability. We also therefore need to see everyday cosmopolitanism in terms of the durability of connections, not simply as intermittent and ephemeral meetings – we need to explore how this durability is produced, especially since, as Appadurai emphasises, we live in era of disjunctures. This durability rests on the reiteration enacted in everyday cosmopolitan neighbourhoods. This is crucial to understanding the dispositional nature of cosmopolitanism, not as a pre-given or sociologically derived ‘orientation’, but habits of engagement produced out of complex, mutual practices. These habits may entail sets of skills in navigating difference, a desire for interaction, an ability to map and reflect upon one’s own cultural backgrounds and experiences (Binnie et al. 2006: 7–8) – but such a disposition can only be explored through the iterative practices in specific settings. Such a focus raises questions of the nature and complexity of identity, especially as it relates to forms of embodiment. But if we are to begin to configure a sense of what Wise (2009) calls an ‘interethnic


habitus’, then we need to cast these questions in terms of the productive practices which habituate us to difference, and develop the capacities to navigate our way around them. Ironically, if everyday cosmopolitanism entails habituation to ‘strangers’, then everyday cosmopolitanism dissolves their unfamiliarity (think of how, for example, no-one would now consider the local Chinese restaurant as a marker of cosmopolitanism). More importantly, however, such a focus alters the way we think recognition operates. Intercultural, collaborative recognition is not simply a face-off relation of oppositional identities that some discussions of recognition imply, but may involve a process where two or more beings are brought into relation because they are producing something, an encounter, which brings these identities into relation – sometimes oppositionally defined, but also in a relation of standing together, of mutuality. Now it is hard to say this without sounding as though I am romanticising this as a utopia of cultural harmony. This is why we need Goffman, who stresses the ‘working consensus’ that makes social encounters possible – both as social encounters that produce something, and as performances of roles that harbour social inequalities as well as differences. As Goffman and the ethnomethodologists emphasise, social activity is about getting something done – it involves questions of subjectivity but, framed in terms of ‘front’ and ‘facework’, as part of the process of getting, producing a meaningful encounter. Goffman (1971: 21) talks about this in terms of a necessary ‘working consensus’, ‘cooperative activity’ that involves levels of respect and processes of recognition. In encounters in which we ask others to take seriously the impression that is offered, ‘mutual acceptance’ is a basic structural feature of interaction (1972: 11, 28). This emphasises the incidental or contingent nature of recognition and subjectivity in social encounters, whereas the politics of recognition in multicultural theory treats such encounters as though they are primarily about identity. As Goffman argues, ‘maintenance of face is a condition of interaction, not its objective’ (1972: 12). The idea of the ‘working consensus’ is close to the forms of social life that can be described in intercultural neighbourhoods. Goffman, of course, doesn’t mean a deeply felt harmony – this is too much of an ‘optimistic ideal and in any case not necessary for the smooth working of society’ (1971: 20), but a kind of ‘agreement’ which gives a modus vivendi to the interaction. Why is this working consensus important? Theorists of recognition like Taylor argue that modern politics must extend public recognition to all citizens, both as human beings and as bearers of particular social identities (Taylor 1992: Markell 2003: 3).

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Recognition theory, however, tends to forget to explore empirically what this first mode of recognition means, and privileges the second mode – the mode of identity. However, work on racial vilification that I have conducted suggests that what is at stake in acts of vilification is the sense of one’s humanity being taken away, or reduced to a social category, which has consequences for the capacity for effective social participation (Noble 2005). We recognise people in the fullness of their humanity – their competencies and accomplishments as well as their social identities. As Westwood (2004: 257) argues, plurality is not an endgame but a beginning, a generative and productive process that forges cosmopolitan sensibilities and citizenship. By exploring the phenomenal dimensions of culturally complex neighbourhoods – both the tensions of everyday racism and the intimacies of everyday cosmopolitanism – we may address gaps in the literature on globalisation and ethnicity and begin to describe the forms of productive, social ‘intensities’ – the networks of interdependent association, if not solidarities (Calhoun 2003) – of suburban life. As Bauman (2002) suggests, conflict shifts entanglement to engagement – it requires some addressing of the issues at stake. In a different way, the habituation of multicultural intimacies is another mode whereby issues are negotiated. But it is the how and where of these processes that are in need of analysis. Such an approach would set out to map the flows of intercultural interaction (amongst locals and between locals and others), forms of local, national and global belonging, civic participation, conceptualisations of local space and their link to national and global imaginaries, investments (social, economic, affective) in local spaces and institutions (such as schools), use of local media, and so on. Such an approach demands a reconfiguration of our understandings of identity and community. The everyday labour of intercultural connection, alongside the practices of exclusion, can recast the question of recognition, so central to identity politics, by showing the distinction between recognition as (I am this, you are other), and recognition with, the mutual, collective fashioning that comes out of shared practice, out of doing something together. In this sense, recognition is the beginning of something, not its end, and the end is never a given. It may be conflict-ridden and difficult, but the desire and capacity to engage is a fundamental demonstration of the dispositions of an everyday cosmopolitanism. Such an emphasis points suggestively towards a more nuanced understanding of a ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ (Appiah 2005) – understood here not as a moral discourse of right and wrong but as protocols for negotiating differences, developing obligations and


reciprocities that facilitate an ongoing intercultural interaction. Importantly, in the making of social connection, cultural difference may become incidental, and yet fundamental. It is through an analysis of the labour of everyday cosmopolitanism that we may begin to flesh out what Ang (2001) has referred to as the complicated entanglements of togetherness-in-difference.

Notes 1. Much of my own work has centred, like that of many researchers on multiculturalism, on spaces of conflict – Bankstown and Cabramatta in south-western Sydney, Cronulla, and so on. 2. I’ve avoided engaging with Putnam’s work because, although it is a significant contribution to how we understand the formation of community networks, it is too caught up in a series of debates about its assumptions, terms, moral emphasis and methods to be of direct relevance here. However, Putnam importantly points to the dual, and sometimes conflicting, processes of bonding (creating social networks between homogeneous groups) and bridging (creating social networks between socially heterogeneous groups). Savitri performs both tasks. 3. Putnam, for example, too easily collapses reciprocity, trust and honesty, and so skews the practical nature of co-mingling. He confuses reciprocity, for example, with altruism (2000: 134).

References Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity’, Environment and Planning A, pp. 959–80. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese (London: Routledge). Ang, I., J. Brand, G. Noble and G. Wilding (2002) Living Diversity: Australia’s Multicultural Future (Artarmon: Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)). Ang, I., J. Brand, G. Noble and J. Sternberg (2006) Connecting Diversity: The Paradoxes of Australian Multiculturalism (Artarmon: Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)). Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture (London: Sage), pp. 295–310. Appiah, A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bauman, Z. (2002) ‘The Great War of Recognition’, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference (London: Sage), pp. 137–50. Berking, H. (1999) Sociology of Giving, translated by P. Camiller (London: Sage). Binnie, J., J. Holloway, S. Millington, and C. Young (2006) ‘Introduction’, in J. Binnie, J. Holloway, S. Millington and C. Young, Cosmopolitan Urbanism (London: Routledge), pp. 1–34. Calhoun, C. (2003) ‘“Belonging” in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary’, Ethnicities, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 531–68. Castles, S., M. Kantzis, B. Cope and M. Morrissey (1988) Mistaken Identity (Sydney: Pluto Press).

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Cohen, S. (2002) Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge). Critcher, C. (2003) Moral Panics and the Media (Buckingham: Open University Press). Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism (Newbury Park: Sage). Frankenberg, R. (1970) Community Studies in Britain (Harmondsworth: Pelican). Friedman, J. (1995) ‘Global; System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds) Global Modernities (London: Sage). Goffman, E. (1971) The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Goffman, E. (1972) Interaction Ritual (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity (New York: Columbia University Press). Keith, M. (2005) After the Cosmopolitan? (London: Routledge). Kroker, A., M. Kroker and D. Cook (1989) Panic Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Postmodern Scene (Basingstoke: Macmillan). McDonald, K. (1999) Struggles for Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Markell, P. (2003) Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Mauss, M. (1966) The Gift (London: Cohen and West). Noble, G. and P. Tabar (2002) ‘On Being Lebanese Australian’, in G. Hage (ed.) Arab Australians Today (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press), pp. 129–44. Noble, G. (2004) ‘Accumulating Being’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 233–56. Noble, G. (2005) ‘The Discomfort of Strangers’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1/2, pp. 107–20. Poynting, S., G. Noble, P. Tabar and J. Collins (2004) Bin Laden in the Suburbs (Sydney: Institute of Criminology Press). Putnam, R. (2000) Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster). Szerszynski, B. and J. Urry (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review, vol. 50, pp. 461–81. Taylor, C. (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Turner, B. and C. Rojek (2001) Society and Culture (London: Sage). Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity). Vertovec, S. (2006) The Emergence of Super-Diversity in Britain, Working Paper No. 25, Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Vertovec, S. and R. Cohen (2002) ‘Introduction’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’. Social Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 17–37. Westwood, S. (2004) ‘Complex Choreography: Politics and Regimes of Recognition’, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference (London: Sage), pp. 247–76. Wise, A. (2005) ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1/2, pp. 171–86.

Everyday Cosmopolitanism and the Labour of Intercultural Community 65 Wise, A. (2009) ‘“It’s Just an Attitude that You Feel”: The Interethnic Habitus Before the Cronulla Riots’, in G. Noble (ed.) Lines in the Sand: the Cronulla Riots and the Limits of Australian Multiculturalism (Sydney: Institute of Criminology). Wittel, A. (2001) ‘Toward a Network Sociality’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 51–76. Yar, M. (2004) ‘Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire’, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference (London: Sage), pp. 57–76.

3 Practices of Difference: Analysing Multiculturalism in Everyday Life Giovanni Semi, Enzo Colombo, Ilenya Camozzi and Annalisa Frisina

Introduction The considerations we wish to make here arise from a profound dissatisfaction with the current debate on multiculturalism. We perceive that there is a growing gap between the main ways of reading and interpreting the presence of difference in contemporary society and what we see, hear and at times experience in our fieldwork. We are comforted by the fact that in recent times various authors, representing a range of different intellectual perspectives and academic environments, have taken a similar stance, lamenting the lack of reciprocal intertwining between theories and studies (Baumann 1999; Beck 2004; Sarat 2002; Wise 2006). The current debate on multiculturalism often seems to acquire an ideological character which tends more to indicate how we would ideally like things to be, as in the case of the approaches of political philosophy and social policy (see Kymlicka 1995), rather than attempting to represent it by looking at the dynamics, the tensions, the intentions and the meanings of those who produce it in their daily lives. The clash is thus between a policy-oriented conception of multiculturalism and the empirical recognition of diversity within contemporary societies. For this reason the debate on multiculturalism often appears to be dominated by concern for normative aspects, the attempt to reconstruct the ideal conditions for a respectful co-existence with difference, presupposing that what this term indicates is something evident, precise and stable. In this way multiculturalism ends up often viewing differences as essences and plays a part in transforming them into something unalterable, which necessarily comes into conflict with other differences, in turn equally unmovable and unalterable, as it’s 66

Practices of Difference: Analysing Multiculturalism in Everyday Life

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often the case for both communitarian and liberal conceptions of it (see Parekh 2000). This tendency to reify difference was identified early on, but moves to counter this in social sciences (mostly in feminist, post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, and cultural studies) were often restricted to deconstructing the essential quality being attributed to differences (Benhabib 2002). Research has thus witnessed a constant clash between those attempting to construct a coherent, definitive theory of justice, capable of uniting equality in terms of respect and opportunities with acknowledging and promoting difference, and those, often starting from ethnographic observation, who attempt to deconstruct all social assertions of difference, highlighting its fortuitous, open-ended, unstable nature as it appears, clearly looking at the huge variety of sociological and anthropological studies on migrants communities, diasporas or networks all over the world. In this chapter we will then follow a double path: in first part we will highlight the theoretical positive foundations of our conception of ‘everyday multiculturalism’. Then, we will sketch briefly ‘ambiguity’ and ‘space’ as two key dimensions through which the empirical making of multicultural societies can be explored.

Everyday multiculturalism The concept of everyday multiculturalism seemed to be a good starting point for trying to reconstruct difference on a sociological level, and the recurrent situations in which it is constructed, invoked, mediated, transformed, disputed or deconstructed. In particular, by using the concept of everyday multiculturalism we attempt to get round a series of simple dichotomies based on a mechanical, mirror-like opposition in which difference is simply counter to equality, and therefore seen as material inequality, before becoming a mere substitute for identity. On the contrary, we attempt to restore sociological substance to the concept of difference, highlighting its role as a political resource, that is, a central element – which may act as a constraint or as a resource – in the daily work of defining reality and managing social boundaries. The political aspect lies in the fact that difference can be a key factor in defining situations, and therefore in the struggle to define rules and criteria for interpreting reality that then become binding, that is, that then appear legitimate and thus capable of directing and involving the interpretation and actions of others.

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Our conception of everyday multiculturalism arises in the context of a constructionist, process-based perspective that attempts to avoid seeing difference as something pre-social, constitutive and fundamental, capable of determining – if it does not betray its innermost essence – the views and actions of social actors. Contrary to this, we consider difference to be a situated production, the result of encounters and conflicts taking place in contexts characterised by an asymmetrical distribution of resources and power but nonetheless necessary, in terms of attributing meaning to social reality and organising how to operate in it. This reality, while constructed socially and not derived from ontological conditions of a natural or transcendental nature, represents the ‘real’, that is the sole, fundamental context for interaction and individual and social life, something that cannot be escaped and from which there can be no exemptions. From this perspective, the ability to create and use differences should be considered as one of the main ways in which we give reality a social, public form. Difference turns out to be a ‘political’ resource, a tool for collective action, for defining our shared reality. This enables us to bring the power dimension to the fore: precisely because it is constructed, and because it is a political resource for defining reality, difference includes a particular, situated vision of the world, includes specific rules for looking at reality and sets up constraints, models and expectations in line with the points of view and interests of specific social groups. A constructionist perspective that is not content merely with highlighting the constructed nature of social reality enables us to raise the issue of which concrete boundaries and distinctions, from among many equally possible and plausible ones, is really selected and drawn, by whom and why. It underlines the fact that it is of sociological interest not only to capture the dynamic, ongoing construction of difference, but also conceive the ways in which this construction is rendered legitimate, stable and taken for granted, as well as the specific historic and contextual conditions which make a particular difference ‘hegemonic’, that is, the result of a power struggle that tends to impose one particular point of view, albeit always in a partial, temporary way (Gramsci 1971; Hall 1986). It is this unceasing conflict between stabilising a specific difference and disputing it, in a context of ongoing conflict between different interests and visions of the world, that represents the main focus of the sociological analysis of difference. Our attention is therefore focused on concrete, mundane, everyday interactions, where difference becomes a resource in defining the situation, regulating relations and defining social hierarchies, with the


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awareness that it is something unstable, in constant evolution, and always open to question.

The everyday dimension The emphasis on the everyday dimension aims to direct the focus both towards the situated character of social relations and practices, and to the aspects of life that strive, in the majority of cases, to avoid analysis (Highmore 2002). The everyday dimension is relevant here not because it has a spatial nature, in the private, intimate or domestic domain, but because it is defined by relations, as a ‘place’, that is, as a set of ordinary, banal, constitutive, incorporated practices (Bourdieu 1977). This is a place that lies at the basis of situated experience, of the here and now, but which is not completely defined by proximity, the community area, neighbourhood bonds or family relations. On the contrary – and this is one of the specific factors introduced by the ubiquitous presence of difference in a scenario of increasing globalisation – the everyday arena is open to and connected to dimensions which go above and beyond the here and now of the immediate context, transforming banal, ordinary relations and practices in a new way (Beck 2004). As Michel de Certeau underlines (1990), the everyday sphere is fragmented, multiform, non-systematic, evocative and in constant evolution. Focusing on everyday micro-practices enables us to resist the temptation to reify actions, relations and categories (Revel 1996), and enables us to bring to the fore the performative dimension that characterises both the creation and the stabilisation of differences capable of making a difference. Lastly it enables us to ‘take social actors seriously’ (Touraine 1984), to listen attentively to their accounts and to make detailed observations of how they construct, combat, alter and justify their actions in concrete terms. The everyday dimension thus serves to highlight three dimensions: the practices, the context and subjective experiences. Focusing on practices appears vital in terms of reinstating the dynamic, complex nature of the concept of difference and underlines its processual nature (as both a social accomplishment and a skill). It enables us to view multiculturalism – that is, situations of co-existence in the same social space of individuals and groups with different values and normative frames of reference, and who see their reciprocal difference as a significant factor – not only as a normative problem (regarding the theory of justice) or a juridical one (in terms of regulation), but as a

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concrete, specific context of action, in which difference comes across as a constraint – reducing options, simplifying the scene, attributing desires and identities – and as a resource – enabling action, distinction, criticism and conflict. In this sense, taking social actors seriously must also translate into believing what they do and how they do it. Spatial practices, for instance, namely the relations between people and the spaces they move in and reconstruct, are packed with information on and examples of the fabric of a multicultural society. The various forms of multisited, transnational ethnography are all empirical ways of acknowledging the formation of multicultural societies located not only in the ‘here and now’ of a pavement or a square, and in this sense they represent something to be taken seriously (Marcus 2002; Riccio 2006). In more general terms what has to be taken seriously is the situated, overflowing, banal nature of everyday life, which far from being something secondary in social (and multicultural) experience, is the setting for the ongoing autopoiesis of the social sphere, and the creation of worlds characterized by what Ulrich Beck terms ‘banal cosmopolitism’. One of the most relevant practices in the everyday use of difference appears to be that of translation. In this case, the everyday sphere emerges as a place where one adapts what one has to the specific demands of the context. It is an ongoing process of adjustment, re-positioning and re-attribution of meaning in which difference, its representations and related discourses, the recipes for action which are available and deemed satisfactory for capitalising on it or opposing it, are translated, and adapted for concrete use in the specific contexts people find themselves operating in (Baumann 1996). This insistence on context does not necessarily call for the isolated contemplation of fragments (Ginzburg 2006: 266), something which is celebrated in some radical postmodern tendencies. On the contrary, it highlights the importance of bringing out the ‘fabric’ and the unceasingly circular links between the micro-dimension (characterised by translation, adaptation and peculiarity) and the macro-dimension (characterised by structuration, synthesis and generalisations) (Marcus 1998). The situation, while positioned in a specific context, is not an isolated, autonomous fragment, nor does it represent a simplification, of lesser complexity than the macro scenario. What it represents is a good starting point for observing how ‘objective’ properties – with their power content, their binding, reified character and their dimension of evidence and necessity – are ‘updated’ to


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adapt to specific situations. Capturing this continuous process of translating implies paying attention to the subjective aspect: the ability to highlight the active dimension required by any kind of translation, which cannot be mechanical or automatic, but which requires interpretative skills and leaves room for transformation strategies and tactics. Devoting attention to the subjective dimension implies highlighting the active work of signification and interpretation of difference and its potentially tactical and strategic use. On a practical, situated level, people never act as ‘individuals’, as lone beings, but as part of a group, of a community, of discourse users, with shared perspectives. As de Certeau underlines (1990), analysing everyday practices does not imply atomism or reducing things to an individual level. Attention to the subjective dimension is also useful when it comes to clarifying the space of resistance granted by difference. Resistance is not synonymous with opposition, but refers to something that obstructs and disperses the energy flow of domination, and interferes with the ‘natural’, ‘acritical’ flow of representations. It is something born out of inertia rather than inventive forms of appropriation. Resistance is something more than opposition, being a way to conserve and to create; rather than presenting the opposite of power, it offers a different, plural explanation of power (Highmore 2002). The type of resistance offered by difference can manifest itself in the form of strategies or in the form of tactics (de Certeau 1990). Strategies imply a conscious, planned use of difference, guided by a model. Tactics exploit and depend on opportunities, and what they achieve cannot be maintained. They reside in blind spots, areas of silence, cracks that open in the control and surveillance of power, without radically challenging these powers, but by slipping in and carving out a space for independence. Taking social actors seriously means acknowledging their stubborn refusal to fall into sociological categories, and in particular their ability to construct apparently rigid boundaries which they are then willing to demolish without a second thought. From the punk who refuses to be categorised as a ‘social phenomenon’, to the youngster from the banlieue who rejects the label of ‘immigrant’, to the community leader constantly erecting rhetorical barriers, this continuous process of breaking down and constructing barriers cannot be ignored or simplistically dismissed (Riccio 2001). When we are willing to listen to a dispirited, racist pensioner living on the outskirts of the city without being sanctimonious or condescending,

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but by reconstructing the relation between his account, his position in life, in the space that he inhabits on a daily basis and in the society he is part of, only then will we able to start reconstructing a map of everyday multiculturalism starting from the accounts of social actors. Taking these accounts seriously is probably one of the most important tasks we are called on to perform.

A category of analysis Thus defined, everyday multiculturalism aims to highlight a particular analytical perspective and an empirical space of observation. The distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practices, taken up by Bourdieu (1977), and Brubaker and Cooper (2000), is purely epistemological: it represents a different way of looking at things and raising questions, rather than distinguishing between two distinct types of action, object or situation. This distinction aims to promote the activation of reflective practices (Melucci 1998) which take a critical distance from theoretical constructions and analytical descriptions of social processes. Proposing an analytical distinction between categories of practices and categories of analysis does not prevent us from acknowledging the fact that sociological reflections are necessarily made by starting out from common, mundane categories (Pollner 1987), and that ‘lay categories’ and ‘scientific categories’ are closely interconnected and influence each other constantly in their practical uses and in their scientific uses (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 4). As an analytical perspective, everyday multiculturalism intends to highlight the need to go beyond the banal observation that difference is a social construction, to focus on the ways it has been constructed, putting these into relation with the micro and macro contexts that make them possible and credible. Difference is viewed as a practice, an ongoing performance, at times the result of evident conflicts, at times the routine effort aimed at confirming or altering the shared meaning attributed to the context in question (Sarat 2002). It is in the context of everyday multiculturalism that we can observe difference acquiring the semblance of a resource: as a key rhetorical and political tool that enables people to use the discourses, identifications and alliances created on a macro level by adapting them and transforming them according to the contingent demands of situated action. Just as daily life appears to be a privileged point of observation for analysing how general, global dimensions are processed in local, individual settings – giving rise to what Robertson (1992) terms the glocal


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dimension – everyday multiculturalism appears to be characterised by its ability to highlight how difference, in its concrete form as a political and discussion-raising resource, manifests itself in the ongoing process of adapting and transforming dominant discourse regarding difference into demotic discourse (Baumann 1997). In other words, it uses the reified representations of difference and belonging that are constructed and circulated on a global scale (in political discourse and the mass media) as relational tools, resources for action. In line with the phenomenological method, the perspective of everyday multiculturalism sets aside value judgements regarding the various claims to and manifestations of difference in order to focus on the ways, places, actors and effects of the practical use of difference. It is more interested in the pragmatic aspects of difference than the semantic aspects. Analysing the tension between these two demands – social construction and reification – represents a central element of the everyday multiculturalism perspective. As Baumann observes (1999) there are objectives with regards to which the reification of cultural difference is necessary. At the same time, there are objectives with regards to which it is necessary to enter into relations with other people, and this is often easier if we can question and take a relative view of reified cultural boundaries. Being socially competent on a daily basis in a multicultural context means knowing when it is better (or just possible) to reify, and when it is better (or possible) to view differences as relative. Comprehending multicultural praxis relies on a close examination of when and how people switch from one approach to the other. By looking at the processual nature of difference, its ability to act as a limitation and as a resource, to open a margin for resistance, strategic or tactical behaviours, everyday multiculturalism invites us to take a decentralised view, a view from the margin (bell hooks 1998). The focus is not on the centre – inside the various ‘cultures’ or ‘ethnic groups’ – but on the areas where these meet, come into conflict, mix and interact – the practices involved in the encounter, the production of accounts which cite and legitimise difference, the clashes. Lastly, as a category of analysis, everyday multiculturalism puts forward a specific methodological approach: a preference for listening and direct observation, devoting attention to the meaning attributed by the actors to their practices and situations, a preference for intensive analysis of specific cases and attention to the dynamics of relations, the construction of the image of the Other and the (lacking or distorted) recognition of this.

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A category of practices As a category of practices, everyday multiculturalism indicates a specific area of research: how social actors, in specific situated practices, use difference in a strategic or tactical way. In this case it refers to specifically urban situations of constant encounters with difference, the setting for repeated interactions between subjects which use difference as one of their main tools for interaction, communication and attribution of meaning. It refers to the diffusion of situations of ‘banal’ multiculturalism, the minutiae, part of daily routines in which knowing how to ‘face’ difference is an everyday, necessary skill. If everyday multiculturalism concerns more than just the acceptance or celebration of difference, but its active and situated use – in a strategic or tactical way – aimed at giving meaning to interactions and the contexts of action, then it has to look at more than just positive situations of intercultural communication. It has to take in problematic relations, forms of conflict, discriminations and simplifications loaded with prejudice and racism. It concerns more than just the requests for recognition made by marginal or minority groups, but also the use that dominant groups make of boundaries and distinctions. This emphasis on the relational dimension of the practical use of difference makes everyday multiculturalism a question of the practices regarding boundaries: it is not about the isolated study of presumed ethnic groups or cultures, of enclaves characterised by a presumed unity and homogeneity, but rather, it regards mediation, the continuous need to translate general categories and distinctions – the vocabulary of the received languages that de Certeau (1984) talks about – into tools that can be used, into phrases that enable the construction of a meaningful discourse regarding the specific situation people are part of. Metropolitan areas are the key setting for practices of everyday multiculturalism. The metropolitan area is viewed here as the setting for difference and variability (Hannerz 1980), where otherness is perceived as a continuous presence (the foreigner here today and staying tomorrow), illustrated by Simmel (1950) in 1908. In its practical dimension, everyday multiculturalism defines specific fields of research: situations where difference is of key importance for the actors involved, as it can function as a constraint or as a resource in setting boundaries, in fostering processes of inclusion or exclusion, permitting or denying acknowledgement. In situations of encounter or


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conflict what is at stake is both the definition of the situation and regular access to material or symbolic goods. This focus on the situated, practical nature of the use of difference does not make it necessary to approach cultural traditions and worlds as if they were complete entities, to be accepted or rejected as if they were homogeneous, uniform entities. As Benhabib observes (2002), relations with ‘the Other’ are always complex interchanges, and to understand these we need to pay attention to how differences are utilised to present and represent the Other and the self, ‘us’ and ‘them’. Rather than seeking a juridical solution to multicultural issues, focusing on the everyday practices involved in the use of difference directs attention to the processes of communication, discussion, mediation and conflict which take place in situations and contexts of direct interaction, but do not lack deep-seated links with the civil society, increasingly defined in terms of movement and flow that transcend traditional local dimensions (Appadurai 1996).

Taking the everyday seriously Having outlined the category of everyday multiculturalism from a theoretical and conceptual point of view, we can now examine it in the light of empirical and daily practices. As an example, we will be looking at two different kinds of dimensions in the everyday use of difference that we consider crucial: ambivalence and space. The following paragraphs are to be considered as simple examples providing ways to observe and grasp the daily making of everyday multiculturalism in the Italian context. Ambivalence One of the characteristics that emerges from the empirical analysis of everyday contexts for interaction is subjects’ ability to use differences and the boundaries they establish in a dynamic, ambivalent way. The studies carried out with the children of immigrants born in Italy and attending Italian secondary schools (Colombo et al. 2009) or involved in Muslim religious associations (Frisina 2007), which are something new in the Italian scenario characterised by the absolute predominance of the Catholic religion, highlight how these youngsters use cultural difference in a tactical and/or strategic way to offer an image of themselves and to forge relations that they view as suitable and satisfactory according to the occasion, resources available and their own specific objectives.

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Highlighting or concealing difference, reiterating the representations produced by the media or politics, or putting these into context, and reinforcing distinctions or breaking down boundaries and dividing lines, are all common moves in everyday relations, skilfully and confidently deployed. Research work on young Muslims shows how cultural and religious difference represents an ambivalent resource, experienced as a possible way of participating in public life, but also as a restriction, for instance, when it tends to be seen as a stigma and interpreted as a sign of closure. The Association Giovani Musulmani d’Italia – Young Muslims of Italy (GMI) – which was set up in 2001 by the children of immigrants born and raised in Italy, is the highest-profile and largest Muslim youth organisation in the public sphere in Italy. Its members have managed to attract press interest, giving numerous interviews to the national papers, and they represent a key voice in debates on religious issues – relations between state and religion, the lay sphere and social and political commitment, religion at school, and freedom of religious expression in the public arena – as well as being a constant interlocutor for the institutions. The association’s prime concern lies in raising the issue of citizenship for the children of immigrants, offering a positive view of the factors that distinguish them in a traditionally Catholic context, but above all after 9/11 it has been committed to showing the peaceloving face of Islam in Italy. GMI members are also very active when it comes to interreligious initiatives, constantly forging links with various groups representing minority religions such as the Waldensian Church or Buddhism, but first and foremost with a number of Catholic groups (in particular ACLI – Christian Associations for Italian Workers) and the Union of Young Jews in Italy (UGEI). Ethnographic observations of the interreligious workshops regularly held by these three different associations (Frisina 2006) have shown how the young people involved in these meetings are constantly engaged in tracing dividing lines which enable them to render explicit, reinforce and reiterate their respective religious differences. At the same time, however, they also attempt to find areas of identification and similarities which enable them to present a common front with regards to what, inside Italian society, is perceived as excessive secularisation or hostility towards religion. These youngsters of different faiths are constantly engaged in dual processes of convergence and differentiation. The former highlights the nucleus of truth common to all the great monotheistic religions, which enables them to show a united front


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against what is seen as an excess of laicism or a lack of acknowledgement of religious freedom. The second allows them both to lay claim to a privileged position and superiority with respect to members of other religions, and to use difference as a critical tool to draw attention to the hegemonic position of the Catholic religion in contemporary Italian society. In more general terms, the interviews conducted with the children of immigrants attending secondary school (Colombo et al. 2009) show how these youngsters tend to reject the idea that national and ethnic difference represents a fixed element that imposes an exclusive choice in favour of a single option, in order to deploy more complex, stratified strategies of identification, which tend to include aspects that may appear contrasting or even incoherent. They never feel completely Italian or completely foreign, but rather both Italian and foreign, capitalising on difference as a tool for making distinctions but also combatting its potentially discriminatory use. Many children of immigrants tend to assume multiple identifications which underline their desire to be viewed on a par with their Italian peers, but without giving up forms of difference that can be used to seduce – the appeal of the exotic and unusual – or to react to discrimination and superficial stereotypes. These hyphenated, transnational, cosmopolitan identifications can often vary and be adapted according to the context: without obvious tensions, the ability to comprehend situations, to change when moving from one context to another, and to understand the codes being used in a particular communication (Melucci 1996) represent relational skills that are more opportune than a strong, coherent identification. The ambivalent value difference can also assume an everyday relational element in relationships which by definition are not contractual but voluntary, such as the relations based on aid and assistance forged within charitable associations (Camozzi 2009). In this case, different people can have different, and contrasting, ideas about the meaning and the relevance of differences, highlighting the dimension of power embodied in any definition of difference. The observation of situations in which autochthons and foreigners work together in order to weaken differences reveals the struggles that the definition of the meaning of difference in a specific context can initiate. In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, in the last 15 years a considerable portion of civil society has been involved in setting up non-profit-making associations to offer support to migrants, comprising both foreign and native members. The current resources of ‘civicness’ in a number of regions of Italy (Putnam 1994), in both the lay and religious spheres, have translated into charity initiatives ‘in favour of’ disadvantaged groups in the overall context of

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Italian society. These charity associations have thus found themselves tackling cultural difference, which, as we have seen, is both a product of interaction and a resource which can be activated on a number of occasions. In a systematic observation of the everyday dimension in various associations, we have been able to observe a marked split between the forms of support ideally offered, and the everyday practices of support. The latter are viewed by many foreign volunteers as ‘empty’, as an element masking the exercise of power by Italian volunteers, who many feel do not respect the subjective experiences and needs put forward by the migrants. There are also Italians who underline this aspect, backing up the accounts of foreign members. On both sides there is a consensus on the conflictual profile running through the ‘them-us’ aspect of the charity sphere. The voluntary associations which are set up with the aim of compensating for institutional delays and shortcomings are the only space for the creation of relations where all active subjects are equal. In many cases, however, the management and committees running the associations are entirely Italian, and while some migrants claim to be happy to toe the line and accept the decisions that are taken, others highlight the inconsistency of these practices with associations’ declared missions. According to the latter, these charity associations are no different from other actors in Italian society, with the added crime that they mask forms of power and misrecognition behind lofty principles of aid and solidarity and the stated aim of constructing a multicultural society. In this case it is easy to see how issues of respect and recognition, which are of vital importance in multicultural theory, acquire empirical substance when interwoven with the ambiguity of everyday relations, and with the power dimension. Space In the last 20 years there has been a healthy return to spatial issues in social theory, and this has occasioned a renewal within the field of urban sociology, enabling its various approaches to penetrate other contexts, such as that of migration studies or multiculturalism. As ‘difference’ has emerged as a phenomenon, a social problem and a subject for research, this has not only heralded a new schism, but also the emergence of the spatial setting of it. To get a measure of the spatial dimension of the everyday social organisation of difference we can draw on the interactionist approach which takes inspiration from Simmel’s ideas on the ‘spatial ordering of society’ (1950), through to the work of Goffman, Behaviour


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in Public Places (1966) in particular. From this perspective cities are made possible by the constant reproduction of situations and encounters; the city is a ‘world of strangers’ (Lofland 1985), rather than foreigners, and the constant, ordered rapport between strangers and urban spaces gives rise to patterns that we are all familiar with, because we practise them continuously (see Watson 2006). An interactionist approach to cities must however reckon with the many divisions and differences that come into being in urban settings. Spaces can differ radically, but in what ways? First of all, built-up areas act, or function, as a setting, a frame (Goffman 1974). Their old streets, parks and gates, renovated inner-city areas, middle-class residential neighbourhoods or gated communities all carry specific modes of decodification and use. Constructing streets and buildings in a certain way implies thinking about the interactions that will inhabit them, in relation to the space, as we have seen. In view of this, together with the built environment as a frame, we need to introduce another concept, that of grammar (Baumann and Gingrich 2005). Drawing on de Certeau (1984), we can make an analogy between social practices and linguistic practices – ways of talking are to tactics what grammar is to strategy. Legitimate language has its own grammar, while the use of language is a constant process of ‘rhetorical alterations’. The fact that spaces are frames and that their use entails grammatical practices enables us to interpret urban situations in terms of conflict between people’s different expressive capabilities (Semi 2008). As an example let’s look at the recent trend of creating fashionable downtown districts in Western cities (see Binnie et al. 2006). In these gentrified spaces we can increasingly observe the use of commercial strategies which play with cultural difference, with a view to turning it into a product to market and consume. The spread of ‘ethnic’ trade thus becomes a way of circulating a domestic (domesticated) form of the exotic (see Semi 2005). In many of the situations that arise in these ‘typical’ city spaces, these processes are accompanied by the appearance of conflictual dynamics. Such dynamics are usually hidden away or pigeonholed under labels such as ‘public order’ or ‘integration issues’, but they are also an expression of the various spatial grammars which come into play when an area is ‘reborn’. For example, in Turin in the north-west of Italy, one city-centre neighbourhood, known as the ‘Roman Quadrilateral’, has witnessed the appearance of a number of shops which have adopted the very fashionable sales register of ‘ethnic’. The ‘ethnic’ factor, a genuine commercial grammar in its own right, involves the use of appealing signs and

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shop-names which create an authentic ‘commercial backdrop’ (Raulin 2000), such as Marhaba (‘welcome’ in Arabic), Hafa Café (the name of a hippy hang-out in Tangiers), Shukran (‘thank you’ in Arabic), Walima (a ceremonial feast, also Arabic), Il Mercante di Spezie (The Spice Merchant), and so on. Neighbourhood streets, sidewalks and squares are refurbished and built up physically in order to spread the scent of exoticism all around and make the interactions follow this frame. In some cases, only a few if truth be told, the immigrants themselves participate in this ethnicisation of themselves, in the role of ‘moral’ entrepreneurs, but in general behind the ‘ethnic’ lies someone ‘domestic’. Shop-owners are furthermore essentially white Italians. However, not all the shops in the area are ‘ethnic’ despite being run and frequented by ‘foreigners’, and this, paradoxically, is at the heart of various misunderstandings. There is, sure enough, a second kind of commercial activity: shops which sell imported African goods without playing the ethnic grammar. Here tubers, bananas, different kinds of flour, fruit juices and dried fish, as well as other goods such as bottled water and beer, are sold in a nonfashionable style. In venues which are often bare, with little attention paid to aesthetics, compared to the ‘typical’ Moroccan shops in neighbouring streets, there are signs which suggest different origins, such as a poster for a charity collection for families affected by recent civil war on the Ivory Coast, or an invitation to an African Catholic mass, distributed by Congolan church-goers who are members of an African choir in a nearby church. Inside these shops the clients are practically all of African origin, and there is a net spatial division between the genders. The women mostly gather inside the shop, where they chat and gossip, exchanging information or doing each others’ hair (or both). The men, meanwhile, remain at the door, often drinking beer, chatting and commenting on the street scene before them. Here a paradox exists: where ‘ethnics’ are at work, you hardly see ethnicisation of the neighbourhood, while fashionable ethnic boutiques run by Italians play the card of exoticism. Having spent much time carrying out fieldwork in both these sites, it is stunning to observe how Italian consumers feel engaged in multicultural experiences while just dealing with Italian co-ethnics within a commercial exotic frame and grammar. The result can be seen in the construction of discourse-related and interactional barriers, erected by both sets, which transform the neighbourhood into an arena for multicultural debate, where some actors try to be ‘more ethnic’ than the others, more ‘authentic’ in a space where the general frame is that of the consumption of difference, and


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where ‘playing along’ with that is a decisive part of people’s daily business. African shops work at their own pace, with products and practices which end up being ‘out of place’ in an area that wants to be multicultural, which resolutely displays its open-ness to cultural difference, as long as this is part of a precise grammar, a process which Baumann and Gingrich, after Said, term ‘orientalizing’ (2005: 18–50). This kind of neighbourhood is not unique – there are similar examples in all Western cities, and the spread of cultural difference as a resource on a global scale would suggest that the phenomenon is set to grow further (Clark 2003). Not all spaces, however, express the same rapport with cultural difference. The desire to control the built environment, to make it an independent variable affecting the behaviour of people, translates into recurring forms in terms of town planning and architecture. The grammar designed directly and explicitly to exclude, which is virtually invisible but, equally, violent attempts to tear up benches, devise bus-stops which cannot be used for any other purpose, deny planning permission for mosques, or allow them only on the furthest outskirts, are just the extreme end of a continuum of urban configurations. Interactions have their own grammatical rules, but as with any living, contemporary language, in the present setting of everyday multiculturalism, these interactions can alter, read differently or struggle to give a voice to dialects, slang, idioms and denied languages. At times the space permits this, at other it attempts to repress them. The tensions between space, grammars and interactions are ever-present.

Conclusions In this chapter we have proposed a more refined concept of multiculturalism, namely one that assumes the necessity to ground in daily routines the practices of dealing with difference. ‘Everyday multiculturalism’ arises then as a two-fold concept, being on one side a category of analysis and on the other side a category of practices. As an analytical perspective, everyday multiculturalism intends to highlight the need to go beyond the banal observation that difference is a social construction, to focus on the ways it has been constructed, putting these into relation with the micro and macro contexts that make them possible and credible. As a category of practices, everyday multiculturalism indicates a specific area of research: how social actors, in specific situated practices, use difference in a strategic or tactical way.

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Our perspective is grounded on empirical qualitative research on different fields and at different levels. We tried to show how, for instance, schools, associations or neighbourhoods in various northern Italian cities can be seen as sites in which to locate the making of a daily multicultural society. In making such a statement we also argued for taking the everyday dimension seriously, which means a double theoretical and empirical effort. The effort is aimed at going beyond the normative debate on the foundations of a fair multicultural society and beyond bringing highly informed empirical accounts out of a celebration of processualism.

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press). Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting Culture. Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Baumann, G. (1997) ‘Dominant and Demotic Discourses of Culture: Their Relevance to Multi-Ethnic Alliances’, in P. Werbner and T. Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Hybridity (London: Zed Books), pp. 209–25. Baumann, G. (1999) The Multicultural Riddle. Rethinking National, Ethnic and Religious Identities (London: Routledge). Baumann, G. and A. Gingrich (2005) Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach (Oxford: Berghahn Books). Beck U. (2004) Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag). Beck, U. and C. Cronin (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision (London: Polity). bell hooks (1999) Ain’t a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press). Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claim of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Binnie, J., J. Holloway, S. Millington and C. Young (eds) (2006) Cosmopolitan Urbanism (London: Routledge). Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper (2000) ‘Beyond “Identity” ’, Theory and Society, vol. 29, pp. 1–47. Camozzi, I. (2009) Lo spazio del riconoscimento. Forme di associazionismo migratorio a Milano (Bologna: Il Mulino). Clark, T. (2008) The City as an Entertainment Machine (Amsterdam: JAI Press). Colombo, E., L. Leonini and P. Rebughini (2009) ‘Different, But Not Stranger. Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 37–59. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Frisina, A. (2007) Giovani musulmani d’Italia (Rome: Carocci).


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Frisina, A. (2006) ‘La differenza: un vincolo o un’opportunità? Il caso dei giovani musulmani di Milano’, in G. Valtolina and A. Marazzi (eds), Appartenenze multiple. L’esperienza dell’immigrazione nelle nuove generazioni (Milan: Franco Angeli – ISMU), pp. 63–83. Ginzburg, C. (2006) Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto (Milan: Feltrinelli). Goffman, E. (1966) Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press). Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart). Hall, S. (1986) ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 5–27. Hannerz, U. (1980) Exploring the City. Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press). Highmore, B. (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. An Introduction (London: Routledge). Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lofland, L. (1985) A World of Strangers. Order and Action in Urban Public Space (Long Grove: Waveland Press). Marcus, G. E. (1998) Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Melucci, A. (ed.) (1998) Verso una sociologia riflessiva (Bologna: Il Mulino). Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging Codes. Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism. Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Pollner, M. (1987) Mundane Reason, Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Putnam, R. (1994) Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Raulin, A. (2000) L’ethnique est quotidien. Diasporas, marchés et cultures métropolitaines (Paris: L’Harmattan). Revel, J. (ed.) (1996) Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris: Seuil). Riccio B. (2001) ‘From “Ethnic Group” to “Transnational Community”? Senegalese Migrants’ Ambivalent Experiences and Multiple Trajectories’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 27, pp. 583–99. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage). Sarat, A. (2002) ‘The Micropolitics of Identity-Difference: Recognition and Accommodation in Everyday Life’, in R. A. Shweder, M. Minow and H. R. Markus (eds), Engaging Cultural Differences. The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 396–416. Semi, G. (2005) ‘ Chez Said à Turin, un exotisme de proximité’, Ethnologie Française, vol. 1, pp. 27–36. Semi, G. (2008) ‘The Flow of Words and the Flow of Value: Illegal Behavior, Social Identity and Marketplace Experiences in Turin, Italy’, in D. T. Cook (ed.), Lived Experiences of Public Consumption. Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 137–57. Simmel, G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press).

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Touraine, A. (1984) Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Watson, S. (2006) City Publics: the (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (London: Routledge). Wise, A. (2006) ‘Everyday Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans in a Suburban Contact Zone’, paper presented at the Congress ‘Everyday Multiculturalism’, 26, 29 September, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Sydney.

Part II Food


4 Kopitiam: Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity in Malaysian Culture and Media1 Gaik Cheng Khoo

Introduction and background A symbol of civic national identity in Malaysia, the kopitiam (Hokkien for ‘coffeeshop’) is considered a cosmopolitan space welcoming diversity and critical democratic discourse across race, class, gender and age. Lately, the name ‘kopitiam’ is also invoked in online discussion forums by Malaysians. As a modest and ubiquitous part of the daily national landscape, found spread out in small towns, urban areas and their surrounding suburbs, the kopitiam is representative of the daily informal civic life of Malaysian citizens. Additionally, it predates by at least 50 years the monumental architectural wonders such as the Islamicinspired Petronas Twin Towers. While the kopitiam does not try to compete for world attention, interestingly it is in itself a place where different worlds and cultures meet/collide in hybrid fusion, whether as patrons or in the menu and food served. Historically, ‘kopitiams have existed for as long as there have been Chinese in [Malaysia]’ (Pillai 2004). Mostly owned and run by Foochow and Hainanese migrants who settled in towns and urban areas during the British colonial era, the kopitiam owner typically has the monopoly of beverage sales while renting out stall spaces to other hawkers selling noodles and assorted food. Unlike many European cafés, the Malaysian kopitiam sells food. But although the kopitiam may offer Malay and Indian cuisine, its non-halal character and Chinese operators signal the ‘Chineseness’ of the space. This signifier holds particular relevance for Muslim Malays who are less inclined to frequent these places. As ‘[e]thnic ideology is [. . .] just as much a question of “who you are not” as “who you are” ’ (Nagata 1975: 3), in Malaysia, Malay identity is most 87

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clearly defined against the second largest ethnic group, the ‘pork-eating’ Chinese.2 ‘Historically this relationship has been marked by a chronic ambivalence: on the one hand, a grudging respect for Chinese economic prowess; on the other, a rejection of perceived Chinese personal and cultural abrasiveness and all that this implies in moral and religious terms’ (Nagata 1997: 99–100). For this reason, I will not be discussing in any detail the experience of Indians who make up a small minority of its customers. Suffice it to say that their recollections of kopitiam are included in my research. There are different types of kopitiam. The most common manifestation is a non-air-conditioned restaurant which sells hawker food (which can include Chinese, Malay and Indian dishes). This kind of kopitiam is frequently invoked in overseas Malaysian restaurants with the same name as a generic signifier of Malaysian diversity, though at much higher prices. Most kopitiams of this type have fast turnovers and little ambience. The second type of kopitiam is a cosier family-run business, where personal relations with the owner of the shop take precedence over business, and where the menu may be limited to coffee, eggs and kaya toast. This type is the kind that provokes the nostalgic renditions in two short animated films and a television series (Kopitiam 1998–2004) that I will briefly mention. It has also prompted gentrified mall versions such as Uncle Lim’s, Kluang Station (in One Utama Mall), Old Town Cafe and Killiney’s which appeal to young executives looking for a cheaper alternative to Starbucks to reflect their social status (Syahredzan Johan 2008). I will focus on the discursive representations of the family-run kopitiam and two actual family-run kopitiams I visited in Malaysia.3 This chapter focuses on the disjuncture between public discourses of kopitiam as cosmopolitan transethnic spaces and the sociological reality of kopitiam as a more exclusively Chinese space because of its non-halal4 character. I argue that the cosmopolitan kopitiam is a discursive construct deployed to critique racialisation in Malaysia. By racialisation, I mean ‘ethnic segregation that is systematically regimented through state policies and institutions, all of which impede the citizen’s ability to think beyond ethnic self-preservation’ (Khoo 2008: 22). Although essentially nostalgic, the cosmopolitan kopitiam is also a form of ethnic-minority resistance against Malay and Islamic hegemony, against corporate globalisation and finally, an assertion of a unique hybrid Chinese-Malaysian place belonging to the imagined community. I then focus on two ‘exceptional’ kopitiams that are cosmopolitan and discuss what conditions foster and enable

Discursive Cosmopolitan Spaces and National Identity in Malaysia

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cosmopolitan crossings. Lastly, I discuss the nostalgic ideal of the cosmopolitan kopitiam as a projection of the alienated desires of the Chinese (and Indian) Malaysian middle classes, particularly those who were educated in English national schools before the 1970s and a younger generation that grew up during the 1990s and was inspired by the inclusive state discourse of a Malaysian race/nation (bangsa Malaysia) in then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 speech. Rather than focusing on an ethnographic account of inter-ethnic interactions in a kopitiam, I am more interested in the perception that the kopitiam offers possibilities for eating together around the same table. Such spatial possibilities for commensality have shrunk with growing racialisation and Islamisation which rigidly divide Malaysians into Muslim and non-Muslim, and drive non-Muslim eating places to adapt to and conform to a halal (permissible by Islam) economy.5 Accompanying the NEP (National Economic Policy 1971–1990) in instituting Malay hegemony, the active dakwah phase – Islamic proselytisation – followed by the mainstreaming of Islam and Islamic discourse in the 1980s, have all led to a stronger visibility of Islamic identity in the public sphere, in Islamic architecture, Islamic banking and insurance systems, and the widespread wearing of tudung (headscarves) for Muslim women, to mention a few examples. More pertinently, Islamisation instituted the halal-isation of the food industry and stricter observation of food restrictions. Laws about Muslims caught eating in public during the fasting (Puasa) month are visibly enforced, though some inter-ethnic kopitiams still continue their discreet policy of having a room at the back for non-fasting Muslim customers. Before the 1960s, despite the existence of laws to fine Muslims caught eating in public during Puasa, ‘if food was consumed in closed places, even in special rooms in restaurants, they were not prosecuted. But in the 1960s, especially after PAS [the Islamic party] took control of Kelantan and Trengganu in 1959, [the idea of enforcement] spread gradually into mainstream Malaysia’ (Pillai 2004). Today, Indian Muslim restaurants no longer serve beer, which they did up to the 1960s,6 and the majority of Malays themselves have become self-conscious about their (prior) lack of public observance of Islamic rituals and norms due to the global rise of Wahhabi-style Islam. Translated microscopically into rigid public observation of daily individual rituals based on fears of pollution rather than an invisible and personal spiritual commitment, hegemonic Islamisation has served to alienate the non-Muslim and non-Malay populace (Ong 2004).

