Digesting Difference : Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe [1st ed.] 9783030495978, 9783030495985

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GLOBAL DIVERSITIES

Digesting Difference Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe Edited by Kelly McKowen · John Borneman

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Global Diversities

Series Editors Steven Vertovec Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany Peter van der Veer Department of Religious Diversity Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany Ayelet Shachar Department of Ethics, Law, and Politics Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, Germany

Over the past decade, the concept of ‘diversity’ has gained a leading place in academic thought, business practice, politics and public policy across the world. However, local conditions and meanings of ‘diversity’ are highly dissimilar and changing. For these reasons, deeper and more comparative understandings of pertinent concepts, processes and phenomena are in great demand. This series will examine multiple forms and configurations of diversity, how these have been conceived, imagined, and represented, how they have been or could be regulated or governed, how different processes of inter-ethnic or inter-religious encounter unfold, how conflicts arise and how political solutions are negotiated and practiced, and what truly convivial societies might actually look like. By comparatively examining a range of conditions, processes and cases revealing the contemporary meanings and dynamics of ‘diversity’, this series will be a key resource for students and professional social scientists. It will represent a landmark within a field that has become, and will continue to be, one of the foremost topics of global concern throughout the twenty-­first century. Reflecting this multi-disciplinary field, the series will include works from Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Law, Geography and Religious Studies. While drawing on an international field of scholarship, the series will include works by current and former staff members, by visiting fellows and from events of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Relevant manuscripts submitted from outside the Max Planck Institute network will also be considered. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15009

Kelly McKowen  •  John Borneman Editors

Digesting Difference Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe

Editors Kelly McKowen Department of Anthropology Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA

John Borneman Department of Anthropology Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA

ISSN 2662-2580     ISSN 2662-2599 (electronic) Global Diversities ISBN 978-3-030-49597-8    ISBN 978-3-030-49598-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Johner Images / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Digesting Difference: Migrants, Refugees, and Incorporation in Europe  1 Kelly McKowen and John Borneman 2 The German Welfare State as a Holding Environment for Refugees: A Case Study of Incorporation 29 John Borneman 3 Accepting Germans: An Ethnographic Exploration of Refugee Integration in Berlin 51 Jagat Sohail 4 The Erotic in Foreigner Incorporation: First Encounters Between Germans and Syrians 75 Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi 5 The Everyday, ‘Ordinary’ Citizens, and Ambiguous Governance Affect in Antwerp103 Anick Vollebergh

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6 Hierarchical Forms of Belonging in an Egalitarian Society129 Synnøve Bendixsen and Hilde Danielsen 7 “Cut and Sew”: Migration, Crisis, and Belonging in an Italian Fast-Fashion Zone149 Elizabeth L. Krause 8 The Power of the Bowels: A Visceral Afro-Pentecostal Critique of Italian Afrophobia167 Annalisa Butticci 9 Workers for Free: Precarious Inclusion and Extended Uncertainty Among Afghan Refugees in Denmark185 Mikkel Rytter and Narges Ghandchi 10 Expulsion or Differential Inclusion? Governing Undocumented Migrants in France209 Stefan Le Courant 11 Solidarity in Greece and the Management of Difference227 Heath Cabot 12 Afterword: The Work of ‘Integration’251 Steven Vertovec Index267

Contributors

Synnøve Bendixsen  Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway John  Borneman  Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Annalisa Butticci  Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany Heath  Cabot  Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Hilde Danielsen  NORCE Norwegian Research Center, Bergen, Norway Narges  Ghandchi  Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Parvis  Ghassem-Fachandi Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

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Elizabeth  L.  Krause Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA Stefan Le Courant  Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, LESC (CNRS- Université Paris Nanterre), Nanterre, France Kelly  McKowen Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA Mikkel  Rytter Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Jagat  Sohail Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA Steven  Vertovec  Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany Anick  Vollebergh Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

1 Digesting Difference: Migrants, Refugees, and Incorporation in Europe Kelly McKowen and John Borneman

Since the turn of the century, millions of migrants have crossed and re-­ crossed Europe’s lattice of internal and external borders. In 2017, approximately 52 million of them had moved for work, their opportunities multiplied by the eastward enlargements of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 (International Labour Office 2018). Millions more, displaced

This collection draws on contributions from two conferences, sponsored by the Princeton’s Program in Contemporary Politics and Society and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). These were “Xenophobia and Social Integration: Forms, Functions, Facilitators, Inhibitors” (2015) and “Digesting Difference: Modes of Social Incorporation in Europe” (2018). A few of the chapters were subsequently presented and refined at the 2018 biennial meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Stockholm. We thank PIIRS for funding and support. We are also grateful to Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi for a close read of our penultimate draft of this Introduction.

K. McKowen (*) Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Borneman Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_1

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by war, endemic violence, and persecution in countries like Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently, Syria, are seeking or have been granted asylum. There are also kinship migrants—the wives, husbands, children, and extended kin brought by the aforementioned groups within or outside the legal framework of family reunification. Finally, in a swiftly warming world, there are climate refugees, those fleeing crises caused by the conjunction of environmental catastrophe, imperiled economies, and dysfunctional political systems (United Nations 2018). In the near future, tens of million are expected to be displaced in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia alone. The result of these movements is a new, kinetic, and “super-diverse” (Vertovec 2007) Europe, teeming with an ever-expanding array of identifications, communities, languages, dialects, memories, and histories. It is a Europe where difference is organized not merely by borders but within and across their physical and imaginative horizons. The most critical long-term issue posed by migration to and across Europe is not the multiplicity of diversities, however, but the confrontation with particular forms of difference that challenge the integrity of extant social bodies and create the possibility for reconfiguring circuits of mutual belonging. In popular, scholarly, and policy discourse, this is framed in the hegemonic terms of “integration” (Rytter 2019). We argue against using this vernacular term for analytic purposes. Integration remains underspecified, referring variously to migrants’ employment outcomes, educational attainment, language acquisition, or participation in political institutions. The emergence of “civic integration” programs in recent decades (Joppke 2007) has broadened governmental intervention, as policymakers now aim to flesh out the skeleton of inclusion with “culture.” In courses and programs, migrants learn about traditions, cultural scripts, and national rituals while being encouraged to adopt an attitude of tolerance for difference in the name of mutual respect. Here, integration becomes a matter of recognizing holidays and histories, of adopting values, and of learning to “do as the Romans—or Dutch, Germans, Norwegians, and so on—do.”

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There is a notable thinness to concepts of integration, despite attempts to include all possible variables. These concepts typically share a state-­ centric vision of integration. All share an insistence on reducing complex processes to relatively straightforward indices of success or failure. Their shortcomings quickly become apparent when one tries to use them to recognize and describe an empirical reality that exceeds employment statistics, graduation rates, or civic integration certificates. Whatever their import, these indicators cannot capture processes wherein identities are revised and adopted, where traditions are jettisoned and appropriated, where the borders of everyday belonging are drawn and redrawn. Brought up against the reality of contemporary Europe, thin integration concepts leave much to be desired. We count at least six critical issues. First, thin concepts conceive of integration processes as teleological rather than experienced unevenly in time and with fluctuating ambivalence. For most migrants, the ends of integration remain open and evolve, encompassing recognizable outcomes but shifting goals. These goals may involve employment, education, and retraining but are also shaped by a host of interactions and exchanges that occur outside of the workplace, school, or retraining course. Further, the linear understanding of integration begs various questions about a migrant’s status when measurable gains are lost. For instance, when migrants lose work, are they de-­ integrated (or disintegrated)? If so, are the non-migrant unemployed not also de-integrated? What becomes of the integrated migrants or non-­ migrants whose skills and education are made redundant by economic or technological changes? And what to make of a migrant who learns the local language, celebrates national holidays, but faces discrimination and persistent exclusion? A “thicker” concept would embrace the possibility that the destinations of integration cannot be divined beforehand because they are constantly changing even among the people who move toward them. Moreover, it would grasp that the processes we call “integrating” are productive of novel social bodies, of which both migrants and non-­ migrants are constitutive actors. A second deficiency of thin conceptions of integration is the mistaken idea that integration is something that is done either to migrants by the authorities or by migrants to themselves, who may have to explicitly disavow elements of their identity to gain acceptance (see Fuglerud 1997).

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In either case, this concept perpetuates the idea that migrants, as the sole or primary locus of change, are to be absorbed into some pre-constituted, unchanging whole. There is little concern, for instance, in “how immigrant groups respond to citizenship laws and integration policies, and how their presence and participation affect the meanings and practices of citizenship” in general (Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul 2008, 170). And even when scholars and policymakers protest that their vision of integration involves both migrants and non-migrants, the implicit premise is that integration is a collaborative process wherein the former aim to become more like the latter, as measured using the aforementioned indicators. This is curious, as migrant movement toward the non-migrant norm is at times perceived by migrants and non-migrants as problematic, even dangerous. This was the case, for instance, in Norway, where the emergence of a slang-filled ethnolect of Norwegian called kebabnorsk was widely greeted not as evidence of generative mixing between foreign- and native-born Norwegians but a threat posed by the former to the latter. Turks met a similarly ambivalent audience in Germany, ultimately appropriating the derogatory term for their ethnolect, Kanakensprache, as a form of self-identification. In Norway, language anxiety helped spur policymakers to implement new language requirements for prospective kindergarten workers, reifying the connection between quantifiable measures and colloquial understanding of integration. In Germany, by contrast, since the 1990s Feridun Zaimoğlu, who has been praised as a poet of the German language and won many literary awards, helped introduce Kanakensprache into German prose. A thicker integration concept would elucidate these developments, discovering in them a process of asymmetrical co-production—one that is at times responsive to, even appropriative of, policy but at other times runs parallel to, even independent of, it. Such elucidation would make space for a broader array of actors, including not only migrants and settled non-migrants but the waves of humanitarian actors and international activists who materialize at the sites of migratory crisis (Cabot 2019a, b). Third, thin concepts of integration offer only a partial and highly selective account of where new patterns of inclusion and exclusion unfold— or do not. Once more, the indicators of integration orient and selectively

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filter our gaze. Scholars look, for example, at civic integration courses (Rugkåsa 2010) where official histories and invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) are promulgated alongside strongly worded encouragement to find work. They look also at the labor market, where that encouragement, mixed with the imperatives to support oneself and one’s family members, including those left behind, compels an often-desperate search for employment (see Rytter and Ghandchi, this volume). They look at schools to see how first- and second-generation children are faring compared to their non-migrant peers. They look at the spatial organization of urban areas and read conclusions into the distribution of peoples, weaving “myths of failed integration” (Andersen and Biseth 2013) from the concentration of peoples in the centers, pockets, and suburbs of European cities. In other words, they situate immigrants into the places where integration is easily measured, failing to appreciate that this ease comes at the expense of the more nuanced understandings that may emerge when one considers all experiences, encounters, exchanges, including emotional and erotic entanglements (see Ghassem-Fachandi, this volume), as potentially integrative or disintegrative. Fourth, there is the emphasis on “citizenship” and the associated language of official rights and obligations. One need not deny the importance of formal civic, political, and social rights (Marshall 1950) to nonetheless contest the use of citizenship as either the basis of or proxy for integration. Cases abound where rights are extended but not accessible, accessible but their invocation is deemed inappropriate or indicative of failed integration, or where the language of rights is not robust enough to express the more personal and intimate aspirations of new arrivals. Even when rights are granted, non-migrants often demand new citizens do more than follow the letter of the law, as the hegemonic understanding of integration is more or less synonymous with cultural assimilation (see Brubaker 2001). Migrants are called to mirror non-migrants in everyday tastes and habits (see Butticci; Bendixsen and Danielsen; Sohail, this volume). Often, migrants, who refuse to abandon aspects of their previous selves and desires, are perceived as indifferent to this mirroring and its associated social pressure, provoking offense and even aggression in some non-migrants.

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If the legally inspired conceptualizations of citizenship are precise but too narrow, the anthropological ones are inclusive but too diffuse. In anthropology, citizenship is often detached from legal rights and entitlements to become a catch-all metaphor with various membership qualifiers—biological, sexual, flexible, agrarian, pharmaceutical, and so on. With respect to migrants, concepts of “cultural citizenship” have proven most influential. But whether these focus on “the right to be different … without compromising one’s right to belong” (Rosaldo 1994, 57) or “the cultural practices and beliefs produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the states and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging within a national population and territory” (Ong 1996, 738), they imply terms and forms of membership that are not remade by the encounters and exchanges between people who are themselves being remade. A thicker concept of integration would capture the relationship between the sociolegal extension of rights and entitlements, their actual accessibility, and the role that both play in hardening, dissolving, and creating boundaries of belonging and shared understandings of alterity (Isin 2002). Fifth, thin concepts of integration tend to explicitly or implicitly center on national membership and belonging (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), at the expense of providing analytical attention to other affiliations and pathways—of friendship, neighborhood, city, occupation, trade union, political movement (see Cabot, this volume)—that also figure prominently in migrant and non-migrant experiences. This neglect may also lead to overemphasizing artifacts and practices deemed essential by some actors to national or ethnic traditions. A thicker concept of integration would focus less on the constructedness of traditions than on their inventiveness and evolution, as well as the diversity of practices and policies intended to regulate them (Sahlins 1999). Further, integration, national and otherwise, is not opposed to but includes transnational and global dimensions and its effects on local inclusion and exclusion. Globalization and capitalist expansion have undermined the ability of states to regulate territoriality through assertions of national sovereignty, which makes security, enclosure, and integration more difficult. New social media and other forms of information technology can undermine national projects or inflect them with transnational audiences through

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the relatively unchecked dissemination of ideas across time and space. A more extensive concept of integration, then, would not jettison the nation and its representations (Rytter 2010) but decenter it. It would emphasize that identifications are nested, situational, and multiple and that national identity and belonging are but one dimension of a broader complex subject evolving under pressures and with possibilities. When a person settles in a new place, integration is not always experienced incrementally but often through “jumps” or shifts between dimensions and scales, creating emergent forms of belonging in, say, new friendship circles, neighborhoods, civic associations, or investments in workplace or leisure cultures. Simultaneous pulls on belonging are the norm, not the exception. Finally, thin concepts of integration engage problematically in “groupism,” or “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis” (Brubaker 2002, 164). Groupism in scholarly and policy literature often involves an excess of “culturespeak” (Hannerz 1999), in which the commonalities and differences between peoples are reified using an anachronistic concept of culture (Wright 1998). Here, cultural distinctiveness typically features as the explanation for otherwise incomprehensible practices. In doing so, it does not render differences palatable or acceptable. Rather, antipathy is displaced from practice to culture and from culture to group. Although the anthropological concept of “culture” has been used to enlarge the space of intelligible discourse between peoples (Geertz 1988), it may also serve to justify the distance or inequalities between peoples, or the complete exclusion of foreigners from a native “culture.” For example, Wikan (2002), writing of Norway, argues that the government invoked culture in the 1990s to legitimate different socioeconomic and educational governmental standards for migrant and non-migrant populations. This, she argues, fostered striking inequalities in what is otherwise an equal society and showed conclusively that what is construed as culture is not what anthropologists intended it to be, becoming, instead, “a new concept of race” (Wikan 1999; see also Stolcke 1995).

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While arguments have been marshaled for and against abandoning the culture concept altogether, there are reasons for using it—and that of the group—within the framework of a thick, “complex” (Eriksen 2007) approach to integration. Construed as an ongoing process of sharing and contesting meanings, culture directs our attention to the actual encounters between lifeworlds mutually imagined as sharing and differentiating along group lines. With respect to groups, a thicker concept would do away with groupism while still acknowledging that humans typically think of themselves in group terms and aspire toward the constitution of bounded bodies or maintenance of the ones that they have inherited. And, critically, people still understand their own integration trajectories in terms that emphasize the sociocultural boundaries that separate one group from another (Barth 1998). These six limitations capture an array of some of the theoretical issues that plague thin concepts of integration. Still, identifying the limitations of a concept is not meant to discourage study of the phenomena it seeks to describe. Integration remains a concern for scholars, policymakers, and publics because it points to a high-stakes question that both migrants and non-migrants ask and answer on a daily basis in thousands of different ways: Who are we becoming (Eriksen 2011)? How is the influx of labor migrants, refugees, kinship migrants, and others changing the sociocultural fabric of contemporary Europe? Here, anthropologists can offer a thicker concept, anchored in the empirical substrate only accessed by “being there” (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009) among migrants and non-migrants. We call this thicker concept “incorporation.”

A Thicker Concept Incorporation is a non-linear, inter-subjective, and multi-scale process. We are certainly not the first to use the term (see Brettell 2008), though some critical dimensions of the concept have not been elaborated. The sociologist Thomas Faist (2009), for example, has proposed that diversity itself, in its multiple referents, should be considered as a new mode of incorporation in Europe. Anthropologists Nina Glick Schiller and Ayse Çağlar (2009) have theorized incorporation as a local process canalized

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by patterns of post-industrial urban restructuring in a neoliberal, globalizing world. Cities, they show, position—and are positioned by—the incorporative trajectories of migrants. Focusing on migrants and born-­ again Christianity, Glick Schiller et al. (2006) argue that city scale helps account for which institutions become central in these trajectories. More narrowly, the politics scholar Rafaela Dancygier (2017) has examined the political incorporation of European Muslims, detailing the recruitment of Muslim candidates for office and the cultivation of new electoral blocs in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and Belgium. At the center of her account are the dilemmas confronted by traditional political parties and their new members and constituents, whose ideas, commitments, and aspirations may diverge from those typically espoused by their parties. In short, processes of incorporation change not only political participants but parties and the political system itself. Other aspects of incorporation, as we use it, have been anticipated in literatures on assimilation and acculturation. Our use differs in key respects, however. For instance, assimilation is typically defined as a process whereby one gives up what one is—identity markers, cultural traits, and habits—as a condition of becoming a member of another, established group (Park 1914). As Sohail (this volume) demonstrates, assimilation still figures as an aspiration for some migrants, who see this shedding of otherness as a condition for enjoying the acceptance, even esteem, of some non-migrants. However, the ethnographic record does not support the notion that this stripping process ever fully succeeds, or that integration of a stranger leaves the non-migrant “culture” unchanged (Waters and Jiménez 2005). Rather, migration spurs mimetic and reciprocal processes of incorporation and estrangement within a single social field. While migrants incorporate meanings, goods, practices, and habits into their performative repertoire, they inevitably refashion them and return them, changed, to circulation. In turn, when communities incorporate new people into their groups, they are also transformed. Acculturation, as developed by the Boasian school of anthropologists in the 1930s, comes closest to our understanding of incorporation. In seeking a theoretical framework to study the changing experiences of native Americans and freed African slaves in the Americas, the Boasians focused on how “groups of individuals having different cultures come

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into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups” (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936, 149). Acculturation offered a way to insist that new arrivals, indigenous groups, and settlers were changing through “first-­ hand contact” shaped by asymmetries of power, misunderstandings, and selective appropriation. Contrary to popular understandings, the leading figures in the Boasian tradition recognized, rightly, that encounters do not produce stable cultures into which the respective sides could be integrated. Change was required of every sub-group in the evolving whole. One of the inspirations in the work of these scholars was the attempt to respond both to the diffusionist model conceptualized by Leo Frobenius, which tracked the flow of beliefs, activities, and “traits” across space, and to the cultural model conceptualized by J.G. Herder, which contextualized these traits as functioning within discrete social wholes. A sophisticated early attempt in 1923 by Boas’ first PhD student, Alfred Kroeber, presaged the work on acculturation. Kroeber made the astute observation that “every culture shows [a receptivity] toward cultural material worked out by other cultures,” but that “as soon as a culture has accepted a new item, it tends to lose interest in the foreignness of origin of this item, as against the fact that the item is now functioning within the culture” (1948, 65). This receptivity of culture to the foreign or new is counter-balanced, however, by a desire for social stability. And those desires for stability and continuity, Kroeber argued, “tend to be considerably stronger than [culture’s] active or innovating faculties” (65). New traits, wrote Kroeber presciently, may meet with anything from eager acceptance to bitter hostility. But since it does represent innovation and change, the traits that are being introduced will expectably encounter some resistance … or their acceptance may have unforeseen consequences that prove to be upsetting. … Intra-­ society transmission of culture in time must normally tend toward persistence, [while] intersocietal transmission in space tend toward[s] change. (220)

Particular cultures, he concluded, flourish precisely because of their “compositeness” and “assimilativeness” (67).

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Kroeber’s points hold for contemporary Europe: receptivity to innovation and change, then, always provokes some form of opposition yet produces vibrant societies more capable of adaptation. The contemporary valorization of innovation, change, and mobility should not lead us to dismiss as irrational the increased world-wide resistance—sometimes violent—to currents of people, ideas, and goods that may disturb imagined sociocultural equilibria. Popular resistance to immigration within Europe is to be expected when linked to the disintegration brought about by the hyper-globalized markets that followed the Cold War. Today social media and new means of disseminating (mis)information afford xenophobic populists opportunities within democratic political institutions to foment such opposition and create internal social dissensus around immigrants, particularly those of Muslim background. In the proportional representation parliamentary systems typical of most European countries, one needs only a small, alienated part of the electorate to secure critical anti-­ immigrant seats in legislative bodies. Right-wing parties across Europe have grown their support by attracting voters with inflammatory rhetoric and imagery that lay the blame for their collective misery and sense of dislocation at the feet of migrants. This is ironic, given that the stability and reproduction of contemporary European lifecourses depends on receptivity to the labor, economic, and cultural exchanges that arrive from outside. Driven to satisfy this need for innovation stimulated from the outside, and confronted with inescapable difference, the reproduction of both individual and social bodies catalyzes processes of incorporation at various scales and intensities. Bodies are made of many parts, they have interiors and exteriors, and they have surfaces that interface with the outside. These parts move together to form a living entity with an image of itself and its relative permeability. For migrants and non-migrants, the creation of new social bodies—that is, incorporation in the sense of constituting new wholes—involves a process wherein sociocultural difference of peoples is itself incorporated, or “ingested.” What follows is a metaphorical “digestion,” whereby the particulates of difference are linked together to reconstitute the body in altered form. Here we might take a cue from William Robertson Smith (1894), who links kinship to the communal meal and incorporation of the guest. For Smith, kinship is created among

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commensals by sharing the same substance in a feast. No feast is complete without a sacrifice, and no sacrifice is complete without guests—that is, non-kin. In order to eat together and create solidarity, people must be kin or, when guests are present, become kin. One becomes kin by sharing in the substance of the feast, and thereafter shares in the protections afforded kin. Incorporation, then, is not merely a matter of ingestion. It involves ritualized sharing and acts of mutuality, which themselves presuppose a body that is incomplete without the guest. Much as the food is incorporated into the individual body, the guest is incorporated into the image of the social body. The critical question is: what differences are to be incorporated and into what? In today’s Europe, the national unit still provides the frame within which people typically  imagine incorporation. In turn, these units are conceived of as democratic and bounded, containing distinct though indeterminate enfranchised peoples. As Lefort (1986, 303–4) argues, Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent. … Power appears as an empty place and those who exercise it as mere mortals who occupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning. There is no law … whose foundations are not susceptible of being called into question. Lastly, there is no representation of a center and of the contours of society: unity cannot now efface social division.

Today’s European populists, in the fascist tradition, try to fill this empty space with an image of an already united people, needing no outside, no guests, no digestive process to create commensality. What these far-right populists ignore is that their own social bodies are constituted through real and imagined encounters with migrants. Difference has in some sense already been digested to draw new circuits of inclusion and exclusion. To be sure, encounters alone do not determine how difference is digested as part of incorporative processes. The nation-state, with its laws and policies, its bureaucracies and administrative arms, sets many of the

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terms of incorporation. Of primary importance in this regard are policies directed explicitly toward inclusion or exclusion of migrants. These include resettlement programs, specialized social assistance schemes, civic integration courses, and frameworks for the evaluation of education credentials from other institutions in other countries. Each of these has potential to influence where and under what conditions the encounters and exchanges between migrants and non-migrants take place. As such, they constitute part of the institutional terrain that migrants navigate while seeking to build new lives and livelihoods. The rest of the institutional terrain is generated in large part both by policies that are not designed and implemented with the express purpose of influencing migrant outcomes (e.g. unemployment benefit schemes, education policies) and by civil society institutions that operate alongside, even in opposition to, the policies and institutions of state. Government policies, associated with everything from social welfare to the regulation of the labor market and working conditions. In reality, they dissolve and create deep bonds between people, as well as between people and the state. They also create exclusions or categories for the purposes of exclusion. With respect to incorporation, exclusion takes at least two forms. One form aims to maintain an image of the body as already complete, often representing other individuals and groups as “indigestible” for reasons of incompatible symbols, practices, values, histories, and so on. This form of exclusion involves the attempt to reproduce recognizable social bodies precisely through the systematic exclusion or expulsion of those newcomers whose incorporation would transform these bodies. This refusal to “eat the other” is a refusal to be made of the other. What is important to note, however, is that such indigestion is the product of an imagination that is unknowingly open to the modification of social bodies. The social body that would be reproduced is itself always something new, something subject to continuous alteration by incorporation of things from outside of it. In short, it is already a product of various unidentified, perhaps forgotten but essential processes of incorporation. Thus a fundamentalist approach seeks to sever these circuits of incorporation, and in doing so, produce heretofore non-existent bodies defined less by their content than by the commitment to maintaining an effective barrier

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between themselves and others. In short, attempts to revive a previous body cannot actually do so; they can only invent. The second form involves the exclusion not of people but of symbolic residues that may foil the successful reproduction or production of new social bodies. This may take the form of shedding languages or customary clothing or habits of propriety and hygiene that lend themselves to exclusion in the new environment. Or it means jettisoning “invented traditions” or downplaying historical narratives that had previously served to legitimate difference, separation, and even subordination. Some things— discourses of criminality, terrorism, itinerant lifestyles, particular religious ontologies—cannot be readily digested in a new environment, as holding onto them risks inducing “indigestion” in social bodies. Migrants themselves may experience a form of experiential indigestion, as their attempt to incorporate symbols, meanings, and practices into everyday life reveals the former to be incongruent with conventional understandings (see Butticci, this volume). In contrast to other concepts, incorporation better captures the multiplicity of actors, processes, and ends that typically fall within—and, unfortunately, outside of—the ambit of “integration.” Working ethnographically, the volume’s contributors offer direct insight into these actors, processes, and ends. In their work, they point to where Europe’s “unbridgeable differences” (Hervik 2004) are bridged, if only momentarily, and to where difference is digested to produce the rudiments of a new and enduring sense of mutual belonging. Their ethnographies also foreground the radical ambivalence of these processes, attentive to when incorporation in key indices of membership does not lead to belonging, when ethnocultural boundaries dissolve or are reified, and how new borders and new forms of discrimination, exclusion, and dysfunction are experienced. But as they thicken our understanding of integration with ethnography, an important question remains: What is European about these modes of incorporation?

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Europe: A Culture Area The individual studies in this volume speak to national contexts from local ethnographic engagements. Across them, there emerges Europe, a macro-ethnographic unit whose differences defy the same kinds of engagement that are possible at smaller scales. Europe is nonetheless the focus of this book. A continent of 500+ million people spread across an array of ethnic groups, countries, and geographies, Europe is a diversity of diversities, yet forms a cultural unity when set against other internally diverse geographic culture areas, such as India, South or Southeast Asia, or Papua New Guinea. Still, Europe cannot be reduced to a common membership, to a unified polity represented by the European Union, or even to a coherent project of shared values or historical commitments. Rather, Europe’s diverse parts hold together in continual integrating and disintegrating processes. Local patterns are subsumed in regional ones, regional in national ones, national in continental ones; diverse peoples in experiencing these scales become more European while simultaneously differentiating in a loose interplay of parts and whole. These loosely bounded units form a discursive field sufficiently interconnected by institutional, historical, and sociocultural similarities to permit identification and analysis. In short, we and our contributors treat Europe as a “culture area” (Lederman 1998), where we might identify a family of issues that arise through incorporation across European cases. Of the many things that characterize this culture area, three are worth briefly discussing in order to provide critical context for the study of European modes of incorporation. First, there is the distinctive complex of occidental relations with the foreign. Europe has always been defined relationally, in terms of various outsides, at times geographically (vs. “the Orient” or Africa), at other times religiously (vs. the pagan, the Muslim), racially (vs. the non-white), or economically (vs. Third World, the Global South). Today, the incorporation of people from this multiform outside is haunted above all by a particular geopolitical other: Europe’s former colonies dating back to the fifteenth century. Most of the continent’s current migrants and asylum-seekers in fact come from former European

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colonies, their arrivals following waves of decolonization, most during the second half of the twentieth century. Many of these migrants, though initially guest workers or students, have made continental Europe their home. Given the long-term effects of centuries of domination, resource exploitation, and the movement of people to and from the colonies to Europe and back, this history can be said to compel a moral claim on Europeans. After all, the continent’s extraordinary economic growth during the last 500 years cannot be imagined without colonial exploitation and plunder. Modern welfare states and relatively stable democracies arose in part at the expense of those who remained or were placed outside. In some cases, such as France’s relation to West Africa, or Great Britain’s relation to India and Pakistan, recognition of this moral obligation has, arguably, led to the granting of citizenship to some former colonial subjects. In Europe today, however, such moral claims appear to carry less and less weight. For the last half century, Europe has structured its post-colonial relationships more around labor needs and current human rights claims than the moral implications of its prior histories. Economic and human rights rationales are still important, but anti-immigrant movements and a backlash to multiculturalism have perhaps diminished the sense that the fact of colonialism should itself justify proactive steps toward incorporating others. Beyond Europe’s longstanding relationship with others outside the continent, there are also institutional commonalities across the continent. One of the most recent is the welfare state. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, most European countries followed the lead of Bismarck’s Germany in developing social legislation aimed at addressing issues associated with health and well-being of the growing working classes. Insurances for workplace accidents, illness, and unemployment, alongside pensions for the elderly and material aid for widows and children formed the rudiments of the modern welfare state, which soon branched into various “welfare regimes” (Esping-Andersen 1990). Today’s migrants thus do not meet one European social model but several, each with different incorporative potential (on the Danish case, see Olwig and Paerregaard 2011).The social democratic welfare regimes of Scandinavia, for instance, are characterized by comparatively generous benefits and social services administered by large public sectors on the basis of legal

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residency, citizenship, or work-history. These welfare regimes institutionalize close relationships of exchange and reciprocity between the individual and the state over the life-cycle. By contrast, the liberal welfare regime of the United Kingdom offers a relatively thin social safety net, forcing the individual to rely to a greater extent on the labor market and family ties to make ends meet, particularly in difficult times. National welfare regimes must feature in discussions of European incorporation in part because they help to account for why the popular discourse and policy of integration revolves around employment and education. Welfare regimes, whether the comprehensive versions offered by the Scandinavian countries, the limited ones found in the British Isles, or the intermediary models found in continental Europe, socialize the costs of unemployment through taxation. At times, this can foster the perception that society is neatly carved into “makers” and “takers.” On top of race or ethnic-related antipathies, this dichotomous view of the social balance sheet may stigmatize groups who, for various reasons, avail themselves disproportionately of the benefits offered by the welfare state. That migrant groups in some contexts, such as eastern Europeans in Scandinavia, are employed at higher rates than non-migrants, typically escapes the attention of domestic media and cynical politicians who understand that outrage at the other typically sells newspapers, attracts viewers, and wins votes. Welfare regimes are also critical to discussions of incorporation because they help to make sense of what makes Europe an attractive destination for migrants. Beyond social, labor market, healthcare, and education policies, modern welfare regimes institutionalize stable lifecourses and, to different extents, create the possibility for intergenerational mobility through public institutions. Building on this insight, Borneman (this volume) examines the perceptions and experience of the “holding environment” of the welfare state—a psychosocial dimension of the latter which transcends benefits and services; it presents some migrants with a distinctive form of security and stability that enables them to care for themselves and others and thus create optimal conditions for a mutual belonging. In addition to colonial histories and the modern welfare regimes, the European culture area is characterized by an ongoing process of

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aggregating nation-states into a single, relatively permeable, supranational body while stabilizing national diversity. These seemingly contradictory ends are integral to facilitating Europeanization and making Europe a distinctive culture area (Borneman and Fowler 1997). Europeanness registers not via official symbols of the EU or in opposition to nationness but by the different constituent nationalities themselves: for example, “being Danish” (Jenkins 2012) or “being Norwegian” (Eriksen 1993) are preconditions for belonging to Europe. It registers through the mobilities and encounters associated with the EU’s various expansions (e.g. to Eastern Europe, the Balkans) and openings (e.g. to Israel and Turkey). There are, for instance, the fellow Europeans, particularly from the East, who have moved to the West to fill labor shortages. There are the asylum-seekers swept onto Greek shores or recovered off Italian coasts, drawn by the promise of comparative safety and stability. There is the extended travel regime of vacations outside one’s country of origin. And there are the well-heeled retirement communities of northern Europeans tucked in various corners around the Mediterranean. Europeanization here registers as an enabler of movements and the instigator of new forms of incorporation. It registers also as new exclusions, such as using Turkey and Algeria as new borders to stop those in flight from entering Europe. While the European culture area certainly encompasses more than colonial histories and legacies, modern welfare states, and the ever-­ evolving project of European integration, these three factors directly and indirectly inform each of the chapters in this volume. As such, they help us to understand what exactly is European about a collection of ethnographies that speaks from perspectives kept close to the ground to address broader, continent-wide processes.

Overview of the Book The chapters that follow fall into four loose groups, each building thoughtfully upon the questions, arguments, and accounts of those which proceed it. The first consists of three chapters that theorize arrivals’ fitful attempts to sort out things—and themselves and others—in their new

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countries. We begin with Chap. 2 by Borneman on the German welfare state and the socio-psychological nature of confronting difference and being incorporated into a distressed “holding environment.” In this account of a single refugee, incorporation figures as a process wherein migrants and non-migrants frame reciprocal demands and modify internal images of one another. This process requires security and continuity, which in Germany is associated with the Sozialstaat, or “social state.” Borneman’s analysis points to something critical about the relationship between social security and incorporation: European welfare states do not merely extend membership to newcomers and sculpt their trajectories in and out of the labor markets or benefit schemes but foster an environment where the social and psychological preconditions of more fundamental forms of mutual belonging can emerge. Welfare states, alternatively viewed as vulnerable to migrant dependency or dependent on migrant productivity, appear to mitigate some issues and anxieties. Still, cutbacks in social welfare for permanent residents exacerbate others and give rise to a backlash against migrants. Staying with Germany, Sohail in Chap. 3 reports on an ethnographic study of migrants’ projects of self-transformation in Berlin. Focusing on mimesis and a shared fixation on authenticity and falsehood, he probes changes since the emergence of the Willkommenskultur discourse in 2015. Contact between refugees and non-migrants, he finds, appears to stimulate mutual desire to become otherwise. Sohail’s ethnography challenges a reductive reading of integration discourse, finding instead that for his refugee interlocutors it was not the pressure to integrate but their self-­ perceived failure to do so that engendered lingering resentment. As a study of incorporation, it echoes the core insights of the preceding chapter, as both foreground the psychological dimension of incorporative processes wherein encounters with difference catalyze creative activity aimed at adjusting and modifying the self as new arrivals adapt to novel circumstances and relations. This all-Germany section concludes with Ghassem-Fachandi in Chap. 4, who offers a rare account of incorporation that revolves around refugees’ and non-migrants’ confrontation with intimate experiences of the erotic, which includes but is not limited to the sexual and the marital. The question of incorporation here is not about flags or folk costumes,

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employment or education, but about what mutual belonging consists of in the field of desire, where an other comes to represent a lack in the self. Ghassem-Fachandi’s migrant and non-migrant interlocutors entered this field and became players while confronting conflictual fantasies, moral proscriptions, various projections, and their own counter-projections, as well as the contemporary protocols of comportment in Germany. His chapter is a striking reminder that the limits to—and openings for— incorporating others also lie between bodies. Overall, this first section, written with heightened sensitivity to what incorporation means to migrants and non-migrants, suggests that physical arrival is rarely attended by an emotional arrival, which remains elusive. The next section consists of chapters that in different ways examine the cross-national concern with, at the very least, coexisting, and more ambitiously, mutual belonging. Chapter 5 by Vollebergh sets the tone with an investigation of how governmental attempts to enhance intercultural samenleven—literally, “living together”—in a multiethnic Antwerp inner-­ city neighborhood are shaped by the populist trope of the “ordinary man” that has become a common aspect of nationalist politics in Europe. She argues that even though these governance projects aim to counter the effects of the resurgent far-right in the city, they also recapitulate a populist construction of “everyday neighborhood life” as a distinct, authentic realm populated by “ordinary people.” Street-level bureaucrats, she shows, routinely distinguish between “ordinary” and “not-so-ordinary” residents, as well as deeper and shallower layers of neighborhood life. This construction of an authentic everyday inspires contradictory governance passions and affects. One of the ironic results is that actually existing relations between working-class whites and Moroccan-background residents, which typically consist of the routinized sharing of public space and neighborly exchanges of gossip, are not intelligible to governance actors as ethical practices in their own right and are dismissed as a deficient form of living together. But bureaucrats are not the only instigators of efforts to weave disparate cultural threads into some new community fiber. In Bergen, Norway, as Bendixsen and Danielsen show in Chap. 6, non-migrant parents have taken the initiative and used the institutional influence of school and neighborhood committees to create events where the residents of a diverse

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borough might gather and share food and customs with one another. These initiatives are largely unsuccessful for a host of reasons, yet Bendixsen and Danielsen discern in them a distinctive approach to incorporation characterized by emphasis on creating equal childhoods for all children, regardless of ethnic or class background. This laudable commitment to overcoming inequality has the curious effect, however, of elevating Norwegian parental practices and norms to a moral standard and the basis of a new social body of parents and children. Egalitarianism in this multicultural environment, they demonstrate, is founded on this implicit hierarchy of parenting—a hierarchy that insists that migrants change to become equal members of society, and more critically, that they do so for their children. A final look at the obstacles to, and possibilities of, forging mutual belonging from projects of living together is offered by Krause in Chap. 7. Building on her extensive fieldwork in Italy, she provides a look at what has become of the social fabric in Prato, a textile city where local Italians and Chinese migrants maintain a critical productive node in the global fashion supply chain. Between plummeting fertility rates, the acceleration of immigration, and the resurgence of nationalism, she discovers a disoriented urban community pervaded by a profound sense of melancholy and uncertainty. She suggests that what it means to “belong” in Europe can best be understood through local-global dynamics, especially those related to population movement, economic structures, racial formation along with race-troubled politics, and even kinship idioms. In four moving ethnographic portraits of Italian and Chinese interlocutors, she uncovers various approaches to grappling with difference and change, concluding that whatever the effect of policy, the emergence of new forms of belonging and mutuality are a matter of relationships, shared experience, and most critically, the “presence of place.” A teleological approach to incorporation might assume that projects of living together move inevitably toward some form of mutual belonging or aversion. It is not so. The volume’s next two chapters examine the “indigestion” of difference itself as a feature of incorporation in contemporary Europe. Chapter 8 is Butticci’s gripping portrait of African Pentecostals in Italy. Facing discrimination, exploitation, and violence, these African migrants turn to their churches and religious practices for a

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spiritual and physical purging of the undigested trauma of being racialized others in a society with little inclination to facilitate any form of meaningful incorporation. What many of the migrants themselves incorporate is ire, pain, and a welter of disappointment—largely unspeakable but nevertheless knotted into their being. Butticci witnesses this indigestion in its religious expression and physiological rawness, as vomiting, spitting, and sweating evil—acts of excretion—serve to somatize the rejection of those terms under which Italian society would permit the other to belong. Moving north, Rytter and Ghandchi in Chap. 9 find Afghan refugees in Denmark similarly unable to process the exploitative terms of policy-­ driven integration. In Denmark, policymakers center labor market participation as both the means and end of integrating refugees. Their ethnography reveals that at least one prominent scheme, consisting of internships, job-training, and sub-minimum wage work, offers little more than a “precarious inclusion,” where positive statistics mask an environment in which Afghan refugees feel manipulated and live with the fear that their residence permits will not be extended. The specter of this latter development that would entail return to an unsafe homeland compels them to participate in an incorporative scheme fated to inscribe them into Denmark’s emergent precariat. This placement they cannot accept, and the Danish state, it seems, does not accept them. Here, then, is a mutual indigestion of difference and a mode of incorporation in which new social bodies emerge on both sides of the line that separates the precarious from the non-precarious. The volume’s final chapters, by Le Courant and Cabot, offer a productive juxtaposition of the extreme ends toward which incorporative processes may be directed. The former, set in Paris, puzzles through the paradox of French deportation policy: while many undocumented migrants are detained for deportation, they are often never deported. Released back into the public, their lives and aspirations are sequestered within a purgatory of uncertainty and fear. Le Courant in Chap. 10 argues that this is no accident. Toward governing the incorporation of France’s undocumented others, policymakers have developed a deportation strategy that embraces both the act and its potential. Expulsion, a centuries-old tool for controlling the population, gains a new disciplinary

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dimension through its ever-present threat, creating a differential form of incorporation that hinders settlement and stifles a sense of belonging among the undocumented. The volume’s final chapter (Chap. 11), by Cabot, takes us to crisis-­ ridden Greece to uncover a striking array of actors—artists, political activists, squatters—whose commitments to showing solidarity with refugees have produced new and troubling forms of exclusion. Her critique of these new movements and initiatives affirms a key point: solidarity does necessarily mean similarity, and what prospects there are for the formation of multiethnic, transnational bodies in contemporary Europe may hinge on shifting from a view of difference as threatening or inconvenient to one that highlights its constitutive character. These chapters—and a ruminative Afterword by Steven Vertovec— traverse distinct geographical and theoretical concerns. But through them runs a thread to a thicker understanding of the incorporative processes that are remaking Europe and its people in the twenty-first century. These processes are best described in their ethnographic unfolding, though a few key points can be isolated. These are: • Incorporation through the Everyday: With a focus on the everyday experience of belonging or exclusion rather than the policy-history associated with “integration,” incorporation offers a means of grasping the implications for both new arrivals and permanent residents of sociocultural difference in contemporary Europe; • Thick versus Thin: The “thickness” of the incorporation concept lies in its openness to the various ends and uneven orientations of migrant and non-migrant experience, as well as its consideration of multiple perspectives and phenomenological approaches. In contrast to its thin alternatives, it also embraces a nested, situational understanding of identity and centers individuals and the symbols they deploy to imagine themselves as members of extant and emergent social bodies. • Digestion: Attempts to form new social bodies are characterized by the incorporation not only of people but of sociocultural difference itself. This ‘digestion of difference’ involves creating links between people that may also redraw their religious, sartorial, gastronomical, and erotic boundaries. Absorbing and excluding elements from these

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dimensions contributes to the maintenance, transformation, or formation of social bodies. Incorporative success or failure—as understood bys its subjects—hinges on everything from the nature of welfare system, integration/deportation policy,  and the structure of the labor market to colonial legacies, racial ideologies, and political conflict. The transnational, often outside state control, inflects, unsettles, or even strengthens processes of incorporation in national contexts. These and other dimensions differ in each European country. • New Europe: The mutual digestion of difference in contemporary Europe is prompting the alteration of individual and social bodies, the creation of new wholes, and novel patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The catalyzing of incorporative processes is inevitable in the wake of migration, as contact spurs encounters and exchanges and the reconsideration of who belongs to—and with—whom. The continued ingestion of persons and their meanings, goods, practices, and habits will mean further change and ultimately the radical remaking of European people and the communities in which they live and interact.

References Andersen, Bengt, and Heidi Biseth. 2013. The Myth of Failed Integration: The Case of Eastern Oslo. City and Society 25 (1): 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/ ciso.12004. Barth, Fredrik. 1998. Introduction. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference, ed. Fredrik Barth, 9–38. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc. Bloemraad, Irene, Anna Korteweg, and Gökçe Yurdakul. 2008. Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-­ State. Annual Review of Sociology 34 (1): 153–179. Borneman, John, and Nick Fowler. 1997. Europeanization. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 487–514. Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi, eds. 2009. Being there: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Brettell, Caroline. 2008. Theorizing Migration in Anthropology: The Social Construction of Networks, Identities, Communities, Globalscapes. In Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines, 113–159. New York: Routledge. Brubaker, Rogers. 2001. The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (4): 531–548. ———. 2002. Ethnicity Without Groups. European Journal of Sociology 43 (2): 163–189. Cabot, Heath. 2019a. The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Regime. American Ethnologist 46 (3): 261–275. ———. 2019b. The European Refugee Crisis and Humanitarian Citizenship in Greece. Ethnos 84 (5): 747–771. Dancygier, Rafaela M. 2017. Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 1993. Being Norwegian in a Shrinking World. In Continuity and Change: Aspects of Contemporary Norway, ed. Anne Cohen Kiel, 11–37. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. ———. 2007. Complexity in Social and Cultural Integration: Some Analytical Dimensions. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1055–1069. ———. 2011. Hva betyr ‘vi’? In Kulturell kompleksitet i det nye Norge, ed. Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Hans Erik Næss. Oslo: Unipub. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Faist, Thomas. 2009. Diversity  – A New Mode of Incorporation? Ethnic and Racial Studies 32 (1): 171–190. Fuglerud, Øivind. 1997. Ambivalent Incorporation: Norwegian Policy Towards Tamil Asylum-Seekers from Sri Lanka. Journal of Refugee Studies 10 (4): 443–461. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Glick Schiller, Nina, and Ayse Çağlar. 2009. Toward a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies: Migrant Incorporation and City Scale. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35 (2): 177–202. Glick Schiller, Nina, Ayse Çağlar, and Thaddeus C.  Guldbrandsen. 2006. Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation. American Ethnologist 33 (4): 612–633. Hannerz, Ulf. 1999. Reflections on Varieties of Culturespeak. European Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 393–407.

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Hervik, Peter. 2004. The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Differences. Ethnos 69: 247–267. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. International Labour Office. 2018. ILO Global Estimates on International Migrant Workers - Results and Methodology. 2nd ed. Geneva: ILO. Isin, Engin Fahri. 2002. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jenkins, Richard. 2012. Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life. 2nd ed. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Joppke, Christian. 2007. Beyond National Models: Civic Integration Policies for Immigrants in Western Europe. West European Politics 30 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402380601019613. Kroeber, Alfred. 1948 [1923]. Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Lederman, Rena. 1998. Globalization and the Future of Culture Areas: Melanesianist Anthropology in Transition. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 427–449. Lefort, Claude. 1986. Image of the Body and Totalitarianism. In The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, 292–306. Cambridge: MIT Press. Marshall, T.H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. In Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olwig, Karen Fog, and Karsten Paerregaard, eds. 2011. The Question of Integration: Immigration, Exclusion and the Danish Welfare State. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ong, Aihwa. 1996. Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology 37 (5): 737–762. Park, Robert E. 1914. Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro. American Journal of Sociology 19 (5): 606–623. Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits. 1936. Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation. American Anthropologist 38 (1): 149–152. Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. Cultural Citizenship in San Jose, California. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 17 (2): 57–64.

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Rugkåsa, Marianne. 2010. Transformasjon og integrasjon: Kvalifisering av minoritetsetniske kvinner til arbeid og deltakelse i den norske velferdsstaten. Oslo: Det samfunnsvitenskapelige fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo. Rytter, Mikkel. 2010. A Sunbeam of Hope: Negotiations of Identity and Belonging among Pakistanis in Denmark. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36 (4): 599–617. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830903479407. ———. 2019. Writing Against Integration: Danish Imaginaries of Culture, Race and Belonging. Ethnos 84 (4): 678–697. Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. Two or Three Things that I Know About Culture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399–421. Smith, William Robertson. 1894. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. 2nd ed. London: Black. Stolcke, Verena. 1995. Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36 (1): 1–24. United Nations. 2018. Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: Part II - Global Compact on Refugees. New York: United Nations. Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-Diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–1054. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465. Waters, Mary C., and Tomás R.  Jiménez. 2005. Assessing Immigrant Assimilation: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges. Annual Review of Sociology 31: 105–125. Wikan, Unni. 1999. Culture—A New Concept of Race. Social Anthropology 7 (1): 57–64. ———. 2002. Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation–State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks 2 (4): 301–334. Wright, Susan. 1998. The Politicization of ‘Culture’. Anthropology Today 14 (1): 7–15.

2 The German Welfare State as a Holding Environment for Refugees: A Case Study of Incorporation John Borneman

For the last several years, die Angst vor neuen Flüchtlingen (fear of the new refugees) and their supposed inability to integrate have come to trump other issues concerning foreigners and immigrants in Germany. Behind this fear is an anxiety pithily summarized in Feindliche Übername (Enemy Take-Over), the title of a 2018 book by an anti-immigrant publicist, Thilo Sarrazin (2018). Within a week of publication, “Enemy Take-Over” rose to number one on Germany’s best seller list. Even though internal divisions are growing and the country seeks new mechanisms of collective integration, recent refugees have become the litmus test of success. Their incorporation is debated in terms of various normative positions that are both aspirational and descriptive: assimilation (evacuating one’s own culture in favor of wholesale adoption of the host culture), Leitkultur and shared values (adopt the dominant culture’s values such as tolerance, equality, women’s rights, secularism, the importance of work, labor market integration), multiculturalism (co-presence of distinct cultures with

J. Borneman (*) Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_2

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equal rights), parallel societies (self-organization of a group to reduce contact with other groups), and integration (becoming part of a larger, relatively stable society).1 Although these positions inform policy, they say little about the actual experience of incorporation in encounters between strangers and citizens and residents in the host countries where they reside together.2 This chapter explores the socio-psychological dimensions of the experience of social incorporation of the most recent new arrivals—over 1.1 million foreigners in 2015 alone—into the German welfare state. I argue that the welfare state attempts to create optimal psychological conditions for social incorporation in national life through the creation of a “holding environment.”3 A concept developed by Donald Winnicott (1953, 1969) to describe “good enough” mother-child relations, it means, simply, an environment in which one feels secure and where one can develop a capacity to care for oneself and for others. A feeling of security makes possible a “capacity for concern,” meaning that one’s loving and aggressive impulses are acknowledged and integrated into the self, facilitating a sense of continuity (Winnicott 1965, 73–82). This holding environment, built in the last century for Germany’s own citizens and permanent residents, is under stress as it is now being extended to many of the new arrivals.4 I use the concept incorporation rather than integration, the most frequent vernacular concept, to foreground the sensual and bodily dimensions of perception in belonging to a group (Lefort 1986; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 58–84, 185–217), and I use a thick notion of successful incorporation to mean the capacity to care for oneself and others in a space of mutual belonging. Incorporation of foreigners is always partial and potentially threatening to the integrity of both the individual and social body. Its possibilities nonetheless emerge in simple everyday interactions that foster feelings of mutual belonging. Yet, even when refugees fulfill the two most common expectations—contributing financially and following the dominant public norms—their incorporation is likely to be perceived as a failure unless there is a mutual modification of the internal images refugees and permanent residents have of each other.5 Although such modification is necessarily asymmetrical in content for the newcomers and host populations alike, mirroring and modification of internal

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images is an ongoing process. A case study is useful to illustrate some of the lived experiences that indexes potential modification, and possibilities for thick as opposed to thin incorporation in the German holding environment.6

Case Study: Serdar, Life in Exile Serdar (not his real name) is a rather unremarkable refugee whom I have known since 2012. He arrived in Germany from Aleppo via Istanbul in 2014, a year before the dramatic flights of 2015,7 which as of this writing appears to have reached its peak. In 2016 German government initiatives with Turkey and Libya severely reduced the number of new arrivals.8 Men like Serdar, then, become representative for Germans of the success or failure of incorporation of those who arrived around 2015. Who is he, who was he, who is he becoming? How might Serdar’s actual behavior and changing self-conceptions challenge German images of the refugee? And how are his images of Germans and Germany changing? Serdar was doing his compulsory military service in 2011 when the uprising in Syria began. In August 2012, he deserted the Syrian army and fled to Istanbul, where he stayed with a Sunni friend and his siblings for almost two years. I met him in December 2012, in Istanbul, where I went to understand how the experience of deserters like him might open a window into the changing nature of the violence of the Syrian regime and the resistance to it. And, I thought, or wished, to its eventual collapse (Borneman 2012). Serdar explained why it was dangerous for him, a conscript, to remain in the Syrian army: the regime had turned on its own people. He was a low-level military grunt and felt likely to be used on the front lines in the accelerating war. He admitted that he had not been subject to torture or persecution of any sort while in the military, though some of our mutual friends had. His flight from Syria into Turkey—swimming across two rivers (and he cannot swim well), evading checkpoints, escaping various militia—had many fearful moments, but he narrated it calmly. Ultimately, his wounds from army life and flight have left few readily discernable marks. He is unused to speaking of personal experience, but he takes every opportunity to emphatically distance

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himself from Kurdish separatist or nationalist longings. He is himself is a proud Sunni Kurd, and Kurdish is his second language. His family was not aligned with the Alawite ruling clan in Syria, a fact sufficient to make them feel endangered enough to flee. Despite the sectarian conflict that divides Syria, Serdar still believes in the unity of the country. On our first meeting in Istanbul, in 2012, I informed Serdar about my long-term interests in Syria (which I first visited in 1999), as well as about my research over several decades in Germany. He asked me only whether it would be hard or easy to live in Europe or the USA as a strict Muslim. I asked him about his military service, reasons for desertion, and the effects of desertion on his family. Many families fled into exile after being targeted by the government due to a son who deserted. Serdar’s fear of becoming such a target was perhaps the most important link he maintained with other Syrian refugees, but it was not the only reason for his desertion. More important was the wish of his mother, who wanted to leave Syria and join her brother, a medical doctor with permanent residency in Germany. For Serdar, then, Turkey was never really a permanent option but, following his mother’s wishes, a stop on the way to Germany. In mid-2014, his uncle obtained a German visa for the entire family. The location of Serdar in exile further disaggregated his Syrian identity, as Syria itself further unraveled. He had no refugee camp experience, where the longing for return is perhaps the only hopeful alternative to the present. Like the other refugees I met and saw on the streets of Istanbul, he initially wore signs of loyalty to Syria: one version was a scarf of the colors of the Syrian flag from 1958 that predated rule by the al-Asad family. He also participated in well-meaning but ultimately ineffective protests in front of the Syrian embassy (Borneman 2020). Serdar’s political participation made him into a potential instrument of the different communities and states, including many foreign, involved in the uprising; this he resisted. Such political instrumentalization risked changing his voice, which was more strongly anchored in the register of a pious Sunni identification than in any project of outside groups identified with beliefs in radical Islam, secular revolution or reform, or imagined geopolitics (such as the Kurdish struggle, Sunni-Shia conflict, anti-Israel, pro or anti-USA).

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Thus, while in Turkey, Serdar’s sense of belonging continued to reflect—politically, religiously, ethnically, tribally, regionally—the mosaic-like differences of Syria itself, without politicizing them. He continued to identify with his inherited affiliations but respected the differences and autonomy of others. He enjoyed his time in Turkey but did not develop any attachments to the place or its people. Most deserters were active in the new group formations possible in Turkey, making friends with Syrians across sectarian lines, from outside their particular identifications, and also with Turks, debating whether to stay or leave, to study or join the resistance. Serdar instead followed closely a few socially active Syrian friends and undertook daily activities with them. He bonded most with the young men who held to pious Muslim beliefs and avoided most of the temptations available to foreigners without family controls. Though he warmly welcomed others into his group, he did not make friends with them. He liked Turkey most because he trusted the local food (always halal) and enjoyed the climate and Levantine cosmopolitanism of Istanbul, which were similar in Aleppo. Although the Turkish state and people were initially welcoming to the refugees, Serdar’s father warned him early that the support would eventually be withdrawn, and ultimately the door to incorporation for most Syrian men did indeed close. On the day of his scheduled departure from Istanbul, Serdar was turned back at the airport while the rest of his family was permitted to leave. An extra fee and a bribe to Turkish officials secured his exit a month later. An experience that for others would likely leave traumatic scars was for Serdar a humorous joke, a blip in his journey to Germany he could easily share with others.

Incorporation in Germany I did not see Serdar again until July 2016, when he visited my partner and me in Berlin. We often invited refugees into our apartment, cooked for them, introduced them to Germans; they sometimes stayed overnight or even for longer periods. Serdar stayed with us for nearly a week. We met several times over the next several years.

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During his first years in residence in Germany, Serdar shared the experience of other refugees of the replacement of the empty time of survival in exile with a division of time into meeting the requirements of various ministries or administrative units. While the challenge of acquiring the language along with issues of appearance largely constituted the everyday preoccupations that Serdar shared with me, he was at the same time struggling to make sense and meaning out of the many demands made by official representatives of the state. The challenge for him was not to see these as a set of discrete demands for compliance but to construct an entirely new narrative of life within the welfare state. Because that narrative can become a clock of the life course if not a clock for life itself, Serdar resisted. By his second year, he could converse fluently in German, which was a source of pride that in part counterbalanced his anxieties about failure in other domains. He advanced to intermediate German after six months of state-supported courses and then completed the civic citizenship course quickly. (Many refugees I know took much longer.) With his father’s encouragement, he enrolled in a government-paid apprentice course to become a security guard. I thought such a job would suit his goals: stable, decent pay, not too much intellectual work. He entered training enthusiastically, even doing weight-lifting on the side. Once, in a Skype conversation we had, he even showed me his barbell exercises as his father watched. But after two months he dropped out of the security training program. The teacher was unhelpful and spoke too fast, Serdar said, so he could not understand the instruction. And he felt that the German students in the course were unfriendly, even hostile to him. The two other migrants who had enrolled also dropped out. Following that disappointment, Serdar easily found work in the local McDonald’s, where he stayed for nearly two years. He spoke fondly of his fellow workers, most foreigners, all from lower middle classes, who were welcoming and helpful and came from many countries. He especially liked an Albanian woman they all called “Mama.” Yet since quitting he has seen none of them again. “They were all too busy,” he explained. “In Germany it is work, work, work.” Currently, he is enrolled in a course to become an automobile salesman and mechanic, for which the auto industry will subsidize his tuition and even pay him a wage.

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Serdar seems very comfortable with himself, and this basic comfort begins with his appearance. A tall, attractive, unassuming young man with a ready smile, he is not immediately identifiable ethnically. He tries hard to be accommodating, laughs easily, but is quiet unless asked to speak. Like most of the young Syrians I know, Serdar has an aesthetics of hair, beard style, and clothing that differs from German tastes. One day he wears his abundant dark brown hair blow dried, 1980s Hollywood style, the next day fully greased and piled very high above his crown, in a helmet style unfamiliar to northern Europeans, the next pulled back in a ponytail. With some hairdos he shaves his beard cleanly, with others he keeps it closely trimmed, with stubble, and, then again, he occasionally wears a full beard with a shaved mustache that conforms to an Islamist look. In the small town where he lives, he has trouble finding clothes he likes. He prefers pants that cling tightly to his thin legs but fit loosely around his bum and crotch. These were easy to find in Istanbul, but he has to look hard to find a similar type in Germany. I have observed Serdar’s friends jokingly mock him for his concern for personal beauty as vanity, even as they too spend hours grooming themselves, plucking eyebrows, fixing their hair just so, shopping, and dressing well. Neither his sartorial choices nor his experimentation with facial hair would lead one to conclude that Serdar is extremely pious. His piety may address mostly his own self-image and the recognition he seeks from his mother, but his hair and dress decidedly address individuals outside the Islamic community he is a part of. In other words, he wants Germans also to see him. For many Germans, Serdar’s choice of style denotes experimentation, openness to change. This fits well into a German conception of the multicultural, though that is not the frame that guides Serdar’s conscious aesthetic choices.

Work, Education, Career Another of the larger issues that has preoccupied Serdar is whether he should just find a job or pursue a career. In his first several years in Germany, a successful career did not appear to be part of his future. In conversations, he was quick to praise his younger sister’s intelligence and

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adaptability, which he thinks he lacks. She excelled in her German school. I met her in 2018, when I visited his family in the small town in which they live in southern Germany. Serdar’s sister’s intelligence and curiosity were obvious. Her German was flawless. She had passed the Abitur with a high score and was accepted into a university in a nearby city. She wants to study translation, a popular major in Syria but nearly non-existent as university program in Germany. I encouraged her to expand her horizons, take some classes in anthropology (which she had not heard of ) and literature (which she said she loved). Germany has much more to offer her, I said, and as a pious Muslim woman, she would be rewarded in the educational sphere for her abilities and unique perspectives. The next day, she indicated she had been mulling over this advice. In greeting me, she extended her hand and showed no shyness. Knowing I was working on integration, she asked, “Should I tell you what I think?” Yes, of course, I said. And then, in front of the whole family, she launched into a monologue as if she had memorized the official goals of the Bundesministerium fur Migration und Flüchtlinge. She wanted to be part of German society, not separate; she was thankful of being taken in and given support, thankful for German legal protection and freedoms: she wanted to work and contribute to German society. I smiled, suspecting she was trying to please me, yet I also did not doubt her own sincerity. She is quite likely to exceed family expectations of success. While his sister talked, Serdar listened quietly but said nothing. He was never good in school in Syria. In Turkey, he lived on parental support, doing nothing, initially waiting to return to Syria and sort things out after the war’s end. After a year of waiting, the family determined the war would not end, and they would all emigrate. That meant, for Serdar, another year or more of waiting. Only when Serdar got to Germany did he begin to even imagine a future of employment. In Istanbul, the future had been suspended. But in Germany, both his father and the German welfare state began making additional demands, pressuring him to pursue a career and prepare for the responsibilities of adult life. Serdar’s father had been a successful engineer in Aleppo, but in Germany, though still a young man, at 55, he is unable to reenter the profession. At first the Job Center offered hope of referral for

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employment in his field. After one year, it simply refused to give him any more referrals, concentrating instead on young men (which is, to be sure, the same policy they apply to older and younger unemployed German men). He thus takes odd jobs: janitor, store clerk, office assistant. He learned German quickly, before other family members, and, being very social, established excellent terms with his neighbors. His future, however, has become clear to him, and it is increasingly dependent on his children’s success in Germany. In our first encounter, in 2015, he was enthusiastic and playful; in our last, in 2018, he was subdued, mournful, and critical, perhaps even depressed.

Marriage Without secure employment Serdar was less likely to find a good bride, an expectation of both parents but also already fully internal to his own motivation for life. He wanted desperately to marry and raised the issue in our every meeting. Since Serdar refused any form of sexual practice until marriage, and thereafter promised himself to have sex only with a wife, marriage was the only possible response to a sex drive that he, in the absence of sex, struggled with. Adding to this was his awareness of deep failure in the eyes of his father, which he sincerely lamented. He felt this failure so intensely that a friend even mentioned it to me. I had the sense that Serdar would have gladly flagellated himself as deserved punishment for failed expectations if this practice were in his cultural repertoire. Instead he was left with thoughts of shame and renunciation of pleasure. Marriage and a child were what he was certain would make him happy and redeem him in his father’s eyes, and he was correct. Through relatives, his mother found him a Kurdish bride who had fled with her family from Syria to Austria. Without having ever met her, a few telephone conversations and Facebook chats sufficed for Serdar to commit to marry. He eventually obtained a visa to visit her in Austria, where they had an Islamic wedding (Nikah). It took nearly a year for her to get a visa to visit him in Germany, where they then registered the marriage with the German state (Standesamt). Their honeymoon was in Berlin, but Serdar did not show her the city. They rarely left the neighborhood they

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were staying in. Now they visit her parents in Austria twice monthly. Serdar told me that his wife wants to return to Istanbul. But he does not want to leave Germany, as he is feeling settled now. A baby born to the couple in late 2019 reinforced this feeling.

Islam Serdar sees Germany as his future, but this future does not, or not yet, involve concepts like democracy, the welfare state, or the rule of law. His ideas of Germany have always been vague, centered around its stability and economic prosperity, and he does not concern himself much with the notion that some Germans might expect him to assimilate to their culture. The idea of Germany seems to engage him only when it affects his concrete goals of marriage, family, and material well-being. He has an inner anchor—Islam, which contributes to his being neither particularly inquisitive about others nor particularly ambitious. This anchor is conservative, not radical, associated more with his mother than father, pulling him back to the known and familiar rather than facilitating change. The face-to-face community of Muslims with whom Serdar has contact is very small, largely restricted to his immediate family and a few friends, most of whom live in nearby towns and villages. Serdar has therefore turned to a Facebook community to enlarge his contacts. He posts many selfies and sends out nearly daily quotes of the joys of Islam and the state of the world from his Imam’s sermons in Friday prayers, or citations from the Koran, or he forwards videos from other Imams that were already posted on the Internet. Other readers frequently comment on these quotes or videos, often critically. Communication is almost always in Arabic. This community includes some non-Muslims, like myself, and many Arabs who do not all share his version of Islam. Serdar holds himself to strict Sunni bodily care practices, including refusing all erotic contact with women, despite being occasionally approached by German women whom he also finds attractive. He maintains a rigorous halal diet, despite the difficulties in sustaining it in small-­ town Germany. Whatever employment positions he has held, he always found a way to pray five times a day—no mean feat given the very

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different everyday rhythms and divisions of work, religion, and leisure in Germany. Being a proud Muslim, and eager to discuss Islam, Serdar has found it difficult to avoid discussions of Islam outside his Internet community. Such discussions not surprisingly put him on the defensive. Many Germans tend to evaluate an interlocutor by his or her ability to critically distance themselves from their religious origins. Serdar has no distance. His mother is the major enforcer of his piety, though she also has changed her own practices since arriving in Germany. She is conservative in all ways, and holds an especially severe view of Islam, while Serdar’s father is very relaxed about religious practices. In 2014 she refused to give her hand in greeting others and covered most of her face with a veil when interacting with men outside the family. The last time I saw her, in 2018, she still offered no handshake but wore a very modest hijab and was curious and forthcoming. She seemed to take joy in having strangers to entertain. Perhaps, restricted in contact to her children and husband, she was lonely. Some of Serdar’s friends from Aleppo now in Germany, who also go to the mosque every Friday, are critical of his unreflective religiosity and of his refusal to acknowledge that he lives in a German cultural context. They needle him for having no desire to accommodate to the changes that Germany, specifically, might demand of him. Unlike Serdar, most of these friends prioritize education and long-term career goals above all else, including marriage, in their present. Even in my company, they were impatient and kindly dismissive of Serdar’s more limited horizons. Before his marriage, they criticized him for making it an obsession that might resolve all his problems. This, although they all share, at least discursively, the desire to marry as soon as possible. The freeze on family reunification for refugees, largely effective since 2016, means that most young men will have to find brides among the Muslims in Europe—or marry a woman outside the faith. The largest such market would be for Turkish-German girls, but most of them are unlikely candidates for class reasons. Their parents and siblings tend to want to protect them from the instability refugees might bring into their lives. In my last visit to Serdar’s home, a mutual friend and I used the ride-­ sharing app BlaBlaCar to share the five-hour drive from Berlin, in an

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extremely comfortable Mercedes. By then Serdar’s whole family—older and younger sister, younger brother, father, and mother—had achieved different degrees of fluency in German. He had found a new self-­ confidence. He had recently rented and furnished a new apartment with a balcony; learned to drive, acquired his driver’s license, and bought a car. Most important, he had acquired a wife. She cooked for nearly two days for us but never left the kitchen. I asked three times if I could meet her, but either she did not want to or Serdar did not want her to. At one point, during our meal together in their home, Serdar sensed he needed a deflection and fetched a Turkish-German policewoman who lived in a neighboring apartment to join us for dessert. Her German husband had died a few years ago, and now she lives alone with her son (three other children, all well-educated professionals, live elsewhere in Europe). She lamented that her son, who is around 40, would never marry. After responding to a few questions, she commanded, “Ask me, what else do you want to know?” I said I had no catalogue of questions, to which she replied, “Then I’ll ask some.” As I expected, she asked immediately about marriage and children, following her aggressive questions with a look of pity at my answers. I said I was not married but was not alone, I lived with a friend. She found this puzzling, and then, as if a light went on, she said quietly, “Oh, I understand.” Sensing that I was gay, like her son, she simply wagged her head disapprovingly, though not without “understanding,” as she put it, while Serdar, who has never discussed the issue with me though is surely aware of my proclivities, and our mutual friend, sat in uncomfortable silence.

Reflections on Serdar’s Incorporation Among the different state forms, the northern European welfare state comes closest to providing an optimal holding environment in which individuals experience sufficient security to develop a capacity to care for themselves and others. To develop this capacity, they must be able to maintain a sense of continuity of self while living through discontinuous times. Germany created such a holding environment for its own citizens following its total destruction in World War II (Borneman 1992), and it

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did so again for former GDR citizens in the 1990s in overcoming the divisions of the Cold War. In 2015 the large number of migrants who entered Germany put a perceived strain on the welfare state’s capacities. Although Germany has historically had to incorporate many strangers (Göktürk, et al. 2007), the patterns of immigration to Germany in the twentieth century are distinct from its European neighbors in that extraordinary migration, or huge spikes in numbers, frequently follow ordinary migration (Héran 2016, 246). Today Germany is incorporating these new arrivals through a sort of internal Marshall plan for displaced foreigners, while at the same time, over the last several decades, its own citizens and residents have seen growing inequality, stagnant wages, and precarious employment—essentially a shrinking of some protections of the welfare state. Serdar is one of these new arrivals. For him, the key difference between Turkey, to where he initially fled, and Germany is precisely the presence of its state. Upon arrival, he entered into relations with the German legal state, der Rechtsstaat, and the German social welfare state, der Sozialstaat. His legal application for residency was driven largely by his search for the protections (e.g., freedom from arbitrary arrest, harassment, torture, rule of law guarantees) and Rechtssicherheit (legal certainty) that he lacked in Syria and Turkey (Borneman 2020). The German Sozialstaat facilitated his social incorporation and the development of his capacity to care. In Turkey, his relation with the state was primarily administrative; he cared for no one and the state did not act to facilitate his development. In Germany, interactions with the administrative state are much more frequent (and thus experienced as more burdensome) but many interactions are unbureaucratic in a relatively open and vibrant civil society. The state provides extensive opportunities to secure a private life largely outside its purview while facilitating a German way of life. More than 10% of German residents are foreign born and undergoing active incorporation. The German state also makes implicit and explicit demands on Serdar, which, even if onerous (e.g., reporting to the Job Center, accounting for his support, completing language and training programs), fosters a sense of care and belonging. Serdar is experientially a refugee, but legally he is not. Desertion from the Syrian army is not grounds for asylum. He found his way to Germany

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in 2014 through Familienzusammenführung (family reunification); in 2016 such reunification was for all intents and purposes frozen for other refugees. This enables Serdar to enjoy most of the features of the holding environment extended to permanent residents but also to experience more legal certainty than most refugees have. Among all migrants and refugees, only Syrian refugees as a group experience incorporation without the anxiety that social supports or legal security will be arbitrarily withdrawn. Serdar’s seamless legal incorporation enabled him not only to join his extended family but also, within two years of arrival, to enlarge that family by incorporating a Syrian bride. Legal incorporation relieved Serdar’s anxiety of deportation but even more integral for his sense of belonging is the encompassing security Germany provides through its holding environment in interactions in the civil sphere. With neighbors, in the work place, in leisure time, he is able to share the experience of aliveness that greeted him in Germany in 2014, a mirroring that ushered in the Willkommenskultur, welcoming many other refugees and migrants a year later (Wiermer and Voogt 2017). This aliveness enables him to engage others and alleviates some of the anxieties Germans might otherwise have about whether he will remain a permanent stranger. Instead, the feeling of being alive that Serdar expresses and shares in public facilitates a sense of mutual belonging to a place. This development of belonging—of a home—will take time and is contingent on many factors. It is important that, for now, rather than feeling under assault by the external environment, Serdar has been able to sustain a sense of continuity of self and non-traumatic growth without fully registering the discontinuities he is experiencing. As a result, his internal image of Germany and Germans is becoming more nuanced, often unconsciously, and often in opposition to what he actually says, in the same way that the internal images Germans have of Syrians is also changing (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017). Given that Serdar has been in Germany less than five years, his opportunity to learn from and reflect on recent experiences is still limited. While initially he was a disappointment to his father, his fidelity to family and marriage, and his entrance into the labor market, has strengthened that relationship. As has the birth of a child in late 2019. Expectations of

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many Germans that he might become a high wage earner are likely to be disappointed. Serdar does not have the ambition to develop a professional career in which he will contribute much to the pensions of retired Germans, though he will work, pay taxes, support himself and his wife, and contribute to his extended family and his neighborhood. Even though most Germans are ambivalent about Muslims having children, they have welcomed Serdar and his child in the small community in which he lives. The instrumental reasoning that the child will eventually contribute to labor force needs works in Serdar’s favor. His children will attend German schools and thus are more likely to resemble his sister’s than his own ambitions. Serdar will likely maintain the piety that his version of Islam demands of him, though the environment around him is already leading him to modify what piety means (as it has his mother). He is unlikely to ever assimilate, or to familiarize himself with German Leitkultur, though he will respect German norms and obey the law. His brief encounter with Syrian politics and civil war has reinforced his tendency to eschew any involvement in politics, thus he is still unwilling to familiarize himself with German parties or politics. That may also eventually change. Serdar does not want to live in a parallel society, one separate and distinct from a German way of life. While his father, two sisters, and younger brother have developed new identifications with neighbors and at the local school, Serdar’s life has more of a parallel quality to it. But then, he is also internally divided, enjoying many dynamic aspects of the dominant German life course that contains multiple projects and arrangements for life. Ultimately, given how much living for him necessitates contacts with Germans and the welfare state, it is an illusion to think that the cultural autonomy he might want to secure will remain uninfluenced by German customs and ways of life, some of which he already fully supports. Serdar remains relatively incurious as to what he means to others around him and indifferent to the criticisms of several Syrian and Arab friends, who, since his marriage, feel neglected. Despite this lack of conscious concern for others, his maturation in the last several years is evidence that he is in fact responding to them, though more unconsciously and passively, than he is able to see.

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Serdar is also demonstrating a much more developed capacity to care than when I first met him. The holding environment of the welfare state is only one factor. Serdar’s supportive family is another, so is his religious affiliations. Through these he has been able to maintain a sense of continuity of self that enables him to grow and embrace belonging to a new place. This entails what anthropologists in the past talked about as acculturation, or the acquisition of culture. While his adaptation to German conceptions of time and space required new behaviors, he has not had to shed parts of himself that he values (i.e., his Muslim religion convictions, his rejection of sexual freedoms, his culinary tastes). Unlike the acquisition of culture, a holding environment does not demand or create stereotyping effects, such as demands to uniformly share customs and values. These might lead to a sense that one is losing culture (as was argued for the case of constantly displaced native Americans). German belonging specifies only that diverse content is respected; its holding environment in fact facilitates the co-existence of groups alongside widespread and individualized diversity in custom and habit (Grillo 2015; Vertovec 2007).9 Will more encounters between strangers like Serdar and Germans lead to a modification of their internalized images? All available evidence points in that direction: the places in Germany with the highest proportion of immigrants are those with the fewest attacks on foreigners; those with the fewest immigrations have the most attacks (Pickel and Decker 2016). The alternative to this modification is either to be captive to one’s own projections or to the spin of media whose sales are often reliant on the reproduction of unmodified stereotypes. German mainstream media is in fact dominated by debates with different points-­of-­view that focus on refugees and the failure of integration. New social media, by contrast, tends to direct users to sites that represent only one point-of-view and that garner attention through more extreme arguments. Hence it is no surprise that platforms like Facebook actually foment hate crimes and attacks on refugees. In towns where Facebook use was higher than average, as Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz (2018) recently found in a study of local community use in Germany, refugees experienced more attacks regardless of wealth, demographics, number of refugees, what political party ruled, or size of the community. Wherever

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Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, the number of attacks increased by about 50%. The space created to voice the extreme is one reason why the fantasies of Thilo Sarrazin, with which I began this chapter, are so widely circulated. Sarrazin first focused the debate about the incorporation of strangers in 2010, with the publication of Deutschland schafft sich ab (Sarrazin 2010) (Germany Abolishes Itself ). His initial polemic updated centuriesold fantasies about the Oriental danger: Muslim reproductive capacities would dilute German socio-biological achievements; lower (Christian) German birth rates will lead to Germans abolishing themselves.10 In his ubiquitous talk show presence, Sarrazin repeats his claims about the danger of Muslims, initially made in 2010 as a self-immolation of the German social body, eight years later as a hostile attack on that body. He supports these claims with an appeal to statistics, an accumulation of numbers that elide how actual attempts at integration are experienced. These numbers find contemporary resonance because they appeal to a largely unconscious, paranoid phantasm essential to National Socialist propaganda: of a Volkskörper (the folk/people’s body) endangered by its opposite Fremdkôrper (foreign body).11 In an extensive review of prescriptions for incorporation Jeffrey Alexander (2013, 547) has argued that there is a “struggle over the mode of incorporation” in Europe, with demands for assimilative incorporation—“allowing persons but not their qualities to be incorporated”—on the rise. This accurately characterizes Sarrazin’s argument about Überfremdung (excessive immigration and its effects on cultural homogeneity). However, I hope to have shown in Serdar’s case that this struggle over assimilation is a hyperbolic demand that erases nuances in experience. In fact, the actual state of incorporation in Germany might be better framed by a focus on the reciprocal demands made by migrants on Germans and vice versa. It might be more prescient to ask whether the holding environment of the welfare state provides sufficient or insufficient security to foster mutual belonging and facilitate the ability of residents to care for themselves and others. This reveals more about who the refugees, migrants, and Germans themselves are becoming rather than who they think they are, or who they were. Ultimately it might help us

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to rethink what it means to incorporate: what is the experience of entering a social body and belonging to it?

Notes 1. See Münkler and Münkler (2016, 183–213) for the most ambitious (and successful) attempt to sort through these positions and propose responses to the interlocked German and European dilemmas on asylum and migration. Among other proposals, they argue for affirming the right to asylum but are also against a general right to immigrate. My chapter essay focuses on the other side of policy, the refugee experience of incorporation. 2. Although these five positions have been repeatedly critiqued and reformulated by academics (cf. Mandel 2008; Schiffauer 2008; Tibi 1998; Welsch 1999), they remain the basis for a persistent phantasmatic understanding of refugee incorporation in popular culture, and among academics and policymakers the actual experience is distinct from these phantasms. 3. Experience of the welfare state is not limited to relations with the law and social welfare institutions but includes everyday interactions and relations with others that have little to do with the state. 4. The new arrivals differ in key respects from prior migrants. First, most are Muslim and today associated with terror coming from the Middle East. Second, they differ in expectations, education, and culture from the two largest immigrant groups from the postwar period: the 12–14 million refugees expelled or driven from the Eastern territories (Ostgebiete) and Eastern Europe after World War II, and the several million Turkish Gastarbeiter from the 1950s to the 1970s. The one group, expellees, were already citizens of the Reich, or classified as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) or Kulturdeutsche, with a right to return to the heart of the homeland. Except for the ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union who repatriated after its collapse in the 1990s, the strangeness of the expellees and the repatriated Volksdeutsche has lessened or entirely disappeared over time. The other group, Turkish migrants, by contrast, remain culturally strange to many Germans while at the same time, following legal reform in 2000, have often become citizens (Palmowski 2008). Both the expellees and Turkish migrants are widely recognized for

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their essential contributions through labor to the Wirtschaftswunder and the success of the social welfare state (sozialer Wohlfahrtsstaat). 5. Internal images are, as Christopher Bollas (1992, 59) writes, “highly condensed psychic textures, … the trace of our encounters with the object world.” They precede and accompany our encounters with the world of external objects, and they are capable of being modified. In this sense, refugees are not only external but also internal objects for scholars and non-scholars, for the welfare states of Europe to which many have fled, for other refugees who they befriend, for family and friends they have had to abandon, and for the states from which they fled and which retain certain powers over them. Moreover, we are objects for refugees, and they are also their own objects, now living in environments that challenge them to objectify and modify how they see themselves. 6. My own ethnographic research began in Germany in 1982 and in Syria in 1999. I had already met as children or younger siblings some of the Syrians who then later fled to Europe after 2014 (Borneman 2007). In 2015, I began a project, together with Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, on the relation of Germans to Syrian refugees. During that summer and through the fall and winter, 1.1 million refugees and migrants entered Germany; 441,899 applied for asylum, of whom 298,000 are from Syria, 79% male, 67% under the age 30 (UNHRC 2018). 7. Distinctive differences mark the experience of incorporation for minimally three groups of Syrian refugees: (1) those who came with families, (2) young men between the ages of 18 and 35 who came alone, (3) those who came as youths. Serdar partakes in experiences of both the first and second groups. 8. A similar account of the experiences of a single German from 2015 to the present would illustrate aspects of mutual modification, but for reasons of length I will narrate only Serdar’s interactions. 9. Although the refugees whom I know think uniformly of Germany as very Christian, not only in a religious sense but also politically and culturally, most Germans are in fact only nominally Christian and think of themselves as holding to a very secular vision of social organization. On the other hand, Germans, when addressing the new arrivals, single out the religious strangeness of Muslim refugees and regularly orientalize them. In any case, German Christianity today is radically different from that practiced in the past. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 10% of Catholics and 3% of Protestants attend church. A majority of Germans

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under 25 claim to not believe in any religion. Today nearly all German Christian communities tend to reach out to other religions rather than define ­themselves against and through the exclusion of Jews and Muslims (Schuster 2018). 10. See the critique by Gilman (2012), who explains how Sarrazin relies on a philo-Semitic argument about Jews having a superior genetic inheritance (and thus not a danger to Germans) to escape his racial accusations about Muslim biological inferiority. 11. The former West German-born history teacher-turned politician, Björn Höecke (2018), who moved from the former West Germany to Thuringia in the former East and co-founded the radical rightwing anti-­Muslim/ anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD), has reintroduced some of the Nazi lexicon into the mainstream media (which cites but largely opposes him). Other neo-fascists follow his lead. In his rhetoric Höcke now consciously uses words, which had either been repressed or only spoken on the radical fringe, with powerful mythical appeals to loss, such as Volkstöt (death of the folk), Volksverräter (betrayer of the people), and Dolchstoß (stabbed in the back) by the opening of the border to Syrian refugees in 2015. Policy-wise, he argues for mass deportations of refugees, including Syrian.

References Alexander, Jeffrey. 2013. Struggling Over the Mode of Incorporation: Backlash Against Multiculturalism in Europe. Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (4): 531–556. Bollas. 1992. Being a Character. In Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and the Self Experience, 47–65. New York: Hill & Wang. Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. Und nach den Tyrannen? Macht, Verwandtschaft und Gemeinschaft in der Arabellion, La Lettre International 98 (Fall): 33–48 (translated by Martin Zillinger and Daniele Saracino).

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———. 2019. The Syrian Revolution: Crowds, the political field, the political subject, In Crowds: Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Megan Steffen, (pp. 23–38). New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2020. Witnessing, Containing, Holding? The German social welfare state (Sozialstaat) and people in flight. In Spaces of Care, eds. Lorraine Gelsthorpe, Perveez Mody, Brian Sloan, (pp. 210–240). Oxford: Hart Publisher. Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. The Concept of Stimmung: From Indifference to Xenophobia in Germany’s Refugee Crisis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135. Gilman, Sander. 2012. Thilo Sarrazin and the Politics of Race in the TwentiethCentury. New German Critique 117 (39): 47–59. Göktürk, Deniz, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds. 2007. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1995–2005. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grillo, Ralph. 2015. Living with Difference: Essays on Transnationalism and Multiculturaism. Amazon Kindle: B and RG Book of Lewes. Héran, Francois. 2016. De la ‘crise des migrantes’ `a la crise de l’Europe. Un éclairage démographique. In Migrations, réfugiés, exil. Ed. Patrick Boucheron. (pp. 239–260). Paris: Odile Jacob. Höecke, Björn. 2018. Nie zweimal in denselben Fluß: Björn Höecke im Gespräch mit Sebastian Hennig. Berlin: Manuscriptum Verlagsbuchhandlung. Lefort, Claude. 1986. Image of the Body and Totalitarianism. In The Political Forms of Modern Society, 292–306. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Müller, Karsten, and Carlo Schwarz. 2018. Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/ abstract=3082972 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972. Münkler, Herfried and Marina Münkler. 2016. Die Neuen Deutschen. Ein Land vor seiner Zukunft. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag. Palmowski, Jan. 2008. In Search of the German Nation: Citizenship and the Challenge of Immigration. Citizenship Studies 12 (6): 547–563. Pickel, Gert, and Oliver Decker, eds. 2016. Extremismus in Sachsen. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme. Leipzig: Verlagsgruppe Seemann Henschel.

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Sarrazin, Thilo. 2010. Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. ———. 2018. Feindliche Übernahme. Wie der Islam den Fortschritt behindert und die Gesellschaft bedroht. Rottenburg am Neckar: Kopp Verlag. Schiffauer, Werner. 2008. Parallelgesellschaften. Wie viel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Für eine kluge Politik der Differenz. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Schuster, Kathleen. 2018. 6 Facts about Catholic and Protestant Influence in Germany. Deutsche Welle 03.23.2018. https://www.dw.com/en/6-factsabout-catholic-and-protestant-influence-in-germany/a-43081215. Accessed 12.09.2018. Tibi. Bassam. 1998. Europa ohne Identität? Die Krise der multikulturellen Gesellschaft. München: C. Bertelsmann Verlag. UNHRC. 2018. Syrian Emergency, available online at: www.unhcr.org/syriaemergency.html (accessed 3 May 2018). Vertovec, Steven. 2007. Super-Diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (6): 1024–1054. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today. In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. Wiermer, Christian, and Gerhard Voogt. 2017. Die Nacht die Deutschland Veränderte. München: Riva Verlag. Winnicott, D.W. 1953. Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena—A Study of the…. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34: 89–97. ———. 1965. The Development of the Capacity for Concern. In The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth. ———. 1969. The Use of an Object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50: 711–716.

3 Accepting Germans: An Ethnographic Exploration of Refugee Integration in Berlin Jagat Sohail

In August 2017, an article appeared in Spiegel Online called “A Syrian Family’s Quest to Become German” (Relotius 2017). In it, the author notes appreciatively that the father “watches German cooking shows on TV … instead of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.” The daughter learned how to ride a bicycle in Germany which, she says, she had not done before because “in Damascus … girls aren’t supposed to.” Perhaps the most striking line in this fairytale of integration comes from the father about his aspirations for the future: “The child we are now expecting …will be even more German than we can ever become.” This story is, of course, far from being out of the ordinary. There is an almost lazy predictability to the story in how it attempts to characterize the “good refugee/guest/ Muslim,” while simultaneously underlining the good-ness of German society—the daughter wouldn’t be able to ride a bicycle in Syria! Indeed, about two years after this article was published, it now seems very likely that this story is representative, quite literally, of a fantasy. The journalist J. Sohail (*) Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_3

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responsible for it is now infamous and largely discredited for having fabricated much of his reporting. There are many things we can and should say about the politics of such media portrayals. Yet, I found this story familiar in a slightly more uncomfortable way. During my first summer in Berlin, in 2017, I became close to a Pakistani family that lived in a refugee camp in the east of the city. Neither Haider nor his wife has been able to learn German—Abidah has been pregnant and overworked for much of their time in Berlin, and Haider is illiterate; he insists that there is no point in trying to learn at his age. But their ambitions for their first-born son, Reza, are clear. Reza is nearly five years old now, and when I last met him and his family in August 2018, he still barely spoke. Indeed, despite their precarious position, Haider invests in a TV that stays perpetually on, filling the cramped room with a constant stream of German from whatever channel that happens to be on at the time. As a result, Reza knows a few German words, though hardly enough to say much more than Schokolade or Fussball. The story is not, of course, new to those who have had experience in migration contexts. It certainly is not the first time a second-­ generation child might grow up without their parents’ language. However, to write this off as the product of his parents’ anxiety about their foreign-­ ness in Germany offers an impoverished picture of the conversations I had with his parents. “Our son will be a real German,” Haider would often say, proudly. “What about Pakistan?” I once shot back. He responded, “What about Pakistan? There’s nothing for him there. Let him be German. After all, it is Germany that accepted us when our own Pakistan drove us out of our home.” I arrived in Germany in the summer of 2017 to conduct research on refugee life in the city. Armed with critiques of the country’s cultural integration projects, I soon found myself running into contexts where my objections seemed awkwardly out of place to my migrant interlocutors. This is not to suggest that refugees experience these projects in a straightforward, positive way. Instead, I want to suggest that scholars of contemporary migration and integration threaten to erase the complexities of the refugee experience if we conflate the cultural critique of assimilationist and integrationist projects with the ethnographic task of approaching

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and interpreting the desires of our interlocutors in open-ended and honest ways. Europe’s ambivalent position with the project of cultural assimilation has a long history, and indeed expectations that refugees must leave their identities at the doorsteps of Europe if they truly wish to be welcomed require a vigorous critique of integrationist projects. Yet the question this chapter hopes to frame is slightly different. As anthropologists who have long resisted the homogenization of cultures and the effacement of non-­ Western Identities, and in a Europe that was not too long ago a colonial power responsible for precisely such forms of epistemic violence, how do we approach the aspirations of the refugee father’s desire that his child be German, not as a news story unfolding in an ideologically charged media landscape, but when we encounter this desire in our own conversations in the field? While refugees are undoubtedly objects of assimilationist imaginaries and policies, they are simultaneously engaged in personal projects of self-transformation, driven as much by the shock of finding themselves in entirely new social worlds as by the hope that incorporation might make possible the beginning of a new life. This chapter, based on my ethnographic work among Syrian and Pakistani refugees in Germany, examines the consequences of attempts by interlocutors to “change” in response to their own personal desires to belong in Berlin’s city life, on the one hand, and to the expectations placed on them by a national discourse of cultural integration, on the other. How do people come to terms with sudden ruptures of continuity in their experiences of selfhood? When, if at all, do they succeed in experiencing their new lives as authentic, and their new selves as honest? What happens when they don’t? To answer these questions, this chapter brings together my ethnographic work with a specific conceptual history of the way anthropologists approached such questions of alterity and alteration. As newcomers and residents encounter each other within an allegedly post-colonial landscape, we might be well served by revisiting some of the debates surrounding mimetic behavior in the context of the colonial encounter that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. Through my ethnographic illustrations, I hope to show how the anxieties about interiority and authenticity, very much at the center of this work

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on colonial mimesis, might be rethought to reclaim their relevance in the context of cosmopolitan city life today.