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Theoretical strategies: vernacular cosmopolitanism, a nostalgic third place/space? Thinking of Malaysian spaces and identities as ‘cosmopolitan’ is thus one way to escape the static racialised boundaries that characterise every aspect of Malaysian pluralism, a situation that is exacerbated by increasing Islamisation and Islamic discourse7 (Khoo 2007, 2008). ‘Cosmopolitan spaces’ refers to spaces where diverse cultures/groups converge and mingle – this includes the customers, and the types of food and drinks served. Moreover, I use the term ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe a commitment to commonly shared values and humanity, regardless of race, class and gender. To be cosmopolitan is to be open to the culture of others, whether within or outside of one’s nation. Having a cosmopolitan sensibility does not necessarily entail travelling beyond national borders; rather, it could be having a ‘broad commitment to civic-democratic culture at the national level’ (Anderson 1998: 279). If, as David Hollinger explains, pluralism connotes different cultures existing side by side, cosmopolitanism that assumes diversity as an ‘always already’ requires those boundaries to be crossed. Unlike pluralism which ‘is more concerned to protect and perpetuate particular, existing cultures’, cosmopolitanism ‘is willing to put the future of every culture at risk through the sympathetic but critical scrutiny of other cultures’ (Hollinger 1995: 85–6). My strategic use of cosmopolitanism connects with more local forms of theorising Malaysian racial pluralism, namely Malaysian writer K. S. Maniam’s idea of the ‘new diaspora’ and historian Sumit Mandal’s ‘transethnic solidarities’. According to Maniam, the members of this new diaspora are ‘conditioned by’ their various ethnicities but do not let their culture/ethnicity limit their ability to relate to or find common ground with those from other cultures or ethnicities. As ‘exiles-athome’ able to see more objectively and comprehensively, they seek to inhabit different intellectual, cultural and imaginative spaces simultaneously. Aware of their own culture, the new diaspora subjects are equally aware of the cultures around them (Maniam 1996: 8). This is similar to Vertovec’s idea that the cosmopolitan attitude or disposition is ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of open-ness toward divergent cultural experiences’ (Vertovec and Cohen 2002: 13). Although, as Maniam acknowledges, such a group is in the powerless minority in Malaysia, yet, their interstitial presence, especially in choosing to negotiate ‘through the more persuasive imaging of a vision in the present, both through its lifestyles and literature’, is crucial. This


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position of the powerless Malaysian minority can be said to be a form of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’: what Bhabha calls ‘a cosmopolitan community envisaged in a marginality’ that he draws from Anthony Appiah’s notion of the ‘cosmopolitan patriot’ (Bhabha 1996: 195). Maniam’s new diaspora suggests that Malaysians of various ethnic and religious backgrounds can still forge a shared vision through this minority cosmopolitan mental and imaginative space that potentially offers them a more liberated cultural community. Though Maniam focused mainly on writers, this clearly applies to other fields such as independent filmmaking and social activism. Further, he believes that identity is artificially categorised into a monocultural, ethnic and political being when multiplicity is our ‘true nature’. ‘It is this multiplicity that the new diasporic man is trying to regain’ (Maniam 1996: 8). We can contextualise this point to the brief period between the Japanese occupation (1942–5) and the National Economic Policy (NEP, 1971–1990), a period, according to Maniam himself, ‘characterised by the driving force to shape a multiracial country into a nation with a common sense of identity’ (1996: 2). In a similar vein, Mandal proposes a strategy to undo the perception of ‘race’ as a totalising divisive force in Malaysia. He points to the 1947 establishment of a united political front by anti-colonial left movements representing different ethnic groups – the alliance between AMCJA and PUTERA which later fell victim to the British anti-leftist Emergency efforts from 1948 to 1960 – as a historical moment of ‘transethnic solidarities’ that has been erased by structural and social racialisation (Mandal 2004: 53). This whole period fostered a cosmopolitan attitude that enabled humanist writers and those in the arts of all ethnicities and left-leaning politicians to think outside and beyond bounded single identities, to form transethnic solidarities in the multiplicity of Malaysia perhaps over a shared meal or a drink at their local kopitiam, if we regard commensality as the very foundation of social bonds. A more recent example of cosmopolitan ethnic unity occurred among opposition parties in the formation of the Pakatan Rakyat (Citizens’ Alliance) and ordinary Malaysian citizens who no longer clung to ethnic political affiliations during the March 2008 elections. In The Great Good Place (1989), sociologist Ray Oldenburg posits the importance and necessity of having a third place, one that is neither home (the first place) nor work (the second), which contributes to informal public life and gets ‘you through the day’. As informal gathering places, third places are physically accessible and inclusive of people of all classes/ethnicities/genders. They are also spaces that

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welcome conversation and conviviality rather than isolation, providing a ‘home away from home’ which allows one to relax and unwind with friends and strangers, fostering social ties and enriching civic life and democracy. Often taken for granted, most third places have a low profile (Oldenburg 1989: 42). The kopitiam is a third place for these categorical reasons and more. Ng Ping Ho, the creator of the TV series Kopitiam, said he was inspired by the American sitcom, Cheers, a place ‘where everybody knows your name’, but he wanted to house it in a typically Malaysian setting, the kopitiam, rather than the neighbourhood pub. The kopitiam conveys ideas about space for democracy, open discourse and debate, a civil society, and a class and ethnic/race leveller. Like the cultural politics of language in Malaysia, it provides ‘space in which ethnicity and class intersect’ (Mandal 2004: 51). Blogger Mack Zulkifli expresses the popular belief that the kopitiam ‘signif[ies] a touch point that transcends race, religion and creed’, for it is ‘a place where millionaires mingle with clerks and “kutu” [lice], and [where] there is very little distinction on segregation by any means’ (Zulkifli 2005b). Thus, the kopitiam shares much with the early 17th-century English coffeehouse for being ‘a place of free association among all classes’ where issues of public concern can be discussed (Habermas 1989: 34–5; Oldenburg 1989: 186). Moreover, the kopitiam is a relatively affordable and, thus, a more accessible space to lepak (Malay slang for ‘hang out’). In terms of its ‘democratic atmosphere’ and ‘equally democratic prices’ (Oldenburg 1989: 185), it fulfills some of the characteristics of the good third place. Modern fast-food outlets and designer coffee shops such as Starbucks are either halal or pork-free and therefore accessible to most Muslims.8 Starbucks in their literature even purports to be Oldenburg’s ‘third place’. But its cosmopolitanism is of the more elite and worldly kind. Accessible only to yuppies who can afford to pay five to ten times the price of a coffee in a kopitiam, it is also limited to those who can understand the English-language menus.9 There is a distinction between the global cosmopolitanism represented by Starbucks and the vernacular cosmopolitanism represented by the family-run kopitiam, which has undergone ‘a tryst with cultural translation as an act of survival’, particularly in their menus (Bhabha 2000: 139). Malaysian multiculturalism and hybridity is a legacy of British colonialism and the drinks in a typical traditional coffee shop reflect adaptation and integration of the Chinese to colonial Malayan influences: Ceylon tea and coffee served with sweetened condensed milk rather than Chinese tea; Milo or Ovaltine, malt drinks found throughout


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the British Empire; boiled barley which the Chinese drink as a herbal remedy and beer (drunk with ice!). In addition, toast (charcoal-grilled bread) spread with butter/margarine and kaya or coconut egg jam and sometimes boiled eggs is served for breakfast. If food is cooked and sold by the Hainanese owners themselves, this may be a pork/chicken chop (a colonial inheritance but prepared Chinese-style), or chicken rice and other Hainanese specialties. The presence of Western food existing alongside more Asian rice and noodle-based dishes testifies to the Malaysian and Singaporean experience of British colonialism which has been adapted and hybridised to suit the local palate. Indeed, ethnic Chinese cooks employed by the British were mostly Hainanese. That said, the kopitiam is part of Malaysian cultural and historical identity, unlike Starbucks which remains a global corporate American entity. Kopitiam cosmopolitanism is older, culturally hybrid and embedded in the idea of a localised public sphere or community. A stereotypical image of kopitiam as a third place is that of retired and unemployed men sitting, drinking, reading the papers and whiling away the offpeak hours with gossip and political discussions.10 Kopitiams provide a barometer for measuring public satisfaction or dissatisfaction about current issues by reflecting the vox populi. So popular is this idea that the phrase ‘coffee shop talk’ appears on Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia, under ‘kopi tiam’.11 A cynical reference to the news-ofthe-day appears in the short animation Don’t Play Play (2002) when the coffeeshop proprietor asks if the hyperactive boy is on the Ecstasy pill which the MCA (Chinese political party) had linked to youth subculture. Those who opt for the kopitiam over the designer café regard their move as a form of resistance against brand-consciousness and the potentially homogenising forces of corporate globalisation. Indeed, a short animation made by some Multimedia University students, Coffeeshop (2002) directed by Teo Yong Jin (b. 1980), expresses nostalgic regret for the loss of one’s cultural and communal identity vested in the kopitiam when the family coffee shop is sold and turned into a McDonald’s outlet. The Mandarin voiceover describes the traditional kopitiam as a place where the owner has a special relationship with his customers, knowing them by their names and habits. He compares it to the upscale, expensive coffee bars today (like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) with their impersonal and alienating atmosphere of ‘foreign music’ and having to ‘choose from a whole list of exotic names that you don’t understand’. Ultimately, the film suggests that the latter is lacking when it comes to providing good, reasonably priced coffee and friendly service. The overt reference to McDonald’s is symptomatic

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of the film’s overall critique and resistance to ‘the homogenous narrative of globalization’ to which its nostalgia for kopitiams constructs a localised alternative (Wang 2002: 671). Nostalgia is posed here as ‘a defiant attempt to find the remainders of history beyond or within the world of commodity [coffee in this case]’ (673). ‘The remainders of history’ in the case of the kopitiam include a space for nourishing relationships and a diversity of human contact, where a sense of place and community is invoked, and life is made more colourful. Indeed, a common thread in the interviews I conducted – that of intergenerational bonding – is humorously conveyed in Don’t Play Play. Here, the kopitiam becomes a site of bonding between a toothless old man and his cheeky grandson. Although invoking cultural hybridity in discussing the food and atmosphere of the kopitiam, I am reluctant to consider the kopitiam as a ‘third space’ which ‘represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot “in itself” be conscious’ (Bhabha 1994: 36). Bhabha’s third space is much too elusive and slippery, as to ‘ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity’ (37). On the contrary, common ideas about the kopitiam (its significance, appearance, social habits, menu, ambience) have become consolidated through the years and provide a detailed store for nostalgia and cultural preservation. Spatially, the coffee shop has an open feel. Neither enclosed nor air-conditioned, it is usually sited in a colonial shophouse and may have electric fans over round marble-top tables and stools or wooden chairs (see Chua 1995: 229). Its traditional decor, furniture, crockery and atmosphere all contribute to a particular collective memory of the traditional kopitiam. On its website (www.unclelimscafe.com/about.htm), Uncle Lim’s claims that it is ‘extending history and preserving our unique culture’.12 The cups and saucers are white ceramic with green floral markings. The walls are usually covered with posters advertising beer and cigarettes, or as in some pre-war kopitiams, a large antique spotted mirror with engraved Chinese characters. Developmentalism (the mad rush for modernisation, urbanisation, the rise of materialist consumption, corporatisation and privatisation) is the impetus behind the nostalgia and memory for the kopitiam. Through the developmentalist 1990s, the kopitiams have been converted into Western fast-food outlets, mobile phone sales shops, clothing retail shops, upscale multinational coffee bars, or been destroyed to make way for ever larger shopping malls. The eradication of rent control


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in downtown Kuala Lumpur and Georgetown has contributed to the physical deterioration of current kopitiams in those areas as operators, fearful of the threat of phenomenal rent increases and possible eviction, are reluctant to invest in renovation and maintenance. Chua Beng Huat notes that the Singaporean nostalgia for kopitiams and kampung (village) is motivated by the desire to recapture characteristics of the pre-developmentalist space and time of contemporary Singapore where, it is believed, individualist capitalism has fostered a sense of competition and urgency which works against building community ties and human conviviality. In deconstructing nostalgia, Chua explains that the slower pace of life back then was based on high unemployment, and that the high level of trust and community among the kampung dwellers had to do with their shared poverty and the physical layout of the kampung, which allowed for a kind of informal surveillance by one’s neighbours. He cautions against romanticising the past and claims that nostalgia for the kampung is counter-productive since there is insufficient political will to realise the preference for a more contented, stress-free life. Moreover, unlike utopianism, which is oriented to a new future based on critiques of the past and present, nostalgia is grounded in the past and, as such, ‘blunts its powers and possibilities as a radical tool’ (Chua 1995: 239). The prevailing discourse of the kopitiam and its image-making by Malaysians, however, I would argue, is not necessarily nostalgic to the point of counter-productivity. Instead, they have to be contextualised by the climate/space of their very enunciation. Based on my informal survey and interviews with informants, the idyllic image of the coffeeshop is a pervasive one obviously imbued not only with some sense of nostalgia for ‘the good old times’, but one which is about the formation of a multicultural national identity and the desire on the part of ethnic-minority Chinese for recognition in the nation’s multiethnic history and inclusion by a Malay state and a Malay Muslim majority. Notably, the three film and television representations of the kopitiam I discuss came only in the wake of the Vision 2020 document and were conceived by middle-class Chinese Malaysians. In the Vision 2020 document, former Prime Minister Mahathir spoke of a Malaysian race/nation (bangsa Malaysia) that is inclusive of non-Malay citizens. The filmmakers believed that they were capturing some sort of local authenticity and national identity that speaks of diversity and civic nationalism in their chosen site of the kopitiam. These cinematic representations are thus landscape gestures of writing themselves into the national imagery/imaginary. They collectively stake a claim to recognise

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the historical contribution and continual presence and future of the Chinese in the everyday Malaysian landscape. Such discursive representations of the kopitiam, while ostensibly wanting to represent a cosmopolitan Malaysian space, came up against some sociological realities. Namely, that even before the Islamisation project took effect, the trans-ethnic kopitiam was more an exception than the rule. For, although popular opinion assumes that kopitiams were more inter-ethnic in the pre-dakwah (Islamic missionary) past, actually, inter-ethnic interaction was superficial and mostly occurred among the English-educated before the war (Abraham 2004: 6). The theme of trans-ethnic interaction through the world of English language notably persists in the television series Kopitiam (1998–2004) in which a Eurasian woman in her late twenties inherits a kopitiam and manages it with the help of two elderly ‘uncles’, one Chinese and another Indian. Other friends and customers of diverse personalities, class and ethnic backgrounds also appear, speaking in English or Manglish (Malaysian English). That this English-language television series survived for six seasons and increased its viewership three-fold speaks to the current existence of a large enough minority of English-speaking middle-class viewers that crosses ethnic boundaries.

Cosmopolitan accommodations: Yut Kee (nostalgia) and Hai Peng (development) But why the perception that kopitiams were trans-ethnic? Perhaps it was because in the past, the only hangout in the neighbourhood was the Chinese kopitiam. But from the early 1970s, the presence of Malay food courts (Taman Selera)13 meant there was little need for Malays to go beyond their ethnic boundaries to a kopitiam. Sadly, the food courts themselves attracted few Chinese and Indian customers, who preferred their own cuisine (Pillai 2004), thus further entrenching racialisation. Today, other cosmopolitan hangouts have emerged to compete for the middle-class dollar. I now want to focus on two kopitiams that have adopted opposite strategies to maintain their cosmopolitanism: Yut Kee in downtown Kuala Lumpur (est. 1928) and Hai Peng Kopitiam in the small east-coast town of Kemaman (est. 1940). For Yut Kee, the conditions that foster its third-place cosmopolitanism lie in its atmosphere and congeniality. Here there is a sense of frozen time as the food, layout and decor have remained mostly unchanged since its founding, except for the cashier’s counter (De Silva 2007), there is a sense of frozen time. The Western food on the menu evokes British


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pub food from the 1950s (Eckhardt 2007). And its present owner, Jack Lee, calls to mind his father, Lee Tai Yut, who had been a former cook to the family of the Chinese tycoon Choo Kia Peng, before opening his own kopitiam. A 71-year-old customer, Mr S. T. Mok, remembers the older Lee: ‘He was just like Jack – friendly, helpful, very communitycentric and a good cook’ (De Silva 2007). More important than the generational continuity is the personality of the shop owner whose friendliness, and welcoming of diversity and difference, can only be described as cosmopolitan. Sixty-one-year-old Jack Lee told me and my friends (after ordering us a round of drinks and refusing payment) about how his father’s shop used to be a ‘landing spot’ and source for new Hainanese immigrants who arrived in Malaya and who needed jobs and help with settlement. Some ended up working as cooks in government rest houses. This is typical of migrant restaurants elsewhere in the world. For example, Hardyment noted that ‘restaurants were at the heart of the self-help movement’ among Bengali migrants in England during the 1950s and 1960s (1995: 133). Today, Lee has taken his father’s place, dispensing help, advice, extending a listening ear, and providing companionship to lonely senior citizens and retired army officers who come by his kopitiam. Lee feels that ‘money isn’t everything’ and values interaction with everyone. He enjoys the conviviality of working in a kopitiam and regards it as a space to meet people. Yut Kee’s cosmopolitanism derives from the vibrant personal networks and friendships the owner has forged since his boyhood. During our conversation, Lee, who was born and raised in KL, frequently mentioned those who had gone to the same premier boys’ school, the Victoria (Boys’) Institution, as he did during the 1950s. This or that person or personality was ‘an old boy’ from VI. And his VI friends, whom he kept in close contact with, would drop by the kopitiam for drinks (beer) ever so often. One former schoolmate, T. Jayanathan, even called it the ‘headquarters’ (in De Silva 2007). Among these friends were Malays as well as Indians, not only Chinese (indeed a couple of them showed up around closing time for precisely this ritual). He has managed to keep these friendships through the old school network: friendships forged through the shared hardship and character-forming experience of colonial school discipline, working on school Shakespeare productions and playing rugby. Lee lamented to me the lack of ethnic integration among the younger generation of Malaysians today, acknowledging that integration between Chinese and Malays in the past was ‘more natural’. In a more recent newspaper article, June 2007, Lee reminisces about the old days: ‘I miss those times. It was a nice mix. I would pick up Tamil words

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from my customers. It was once a meeting place for the Kampung Baru residents [mainly working-class Malays]’ (De Silva 2007). Due to Islamic food restrictions, Lee’s customers are now mostly Chinese. Conservative Malays will not come since he has pork items and beer on the menu. Islamic food restrictions, Robert McKinley explains, not only mark and bound Islamic identity but also create an asymmetrical power relationship between Malay hosts who are able to give (regarded as socially elevating) but unable to take as guests of nonMuslims (2003: 1–2). Thus, ‘the presence of halal observances in the national culture thereby has the ideological bonus of stressing that Malays are permanent hosts in relation to non-Muslim Malaysians’ (33). This idea of Malays as permanent hosts resonates with the NEP politically imposed essentialist notion of Malays as bumiputera (‘sons of the soil’) which dialectically casts the Chinese and Indians forever as pendatang (Maniam 1995: 17–20) (newcomers or immigrants) rather than longtime citizens deserving of equal rights. Nevertheless, Chinese Malaysians should not discount barriers for ethnic socialisation as their food is out of bounds to Malay Muslims since it contains pork and various other non-halal ingredients (Chua and Rajah 2001: 184). Jack Lee reveals that his long-time Chinese customers have requested that he should not remove his recipe, roti babi (which contains pork) from the menu. I read this gesture not as about being exclusivist but conversely about retaining one’s right to an ethnic diet and cuisine and in resistance to hegemonic halal-isation. In contrast, Hai Peng Kopitiam in Kemaman is a cosmopolitan kopitiam that serves only halal food (Figure 4.1). Well aware of the possibilities of excluding the town’s majority Malay population, secondgeneration owner Elaine Wong tells me that the family, who lives above the coffeeshop, does not cook pork even for themselves. They have both Chinese and Malay workers and eat meals together with their staff. Their patrons are a mix of locals (majority Malays), urbane friends from KL who drive up on the expressway during weekends for breakfast, and tourists from Star Cruise staying at the nearby resort. Aside from the traditional breakfast, her kopitiam does not serve the old-style Hainanese Western food but instead, adopts more contemporary Western fusion dishes, since Elaine lived in Canada for many years. She has introduced ice-blended drinks, spaghetti vongole, ‘Italian Pasta with Asian Touch’, and peanut butter banana sandwiches on top of the usual coffee, kaya toast and eggs, and Malay fare. The Western meals cater to tourists and to those who want Starbucks’ style ice-blended coffees but with a nostalgic atmosphere. The sealed iced coffee containers


Figure 4.1

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Hai Peng Kopitiam’s mixed clientele (photo by the author)

perhaps suggest not only convenience but also modern concerns about hygiene. Elaine has added a charming touch to the classic kopitiam decor by keeping her collection of antiques in the shop. Such touches lend this small-town place an air of nouveau nostalgia that is in keeping with gentrifying developments in the cities. Hai Peng’s decision to go halal and global makes business sense due to its location in a Malay-majority town that periodically benefits from cruise tours. On the other hand, Yut Kee, situated in KL, can afford to stay non-halal because of Lee’s extensive social network, its longestablished reputation and a relatively larger pool of urban Chinese and Indian customers.

Conclusion So, to return to the question: why is the kopitiam regarded as cosmopolitan? Perhaps this comes from the notion of coffeehouses contributing to the public sphere, a possibility constricted by time, place and ideology in Malaysia. Nostalgia for the kopitiam as the good third place on the part of the Chinese middle-class has to be further deconstructed. More than its literal meaning, ‘a longing for a home that no longer

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exists or has never existed’, nostalgia is ‘a sentiment of loss and displacement’ and also ‘a romance with one’s own fantasy’ (Boym 2001: xiii). For the TV series’ creator, Ng Ping Ho, the programme Kopitiam precisely articulates that ‘sentiment of loss and displacement’ for the boy who left KL at the tender age of 11 only to return to an unrecognisable KL landscape a decade later. Similarly, the two animations are self-conscious constructions based on unreliable memory and creativity rather than professed authenticity. Not only does this nostalgia for the small-town kopitiam re-appear ‘as a defence mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals’ (Boym 2001: xiv), that is, in response to the last few decades of developmentalism – it is also spurred by increasing Islamisation of the public sphere and public discourse (Ong 2004). Jack Lee’s case makes it clear that it is a longing for interethnic communitas, not an ancestral homeland outside of Malaysia as some ethno-nationalists would like to believe (China, for example) but more of a Malaysia that is either of the past or of an indefinite and utopian future that allows for mutual human flourishing. The nostalgia can be traced back to two moments: the late 1940s–50s; and the more immediate past, the 1990s, with the then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s Vision 2020 speech about the hopeful emergence of a ‘bangsa Malaysia’ by the year 2020. The persistent longing and projection of the kopitiam as a cosmopolitan space allowing for civil discourse and political conversation is perhaps an attempt to recapture an exciting moment in Malaysian history, a time around Independence and before the NEP when English-educated Malayans of all ethnicities felt and identified themselves first as Malayans, and only secondarily as Chinese/Malays, and others. Certainly Yut Kee embodies a cosmopolitan space that provides continuity with Victoria Institution cosmopolitanism. More broadly, however, Jack Lee’s generation is not held together by the assertion of rigid linguistic boundaries. The cosmopolitanism of the Chinese diaspora, their adaptation to Malaysia, undermines the ‘naturalness’ of ethnic absolutisms that are regulated through language (Clifford 1998: 365). In a typical cosmopolitan gesture, the members of this generation also crossed linguistic lines to reach out to other ethnic communities. Jack Lee speaks several Chinese dialects as well as Malay, English and a bit of Tamil. Among Englishlanguage theatre ‘elite’ directors after the 1969 race riots, Syed Alwi and Krishen Jit crossed over into Malay-language theatre (Rowland 2003: 16). Theatre director Krishen Jit, who recounted to me his memory of his favourite kopitiam, also wrote reviews in both the Englishlanguage and Malay-language newspapers (New Straits Times, from


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1972–94 and Berita Minggu, from 1974–6). This trend of trans-ethnic interaction through the world of English notably persists in a much younger generation of people involved in the arts and social activism. Such an ethnically inclusive nationalist moment, whether imagined or really occurring within the kopitiam (then a popular urban meeting place), soon evaporated with the advent of race politics, the NEP, Islamisation, and the various prohibitory laws that circumscribed freedom and imposed (self) censorship. A renewal of nationalist faith in light of ‘bangsa Malaysia’, the 1990s’ ideology of developmentalism which contributed to the waning of the discourse of ethnicism (though not ethnic identity) in and among Malaysian political parties (Loh 2002: 50), and the opening up of civic discourse and the manifest appearance of trans-ethnic cooperation by the Reformasi movement in 1998 are some crucial points in recent history that signal some continuities and similarities with the past. This may explain the contemporary cinematic invocation of the cosmopolitan kopitiam. Such keen reminders of trans-ethnic solidarities, past and present, provide a hint of ‘the coming community’, one that might seem an idealistic projection for the future or a nostalgic hearkening to a lost national past, yet it is also not beyond the realm of the possible present. The new minority, writes Maniam, ‘will not subscribe to the concept of pragmatic tolerance’ bred by a pluralism that creates cultural enclaves; ‘nor will they rely on a vision projected from fruition some time in the future. For them the society of the future is already here’ (1996: 7). Instead of longing for a reverse in racist policies and racialist thinking accumulated through colonial history and post-colonial continuance of racialised structures, we should be thinking ahead through and beyond race while expanding discursive and actual cosmopolitan spaces in Malaysia today, true ‘kopitiams’ in that Habermasian sense.

Notes 1. A draft of this chapter was first presented at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) conference, ‘Overcoming Passions: Race, Religion and the Coming Community in Malaysian Literature’, Singapore, 11–12 October 2004. 2. Malaysia’s ethnic population consists of 50.68 per cent Malays, 23.19 per cent Chinese, 6.9 per cent Indians, 10.67 per cent non-Malay bumiputeras, and the rest making up 8.56 per cent (2007 census). 3. In May 2004, I conducted fieldwork near Petaling Street, Petaling Jaya (a predominantly Chinese suburb) and Penang. My informants had formative experiences of kopitiams in smaller towns such as Ipoh, Kemaman, Sibu, Temerloh and Johore Baru. They ranged in age from the early twenties to sixties and were from diverse ethnic and dialect groups. A year later, in May

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Everyday Multiculturalism 2005, I returned to visit a popular kopitiam in KL, Yut Kee Restaurant, and on 31 December 2005, I went to Hai Peng Kopitiam Sdn. Bhd., in Kemaman. Halal means permitted by Islam. Such racialisation and non-mingling between ethnic groups is manifest even in the cosmopolitan eating places I visited where different ethnic groups came with their families or with friends of the same ethnic background. Tables with ethnically mixed customers were a rare phenomenon. Thanks to Tim Bunnell who obtained this information from geographer Terry McGee, who conducted fieldwork in KL during the 1960s. Indeed, on 17 July 2007, Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak announced that Malaysia was an Islamic state, ignoring the existence of the nation’s secular Constitution. A spectrum of diverse and diverging interpretations and feelings among Muslims exists about whether to eat at pork-free or halal establishments. Social stigma also reinforces such religious and ethnic divisions for Malays who are reluctant to be seen in a kopitiam. An English-language tutor to Chinese-medium high school students told me that the reason her students do not frequent Starbucks is because they are intimidated by the menus and do not know how to order in English. Unlike the male-dominated early European coffeehouse, the kopitiam is ‘unintentionally’ gendered, according to one female informant. She rationalises that women have less leisure time as they are taken up with childcare but that women whose children are older also frequent coffee shops if they are not busy playing mahjong. Gender in the kopitiam deserves more space and elaboration than possible here. For example, Lai (2003) mentions the sexual harassment that women working in the kopitiam experience. This Wikipedia page on ‘Kopitiam’ was accessed at 12:47, 24 July 2007. www.unclelimscafe.com/about.htm. Taman Selera was an NEP initiative to encourage Malays to do business since there were limited allocations to non-Malay food sellers in such food courts (Pillai 2004).

References Abraham, C. (2004) The Naked Social Order: The Roots of Racial Polarisation in Malaysia (Subang Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications). Anderson, A. (1998) ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, in B. Robbins and P. Cheah (eds) Cosmopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities (London: Verso). Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Bhabha, H. (1996) ‘Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in L. Garcia-Moreno and P. C. Pfeiffer (eds) Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities (Columbia SC: Camden House), pp. 191–207. Bhabha, H. (2000) ‘The Vernacular Cosmopolitan’, in F. Dennis and N. Khan (eds) Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (London: Serpent’s Tail), pp. 133–42.


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Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books). Chua, B. H. (1995) ‘That Imagined Space: Nostalgia for Kampungs’, in Brenda S. A. Yeoh and L. Kong (eds) Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Times Editions). Chua, B. H. and A. Rajah (2001) ‘Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore’, in David Y. H. Wu and C. B. Tan (eds) Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press), pp. 161–97. Clifford, J. (1998) ‘Mixed Feelings’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 362–70. Coffeeshop (2002) Y. J. Teo, T. H. Saw, W. Y. Lau and Y. C. Lee, 6 mins. De Silva, R. (2007) ‘50 Years of Eating Outlets: Those Were the Days, My Friend’, New Straits Times, 18 June. Available at: www.nst.com.my/Current_ News/NST/Monday/National/20070618122751/Article/pppull_index_html Don’t Play Play (2002) Liew Seng Tat, Ng Jun Wei, Soon Ah Hui and Terence Raj, 6 mins. Available at: www.outphace.com Eckhardt, R. (2007) ‘EatingAsia: How the West Was Eaten’, in KLue magazine, issue 102, April. Available at: http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/ 2007/05/how_the_west_wa.html Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger in association with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Hardyment, C. (1995) Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating Since 1945 (London: BBC Books). Hollinger, D. A. (1995) Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books). International Press Institute (2005) ‘World Press Freedom Review: 2005 Malaysia.’, available at: www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html?country=/ KW0001/KW0005/KW0123/&year=2005 Khoo, G. C. (2007) ‘Just-Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 227–47. Khoo, G. C. (2008) ‘Listen to the Sound of the Azan’, Off The Edge, no. 42, 22–3. Kopitiam (1998–2004), starring Douglas Lim, Rashid Salleh, Joanna Bessey, Jojo Struys, Chew Kin Wah, Mano Maniam. Prod. Carlos Agustin for Double Vision Sdn. Bhd. Lai, A. E. (2003) ‘Work and Family – Insights from an Ordinary Woman’s Journey’, Awareness, no. 10, pp. 61–73. Loh Kok Wah, F. (2002) ‘Developmentalism and the Limits of Democratic Discourse’, in F. Loh and B. T. Khoo (eds) Democracy in Malaysia: Discourses and Practices (Richmond: Curzon Press), pp. 19–50. ‘Malaysia Sets Up Unit to Circumvent “No Internet Censorship” Guarantee.’ (2007) Southeast Asian Press Alliance. 15 June. Available at: www.seapabkk. org/newdesign/alertsdetail.php?No=687 Mandal, S. (2004) ‘Transethnic Solidarities, Racialisation and Social Equality’, in E. T. Gomez (ed.) The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity and Reform (London: Routledge Curzon). Maniam, K. S. (1995) ‘Arriving’, in Arriving . . . and Other Stories (Singapore: Times). Maniam, K. S. (1996) ‘The New Diaspora.’ First given as a keynote address at the Internationalising Communities Conference, University of Southern

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Queensland, Australia, 27–30 November. Available at: www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/ eduweb/engl392/492/maniam-dias.html McKinley, R. H. (2003) ‘DiTanggung Halal (Guaranteed Islamicly Proper): The Importance of Serving Halal Food in Religiously Plural Malaysia; Who is Host and Who is Guest?’ Presentation paper at Eat, Drink, Halal, Haram: Food, Islam and Society in Asia workshop, Asia Research Institute, Singapore, 3–5 December. Meng Yew Choong (2004) ‘Table of Taboos.’ The Star, 1 August. Available at: www.jphpk.gov.my/English/Aug04%201c.htm Nagata, J. (ed.) (1975) Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and Reality (Leiden: Brill). Nagata, J. (1995) ‘Modern Malay Women and the Message of the “Veil” ’, in W. J. Karim (ed.) ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Developing Southeast Asia (Oxford: Berg). Nagata, J. (1997) ‘Religious Correctness and the Place of Islam in Malaysia’s Economic Policies’, in T. Brook and H. V. Luong (eds) Culture and Economy: the Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Ng, P. H. (2005) Interview at Popiah Pictures, Kuala Lumpur. 28 May. Oldenburg, R. (1989) The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House). Ong, A. (2004) ‘Suaram: Islamisation Race Affecting Non-Muslims’, Malaysiakini. com, 18 June. Available at: www.malaysiakini.com/print.php?id=20338 Pillai, M. G. G. (2004) Email correspondence, 21 May. Rowland, K. (2003) ‘Introduction’ in Krishen Jit: An Uncommon Position (Singapore: Contemporary Asian Arts Centre), pp. 13–24. Syahredzan Johan (2008) ‘The Rise and Rise of Commercial Kopitiams’, 10 February. Available at: http://reflecksiminda.wordpress.com/2008/02/ Vertovec, S. and R. Cohen (eds) (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press). Wang, B. (2002) ‘Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi’s ‘Song of Unending Sorrow’, Positions, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 669–94. ‘World Press Freedom Review’ (2005) Malaysia, International Press Institute. Available at: www.freemedia.at/cms/ipi/freedom_detail.html?country=/ KW0001/KW0005/KW0123/&year=2005 Yao, S. C. (2007) Singapore: The State and the Culture of Excess (Abingdon: Routledge). Zulkifli, M. (2005a) ‘Internet Culture: The Malaysian Kopitiam or Where Intelligent and Rational Dialogues Can Be Had?’ (BrandMalaysia.com 12 March – removed). Zulkifli, M. (2005b) Personal email communication, 5 December.

5 Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys Jean Duruz

This chapter takes as its point of departure the culinary landscapes of two shopping streets – King Street in Newtown, Sydney, and Green Lanes in Haringey, London. Within these streets’ differing geographies, the chapter maps everyday practices of food shopping, cooking and eating as spaces for negotiating meanings of home, ethnicity, cultural belonging and exchange. These negotiations trace the outlines of mainstream, Western identity. At the same time, they blur traditional boundaries, suggesting subtle movements between and within established identity categories (McDowell 1999). Certainly, these streets offer opportunities to cross culinary and cultural borders. The suburb of Newtown in the inner-west of Sydney, for example, is where you ‘[e]at with your feet . . . [since] more than 20 ethnic cuisines can be found . . . along King Street and Enmore Road’ (Newtown, Sydney 2000), and where ‘back streets are occupied by libertarians, librarians and lesbians, as well as septuagenarians, Aquarians and vegetarians’ (Sharpe 1999: 62). Meanwhile, in London’s Haringey, the Haringey Council’s Community Plan announces: ‘Nearly half of our residents come from black and ethnic minority communities. In Haringey we embrace that diversity’ (Haringey Council 1999: 4). As testament to this embrace, Yasar Halim, a Turkish bakery and grocery on Green Lanes, was declared one of London’s top ten specialist food shops (Rista 2000). Discourses of ‘rejoicing in our diversity’ persist to this day in recent Council statements (Haringey Council 2008a). Nevertheless, this chapter is less about ‘public’ imaginings of these streets and the ‘symbolic economy’ of cities (Zukin 1995: 7) and more about how such streets are lived in everyday life – the tensions and opportunities of multicultural encounters in street spaces. For this project, the argument draws on the culinary biographies of 105

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two older women – one, a working-class Australian woman of British descent, the other an English woman, who is also working-class.1 The intriguing question is what does living near ‘cosmopolitan King Street’ (Sharpe 1999: 62) or among the different cultures of Haringey mean for women with British-centred histories and mainstream identities? Re-casting these fragments as personal mediations of public meanings, I suggest we might detect shifts in the everyday imagined geographies of mainstream identity and those of difference (mirroring shifts in ‘public’ meanings in ‘Britishness’ and ‘Australianness’ in both Britain and Australia) (Johnson 2002). Furthermore, in the disruptive potential of dreaming, remembering and storytelling, we might detect the fragility of Anglo-centred ethnicity’s hold on its terrains, and the permeability of its borders. In fact, this chapter is not a meditation on particular streets. Instead, in this context, both Green Lanes and King Street move beyond their built form to become places of departure and of return: landscapes of microscopic, ritual engagements to which memories of other times and places are attached; landscapes of imagined possibilities, threaded with the dense imagery of global and local discourse. Here, Appadurai’s (1996: 48) conceptualisation of ethnoscapes as mobile ‘landscapes for group identity’ will prove useful. Concerned about anthropology’s traditional focus on a fixed relationship between identity and place, particularly in an era so obviously shaped by the forces of globalisation and transnationality, Appadurai writes: The task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world? . . . [T]he beginnings of an answer to this puzzle lie in a fresh approach to the role of the imagination in social life (1996: 52). Imagination allows travel through time and space: to leave Green Lanes or King Street for childhoods elsewhere; to taste the ‘other’ as exotic; to fear difference as unhomely; to confront the changing streetscape with nostalgia; to embrace it as emblematic of possibility. My intention is to seek disruptive moments of storytelling to unsettle assumptions that mainstream eating does not have its own ethnic boundaries to confront. However, to set the scene for unpredictable narratives of King Street or Green Lanes we need to abandon the present and the built fabric of global cities, such as London and Sydney, for comforting spaces of the ‘rural’ and the ‘past’.

Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys

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Recipes for a country childhood At the time of our interview, Alice Wilson was a widow in her early seventies living within walking distance of King Street, with its bustling shops and cafes, quirky public art installations and lively street cultures. Alice, however, spent her childhood in the north-west of the state of New South Wales, in small country towns, where her father ran a motor repair business and her mother kept house. Alice’s memories of a 1930s Anglo-Celtic Australian childhood resonate with the pleasures and constraints of rural life. They include days marked by an unmistakably British diet, although the need for thrift and an economy of exchange allowed degree of colonial invention: I still remember . . . [my mother’s] cooking there and we always had lots of lovely home-made cakes . . . [my father] would come back [from work] maybe with some emu eggs and some mutton . . . and Mum would corn the legs of mutton . . . [and] at times we ate kid . . . [b]ecause food was scarce . . . and money was scarce . . . [a]nd we had our own goats. . . . Mum would also cook rabbit . . . with nice white sauce . . . and onions . . . [a]nd she made all her own pickles and jam. Elsewhere, I have discussed the romance of country cooking, particularly from the perspective of the remembering child who receives food rather than the parent who provides, or that of a generation, now kitchenless and time-poor in the cities of the West, nostalgic for the tastes, smells and textures of a rural past (Duruz 2001). Here, I simply want to draw from this remembering to produce a tale of AngloCeltic, Australian belonging: a tale of femininity’s resourcefulness, with mutton corned, not only to preserve it but also to tenderise tougher cuts; a tale of household thrift, wild ingredients and domestic animals raised for meat; a tale of country kitchens, seasonal abundance, with preserved fruits and vegetables on offer for leaner months, and the skills of baking perpetually on display (Symons 1982, 1993; Santich 1996). Interestingly, in Paul Richardson’s account of his memories of British food, it is possible to detect traces of the culinary cultures and domestic economies on which Alice Wilson’s memories draw (see also Symons 1982, for a discussion of Britain’s contribution to Australia’s culinary heritage). While Richardson (2000: 4) deplores the ‘meanness, the sensual poverty of British institutional [eating]’ which has now become legendary as the dark side of British cuisine (see also Scruton 2000),

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he applauds ‘the solid, savoury repertoire of English home cooking’ he remembers from growing up there – a repertoire that included: Joints of roast meat . . . steak and kidney pudding . . . hot pot. Jugged hare. Sometimes we had pheasant, when someone ran one over in the road. Vegetables from the garden . . . Gooseberry fool, fruit pies, jam tarts, and the endless parade of sweet puddings (2000: 5). This ‘solid, savoury repertoire’ is echoed in Meg Banks’s memories of her mostly 1920s London childhood. In her mid-eighties at the time of the interview, Meg Banks was born in Bedfordshire where her mother ran a village pub and her father was a wheelwright. After her father’s death, the family moved to London in 1917 to a small terraced house near Green Lanes – the house where, until recently, Meg had lived with her husband Tommie. In remembering her childhood, Meg recalls her mother as a ‘brilliant cook’ who used to make ‘beautiful, home-made brawn . . . lovely meat pies . . . rabbits . . . stuffed with the baked potatoes all around them’ and comments tartly, ‘Pity they don’t do it today’. At the same time, Meg is anxious to stress the costs that austerity imposes: ‘Never bought anything, never . . . She never stopped working . . . things were . . . very hard when we were kids’. It is also interesting to note that, despite differences in Meg and Alice’s ages, family backgrounds and economic circumstances, ‘ethnic’ identities and geographical locations, their memories display striking continuities. The figure of the good woman serving plain but sustaining British fare hovers in all these accounts. Furthermore, both Meg and Alice declare their own connections with this tradition. Meg, for example, describes herself as an ‘old-fashioned [cook] like my mum’, and lists pies and roasts among the dishes she most enjoys cooking. She is also a keen gardener, and recalls with pleasure the two large allotments she, her husband and brother-in-law maintained for 12 years. These allotments not only provided produce but also opportunities for socialising (Bell and Valentine 1997). Alice remembers adolescence in the southern suburbs of Sydney where her parents ran a family business growing and delivering fruit and vegetables, as well as selling these from a roadside stall. Later, Alice, having learnt to cook from her mother and grandmothers, continued her commitment to the previous generation’s cooking: I probably did very much the same as my mother . . . it was roast meals and . . . nice salads . . . but my husband was reared on stew, stew and stew . . . [so] we had casseroles and stews often.


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As confirmation of her Anglo-Australian heritage, Alice declares her favourite meal is still a roast, and describes her cooking style as ‘home, country and occasional international’ – the international an unusual twist, and one to which we shall return later. Such memories hardly rewrite the maps of English and Anglo-Celtic Australian femininity. In fact, they present a solid portrait of family and community maintenance through food. This is a portrait reflecting endorsement of traditions of ‘home’ and ‘country’, and one tinged with regret that these traditions are now under threat. Meg and Alice, however, are not unusual in their attachment to their heritage of British country cooking. Paxman (1999: 258), celebrating the quality of English food in this regard, says ‘Once the Industrial Revolution drew workers into towns, knowledge of country cooking died’, while Michael Symons argues that in [white] Australia, the cuisine has always been an industrial one, lacking a ‘traditional’ basis, and, accordingly, impoverished by this (1993: xi–xiii). Such laments continue (see Cooper 2000; Scruton 2000). Re-casting Alice and Meg’s stories of attachment and regret as negotiations with landscapes of mainstream identity, we find that the detail of these landscapes needs a degree of shoring up. Vulnerable to changes in local and national imaginaries, such identities suffer from loss of inherited certainties (Massey 1994). However, the women’s stories do not finish here. Instead of opting for an account of working femininity’s love and nurturance – its capacity to provide, even under conditions of hardship; its ability to live in harmony with others and nature – I suggest we take a second look. And here my purpose is to seek out fragments in these narratives that will ‘trouble’ (Butler 1990) the outlines of mainstream identity, rendering these more complicated and less certain than myth implies. There is an additional incentive to return to Alice’s and Meg’s stories. This involves a closer scrutiny of the everyday, lived experience associated with mainstream Englishness and Australianness. The need to re-incorporate mainstream identities and experiences into images, discourses and meanings of ethnicity is an important project. Too often ethnicity demarcates the ‘other’ who is to be consigned to the margins, while the mainstream is rendered as ‘self’. From this perspective, the power of the dominant group becomes naturalised, stripped of ethnic imperatives. I suggest that we need to reverse this gaze, examining Anglo-Celtic Australian and mainstream British identities as ones concerned for their own ethnic protection. By making these territories’ borders more explicit and testing their points of instability, we might begin to trace territorial imperatives of cultural power and moves to

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strengthen one’s own ethnic boundaries. As well, and importantly, we might unearth some productive, perhaps unexpected, possibilities for border crossings (Cook et al. 1999; see also Hage 1998; Stratton 2000).

English shops and Spanish sherry Green Lanes, a shopping street stretching from an overhead railway bridge near the southern end to the more conventional spaces of an English high street at the northern end, is a different foodscape from the one of Meg’s earlier memories. Travelling north along Green Lanes, one passes Greek bakeries, Turkish-Cypriot cafes, halal butchers, English pubs, delicatessens selling Mediterranean food, and small mixed businesses with displays of fruit and vegetables (pomegranates, plaits of chillis, ‘fabulous big misshapen quinces . . . and real Cypriot specialities like [the vegetable] kolokassi’) (Hafner 1998: 28–9) spilling into the street. Most shops are open until late at night and the street supports a lively street culture. ‘It’s Little Istanbul,’ an acquaintance remarks to me, ‘Very un-English.’ Haringey Council’s claims for the borough’s diversity are not unfounded. In the late 1990s, Daniel Miller and others summed up the population profile of Haringey accordingly: Haringey, an inner-city borough, has for many years been a Labour stronghold and has a significant concentration of people from ethnic minority backgrounds . . . Haringey’s cultural diversity is also illustrated by the number of languages spoken in its schools. An Education Service Survey [in 1993] . . . found that . . . Turkish . . . was the most widely spoken [minority] language, followed by Greek . . . and Bengali (1998: 45). Statistics on the Council website confirm these findings, together with the conclusion that ‘In 2001 less than half of Haringey’s residents (45.3%) were of white British ethnic origin, the sixth lowest [borough] in London’ (Haringey Council 2008b). In conversation with Meg about the changing character of her neighbourhood, I am not surprised to find her observations tinged with a sense of loss: Meg: [F]or all the years I’ve lived . . . here, there’s only three houses I’ve ever been in. Jean: Really! So people keep to themselves?


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Meg: [Y]ou could be dead, nobody would know here. . . . Of course, how many English have we got here, you see? . . . They’re all dead and left . . . all moved, all gone, dead. Generational nostalgia, particularly from the perspective of a long life, is not unexpected. Meg’s lament of ‘all dead . . . all gone’ is easily attached to the iconic sentiments of a particular life stage as much as to changes in the streetscapes and their cultures. Nevertheless, the losses take on a racial dimension with Meg’s ‘how many English have we got here?’ The question is interesting, coming from a context in which English working-class propriety, centred on domestic privacy, would have restricted neighbourhood visiting, and for one in which exchanges of courtesies and moments of conviviality with neighbours are not absent (Meg regularly chats with the Pakistani woman at the supermarket check-out, claims ‘everybody knows me if I go out’ and relishes visits to the local laundromat where she would ‘sit and have a talk’ with her Indian friend and other neighbours, and ‘discuss the world’). Nevertheless, Meg’s lament is not only for a lost generation but also for lost meanings of ethnicity. Not surprisingly, Jon May (1996b: 200–2), interviewing long-term working-class residents in Stoke Newington, North London, notes the presence of similar racialised ‘narratives of decline’. And hand in hand with the loss of traditional Englishness come fears that something alien has taken its place. The otherness of Green Lanes is most apparent in its food and shopping cultures. Although food writer, chef and television celebrity Dorinda Hafner delights in the possibility of exotic purchases such as kolokassi, or reviews of Yasar Halim extol the pleasures of ‘louka (honey balls) . . . black-eyed beans and colourful sweet peppers’ (Rista 2000:136), for Meg, shopping means the security of large British chains such as Safeway or Sainsbury’s or the small traders in Wood Green Shopping City.2 When asked why she doesn’t shop in Green Lanes, Meg replies, ‘Well, there aren’t any English shops . . . I don’t know what half the stuff is’. At this point, ethnicity’s imperatives appear firmly in place, its borders warding off unfamiliar figures, their stuff regarded with suspicion. This is a story to write against the growing tide of gastronomic celebration as food writers proclaim London to be ‘The World on a Plate’ with a cornucopia of food available for the tasting (Cook and Crang 1996; see also Cook et al. 1999), and with readers invited to ‘visit . . . [your] local ethnic store to plunder an alien but intriguing world’ (Kapoor 2000: 32). Meg’s discomfort with culinary plundering hints at a different kind of journey: one in which insular and conservative forms of classed, gendered

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and generational identity, bound by traditional Britishness, seem out of step with globalisation, de-territorialisation and cosmopolitanism. The last, in particular, requires ‘the cultivating of “globalised cultural capital” as a form of lifestyle shopping which, crucially, involves possessing considerable knowledge about the “exotic”, “the authentic”’ (Bell and Valentine 1997: 135–6). Meg’s story does not fit this analysis neatly. As Jon May comments, ‘[W]e may need to recognise the multiple place identities people now draw upon and consider more carefully the ways in which such identities are constructed’ (1996b: 210). Meg is a case in point. Hardly a member of the new cultural class prominently displaying distinction as its cultural capital (May 1996a: 60), Meg nevertheless draws on memories of her travels to Italy, Canada, Spain, Austria and Australia. In 1950s’ Italy where she and Tommie celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, Meg discovered a love of pasta, experimenting with cooking it on her return, while in Austria she remembers having ‘fun with the waiter’ at a ski resort as she ‘used to love a drink in those days’. However, it was during visits to Spain that Meg developed her taste for café society and European food. Here, Meg’s sister would ‘take us to real little Spanish places . . . those bars where you stand in the sawdust . . . and . . . you’d have a glass of sherry’. Later, when visiting her son and his family, Meg was to experience the pleasure of eating sushi at outdoor cafés in Adelaide, Australia – an opportunity to ‘see how the world goes and what other people are having . . . and trying everything’. It is obvious Meg relishes the performance of cosmopolitan connoisseur – a performance that manages to intersect with both her class needs for economical travel and her liking for boisterous, English pub culture. The opportunity to be ‘not-English’, with an entrée into ‘real little places’ is obviously one to be seized. Here, Meg presents a slightly different figure of the British abroad to the one that, according to Karen O’Reilly, has persisted in Spain, particularly during the last decade: [T]he image remains of upper-class, colonial-style, or lower-class, mass-tourist style expatriates searching for paradise, living an extended holiday in ghetto-like complexes, participating minimally in local life or culture, refusing to learn the language of their hosts, and re-creating an England in the sun (2000: 6). On the other hand, we should not overestimate the cross-cultural exchange implied in Meg’s remembering. While Meg might declare she had the ‘time of my life . . . trying everything’ in Spain or in Australia


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where migration has supported the establishment of British-based communities, her cosmopolitanism is less useful to her in the spaces of home. It seems that while productive border crossings are possible – reworking meanings of Englishness or flirting with safe forms of difference – other boundaries for identity, lacking points of connection beyond the comfort zone of the familiar, become more entrenched.