Umar and Osman When I first met Umar in the summer of 2017 he communicated freely and frequently in German, despite having been in the country for less than a year. Part of this, no doubt, had to do with the fact that he had just turned 19 and was still young enough for language acquisition to come to him easier than to many others older to him. It was evident from the beginning that this was a source of conflict between Umar and his Syrian friends, most of whom were in their mid-20s. My German friend, Hannah, who introduced me to him, tried to tell me what was going on, “They think he is trying too hard to be German.” She is not wrong. I remember sitting around a table one afternoon with some of the other people in the camp when I broached the topic with them. Pointing at the office, Sadiq said, “Houwa kaffir al-Qureshi.” Everyone burst into a fit of laughter. This was, loosely, a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that Umar had been enticed by the Germans to switch sides—a traitor to the cause. For one, they were clearly referring to the fact that Umar’s German skills had earned him a part-time job at the camp as a translator, and he had taken the first opportunity he could to move out to an apartment in the city, completing the quite literal switch from camp resident to office worker. For another, their resentment ran a little deeper. Umar, they told me, was too proud of his German and looked down on those who were not as good. “All he wants is German friends,” Sadiq said. “I think you mean girlfriends,” said another, triggering the next round of laughter. Of all the times that I met Umar, I can hardly think of anywhere he wasn’t with a group of German friends, or on his way to meet them. For his part, Umar saw integration as the natural way forward and approached his classes with a religious enthusiasm that rubbed off on those around him. Despite the teasing, his friends often admired, even envied, his eagerness and his ability to do so. Basam, for instance, eventually interrupted the group’s laughter by saying, “Sohail, don’t take them seriously, we are just envious, because Umar is still young and he is better at

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learning; he has more energy than us.” Indeed most of the refugees I spoke to had a fairly indifferent and practical approach to the actual integration courses they were compulsorily enrolled in. When I asked Umar about what he thought about them, he simply shrugged, “Yeah, they’re useful. They tell us about German culture and laws. How else will I know what laws to follow in Germany? Anyway, the classes are very easy.” Umar was proud of how quickly he had picked up German, just as he was proud that, more than others in his position, he could claim to have started his life in Berlin as a Berliner. * * * I went to meet Osman at a new Syrian restaurant in the city. There are enough of these now that they almost seem like the result of an unspoken deal struck by Berliners with the refugees that they welcomed in 2015. Osman had a particularly harrowing journey to Germany. Smuggled around in crates through North and Western Africa, where he first sought refuge, he made it to Italy after being rescued from a boat on the verge of sinking. “I was one of the lucky ones,” he insists. “I took the journey before the smugglers really knew what they were doing, before they really learned how to make a profit.” Osman works part-time with a pro-­refugee NGO in the city and was recently able to enroll in an undergraduate course, with scholarship, in one of the city’s institutes. Though a few years older than Umar, Osman, also seems particularly adept at life in Berlin. His German is coming along slowly, but he speaks fluent English. “When I first came here, I had nothing to do. I managed to get a laptop, so I would just sit at home watching English movies. That’s how my English became so good.” Curious, I asked him why he hadn’t tried the same with German. “See, what you have to understand, is that everyone in Berlin speaks German. But not everyone speaks English.” Osman is not the only person that has said this to me. Even when faced with the daunting prospect of learning German, many of the refugees I spoke to would often insist, with mixed results, on practicing English with me. Yet, where others his age have sometimes struggled with learning the codes of the new city, Osman always seems comfortable and confident. He has a group of

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friends from all over, he tells me. Some of them are German, but most are from other European countries. “That’s what Berlin really is,” he tells me, “it’s easier to be friends with the Americans than the Germans.” “Why is that?” I press him. He takes a moment to respond and seems suddenly less sure of himself: I had German friends in the beginning. But … I don’t know. They just kind of drifted apart after some time. I mean, whenever I see them, they still act all excited like we’re best friends even though I haven’t heard from them in months. I don’t think that’s what friendship is, so I call them acquaintances. I have many German acquaintances. It’s strange, sometimes I think it’s easier to be friends with people that are always coming and going from Berlin, instead of those that live here all the time.

Before meeting Osman, I once had a conversation with some refugees about the best cheap gyms in the city. Knowing that Osman made it a point to go to the gym almost every day, I thought I would ask him about it. “That’s what we do. We go to the gym, and we go to German class. What else do you do when you have nothing but time? You should go too, you know.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “Haven’t you noticed, everyone in Berlin goes to the gym. When I came here, I was thin and skinny. Tell me, how many skinny Germans do you see?” he says. We laugh, and I ask him whether people now think he is German because of his muscles. “No, no. Not German. No one will look at me and think I’m German, but people don’t look at you like you’re new.” I have spoken to Osman about my own feelings of being out of place, and several times in the conversation he gives me advice. “But, it’s not just the gym, it’s also what you wear,” he says. “You dress too plain. And your shoes aren’t good.” “What about you? Your clothes don’t look very German!” I point at his shirt which is clearly made to look like it’s from somewhere else. He laughs. “Do you think this is what people wear in Damascus?” No, I smile, thinking of the “Indian” clothes I have seen people wearing in the city.

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How does one become German? Both Umar and Osman are among the better integrated refugees you’re likely to run into, if by different understandings of the term. Both have established a fairly stable social world for themselves in the city, and both have developed ways to blend in. Both have, to various degrees, been successful at exploring German alterity. Both have learnt languages, whether literally German, or more obliquely, the aesthetic language of the city. Walter Benjamin (1999) famously called this capacity to explore difference “the mimetic faculty,” and indeed the idea that mimesis provided a “pre-linguistic” (Pang 2008, 124)—yet still relational—approach to the formation of social identities has been of interest to scholars across disciplines for generations. While the extent to which projects of incorporation are thought of as mimetic is by no means uncontroversial—indeed the use of “integration” instead of “assimilation” has much to do with the explicitly mimetic expectations of the latter—the intersubjective emphasis on identity formation through mimesis provided particularly fertile grounds for psychodynamic approaches to the self. Mimetic practices lie at the center of the Freudian notion of “identification,” which, Freud argued, “endeavors to mold a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a model” (1955, 106).1 Yet, clearly, the ambivalent response of Umar’s friends to his perceived enthusiasm to become German is inflected with a series of particularities—of age, power differentials, and guest-host dynamics to name just a few—that invite a deeper discussion of the politics of such processes of identity formation. In this sense, perhaps the most important intervention, in the discussion about the productive, pre-linguistic, and ontogenetic functions of mimesis, was made by Franz Fanon. In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon (2008) argues that colonialism functions by perversely requiring the colonized to identify with their colonizers, such that they find themselves desirable only through the eyes and categories of their oppressors. In other words, Fanon reminds us that “the dominated are dominated in their brains, too” (Bourdieu quoted in Oushakine 2001, 191). He argues that colonialism “may inflict its greatest psychical violence precisely by attempting to exclude blacks from the very self-other dynamic that makes subjectivity possible” (Fuss 1994, 21). That is to say that while

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“‘the black man must be black in relation to the white man” (Fanon in Fuss 1994, 22), “the converse does not hold true” (Fuss 1994, 22). The source of the discomfort that Umar’s behavior produces, in other words, has much to do with the cultural and political hierarchies that third-­ world “guest” communities face as they encounter their European “hosts.” It is a discomfort that emerges through the realization that not everyone participates equally in the mimetic co-production of selfhood. Yet, very little about my conversations with Osman would allow me to suggest that this is the essential way in which mimesis functions for refugees creatively adapting to the sudden shift in their semiotic landscapes. In direct contrast to Fanon, Michael Taussig (1993) argues, “t]he wonder of mimesis, lies in the copy drawing on the character and the power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power” (1993, xiii). Taussig analyses curative figurines among the Cuna, asking, why they “should be carved in the form of ‘European types’ … why are they Other, and why are they the Colonial Other?” (1993, 7). To answer this, he builds on the Frazerean law of similarity through which “the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it” (1993, 52). Thus, indigenous people, through mimetic magic, appropriate the power of the colonizer. Building on Benjamin’s notion that mimesis is the capacity to become the other, and to explore difference, Taussig places mimetic practice somewhere between parody and resistance. In other words, it becomes a play “of mischievous imitation … that pays an ironic homage to its object” (Huggan 1997, 94). In both these senses, “[i]ndigenous imitative appropriations of colonialism” (Roque 2015, 206) are expressions of resistance. On the one hand, they provide a commentary on European colonialism’s violence. On the other, they claim colonialism’s discourse for indigenous causes, functioning as “an appropriation of the Other as Self on the Self ’s own terms” (Walker in Roque 2015, 206). It’s hard not to see some degree of this playful but subversive appropriation of the German “other” in Osman’s sardonic self-awareness. At stake in these approaches seems to be a two-pronged “either-or” desire placed dialectically between the figures of the feared con-artist and the derided human chameleon—mimesis as either the capacity to manipulate the other or the desire to be the other. One threatens authenticity

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by destabilizing the link between motive and performance, the other by altogether replacing the self with a copy. Thus, Taussig’s con-artists stage a coup d’état, perceptible only to the cleverest eyes, whereas to the threat of the chameleon, Fanon (2005) insists that, “if we want to respond to the expectations of the Europeans we must not send them back a reflection, however ideal, of their society and their thought … we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (2008, 238–239). James Ferguson has argued that anthropologists, confronted with the “embarrassment, as well as a stark horror … of the cultural other who wants ‘to become like you’” (Ferguson 2002, 552), often find themselves trapped precisely between these two poles. On one side is “the Fanonist line, which would leave them in the awkward role of either condemning or pitying their informants” (2002, 553). On the other is an interpretation that “insist[s] that such ‘mimesis’ is … in fact a gesture of resistance to colonialism” (2002, 555). Indeed, it is easy to think of Umar and Osman as presenting precisely these two poles. Usman is the butt of the joke because he seems to relinquish something of his essential selfhood too willingly, while Osman plays the role of the self-proclaimed trickster, winking playfully, when all anyone else sees is a blink. Such a double bind presents itself in what Oushakine (2001) sees as the limits of “mimetic resistance,” or the reminder that “being constituted by the discourse of the dominant does not mean being recognized by the dominant; being similar to the dominant does not mean being homogenous with or homologous to them” (2001, 213). This “ironic compromise” is not lost on Bhabha (1994, 126), who argues however that mimesis occupies a double presence in the colonial encounter, both being the pernicious desire for the colonial other and containing possibilities of a threat to European notions of identity. Colonial reform, Bhabha suggests, was always a partial process. Colonized subjects were expected to imitate the colonizers, but colonial education could never elevate the subject to a relation of true equality with the European. The internal contradiction of mimicry then is precisely this partiality, “a difference that is almost the same but not quite.” In other words, the expectation of mimesis is always juxtaposed with its ultimate impossibility.

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Thus, “mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (1994, 126). Bhabha’s ultimately tragic, yet hopeful, assessment of mimesis concludes that, “The desire to emerge as “authentic” through mimicry— through a process of writing and repetition—is the final irony of partial representation” (1994, 129). For if authenticity lies somewhere beyond appearance, in an unreproducible “aura,” then to admit the centrality of the mimetic faculty to the processes of identity formation is to reject the very notion of an essence that authenticity might point to. What these debates raise, then, are uncomfortable questions of interiority and authenticity that are just as fraught in the lives of contemporary refugees as they were in the heyday of Western colonialism. This contradiction, between the essence of identity, on the one hand, and plasticity of selfhood, on the other, continues to powerfully shape the German political landscape. Seen this way, it shouldn’t be surprising that those most vociferously calling for complete assimilation are frequently the first to deny the possibility of the integration of Muslim “civilizational others” altogether. In many senses, the debates around colonial mimesis seem to have been left unresolved. With Bhabha, what we are left with is the sobering realization of the ultimate impossibility of the authentic—a statement whose validity is of almost no use to the actual concerns of those of our interlocutors, actively immersed in the search for authenticity and intimacy in their new lives. To understand and illustrate, with a little more context, the complex relationships between the real and the fake, this chapter turns briefly to the nature of city identities, and the implications of falsehood and inauthenticity for the conversation around refugee incorporation.

Counterfeiting Identity, Forging Authenticity I first met Rafik at a Sprachcafé or volunteer-run sessions held in cafés around the city where refugees meet—usually weekly—to practice speaking German with fluent speakers. He is much older than Umar and Osman—he turns 40 soon, but hardly looks it. It is quite evident that he

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is a good-looking man. He tells me that people usually think he is from Eastern Europe. He is still figuring out if it is in his interest to correct them or not. Unlike many other refugees, Rafik had family here from before the war. Abdul is two years younger than Rafik but has been in Germany for over ten years now. Rafik describes his brother as “dynamic.” I know what he means. Where Rafik is quiet and brooding, Abdul has a charismatic charm about him. More than once, I have witnessed conversations between the brothers where Abdul tries to give his brother advice on dating. One went like this: “The truth is, I’ve tried a lot you know,” Rafik says. “I’m a romantic, and I would like to find a girlfriend, but it’s so different here.” “Look Rafik,” Abdul says, “women are different here, but they’re also the same. You just have to learn how to get their attention. Okay, that last girl you were with … in Aleppo … what was her name, Nadia? How did you flirt with her?” Rafik takes a moment to remember and responds, “She was a waitress at a café and I left her a written note on a napkin telling her how beautiful she was.” “See!” Abdul looks at me incredulously. “Rafik, that will never work with women here. They are confident, they know what they want, and they know they don’t want a man who has to write his love poems on a fucking napkin!” “You know,” Abdul says to me, “he won’t even get a new haircut. I think it was supposed to be cool in the 90s, but our friend here is stuck in the past.” Unlike Umar, it is clear that Rafik has struggled, despite his efforts, to find intimacy in Berlin. Most of his conversations would end with him throwing his hands up in the air: “this is who I am! What do you want me to do? Be Fake?” His loneliness seems to manifest in a kind of permanent melancholia. But he insists that Berlin is special. “It has a place for everyone,” he says, and he is convinced he will find his. But the complications, especially for someone his age, are apparent. In the introductory section, I suggested that disagreements in the literature on colonial mimesis are the result of uncomfortable questions of interiority and authenticity. The brief ethnographic conversations I have described show that these anxieties are very much in play in the lives of

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my interlocutors. Refugees find themselves in the midst of a variety of conversations, among themselves, among Germans, between themselves, and with other residents, about what is often seen as ‘fake-ness’ or inauthenticity. Whether in terms of their suffering, national identity, or the self-alienating expectation that they must radically and rapidly alter their ideas of selfhood, these conversations shape shared understandings of self-transformation, foreigner incorporation, and national integration. Academics have engaged quite extensively with the strategies and scripts refugees have used in order to navigate bureaucratic and national regimes of truth. Most of this work has had to do with narrative and the ways that refugees are expected to narrate their lives. Sometimes the most horrific experiences turn out to be less narratively stable, and thus less legible (Das 2007; Fassin and d’Halluin 2005; Stouter 2011). Refugees, this part of academia has contested, have frequently had a difficult relationship with falsity. Often, real trauma can only be bureaucratically validated through fake stories (Beneduce 2015). Yet the overwhelming, if understandable, focus of this literature continues to be the bureaucratic, medical, and legal worlds that are so often at the center of refugee experiences. In my conversations with young refugee men, however, often the more banal everyday materials of selfhood—muscle, clothes, hair, voice—seemed to play equally important roles when it came to navigating the city. If theoretical approaches to mimetic behavior look back to Benjamin’s work on the mimetic faculty, his much more influential text deals not with the replication of people but with the mass reproduction of things in capitalism. For Benjamin (2008), the mechanical reproduction of art leads to a decline of the “aura” of its authenticity by fundamentally destabilizing the authority of authorship and originality. Indeed the destruction of the aura of things made possible through replication and faking has led to vital insights into how the counterfeiting of objects—IDs, Documents (Reeves 2013; Srivastava 2012), and the consumption of counterfeit commodities—turns out to be an essential way in which selfhood is legitimated (Crăciun 2012).2 That is to say that identities are often paradoxically authenticated through the forging of things. Indeed, it is precisely this promise of the productive capacities of the fake to make possible what is experienced as “real” or authentic that drives the mimetic practices of many of my interlocutors.

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In Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic typology, the arbitrary sign—symbol—was only one kind of sign along with the icon and the index. Indeed, the latter two were seen as motivated, in that the icon was related to its referent through a relationship of similarity, while the index with one of causality (Peirce 1992; Nöth 2001). In this sense, the appropriative power of mimesis goes somewhat like this: through an iconic duplication, what the mimed object appropriates is the indexical relations represented by the original. Thus, the power of mimesis lies in this aesthetic operation that allows it to claim the genealogy and teleology of the form that it has no link to. This approach allows us to think of the relationship between self, body, and material in more synthetic ways. As an aesthetic phenomenon, this means, to put it simply, getting the proportions right. Mimesis then means an operation that objectifies the self through “aestheticizing” or materializing new identities, the strategic—if not always conscious— exploitation of what Webb Keane calls “bundling” or the expected “co-­ presence” of icon and the index within the same sign (2003, 421). Indeed, urban contexts might increasingly open up such possibilities. Here, Bhabha’s “partial representation” might find less tragic and more fertile grounds for new identity formations. The symbolic excess, and floating signifiers of urban, cosmopolitan spaces, builds on a generalized anonymity of the city that has historically drawn significant attention from social theorists. Almost co-terminus with this development were discussions about the figure of “the stranger” and the increasing sense of the common estrangement of life in the city (Simmel 1950; Iveson 2006). In the theoretical imaginary that provided this distinction, the rural was where one felt at home, the site of nostalgia where life was determined by a personal and intimate knowledge of all those around you, not by un-­ seeable, un-nameable rhythms, or the anomie, alienation, and disenchantment of the city. The city was where one became a stranger. Where everyone became strangers. Indeed, the strange-ness of a life among strangers became one of the constitutive features of the urban. In Zygmut Bauman’s words, “City life is carried on by strangers among strangers” (1995, 126). If iconicity slips into indexicality, then we might think of going to the gym as a way through which young refugee men sculpt their bodies in the fashion of the White Berliner Vegan male bodies that carry with them all

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the social capital that the city’s middle class has to offer. We might be tempted to suggest that the productive potential of misrecognition, of appropriating the social through the material, is what is at play, when refugees buy new clothes, get new haircuts, or even learn German, and I believe this would be, in a sense, true. Much of what Osman banks on, for instance, is precisely the scale of a cosmopolitan city, where questions of access are, more often than not, determined by quick aesthetic judgments. Yet, I think we are papering over something essential in these kinds of reading. Is counterfeiting an aesthetic identity the same as forging a self? The semiotic “loose-ness” of the city might indeed turn access to space into a treacherous aesthetic game. But access presents only a partial appraisal of what it means for refugees to belong in Berlin as Berliners. Indeed, if the revolutionary praise for fake and copied things borrows from the ability of such fakes to expose the myth of the essence of authenticity, such a disavowal of authenticity is experienced as anything but triumph for refugees, when it presents itself as the souring of newly forged relationships.

Toward a Relational Authenticity What answers might Berlin provide to the problems posed by mimetism? While its scale and the aestheticized nature of cosmopolitan identifications are certainly essential, if not unique, I want to underline a specificity that, I think, is fundamental to understanding the special trajectory of integration that my interlocutors find themselves in. To illustrate, I turn to a story Rafik told me about a gift that ended a relationship. On this particular day, we are meeting each other a little early, and Berlin is really hot, even for two people from Aleppo and Delhi. Most of Germany is experiencing a fairly severe heat wave, and all the stores have run out of fans. “They’ll say we’ve brought the weather with us,” Rafik says. The heat means that our conversation is slower than usual, and Rafik does not even seem to have the energy to smoke his cigarettes. I ask him why his initial interactions with Germans had not endured. “I’ll give you an example,” he says. “A year ago … I had just arrived, there was this German girl. We had got very close—not like love—she

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was married, and I was not interested, but I was very happy to know her because I thought I had made a new friend here, maybe life in Berlin … it won’t be so hard. We met at least 30 times, for coffee, beer, lunch. Then, one day, when she came, she had bought a very nice jacket. She gifted me this, and I didn’t know what to do, so of course … I didn’t want to offend her … I accepted the gift. But you know, what’s strange? I haven’t met her after this. I’ve messaged her, saying ‘Hi, how are you?’ And she responds, but if I ask her if she’d like to meet … she has no interest.” “Why do you think that is? Why did she stop meeting you?” “Well, because of the jacket! For her, it was like a transaction. See? Her conscience is clear, she helped a refugee, and now she can move on with her life.” “Intimacy,” Lauren Berlant (1998) argues, “builds worlds” (1998, 282). Gifts too build worlds, and this is the central axiom to the study of gift-giving practices in anthropology. Indeed, this notion has been central to anthropology ever since Marcel Mauss’ conceptualization of the “spirit of the gift,” which binds giver and receiver through the mutual obligations it sets up (Mauss 2002). How is it that, in Rafik’s story, the gift marked not the beginning, but the end of a relationship? I think there is something about this that captures, in many ways, the double loneliness that I found in many of my conversations with refugees. Take for instance John Borneman and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi’s (2017) discussion on the shifts in public mood toward the refugee crisis in Germany from xenophilia to indifference, and finally to xenophobia. The direction of this movement is essential: In the summer of 2015, Berlin was marked by a kind of excitement. The city saw one of the most large-scale acts of interpersonal gift-giving Europe has likely seen. Thousands of locals in Berlin came to the street and opened their homes, volunteering their time, skills, and resources. Yet, how is it that instead of marking the beginning of long-lasting, enduring relationships as gifts are traditionally meant to do they marked what some refugees have experienced as a sudden transition into indifference?3 Indeed this is where I think something specific needs to be said about the Berlin, and, more broadly, German experience for refugees. For all three refugees depicted in this chapter, their first experiences of Berlin involved much more cross-cultural, intimate contact than

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might be true for refugees or migrants arriving at any other time. Yet almost with a slow inevitability, these relationships seem to be falling through, or simply drifting apart. For all his attempts at distancing himself from the camp, Umar’s lack of education means that the only real spaces open to him are those where he can capitalize on being a Syrian refugee, and so he finds himself working as a translator in the camp he tried so hard to leave, especially if he is to pay the rent of his new apartment outside the camp. Osman has a witty, trickster-like humor about this, but the bitterness in his voice is clear when he renounces the Germans in his life as mere “acquaintances.” Toward the end of my time in Berlin, this last summer, as I sat with Rafik, I decided to bring up Umar, whom Rafik had never met, and ask him what he thought about the demands that national discourses of integration placed on people to be different. Did he think Umar was being fake? Rafik immediately told me I’d got it all wrong. “It’s Germans who are fake … cold … not like you and me. Friendship in Syria … I think it’s like friendship in India. When you laugh, I know what’s behind the laugh. With Germans … I think sometimes, really, there’s nothing behind it. I know many Germans, but they don’t understand friendship.” To Rafik, I think, it felt like Germans didn’t really know how to be intimate. I think we can all agree that that’s unlikely, at the very least. Yet if the debates about colonial mimesis had to do with questions of interiority and authenticity, then I think this perhaps approaches one alternative to think about authentic selfhood. To ask questions about authenticity is not to posit some essential notion of “innate personality” that lies behind all the smoke and mirrors of mimesis. Nor do I mean to suggest that selfhood is but the rhetorical effect of modernity. While, indeed, critiques of “true-self fantasies” (Thin 2018) and the “rise of expressive authenticity” (Lindolhm 2013) are important reminders of the way notions of interiority are discursively produced to the ends of neo-liberal post-modernity, I think my ethnographic experiences place authenticity as fundamentally relational. I want to suggest that internal experiences of fake-ness emerge as a result of the failure of relationships to endure. Integration was desired when it produced, or was hoped to produce, relationships that would last. Osman, for instance, reveled in his ability to change, but that he chose English, and not German, as the medium through which he incorporated into the

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city is vindicated by the fact that he believes he has made enduring relationships with people in the city by doing so. Yet the resentment that Osman’s dry humor seems to hide is a reminder that “life cannot be wholly lived in a tactical vein—in order for one to establish a stable sense of self, and a sense of belonging, one requires the ability to act through and within one’s environment. This, in turn requires expectations about oneself and one’s environment that endure overtime” (Samanani 2017, 252–253). For Rafik, who still frequently boasts that Syrians are far better at integration than anyone else, questions of falsehood and insecurities about authenticity surface not in response to the politics of integration as a whole, but in the face of the sudden indifference of the friends he made among Germans at the height of the Willkommenskultur. I asked, at the beginning of this chapter, how refugees dealt with sudden ruptures in their experience of selfhood. In the context of sudden shifts in the cultural and symbolic grounds of self and identity, to many of my interlocutors, integration seemed to provide one potential roadmap to re-­ stabilize themselves in their new lives. Resentment toward such projects of incorporation seemed to stem more from the falling through of this new tenuous cultural ground, than from the more direct critiques of the cultural politics of integration.

Conclusion Crucial to any understanding of Berlin’s incorporation of the “strangers” that arrived in the city, then, is an understanding of the kind of objects these strangers and Berliners became for each other. If social theory— perhaps more specifically, sociological theory—began dealing with the rise of the stranger through the emergence of the “urban,” anthropology has an altogether different genealogy of this term, drawing from the colonial encounter. For anthropology, the strange-ness of this anonymity had less to do with the generalized anonymity of the city than it did with “the desire to accumulate knowledge about those who are already recognized as strange(rs)” (Ahmed 2000, 49). Thus, where sociological approaches that dealt with the cosmopolitan condition of being strangers in the city produced normative theories of common-ground, civic duties, and

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liberal notions of reasonability and debate, the anthropological stranger holds a slightly more polarized set of emotive responses to difference. If the sociological stranger finds purchase in the notions of indifference/ tolerance to diversity, the anthropological stranger is the object of excitement/repulsion. When Zygmut Bauman (2016) talks of “Strangers at our Doors,” we might be well served to think of strangers in the dual, rather than the plural, for the refugees who arrived in the city in 2015 were strangers in this double sense—at once the objects of excitement and repulsion, as well as new subjects, subject to the city’s rules of estrangement and indifference. I want to end by suggesting a few ways in which understanding these encounters in Berlin might contribute to a “thicker” concept of incorporation (Borneman and McKowen, Introduction). The first, when thinking about colonial mimesis, is the obvious spatial inversion of the movement. The colonial encounter was experienced by the global south “at home,” as the objects of mimesis arrived in their lands. In the new encounters, the south has come north. There is an inverted delicate here. Refugees are, of course, fleeing. They are not travelers as much as they are displaced. For many, to imply otherwise might seem to threaten the legitimacy of their asylum claims, and of their sufferings. Yet, to suggest that refugees experience life in Berlin only through nostalgia, melancholia, trauma, loss, and precarity presents for many a rather self-serving and dishonest picture of everyday life. I use the word travel not to suggest that refugees are here because they chose to be, that they could simply leave if they wanted to, or worse that they are but transient additions to city life in Berlin. I use it instead, to indicate how the excitement of being somewhere new is not the exclusive privilege of the privileged.4 All of the refugees I spent time with had very recent and ongoing stories of trauma and separation. Yet, the fact that they found themselves, all of a sudden, beyond the reach and eyes of family also meant the opening up of new avenues to explore difference. Of course, refugees in Berlin cannot escape their entanglements with the national discourse about integration, yet for many, integration, at least initially, seemed to imply more a promise that their lives in the city might really become theirs, rather than the taming of their difference. An ethnographically and empirically informed approach to foreigner incorporation thus requires close attention to the

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specific dynamics of change—trajectories that frequently turn out to be nonlinear. The second way these ethnographic sketches push us to rethink immigration and imitation is through their setting in a cosmopolitan Berlin. First, if mimesis requires a model, then what kinds of identification might the city offer? With colonialism, one such model was provided by colonial education, but the fractured and multiple semiotic landscape of Berlin forces us to ask—integration into what? The refugees I am in conversation with seem relatively unconcerned with “becoming German.” Instead, their everyday negotiations with the city reveal a searching for ways to belong in Berlin, as Berliners. Yet, to be a Berliner is a paradoxical thing. The question of incorporation in Europe must keep in mind, in other words, that these “identifications are nested, situational, and multiple” (Borneman and McKowen, Introduction). The fractured, diverse, and multiple forms of identification such a city offers is dizzying, and the combinatory and hyphenated identities it throws up challenge any straightforward notion of assimilation. Importantly, however, this hyper diversity should not lead us to turn to utopian promises of a de-centered cosmopolitan life where identities are infinitely fluid and flexible. Here I hesitate to follow Ruth Mandel when she suggests that mimetic identifications are always co-constitutive, such that “Turkish women might opt for cosmetic surgery, aspiring to a “Germanic” look; and German men choose to eat “Turkish” garlic” (Mandel 2008, 4). It is important to point out that some acts of mimetism have far deeper consequences for the experiences of selfhood than others. Further, a certain mode of consumption along with a bundle of semiotic elements that indicate cosmopolitan values still forms dominant modes of signification in the city. Finally, returning to the debates around colonial mimesis, instead of asking how we might interpret mimetic desires, I think we might be better served, as ethnographers, to simply follow their trajectories more closely. To see when they fall apart, and when they go unquestioned or even enjoyed. In this regard, I believe an approach to authenticity as not “essential,” but rather “relational,” might allow us to ask how, as the “Refugees are welcome” stickers wear off from the many walls of Berlin, we might provide crucial insights into the processual dynamics of ethnic boundary formation. Here it might be important to add that this chapter

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has made use of the term “refugee” without looking too closely at the term itself. The path that integration takes for my interlocutors in this chapter depends on the specific way their new personal relationships—as Syrians that arrived more or less at the height of Berlin’s Willkommenskultur—became entangled with city-wide, and even nation-wide, shifts in what Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi (2017) call “Stimmung” or public mood. For refuges, variables such as ethnicity, class, religion, year, and even month of arrival all play large roles in their “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004). An attention to the effects of such variability might in turn also allow us to deepen our understandings of the limits and possibilities of Willkommenskultur specifically and the cultural politics of hospitality more generally. When I last met Haider, he seemed a defeated man. He had all but given up on getting asylum in Germany—here, the experience of non-Syrian refugees has been decidedly worse post-2015—and had resigned himself to an uncertain future. “What else can we do? If they tell us tomorrow that we have to leave, then we will leave. We have to keep looking forward.” For now, though, the TV stays on.

Notes 1. This is equally true for Lacan’s famous “Mirror Stage,” which sets up “a fictional direction” for the infant, who now forever seeks to meet this “Ideal-I” which is always unattainable, always approachable only “asymptotically” (1949, 503). Indeed, Lacan goes as far as to suggest that this mimetic desire “decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other” (1949, 507). 2. Yet, the approach in this literature often involves the elimination of the body from the world of things. Thus, skin whitening creams (Nadeem 2014), for instance, are placed firmly on the side of the world of pitiable identifications, while fake branded t-shirts are placed on the other side of the fence, so that they, “authenticate selves” (Crăciun 2012). 3. Indeed, much of the confusion seems to be not about how—“how do we make friends with Germans?”—but about why—“why did these relationships not last?”

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4. Here I follow scholars such as Schiler and Salazar (2013) and Liisa Malkki (1992) who have argued that the epistemological position of the mobile body is not the exception, but the norm, and that notions of belonging and selfhood ought to be recognized to be more fluid and capable of transformation.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Who Knows? Knowing Strangers and Strangerness. Australian Feminist Studies 15 (31): 49–68. Appadurai, Arjun. 2004. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition. Culture and Public Action 59: 62–63. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1995. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ———. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beneduce, Roberto. 2015. The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum. Medical Anthropology 34 (6): 551–571. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. On the Mimetic Faculty. In Selected Writings, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W.  Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. ———. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin. Berlant, Lauren. 1998. Intimacy: A Special Issue. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 281–288. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. In The Location of Culture, 85–92. London: Routledge. Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. The Concept of Stimmung: From Indifference to Xenophobia in Germany’s Refugee Crisis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135. Crăciun, Magdalena. 2012. Rethinking Fakes, Authenticating Selves. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (4): 846–863. Das, Veena. 2007. Commentary: Trauma and Testimony: Between Law and Discipline. Ethos 35 (3): 330–335. Fanon, Frantz. 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

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Fassin, Didier, and Estelle d’Halluin. 2005. The Truth from the Body: Medical Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers. American Anthropologist 107 (4): 597–608. Ferguson, James G. 2002. Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the “New World Society”. Cultural Anthropology 17 (4): 551–569. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press. Fuss, Diana. 1994. Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification. Diacritics 24 (2): 20. Huggan, Graham. 1997. (Post) Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis. Cultural Critique 38: 91–106. Iveson, Kurt. 2006. Strangers in the Cosmopolis. In Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Craig Young, and Steve Millington. New York: Routledge. Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language & Communication 23 (3–4): 409–425. Lindholm, Charles. 2013. The Rise of Expressive Authenticity. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (2): 361–395. Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7 (1): 24–44. Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Nadeem, Shehzad. 2014. Fair and Anxious: On Mimicry and Skin-Lightening in India. Social Identities 20 (2–3): 224–238. Nöth, Winfried. 2001. Semiotic Foundations of Iconicity in Language and Literature. The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2: 17–28. Oushakine, Serguei Alex. 2001. The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat. Public Culture 13 (2): 191–214. Pang, Laikwan. 2008. China Who Makes and Fakes: A Semiotics of the Counterfeit. Theory, Culture and Society 25 (6): 117–140. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reeves, Madeleine. 2013. Clean Fake: Authenticating Documents and Persons in Migrant Moscow. American Ethnologist 40 (3): 508–524.

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Relotius, Claas. 2017. A Syrian Family’s Quest to Become German. Spiegel Online. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-syrian-refugee-familys-quest-to-become-german-a-1160939.html Roque, Ricardo. 2015. Mimesis and Colonialism: Emerging Perspectives on a Shared History. History Compass 13 (4): 201–211. Salazar, Noel B. 2013. Imagining Mobility at the “End of the World”. History and Anthropology 24 (2): 233–252. Samanani, Farhan. 2017. Introduction to Special Issue: Cities of Refuge and Cities of Strangers: Care and Hospitality in the City. City & Society 29 (2): 242–259. Simmel, Georg. 1950 [1903]. The Stranger. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K.H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press. Souter, James. 2011. A Culture of Disbelief or Denial? Critiquing Refugee Status Determination in the United Kingdom. Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration 1 (1): 48–59. Srivastava, Sanjay. 2012. Duplicity, Intimacy, Community: An Ethnography of ID Cards, Permits and Other Fake Documents in Delhi. Thesis Eleven 113 (1): 78–93. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Thin, Neil. 2018. “True Self ” Fantasies. In Fake: Anthropological Keywords, ed. Jocab Copeman and Giovani Giovani da Col. Chicago: HAU Books.

4 The Erotic in Foreigner Incorporation: First Encounters Between Germans and Syrians Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi

If mutual belonging (gegenseitige Zugehörigkeit) is achieved in processes of social incorporation, a point of departure must lie in the way in which people become present to one another in initial encounters. These inaugural moments are a privileged analytic vantage point, even though transient and easy to overlook. Eclipsed by subsequent experiences that offer more immediate meanings, early imprints nonetheless coalesce quickly into forms of memory that retain traces of what unfolded. During later recall, these first impressions emerge in oral narratives as a presence of what was in the beginning surprising, odd, embarrassing, unacceptable, or never quite comprehensible. They tend to be neglected in many written accounts, smoothed over by the taming necessities of narrative coherence. In this chapter, I focus on early erotic encounters between Germans and Syrian refugees. Such early experiences carry a weight difficult to disentangle in their intricacies. Syrians escaped a catastrophic civil war

P. Ghassem-Fachandi (*) Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_4

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after which the role of Eros became particularly pronounced. Eros suggested the possibility of a new life that departs from the experience of death. Germans, by contrast, feared that with refugees entered a threat of terror, which they associated with their grandparents’ generation and in relation to which they felt vulnerable and clueless. First encounters describe a moment of limbo, where meanings lack certainty, balancing on a threshold between the furies that lie behind and a future yet to unfold.1 They render more visible instances of unconscious emotional transference with which they are replete. In early interactions, Syrians often appeared calm and measured, appearing to grasp from where they spoke and confronting their predicament. This precocious maturity may have partly been the product of the series of displacements within a short period of time traversing different cultural contexts: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Greece, Germany. Most Germans had no imagination that could contain such experience, despite their great grandparents or grandparents’ history of war and flight. Habituated to life at home made it difficult to balance this unfamiliarity with the automatic authority they wielded in things German, which included an explicit official memory of war and atrocity. While the echoes of past calamities were a vital factor for solidarity and for welcoming the newcomers, the presence of refugees nonetheless gave rise to an inner disquiet (innere Unruhe) in many a German I knew. The refugees were tainted by something as indigestible as was the Nazi past for post-war Germans. The erotic dimension in human relationships is of great importance in our sense of belonging to a social unit. Yet, with the exception of sensational and scandalous incidences that tend to confirm preexisting prejudices, the erotic is kept marginal in the significance given to it in both academic work and the popular press.2 Making refugees present means to acknowledge that they appear in the field of desire of an other in rather complex and unexpected ways. Something novel is configured in these relationships, which include, but is in no way limited to, the romantic or the sexual. A thicker notion of incorporation implies not simply becoming a subject with rights or values analogous to those of longer-term residents but, thinking more inter-subjectively, to include what preceded the encounter

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and implicitly affected the way it unfolded. It is dependent on both the modification of projections and the work of Eros: changing perceptions of who the other is for us, and feeling being wanted and desired or rejected. Mutual belonging, unlike discourses of rights or values, implies an acknowledgment of, and a reckoning with, the conflicts inherent in the erotic dimension of human social life. To understand the complexity of this dimension, I begin with a specific example to which I will return at the end of this chapter.

A First Encounter Marwan and Alaa discover Berlin, and Georg accuses them of not sharing their women In 2015, I began working in tandem with John Borneman in a fieldwork project on refugee incorporation in Germany (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017b). In early August 2016, we invited Marwan and Alaa, two Syrian men in their early 20s spending four days with us in Berlin, the capital of the country they had fled into. Alaa had been in Berlin once, for two days; it was Marwan’s first visit. They had been friends since childhood in Aleppo and shared an apartment with others in Turkey before separately fleeing to Germany. Introducing them to the city, we took them to places that might reveal to us how they see and experience Berlin and Germans. We arranged some used bicycles and cycled everywhere, as many Berliners do: to the Freie Universität, since Alaa wanted to study at a German university; to the governmental district of the capital and the office of the Chancellery (Marwan always fondly referred to Germany’s head of state, Angela Merkel, as “Haji Merkel”;3 Alaa affirmed with awe); to the old site of Nazi power, Wilhelmstrasse, which is presently known for the permanent exhibit Topographie des Terrors. We thought this underground museum, which includes former Gestapo torture chambers and prisons, might enable them to connect their own history of persecution and torture by Bashar Al Assad in Syria to German history.4 Both men were indefatigable and incredibly curious, taking in what they saw. Their resonating energy was contagious. Handling the urban

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traffic well, they were visibly at ease and in high spirits, at one time riding standing up on bicycle seats and bars like a couple of acrobats, leaving us fearful for their safety given the choppy cobble stone streets. Marwan had deserted the Syrian army. At a coffee shop, he shared the details of his flight, and fright, especially how he had to cross the Tigris River but had never learned to swim. It took me a while to fully comprehend the terrifying experience the young man was sharing with me: inundated by cold water, the fear of drowning alone in the dark, the anticipation of being discovered and summarily shot. Alaa was still mourning his journalist father, tortured for months until near death in Assad’s prisons, only to be released and die within a week. We took them to Vietnamese, Iranian, and (unfortunately very bad) Indian restaurants, to a newly opened Damascene restaurant in the hip, very mixed district of Neukölln (in which I myself had lived at some point in the early 1990s), and to Turkish neighborhoods in Kreuzberg. We pointed to streets named after victims of Nazi terror, or named in honor of resistance fighters, showed them the many bronze plaques (Stolpersteine) on Berlin’s pavement that commemorate German Jewish victims who had been deported to concentration camps, and we told them of the tough and ongoing struggles to interpret Germany history. They listened attentively and asked many questions revealing curiosity and sympathy. John met Marwan and Alaa initially when they were still children, before the current war, 14 years ago in Aleppo, Syria. He had then met them again several times in their exile in Istanbul. For me, this was my first encounter with the two men. Both were eager to marry, they told us often, though as pious Muslims they wanted to wait for sex until after marriage. Neither at this time had any sexual experiences, so they said and we believed them. Both men told us of their own erotic encounters in Germany without our prompting, probably because they discussed such issues with one another regularly. We, as older male fieldworkers, constituted a more or less safe environment in which they might reflect on their experiences. Marwan, for example, was tempted by young German women but ultimately wanted his parents to find him a wife. And since April 2016, Alaa, who is innocent looking and many consider rather attractive, was pursued by two German women in his new residence. One, he met on

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the street. They began texting daily. Another was very interested in him, but kept a certain distance after Alaa had piously explained he wanted to pursue his studies first before getting involved with someone in Germany. They communicated daily. He described these two women as “beautiful” and “very nice.” Other Syrian newcomers also told us about such experiences. After becoming accustomed to such discussions, we made it a habit to ask everyone about them without prompting. Alaa was the subject of a video made and published by a German weekly, and afterward received many messages on his Facebook page. They were nearly all friendly and positive, he said. He was surprised by the inability of many Germans to properly spell English words. At one point he was astonished to receive two messages from gay men. One message said that he imagined Syrians and Muslims as incorrigibly violent, but he acknowledged to be moved by Alaa’s story of flight, which he had followed in its details on the TV broadcast. I complemented Alaa for being able to alleviate so quickly the fear Germans have of Muslims. On our visit to the Freie Universität, an institution founded in 1948 against the backdrop of persecution of critical students and academics in eastern Berlin, we took them both to the student-run villa (called ASTA). The villa was mostly empty, as students were absent during the summer break. Stumbling from room to room without much attention, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by images of men and women kissing one another on posters loudly advertising events involving alternative sexualities. We had, more by accident than planned, entered the room of the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual student activist groups. After a short moment of arrest, Marwan exclaimed, in Arabic, “I feel išmi’zāz (‫)اشمأز‬.” Alaa worked on translating this into German and English, playing with the word ruhāb (‫رعب‬, terror, fear, horror, phobia), although Marwan probably meant something closer to the meaning of išmi’zāz, disgust or revulsion. In any event, it was more than Marwan at that moment wanted to think or confront. He had obviously been caught off-guard. Finally, we introduced them to two German friends from the former east—Jan and Georg, whom John had known since the early 1980s. Jan is an intellectual and in his early 70s, well situated and financially comfortable, while Georg, in his mid-50s, has shifted from job to job, from Ausbildung (apprenticeship training) to Ausbildung, always again

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attempting to restart his life to achieve some form of financial stability. I have known Jan since approximately 2010, but Georg I met for the first time. We joined in a café at Marheinekeplatz in the Bergmankiez, the center of cosmopolitan Kreuzberg. I will switch here to the ethnographic present: Jan seeks above all to ascertain Alaa and Marwan’s interest in Germany and what investments they have made in learning German. Throughout our conversation, he corrects their use of definite articles and the past perfect tense. I find that very annoying since it disturbs the ongoing and slowly unfolding discussion. The other Germans present criticize Jan, who defends himself that it was important they learn proper German. He then suddenly assesses Marwan’s German as better than Alaa’s; Georg and I contradict him. After another hour goes by, Jan amends his assessment and complements Alaa, “Your German is very good.” Alaa thanks him politely, shy in responding. Jan’s initial assessment was an expression not of prejudice but nervousness and impatience. As an articulate man who often assumed authority in public settings, he fell into the role of disciplinarian and language teacher. He later admitted that he was slightly overtaxed during the encounter (“leicht überfordert”). He felt embarrassed not being able to speak proper English and regretted his own overly formal if stiff behavior. Jan asks about education and career goals. Alaa talks about how German administrative officials have lost his Syrian passport—not an untypical occurrence in a country whose state administrative apparatuses were unprepared for refugees and overwhelmed. He also talks about his attempt to matriculate in engineering at four different German universities, which rejected his application out of hand because he had not yet submitted the approved language proficiency exam. He had in fact taken the exam, but it was too late to include the positive results into the application procedure. He does not understand why this is the case and expresses exhaustion in dealing with German bureaucracy. In all his exhortations, Alaa tended to begin the sentence in German, sometimes to end it with an English expression or phrase. Since Jan’s English was not that good, we had to translate words and phrases into German for him. Marwan remained mostly silent as neither his English nor his German was strong enough unless a question was clearly directed to him. But he listened intently throughout.

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Suddenly, as if this had long been on his mind, Georg intervenes and switches the topic to cultural difference as cause for the putative failure of “Integration.” He objects that in Germany he has no access to Muslim women, while men from those communities (including the Muslim men present) would have access to German women. The other men at the table are taken aback by Georg’s frank statement. He wants an explanation for what he sees as an obvious imbalance between Arab access to Christian women while he cannot have affairs or even flirt with Muslim women. “Why is that?” he asks pointedly. “The Muslim girl’s brothers would want to kill me if I even, respectfully”—he repeats the word “respectfully” several times—“approached their women.” The two young Syrians initially remained silent, but they seemed to agree with Georg’s statement about the imbalance. Jan, who knew well Georg’s history of serial monogamy with shifting partners and his frustration in search for romance, was visibly annoyed. I remained quiet, not sure of the situation. John, more confident, intervened several times to repeat Georg’s questions with alternative phrasing. He asked Marwan and Alaa if they have any tips for Georg since he apparently did not know the correct protocol with Muslim women. Jan eventually teased Georg, impatiently, that all he wanted to do was to get into bed with these women, and he was frustrated because he was not attractive enough for them. I laughed and agreed with Jan. Georg fell silent. After a long silence, gauging the situation, Alaa hesitatingly formulates a response: There were controls on marriage and dating within Syria, also. Men cannot date the women of another community—he means across sectarian groups such as Shia, Sunni, Druse, Christian, Kurd, Alevite. I mention how caste dynamics in India create similar control. Marwan, Jan, and John remain silent.

The Erotic Dimension in First Encounters While we witnessed first encounters in situ ourselves, we also heard much about them second hand in accounts by the young Syrian men who were the primary subjects of our research. Having entered Germany as refugees in 2015, they had by 2016 begun to reflect on these early

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experiences. Our interlocutors generally remembered such incidents when confronting similar scenes in the urban landscape of Berlin, where they regularly visited us from various government-assigned locations in Germany (most have since successfully relocated to the capital). They then recalled what they initially found baffling or inexplicable. Their memories were often prompted by others who spontaneously added details in a group discussion over tea and coffee. These were undoubtedly precious moments of fieldwork, especially for me, a German, as I witnessed parts of myself being seen from outside—in many ways a privilege—when talking to young Syrian men. Entering Germany, leaving a world behind, and becoming present to a new place means, ultimately, settling down and focusing on elementary questions of how to pick up an interrupted life. Although only occasionally articulated explicitly, this process and trajectory nonetheless occupied our informant’s thoughts and concerns most of the time. One question that loomed large for Syrian refugees for whom return was unthinkable was what the future that had suddenly been thrown open held if they stayed in Germany. This future was reflected existentially; they did not so much reflect on what it meant politically. Reckoning with their predicament, namely, a confounded life course, meant that the usual ideas about job, private life, and marriage were unlikely to be realized and had largely become unachievable. Our interlocutors reacted to this fact in multiple ways, including depression and sadness; most discussed their options with one another and, most importantly, with us. One set of concerns that we confronted with young Syrian men surprised us. After a few months we realized that we were, more or less, being asked: “What will happen to our erotic future? What are we here erotically?” This question was, to be sure, part of a much larger one that included the question “Who am I in this society? How am I present here other than as a refugee? Who will I be in this society?” These questions articulated a basic existential concern, namely how an unfamiliar context might become the basis for a new home, what Germans refer to as Heimat. I admit being initially unprepared to be asked detailed question concerning questions of marriage, romantic relationships, girlfriend-­ boyfriend dynamics, and especially questions about raising a family (the latter of which I knew precious little about). Far from being frivolous,

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these inquiries seriously pondered the private, personal, and intimate dimensions of everyday life in Germany that seemed most obscure to them. I had anticipated questions and discussions concerning being part of a Muslim community in Europe, about Islam in a Christian or secular context, or Germany’s relation to Israel, but instead I was more frequently confronted with questions I myself had not seriously pondered since my early 20s. Once asked, however, I thoroughly enjoyed discussing them. Suddenly there was a willing audience to experiences I had forgotten the pleasure to share. Many Germans, by contrast, were initially surprised about Syrian modes of fashionable dress and hairstyle, about the occasional blond hair, and, in general, many commented on how attractive young Syrian men appeared to them. One German man explained, “How are we supposed to deal with this?” “What?” I replied. “These men,” he said, “They are so attractive!” These positive evaluations evolved even after the 2015–2016 Cologne New Year’s Eve incidents (Amjahid et al. 2016; Daoud 2016a, b; Dietze 2016b: 93–102). The alarming suspicions about Arab male predatory sexuality that followed the Cologne event lessened in intensity, at least in Berlin, for those who had personal experiences with Syrian men. The limbo that first encounters can engender was well expressed by a middle-aged, unattached, and independent German woman, who in the context of her work spent significant time with a group of younger Syrian men. Attracted to some of these men and still mesmerized by her early impressions, she wrote to me: (…) Despite all my (…) experience, the fact that some of the men do not directly look into my eyes out of respect, but only at my chin or my throat, remains confusing (irritierend) to me. All these intricacies (Feinheiten) of the male gaze I have not yet mastered (durchdrungen). Where should I then direct my gaze? Should I direct it nonetheless into the eyes of my interlocutor? And if the gaze of the man does meet mine, should I then better avert my gaze or would that be a sign of inferiority (Unterlegenheit)? If that man increasingly looks into my eyes over time, is that then friendship gained or respect lost? (…) [my translation from the original German].5

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Unfamiliar with the visual protocol of the Syrian male gaze, this woman encountered men who, still new to Berlin, were themselves quite unfamiliar with German protocols. While interested in flirting, she did not know how to understand the tendency of men to avoid meeting her eyes. She did not automatically presume this avoidance meant disrespect as some Germans are quick to conclude. In a later discussion she admitted that in the moment recounted she was in fact titillated by this unaccustomed address. She felt that the eyes evading her gaze passed onto her neck, throat, chin, and shoulders—unfamiliar (“ungewohnt”) and irritating. Despite the avoidance, she felt being perceived erotically. And it posed the problem what to do with her own eyes. If it is correct that the meeting of gazes was a potential moment of intimacy for Syrian men which they avoided, she in turn experienced intimacy when she did not know where to direct hers. Undecided what this meant, and being an independent woman concerned about her status in the eyes of others, she pondered about the further unfolding of things: whether she would gain friendship or loose respect if eyes ever did meet. I very much appreciated her keen attentiveness and ability to articulate these liminal experiences, which I found to be rare among Germans. As I am privy to the German field of the erotic—the way men and women talk, refer to, or behave in public as well as privately when it concerns sexual, romantic, or marital practices, I was often asked to discuss matters of attraction or rejection by young Syrians. This included forms of being looked at or, inversely, studiously avoiding gazes by the same or opposite sex and it frequently included what Germans refer to as Berührungsängste (fear of contact or intimacy) and might be rendered into Arabic as allams min alkhawf (‫ )الخوف من اللمس‬or allams rahab (‫)رهاب اللمس‬. Most initial encounters were made in public contexts such as cafés, bureaucratic offices, clubs, public swimming pools, or at private grill and dinner parties. Syrians with whom we spoke had significant experiences with the landscape of attraction and rejection in Germany. But while the Syrians took these experiences quite seriously, Germans often dismissed or forgot all about them. This inattentiveness has much to do with an unselfconscious assertion of representing a host society into which foreigners have entered from outside. It is associated with a sense that

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Germans need not and have nothing to reflect: as natives they are entitled to keep on gaping, behaving, small-talking, and thinking the way they usually do (“wie wir halt sind”). While it is safe to say that the focus on the erotic has much to do with the fact that most of our interlocutors were unmarried men (between the ages of 20–35), it is also true that sexuality, in general, plays a rather pronounced role in the way Germans become present to one another at that age. Sexuality and attraction are openly and quite explicitly articulated and negotiated not only in entertainment venues and on social media, but also during various live interactions. Within Berlin’s urban landscape of enjoyment and leisure there is a tendency to scoff at the avoidance of openly discussing matters of sexuality, even if such “openness” sometimes merely amounts to no more than the exchange of standardized clichés. The general understanding is that one ought to be “aufgeklärt” (enlightened, mature) and “unverkrampft” and not “verklemmt” (relaxed, uninhibited, not repressed), able to voice and act upon one’s desires as long as they remain within the limits of the legally and morally acceptable. Not pursuing one’s desire is conceivable only when individual mood shifts, ambivalent feelings, or a shyness of character prevent the action, while piety is rarely considered relevant. The performance of piety is a weakly understood emotional disposition among mainstream Berliners. To many it suggests being fremdbestimmt (other-directed), whereas sexuality is supposed to be selbstbestimmt (self-determined).6 German women frequently assert their sexuality, and German men while perhaps more coy want to be thought of as experienced or at least as knowledgeable much unlike the Syrian men we met, who were, by contrast, rather quick to openly announce their virginity. Syrian young men thus entered an already existing field of the erotic, of expectations, practices, and fantasies that included various sexual ideas and protocols. They were a quick study. They reacted to this field differently than they had with the one they experienced in Turkey (as some pointed out), which was for many the first country of exile. They were now far removed from what they had barely begun to experience as adolescents or as young men in Syria. Most were too young to have had access to sexual practices in Syria before they became refugees. Germany, then, became a site of

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opportunity, enactment, and, given the paucity of Syrian or Arab women, also of renunciation. One experience most were bewildered by was the emergence of an erotic dimension in interactions with older age groups, which has its origin in the open structure of German life courses, where marriage, divorce, and sexuality are less strictly regulated and dominated by the master plot of conjugal reproduction (Georg, e.g., was divorced and had a daughter with a woman who had remarried). Another was the fact that Turkish German women, who many initially imagined as possible partners, often acted in ways that did not align well with Syrian ideas about romance. In Turkey, many Syrian men had experienced strong rejection against any attempt to enter the local marriage market. We are using the term erotic here in its most general sense, neither reducible merely to the sexual nor to the romantic or the marital—yet concerned closely with all three domains. The broadness of the term implicated as “erotic” is imperative not least because Syrian notions of intimacy are not as explicitly or reductively sexual as the German sense of the term erotisch might perhaps imply today.7 This we believe to be true for all Arab notions of the erotic. The term erotic means to cover the experience of desire—of being desired or desiring—whether in real or in fantasy, that becomes internal to interactions with Germans. Desire traverses boundaries of self and other and by intimately implicating one another in a pregnant exchange. It is a privileged site for investigating mutual belonging, that is, becoming present to one another. When moving through urban space, Syrians experienced German reactions to them, which were often positive, but at times could also be negative. At a breakfast organized by us at a well-known Turkish café, frequented by international tourists as well as by urban locals, a German waitress approached us repeatedly to show demonstrably her appreciation for the way the young men at the table looked handsome and groomed (“Das sind ja mal gut aussehende Männer…,” which translates as, “Finally some good-looking men here …”). In a flirtatious style, she inquired about each and every individual present and showed much interest in the group, surprising all of the guests. Somewhat embarrassed by her behavior, I took the waitress aside and engaged in a short discussion with her while the others drank their coffees. She was a typical child of the city: open,

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kind, and unafraid, employing many phrases that bespoke her Berlin origins. By contrast, in a commercial sauna into which one Syrian man had taken his girlfriend (blond and hence “German-looking”), a tense scene erupted as another visitor felt uncomfortable with the couple’s presence and expressed his disapproval by openly disciplining the Syrian on “hygiene,” correcting the way he had placed his towel on the wooden planks. In a later discussion, the couple, visibly upset about the man’s brazen sense of entitlement, thought this was a case of disavowed jealousy: seeing a young foreign man with what he thought was a German woman. Syrians were sensitive and attentive to such slights, and later discussed them at length with us. For better or worse, it was part of how Germany became familiar to them. The following two examples depict ways in which young Syrian men entered into German fantasies and desires.

Exemplary Cases Halim is offered a “very exciting experience” and told he is a “Quotenaraber.” A young man from Damascus, Halim, told us that he befriended a married couple with children in his first German residence, in Mecklenburg, that he had been assigned after fleeing to Germany. He now considers them “family.” When he told them one day that he was still a virgin, they felt pity. It was unfortunate for him, they said, “You should start seeing girls. We are sorry for you.” “I cannot do that,” he replied, and “I don’t want to, not before marriage.” Halim explained that he would not like himself if he were to engage intimately with a girl. He would disappoint himself. “I consider myself a religious guy,” he said, “I became more religious after my trip from Syria to Germany. God protected me.” After receiving asylum in Germany and a three-year visa, Halim began using couchsurfing.com to find free lodging while traveling throughout Europe. In a visit to Frankfurt (am Main), unable to find a place to stay, Halim was approached by an attractive woman in her 50s while sitting on a park bench. Surprisingly, after he told her that he was a refugee, she

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offered to put him up. She promised a “very exciting evening.” In Syria such an offer would only be made by a prostitute, Halim commented. So, he rejected her offer, much as he rejected having sex with any woman before marriage. Although Halim found the idea of an older woman approaching him somewhat objectionable, he reacted politely, and now enjoyed representing the encounter as a humorous event. Since then he has shared a room through couchsurfing.com with many women closer to his age. He often calls them “girlfriends” but denies having had any sex with them. One of these girls, Renée, whom he visited several times, became close to him and they engaged in what he considered a romantic relationship. One day, however, Renée became suddenly very annoyed after Halim had attempted a first shy kiss. She no longer wanted to see him, she texted him later, adding that, “You were only my Quotenaraber” (“token Arab”). As Halim told us this story, he was still visibly perturbed about what had gone wrong in the brief but intense relationship. Following this disclosure, I had several long conversations with Halim in which he asked, “What happened?” It bothered him that Renée ended their relation over the phone, through a text messaging service and not in person. Perhaps, he thought, she did not want to use the insulting term Quotenaraber to his face and then have to deal with the repercussions (i.e. his anger or disappointment). Halim felt wounded. The sudden rejection struck him as unnecessarily cruel. An important aspect of these encounters concerns new technologies of contacting, messaging, meeting, and hooking up such as couchsurfing. com, Tinder, Facebook, Instagram, and other new media in general. We became aware of the widespread use of couchsurfing.com for traveling only through this project. Certainly, none of these technologies were around when I myself was in the busyness of “hooking up” in Berlin some 25–30 years ago. Syrians we knew had, for example, uploaded their muscular torsos onto websites receiving massive responses from men and women astounding us about the explicitness of sensuous communication (very unlike what I remember for my generation). In strategies of photographic hide and seek, online flirting, and double entendres, we realized we were hopelessly altmodisch (old-fashioned) and more or less clueless. These new technologies of excitement (“die neue Erregungstechnologie”) played an important role especially in intervening months before the first

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German sentences were inculcated and more permanent contacts established. While remaining under-analyzed in how exactly these technologies affected German-Syrian first encounters, we hope other researchers will tread that path—preferably those unencumbered as we are by more advanced age and technological ill-talent or even phobia. Firat is asked to be photographed without his shirt, and Karolina asks about John and Parvis. The current housing shortage in Berlin, partly due to the new arrivals, made it difficult to find affordable housing. We encountered many Germans who offered refugees rooms in their own apartments. Firat, a young man from Aleppo, stayed with us while he searched for a room. After three weeks, he found one in an apartment with a 77-year-old man, Dieter, who soon revealed that he was bisexual. Firat praised Dieter’s kindness in daily interaction and conversation and he liked the room he was given. He also liked that Dieter spoke only in German improving Firat’s ability to converse in the language. But he disliked the distance he had to travel to get to Dieter’s apartment (over an hour from the city center) and Dieter’s obsession with petty domestic rules, such as order (Ordnung) and punctuality (Pünktlichkeit). Dieter was disappointed but amicable when Firat told him that he had found another place closer to the city center. On the night of his departure, after he had prepared a dinner, Dieter surprised Firat by spontaneously asking to photograph him without his shirt on. Firat, a man in his early 20s, had what many would consider perfect muscle definition. Nor was he a stranger to using photographs to advertise his body’s build. But the following morning, seemingly perplexed and ashamed, he told us, “I wouldn’t do such a thing.” The idea to leave behind a memento of his body for Dieter to play with shocked Firat as it revealed in one instant an element in their relationship he had entirely missed: he was the object of Dieter’s desire. The older men’s gentleness, which Firat had always praised, suddenly became disturbed by what seemed to be of a more instrumental nature. Dieter, a benevolent older friend, had shown that he, too, wanted something from him. By consequence, Firat never returned to visit and give his respects to Dieter as he did with so many other German acquaintances.

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We helped Firat find a room in an apartment a young local German man inherited from his grandparents. Again, through couchsurfing.com, Firat made this room available for tourists visiting Berlin over the summer thus acquiring the ability to visit foreign countries for short trips in return. Nearly every week during the summer, he hosted female visitors from many countries, including France, Italy, Belgium, Japan, and the United States. Couchsurfing.com had undeniably morphed into a technique of experimenting with friendship and erotic encounter. Firat traveled to Italy to visit a girl who had stayed with him. “It was a disaster,” he narrates, as she refused to welcome and see him altogether. They communicated only over the phone even while he stood outside her apartment. Through an online dating service, Firat also befriended Karolina, a 30-year-old single German mother who recently moved to Berlin. A pleasant, intelligent woman with a Master’s Degree, she had fallen in love with a Latin American immigrant, had his child, and then was told he did not want to be a father. She was definitely interested in a romantic relationship with Firat, while he remained ambivalent. He doubted from the beginning whether she was “the right one.” One day we organized a trip with six Syrian men to a lake in southern Berlin. We gave them the choice of swimming either in Schlachtensee or in Krumme Lanke, two well-known adjacent lakes in the south of Berlin. The latter, we pointed out, had a great deal of nudity as Berliners have the tradition of swimming naked in the lake and lie at certain spots in the rare heat of summer. To our surprise, they chose Krumme Lanke, which they had already visited once. Less concerned about nudity, they intimated that at one spot there was a long rope attached to a tall tree from which they could swing and jump out high into the water. They very much appreciated that. Immediately upon arrival at the lake, a German man approached us and asked John, “Did you bring these guys here?” “No,” John replied, “It was them that brought me here.” “Do they know this is a nude beach (Nacktbadestrand)?” he asked. (About 80% of those lying in the area were naked.) Yes, they know, replied John, as it was obvious. Afterward, our Syrian group of men who had observed the exchange asked about what had been spoken. They interpreted the question of the man to suggest that they would be unable to handle German nudity, because they were

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Arab men—an idea at which they scoffed. This seemed to attribute a petty small-mindedness to them. At least he wasn’t unfriendly, John explained apologetically, but they were disturbed and felt insulted. “Why should we care about naked bodies?” The young Syrian men sunbathed in their underwear and swam in their bathing suits playing ball in the water. The atmosphere was calm and playful. An hour later, Karolina arrived at the scene and exclaimed to me, “Why are you guys here? This is a nude beach.” Everyone studiously avoided addressing her remarks and changed the topic. Several times Firat had already brought her and her child along to visit us in our apartment or in various cafés. The men were annoyed that she, too, thought this might be an issue for them. But, being a friend, they did not want to confront her. In both cases Germans attributed to Syrians what they thought they could not handle. A few hours later, we walked to a café near the underground station (subway). While I was buying cappuccinos and local desserts for all, Karolina grasped the opportunity and asked John in German, “So, do you and Parvis have women (Frauen) in the US?” She obviously meant “wives” (Ehefrauen) instead of “women,” but John feigned as if his German was limited, and said, “Of course, there are many women in the US.” “No,” Karolina corrected him, “I mean, are you married to women?” Since she had visited us a number of times, John was taken aback by such directness in front of the other men. John and I had not broached the topic directly with our Syrian acquaintances, although it was obvious that we were something like a couple. The men knew that John and I lived together in Berlin as well as in the United States. He stumbled to respond, “Parvis and I are together, we live together.” While Karolina doggedly kept on searching for an explicit reference to homosexuality, oblivious to John’s evasions, our Arab friends sat quietly, either looking down or checking their cellphones. No one showed any overt curiosity in Karolina’s question. They displayed a sort of tact, perhaps unfamiliar to contemporary Germans. This was not something they would have wanted us to answer openly, nor did they ever ask us directly. For them, it all went without saying. Let me return to the first encounter described at the beginning of this chapter. It encompasses two parts. The first is how Marwan and Alaa

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initially discovered Berlin as tourists as well as life in Germany’s capital. The second part consists of how Georg accused them of not sharing their women. We initiated these interactions, thus fulfilling a role they had assigned to us as friends capable of introducing them to some of the German expectations of Integration. Most European countries have introduced integration courses for newcomers, made more urgent by the “refugee wave” into Europe of 2015. The expectations of what integration might mean outside these courses, however, are vague and cannot be deduced from policy guidelines. When we asked young refugee men what they had learned from the integration course, one recurrent response was, “the colors of the German flag.” In the first encounter depicted we initially wanted Marwan and Alaa to experience ways in which Germans, specific to their age, organize their own experiences in Berlin. We are considerably older than these two men, but while always paying for expenses, we did this much as they would have insisted on paying for us in Syria. Reciprocity was not lacking in the relationship, as they advised us on new cellphones and computer apps, and helped with small household repairs when we did not know the ins and outs (which was much more frequent than one might assume). This was not a pre-arrangement, but happened when they witnessed our utter helplessness with some of these chores. The important point is not reciprocity, however, but mutual discovery, not only to share what we knew of the city and country but to become aware of the city’s changes and, along with it, German culture. We are all part of these changes and discovering them simultaneously as John and I are living our quotidian lives as academics in the United States. To be sure, every discovery was not equally pleasing—like Marwan’s discovery of the student LGBT groups at the Freie Universität. Yet Alaa confided in us about eight months later that he takes every guest who visits him to many of the same places we initially took him and Marwan. Outside of language and integration courses, refugees had a great deal of free time but little idea about what sort of things Berlin offered that they themselves might also enjoy. In Syria, for example, bicycling is rarely used to get to some place but only for play, swimming is done with families and never nude, cooking at home by women. Both now daily ride their bicycles when the weather permits, and Alaa is

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becoming somewhat of a regular cook, meeting with friends, and swimming in Berlin’s public baths and lakes. The second part of the first encounter was a conversation between two Syrian and two German men of different generations. John and I were merely trusted facilitators and observers here. Jan encouraged the refugees to focus on language and education, what for most Germans are the major indices of successful Integration, but he did not insist about knowledge of Germany, nor try to school them with his superior knowledge as writer and intellectual. The two Syrians understood these expectations, however, and agreed with them. Georg, in contrast to Jan, engaged wholly in a phantasmatic register, not interested in what the two men themselves were experiencing. He sought to actualize his conscious fantasy of unavailable sex by projecting into Alaa and Marwan his unconscious phantasies about the reasons for the unavailability of Muslim women. Implicitly, he also reacted to the fact that it was mainly young men who had entered Germany in 2015, leaving other family members behind. His repetition of the word “respectfully” was to take the edge off his demand. The encounter with two energetic and attractive Syrian men, many years his junior, led him to confront them with his frustration or fear of approaching Muslim women. Georg understood that these men represented something German women might be interested in and his reaction smacked of disavowed jealousy. While veiled Muslim women in Berlin may indeed be unavailable to Georg, he seemed to think that veiling itself may be making them unavailable and not the fact that at his age they are usually already married. Nor did he reflect on his relation to the veil and what it symbolizes to him. To be sure, veiling does allow women to evade the desirous gazes of men they do not want to acknowledge, but unveiling would not suddenly render them more available either. Georg’s fantasies about female availability led him to articulate arguments about culture and religion that repeated a common assumption, namely, that Integration fails to the degree that Muslim women are pious. He does not make a similar observation of pious Catholic or Protestant women, whose unavailability he seems to take for granted without being bothered by it the least. Indeed, he would in all likelihood not expect a pious Christian woman to ever be interested in him, a divorcee with various erotic ambitions and ponytail. Jan, then,

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was right that Georg’s argument about cultural integration was actually a displacement of his frustration about sexual access and availability. The attentive silence of Alaa and Marwan suggests that they were affected not just by a projection onto them but a projective identification: that some emotion had been deposited into them—the weight of Georg’s intervention which they were asked to contain and compelled to respond to. Georg was making them feel responsible for the unavailability of women to him. He wanted to remain who he was and at the same time become an object of Muslim female desire thus enlarging his circle of erotic possibility. Integration, for Georg, meant becoming successfully present in the other’s field of desire without having to do anything to gain entrance. The two Syrian men were of course not positioned and perhaps did not want to tell Georg how he should change himself to gain access (e.g. by entering Berlin’s Muslim and mostly Turkish community). They themselves were struggling with how to navigate the erotic landscape in Germany. The frame for understanding this encounter, then, is not the performance of projections following German and Syrian cultural scripts, but the interpersonal actualization of projections through the unconscious transference of emotions (Ogden 1979: 357–371). Long-term incorporation might in fact depend on the willingness to be the container for the other’s fantasies but also the ability to modify these such that communication can continue (Bion 1962; Borneman 2014: 442–461).

Conclusion First encounters provide a window into initial moments of mutual projection, identification, and transference, which are often edited out from narratives and memories through processes of secondary revision. The liminal quality of these encounters is due to the vulnerabilities revealed and brought to bear in specific pregnant moments when one’s guard is down, when denial, disavowal, or repression no longer allow for a successful circumvention of potentially conflictual exchanges. The ethnographic examples presented here depict the friction in erotic encounters with its origin in the conflictual nature of desire itself. Erotic

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conflicts arise when we identify each other as objects of desire, as worthy of attention, or when we witness others do so. They are an unavoidable element in exchanges between Germans and the new arrivals; both want to be perceived as desirable but also want to control the terms in which this desire is expressed and what it implies. To disavow the desire of others is to express indifference, to make them feel invisible, if not excluded. To acknowledge the desire of others, by contrast, may generate feelings of lack and jealousy, but also can also lead to mutual belonging to a place. It is important to stress that a failed encounter is not one that is conflictual, but rather one that leads to no modification of one’s behavior or expectations as impressions do their work with the passage of time. The erotic in human relationships allows for an existential proximity in which the other’s lack becomes the spark for one’s own renewal, eventually allowing both persons to become someone other than what each were to the world before. To be true, becoming the “solution” to someone’s else’s lack is rarely a successful recipe. It frequently ends in disappointment or is of limited duration. But even if and when such encounters end in “failure” (however one defines that term), they allow those involved to depart from the past into something that they were not before. The asymmetry of “refugee” and “native” is not overcome, but the inequality is altered in allowing those that stood under the shadow of death to participate as objects and subjects of attraction, desire, or even love—all of which are sources for vitality and aliveness. In this, erotic encounters can subvert the symmetry of national belonging. In the enigmatic register of desire, indeed, the question arises of who exactly belongs to whom. One can speak of a domain here where the German belongs to the Syrian as much as the Syrian belongs to the German. As internal images of each other mix with external objects, erotic attraction can conflict with claims of origin, their relevance, or legitimacy. As a source of emotional security or anxiety, it is poised to upset the relation of desire to belonging. The various solutions and creative elaborations of such unfolding relationships might be seen as presenting a vanguard of processes of incorporation or their failure. While they tell us of pleasure and plain, they also indicate momentary solutions as well as the travails that a society as a whole will eventually have to undergo to arrive at what it conceives of as Integration.8

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In German public discourse, Arab’s men sexuality is often portrayed as a problem of cultural adaption, failing social integration, or a problematic masculinity, while the intersubjective dimension of erotic incorporation is ignored. Scholars have shown that in recent years migration has increasingly become understood also as a “sexual problem” (Partridge 2012; Dietze 2016a: 1–16). We have found that Germans are not only objects of desire for Syrians, but Syrian men have frequently become objects of desire for Germans.9 Whether this desire expresses itself in attraction or rejection, acknowledging this fact results in a more nuanced picture. It is striking how pervasively German desires in these encounters have been erased in public discourse. As it is Syrians who entered Germany, there dominates a more or less unquestioned assumption that they entered German forms of intimacy downplaying the interactive and intersubjective dynamics of erotic exchanges.10 Is this erasure perhaps the expression of an unacknowledged German wish to be desirable? While I have limited this brief overview to initial encounters, many stable relationships have emerged in which Syrian men have found a new home in Germany with partners unimaginable to them just a few years ago. Alaa has moved to Berlin and now lives with his girlfriend in their first apartment. They were later betrothed in an Islamic marriage (because it allowed him, a pious Muslim, to engage in sex) but held off German legal marriage for now. They are, quite exceptionally, not planning to have children, and there are no external strings attached to their relationship. This is something Alaa never conceived of in previous years. When Jan’s partner of many years died, he invited Alaa to come to his home to select expensive items from his partner’s kitchen to begin a proper household with the much needed utensils. Halim, after his disheartening experience with Renée, married a Muslim woman from the Balkans, herself an immigrant to Germany. After some difficult searching they found an affordable apartment. Georg is still searching for a partner and regularly visits with his daughter. Most Syrian men we know would now, four years after their arrival in Germany, preferably shed their identity as refugees. They see nothing positive in inhabiting a category associated with a shattered life brought to a halt in its tracks with an uncertain future: matter out of place in Germany. Erotic entanglements, by contrast, whether they lead to sexual

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and romantic contact or culminate in marital union, suggest an overcoming of this paralysis allowing life to begin anew. They present the most significant accomplishment in their recent lives allowing for a real transformation of predicament. They emphasize a form of arrival in Germany that is more elementary than mere physical presence, the acquisition of rights, or the recognition of asylum. It establishes for each individual in a unique way a human connection by being desirable to someone else. Furthermore, it involves the newcomer with a wider friend and kinship network that is not limited to fellow refugees, bureaucratic, or institutional personnel. The profoundly existential dimension of the erotic has the potential to complicate and alter the asymmetry between “refugees” and “natives,” new and old Germans. The desire to be desired is something we found present with all refugees we worked with. Being deemed valued enough to participate in intimate relationships implies becoming the source of emotional security and trust for somebody else. The erotic resists most radically the tragic script that lies in waiting, already complete and forced upon all refugees, wherever they happen to arrive. This script encloses them in a victim narrative that invites either pity or indifference, with the latter the final outcome when the former is exhausted. Many Syrians we know understand this dynamic rather well and try to resist it. Even if it proves illusionary in some cases, the erotic entertains a possibility of departure from Flüchtlingsstarre, a sort of refugee rigor mortis, by allowing the future to beckon as something positive, something one can look forward to, something to defeat the dark pull that lies behind them.11

Notes 1. The employment of qualifiers such as “first” and “initial” contemporizes the voluminous anthropological theorization of “first contact” to which I do not refer here. Compare, for example, the debate between Marshall Sahlins (1981) and Gananath Obeyesekere (1992), which also involved an erotic dimension. Sahlins, in his analysis of the encounter between Captain Cook’s crew and Hawaiians, was one of the first anthropologists to interpret erotic contact as having a political significance, leading ulti-

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mately to the murder of Cook. Told solely through the viewpoint of Cook’s men, Sahlins (1981: 39) quotes Cook’s own account: “They [i.e. native women] visited us with no other view than to make a surrender of their persons.” He interprets this wish to have sex in several ways: first, as a submission to mastery among the pre-contact Polynesians; second, as the appropriation of their mana in the form of sexual intercourse with Cook’s crew; third, as a form of rebellion against their own men; and fourth as the enactment of a cultural script where Cook’s appearance was understood in terms of the myth of Lono, a God who returns and is killed (cf. Gagnon 1997). By contrast, I conceive first encounters here within the actual fieldwork setting involving a third (Borneman 2011: 234–248). These are not absolutely original encounters between peoples (cf. Sahlins) but transformative experiences between individuals. They concern particular Syrians and particular Germans who meet one another face to face and interact or converse in an urban landscape for the first time. First encounters are analytically most informative if one can follow the unfolding relationships through time. What concurs with older forms of anthropological inquiry as “first contact” is the fact that aspects of otherness and familiarity are unusually striking in early situations and that prejudices preceding the encounter come to structure the interaction, making visible to a degree what frequently remains unspoken. What is experienced as other, similar, or familiar is hence never given objectively but regularly as much a product of fantasy as of displacement, transference, or projection. My emphasis here lies on what these encounters might mean for the future, how they tell participants what awaits them, and how individuals cope with what happened in them. 2. One significant development in Germany is the emergence of a new pornographic genre called Flüchtlingspornographie (“refugee porn”) since 2015. According to Mohamed Amjahid (2018), author for the German weekly Die Zeit, this genre depicts refugee women (often veiled) in submissive poses to German or Western customers. The staged scenes sometimes include the exchange of money, sometimes Arabic language. In countries like Germany, Austria, Poland, or Hungary, for example, the demand fluctuates on websites such as pornhub, xHamster, RedTube whenever political dispute on migration dominates the news as it does for example during regional or national elections. I want to thank Nada

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El-Kouny for informing me about the phenomenon of “refugee porn” of which I was, until then, unaware. 3. The epithet “Hajji” is often used as a title expressing respect and honor toward an elderly person. It originally describes the one who has successfully performed the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca/Medina, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, its core practices: the profession of faith ­(shahada), prayer (salat), alms-giving (zakat), fasting (zawm), and the pilgrimage (hajj). 4. Some refugees have even attached a picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the wall of their apartments as the Chancellor’s decision had profoundly changed their predicament. 5. In the German original: “Bei aller (…) Erfahrung, die Tatsache, dass mir einige der Männer aus Respekt nicht in die Augen, sondern auf das Kinn, bzw. den Hals schauen, finde ich immer noch irritierend. Diese ganzen Feinheiten des männlichen Blicks habe ich noch nicht durchdrungen. Wo schaue dann bitte ich selbst hin? Trotzdem in die Augen meines Gegenübers? Und wenn dann der Blick des Mannes doch mal auf meinen trifft, schaue ich dann besser weg oder wäre das ein Signal von Unterlegenheit? Schaut mir der Mann mit der Zeit mehr und mehr in die Augen, ist das dann gewonnene Freundschaft oder verlorener Respekt?” 6. However erroneous or appropriate such conceptions are held to be, it is perhaps useful to point out that “sexuelle Selbstbestimmung” (sexual self-­ determination) is an actual legal category in Germany since the 1970s. There is not one but many laws circumscribing and defining the right to sexual self-determination in the German Criminal Code. For codes defining violations of this right, see §§ 174 ff StGB (Strafgesetzbuch). 7. Arabic terms referring to the erotic include ‫( شهواني‬chivalry, honor, romance). 8. This is a shortened version of a longer paper which describes various erotic encounters between Syrians and Germans in contemporary Berlin approximately between 2015 and 2017, mostly in 2016 (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017a). We were present in these as an ethnographic intersubjective third (Borneman 2011: 234–248). While engaging in ethnographic work, we participated in and organized conferences, workshops, and gave invited talks in Germany, the United States, and India. In these academic contexts, we met heightened sensitivity and sometimes uncomfortableness in the use of various terminologies. Frequently, this was due to linguistic and conceptual confusion, the adherence to

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specific theoretical approaches, and the general unpleasant academic climate of suspicion and competition. An early conference in the United States was deliberately titled Xenophobia and Social Integration (2015). The appearance of the term “integration” coupled with “Xenophobia” annoyed some scholars who assumed we posed an automatic causal link between the two. Others commented that integration resembled too closely the French intégrism or suggested we meant a sense of assimilation. The term integration, however, is ubiquitously used in public discourse in many European countries: in Germany on the street as much as in talk shows or in professional discussions. It is somewhat difficult to avoid. Rejecting the implicit demands of German Assimilation and skeptical of some meanings associated with German Leitkultur, we initially deployed the term integration because it traverses English, German, and French, thus offering the greatest transparency in translation. At a follow-up conference, titled “Digesting Difference: Modes of Social Incorporation in Europe,” we employed the word “digestion” (which I translated from the German Verdauung) and incorporation (which I translated back into Eingliederung). During discussions in 2018–2019 at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany, however, the term incorporation again raised eyebrows as some German scholars associated it with German Volkskörper (literally, the body of the people, a body politic), a term abused by the National-Socialists while its use predated the Third Reich. Reading incorporation as a form of Einverleibung, these concerns were apt insofar as members of right-wing German political parties, including the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), had begun deploying a clever strategy to revitalize older meanings of that period. We eventually decided to ignore such concerns and stick with the English incorporation, by which I mean Eingliederung as integration and embodiment through mutual belonging, and not Einverleibung as form of assimilation. 9. We experienced a great amount of tactfulness in the way Syrian men dealt with the fact that John and I were a couple and lived an alternative lifestyle that nearly all of them do not consider a possibility for themselves. For a wonderfully reflective account of how the vulnerability and exoticism of refugees can result in attraction, see Cabot (2018). 10. For a diverging and more critical analysis and understanding of such dynamics see Partridge (2012: 91), who speaks of strategies of “exclusionary incorporation” and the production of a “hypersexuality” of espe-

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cially black bodies in Germany, which he links to patriarchy, the history of Nazi genocide with its resulting German guilt, as well as US military occupation (which included many black men) and the triumph of African American popular culture in Germany. 11. I do not speak, write, nor read Arabic. All discussions were conducted in English, German, and, on some occasions, French. I consistently asked for Arab translations in order to have my interlocutors associate meanings submerged and distorted in German, French, or English during discussion. I want to thank Alaa, Halim, Firat, and Marwan in particular for their patience and kindness in helping me with Arabic words and meanings throughout fieldwork and with Arabic script when finally finishing this chapter.

References Amjahid, Mohamed. 2018. Sexismus: Wann Flüchtlingspornos boomen. ZEIT ONLINE. https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2018-05/sexismus-refugeepornfluechtlinge-pornografie-deutschland-analyse/komplettansicht. Accessed 3 Feb 2019. Amjahid, Mohamed, Christian Fuchs, Vanessa Guinan-Bank, Anne Kunze, Stepgan Lebert, Sebastian Mondial, Daniel Müller, Yassin Misharbash, Martin Nejezchleba, and Samuel Rieth. 2016. Was geschah wirklich? ZEIT MAGAZIN. https://www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2016/27/silvesternacht-koelnfluechtlingsdebatte-aufklaerung. Accessed 5 Feb 2019. Bion, Wilfred. 1962. A Theory of Thinking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 43: 306–310. Borneman, John. 2011. Daydreaming, Intimacy, and the Intersubjective Third in Fieldwork Encounters in Syria. American Ethnologist 38 (2): 234–248. ———. 2014. Containment in Interlocution-Based Fieldwork Encounters: Thought, Theory, and Transformative Thinking. Anthropological Theory 14 (4): 442–461. Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017a. Syrian Refugees in Germany: Erotic Conflict and Foreigner Integration. Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences XXII (1): 20–47. Shimla, India: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. ———. 2017b. The Concept of Stimmung: From Indifference to Xenophobia in Germany’s Refugee Crisis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135.

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Cabot, Heath. 2018. ‘She Goes with the Refugees’: Desire and Power Amid the Politics of Asylum in Greece. In Sex: Ethnographic Encounters, ed. Richard Joseph Martin and Dieter Haller, 27–46. London and New  York: Bloomsbury Academic. Daoud, Kamel. 2016a. Cologne, lieu de fantasmes. Le Monde, January 31. ———. 2016b. La misère sexuelle du monde arabe. The New  York Times, February 12. Dietze, Gabriele. 2016a. Ethnosexismus: Sex-Mob-Narrative um die Kölner Sylvesternacht. Movements 2 (1): 1–16. ———. 2016b. Das ‘Ereignis Köln’. Femina Politica. Zeitschrift für Feministische Politikwissenschaft 25 (1): 93–102. Gagnon, John. 1997. Others Have Sex with Others: Captain Cook and the Penetration of the Pacific, Sexual Cultures and Population Movement. In Sexual Cultures and Migration in the Era of Aids: Anthropological and Demographic Perspectives, ed. Gilbert Herdt, 21–40. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ogden, Thomas H. 1979. On Projective Identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 60: 357–373. Partridge, Damani J. 2012. Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

5 The Everyday, ‘Ordinary’ Citizens, and Ambiguous Governance Affect in Antwerp Anick Vollebergh

Oud-Borgerhout is a relatively poor and pluri-ethnic borough in the northeast of the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Infamous because of a large Moroccan-background population and high levels of electoral support for the far-right, Oud-Borgerhout for a long time functioned as the symbol of the failure and frictions of Flemish multicultural society (Beyen 2015; De Koning and Vollebergh 2019). It became a laboratory for grassroots and governance efforts to solve these frictions and foster ‘living together’ (samenleven) between so-called allochthons (with a migrant background) and autochthons (native Belgians). One summer afternoon in 2009, in part of Oud-Borgerhout that I will call ‘Van Rijswijck,’ two civil servants were busy putting out tables and chairs in the middle of a somewhat dilapidated roundabout. This was the culmination of a resident consultation process, where the civil servants and two district aldermen would present to local residents the final plans

A. Vollebergh (*) Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_5

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for a reconstruction project that would turn the roundabout into a square. This and other small-scale, local reconstructions—of playgrounds, parks, squares, and street lay-outs—were carried out by the progressive-green district council to fulfill their two main objectives for the borough: increase livability and stimulate samenleven. By rerouting traffic to create a new square, local officials hoped to create an attractive space where residents could ‘encounter’ one another. The presentation itself was to be a festive occasion: not only was there a stall where residents could view the final design for the reconstruction, but there were chairs for people to sit and chat, and a local Moroccan organization was to serve mint tea. The afternoon turned out to be anything but festive, however. A handful of middle-aged and elderly white residents came out of their houses to see what was going on. They were joined by several Moroccan-Belgian residents and local business owners. As soon as they saw the design, they began to complain angrily, ganging up on the civil servants and raising their voices. “Who is paying for this?” one white woman asked rhetorically. “We, the citizens, right? And we don’t want a square, so what else do you need to know? But no one listens to the citizen…you should come out here once, spend a night here. Then your eyes will open up to the truth and you will say: ah well, that lady was right after all.” A Moroccan-Belgian business owner backed her up, addressing the civil servants: “You are back in your suburb by the evening, I am sure, and then you think you can decide what will happen here, while we all have to suffer the nuisance?” The small group applauded and laughed. “We don’t have a traffic problem,” he continued, the white residents nodding along. “We have a problem of youth nuisance. And that is not my opinion, that is the opinion of all the residents here.” Across the sidewalk, small groups of white residents were talking among each other. They repeated a narrative that I had often heard before in Oud-Borgerhout: “Moroccan youths,” always up to no good, had taken over the neighborhood and caused its demise—and the district government and police had just let it happen. By this point, Moroccan-Belgian youth had joined the small crowd. Whenever the civil servants stopped paying attention, the youth would

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knock over chairs and try to snatch away the blueprints for the square. Meanwhile, members of the local Moroccan organization that were meant to serve mint tea had gathered at some distance from the roundabout and stood watching the discussions and the mockery of the children. The tea was never served.

Incorporation and the Trope of the Ordinary Citizen The governance of difference in postcolonial Europe is inexorably tied to the political summoning of the trope of the ordinary national citizen. The anxious national discourses and culturalist integration policies that started to draw anthropologists’ attention at the turn of the century relied heavily on the construction of a ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ national population whose norms, values, and freedoms were supposedly threatened by ethnic and religious Others (Geschiere 2009; Stolcke 1995; Vertovec 2011). Now that far-right populism has swept over Europe and other parts of the world, the figure of the white, disenfranchised ‘ordinary man’ stands at the center of political and scholarly attention (Gusterson 2017; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Walley 2017; Gingrich and Banks 2006; Wodak et al. 2013). The trope of the ordinary man and the concomitant political reworking of white working-classness have not remained limited to the political arena. A range of ethnographic studies shows how these notions have seeped into vernacular practices, shaping denizens’ sensorial reading of the urban landscape, informing senses of self, and providing a potent frame for political resistance, as the vignette above also illustrates (de Koning and Vollebergh 2019; Shoshan 2008; Mepschen 2019). In this chapter, I use the incident on the roundabout, and the governance response that it triggered, to ask how the trope of the ‘ordinary national’ structures governance perspectives on vernacular  practices of incorporation and conviviality as they come about in marginalized multi-­ ethnic neighborhoods. Governance actors in Oud-Borgerhout perceived the contestations described above as problematic and responded to it by developing a ‘diversity trajectory’ focused on repairing trust in the Van

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Rijswijck neighborhood. Both the consultative moment on the roundabout and the subsequent intervention were part of a particular type of urban governance program, aimed at remedying a perceived deficit of neighborliness and cohesion in ‘deprived’ diverse neighborhoods and seeking to foster new civic dispositions and affects. This governance investment in what in Flanders is called samenleven (‘living together,’ akin to the Spanish convivencia or the French vivre ensemble) related in ambiguous ways to neighborly interactions as they unfolded in Oud-Borgerhout. Despite its cross-ethnic character, the joined protest on the roundabout, for example, was not understood by governance actors as evidence of living together. I argue that, in order to understand why some vernacular practices of incorporation and conviviality become intelligible as proper samenleven and some do not, we need to attend to the way in which the notion of the ordinary man as well as related constructions of ‘everyday life’ shape the governance of diverse neighborhoods. The new political importance and meaning ascribed to the white working-class by way of the populist appeal to the ‘ordinary national’ is deeply ambiguous. The white working-class is rendered as an undemocratic and intolerant threat that needs to be brought into the proper national fold, but also as authentic seer and speaker of the real, unmediated truth of multicultural society and its supposed failure. On the one hand, the rise of neo-nationalist and far-right populist parties in Europe is commonly framed as a moral and political threat: a dangerous reflux of an ‘illicit’ racist and anti-democratic nationalism that was assumed to have been left behind (Shoshan 2016). In Belgium, the consecutive electoral wins for the Flemish far-right, known as “Black Saturdays,” generated a deep sense of moral shock and instigated social mobilization and governance interventions. As Nitzan Shoshan argues with respect to the governance of neo-nazi youth in Berlin, overlapping political, therapeutic, and academic discourses tend to produce the ‘extreme-right voter’ in a specifically classed and raced way: as a disenfranchised white figure associated with marginalized urban spaces and with the ‘losing’ side of globalization (2016, 40–42; 174–175). This ascription is upheld even when electoral studies show that this is a much too limited interpretation (Walley 2017), symbolically purging and absolving the nation and society as a whole from the moral stain of

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racism (Ceuppens 2003; Haylett 2001; Hewitt 2005). As a result, marginalized white working-class spaces have become the object of an intense “management of hate” that seeks to reform and domesticate the “affective attachments and aversions” of those perceived to have extreme-right sympathies (Shoshan 2016, 15). Oud-Borgerhout is such a space. On the other hand, mainstream political parties have increasingly adopted aspects of populist far-right discourse, especially since what has been termed the “backlash against multiculturalism” (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). This includes a (positive) re-centering on the white working-class as the ‘ordinary people’ whose negative experiences and feelings of migrants have supposedly been tabooed and dismissed by a politically correct elite. Baukje Prins (2002) has analyzed this as the emergence of a “new realist” genre that has been adopted across the political left and right. This is a genre in which the speakers position themselves as siding with ‘the ordinary people’—implied to be autochthonous—and dare speak their uncomfortable truth about the failure of multicultural society. In Flanders, such a positioning used to be the prerogative of the far-right, but, there too, a new realist genre has taken hold, including among leftist politicians claiming the need to “say it like it is” (Arnaut et al. 2009, 13–14). As a result, the white working-class does not only figure as dangerous incarnation of a racist specter, but also as “realists par excellence” who supposedly “know from day-to-day experience what was really going on, especially in the poor neighborhoods in big cities and were not blinded by politically correct ideas” (Prins 2002, 368, my emphasis). In Flanders at the time of my fieldwork,1 the governmental fostering of samenleven was explicitly understood as oriented against the far-right and its effect on the urban social fabric. I will argue, however, that governance practices reiterated and co-opted a key aspect of the far-right’s populist imagination. Similar analyses have focused on the way in which populist constructions of a racialized essence of ‘the people’ have filtered into revanchist or culturalist policy measures (Lentin and Titley 2011; Schinkel and Van den Berg 2011). I focus, instead, on the role of a different populist premise: the imagination and valorization of the “day-to-day experience,” as Prins aptly termed it, of the ordinary man as a distinct, authentic, and socially primordial domain. This populist construction of

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‘ordinary everyday life’ in diverse neighborhoods has received far less critical scrutiny, but it is crucial, I argue, for understanding the inner logic of the governance of samenleven. This notion of the everyday deeply shapes governmental affective pushes and pulls—fascination, desire, suspicion, indifference—that circulate around different categories of residents and their vernacular practices of incorporation. It is useful here to return to Douglas Holmes’ notion of ‘integralism.’ Holmes (2000, 3–9) used this term to reference what he saw as a cultural undercurrent to populist far-right discourse in Europe, namely the investment in the everyday of locally rooted communities as an ‘organic’ lifeworld that is morally superior and more authentic than, yet threatened by, the alienating forces of late modernity. Holmes traced integralism to the moral orientations and dispositions of Romanticism, which he, following Isaiah Berlin, viewed as postulating an alternative project for life, truth, and humanity explicitly counter that of the Enlightenment (Berlin 2000 [1960]). I argue that an ‘integralist’ construction of the everyday life world of ordinary men—as a distinct realm over and against what are taken to be the more alienated, distant, and artificial realms of the state, politics, or the elite—has been the Flemish far-right’s most successful ‘export-product.’ Whereas Flemish Interest’s racialized definition of the Flemish nation has continued to spark debate, its assumption that everyday neighborhood life is an identifiable and socially primordial realm has become an unmarked part of the governance (and academic) understanding of samenleven. In the next section, I draw on anthropological debates of ordinary ethics to argue that the notions of the ‘everyday’ and the ‘ordinary’ are embedded in theoretical and political contestations over where morality and truth are located and who counts as an intelligible moral subject. I then discuss briefly how the rise of the far-right, political anxieties over a deficit of samenleven, and the ambiguous invocation of the ordinary citizen are interconnected in Belgium, and have been projected onto Oud-­ Borgerhout as a multivocal symbol of the multicultural urban condition. In the last two sections, I return to the incident on the roundabout. Taking a close look at the ways in which governance actors developed the diversity trajectory and imagined it to work, I show that they reproduced the claim made by the protesting residents that their “eyes would open to

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the truth” of the van Rijswijck neighborhood if and when they would immerse themselves in the flow of ‘ordinary’ citizens’ daily life. I also show, however, that the idea of an authentic flow of everyday neighborhood life generated contradictory desires and impulses within the governance of samenleven, which I will describe as an oscillation between Romanticist and Enlightenment affect.