Lotus root friendships Returning to Alice Wilson and to King Street, we find that the innercity suburb of Newtown, once solidly working class, its residents mostly of British origin, is now an urban village of ethnic diversity and culinary opportunity. From the migrant boom of the 1950s and subsequent migration and gentrification, King Street has emerged as ‘multi-lingual, multi-aroma, multi-takeaway, multi-most things’ (Sharpe 1999: 62). The street is a site where differences in ethnicity, age, class and sexuality are embraced; a landscape of Victorian shopfronts, cottages, warehouse apartments, restaurants, clubs and galleries; a home for lifestyles embedded in social activism, campaigns for food security, environmental protection and indigenous rights; a meeting place for tribes – ferals, greenies, gays, lesbians, ‘grungey university students riddled with body piercings’ (Reiden 2000: 32). Unlike Meg Banks with her life spent in Green Lanes and Haringey, Alice Wilson is a relatively recent arrival in Newtown and King Street. Her daily ritual is quickly established. As well as going to her favourite food shops, Alice will browse in book shops, travel further for ‘nice quality’ meat, and ‘take a walk . . . look in the hat shop along the way’. Alice continues: ‘It’s fantastic [to have a walkable neighbourhood] and you feel safe. People say, “Are you scared?” but I am not.’ Newtown is a model of the walking village of new urbanism, or that urban core of people, places and interactions, described in Jane Jacobs’ 1960s’ account of the sidewalks of Greenwich Village, New York City. According to Jacobs, ‘eyes on the street’ and ‘busyness’ are ‘informal’ ways of protecting residents, managing strangers and offering variety in the everyday rhythms of the village (1995: 116–17; see also Johnson 1997 on new urbanism in Australia). However, King Street is not only a site of comfort and security with interesting browsing. Alice Wilson relishes its culinary diversity, its ‘olfactory geographies’ (Law 2001: 273–4), and the opportunity to be a more adventurous cook and eater: ‘[Now] I’m . . . trying all sorts of recipes. I love North African, Moroccan type of cooking . . . and

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I like Indian cooking. . . . And I like . . . Lebanese foods . . . I do tabouli and things like that’. Savouring the smell of spices and peanuts in an Indian shop, the taste and textures of ‘crispy and nice’ Chinese vegetables she buys from a shopping centre close to Chinatown, Alice concludes: ‘I think we’ve diversified from English cooking a lot’. Diversifying from English cooking also means crossing the borders of cuisines and culinary styles: Alice eats vegetarian, Italian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, especially when her family is visiting. King Street, in its gastronomy, is a long way from the landscapes of Alice’s childhood. In grazing along the street, Alice, in her imagination, travels to other places and the food practices of other cultures. Perhaps smelling spices, buying Chinese vegetables and tasting Italian, Lebanese or Vietnamese in favourite cafes produce images of elsewhere – images formed at the intersection of memory and imagination and shaped by mediations of global and local, that Appadurai claims as the stuff of identity’s ethnoscapes (1996: 48). Certainly, promotional literature is written in this vein, with its ‘cosmopolitan King Street’ presenting a classic performance of Australian multiculturalism (Sharpe 1999: 62). This is a performance scripted with discourses of diversity and opportunity to ‘eat across borders’ and, by implication, a performance radiating approval for that ‘diversification from the English’ that Alice’s culinary history endorses. At last, it seems, Australians have escaped from those supposed ghosts of ‘meanness, the sensual poverty’ of English cooking (Richardson 2000; see also Duruz 1999a). However, while King Street may offer many culinary styles (Newtown, Sydney 2000), does it enact ‘multiculturalism without migrants’ (Hage 1997: 118)? As Alice Wilson explores King Street, does she walk in the footsteps of Ghassan Hage’s ‘classy and more often than not an “Anglo”cosmopolitan eating subject’, eager to satisfy that appetite for novelty, dazzled by the commodities of ethnicity’s marketplace? Is this a landscape of home where ‘our neighbourhood Thai’ (O’Meara and Savill, 2002: 442) becomes simply a nostalgic eating style? Are ethnic communities appropriated for its performance, but, in themselves forgotten and overlooked (Hage, 1997: 118)? In other words, we find that this is the paradox in which ‘cosmo-multiculturalists [cosmopolitan identities developed in isolation from migrant subjects]’ derive a homely feeling from ‘the five Thais in our street’ but have little daily ‘homemaking’ interactions with Thai or other migrant-based communities (Hage, 1997: 134). Obviously, it would be easy to cast Alice Wilson as the consuming cosmopolitan. Through the global circulation of products and


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performances, Alice is able to conduct judicious raids across ethnicity’s boundaries. While holding true to her favourite roast, Alice has added international to her repertoire; she has become a world traveller. However, as with Meg Banks’ memories, this analysis might prove too neat, and is certainly incomplete. Alice Wilson’s narrative is not so easily attached to the shadow of Hage’s cosmo-multiculturalist. To some extent the exigencies of her class and gender muddy the outlines of this opposition. Here I want to draw on two fragments that complicate the attribution of cosmopolitan to Alice’s shopping, cooking and eating. For the first, we must imagine Alice standing in the Indian food shop in Newtown, inhaling its pungent aromas. She says: When we lived [in the country] . . . there was a shop opposite our house . . . [and] they had a cellar . . . underneath where they kept their bulk foods . . . [and] we’d be invited to go over there [to play with their granddaughter] . . . [A]nd occasionally her grandparents would say ‘Go down in the cellar and bring up this or bring up that’ . . . [E]very time I go into the Indian shop it reminds me because of all the . . . spices they have and their peanuts . . . I can remember . . . when I was standing near the peanuts . . . down in the cellar . . . You do have memories of those things. Contradictorily, I find this vignette less reminiscent of Hage’s cosmomulticulturalist and more of his homesick migrant who uses the tastes, smells and textures of food to assist with home-building in Australia (Hage 1997: 109–11). Alice Wilson is certainly not a homesick migrant, but neither is she clearly the disembodied cosmopolitan, greedy to devour the commodified products of other people’s home-building. The role of memory and imagination is crucial here, with hints of boundary fluidity. For Alice, memory (particularly sensory remembering) provides a textured, embodied past as a resource for re-embodying oneself in a new location. Meanwhile, imagination allows unusual connections. Through imagination it is possible to link the food from one’s traditional childhood with those of a very different, yet similarly traditional, Asian community of the present. Certainly, power disbursements, in all their inequities, should not be underestimated. While one would not want to exaggerate the significance of border crossings, these moments of embodied remembering and creative thinking indicate that Alice’s King Street is not one without migrants, nor is it one without her own ‘Anglo’ past. The ghosts of all these haunt the streets, and sometimes these ghosts meet.

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I am wary, however, of an analysis that primarily serves the remembering Anglo-Australian, one that threatens to enter politically dubious waters in which multiculturalism is endorsed as a non-threatening enrichment of the dominant culture (Hage 1998: 118–22). I now want to return to Hage’s conception of multiculturalism as multiculturalism with migrants, and to my second fragment. Alice is in constant contact with her Indonesian friend, Stella, ever since the two women met through the local church. As well as exchanging food, recipes and cooking techniques, Alice and Stella take trips to Chinatown together: Alice: [S]he tells me what nice foods to buy and where to buy them. Jean: Oh, that must be lovely. Alice: It’s wonderful. And then we might go and have yum cha. Alice: And outside of the [Burlington] Centre [Chinatown’s main shopping centre] there’s other places . . . that she buys from and they know her . . . and I bought some lotus root things and cooked those [laughter] . . . but they were good in a soup . . . because they’re crisp . . . and you get that difference of crisp and soft, you know. The point to note here is the economy of exchange (a complex one of food, ideas, experiences, knowledge, caring) that is operating between the two women. While Alice takes pleasure in ‘lotus root things’ as exotic, she, in turn, draws on her own accumulated culinary expertise, making diabetic fruitcake to meet the requirements of Stella’s medical condtion or approving of a novel contrast between crisp and soft. Once again, Alice can summon her childhood memories of improvisation and exchange, as well as her own positioning within traditional feminine networks, with recipes passed between its members. At the same time, both Alice and Stella acknowledge ways of establishing different relationships through food, however uneven these moments of exchange might be. Hage supports such practices of cultural interactivity, despite the incompleteness, unevenness and inadequacy of the exchange. He says: [A]ny reality worthy of the title of multiculturalism in Australia has to involve a certain degree of homely forms of intercultural interaction in which both eater and feeder experience themselves as subjects. [This is a] . . . multiculturalism that provides this homely space for the migrant by interpellating him or her as a subject: a dominated subject sometimes, but a subject nevertheless (1997: 146).


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While the search for spaces for Hage’s ‘intercultural interaction’ might seem a utopian project, I suggest that Alice’s story does provide some glimpses of multiculturalism in those ‘lived’ moments of everyday life. Her story indicates the significance of ‘lotus-root friendships’ based on women’s responsibility for feeding others, and on their own pleasure in food shopping, cooking and eating. Such friendships can confront not only the boundaries of ethnicity, but also the ghosts of mainstream identity. To return to King Street, we need to problematise the spaces of the urban as simply sites of ‘our neighbourhood Thai’, and instead constitute these as ethnoscapes of remembering and dreaming, with the potential to foster different forms of intercultural interaction and different kinds of Anglo-cosmopolitans as well.

Unsettling journeys and eating between meals Reflecting on the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an intellectual project that supports undoing traditional boundaries and challenging cultural imaginaries as fortresses of ethnic exclusivity, Ien Ang states: [B]y recognizing the inescapable impurity of all cultures and the porousness of all cultural boundaries in an irrevocably globalized, interconnected and interdependent world, we may be able to conceive of our living together in terms of complicated entanglement, not in terms of the apartheid of insurmountable differences . . . I wish to hold onto . . . [my own] hybrid in-betweenness not because it is a comfortable position to be in, but because its very ambivalence is a source of cultural permeability and vulnerability which, in my view, is a necessary condition for living together-in-difference (2001: 194). While acknowledging the complexities of Ang’s own positioning (‘an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born, European-educated, who now lives and works in Australia’; 2001: 3) I want to underline her argument that all cultural groups are impure and all cultural boundaries are potentially porous. In other words, it is significant that Ang does not present the in-between of identity solely as that uncomfortable state of not-quitebelonging that is usually attributed to migrant and diasporic communities (see also Chan 2001: 150). Likewise, I have deliberately set out to expand my own meanings of ‘in-between’ – to address the ‘in-between’ as a reading between the lines of women’s stories, and a position from which to acknowledge the tensions and ambivalences contained within

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taken-for-granted identities. All in all, the journey has been mildly disruptive, its purpose to unsettle those seemingly uncomplicated outlines of mainstream Britishness and Anglo-Celtic Australianness, constituted through histories of imperial–colonial meanings of belonging, and to unsettle unthinking acceptance of their mythic comforts and positions of privilege. In terms of disruption, however, these stories from King Street and Green Lanes are hardly that, with their nostalgia for traditional country cooking and the past, and their catalogues of the efforts these women make to maintain their culinary heritage. However, the disruptive turn in both narratives appears not only in the ghostly presence of a cosmopolitan imaginary, but also in the differing conceptions of cosmopolitanism embedded in the streetscapes of home. For Meg Banks, both her own travel and her history of family migration have enabled her to cross borders and to embrace Europe, although a very particular Europe. While Meg’s cosmopolitanism certainly draws on some typical destinations of English travellers and migrants, her cultural boundaries are less permeable for those unfamiliar and more ambiguous parts of Europe and places that are not-Europe that, contradictorily, occupy her own home territory.3 For Alice Wilson, travel has involved the move from the country to the suburbs to the cosmopolitan spaces of the inner city. Here, in King Street, as a citizen of Western consumer capitalism, Alice savours the taste of both Europe and Asia. However, it is in the everyday of Alice’s ‘lived’ experience that borders are occasionally crossed and understandings (and recipes) exchanged. Again, as with Meg Banks, one needs a safety-zone for encounters with the ‘other’. In Alice’s case, the local church and neighbourhood provide meeting points to develop intercultural understandings, while femininity’s ritual tasks and networks provide contexts for their performance. Curiously, although church, community and femininity itself may be regarded as conservative institutions, they also provide border-crossings to ‘other’ ethnicities – moments of tradition’s un-bounding – while reaffirming other traditions, such as the gender of cooking and care. From these brief instances of unsettled culinary journeys, I feel there is a need to acknowledge that sense of ‘in-between’ for all cultural groups and to acknowledge the significance of ethnoscapes as spaces of everyday remembering, dreaming, imagining and exchange. These are cultural landscapes on which to chart moments of arrival at, passage through, and containment by culinary and cultural borders – moments mediated by myriad micro-encounters within the built environment, as


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well as by discourses and images of elsewhere. With an eye for unexpected detail, we also need to develop more complicated narratives to challenge the figuring of the consuming ‘Anglo-self’ and his/her migrant-other, while unravelling dimensions of difference, such as class, gender and generation. To use Ang’s phraseology, a focus on such ‘entanglements’ should be instructive for imagining how to eat into ethnicity’s borders and for questioning the limits of eating contained by these.

Notes 1. Informally structured interviews were carried out during 2000–1 with residents who lived near King Street or Green Lanes. In both locations, the people interviewed differed from each other in any number of ways – in ethnicity, culinary history, class, gender, sexuality, age, marital status, number of children, participation in and nature of paid work, number of years living in Newtown/Haringey and composition of household. 2. The interesting point here is the perception of such shops as English icons, despite the ramifications of the multinational ownership and their promotion of a diverse range of ethnic food, including traditional English food as another form of ethnic food. Recipe cards collected in Waitrose in 2000, for example, included Chilli and Lemon Rub Steak with Couscous Tomatoes, Stilton Tartlets with Chestnut Mushrooms, Chicken Chorizo Rice, Turkey and Pesto Risotto and Toad in the Hole with Onion and Mustard. 3. Haringey Council’s website (Haringey Online, 2000) emphasises that Greek and Turkish Cypriots are core ‘ethnic minority groups’ in Haringey, but also points out that, recently, numbers of Kurdish, Somali and Kosovan nationals have settled in Haringey.

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and J. Seymour. (eds). Practising Identities: Power and Resistance (London: Macmillan), pp. 223–48. Cooper, D. (2000) Snail Eggs and Samphire: Dispatches from the Food Front (London: Macmillan). de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Duruz, J. (1999a) ‘Food as Nostalgia: Eating the Fifties and Sixties’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 29, no. 113, pp. 231–50. Duruz, J. (1999b) ‘The Streets of Clovelly: Food, Difference and Place-Making’, Continuum no. 13, pp. 305–14. Duruz, J. (2001) ‘Home Cooking, Nostalgia and the Purchase of Tradition’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 21–32. Hafner, D. (1998) Tastes of Britain (London: Kyle Cathie). Hage, G. (1997) ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-building’, in H. Grace, G. Hage, L. Johnson, J. Langsworth and M. Symonds, Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Annandale: Pluto Press), pp. 99–153. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Haringey Council (1999) Haringey, The Opportunity Borough: The Council’s Community Plan 1999–2002 (London: Haringey Council). Haringey Online (2002) website of Haringey Council, London, available at: www.haringey.gov.uk/data/abouthar/factfile.asp Haringey Council (2008a) ‘Rejoicing in our Diversity’, 14 May, available at: www.haringey.gov.uk/rejoicingdiversity.htm Haringey Council (2008b) ‘Haringey Census Statistics’, available at: www.haringey.gov.uk/index/news_and_events/fact_file/statistics/census_ statistics.htm Jacobs, J. (1995) ‘The Uses of Sidewalks’, in P. Kasinitz (ed.), Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 111–29. Johnson, C. (2002) ‘The Dilemmas of Ethnic Privilege’, Ethnicities, vol. 2, pp. 163–88. Johnson, L. (1997) ‘Feral Suburbia’, in H. Grace, G. Hage, L. Johnson, J. Langsworth and M. Symonds (eds), Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West (Annandale: Pluto Press), pp. 31–65. Kapoor, S. (2000) ‘Sun-dried Squid or Jaggaray, Anyone?’ Life: The Observer Magazine, 12 November. Law, L. (2001) ‘Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong’, Ecumene, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 273–4. McDowell, L. (1999) Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity Press). Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). May, J. (1996a) ‘A Little Taste of Something More Exotic: The Imaginative Geographies of Everyday Life’, Geography, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 57–64. May, J. (1996b), ‘Globalization and the Politics of Place: Place and Identity in an Inner London Neighbourhood’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 194–215. Miller, D., P. Jackson, N. Thrift, B. Holbrook and M. Rowlands (eds) (1998) Shopping, Place and Identity (London: Routledge).


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Newtown, Sydney (2000) (promotional pamphlet), Newtown Neighbourhood Centre, King Street, Newtown, NSW. O’Meara, M. and J. Savill (2002) The SBS Eating Guide to Sydney 2002 (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin). O’Reilly, K. (2000) The British on the Costa del Sol: Transnational Identities and Local Communities (London: Routledge). Paxman, J. (1999) The English: Portrait of a People (London: Penguin). Richardson, P. (2000) Cornucopia: A Gastronomic Tour of Britain (London: Little, Brown and Company). Reiden, J. (ed.) (2000) Time Out: Complete Sydney Guide (Leichhardt: Time Out Australia). Rista, C. (ed.) (2000) The Essential Guide to London’s Best Food Shops (London: New Holland). Santich, B. (1996) Looking for Flavour (Kent Town: Wakefield Press). Scruton, R. (2000) England: An Elergy (London: Chatto and Windus). Sharpe, A. (1999) Pictorial History: Newtown (Alexandria: Kingsclear Books). Stratton, J. (2000) ‘Not Just Another Multicultural Story’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 66 (September), pp. 23–47. Symons, M. (1982) One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia (Adelaide: Duck Press). Symons, M. (1993) The Shared Table: Ideas for Australian Cuisine (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service). Zukin, S. (1995) The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge MA: Blackwell). In relation to material drawn from interviews, all quotations are from transcripts held in the author’s collection.


Part III Shopping


6 Brief Encounters of an Unpredictable Kind: Everyday Multiculturalism in Two London Street Markets Sophie Watson

Across the world street markets represent a site of everyday sociality and public space where people from different cultures connect through casual encounters as both traders and shoppers. Given the significance of this public space in many global cities, surprisingly little is known about how these sites operate as sites to mediate intercultural and ethnic differences in a locality. In London, in particular, markets have changed dramatically in the ethnic composition of both traders and shoppers as global processes have given rise to large numbers of migrants living in inner-city areas. In many London markets today the diversity of products on sale can give the illusion of shopping at a market in India, Pakistan, Africa or Asia, with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and spices which two decades ago were rarely seen. These rapid changes in traditional working-class markets have occurred with differentiated effects (see Watson 2006b for a more detailed discussion). In some localities traders and shoppers have accommodated sociocultural shifts with minimal hostility and even enthusiasm. In others, nostalgia for an imagined homogenous community of traditional white working-class life has mobilised considerable hostility between the long-established local communities and the more recent arrivals. Such tensions have been further exacerbated in the context of the post-9/11 and 7/7 environment, where those perceived as Muslim are imagined as a potentially threatening presence. Discussions of multiculturalism and living with difference range across a broad spectrum from an optimistic celebration of multicultural differences in the city and their potential as sites of the meeting of 125

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strangers and an ‘open-ness to unassimilated otherness’ (Young 1990), to more pessimistic accounts of the failure of multicultural policy as articulated by politicians in recent years in both Britain and Australia, or similarly jaded arguments proposed by academics and gloomy research findings which reveal tensions, racism and negative encounters. Thus, for Hage (1998) for example, multicultural policy in Australia represents white peoples’ attempts to manage those that are ‘other’ according to their own agendas and interests. In between these two poles a number of writers, as illustrated in this collection, argue for the importance of drawing attention to the sometimes small instances of where multicultural diversities in the city exist in the context of minimal friction or where intercultural dialogues and connections may even be productive. In my own work (Watson 2006a) on city publics, a central argument was the importance of investigating in a fine-grained and textured way where the possibilities lie for intercultural ‘rubbing along’ in the public spaces of the city, and what the limitations and constraints are on mixing across differences in specific contexts. Such an approach is predicated on the argument that there is no easy answer to the questions posed by the idea of living with everyday multiculturalism. Rather, the specificity of place, cultures, local historical context, the contemporary political climate, national policy and local planning policies all have an effect. Deep ethnographic studies such as those exemplified in this book are thus the only way to identify wider trends and to broaden understanding. In such a spirit this chapter aims to explore the complexity of intercultural encounters in two London street markets: Queen’s Crescent in Camden and Ridley Road in Hackney.

The market sites Two markets were selected to illustrate contrasting spaces of multicultural diversity. Queen’s Crescent market is located in Camden, North London, and is an area marked by contrasts with 1960s and 1970s blocks of modernist high-density council housing interspersed with small roads of expensive gentrified terrace houses. The two are so close that is almost impossible to geographically separate them. On socioeconomic indices however, the two groups are worlds apart, with census data revealing very high levels of disadvantage on all social indicators amongst the council tenants living there. This was a traditional white working-class area, with a postwar history of in-migration, of West Indians and Africans from the 1960s, followed by people from India and Pakistan, and a more recent immigration of asylum-seekers

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from the Middle East, Somalia and other parts of the world, reflecting Camden’s housing policies for migrant families. Between 1991 and 2001 the ethnic composition shifted from white people comprising approximately 80 per cent of the population (consistent with the borough’s population as a whole) to 50 per cent in 2001. The market, which dissects the large housing estate with owner-occupied housing at either end, operates on Thursdays and Saturdays and has been in a state of decline over the past decade or more with a stall occupancy level of little over two-thirds on Thursdays and 79 per cent on Saturdays. The feel of the place is rundown with shuttered shop windows at night, and a general sense of malaise pervades the street. Over three-quarters of the local population visit the market but spend per visit is low with 56 per cent spending less than £10, reflecting the very low incomes of people living in the immediate area. The middle-class households nearby tend to shop elsewhere. Ridley Road (Figure 6.1) is a long-established market in the East London borough of Hackney which was once a market of predominantly Jewish traders, but which has shifted in composition as the area’s population has changed. This is a very ethnically diverse area where 59.4 per cent of the population is white, 8.6 per cent British Asian, and 24.7 per cent Black African or Afro-Caribbean. The borough is one of the poorest in Britain with a high proportion of lone-parent families. This borough also has one of the highest rates of public housing tenancy. The street market takes place every day except Sunday and is one of the most vibrant in London, selling every imaginable type of fruit, vegetables, meat and food from all over the world. The street is bordered by small rundown shops which also sell a striking diversity of products. It is packed every day, especially on Saturday, with shoppers coming from as far away as Birmingham to buy something that is only available there or to meet up with friends and family, and you could easily imagine yourself to be in a large city in Africa or India. Interviews were carried out with between 10 and 20 shoppers and a similar number of traders in each market. Observation was also conducted on the nature of encounters on the market site at different times of the day and week. A photographic record was undertaken. Through an interpretation of the interviews and observations of everyday encounters and connections across ethnic/racial differences in the market sites, this chapter will argue that everyday multiculturalism is a concept that can only be understood in its local sociocultural specificity. The two sites selected here elucidate the variety of ways in which everyday encounters across multicultural differences are enacted

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Figure 6.1 Ridley Road market (photo by the author)

in market sites, sometimes with ease and sometimes with tension, or at many points in between. To put this another way, rubbing along in the spaces of the global city is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon (Watson 2006a). Moreover, the experience of ‘successful’ everyday multiculturalism is not necessarily shared by all the people in one locality – rather it is subjective, varying across ethnicity/race, age and gender in highly complex ways such that one person’s experience or imaginary of a particular place does not mirror another’s. Two specific themes emerged as central in this research: the place of nostalgia and resentment and the importance of histories of marginality in the city. The two markets selected throw light on these themes. Other markets illustrate different matters of concern (see Watson, 2006b).


White British nostalgia Writing in the 1960s Buchi Emecheta in Second Class Citizen (1987) describes Queen’s Crescent through the eyes of Adah, a recent arrival to the area from Nigeria. As she sets off down to the market one morning: People were passing her this way and that, all in colourful sleeveless summer dresses, one or two old dears sitting on the benches by the side of the Crescent in front of the pub smiling, showing their stiff dentures . . . She walked into the Crescent where the smell of ripe tomatoes mingled with the odour from the butcher’s (182). Adah’s impressions were confirmed in the interviews with the local traders who remembered the market as buzzing and vibrant through to the 1980s. As the only remaining fruit and vegetable trader on the market said, when he first started working on his father’s stall as a young man there were five fruit and vegetable stalls on the market and five butchers – now one of each remains. For the locals who remain living, shopping or working in the market, there is a prevalent sense of disappointment and frustration at what is perceived as a decline in the locality’s prosperity, vibrancy, moral certainty, social harmony and sense of community. A local estate agent’s description of the street as ‘ home to one of . . . London’s largest street markets (where) the atmosphere has an amazing buzz’ would not be recognised by those who live and work there. This decline of the market is variously laid at the door of large capital moving into the retail sector – notably Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s supermarkets within less than two miles of the market, the council’s lack of investment, the local police and the ‘influx’ – a derogatory term – of new migrants to the locality. In this hollowed-out space, abandoned by many of those who can move to the reputedly more salubrious outer suburbs of London, has emerged a nostalgia for the halcyon days when people came from far and wide to the market, when there was laughter and life in the street, and when there was a strong sense of community. Certainly most of the interviews with respondents who knew the market at that time give the sense of a market which bears little resemblance to the market now in terms of its sociality and conviviality. This was a place that felt like home, from which, having been subject to rapid and significant processes of change, many now felt estranged. Nevertheless, what these nostalgic discourses mask are the social divisions which also existed at this time (which Emecheta starkly evoked in her book), while in this romanticised vision of the past (which also reflects very

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real experiences), the new population of asylum-seekers become an easy trope for the dissatisfactions of the present. The earlier in-migration of people from Africa, Asia and the Afro-Caribbean is now remembered with fondness and the migrants from this period appear relatively integrated; thus the majority of the white people interviewed recounted relatively positive stories about how different groups of people had historically got along, romanticising an earlier time of harmony and stability. The fruit-stall owner was one such respondent, although unlike some others, he was also positive about his relationships with his customers today: We look after our customers. I have been serving people 30 years, I know what they want . . . It’s worked out well – different varieties of food, we serve pumpkin now, garlic, different salad stuff – changed what people eat – 30 years ago we had six or seven lines – carrots, onions, apples . . . Yeah, no problem at all – 50 per cent of our customers are Asian Caribbean [sic] – I’ve got to know what they want . . . no problem at all. On the whole no problem at all. Mr Khan (a Sikh) – he used to have a shop here, used to sell all the West Indian fruit, where the carpet shop is – he’s now got a restaurant down in Covent Garden . . . Used to sell all the West Indian food – he comes up twice a week to get his fruit and veg for his restaurant. This stall holder, like some others, thus attempted to make some positive sense of the loss of community he felt by adapting his practices to the new world in which he found himself trading. The grocer’s shop, which had been in the market for 50 years and was located behind his stall, similarly now stocks a wide variety of spices, sauces, rice and other food which would have been rare in such a locality less than 20 years ago. Yet in many other accounts, there is a lack of awareness of how the interviewee’s comments were steeped in a naturalised sense of superiority even as they spoke of there being no racial tensions in the market. A preoccupation with language was displayed time and time again, where Anglophone speakers mourned the loss of a shared language, a discourse even shared by some of the other non-British people in the street, in one case the Vietnamese owner of an Asian shop: ‘Some of them can’t even speak English. You can’t understand them, they can’t understand you.’ These comments reflected both a real sense of difficulty in communication within the community which had been absent in earlier times, while also articulating a lack of understanding of how language barriers operated as a form of exclusion.


Such comments were frequently articulated by the traders and shopkeepers in the street. But what is notable in many of the comments is that their present-day narratives write out the sense of difficulty and discrimination that people who are not White British may have experienced then and now. What has changed is the group to whom racialised discourses are attached. The interview with Larry is fairly typical, expressing the ambivalence and tensions felt by many: The racial problem round here that’s OK. I give it very high marks for the blacks, the whites, the Pakistanis, the Muslims. I don’t think I’ve seen no racial tension round here at all, and they seem to mix all right. Whatever it is we seem to mix all right. I treat everybody the same . . . The racial situation is very good. I hope it stays like that. Occasionally you get a few of my customers saying ‘oh you’ve got all these Pakis coming in’ an all that. It’s only natural. You get these English people or British people . . . people that were born here . . . Since I’ve come here we’ve got two Mosques . . . and I’ve noticed it’s more black faces, more robes, whatever you wanna . . . And a lot of them . . . A lot of them can’t speak very good English, but I’ve got a lot of patience . . . I was brought up with Indian kids. I know how to deal with them and how to speak to them. I’m alright. I haven’t noticed any racial prejudice. What was clear from the interviews was that it is asylum-seekers who are now seen as a legitimate category where discourses of racial exclusion and ‘otherness’ can be mobilised. In these racist articulations some of the white people interviewed also included longer-term black residents into the discourse of ‘us’ as a rhetorical device to protect speakers from the racist implications of their own discourse. Another local man, Ian, commented: There have been a lot of problems since the asylum-seekers come here . . . people are resentful they get everything given to them . . . Old-age pensioner needs something, hasn’t got a chance in hell of getting nothing . . . West Indians feel the same, the old ones, why should they come and get new carpets new television everything – they got £1000 from the government starting off – last two or three years . . . . Yet of course these claims are absurd. Such racist discourses were central to many of the nostalgic narratives. The mobilisation of Black British support for these views was frequently deployed to legitimate and exonerate them. Similar attitudes were indeed articulated by some (but not all) of the local Asian British

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who, it could be argued, strategically identified with the powerful exclusionary discourses of the local White British, separating themselves discursively and practically from the powerless space left for newer arrivals. As the new owner Sam – a British Kenyan – of a children’s toys and odds-and-ends shop which had been run since the Second World War by a white working-class couple said: Too many refugees . . . The people that are legally here, they’re made to go and bring in refugees, no jobs, they get everything, all the facilities, they don’t even speak English. Too many foreigners. All my family have been British for generations The two most extreme statements of this kind were made first by a white working-class older woman who owned a shop in the market: I don’t care if you’re racialist or not. It’s our country. They come here. Young people get pregnant, they get a flat. And the ethnics. They get a flat, carpets. The government. going to give asylum seekers £400 to buy a car and money for lessons. And £2 a day for dog food. If we’ve got no money we can’t eat. The fact that being racist is recognised as a taboo by the very people who are racist does not seem to deter them. Rather, a racist standpoint is defiantly claimed. A shop owner, Bob, from a White British family who had owned a business in the same location for the last 100 years said something similar, though in his case he brings imaginary black people into his conversation to insist he is not racist: How can I say this without sounding racialist? They get jobs, houses. If you’re Muslim you go to the top of the housing list . . . They took over . . . and now they’re taking over here. They won’t speak English. Why don’t they want to know us? If you’re English, white English or black English, you get left out [people] get off the boat and get £1000s straight away. If you talk to old West Indians they would agree – they know what it’s like now. Unlike the other two, Ian was largely positive about the changing racial/ethnic mix, illustrating the variety of responses to the rapid social changes in the area. Even in Bob’s case, racist discourse did not simply translate into overtly racist actions or behaviour directed to others, at least not during the interview, which is not to deny the damaging effects of his words. While I was there he cheerfully served and joked with the black people who came into the shop, who no doubt would


have found his comments offensive. But what was consistently reiterated was a sense that the new wave of migrants to the country – homogenised discursively as asylum-seekers – were all gaining access to benefits and special treatment denied to the longer-term residents of the area (Wells and Watson 2005). Rumours of special treatment were clearly circulated and exaggerated up and down the market, fuelling such perceptions. What these three interviews shared with many others were nostalgic references to the market and the community in its earlier days and a resentment towards the newcomers for its demise. It is this nostalgia which I suggest masks and writes over the social divisions of the past, and also leads to a negative and disappointed sense of the present imbued with a blame culture, a celebration of the past and a fatalism about the future, where big business, the council, the police or asylum-seekers are all seen to have contributed to the decline of the area. Nostalgia, I would argue, operates with an idealised imaginary of the past. Yet as Raymond Williams (1975) forcefully reminded us, such nostalgic formulations served only to obscure the inequities and miseries generated by the rise of industrial capitalism and consequent urbanisation. Typically, in these formulations public life is characterised as rational, impersonal and abstract, with the family or private sphere as the place of connection, support and interdependence. In response, radical/critical sociologists and others have tended to critique nostalgic discourse as a vehicle for maintaining the status quo, for resisting sociocultural change, and for denying the inequalities and social divisions of the past. Queen’s Crescent market illustrates this well. For those who can claim a stake in the past, nostalgia plays an active role in the construction of nation and a sense of belonging, leaving newer arrivals excluded from a narrative of continuity in place. As Raphael Samuel (1989: x) pointed out, the division between the established and the outsider has been a consistent feature of national life whichever period one looks at. This too becomes a route through which racist discourses are deployed and was certainly evident in the market interviews. In Queen’s Crescent market these conditions underpinned the sense of place and the disappointment expressed at the changes that had occurred. These yearnings can be framed thematically around crime and safety, and an imagined earlier cosmopolitanism, and an emptying out of the area. One Jewish shop owner described it thus: Ten years ago the market was buzzing. It was very cosmopolitan, it’s not as cosmopolitan as it was. As people can they move out, people come in at the bottom end . . . it’s not conflict between people, it’s . . .

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Here you tend to have pockets of Somalis, even the Anglo-Saxons. They don’t interact. There’s not any conflict, there’s no interaction. You get people coming in [the shop] who don’t even realise they’re neighbours. People have their Somali evenings, Bangladeshi evenings . . . I don’t know if they mix . . . When I was a kid my family lived in the East End of London, you had British, Jewish, whatever. They all had their own little areas, but they also intermingled, they knew each other and they got on. Wherever you came from you came there to get away from some form of oppression be it economic or political. So everyone had the same goal, they wanted to get on in life, they wanted to achieve something. Or as Ian said: There used to be lots of Jewish traders here – different atmosphere here – a bit of a laugh – they was more in pots and pans, toys everything . . . right the way through the week, no punch ups was there? No druggies no junkies, muggings . . . rougher, the whole area is, everywhere you go – drugs are the main problem . . . It became clear from the interviews that these memories of a happy intermingling, this cosmopolitanism, referred to different groups of white people, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English and Jewish, rather than a more diverse cultural mix. Protestantism, Colley (2003) has argued, was crucial to the formation of British national identity and acted as a cultural marker for inclusion or exclusionary practices. In Queen’s Crescent, this boundary appeared to have been extended to include Jewish people, whereas Muslims’ claims to a British – or even a cosmopolitan – identity were clearly rejected. Nostalgia was also expressed for the days when people went in and out of each others’ houses, or controlled the bad behaviour of children simply through knowing who they were and where they came from. This, then, was a community which did not need external regulation or intervention for people to belong and to feel safe, reminiscent of Wilmott and Young’s (1957) account of Bethnal Green, where a community had been displaced by redevelopment, leading to similar feelings of nostalgia for community life where local residents had stronger social ties and practices of mutual care. Respondents commented on how the area felt like a stable community steeped in tradition where children grew up in the market and shopped there themselves as adults. Larry, who owned the freehold on his shop and the shop opposite, described it thus:


You’ve got a market that’s been here for hundreds of years. You’ve got a generation that’s been coming here for hundreds of years. [During the interview one of his customers, who owned the cycle shop, chipped in]: Markets are finished. And the stallholders that are in the market now are not real stallholders. Stallholders years ago it was their job. I’ve got a picture indoors of the Market in the 1880s when it was a proper market. It was a business. The stallholders that are here on Thursdays and Saturdays are people on the dole. There’s about half a dozen stalls that ’ave got all, erm, eh, careful what I say, illegal refugees selling stuff. There’s two or three proper ones. The fruit and veg stalls. As a result many people reported a desire to leave. As the Sunny Café waitress put it: ‘If I could move I’d get out of here. Even the kids are polite to you over there. The names you get called by these kids is unbelievable’. Others very explicitly laid the blame on multiculturalism. The butcher, whose ‘talk’ was relentlessly racist, encouraged a white woman in his shop, in front of an Asian family also at the counter, to describe her feelings about the market. Reluctantly she said: ‘They’ve broken up the local community. It’s gone . . . I blame the multiculturalism’. ‘Say what you mean [the butcher interjected]’. ‘There’s more of them than there is of us’.

On the margins Ridley Road has a long history as a focal point for the more recent arrivals to East London. From the 19th century, Jewish migrants to London moved into Tower Hamlets and Hackney in large numbers, shifting later to the outer London suburbs of Golders Green, Finchley and Barnet in the mid-20th century. The first dominant group of traders in the market were thus Jewish for whom the market represented an important meeting place. At the top end, near Kingsland High Road, until recently stood the best (reputedly) bagel shop in London, which on Sundays brimmed with customers buying bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon and gefilte fish. The traders comprised a group of families who knew each other well. Larry, who is chair of the market traders, explained: Going back, it was all family-run markets, so there was loads of family and friends that ran the markets. There was about 70 families here . . . you had the Caines, the Moseleys, the Greys, the Lamberts . . . it had a nice social

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side to it . . . It was very, very Jewish . . . But then, Jewish people couldn’t work on a Saturday. So some of the Jewish traders would give up their pitch to someone else on a Saturday. But then, times change, and the Jewish people started to move away . . . and we got loads and loads of Greeks, Cypriots, Turkish people. That was another good era we had. Even today this respondent’s cousins own five of the stalls, including the egg stall, where the owner’s father was the publican at the local pub, the Ridley Arms (now closed). These strong family connections provide a sense of social cohesion and often exuberant banter between the stalls, creating a vibrant social atmosphere. Mutual support in running the stalls and loading and unloading each other’s produce was typical. This market offers a strong contrast to Queen’s Crescent. As major shifts in the ethnic composition of the area occurred, first migration from the West Indies in the 1950s and 1960s when UK immigration policy encouraged migrants to take up jobs in the public sector – particularly the health service and transport – and then from Africa, followed by traders from Asia, the Middle East and more recently Eastern Europe, the market retained its strong sense of community where intercultural connection and mixing is typical. According to this trader: You get a lot of Jamaicans, Africans, Nigerians. They all live in the area. It’s the old famous Ridley Road. This is like a meeting point for a lot of them. There are people down here who haven’t seen each other for 20 years, and they have met in Ridley Road. You know, no other market but Ridley. It must say something, you know. The woman who owns the egg stall celebrated the market’s diversity, which formerly was also welcomed by her father in the Ridley Arms pub, where migrants across Britain regularly congregated: There are lots of South American people down here now. Spanish, Brazilian, Cuban . . . there’s a big community of South Americans coming up now. Chinese, you get a lot of Chinese people now. And Polish. Lots of Russians. Lots of different people shop here. The shoppers interviewed reported visiting the market regularly with the specific intention of bumping into acquaintances and long-lost friends, even to the extent of looking out for people last seen in their country of origin:


Yeah, I do bump into people . . . You meet people you have not seen for years! From abroad! People from Nigeria come here, they are looking for me, they don’t know my address . . . I tell them everything because they have been looking for me for long. And eventually they found me here. Nigerian woman, late 50s The young Rasta soap stall owner, who had built up his business selling soaps made from products from the Afro-Caribbean with the help of a small bank loan, saw himself as a ‘guardian’ of the local Afro-Caribbean youth, giving advice and acting as an example of entrepreneurship and possibility. He described the market’s sociality thus: Yes, they’ll collect in the street. If they see a friend or neighbours they’ll just hang in there, stop and start chatting. And in about 10 minutes they finish, it’s up to them. Usually it doesn’t trouble me. It happened to me once I said please can you move aside a bit for me, because they had been standing there for so long, chatting, chatting and blocking the stall. This view was confirmed by an Afro-Caribbean woman in her 30s who responded: Sociable? Yeah!!! I come down here on a Saturday because I know if I’m going to bump into someone you can bump into them here on a Saturday. That used to be a big pub . . . and on a Saturday, I’ll tell you what . . . they’d all be there and you could have a laugh and you used to meet your uncle there, your brother. The spaces of the market lend themselves to easy informality, with older people in particular, sitting about on packing cases, empty stalls and steps to the containers, or on the stools at the caravan selling goat curry and other Jamaican specialities. The accounts of both shoppers and traders confirmed a narrative of intercultural mixing and connection which appears to have existed for many years in Ridley Road. This is an everyday multiculturalism not steeped in tension, hostility or complex power relations. Rather what is performed in this space are casual encounters and ‘rubbing along’ in this rather ramshackle but richly diverse commercial space. How can Ridley Road’s success as a multicultural site be understood? My argument is that the market’s long history as a space on the margins, where new migrants found a place, work, a voice and sociality,

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saved it from becoming an iconic space of the traditional white working class where a real and imagined sense of homogenous community could exercise its exclusionary powers. The fact that the community had been mixed for many years meant the ethnic/racial changes in the market did not mobilise discourses of mourning, nostalgia or resentment as each new wave of non-Anglo populations moved in. Within the market there was no cohesive Anglo community to be threatened or destabilised. Rather the presence of non-Anglo traders and shoppers since its early days enabled a sense of fluidity, open-ness and porosity in this space, which allowed for cultural change and has continually opened up the potential for intercultural exchange and encounters across difference. The very marginality of the market from mainstream white British culture appeared to have produced a sense of pride and easy un-boundaried belonging. This, then, was a story of everyday multiculturalism where difference could be lived productively in mutual respect.

Conclusion This exploration of these two markets in London has illustrated the complexity of analysing everyday multiculturalism in city spaces, and the danger of constructing overarching narratives on the nature of multicultural encounters in the global city. Rather, as I have argued, the sociocultural context of specific spaces and populations warrants textured investigation to make sense of when, where and how encounters across difference occur productively or antagonistically or somewhere in between. As Queen’s Crescent market illustrated, the national or even international political context – in this case civil wars forcing migrants to seek asylum elsewhere – can have micro effects in relation to place, disturbing what may once have been a peaceful co-existence. Similarly, the wider socioeconomic climate can also affect local intercultural relations, as in Queen’s Crescent, where the market’s decline, which to a large extent derived from lack of investment in the market and the competition from local supermarkets, was more frequently laid at the feet of the new migrants rather than these more significant economic shifts. Ridley Road illustrated the importance of social history in understanding why encounters across difference appeared routine, everyday and seemingly unproblematic. What is clear from this research, in conclusion, is that everyday multiculturalism is a complex, textured and shifting terrain which warrants careful research and analysis.


Acknowledgement The research in Queen’s Crescent was conducted with Karen Wells. I would like to thank her.

References Colley, L. (2003) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico). Emecheta, B. (1987) Second-class Citizen (first published by Allison and Busby, 1974) (London: Fontana Paperbacks). Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Hamnett, C. (2000) ‘Gentrification, Postindustrialism and Restructuring’, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds) Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 331–41. Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (2007) Regeneration Study for Golborne Road, W10 (London: RBKC). Samuel, R. (1989) Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 11 (London: Routledge). Watson, S. (2006a) City Publics: the (Dis)enchantments of Urban Encounters (London: Routledge). Watson, S. (with D. Studdert) (2006b) Markets as Sites for Social Interaction: Spaces of Diversity (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Policy Press). Wells, K. and S. Watson (2005) ‘A Politics of Resentment: Shopkeepers in a London Neighbourhood’, Race and Ethnicities, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 261–77. Williams, R. (1975) The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Willmott, P. and M. Young (1957) Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge). Young, I. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

7 Street-level Cosmopolitanism: Neighbourhood Shopping Streets in Multi-ethnic Montréal Martha Radice

This chapter looks at everyday multiculturalism as it is experienced in multi-ethnic neighbourhood shopping streets in Montréal (Quebec, Canada).1 As one of Canada’s three major metropolises, Montréal is a historic and continuing destination for immigrants from an increasingly diverse range of countries. It is also implicated in complex debates over the French-speaking province of Quebec’s status as a distinct and potentially sovereign society, which gives its relationship to ethnocultural diversity a very particular tone (Germain and Radice 2006). While Quebec’s own brand of Canadian multiculturalism has been provoking lively argument in institutions such as school boards and government services (Bouchard and Taylor 2008), apparently inconsequential multi-ethnic public spaces – such as neighbourhood shopping streets – attract little controversy. If anything, they are celebrated for their contribution to the city’s conviviality, in newspaper features, alternative urban heritage tours and the like. Going beyond such images, this chapter explores how diverse everyday users of local commercial streets (shopkeepers, customers, residents, passers-by) engage in situ with ethnocultural difference, as represented by the other users they encounter and the ethnically marked places and products that make up the landscape of these streets. In the Canadian context, multiculturalism as a theoretical framework evokes a long and complex history of legislation and social policy designed to manage the country’s ethnocultural diversity. ‘Official multiculturalism’ allocates state resources to the recognition of ethnocultural groups’ heritage and their representation in the ‘mosaic’ of Canadian society, and has evolved from funding folklore preservation, 140

Neighbourhood Shopping Streets in Multi-ethnic Montréal 141

to promoting intercommunity dialogue and antiracist education, to creating a sense of belonging to a multicultural nation (Mackey 1999; McAndrew et al. 2005). Discussions of multiculturalism tend therefore to be bound up with policies, institutions and public opinion. Since I wish to shift my analysis of intercultural contact to other fields of social relations, this chapter draws instead on concepts of cosmopolitanism, which, I argue, represents a broader (if at times contradictory) range of ways to theorise engagement with cultural difference. Cosmopolitanism is particularly apposite in the modern metropolis, which is not only where the most ethnoculturally diverse populations can be found, but also where ethnocultural diversity is most often sought out, appropriated and repackaged in order to enhance the cultural capital of people or places (Binnie et al. 2006b).2 Thus, a so-called economic development strategy published by the City wants Montréal to be recognised as ‘an international, cosmopolitan city, open to the world’ (Ville de Montréal, 2005, my translation). Clearly, ‘cosmopolitan’ is not just a synonym for ‘multi-ethnic’ here, but what does it mean? Trivial as it may seem, there are clues in the facts that a cosmopolitan can also be a vodka cocktail and a racy women’s magazine. What is that extra cachet that the cosmopolitan label gives, and how does it help our understanding of cities? To respond to this question, I begin by explaining how Montréal constitutes a good laboratory for exploring cosmopolitanism. I then propose a four-fold typology of varieties of cosmopolitanism, associated with politics (global citizenship), identity (multiple affiliations), personality (openness to the Other) and commodification (consuming the Other). I relate each variety to material from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2006–7. How are citizenship of the world or openness to the Other made manifest in the ordinary neighbourhood shopping streets of a real, ethnoculturally diverse city? Overall, this chapter aims to begin to respond to calls to locate ‘actually existing cosmopolitanisms’ as they are lived in everyday urban settings (Robbins 1998).

Exploring cosmopolitanism in multi-ethnic Montréal Montréal has a fascinating history of what we would now call intercultural contact. The city, built on an island in the St Lawrence River, is part of the homelands of Aboriginal peoples, principally the Iroquois, but also Hurons, Stadaconians, Algonquins and others (Germain and Rose 2000). In 1611, the explorer Samuel Champlain set up a shortlived fur-trading post on the island, and in 1642 a group of French

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settlers founded the missionary colony of Ville-Marie. It remained a small French village for the first century of its colonial existence, but after the British conquest of New France in 1759, English, Scottish and Irish immigrants arrived in the city to live alongside the earlier settlers. Differences of language, religion, colonial allegiance and socioeconomic status between these groups could be marked, and they tended to establish separate neighbourhoods and institutions. Compared to other north-eastern American cities, Montréal’s ethnocultural diversity bloomed late: in 1901, people who could trace their origins back solely to France or the British Isles still made up 96 per cent of the island’s population (Linteau 2000: 45). However, as Montréal was then and remained until about the 1950s the industrial and commercial capital of Canada, the first waves of immigrants of other origins soon landed. Significant Chinese and Afro-Caribbean communities were established in the early 20th century, but otherwise, until the 1970s, most immigrants came from Europe and settled in distinct residential areas, such as Little Italy and the Greek and Portuguese neighbourhoods (McNicoll 1993). Montréal has since become increasingly ethnoculturally diverse. Changes in Canadian immigration policy that favour education and professional experience over country of origin have led to increased flows of immigration from non-European countries. Moreover, the province of Quebec has since 1978 been able to select its own immigrants in the skilled worker category, and can therefore favour those with a knowledge of French. Thus, although in 2001 only 28 per cent of the city of Montréal’s population was born outside Canada, compared to nearly 50 per cent in the cities of Vancouver and Toronto, the origins of recent immigrants to Montréal are much more evenly spread between world regions, thanks to immigration from countries where French is a common second language (for example, Algeria, Vietnam, Romania, Haiti, Lebanon) as well as renewed immigration from France. While the spread of countries and continents of origin is now broad, the geographical distribution of immigrant and minority ethnic residents of Quebec is not: the vast majority live in the metropolitan region of Montréal, and immigration remains a central-city phenomenon, with few immigrants settling directly in the suburbs (although second generations often follow the familiar pattern of moving out to wealthier suburbs when they can afford it). Finally, although older ethnic neighbourhoods can be identified by traces such as shops, places of worship and community and cultural centres, there is now little residential ethnic segregation: Montréal has become a city not of ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods but of ‘multi-ethnic’ neighbourhoods (Germain 1999).