 Critique of ‘Everyday Life’ A and Governance Affect In separate but related critiques, Thomas Blom Hansen (1997, 2012) and Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015) have teased out the political and normative assumptions undergirding the use of the notions of the ‘everyday’ or the ‘ordinary’ in the burgeoning anthropological literature on ordinary ethics. The notion of ordinary ethics was introduced as a critical alternative to the dominant Enlightenment or Kantian focus on reflexive, rational deliberation and moral judgment. The Kantian conceptualization of ethics implies, as Veena Das (2010) critically states, “that we should be able to take an abstract, non-subjective vantage position” (2010, 377, my emphasis). Seeking to go beyond this narrow understanding of ethical subjecthood, the notion of ordinary ethics theorizes moral striving as an inherent aspect of the incoherent, unarticulated flow of everyday life. As in Das’ work on inhabitants of low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it makes it possible to uncover as ethical the mundane lives and actions of subjects that would not easily be recognized as such from a Kantian perspective. Fadil and Fernando (2015) investigate a recent off-shoot of the ordinary ethics literature, namely the anthropological interest in what are termed ‘ordinary Muslims’ and ‘everyday Islam.’ They recognize that this interest in the everyday is intended to recuperate the morality and humanity of a certain kind of subject, Muslims in this case, in a political context in which Islamophobia looms large. The problem with this approach, so Fadil and Fernando argue, is that by distinguishing ‘ordinary Muslims’ from ‘extra-ordinary’ (i.e. pious, or Salafi) ones, the notion of the

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everyday ends up operating as, “a normative vocabulary that serves to disqualify the ontological validity of particular life-worlds by delineating them as not-everyday, and, ultimately, as unreal” (2015, 81). Hansen formulates a similar critique of subaltern studies’ commitment to excavating localized, popular identities and culture (1997) and of the recent anthropological valorization of the ‘ordinary’ (2012, 19–20). Both literatures, he argues, reiterate the Romanticist celebration of localized, popular life-worlds as the locus of an authentic, resilient morality that is somehow outside of, or less shaped by, political discourses or governance (1997, 27–30), and which can only be fully grasped and accessed by immersing oneself into its radical difference. Like Fadil and Fernando, Hansen points out that this implies distinguishing between subjects taken to be truly ‘ordinary’ and ‘popular’ while other subjects are “relegated to a realm of the mediated, even not-so-ordinary” (2012, 20). What is most problematic to him, however, is that theoretical approaches following the Romanticist episteme fail to take heed of political and governmental visions of the everyday and the uses to which everyday and ordinary life have been put by (post)colonial powers and institutions, such as those of the Apartheid state (2012, 19–20). I distill three main starting points for an analysis of the construction of everyday life in the governance of samenleven from these critiques. First, instead of assuming that the everyday is a pre-existing realm on which governance simply seeks to act, we have to ask how governance imaginations and practices construe ‘everyday life’ and engage with this construction as an aspect of governance itself (cf. Mitchell 2006). Second, constructions of the ‘everyday’ and the ‘ordinary’ are intertwined with affective politics of morality. Demarcating the ‘everyday’ from the non-­ everyday, and the ‘ordinary’ from the non-ordinary, marks some practices and subjects as particularly fascinating and recognizably moral, while rendering others unexciting, unreal, and less intelligible as moral subjects in their own right. Third, these affective politics are broadly structured around a tension between an ‘Enlightenment’ and a ‘Romanticist’ mode of engagement with the ‘everyday.’2 Claire Colebrook (2002) succinctly sums up the contrast:

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Either we insist that everyday life is inauthentic, confused, or mystified— requiring the transition to reflective theory [Enlightenment, AV]—or we see everydayness as uncorrupted life, a life that in its animal or natural immediacy would bear all the joy and promise that political structures would subsequently enslave or enhance [Romanticist, AV]. (2002, 687)

As the quote reflects, the everyday is not only differently conceptualized from within these two traditions, it also instills different passions and affective impulses. From within the Enlightenment mode, true moral judgment and true knowledge are, as Das noted, dependent on the capacity to reflexively distance and abstract oneself from the flow of everyday life. Everyday, ordinary life is seen as a realm that is always potentially corrupted by subjective interest and the (false) norms of religion, politics, or tradition. To create proper moral subjects, everyday practice needs to be made legible, disciplined, and reformed in line with universal laws and scientific knowledge (cf. Foucault 1995 [1975]). In contrast to the Enlightenment suspicion and disdain toward the everyday and its will to improve, the Romanticist mode of engagement, as we have seen, celebrates the everyday as containing an organic, authentic morality and as the tantalizing source of a deeper, ‘truer’ kind of knowledge than that of ratio and science (Berlin 2000). These two ‘structures of feeling’ toward the everyday thus stand in tension with one another both as to where they locate knowledge or truth, and where they locate ‘true’ morality, in relation to the everyday. Even though they are opposed in many ways, the Enlightenment and Romanticist epistemes are best understood as dialectically articulated fields, “whose recurrent intermixtures and re-differentiations remain a crucial intellectual deep structure of modern Western thought” (Hansen 1997, 23). Asking how the everyday is construed and engaged in governance practices, thus means being attentive to complex oscillations between these two modes. I approach the governance of samenleven as an affective practice (Stoler 2008), not only in the sense that it aims to instill in citizens particular affective and moral sensibilities toward difference, but also in that it is itself “haunted by affects that are, if not entirely articulable, then nevertheless always already historically qualified” (Shoshan 2016, 17). In this

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section, I have qualified the affects circulating in the governance of samenleven as rearticulating a historical tension between an Enlightenment and Romanticist ‘structure of feeling’ in relation to everyday life. Such an approach directs attention away from governance plans as rational decisions and orients us instead toward affective governance impulses as they surface in desires and plans that never find practical fruition, in jokes, or shrugs. The planning and development phase of the diversity trajectory formed a moment were contradictory governance affects generated by and through the notion of the everyday and the ordinary came to the fore in very clear ways.

Oud-Borgerhout and the Emergence of the Governance of Samenleven The incident on the roundabout marked a moment in which the “the everyday as a site of open conflict and moral debate” (Hansen 2012, 21), both between citizens and between citizens and governance actors, was out in the open for everyone to see. This was not coincidental: everyday life in Oud-Borgerhout had been the topic of political discussion for quite some time. Since the 1980s, news reports, films, novels, non-fiction books, and even an opera investigated Flanders’ multicultural condition—it hopes and its failures—by taking life as it supposedly unfolded in Oud-Borgerhout as their subject (Beyen 2015). Moreover, political actors from across the political spectrum deployed references to Oud-­ Borgerhout residents’ imputed everyday experiences to make contrasting claims about the ‘truth’ of life in pluri-ethnic urban neighborhoods (de Koning and Vollebergh 2019). Flemish Block (later Flemish Interest), the Flemish-nationalist far-­ right party, coined the moniker ‘Borgerokko,’ a derogatory reference to the district’s relatively large Moroccan-background population. In Flemish Block rhetoric, Borgerokko functioned as the ultimate example of the threat that immigration posed to Flemish culture and the political abandonment of ‘ordinary Flemings,’ left to suffer the taking-over of their neighborhood by menacing ‘strangers.’ When Flemish Block rose to

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unexpected electoral success with its anti-immigrant program, Oud-­ Borgerhout, where it captured up to 40% of the vote, became the national symbol of failed incorporation: a gloomy ghetto where rowdy migrant youths were in constant conflict with embittered, racist working-class white residents. Around the turn of the century, Oud-Borgerhout started to attract new white middle-class families and a progressive, pro-diversity party began to find success. These actors sought to change Oud-­ Borgerhout’s negative image. Drawing upon their own efforts to invest in the neighborhood, they portrayed Oud-Borgerhout as displaying the richness of urban diversity and as a hopeful breeding-ground of new forms of neighborly incorporation and engaged citizenship. The idea that the way in which citizens of different backgrounds live together needs governmental intervention was a direct response to the rise of the Flemish Block. Far-right support and the so-called failed integration of migrants that Flemish Block had put on the political agenda were conceptualized as amounting to the same problem: an urgent deficit of samenleven in urban areas marked by exclusion and marginalization (Stouthuysen et al. 1999). Both ‘deprived autochthons’ and ‘allochthons’ living in such spaces needed guidance and re-integration into the social fabric in order to achieve the newly defined governance ideal of “harmonious living together” (KCM 1990). Policy documents defined samenleven, and its absence, as located in “ordinary day-to-day life” in the neighborhood (ICM 1996, 34) and stipulated the need to pay attention to (white) residents’ negative experiences and perceptions. In that sense, the emergent governance of samenleven echoed Flemish Block’s focus on ‘ordinary Flemings’ daily life in diverse neighborhoods from the outset. In deprived neighborhoods like Oud-Borgerhout, a dense landscape of governance projects and programs was set-up that aimed to map and manage residents’ neighborhood experiences, neighborly interactions, and use of public space. Reflecting broader European trends of “moral” and “active” citizenship (Fortier 2010; Muehlebach 2012; Newman and Tonkens 2011), governance programs increasingly described samenleven as an individual capacity and citizen responsibility underpinned by the “shared values” of the Enlightenment (Stad Antwerpen 2009). Antwerp municipal authorities sought to foster this capacity by organizing “encounter” and stimulating citizens’ active participation in social

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cohesion and consultation projects (Loopmans 2006; Vollebergh 2016a). Not all categories of citizens were seen as equally amenable to “living together in diversity.” Whereas ‘allochthons’ and ‘deprived autochthons’ were considered notoriously hard-to-involve, as professionals often put it, urban policy documents heralded new urban middle-class families, who were believed to have an open and reflexive attitude toward difference, as “positive role models” naturally ameliorating the quality of samenleven and democracy (Uitermark 2003, 77). When governance actors in Borgerhout sought to discover what was going on in the Van Rijswijck neighborhood, they thus did so in a political context in which Borgerhout was at the center of polarized debates about the ‘truth’ of everyday life in pluri-ethnic neighborhoods. Moreover, they did so from within a broader governance landscape that distinguished categories of citizens in relation to their presumed capacity for samenleven.

“ We should live there”: Constructing and Desiring ‘the Everyday’ The Borgerhout district authorities interpreted the contestations at the roundabout as evidence of a problematic “gap” between residents and the district administration that needed to be remedied. It was decided to start a ‘diversity trajectory’ focused on the Van Rijswijck neighborhood, and a small steering team was formed. The team consisted of the district secretary and the civil servant of the municipal service for citizen consultation (Wijkoverleg) who had been involved in the presentation at the roundabout.3 Trained as sociologists and now in their fifties, both men had extensive experience in neighborhood development. Two consultants of the municipal Bureau for Diversity Management completed the steering team. The official documents stipulating the reason and aim of the diversity trajectory stated that “both Moroccan and (old Belgian) residents” of the Van Rijswijck neighborhood had displayed “enormous distrust” toward the district administration. The aim of the project was to “restore

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contact” between residents and the district administration and establish a “long-term dialogue,” requiring “getting to know the neighborhood in all its aspects.” Several months after the encounter at the roundabout, the members of the steering team and I gathered in the large, wood-paneled council chamber of Borgerhout’s nineteenth-century town hall. The goal of the meeting was to develop a strategy and concrete plan for how to reach these objectives. As the meeting proceeded, the steering team members sounded much like urban ethnographers designing the first steps of a neighborhood study. They discussed consecutive research phases and how to counter bias in their initial sample of residents. Underpinning these discussions was team members’ joint reiteration of a distinction between ‘real’ neighborhood residents and implicitly not-so-real ones, and an overlapping distinction of ‘deeper’ and more superficial layers of neighborhood life. In preparation of the meeting, the steering team members had made an inventory of the “network” that they and other district staff members had in the area. The meeting started off with the team members going over the listed residents and professionals so as to distill a set of initial contacts that would give them access to the neighborhood and its residents. The first phase of the project, so everyone agreed, would be to reach out to these initial contacts and interview them about the Van Rijswijck neighborhood. Team members were critical, however, of the kinds of persons listed in the network inventory. “These are mainly key figures [sleutelfiguren; i.e. professionals],” the borough consultation official pointed out. “But we need to get to the neighborhood residents…It is a black hole now. We don’t know what they want.” In fact, the list of initial contacts did contain several residents. These were mainly white, middle-class friends and colleagues of district staff, and professionals working in the neighborhood. The team members worried that the initial contacts were biased in terms of their ethnic and class backgrounds. Everyone agreed: it would be especially important to talk to “the Moroccan community” as well as to “old Belgians.” Ideally, the first round of interviews would provide, snowball style, a broader sample of residents to contact and interview in a second round.

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As the conversation went on, they also implied, however, that the middle-­class residents and professionals of the initial list were not just unrepresentative, but that they provided only a superficial access to, and insight in, the neighborhood. This became especially evident as the project members outlined the different phases of the project, and their vision of the process as a slow, step-by-step immersion into the neighborhood, in which they would get ever closer to those who were implied to be genuine “neighborhood residents.” In a second meeting, the second round of interviews was discussed in more detail. One of the diversity consultants repeated that, in order to go “deeper” into the neighborhood, a broader sample of residents would be needed than the initial (white middle class and/or professional) contacts. The diversity consultants went on to explain that contacting and interviewing these other categories of residents, presumably located ‘deeper’ within the neighborhood, also required a shift in skills and techniques. When conducting interviews with “Moroccans” or “old Belgians,” team members should be prepared to let the formal questionnaires go, and instead focus on building trust. In contrast to most other surveys conducted by the municipality, the goal here would be to “achieve a real [naturalistic] conversation.” Indeed, the ideal of connecting with neighborhood residents in a spontaneous, informal way underpinned the team’s vision of the third and final phase of the project. This last phase would consist of team members striking informal conversations with random residents while hanging out in the neighborhood. Nearing the end of the first meeting, the district secretary recounted such a chance-encounter he had had with a resident, gleefully remembering the richness of the gossipy chatter that she shared with him. “That third round,” he concluded, “I suspect that will yield the most.” “We should go and live there, shouldn’t we,” one of the diversity consultants reacted half-jokingly, taking the ethnographic undercurrent of the project to its logical conclusion. “Rent an apartment on the square and just be there a couple of months.” The others laughed and nodded fervently. The meeting, the three-phase plan, and the half-joke about renting an apartment were not interesting as indications of what the project team

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actually did. In fact, the project never made it past the second phase of interviewing a small selection of neighborhood residents. It turned out that that phase alone already overstretched the resources the district had freed-up for the project. What the meeting shows, in some detail, is, first, that governance actors themselves constructed everyday neighborhood life as a distinct, inherently authentic realm that is the prerogative of ‘ordinary,’ ‘real’ residents.’ This construction was produced by the distinctions they made between the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary and between deeper, more organic layers of neighborhood life, and more superficial ones. Though the project group members began by confirming the need to talk to “residents,” this eventually slipped into a desire to connect to those categories of working-class residents, both ‘Moroccan’ and ‘old Belgian,’ that were thought to be just outside governance’s reach and imagined to be wholly immersed and embedded in everyday neighborhood life. Middle-class residents, in contrast, were felt to be so readily available for, and enmeshed in, governance, that they seemed to somehow stand over and above, instead of immersed within, the experiential realm of everyday neighborhood life. They might be residents, but, to these governance actors, they were not exactly “neighborhood residents.” Second, the meeting shows that this construction of an authentic everyday neighborhood life populated by ‘real’ neighborhood residents held a strong allure and fascination for governance actors. It was there that the steering team members felt they could access and find a deeper ‘truth’ about the Van Rijswijck neighborhood. The round-by-round design of the project and the emphasis on ‘real,’ natural conversations point to a Romanticist passion within the governance of samenleven: a desire to immerse oneself into the everyday such as to be able to access and know a ‘deeper,’ authentic truth about the state of samenleven in pluri-ethnic neighborhoods. This desire was explicit in the project meeting, but it fitted with, and was an exponent of, a desire and imagination structuring governance programs and services focused on fostering samenleven more generally. The position of ‘neighborhood supervisor’ is a case in point. First invented in Borgerhout in the early 1990s but later rolled out over the city as a whole, neighborhood supervisors were tasked with being both the “eyes and

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ears” of the city and a familiar, approachable face to local residents. They were to be visibly present in neighborhood public space, walking the streets and striking up conversations, with the goal of rebuilding residents’ trust and so rechanneling their discontent away from far-right support. The joke about renting an apartment and “just be there,” in the real of the neighborhood, was truth and joke in one, as it drew a central affective drive within the governance of samenleven to its logical, but unrealistic, conclusion. It was also an almost literal confirmative response to that provocative invitation of the protesting residents on the roundabout to come and ‘spend the night.’ In their effort to create trust and heal discontent, the steering team co-opted the basic, Romanticist premise of the protesters: that it is only by being there that one can know the ‘truth’ of the neighborhood. It illustrates the broader way in which the governance of samenleven aimed to recapture the access to the truth of everyday neighborhood life that is claimed by the far-right, for the sake of creating a more wholesome and ‘harmonious’ everyday multiculture.

 he ‘Encounter’: Suspicions of the Ethics T of the Everyday The steering team members expressed a Romanticist desire to ‘be there’ in the neighborhood and to connect to the lived, embedded experiences of ‘ordinary residents.’ They also imagined everyday neighborhood life as precisely the site of deficit—the domain where trust and samenleven were lacking, making their intervention necessary. As we will see, the governance desire to foster samenleven as an ethical practice and ideal relates to the figure of the ‘ordinary resident’ and to the constructed realm of ‘everyday neighborhood life’ in a very different way. What practices and interactions became (in)visible and (un)intelligible as fulfilling the ethical ideal of samenleven during the diversity trajectory? As the opening vignette showed, the conflict during the presentation of the reconstruction plan was not a conflict between Moroccan-­ background and white residents. Though the informal conversations in

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the margins repeated a racist discourse about neighborhood demise, they also revealed an intense familiarity across difference. During one of those conversations a young white woman turned to me and stated: “The living together is extremely difficult here.” Pointing to the Moroccan-­ background youngsters, she continued: “They can really drive a person mad, you know.” Then she turned to one of the youths who was listening to our conversation and said to him: “Like that time when I chased you down the street with that frying pan, remember?” The boy grinned and nodded. “That was so funny,” he remembered. The siding of Moroccan-background and white working-class residents during the protest on the roundabout, however, was never perceived by the steering team as a sign of some form of cross-ethnic understanding or recognition of common interests. It was, in short, not understood as evidence of a form of samenleven. Instead, as the project group met more often and the focus shifted to designing questionnaires and interview topics, the quality of the relations between ‘Moroccans’ and ‘Belgians’ in the neighborhood were foregrounded as a problem to scrutinize and monitor. “What I really would be curious to know,” said the consultation official, “is how the living together is going.” In the end, almost half of the questions that the diversity consultants developed for the interviews addressed topics pertaining to the way in which residents and “communities” interacted with each other and how they felt about the quality of samenleven in the neighborhood. This default suspicion of ‘old Belgian’ and Moroccan-background residents’ capacity for samenleven was telling of the ways in which governance actors more generally discussed and interpreted the everyday interactions between these categories of residents as they could be observed in the more working-class areas of Borgerhout. In historically working-class parts of Borgerhout, Moroccan-background and white elderly residents practiced what I elsewhere have called a popular neighborhood style (Vollebergh 2016b, 171–174). This style consisted of converging routines of intensive use of neighborhood space and a shared anxiety over indecent behavior and the withering of Oud-Borgerhout as a respectable neighborhood. Some of the white residents who protested most fiercely, for example, had a habit of pulling out chairs on their doorsteps every evening. Usually, several Moroccan-background neighbors

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would come by for a chat or would join them for a smoke and a coffee. The conversation revolved around their shared complaints about Borgerhout, and the telling of stories of muggings, thefts, and conflicts. As the dialogue about the frying pan shows, these interactions were characterized by a mixture of an unarticulated long-term familiarity and explicit, heavily racist discourse (de Koning and Vollebergh 2019, 394; cf. Tyler 2017; van Eijk 2012). This kind of interaction and understanding across difference—situated within unarticulated praxis and shared classed sensations of everyday life—was rarely discussed as a form of samenleven by officials. When I prompted the district secretary during one of our conversations, he shook his head dismissively. “That’s not really samenleven,” he said. “That’s just pure necessity.” Neighborly relations between white working-class and Moroccan-background residents are a façade, he implied, because they are born out of pragmatic routine and coincidental at-handness, and not out of a genuine, deeper openness to difference. Whereas governance actors tended to view unarticulated vernacular interactions embedded in everyday routine as superficial, they took modes of public talk about the neighborhoods as indicators of an inner will to live together. After the incident on the roundabout, the borough consultation officer set out to explain how older Belgian residents, “those who wanted to leave Borgerhout but couldn’t,” have a tendency to “complain” and do so by using a discourse of “Moroccans this and Moroccans that.” He contrasted them with another category of residents: “the positive, engaged, educated, white, middle class: the young double income couples, university-educated, the retired active residents,” who refrain from any references to ethnicity, because “they have a positive attitude, they view the multicultural aspect as a positive element.” In order to tease out more clearly how these assessments of different residents’ capacity for samenleven as an ethical practice are related to ‘everyday life,’ I turn to the way in which the notion of encounter was deployed in the governance of samenleven. In the municipal diversity policy plan (Stad Antwerpen 2009), “encounter” figured as both a technique and an ideal of living together. The policy plan, entitled “Living Together in Diversity,” stipulated the following ambition: “Antwerp is a city where people with different backgrounds understand each other

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better” (2009, 9). In order to realize this goal, the city set out to invest heavily in creating “encounter” and “dialogue,” by further developing what it called the municipal “encounter infrastructure” (65), comprised of neighborhood-based “centers for encounter” (ontmoetingscentra), social cohesion projects such as neighborhood feasts, structures for interfaith dialogue, and third-sector organizations organizing debates, lectures, events, and other “initiatives for encounter” (ibid.). The logic of encounter that suffuses the governance of samenleven more broadly is structured by a very specific understanding of what a true encounter is in relation to the constructed realm of everyday life. As the policy plan makes clear, ‘encounter’ is understood as moments and spaces of togetherness that are specifically and deliberately organized. Ideally, they lead to a reflexive change in the perceptions of those involved. Implicitly, the prosaic sharing of neighborhood space and encounters in the course of everyday life—waiting for a bus, standing in line at the baker’s—were constructed as somehow failed or too-superficial encounters. The underlying suspicion of everyday neighborhood life as a routinized and unreflexive realm blocking the realization of true encounter— what I would call an Enlightenment engagement with the everyday—was further elaborated to me by one of the officials involved in the writing of the policy plan. Referring to Antwerp as a “divided city” in which “communities live separated from one another,” he linked the need for encounter not to large, visible conflicts, but rather to myriad self-reinforcing “small discontents” that take place in everyday life. Let me give an example. I always try to stop for a pedestrian crossing, and it is almost custom, when a car driver stops, for a pedestrian to signal your appreciation. So everyone, you and me, when a driver stops to let us cross, we thank him and go our way. Muslimah’s cannot make eye contact, so they do not [thank a stopping driver], they just walk on. That is the beginning of a conflict right there. Because the next time, that driver will think: “I won’t stop.” And at that moment, the Muslimah will say: this is a crossing, I should have been able to cross, this is racism, because for someone else, he would have stopped. […] Those are very small examples. I have examples like that, but they [Muslims] have just as much examples, too.

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Here, we can see that ‘everyday neighborhood life’ and ‘ordinary residents’ also trigger an affective impulse in the governance of living together that is contradictory to the Romanticist fascination of the everyday as a realm of an authentic truth, namely, an Enlightenment suspicion of the everyday as a realm of impeded ethics. When it comes to living together as an ethical ideal, officials imagined everyday life as a limiting, unreflexive realm where people, and especially those construed as ‘ordinary’ residents, are constrained by parochial horizons and interests, so that, officials and residents never tired of telling me, people live “next to, but not with each other.” From within this Enlightenment  mode of engagement, everyday life needs to be overcome—one needs to abstract oneself from its self-evidence and its practical pushes and pulls—if ‘true’ living together is to be fostered and achieved. The underpinning logic to governance actors’ commitment to organized encounters is that these hold the promise of, even if momentarily, pulling people out of the routinized and assumedly conflict-ridden flow of everyday life, so that an opening up of perceptions and reflexive mutual understanding beyond their own particular horizons might become possible. As a result, those residents construed as ‘ordinary’ by governance actors, because they are imagined to be immersed in the unreflexive, immediate flow of everyday life, are perceived as morally flawed. Similarly, vernacular neighborly practices of incorporation and exchange that are situated in unspoken pragmatic routines, and not accompanied by discourses of reflexive openness, are unintelligible from within this governance perspective as a form of ‘true’ living together.

Conclusion The protest against the district’s plans to reconstruct the roundabout into a square amenable to ‘encounter’ united working-class  white and Moroccan-background residents. They jointly claimed to be embedded in the day-to-day life in the neighborhood and to therefore know the real truth of the problems of the Van Rijswijck neighborhood as opposed to governance officials and their focus on encounter. The protest and its cross-ethnic character were embedded, moreover, in a range of routine

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neighborly interactions and familiarities. Nevertheless, the protest was not registered by governance actors as indication of a form of successful incorporation, or samenleven, in its own right. I have taken the protest and its governance aftermath as a window into the relation between governance ideals of incorporation and the way in which vernacular practices of incorporation and conviviality appear from within such an ideal. Although the notion of samenleven may appear to revolve around ethno-cultural difference, I have argued that the governance of samenleven is deeply shaped by the current reworking of the political meaning of working-class whiteness. As the project meeting showed in detail, the governance of samenleven co-opted and reiterated the populist, Romanticist construction that the ‘everyday neighborhood life’ of ‘ordinary people’ constitutes a distinct, authentic, and primordial social realm. This construction forms a deep structure of the governance of samenleven, inciting contradictory affects and impulses. Whereas the everyday prompts a Romanticist desire and fascination as a source of a deeper and more authentic truth about the multicultural condition, it evokes an Enlightenment suspicion or disdain as a realm that impedes truly ethical practice. This results in an ambiguous governance engagement with both those residents imagined to be ordinary (‘Moroccans’ and ‘old Belgians’) and those deemed not-so-ordinary (middle class, highly educated white families). Their active involvement in organized encounter and governance means that white middle-class residents were dismissed as not-so-­ real neighborhood residents lacking authentic embedding in the neighborhood, while they were celebrated as possessing the right kind of inner ethical, reflexive disposition toward difference. ‘Moroccans’ and ‘old Belgians,’ instead, were desired as ‘ordinary’ neighborhood residents whose authentic embeddedness formed a crucial entrance into the ‘real’ of the neighborhood. But they were also the object of reform and governance scrutiny. They and their pragmatic neighborly practices of incorporation were perceived to be too immersed in everyday routines and parochial networks to constitute ‘true’ living together.

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Notes 1. The fieldwork on which this chapter is based took place from 2008 to 2010 and was focused on the ethics and politics of samenleven in two Antwerp neighborhoods. In 2011, the new Flemish-nationalist party New Flemish Alliance won the Antwerp municipal elections after over thirty years of socialist rule. My material does not speak to that significant reversal in political power. 2. This dichotomy is a strong simplification of the anthropological debate on morality and ethics. It also does not do justice to the diversity of European philosophical traditions that have explicitly engaged with the notion of the everyday (see for an overview: Gardiner 2002). 3. I had spoken to both men on several occasions, and they had informed me about the presentation of the reconstruction plans. Upon my request to examine the diversity trajectory as an extended case, I was granted permission to follow the steering team’s meetings and access the project documents.

References Arnaut, Karel, Sarah Bracke, Bambi Ceuppens, Sarah De Mul, Nadia Fadil, and Meryem Kanmaz. 2009. Een leeuw in een kooi. De grenzen van het multiculturele Vlaanderen. Antwerpen: Meulenhoff. Berlin, Isaiah. 2000 [1960]. Three Critics of the Enlightenment. London: Pimlico. Beyen, Marnix. 2015. Greetings from Borgerokko. An Antwerp Neighborhood as a National Icon of Globalization and Anti-globalism. In Local Memories in a Nationalizing and Globalizing World, ed. Marnix Beyen and Brecht Deseure, 244–257. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ceuppens, Bambi. 2003. Congo Made in Flanders? Koloniale Vlaamse visies op “blank” en “zwart” in Belgisch Congo. Gent: Academia Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2002. The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life. New Literary History 33 (4): 687–706. Das, Veena. 2010. Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Everyday Life. In Ordinary Ethics. Anthropology, Language, and Action, ed. Michael Lambek, 376–399. New York: Fordham University Press.

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De Koning, Anouk, and Anick Vollebergh. 2019. Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe. American Anthropologist 121 (2): 391–402. Fadil, Nadia, and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. Rediscovering the ‘Everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 59–88. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2010. Proximity by Design? Affective Citizenship and the Management of Unease. Citizenship Studies 14 (1): 17–30. Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House. Gardiner, Michael. 2002. Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gingrich, Andre, and Marcus Banks, eds. 2006. Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond. Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New  York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism. American Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–214. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1997. Inside the Romanticist Episteme. Thesis Eleven 48: 21–41. ———. 2012. Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haylett, Chris. 2001. Illegitimate Subjects? Abject Whites, Neoliberal Modernization, and Middle-Class Multiculturalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (3): 351–370. Hewitt, Roger. 2005. White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ICM (Interdepartementale Commissie Migranten). 1996. Strategisch plan voor het Vlaamse minderhedenbeleid t.a.v. etnisch-culturele minderheden. Kalb, Don, and Gábor Halmai. 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn. KCM (Koninklijk Commissariaat voor het Migrantenbeleid) 1990. Voor een Harmonieuze Sameneleving. Deel I: Eerste realisaties en nieuwe voorstellen. Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. 2011. The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. London: Zed Books.

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Loopmans, Maarten. 2006. From Residents to Neighbors: The Making of Active Citizens in Antwerp, Belgium. In Policy, People and the New Professional, ed. Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Trudie Knijn, and Monique Kremer, 109–121. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mepschen, Paul. 2019. A Discourse of Displacement: Super-diversity, Urban Citizenship, and the Politics of Autochthony in Amsterdam. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42 (1): 71–88. Mitchell, Timothy. 2006. Society, Economy, and the State Effect. In The Anthropology of the State, ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, 169–186. Oxford: Blackwell. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newman, Janet, and Evelien Tonkens, eds. 2011. Participation, Responsibility and Choice: Summoning the Active Citizen in Western European Welfare States. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Prins, Baukje. 2002. The Nerve to Break Taboos: New Realism in the Dutch Discourse on Multiculturalism. Journal of International Migration and Integration 3 (3–4): 363–379. Schinkel, Willem, and Marguerite Van den Berg. 2011. City of Exception: The Dutch Revanchist City and the Urban Homo Sacer. Antipode 43 (5): 1911–1938. Shoshan, Nitzan. 2008. Placing the Extremes: Cityscapes, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right-extremists in East-Berlin. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16 (3): 377–391. ———. 2016. The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stad Antwerpen. 2009. Samenleven in diversiteit: Eenheid in verscheidenheid & verscheidenheid in eenheid. Beleidsplan 2009–2011. Stolcke, Verena. 1995. Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36 (1): 1–24. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. Affective States. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent, 4–20. Oxford: Blackwell. Stouthuysen, Patrick, Jan-Willem Duyvendak, and Peter van der Graaf. 1999. Stedelijk beleid in Vlaanderen en Nederland: kansarmoede, sociale cohesie en sociaal kapitaal. Tijdschrift voor sociologie 20 (3–4): 579–608. Tyler, Katharine. 2017. The suburban paradox of conviviality and racism in postcolonial Britain. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (11): 1890–1906.

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6 Hierarchical Forms of Belonging in an Egalitarian Society Synnøve Bendixsen and Hilde Danielsen

It is a warm summer day as we enter the schoolyard in Soltre, a diverse urban neighborhood in Bergen—Norway’s second largest city. The Working Committee for Parents at the local school has organized a barbeque for parents. The event is supposed to be a low-key, potluck-style gathering where everybody will “bring some food.” A rather large crowd of parents and children has come for the barbecue, and the atmosphere is relaxed and cheery. However, conspicuously, most of the parents who have a migrant background and live in social housing have not shown up. As we enter the party, the event’s organizers discuss this: the barbecue was supposed to bring the school’s diverse group of parents together—why had they not succeeded in attracting a more diverse crowd? They mention that the invitations were made only through email, and

Parts of the ethnographic material in this chapter have been presented in previous publications (Bendixsen and Danielsen 2018, Danielsen and Bendixsen 2019).

S. Bendixsen (*) Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] H. Danielsen NORCE Norwegian Research Center, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_6

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they were sent to “everybody,” perhaps they did not reach all parents. Additionally, the organizers have just discovered that Ramadan started a few days before the party, so their efforts to provide halal food were in vain. “We are lucky enough to now have one Muslim parent in the Parents Committee, but she was not present when we set the date for this party,” one of the organizers explains. The organizer adds that they would have planned differently if they had known about Ramadan. The parents also comment that they are glad to see three black mothers, two of them with a hijab, in spite of Ramadan. Yet, these three mothers and their children sit together by themselves and no one steps over to talk with them, except for, in the end, the researchers.

This vignette suggests some of the difficulties and pitfalls in everyday efforts to foster inclusion and incorporate others. Members of the school Working Committee for Parents in Soltre sought to create a common space for meeting across difference. In doing so, they aimed to address what they saw as a problem: that many parents with migrant background did not attend activities for parents and children at the school. Why did the barbecue fail? The Working Committee for Parents consisted primarily of women and middle-class parents. There were also a few working-­ class parents, almost all of non-migrant background. While the school caters to a diverse group of parents, their co-existence had failed to generate a space in which they could socialize and communicate. In turn, this lack of communication shaped the organization of the barbecue, which ultimately excluded the group of parents it was designed to embrace. In the end, the organizers not only failed to create a new sociality but demonstrated how, even with a diverse school population and neighborhood, a social mix does not necessarily translate into social mixing (Vincent et al. 2016, 12). Studies of diversity, belonging, and identity-construction in contemporary Europe often miss such mundane attempts and failures to create spaces of incorporation. Rather, they focus on ideal-typical symbolic centers, and their constitutive elements, such as flags, national days, Christian celebrations, and food habits (Eriksen and Sajjad 2015). Or they examine how diversity shapes everyday life and generates conviviality in urban spaces (see also Gilroy 2005; Wessendorf 2013, 2014; Wise 2013; Amin 2002). What often goes unexplored is people’s engagement with diversity

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in their everyday life, the “local micropolitics of everyday interaction” (Vertovec 2007, 1046), and how they attempt to navigate this diversity toward making difference the basis of new commonalities. These “situated descriptions of social life in process” (Back 2009, 203) are significant, however, because they promise to cast light on the processes of social incorporation and politics of belonging that are remaking Europe. In this chapter, we focus on the mundane activities of non-migrant parents in a diverse Norwegian neighborhood to illuminate processes of social incorporation and the politics of belonging. This chapter aims to go beyond the conviviality approach, which focuses on materiality, public spaces, and ideologies (Gilroy 2004; Wessendorf 2016; Wise 2013; Danielsen and Bendixsen 2019), to show how an egalitarian normative ideal of parenthood, promoted and understood as necessary for children to flourish, becomes a tool for incorporating migrant into social hierarchies in an otherwise egalitarian society (Bendixsen et al. 2018). Or to put it another way: building on an emerging pattern in the Nordic region, non-migrant parents’ efforts to generate equal access to a particular kind of childhood is instantiating hierarchical forms of belonging despite equality’s status as the guiding value of social interaction. Critically, our ethnography of parents in Soltre demonstrates that processes of incorporation and exclusion take place on different scales. They occur not only at the levels of law (i.e. on citizenship), policy (i.e. integration policies), and institutions (i.e. school), but also in the informal social interactions of everyday life. Echoing the other chapters in this volume, we emphasize that incorporation is a social process through which difference is navigated to with the aim of creating social bodies or units (see Introduction, this volume). Our chapter, which looks at attempts to build sociality among parents of different backgrounds, shows that at the center of this process is the cultivation of new ways of thinking about, and conforming to, values, norms, habits, and forms of sociality in everyday life. White Norwegian parents’ practices to include migrant parents, we argue, contribute to encourage migrant parents’ conformity to a shared ideal. In this process, non-migrants are concurrently denying migrants the opportunity to participate in the process of creating a new social body.

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Parenting in an Egalitarian Welfare State In Norway, migrant incorporation has been pursued at the level of policy through both specific integration policies and more general universal welfare state policies that focus on labor market participation and active citizens. Discussions on integration are thus not restricted to economics but encompass the social, religious, and cultural practices of newcomers in order to generate and maintain social cohesion. In part, there is public concern with the preservation of national identity and folk behavior (Eriksen 1997; Gullestad 1997; McIntosh 2015). The Norwegian “we” tends to appear as universally inclusive, as opposed to the culturally distinctive and exclusive “Other” (Gressgård 2005, 56–57). One outcome of the Norwegian approach is that immigrants are generally perceived as potentially like “us”—and thus as having potential to embrace the hegemonic ethos of wage labor and collective commitment (Gressgård 2007), as well as values and meanings connected to gender equality, parenting, and freedom. These values and meanings are commonly viewed as historically constituted, emerging from hard-fought political struggles. They now, people believe, constitute a Norwegian ethos that is shared by the Norwegian population, although in practice they are—and have been— class defined and differentiated. Parenting lies at the center of this shared view of a Norwegian ethos. In Europe, migration and social segregation have fostered a situation where different parenting ideals co-exist uncomfortably. In Norway, this has resulted in an increase in the number of sponsored parenting courses meant to introduce migrants to local parenting norms and practices.1 Support for these courses comes from various actors, including the right-­ wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet), which insists that quota refugees should sign a “value contact” in order to be resettled in Norway. In such a contract, refugees should commit to follow “Norwegian standards” when raising their children. Breaking this or any other agreement in the “value contract,” would, in theory, lead migrants to lose citizenship rights and residence permits. This narrow fixation on the parenting of others is striking, given that equal treatment is a foundational principle of the Norwegian welfare

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state. Norwegians see Norway as an egalitarian country and a society characterized by a lack of hierarchies, a high standard of living, and low inequality. Marianne Gullestad (2006) has suggested that equality in Norway has come to mean “sameness”: the idea that people, in order to feel equal and create a sense of community, accentuate similarity and under-communicate difference in their interactional style. “Equality as sameness,” Gullestad (1992, 197) argues, is a dominant cultural idea that not only equalizes but reconciles society and the individual, community and independence, hierarchy and equality in the Norwegian ideological system. Introducing the term “symbolic fences,” Gullestad suggests (1992) that Norwegians exclude (and implicitly subordinate) people whom they perceive as different, which calls attention to Dumont’s (1970) point that in any society, equality and hierarchy are always combined in one way or another. Yet, interactional styles are not static, and much has changed in Norway in recent decades. It seems appropriate to ask if these changes have not precipitated new responses and modes of relating to difference in everyday life. This chapter will suggest that the parents in this study are not erecting symbolic fences, but instead inviting differences into the social spheres to create a good neighborhood and childhood. In this process, they are simultaneously domesticating those differences.

Methods and Choice of Study Location Bergen, Norway, is a medium-sized urban area that is not characterized by the patterns of ethnic and socioeconomic segregation typical of European cities like Oslo or Paris. Bergen as a whole, and the Soltre neighborhood in particular, is a mosaic where long-term residents of working-class background, a growing number of middle-class and highly skilled professionals, and resettled refugees mix. The migrants are themselves also quite diverse. They come from different countries, have different level of education, and belong to different religious congregations and vary in terms of religiosity. Given the mix of socioeconomic backgrounds, parts of Soltre feature social housing. In fact, Soltre has the most social housing in Bergen, and the area receives targeted government social

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and economic support. To some extent, it can be said to be “super-­ diverse” (Vertovec 2007). In addition to its mosaic quality, Soltre is characterized by “multi-­ signification,” wherein the same geographical space is layered with vastly different understandings and connotations among differently situated people. This is, in part, the product of regional media discourses and representations of Soltre. For the municipality and state, Soltre is generally considered to be a place “at risk” because of unfavorable living conditions. Its supposed riskiness fosters the belief that it is in need of support and urban development. For the creative middle class, by contrast, it is a relatively affordable place for urban living, diversity, and “people like us.” For both middle- and working-class people, Soltre is a place of pride and a setting for neighborhood projects aimed at building a positive reputation for the area. For parents with a migrant background, as well as people of low socioeconomic status, it is where the municipality provides social housing. For this reason, some residents leave Soltre when they no longer need social housing. We heard of several migrant families who departed once family members were employed and could afford to choose where they wanted to live. In the media, representations of Soltre are ambivalent. On the one hand, parts of the neighborhood have been described as an “ill-suited place to raise children.” On the other, a local real estate newspaper (which comes with the regional newspaper) has featured housing complexes near these “ill-suited places” as desirable residences “in the country-side, in the city.” In 2015–2016, we conducted ethnographic observation and interviews with forty-two parents (middle class and working class, ethnic white Norwegians, migrants, and refugees) from Soltre. This fieldwork revolved around activities for parents, such as neighborhood initiatives (organized by both the municipality and local parents), and the Working Committees for Parents at three different schools. In addition, we interviewed teachers and headmasters at these three schools. Audio-recorded interviews were fully transcribed. The main focus of the research was parenting and parents’ involvement in multi-ethnic and class-differentiated urban public schools in Bergen, Norway. In this chapter, we start from the recognition that parenthood shapes everyday encounters—that is, at school and in free-time

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activities—with difference. In turn, these encounters reveal how people relate to diversity and seek to use it or downplay it as part of processes of social incorporation. These encounters are person-to-person but also person-to-­welfare state, as being a parent in Norway prompts one to use particular benefits and services. Both kinds of encounter have potential to bring opposing ideals of parenthood into contact, fostering new modes of incorporation that include people while excluding practices considered as undesiring.

Practices of Social Incorporation by Parents During our fieldwork and interviews, several people spoke of their commitment to contributing to Soltre as a neighborhood. This engagement was motivated by their status as parents and realized through the practices and relations of parenthood. Our interlocutors were particularly conscious of how class and migration background could work to exclude various children and parents from participating in events (Danielsen and Bendixsen 2019). Recognizing that some other parents had low income, many worked to keep the entry costs low when arranging neighborhood activities. This was paralleled by a concern, shared in meetings for the Working Committee for Parents at three different schools, regarding the need to promote equality among children and parents. During one meeting, a middle-class mother and group leader said, “The committee is really resourceful, with parents who have not gone through much challenges in life—which is needed to create a dialogue. We have talked about that we want to include everybody, and then we have to think about keeping it cheap, simple, and that it should be easy to take part in activities.” Several parents mentioned the lack of representatives of migrant background in local committees—a situation some saw as a democratic problem. In another committee meeting, one white middle-class Norwegian father said: “We are not representative. We are only middle-­ class women,” highlighting his own position as a gendered minority (women outnumber men in the committees) and what he perceived as a lack of social and ethnic diversity. Another mother said during a discussion: “If the activity is not inclusive, I am against it.”

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Many non-migrant residents in the area talked about the presence of migrants as a positive aspect of Soltre and their children’s school. Diversity was valued as an aspect of contemporary global society, and its local, intimate manifestations were seen as a way in which their children could learn to be “with others.” This, some parents argued, would provide their children with important and relevant experience for their eventual professional lives, as well as life in general in a more diverse Norway. But diversity was also discussed as something that had less positive consequences for children. For example, it was blamed for the soccer team’s limited resources, the dearth of parent volunteers, and the children who arrived late for tournaments and lacked the right equipment. It was also mentioned in connection with the children who did not participate in birthday parties, as well as tension in the local schools. When bringing their children to events, such as football games or birthday parties, parents of the ethnic majority often took responsibility for other people’s children. They would, for example, ask whether they needed a ride, or they would bring along used, but still usable, soccer cleats. Many parents emphasized that they had to “do something extra” to facilitate inclusive activities for all children in Soltre. Anne, a working-­ class mother who helped with a children’s football team, told us, “I am so interested in letting those kids be part of the soccer team, and then I have to do something extra, because those kids want to join, and then they should be allowed, but it demands a lot.” Another mother said, “I am a mom for all the kids in the football team.” She did things which she considered the tasks of children’s parents because she believed that the parents of children with migrant background did not “follow up” in the same way as ethnic Norwegians would and are expected to. Not every white Norwegian acted in response to what they believed were the needs of other people’s children (Bendixsen and Danielsen 2018). Those parents who did saw it as a means of counteracting social exclusion and promoting social incorporation—particularly of “Other” children (in terms of migration and class background). They practiced this through voluntary activities and engagement in the neighborhood and local school. Some parents had pursued activities to include “other people’s children” over several years, and a couple of them appeared to have reached a fatigue in what we might call “integration work” in their

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everyday life. One non-migrant working-class mother said: “I feel sorry for the children whose parents refuse to let them go to birthday parties. We want the best. We want to give. But the communication cannot be only one-sided.” Kari, a middle-class mother, was enthusiastic in her efforts to get to know people living in Soltre: We were completely entranced by how wonderful it is to live here, and that it is very rewarding … people have a genuine desire for change, and see that there is much that can be very good, and there’s a lot you have to work with and there are many challenges. … One is engaged, and you may feel important and then … you are making a difference.

Kari believed that she and her husband could make a much more significant difference to the neighborhood than in other more homogenous middle-class areas. It gave her engagement a particular purpose and value. She also talked about how her practices as a parent were fueled by the place where she lived because she perceived that so few others were similarly engaged: If you live in a place where everybody is equally engaged and involved as parents, it would be easy to think that ‘I don’t need to do it, because my neighbors will fix it.’ While here, there are not so many engaged parents. So, when you do something, you notice that you have influence. Like in the class, where I am the class contact, it is quite easy to get people engaged. If you take some responsibility yourself, and delegate, or tempt them, you can get a lot done.

The perceived lack of parental participation in Soltre motivated Kari to become more active. She felt that parents should engage with the neighborhood and local children, including those who were underserved. For this reason, she pursued what has been called “intensive parenting” (Lareau 2003), meaning that she used much of her time, thought, and resources for her children, while initiating many activities for children at the school. While initially she organized activities because her own children needed something to do in their free time, her commitments soon went beyond them. In time, she and others put considerable thought,

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effort, and time into building up a large number of recreational classes— including chess, cooking, dancing, sports, and guitar—for different ages, genders, and interests. For Kari, parenting became a space where she could engage with others and the neighborhood itself. She talked about it as a duty to make a difference, to create a good neighborhood that was inclusive of all future citizens. She explained that her activities were driven by a concern about the welfare system: without citizen engagement like hers, there would be too many refugees and migrants on welfare, and the system would not be sustainable. Indeed, several parents we interviewed expressed concern about children of migrant background and were keen to prevent them from becoming future welfare dependents. Sara, a working-class mother who had climbed the social ladder and moved from social housing to owning her own home, did voluntary work for local children. She was passionate about her work to improve the prospects for the children there: There is nothing that says that if the parents are dependent on welfare, the children will become that as well. And I want the parents to understand that even though they feel that they did not make it at school, their children can. And we have a big job working with that; we need to make the children believe in themselves. And let the parents know that we will help them along. … It is important that we drive this enthusiastically.

Sara was concerned that a failure of integration would mean that too many would be dependent on social welfare when growing up. This could be avoided, she believed, if the child had a supportive community. Similarly, Maria, a highly engaged, middle-class mother, said: “We do not want them [migrant children living in social housing] to become dependent on welfare services. We want the whole group to climb the social ladder.” In the work to create an inclusive environment where diversity is valued, non-migrant parents strived to incorporate parents with migrant background through activities. One middle-class father, who was active in the local children’s football club, told us:

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When we arranged that football match, we suggested that the parents with a minority background should make the food. And the response we got, and the confidence and satisfaction they gained, after that, it was so good to be part of that. They achieved something and felt important.

Giving clear assignments—which in this instance was about providing food—seemed to be a typical practice to get other parents to engage or be active. At events and festivals organized by the school, the Working Committee for Parents, or the municipality to celebrate Soltre, the food was as diverse as the population, with tables set up for “Indian food,” “Iranian food,” and “Somali food.” During May 17, Norway’s national day, children typically eat hot dogs and ice-cream, though at two of the schools we studied, halal sausages were made available. During one of the yearly “local neighborhood days” for celebrating the community, a food stall sold lapskaus, a Norwegian stew with potatoes, root vegetables, and meat (most often pork), made by a non-migrant mother. She explained to us that at all the events for children in Soltre they could eat more exotic food, but many migrants and their children had never eaten something so common to Norwegians as lapskaus, which she felt was a pity. She had asked a migrant mother if she knew lapskaus, and the mother had never heard about it. This motivated her to introduce them to this more traditional Norwegian food, which she thought was probably exotic for them. She made sure to only use halal meat and to inform about this clearly at the food stall.

Creating Mutual Belonging? In the work of Kari, Maria, and others to include other children and other children’s parents in school and neighborhood programming, we see a process of social incorporation characterized by both ideals of equality and hierarchical forms of belonging. To create equal childhoods, parents tried to create similar childhood experiences. But outreach to migrant parents was not just about an idealized view of diversity. Rather, it partly reflected a shared perception that these other parents were failing the obligations associated with good parenthood. One example is the

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obligation to keep your children busy. In Norway, recreational activities are considered as important tools in order to keep children off the streets (Loga 2011) and out of trouble. Furthermore, activities for children are seen as vital to develop desired skills and personality traits, such as the ability to concentrate, cooperate, and keep fit (Stefansen and Aarseth 2011). Engaging with other children as part of their own parenting establishes new norms of what parenting should be about. In the case of the working-­ class mother Anne, she talked about how she performed several actions, specifically for children with migrant backgrounds, which she would otherwise expect the children’s parents to do. Comparing her child’s handball team with teams from other neighborhoods, she argued that the latter could rely on more parental involvement, as they had several parents volunteering for the team. Her team had very few. In her view, the parents of children with a migrant background did not “follow up” in the same way as ethnic majority Norwegian parents, which was a problem because following up was, to her understanding, an essential part of being a good parent. What she could not accept is that the shortcomings of other parents—due to language challenges, economic circumstances, and unfamiliar cultural norms—should affect the children. She tried to compensate for these shortcomings, to eradicate the boundary between her own children and differently situated parents’ children. She and other non-­ migrant parents have a particular vision of childhood, which, when interrelated to a shared orientation toward equality as sameness, contribute to their trying to create egalitarian childhoods for their own—and others’—children. The value of equality is inculcated directly through the impression it leaves on the activities and events themselves. Creating similar experiences for the children or establishing equality of access to common experiences were initiated to create equality of opportunity. The goal of many of the practices was that of social equality and to bring along equality of outcomes for the children as they grow up. Thus, in order for equality to flourish and thrive in a condition of unequal resources (money, social capital, and social network), differences were incorporated through parenting practices that sought to reduce different access to common experiences. The sameness which is created through these parenting practices is a new sameness because it is based and

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initiated on recognizing differences. As such, the social incorporation processes change all the actors involved. Instead of trying to constitute equality by making the different starting points irrelevant or ignoring differences (Gullestad 1992), specific differences are tacitly defined and incorporated through practices that have the aim to limit what these parents believe would otherwise establish different outcomes for the other children’s childhood and future opportunities. In this social incorporation process, thus difference is acknowledged and reconfigured in social interaction where equality in difference is the main social aim. The parents’ efforts of creating social inclusion in the neighborhood suggest how an understanding of social relations in Norway should not be reduced to equality as sameness and an avoidance of difference (see also Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer 2011): the parents relate to each other despite, or even because of and with a focus on, social inequalities. Research in Scandinavia has showed people can create a sense of community despite internal differences (Bruun 2011), focusing on common concerns. Social interaction is not necessarily based on sameness, but on ascribing equal value to people and thus allowing difference in status, economic resources, and lifestyle to co-exist (Lien et al. 2001). In this case, differences not only co-exist but become the main focus of the interaction. In Soltre, parents do not avoid difference, but try to include difference in their everyday parenting practices. The effort by these parents to create social cohesion must also be understood within the context of the Norwegian governments’ long emphasis on activation and active citizens. As in other EU states, Norway has followed the trend of a “duty turn” in how to pursue its “citizen-­ making.” The desired, “good citizen” with the respected civic dispositions that will make productive incorporation feasible and easy is dependent on labor market participation and civic virtues, like learning the language and participating in civil society (Brochmann 2014). The Soltre parents distinguish between active versus passive parenting in their approach to different ways of parenting. Parents who are not actively engaging in a similar way as these parents are viewed as passive—a form of parenthood that is regarded as lacking in its potential to configuring a “good childhood.” However, while researchers suggest that the Norwegian

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government is moralizing and incentivizing individual citizens (Brochmann 2014), producing individualized citizens, the incorporation process viewed here is characterized by social attempts to bring about cohesion, rather than relegating it to individual efforts of migrants. The ways in which the parents respond and include difference in social interaction contribute to a hierarchy of belonging because some differences are considered as valuable, while other differences are disapproved of or made invisible. The social incorporation process we have looked at here is foremost defined by practices pursued by non-migrant parents. This focus is also a result of the choice of researcher’s gaze in this chapter on the non-migrant parents. In these processes the parents of other people’s children were to a large extent viewed as different by the non-migrant parents. Other people’s children became part of their parenting practices in different ways, that is, for some citizen parents, including other children was part of cultivating a specific ethical character trait in their own children, namely, that they should grow up to be tolerant and understand that differences are “not scary or dangerous,” or, as Anne said, that migrants are “just normal people.” Some parents were explicitly striving for their children to encounter diversity positively, in terms of people and practices (see also Danielsen 2010; Song and Gutierrez 2016). One middle-class father commented: “My children have a better childhood when we know each other and create a good living environment together.” Including other people’s children as part of their parenting practices was for many a way of contributing to shaping the society in which they lived and in which their children would thrive. The other becomes partly a figure toward which children must develop important skills of being-in-the-world—in a world that has become increasingly diverse. The practices are based on a recognition (and sometimes a celebration of ) that the Norwegian society is differently constituted than when they grew up, and that raising their children in this new society includes embracing and relating to differences. Welcoming migrants to make and sell “food from around the world” during various activities at the schools and free-time activities was frequently mentioned as a positive consequence of migration. These food stands come to represent spaces of “banal cosmopolitanism” (Beck 2006, 40), where ethnic difference is positively valued through its difference, incorporated through consumption (Erel 2011).

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Conclusion Based on an ethnographic study in a diverse Norwegian neighborhood, we have examined the ways that some parents pursue the incorporation of “other” parents and their children. Their approach to difference is motivated both by shared normative values and by attention to what they view as the particularities of the other. We see the desire for equality, in terms of creating equal chances, as the defining feature of how parents respond to differences in their local surroundings, and influencing how they interact with other parents at their children’s school and social environment. Recognition of existing difference (economic differences, language difficulties) can, as we have seen, mean that an activity or event must accommodate those differences, in order to make room for a common space, or for mutual belonging in Soltre. While some of these practices are pursued by parents as a way in which to reduce differences and social inequality, and socially including parents with migration background, these practices simultaneously draw on ideas of difference, and contribute to hierarchal forms of belonging. In everyday encounters there are implicit and explicit expectations from the non-migrant parents that people with migrant background should learn and appreciate certain Norwegian traditions and values (e.g. walking in the nature, dugnad, gender equality, and birthday celebrations). There are efforts to create mutual belonging, as well as a single, valorized set of social expectations on behavior and parenting. Social incorporation is always situated in a dynamic of power relations, that is, in the definition of who can belong and what it takes to be allowed to belong. The minority population, such as migrant parents, is frequently not provided much public space to be part of constituting the content of belonging. Yuval-Davis (2006, 205) has drawn attention to that: The politics of belonging includes also struggles around the determination of what is involved in belonging, in being a member of a community, and of what roles specific social locations and specific narratives of identity play in this. As such, it encompasses contestations both in relation to the participatory dimension of citizenship as well as in relation to issues of the status and entitlements such membership entails.

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Any promoting or adapting of social values, that is, equality, also introduces hierarchy (Dumont 1970). Conforming to forms of sociality, such as equality as sameness, introduces a hierarchy, partly because people will have differentiated abilities to master the valued forms of sociality (Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer 2011). In consequence, spaces which are generally understood to be egalitarian simultaneously operate with hierarchical specters (Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer 2011). While hierarchy in a total system of meaning implies difference, it does not per se mean inequality or injustice, although frequently described as such in the West. As Dumont (1970, 20) argues: “To adopt a value is to introduce hierarchy, and a certain consensus of values, a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life.” This chapter substantiates earlier research (Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer 2011) that shows how the particular understanding of hierarchy in values and notions of what is good or right is operating together with the value of equality in Scandinavian social life. The characteristics of social incorporation presented here must be understood within a particular political and public discourse on the anxiety of the survival of the welfare state, ideals of egalitarianism, and ideas about national identity and social cohesion. Good Norwegian citizens must be active, not only through work, but also in civil society. These practices are not without friction. The barbeque with which this chapter began can be understood as an example of well-meaning intentions gone wrong. It went wrong, in part, because of the lack of encounters in which people come together and forge genuine connections. More generally, the parents’ practices discussed in this chapter can suggest that egalitarianism—when it is played out as sameness, generating efforts to highlighting similarity and under-communicate difference—can impede a process of incorporation in which all parts have a (equal) saying in its making.

Note 1. The Norwegian Child Authority has been critiqued for their overrepresentation of interventions in migrant families.

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Wessendorf, Susanne. 2013. Commonplace diversity and the ‘Ethos of mixing’: perceptions of difference in a London neighbourhood. Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 20: 407–422. ———. 2014. ‘Being open, but sometimes closed’. Conviviality in a superdiverse London neighbourhood. European Journal of Cultural Studies 17: 392–405. ———. 2016 ‘Settling in a super-diverse context: Recent migrants’ experiences of conviviality’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 37 (5): 449–463. Wise, Amanda. 2013. Hope in a Land of Strangers. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10 (1): 37–45. Yuval-Davis, Nira 2006. Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice 40 (3): 197–214.

7 “Cut and Sew”: Migration, Crisis, and Belonging in an Italian Fast-Fashion Zone Elizabeth L. Krause

What it means to “belong” in Europe can best be understood through local-global dynamics, especially those related to population movement, economic structures, racial formation along with race-troubled politics, and even kinship idioms. The social fabric of one European city, renowned as Europe’s “most diverse” due to its concentration of migrants, inspires this chapter’s ethnographic investigation into the theme of difference and belonging in Europe. The factory-city of Prato in greater metropolitan Tuscany is known for its postwar population boom, transnational migration, and births to foreign women. Chinese migrants occupy a formidable niche in the Made in Italy sector. These non-citizen entrepreneurs own and manage more than 5200 small family firms, mostly in the fast-fashion sector just north of the Renaissance city of Florence. Together, Chinese and Italian protagonists reveal themselves as desiring subjects of a global capitalism that E. L. Krause (*) Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_7

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is surprisingly heterogeneous. Their stories make tangible the diverse ways in which crisis and transformation manifest in modes of belonging. They reveal how individuals encounter global forces resulting from different trajectories yet structural similarities vis-à-vis migration and demographic shifts. This chapter draws on a transnational collaborative research project in greater metropolitan Tuscany. I spent 220  days across 7 trips between 2012 and 2015 as the project’s principal investigator conducting urban ethnographic research at various sites and events across the city, its industrial district, and connected townships. Prato and its sprawling province, which cuts across postwar industrial districts and picturesque hilltowns, serve as a laboratory of globalization. Ethnographic data derive largely from two different types: unstructured, in the form of participant observation and socially occurring discourse, and semi-structured, in the form of interviews with Chinese as well as Italian participants. Against a demographic dynamic of lowest-low fertility and mass migration, this chapter revives the concept of crisis of presence (De Martino 1977) as it places into dialogue three different migratory trajectories: regional, national, and transnational (Bressan and Cambini 2009). Each of these phases of migration brought new residents into a historic textile urban area. The new arrivals had dialects, habits, and dreams that differed from the locals who identified Prato as their home. Belonging was not automatic. Newcomers historically were more attached to their towns of origin than to their regions. Establishing roots and a sense of belonging took time and came with conflict as well as a recognition that the world had significantly transformed: first with the fall of fascism, next with the economic miracle, and still later with globalization and its new forms of economic crisis and possibility.1

 etting: Migration, Demographic Dynamics, S and Racism A controversial New York Times article in December 2019 used the case of Prato to explain Italy’s current lurch to the political right: “The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage” (Goodman and Bubola 2019). A tagline

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noted that Italy’s current political dynamic is “often attributed to anger over migrants” but then suggested that the “story begins decades ago, when China first targeted small textile towns.” The article’s dateline was Prato, indicating that the reporters gathered the bulk of their information there. In a public letter, Prato’s mayor objected to placing the blame for national voting trends on Chinese migrants. He called the article’s us-­ them characterization of Prato as “desueto,” or obsolete (Biffoni 2019). Among its most glaring omission were the results of the city’s two recent mayoral elections in which the center left beat out the far-right. Prato has gone against the national election trends. In summer 2019, anti-fascist protesters clashed with riot police and expressed opposition to far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, a trafficker in selfies that soften his hardline anti-immigrant politics of fear and hate. Salvini’s party, the League, enjoyed tremendous success in 2018 and 2019 both in European Parliamentary and in local administrative elections. Analysts characterized Salvini as a populist and a neo-fascist. He was steadfast in his policy forbidding rescue ships carrying refugees to land in Italian ports and in fact a new security decree would impose fines on rescue boats that bring migrants to Italy—“a declaration of war against the NGOs who are saving lives at sea” (The Guardian, June 15, 2019). A security law cracked down on third-sector organizations helping the most vulnerable of refugees and asylum seekers. In Prato, Salvini made an appearance at the Emperor’s Castle, no less, just three days before the mayoral election in June 2019, to lend his support to a candidate in a high-stakes run-off. The closely followed race pitted the incumbent from the Democratic Party (PD) against a candidate supported by the right-wing coalition. The run-off was required because neither won more than 50 percent of a vote involving eight candidates from across the political spectrum. The tone of the two camps offered a study in contrasts: a politics of hate versus a politics of love. Mayor Matteo Biffoni’s motto: con tutto l’amore che c’è. On Sunday, June 9, Biffoni was re-elected to a second five-­ year term. The tally was 56 percent. Love won. The supporters’ mood was nothing short of jubilant. A good crowd showed up in a city park to celebrate the win.

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Prato’s race was especially noteworthy because of its demographic profile. Prato ranks as Italy’s most diverse province. This bears out in terms of the portion of transnational migrants to total residents. In the most recent census, in 2011, the city’s total resident population reached 185,456, of which 28,518, or 15.4 percent, were classified as stranieri, or foreigners. Meanwhile, the Province of Prato boasted a total population of 248,477, of which 36,834, or 14.8 percent, were foreign residents. These numbers compare with the rate of 6.8 percent of foreign residents in Italy nationwide (Istat n.d.). In terms of the Chinese presence, estimates vary wildly since the situation is very fluid and a large percentage begin their stay as undocumented and thus unregistered. In our research project, 75 percent of participants reported having been undocumented at one point during their stay in Italy. Registered Chinese migrants yield numbers of around 40 percent of official resident foreigners. When only Chinese individuals with residency permits are included, estimates hover around 15,000 migrants; when those who are undocumented are included, estimates often double to a total of 30,000 or more. These numbers have won the city various popular designations, such as Europe’s number one multicultural city (Brandi and Sabatini 2012; Istat 2011; Office of Statistics 2013). It ranks first in Italian provinces in terms of the ratio of Italian to registered foreign residents. Non-Italians have migrated from 118 different countries. That said, the most notable non-­ Italian residents in Prato carry Chinese passports. The transnational migrants are the most recent in seven decades of migration. The first phase of migration occurred after the devastation of world war as Tuscan peasants abandoned the countryside for the city. Many peasants from the rural hinterlands had been politicized as partisans in the resistance against Italian fascism and the Nazi occupation of Tuscany. Nationalism left a bad taste by the end of World War II. During the two decades of greatest growth, 1951–1971, Prato witnessed a doubling of its population from 77,631 to 143,232 residents. Many former peasants brought with them a desire for autonomy. The new arrivals left behind the mezzadria system of sharecropping with its hierarchical family and agricultural organization. They traded the rigid system for the promise of an urban lifestyle of factory work or industrial artisanship and the relative autonomy it promised. Work in an informal economy spread as labor

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struggles heated up and in turn as small family firms proliferated. A peasant ethos persisted—visceral yet mixed memories of the soil, of patron-­ client relations, of generational, conflict, and of reciprocity (Barbagli 1984; Becattini 1986; Blim 1990; Cento Bull and Corner 1993; Gaggio 2007; Snowden 1989). A second phase of migration, in the 1960s, witnessed the arrival of residents from the deep south. They left behind diverse peasant agriculture. People of southern Italian heritage suffered quasi Jim Crow-style discrimination as they sought housing and employment in their new city. Southern Italians were long stigmatized in the Italian imagination as inferior—a status and a trope that Italian state formation reinforced, Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology underwrote, and Edward Banfield’s “amoral familism” reinscribed (Banfield 1958; Gramsci 1971; Silverman 1968). In Prato, Southerners settled in parts of the urban center, such as San Paolo, that were later dubbed Little Italy. They also found outlying semi-rural municipalities to be welcoming with their abandoned farmhouses especially as some landowners refused to rent to Southerners. A set of these municipalities in 1992 split from the Province of Florence and became incorporated into the Province of Prato. (Municipalities include Prato, Montemurlo, Carmignano, Vaiano, Poggio A Caiano, Vernio, and Cantagallo. Vaiano is the birthplace of the famous actor Roberto Benigni.) In a third phase, especially since the 1990s, transnational migrants began moving into the area. By far the most numerous of these non-­ citizen residents have their origins in China, with most born in Wenzhou of the southeastern coastal province of Zhejiang and some from Fujian. Scholars estimate 90 percent of Chinese in Tuscany have origins in Wenzhou (Tomba 1999, 281). Among the 41 migrants who participated in our research, 34 were from Zhejiang Province, 1 from Hunan, and 3 from Fujian (another 2 were born in Italy and 1 did not respond). These migrants view southern Europe as a “frontier of highly developed economies,” a place “where they … face little competition from established Chinese communities” (Pieke et al. 2004). Protagonists of these migrations offer perspectives that illuminate senses of existential despair and possibilities of transcendence born out of economic crisis of a global scale that unfold at the local level. Stories span

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local, regional, and transnational histories. They expose a dialectic of “presence in the world” and “the world which presents itself ” (Saunders 1993, 883). This dialectic has the potential to energize our thinking particularly in relation to belonging. The backdrop of ongoing economic crisis reveals how the hegemony of global supply chains (Tsing 2015) has transformed not only local production systems (Becattini 2015) but also social worlds that reveal an unexpected mutuality of belonging. Protagonists voice a world unhinged, using metaphors such as “one world ends, another one begins,” “cut and sew,” and “a world undone.” Migration and families have long been intertwined in producing the Made in Italy brand. After the labor struggles of the 1960s, much production was outsourced to family firms. In the 1980s onward, small sweater firms dominated the landscape. In the 2000s, transnational migrants came to occupy a formidable niche. By 2015, Chinese entrepreneurs in Prato owned and managed more than 5200 small enterprises, mostly in the Made in Italy fast-fashion sector, totaling 45 percent of manufacturing activity. Prato offers a living laboratory of globalization. The experiment has not been so smooth. Challenges that plague globalization intensify. Once a darling of postwar flexibility, the city can hardly be called a crown jewel of globalization. A prolonged economic crisis has hit both the mainstream Italian economy and coexisting immigrant one hard (Bressan and Cambini 2011). Indeed, the author of the popular and unconventional travel book Non ti riconosco (I Don’t Recognize You) describes Prato as having transformed from an Italian miracle into a symptom of a global illness (Revelli 2016). Metaphors of pathology have become commonplace to describe cultural and demographic dynamics. Mainstream demographers from the 1990s educated the public about the so-called demographic malaise of low fertility, its “true and real ‘mutation,’” with the power to “unhinge the whole social and economic structure of the country” (Golini 1994, 8). This extended to characterizations of a veritable national “anorexia” (Krause 2001; Livi-Bacci 1994). I argued that the expert advice constructed a sort of social Viagra, pushing a patriarchal variety of pronatalism to counter the “danger” of low fertility and revitalize normative Italian family-making (Krause and Marchesi 2007). Recently, in 2016, a

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National Fertility Day campaign to provoke citizens to procreate was so controversial for conjuring the ghost of fascist pronatalism that, similar to a national act of coitus interruptus, it was immediately withdrawn (Krause 2018a).

Encounter Ethnography I conceptualized encounter ethnography as a methodological strategy to guide transnational collaboration. Encounter ethnography is both a way of conducting research and an approach to enriching analysis. Many anthropologists have written about encounters in the legacy of ethnographic research. The concept emphasizes experiences or processes that are at odds with one another, as in the phrases “colonial encounter” (Asad 1973), “development encounter” (Escobar 1991), “intercultural encounter” (Sahlins 2000), “clinical encounter” (Ferzacca 2000), “activist encounters” (Razsa 2015), “fieldwork encounters” (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009), and even “unpredictable encounters” (Tsing 2015). Rather than leave encounters to the realm of common sense, I have nurtured encounter ethnography as a theoretically informed framework. The orientation places encounters as points of interpenetration and mediation at the center of investigation, one that lends itself to be carried out on a local level yet with global sensibilities. Here, encounter ethnography takes particular inspiration from Eric Wolf ’s (Wolf 1982) billiard ball critique of the culture concept, Anna Tsing’s (Tsing 2015) call for the arts of noticing, and Ernesto De Martino’s (De Martino 1977) insights related to analytic categories and observational paradoxes. The approach offers value for understanding the big picture of relationships between immigrants, majority populations, and global systems. How do the ways in which people are entangled in global supply chains bind people together? How do these systems underwrite or undermine belonging? Such bindings and belongings are often rendered invisible through urban segregation patterns, heightened security, and xenophobic discourses. In this sense, I see encounter ethnography as a methodological positioning that works and writes against the sorts of divisions and separatist backlash coursing through many societies the world over.

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Crisis of Presence A “crisis of presence” was palpable while I conducted field research for Tight Knit (Krause 2018b). I borrow from De Martino’s crisi della presenza to describe a sense of existential despair akin to an individual standing at the edge of the earth, precarious and disoriented, as when a Southern Italian peasant once left his town and lost view of his bell tower. De Martino’s work represented an ongoing dialogue with the anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci, and he was drawn to illuminate how subaltern practices occurred in relation to hegemonic systems. De Martino drew from subaltern ontologies as well as philosophers and political theorists to develop a way of thinking about the relationship between selves and the outside world: a dialectic of “presence in the world” and “the world which presents itself.” The first speaks to experiences of internal being, whereas the second points to perceptions of an external reality. Reviving De Martino’s work helps make sense of the kind of melancholic mood that I frequently encountered in Prato. The world as people knew it seemed to be spinning out of control. Intense immigration combined with lowest-low fertility has manifested in a rising tide of demographic nationalism. Protagonists revealed existential despair along with possibilities of transcendence born out of economic crisis of a local-global scale. Stories span local, regional, and transnational histories. They expose a process in which “recognizing the other is fraught with the danger of losing one’s own center, … of losing one’s own presence” (Giordano 2014, 54; see also Saunders 1993). Protagonists voice a world unhinged as well as possibilities for a world re-made. Four brief cases illustrate how the crisis of presence is lived. Three of these encounters were the result of long-term relationships dating back to my fieldwork in 1995–1997 and my work in a family sweater finishing firm where I worked for six months attaching buttons in a workshop with two other retired Italians.

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“One world ends, another one begins” Letizia was rooted in place, culturally and politically from the left, pushed to the right of late, angry and full of fear, adamant that she and her town had been subject to a hostile takeover.2 She was a longtime Tuscan native and prominent art and public works advocate whose frustrations with the new immigrants manifested in concerns for beauty and the environment. She agreed with a popular journalist who framed the Chinese migration to Prato as a siege. She asserted her roots, saying that her ancestors had always been Tuscans, proudly noting that her grandmother was from Vinci, home of Leonardo, and that her father, a contractor with communist sensibilities, had initiated a cooperative-style of financing during Prato’s boom years, in the burgeoning San Paolo neighborhood, in which dwellers could pay rent and eventually own their houses without the burdens of an official mortgage. Born in 1941, Letizia grew up during the transformations of the postwar. She watched her town transition from agriculture to industry: “One world ends and another one begins.” She repeated the phrase like the refrain to a song. In the mid-1990s, Letizia and her husband, a retired state railway employee who had migrated to Tuscan from the south, operated a sweater finishing firm out of a room of their house. In the 2000s, as her town registered a 400 percent increase in immigrant residents, she voiced the dominant and resentful sentiment that the Chinese refused to integrate into Italian society, that they isolated themselves, and that of Italians or Italian culture they could give a damn. “Our equilibrium is very delicate; it’s been thrown into crisis by many things,” she said, reflecting on her values to foster democracy and art. “You can’t live without beauty; otherwise, we are really just brutes.” It was difficult to reconcile the changing world with the one she sought to foster.

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“Cut and sew” What can be done about the crisis? That question opened a public Democratic Festival. Among the speakers was Wang, an entrepreneur who claims to have the longest business activity of any Chinese person in Prato. His journey from undocumented migrant to leader of a local business association reveals the “spiritual insistence” of many migrants from Wenzhou. His firm specialized in sewing yarns, providing materials to cut-and-sew firms. Following the tragic Teresa Moda factory fire of 2013, Wang sought to recruit Chinese firms to respect safety regulations. He drew on the cut-­ and-­sew metaphor to make the point that good city leaders must study the situation, then keep the good and cut out the bad. “How do you cut with scissors?” he asked, rhetorically. The Chinese who use fake names just to escape paying any taxes, for example, they should be cut out, he said. But like with sharp scissors, leaders need to cut with care. “Scissors must cut well,” he said. His approach shows respect for the migrant spiritual insistence and carves out space to cultivate entrepreneurial activity. He added, “Yes, yes, cut and sew, yes, cut and sew.”

“A world undone” The world was pushing up against a precipice. Antonio and Aurora sold their sweater-weaving looms, tore down their workshop, and built condominiums around 2004. I knew them well and my husband and I became close with them back when her mother was our landlady. Antonio and Aurora did not have children of their own and they developed a kin-like relationship of aunt and uncle to my daughter, who attended preschool and first grade in the local schools. We watched as they shifted from production to real estate, which was a common strategy among subcontractors. There was no longer any money to be made as a sweater artisan. When I came to visit them, during 2012–2015, instead of furiously finishing sweater orders, they’d spend their days doing errands, making and keeping medical appointments, and smoking a lot.

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Antonio drew a pension. Aurora got furious every time the government raised the age for pension eligibility. The welfare state has been cut back. They seemed unsettled, even anxious. Many times, face to face and over the phone, she ranted about the situation: “This is an inhumane crisis.” Both Antonio and Aurora were born in the 1950s and migrated with their families to Prato in the years of the postwar boom. Aurora moved from Calabria in the south. Antonio from Maremma in rural Tuscany. Nowadays, everyone seemed to have only their own interests at heart. Too much “progress” had taken people back. “I see a world tutto disfatto, completely undone, very aggressive, very violent,” Aurora said. To illustrate her point, she told me about a grizzly double murder-suicide reported as the planned outcome of an economically distressed couple whose bodies were discovered in the next town over after two months in their house. The case stimulated conversations of people pushed to the brink in times of economic hardship and institutional abandonment. Austerity takes a toll and has a price. Aurora also told me an ordinary personal story of what it meant to live in an undone world. One day, she arrived at the farm where she regularly went to buy local peasant wine. She noticed an abundance of strawberries growing in pots. “Y’know, we like sweets,” she said. The woman told her to look at all the strawberries “down there” but did not offer her a single berry—a sample as a small gift. For Aurora, the experience stood out as a parable. With the economic crisis, people had become selfish. Relationships based on reciprocity were withering away. It troubled her. To give away one strawberry would not be “the end of the world.” She spoke about a different sort of world-ending, one which she characterized as a world undone.

“We are the Chinese” Antonio participated in the heated labor struggles of 1968. He was of the generation of artisans that some ten years later opened up small shops and bought their own machines. The idea of an eight-hour workday became a distant notion as the phases of sweater production moved outside of factories. For subcontracting artisans, a fixed workday didn’t exist.

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“We subcontractors are the flexible ones.” Antonio explained that a regular worker cannot compare in terms of flexibility. “In the moments when there’s a lot of work, we manage to do it; we work Saturday and Sunday, twenty hours, eighteen hours, sixteen hours. I cinesi siamo noi. We are the Chinese.” To say, “We are the Chinese” is a powerful metaphor. It speaks to the similar structural positions that Italian internal migrants then share with Chinese transnational immigrants now.

 onclusion: Crisis, Transformation, C and Belonging Each of these desiring subjects makes tangible diverse ways in which crisis and transformation manifest. They suggest how individuals encounter global forces resulting from different trajectories vis-à-vis migration and demographic shifts. Each protagonist faces a changing world, encounters alterity, and confronts it differently. Letizia’s “one world ends and another begins,” Wang’s “cut and sew,” Aurora’s “world completely undone” and Antonio’s “We are the Chinese,” together reveal worlds that are changing, being re-made, with endings and beginnings. They have thought deeply about the changes. In varying degrees, each makes the world anew through actions. I take seriously these ethnographically generated metaphors. On the one hand, they call attention to local ways of understanding how one belongs to the present often in comparison with memories with a past; on the other hand, they provoke thinking about the future of the craft of ethnography and the value of ethnographic knowledge. Such thoughts bring to mind our own endeavors of doing and writing ethnography as well as the future social worlds that we might encounter as ethnographers. De Martino observed that the challenge of culture is to suture inner and outer worlds together. Do we agree? If so, the purpose of “culture” is also to provide subjects with tools for everyday making of meaning. In addition, this kind of suturing stands for another way to conceptualize

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belonging. With each stitch, mutual incommensurabilities may become less incommensurable. Through quotidian experiences and encounters, feelings of difference and distance may give way to shared sensibilities. Different histories may give way to realizations of structural similarities: A good number of Italian sweatermakers and textile workers have come to realize that they occupied a niche very similar to their transnational migrant counterparts. Ethnography suggests that integration may happen organically across time and within place. It may be deeply connected to global structures, displacements, and tensions, and it may be profoundly encouraged or disrupted by certain political and racial regimes. When it comes to difference and belonging, nothing is guaranteed. The subject may or may not be able to handle internal or external “realities” that go hand in hand with economic, social, and cultural change and feelings about their place in the world. The bell tower may slip out of view as quickly as it may come back into view. The bell tower stands for a certain kind of belonging, one whose scale is graspable and tied to a particular place, with specific histories, and precise relationships. This sort of scale brings to mind something that Marshall Sahlins said not long ago in the book-length essay, What Kinship Is—And Is Not (Sahlins 2013, ix). Sahlins’ essay highlights the multiple ways in which being and belonging can be realized. What resonated with me in that essay was his idea that kinship has to do with “mutual relations of being” and “participation in one another’s existence.” The idea is that to be part of a family means that family members have a desire to be part of each other’s lives, to share in one another’s milestone moments: births, marriages, deaths; sickness and healing; suffering and joy. Family members make memories together. They share feelings about their lives whether they live close to one another in the same town or far away in different cities. Indeed, there’s something profound in this concept of kinship in terms of a sensibility of belonging. Kinship itself can serve as a way to help us understand belonging. The most basic unit in which many people feel a sense of belonging is family. Here we can understand in its most fundamental way what belonging is: it is perhaps more than anything a desire to be part of one’s life, and even one’s death. I remember when my mother-in-law died. We had been in

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the field during fall 2002 and as soon as we returned, my husband learned his mother was doing poorly. He quickly booked a flight and traveled back to Missouri. His mother passed ten minutes before he arrived. Somehow, missing out on her final breath made the death all the more tragic. The funeral conflicted with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, and I kept my obligation to present on a panel. I was pre-tenure and worried about breaking my commitment. Family members said my mother-in-law would have wanted me to keep my work commitment. It was a terrible decision. I suffered terribly for missing this moment. There is a sense that close family members should be present for key moments, including milestones such as birth and death or remembering a life. This represents belonging at its most intimate. We can extend these notions of belonging to social belonging. Belonging does not often come easy even in families. Conflicts and tensions are as common as sentiments of love and intimacy. After more than 25  years working in Prato, my relationship with my fieldsite can be understood through this idiom of kinship. I work on sustaining the relationships. Some are harder than others. Some come easier than others. Some feel highly tenuous whereas others feel profoundly durable. It is through these relationships and my history with the place that I have a sense of belonging—despite not having citizenship or residency. As anthropologists, we often experience a form of kinship in our belonging to social worlds. I have come to know my fieldsite with great intimacy over the course of more than two decades of research. I experience a great deal of personal satisfaction when I happen to be in the field for certain milestones, such as the recent re-election of the mayor who beat out the right-wing candidate. Policies may foster belonging, but ethnographic research suggests that belonging comes from relationships and a mutuality of being. As much as anything, belonging has to do with presence of place. It has to do with shared struggles, wins and losses, and relationships with others, with territories, and with economic and political ups and downs over time. Acknowledgments  I am grateful to my research participants and friends for sharing their time, stories, and insights with me and my team over the years. This research was made possible in large part due to the National Science

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Foundation for funding the project, “Chinese Immigration and Family Encounters in Italy” (BCS-1157218), as well as a Wenner-Gren Foundation International Collaborative Research Grant, (ICRG-114), “Tight Knit: Familistic Encounters in a Fast-Fashion District.” I am grateful for the collaboration with Dr. Massimo Bressan, co-applicant on the Wenner-Gren, and support from the Prato-based IRIS research institute. Research assistance from Fangli Xu was particularly essential to data collection. Ying Li, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also assisted with translation and analysis. Support from the National Humanities Center, where Krause was a fellow during 2013–2014, allowed precious writing time. My thanks are also due to Kelly McKowen and John Borneman for care they brought to curating the volume. In memory of my father, John “Jack” Krause (1931–2020).

Notes 1. If the fall of Mussolini’s fascism can be marked with a date of 1944, and the postwar boom with the two decades that followed, current dynamics in globalization can be framed with the unraveling of Europe’s Multi Fibre Agreement in 1994 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. 2. I follow ethnographic conventions and use of pseudonyms.

References Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New  York: Humanities Press. Banfield, Edward C. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe: Free Press. Barbagli, Marzio. 1984. Sotto lo stesso tetto: Mutamenti della famiglia in Italia dal XV al XX secolo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Becattini, Giacomo. 1986. Riflessioni sullo sviluppo socio-economico della Toscana in questa dopoguerra. In Storia d’Italia / Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi, ed. Piero Bevilacqua, Valerio Castronovo, and Silvio Lanaro, 901–926. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2015. La coscienza dei luoghi: il territorio come soggetto corale. Roma: Donzelli.

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Biffoni, Matteo. 2019. Prato e’ Cresciuta Tanto Negli Ultimi 10 Anni. La Nazione, December 8. www.datastampa.it Blim, Michael L. 1990. Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences. New York: Praeger. Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi. 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brandi, Enrico, and Andrea Sabatini. 2012. Dossier statistico sociale 2012. Osservatorio Sociale ed Ufficio Statistica della Provincia di Prato. Bressan, Massimo, and Sabrina Tosi Cambini. 2009. The ‘Macrolotto 0’ as a Zone of Transition: Cultural Diversity and Public Spaces. In Living Outside the Walls: The Chinese in Prato, ed. Graeme Johanson, Russell Smyth, and Rebecca French, 149–160. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2011. Zone di transizione: Etnografia urbana nei quartieri e nello spazio pubblico. Bologna: Il Mulino. Cento Bull, Anna, and Paul Corner. 1993. From Peasant to Entrepreneur: The Survival of the Family Economy in Italy. Oxford: Berg. De Martino, Ernesto. 1977. In La fine del mondo: contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, ed. Clara Gallini. Torino: G. Einaudi. Escobar, Arturo. 1991. Anthropology and the Development Encounter: The Making and Marketing of Development Anthropology. American Ethnologist 18 (4): 658–682. Ferzacca, Steve. 2000. ‘Actually, I Don’t Feel That Bad’: Managing Diabetes and the Clinical Encounter. Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Cultural and Social Analysis of Health 14 (1): 28–50. Gaggio, Dario. 2007. In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Giordano, Cristiana. 2014. Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golini, Antonio. 1994. Prefazaione. In Tendenze Demografiche e Politiche per La Popolazione. Terzo Rapporto IRP Sulla Situazione Demografica Italiana, ed. Antonio Golini, 7–12. Milan: II Mulino. Goodman, Peter S., and Emma Bubola. 2019. The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-­ Right Rage. The New  York Times, December 5. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/12/05/business/italy-china-far-right.html. Accessed 7 Jan 2020. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers.

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Istat (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica). 2011. La popolazione straniera residente in Italia: Statistiche Report. ———. n.d. Demografia in cifre  – Bilancio demografico 2011 post censimento. http://www.demo.istat.it Krause, Elizabeth L. 2001. ‘Empty Cradles’ and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race and Class in Italy. Cultural Anthropology 16 (4): 576–611. ———. 2018a. Reproduction in Retrospective, Or What’s All the Fuss Over Low Fertility? In International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes, ed. Nancy E. Riley and Jan Brunson, 73–82. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. 2018b. Tight Knit: Global Families and the Social Life of Fast Fashion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krause, Elizabeth L., and Milena Marchesi. 2007. Fertility Politics as “Social Viagra”: Reproducing Boundaries, Social Cohesion, and Modernity in Italy. American Anthropologist 109 (2): 350–362. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 1994. Introduzione. In Tendenze Demografiche e Politiche per La Popolazione. Terzo Rapporto 1RP Sulla Situazione Demografica Italiana, ed. Antonio Golini, 13–16. Milan: II Mulino. Office of Statistics, Comune of Prato, ed. 2013. Prato conta: Stranieri per cittadinanza dal 2008 al 2012 (dati al 31/12), Tabella 3.2. http://statistica. comune.prato.it/annuario/?act=f&fid=5992. Accessed 19 Nov 2013. Pieke, Frank N., et al. 2004. Transnational Chinese: Fujianese Migrants in Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Razsa, Maple. 2015. Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Revelli, Marco. 2016. Non ti riconosco: un viaggio eretico nell’Italia che cambia. Torino: Einaudi. Sahlins, Marshall. 2000. Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of “the World System”. In Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, 415–469. New York: Zone Books. ———. 2013. What Kinship Is- and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saunders, George R. 1993. ‘Critical Ethnocentrism’ and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino. American Anthropologist 95 (4): 875–893. Silverman, Sydel. 1968. Agricultural Organization, Social Structure, and Values in Italy: Amoral Familism Reconsidered. American Anthropologist 70 (1): 1–20. Snowden, Frank M. 1989. The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tomba, Luigi. 1999. Exporting the ‘Wenzhou Model’ to Beijing and Florence: Suggestions for a Comparative Perspective on Labour and Economic Organization in Two Migrant Communities. In Internal and International Migration: Chinese Perspectives, ed. Frank N.  Pieke and Hein Mallee, 280–294. Richmond: Curzon. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

8 The Power of the Bowels: A Visceral Afro-Pentecostal Critique of Italian Afrophobia Annalisa Butticci

It’s Friday evening and in the Tempio della Pace parish church hall a group of Nigerian Pentecostals is praying ardently. The sound of their prayer is audible from both the parish patio and the main chapel of the Catholic church.1 Pastor Stella invited me to attend the meeting when I called her to ask for an interview. “We can talk Friday, after evening prayer. Come around 5pm,” she told me. I accepted her invitation and, as directed, I went to the specified room in the parish hall. When I arrived, Pastor Stella’s congregation was still praying. From the patio, I could hear people loudly repeating the word “Fire! Fire! Fire!” I immediately recognized the kind of prayer in which they were engaged: it was a prayer of deliverance to cast out evil spirits. This particular prayer is usually vigorously embodied and, as several deliverance pastors told me, it requires “holy violence” (Butticci and Esiebo 2014). This includes shouting, animated gestures, and belligerent words that

A. Butticci (*) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_8

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aggressively attack evil powers causing individual and collective afflictions such as poverty, unemployment, infertility, marriage breakdown, illness, as well as crime, corruption, war, and conflicts. While I was trying to make out the specifics of the prayer, I was jolted by a sudden and frightening sound: a woman began to scream at the top of her lungs. Yes, I thought to myself, they are doing a deliverance! I quickly reached the room where Pastor Stella was leading the prayer. The door was slightly ajar and through the crack I could see a circle of people gathered around a young woman who was rolling around on the floor, contorting her body. She was crying, screaming, and emitting harsh guttural sounds. As much as I wanted to observe the scene directly, I did not want to be seen or to interrupt. I stayed behind the door, discretely hiding myself from the small congregation’s view. I was concerned that they would have become self-conscious, suspicious, and even worried had they caught sight of me. Still, I tried to follow what was happening by paying attention to the sounds and voices coming from the room. The young woman was going from lamentations to cries to dreadful screaming while the people around her kept praying, at times individually, at others together, compulsively repeating the same words: “Out! In the name of Jesus! Out! Out! Out!” As this prayer became louder, the young woman started dry heaving, until finally I heard her vomiting. Then ensued a few seconds of complete silence followed by the sound of the young woman’s heavy breathing. One, two, three deep breaths and then the congregation erupted in prayer of thanksgiving, loudly shouting “Amen! Amen! Amen!” Suddenly, a joyous song, accompanied by vibrant drums, transformed the anguished soundscape of aggressive prayer, dry heaves, vomiting, and desperate screaming. The congregation was jubilant. The young woman had been delivered from the evil spirit that was affecting her. I met with Pastor Stella after the prayer was over and all members of the congregation had left the room. When it was just the two of us sitting alone in the room among the scattered chairs, she told me the young woman’s story. Her name was Grace and she was a former trafficked girl from Benin City, Nigeria. She was a new member of the church. That evening, she had given her testimony and had told to the congregation

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her story and her life in the Italian streets. Pastor Stella told me that it was necessary and urgent to pray for her and deliver her from the evil that was still in her spirit and her body. She explained that evil can affect not only the life of people causing suffering and misfortune but also the human body and its organs. It can flow in people’s veins and manifest in sickness, pain, as well spiritual and particular individual afflictions. When evil leaves the body, she said, it can take a variety of material forms including tears, vomit, urine, or even objects of various kinds. Indeed, after several months of field work among Nigerian and Ghanaian Pentecostals in Italy, Nigeria, and Ghana, I had witnessed prayers that involved various bodily excretions. At the Mountain of Fire and Miracles prayer city, in Lagos, Nigeria, I once interviewed a young man who went to a week-long program in search of deliverance from the evil spirits that where blocking his financial breakthrough and ruining his marriage. He happily told me that after a week of violent and aggressive prayer and fasting, he was eventually able to vomit out the source of his misfortune. He showed me what he had vomited. Putting his hand in his pocket, he retrieved a folded white handkerchief, opened it, and showed me a small white shell. “This is what was blocking me. It is from the Mami Wata.”2 The many African Pentecostals I met in Italy during my research seek deliverance from evil in ways similar to those I observed in Nigeria and Ghana, but in Italy they are forced to face different evil powers. Grace and the majority of the people who were praying for her are vulnerable economic migrants or women and men exploited by the Italo-Nigerian mafias and international criminal organizations controlling sex and drugs markets. Economic exploitation, discrimination, racism, prostitution, and violence are some of the evil spirits that make prominent appearance in the African Pentecostal churches in Italy. In this chapter, I examine the ethics and politics of African Pentecostal migrants’ visceral religious practices in relation to their social experience in Italian society. By engaging metaphors of incorporation as (in)digestion and by taking seriously religious visceral practices and bodily matters, I offer an analysis of African Pentecostals’ gut ethics and visceral critique of Italian Afrophobia. I highlight how African Pentecostals’ embodied prayer provides African women and men with a space in which

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to reject Italian Afrophobia and undigested experiences of violence and racism. The literature on African migration in Europe often focuses on the various modes of incorporation of migrants into pre-existing social orders. The term “incorporation” is often used as a conceptual umbrella for other concepts like “inclusion,” “absorption,” “integration,” or “assimilation.” These concepts describe the various ways governments and societies control migrants’ economic, social, and political rights and govern cultural diversity. The diverse terms also emphasize the outcomes of various modes of incorporations resulting in the often marginal position of migrants in the economic, social, racial, and religious hierarchies of European societies (Martiniello and Rath 2014). In this chapter, I shift the gaze and I focus on African migrants’ incorporation and “indigestion” of European social hierarchies and violent modes of incorporation. The chapter has four sections. The first section introduces the history of African migrations to Italy and of the Italian political economy’s violent ingurgitation of African migrants, particularly by the informal economic sector and the sex and drug markets. The second section analyzes the peculiarities and features of Italian Afrophobia. The third section discusses theories of viscerality in colonial and post-­ colonial society and, through a Fanonian lens, highlights the politics of visceral arousal. The fourth section analyzes the visceral politics of African Pentecostal practices and in particular the logic of vomit.