This distribution of population means that there are many places in Montréal where regular daily contact between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds is the norm. However, with two major exceptions (Germain et al. 1995; Meintel et al. 1997), there has been little research into such inter-ethnic relations in specific urban places, in the spirit of studies such as those of Simon (1997) in Belleville, Paris, Blokland (2003) in Rotterdam or Wise (2005) in Ashfield, Sydney. This gap in knowledge is part of the motivation for my doctoral research into everyday social relations and the mobilisation of ethnicity in multi-ethnic neighbourhood shopping streets in Montréal. Focusing on such clearly delimited places has the advantage of grounding discussions of intercultural contact in a particular context; focusing on commercial streets acknowledges that this contact often occurs in spaces of consumption, with all the potential for the commodification of ethnicity that that implies. The four streets I studied cater to a mainly local clientele in the central city neighbourhoods of Parc-Extension, Mile End, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) and Villeray. Fieldwork consisted chiefly of direct and participant observation and interviews of varying lengths with merchants, workers, residents and visitors in the streets. All four streets are multi-ethnic, in that their shops and services represent a variety of ethnocultural groups and affiliations (although not necessarily in the same proportions as in the local population), but each street’s mix and history of immigration settlement is unique. A section of Rue Sherbrooke Ouest,3 in NDG, has about 100 stores that are extremely diverse, including Korean, Iranian, Caribbean and Indian businesses. In Parc-Extension, Rue de Liège Ouest’s 40 or so shops reflect a local division between an older generation of European immigrants, mainly Greek, and more recent arrivals from South Asia. A portion of Rue Jean-Talon Est in Villeray has about 90 businesses, including an older base of Italian stores, several of which are now owned by the second generation, plus newer grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries run by North African, Haitian or Vietnamese immigrants. Finally, in Mile End, Rue St-Viateur Ouest’s 40 to 50 shops reflect a mainly European mix of products and proprietors, including kosher butcher’s and fishmonger’s shops, Italian cafés and a few more ‘exotic’ restaurants. Each street also has its share of ethnically ‘unmarked’ or mainstream businesses such as banks and convenience stores, although the latter are typically run by members of ethnic minorities.4 Besides being multi-ethnic, the streets were chosen to vary in their socioeconomic circumstances (in areas of relatively low income or showing signs of gentrification) and their built environment (small street in the heart

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of the neighbourhood or major thoroughfare). Since they offer different conditions for intercultural contact among many kinds of people, through co-presence and consumption, the four field-sites provide an ideal terrain to explore varieties of cosmopolitanism. In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in the social sciences, generating much debate about what it actually is, or should be (Binnie et al. 2006a; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Featherstone 2002; Pollock et al. 2000; Vertovec and Cohen 2002a). Several overviews propose typologies of the literature, distinguishing for example between political-legal and culturalist approaches (Binnie et al. 2006b; Yeˆgenoˆglu 2005). My own readings lead me to identify four main clusters of meaning, which I label political cosmopolitanism, identity cosmopolitanism, personal cosmopolitanism and commodified cosmopolitanism, and I will address each in turn, along with some of their knots and slippages. I want to pay particular attention to each variety’s apparent opposite as well as the extent to which it is normative and judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I will also draw on fieldwork material to illustrate how each kind of cosmopolitanism can be understood at the level of everyday urban life.

Political cosmopolitanism: citizens celebrate the world in a neighbourhood In political philosophy, following Kant, cosmopolitanism refers to ideals of global citizenship, in the form of human rights, activism and institutions that cross or transcend international borders, like the UN apparatus and international NGOs (Cheah 2006). This political cosmopolitanism tends to be normative, setting out how we ought to engage with our fellow citizens of the world. Besides envisaging cosmopolitan governance, some theorists have also called for a cosmopolitan turn for the social sciences, to take them beyond ‘methodological nationalism’ (for example, Beck and Sznaider 2006). Thus, political cosmopolitanism’s antonym is usually taken to be nationalism or xenophobia, and it is generally seen as a Good Thing. It was not always so: at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, ‘cosmopolitan’ was often a slur used to denounce the anti-patriotic rootlessness of, say, workers’ solidarity networks. Less prescriptively, recent scholarship points out that nationalism and cosmopolitanism are neither necessarily diametrically opposed nor mutually exclusive (Appiah 1998), and can both be either progressive or reactionary (Cheah 2006). At the scale of the city, as opposed to the international scene, political cosmopolitanism might


include a municipal government’s decision to give refuge to those fleeing political persecution (Derrida 2001) or to set up an ethnoculturally inclusive urban planning process (Sandercock 2003). Political cosmopolitanism initially seems hard to apply or interpret at the ‘micro’ level of everyday life. However, if we take it in its more descriptive sense of inclusive political action, an example can be found on St-Viateur, the narrow, lively street I studied in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montréal. For over a decade, the Mile End Citizens’ Committee organised an annual street party to celebrate Saint-JeanBaptiste Day, Quebec’s national holiday on 24 June (Germain and Radice 2006; Olazabal and Frigault 2000; Rose 1995). The party was held on St-Viateur Street, closed to traffic for the occasion; local bands and artistes provided entertainment while merchants and residents provided the food and drink. Right from the first, in the mid-1980s, the party was designed to welcome Quebecers of all origins. As such, it quite innocently subverted the then somewhat ethnocentric agenda of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the NGO responsible for organising and allocating funds for local celebrations of this holiday, traditionally associated with the French-Canadian majority of Quebec (who, it must be remembered, constitute a minority within Canada). A longstanding member of the Mile End Citizens’ Committee told me that the first poster they made advertised the event in both French and English, with ‘All welcome’ written in many other languages, so as to reach as many residents as possible in the local multi-ethnic population. The Société Saint-JeanBaptiste reportedly threatened to withdraw their funding unless the Citizens’ Committee stuck blank paper over the English text on all the posters, which they duly did. The same interviewee, a European immigrant herself, explained the neighbourhood organisers’ approach to the festival: We always had folk groups putting on a bit of a show, so we always made sure to have a Québécois group. But the people who came to dance were Greek, Polish, Chinese, everything. And that was really weird for [the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste]. ‘What kind of a Saint-Jean festival is that!’ [laughter] And we tended to not really do the patriotic speeches. [. . .] So we were ahead of our time because we made them accept a new way of doing things, above all a new way of understanding how immigrants – for us it was very clear that it was a good way to integrate immigrants into Quebec society. But that if you have loads of people from different ethnic groups, you have to do something that speaks to them. [. . .] So we always had fèves au lard [traditional Québécois beans with pork] and a big cake made by a

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real Québécoise from here, there were Québécois aspects to it, but for us it was important that people . . . if you are used to partying in a certain way, you’ll feel better if your way of partying is integrated into a new celebration. [. . .] [For people in the neighbourhood] it was normal to have Greek dances, Polish dances, and tabouleh on the table (my translation from French). Over the years, thanks to word-of-mouth and enthusiastic newspaper features (for example, Roux 2000), the party on St-Viateur became the most popular ‘alternative’ Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebration in the city, ethnoculturally inclusive, locally oriented and somewhat detached from the larger, more nationalist celebrations (Olazabal and Frigault 2000). Interestingly, the official discourse of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste finally caught up and became much more inclusive itself, although as can be seen in the extract above, ‘Québécois’ is still an ambiguous term that can either refer to all Quebec residents or, more exclusively, to those of French-Canadian origin (Lamarre and Djerrahian 2004). Eventually the Mile End Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebration became a victim of its own success: the fire service and municipal authorities expressed concerns over public safety, and the Citizens’ Committee volunteers were no longer able or willing to deal with the crowds of people coming in from outside the neighbourhood, so they stopped organising it. Still, local residents and businesspeople speak of it with nostalgia and some dream of starting it up again. In its explicit inclusiveness of local residents of all backgrounds, the St-Viateur festival of the 1980s and 1990s incarnates a kind of grassroots political cosmopolitanism. However, its demise also shows that such a microcosm of cosmopolitanism cannot be stretched too far: its ‘citizenship of the world’ cannot be extended beyond the world of the neighbourhood. This is understandable, given the intense nature of the event and the scarcity of material and human resources on which it depended. Political cosmopolitanism at the local scale can only thrive under certain conditions, but it is clearly possible, confounding the traditional opposition between cosmopolitans and locals that I will discuss later.

Identity cosmopolitanism: markers of multi-ethnic business A second register of cosmopolitanism is performed through claims of identity. Here, the argument is that citizens of the world are likely to belong and claim belonging to a variety of ethnic, cultural, social or national groups, whether by affinity or affiliation (Vertovec and Cohen 2002b: 18). This may be the case for immigrants and their children and


grandchildren, for partners and offspring in mixed marriages or unions, and even for those who develop international solidarities through experiences of travel or activism. Cosmopolitan identities can be multiple (I am a Montréaler, a woman, an immigrant and an academic), hybrid (he is a blend, Indian-Canadian) or nested (she is Porteña, Argentinean, South American and Latin American), or any combination of the above. Identity cosmopolitanism is often opposed to multiculturalism, which can appear to allow only one ethnocultural affiliation per person. As such, identity cosmopolitanism is typically seen as positive, and even liberating, although it is generally discussed in descriptive rather than prescriptive mode. In cities, one would expect it to be made manifest in places or social groups that allow people to freely claim and perform their various identities. For example, Law (2002) describes how Filipina domestic workers claim multiple identities in their Sunday gatherings in downtown Hong Kong. To an extent, the St-Viateur Saint-Jean-Baptiste festival can be understood as an instance of identity cosmopolitanism. Its organisers and participants were effectively claiming several identities: as Québécois, as Mile-Enders and as people attached to other countries, and perhaps as artists, immigrants or parents, depending on each person’s allegiances. Other indicators of identity cosmopolitanism can be read in the marking of ‘ethnic’ businesses in the streets I studied. There are examples of nested identity: a restaurant on busy Sherbrooke Street, clearly labelled as Vietnamese a year ago, now serves ‘fine Asian cuisine’; an Algerian baker on Jean-Talon Est sees his business as North African (maghrébin), although he also serves a mixed clientele who appreciate that his prices are lower than the Italian bakery a few shops along. It is hard to put an ethnic label on the bagel shop run by a Sikh family on Sherbrooke Street that also sells home-made Indian curries. The same goes for the 24-hour St-Viateur Bagel Shop, whose Italian owner first started work there as a teenager on the night shift in 1962, learning Yiddish on the way. I asked him if he saw the bagel shop as an ethnic business. Certainly [it] started out as an ethnic business, used to be, a, a Jewish business. But as you can see now an Italian owns it. Ah, and I’ve always worked in it so, no, it’s ah, very very multicultural, I mean, our clientele is made from, you know, ‘cause it used to be basically strictly Jewish customers come here, now bagels have gone international, so, definitely not, no. He currently employs workers of many origins, immigrant and otherwise, and sells bagels that have not only ‘gone international’ but gone

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intensely local, becoming an edible symbol of Montréal, regularly pitted against the bagels of New York in the kind of taste tests that fill the lifestyle sections of weekend newspapers. Of course, market imperatives are likely to disrupt claims to a single, authentic ethnic identity among businesses in Montréal. Some businesses remain highly ethnically specialised, particularly hairdressers and certain cafés (often also specialised by gender). But generally, if a product sells, a business-owner may sell it, regardless of whether it fits his or her origins; moreover, if he or she has employees who are not family members, they may well be of a different ethnic background. And customers are often on the lookout for a bargain or a treat rather than a vendor of their own background. So, in another of the streets, the Chinese immigrant owners of a small supermarket with an Italian name employ workers including a Greek-speaking man at the deli counter, an older cashier who is related to the original Italian owners and another who is a young black student. Since they lack the knowledge to specialise (particularly as there is no significant Chinese population in the neighbourhood), the owners aim instead to stock a number of ethnic product lines to cater to the highly multi-ethnic local population. What counts for the study of inter-ethnic contact here is that, however market-driven it may be, the mix of identities on display in these shops’ ethnic markers (products, workers, décor, name, customers, and so on), reflects and reinforces the sense that multi-ethnic co-presence can work well in many small urban places. More importantly, they indicate that ethnicity is not the sole mode of appropriation of these streets.

Personal cosmopolitanism: food for intercultural contact A third variety, much favoured by anthropologists and sociologists following Hannerz’s (1990) development of Merton’s (1957) ideas, construes cosmopolitanism as an attitude or ‘disposition’ (Skrbis et al. 2004), ‘a willingness to engage with the Other’ (Hannerz 1990: 239). Here, the cosmopolitan is disposed to be open to and interested, though not necessarily expert, in elements from cultures other than his or her own – whether these elements are events, people or products (food, music, art) or kinds of information or skills (current affairs or ways of doing things). His or her opposite is the ‘local’, whose scope of interest is much more limited to the immediate cultural environment. While personal cosmopolitanism can be presented normatively as a desirable ethical ideal (such as by Nussbaum, discussed in Yeˆgenoˆglu 2005), in more exploratory accounts, the moral judgement is usually more ambivalent. Sometimes the open cosmopolitans are presented as the heroes and


locals as the villains; elsewhere, the reverse is suggested, or the good and bad in both are outlined. This is in part due to the ultimate interdependence of the two groups: ‘there can be no cosmopolitans without locals’ (Hannerz 1990: 250). For personal cosmopolitanism to be analytically useful, it is crucial not to confuse mind-sets with mileage. Perhaps because Merton picked the word ‘local’ as the opposite to cosmopolitan, it is often assumed that only the well-travelled elite can be open to the Other, whereas the locally born are local in attitude (see, for example, Friedman 2002; Nijman 2007).5 However, other scholars point out that both workingclass migrants and people who stay at home can be cosmopolitans too, particularly given current technologies of communication (Hiebert 2002; Roudometof 2005; Szerszynski and Urry 2002; Werbner 1999): ‘vernacular ethnic rootedness does not negate openness to cultural difference or the fostering of a universalist civic consciousness and a sense of moral responsibility beyond the local’ (Werbner 2006: 497). This nuance is important for understanding everyday inter-ethnic contact in the city: what counts on the street, in the park, at school, in the workplace or at city hall is the way in which we interact with the Other in this place, now, however we got here. Unsurprisingly, one of the most obvious indicators of personal cosmopolitanism in multi-ethnic shopping streets is being open to the Other’s food. Mrs D., who immigrated from Jamaica over 40 years ago, runs a shop on Sherbrooke Street that looks like a regular convenience store from the outside, but the inside reveals shelves stocked with a wide range of Caribbean products, from malt drinks to hot sauce to pigeon peas to oxtail. She said: I thought, by having that, it would be only West Indian people that would buy that product because they know the product and they’re used to the product. It’s amazing! Because of the internet today and because people travel more than they did 30 years ago, people go to different places and they see things or they taste things, and when they come back, even if we don’t have it they ask questions about certain products. Or they might not know the name and they describe it to you so you know the name and you show it to them so they are willing to try certain things. So therefore you have all kinds of people trying different things, and people are more open to variety. Similarly, the owner of the nearby Korean and Japanese grocery store said he was looking for ways to respond to Canadians’ curiosity about Korean food, like giving away free samples or recipes in French.

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A significant current of scholarship sees consuming ethnically ‘other’ foods as ‘culinary tourism, [which] is often more about the traveller’s performance of cosmopolitan competence than it is about the culture and cuisine being eaten’ (Germann Molz 2007: 91). Indeed, the very point of the ethnic eating experience – to consume something new and different – seems to negate the possibility of genuine contact, since if one really got to know the culture of the cuisine, it would no longer be new and different. A customer I interviewed in a Polish restaurant on St-Viateur fitted this model of the culinary tourist: What a thrill to walk into that place [an Italian café], and it was at a time when it was still governed by old men. So, to be a youngster of 19 or 20 walking with her boyfriend into that place, we felt like foreigners, we felt like intruders, we felt like those old men were spitting on the young blood walking into that, that place. But that was part of the high of discovering these places. [. . .] I think the lure for me is discovery. Once something has been discovered, I disappear and I’m not that interested. Her latest discoveries were, coincidentally, certain shops on Rue de Liège, a street that is typically unknown to Montréal’s ethnic-foodloving middle classes. But although relations of power and privilege (including access to money and mobility) traverse such expeditions and deserve our attention, I am wary of equating all expressions of personal cosmopolitanism in the culinary sphere to eating, consuming and forgetting the (subaltern) Other (hooks 1992). Interviews with shopkeepers like Mrs D. and their customers show that openness to the Other is not only articulated by affluent members of the ethnic majority, as some seem to suggest (Butler 2003; May 1996), but is a two-way or multiway process that engages people of varying origins and classes. As Cook and Harrison (2003) and Duruz (2005) have argued, everyday relations are usually messier to analyse than the abstract opposition between the migrant and ‘the “disembodied” cosmopolitan, greedy to devour the commodified products of other people’s home-building practices’ (Duruz 2005: 65). The question of what people ‘do’ with their personal cosmopolitanism leads us to the fourth cluster of meaning.

Commodified cosmopolitanism: capitalising on multi-ethnic streetscapes In contrast to the other three rather endearing versions of cosmopolitanism, the final variety flips cosmopolitanism on its back to expose


its grubby underbelly. Here, cosmopolitanism is understood as a discourse that co-opts openness to the Other in order to sell commodities or otherwise gain a competitive advantage in today’s cutthroat global economy. Commodified cosmopolitanism, as I call it, is not about being open to Others (let alone knowing or understanding them) as a virtue in itself, but because it helps one distinguish oneself (that is, accumulate cultural capital) or make a profit (that is, accumulate economic capital). In other words, it instrumentalises personal cosmopolitanism. It has two identifiable opposites. The first, on an ideological register, is multiculturalism, seen in its most positive light as an honest and inclusive recognition of collective cultural difference, as opposed to an instrumental and individualising cosmopolitanism. Thus, Mitchell (2003) criticises the shift in school citizenship curricula from a respectful multicultural model to a ‘strategic’ cosmopolitan model (see Zachary 2000 for a barefaced example of this thinking). The second, on a more interactional register, would be authenticity: commodified cosmopolitanism is a cultural con-trick reducing ethnocultural difference to just another kind of branding, another way into our wallets, while genuine inter-ethnic exchanges would somehow be free of these ulterior motives and therefore more authentic. Obviously, social scientists do not generally see commodified cosmopolitanism as a desirable ideal; it is rather a critical analysis of a given state of affairs. Commodified cosmopolitanism in the city has shown up in several studies of place-marketing strategies. In Toronto and London, some streets or neighbourhoods have been branded with particular ethnic identities, whether or not that label bears much relation to the ethnic composition of the local population, or indeed improves the lot of the ethnic group whose image is so appropriated (Hackworth and Rekers 2005; Shaw et al. 2004). ‘Cosmopolitan’ is itself a keyword in the dreams of a distinctive lifestyle that real estate agents sell as part and parcel of condominiums in Manchester, UK, evoking trendy loft-living in a 24-hour café society (Young et al. 2006). Since this signification is entirely divorced from any actual contact with people or practices from other cultures, it takes cosmopolitan place-marketing one step beyond the repackaging of ethnic neighbourhoods. This is doubtless where the vodka cocktail and the women’s magazine come in: they are cosmopolitan not because they represent international solidarity or openness to the Other, but because they give their consumer a patina of worldly sophistication. From this perspective, commodified cosmopolitanism in my street study might involve the sale of exotic food, music, clothes, and the like,

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where the transaction is seen as inauthentic, either because the seller or the goods are not ‘really’ of that culture or because the buyer buys in order to show off his or her knowledge of those goods. For instance, a vegetarian restaurant on one street appears to be Mexican, but the Anglo-Canadian owner told me: Oh, it just suits the ingredients, you know, like to have a restaurant with almost strictly organic ingredients and keep it affordable and substantial, you need to be pretty basic. [. . . ] But I never say it’s Mexican first, I say it’s vegetarian, Mexican-style. This is a rather mild-mannered commodification, since it makes no claims to ethnic authenticity (organic authenticity being another matter). A case of distinction could be made for the Italian restaurants and delicatessens on all the streets except working-class rue de Liège, which benefit from the strong culinary cachet of Italian cuisine in Quebec to attract an affluent French-Canadian and AngloCanadian clientele. But whatever inter-ethnic exchange takes place on their premises, the question is what the participants really do with that exchange – and it is not easy to access such interpretations. People are rarely as candid as the ‘culinary tourist’ quoted above about ‘using’ the streets’ multi-ethnic mix for their own ends; rather, they tend to present ethnocultural diversity as a virtue in itself. Can a researcher accept their enthusiasm at face value, or should the commercial setting necessarily raise suspicions of a strategy to extract cultural capital? More obvious, if indirect, commodification of openness to the Other is evident in press coverage of St-Viateur Street and Mile End. Journalists ‘discovered’ (and doubtless some moved to) the neighbourhood during the late 1990s and early 2000s, with articles referring to the street booming in quantity and changing in quality from ‘real news’ to celebrations of all the opportunities for unique, exotic consumption the multi-ethnic neighbourhood offers. For example, a review of a restaurant adds: ‘St-Viateur is still one of those delightful streets that shaped Montréal’s unique character. Go there and you’ll find little Polish shops, barbers like in Seville and the kind of Italian cafés we just love’ (Mollé 2005, my translation). This gradual construction and dissemination of the myth of cool, cosmopolitan Mile End doubtless contributes to the continuing residential and commercial gentrification of the neighbourhood. On the other hand, it still has its roots in shared experience and representations such as the Saint-Jean-Baptiste celebration discussed above. On 1 June 2007, the spirit of that festival was reincarnated when


the Montréal branch of Ubisoft, a transnational gaming software company, organised a street party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its move to premises on St-Viateur. This could easily be seen as an attempt by Ubisoft to enhance its own image by exploiting the (multi-ethnic) cultural capital of the street and the neighbourhood. This reading is partly valid: Ubisoft did have the experience and resources to conduct a smooth and successful publicity campaign for the festival, resulting in newspaper articles that made it clear who its chief organisers were. On the other hand, Ubisoft was also aware that over-publicising the company would provoke resentment, not only in the neighbourhood but also among its own employees. The event was simply dubbed St-Viateur festival de rue (St-Viateur Street Festival) and on the day, the company’s logo was barely visible. While this low profile again could have won kudos for the company, it also meant that some festival participants were unaware of the Ubisoft connection, attributing the event instead to other music and community institutions that helped organise it. The company received surprisingly few mentions in the 100 responses to a questionnaire survey I conducted at the event.6 Thus, the commodification of St-Viateur Street’s multi-ethnicity is not all-embracing, even if it is one of the ingredients of its own urban cosmopolitan cocktail.

Conclusion Cosmopolitanism, then, can be understood as a kind of political philosophy, identity politics, personal disposition or commodification of otherness. It has a variety of antonyms and is rarely morally neutral. This ambiguity makes it all the more obvious that we need to study actually existing cosmopolitanisms in everyday lives, in specific places, exploring real people’s practices and discourses of being open or closed to the Other. A more complete analysis, going beyond mere indicators, would also examine in more depth what kinds of worlds people want to belong to, or be citizens of, and how their claims are affected by subject positions determined by class, gender, ethnicity, mobility, age and the like. Still, as the material that I have presented shows, a given activity, representation, exchange or event can be open to multiple and sometimes contradictory readings of cosmopolitanism. I would argue that it is particularly important to recognise that what appears to be superficial inter-ethnic exchange in the sphere of consumption – that is, commodified cosmopolitanism – often contains a thread of personal or identity cosmopolitanism that is tightly woven into other, perhaps more

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consequential spheres of action. The glossy image of the cosmopolitan city is pervasive, but reductive: we need to know about the full spectrum of street-level cosmopolitanisms.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society, University of Toronto, May 2007. I would like to thank Annick Germain, Heidi Hoernig and the two reviewers for their useful comments. I gratefully acknowledge the Canada Graduate Studies Doctoral Scholarship I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2. This assertion ignores the significant ethnocultural differences between Aboriginal peoples and settlers in non-urban areas, which can also be appropriated and repackaged, particularly for tourists. However, in Canada at least, studies of immigration and ethnicity remain conceptually severed from Aboriginal issues, and my research is no exception. 3. Street names in Montréal are officially French, but I sometimes use their informal English names for ease of reading. 4. Identifying the ethnicity of ethnic businesses is certainly not a simple affair (Radice 2008). 5. A more useful opposite number for the cosmopolitan (in this variety, at least) might be an etymologically Greek rendering of ‘citizen of one’s own back yard’ – a polites of the oikos, perhaps? 6. Fieldwork at the festival included observations and a ‘research kiosk’ where festival-goers were invited to ‘tell me about [their] St-Viateur’ by means of brief interviews or a fairly open-ended two-page questionnaire. My thanks to Marilena Liguori for her assistance at the kiosk and Nathalie Boucher for her collaboration in the conduct and analysis of this part of my research.

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Neighbourhood Shopping Streets in Multi-ethnic Montréal 157 Simon, P. (1997) ‘Les représentations des relations interethniques dans un quartier cosmopolite’, Recherches sociologiques, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 5–37. Skrbis, Z., G. Kendall and I. Woodward (2004) ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism: Between Humanist Ideal and Grounded Social Category’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 115–36. Szerszynski, B. and J. Urry (2002) ‘Cultures of Cosmopolitanism’, Sociological Review, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 461–81. Vertovec, S. and R. Cohen (eds) (2002a) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Vertovec, S. and R. Cohen (2002b) ‘Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 1–22. Ville de Montréal (2005) réussir@montréal: Stratégie de développement économique 2005– 2010 – Sommaire (Montréal: Ville de Montréal). Werbner, P. (1999) ‘Global Pathways, Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds’, Social Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 17–35. Werbner, P. (2006) ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 2–3, pp. 496–8. Wise, A. (2005) ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb.’ Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1–2, pp. 171–86. Yeˆgenoˆglu, M. (2005) ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in a Globalized World’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 103–31. Young, C., M. Diep and S. Drabble (2006) ‘Living with Difference? The “Cosmopolitan City” and Urban Reimaging in Manchester, UK’, Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 10, pp. 1687–714. Zachary, P. G. (2000) The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge: Picking Globalism’s Winners and Losers (New York: Public Affairs).


Part IV Leisure


8 The Colour of Muscle: Multiculturalism at a Brooklyn Bodybuilding Gym Jamie Sherman

I was dawdling near the reception desk of the gym, scanning the room for ethnographic inspiration, when a heated discussion broke through the cacophony of tinny pop music and clanking weights. ‘Reverend Billy’, a wiry man wearing a black do-rag and white sleeveless undershirt, was sweating furiously on the Stairmaster while shouting passionately at someone I had never seen before: a broadly muscled, magnetic AfricanAmerican man with an air of mischief. This man, between sets of dead lifts (an exercise where a barbell is lifted from the floor to about waist height, keeping the back straight, and the knees slightly bent), was clearly taking pleasure in working Reverend Billy (who is not, in fact, a Reverend) into a lather. Reverend Billy’s usual workout partner, a Jamaican Israelite whom most people call Rasta, was on the next Stairmaster over, muttering and shaking his head. The argument was theological, as it usually was whenever Reverend Billy was around (hence the nickname). I walked over and took a seat on the stationary bike next to them, pedalling half-heartedly. As I knew they would, the three men turned their attention to me and I asked them, perhaps a little coyly, what they were arguing about. Regaining the momentum I had interrupted in passing through, Reverend Billy insisted that he had a duty to bear witness to the Truth of the Lord. The dead-lifter, who eventually introduced himself as Lenny, argued that while that was true, you can’t bash people over the head with it. Berating people won’t bring them into the Church; you have to begin with respect for the beliefs of others. Take me for example, and Lenny turned to me, ‘you’re Jewish, right?’. Reverend Billy, before I could answer, told him I was. Lenny had thought so. One of the women who lives in his apartment is Jewish, he recognised something – he gestured to his face, 161

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meaning mine. Lenny told the other two, his voice gaining the cadence and rhythm of a sermon, that you have to have respect for Jewish people, there is something to learn from them. They take care of their own. They build their own schools and educate their children. He then said something I couldn’t quite follow about how these Jewish kids then go to Harvard and instead of an 80, the professor gives them a 95. I wondered to myself whether this was a reference to the value of education, or a case of some Jewish Conspiracy that Lenny admired and would like to emulate in the black community. Aloud, and pointlessly, I volunteered that, actually, I had gone to public school. Rasta interjected that the Holocaust was God’s punishment visited on the Jews, but also on others, that there have been other Holocausts – in Africa. Rasta’s voice was pitched low, yet infused with the force of conviction. Like Reverend Billy, his accent became more pronounced when he spoke passionately. The Jews of Europe, he said, were sinful and therefore brought the Holocaust on themselves as God’s punishment, but also, and more importantly, there have been other Holocausts that have gone unnoticed because they happened to people of colour. Lenny, his eye on me, pointed out that evil is not distributed by colour. Reverend Billy, introducing a new topic, asked the other two ‘Is she Jewish? Or white?’ They debated this for a moment and then Lenny, having by this time completely abandoned his workout to stand by me, hand resting flirtatiously on the handlebars of my stationary bike, told us that beneath the skin everyone is the same colour and that, more importantly, for him I am neither Jewish nor white, but when he looks at me what he sees is ‘Woman’. He said it twice. Woman. I asked whether it was not important, even so, to recognise that I am the beneficiary of an evil system that discriminates against people of colour. Rasta and Reverend Billy nodded vigorously, sweat dripping. Lenny said yes, but that recognition is an important step by each of us. You have to know where you are, sure, like if he is walking through Bensonhurst (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) he can see it’s all Italian, Irish, and also maybe a few Jews come over from Midwood (an adjacent neighbourhood), and that it’s completely different from being in the inner city, but no matter what, you have to look at people as people, as the children of God. Living that way, he is never afraid, no matter where he is, not even in Bensonhurst. I said that sounded great, but I wasn’t going to go walking in Crown Heights (a poor, mostly black neighbourhood of Brooklyn) by myself at 1 o’clock in the morning. He laughed and said ‘of course – there is a difference between faith and stupidity’. We all laughed and I asked Lenny about his religious conversion from what he described as his former life of

The Colour of Muscle: Multiculturalism at a Brooklyn Gym 163

sin which, he emphasised repeatedly, included lots of fornication with several women at once, fast cars, and (again) lots of fornication . . . with several women at once. I offer this narrative by way of introduction to some of the themes I hope to tease out in the course of this essay. In particular, key entanglements of race and ethnicity in the United States. While, as Philip Kasinitz makes eloquently and perceptively clear in his ethnography of West Indian identity formation in New York City, race and ethnicity are distinct entities (Kasinitz 1992), the difference is blurred in this account, in part because it is at times elided and at others brought into question at Brooklyn Gym: am I Jewish, or am I white? Bracketing for a moment the role of gender while acknowledging that it is central, that raced bodies are always also gendered bodies (that ultimately for some I am Woman), I want to think about the dynamics of race and ethnicity as they flow through social interaction in this bodybuilding gym in Brooklyn, New York. To what extent are categories of cultural difference relevant to this space? In what ways do they shape or not shape everyday social experience? How are such categories of difference deployed, by whom and to what social ends?

Brooklyn Gym, an introduction Brooklyn Gym, as I call it here, is located at the cusp of two neighbourhoods: upscale Park Slope, and not so affluent Sunset Park. Park Slope is predominantly, though by no means entirely, white; Sunset Park residents are contrastingly less wealthy and less white. Largely Hispanic, the neighbourhood is home to significant immigrant populations from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other parts of Latin America, as well as India, China and, historically, Scandinavia. In recent years, the demographic of the blocks immediately surrounding Brooklyn Gym has changed, with working-class Irish, Italian and Puerto Rican residents increasingly bought out or pushed out by the expansion of Park Slope that began in the early 1990s. Brooklyn Gym has been in its current location, the basement below a Korean grocery and a discount dry-goods store, since shortly after its founding in 1979. In contrast to the range of services offered by larger sports clubs, Brooklyn Gym is dark, dingy, cramped and dilapidated, offering no classes, no childcare, and relatively few aerobic options. Of the small number of treadmills, bicycles, and Stairmasters, some are not working and, members say, haven’t done in recent memory. Most of the space is dedicated to a variety of hulking resistance training machines in steel and worn black

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vinyl, and a large array of ‘free weights’. The weight equipment, in contrast to the treadmills and bikes, is generally in working if somewhat shabby condition, with tears in the padding and alarming amounts of dust collecting in the crevasses. When I mentioned seeing a very large, very dead cockroach behind the ‘Butt Blaster’, another member said, only half joking, that he thought it had been there for over a year now. On the other hand, Brooklyn Gym is remarkably inexpensive, offering low daily, monthly and yearly rates on a cash-only basis. The original owner was, and still is, active in the world of competitive bodybuilding, organising and promoting contests and sponsoring athletes. In the 1980s and 1990s, while the gym was still under his ownership, bodybuilders frequently travelled across town, and even across the country, to train at Brooklyn Gym. Since then, ownership has shifted several times and subsequent proprietors have been less inclined to promote and sponsor bodybuilders. As a result, membership has declined and a greater proportion of the people who train there are less interested in bodybuilding per se than in proximity, the cheap, commitment-free membership, and the personal trainers who work out of the gym on an ad hoc basis. For enthusiasts, however, and in particular for devotees of ‘all natural’ (non-steroid using) bodybuilding, Brooklyn Gym remains something of an icon and a good number of people still travel from outside the immediate vicinity. In addition, there is a fairly substantial West Indian contingent, drawn by word of mouth, its relative similarity to gyms ‘back home’, and the existing core of other Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Barbadians and Haitians. Thus Brooklyn Gym is a neighbourhood institution, yet also draws from a broad swathe of New York City’s cultural fabric. In comparison with the more upscale gym that is literally across the street, it is also more working-class, and less white. The practicalities of identifying and navigating difference in this urban context attest to both the fluidity of distinctions, and their persistence as social categories. Cultural, ethnic and racial difference are both assumed and denied through practices that range from the censure of racialised language to the verbal and practised assertion of a bodily aesthetic that rests beneath the surface of the skin, while social distinctions between groups are drafted into local economies of power and status.

‘Man, you look practically black, you’re like a black man’ – speaking of difference Douglas Foley and Kirby Moss, in their contribution to an edited volume on cultural diversity in the United States, generalise that in the


late 1990s, anthropologists shifted their focus from cultural differences to the mechanisms that construct such differences. Through studies of how dominant societies produce stigmatised others, and of how those stigmatised others counter by producing their own, self-valorising images, scholars sought to understand what role negative stereotypes play in sustaining the uneven distribution of power between groups (Foley and Moss in Susser and Patterson 2000: 343). Expressions of negative stereotypes or racist language on the part of individuals represent, from such a perspective, submissions to the hegemonic order, while counter-images offer resistance. In this section, I argue that everyday interactions at Brooklyn Gym do not fit snugly into this model of dominance and resistance. Instead, bodybuilders take up tropes of racial distinction as markers of difference that stand in for, and re-work, a range of other relationships. It was a weekday evening and Mike, a 6ft 4in man with blond hair, blue eyes, pink skin and an easy laugh, was flushed and red after a training session with Bruce. James, an African-American man in his thirties who teaches at a federal corrections facility, called out to him teasingly ‘Man, you look practically black, you’re like a black man!’ They laughed and I joined in. I asked them if they could tell who is who anyhow, wondering if they shared my sense that, seriously now, reading these things is not so simple. Mike told us that his wife is a mix of Jamaican and Syrian and his daughter is often mistaken for Puerto Rican. James, whose skin is dark, said his great grandfather is white – Irish, in fact, nodding to Mike – and his father has light skin and green eyes. People never believe he is his father’s son. Then, speaking loudly, directing his comment at Gary, who was nearby, James said ‘yeah, but Gary, man, he’s the triple threat. Gary! Aren’t you the triple threat?’ Gary entered the sphere of our conversation grouped around the bench press ‘What? Oh. Yeah.’ Gary is a personable man with a shaved head and stylish wire-rimmed glasses who, in addition to being a professional drummer, trains clients in the gym. He frequently works out with James and a loose-knit group of about four to six others. I was mystified by James’s comment and asked for an explanation. Italian, Puerto Rican and black, James said, joking that Gary is confused, doesn’t know whether to steal the car or torch it. Everyone laughed, Gary included. While James’ comment regarding Gary as the ‘triple threat’ obviously draws on negative racial stereotypes, to stop there is to miss the way James draws on such images, the social ‘work’ to which he puts them. In suggesting that Mike, at that moment a shade of fuschia, looked black, James playfully offered up Mike’s whiteness as mutable; Mike was black

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when working out. Through laughter, they also marked the absurdity of the comparison, the impossibility of Mike being black. Yet the point of the initial move seems to me less about race in an obvious sense, than about friendship. James used race to reach out to Mike, to assert a relationship between them in which such ribbing is acceptable. In laughing himself, Mike acknowledged James’s gesture, and accepted the overture. Such comments operate within the framework of existing racial power relations; had Mike, for example suggested that James looked white, or called him ‘Blacky’ in the way that other gym members sometimes call Mike ‘Whitey’, the connotations and thus the social effect would have been far different. Yet James’s remarks are not reducible to a commentary on race, but rather draw on race analogically, as a marker of difference: in this case, a difference erased. James’s comment asserts a commonality, however ironic and incomplete, and an intimacy that is made more effective for its play with the often taboo topic of race. In the second part of the conversation, James included Gary in a joke that marked him as a hybrid of stereotyped categories, while also reinforcing a hierarchy in which James frequently picks on Gary through friendly insults. Gary generally submits to such poking good-naturedly, but I have rarely seen him tease James back. James’s humour thus articulates and reinforces the existing hierarchy of the gym as a social space, using race as the medium (not the matter) through which to assert his dominance. Such playfulness on the edge of insult is typical of the gym more generally, and in this ‘locker-room’ humour, group identities are invoked almost (though not quite) as frequently as gender. They mark difference, but are also – and this is my point – the operative tools of inclusion. It is rare in the gym that conversations become meta-discourses, addressing directly the issue of what should and should not be said. The following exchange is an exception, yet serves again to illustrate the variety of social functions served through the invocation of terms of difference. Joe, a Latino man of 20 or so (I originally thought him Middle Eastern but was later corrected), called out to his friend, another young Latino male: ‘Come on! Lift it niggah!’ James, who was next to me, stopped and yelled ‘Hey! You can’t say that!’ He called out to Bruce, across the room: ‘Yo! Bruce!’ ‘What?’ ‘New Kid used the N-word’ ‘He can’t say that’ ‘Tell him! Tell him he can’t say that.’


Bruce turned to Joe, his voice deepening authoritatively, ‘We don’t use that kind of language in here’. Joe blustered, was quiet for a moment, then rallied: ‘Well okay, but can I call him a faggot?’ Bruce paused theatrically, pulled a face and said ‘yeah, sure. That’s okay’. People laughed, the momentary tension drained out of the room and everyone resumed their workout. On the one hand, this exchange represents a clear instance of social gate-keeping; ‘New Kid’ was reprimanded and educated into understanding that the ‘N-word’ is inappropriate here. It also demonstrated and reinforced the distribution of social status in the room. James calling out ‘New Kid’ emphasised Joe’s status as younger, smaller and newer than himself; appealing to Bruce for reinforcement acknowledged and bolstered Bruce’s position as a ‘big man’ in the gym. Bruce’s exchange with Joe reinforced an etiquette of speaking about race, while demonstrating a hierarchy of prejudice that allows negative sexual epithets, but not racial ones. ‘Faggot’ is okay whereas ‘nigger’ is not. At the same time, and as importantly, ‘faggot’ is used in a humorous way to diffuse tension and reintegrate Joe and his friend back into the unified (albeit homophobic and masculine) body of the gym. Bruce (and Joe) drew on the derogatory quality of the term faggot as a social mechanism to ease the pain of Joe’s public humiliation. In Lévi-Straussian fashion, bodybuilders bricolage the found objects of hegemonic culture in navigating moment-to-moment social contexts. Relations of difference – here, black to white, nigger to faggot, white to Jew – stand in for and re-work other relationships – James to Mike, Bruce to Joe, Lenny to me. At the same time, such invocations of race and ethnicity play with, stretch, argue against and yet, ultimately, also reinforce race as a relevant category of difference, a key trope through which social life is experienced and articulated both inside and out of the gym.

‘I thought he was a gringo, and then I heard him speak’ – reading difference At Brooklyn Gym, both I and my interlocutors are constantly and consistently engaged in the reading of the bodies of others into categories of racial and ethnic belonging. They are assigned according to style and phenotype, as Lenny reads me Jewish by the shape of my face, and also negotiable, as both my Jewishness and my whiteness come under discussion (though, in this case, ultimately trumped by my certainty as Woman). In another instance, one brisk December evening I was ‘doing back and shoulders’ with Lorena, a Puerto Rican woman of 35 whom

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I had met a few times before but did not yet know well. As we chatted our way through the workout, Lorena mentioned Omar, a man she had been dating for about eight months. I didn’t recognise the name and she described him to me: tall, lean, gingery red hair, wears his baseball cap backwards, rides a bike to the gym. I knew who she meant; I had always thought of him as one of the white guys. Hearing his name was Omar, I wondered aloud if he was Muslim, maybe Middle Eastern – I had had a boyfriend once who was Moroccan and had red hair like that. She laughed and said no, he’s Puerto Rican, like herself. Lots of Puerto Ricans, she told me, are named Omar, it’s a Spanish name. ‘But,’ she laughed, ‘I thought he was a gringo, until I heard him speak!’ She mimed an exaggerated double take with her mouth open, the shock of hearing him speak – not just any Spanish, but Puerto Rican Spanish. Lorena doesn’t date white guys. She prefers black and Spanish men. White guys are too stiff, she told me. ‘They don’t have that “–” ’ and she made a physical gesture, flicking her eyes and moving her body to suggest a certain kind of sexiness. ‘Oh yeah,’ I responded, ‘that “–” ’ and I made a similar motion, moving my hips one way and eyes the other; we laughed our agreement. Among the several things that emerge from this account of female bonding and male objectification, I point to the obvious. Both Lorena and I initially, automatically, made an identification of Omar’s ethnicity. His pale skin and ginger hair, along with the baseball cap he likes to wear backwards, the bicycle he rides, and perhaps the jeans that fit closer to his body, marked him as white to us. That I know there are many non-Muslim Arabs, that Latin Americans are not all dark-skinned, and that it is almost certainly true that a man could be Muslim, Puerto Rican and white all at the same time is less relevant here than how easily we drew on a similar understanding of black and Latino masculinity as having that ‘ – ’, and the shorthand cultural assumptions both Lorena and I made in reading and later re-reading Omar’s ethnic identity. Collectively, I and the other gym members draw on a set of somewhat arbitrary markers, pieced together from a combination of personal experiences, such as red-headed Moroccan boyfriends, and more general social stereotypes, such as the fit of a man’s pants, to ‘read’ the people we see into a set of ethno-racial categories. If it seems to go without saying that (duh), of course one can’t help but see that this person is Asian and that person is black, then in pointing out what is obvious, I hope I make clear what is often overlooked in the taken for granted; namely, as Clifford Geertz argues, that phenomena that appear as common sense (the duh factor) are, in fact, ways of


ordering the world. Such orders are characterised precisely by the way they blend into our sense of reality, the way they seem to be ‘what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows’ (Geertz 1983: 75). Thus, if it is ‘common sense’ that we notice and interpret visual cues into racial and ethnic identifications, then another self-evident truism, and one that troubles the first, lies in the way Lorena and I came to see our first readings of Omar as erroneous. Lorena and I revised our initial impressions, realizing that, ‘in fact’, Omar was no gringo at all, but a Puerto Rican, with that certain ‘ – ’. The impossibility of cleanly, accurately reading race and ethnicity onto the bodies of a large percentage of the gym population, of New York City and of the US more generally, speaks to the systemic fiction of such categories as either necessary or natural. Pointing out the negotiability of racial and ethnic identity, however, holds within it the tacit acceptance that these categories describe in some way what a person ‘really’ is, that they somehow capture a ‘truth’ subject to verification and authentication. In recent years, anthropologists have spent considerable energy debunking the biological validity of race, proving almost repetitively that human diversity does not and cannot be divided into distinct races. Such writings represent an important step in recognising and accounting for anthropology’s complicity in the history of race. Yet they have had little to no discernable impact on the systemic racism of American social life. John L. Jackson Jr. suggests that the futility of such falsifications, in the face of the overwhelming presence of race in social life, lies in misunderstanding the logic of race as an organising principle. Efforts to falsify race engage the construct on its own terms, as a question of authentication. Authentication (and falsification), he argues, operate between an authenticating subject and an object that is evaluated. Race, when considered in terms of falseness or authenticity, is objectified and objectifying. To argue about the authenticity of race (or lack thereof) thus mimics the dynamic of racialised thinking that allows it to carry out its objectifying project in the first place (Jackson 2005). Jackson’s discussion of authenticity focuses less on racial identification and classification, as I have here, than on the bundle of generalisations, assumptions and ‘scripts’ for which such categories are often a shorthand – whatever it is we think we mean when we say a person is ‘white’, or ‘Jewish’, ‘Puerto Rican’ or ‘Muslim’, that Jews get 95s at Harvard, and Latino men have that ‘ – ’. The logic of authenticity, in the sense that Jackson uses the term, refers to the critique of individual performances in relationship to objective and objectifying characteristics that come pre-packaged with those identifications.

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Jackson’s formulation presumes a priori the classification of others into racial and ethnic categories. When Jackson’s informant remarks that all the diners in a Harlem café are white except for her and him, Jackson tells her, and us, that he has already made a note of it (Jackson 2005: 46); they, like Lorena and I, like Lenny, Reverend Billy, Rasta and I, read the people around them into categories for which, in that initial moment, whatever notions the apparently white diners hold regarding what Karen Brodkin calls their ‘racio-ethnic identities’, are quite literally immaterial (Brodkin 1998: 366). Such processes of authentication, in which I deliberately misuse Jackson’s terminology to address the initial and almost subconscious reading of bodies as objects into categories of racial and ethnic distinction, are pervasive. As Foucault would argue, they are not the sole property of the dominant classes, the faceless corporations, the government, or some ideological haunting that floats in the ether, nor even the ubiquitous media devils. Racial and ethnic categories are constructed, performed and authenticated through habits of seeing, hearing, speaking and writing that are shared across imaginary lines of colour/culture. This is not to suggest that institutions, laws and media play no role in the creation and perpetuation of hegemonic categories of difference but rather to argue that the practices of everyday interaction are implicated in the construction of these hegemonies at all levels and across social domains. It is further to suggest that the distinction between the classification of others and the set of assumptions associated with those categories, while important, is always necessarily incomplete. Addressing this problem of objectification, Jackson suggests we approach race in terms of sincerity, rather than authenticity. Like authentication, sincerity refers to an evaluative relationship; unlike authenticity, however, sincerity operates between subjects. Jackson’s theoretical and programmatic move is to shift the focus of evaluation from a set of qualities distinctly separate from the performer, an ideal role which she or he approaches with more or less success, to the quality of the relationship between performer and performance, to the honesty and integrity of the attempt itself. In some ways, this seems to me a phenomenological rendering of Lenny’s determination to live in faith, to see people as people, even in Bensonhurst. Yet to misquote Lenny, there is a distance between faith and stupidity, one that mirrors the relationship between agency and constraint in the rendering, the performance and the negotiation of identity. The difference between authenticity and sincerity is not an opposition, such that one is fully the alternative of the other, but a shifting terrain in which at times one, and at


times another may be foregrounded. At Brooklyn Gym, both processes are at play as Lenny reads me as Jewish, and therefore more likely to receive 95s at Harvard (though in fact I never did) and in his determination to view ‘people as people, as the children of God’. Such faith, however, must acknowledge the constraints of stupidity. The trick, as Lenny makes clear, is in navigating this terrain, in knowing where we are, and when, for a black man alone at night in Bensonhurst, one’s own sincerity is beside the point.