Afrophobic Incorporations of African Migrants According to recent data, in 2017 the majority of new European citizens were from Africa.3 In countries like Italy, Africans make up 31% of the migrant population (or a total of 1,047,229 persons). The majority of these Africans are economic migrants who come from north and sub-­ Saharan Africa.4 They predominantly migrated in the 1980s due to economic crises, deterioration of African natural resources, and political tensions as well as a common desire and aspiration to travel to and live in Europe (Adepoju 2008; Colatrella 2001; de Haas 2006). African economic migrants were attracted to Italy by the growing demand for

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manpower in the flourishing informal services, trade, and agricultural sectors (Carchedi 2012; Arango and Baldwin-Edwards 1999; Calavita 2005; King 2000). By the early 2000s, less-educated and unskilled young African women and men were increasingly targeted by international criminal organizations and human traffickers, who assured them a passage to Europe and promised profitable jobs. Instead, many of these migrants were destined for the sex and drug markets and other highly exploitative informal economies (Monzini 2015; Achebe 2004; Aghatise 2004; Carling 2006). Recently, African immigration to Europe has been more difficult than ever. Since the 1990s, African migrants have experienced a decline in living and working conditions, growing their numbers as a marginalized subset of the Italian population. This trend has been exacerbated by the escalating wide-scale trafficking of human beings between sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria, and Italy, the country known as the primary destination for young trafficked African women and men. Indeed, the numbers of young sub-Saharan Africans employed in the sex market, drug dealing, the appalling conditions of agricultural fields in southern Italy, or exploited by the urban shadow economy, including, for instance, selling counterfeit goods, are particularly alarming. Often living in overcrowded, unhealthy tenements in the city suburbs, these men and women are extremely vulnerable, exposed to the abuse of unscrupulous employers and the violence of consolidated Italo-Nigerian mafias. These trends are not exclusive to Africans. In fact, the entire migrant population in Italy is vulnerable to exploitation, social marginalization, and discrimination. But the experiences of African migrants remain particularly difficult as they confront various forms of Afrophobia. The term describes the specificities of racism and discrimination that targets people of African descent on the basis of a socially constructed idea of race.5 As the most recent report on Afrophobia in Europe describes, Afrophobia takes many different forms, ranging from dislike, bias, and prejudice to the most violent crimes.6 The report analyzes various forms of discrimination and violence that African people and people of African descents face in the areas of labor and employment, housing, criminal justice, education, culture, and heritage. Variations in Europe’s diasporic African communities, as well as different legacies of colonialism and colonial

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encounter, mean that each European country has its own particular form of Afrophobia. In traditional Freudian psychoanalytic theory, “phobias” are affective disorders or excessive, irrational fears of an object/subject of abjection (Morgan 2003). While Freud articulated a theory of phobia that mainly referred to individual fears or neuroses, other scholars including Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and certainly Franz Fanon examined the social dimensions of phobias, specifically in relation to colonialism and colonial violent domination. Fanon, in particular, closely examined the colonizers’ fear of, and obsession with, the bodies of the colonized. To Fanon, the aberration for Africans and the colonizers’ superiority complex reveal the colonizer’s fear of the black bodies’ superior power. In a similar way, Kristeva (1982, 2000), partially drawing from Mary Douglas’s notions of purity and danger, highlights how phobias, rejection, and exclusions are defenses against the crossing of boundaries and the contact with the abject. In other words, the abject is a menace to purity, social wholeness, and a defined biosocial order. For Kristeva, phobias of the abject are a defense against ambiguity, an ambiguity that, also according to Fanon, creates the white man’s phobias regarding contact and proximity with the absolute “other,” the black. It is indeed such otherness and abjection that provides the white man with a subject in contrast to which he defines himself. Negrophobia, as Fanon called it, is therefore the fear of the destabilizing “other,” of the one who can question racial boundaries as well as biosocial order. For this reason, the abject is disempowered, oppressed, and injected with white colonial values of discipline and subordination. The ultimate goal is to prevent the “other” from exercising his power.

Italian Afrophobia In twenty-first-century Italy, various fears shape Afrophobia including fear of mixing, equal rights between citizens of different skin colors, and Africans’ rebellion against racism, oppression, and economic exploitation (Valeri 2019).

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Phobias of mixing are particularly acute, especially if one looks closely at the porous Italian racial and cultural boundaries with Africa. Indeed, Italy is at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and has been exposed to centuries of constant contact and mixing with people and cultures of the African continent, making it a significantly culturally and racially mixed nation. Like other Mediterranean-European countries like Spain, Portugal, and Greece, Italy has deep biosocial connections with Africa. Paradoxically, this might be the reason for the phobia of “Afro-Italy” and Afro-Italian biosocial formations that have always haunted Italy and reached its peak with the fascist regime and Mussolini’s infamous manifesto on the Italian race (Gillette 2002; De Donno 2007; Ponzanesi 2012). Fascist racial laws—which are today still affirmed by Italian right wing and xenophobic political parties particularly nostalgic of white supremacy—portrayed black men and women as little more than animals.7 But fascism aside, racism has always been what Alessandro Mezzadra has called an “internal supplement” of Italian political economies and divisions of labor (Mezzadra 2012). Before the arrival of African migrants, it was the Italians from the south and the islands who bore the brunt of the discrimination and labor exploitation that helped to make the fortunes of industrialists and entrepreneurs who oversaw Italy’s economic miracle. With the arrival of the first significant wave of African migrants in the 1980s, the burden of exploitation, marginalization, and racism was deliberately transferred onto the backs of the migrants attracted by the strong demand for labor in the factories of northeastern Italy, the agricultural sector of the south, domestic work, and the informal economy as a whole (Andall 2000; Anthias and Pajnik 2014; Passerini et al. 2009). Phobias of rebellion of African workers are deeply engrained in the fiber of the Italian economy, especially if one looks closely at the various layers of economic and social discrimination that shape African workers and their experience of being black in Italy. In the highly exploitative Italian labor market, African women and men face harsher socioeconomic conditions and are twice as likely to be unemployed as people from the majority population (Nwabuzo 2016, 14), and much more likely to work in a job below their qualification level or to be employed in the so-called five P’s jobs: precari, pesanti, pericolosi, poco pagati, and

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penalizzati—meaning jobs that are precarious, tiring, perilous, poorly paid, and socially stigmatizing (cf. Ambrosini 2008; Merrill 2011). Equally difficult for African migrants is access to housing. African migrants are often pushed toward suburban areas and European-style urban ghettos (Butticci 2006), while selective police controls and racial profiling lead to significant levels of criminalization and incarceration of these migrants. Migrants represent 36% of the prison population in Italy. Africans make up 6% of the 36% migrant incarcerated population, with Nigeria (8%) and Senegal (3%) topping the list (Ministerio Della Giustizia 2018). However, research on racial profiling and criminal justice shows that contrary to appearances, this is not simply a result of a causal relationship between immigration and crime. In fact, several studies show that Africans and people of African descent are seven times more likely to be stopped by police than white people (Angel-Ajani 2000, 2003). Selective police controls, over-representation of migrants in criminal activities, and the labeling of African migrants as criminals together generates a common imaginary of Africans, and in particular Nigerians, as a “dangerous race,” “prostitutes,” and “drug traffickers/dealers.” Indeed, in Italy, “Nigerian” and “African” have thus become terms synonymous with “African criminal” (Angel-Ajani 2003, 439). Yet paradoxically, Nigerians, like all African migrants and black people, suffer disproportionate levels of racial violence and crimes. In 2018, the human rights Italian association “Lunaria” registered an alarming increase in the number of racially motivated attacks. Shootings and murders by neo-fascist and Nazi groups increased exponentially after the far-right League entered the Italian government. In the first two months of 2018, there were 12 shootings, 2 murders, and 30 physical assaults. Yet this is not a new phenomenon in Italy. Memories of racial attacks and murders of black people are an integral part of the history of Italian Afrophobia and racism along with the history of ignorance, bias, misconceptions, and prejudice about Africans and the African continent. Indeed, the violent repressions of African workers and the recent brutalities against Africans figure as warning for the rest of the African migrant population. Such violence seems to be a direct reaction to Africans’ rebellion, increasing mixing, and claims of social and economic rights. In recent times, dehumanization and violence against African

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workers have triggered several race riots and public protests. Serious episodes occurred in southern Italy in 2010 when a thousand African workers rebelled against the inhumane working and living conditions in the tomato fields in which they worked. Riots and clashes also occurred when seven Ghanaian migrants who owned a tailor shop in Castel Volturno (Naples) refused to come to terms with the local mafia and were killed. That was not an isolated case. In recent years, other African migrants have been shot and beaten to death simply for being black and African. Today, as I am writing this chapter, the Italian newspapers are reporting yet another assassination of a Nigerian prostitute. She was found naked in an agricultural drainage canal at the edge of a roadway in the countryside of a northern Italian city. Her head had been smashed with a heavy metal object. Her assassination is part of the forgotten feminicides that, despite the cruelty that often characterizes them, rarely receive the necessary attention from institutions, public opinion, civil society, and the media, being also for this reason one of the segments of the phenomenon with the highest percentage of unsolved cases (44.6%, compared to 11.4% of total feminicides).8 Between 2000 and 2016, there were 184 assassinations of prostitutes. The average age of the victims is 30.5 years, with 70.7% of victims aged 18–34. Among the nationalities of the victims, Nigerians are the majority (25.3%), followed by Romanian (18%), Albanian (11.3%), Moldovan (6.7%), and Brazilian (5.3%). All known authors of these feminicides are male, with a prevalence of Italians (70.6% of cases) compared to 29.4% of foreigners.

The Visceral From racial slurs to brutal assaults and assassinations, the incorporation of Africans in Italian society has been more like a violent ingurgitation of surplus population meant to satisfy the neoliberal hunger for racialized and forcibly domesticated bodies needed in Italy’s shaky economy, replete with a sizable informal sector and flourishing markets for drugs and sex. Yet this hunger rests upon a tragic and visceral ambivalence. Africa and African people are fresh flesh for predatory consumption that both

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attracts and repels European and Italian neoliberal and libidinal economies. This ambivalence, legacy, and replication of colonial evisceration and ingurgitation of Africa’s humankind, civilizations, and natural resources also create a certain racial indigestion when this surplus African humanity strives to maintain its own semblance of biosocial entirety and, nauseated, vomits up the indigested violence. Metaphors of incorporation or visceral arousal make the African bodies and their bowels critical sites of ethical judgment and rejection of European and Italian modes of incorporation. But the visceral can also exceed the metaphorical and materialize into bodily intensities and enteric reactions, like the ones I observed at the African Pentecostal congregations in Italy. The visceral has been theorized from the perspective of post-colonial, feminist, queer, and affect geography. Feminist and queer scholars also engaged the “electric critical energy of the ‘visceral’ or ‘gut’ metaphor” (Tompkins 2015, 4) to highlight dissident feelings in relation to sexualized, erotized, and racialized bodies. In another peculiar way, affect geographers critically approached the political ecologies of the body and its visceral (dis)identification with the experience of the lived biosocial environment (Longhurst et  al. 2009; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008; Probyn 2000). In this perspective, the visceral is about the ways in which the body biologically and socially feels and reacts to the world and its oppressive social order. Indeed, as Haynes-Conroy argues, the visceral approach collapses the biological and the social, the cellular/chemical and the discursive/intellectual, the mind and the body binary, the nature and society divide and reveals the politics of visceral sensations and carnal processes of social critique. By focusing on biosocial process, the visceral reflects on the interaction between biological and social forces that make the body feel, sense, exert, emit, as well as transform and reshape. Indeed, the visceral shapes and is shaped by socio-political relations that place the individual and collective body under pressure. In a similar way, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1963) links the motives of the colonized’s bodily sensations and visceral reactions with colonial violence and biosocial violations. According to Fanon, vomiting the forcefully incorporated hostile colonial values is a counter-violence that directly responds to white colonial oppression. For Fanon, colonial

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values and violence are injected and secreted while black bodies feel metaphorically amputated. Violence is incorporated via the skin and runs throughout the body before being secreted again as “race.” Fanon also suggests that injected violence can move from body to body, from a body to a community, and that it can prompt a visceral counter-reaction or, as Fanon puts it, a counter-violence. Fanon’s approach places viscerality at the core of the politics of resistance of subaltern and racialized subjects inhabiting bodies violated by various (colonial) structures of power.

Afro-Pentecostal Politics of Viscerality In her book Migrants in Translation, Giordano (2014) examines the practices of the Centro Frantz Fanon, a small ethno-psychiatric clinic that advises state and non-state agencies on matters of “culture,” “identity,” and experience of trafficked women, mainly those from Nigeria and Eastern Europe. Interestingly, Giordano highlights how the Franz Fanon clinic challenges both the psychiatric and state’s project to disciple otherness and reduce the women’s “indigestible” alterity (2014, 7) to a presumably known and pinned down identity. Giordano writes: “In other words, once the women step into the rehabilitation program for victims, they turn themselves into the victims that the state can comprehend and integrate and thus digest” (2014, 156). While this clinic and other institutions like it help the state to digest Nigerians’ identity, experiences, and “otherness,” African Pentecostal churches provide African migrants a space in which they can react viscerally to the state’s violent ingurgitation of their racialized and sexualized bodies, exploited labor, and disfigured cultures. The intimate stories of exploitation, racism, and violence reemerge from the viscera of their bodies and are expelled via words and bodily matter. Pentecostal churches are one of the great novelties in the history of the last 30 years of African migration, and they are the most resilient non-­ Catholic, non-Italian, and non-white subjects of the last century of religious pluralism in Italy. The history of today’s African Pentecostal churches in Italy dates back to the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s, when the first significant migratory movement from West Africa reached

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Italy. The 1980s were the years of strong demand for labor in the farming sector in southern Italy and from the industries and factories in the north of the country. In those same years, Nigerian and Ghanaian migrants’ departure cities, like Lagos, Benin City, as well Accra, and Kumasi, witnessed an impressive growth of Pentecostal megachurches and prayer camps. Inspired by the religious fervor of the megachurches and the charismatic preachers left behind, several migrants started their own prayer groups, and attracted other African migrants who could not find the social and religious experience they needed in the local Catholic churches. The language barrier, differences in worship styles, difficult interracial relations, and suspicions prompted the most religiously inspired and experienced migrants to form their own churches. The women and men who started to attend their prayer meetings were recently arrived migrants. Even today, the African Pentecostal churches tend to attract the newly arrived migrants while the first-generation migrants are more numerous in the African Catholic communities. In Italy there is now approximately one Pentecostal church for every 100–150 immigrants of Christian faith. The largest Pentecostal churches do not exceed 150 members, and in some cases number fewer than 30 adherents. The majority of the churches are of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin. The Nigerian community alone may have as many as 400 churches in Italy. A similar number cater to and are led by Ghanaians; most of these churches are located in areas with large concentrations of African Christian migrants. Most of the churches are concentrated in social and geographical peripheries of Italian urban centers and occupy old industrial warehouses that church members beautify with lively colors, flowers, and colorful textiles. Yet the Afrophobia that disfigures African cultures also shapes a common imaginary about African churches and African Christianity. Indeed, in the public European imaginary African Pentecostalism is often addressed as a non-religion, a “black thing,” and Africans and people of African descent are often associated with lands of voodoo and fetishes, superstition and magical cults, religious expressions Europeans both dismiss and fear (Jenkins 2011). Yet it is precisely in these churches, those looked at with doubt and suspicion, that African Pentecostals—those perceived as a “dangerous race,” as criminals, as unwanted survivors of

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the violence of the sea, street hawkers, prostitutes, and fetishists—share their stories of everyday racism experienced on public transport, in shops, and at work, while searching for a place to live, or when walking in the street, stories of being assaulted by racial slurs, physically attacked, or obsessively checked by the police. In these churches African migrants bring back to the world the indigested humiliations and violence that Italian society has forced them to experience and incorporate. Some of these stories the congregation comments on in lively ways, others are absorbed in silence. Each testimony becomes an object of prayer. The more disturbing is the story, the more aggressive is the prayer and the more visceral is the individual and collective reaction. The testimonies of trafficked young women and men are the most difficult to listen to. At times, pastors narrate the story of someone who is sitting in the room, who wants deliverance, but does not want to be seen or identified. In these cases, the congregation prays together, and every single member becomes the embodiment of the suffering and pain experienced by the one person suffering silently. One Sunday, a pastor of one of the many Nigerian Pentecostal churches in Rome told the story of a young trafficked girl who suffered tremendous violence in the street that caused her severe injuries in her reproductive organs. He told the congregation that the lady was raped several times. Her clients were very violent and on one particularly terrible night, she was raped with a broken bottle. The story was followed by a prayer. “Let’s pray all together for this person!” shouted the pastor. As usual, the congregation started to pray. Women and men were moving around, leaving their chairs, gesticulating, asking God to deliver the woman from the spirit of prostitution and the spirit of sickness. Some were asking God to change her shame into glory and her pain into joy. Others were directly addressing her evil spirits and ordering them to leave her. I noticed that a small group of five women was gathering in a corner of the room to hold a young girl who was shaking violently. While holding her, they surrounded and shielded her, keeping her from falling on the floor or bumping against the wall. After few minutes, one of the women left the group and rushed to one of the tables of the room to take a white towel. Then went back to the girl and wrapped her waist to hide trousers. They were wet and a liquid was on the floor. Then the same lady who took the towel accompanied the young girl to

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the restroom in the hall, holding her. The girl looked exhausted. Her head was lying on the shoulder of the other woman, tears running down her face, her trousers soaked with urine. From Rome to Padua, such testimonies and visceral prayer and reactions bring to life what African migrants are refusing to absorb and digest. During my fieldwork in African Pentecostal churches in Italy, I observed various deliverance prayers—aggressive and passionate prayers with compulsive contractions of bodies followed by vomiting, spitting, tears, urination, and overabundant sweat that often left church floors wet and slippery. To Pentecostals, those bodily matters are the material signs of victorious spiritual warfare against evil. They are the physical evidence of tangible evil expelled from their bodies. And they are also signs of their spiritual redemption and life transformation. The bodies of African Pentecostal migrants are indeed bodies that spiritually, biologically, and socially experience their oppressive and violent social world where Africans face the toxic and violent results of Italian Afrophobia injected into their individual and collective body. Grace’s visceral reactions to her own testimony in Pastor Stella’s congregation, her vomiting induced by stomach convulsions, and entrancing collective prayers served as powerful means to expel spiritual evil but also as a kind of individual and collective “somatic political unconscious” (Roy 2010) that critiques and rejects the violent Italian incorporation of African migrants. In her article “The Alimentary Life of Power,” Macura-Nnamdi (2015) provides a poignant analysis of the politics of the visceral, and in particular of the gut and the vomit, as agents of refusal to incorporate and absorb harmful matter, which in the case she studies is the “malign order” of colonialism. Viscerality and vomit are therefore the most eloquent critique of the politics of (post). Indeed, vomit signals the violent breaking of an order, an inversion of the circulation of fluids, and the coming out of a hostile and toxic matter meant to be accepted, absorbed, and processed. But most of all, a body that vomits is also a body that lives. In other words, vomit resurrects agency. Macura-Nnambi writes: “Vomit, as well as other gastralgic discomforts that precede its eruption, captures the body’s antagonism to, and confrontation with, the world in which it lives” (2015, 112).

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Certainly, Grace’s vomit was not just a bodily matter or a reaction to her gut stimulation. It was a signifier of indigestion and rejection. As Macura-Nnambi aptly writes, “Vomit is food on its way back, but what returns is never exactly what went in. It is thus also a signifier of change” (2015, 113). Indeed, these bodily matters have a transformative power. They are a reversal of an imposed, violent biosocial order. They are the ultimate counter-violence and reaction to European and Italian Afrophobia.

Notes 1. The Tempio della Pace is just one of many parishes that host Pentecostal African churches. Its peculiarity lies in that there are as many as nine Pentecostal churches that all meet in the same building, but in nine separate rooms. 2. Mami Wata means “Mother Water” in pidgin English. She is a marine or water deity. Pentecostals consider her as one of the most dangerous evil spirits affecting the health and wealth of human beings. 3. According to Eurostat 2016, the majority of new EU citizens are from Africa (31%), followed by North and South America (14%), Asia (21%) and non-EU Europe (20%). 4. See Istat, 2019 http://demo.istat.it/str2018/index.html 5. The term Afrophobia emerged from a debate about various terms describing violence and discrimination against black people. Other terms such as negrophobia or anti-black racism equally target the various forms of racism suffered by all black people, including those who are not of African descent (see European Network Against Racism. 2015. General Policy Paper on People of African Descent and Black Europeans. Available at: http://www.enar-eu.org/IMG/pdf/people_of_african_descent_-_Black_ europeans_gpp_8_final.pdf.) 6. European Network Against Racism. 2015. 7. At the outset, the Northern League was a federalist populist party born out of the protest against a centralized state and the assistance programs toward what this party considered the unproductive south of Italy at the expense of what it considered to be the productive North. Within years, the Northern League party started to bear all the hallmarks of a classic and

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modern party of the extreme right. It was anti-European, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and on many occasions explicitly racist. Their provocations ranged from bringing pigs to pastures close to mosques or to publicly comparing the former African-Congolese Italian minister to an orangutan. 8. See https://www.eures.it/il-femminicidio-in-italia-nellultimo-decennio/

References Achebe, Nwando. 2004. The Road to Italy: Nigerian Sex Workers at Home and Abroad. Journal of Women’s History 15 (4): 178–185. Adepoju, Aderanti. 2008. Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa. Uppsala. Aghatise, Esohe. 2004. Trafficking for Prostitution in Italy: Possible Effects of Government Proposals for Legalization of Brothels. Violence Against Women 10 (10): 1126–1155. Ambrosini, Maurizio. 2008. Un’altra Globalizzazione: La Sfida Delle Migrazioni Transnazionali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Andall, Jacqueline. 2000. Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service: The Politics of Black Women in Italy. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Angel-Ajani, Asale. 2000. Italy’s Racial Cauldron: Immigration, Criminalization and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cultural Dynamics 12 (3): 331–352. ———. 2003. A Question of Dangerous Races? Punishment & Society 5 (4): 433–448. Anthias, Floya, and Mojca Pajnik, eds. 2014. Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration: Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Arango, Joaquin, and Martin Baldwin-Edwards, eds. 1999. Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe. New York: Frank Cass Publishers. Butticci, Annalisa. 2006. Destinazione via Anelli: Traiettorie Di Vita e Percorsi Migratori. In Destinazione via Anelli, ed. Francesca Vianello, 22–48. Bologna: Carocci Press. Butticci, Annalisa, and Andrew Esiebo. 2014. Enlarging the Kingdom. African Pentecostals in Italy. Italy. https://www.pentecostalaesthetics.net/ documentary/ Calavita, Kitty. 2005. Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Carchedi, Francesco. 2012. Cittadini Nigeriani Gravemente Sfruttati Sul Lavoro e in Altre Attività Costrittive: Indagine a Doppia Sponda Tra l’Italia Ed Alcuni Stati Della Nigeria, Prime Considerazioni. Rome: Ediesse. Carling, Jørgen. 2006. Migration, Human Smuggling and Trafficking from Nigeria to Europe. 23. MRS. Geneva. Colatrella, Steven. 2001. Workers of the World: African and Asian Migrants in Italy in the 1990s. Trenton: Africa World Press. De Donno, Fabrizio. 2007. La Razza Ario-Mediterranea: Ideas of Race and Citizenship in Colonial and Fascist Italy, 1885–1941. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8 (3): 394–412. de Haas, Hein. 2006. International Migration and National Development: Viewpoints and Policy Initiatives in Countries of Origin  – The Case of Nigeria. 6. Working Papers Migration and Development Series Report, Nijmegen. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gillette, Aron. 2002. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. New York: Routledge. Giordano, Christiana. 2014. Migrants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hayes-Conroy, A. and Hayes-Conroy, J. 2008. Taking back taste: Feminism, food, and visceral politics. Gender, Place and Culture 15 (5): 461–473. Jenkins, Philip. 2011. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Russell. 2000. Southern Europe in the Changing Global Map of Migration. In Eldorado or Fortress? Migration in Southern Europe, ed. Russell King, Gabriella Lazaridis, and Charalambos Tsardanidis, 3–26. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. New  York: Columbia University Press. Longhurst, R., Johnston, L., and Ho, E. 2009. A visceral approach: Cooking ‘at home’ with migrant women in Hamilton, New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (3): 333–345. Macura-Nnamdi, Ewa. 2015. The Alimentary Life of Power. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 (1): 95–120. Martiniello, Marco, and Jan Rath, eds. 2014. An Introduction to Immigrant Incorporation Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Merrill, Heather. 2011. Migration and Surplus Populations: Race and Deindustrialization in Northern Italy. Antipode 43 (5): 1542–1572. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2012. The New European Migratory Regime and the Shifting Patterns of Contemporary Racism. In Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Hegemony, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, 37–50. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ministerio Della Giustizia. 2018. Detenuti Presenti Stranieri per Area Geografica  – Anni 2007–2014. http://www.giustizia.it/giustizia/it/ mg_1_14_1.wp?facetNode_1=2_0&previsiousPage=mg_1_14&content Id=SST679902 Monzini, Paola. 2015. Exploitation of Nigerian and West African Workers and Forced Labor in Italy: Main Features and Institutional Responses. In Eurafrican Migration: Legal, Economic and Social Responses to Irregular Migration, ed. Rino Coluccello and Simon Massey, 57–73. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Morgan, Sian, ed. 2003. Phobia: A Reassessment. New York: Routledge. Nwabuzo, O. 2016. Afrophobia in Europe-ENAR Shadow Report 2014–2015. Brussels: ENAR. Passerini, Luisa, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti, and Ioanna Laliotou, eds. 2009. Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2012. The Color of Love: Madamismo and Interracial Relationships in the Italian Colonies. Research in African Literatures 43 (2): 155–172. Probyn, E. 2000. Carnal appetites: foodsexidentities. Psychology Press. Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham: Duke University Press. Tompkins, K. W. 2015. On the Visceral 2. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 (1): 1–4. Valeri, Mauro. 2019. Afrofobia: Razzismo Vecchi e Nuovi. Rome: Fefé editori.

9 Workers for Free: Precarious Inclusion and Extended Uncertainty Among Afghan Refugees in Denmark Mikkel Rytter and Narges Ghandchi

“They just want workers for free (‘kârgar-e moft’),” Taha claimed during an interview. Agitated, he continued: “You get three months here, and then you can add three months there, and then you have to change your place, then I’m replaced by someone else … it’s never stable and they never give us a job. They just want us to work for free.” Taha is an Afghan refugee in his early 30s, and the “they” refers to his home municipality and the authorities in charge of his integration program. He came to Denmark in 2015 with his daughter in the midst of a moral panic about refugees when 21,000 asylum seekers entered Denmark. In the wake of the moral panic, there was a general political agreement that more refugees needed to start working as soon as they M. Rytter (*) Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] N. Ghandchi Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_9

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were granted asylum. The political slogan was: “They should work from day one” (de skal arbejde fra dag et). For that reason, in the summer of 2016, an amendment to the then-existing Integration Act was put into effect. A historic agreement between the government, the Confederation of Danish Employers (DA) and the Unions1 introduced a new model for the three-year integration program. Refugees now had to start internships (virksomhedspraktik) or job-training schemes no later than two weeks after being granted asylum and temporary residency in Denmark. Private companies agreed to open their doors and workplaces for refugees, who would in turn work for salaries below the minimum wage (partially funded by the welfare state, and with the blessing of the Unions). In the name of integration, refugees became a cheap labor reserve for private companies. In this chapter, we explore Taha’s outburst and his claim that the Danish state just wants workers for free. The chapter focuses on newly arrived Afghan refugees and what we refer to as their “precarious inclusion” in the Danish labor market (cf. Karlsen 2015). We discuss how, why and at what cost the Danish state has increased the number of recent refugees entering the labor market since the long summer of migration. Back in 2015 only 21% of recent refugees had a job after three years in Denmark, but in 2018 the employment rate for refugees after three years in the country was 43%.2 Obviously, these numbers were presented by national politicians as an overwhelming success. However, we argue that the “thin” (cf. Geertz 1973) statistical representation of successful inclusion in the Danish labor market is a simplified and politicized representation of much more complicated experiences and realities. In fact, it may be counterproductive, creating a new precarious subclass of underpaid refugees who fear that they might be sent back to war-torn countries if they object to their current conditions in Denmark. We are not only interested in the insecurity of the structural position in Danish society occupied by refugees like Taha. In this chapter we also examine how the different internship and job-training schemes are perceived, understood and experienced by recently arrived Afghan refugees. Their perspectives on these integration programs illuminate precarious inclusion as a dimension of everyday experience. Many of our

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interlocutors explain that despite their willingness to work and earn their own money, they feel that they have been parked outside the real labor market and have a difficult time relating to Danish colleagues, who often ignore them at work. They too work but for a much lower salary and under other legal conditions than their Danish colleagues. To make matters worse, Afghans and other refugees risk not having their relatively short-term temporary residence permits extended (these are currently issued for 1–2 years at a time). In other words, they risk being deported back to Afghanistan. In the current state of “precarious inclusion,” the uncertainty, which has been documented in research on asylum centers (Whyte 2011a, b; Vitus 2011; Syppli Kohl 2015; Verdasco 2019), is extended into the lives of recognized refugees.

The Study The chapter is based on 28 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017–2018 with Afghan refugees arriving in Denmark after 2009. Six of the respondents were women, and 22 were men. Most of the respondents were in their early 20s, but the sample covers individuals ranging in age from 17 to 50.3 The informants were recruited through personal networks, NGOs and social media. All the interviews were conducted in Dari or Danish—often both, as informants switched between the two languages.4 There are currently approximately 19,000 Afghans living in Denmark. Many of them have been in Denmark for decades and are from a Tadjik or Pashtun background. They were part of Afghanistan’s intellectual elite or were employed in the  state administration under the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1992. They used their national and international networks to flee when civil war broke out in the early 1990s. Since the Taliban seized power in 1996 and the “war on terror” was initiated in 2001, there has been a steady flow to Denmark of Afghan families and unaccompanied minors (often boys). Many of these individuals are Shia Muslims from a Hazara background and come directly from Afghanistan or from a life in Iran or Pakistan (Rytter and Nielsen 2019). In short, Afghan refugees in Denmark are a

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“fragmented diaspora” (Khosravi 2018) that vary widely in ethnicity, religion, social status and political background. The Afghans are currently one of the largest groups of asylum seekers in Denmark, even though their numbers are declining. In 2015 the number of Afghans applying for asylum was 2331, 844 of whom were unaccompanied minors. In 2016 the number of Afghans that entered Denmark and appealed for asylum was 1127, of whom 527 were unaccompanied minors (Danish Refugee Council 2017). And in 2017 the total number of applications for asylum by Afghans was only 188 (NOAS 2018). In the aftermath of the rise of the Taliban regime in 1996–2001, the Afghan asylum seekers who managed to reach Denmark were often seen as genuine, deserving refugees. However, the war in Afghanistan officially ended in 2014. Currently, it is the Syrians who are perceived and presented as the real, deserving refugees (Crawley and Skleparis 2018). This change is reflected in the declining proportion of Afghans who are granted asylum. In 2015, 2016 and 2017 the percentage of applicants who were granted asylum declined from 38% to 26% and 16% respectively (NOAS 2018: 11), and individuals whose applications are rejected risk being sent back.5

Integration in the Danish Welfare State Since the 1980s–1990s, integration has been an omnipresent buzzword in the public and political debate concerning immigrants and refugees in Denmark (Schierup 1988; Preis 1998; Pedersen and Rytter 2006; Olwig and Pærregaard 2011; Olwig et al. 2012; Rytter 2018, 2019). In 1999 the first Integration Act was adopted by the Social Democratic-Social Liberal government, and in 2001 the first Ministry of Integration was launched by the newly elected Liberal-Conservative government, which had an absolute majority from 2001 to 2011 thanks to the support of the populist, right-wing Danish People’s Party. Sociologist Morten Ejrnæs (2002, 7) emphasizes that the meaning of the concept of integration is “exceptionally unclear” in Danish public and political discourse. Integration may refer to anything from social

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integration in certain neighborhoods or educational institutions to economic integration (participation in the labor market); political integration (participation in general elections and local associations); and cultural integration (measured by the extent to which immigrants and refugees have maintained traditions, identity or notions of belonging connected with their original homeland) (Rytter 2019, 681). Despite the fuzzy definition, integration has become a common political ambition and desirable imagined horizon in Denmark over recent decades. When it comes to refugees, integration currently involves extensive programs of inclusion amended by the revised Integration Act in 2014 (Integrationsloven, October 2014).6 When refugees are granted asylum and given temporary residency—often after living in an asylum center for an extended period—they are assigned to 1 of the 98 municipalities in Denmark, where they have to live for the first three years. After that period, they can choose to move to other parts of Denmark. The municipality must provide housing and financial support of DKK 6182 per month, known as integrationsydelse (integration-payment). The amount is way below the lowest social welfare benefits for Danish citizens.7 Within the first two weeks, the municipality and the refugee have to agree on and sign an “integration contract” and a statement of active citizenship.8 The municipality is also responsible for enrolling refugees in language courses so that they can start or continue to learn Danish. Finally, within two weeks, it is the obligation of the municipality to provide access to the labor market in the form of a job-training scheme, internship or subsidized employment. An internship only lasts for a limited period (three months to one year), during which period the refugee has to work in order to receive his or her integration-payment. In subsidized employment the municipality is still paying part of the salary. Refugees always have to accept a wage which is lower than the standard minimum wage on the Danish labor market.9 It can be quite challenging for local municipalities to meet all the obligations of the Integration Act. In 2016 anthropologist Sophie Nielsen followed a group of refugees during three months of their integration program in a municipality in Jutland. The refugees had two days of language classes, one day of Danish culture and history, and two days of internship. However, due to a shortage of local companies willing to host

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refugees in internships, they all ended up working in a factory packing screws and nails, under the supervision of a foreman. Paradoxically, they were expected to improve their language skills despite the absence of Danish-speaking colleagues, and to learn how to be responsible, hardworking citizens by doing tasks that demanded an absolute minimum of skills (Nielsen 2017). On the one hand, the current state-based integration program is a “social technology” (Jöhncke et al. 2004) whose aim is to help refugees to enter the labor market. It is based on the general idea that such programs can transform and change prospective citizens for the better and make them more adaptable to life in Denmark. In this respect, it has many similarities to welfare programs designed to help and rehabilitate alcoholics, the unemployed, drug users, former criminals or vulnerable young people (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2003). On the other hand, the integration program is also based on neoliberal values, emphasizing the duty, autonomy and responsibility of the individual refugee. It has been suggested that in Denmark, neoliberalization does not work against the state in the guise of cutbacks, reductions and austerity, but seems to work through established and cherished welfare state institutions—in this case the current integration programs (Bruun et al. 2017; Rytter 2018). The focus on the responsibility of the single individual reflects a more general trend of responsibilization in the neoliberal state, where we all have to take care of ourselves and our individual interests (Pedersen 2011; Nielsen 2017; Shore 2017).10 In general, refugees are subject to mandatory integration programs and have to accept being sent on job-training schemes or various internships while they struggle to learn Danish. In this extended period of time it is their duty, obligation and responsibility to follow the program.

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L inks Between Foreign Policy and Integration Politics In January 2002 the Danish Parliament agreed to join the US-led international security force, the ISAF, and send soldiers to Afghanistan (Jessen and Fenger-Grøndahl 2013).11 The overall goal of the operation was to hunt down Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but also liberate the Afghan population from the Taliban regime, which included helping children getting back to school, install democracy and to empower the Afghan women (Marsden 2010; Abu-Lughod 2013; Lidegaard 2018). Since the military operation officially ended in 2014, Denmark has been involved in rebuilding Afghanistan. According to the “Afghanistan Country Program 2014–2017,” Denmark provides annual aid of DKK 530 million, in order to contribute “to the emergence of a stable and more developed Afghanistan, which manages its own security, continues its democratic development and promotes respect for human rights.”12 However, according to several articles published in Danish newspapers, development aid was only provided on condition that the Afghan government would accept rejected Afghans asylum seekers returning from Denmark.13 Basically, in order to receive aid for development and rebuilding the country, Afghanistan had to accept the repatriation of rejected asylum seekers from Denmark. It was the contours of a new development-­ deportation nexus. The Afghan government objected to linking deportation policies and development aid. The Chief of Government, Abdullah Abdullah, criticized countries like Denmark and Norway for being too impatient and pleaded for more time before they started to send Afghans back. The Minister of Refugees, Seyed Alem Hosseini, stated in an interview that Afghanistan “will close the borders to anyone who does not return voluntarily” (Damkjær 2015). They hesitated because of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were already internally displaced due to armed conflicts or deportation from Pakistan and Iran. This large number of internally displaced citizens creates a highly unstable situation in Afghanistan (Schuster and Majidi 2013; van Houte 2017). In the end,

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the Afghan government had to accept the bargain in order to receive the development aid. European states can only return rejected asylum seekers when the country in question is defined as a “safe country.” Whether Afghanistan is a safe country or not, is a highly contested issue. Even though the war has officially ended, the capital of Kabul is regularly targeted by suicide bombs, kidnappings and terror attacks, and few international observers dare to travel outside the capital due to the presence of various fractions of Taliban, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and warlords terrorizing the local population. In 2017, Amnesty International declared that they considered the whole of Afghanistan to be unsafe and advised European authorities to stop all deportations.14 A survey conducted by NOAS in 2018 shows that Italy is the only country in Europe to follow their lead and declare that the whole of Afghanistan is unsafe. Several other countries with a large number of Afghan asylum seekers such as the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Denmark state that their authorities regard several areas in Afghanistan to be “safe country” (NOAS 2018, 27)—basically, this means, that they can send rejected asylum seekers back to these areas. In all, post-war development and the contested security situation in Afghanistan are currently being linked directly to the asylum system and to local integration programs in Danish municipalities. This is a new situation, reflecting the current political discussions in many European countries about returning refugees to their home countries. Afghan refugees with temporary status cannot be sure to having their permits extended. In the rest of this chapter we explore the impact of the current situation on the everyday life, human security and wellbeing of Afghans in Denmark.

Internships, Job Training and Subsidized Employment It is the responsibility of the 98 municipalities to set up local integration programs and help the refugees find jobs. The municipalities receive a bonus from the Ministry of Integration every time they manage to help a

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refugee to find a job (DKK 25,000 per refugee)15 and they also save money by moving recently arrived refugees from state subsidies into jobs. This financial win-win situation for the municipalities apparently motivates caseworkers to encourage the refugees to find jobs. This happened, for instance, with Kanishka, a trained journalist in his 20s who came to Denmark in 2016: I’m always looking for a job, and the immigration office encourages me to do something. I go to the job center every day, and they show me a number of job adverts. These are jobs that don’t need any prior experience or professional training. Like jobs in restaurants or supermarkets. But they aren’t real jobs – the companies demand internship periods. I have rejected many of them, but the caseworker in the municipality tries to push me. (Kanishka, 20s)

Qafur (in his early 20s) goes to language classes every week, each day from 8:00 am to 3:30 pm. His goal is to complete language school, but the municipality has encouraged him to find an internship. At first, he tried to refuse, complaining that it was too difficult. His caseworker saw it differently and threatened to stop giving him income support if he did not comply. At the time of our interview, Qafur was just about to start an internship at a supermarket the following week. In order to pay his rent, he had accepted the internship. In general, our informants were quite critical and skeptical with regard to internships. It seems to be a tendency that despite Afghan refugees’ personal interests, previous qualifications or education, they end up in internships doing manual labor in supermarket chains like Netto, Bilka, Kvickly and REMA 1000. One had a job in a toyshop, another repaired bikes, one sold sandwiches, and one was an office cleaner. Pernille Milton (2017) has followed several Syrian families during their settlement and integration program in an anonymous Danish municipality. They took part in the mandatory language classes, job-­ training and internship programs. However, many of them were openly frustrated about being “stuck” in the program and not being allowed to start up their own companies (Milton 2017).

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In our study, Reza (late 40s), who came to Denmark in 2015, became similarly stuck. He attended language class two days a week, and the remaining three days a week he was sent out to clean offices, despite his background as a university teacher. He was critical of the integration program: I swear to God that money from the municipality is like poison to us. For a person like me who has worked hard since childhood to earn his own money, the salary they provide us with [him and his daughter], I eat it like a poison. The money they give us is like charity. We are now experiencing a new system of slavery. We don’t have any rights to travel, we have to call them if we are sick, otherwise they stop the money; we have no rights to travel, I don’t even have a week off. The schools are on holiday at the moment, but my daughter spends the whole week at home because we aren’t permitted to travel. Is this not a new slavery system? (Reza, late 40s)

Internships and subsidized employment left the refugees in a vulnerable position. Habib (in his early 30s) arrived in Denmark back in 2009 and was given a seven-year residence permit and allocated to a municipality in the western part of Denmark. He remembers what happened back then: I enrolled in a language school, and the same time I started working. I studied and worked full time. It was very strange for them [the caseworkers]. I worked in a restaurant and helped the chef to make food and sandwiches. They have a system called ‘løntilskud’ (subsidized employment). I didn’t like this system much, because a lot of my salary was paid by the municipality and less by my employer. We had agreed that after six months the employer would hire me full-time. After six months everybody – even the chef – was content with my work, but the boss did not offer me the job. I told him that I would no longer work under these conditions. So I stopped working in order to concentrate on my language classes and complete the entire course in one year. (Habib, early 30s)

The experience of being exploited is something we heard again and again. As Taha complained at the start of this chapter: “They just want workers for free.” People go from internship to internship with little

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prospect of entering the real labor market. And when someone actually manages to land a job, the integration program may stand in the way. Abbas has been in Denmark since 2015. After a year in an asylum center he was given “positive” and temporary residency for one year (followed by a two-year extension later on). Abbas managed to find a job, but it did not work out: I had an internship for three months in a bike workshop, then I took another internship for six months painting cars. I asked my boss if I could stay and work for him, and he offered me a job. But when I told my caseworker at the municipality that I wanted to continue working there, she [the caseworker] told me that I was not allowed to do this. I had to finish my language course. After that I might continue in the 9th grade and have a spare-time job. But at the moment, she would not allow me to work. With no exam papers, I would be left with nothing if the boss fired me. And I would be out of the municipality’s program and without a job. So, the caseworker insisted that I went back to school to get my exam certificate. (Abbas, early 20s)

Learning the Language Learning Danish is an essential part of the integration program. It is the obligation of the municipality to provide the language classes, just as it is the duty and responsibility of refugees to learn the language as fast as possible. The idea of combining language classes and internships is that refugees should train their language skills while they work to earn their own money. Meeting Danish colleagues at work on a daily basis is meant to provide them with the training needed to learn the language (SIRI 2018). However, this is not always the case. Taha told the following story of his internship at the supermarket, Føtex: They say our language improves at work. But who am I supposed to talk to at work? The first day at Føtex they showed me all the goods and told me where to put things. After that they never talked to me. I was left on my own. (Taha, early 30s)

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Farid, in his early 20s, had a similar experience during his three-month internship at a toy shop. He explained: The first week was very difficult. I didn’t know anybody. I was the only foreigner, a refugee, among a group of people who already knew each other. We had breakfast together on Fridays. The second week I told them that I knew that I was a beginner in the Danish language and a refugee, but I was also a human being and a young person like them. I asked them not to think that all refugees are bad. We are here to learn from you. If you don’t talk to me, I will never learn. (Farid, early 20s)

After this confrontation some of his colleagues started talking to Farid. After three months his boss wanted to extend the internship, but Farid refused the offer because it was taking him nowhere. According to him, the job was “a constant zero step.” He felt he was stuck, with no prospects for the future. The theme of subtle discrimination and the reservation of Danes, who tend to talk and socialize with people they already know, are well described in ethnographic accounts (see Thuesen 2017; Holm 2017). Elyas had similar experiences of reservation and silence among his Danish co-­ workers. He explained that It’s a bit problematic because Danes are introvert, and especially when it comes to a person with an Asian appearance, then they don’t show any interest. But I have used places like the ‘Trampoline House’16 (…) to get into contact with Danes… I now have some acquaintances amongst Danes, but no real friends. (Elyas mid-30s)

One of the main goals of the integration program is that Afghans should learn Danish. This might be difficult in language classes of questionable quality (Milton 2017; Verdasco 2019), and when they end up in internships where they do manual labor and have little—if any—contact with Danish colleagues.