The colour of muscle: on bodybuilding and difference In the United States, in contrast to Latin America, race (and to a lesser extent ethnicity) is historically understood as lying beneath the skin such that, regardless of appearances, one may be ‘really’ Puerto Rican, even if one displays none of the visually available attributes generally associated with Latinidad, as in the example of Omar. At the same time, however, and despite this understanding, race is generally imagined as physically displayed on the surface of the body, such that one can look at a person and see that they are white like the diners in Jackson’s Harlem café, Jewish like myself, or black like James. Bodybuilding, like race in the social imaginary, is articulated in the formal appearance of the body and evaluated through particular modes of seeing. Significantly, it offers a mode of viewing and evaluating the aesthetics of bodily form in which racial phenotypical variations are elided. Bodybuilding practice is dedicated to the pursuit of what Fletcher Linder calls the ‘big body’. Not merely size alone, the concept of bigness in bodybuilding refers to an ideal combination of muscle mass (the bigger the better), shape (the more symmetrical the better), and definition (the leaner the better) (Linder 2007). In competition, bodybuilders line up on stage according to classes of age and weight to flex their muscles in a series of poses that are compared and evaluated by judges according to these aesthetic criteria. In the gym, bodybuilders similarly dedicate considerable thought, time, effort, and money into looking at, gauging and perfecting their physical selves. Mirrors line the walls at Brooklyn Gym, and members can frequently be seen flexing in standard postures such as ‘front double bicep’ and ‘most muscular’, evaluating their bodies for the results of their training. Results are seen in the degree to which ones body begins to approach the ‘big’: that ideal balance of symmetry, mass and definition. Bodybuilding, in short, is steeped in processes of viewing and evaluating the form of the human body.

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Successfully becoming ‘big’ lies in complex manipulations of physical training and dietary regime. The careful management of metabolism, nutrition and physical activity are understood as a dialectic between individual ‘experience’, knowing ‘what works’ for one’s own body, and ‘knowledge’, in turn comprising a general understanding of physiology, and the physical, bodily comprehension of form and technique that enables the bodybuilder to craft his or her body into a work of art while avoiding injury. Knowledge is literally embodied such that long time members who reminisce about a time when the gym was filled with ‘huge’ men, will often follow this by mentioning how much ‘knowledge was in the room’ back then. In a variation on Foucault, for whom knowledge represented calcified and hierarchical systems of thought produced through exertions of power (Foucault and Rabinow 1997: 9), big (or even better, ‘massive’ and ‘huge’) bodies invest and infuse their possessors with the power of having achieved such impressive ‘results’. Knowledge is power, and translates directly into status and authority in the gym. Put simply, the bigger your body, in the sense that it has been laid out here, the higher up the social ladder you are. James can pick on Gary not because he is a head taller than Gary, but because he is significantly leaner and more muscular. James asks Bruce to reprimand Joe because Bruce is physically, and therefore metaphorically, a bigger man than James. As Bruce put it, pointing to himself, flexing his pectoral muscles just a bit, ‘This is my authority’. Hierarchies of power within the gym, then, while rooted firmly within and upon bodily form, rely on criteria that escape the dynamics of racial and ethnic difference. This is not so because some black men rank highly on the social ladder there, but because blackness or Jewishness or Asianness are made irrelevant in so far as you can coax and train your body toward physical bigness. Bodybuilding as an industry is not colour blind and while this has been gradually changing, white athletes are historically more likely to receive lucrative endorsement contracts and appear on magazine covers than non-white competitors (see Klein 1993). Yet the aesthetics of bodybuilding, like the bodies of athletes at bodybuilding competitions uniformly tinted with tanning creams to a narrow spectrum of burnt carrot to burnt ochre, shifts our vision to a different spectrum. One afternoon at the gym, Bruce, who at 6ft 2in, 225lbs, and 5 per cent bodyfat is in every way a big man, told me he was planning to create a coffee-table book of photographs, depicting himself as a broad variety of superheroes, or as close as he could get without infringing on copyright laws. The project, he said, demanded substantial changes to his training regime toward emulating the musculature of specific


characters and perfecting an ability to flex in mid-air. That particular day, he and his workout partner, Robin, were doing pull-ups on a bar attached to the ‘dual cable station’ at the far end of the gym, next to the mirrors. At the end of each pull-up, he was adding a sort of ‘hop’ so that, for a moment, he was airborne. Between sets, his face lit up in that way that suggests he is both joking, and completely serious; he explained that it was really very important because Batman needs to get that extra lift in order to leap from gargoyle to gargoyle. For Bruce, whose complexion is very dark, distinctions in skin tone between himself and the superheroes, who are largely white, are not unseen in this endeavour, but rather immaterial. From the perspective of a bodybuilder, the look of the superhero, the masculine aesthetic, and the moral ideals he embodies lie in the form and shape of his physique, understood purely in terms of bigness. Hierarchies not based on race are hardly uncommon and neither negate nor substantially undermine systemic racism. Instances from the world of sports are particularly prominent. However, the social imaginary that posits race as written on the body, and habits of everyday viewing in which ethnicity is the central classificatory system are implicitly challenged in the way that bodybuilding constructs a mode of seeing that bypasses, without denying, racial distinctions. While one may rightfully doubt the potential of bodybuilding to substantially change dominant social inequalities, these subtle reconstructions must be taken into account as participating in what Michel de Certeau calls the ‘tactics’ of everyday life through which social actors, however minutely, redeploy the artifacts of culture toward (re)constructions of their own design (de Certeau 1984). Members of Brooklyn Gym claim that bodybuilding changes more than the shape of one’s body. In a Cartesian conceptualisation of the self as dually comprised of mind and matter, bodybuilding is seen as an act of will in which the mind emerges victorious, having overcome physical limitations to go ‘beyond what is humanly possible’. The effects of such personal and individual victories, they say, resonate beyond the gym, not only in the remaking of self into a more physically attractive package, but in the ability to overcome one’s limitations more generally. Jean Comaroff, in her influential study of the South African Tshidi, posits a mutually constitutive relationship between physical bodies and the body social such that efforts to ‘transform and allay the debilitating effects of social disorder tend to involve exertions to treat and repair the physical body, and vice versa’ (Comaroff 1985: 8). In this sense, then, the self-transformation that lies at the heart of bodybuilding as

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a project, and the self-transformation through faith that allows Lenny to walk, unafraid, through Bensonhurst are of a piece. Both projects assert the potential of the individual to (re)shape the world in which s/he lives. While this empowering vision of the self resonates well with the study of everyday practices and the role they play in constructing social life, emphasising individual agency in self and social transformation alike also tends toward a concealment of the structural conditions that constrain social life and maintain social inequities. Thus while in many ways bodybuilding as a practice, and the social space of Brooklyn Gym, may represent something of an oasis in which members are able to subvert, elide, refigure, and otherwise tamper with the constraints of race-based power differentials, we must also ask why such efforts must rely on leaps of faith and disciplinary measures that ‘go beyond the humanly possible’.

Conclusions and reprises Brooklyn Gym is hardly the embodiment of the liberal multicultural agenda. It is no rainbow-coloured dreamland, no Benetton ad in the flesh. Yet it offers a glimpse into an environment where people of many backgrounds interact in relative harmony. It is also a space where individuals of divergent social spheres find common ground, and otherwise unlikely friendships are made possible. I was reminded of the vast distance between, and the wide variety within, raced experiences of New York City when, in the midst of writing this essay, I was invited to lunch at Barney’s, an upscale department store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Hurrying uptown, late as usual, feeling overheated, frizzy and fleshy as I always do in that sleekly coiffed part of the city, I noted how strikingly white it was. So much so, that the few Asians and even fewer African-Americans stood out. What, I was wondering to myself, happens to the voices and experiences of these minority elites in the discourse of race that colours poverty as black and wealth as white? At that moment, I passed a crew of workmen resurfacing the road with steaming, reeking asphalt, almost overwhelming in the August heat. One of the workers, all of whom were black, glanced at me and though he showed no sign of recognition, I was almost sure it was Carlos, a very dark-skinned Colombian immigrant I had chatted with briefly at the gym a few weeks before. I didn’t stop. It may not have been him. But it could have been. The social divides that exist between myself and the wealthy denizens on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, and those that separate me from


Carlos, or the worker who could have been him, viewed alongside zones where such divisions are criss-crossed, as in Brooklyn Gym, create a dynamic, layered and in some ways elusive picture of structural forces and everyday practices. Moreover, the attention paid here to race and ethnicity as the key referents of ‘multiculturalism’ is not entirely borne out in directly questioning gym members. That is, when I asked people if they saw the gym as a ‘multicultural space’, to a man (and woman) they said yes, absolutely. When I asked what it meant, however, to say the gym was a ‘multicultural place’, responses did not cohere to a narrow understanding of the ‘cultures’ in multiculturalism as a euphemism for race and ethnicity. Instead, what I was told over and over was some variation on: ‘we get all kinds of people here: black, white, Spanish, cops, cons, PhDs, Rastafarians and rappers.’ That collective identities are both layered and contextual has long been noted in social science literatures. Thus it should not be surprising that alongside distinctions such as ‘black’ and ‘white’, Brooklyn Gym members tend to identify themselves and others more narrowly as Puerto Rican, Dominican, Caribbean, Barbadian, Haitian, Italian and so on. And while, to some extent, one might argue that responses to the question of the nature of multiculturalism may reflect a general discomfort around explicit discussions of race in the United States, it remains significant that differences of education, class, profession and fashion are represented on equal footing with race and ethnicity as signifiers of the multi- in ‘multiculturalism’. Such everyday blurring suggests, at the very least, a far more fluid experience of difference than is captured in calcified discourses of ‘multiculturalism’ that reduce social distinctions to hard-bounded groupings of ethnic and racial categories. Racial thinking, seeing and speaking permeate the everyday experiences of life in Brooklyn Gym, in New York City and beyond. They structure and colour the world we live in, infusing our days with the question of who is really what. Simultaneously, racial actors sincerely draw upon these thought systems, these bodies of knowledge, to dismantle and redeploy them in social construction projects of their own making. Explicit references to ethnicity in verbal exchanges in the gym articulate and serve social ends that are not about these distinctions. Rather, racial and ethnic differences serve to mark and reconcile other relationships of power within the localised hierarchy of the gym itself. Categories of multicultural belonging are taken up in the gym as found objects of culture, part of the bricolage through which we creatively seek to carve a space for our presence in the world. Such fragments are not innocent, but shape experience, and are imbricated in the mantling and

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dismantling of social inequalty. In addition, for people in the gym, as in the broader context of New York City, the ‘reading’ of the bodies of others into categories of racial belonging remains deeply embedded in habits of seeing, thinking and interacting such that these identifications represent a key trope through which others are situated in relation to oneself, and in terms of which relationships are constructed and negotiated. At the same time, the implicitly objectifying processes of such identifications are resisted through conscious efforts to evaluate others intersubjectively, ‘to see people as people’. In Brooklyn Gym, everyday practices are carried out within categories of difference, while also reframing and escaping them as they are calcified in academic discourses of racism and multiculturalism alike. Academic framings of the multicultural must move beyond reductions of society into census categories of difference, toward a different way of seeing how they are practised and produced in the messy interstices of daily life.

References Brodkin, K. (1998) How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press). Comaroff, J. (1985) Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Foucault, M. and P. Rabinow (1997) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press). Geertz, C. (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books). Jackson, J. L. (2005) Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Kasinitz, P. (1992) Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Klein, A. M. (1993) Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction (Albany: State University of NY Press). Linder, F. (2007) ‘Life as Art, and Seeing the Promise of Big Bodies’, American Ethnologist, vol. 34, pp. 451–72. Susser, I. and T. C. Patterson (2000) Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader (Oxford, UK and Malden MA: Blackwell).

9 Fishing the Georges River: Cultural Diversity and Urban Environments Heather Goodall, Stephen Wearing, Denis Byrne and Allison Cadzow

Introduction Fishing is the most popular recreation in Australia but there are many different ways in which Australians have fished. Here are just a few extracts from interviews with people who live near and use the Georges River, a large tidal river in Sydney’s suburban south-west.1 They suggest the diverse skills and knowledge on the river, but also the currents of emotion, fear and politics which swirl around everyday fishing: Mahmoud lives in Bankstown but his family came from Syria: . . . we use a traditional Syrian or Lebanese rod where there’s no reels. It’s about a metre long and it’s telescopic . . . so it comes out to some six metres and then from the end tip, a fishing line is just tied to the top and then you put a sinker, a float and then another line down with the hook. Kel, from an Irish background, grew up in the Depression-era squatter settlement at One Tree Point on Salt Pan Creek, which runs into the Georges River (Earnshaw 2001; Barnham 2003). He reminisced about the 1930s: Me and my brothers made prawn nets out of chaff bags strung together and we’d use a hurricane lamp at night time to go down and prawn and take them home and cook them straight out of the river into the pot. 177

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John, an Aboriginal man, grew up on Salt Pan Creek in the 1950s. Calling himself ‘a lazy fisherman’, he explained: . . . if you go when the coast wattle is in flower, you can pop the flower and leaves into the deep inlets and pools around the Salt Pan. The next tide cleans it all out. But when you do it, it takes the oxygen out of the water and you can just scoop the fish out. Cuong, who came from Vietnam as a young boy in the 1980s, described how his family’s growing financial security was expressed through their fishing gear: So when they got here, they’d just buy a rod, just a stick, back when they poor. And when they got a bit more, they got introduced to the whole fishing technology and that’s when they’d first buy themselves a few expensive parts and they’d go fishing. My uncle actually went to Queensland and bought a net for $400 but he only used it once, because it’s illegal. [. . .] he was so excited about it because it was about 20 years that he hasn’t been able to find a net. In Vietnam, he didn’t do it that often but it was part of his childhood, so when he found the net he just had to buy it, no matter how expensive it was! Coming back from Queensland the next day, he got up at about four o’clock, got all my other uncles up and went to the national park just to try the net. They caught nothing at all . . . In contrast here is an Anglo-Australian teenager who’d grown up on the Georges River. He told us he’s never fished, ‘the water is too polluted’. But he’s spent all his childhood with family and mates on the banks and out on boats. He says: . . . anyway, it’s the Asian fishermen who take all the little fish. They never throw anything back. I don’t know if they’re Vietnamese. Hell, they’re just Asian. When we were kids we’d walk past their buckets and try and push them over, and we’d throw stones at them when we were out in the boats because they’re dragging. We’d see them out there with their throw-nets, dragging the river at night. We were down there. They take all the prawns. It wrecks the river. And here is Helen, from the Sudanese community, describing how she learned to fish from the people along the river’s banks:

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There’s this old guy I met a couple of times when I first started fishing and he showed me a lot of what I needed to know, he was an old Greek guy, like a retired tiler or builder. He used to have these home-concocted baits. [. . .] And then, when he was showing me that bait, then some other guys, a group of young Lebanese guys, would come up to me and go, ‘Nah, we’ve been catching all day on steak’. These diverse views arise because fishing is tangled up in the rapid cultural, social and environmental changes which have occurred on the Georges River in recent decades. Beyond the headlines and statistics of ethnic conflict in the area, it is everyday activities such as fishing that open up the lived realities of change because they are always social practices, even when people fish alone. The Georges River runs through the heart of Sydney’s most culturally diverse population, including long-established Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic communities as well as the many more recent immigrant communities that have developed since the 1980s. Most people in all these communities are in working-class employment (if they have jobs at all), are living in densely packed suburbs and, despite some gentrification on the margins, still have significant disadvantages in educational and social infrastructure. As well as being a large river with scenic parklands threading along its lower estuarine reaches, the Georges River is also the focus of intensifying ethnic conflicts which often spill over into the media. The names of the river’s suburbs – Cabramatta, Liverpool, Bankstown, Macquarie Fields and Lakemba – are well known around Australia for their tensions. Yet, recent surveys of Australian attitudes to cultural diversity have demonstrated a widespread endorsement of the desire to reach across cultural differences despite the effect of international events and the media in increasing the hostile polarisation between ethnic groups (Ang et al. 2002, 2006). This paper will ask whether considering the area’s complex relationships and tensions through the lens of ‘everyday’ activities might allow us to understand those conflicts more clearly. Fishing is one of those everyday sites, offering the chance to reflect on how the day-to-day relationships across and between communities actually work. Our project, Parklands, Culture and Communities, has conducted around 120 in-depth interviews drawn, in roughly equal numbers, from four of the many cultural groups in the area: the Aboriginal, Anglo, Vietnamese and Arabic-speaking people who live near and use the Georges River parklands. The Aboriginal population is a small but culturally significant minority of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent along the river. The

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Vietnamese community is focused in the Fairfield area, where it forms 16 per cent of the local government area, but Vietnamese people comprise between 4 per cent and 7 per cent of the LGA populations along the northern length of the Georges River and along the Cooks River which also runs into Botany Bay. Arabic-speaking communities form expanding minorities in many areas on the northern riverside, their numbers rising from 9 per cent to 16 per cent of the population in the Bankstown LGA between 1986 and 2001, and from 12 per cent to 15 per cent in the Canterbury LGA, with substantial although small rises in all areas from Rockdale in the east right out to Parramatta (ABS results to 2001), As the river is the historic and geographic centre of the only substantial bodies of ‘nature’ in these densely developed suburbs, the topic of fishing arose constantly. The project team members have each worked on fishing in different contexts (Goodall 2001, 2006a, 2006b; Byrne and Nugent 2004; Wearing et al. 2008) and so to consider this question we have turned to the substantial literature on fishing as a recreational activity (Kuehn et al. 2006; Hunt et al. 2002; Hunt 2005) This has been helpful in identifying the social nature of anglers’ decisions about when and with whom to fish, but only a small amount of it, notably that of Myron Floyd, considers the impact of ethnic diversity (Floyd et al. 2006; Henry and Lyle 2003; Hawkins 2004; Behrendt and Thompson 2004; Toth and Brown 1997). Development studies offers complementary work on the geography and biology of the rapidly transforming fishing industries in countries and regions from which many Australians come, such as Vietnam, India and the Middle East, demonstrating that ‘traditional’ fishing has long since disappeared under the impact of global commercial economies (Dey et al. 2005; Can and Quy 1994). A valuable approach has been the human-centred sociology of the ‘everyday’, notably that based on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, which investigates taken-for-granted and very physical activities to learn more about how they contribute to social relations and the power expressed through them. Much of this work has aimed at explaining how power is entrenched and preserved. However, analysts such as Judith Butler and, in Australia, Noble and Watkins, have argued that the embodied practices of habitus need not be seen as deterministic. Rather, they investigate situations in which consciousness and the exercise of agency could challenge social dominance and political control (Butler 1999; Noble and Watkins 2003). Most useful, however, have been those approaches which engage a recognition of embodied knowledge, like fishing, with a consideration of how it is related to the external environment. Bruno Latour’s work


identifies the agency of networks which include the biological, living world but also non-living technologies such as fishing rods and nets with which and through which humans interact (Latour 1999, 2004). Central to our understanding of how fishing works on the Georges River have been the approaches in anthropology that investigate the way humans are continually creating and recreating their relationships with their environments. Tim Ingold and Arjun Appadurai argue in their quite different works that culture does not predetermine a fixed pattern of relationships with any environment. Rather it offers a repertoire with which to continuously generate a sense of belonging to a place. Ingold’s definition of a ‘dwelling perspective’ is important in the attention it pays to the way culture is not a given but is learnt each day in an active process of interaction with one’s physical as well as social environment (Campbell 2005; Ingold 2000, 2005). Appadurai points to the cultural labour involved in continuously investing sites and landscapes with social meaning, labour which is intense but largely invisible to its practitioners. This results, Appadurai argues, in the production of localities, or the lived, socialised and ‘everyday’ generation of bonds between humans and places (Appadurai 1996, 1995). In considering the everyday embodied activities, like fishing, of our interviewees on the Georges River, we argue that they are making performative claims on this external, material and natural world. By doing so they are making interventions in the relationships of power in the human societies around them. Ingold has identified the intentionality in everyday embodied practice when he writes: The concept of nature, like that of society, is inherently and intensely political. It is invariably bound up in a politics of claim and counterclaim, whose outcome depends on the prevailing balance of power (Ingold 2005: 503). This paper discusses three examples of fishing in which it has been characterised as a ‘problem’ or has been a site of conflict. 1. Fishing out of place: embodied knowledges which seem to be dislocated from the external natural world through migrancy or time. Such activities tend to be regarded as an inappropriate repetition of the past or as practices deployed in ignorance or disregard of new conditions. 2. Fishing as claim: a process involved in performative deployments of embodied knowledges.

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3. Fishing to ‘produce locality’: fishing as an exploratory and futureoriented intervention which, as Appadurai might suggest, generates an engagement for individuals or communities with the new ‘locality’. The first of our examples concentrates on the fishing practices of Vietnamese people in the Georges River area, while the second and the third examples widen the scope of inquiry to all four of our chosen study communities, including Aboriginal, Anglo-Irish and Arabic-speaking communities. Migrancy, and particularly the problem of how to undertake the ongoing creation of a relationship with a new place, is relevant for all four communities. Our research has been framed overall within Massey’s understanding of place as a node in both time and space formed by the interconnections of the people who move through a place at any one time and of Chambers’ understanding of migrancy as the presence of earlier and more distant homes in constant interaction with current places (Massey 1994; Chambers 1994). In our research on the Georges River, many of the local Aboriginal population have either moved from rural areas into the city themselves or have parents who did so. The group who least recognise themselves as migrants are in fact the Anglo-Irish, but the possibility that their fishing practices are a continuing expression of discomfort and insecurity in relation to place is an element which recurs frequently in our data. Migrancy has often been understood as leading to the preservation of links to the past by consolidating identities and repeating practices. We argue to the contrary that embodied practices like fishing, following the suggestions of Judith Butler, can be seen as future-oriented activity for change, mobilising known skills in a grassroots strategy for learning and making a new ‘place’.

1. Fishing ‘out of place’ Fishing is so engaged with the non-human material world that it is hard to imagine how it could be ‘out of place’. Yet Australian regulators argue that migrants, and in particular Vietnamese migrants, are practising fishing behaviours which were developed for different environments and in different economic, legal and social contexts. We suggest that this is too simple a reading and will argue below that much Vietnamese fishing is related to the local environment. Yet there are also fishing behaviours on the Georges River which are indeed ‘out of place’. They were not only learnt in another environment but are practised to evoke not just the memory but, beyond that, the physical feel and experience


of that other place. Ghassan Hage has argued from his research that for Lebanese immigrants missing their home, the complex of embodied experiences involved in feeling the weight of holding a Lebanese fishing rod in one’s hands, the familiar physicality of baiting, casting and hauling in and the surrounding presence of a riverine environment were ways to conjure up the sensations of regaining a lost homeland, to experience both places simultaneously.2 The group whose fishing is consistently identified as ‘out of place’ both by the group itself and as a ‘problem’ by regulation agencies are Vietnamese Australians. Their rod fishing, use of nets and shellfish gathering is criticised because regulators and the general public assume that Vietnamese people tend to catch and keep under-sized fish, to gather too much and in general to fail to abide by the regulations about the types and size of fish to be caught. The main issue for the Georges River is net fishing. While regulators have quite complicated rules about where you can or cannot net fish in the lower Georges River and what sort of nets you can use, it is generally understood in the wider population that all net fishing today is illegal everywhere and in any form. Australian regulation authorities talk about Vietnamese fishing practices in the same deterministic way that Bourdieu writes about habitus. The 1997 Australia-wide report, We Fish for the Future, commissioned by the Department of Environment, remains the major report conducted to date (Recfish, ECC 1997). It broke important new ground in initiating consultation with the Vietnamese community and exposing the official failure to convey information effectively to this or other non-English-speaking communities. Yet at the same time, it identified Vietnamese practices as a major problem, which threatened the existence of species in estuarine and coastal environments. The authors explained such activities with phrases like ‘all activities are naturally geared to the catching of food’ or these activities are ‘culturally entrenched’ and ‘continue to persist’. In effect, the Recfish report argued that Vietnamese people were trapped within a culturally determined understanding of fishing as aimed at essential food provision, which led them to have what Recfish termed a ‘conceptual difficulty’ in comprehending regulations restricting those practices in Australia. As a consequence Recfish generated a number of recommendations about policies which would socialise or in extreme cases punish the groups involved, in order to dissuade them from such inappropriate behaviour. The Recfish argument is contradicted by the accounts of participants in our study, and in earlier research (Thomas 2002), which have all suggested that most migrants from Vietnam since 1980 have come from

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urban areas, not from subsistence agriculture. Although they might have lived close to rivers or to coastlines, as do most people in Vietnam, they were only very seldom practising fishing, either commercially or as subsistence. Most of our interviewees explained that they had not fished for a long time before migrating. For many of them, fishing was something that they remembered with nostalgia as a childhood pastime at their grandparents’ village, in what several called ‘fishing for fun’. Fishing had a variety of meanings for the Vietnamese we interviewed but what it doesn’t mean is the expectation that their life in Australia will rely on subsistence fishing. More people in our interviews explained that on arrival in Australia they felt a sense of unfamiliarity with the recreational behaviours around them, like lawn bowls. Furthermore, they had not felt welcomed into such sports clubs and venues. Having looked in vain for recreational pastimes with which they had been familiar in Vietnam, they chose to practise what they did know, which was how to fish. In this sense their practice of fishing reflected, at least initially, a sense of exclusion as well as an inability to participate in the dominant local recreational activity. There were, however, outcomes to this almost enforced fishing which were seen by both older and younger Vietnamese interviewees as beneficial. The older interviewees reflected that it had allowed them to talk about their lives in Vietnam to younger members of their family who were growing up without that experience. Strikingly, a number of the people with whom we spoke explained that they or their older relations fished more in Australia than they had in Vietnam. They pointed out that fishing had taken on not only a different but a more central and defining role in Vietnamese people’s experience of being Vietnamese in Australia, so that over time the practice became much more commonly assumed to be an expected part of family outings and larger extended family and community gatherings. It came to be almost a ritual which would demonstrate a link with the past. While it did not reflect their actual previous practice in Vietnam, it had come to express a sense of what they shared with other Vietnamese people in Australia. Fishing became that which defined them as a cultural group with a sense of identity to non-Vietnamese people in Australia. This also helped to explain why activities that involved significant numbers of people, such as harvesting shellfish on coastal rock shelves or prawning, or illegal netting, might be carried on long after there might be any economic or nutritional need, if there ever was one. It was the ‘collectiveness’, one interviewee explained, ‘the fact that it was doing things together! so they could


come home with what they had gathered, have a get-together, eat this food they had collected together!’ In a situation of migrancy, in which pressures have been high and identities challenged, the emergence of a collective activity that was even marginally related to a home-country tradition, and which could offer ongoing opportunities for socialisation and community building, was to be welcomed and sustained.

2. Fishing as a claim In a very different use for fishing, the performance of a claim in the sense to which Ingold refers, there is a clear relationship to the surrounding environment. Fishing can be seen as a claim because to be comfortable and skilful requires long practice and participation in the sport, which could be anywhere, but also a familiarity with the specific place, the way the banks slope, the currents in the river as they flow over the unseen bed, the tidal influences and the species which may swim there. This performance of comfortable and knowledgeable fishing therefore positions the fisher as one who is ‘at home’, who belongs in that place and may be said to exercise an assertion of ownership. Each of the four groups we have interviewed have used fishing to make such claims about their relationship to the river. Their claims are in tension – and even in competition – with each other. The most assertive group to use fishing in this way are the AngloCeltic residents of the area, increasingly the minority in the parks on weekends or holidays, but during the quieter weekdays, it is Anglo-Celtic locals who are most often seen fishing. They are eager to talk about their sense of their fishing as a demonstration of belonging. We interviewed a group of elderly Anglo-Celtic Australian men fishing at Burrawang Reach at Picnic Point, a section of the Georges River National Park. They told us they lived on Heroes Hill, their nickname for the returned servicemen’s retirement village close by. Their affectionate reference to ‘Heroes’ evoked the legends about national identity born in warfare but it embedded those distant battles into their familiar local landscape within and around what is now designated ‘national’. Today this title indicates a focus on conservation management, but the first people to demand that the riverland park be called a ‘national park’ were the local working-class Anglo-Celtic populations of the 1940s, who argued that it needed to be ‘national’ to save the green space from factory expansion, not only to protect the environment but to offer space for the local working people to enjoy the real ‘bush’. For them, these local people were ‘the nation’

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and their imagined construction of a group identity was closely tied into the native landscape. The elderly fishermen told us first how much they enjoyed their time in their regular spot on the river bank. Before long, however, they began telling us how angry they were that newcomers were taking over some of their spaces. Overall, they complained particularly about Arabicspeaking people, whom they assumed were all Muslims – they joked bitterly that their home would soon be called Iraqi Hill. In relation to the river, however, their main complaint was about Asian fishermen. Their accusations mirrored those of the young teenager we had talked to who didn’t fish but still claimed to care about anyone who ‘wrecked the river’. These older men positioned themselves as the ones who not only knew the regulations about fishing and catch sizes, but who cared enough about the river to abide by the restrictions. Asian fishermen, they complained, would ‘take everything out of the water’, catching and keeping fish smaller than the regulation size by using nets as well as lines. Such representations are reinforced by press articles about violent clashes along the Georges River between Vietnamese fishers, fishing authorities and European-identifying fishermen. Greek and Italian fishermen accused Vietnamese fishermen of ‘overfishing’ and using aggressive tactics to secure the best fishing spots (Sun Herald, 22 October 1996, p. 40; Torch, 30 January 1991, p. 1) Yet violence – or the accusations of it – do not all flow one way. A number of Vietnamese recreational fishers have been assaulted while fishing and many reported that they had been targeted for abuse (Recfish, ECC 1997). Deeper investigation shows that these assertions of responsible fishing mask a more ambiguous past and present. Anglo-Celtic fishermen interviewed in our study talked frequently about how they used nets in the past, from the hessian bags used for prawning to the hand-made nets of local anglers and the commercial nets of the professional fishermen who trawled in the Georges River up until the 1960s, when it was closed due to heavy industrial pollution. Today, with the river again open for fishing, the old fishermen have been happy to tell us humorous but ‘off-the-record’ stories about how they trick the fishing inspectors by keeping a ‘second bucket’ in the car boot to hide undersize catches and escape a fine. Yet the public claims that Anglo-Celtic and, more broadly, European fishermen are defending environmental responsibility keep being repeated as a way to marginalise Asian fishermen. In effect, this is consistent with the 1940s vision of the local residents who wanted their park to be ‘national’. Their desire, as demonstrated in their campaigns and public statements, was to use the parks to foster an imagined nation


which would be mono-cultural and quite strictly bounded in racial and ethnic terms. The river and fishing continue to be mobilised to make the same claim that the ‘nation’ belongs to those who claim they know how to look after it. This is certainly not the view of Aboriginal people who live on the Georges River. There has been a sustained history of Aboriginal presence in this area, including both traditional owners and the people who migrated into the area from rural areas. The emerging Aboriginal communities have drawn on affiliations to land both distant and local to develop an understanding of cultural responsibility as Aboriginal adults towards this city river, taking an active role in the custodianship of the land on which they are living now. Fishing has played a major role in the way many people have done this. Lew Solberg’s life-story exemplifies this process. Lew came to Sydney as a child with his mother, an Aboriginal woman from around Yass, and his Anglo-Norwegian father. They lived in Redfern, where Lew spent some of his time, but most of his weekends were spent with his father’s mother in her home at East Hills on the Georges River. From this childhood on the river, he has remained in the area all his life, fishing regularly from his small ‘tinny’ motor boat, building on his knowledge at the same time as learning more about the conservation needs of the river he had previously fished only for food and pleasure. He is now an elderly man who continues to fish, although now only on a ‘catch and return’ basis. He has taken up his responsibilities to the Aboriginal community and to the river by participating actively in the Aboriginal Land Council as their representative on the emerging Catchment Management Committees for the area, where he is able to speak on behalf of the Land Council, reflecting its concerns about the health of the river as a whole. Lew’s knowledge of fish habitat, of changing bank and bed structures, the condition of the waters and the changing life along the water’s margins on the river banks have all contributed to a deep understanding of change in the quality of the water over time. These factors have allowed Lew to strengthen his own sense of his role as a custodian of the river which in turn he sees as embodying his responsibilities as an Aboriginal man. The assumptions of white Australians that they are the owners of the area is in conflict with the claim being developed by Aboriginal members of the community such as Lew Solberg that they are the people with the custodial responsibility to care for the river. There is yet another and quite different type of claim being made by a number of the Arabicspeaking groups in relation to their use of the river, including fishing.

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Access to the open air, nature and to the river is understood among Muslims to be one of the ways encouraged by the Koran to communicate with God. According to Manzoor: ‘all is holy ground. As the Prophet so beautifully puts it: the whole of the earth is a mosque.’ Nature is seen as a gift and a divine revelation (Wersal 1995). In Islam, the material use of water continues to have a very direct link to the expression of religious affiliation, so that the ability to access parks freely, to sit and meditate by the waters, to fish in river water as well as to participate actively in coastal beaches and swimming, are all expressions of relationships to God. Some academics have argued that Islamic teaching considers water as God’s gift to people, and that the whole Muslim community must have access to it (Abderrahman 2000). Others have stated that the Koran and associated hadiths recommend water conservation and valuing of resources (Amery 2001). Our respondents have described how Muslim families seek out parklands and access to the water on occasions like family celebrations and birthdays, for family and community events like Eid at the end of Ramadan as well as for personal meditation and reflection. This Muslim use of the river echoes that of some Vietnamese Buddhist interviewees who use local rivers for meditation. For all of these events the assumptions are that being close to nature and rivers means being close to God in a very material sense. This takes parklands out of the ‘national’ frame in which they are positioned by white Australians generally. Instead of offering a platform on which to perform the nation and national identity, the parklands and the river instead offer a site with which to express one’s relationship to God and one’s common humanity rather than one’s national identity. The significance of water is even more evident in the case of the Arabic-speaking Mandaeans, an Iraqi group whose religion is neither Christian nor Muslim, but whose teachings, like Islam, retain a strong link between the symbolic meanings of water in a religious sense and the material uses of water both for religious practices and for everyday life (de Chatel 2005). Mandaeans baptise regularly in full-immersion ceremonies in what they regard as Yardna, the living water. This again allows a direct relationship between the individual and God and between individuals within the community, with each other collectively and through that collective process with God again. Both of these quite different religious groups from Arabic-speaking cultures bring with them a way of positioning themselves and of claiming their rights of access to water both for picnics and for fishing as being expressions of a far broader global humanity and affiliation with human beings generally in their


relationship with the spiritual. These points of reference are far outside the concept of either local and underlying owners or the concept of a nation state as owner of a common and public ‘nature’. Indeed, any such concept of a singular ‘nature’ is illusory. These are all different ways in which the physical practice of fishing and the use of waters in the Georges River area can be understood to be an expression of making a claim for positioning oneself as having a particular relationship to the land and to the social and political structures of the nation state and then again to the broader religious community. Vietnamese net fishing can also be regarded as a kind of placeclaiming, even though authorities and other communities see it as a demonstration of Vietnamese people’s failure to understand Australian fishing conditions or regulations. Nets, commonly used right across Vietnam, as they are in most countries of Southeast Asia, involve high degrees of knowledge, co-ordination and skill on the part of individuals and groups of people. Fishing with nets is not only a technologically complex but a socially complex process, a point stressed by many of our Vietnamese interviewees. They also expressed a firm belief in the importance of the productive utilisation of valuable resources rather than leaving them unused. This is regarded not as inappropriate exploitation or greed but as a responsible attitude in relation to the environment. This is much more like a claim to belong or a claim to be able rightfully to utilise the resources of the natural world than it is an inappropriate and ignorant action. This is clearly not appropriate in the fragile circumstances in which much of Australia’s environment exists nor in the more stressed urban environment. Yet as long as Vietnamese people are thought to be fishing in a way that reflects ignorance and an absence of respect or understanding for environmental concerns, there will be a fundamental mismatch between what regulatory bodies are trying to tell Vietnamese people and what they understand themselves about their own behaviour. Vietnamese fishing could be seen overall, even in forms like netting which are most strongly condemned as being out of place, as being a demand for recognition of the knowledge and skills that Vietnamese bring with them and the environmental responsibility that they seek to exercise. Such a recognition could contribute to fostering Vietnamese participation in the building of knowledge that will allow a genuine conservation of the resources that are here in their new home. This only becomes a possibility, however, if we see the embodied knowledge and practice of fishing as being one that is open to change rather than one

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that is constrained by the inertia of a deterministic view of culture. This takes us to the final theme of fishing as exploration.

3. Fishing as exploration We can take a further step, beyond either the assertiveness or the reactivity of the fishing described so far. The We Fish for the Future report of 1997 assumes that the practice of fishing is extremely difficult to change. Nevertheless even within the pages of the report we find that many of the Vietnamese respondents talked about actively seeking knowledge in the form of written material or radio broadcasts or other sources that would guide them about Australian fishing regulations and laws. If we consider fishing to be an embodied knowledge, one that is expressed as much in the physical practices of fishing as it is in conscious knowledge, we have a good example of identifying the conditions by which change might occur in Noble and Watkins (2003), who followed a tennis player trained both physically and intellectually by a coach. But fishing is not a case in which the conditions for changing a physical practice would come from manuals and trainers in controlled conditions. Instead, change in fishing takes place as an active exploration by ordinary people, undertaken not with formal training but in the everyday and taken-for-granted trialling and testing of fishing. Not only did the Vietnamese people we interviewed describe seeking information from official sources but many talked about either themselves or their close relations taking active steps to observe and communicate with non-Vietnamese fisherman, of whatever cultural background. They set out to learn from watching them and imitating the ways in which they made decisions on locations, for example, or how they cast lines. As one young Vietnamese woman described her observations of her community for our study: People take part in fishing here even if they haven’t done it in Vietnam, like if they came from urban Saigon. They’ll watch each other, watch ‘Aussie’ fishermen and learn from them, and take part! [. . .] It has been a really obvious thing since ‘Asians’ came to Australia. They have loved to fish. It might be about food or finances but also enjoying it. But they haven’t usually been professional fishermen. They’ve had to learn to fish since they‘ve got here, for example by looking at how the Australians fish. Our interviewees described Vietnamese people deliberately undertaking fishing as they know it in order to test out the environment, opening


themselves up to communicate, be observed and perhaps even to be criticised by neighbouring fishermen. What they were doing was exploring the environment directly by seeing what worked and what didn’t from the repertoire of fishing knowledge they already had. This allowed them to have a direct feedback mechanism from the non-human social world, the environment, where they had to make decisions and judgements about water conditions, about baits and about tackle. They also received feedback directly from the social world around them, which is outside the Vietnamese community, so that they placed themselves in a position of vulnerability in order to be able to learn more effectively. This type of exploratory behaviour means taking social risks. Yet it was demonstrated not only by Vietnamese interviewees but also by Arabic speakers, including Lebanese Muslims, Syrians and Sudanese. Each of them described the complex and satisfying social processes within their own community of sharing fishing time with either members of their own generation or cross-generational groups where there was talk about practices in a home country as well as about the conditions and the results from fishing in this new environment. There were also descriptions of interactions with neighbouring fishers on the bank who were outside their cultural or language group. These were often deliberately initiated conversations in which information was exchanged about baits and about biting, the sort of low-key and everyday exchanges that nevertheless allowed more open observation of each other’s practices and more thoughtful learning about what others were doing. Mahmoud described his enjoyment in learning from members of his own community but also his keen interest and pleasure in the diverse cultures who all end up fishing the Georges River together: My brother and I, we’d just grab the rod and we go by ourselves and we’d see all the people from the same community or same cultural background there. There’s a few characters in particular that I admire for their skill and for their knowledge and experience. Because it’s amazing you know? They put like not even a dollar’s worth of prawns or dough, and they just keep on catching . . . you get to meet new people and learn new things and you find that a lot of people like to help each other. If you’re out of bait, or you need equipment, hooks, or sinkers whatever, I’m sure your neighbour will fix you up. Lots of different people fish there, like heaps. It’s not really any particular cultural background that fishes there, it’s unlimited. And young and old, some people even just park their car and watch the other people fishing, they just have a look at what the people are doing, sometimes they have a

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look in the bucket. It’s a nice place, just even if you just want to relax, have some time out, private time. Nice place to go . . . This pleasure in exchange is extraordinary in a climate in the area, and in the country generally, where communication between Arabicspeaking and other Australians is becoming more tense and difficult, reflecting wider national and global conflicts (Ang et al. 2006). And yet such informal, personal and everyday interchange over the very ordinary activity of fishing was reported widely among all our respondents. The deliberate extension and expansion of such embodied knowledge as a form of cultural exploration is an important example of agency and confidence in the processes of migrancy. Perhaps even more importantly, the communication we are tracing in the everyday pastime of fishing on the Georges River offers some hope in the intercultural future for an area high in social polarisation and ethnic and religious conflict. Our interviewee Helen, the young woman from the Sudanese community who has enjoyed the camaraderie among many different people which fishing has brought her, is an example of just such low-key and important optimism: . . . There’s a lot of older men from non-English-speaking backgrounds I’ve met. Different cultures have different ways of fishing, which I find really interesting, like different methods. [. . .] I think people just talk to each other when they’re fishing. You stroll along and say ‘hey, how’s the catch? What you getting? What bait are you using? I was here last week, I got this . . . ’ There’s conversation you can have with people without asking them any details about them or being intimate. So you can actually get to know someone fishing quite easily, so I’ve got people who I’ve met doing that, but I don’t know them to talk to them again or anything . . . Fishing’s like that, I’ve found . . .

Conclusions Reflections on the relationship of everyday activities to locality and environment have often been aimed at understanding the persistence of stratification and control. Yet in this study of Sydney’s suburban Georges River, the exploration of the everyday has been useful in considering an unstable and disrupted situation, where political and environmental power have been challenged by rapid cultural and environmental change.


The recreational fishing considered here has ranged across these possibilities. Firstly, fishing ‘out of place’ can be seen not to be the thoughtless and inescapable repetition of homeland behaviours, as critics have alleged. Rather, for Vietnamese and Lebanese immigrants, and no doubt for many others, it has evoked a lost homeland and allowed knowledge to pass to younger generations. Beyond this, however, for Vietnamese Australians it has taken on a role it never had in Vietnam itself – it has become a focal point for internal collective identification, for building solidarity and for forging a sense of group confidence after what were often traumatic migration experiences. The intensely political dimension of the everyday can be seen playing out in the claims made through fishing on the Georges River. The competing claims advanced through and about fishing by each of the cultural groups with whom we worked are expressions of the shifting power balance in the area. Incoming communities and emerging cultures have challenged the previous power of the ‘settler’ Anglo-Celtic ‘white’ population of the area to define its control of fishing as legitimately ‘national’. Each in different ways has used the criterion of environmental custodianship to support demands for greater recognition as collectively belonging to that place, even if for very different reasons, from challenging the legitimacy of a settler ‘nation’ to calling into question the ‘national’ altogether. Everyday activities like fishing are physical expressions of such demands, forming the substance of the practices that Appadurai describes as ‘producing locality’ by generating relationships between people and places. Such roles for the everyday have served not only to strengthen collective identities within cultural groups but to draw the boundaries between such ethnically identified groups so as to defend or argue positions in wider political conflicts. Finally, however, the everyday fishing of many individuals has gone beyond fostering the closure of ethnic or cultural boundaries in conflict conditions to which the two earlier types of fishing might have contributed. Instead, in the third form, of fishing as exploration, our research suggests that the practice of fishing offers a different way to ‘produce locality’. This is a conscious mobilisation of fishing knowledge for opening up to new environments and new people, and for learning more about a new place by using the tools of the old. Fishing as an informal and everyday practice can offer ways for opening communication between people who might in more formal situations be found in opposing corners. Our research suggests that fishing is one of the practices that in low-key, informal and everyday situations can allow expression of

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the underlying interest in cross-cultural communication that has been demonstrated to exist within the Australian public (Ang et al. 2006). This potential should be fostered. Producing locality does not need to reinforce divisions – it might instead enable the emergence of new social networks that link people far more widely than closed community identifications can do on their own.

Notes 1. Interviews conducted for the Parklands, Culture and Communities project, 2006–8. 2. Personal communication.

References Abderrahman, W. A. (2000) ‘Application of Islamic Legal Principles for Advanced Water Management’, Water International, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 513–18. Amery, H. A. (2001) ‘Islamic Water Management’, Water International, vol. 26, no. 44, pp. 481–9. Ang, I., J. Brand, G. Noble and J. Sternberg (2006) Connecting Diversity: The Paradoxes of Australian Multiculturalism (Artarmon: Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)). Ang, I., J. Brand, G. Noble and G. Wilding (2002) Living Diversity: Australia’s Multicultural Future (Artarmon: Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)). Appadurai, A. (1995) ‘The Production of Locality’, in R. Fardon (ed.) Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 204–23. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, Public Worlds Vol. 1 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press). Barnham, G. (2003) Riverside Reflections: Memories of Lugarno (Douglas Park NSW: self published). Behrendt, J. and P. Thompson (2004) ‘The Recognition and Protection of Aboriginal Interests in NSW Rivers’, Journal of Indigenous Policy, vol. 3, pp. 37–140. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Butler, J. (1999) ‘Performativity’s Social Magic’, in R. Shusterman (ed.) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell). Byrne, D. and M. Nugent (2004) Mapping Attachment: A Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-contact Heritage (Sydney: Department of Environment and Conservation). Campbell, B. (2005) ‘Changing Protection Policies and Ethnographies of Environmental Engagement’, Conservation and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 280–322. Can, L. T. and V. Quy (1994) ‘Vietnam: Environmental Issues and Possible Solutions’, Asian Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 69–77. Chambers, I. (1994) Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge). de Chatel, F. (2005) ‘The Hammam and the Mikvah: Physical and Ritual Purity in Islam and Judaism’, paper read at the Water and Civilization conference, Paris, France, 1–4 Dec.

Fishing the Georges River: Cultural Diversity and Urban Environments 195 Dey, M. M., M. A. Rab, F. J. Paraguas, S. Piumsombun, R. Bhatta, M. F. Alam and M. Ahmed (2005) ‘Fish Consumption and Food Security: A Disaggregated Analysis by Types of Fish and Classes of Consumers in Selected Asian Countries’, Aquaculture Economics & Management, vol. 9, pp. 89–111. Earnshaw, B. (2001) The Land between Two Rivers: The St George District in Federation Times (Kogarah: Kogarah Historical Society). Floyd, M. F., L. Nicholas, I. Lee, J. H. Lee and D. Scott (2006) ‘Social Stratification in Recreational Fishing Participation: Research and Policy Implications’, Leisure Sciences, vol. 28, pp. 351–68. Goodall, H. (2001) ‘The River Runs Backwards: The Language of Order and Disorder on the Darling’s Northern Flood Plain’, in T. Bonyhady and T. Griffiths (eds) Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press). Goodall, H. (2006a) ‘Gender, Race and Rivers: Women and Water in Northwestern New South Wales’, in K. Lahiri-Dutt (ed.) Fluid Bonds: Views on Gender and Water (Kolkata: Stree Books). Goodall, H. (2006b) ‘Main Streets and Riverbanks: The Politics of Place in an Australian River Town’, in S. Hood-Washington, P. Rosier and H. Goodall (eds) Echoes from the Poisoned Well (Lanham: Lexington). Hawkins, S. (2004) ‘Caught, Hook Line and Sinker: Incorporating Aboriginal Fishing Rights into the Fisheries Management Act’, Journal of Indigenous Policy, vol. 3, pp. 4–36. Henry, G. W. and J. M. Lyle (2003) The National Recreational and Indigenous Fishing Survey, Final Report, Fisheries Action Program Project, Natural Heritage Trust, vol. 48 (Cronulla: NSW Fisheries). Hunt, L. (2005) ‘Recreational Fishing Site Choice Models: Insights and Future Opportunities’, Human Dimensions of Wildlife, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 153–72. Hunt, L., W. Haider and K. Armstrong (2002) ‘Understanding the Fish Harvesting Decisions by Anglers’, Human Dimensions of Wildlife, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 75–89. Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge). Ingold, T. (2005) ‘Epilogue: Towards a Politics of Dwelling’, Conservation and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 501–8. Kuehn, D. M., C. P. Dawson and R. Hoffman (2006) ‘Exploring Fishing Socialization Among Male and Female Anglers in New York’s Eastern Lake Ontario Area’, Human Dimensions of Wildlife, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 115–27. Latour, B. (1999) ‘Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest’, in B. Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). Noble, G. and M. Watkins (2003) ‘So, How Did Bourdieu Learn to Play Tennis? Habitus, Consciousness and Habituation’, Cultural Studies, vol. 17, no. 3–4, pp. 520–38. Recfish, and Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (1997) We Fish for the Future: Recreational Fishing and People of Indo-Chinese Background (Canberra: Department of the Environment). Thomas, M. (2002) Moving Landscapes: National Parks and the Vietnamese Experience (Sydney: NPWS (National Parks and Wildlife Service)).

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Toth, J. F. and R. B. Brown (1997) ‘Racial and Gender Meanings of Why People Participate in Recreational Fishing’, Leisure Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 129–46. Wearing, S. H. Goodall, D. Byrne and A. Cadzow (2008) ‘Cultural Diversity in the Social Valuing of Parkland: Networking Communities and Park Management’, Australasian Parks and Leisure, vol. 11, no. 2 (Winter), pp. 20–30. Wersal, L. (1995) ‘Islam and Environmental Ethics – Tradition Responds to Contemporary Challenges’, Zygon, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 451–9.

Part V Everyday Solidarities, Everyday Politics


10 ‘Rubbing Along with the Neighbours’ – Everyday Interactions in a Diverse Neighbourhood in the North of England Maria Hudson, Joan Phillips and Kathryn Ray

Introduction Following disturbances in northern cities of the UK in the summer of 2001, investigations suggested that tensions amongst different ethnic groups were a key factor (Home Office Community Cohesion Unit 2002). In this context community relationships have come under greater scrutiny, with particular emphasis on the role of ethnicity and the meanings and values attached to national identity and ‘integration’. The aftermath of the 2001 disturbances generated a new emphasis in policy with respect to promoting ‘social (and community) cohesion’. Earlier policy discourses around multiculturalism, which emphasised difference and diversity, were said to have gone too far in challenging the notion of a British collective identity, and had presented problems for the ‘integration’ of new communities. The promotion of a stronger sense of community along with greater community involvement, particularly in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods, has become an important strand of current government thinking, infusing policy and strategy across a range of departments (Phillips 2006; Hudson et al. 2007). This paper seeks to engage in this debate about the relationship between everyday interactions and community cohesion, by exploring the everyday lives of residents in a diverse neighbourhood where established and new communities are living side by side. We seek to draw out the ‘ordinariness’ of everyday interactions across racial difference, while exploring the complex narratives of community in which they are set. 199

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Two broad paradigms have been used to frame the policy of integration in the UK, that of assimilationism and of multiculturalism. To a large extent the dominant policy orientation has been one of assimilationism. This embodies an imperative to erode ethnic and religious identifications and absorb minority cultures into the majority, in order to achieve positive community relations and a unified national community identity. This contrasts with the discourse of multiculturalism which occupied a prominent place in the policy landscape during the 1970s and 1980s. While there were divergent interpretations of multiculturalism among different policy actors, particularly at the level of local policy, multiculturalism was characterised by a celebration of cultural difference described by the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain as the ‘communities within communities’ (Runnymede Trust 2000) that an ethnically diverse population was seen to bring. This sometimes went hand in hand with strategies to challenge racism and a perception that an emphasis on mutual tolerance between communities could help to maintain solidarity in the midst of conflict. However, multiculturalism is today facing criticisms from a number of quarters. For example, against the backdrop of patterns of ‘superdiversity’, signifying a marked increase in the scale and diversity of immigration (Vertovec 2007), one concern expressed is that British society is ‘drifting towards residential segregation’ with people from different ethnic and religious communities becoming strangers to each other. Indeed, the recent Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality – previously a champion of multiculturalist policy – has spoken of how British cities are ‘sleepwalking to segregation’, presenting a picture of ethnic groups either living residentially separated lives with their ‘own kind’ (termed ‘hard spatial segregation’) or inhabiting separate social and cultural worlds (termed ‘soft segregation’) (Phillips 2005). Social interactions and relationships in diverse neighbourhoods, particularly where there is residential segregation, have been presented as a problem and indicative of a failure of multiculturalism. Thus the role of physical proximity in the generation of good community relations in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods has been reified (Fortier 2007; Hudson et al. 2007). It has been argued that these policy shifts reflect a renewed assimilationism within British government policy, with a focus on a unified national culture, in the face of fears about the ‘porosity’ of national boundaries and identities (Sandercock 2003). Amidst such pronouncements of the terminal decline of multiculturalism there are also voices appealing for more critical accounts of its staying power and value. Gilroy forcefully argues that multiculturalism

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has not expired, but there is a need to create more complex and challenging narratives of its contours and dynamics, located in ‘everyday patterns of heterocultural life by reducing the exaggerated dimensions of racial difference to a liberating ordinariness’ (Gilroy 2004: 131). Within UK policy, ‘softer’ versions of ‘community cohesion’ also continue to echo the multicultural paradigm. While searching for increased (overarching) solidarity and commonalities, they put the focus back on celebrating multicultural society and a need to erode material inequalities rather than cultural identities in the pursuit of social justice and equality (for a helpful synthesis, see Wetherell et al. 2007). Others have called for institutional interventions to help harness the cohesive potential of multiculturalism, recognising the commonalities of experience of disadvantaged and marginalised groups across ethnic communities. For example, Stubbs (2007: 30) appeals for efforts to build ‘habits of solidarity’, defined as ‘bridges across communities, away from narrowly constructed ethnic, religious or cultural identities, in pursuit of common objectives and a common future’.

Exploring everyday interactions in Moss Side In order to explore everyday interactions, we draw on a study of social cohesion in diverse communities.1 From the outset the focus of the study was on ‘social’ cohesion, rather than ‘community’ cohesion. Such a distinction was important in signalling a desire to understand broader issues of social justice and social exclusion that may cut across ethnic boundaries in areas experiencing new immigration. While our research explored experiences in two areas, one in the south and one in the north of England, where different ethnic groups were living side by side, this paper takes an in-depth look at one of those areas: Moss Side in inner Manchester in the north of England. In recent years Moss Side and other inner-Manchester areas have experienced a growth in ethnic diversity, partly because of the increasing settlement of refugees and asylum-seekers. This development is very visible in Moss Side where black and ethnic minorities, primarily from Black Caribbean and Black African groups, constitute over 50 per cent of the population in the area. When the Black Caribbean community migrated to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s Moss Side, predominantly a white working-class area, was already a reception area for migrants to the city, dominated by cheap boarding houses (Taylor et al. 1996). Moss Side became a centre for Black Caribbean life and culture with the establishment of shops, social clubs and music venues, and became notorious

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in 1981 as a site of the riots that also swept a number of other British cities. In recent years a high proportion of refugees have been Somali, either coming directly from Somalia or from other European countries where they first claimed asylum after fleeing civil conflict in Somalia. Moss Side is divided by the main Princess Road, with traditional terraced ‘back-to-back’ housing in the east (the old Moss Side) and 1960s local-authority-built homes on the west side, mainly comprising the Alexandra Estate. The recent arrivals to Moss Side have settled in an area not without its problems. Moss Side is characterised by issues of poverty, deprivation, persistent unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour; as well as ongoing media scrutiny in the context of widely publicised inter-racial tensions in the 1980s. However the area has undergone substantial social and economic regeneration activity. A new flagship resource centre for young people (the Millenium Powerhouse) is a symbol of this. Moreover, modernisation of the housing stock has contributed to making the area very popular, so much so that there is a squeeze on the housing supply. In 2000 a 10-year plan was initiated to tackle racism and racial discrimination in Manchester with priority areas of employment, education, crime and disorder, and health and social care. Over a period of six months, from spring to autumn 2005, we undertook interviews with range of key informants, from service providers and community organisations in Manchester and Moss Side as well as residents in Moss Side. Residents were chosen as a main focus for the research to contribute to better understanding of the quality of intraand inter-community relationships across ‘black’ and ‘white’ and new and established communities. Thirty residents were interviewed from White British, Black Caribbean and Somali ethnic groups, men and women, younger and older. To increase the representation of young people in the research, several youth discussion groups were undertaken. The majority of the White British interviewees were born in the area and had lived there all their lives, although some had lived elsewhere at different points and then returned. Most people described themselves as White British or White English, although a few had Scottish, Welsh or Irish heritage. Many of the Black Caribbean residents interviewed were ‘second-generation’ individuals, born in the UK and living in and around their neighbourhoods for over 20 years. In contrast, most of the Somali respondents had been in the UK for five years or fewer. The vast majority were first-generation Somali by ethnic origin, having left Somalia due to the civil conflict and secured refugee status in the UK. In addition, several of the residents interviewed were of multiple


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heritage. For example, they included residents born to White British and Black Caribbean parents and one resident born to White British and Somali parents. Some of the respondents also had children of multiple heritage. Our study focused on exploring interactions between people of diverse background living in proximity with one another in the same neighbourhood. Each of our interviewees was asked to outline what they did in a typical day in order to try to gauge their use of local spaces and places of interaction. Following our interviewees’ accounts of their typical day, they were probed further on their social networks (including family, friends, neighbours and colleagues) and asked about the ethnic diversity of those networks. They were also asked about the length of time they had been living in Moss Side, their area attachment and feelings about diversity. As will be seen below, life-course-related activities heavily shaped the nature of their accounts of what influenced the opportunities for inter-racial interactions – examples included being in paid work, having young children, or being an older person. Narratives were also shaped by whether people had been brought up in a relatively homogenous white community (typical amongst the older respondents) or a relatively ethnically mixed neighbourhood environment (typical for the younger ones). The remainder of this paper explores these themes by looking at the interactions and networks of younger people, recently arrived Somali men and women and older people.

Moss Side residents’ interactions and networks Younger people In describing their ‘personal communities’ (Pahl and Spencer 2003), the younger people we interviewed in Moss Side tended to have more ethnically mixed friendship groups. Regular social contact for these people (who were aged 34 and under) took place across ethnicities in schools, colleges, nurseries, playgroups and leisure activities. Residents also presented vivid accounts of a diverse mix of children, their own and others, playing together on local streets as well as friends visiting each others’ homes. One young Black Caribbean mother had longstanding diverse friendship networks from school, reinforcing the picture of mixed networks among the younger respondents. Expressions of feeling ‘comfortable’ in their neighbourhood emerged from young people of Black Caribbean and multiple-heritage

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backgrounds, who explained how they felt more insulated from racial abuse because of the ethnic and cultural diversity among residents: I’ve been to other areas and that and the way people look at you and that [. . .] the fact that you don’t get stared at [here] because you’re black or because you’re Asian or something, like it’s a completely different are, so . . . Hannah,2 multiple heritage, 20s On the whole, young peoples’ cross-ethnic interactions appeared associated with more positive attitudes to diversity. One White British lone parent had recently moved back to Moss Side, both so that her child could get to know his Black Caribbean father and relatives if he wanted to, and also because she felt that he would feel more ‘secure’ about his identity in an ethnically diverse environment. There were accounts of a generational shift in interactions between groups and attitudes to diversity, for the most part from Black Caribbean residents. Oliver, a young Black Caribbean man working in Moss Side, spoke at length of how, by interacting with Asian people through his work, he began to recognise and address some of his stereotypical perceptions, discovering Asians to be ‘just as friendly and open as me’. Comparing his life to that of his parents, he also spoke of greater social interaction across ethnic groups among his generation: My Asian guy’s coming round with his daughter and his wife and he’s eating jerk chicken at my barbecue, same when I [go] to his, you know what I mean? And [the] racists in their family and my family has to just love it ’cos we’re sorting it out, do you know what I mean? Our kids are as well now, and it’s slowly getting sorted. Oliver, Black Caribbean man, 20s Other people indicated instances of White British and Black Caribbeans sharing social spaces, such as the following account from Taisha of a more diverse range of people drinking in the same pub: You see more black people hanging with white people, and vice versa. One local pub used to have mostly black people in it, and now it’s mixed and everyone just, they all get along. Taisha, Black Caribbean woman, 20s Young male interviewees, in their 20s, often mentioned how sport and music activities brought them into contact with other ethnic-minority


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groups. For example Charlie, a White British man in his 20s, spoke of having primarily white social networks, but regularly played football with blacks, whites, Asians and Somalis. Similarly, Ed described how the only sign that he could see of people in the neighbourhood doing things together was young people from different ethnic backgrounds spontaneously coming together to play football. There were examples of young people (primarily men) trying to develop music projects and businesses, sometimes using their homes as a base for meetings. Generating what one community activist described as ‘communities of musicians’, such networks could be diverse, with Somali, Black Caribbean and White British involvement. These accounts were sometimes accompanied by expressions of concern about the lack of mainstream employment opportunities for young Black Caribbeans, respondents reporting continuing racial discrimination and disadvantage. This suggests that despite widespread social interaction between Black Caribbean and White British individuals, racial difference has a continuing significance in terms of differential life chances. Older people Interactions with neighbours and family were important to older people (aged 55 and over). For those lacking family contacts, neighbourhood interactions took on even greater importance, with longer-standing neighbours tending to dominate their social networks. A consequence was that their networks tended to be less ethnically diverse than those of younger residents. However, there was also significant interaction between longer-established ethnic groups, particularly the Black Caribbean and the White British population. Integration taking place through intermarriage was a theme in the narratives of both these groups. Asked whether he thought there was any tension between white people and the Caribbeans, Charles, a White British man in his 70s, replied: ‘No because there’s so much interaction, you know, intermarriage’. The picture was not one of complete harmony, however, with some respondents both black and white, in mixed relationships or with children of multiple heritage, referring to being at the receiving end of negative comments about their inter-ethnic partnerships. While there were one or two dissenting voices, a striking theme was that when older people were asked about local interactions they often talked of neighbourhood decline, linking this to an erosion of local social interactions. While this theme emerged from both Black Caribbean and White British respondents, it was particularly evident

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among the latter. White British residents voiced concerns about becoming a ‘minority’ as White British people moved out of the area. Julia, a White British woman in her 50s who had lived in Moss Side all of her life, expressed these concerns thus: . . . people will want to get out, and people that’s been here years and years, they want to go, so it will just become an area I think of ethnic, coloured people, I don’t think there’ll be an awful lot of white people in it at all. Julia also ascribed the decline of local shops in Moss Side, in part related to the riots, to a ‘takeover’ by new communities: We never got them shops back again, like hardware shops, and a fruit’n’veg shop, now you can’t get anything for your basic essentials or, because they’re just cyber cafes for the Somalians, every shop on Broadfield Road is a Somali cafe, every shop on Claremont Road, I mean who wants to sit out there? Even the seating is absolutely filthy, and sit and have a cup of tea! Henry, a White British man in his 50s, similarly conveyed the increased transience he had witnessed on his street. Of the new residents he said: ‘they don’t seem to ever put roots down.’ There were exceptions to this narrative of decline. Stella and Trevor, Black Caribbeans in their 40s, spoke of how, following the 1980s riots, business had been brought back to Moss Side and how Somalis opening cafes and phone shops and Jamaicans opening cafes and barbers had ‘brought a lot of colour to the area’. Recently arrived Somali men and women We have seen the Somali presence is very evident in Moss Side, due to their settlement patterns and through shops that have emerged in the process of settlement. Somali respondents often made reference to the importance of culturally specific institutions such as shops and mosques and to others who spoke their language in making them feel comfortable in the area. Service providers in Moss Side also described how for some time Somalis had wanted to be housed in this area rather than in other parts of Manchester due to the presence of kin and community facilities. The family and community-centred networks of recently arrived Somali interviewees reinforced this theme. The (on the whole) less ethnically diverse networks and patterns of interaction of recently arrived Somalis also show a gendered division,


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with the Somali men citing more involvement in the broader Somali community in the neighbourhood than the women. This took place primarily through activities organised by the mosque or Somali community organisations, but there was also heterogeneity in patterns of interaction. Unemployment rates among Somalis are particularly high. An unemployed Somali man in Moss Side in his 30s, who also had English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) needs, recounted how he spent much of his time in cafes chewing khat3 with other Somali men and had very limited local social networks outside of the Somali community. A Somali activist and Somali teenagers also expressed concern about this pattern of behaviour. The accounts of social networks and interactions given by Somali women suggested that women, again particularly those more recently arrived and with ESOL needs, tended to have daily lives revolving around taking children to and from school, visiting parks, shopping for food, and perhaps visiting locally based Somali family or friends. Some cited problems with accessing mainstream information and services and some were dependent on male relatives for interacting in the local neighbourhood beyond the Somali community. Local childcare settings provided a potential venue for interactions across ethnic groups in Moss Side; however, some respondents commented that such interaction was mostly casual. Waris, a Somali mother in her 30s in Moss Side connected within strong Somali social networks, explained what this meant for her. Although she attended a mixed parents and toddlers group and could converse in English, she found it impossible to develop relationships outside her community. Conveying a sense of isolation, and an internalisation of this experience, she said: ‘I don’t know what to talk about, what’s interesting them, what they want to talk about, [or] if it’s something wrong with me.’ Again, however, there were differences. Somali women (and indeed other women) were undertaking unpaid work for community-based parenting and childcare projects. As already implied, participation in either paid work or voluntary work tended to lead to more diverse social networks across age ranges, gender and ethnic group, although they depended on the nature of the occupation or activity. Much of this activity involved organisations crossing ethnic boundaries, though these women tended to be working with other Somali women through a desire to improve the experience of settlement and identify and address needs. Hamila, a young Somali woman in her 20s who had come to Moss Side from Somalia 15 years earlier, was employed in childcare and her everyday life centred on paid work, voluntary work and her extended

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family. Her employment provided her with ethnically mixed networks and she had strong links with other young Somalis working to target more youth provision. Since arriving in Manchester six years earlier, and through voluntary work and then paid work, Jameelah, a Somali lone parent in her 30s, had built up a network of colleagues and service users from a range of ethnic backgrounds, including Somali, Black Caribbean and Pakistani. Such day-to-day activity, acting as a conduit for cross-ethnic interactions, tended to be associated with more positive attitudes towards ethnic diversity, implying that social interactions can matter. To reiterate, life-course-related activities heavily shaped the nature of social interactions, sometimes helping to promote inter-ethnic social connections, including school, paid work and unpaid activities. Moss Side hosted a range of initiatives, promoting the inclusion or integration of the Somali community; including forums for community members (across ethnic lines) to come together to articulate needs, discuss problems and/or debate solutions. Willingness to mix and make newcomers feel welcome, language skills, cultural exchange and tolerance all helped to facilitate inter-ethnic contact, but resident narratives suggested that these elements were sometimes lacking in everyday Moss Side life.

Factors inhibiting everyday interactions A striking sign of the cohesive potential of multiculturalism was that, when asked about the good and bad things about living in a diverse neighbourhood, respondents across both fieldwork areas and all ethnic groups, ages and genders viewed diversity positively. Living in a diverse neighbourhood was thought to result in greater exposure to different ethnic cultures, potentially leading to increased tolerance and understanding. Conversely, people felt that a lack of knowledge and understanding of people from different ethnic backgrounds, resulting from limited interaction, would foster intolerance and fuel racism. At the same time, however, when asked about the limited interaction between people from different ethnic backgrounds in the neighbourhood, respondents by and large did not see this as problematic. Implicit in many respondents’ narratives was a lack of a concrete incentive for people from different backgrounds to have more contact; a frequent comment was that different ethnic groups did ‘get on all right together’, rubbing along with the neighbours, even if they had little contact. Despite this, a range of factors inhibited everyday interactions between members of the new and established communities whom


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we met in Moss Side, generating everyday multicultural dissonance. Themes included willingness to mix and make people feel welcome, language and communication, cultural and ethnic identity and racial stereotyping and harassment. Unwillingness to mix and make newcomers feel welcome Longstanding residents often placed the onus on newcomers to mix more with the existing population. Sometimes this was tinged with an implicit racism and a distaste for interacting with newcomers. However, the majority of people expressed a desire to interact, though they felt that it was down to the newcomers to ‘make the first move’. A number of respondents who were active in Tenants and Residents Associations or other groups commented that new communities had been invited to their meetings through, for example, leaflets, sometimes translated into appropriate languages, but that nothing had come of it. Geraldine, for example, described how Somalis were reluctant to attend her over-50s group, although she felt that people of all faiths were welcome and had been invited. Some respondents acknowledged that more could be done by longstanding residents, however. This was apparent in the comments of Stella, who stressed the importance of extending ‘community spirit’ to newcomers, arguing that ‘a divided community is a weak community’. However, in general, there seemed to be a lack of awareness among longstanding residents about some of the obstacles that might be facing Somalis and other new communities in attending such events and little enthusiasm for thinking more creatively about the format of events to facilitate inclusion. Some of the Somali community leaders also stressed the need to challenge negative perceptions about interacting with other residents on the part of the Somalis as well. We encountered numerous narratives from people expressing frustration about the reputation of Moss Side as a crime hot spot. Oliver explained: . . . everyone that passes through Moss Side treats it like it’s the devil’s ground . . . Princess Road is regularly used by commuters to go back and forth to work, and every day you would have some form of experience where, ‘Huh, I hope he doesn’t steal my car?’ or hear doors going click as they drive past us as we’re crossing the road Oliver, Black Caribbean man, 20s Nevertheless, crime and nuisance were central concerns, particularly around drug, gun and gang crime, and personal experience of crime was

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widespread. Fear of crime constrained people’s use of local space and their social relationships. This meant that some residents felt unsafe when walking around the area, particularly at night, and this affected their behaviour to the extent that they would either use or avoid particular routes at particular times. Examples of residents whose use of the local area was influenced by a sense of safety emerged across people of all ages and groups. For example, Geraldine, who is retired, took a regular early-morning walk in the park rather than using it during the remainder of the daytime, when she perceived it to be less safe. Language barriers Across the groups, language was commonly signalled as a potential barrier to social interaction, often alongside the viewpoint that newcomers ‘did not want to mix’. Somali respondents emphasised the impact of not being able to speak or understand English and several interviewees were attending ESOL classes. The case of Waris, the Somali woman mentioned earlier who was finding it hard to relate to other mothers at her parents and toddlers group, illustrates the need for caution in emphasising the role of language in separation. Not all of the ‘separation’ of new communities is self-initiated or due to ESOL needs. However, a local grassroots project involving the collaboration of a Somali organisation with an adult-education centre was showing the potential for creative connections to be made to make a difference to both Somali men and women with ESOL needs. Limited interaction can be associated with individuals and communities feeling a sense of isolation and anxiety about making connections with people from different backgrounds. Cultural distance While, as we have seen, people tended to say that cultural exchange was a positive feature of living in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood, cultural traditions associated with different ethnic backgrounds were also cited as a barrier to interaction. For example, there were many references to the British pub culture being alien to the Muslim faith, and issues raised around appropriate food preparation (for example, the availability of halal food). Family structures were also felt to discourage cross-group interaction, with the Somali (and sometimes other ethnic-minority communities) described as having bigger families and being more family-orientated than the White British. Linked to this were perceptions of a primarily ‘home focused’ role for Somali women. Somali respondents’ perspectives on barriers to interaction reinforced some of these themes, with religion and culture again viewed as barriers


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to interaction. Many interviewees also felt that frequenting pubs was in contradiction to the laws of Islam, and pointed to this as a factor impacting on interaction in mixed local social spaces. In addition, many also cited the fact they could not eat with their neighbours because the latter’s food preparation was not halal. However there were exceptions to this. Samatar (40s) and Luqmaan (60s), two first-generation Somali men in Moss Side, perceived no conflict between what they described as an English pub culture and Islam, and met their Black Caribbean and White friends in pubs to drink soft drinks and play pool. The issue of cultural norms surrounding Somali women’s interaction with non-Somalis was raised by some respondents. One Somali man described how cultural norms surrounding Somali women’s interaction with strangers could be interpreted as women being ‘standoffish’, clearly visualising his community from the standpoint of others. As we have also seen, there appeared to be more diverse networks among younger Somalis, particularly those who had been raised in the UK. Nonetheless some young Somali men in Moss Side spoke of leading ‘double lives’, and only interacting outside of the community to a certain degree. Again, religion and culture were cited by them as important dynamics: . . . most Somalians lead double lives, there’s their life in Moss Side with the Somali community, then there’s a life outside Moss Side when they’ve got friends that are not Somalians, they’re Asian friends, they’re white friends, but they come back to Moss Side and . . . the reason why they don’t merge, because like our culture, the fact that we’ve got a different religion, we merge to a certain level and that’s it. Somali teenager Racial stereotyping and harassment Some overt signs of racial stereotyping and intolerance, such as verbal abuse and aggression, emerged in respondent accounts of everyday neighbourhood life in Moss Side. People provided numerous accounts of relationships between youths taking a racialised form (particularly amongst males) including accounts from young people themselves. Tensions between Caribbean and Somali youth were evident in accounts of a lack of Somali access to the flagship Millenium Powerhouse youth centre and a sense of exclusion from what was supposed to be a shared space for all young people living in the Moss Side area. The narratives were also indicative of the complexity of dynamics in movements towards integration. In a discussion group involving Black Caribbean and Somali

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children and youths using this centre there were accounts of a harmonious shared use of the space. However, other Somali youths who no longer used the centre presented a very different picture; for example, they felt unwelcome and were angered by having their area attachment and right to belong to Moss Side challenged. The accounts were suggestive of a lack of a simple black-white dichotomy in integration and ongoing struggles over access to and the distribution of ‘community’based resources. Somali youths were also making claims for better education and employment opportunities as well as youth spaces. There were recurring perceptions that young (mainly Black Caribbean) men were harassing Somali women, which resulted in wider aggression between Black Caribbean and Somali young men. While the police were unable to find any Somali women willing to come forward and report any racially motivated attacks, a number of the Somali women interviewed cited personal experience of harassment. Mothers also described how this context was affecting interactions, often talking about their children: The children were beaten by teenagers whenever they went to the park, so we don’t allow them, so they play in the garden, it’s frightening, they are scared of the teenagers. Jannah, Somali woman, 50s On the whole, Somali respondents did not attribute such negative experiences to the aftermath of 11 September and the 7 July bombings. However, these events clearly had an impact on perceptions of what it was like to live in Moss Side. A Somali man who was a community activist referred to a widespread perception that Muslims were terrorists, with this viewpoint being fuelled by the media: Here Muslims are perceived to be terrorists, this is after the September 11 . . . Muslims are not terrorists, Muslims do not condone terrorism or violence, but unfortunately there is nothing they can do about it because it is the media that is stereotyping it. Samatar, Somali man, 60s Confirming such stereotyping, one of the White British interviewees, Irene, in her 50s, made an association between the Somali community and terrorism: ‘And you know what you get as well, because half these terrorists are Somalians as well and that.’ ‘Racialised resentment’ expressed by existing residents in Moss Side was often targeted at the Somali community, particularly around the


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distribution of limited housing. The discussion by Bhavani et al. (2005) of ‘elite’ and ‘situated’ racisms suggests that individuals do not simply repeat media stories about asylum-seekers and new immigrants, but incorporate these ideas into their everyday lives and understandings of their local situations. The role of the media in the dynamics of everyday interactions has been highlighted by a number of commentators (Bhavnani et al. 2005; IPPR 2006; van Dijk 1999).

Conclusions Ethnic identifications are more complex than implied in assimilation arguments. In Moss Side, where for many years the Black Caribbean population had been the most visible black population in the area, there were numerous references to how Black Caribbean and White British populations had become more ‘integrated’ over time. There is a range of research which suggests an erosion of difference between Black Caribbean and White British communities in the UK, reflected in residential patterns and in rising rates of intermarriage between the two groups (Modood et al. 1997; Peach 1998; Buck et al. 2002). The accounts of everyday interactions presented in this chapter reinforce these themes and are also in keeping with arguments that there is a complex picture of inter-ethnic relations and solidarities challenging any simple blackwhite dualism (Bhavnani 2001). The narratives are also in keeping with a reduction of racial difference to a ‘liberating ordinariness’, as Gilroy (2004) puts it. The everyday interactions of our residents shows that spatial proximity in terms of shared residence in a neighbourhood does not automatically result in social interactions across culturally diverse groups. At least in part, this reflects situated racisms. In narratives of community in Moss Side the longstanding residents/newcomers divide is a pertinent one. While the picture of interactions between Black Caribbeans and White British is mostly one of convergence, there was a different picture conveyed of interactions between Somalis and others in the neighbourhood. Somalis – on the whole, albeit with exceptions – were more segregated in their interactions and relationships. This was for a variety of reasons including ‘newness’ and lack of fluency in English, perceptions of cultural distance (from both Somali and more established communities), and racial abuse and hostility. Refugee and asylum-seeking communities are attracted to areas where there is pre-existing settlement and structures of support (Robinson and Reeve 2006). Many of the issues emerging in Somali narratives reflect a context of settlement, and of trying to settle into urban Moss Side life. The

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media, at least in part, contributes to making this process all the harder, in fuelling racial harassment via negative reporting about Muslims in the wake of terrorist incidents, as well as more general negative coverage of refugees and asylum-seekers. It is not the media that is at work here. Valentine argues that there is a need to draw together separate debates about prejudice and socialeconomic inequalities of power. He emphasises the need to address ‘the perceived fairness of resource distribution between majority and minority populations’ (Valentine 2008: 334). In Moss Side material inequalities emerge as a key dynamic shaping the contours of community relationships. Neighbourhood tensions and resources often reflected struggles over resources including employment, housing and community-based resources (as in the example presented earlier of inter-ethnic tensions centred on youth spaces). Moreover, limited shared use of public spaces across ethnic groups often reflected differences in lifestyle and material opportunities. The findings of our research lend weight to calls for institutional responses that address the material underpinnings of these tensions and racisms. Responses also need to provide sustained support for grassroots activity that forges creative connections between ethnic communities. ‘Laissez-faire’ attitudes about separation seemed to be sometimes related to a lack of awareness regarding the barriers that might be facing Somalis and other new communities in using shared public spaces and facilities, as evidenced in the frequent comment that new communities ‘don’t want to mix’. These measures may contribute to a widening of the experience of a reduction of racial difference to a liberating ordinariness.

Notes 1. The research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation under their Immigration and Inclusion programme. The full report (‘Social Cohesion in Diverse Communities’ by Maria Hudson, Joan Phillips, Kath Ray and Helen Barnes) can be downloaded free of charge from www.jrf.org.uk. 2. All respondents in this chapter have been anonymised. 3. Khat is a plant whose leaves are chewed for their stimulant effect.

References Bhavnani , R. (2001) Rethinking Interventions in Racism (Oakhill: Trentham Books). Bhavnani, R., H. Safia Mirza and V. Meetoo (2005) Tackling the Roots of Racism: Lessons for Success (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation/Policy Press). Buck, N. I. Gordon, P. Hall, M. Harloe and M. Kleinman (2002) Working Capital: Life and Labour in Contemporary London (London: Routledge).


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Fortier, A (2007) ‘Too Close for Comfort: Loving Thy Neighbour and the Management of Multicultural Intimacies’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 104–19. Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge). IPPR (2006) Warm Welcome? Understanding Public Attitudes to Asylum Seekers in Scotland (London: IPPR). Home Office Community Cohesion Unit (2002) Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team (London: Home Office). Hudson, M. J. Phillips, K. Ray and H. Barnes (2007) Social Cohesion in Diverse Communities (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation). Modood, T., R. Berthoud, J. Lakey, J. Nazroo, P. Smith, S. Virdee and S. Beishon (1997) Ethnic Minorities in Britain – Diversity and Disadvantage (London: PSI). Pahl, R. and L. Spencer (2003) ‘Personal Communities: Not Simply Families of ‘Fate’ or ‘Choice’, ISER Working Papers, number 2003–4. Peach, C. (1998) ‘South Asian and Caribbean Ethnic Minority Housing Choice in Britain’ Urban Studies, vol. 35, no. 10, pp. 1657–80. Phillips, D. (2006) ‘Parallel Lives? Challenging Discourses of British Muslim Selfsegregation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 25–40. Phillips, T. (2005) ‘Sleepwalking to Segregation.’ Speech given by the Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality at the Manchester Council for Community Relations. Robinson, R. and K. Reeve (2006) Neighbourhood Experiences of New Immigration: Reflections from the Evidence Base (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation). Runnymede Trust (2000) The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (London: Runnymede Trust). Stubbs, S. (2007) ‘Britishness and the Habits of Solidarity’, in D. Flynn and Z. Williams (eds) Towards a Progressive Immigration Policy (London: Compass, with Migrant Rights Network and Barrow Cadbury Trust), pp. 30–1. Taylor, I., K. Evans and P. Fraser (1996) A Tale of Two Cities: Global Change, Local Feeling, and Everyday Life in the North of England. A Study of Manchester and Sheffield (London: Routledge). Valentine, G. (2008) ‘Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 323–37. van Dijk, T. A. (1999) ‘Discourse and Racism’, Discourse and Society, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 147–8. Vertovec, S. (2007) ‘The Emergence of Superdiversity in Britain’, Compas Working Paper 06-25. Wetherell, M., M. Lafleche and R. Berkeley (2007) Identity, Ethnic Diversity and Community Cohesion (London: Sage).

11 Volunteering, Social Networks, Contact Zones and Rubbish: The Case of the ‘Korean Volunteer Team’ Francis Leo Collins

Encounters with difference are an increasingly common aspect of everyday life in contemporary cities. Indeed, Ang (2001: 89–90) notes that in the global city ‘groups of different backgrounds, ethnic and otherwise, cannot help but enter into relations with each other, no matter how great the desire for separateness and the attempt to maintain cultural purity’. Yet, despite the increasing commonality of such encounters, most research indicates that everyday life in multicultural spaces is characterised by tensions, racism, encounters that are superficial or exploitative, and more generally feelings of physical and sociocultural distance between individuals and communities. In this context, this chapter argues that there is value in drawing attention to small examples that offer the possibility of or hope for different kinds of everyday multiculturalism in contemporary cities. To do this I draw on the literature around volunteering and contact zones to tell the story of a group who called themselves the ‘Korean Volunteer Team’ (KVT). Despite this ethno-specific name, the KVT’s members were South Korean, Japanese and Chinese international students, as well as Pakeha (European) New Zealanders. As part of an attempt to engage with the public in Auckland and to overcome racial stereotypes about ‘Asian students’, the KVT met every Saturday to pick up rubbish in Auckland’s inner city. This rather unlikely activity sought to bridge the significant gap between international students from the Asian region and other inhabitants in Auckland, especially the dominant Pakeha population. During the two years that the KVT operated, the group had many noteworthy encounters with members of the public, both positive and negative. They also established a network of friendships that are 216

Contact Zones and Rubbish: The ‘Korean Volunteer Team’

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maintained transnationally between the different localities where these individuals now reside. In this sense, the practices and experiences of the KVT are important because they offer insight into the possibilities for everyday urban encounters between individuals and groups who perceive each other as ‘foreign’. It provides an example of how individuals might learn to negotiate, if not cross, borders. To address these issues the chapter proceeds as follows: I begin by introducing some literature on the practices of voluntary work with an emphasis on the role of voluntary organisations in the lives of migrants. Secondly, I consider scholarship focused on the cultural politics of contact zones. Using insights from these literatures I elucidate the story of the KVT through my own experiences as a member and through the words of its founder, Cho Won-Jun, or, as he was known in Auckland, Pedro.1 This presentation includes consideration of the origins of the KVT, the volunteering activities that they engaged in, the social networks that served as the foundation of the group and encounters that occurred with the general public through the conduct of the KVT. In discussing these issues I consider the contribution of the KVT both to the individuals involved and to the possibility for forms of everyday multiculturalism in cities like Auckland.

Volunteer work as a cultural contact zone There is an increasing scholarly interest in the role played by volunteers in society (Milligan and Conradson 2006; Smith et al. 1995). Often this research has been concerned with formalised efforts to provide welfare and support services, particularly in response to contractions of the welfare state (Wolch 1990). Conversely, there appears to be a relative dearth of research into the practices of more informal voluntary work (Roberts and Devine 2004), an absence that appears to be the result of a lack of institutional structure, records and the supposedly less politically relevant character of informal work (Moya 2005). For many, informal voluntary associations like the KVT appear to be less significant in societal terms and relatively short-lived in nature. However, such a perspective overlooks the huge amount of undocumented and unrecognised informal voluntary work that takes place on an everyday basis under the auspices of neighbourliness and the highly significant contributions such work makes to the lives of both donors and recipients. Indeed, Roberts and Devine (2004) have suggested that recent moves by the British state to formalise voluntary work and integrate volunteers into state-led welfare provision may reduce the level of voluntary work,

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the pleasure gained by volunteers themselves and the positive outcomes for recipients. As such they argue that a progressive understanding of voluntary work needs to be open to the different contingencies of both formal and informal efforts. There are a number of reasons why voluntary organisations emerge in different locales in different ways. More often than not, however, the particularities of the context of emergence play a significant role. Milligan and Conradson (2006: 7) observe that ‘[v]oluntary action commonly develops in response to localised need and interests that change over time and space’. However, such an observation cannot come at the expense of those who actually choose to volunteer – individuals. Roberts and Devine (2004: 290) explain: ‘[a]lthough it was rare for people to pursue an interest entirely on their own, in the sense that voluntary activity would be initiated through friendship and family networks, we also found that the mobilizing force of the event was often a highly personalized and in some instances emotional experience.’ In this research both of these influences, localised experiences and individual motivations, are shown to be important characteristics of the KVT’s activities. There is also a significant literature that investigates the role that immigrant voluntary organisations play in the formation of social networks and communities. Indeed, some of the earliest work on ‘transnationalism’ focused specifically on the cross-border practices of groups that provided social, economic and political support to migrants’ origin locales (Basch et al. 1994). Here too, however, the focus has been disproportionately on the formalised elements of immigrant associations and on those whose actions or influence cross national borders (Babcock 2006). Nevertheless, this literature does provide useful insight into the reasons why migrants appear to establish a disproportionate number of voluntary groups (Moya 2005) and the perceived benefits from such civic involvement. In regards to the latter, for instance, Lalich (2006: 210) suggests that: Immigrant organisations are central to the process of adaptation to a new social environment; they play a key role in expression of identity, cultural transfer and maintenance. [. . .] They are also places of social exchange and communication, not only with other co-ethnic immigrants, but also with other social groups in the host city. Indeed, research with recent migrant groups in Auckland has confirmed these assertions to suggest that voluntary action gives otherwise estranged individuals a way to be involved in the community (Tse and


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Liew 2004). By establishing social networks and a sense of identity in the host community, recent arrivals are likely to feel greater levels of social embeddedness and engagement with society as a whole. In a related sense, Ahmed (1999) has argued that communities of shared interest among migrant women can play an important role in the re-inhabitation of the unfamiliar spaces encountered in migration. Conversely, others such as Schrover and Vermeulen (2005: 824) take a more negative stance, arguing that ‘[b]y forming an organisation, immigrants fence off their ethnic or national identity from others’ and may in fact feel greater distance between themselves and the host society. It would seem, then, that the outcomes of involvement in voluntary organisations depends very much on the nature of the association itself and the practices it engages in. In this regard, we can usefully frame voluntary organisations, migrant-associated and otherwise, formal and informal, as presenting opportunities for intercultural contact in that they have the potential to bring individuals of different backgrounds together. They can be, although not necessarily are, manifestations of ‘cultural contact zones’ (Wise 2004). In this chapter I employ the notion of a ‘contact zone’ in a modest everyday fashion, as a site of contact between individuals separated by geographic, historical and sociocultural distance (Pratt 1992). I draw inspiration here from grounded empirical investigations of encounters between individuals who conceive themselves as being separated by borders. Wise (2005) has offered a useful example of the everyday cultural politics of encounter in contact zones through her research in the multicultural suburb of Ashfield in Sydney. Despite the fact that her research revealed continued expressions of racism and the maintenance of strong and fixed borders between individuals, Wise notes in a hopeful way that different sorts of encounters did take place. In particular, she found that individual efforts to reach out, from both the longer-term AngloCeltic residents and newer ‘Asian’ arrivals, played a part in opening up spaces of encounter, spaces of hope. This sort of grounded investigation of contact zones suggest that it is necessary to continue to focus on the uneven power relations that characterise all encounters between difference. However, it also highlights the fact that such encounters do not necessarily have to lead to continued difference and disjuncture but can in fact open up spaces for everyday examples of ‘togetherness-indifference’ (Ang 2001) or the ‘multicultural real’ (Hage 1998). This focus on the possibilities of everyday encounters in contemporary cities is also shared by an increasing number of urban scholars

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(Amin 2006; Laurier and Philo 2006). Much of this work focuses on the manner that forms of low-level sociability might act as a basis for developing sustained ways of living together through difference. Here the sorts of everyday interaction between customers and shopkeepers, people in bus queues, regulars at cafes and bars, passers-by and neighbours is seen to offer opportunities for what Amin (2006) has called a ‘politics of connectivity’. Certainly, these are attractive suggestions but they are also perhaps too positive when they overlook the extent to which everyday politeness can shroud prejudice, antagonism and an absence of sustained relationships (Valentine 2008). While I agree with the general premise of these arguments that the everyday urban is pregnant with possibilities, I also want to suggest that there is a need to focus on how these are delivered. Indeed, a nuanced understanding of everyday multiculturalism demands that more attention be paid to both the opening as well as the closing of possibilities for encounters through difference. This includes focusing on the manner in which individuals and communities seek to negotiate differences, the ways in which such efforts are received by others and the hope they do or do not generate for forms of ‘real multiculturalism’ in everyday life. In this regard, voluntary organisations, particularly those like the KVT that specifically aim to challenge socio-cultural difference, appear to be a particularly useful avenue of inquiry. In this chapter I focus on the role of the KVT as a vehicle for opening up opportunities both for those who are involved in its conduct and more broadly for public life in a city such as Auckland.

Researching South Korean international student experiences in Auckland The research discussed in this chapter emerges from a larger project on the lives of South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand. This research centred specifically on students’ ‘everyday urban encounters’ in Auckland as a means of identifying the transnationalism involved in their daily lives, the impact that their presence and practices were having on the urban landscape of Auckland and the different sorts of encounters that resulted from this emergent form of mobility. The research included a wide range of methodological techniques, from orthodox approaches, such as a survey, interviews, discourse analysis of print media and extended participant observation, through to experimentation with emergent techniques such as diary-writing, participatory map/diagram drawing and research through personal homepages.


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In many ways the everyday lives of South Korean international students during their sojourn are almost always enacted in ‘contact zones’. In Auckland students encounter not simply an urban environment that is unfamiliar but also individuals and communities who are conceived as different and who conceive students as different. For the most part, my research has confirmed existing studies of international student experience in New Zealand (Ward and Masgoret 2004) that suggests these encounters are more often than not highly problematic, particularly where they involve the host population. Indeed, I have documented elsewhere (Collins 2006) the extent to which the print media in Auckland have constructed a broader group of ‘Asian students’, that includes South Korean international students, through a process of racialisation. Other findings from my research include the experience of contact zones such as homestays, educational institutions or the streets of Auckland. Each of these ‘contact zones’ offers opportunities for encounter through difference in the manner recently highlighted by urban scholars (Amin 2006; Laurier and Philo 2006). For the most part, however, these encounters are negative and lead not to opportunities to challenge borders between individuals but instead reinforce the apparent rigidity of difference. This chapter, on the other hand, focuses on the practices and experiences of the Korean Volunteer Team as everyday enactments of multiculturalism that suggest that more positive encounters might be possible, but on the basis that specific acts are brought to life. This chapter draws on interviews with members of the Korean Volunteer Team (KVT), participant observation as a member between January and August 2005, and ongoing social engagement with ex-members. As a Pakeha male I might be assumed to have considerable social and cultural distance from members of a group like the KVT. Indeed, their actions are in many ways responses to experiences of distance from ‘people like me’. I speak English with a New Zealand accent, I have New Zealand citizenship and my presence in Auckland is never challenged. In contrast, the members of the KVT speak English as a second language, possess citizenship from ‘other’ places that makes their residence in New Zealand temporary, and their presence in Auckland is regularly challenged. We also share much, however: we are all in our twenties; none of us (at the time) were married; we are all language learners (I also study Korean and have lived in Korea); and we all have rather idealistic hopes that people can just get along. Because of the sorts of embodied differences identified here, my initial contact with the KVT required significant mutual effort. I approached the KVT on one Saturday in January 2005 after reading an article

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Figure 11.1

Korean Volunteer Team rubbish collection (photos by the author)


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published about them in the New Zealand Herald and learning about their activities during an interview. While the KVT had always been open to members from different backgrounds, they were also cautious of a young Pakeha male and suspicious of why he would want anything to do with them. I was open about the research from the beginning but I also made it clear that this was not a ‘hit-and-run’ exercise, I thought that the activities they were involved in were useful and I wanted to help out wherever I could for as long as possible. As with all the other members of the team, it was the things that we shared that made our collective activities possible. Sharing the experience of learning a language, being open to the experiences of ‘foreigners’ in places we call ‘home’ and, most importantly, enjoying each other’s company, and the good times to be had after the rubbish had been collected.

The Korean Volunteer Team: volunteering, social networks, encounters and contact zones In this section I discuss the experience of the KVT in relation to three themes: practices of volunteering, social networks amongst its members, and the sorts of opportunities for encounters with the public that were created by the KVT. Volunteering The Korean Volunteer Team was formed and originally led by Pedro, an international student from Gyeongju, South Korea. Pedro came to study English in Auckland in February 2004 and remained there until March 2005; he chose New Zealand based on an uncle’s recommendation: not as racist as Australia and the United States, safe, green and not too expensive. Pedro enjoyed living in Auckland and New Zealand; however, he was also concerned by the ways that people seemed to treat him and the apparent distance that existed between individuals of different ethno-national backgrounds. It is partly for this reason that he decided to establish the Korean Volunteer Team. The account provided below is interspersed with Pedro’s own explanation on the emergence and activities of the KVT:2 I organised the Korean Volunteer Team to clean Auckland city’s downtown and Queen Street every Saturday for two hours by picking up rubbish. We started it on the 29th of May 2004. At the beginning of this activity, the team was formed by five people who were all Korean international students.

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The team would meet every Saturday at 2pm outside a bookstore in downtown Auckland. After meeting, exchanging greetings and handing out rubbish bags, printed t-shirts and tongs the group would start on one of three walking routes. When the KVT was at its peak (up to 25 members) they would divide themselves into groups that would each take a different route. For most of the time that I was involved there were about eight to 12 members and we always went on one route together. The membership was predominantly South Korean, but also included members from Japan and China. I was also a member for eight months and a friend of mine, Steven3 (also a Pakeha New Zealander), also intermittently attended. There were both female and male members of the KVT, although the longest-serving members were all male and the team was always led by these members. The KVT members were aged from 21 to 26. With the exception of Steven and me, all of the members of the KVT were on temporary permits in New Zealand – either student or working-holiday visas. During my time with the KVT I found that each of the members had different motivations for being involved in the group. For some the KVT simply offered something to do on the weekend, for others it was a set of interpersonal relationships that played an important role in their adjustment to life in Auckland. In contrast to the varying reasons for other individuals becoming involved in the KVT, Pedro’s motivations for establishing it were quite specific. They were located both in his general sense of malaise about intercultural relations in Auckland and two particular incidents: The reason why I started this activity is that I was extremely shocked by my home-stay granddaughter. She asked me, ‘Where is Korea – in Japan?’ She thought that Korea was a part of Japan because of the 2002 Korea–Japan World Cup. Futhermore, when a police officer visited my institute to teach international students, who were from China, Japan and Korea, about traffic regulations and how to drive in Auckland, one of my English lecturers complained about why many Asian students came to New Zealand and made problems such as car accidents, making dirty, spitting and gambling. At that time, there was a serious problem which was that one Asian guy killed a Kiwi person in a car accident. I realised that many Kiwi people do not know in terms of Korea and Korean people exactly and they have a stereotype that Asians are the cause of many social problems, and dirty. I supposed that this is because some


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naughty Chinese international students performed badly. Therefore, I tried to find the way to change Kiwis’ idea about Asian people and Korean international students. The emergence and activities of the KVT, then, remind us that voluntary work is often conducted according to local needs and interests (Milligan and Conradson 2006). In this case, there were two factors: New Zealanders’ lack of knowledge about Korea and their derision for ‘Asians’. Indeed, the English lecturer’s complaints about ‘Asian students’ are almost a perfect utterance of all the different racialised tropes that are produced in Auckland’s print media (see Collins 2006). Not only does this reinforce the connections between media representations and public discourses but also the ways that these impact upon the lives of individuals. At the same time, it is also clear there is something quite personal about this voluntary work. Pedro’s motivations to start the KVT were in fact the result of his outlook on the world, which sees cross-cultural distance as problematic, and the two ‘highly personalised’ experiences noted above (Roberts and Devine 2004). It is also worth noting that while the KVT did have as many as 25 members for a period of time, Pedro’s eventual departure in March 2005 did also mark in many respects the decline of the KVT. In the months following fewer and fewer members attended, until there was only a core of five individuals (including myself) who attended every week. The team’s activities concluded in August 2005. In this respect, while the KVT did certainly rely on networks of friends and classmates, mostly fellow ‘Asian students’, the ‘mobilising force’ behind the particular actions of this group was Pedro. Moreover, in my own personal contact with Pedro I became aware that he was involved in a variety of voluntary activities, including advocacy for greater wheelchair access in South Korean cities and English teaching for individuals from low-income households. What this suggests is that while informal voluntary work like that of the KVT often has a particular local purpose, such action usually only materialises because of the practices of individuals who can organise and lead groups of fellow volunteers. Social networks The KVT advertised each week for new members on a Korean internet community called New Zealand Iyagi. Here there was a separate space dedicated to the KVT where members left messages and photos,

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and described their activities. At times there were also stories in other Auckland-based Korean-language media about the KVT. In addition, new members were also recruited through personal contacts at schools, churches and through the arrival of friends from South Korea. All of the non-Korean members, except myself, were recruited because they were classmates, roommates or friends of existing KVT members. The practice of collecting rubbish was always reasonably relaxed and social. Members would catch up on each others’ lives, talk about things happening around them or discuss other items of interest, usually in either Korean or English. The use of these languages was partly because some of the members were not completely fluent in Korean but also because, as Pedro once said, this allowed the KVT to ‘il seok, i jo’ – literally, ‘one stone, two birds’. By speaking English the members got an opportunity to practise the language they were in New Zealand to learn. The purpose of the KVT would seem, then, to have been broader than simply the practice of rubbish collection or the effort to effect change in the perceptions of ‘Asian students’. In fact, many of the members didn’t even want to pick up rubbish, even if they respected Pedro’s intentions. For the most part they had joined the KVT because it gave them a social outing every Saturday, something that could become part of their weekly routine. The KVT’s activities also rarely concluded once the rubbish collection was finished. Rather, we would often find a place to have a meal and drinks, and socialise together, sometimes for the entire evening. The first day I attended the KVT is indicative. Pedro invited me to join everyone afterwards for a party for a member’s birthday. Pedro also told me that this event was going to be ‘Korean style’, so everyone would give some money and we would share everything together. After we finished collecting rubbish we went to an inner-city backpacker hostel where Tyrell, a South Korean member of the KVT on a working-holiday visa, lived in exchange for cleaning duties. We often met in the lounge or kitchen of the hostel for socialising activities. That first day we waited for Pedro and Seon-Jun who soon returned with western snack foods, Korean and Chinese takeaways, beer and soju (a Korean spirit similar to vodka). We shared everything together and stayed talking at the hostel till quite late in the evening. That day there were Korean, Japanese and Chinese members. We spoke in Korean and English, as well as some Japanese (Tyrell is also conversant with Japanese). The hostel was not the only place we socialised. Sometimes we would go to different members’ homes, including my own, to parks in the city area, to Korean restaurants or on trips out of the city. On one occasion


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we drove to a park in west Auckland, where we had a fusion barbeque of Korean cuts of meats, dipping sauce, side dishes and beer. On another occasion I organised with Steven to take the team to Piha, a famous surf beach on Auckland’s west coast. Again we brought a picnic that integrated both Korean and New Zealand foods, something that is perhaps best exemplified in the crayfish (caught the day previously by Steven) that we dipped in chogochujang, a Korean sauce made of chilli paste and vinegar. Later on, Steven and I taught the rest of the team how to play touch rugby. It is clear then, that social networks were an important part of the KVT in ways that align the group with observations about the role of voluntary organisations in the lives of migrants more generally. In particular, the activities of the KVT were based on an important foundation of interpersonal relationships between fellow international students from East Asia. These relationships were the result both of these individuals’ co-presence in particular places, notably English-language schools, and their shared experiences in Auckland. In this sense, the KVT appeared to facilitate a sense of identity and social embeddedness through the space it provided for social exchange. Yet, in contrast to some literature on voluntary organisations amongst immigrant groups (Schrover and Vermeulen 2005) what members of the KVT shared was not a bounded sense of co-ethnicity but rather what Ahmed (1999) calls ‘uncommon estrangement’, the reworking of the unfamiliar as a means to re-inhabit spaces and places. Put another way, it was the manner in which these individuals uncommonly experienced being conceived as collectively ‘foreign’, and treated with the same disdain, by the host population in Auckland that produced the possibility for commonality. In fact, the social networks that were established between individual members of the KVT actually outlasted the group itself (when I visited South Korea in mid-2006 we had a small reunion of the longest-serving members). As Pedro noted, the weekly meetings of the KVT provided a social outing for ‘international students who did not have any activity in the weekend’: it provided a regular space of exchange and hence social embeddedness or belonging for individuals whose lives were otherwise characterised by transient friendships and activities. In this respect the KVT also played a role as a ‘cultural contact zone’ (Wise 2004) that facilitated encounters between differently positioned students. The significance of the involvement of Japanese and Chinese members in this group should not be underestimated. Although media representations (Collins 2006) and some social science research (Ward and Masgoret 2004) would suggest there is little differentiation between

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the practices and experiences of ‘Asian students’, this is rarely the case in reality. Indeed, both key informants and students spoke about difficulties in the interactions between different nationalities of ‘Asian students’ in Auckland. In the case of South Korean students it was often suggested that some of the greatest difficulty occurred with Chinese students in Auckland, something Pedro’s statement revealed when he speculated on the causes of stereotypes about Asian students – ‘I supposed that this is because some naughty Chinese international students performed badly’. However, there were also difficulties with other nationalities. Even Pedro recalled during an interview that he originally had distrust for Japanese before he came to New Zealand because of their colonial relationship with South Korea and the way that this is represented in the media, history books and by the military. His experiences in the KVT provided him with interpersonal encounters that forced him to reconsider this view. Although some of these difficulties are resolved in other contact zones such as language schools, the KVT offered a quite unique way of bridging differences between these groups. Certainly, the KVT’s organisation and activities were maintained according to Korean sociocultural norms but it was flexible enough that different individuals could take an active role in the group. The result of this is that even now, after almost all the individuals in the KVT have left Auckland, transnational and crosscultural relationships are maintained through trips abroad and regular communication between ex-members in South Korea, Japan, China and New Zealand. Encounters with the public The activities of this group of students did not go unnoticed by people in the streets of Auckland’s inner city. Indeed, it was quite common for passers-by to interact with members in both positive and negative ways. Often this simply consisted of queries about their actions, smiles or looks of bemusement, and grateful or not-so-grateful comments. Sometimes, however, more notable encounters occurred. Four such encounters are described below. • 19 February 2005: We had just started walking up Victoria Street. There was always a lot of rubbish in this area because of the number of bars and restaurants in the vicinity. Seon-Jun was collecting some glass from the kerb when a woman walking out of one of the nearby shops said ‘I’ve got a brush and shovel if you want it, honey’. Seon-Jun, who had only just arrived in Auckland, did not understand the women’s accent or expression. I nodded and she brought the brush and shovel to


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Seon-Jun who was able to clean up the glass in much less time and without the risk of getting cut. While he was cleaning the glass the woman said that she saw the team go past every week and thought we were doing a wonderful job – Seon-Jun responded that he was happy that he could help with something. • 26 February 2005: As we walked towards Princes Street we noticed that it had been closed by traffic wardens to allow for preparations for the annual Chinese Lantern Festival in Albert Park. At the corner of Princes Street we stopped for a break. While we were talking one of the traffic wardens walked towards our group and asked us what we were doing. Seon-Jun explained in his usual prompt and rehearsed manner – ‘we volunteer to pick-up rubbish in Auckland’. The warden responded in a positive but bemused way and returned to the other side of the road where his co-workers appeared to ask him the same question. Shortly after a different traffic warden came towards us with a bag – when he arrived he congratulated the team on doing a great job and gave each member an ice-cream from his bag. After a brief exchange the warden returned to his position watching the road and we continued on our route. • 21 April 2005: It had been a pretty quiet day until we got about halfway along Victoria Street. Jun-Seok, who had come to KVT for the first time, was collecting a pile of rubbish that was in the gutter. Two young men were walking along Victoria Street towards Queen Street – as they walked past Jun-Seok they said in a loud voice behind him ‘you can pick up the trash on your feet after that’. Jun-Seok was startled. Jeremy saw this and tried to explain what the KVT did but the men just ignored him and kept walking. • 2 April 2005: I was walking with Matthew (South Korean) along Victoria Street just before the entrance to Victoria Park. A short distance ahead of us a car slowed down and parked on the same side of the road. As we started walking past the car an elderly couple got out. The women had obviously been trying to figure out what we were doing. She asked me directly – ‘What are you doing?’ I answered, as I usually did, by deferring to the Korean aspect of the KVT and just said that I was trying to help them with their idea. She said that she thought there should be an article in the newspaper about them, to which I responded that there had been nine months earlier. She responded: ‘Well, I think it’s a wonderful idea. Please tell them that I am very grateful and that they are doing a wonderful job.’ I said I would. Notably, Matthew had been

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standing next to me the entire way through this conversation and that elderly women, despite her positive approach, never looked at him once or talked to him directly. These are only a few of the encounters with the public that I saw during the time I was a member of the KVT. Every Saturday there would be at least one, if not many, such encounters. As is the case in these four anecdotes, most of these encounters were positive in some ways. However, there were occasions when members of the public expressed in subtle and, as above, not so subtle ways their derision for the individuals involved in the KVT. At other times, reactions were more bemused than anything else – not comprehending why anyone would want to take part in such an activity. Encounters between members of the KVT and the general public were obviously not as sustained as the contact maintained within the group itself. However, even the four apparently fleeting encounters described here have some significance. The most negative of these reinforces some of the problematic elements of encounters in Auckland by illustrating the way that racism can materialise in small ways on an everyday basis, regardless of the actions taken by students. My encounter with the elderly woman, despite its positive nature, also illustrates problems. Although she clearly wished to express gratitude her avoidance of eye contact and conversation with Matthew suggested that she perceived the distance between herself and this ‘Asian student’ as far too great to bridge without an intermediary. In contrast, however, the two positive encounters noted above suggest, as Wise (2005) has, that behind the everyday difficulties of cross-cultural encounters there is sometimes ‘hope’ for a ‘real multiculturalism’ (Hage 1998). Certainly, these encounters are not the kind of sustained interpersonal relationships that would suggest that students are included in society. However, they are the kind of small gestures that offer the possibility for cultural politics of a more open variety in Auckland. Indeed, even supposedly smaller gestures such as smiles and kind words can open up space for more significant encounters between individuals who might otherwise be separated by great distance. In the lives of many international students it is the absence of these kinds of small everyday gestures in their homestays, classrooms and in public spaces that really exacerbate their feelings of isolation and estrangement in Auckland. Finally, in Pedro’s words: In conclusion, I guess that while we were doing this volunteering, there were some changes in native people’s mind about Asian international students.


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It was a marvellous opportunity to international students who did not have any activity in the weekend. Sadly, after I came back to Korea, there is not the Korean Volunteer Team any longer. I am so sorry for that. In my personal opinion people should make these kinds of activity groups because there are many chances to meet different people and help society, which is the place we live in.

Conclusion The emergence of the Korean Volunteer Team represents an effort by a group of usually marginalised individuals to challenge the sorts of sociocultural distance that characterises everyday life in multicultural cities like Auckland. In terms of considering the potential for everyday multiculturalism the discussion in this chapter presents a number of important points. Firstly, the experience of the KVT would appear to suggest that voluntary organisations, whether formal or informal, can generate important benefits for individuals such as international students who experience estrangement in their migratory journeys. Indeed, it would seem that even voluntary activities that are relatively short-lived and reliant on a particular individual can have important effects. On the one hand the KVT facilitated a particular social embeddedness among South Korean students, other international students and Pakeha New Zealanders. This was founded, at least in the initial instance, upon the shared experiences of different international students who are conceived as ‘Asian students’ in Auckland and New Zealand. In both the official rubbishcollecting activities and the socialising that followed, the members of the KVT could overcome other differences associated with culture, language and nationality and create together a space of belonging that was both mutually beneficial and longer-lasting than the group itself. At the same time the KVT also offered opportunities for particular sorts of encounters with the general public. These encounters were never as sustained as those within the group but they do point to some of the problems and possibilities of everyday multiculturalism. From one perspective they suggest that even where individuals do consciously try to challenge perceptions about sociocultural difference these can be either ignored or even rebuked by those who would appear to have more power in urban space. Yet, at the same time, the positive encounters discussed in this paper and the many more not listed here suggest that activities like those undertaken by the KVT can generate possibilities for encounters in contact zones that do not otherwise occur very easily. Curiously,

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these encounters are not the product of grand schemes and policies for integration but are instead constituted by everyday gestures and acts of gratitude or kindness. This, it would seem, is what the KVT and its encounters with the public offered – the possibility for encounters in a globalising city like Auckland that are not characterised simply by social and cultural distance. I do not want to suggest that these encounters in themselves serve to easily resolve the sorts of problems I laid out earlier in this chapter. Indeed, it is quite clear that the crossing of borders that occurred with the KVT is likely to be undertaken much more readily by individuals such as international students who are on the periphery of society and for whom the benefits seem much more immediate. Nevertheless, what the encounters discussed in this chapter demonstrated is that when presented with the opportunity, some people do engage with each other in a manner that appears, on the surface at least, to move beyond the fixed categorisations of ‘Asian student’ and (Pakeha) ‘New Zealander’ or, equally, ‘Korean’, ‘Japanese’ and ‘Chinese’. The question that remains, then, is to what extent these encounters can or will lead to more sustained changes in the sociocultural landscape of cities such as Auckland. The evidence presented here cannot clearly resolve this but it does show that if such changes are to occur they require not simply low-level sociability and the willingness to be open to ‘others’ when provided with the opportunity but instead the actions of people such as Pedro and organisations such as the KVT who will take the initiative and cross the borders themselves.

Acknowledgement This chapter and the research it draws from would not have been possible without the trust, support and friendship of Pedro and all of the members of the Korean Volunteer Team.

Notes 1. All names used in this chapter are fictional with the exception of Pedro, the founder of the Korean Volunteer Team. It was mutually decided to keep his original name because Pedro had already been the subject of a newspaper article – ‘Young Koreans Clean up Image’, New Zealand Herald, 16 August 2004, p. A5. 2. Pedro prepared this explanation at my request and on the understanding that it would be published as close as possible to verbatim. It was edited by the author and the final version was approved by Pedro.


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3. I met Steven while I was teaching English in South Korea in 2002 and 2003. His interest in contributing to the KVT resulted from his own experiences in Korea and his feeling of connection with Koreans in Auckland.

References Ahmed, S. (1999) ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 329–47. Amin, A. (2006) ‘The Good City’, Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 5–6, pp. 1009–23. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge). Babcock, E. C. (2006) ‘The Transformative Potential of Belizean Migrant Voluntary Associations in Chicago’, International Migration, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 31–53. Basch, L. G., N. G. Schiller and C. Szanton Blanc (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nationstates (Basel: Gordon and Breach). Collins, F. L. (2006) ‘Making Asian Students, Making Students Asian: The Racialisation of Export Education in Auckland, New Zealand’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 217–34. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale: Pluto Press). Lalich, W. F. (2006) ‘Developing Voluntary Community Spaces and Ethnicity in Sydney, Australia’, in C. Milligan and D. Conradson (eds) Landscapes of Voluntarism: New Spaces of Health, Welfare and Governance (Bristol: Policy Press). Laurier, E. and C. Philo (2006) ‘Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 31, pp. 193–207. Milligan, C. and D. Conradson (2006) Landscapes of Voluntarism: New Spaces of Health, Welfare and Governance (Bristol: Policy Press). Moya, J. C. (2005) ‘Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 833–64. Pratt. M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge). Roberts, J. M. and F. Devine (2004) ‘Some Everyday Experiences of Voluntarism: Social Capital, Pleasure, and the Contingency of Participation’, Social Politics, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 280–96. Schrover, M. and F. Vermeulen (2005) ‘Immigrant Organizations’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 823–32. Smith, J. D., C. Rochester and R. Hedley (1995) An Introduction to the Voluntary Sector (London: Routledge). Tse, S. and T. Liew (2004) ‘New Zealand Experiences: How is Community Resilience Manifested in Asian Communities?’, International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–8. Valentine, G. (2008) ‘Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter’, Progress in Human Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 323–37. Ward, C. and A. M. Masgoret (2004) The Experience of International Students in New Zealand: Report on the Results of the National Survey (Wellington: Ministry of Education).

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Wise, A. (2004) Contact Zones: Experiences of Cultural Diversity and Rapid Neighbourhood Change Among Anglo-Celtic and Long-term Elderly Residents in Ashfield. Report for the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, Sydney. Wise, A. (2005) ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 26, no. 1–2, pp. 171–86. Wolch, J. R. (1990) The Shadow State: Government and Voluntary Sector in Transition (New York: Foundation Center).

Part VI Everyday Tensions


12 We Both Eat Rice, But That’s About It: Korean and Latino Relations in Multi-ethnic Los Angeles Chong-suk Han

Introduction On any given day, in any given restaurant in Koreatown, countless orders are taken, meals are served, tables are cleared, dishes are washed, and cheques are paid. Down the street at a corner convenience store, shelves are stocked, beverages are placed into large refrigerators, and purchases are rung up. Even to the most casual observer, it becomes obvious that Korean workers take the orders and collect the money while Latino workers replenish the shelves, clear the tables and wash the dishes. While the routine activity in a restaurant or a convenience store may not seem extraordinary, what is significant is the creation of a common environment where different ethnic groups come together to perform various tasks. These locations, which Louise Lamphere calls ‘mediating institutions’ – including workplaces, schools, apartment houses, community organizations and government agencies – bring ethnic groups, who would otherwise have only limited contact, together for daily interaction (Lamphere et al. 1994). Because these institutions are often the only places where such ethnic groups have daily contact with each other, ethnic prejudices and misconceptions created within the confines of these specific interactions develop into widespread belief systems (Lee 2002). That is, when members of one ethnic group form opinions of another ethnic group in these limited settings, they are likely to disseminate this information through their own ethnic networks until these experiences come to be understood as the stereotypical ‘norm’ in interactions with the other group. As such, these interactions have profound implications for Korean–Latino conflict given the structure of certain 237

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‘mediating institutions’ that are likely to bring these groups into daily contact. In this paper, I argue that the structure of Korean American-owned stores relegates Latino workers to more difficult and less lucrative positions and Korean Americans to more privileged positions. I hypothesise that it is the formation of these specific ‘mediating institutions’, in the form of split labour markets, which is an important factor in shaping the nature of ethnic conflict between Koreans and Latinos by creating a system of oppression that favors Koreans over Latinos and contributes to ethnic antagonism between Korean storeowners, their Korean employees, and Latino residents and workers. To do so, I first outline how Korean-owned small businesses, a very specific mediating institution that brings Koreans and Latinos together for daily interaction, are structured. Then I show how the structure of the Korean-owned small business leads to specific types of interactions among Koreans and Latinos and contributes to ethnic antagonism. Although this paper is not about the causes or consequences of the Los Angeles urban riots following the Rodney King verdict in 1992, I use that event to demonstrate how these arrangements might be manifested.

Methods This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 1995 and 1996, and again in 2003, in Los Angeles. Exploiting existing networks, I sought out Korean American storeowners who owned small businesses within the most heavily affected areas during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising as outlined by Pastor et al. (1993). Using snowball sampling methods, I interviewed 12 Korean American storeowners and conducted ethnographic observations at their businesses. Among the stores, six were located in Koreatown, four in Central Avenue/South Park, and two in Vermont Square. The stores were all ‘mom and pop’ operations with fewer than four paid employees. Three of the stores had no paid employees. The businesses included restaurants (four), liquor stores (seven) and one beauty supply store. These interviews were conducted in Konglish, a uniquely American language composed of English and Korean. Where answers were given in English, I transcribed them and present them verbatim. Where answers were given in Korean, I translated them to the best of my ability. Four of these Korean American storeowners were interviewed again in 2003. I met the first of five Latino informants while working as a food server at an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica. Through this initial contact,

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I earned the confidence of four other Latino workers who all worked for, or were currently working for, Korean employers. All of these interviews were conducted in English. Seven more informants provided shorter interviews which were conducted by a Spanish-speaking assistant. They were identified through her networks. These shorter interviews were used only to clarify and/or support themes found in the five longer interviews. Four of the short interview respondents had no prior experience working for Korean-owned stores. However, all previously lived or were currently living in the areas identified by Pastor et al. (1993). These interviews, which were conducted in Spanish, were translated by the Spanish-speaking interviewer. Rather than coding and counting frequencies, I examined the themes found within the narratives. I was interested in how Korean Americans and Latinos made sense of each other. As I examined these themes, I was particularly interested in how members of both of these groups constructed what it meant to be the ‘other’. Particularly, I found that during their interactions, they actively formed ideas about each other and, through story-telling and myth-making, they solidified their constructions. More than simply ‘story-telling’, I took these myths to be an important part in racial formation (Fine and Turner 2001).

Workplace structure According to Bonacich (1972), the development of a split labour market may entail the formation of a caste-like system where one group excludes members of another group from certain occupations with higher pay, channelling them into occupations with lower pay. This arrangement occurs when the in-group cannot exclude the out-group from the workforce completely. In addition, in many incidences it is not in the employers’ best interest to exclude certain groups. While racial and cultural differences may foster the development of ethnic antagonism, the split-labour-market theory suggests that economic processes are more fundamental to the creation of the splitlabour market and, by extension, of ethnic antagonism (Bonacich 1972). The formation of a split labour market depends on different ethnic groups, with different socioeconomic backgrounds entering the same labour market at different rates of pay (Bonacich 1972). The specifics of the formation and existence of the split labour market in Koreatown and the exploitation faced by low-paid workers will be discussed later. However, it is important to note that the existence of a split labour market and the exploitation faced by low-paid workers has been documented

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in other Los Angeles industries such as the garment industry (Bonacich 1993). Much like businesses in Koreatown, the Los Angeles garment industry is characterised by Korean American bosses exploiting Latino workers (Bonacich 1993). While the operators of small enterprises may not be the actual oppressors who hold any real power over the general economic process, they are in control of employment and business practices in Koreatown. In addition, because the Latino workers are in daily contact with their Korean bosses, the Korean bosses are the only visible oppressors. Workers in the Korean American-owned stores are arranged into a hierarchy based on ‘responsibility’ and pay. Often these arrangements are made based on availability of labour or owner perception of competence. For example, one Korean informant explained why he does not hire Latino workers for some jobs in this way: They have to handle money; they have to have a sense about money. They have to be responsible . . . it’s an education problem. They (Latinos) don’t calculate things well. For instance, with Koreans, if someone buys two items, they can calculate how much something is. But [Latinos], they can’t calculate these things. They constantly make mistakes so we can’t use these people for that. This particular informant also stated that when he uses Koreans for jobs such as cashier, he has to pay them at a higher rate. What is important to note is that if the workers were to be in the same position, they would be paid at different rates. Thus, while Korean storeowners have excluded Latino workers from higher-paying jobs and place Korean workers in better-paying jobs, this may only be due to the employer’s belief that if Koreans were to do the jobs that Latinos are doing, they would have to pay more. As one informant noted: Koreans don’t want to do these jobs (busboys, stock and dishwasher). And even if they did, they wouldn’t work for so little. So I hire (Latinos) to do these jobs and they seem okay. Also, Koreans were not meant to do these jobs. Latinos are stronger and are used to the hard work. Within this system, rules and conceptions become rigid and develop into an ‘elaborated battery of laws, customs and beliefs’ (Bonacich 1972). These rules and conceptions lead to the inability of the excluded groups to move into other positions due to the widespread belief that they are somehow inadequate for certain positions. Because Korean


storeowners view Latino workers as being incompetent at certain jobs, it becomes difficult for Latino workers to move into these jobs even when they do become available. Also, there was also a perceived oversupply of labour at the lower end of the scale. For example, according to another Korean informant: There are always lots of (Latinos) coming looking for jobs. So I don’t have to worry about busboys or dishwashers, there will always be others. If they don’t like their job, then I can always find someone else. There was also a wide consensus among Korean storeowners about the nature of the type of work Latinos can do as opposed to the type of work Koreans can do. Korean storeowners generally believed that Latinos were somehow ‘suited’ for manual labour, based on their social and genetic make-up. One Korean storeowner told me: They’re [Latinos] stronger than Koreans. So where strength is needed, they use Mexicans. Even since they were little, Mexicans have worked. But for Koreans, most people don’t grow up doing hard work. They usually start working when they are about 25 [. . .] In Korea, if you’re in the position to immigrate to America, it implies a certain social status, so they probably did not do hard labour. But for Mexicans, they are used to the hard work. So when a job requires labour and not any technical skill, Koreans tend to hire Mexicans. In addition, Koreans tend to regard Latinos as ‘expendable’ workers. This leads to the belief that they can also pay Latino workers less than Korean workers, place them into jobs which are lower in status and pay, and cut employment at their discretion. One Korean informant stated: I have not had any conflicts with my Latino workers, if I did, I could simply fire him and find someone else [. . .] There is a demand for these jobs and not enough positions, that’s why their wages are so low [. . .] Koreans will not do these jobs and even if they did, I would have to pay them more. The surplus labour market and the willingness of Latinos to provide the labour for these jobs reduce Latino power over their work schedules and give them little power over the security of their employment. This surplus Latino labour allows Korean storeowners to benefit but it is detrimental to Latino workers. By this I mean that Korean storeowners not only have the benefit of hiring Latino workers at a lower rate of

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hourly pay, but of offering odd and limited work schedules to further cut employment costs. According to one Korean American employer: We use him for about four hours a day, seven days a week. He takes home about $600 per month, but we pay him ‘under the table’ [. . .] He seems to do all right, I’m sure he doesn’t have too many expenses . . . he lives with his sister and his rent is only about $250.00 per month, so I’m sure he has enough. The employment practices of the Korean American merchants rob Latino workers of key factors which they consider important to a good job. In a focus group study, Latinos indicated a good job offered job security, a sense of responsibility, and upward mobility (Bobo et al. 1995). Obviously, none of these things were offered to the Latino workers employed by my sample of Korean American merchants.

Immigrant status The illegal status of an immigrant, as it is defined by the state, carries with it a certain level of discrimination and disabilities (Bonacich 1987). Such immigrants lack the rights of citizens and are vulnerable to certain conditions which may be placed upon them by others. Therefore, it was not surprising that a significant reason that Korean American merchants viewed Latino workers as being ‘expendable’ came from the merchant’s perception of the workers’ legal status: The ones without green cards are more docile. They don’t complain as much and work harder. They have a sense of responsibility to the job and to the employer. Later this same informant stated that: The ones without green cards don’t cause as much trouble because they don’t want to get in trouble. They can’t really complain to anyone because they will be sent back to Mexico. So it’s more comfortable to have them as workers. Yet another Korean merchant stated: I prefer Mexican-born (workers). They don’t know about American laws. They do as the owner tells them to do. The ones who are born here, they act


up, make excuses for everything and threaten to sue. Of course, I’ve never been sued, but I’ve heard that’s what they do. The use of undocumented immigrant labour is widespread in the Los Angeles garment industry (Bonacich 1993); likewise undocumented workers may be employed in other Korean businesses. The majority of the Korean informants stated that they had, at one time or another, employed an undocumented worker. In addition, several more stated that they were not sure of the status of the Latinos currently working for them. Korean American merchants use the immigration status of their workers as a method of labour control. Korean American merchants feel that they do not need to offer full-time employment or benefits to their undocumented employees because they believe that there are no legal courses of action that can be taken by their employees should they choose to discontinue the employment. This allows Korean American merchants to secure long hours of employment when needed and cut the hours of employment when they are no longer needed. Likewise, undocumented immigrants are often forced to take these jobs. According to a Latino worker: Sometimes, they have no choice. They have to take the jobs because other people won’t give them a job. The Koreans don’t care, you can give them any fake papers and they usually don’t check up on it. Usually, they pay in cash so it doesn’t really matter. Taking advantage of the immigrants’ illegal status provides Korean American merchants with two benefits. First, it guarantees submissive employment because the employees don’t understand the legal course of action they could follow should they find themselves out of work. In addition, paying cash for labour allows Korean storeowners to pay workers less than the required minimum. In addition, they avoid paying taxes on their payroll. Furthermore, unscrupulous Korean storeowners can take advantage of the situation. On Latino informant pointed this case out: My brother always got less pay than he thought he deserved. He would check his hours and he would always get paid less. But the Korean lady, she said that she was taking taxes out of his pay, but he never got any papers, even after he quit.

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Because the undocumented employees often do not file federal tax returns, it leaves the Korean storeowners the option of taking money out of the employees’ pay and stating that the money is going for taxes. As such, employers often deduct federal, state, social security, and local taxes without paying them to the government.

Workplace antagonism The nature of the Korean-owned small business seems to dominate the way that Latinos perceived Koreans. When asked to discuss Korean characteristics, even Latinos who have never worked for Koreans tended to offer work-related characteristics. For example, Latino informants stated that Koreans are discriminating in jobs, mean, cheap, demanding, dishonest, cheats and angry. In addition, a common complaint against Koreans is that they do not pay on time, cheat you when they do pay, show workers little respect, and expect long, hard hours for relatively little pay. Although these complaints are workplace-related, it is important to keep in mind that even Latinos who indicate that they have never worked for Koreans hold these beliefs. This is interesting when we compare this to the type of complaints expressed by blacks against Koreans. Most blacks tended to believe that Koreans are rude to customers, suspected all blacks to be shoplifters, would not give jobs to blacks, and would not extend credit to the creditworthy (Light et al. 1994). The significance of these differences is that blacks viewed Korean storeowners as ‘middlemen’ who entered their neighbourhoods and exploited their resources. Latinos, on the other hand, seem to view Koreans as employers who exploit workers who are powerless against them. While the percentage of Latinos living in Koreatown who are working for Korean American-owned stores could not be determined for this paper, casual observation indicates that Latinos make up the majority of the workforce in Koreatown. Nonetheless, given the population of Latinos in Koreatown, it is highly unlikely that a significant percentage of them work for Korean bosses. What is important is the way that all Latinos come to construct Koreans. An explanation for the different ways that Koreans are constructed by blacks and by Latinos may also be explained by the workplace structure. Although Korean American business owners in largely black neighborhoods employ black workers, the nature of the work seems to be different. For example, in her study of Korean-owned businesses in black neighborhoods, Jennifer Lee (2002) demonstrated that black workers provide more than just manual labour. Rather than taking up the lowest rung of the job ladder, black workers in Korean-owned businesses


located in black neighbourhoods are often managers or ‘front-of-house’ staff members who act as mediators between the Korean storeowners and their black customers. However, none of the storeowners I interviewed for this study had employed blacks, with the exception of one liquor-store owner who told me he had a black employee ‘a long time ago’. When asked why they did not employ blacks, most of the storeowners stated that few blacks come in to apply for jobs. A few indicated that they would prefer not to hire blacks, even if they would come looking for work, for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with perceived work ethic and honesty. A major reason that Koreans hire blacks in black neighborhoods has to do with the perception that black customers would be less likely to turn everyday conflicts into racial conflicts (Lee 2006). However, in Koreatown, where the majority of the customers are other Korean Americans, there is little incentive to utilise Latinos as managers or customer-service representatives. Even in Latino neighbourhoods, there was little indication among the Korean storeowners that Latino customers would give them problems based on perceptions of race. Although Korean hiring practices may be partially due to storeowners’ own economic limitations (Bonacich 1987), it still places Latino workers in a situation of low income and low job security. While Koreans make these justifications for their hiring and paying practices, Latinos have a different perception of the workplace environment. A Latino informant saw the pay arrangements thus: We agreed originally that I would be paid $50.00 per day for 10 hours of work. I was supposed to come in at ten o’clock, work until three, take a break and come back by six and work another five hours. But he always tries to cheat me. He wants me to stay longer and come back earlier from my break. One day, he sent me to clean his house and he didn’t give me my break. He didn’t pay me for these hours. Interactions such as these lead Latino workers to view Korean storeowners as being dishonest, cheap and demanding. In addition, these stories get circulated around the Latino community until they are accepted as ‘truths’. In addition, the caste-like structure of the workplace causes Latino workers to view Korean bosses as cruel and rigid. While the hiring and paying practices of Korean storeowners may reflect some economic necessity, it has detrimental affects on the livelihood of Latino workers. More importantly, it leads to the perception that Korean storeowners are cheap and dishonest.

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Creating the ‘other’ and constructing the ‘self’ During interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it became obvious that these interactions were used to create a racial image of the other group. Because the social environment that Latinos and Koreans share, namely the Korean-owned store, the way that they construct each other and themselves as opposites of the ‘other’ were intimately tied to perceptions of work, work ethic and consumer honesty. In one conversation, a Korean American storeowner told me this story: I’ll tell you what these people are like. Once, I caught this one little kid shoplifting, nothing big, just some candy. When I took him to his mother, she just looked at me in complete shock. Then she asked me what I wanted her to do about it. She asked me why I didn’t just take him to the police. Her attitude was, like, I don’t care what he does. If you don’t like it, take him to the police. Not surprisingly, this very story was repeated by the majority of the Korean American informants to describe their encounters with Latinos. What perhaps may have been an isolated incident involving one Korean American storeowner has become a sort of an ‘urban legend’ used to generalise all Latinos. In the context of their stores, Korean American storeowners use this characteristic to justify not allowing Latinos to be cashiers. The same informant added: So you see why they can’t be cashiers. I would have to watch them all the time. At least with Koreans, I can trust them to be honest. Our people are just not raised that way. Latinos have also used their experiences with Korean storeowners to create an image of Korean Americans. According to one Latina informant: I would never work for a Korean. They cheat you, they treat you badly, and expect you to work so hard for so little pay. They are greedy people these Koreans. They are no good. When asked if she had ever worked for a Korean storeowner, she simply replied: I don’t need to work for them to know. All of my friends who work for Koreans say the same thing.


For both Koreans and Latinos, the interactions within these specific ‘mediating institutions’, in this case the Korean-owned workplaces, have led to the development of stereotypical images for the other. Once developed, these stereotypes were diffused to the larger ethnic community until the grievances of a few became the grievances of the many. As for Korean American storeowners, they came to view Latinos as being unworthy of better job opportunities and thus further limited their ability to enter better-paying jobs in the Korean enclave. As for Latinos, they further began to see Korean American storeowners as greedy merchants who would never provide better opportunities for them. Ironically, the ‘stories’ that Latinos and Korean Americans tell about themselves are strikingly similar. This was not surprising given the specific historical and contemporary similarities shared by the two groups (Alcoff 2003; Kim 1999; Park 2004). When asked why they immigrated to the United States, one Latino informant told me: We [he and his wife] came here for our kids. We really wanted to give them a better life, better than what we had in Mexico. It’s hard in Mexico, these young people, even if they finish school, they have a hard time getting a good job and having a good life. Here, they could go to school and find something good for themselves. A Korean American storeowner said: We [he and his wife] came here because we wanted a better life for our children. It’s hard in Korea. In Korea, they would be under so much pressure and so much stress. And they would need a lot of connections to succeed. Here [in the US], if they study hard, go to a good college, and work hard, they could succeed. Their worries were similar as well. When asked what their biggest concern was, members of both groups tended to point out the rapid ‘Americanisation’ of their children and the loss of ‘their’ culture. As one Latino worker said: I worry about my daughter. In Mexico, we wouldn’t have this kind of problem. Here, she feels like she can wear whatever she wants, go wherever she wants, and do whatever she wants. This isn’t right. Both groups, as Cheng and Espiritu point out (1989) do seem to share an ‘immigrant ideology’ and believed strongly in the ‘American dream’

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of hard work leading to success, at least for their children. Both groups viewed America as a place where hard work and perseverance would one day pay off with a better life. As such, both groups saw themselves as having a very strong work ethic. As one Latino worker relayed: When I first started looking for jobs, like many people from Mexico, I went to the street corner. But many people come to the corner, 50 guys are there and they are looking for an opportunity. Sometimes they don’t get an opportunity. I was working with this young guy and he told me he was going to quit, but I talked him out of it. I said ‘what are you going to do, you want to go to the street again, to wait one, two, three days to get 50 dollars. This is better’. And another said: It’s for sure, I have my work for sure. That’s important, for Mexican people to keep working every day is important. Every day it’s hard work, but many people want to do it. Likewise, Korean merchants also spoke of their diligence: One time this guy came into the store and said, ‘You have it easy, nice car, your own business’. So I told him, I work 12 hours a day, every day. I never take a vacation, never go anywhere. If I get sick, I don’t make any money. Who has it easy? When I told him that, he looked at me and said, ‘I guess it’s not easy’. For both groups, self descriptions work to promote themselves as the moral superior. If there is any ‘success’, it is due to their hard effort and diligence. However, Korean American storeowners seem to be aware of their dependence on Latino labour. As one storeowner told me during the California recall election: We’re all very nervous right now. If [Arnold Schwarzenegger] becomes governor, he’s going to round up all the Mexicans and ship them off. Most of us can’t run our businesses without them, so we’re all very nervous. This is a big concern among all the people that I know right now. Ironically, despite this understanding that they are dependent on Latino labour, members of both groups seem to fail to see the similarities. When


asked what they felt they had in common with Latinos, one Korean storeowner told me: We both eat rice, but that’s about it. We really don’t have much in common with them; we’re just from very different cultures. Not surprisingly, Latinos who were asked what they had in common gave similar responses. However, several of the Latinos noted the similarities in that they were, like the Korean storeowners, immigrants trying to build a better life. This was surprising given that none of the Korean informants talked about a shared history of being immigrants in the US. Yet here, too, the discussion was marked by their different social statuses in the Korean-owned stores. For example, one Latino worker told me that he could not understand why ‘they’ (Koreans) treated him ‘badly’ when they were both immigrants. It is likely that the different social locations occupied by Koreans and Latinos leads to divergent interpretations about similarities and differences.

Conclusion While the black/Korean conflict has been the subject of much scholarly work, relationships between Korean Americans and Latinos has not been the focus of much scholarly literature. In 1989, only three years before the Los Angeles uprising, Cheng and Espiritu hypothesised that Latinos and Koreans share an immigrant ideology. Immigrants believe that America is still the land of opportunity and are often willing to work extra hard hours because they hold on to the possibility that they can rise within the established system through perseverance and hard work (Cheng and Espiritu 1989). Their findings, based on an exhaustive search of Spanish language newspapers, suggested that there were no overt racial tensions between Korean Americans and Latinos. Their findings were also mirrored by ‘real-life’ events. While blacks in urban areas were actively picketing Korean-owned stores in black communities, there was little overt conflict among Latinos and Korean American storeowners, even in heavily Latino neighbourhoods. Given the lack of media and academic discussions about Latino and Korean conflict, it isn’t surprising that when the Los Angeles uprising erupted in April 1992, academic and popular literature tended to interpret it as a ‘black riot’. One article attempted to explain the urban uprising by equating events in 1992 with the Watts Riots of 1965 (Chang 1993). The urban uprising became another ‘black riot’ in most media

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accounts. In this scheme, Korean American merchants became modernday Jewish merchants while the rioters were still, simply, black (Chang 1993). However, even before the burning and looting were over, it became obvious that the largest group affected by the damage caused were Korean American merchants who made a living in, or on the periphery of, largely poor Latino neighbourhoods. Yet the facts that Latinos constituted a majority of riot participants (Hayes-Bautista et al. 1993; Park 1995; Pastor et al. 1993), and that the riots were heavily concentrated in largely Latino neighbourhoods, were downplayed in both the press and the scholarly literature. In addition, Latinos constituted 50.6 per cent of the 5633 people arrested while African Americans constituted only 36.2 per cent. Given that the most heavily affected areas had a 49 per cent Latino residential population, it may not be surprising that nearly 51 per cent of the arrested were Latino. However, among those arrested, over 65 per cent of Latinos were arrested for suspicion of looting and illegal actions rather than simple curfew violations while only 55 per cent of African Americans were arrested for riot-related activities. Overall, a larger percentage of those arrested for more serious illegal activities were Latino than would be expected even given their greater numbers in the community. Nonetheless, this lack of coverage regarding the role that Latinos and Korean Americans played during the unrest is not surprising given the long history of looking at race along a black/white paradigm (Alcoff 2003; Park and Park 1999). This paper is an attempt to explain a possible source of Korean American and Latino conflict in Los Angeles. Drawing largely on ethnographic fieldwork in Koreatown, I place Koreans and Latinos in the context of a multi-ethnic city in order to address the theoretical implications of ethnic conflict, describe the relationship between Latinos and Korean Americans as they interact with each other in Korean-owned workplaces, and analyse the nature of these relationships to locate possible factors that may contribute to the formation of ethnic antagonism between Latinos and Korean Americans. Although this paper centres on the role that Koreans play in ethnic conflict, it is important to state that Korean small-business owners, particularly those operating small manufacturing operations, hiring cheap Latino labourers and ‘exploiting’ them is a reflection of the globalisation of the world economy. As capitalistic competition continues to take on a more global character, with manufacturers increasingly relying on low-cost labour in order to compete effectively in the


global marketplace, manufacturers shift production from the ‘developed’ nations to ‘developing’ nations where labour costs are lower. This shift from a production-based to a service-based economy in the ‘developed’ nations, however, leads to the displacement of unskilled workers in these regions, with the effect of driving down wages (Ong et al. 1994). Ironically, the inflow of capital into a region also leads to an outflow of labour as natives displaced from their land look for opportunities in areas where capital is fleeing (Sassen 1988). In order to stay competitive, Korean American merchants, particularly those who engage in light manufacturing, are almost ‘forced’ into hiring the cheapest possible labour supply. While light manufacturing is the obvious arena where lower labour costs abroad drive down wages at home, it leads to a reduction in wages in other industries as lower wages lead to lower spending in other arenas and a weakening of labour unions (Bonacich 1998; Ong et al. 1994). Korean Americans who own small businesses such as liquor stores, dry cleaners and restaurants don’t fare much better. Intense competition, the high cost of doing business in poor neighborhoods, difficulty in acquiring long-term loans from banks and reliance on rotating credit groups lead many Korean American merchants to carry extremely high debt. Given this debt, most Korean American merchants have little choice but to rely on non-paid family labour and low-paid Latino labour. As such, Korean Americans are less perpetrators of racial oppression than they are victims of a racialised system that permeates even to the level of local economics. Also, this paper should not be taken as an implication that the conflict between Korean American merchants and Latino workers ‘led’ to the Los Angeles uprising. By now, we should all be familiar with the actual social, economic and political factors that led to the now-historic event. My discussion about the Los Angeles uprising aimed simply to point out that there may have been more to the Latino participation in Koreatown, and by extension Korean/Latino conflict, than the simple factor of class. If the Los Angeles riot was simply a reflection of class differences, we should have observed similar patterns of riot activity among poor Latinos throughout the city. However, in terms of community profiles revealed in the 1990 census, Latinos in South Central, where targeting of Korean-owned stores by Latinos was minimal, did not differ substantially differently from Latinos in neglected areas in the rest of the county, and both of these groups of Latinos differed only by a matter of degree from Latinos in [non-affected] areas of the county, by virtue of being somewhat poorer and less educated. However, some key characteristics, such as high rates of family formation

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and labour-force participation, are common to all Latinos. Thus, the key to Latino participation in the riots cannot be sought only in the ‘objective conditions’ in which Latinos live; if poverty alone caused riots, Latinos should have been looting nearly everywhere in the county (Hayes-Bautista et al. 1993). While the Hayes-Bautista et al. (1993) study singled out Latinos in South Central and not Koreatown, the argument they made is that Latinos in all areas of Los Angeles County share similar economic backgrounds. As such, we need to examine something beyond class as the underlying reason for ethnic antagonism between Koreans and Latinos. More importantly, my research allows us to think about possible avenues of further research regarding minority relations in Los Angeles and the rest of the country. It allows us to start asking questions of Korean American merchants as actors in the shaping of ethnic relations rather than as scapegoats or innocent bystanders. This allows us to inquire if other factors may be at play in the formation of ethnic conflicts in multi-ethnic settings.

References Alcoff, L. M. (2003) ‘Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary’, The Journal of Ethics, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 5–27. Bergeson, A. (1996) ‘Were the LA Riots a Backlash Against Recent Immigrants?’, talk given at the University of California, Irvine. Bergeson, A. and M. Herman (1998) ‘Immigration, Race and Riot: The 1992 Los Angeles Uprising’, American Sociological Review, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 39–57. Bobo, L., C. L. Zubrinsky and J. H. Johnson (1995) ‘Work Orientation, Job Discrimination, and Ethnicity: A Focus Group Perspective’, Research in the Sociology of Work, vol. 5, pp. 45–55. Bonacich, E. (1972) ‘A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market’, American Sociological Review, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 547–59. Bonacich, E. (1973) ‘A Theory of Middleman Minorities’, American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 583–94. Bonacich, E. (1987) ‘ “Making It” in America, A Social Evaluation of the Ethics of Immigrant Entrepreneurship’, Sociological Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 446–66. Bonacich, E. (1993) ‘Asian and Latino Immigrants in the Los Angeles Garment Industry: An Exploration of the Relationship between Capitalism and Racial Oppression’, in I. Light and P. Bhachu (eds) Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital and Ethnic Networks (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers). Bonacich, E. (1998) ‘Organizing Immigrant Workers in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry’, Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 10–19. Chang, E. (1993) ‘Jewish and Korean Merchants in African American Neighborhoods: A Comparative Perspective,’ Amerasia Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 5–21.

Korean and Latino Relations in Multi-ethnic Los Angeles 253 Cheng, L. and Y. Espiritu (1989) ‘Korean Businesses in Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods: A Study of Intergroup Relations’, Sociological Perspectives, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 521–34. Fine, G. A. and P. A. Turner (2001) Whispers on the Colorline (Berkeley: University of California Press). Hayes-Bautista, D. E., W. O. Schink, and M. Hayes-Bautista (1993) ‘Latinos and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots: A Behavioral Science Perspective’, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Science, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 427–8. Jo, M. H. (1992) ‘Korean Merchants in the Black Community: Prejudice among the Victims of Prejudice’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 395–411. Kim, C. J. (2000) Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press). Kim, D. S. and C. C. Wong (1977) ‘Business Development in Koreatown, Los Angeles’, in Kim, Hyung-Chan (ed.) The Korean Diaspora (Santa Barbara: ABCClio), pp. 229–45. Kim, D. Y. (1999) ‘Beyond Co-ethnic Solidarity: Mexican and Ecuadorean Employment in Korean-owned Businesses in New York City’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 581–605. Lamphere, L., A. Stepick and G. Grenier (1994) Newcomers in the Workplace: Immigrants and the Restructuring of the US Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Lee, J. (2002) Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Lee, J. (2006) ‘Constructing Race and Civility in Urban America’, Urban Studies, vol. 43, no. 5–6, pp. 903–17. Light, I., G. Sabagh, M. Bozorgmehr and C. Der-Martirosian (1994) ‘Beyond the Ethnic Enclave Economy’, Social Problems, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 65–79. Light, I., H. Hadas and K. Kan (1994) ‘Black/Korean Conflict in Los Angeles’, in S. Dunn (ed.) Managing Divided Cities (Keele: Ryburn Publishing/Keele University Press). Min, P. G. (1984) ‘A Structural Analysis of Korean Business in the United States’, Ethnic Groups, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–25. Min, P. G. (1990) ‘Problems of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs’, International Migration Review, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 436–55. Min, P. G. (1996). Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press). Min, P. G. and A. Kolodny (1999) ‘The Middleman Minority Characteristics of Korean Immigrants in the United States’, in Kwang Chung Kim (ed.) Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Ong, P., E. Bonacich and L. Cheng (1994) ‘The Political Economy of Capitalist Restructuring and the New Asian Immigration’, in P. Ong, E. Bonacich and L. Cheng (eds) The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), pp. 3–35. Ong, P. and S. Hee (1993) Losses in the Los Angeles Civil Unrest, April 29–May 1, 1992 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Pacific Rim Studies). Park, E. J. W. (2004) ‘Labor Organizing Beyond Race and Nation: The Los Angeles Hilton Case’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 137–52.

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Park, E. J. W. and J. S. W. Park (1999) ‘A New American Dilemma?: Asian Americans and Latinos in Race Theorizing’, Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 289–309. Pastor, M., L. Megana, A. Cabezas and M. Appel (1993) Latinos and the Los Angeles Uprising: The Economic Context (Claremont: Thomas Rivera Center). Sassen, S. (1988) The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow (New York: Cambridge University Press). Skerry, P. (1993) Mexican Americans, the Ambivalent Minority (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Yoon, In-Jin (1997) On My Own: Korean Businesses and Race Relations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Yoon, In-Jin (1998) ‘Who is My Neighbor?: Koreans’ Perception of Blacks and Latinos as Employees, Customers, and Neighbors’, Development and Society, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 49–75. Yong, M. C. (1992) ‘Some Thoughts on Modernization and Race Relations in the Political History of Singapore’, in Yong Mun Cheong (ed.) Asian Traditions and Modernization: Perspectives from Singapore (Singapore: Time Academic Press), pp. 49–66.

13 Everyday Racism in Singapore Selvaraj Velayutham

In 1992, in a parliamentary speech, MP Choo Wee Khiang remarked ‘one evening, I drove to Little India [an Indian shopping enclave and popular tourist destination in Singapore] and it was pitch dark but not because there was no light, but because there were too many Indians around’. Choo later apologised in Parliament, though his disparaging and racist remarks had earned him no censure there. There was no public outrage against Choo’s comments either. His ability to get away with the audacious witticism that pitch-darkness around Little India was due to the high number of (dark skinned) Indians in the area seems to suggest that there was tacit approval of his comments by other members of parliament. *

*

*

One evening in Singapore in July 2007, my wife and I were travelling on a bus to Little India to have dinner. We were seated behind a young Singaporean Chinese and a Caucasian woman who were engaged in a conversation. The Caucasian was a tourist from Europe visiting Singapore for the first time. She told the Chinese woman that she was on her way to explore the popular Little India district. She wondered how long the bus trip would take and where she should get off. The Chinese woman in a fairly serious tone remarked: ‘Little India is a dirty and dangerous place. You do not want to go there on your own, because there are many Indian men loitering around and it is not safe.’ The tourist was puzzled by the response. We were equally startled when we overheard those comments. Soon after, we arrived at our destination. The Caucasian woman also alighted at the same 255

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stop as us and as she disappeared into the bustling streets of Little India with a camera in her hand, we stood in shock wondering at what we had just heard . . .1 Multiracialism is a fundamental pillar of postcolonial Singaporean society. It is a political ideology that is actively promoted by the city-state to represent Singapore as a racially and culturally diverse society. By that token, the main racial groups in Singapore are accorded official status and are guaranteed equality. Singapore considers itself as a racially tolerant and harmonious country and indeed the four official groups – Chinese, Malays, Indians and Others – have co-existed peacefully since its independence in 1965.2 In fact, political leaders of this Chinesedominated city-state repeatedly make the point that racial and religious harmony must not be taken for granted and that building a harmonious Singaporean society is an unfinished project. However, this does not mean that racial discrimination and intolerance are nonexistent. Whilst there are many examples of peaceful cross-cultural intermingling between the races, everyday social tensions and discomforts arising from living with cultural difference are rarely officially acknowledged (see, for

Figure 13.1

Singapore’s Little India (photo by the author)

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instance, Lai 1995). More to the point, the term racism is completely absent in official discourses and public debates in Singapore. As the above two incidents suggest, racism is not uncommon in Singapore and it is not limited to perceptions of Indians in Little India alone but extends to other areas of Singaporean life. The comments by the parliamentarian may be a rare slip-up but such racist views as evidenced in the second story are widespread. In this paper, I seek to document some of the everyday experiences of racism among Indians in Singapore.3 Using research field notes and interviews with Indians in Singapore, I will outline a range of subtle to explicit forms of racism that are manifest in different social spaces and in everyday encounters and situations. I argue that while the city-state actively engages in activities targeted at ‘fostering social cohesion’ and is vigilant at suppressing overt racist provocations, with few exceptions it has effectively silenced the voices of people who are at the receiving end of everyday racism. Encounters and experiences of racism are seldom reported in the media. The lack of acknowledgement and limited public discussion have meant racist acts are simply never addressed. In addition, Singapore does not have anti-racism strategies and policies to mitigate the effects of everyday racism.

Racial riots, multiracialism and racism The 1950 Maria Hertogh riots and those in 1964, which are often referred to as the Prophet Muhammad Birthday race riots, remain the two foremost events in Singapore history to have exposed serious racial tensions on this island state. The Maria Hertogh riots started on 11 December 1950. They were led by outraged Muslims after a court decision to award custody of Maria Hertogh – raised in a Muslim family – to her biological Dutch Catholic parents. The riots lasted three days with 18 killed, 173 injured and significant property damage. The 1964 race riots took place during two separate periods in July and September between Chinese and Malays. Although no clear causes were identified, state officials blamed Indonesian and communist provocateurs for instigating racial violence. As official history and discourse would have it, these riots were the country’s most bitter experiences of racial conflict. Singaporeans are regularly reminded in official speeches not so much about the causes of the riots but the fact that they were serious and potentially disabling events in Singaporean history. The fragility of inter-racial relationships and the disaffections that arise in the daily experience of living with cultural difference, meanwhile,

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remain strategically unspoken. As a consequence, the notion of interracial solidarity is unquestioned and assumed to simply exist (Yong 1992). In 1965, when Singapore left the Malaysian federation to become an independent nation, one of the foremost concerns of the People’s Action Party (PAP) government was to ensure that such racial conflicts did not flare up again. And so, the promotion and maintenance of racial harmony became a central pillar of nation-building. The new government was confronted with the realities of serious unemployment, immense poverty, low levels of education, acute housing shortages, strikes and demonstrations, most of which were communist-led. Being a nation of immigrants it also had to deal with a plethora of competing ethnic and national sentiments. The PAP addressed these challenges through what Chan (1975: 51) describes as ‘a steady and systematic de-politicisation of a politically active and aggressive citizenry’ and mobilising the support of various organisations such as the trade unions and grassroots groups. Central to the PAP leaders’ thinking on the role of the government was their view that the compulsion to achieve economic progress and ethnic harmony made it imperative that the government in Singapore controlled all instruments and centres of power and did not allow the growth of political pluralism (Vasil 2000). Following independence, many policies and programmes were put in place by the PAP government in an effort to build a nation-state. According to Quah (1990: 45): [t]he rationale for the Singapore government’s approach to nationbuilding has always been and continues to be the nurturing of the growth of a Singaporean national identity among the population, which will surmount all the chauvinistic and particularistic pulls of the Chinese, Malay, or Indian identities of the various ethnic groups on the island. The objective of the political leaders is to build a nation of Singaporeans out of the disparate groups in the citystate. The government has relied on many instruments to promote national integration, including the promotion of economic development, public housing, national service, educational policies, the mass media, periodic national campaigns, and grassroots organization. For instance, by emphasising multiracialism and multilingualism as fundamental principles of the state, the Singapore leaders aimed to inculcate a sense of commitment in the various race groups to the state and to the existence in racial harmony. In institutionalising multiracialism


as a state ideology, the fragmented and divided nature of the nation no longer became an issue. Multiracial Singapore, with a population of around four million people – consisting of 77 per cent Chinese, 14 per cent Malays, 7.6 per cent Indians and 1.4 per cent Other (the ‘CMIO’ ratio) – was defined as an essential feature of a Singaporean identity and culture (see Velayutham 2007). The concept of Singapore’s multiracialism was fostered through every conceivable means – in all forms of official cultural representations, social programmes, celebrations, schools, the media, national holidays and tourism (see Lai 1995). In addition, the government also actively championed the ideology of meritocracy in order to tackle the problem of persistent racial inequality. Its practical application can be observed in the government’s promotion of multiracialism as a fundamental ideal where the four main races are said to be given fair and equal opportunity without privileging one or the other. According to Carl Trocki (2006: 140–1), as an excuse for the paternalistic management of society, the multiracial agenda justified the government’s structuring of education, housing and the new identity to which all Singaporeans were expected to subscribe. At the same time, any attempts by members of a specific cultural community to gain consideration for themselves have been treated as expressions of chauvinism by the government. The possibility of racial violence or outside intervention, should the government’s brand of multiracialism fail, was presented as a constant threat to Singapore’s ‘survival’ and thus became an unchallengeable article of faith. Many scholars (Benjamin 1976; Clammer 1998) argue that the CMIO model accommodates and assures equality and rights for minorities and is a practical and viable ideology for maintaining racial harmony. One of the most notable critical assessments of Singapore’s multiracial policy was provided by Geoffrey Benjamin (1976: 115) who argued that although the multiracial policy ‘accords equal status to the cultures and ethnic identities of the various “races” that are regarded as comprising the population of a plural society, [it at the same time] serves to define such a population as divided into one particular array of “races”’ (see also Ang and Stratton 1995; Chua 1998). The high visibility of race and racial divisions enables ‘the state to set itself structurally above race, as the neutral umpire that oversees and maintains racial peace and racial equality’ (Chua 2003: 61). This emphasis on race, however, has not

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troubled the government or the people in comparison to other multicultural nation-states such as Britain, Canada and Australia. As Chua argues, ‘there is an apparent absence of anxiety about being multiracial, about differences and potential conflicts that are presumed to be well policed and kept in check by legislation and by government agencies’ (Chua 2003: 61; emphasis added). Yet, a racialised economic hierarchy with the Chinese on the top, the Malays at the bottom and the Indians straddling the middle exists in Singapore, as evidenced in the population censuses. This hierarchy is also reflected in income, education, housing and virtually every other social and economic category (Moore 2000). And yet racial discrimination, inter-racial tensions/discomforts and social disaffection in Singapore are not publicly discussed. Instead the need to maintain racial harmony, social cohesion and tolerance are repeatedly voiced to render racist practices as ‘non-occurrences’, and thereby even negate them to some extent. In other words, racism remains an unspoken word for fear that it may again raise the spectre of racial disaffection that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and lead to conflict. Moreover, for a nation which prides itself as a multiracial, multilingual, multireligious and multicultural society, there has been very little academic scholarship on racial relations, cross-cultural interaction and racism in Singapore. In this context, there have been no efforts by the government to bring to light instances of institutional or everyday racism. A rare exception is the case of three bloggers who were charged under the Sedition Act for publishing inflammatory racist remarks on the Internet in 2005. While the bloggers were punished for posting racist comments on the Internet (deemed to be in the public domain), other everyday acts of racism escape official scrutiny. While the focus of this paper is on Indians and their experiences of racism, it goes without saying that other minority communities such as the Malays and Eurasians also experience racism in Singapore’s Chinese-dominated society. Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that racism also exists within and between the minority groups such as the Indians, Malays and Eurasians as well as against migrant workers in Singapore.4 For that matter, Indians and Eurasians can be both complicit with the Chinese in their negative portrayal and treatment of the Malays, and also team up with the Malays to challenge racist practices. The forming of inter-racial group solidarities either to perpetrate or resist racism according to circumstances and context highlights the fact that everyday racism is a complex and strategic process. In other instances, English-educated Chinese Singaporeans berate local employers for often discriminating against them in favour of expatriates (mostly


Caucasians) in their hiring practices and in the workplace. Occasionally, the Singapore media will report Singaporeans (most often Chinese) encountering racism while travelling or studying overseas – usually in Australia. However, racism in Singapore is seldom a talking point. Nevertheless, there has been some academic interest in exploring perceived official and institutional racism suffered by the Malay community. The Malays, who are indigenous to the region, migrated to Singapore from Indonesia and Malaysia. Their ‘indigenity’ unfortunately has earned them the unenviable historical and cultural tag of the ‘lazy native’ (Alatas 1977). The works of Rahim (1998) and Li (1989) have drawn attention to the marginalisation, stereotyping and socioeconomic discrimination faced by Singapore Malays, despite the so-called meritocratic policies of the Singapore state (see also Yong 1992; Tamney 1996; Tremewan 1996; Chua 2003). In essence, racism against the Malay population is handled delicately by the government, which is conscious of a potential outcry from its neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia.5 Moreover, because the Malays are often singled out as a ‘socially and economically underachieving’ community in Singapore, which in turn has generated critical response and resentment from countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, racism directed against the Malays is also well publicised. In comparison, racism towards the Indians has received little academic attention. Even though Indians face racial discrimination in their everyday lives, their high socioeconomic standing relative to their population size positions them as a prosperous and successful community in Singapore. As a result, the possibilities of speaking out openly about encountering racism are constrained.

Encountering everyday racism Although the term ‘everyday life’ is synonymous with the mundane and ordinary – according to Gouldner (1975) it is the stable, recurrent and seemingly unchanging features of the social life of ordinary individuals – it and its features are by no means insignificant. In particular, what Heller (1984) termed the ‘modalities of everyday contact’, which range from the random to the organised, are important sites for gaining an insight into everyday racism. It is often argued that in multicultural societies the proximity and intimacy created by living and encountering racial and cultural diversity can encourage familiarity and awareness of cultural difference. But as scholars such as Ash Amin (2002), Amanda Wise (2005) and others have argued, it can also create social tensions resulting in racial abuse, discrimination and stereotyping. The

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mechanisms involved have been examined by Philomena Essed; she points out that: everyday racism is the integration of racism into everyday situations through practices (cognitive and behavioural) that activate underlying power relations. This process must be seen as a continuum through which the integration of racism into everyday practices becomes part of the expected, of the unquestionable, and of what is seen as normal by the dominant group. [It is a ] process in which a) socialized racist notions are integrated into meanings that make practices immediately definable and manageable, b) practices with racist implications become in themselves familiar and repetitive, and c) underlying racial and ethnic relations are actualized and reinforced through these routine or familiar practices in everyday situations (Essed 1991: 50). In this sense, everyday racism is a normalised act that reinforces underlying relations of power between dominant and minority racial/ethnic groups. Importantly, the process itself, as Essed has argued, must be seen as cyclical in nature in that racist acts become naturalised, mutually reproduce particular responses, and reinforce unequal power relations between the groups. Everyday racism is intimately connected with broader structural and dominant racial order. As Essed (1991: 39) argues ‘specific practices, whether their consequences are intentional or unintentional, can be evaluated in terms of racism only when they are consistent with (our knowledge of) existing macro structures of racial inequality in the system’. In Singapore, although the state promulgates the idea of a meritocracy that supposedly accords equal status to all races in Singaporean society, the flow-on effect between the systemic and everyday racism and vice versa remains unspoken. There are, for instance, no anti-discrimination laws in Singapore to deal especially with biased hiring practices in the workplace. Thus, frequently we can find job advertisements seeking applicants who are ‘Mandarin speakers only’ or indicating that the workplace is a ‘Chinese-speaking environment’. Employers have been allowed to do so without penalty even though this clearly discriminates against non-Mandarin speakers such as Malays and Indians. Furthermore, structural and institutional racism also occurs in local neighbourhoods, shops and schools, where it generally favours and privileges the dominant racial group over minorities. However, these practices remain largely unstudied.


Name-calling and racist jokes The use of derogatory names with reference to one’s physical appearance, mocking the ways Indians speak and their ‘cultural traits’ are common forms of everyday racism experienced by Indians. Racialised descriptors such as hitam (black in Malay) and orang minyak (oily person in Malay) are often used as a point of reference for ridicule and insult. Other terms used by Chinese and Malays include keling, appuna-na, mama, thambi, mangali and babu-singh. The word keling is said to originate from the term ‘Kalinga’ – an ancient Indian kingdom that had considerable influence over Southeast Asia – which led to it being used to refer to persons of Indian origin. However, another popular myth suggests that the term is an onomatopoeia originating from the sounds made by the chains on Indian convict labourers who were sent to work in Singapore at the time of its founding as a British colony. Given this association, keling and its derivations keling-kia and keling kwai (devil/ghost) have taken on negative connotations and Indians mostly find the label offensive. Words such as mama (uncle in Tamil), thambi (younger brother in Tamil), mangali (a mispronunciation of the word Bengali but in Singapore erroneously used to refer to Sikhs) and babusingh (Sikh brother in Punjabi), although not offensive in themselves, are commonly used in everyday contexts by non-Indians to address Indians. However, depending on the spirit of the utterance (especially when articulated by a non-Indian with a raised inflection), it can convey disrespect or condescension towards the addressee. According to Essed (1991: 256) name-calling is a form of intimidation, and in the Singapore context it can be argued that it is used as symbolic weapon by non-Indians to reproduce racial and cultural discrimination. Many of the respondents in my study cringe when they hear or are called by such names. They point out that they have felt anger and sometimes humiliation due to racial name-calling. Their recourse in such encounters has been either to ignore them or return a barrage of racial abuse back at the addresser. However, depending on the context, reverse name-calling by Indians does not have the same power or effect, given their minority status. Other names such as appu-na-na (appu meaning father in Malayalam) is a play on words that mocks the way Indians talk to one another. As Siva, one of my informants noted: I guess the most common form of racism encountered countless times would have to be members of the non-Indian races making fun of the

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Tamil language whenever Indians spoke among themselves. It was not just the Chinese who made fun, Malays too. This I have experienced since kindergarten all the way to national service and in the work environment. I have never encountered the Malay language being made fun of, because I think Malay is accepted as the national language and everyone sings the national anthem, and somehow it is programmed in people’s minds as not a funny language. In school, I have also witnessed Chinese and Malay [race] teachers making fun of Tamil. Even though Tamil is one of the official languages in Singapore and most Singaporeans would encounter the spoken and written form of the language in their daily lives, making fun of the ways Indians ‘speak’, supposedly intended as a funny gesture/comment, is a common occurrence. This is usually done by mimicking the way Tamil is spoken (with head wobbles) and spurting out unintelligible and supposedly ‘Indian’sounding words. One respondent recalled an incident that happened to his friend: While on bus journey, two Indian boys in primary school uniforms boarded the bus. When the bus came to a stop and one of boys got off, the other boy went to the exit and shouted at his friend to remind him of something. The Chinese bus driver started making fun of their Tamil and then said, ‘Thambi! Makan [‘eat’ in Malay] curry good! But sit down, lah!’ In this instance it would appear that there was no malice intended, but the way the driver spoke to the boy sounds patronising. The bus driver made fun of the Tamil – possibly mimicking the way an Indian would speak to instruct the boy to resume his seat as the bus was about to move. In a patronising manner, he calls the boy Thambi and admonishes him for supposedly misbehaving on the bus. His comments about eating curry indeed carry a racial overtone. Essed (1991: 257) argues that racist jokes and forms of ridicule are often conveyed in the ‘expectation or hope for consent from others by way of laughter’ and more importantly are ‘integrated into casual conversations or presented as casual comments’. Obviously, the driver was expecting that the other passengers on the bus would agree with his comments and find them amusing. Thus name-calling, ridicule and racist jokes which are supposedly spoken in jest reinforce racial difference and relations of power. For instance, calling an Indian ‘black’ or a dark-skinned person is not only about differentiating who is fairer than the other but also is aimed at pointing out that she/he is somewhat inferior. Similarly, ridiculing


the way Indians speak, a form of cultural racism, highlights the fact that there is little awareness of and respect for the cultural practices of Indians among other Singaporeans. In sum, these racist practices are offensive, hurtful and can even be intimidating. Whether they take place in the classroom, workplace or in public places, they are often difficult to deal with given that Indians are a quite small minority.

Black, dirty and smelly As scholars such as Audre Lorde (1984) and Frantz Fanon (1965, 1967) have well argued, racism is an embodied experience. That is to say, racism is marked through the body, which can also be the site of racism. This is clearly illustrated in the old form of racism which relied on innate physical difference and traits to establish a hierarchy between the races. Those with dark skin were considered inferior and deficient compared to someone with fair skin. Reference to skin colour and physical attributes is an inescapable reality in Singapore. As one informant, Shanti (in her early 30s), pointed out: I first became aware of racism when a PE [physical education] teacher of mine, because I was not athletically inclined, called me ‘Black tofu’ [bean curd] in front of everyone. He later said he was just joking when my father complained to the school. Another respondent, Gita (in her 20s) recalled: I was about 14 and at the public swimming pool with my brother and cousin. I didn’t know how to swim and was just getting interested in water, swimming etc. and quite excited. A Chinese man walked past, looked at us and said, ‘Indian Olympics ah?’ My whole body froze, felt strange, embarrassed, hurt. I lost interest in learning swimming and did not wear a swimsuit for 20 years. More importantly, it severely affected my body confidence. Obviously, the teacher was trying to say to Shanti that she was ‘dark’ on the outside (skin complexion) and rather ‘soft’ on the inside like bean curd and heckling her for her lack of physical prowess. It begs the question as to why he would add the prefix ‘black’ and not simply call her ‘tofu’ in an inoffensive way. In the second incident, the Chinese man’s remarks mocking the teenagers splashing about in the pool, though appearing inoffensive, affected Gita very much. In both instances, the

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Indian body is discredited and made to feel inferior because of its inability to perform according to dominant expectations. Singling out one’s race or racial identity is a common practice in Singapore. However, and quite frequently, the underlying tone of such articulations tends to be negative, as in the case of the above situations. As these were pointed and racialised remarks, they were inflammatory and indeed hurtful, as if to say that ‘one is not good enough’. Both respondents were left distraught after hearing them. The fact that the teacher got away with it by claiming that he had meant it as a joke highlights the power of everyday racism. Such remarks are legitimised and accepted because they are, as Essed (1991) has argued, presented as casual comments and not to be taken seriously. Another common theme to emerge from this study is experience of racism on public transport. The involuntary proximity created by a crowded bus or train can lead to expressions of discomfort and subtle racism. As my informant Vimala (in her 20s) recalled: Often the seat next to me is one of the last ones to be taken on the bus. Once a young girl boarded the bus and saw me and immediately told her mother loudly, ‘eeee, mummy, Indian . . . smelly’ (I did not smell or look shabby). Vimala’s story strikingly mirrors one of the most cited passages in Fanon’s (1967) book Black Skin, White Masks. While walking along the streets of Paris, accompanied by her mother, a little girl, upon seeing Fanon, exclaims, ‘. . . look, a negro! Mum, look at the negro, I’m frightened!’ (1967: 90). For Fanon, this incident was not only traumatic but profoundly impacted on his sense of self. Although Vimala did not scare the girl, the girl certainly made it clear that Vimala was somehow repulsive. Here too, the comments highlight an extremely powerful and yet subtle way in which racism operates in everyday situations. Vimala noted that she was horrified and felt embarrassed when she heard the remarks. However, rather than telling the girl or her mother off for passing such an insensitive comment, and feeling awkward, she actually ‘checked’ herself so as to assure herself and by implication those around her that she did not smell or appear scruffy. Ironically, her action reinforced the racial stereotype and her relatively disempowered position as an ethnic minority. Similarly, Ravi (in his late 30s) said: On many occasions this incident has happened while I travelled in a bus. A Chinese co-passenger would rather stand than sit next to me if there are


no other places in the bus. At other times, the passenger would pass by me and sit next to another Chinese ignoring to sit next to me. Am I smelly or what? Here Ravi’s rationalising of the practices of his co-passengers who seem to avoid sitting next to him is insightful as it again becomes an issue over his appearance. Because such incidents occur regularly, Ravi seemed convinced that something must be wrong and to some extent he had developed a sense of self-doubt about his body. A much more sinister account of this practice was narrated by Bala (in his 20s): My first direct encounter with racism was probably my first day in kindergarten when Chinese classmates did not sit next to me or covered their noses whenever I was near because they thought I smelt. They would tease or tell me that their parents told them that my skin is dark because my family and I bathed in mud or excrement or never bathed at all. As a six year old, it was very troubling to be perceived in such a way and it certainly damaged self-confidence. All of the above encounters revolve around issues of body odour, hygiene and the possibility of physical contact. The space of a classroom or a bus presents the chance for involuntary proximity between people from different racial backgrounds and forces them to rub shoulders. Such occasions can also unleash racial prejudices and discomforts held by different groups. Clearly, whether it is vocalised or acted out (covering of the nose or refraining from sitting next to an Indian), these actions are a reaction to particular negative perceptions about Indians.6 Terms such as dark, dirty and smelly are not just hurtful and distressing but can result in what Fanon (1967: 11) describes as ‘the internalisation or the epidermalisation of this inferiority’. Building on this idea, Wise (forthcoming) in her study on cross-cultural interactions points out that ‘conceptions of dirt, and particularly smelly dirt, are so deeply enculturated that our experience of such matter out of place becomes epidermalised, felt on the skin, and inside the body, able to evoke the most palpable emotions of revulsion from within’. The displeasure people tend to express seems to be deeply embodied. While some chose to display it openly, others avoided physical proximity (though always subtly) by refraining from sitting next to my Indian respondents. A fear of contamination (and possibly personal safety) and disgust were the obvious reasons. This form of racial discrimination is extremely confronting and humiliating, as evidenced in the responses.

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Another of my interviewees, Velu, argued: . . . these kinds of everyday racism, I must admit, made me a racist as well, particularly in terms of how I viewed the other races, in terms of the people I hung out with (mainly Indians) and in terms of my perceptions of the country. It is interesting to note the kinds of strategies that Velu adopted to counter racism. He admits that he began developing racist attitudes against people around him in retaliation and chose to interact less with people of other races. In a sense, then, without official avenues of redress against such racism, many Indians like Velu are deeply bitter about their experiences of racism. The respondents in my study were clearly affected by disparaging remarks directed at them to the point that they felt that it had damaged their self-esteem and confidence. Moreover, the subtle as well as overt responses to the Indian body, such as the impulse to avoid sitting next to an Indian and holding the nose in revulsion, may not appear as acts of racism but are powerful means by which displeasure and fear is conveyed.

Incivility, distrust and other forms of discrimination English is the official language of business and instruction in Singapore, but it is used to a more limited extent in private and social settings; sometimes its non-use in those contexts can be selective. While it is not uncommon that the races speak their own mother tongue socially, this choice can be influenced by a tendency for dominant groups to exclude minorities from the conversation. As Mani noted, ‘linguistic discrimination is most obvious as many Chinese speak Chinese in my presence’. Similarly, Gita pointed out that ‘Chinese is more commonly spoken than English even if you are in the group. This can evoke strong feelings of isolation and feeling “left out”’. These experiences highlight a lack of consideration among dominant group members for those around them who can’t speak their language. While strictly speaking it is not a racist act, in a social group situation it is both rude and shuts out non-speakers. The dynamics of cross-cultural interaction and prosaic encounters also contribute to the generation of numerous racial stereotypes of the various races. For instance, Indians are generally regarded as ‘good talkers’ or ‘debaters’ because of their high level of English-language proficiency. Equally, there are many negative views about Indians, especially


in relation to their behaviour and attitude, that circulate widely in Singapore. As Siva, recalling his childhood experience, said: My childhood friend was a Peranakan Chinese. We have been close friends since we were eight years old. His parents, however, in our pre-teen and teenage years, were wary of his friendship with me. He would share with me that his parents and brother often warned him that he can never trust an Indian and that Indians were conmen. And within his family they referred to me as the ‘bum’. His father would often remark to him, ‘So, you’re hanging out with that bum again?’ Being ‘untrustworthy’ and prone to ‘cheating’ are stereotypes that haunt most ethnic minorities. The boy’s family obviously did not approve his association with an Indian because they regarded Indians as deceptive and lazy and therefore assumed Siva would be a bad influence on their son. The notion that Indians cannot be trusted was echoed in another situation – once again during a bus journey. As Vijay recounted: Some years back while on a bus, a Chinese bus inspector spoke to me in a very loud and rude manner when I had paid a lower fare for my journey. He said, ‘Hello! You go where?! Your fare expire already!’ I did not have a fare card and started looking for change in my pocket. During which time he barked, ‘If you no money, you get down next stop!’ I managed to find some change and got a new ticket. The experience was embarrassing as the bus was also crowded. Sitting opposite me was a Caucasian passenger whom the bus inspector also found to have paid a lower fare. Amazingly, he bends over and spoke to him respectfully in a polite and soft voice, ‘Excuse me sir, may I know where you go?’ And he proceeds to advise him the correct fare and did even not ask him to pay for another ticket! Incidentally that Caucasian was a friend whom I was travelling with. My friend later joked that as a white man he can get away with almost anything in Singapore and still be treated nicely. And on another occasion: A few years back, my Chinese friend and I boarded a SBS bus in Orchard Road for a journey two stops away. The Chinese bus driver stopped and questioned (impolitely) where I was travelling to since I paid cash for the lowest fare. I cannot help but wonder why my Chinese friend was not

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stopped since he boarded the bus before me, and he also paid cash. So the driver was clearly aware of what both of us paid. As in the previous examples of passengers who avoided sitting next to an Indian on public transport for whatever reason, querying whether someone has paid the correct bus fare or not are instances that are often difficult to identify conclusively as acts of racism. Nevertheless, looking at the way Vijay was spoken in comparison to his travelling companions, it does raise the possibility that he received differential treatment. The Caucasian passenger, on the other hand, was not publicly shamed for his incorrect fare nor was the Chinese passenger pulled up to verify his fare. Differential treatment is a subtle form of discrimination. Under the circumstances, one cannot help but wonder if Vijay was treated unfairly. It also certainly reinforces the proposition that a perception exists that Indian passengers are likely to be dishonest and cannot be trusted to pay the correct fare.

Conclusion The term racism is almost a non-operative word in public Singapore as it is hardly ever discussed in official discourses. The lack of attention given to identifying and exposing everyday racism there leaves much to be desired. As a result, it continues to simmer beneath the warm and fuzzy image of a multiracial Singapore, harmonious and tolerant. While there are some studies looking at the marginalisation and socioeconomic discrimination faced by Malays, more research is needed to examine structural and everyday forms of racism as experienced by racial minority groups. The Indians are a racial minority in Singapore who are often over-represented in official statistics as high achievers in terms of education, employment and social status. Discrimination, intolerance and racism against Indians and in particular within dominant and minority relationships and encounters are common occurrences. This paper is therefore a first step towards highlighting some of the racial discrimination endured by Indians in everyday situations. Everyday racism involves racist practices that are integrated into everyday normal interactions and which in turn reinforce underlying racial and ethnic relations (Essed 1991). Based on my fieldwork and interviews with Indians in Singapore, I outlined a number of examples of everyday racism. The respondents reported having encountered discrimination in various situations and places. They included name-calling, racist jokes, use of expletives, covering of noses, avoidance of close contact and


differential treatment. This list is by no means exhaustive. The forms of racial discrimination that Indians experience in the everyday context shift between old and new forms of racism based around biological inferiority and cultural difference respectively. More importantly, as we gathered from the responses, racism and discriminatory practices also tended to vary from casual comments and mocking to subtle and concealed acts. Most respondents revealed that such experiences were deeply distressing and humiliating. Often they were not able to challenge or retaliate against racist practices given the situation and due to their relatively disempowered position. But it became clear that they developed negative attitudes and interacted less with other racial groups and in some cases simply had to put up with such practices. The experience of Indians highlights the point that racial prejudices and stereotypes are reproduced in everyday situations to abuse, socially exclude and perpetuate racial hierarchies between the races. It is not surprising that, as demonstrated in the opening anecdotes, such practices have important implications for the position of Indians within Singaporean society. Given their minority status, experiences of everyday racism, if not addressed in political and policy debates, are likely to fuel more resentments and a sense of alienation among the Indians. Moreover, it goes without saying that everyday racism experienced by Indians is also indicative of potential structural racism that may exist in Singapore against minority groups.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Vijay Devadas for his comments on this paper.

Notes 1. These are the author’s own field notes. 2. Singapore was founded by the British in 1819. It later became a crown colony and flourished as an entrepôt attracting immigrants from China, India and neighbouring countries. 3. The Indians, along with the Chinese and Malay population, arrived as immigrants to Singapore after its founding in 1819. They are the third largest ethnic group in Singapore. In official policies, the category Indian is used to describe anyone who has ancestral links to India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. 4. In 2007, according to Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower, there were 577,000 foreign workers (excluding foreign female domestic workers) employed in low-skilled jobs in manufacturing and construction sectors. The foreign workers are mainly from China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Burma and the Philippines. Many of these workers congregate at a number of public spaces

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such as shopping malls and parks and enclaves such as Little India and Chinatown on Sundays and public holidays that are also frequented by Singaporeans. Racism and class discrimination against these workers have intensified over the years. Their visible presence has generated anxieties, discomfort and racist sentiments among Singaporeans who claim that they feel unsafe as the workers litter, consume alcohol and misbehave in these places. 5. The issue of loyalty among the Malays to the Singapore nation and the broader Islamic community in the region in times of conflict is a constant worrying point for the Singapore government. It is a commonly held view that Malays have been denied key military appointments, including as pilots in the Singapore air force, because of the possibility of them shifting their allegiances. 6. It should be pointed out that discomforts and tensions arising out of unaccustomed sensory experiences in cross-cultural encounters – for instance cooking/food smells and ethnic music – frequently emerge in multicultural Singapore.

References Alatas, S. (1977) The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass). Ang, I. and Stratton, J. (1995) ‘The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western Concepts/Asian Cultures’, Sojourn vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 65–89. Amin, A. (2002) ‘Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity, Environment and Planning A, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 959–80. Benjamin, G. (1976) ‘The Cultural Logic of Singapore’s “Multiracialism” ’, in Riaz Hassan (ed.) Singapore: Society in Transition (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press). Chan, H. C. (1975) ‘Politics in an Administrative State: Where Has the Politics Gone?’, in Seah Chee Meow (ed.) Trends in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), pp. 51–68. Chua, B. H. (1998) ‘Culture, Multiculturalism, and National Identity in Singapore’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.) Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge), pp. 166–83. Chua, B. H. (2003) ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: an Instrument of Social Control’, Race & Class, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 58–77. Clammer, J. (1998) Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965-1990: The Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society (Brookfield: Ashgate). Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (London: Sage). Fanon, F. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press). Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press). Goldberg, D. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell). Gouldner, A. (1975) ‘Sociology and Everyday Life’, in L. Coser (ed.) The Idea of Social Structure (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Heller, A. (1984) Everyday Life (London: Routledge). Lai, A. E. (1995) Meaning of Multiethnicity: A Case-Study of Ethnicity and Ethnic Relations in Singapore (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press).

Everyday Racism in Singapore 273 Lai, A. E. (1996) ‘Everyday Spaces, Ordinary People and Everyday Life Activities’, in Lee Weng Choy (ed.) Space, Spaces and Spacing (Singapore: The Substation). Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press). Moore, R. (2000) ‘Multiracialism and Meritocracy: Singapore’s Approach to Race and Inequality’, Review of Social Economy, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 339–60. Rahim, L. (1998) The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press). Quah, J. (1990) ‘Government Policies and Nation-Building’, in J. Quah (ed.) In Search of Singapore’s National Values (Singapore: Times Academic Press). Tamney, J. (1996) The Struggle Over Singapore’s Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Tremewan, C. (1994) The Political Economy of Social Control in Singapore (New York: St Martin’s Press). Trocki, C. A. (2006) Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge). Vasil, R. (2000) Governing Singapore: A History of National Development and Democracy (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin). Velayutham, S. (2007) Responding to Globalisation: Nation, Culture and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies). Wise, A. (2005). ‘Hope and Belonging in a Multicultural Suburb’, Journal of Intercultural Studies vol. 26, no. 1–2, pp. 171–86. Wise, A. (forthcoming) ‘Sensuous Multiculturalism: Emotional Landscapes of Interethnic Living in Australian Suburbia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Index Ahmed, S. 227 Aksartova, S. 4–5 allotments 108 Allport, G. 8–9 ambiguity, of cosmopolitanism 153 ambivalence 75–8, 117–18 Americanisation 247 Amin, A. 7, 40, 51, 220, 261 Ang, I. 6, 36, 46, 117, 216 Appadurai, A. 106, 114, 181, 193 Appiah, A. 63 assimilation 200 Association Giovani Musulmani d’Italia (GMI) 76–7 asylum-seekers 130, 131–3 Australia, crisis of multiculturalism 10–11 authenticity 169–70 backyard food 25–6 banal cosmopolitanism 48–9, 70 Bauman, Z. 63 Baumann, G. 73 belonging 134 Benhabib, S. 75 Benjamin, Geoffrey 259 Berking, H. 58 Bhabha, H. 91, 94 biographies, of gifts 27 bodies 9–10 as art 172 reading difference 167–71 relationship between physical and social 173 as signifiers of race 171–4, 176 as sites of racism 265–8 bodybuilding 12–13, 171–4 Bonacich, E. 239–40, 242, 243, 245 bonding and bridging 55 border-crossings 118 boundaries 115, 117 Bourdieu, Pierre 69, 72, 180 bridging capital 55

Brodkin, Karen 170 Brooklyn Gym study bodybuilding and difference 171–4 conclusions 174–6 hierarchies 175–6 hierarchies of power 172–3 hierarchy of social space 165–7 language 166–7 location 163–4 multicultural space 175 power relations 175–6 reading difference 167–71 shared social space 174 speaking of difference 164–7 Butler, Judith 180 Camozzi, I. 11 Canada immigration policy 142 official multiculturalism 140–1 Cantle, T. 5 capitalism 133 care responsibility for 41 spaces of 28–9, 33 Chan, H. C. 258 Chang, E. 249–50 charities 77–8 Cheal, D. 24–5 Cheng, L. 247, 249 Chicago School 7 childhood, rural 107–10 Chua Beng Huat 95, 259–60 cinema, representations 95–6 circuits of recognition 53 City Publics 7 CMIO ratio 259 Cockburn, Cynthia 23 Coffee Shop 93–4 collective identities 175 Colley, L. 134 Collins, F. L. 13–14 Colombo, E. 11 274

Index 275 colonialism, legacy 92–3 Comaroff, Jean 173 commensality embodied 32 spatial possibilities 89 commodified cosmopolitanism 150–3 common sense 168–9 communality 50 community intercultural 59 labour of 53–6 community cohesion 5 and everyday interactions 199 conceptualising 11 conflict theory 8 Connecting Diversity 46–7 connectivity 220 Conradson, D. 34, 218 constructionism 68 consuming cosmopolitanism 114–15 contact theory 8 contact zones defining 22 international students 221 volunteer work 217–20, 227 ‘Contact Zones’ project conceptual framework 22–4 contact zones/danger zones 37–40 field sites 21–2 gift exchange and quotidian recognition 34–7 gifts in intercultural encounters 24–9 host-guest relations 30–3 transversal knowledge exchange 29–30 context, of difference 70–1 contributing disciplines 8 convergence 213 cooking diversification 114 English 107–8 cosmo-multiculturalists 4, 114, 115 cosmopolitan ethics 62–3 cosmopolitan mentality 49 cosmopolitan sensibility 90 cosmopolitan virtue 49

cosmopolitanism 46, 47 commodified 150–3 consuming 114–15 as global fluid 60 of identity 146–8 in modern metropolis 141 Montréal 141–4 personal 148–50 political 144–6 reconceiving 48–51 strategic nature 56–7 vernacular 90–6 ways of understanding 153 crisis of multiculturalism 10–11, 46 culinary tourism 150 cultural capital 112, 141 cultural differences, mechanisms of 165 cultural distance 210–11 cultural labour 181 cultural maintenance 47–8 cultural orientations, awareness of 38 cultural power, territorial imperatives 109–10 cultural transaction, exploratory gestures 58 culture hegemonic 167 risk of loss 247–8 de Certeau, Michel 69, 71, 74, 173 debt 251 developmentalism 94–5, 98–9, 101 Devine, F. 218 dialectic of mobilities and moorings 60 difference and bodybuilding 171–4 coming to terms with 40 context of 70–1 everyday dimension 69–72 hegemony of 170 political aspect 67–8 as practice 72 practices of 69–70 reading 167–71 recognition of 36 reconstructing 67–8

276

Index

difference – continued reification of 66–7 relational perspective 74 resistance 71 as resource 72–3 as situated 74–5 spatial dimension 78–81 speaking of 164–7 subjective dimension of 71 use of 75–8 dirt 265–8 displacement 28 disruption 118 diversity 141 Haringey 110 Montréal 142 positive attitudes 208–9 division of labour, by race 239–42 Duruz, J. 11–12 dwelling perspective 181 economy of exchange 116 embodied commensality 32 Emecheta, Buchi 129 encounters, variety of 3 English cooking 107–8 English tourists, images of 112–13 Espiritu, Y. 247, 249 Essed, P. 8, 262, 264, 266 ethical dimensions 3–4 ethics, cosmopolitan 62–3 ethics of encounter 36 ethnic concentration 27 ethnic conflict 179 ethnic identifications 213 ethnicisation 79–81 ethnicity 109 border-crossings 118 and familiarity 111 ethnoscapes 106, 114, 118 everyday cosmopolitanism rescuing 10–11 in a school 51–3 everyday dimension, of difference 69–72 everyday interactions, and community cohesion 199

everyday multiculturalism as analytical perspective 72–3 as category of practice 74–5 definition 3 everyday racism 7–8, 14, 50 see also Singapore exchange 59 economy of 116 exclusion 130–2 family connections 136 Fanon, Frantz 265, 266, 267 femininity 109, 118 festivals 27–8 fishing, 12–13 fishing study Aboriginal people 187–8 Anglo-Celtic 185–8 Arabic peoples 188 belonging 185 competing claims 193 conclusions 192–4 fishing as a claim 185–90 fishing as exploration 190–2, 193–4 fishing as site of conflict 181–2 fishing ‘out of place’ 182–5, 193 learning 190 literature 180 location 179–80 Mandaeans 188 marginalisation 186–7 method 179–80 Muslim people 187–8 ownership 187–8 research team 180 styles of fishing 177–9 Vietnamese fishing practices 183–4, 189 water in religious practice 187–8 fluidity 36–7 of boundaries 115 Foley, Douglas 164–5 folklore preservation 140–1

Index 277 food 11–12 adventurousness 113–14 curiosity about 149–50 family and community maintenance 109 nostalgia for 107 food courts 96 food-sharing 58 Fortier, A. M. 39–40 Foucault, Michel 170, 172 Frisina, A. 11 Geertz, Clifford 168–9 gender 118, 206–7 gentrification 79 gift economy, defining 24–5 gift exchange, and quotidian recognition 34–7 gifts biographies 27 ethical dimensions 34 in intercultural encounters 24–9 meanings 33 as social activity 57 Gilroy, P. 200–1 global fluid 60 globalisation effects on local labour markets 250–1 kopitiams as reaction to 93–4 porousness of boundaries 117 glocal dimension 73 Gluckman, M. 30 Goffman, Erving 61, 78–9 Good Neighbour Movement 41 Goodall, H. 12–13 gossip, as social control 30 Gouldner, A. 261 grammar 79 gratitude 36 Green Lanes, Haringey 105, 110–13 Greenland, K. 8 Guattari, F. 23 habits, of engagement 60 habitus 60–1, 180 Hafner, Dorinda 111 Hage, G. 3–4, 32, 34–5, 57, 114, 116–17, 126, 183

Hai Peng 98–9 halal 98 Han, C. 14 Hannerz, U. 149 harassment 211–13 Haringey, diversity 110 Hayes-Bautista, D. E. 252 hegemonic culture 167 hegemony, of difference 68, 170 Heller, A. 261 Herbert, J. 8 heritage preservation 140–1 Hewstone, M. 8 hierarchies Brooklyn Gym study 175–6 racialised economic 260 Highmore, B. 9 Hollinger, David 90 homesick migrants 115 Honneth, A. 35 ‘hopeful intercultural encounters’ 59 host-guest relations 30–3 Hudson, M. 13 human geography 7 humour 165–6 racist jokes 263–5 hybridity 6–7, 92–3, 117 hyperdiversity 47 identarian reduction 50 identifications, multiple 77 identities, hybrid 6–7 identity collective 175 formation 95 generational 112 in-between 117–18 mainstream 106, 109 of self 100 identity cosmopolitanism 146–8 imagination 106, 114, 115 immigrant ideology 247–8, 249 immigrant status 242–4 immigration policy, Canada 142 impurity 117 in-between 117 in-migration 130 inclusivity 95, 101

278

Index

inequalities and community relationships 214 recognising and addressing 40–1 information networks 24 Ingold, T. 181 integration 47–8, 213 non-assimilationist 40 paradigms 200 inter-ethnic habitus 60–1 interactionism 78–9 interchange 23 intercultural community 59 intercultural interaction 117 intercultural mixing lack of research 143 Montréal 141–2 street markets 137 interdependency 62 intergenerational bonding 94 intermarriage 205 intermingling 52 international students, research about 220–3 intersectional gossip 24 Islam, food restrictions 98 Islamisation 89, 100 Jackson, John L. Jr. 169–70 Jacobs, Jane 113 Jit, Krishen 100–1 kampung 95 Kant, Immanuel 144 King Street, Sydney 105, 113–17 knowledge embodied 180–1 embodiment 172 transversal exchanges 29–30 kopitiams 11 adaptation 92–3 conversion and destruction 94–5 cosmopolitanism 93 description 87–8 food and drinks served 92–3 Hai Peng 98–9 public discourses 88–9 representations 95–6 research focus 89

as third places 91–2 Yut Kee 96–8, 100 Korean Volunteer Team (KVT) study 216–17 benefits of volunteering 231 conclusions 231–2 members of team 224 method 221–3 problems and possibilities 231–2 research literature 217–20 social networks 225–8 volunteer work as contact zone 217–20 volunteering 223–5 labour, of community 53–6 Lamont, M. 4–5 Lamphere, Louise 237 language acceptability 166–7 as barrier 210 and discrimination 268–9 and exclusion 130 mocking 263–4 multilingualism 258–9 Latour, Bruno 180–1 laughter 165–6 Law, L. 27 Lee, Jennifer 244–5 leisure 12–14 Living Diversity 46–7 local liveability 51 localities 181, 192, 193 Lorde, Audre 265 Los Angeles study conclusions 249–52 globalisation 250–1 immigrant status 242–4 method 238–9 ‘other’ and ‘self’ 246–9 sources of conflict 250–2 workplace antagonism 244–5 workplace structure 239–42 Los Angeles uprising 249–50, 251–2 ‘lotus root friendships’ 117 love 35, 39 mainstream, as self 109 Malaysia, Islamisation 89

Index 279 Mandal, Sumit 90, 91 Maniam, K. S. 90–1, 101 marginality 128 Maria Hertogh riots 257 Mauss, M. 28, 31, 37, 57 May, Jon 111, 112 McKinley, Robert 98 mediating institutions 237–8 memory 115 Merton, R. K. 148–9 metropolitan areas 74 micro-moral economy 26–7 micro-publics 7 migrants 116 Mile End, Montréal 145–6, 147, 152–3 Miller, Daniel 28, 110 Milligan, C. 218 mixing 5 modalities of everyday contact 261 Montréal 140 cosmopolitanism 141–4 ethnic diversity 142 fieldwork sites 143–4 intercultural contact 141–2 population distribution 142–3 moral economy 25, 28 moral panic 50–1 Moss, Kirby 164–5 Moss Side study conclusions 213–14 cultural distance 210–11 factors inhibiting everyday interaction 208–13 language barriers 210 location 201–2 method 202 older people 205–6 participants 202–3 racial stereotyping and harassment 211–13 social cohesion 201 social space 204 Somali people 206–8 unwillingness to mix 209–10 welcoming newcomers 209–10 younger people 203–5 multicultural recognition 35

multiculturalism backlash against 46–7 changing attitudes towards 200 as subjective 128 traditional perspectives 2 multiculturalism with migrants 116 multiracialism, as ideology 256, 258–9 music 204–5 mutual care 36 mutuality 31–2, 41, 61 name-calling 263–5 nation-building, and racial harmony 258–9 nationalism 144–6 neighbourhood decline 205–6 neighbourhoods 10 neighbourliness 39–40, 217 network capital 55 network sociality 50 networks inter-ethnic 29–30 social 225–8 new diaspora 90 new urbanism 113 Ng Ping Ho 92, 100 Noble, G. 6–7, 8, 10–11, 35, 180 nostalgia 94, 95, 96–8, 99–100, 125, 128 for food 107 generational 111 white British 129–35 objectification 170 Oldenburg, Ray 91–2 openness 48, 150, 151 ordinary cosmopolitanism 4, 5 O’Reilly, Karen 112 other creating 246–9 and self 109 otherness 111 Pakatan Rakyat 91 panicked multiculturalism 51 Paxman, J. 109 people-mixing 10–11, 47, 48 permanent hosts 98

280

Index

personal cosmopolitanism 148–50 pessimism 126 Pettigrew, T. F. 8–9 Phillips, J. 13 Phillips, T. 5–6 place-marketing 151 place-sharing 28 place sharing 42 pluralism 90 political cosmopolitanism 144–6 politics 13–14 politics of connectivity 220 porousness 117 power relations 42 and bodies 172–3 Brooklyn Gym study 175–6 race 166 power, uneven distribution 31 practical dimension 74 practices of difference 69–70 embodied 181 spatial 70 Pratt, Mary Louise 22 properties, objective 70–1 Prophet Muhammed Birthday race riots 257 propriety, working-class 111 Protestantism 134 proximity 213 public spaces 7, 125 Putnam, Robert 55, 77 Quah, J. 258 Quebec 140 quotidian recognition, and gift exchange 34–7 quotidian transversality 10, 22–3 race biological validity 169 as displayed on the body 171–4, 176 and division of labour 239–42 power relations 166 in urban contexts 7 visibility of 259–60

race and ethnicity, entanglement 161–3 race riots, Singapore 257 racial harmony, and nation-building 258–9 racial thinking 175–6 racial vilification 62 racialisation 88–9 racism 131–3, 211–13 embodiment 265–8 everyday 261–2 Singapore 256–7, 260–1 racist jokes 263–5 Radice, M. 12 Ray, K. 13 reciprocity 27, 28 phenomenology of 57–60 politics of 31–2 recognition 52–3 as and with 62 conceptualising 6 recognition theory 62 reflective practices 72 reification, of difference 66–7 relationships, voluntary 77–8 resentment 128 resistance 71 resourcefulness 107 Richardson, Paul 107–8 Ridley Road 128, 135–8 rituals, secular and everyday 30–1 Roberts, J. M. 218 Rodaway, P. 27 Rojek, C. 49 romance, of food 107 romance, of past 129–30 rooting and shifting 23 Samuel, Raphael 133 Sandercock, L. 7 school, everyday cosmopolitanism 51–3 Seddon, George 25–6 segregation 200 self constructing 246–9 and other 109

Index 281 self-transformation 173–4 Semi, G. 11 Sennett, R. 31, 37 senses 9–10 and food gifts 27 sensuous multiculturalism 9 settlement, inter-ethnic networks 29–30 Sherman, J. 12–13 shopping, familiarity 111 Simmel, G. 36, 78–9 sincerity 170–1 Singapore conclusions 270–1 everyday racism 261–2 language 263–4 linguistic discrimination 268–9 meritocracy 259 name-calling and racist jokes 263–5 population distribution 259 promotion of multiracialism 256 race riots 257 racial harmony and nation-building 258–9 racialised economic hierarchy 260 racism 256–7, 260–1 racist behaviour 270–1 untrustworthiness 269 visibility of race 259–60 social actors, taking seriously 70, 71 social cohesion 136, 201 social divisions 129, 133, 174–5 social networks 225–8 social space hierarchy of 165–7 sharing 204 society, spatial ordering 78–9 sociology of everyday life 3 solidarity 13–14 transethnic 91, 101 space and difference 78–81 multicultural 175 socio-cultural contexts 138 spaces of care 28–9 spaces of intercultural care 33–4 spaces of social exchange 29 spatial proximity 213

split labour market theory 239–40 sport 12–13, 204–5 St-Viateur festival 145–6, 147, 152–3 stability 134 Starbucks 92 stereotypes 165–6, 211–13 and division of labour 239–42 stigmatisation 165 Stratton, J. 4 street markets 125 decline 129, 134 diversity 125 economic contexts 138 family connections 136 intercultural mixing 137 interviews 127 on the margins 135–8 as meeting places 137 political contexts 138 Queen’s Crescent 126–7 research sites 126–9 Ridley Road 127, 135–8 sub-themes 2–3 subjective dimension, of difference 71 super-diversity 47 Symons, Michael 109 Taylor, C. 34–5, 61–2 temporality 60 ‘The Discomfort of Strangers’ 8 The End of Parallel Lives? 5 The Great Good Place 91–2 theatre 100–1 themes, dominant 66 thinking, racial 175–6 third places 91–2, 94 Thrift, N. 7 tolerance 3–4 traditions, around food 109 trans-ethnic solidarity 101 trans-ethnicity 95–6, 101 trans-ethnic solidarities 90 translation 70 transversal enablers 10, 24, 29–31, 38–9 transversal exchanges 24–9 transversal knowledge exchange 29–30

282

Index

transversal politics 23 travel 118 Trocki, Carl 259 Turner, B. 49 uncommon engagement 227 unpanicked multiculturalism 50–1 untrustworthiness 269 urban sociology 7 urbanisation 133 Urry, John 36, 49, 60 Valentine, G. 6, 39, 40, 214 vegetables, exchanged as gifts 25–6 Velayutham, S. 14 vernacular cosmopolitanism 90–6 Vertovec, S. 47, 90 Vision 20 20 95, 100 volunteer work 223–5 benefits 231 as cultural contact zone 217–20

encounters with public 228–31 and socialising 225–7 walking villages 113 water, in religious practice 187–8 Watkins, M. 180 Watson, S. 7, 12 Werbner, Pnina 4 white cosmopolites 4 Williams, Raymond 133 Wilmott, P. 134 Wise, A. 9, 10, 219, 261 Wittel, A. 50 working-class cosmopolitans 4 working consensus 61 Yar, M. 50 Young, I. M. 35 Young, M. 134 young people 47 Yuval-Davis, Nira 23–4 Yut Kee 96–8, 100 Zulkilfi, Mack 92

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