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Extended Uncertainty and Stress In 2015 the Danish government, led by Social Democrat Helle Thorning-­ Schmidt, decided to reduce the number of years for which refugees were granted temporary residency in Denmark. Before 2015 it was normal to be granted between five and seven years at a time, after which refugees had to reapply (which resulted in a more or less automatic extension). Currently, the temporary residence permit is only granted for one to two years at a time. This change went into effect at the same time that the Danish government managed to link development aid to the willingness of the Afghan authorities to accept deported citizens. The relatively short period of temporary residence combined with the new option of being sent back to Afghanistan created a lot of uncertainty and stress among recently arrived Afghans. Already mentioned Habib is now studying at the university. His first residence permit was for seven  years, but his current one is only for two years. My present status has changed. I now have to prolong my residency every two years. And besides all this, I have seen among my friends that even the evaluation of their application for residency takes around 1–1½ years, which restricts their plans for travel and affects their lives here. This is a difficult situation. (Habib, early 30s)

In an article on the Danish asylum system, anthropologist Zachary Whyte (2011a) suggests, paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham’s infamous installation of “Panopticon” (Foucault 2002 [1975]), that the asylum center is a “Myopticon.” Whereas the Panopticon was effective because it separated the prisoners and made each of them visible to the gaze of a single guard in the tower in the middle of a cunningly designed structure, the Danish asylum system has asylum seekers strive to attract attention, be seen and recognized by the bureaucrats who manage and administer the system. The asylum procedures and decision as to who should be granted positive status are seen as arbitrary and a great lottery (Whyte 2011a, b). Whyte suggests that the Myopticon constitutes a “technology of uncertainty.” The asylum seekers never know when they are subject to the gaze

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of power, whether they will have their case taken up, or when they will be moved to a new asylum center (cf. Vitus 2011). We suggest that the current integration programs, combined with the redefinition of Afghanistan as a safe country, have extended and intensified the technology of uncertainty beyond the fences of the asylum center and on everyday basis. Currently, refugees have to live and work in internships or job-training schemes, protected temporarily by the status of being a refugee—but they never know how long this will last, or whether their residence permit will be extended or not. All together the current situation creates a lot of stress. Here is the case of Farid, who arrived in Denmark as a minor. Today he is in his early 20s and has a 2-year residence permit. He elaborates on what he has just called “a normal life”: I mean a life that has no stress in it. What will happen after two years? What if they say no (if he is rejected). All the efforts I have made over the last two years, and they can still say ‘no’. Then I have to go to another country and start all over again from scratch. I don’t want to have this stress. It will be enough for me if this stress is taken away from me. (Farid, early 20s)

When we asked Farid to explain this form of stress created by uncertainty, he replied: It very often happens among the young people I know. They live here, far away from their families, alone, and now another stress is added to all this. What will happen after two years? I know that nobody can be sure about what will happen tomorrow. But most people don’t have to live with the kind of uncertainty that refugees have to endure. What will happen after two years, what will happen after one year? Whenever I talk to young Afghans, for instance in the Help Community for Refugees,17 they all have this stress. They say: now we’re attending an education program, but what happens after that? We learn the language, but what will happen if our residency ends? Will we be given a new (period of ) residency, or will we be sent back? What will happen? (Farid, early 20s)

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Saeed (in his early 20s) has similar concerns. He was born in Iran to Afghan parents. The family returned to Afghanistan when he was nine. Three years later, when Saeed was almost 13, he headed off to Europe. He was a minor when he came to Denmark and was granted asylum in 2010. He explained: I came to Denmark when I was a minor. Now I’m in my early 20s, right? They gave me a seven-year residence permit. Seven years is a long time, and I was a young guy who didn’t take it seriously. But when you are in your early 20s, you realize that the future is unclear and uncertain. Now my residence permit can be prolonged for a 2-year period only. They have this right (and power) to say after two years: ‘Saeed, we think the situation in Afghanistan has changed. You can now live in Afghanistan.’ Even though the last time I saw Afghanistan, I was 12 years old. I know Iran better than Afghanistan. … They have the right to tell you that you can’t stay here any longer, and this makes the situation very hard. It fills your head with thoughts. Your thoughts are not free. (Saeed, early 20s)

For Saeed, and many Afghan refugees like him, the future is fundamentally uncertain—especially since Denmark now has a bilateral development/deportation agreement with Afghanistan, which means that more Afghans can expect to be deported in the years to come.18 In this respect, the technology of uncertainty, instituted by the state as a means of governing asylum seekers in the centers, has been extended to include the everyday lives of refugees in integration programs.

 onclusion: Precarious Inclusion C in the Welfare State The economist Guy Standing has suggested that we are currently witnessing the emergence of a “Precariat,” a new global class of mobile people on short-term labor contracts (Standing 2011). The precariat includes different groups such as unskilled laborers, workers paid by the hour or on short-term contracts and academics without tenure. We suggest that the current integration programs in Denmark have resulted in a particular

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form of “precarious inclusion.” Refugees are inscribed in the growing precariat when they are assigned to manual labor on short-term internships at a salary below the minimum wage. They must be “docile bodies” (Foucault 2002[1975]); they have to accept being moved around and are expected to keep silent and be grateful for the internship or job-training scheme to which they are assigned. In this form of precarious inclusion, Afghan refugees are given help to enter the labor market, but they are not seen or treated as ordinary colleagues. They do not have a regular minimum wage and often have to accept the fact that they are ignored by their colleagues. Refugees may regret that they are stuck and parked outside the real labor market (see Milton 2017), but they cannot normally question and challenge the system because the integration program is mandatory and they often go from one internship to the next. In this respect there are similarities between Afghans in the three-year integration programs and long-term unemployed Danes that also have to accept different job-training programs and internships aimed at reintegrating them on the labor market (cf. Vohnsen 2017). The difference is that while some long-term unemployed Danes may have an interest in staying out of the job market and live from welfare benefits, our Afghan interlocutors are frustrated that they are not allowed to leave the mandatory integration program. Actually, as we have seen, it is sometimes the caseworker that obstructs their opportunities of getting a real job, because they want the refugees to stay in the integration program. Another significant difference is of cause that long-term unemployed Danes only risk economic sanctions, whereas the Afghans (rightfully or not) fear being sent out of the country if they do not comply with the internship and follow the integration program. This chapter has also suggested that the way in which integration programs are currently linked to the political aspiration of returning refugees is a characteristic of precarious inclusion. The bilateral agreement between Afghanistan and Denmark connecting development aid and deportation makes Afghans vulnerable. In 2018 the Danish authorities started re-­ evaluating expired residence permits held by Somali refugees and, since Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia have now been declared “safe country,” many will not get their permits extended. More than 900 Somalis have been instructed to leave the country.19 Likewise, refugees

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from countries like Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan risk having their cases re-­ evaluated in the near future. This obviously adds to the extended uncertainty. The Afghans are included in Danish society and labor market, but it is a precarious form of inclusion: they are kept at arm’s length and constantly have to prove their good intentions by working hard and demonstrate that they can be “responsible.” The data also demonstrates a common concern among our Afghan interlocutors: while they strive to be seen and recognized as “integrationable,” they worry that their residence permit will not be extended and that they will be deported. More generally “precarious inclusion” seems to be a promising concept to illuminate and discuss the relationship between the welfare state and more or less vulnerable groups of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants. Especially in light of the current economic reductions, cutbacks and austerity at all levels of the state administration and the rising identity politics, ethno-nationalism (Gullestad 2006; Hervik 2011) and nativism (De Genova 2016) we see in countries all over Europe. Anthropologist Marry-­ Anne Karlsen uses the concept “precarious inclusion” to discuss how undocumented migrants in Norway despite their legal status have access to different kinds of healthcare services. The undocumented migrants are demarcated legally outside the scope of welfare legislation, while at the same time humanitarian exceptions are built into the system to relieve tensions between the welfare state’s commitment to basic security and immigration law enforcement (Karlsen 2015). Similarly, Mikkel Rytter has discussed how the national legislation on family reunification distinguishes between “real” and “not-quite-real” Danes. The latter are Danish citizens with immigrant background (e.g. their parents have immigrated from Turkey or Pakistan in the 1960s–1970s) that have a difficult time obtaining family reunification with non-European spouses because the newlywed couple’s total attachment (samlede tilknytning) to Denmark is seen as insufficient (Rytter 2010, 2013). The undocumented migrants in Norway, family reunification in Denmark and, in this chapter, Afghan refugees in the current integration programs are three different cases that illustrate the ambiguous belonging and precarious inclusion of migrants and refugees in Nordic welfare states. Precarious inclusion is a concept

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and aspect of the encounter between migrants and welfare state regimes and that deserves to be explored and discussed further in the future. The chapter opened with Taha’s outburst that the Danish state just wants workers for free. The statement might make him seem ungrateful. That, however, is not our general impression of him or the rest of our interlocutors; they are just frustrated about the mandatory integration program and the way it structures their life in particular ways. Finally, it should be emphasized that we recognize the ambition of the national Integration Act and the local integration programs to help refugees enter the labor market and start a new life in Denmark. But based on our data, we question the way in which local integration programs are linked to the current political aspiration of returning refugees to their home country as soon as possible.

Notes 1. This agreement states that a job is the key to integration, making it essential to introduce refugees to the labor market so they become a resource instead of a burden upon society. (See http://www.stm. dk/_p_14312.html; https://www.kl.dk/kommunale-opgaver/integration/politiske-aftaler/) 2. The numbers refer to refugees between ages 21 and 64. The 43% covers both “real” jobs and jobs subsided by the welfare state. https://integrationsbarometer.dk/aktuelt/7 3. The data was collected as part of an interdisciplinary research project in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark exploring the opportunities available for recently arrived Afghans (see https://snis. ch/project/engendering-migration-development-and-belonging-theexperiences-of-recently-arrived-afghans-in-europe/). We thank the editors and our colleagues Zachary Whyte, Anja Simonsen, Michala Clante Bendixen, Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Nicholas Van Hear,  Carolin Fischer, Anna Wyzz and Esra Kaytaz for reading and commenting upon the chapter. Earlier versions were presented in the conference “Exploring Dimensions of Afghan Migration to Europe: Experiences, Discourse and Politics” at Moesgaard Museum, Aarhus University, in February 2019, and at the annual IMISCO-conference in Malmö, June 2019.

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4. Interviews were conducted by Narges Ghandchi in different regions of Denmark. Interviewees were informed of the study objects as well as of their rights to participate, be anonymized, leave uninterested questions unanswered, and withdraw their consents during and/or after the interviews. 5. In 2015, Denmark started deporting rejected asylum seekers from Afghanistan. In 2015, 56 individuals returned voluntarily while 34 were deported. In 2016, 36 individuals returned voluntarily while 16 were deported. In 2017, 147 individuals returned voluntarily and 14 were deported (see https://www.ecre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ Returns-Case-Study-on-Afghanistan.pdf.; NOAS 2018). 6. https://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/100584/12090 5/F-1089919270/DNK100584DanishConsolidation.pdf 7. http://refugees.dk/fakta/integration-job-uddannelse/integrationsydelse/ 8. http://uim.dk/filer/integration/integrationskontrakt-og-integrationserklaering/integrationserklaering-engelsk.pdf 9. Generally, the minimum wages are negotiated every second or third year between the Confederation of Danish Employers and the Unions. This arrangement is often referred to as “The Danish Model.” Normally the Unions will protect the minimum wages, but the Unions are now happy to compromise in this area to help refugees gain a foothold on the labor market. 10. The current Danish integration program is also part of a broader policy of deterrence at the state level. In 2015, Inger Støjberg, Minister for Foreigners and Integration, representing the Liberal Party (V), published commercials in Arabic in Lebanese newspapers to inform potential asylum seekers about the new strict rules and the reduction in state benefits in Denmark. See https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/stoejbergs-flygtningeannoncer-indrykket-i-libanon 11. The Danish involvement in Afghanistan since 2002 has ranged from military engagement and the training of Afghan national and security forces to the development of infrastructural projects and demining programs, social contributions like support for democracy and civil society, economic growth and employment, the settlement and protection of returnees and internally displaced refugees, and good governance. More recently, an anti-corruption program has also been introduced (openaid. um.dk, fmn.dk). According to the Danish Armed Forces, 9500 Danes had been deployed in Afghanistan by the time Denmark withdrew in

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2014 with 43 Danish soldiers losing their lives in this period (Jessen and Fenger-Grøndahl 2013). 12. fmn.dk, http://www.fmn.dk/eng/allabout/Pages/Thedanishen gagementinAfghanistan.aspx 13. See “Danmark i strid med Afghanistan om afviste flygtninge” (Berlingske Tidende, Ole Damkjær, 20. March, 2015) and “Rejse ind i natten” (Information, Carsten Jensen, 20. October, 2016). 14. Amnesty International, Afghanistan: “Forced back to danger” Asylum-­ seekers returned from Europe to Afghanistan, October 2017 (p. 41). 15. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/kommuner-faar-millionbonus-flereflygtninge-i-arbejde; http://uim.dk/filer/integration/orienteringsskrivelse-l-189.pdf 16. Trampoline House is a volunteer-based community center where refugees, asylum seekers and other citizens meet, network and participate in social and cultural activities. (https://www.trampolinehouse.dk/ press-and-videos/) 17. A grassroots organization set up to assist refugees to network and give them opportunities for life, work and social engagement (the actual name has been anonymized). 18. It is legal caseworkers in Udlændingestyrelsen that, based on criteria defined by the Folketing (Parliament), assess every single case and decide whether a refugee’s residency permit should be extended or terminated. 19. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/forstaa-sagen-derfor-kan-somalierepludselig-sendes-hjem

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Milton, Pernille. 2017. Everyday Security – A Need to Belong: A Qualitative Study of Well-Educated Syrian Refugees’ Resettlement Process in Denmark. Unpublished MA-thesis in Human Security, Aarhus University. Nielsen, Sofie. 2017. When ‘Ansvar’ Is Insanely Many Things: An Anthropological Study of ‘Ansvar’ (Responsibility) and Power in the Meeting between Refugees and Employees in the Danish Welfare State. Unpublished MA-thesis in Anthropology, Aarhus University. NOAS – Norsk organisasjon for asylsøkere. 2018. Who’s the Strictest? A Mapping of the Afghanistan-Policies in Western European Countries. Rapport. https:// www.noas.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Afghanistan-notat-påengelsk.pdf Olwig, Karen Fog, and Karsten Pærregaard, eds. 2011. The Question of Integration: Immigration, Exclusion and the Danish Nation State. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Olwig, Karen Fog, Birgitte Romme Larsen, and Mikkel Rytter, eds. 2012. Migration, Family and the Welfare State: Integrating Migrants and Refugees in Scandinavia. London/New York: Routledge. Pedersen, Ove Kaj. 2011. Konkurrencestaten. København: Hans Reitzels forlag. Pedersen, Marianne Holm, and Mikkel Rytter, eds. 2006. Den stille integration: nye fortællinger om at høre til i Danmark. København: C.A. Reitzels Forlag. Preis, Ann-Belinda Steen, ed. 1998. Kan vi leve sammen?: Integration mellem politik og praksis. Viborg: Munksgaard. Rytter, Mikkel. 2010. The Family of Denmark and ‘The Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 75 (3): 301–322. ———. 2013. Family Upheaval: Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2018. Made in Denmark: Refugees, Integration and the Self-Dependent Society. Anthropology Today 34 (3): 12–14. ———. 2019. Writing Against Integration: Danish Imaginaries of Culture, Race and Belonging. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 84 (4): 678–697. Rytter, Mikkel, and Andreas Gadeberg Nielsen. 2019. Marriage in the Ruins of War. Intergenerational Hauntings in the Afghan Diaspora. Ethnicities (Onlinefirst). https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/1468796819896100 Schierup, Carl-Ulrik. 1988. Integration?: Indvandrere, kultur og samfund. København: Billesø and Baltzer. Schuster, Liza, and Nassim Majidi. 2013. What Happens Post-Deportation? The Experience of Deported Afghans. Migration Studies 1 (2): 221–240.

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Shore, Cris. 2017. Audit Culture and the Politics of Responsibility: Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilization. In Competing Responsibilities: The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Life, ed. Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle, 96–117. Durham: Duke University Press. SIRI. 2018. Integrationskit – inspiration til den beskæftigelsesrettede indsats. Gode eksempler fra det kommunale landskab. Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet, Styrelsen for International Rekruttering og Integration. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Syppli Kohl, Katrine. 2015. Asylaktivering og ambivalens: forvaltningen af asylansøgere på asylcentre. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, The University of Copenhagen. Thuesen, Frederik. 2017. Linguistic Barriers and Bridges: Constructing Social Capital in Ethnically Diverse low-Skill Workplaces. Work, Employment and Society 31 (6): 937–953. van Houte, Marieke. 2017. Return Migration to Afghanistan: Moving Back or Moving Forward? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Verdasco, Andrea. 2019. Communities of Belonging in the Temporariness of the Danish Asylum System: Shalini’s Anchoring Points. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45 (9): 1439–1457. Vitus, Kathrine. 2011. Zones of Indistinction: Family Life in Danish Asylum Centers. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 12 (1): 95–112. Vohnsen, Nina Holm. 2017. The Absurdity of Bureaucracy. How implementation works. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Whyte, Zachary. 2011a. Enter the Myopticon: Uncertain Surveillance in the Danish Asylum System. Anthropology Today 27 (3): 18–21. ———. 2011b. Asyl, insh’allah. Tro og mistro i det danske asylsystem. In Islam og muslimer i Danmark: religion, identitet og sikkerhed efter 11. september 2001, ed. Marianne Holm Pedersen and Mikkel Rytter, 115–140. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

10 Expulsion or Differential Inclusion? Governing Undocumented Migrants in France Stefan Le Courant

In France, the deportation of undocumented migrants has always been represented in public discourse as the solution to all the threats undocumented migrants are said to pose.1 These may be threats to the public order, linked to representations of undocumented migrants’ “dubious morality” or “dangerous” political or trade union engagement. Or they may be threats to the labor market and the social welfare system, where undocumented migrants are believed to benefit without contributing. With these threats in mind, deportation policy would seem to respond both to a security imperative and to the need to protect the national economy. Curiously, however, deportation is also presented in political discourse as a way of better integrating regular migrants, who will not have to contend with undocumented migrants for the limited resources devoted to integration programs and social assistance. In this sense, some argue that deportation, insofar as it mitigates the problems associated S. Le Courant (*) Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, LESC (CNRS- Université Paris Nanterre), Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_10

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with migrant integration, also undercuts the far-right critique of migration. The paradox of the discourse I have just briefly outlined lies in the ruptures it points out and in the continuities it suggests. On the one hand, two populations are opposed in the public debate regarding the legality of their stay: undocumented and regular migrants. On the other hand, links are established between old migrant populations and new ones, the presence of whom has to be restricted. This distinction has not to do with legal criteria, but with the assimilation of populations on religious, national, ethnic or racial grounds. The deportation policy, which is justified by the fight against the extremes, takes up the latter’s categories of thought. The conflation between regular and irregular migrants and their French descendants regularly resurfaces in public debate. Migration is therefore the point of convergence between external borders and internal boundaries; the former legally separating territories, the latter—which are a legacy of colonial times—distinguishing social groups. The illegalization of newcomers is related to the racialization of those already present in the national territory (Fassin 2011), but migrants are seen as a “problem” that should always be dealt with on its own. Over the last two decades, the French state has embraced managerial logics, entailing greater reliance on statistics and quantitative measures. Between 2004 and 2012, the projected number of deportations rose from 15,000 to 28,000 and eventually to 35,000. During the 2007 presidential campaign, the deportation of 40,000 “clandestins” (“clandestine migrants”) was among the promises of the candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Deploying figures in political discourse was a way of illustrating the dynamism of the government—its “results culture” (culture des résultats). When the Socialist Party took over, the discourses changed but the practices remained the same. “We always try to expel as many undocumented migrants as possible” wrote Manuel Valls, in an internal note, when he became Interior Minister in 2012. Aiming to meet target figures associated with the managerial turn, there was a radical increase in the arrests and detention of undocumented migrants in order to meet targeted (and publicized) figures. What is curious, however, is that the deportation process often goes uncompleted, as most migrants who are arrested are never actually deported. This is the

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case mainly because the deportees’ countries of origin often refuse to recognize their citizens, thus complicating deportation procedures. In eight years as an undocumented migrant, Souleymane Bâ2 was stopped and arrested more than ten times by the police. He was detained twice for 15 days in a detention facility. He always avoided deportation. In 2016, in Metropolitan France alone, 92,076 expulsion procedures were launched, but only 16,489 (18%) were carried out. This new approach to deportation has transformed the everyday lives of undocumented migrants who are under an ever-present threat of deportation. Many scholars consider the production of this deportability to be the objective of the deportation device,3 which produces flexible and easily exploited labor, well adapted to the contemporary liberal economy (Heyman 1998; De Genova 2002; De Genova and Peutz 2010). The employment of undocumented migrants is concentrated in difficult-to-­ export industries, such as construction, cleaning and food service (Terray 1999). Beyond the stated goals, the deportation device contains a disciplinary dimension, coexisting with the security paradigm, aimed at optimizing available forces (Foucault 2004). The rhetoric of the need to defend the social system and the labor market, usually used to justify the deportations, masks the constitution of a new low-wage labor force and the modalities by which it is kept in line (“salariat bridé”) (Moulier-­ Boutang 1997). Nowadays, undocumented migrants are, in this sense, the descendants of yesterday’s immigrants who remained “semi-skilled workers for life” (“OS à vie”) (Sayad 1999, 233–253). Mechanisms confining migrant workers to the most thankless and least remunerative tasks have evolved at the same time as the economy has transformed. Regular immigrant workers, deployed in assembly-line work, were replaced by undocumented migrants, flexible and revocable at any time. Reducing the deportation device solely to this economic function would nevertheless mean overlooking the changes brought about by these new mechanisms of subordination and new types of incorporation within society. As I see it, this approach does not sufficiently take into account new ways of digesting difference developed by the state. Rather than assessing deportation’s efficacy on its own terms, my work examines how this policy affects the lives of undocumented migrants and analyzes the types of incorporation within French society that are at stake

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through the threat of deportation. The failure to deport is not a failure of deportation policy. By transforming the theoretical risk of removal into the very tangible and always operative threat of deportation, this policy guarantees a form of “double expulsion” (Sassen 2016): expulsion from the territory for some, and from rights and protections related to citizenship for others. I argue that deportation and the threat of deportation are two sides of the same policy, which is, among other things, about population control, achieved by slowing down movement, and confining people on both sides of the border. This chapter draws on ethnographic data collected between 2006 and 2013 among undocumented migrants who remained in France after at least one detention period.4 The first encounter with most of my interlocutors took place in a detention facility in the Parisian suburbs where I provided pro bono legal assistance as an NGO volunteer from 2006 and 2009.5 I then accompanied many migrants after their release in their daily activities: from appointments with NGOs or private lawyers, to visits to the Préfecture, and even more ordinary activities. Building on the ethnographic data collected during these encounters, the first section of this chapter briefly shows how deportation policy—mainly through its containment dimension—pushes unauthorized migrants to develop a set of practices outside the law and to undermine undocumented migrants’ representations of themselves. The conflation of these elements leads to the production of “clandestine” individuals. The second section deals with the effects of deportation policy with respect to time. It analyzes how the irregular nature of individuals’ administrative situation in France informs their perception of being in a time loop that prevents them from moving on in life, thus impacting their social relations in their home country. The third section considers questions of space and examines how border politics operate by confining undocumented migrants to local experience. In the last section, as a way of concluding, I argue that the threat of deportation and its effects produce a form of differential inclusion for undocumented migrants within France.6

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Producing “Clandestine” Individuals In France, the deportation procedure for undocumented migrants has been associated with a specific form of confinement since the beginning of the 1980s. The scandal of the discovery of a confinement site for undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in Arenc (Marseille) in 1975 was the beginning of a wave of protests which put pressure on the Ministry of the Interior to legislate on the matter (Fischer and Makaremi 2012). Since then, following a general trend in EU countries, every reform of Immigration law has increased the length of the period that undocumented migrants can legally be detained—increases that are said, in political discourse, to improve the efficacy of removal orders. From 7 days in 1983, the maximum detention period was extended to 10 days in 1993, then to 12 in 1998, 32 in 2003 and 45 days in 2011. In the coming months, it will most probably be increased to 90 days, as during the parliamentary discussions on a new reform of detention times, members of the French lower chamber, the National Assembly, have already voted to this effect. Through this process, confinement has ceased to be the exception and become the general rule. Although in most cases confinement does not lead to deportation, the state’s power has far-reaching effects on the lives of the “non-deportable deported” beings. For example, arrest and confinement reveals an individual’s undocumented status to people it was previously hidden from, creating the possibility that a migrant could lose his or her job or house. Confinement also reduces the possibility of getting a legal residence permit, further marginalizing migrants who often already live on the margins of society. After their arrest, many undocumented migrants, already barely incorporated into the labor market, lose their means of making a living. To make ends meet, they may purchase forged residence permits or use somebody else’s ID in order to get a job. Finally, even if an individual is not deported, undocumented migrants remain in a state of “deportability” (De Genova 2002; Peutz 2006) once they are released back onto the French territory after a detention period. With no change in their legal status, they remain a target for future arrest, confinement and possibly expulsion.

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Faced with the impossibility of modifying their legal status, undocumented migrants in France have developed a range of “illegalist practices” (Foucault 1975). Outside the law, many of their ordinary activities must necessarily be clandestine. Confinement also illegalizes: it produces illegality as it implies an automatic deliverance of an expulsion order that lasts a year in most cases. Every time an undocumented migrant tries to gain a more regular status, the deportation order issued comes up again and the legal paths to finding a solution gradually close. Although it is a case-by-case decision, the usual way of redressing one’s legal status is by applying for a residence permit after spending at least ten years in the country. Each reform of Immigration law over the last two decades has been designed to favor legalization through work, over legalization through family ties. Family ties are increasingly suspected of being false, and current policies promote immigration that is supposed to be “useful” to the national economy. In exceptional cases, undocumented migrants receive legal permits for “humanitarian” reasons (e.g. life-threatening illnesses). This practice is used to justify the securitization and hardline policies against (the majority of ) migrants who do not elicit compassion (Fassin 2012; Ticktin 2011). Still, these possibilities are full of obstacles and make legalization little more than a possibility. Soon after being released, undocumented migrants find themselves in a state of latency: their legalization project seems unattainable and their whole trajectory is reoriented by the experience of detention. After an arrest and a detention period, everyday living conditions are jeopardized and the presence of these individuals in France becomes even more fragile. In July 2009, when he was released from detention, once again after other arrests and detention periods, Souleymane Bâ was convinced of the uselessness of French policy: “they tire people out for nothing.” Upon each of his arrests, Souleymane Bâ declared that he did not work despite the fact that during the week he picks up garbage at Orly, Choisy-le-Roi, Thiais and Créteil (all suburban cities bordering Paris), and on weekends he does cleaning work in a high school in Montrouge. He does it just to avoid trouble similar to what he encountered in 2007, when the police arrested him and contacted his employer. Whether he was ignorant of or had previously just taken advantage of his employee’s irregular status, Souleymane Bâ’s employer was nonetheless obliged to dismiss him.

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Souleymane Bâ thus lost a job in the construction industry he had had for years thanks to the identity documents provided by a cousin. In the detention facility, isolated in one of the “rooms” to avoid the noise, many individuals call their employers to pretend they are ill and not able to go to work. The revelation of the irregularity of an individual’s administrative situation is a very concrete consequence of arrest and confinement. “How many arrests, how many detention centers and how many jobs lost because of papers… How many times have I lost a flat because of that,” remembered Moussa Kanouté a few days after getting a three-month residence permit. Looking back on eight years of living without papers, he remembers many arrests, too many confinement periods, and all the times he was forced to start again from scratch. Another effect of containment is to be found in the transformation of the self-image of the undocumented migrant. The use of handcuffs by the police is usually perceived as one of the most striking events of the detention experience. “I have never had handcuffs. It’s humiliating for us. I did not steal anything,” recalled an outraged Béatrice Tamba, arrested at the bank where she had an appointment to open an account. Confinement crystallizes a bureaucratic situation that is considered to be felony by the law. The way they are treated does not correspond to the self-­representation of my interlocutors. Although their presence in France is illegal, undocumented migrants envisage their stay as legitimate, both because they perceive their behavior (as workers, as parents, as tax payers, etc.) to be irreprehensible and because their infraction of the Immigration law seems insignificant (Coutin 2006 [2000]). Nonetheless, the use of such symbolically charged coercive tools blurs the self-image of undocumented migrants, who have to face the implications of their administrative status. During an interview, Vololona Ravaomanely questioned the means deployed by the state to send him back to Madagascar: I don’t know why they attacked like this, this is what I cannot… the others were released after two days, five days… but why me? I don’t know [later he adds:] It is true that France has already given me a lot, but I also gave, even if it’s not much compared to what I received, in my work, in all I have

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done. But what is it? Is it because I have been operated on, because France paid for my surgery, is it that? Is that what gets into their criteria? (Interview with V. Ravaomanely, January 9, 2009)

Trying to explain the reasons for his 32-day confinement, Vololona Ravaomanely ends up imagining that he was punished for the medical treatment he received, which was paid for by French Social Security. His understanding of himself was transformed by the experience of detention, which he lived as a punishment for having committed a fault. He believed that he remained in the detention center for a longer period than other detainees because he had benefited from the health care system. He internalized the public discourse that imagines migrants as scammers and profiteers and that understands detention as an appropriate response. After two consecutive arrests, within a one-month interval, Dario Achadoo—a native of Mauritius—explained, retrospectively, the ideas that crossed his mind: When you get out from there, it has consequences on the person, it hits your self-esteem […] When you are confined, you ask yourself about the decision you’ve made. I would have done better not doing that … you think of suicide and everything. You lose confidence in yourself. You put the idea in your head that you’re a big loser. You can neither move forward nor backward. At least if you step back, you move. That’s why some people say send me back home. They will not send you back. They will make you hang around here and drop you in the middle of nowhere. (Interview with D. Achadoo, May 24, 2010)

While in detention or just after their release, many undocumented migrants I encountered felt the need to assert their moral probity to distance themselves from the image of offender typically connected with deportation device. This need demonstrates the effects of a form of violence that coerces bodies, undermines self-esteem and degrades people (Das 2007; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In achieving this, the deportation device carries out a double reduction, both objective—through fragilization—and subjective—by the representations it imposes—from the undocumented migrant to the “clandestine” migrant.7 The control policy

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thus creates the “clandestine” migrants against whom it fights. Far from living at the margins of the state, “clandestine” migrants are produced at its core but live in its shadow.

Troubled by Time In 2000, Téné Coulibaly left Bamako and came to France. He was almost 50, and the income from his garage did not allow him to meet the needs of his family. At the time, he planned to spend as little time as possible in France, a year or two, to earn some money to build a second floor to his house, buy some material for his shop and hire a heavy goods vehicle mechanic for his garage. After arriving in France, Téné Coulibaly worked part-time jobs in cleaning companies. Despite his low income, he could start his building project back home. In April 2007, he was on his way to work when he was stopped for an ID check and was arrested. He spent three days in a detention facility before being released because the center to which he was going to be sent was full. His cousin covered for him at work, and his period in confinement went unnoticed by his employer. After that, he was always afraid of being arrested and deported, and only left his accommodation to go to his job, limiting the possibility of getting small extra jobs to increase his income. If deportation is dreaded, voluntary return is typically unthinkable. Once they cross into France, migrants discover that the border closes on them, as leaving is impossible without papers. Visiting family in the home country is too risky as it compromises the possibility of coming back afterward. Any type of border crossing is difficult, as it is monitored by the administration. One of the stakes in arrests is the identification of undocumented migrants. Arrests, even when they do not lead to confinement, enable the authorities to develop their databases and break the anonymity (Broeders 2009) that is one of the main resources of clandestinity.8 The fear of being arrested and the threat of deportation also reduce the possibility of moving around in everyday life, contributing to the feeling of living “like in prison,” even once out of the removal center. While waiting for regularization, time goes by and on-the-spot confinement combines with temporal confinement.

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The expression “back to zero” (“retour à zero”) reflects a cyclic temporality wherein after every detention it is necessary to start over: look for a new job, a new place to stay, contact a lawyer and so on. On the other hand, the bureaucratic situation produces a temporal shift: undocumented migrants are at once separated from social time in France and the progress of time in their home country. Abdoulaye Sacko was 30 years old when he returned for the first time to Mali after 11 years in France. He knew he was “young” in the village while his peers were not young anymore. His youth was measured socially and not biologically. He was not married. The nine years he spent in France appeared to be a temporal bracket, adjourning his passage into adulthood. Waiting is, as Bourdieu (1997) put it, a way of experiencing the effects of power. It is a source of anxiety and distress; it is also painful in that it reinforces the impression of being confined to a timeless present (Kobelinsky 2010). In 2009, Masséré Diaby’s younger brother was granted legal status in France following a workers’ strike in his company.9 Since then, the brother has gone back to the village, got married and had his first baby. He also bought land in Bamako, where he is building a house. Masséré Diaby explained that “generally among the Soninke” a younger brother has to wait until the elders get married before he himself can marry. If they were in Mali that would happen, but “when it comes to papers, it’s every man and his luck.” Patience is needed when dealing with the state (Auyero 2011), but it is not enough. Luck is also required. How otherwise could Masséré Diaby explain that his younger brother, who arrived in France two years after him, had already got his papers? Bureaucracy does not only put individuals lacking legal status on hold but also interfere in family relations, disturbing customary rules on the order of precedence. In comparison with his brother, Masséré Diaby “has not done anything.” He tried to find a wife in France, though his first attempt was rebuffed by the uncle of the potential bride: “how can an undocumented person be in charge of a family?” The second attempt also ended in failure. This time it was the bride who disappeared after receiving his gifts just before the wedding. Masséré Diaby was discouraged: “Anyway, I am late. There is no need to run now. I’ll wait for the papers and then I’ll look for a wife in Mali.” The situation of Masséré Diaby summarizes the imbricated temporalities of undocumented migrants’

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experiences: the cyclical time imposed after detention, the waiting imposed by the bureaucracy when trying to legalize one’s status, and the social time in the home country. These three dimensions gave all my interlocutors the impression of having reached a deadlock. They feel “locked” in time and, as I’ll show in the following section, in space. “I lost my life here,” “I wasted my life,” “I wasted my time,” “I am late” are sentiments often expressed in detention facilities. Undocumented migrants systematically compare their situation with what would have happened if they had stayed at home. Particularly for young men affected by border politics, the temporal markers such as marriage and children become the way to calculate this delay. Migration politics increase the disconnection between chronological and social time, both in France and in the home country. This is particularly the case for migrants coming from Western Africa, for whom age is an important determiner of social position (Mbodj-Pouye and Le Courant 2017). However, the perception of time wasted is shared by other migrants as well. Deportability is an everyday feeling, and the uncertainty of this threat does not allow for much thought and action outside of trying to escape this status. The actual waiting time imposed by bureaucratic procedures is doubled in the subjective perception by the experience of a fixed, suspended time that is contingent on the hope of legalization. The body of the undocumented migrant then becomes the only marker of time passing. The timeless present of anguish transforms impossible social aging into accelerated physical aging. Compared to the pictures on their passports, many of our interlocutors seem much older than the number of years passed since they got them, just before coming to France. The threat of deportation confines migrants within the national borders and in an eternal precarious present while they are waiting for regularization. This raises the question of sovereignty. The apparent inability to decide who is entitled to stay on the territory is compensated here by the confinement of undocumented migrants on the very same territory. State control of geographical borders must be thought together with the border itself as a tool used to govern migrants’ presence on the territory. As such, the border becomes a threat and, in turn, this threat creates new, everyday boundaries that confine undocumented migrants. On both

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sides of the border, control is exercised not only on territories and movement but also on time and individual temporality.

Governed by the Border Despite their legal status in France, many undocumented migrants represent themselves as transnational beings (Boehm 2012). Without traveling—as they do not have “papers”—they are, through a variety of practices, at once both here and there (Chu 2010). Souleymane Bâ sent money to his brother in Mali in order to organize his own wedding at the city hall of the village. His brother pretended to be Souleymane Bâ to the Malian authorities. This allowed Souleymane to get married and change his status without (physically) leaving France. This possibility of being elsewhere—through the body of his brother—while remaining here shows how the fixist constraints can be cleverly circumvented. Moussa Kanouté and many of my other interlocutors from the region of Kayes, in Mali, participate in small NGOs, created during the 1980s, that promote the development of their home villages. They frequently organize meetings in Paris or in its suburbs where they share food while discussing about the latest news concerning their birth place and make decisions concerning their relatives who remained back home. In so doing, my interlocutors actively participate in the life of their communities. While offering a form of sociability and sharing, these moments keep them going daily, providing a sense of belonging and self-esteem. They also regularly send money and closely follow—individually and collectively—the progress of specific projects as a way of preparing for the future. These transnational practices help undocumented migrants cope with the uncertainty of their present. They also allow to anticipate a better future even if the risks associated with being undocumented thwart their ambitions. After an arrest or the loss of a job, sending money home becomes more difficult, perhaps even impossible. Telephone calls which allow migrants to take part in life back home (i.e. to follow the progress of a house under construction or to participate in family decisions) are dreaded because they come with requests that cannot be satisfied. Oftentimes, contact with the family is reduced to a minimum and

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building projects are suspended because of lack of means. A house can therefore remain without a roof for months or even years. Without a job, undocumented migrants withdraw into private spaces. Unable to maintain this double presence, they are again confined to the space and time of their fragile local existence. The present politics of immigration detention hinders transnational circulation of people, money and communication. The threat of deportation makes the borders on which nation-states are built exist. The increasing movements of capital, properties and ideas both break free from borders and threaten them. The massive investment in the control of undocumented migrants is a sign of this atrophy of state power, which is unable to regulate all flows. The exhibition of omnipotence on a restricted population could be seen as bearing witness to the weakening of state power. The visible failure of the deportation policy allows us to think that the explicit desire to “make the borders exist” in reality hides how impossible it is to enforce them. But by approaching the deportation device by its effects, it seems to me that we are able to grasp the outlines of the government of a population where the border is not only the object of control—as a demarcation line between two sovereignties on which it is possible to set up barriers—but also the means. Raised as a threat, the border becomes an instrument of domination over people already present on the territory. The control at the border is then coupled with a government by the border. The central object of the exercise of this power is the population (and not the territory), and another materiality of the border comes into being—less solid than it is unstable and fluid, capable of getting into the cracks of everyday life. However, sovereignty is not supplanted by the logic of government. Incapable of applying the law, deciding who can enter and who is tolerated on the territory, state power is exercised on a population which is excluded from inside. The legal, social and moral confinement that justifies the exclusion of some individuals from the national territory leads to the “differential inclusion” (Balibar 2012, 45) of all the others. The undocumented migrants who have not been deported are thereby assigned to a singular position. When the border can reappear in their lives at any moment and when the threat of deportation excludes them

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from society, the border as threat and the threat as border work together and strengthen their effects. The border pins individuals down to a certain locality while imposing the redundant temporality of an eternal present. Deportation and the threat of deportation are therefore the two complementary faces of the contemporary government of migrations. Confining individuals to a local existence, “here” or “there,” allows the state to affirm its limiting power by the border. On both sides, it is all about containing the “unwanted,” to hinder and slow down undocumented migrants’ movements.

A Blurry Line, a Fragile Existence Deportation and the threat of deportation are thus two sides of a single policy that controls migrants on both sides of the border. Control is exercised not only on territories and movement but also on time and individual temporality, thus contributing to the development of a particular way of “digesting difference” by the deportation of some and the threat to deport the majority. For those who stay in France, and broadly in Europe, and who are the majority, the threat of expulsion leads to a differential inclusion within the French territory. This differential inclusion lies in a form of power that exercises the capacity to keep people waiting and to slow down their settlement. It also implies maintaining undocumented migrants at the margins of legality and thus fragilizing their daily lives. In other terms, this differential inclusion can be seen as a particular way of containing a population, by reducing its dangers and by regulating the threats it is supposed to convey. After the attacks of November 13, 2015, in which gunmen and suicide bombers hit simultaneously a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars in Paris, President François Hollande made a commitment to reforming the constitution in order to include the loss of nationality for binational individuals condemned for terrorism. The reform was finally abandoned after four months of public debate about the creation of two types of French citizen. In the continuity of this proposal, during the presidential campaign of 2017, many voices on the right and on the

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far-right demanded the deportation of all migrants with “S files”—that is, people suspected of representing a threat to the safety of the state. These public debates remind us that the line separating the migrants to be incorporated from those to be deported is blurry.

Notes 1. The possibility to deport foreigners entered the French criminal code in 1832 and the power to proceed to such removals from the national territory was given to the préfets in 1849. 2. All the names I employ in this chapter have been changed in order to preserve the anonymity of my interlocutors and the sensitive information they provided. 3. I employ the term device as a translation of the French dispositif, a heterogeneous assemblage of laws, practices, discourses (Foucault 1994 [1977], p. 299). 4. I employ the term undocumented in order to emphasize the absence of documents, considered as “powerful” material artifacts (Riles 2006). Sometimes I use the word unauthorized in order to stress individuals’ non-­ conformity with bureaucratic standards, in the same way as the French expression étranger en situation irrégulière. 5. For a reflection on the ethical tensions and difficulties related to this double commitment in the field, see Le Courant (2013). 6. In the following pages, I will mostly use masculine pronouns when describing the actions of a singular unauthorized migrant. As men are the main targets of immigration detention policy—because of the stereotype of a migrant being a single (young) man—most of the undocumented migrants who are arrested and deported are men, and most of my interlocutors are men as well. The data I was able to gather on women’s experiences show that although women use different strategies to obtain legalization and to stay in France, the effects of the deportation device are very similar on both genders. 7. The distinction between undocumented migrants and clandestine migrants is acknowledged by the government. In a parliamentary report it can be read that: “Not all the undocumented migrants are clandestine migrants. Only those who have never had anything to do with the

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­administration.” Sénat, Immigration clandestine: une réalité inacceptable, une réponse ferme, juste et humaine, April 2006, n°300 p. 19. 8. Since 2006, the Eloi database has collected information on individuals subject to an expulsion order. Since 2009, the Oscar database has stocked information on the beneficiaries of return aid. In 2008, the European Return Directive introduced the compulsory incorporation of the names of deported individuals and their biometric identifiers into the Schengen information system (SIS) to make the entry ban effective in the EU for a period of five years. 9. In April 2008, a strike of “sans-papiers” (undocumented migrants) started with the support of trade unions. The specificity of this movement is related to the wish to obtain the papers through the recognition of the “undocumented worker” status (Barron et al. 2011; Iana Mar 2011).

References Auyero, Javier. 2011. Patients of the State: An Ethnographic Account of Poor People’s Waiting. Latin American Research Review 46 (1): 5–29. Balibar, Etienne. 2012. L’introuvable humanité du sujet moderne. L’Homme 203–204 (3): 19–50. Barron, Pierre, Anne Bory, Sebastien Chauvin, Nicolas Jounin, and Luci Tourette. 2011. On bosse ici, on reste ici ! La grève des sans-papiers: une aventure inédite. Paris: La Découverte. Boehm, Deborah A. 2012. Intimate Migrations. Gender, Family, and Illegality among Transnational Mexicans. New York: New York University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Le Seuil. Broeders, Dennis. 2009. Breaking Down Anonimity: Digital Surveillance of Irregular Migrants in Germany and the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univesity Press. Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham: Duke University Press. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 2006 [2000]. Legalizing Moves: Salvadorian Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–447.

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De Genova, Nicholas, and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime. Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2011. Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries: The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 213–226. ———. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fischer, Nicolas, and Chowra Makaremi. 2012. ‘L’horreur de la République’: Les enjeux moraux de l’enfermement des étrangers. In Economies morales contemporaines, ed. Didier Fassin and Jean-Sebastien Eideliman, 217–241. Paris: La Découverte. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France. 1978–1979. Paris: Gallimard / Seuil. Heyman, Josiah McC. 1998. State Effects on Labor Exploitation: The INS Undocumented Immigrants as the Mexico-United States Border. Critique of Anthropology 18 (2): 157–180. Iana Mar. 2011. Travailleurs, vos papiers ! Paris: Libertalia. Kobelinsky, Carolina. 2010. L’accueil des demandeurs d’asile. Une ethnographie de l’attente. Paris: Editions du Cygne. Le Courant, Stefan. 2013. What Can We Learn from a ‘Liar’ and a ‘Madman’? Serendipity and Double Commitment During Fieldwork. Social Anthropology 21 (2): 186–198. Mbodj-Pouye, Aissatou, and Stefan Le Courant. 2017. “Living Away from Family Is Not Good but Living with It Is Worse.” Debating Conjugality Across Generations of West African Migrants in France. Mande Studies 19: 109–130. Moulier-Boutang, Y. 1997. Une forme contemporaine du salariat bride. In Les lois de l’inhospitalité: Les politiques de l’immigration à l’épreuve des sans-papier, ed. Didier Fassin, Alain Morice, and Catherine Quiminal, 127–143. Paris: La Découverte. Peutz, Nathalie. 2006. Embarking on an Anthropology of Removal. Current Anthropology 47 (2): 217–241. Riles, Annelise, ed. 2006. Documents: Artefacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2016. Expulsions: Brutalité et complexité dans l’économie globale. Paris: Gallimard.

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Sayad, Abdelmalek. 1999. La double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Paris: Seuil. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Terray, Emmanuel. 1999. Le travail des étrangers en situation irrégulière ou la délocalisation sur place. In Sans-papiers: l’archaïsme fatal, ed. Etienne Balibar, Monique Chemillier-Grendeau, Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, and Emmanuel Terray, 9–34. Paris: La Découverte. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

11 Solidarity in Greece and the Management of Difference Heath Cabot

I arrived in Greece in May 2017 for a few months of fieldwork to find Athens in the midst of documenta 14 (d14), an artistic event complementing that which takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years. Entitled “Learning from Athens,” the much-hyped art festival was framed as a collaborative tribute to a city that had emerged as an inspiration for many on the political left globally, and in Europe specifically. After years of austerity packages spearheaded at the European level by the German Prime Minister Angela Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the event sought to invert the power imbalance between residents of Greece and the European North by positioning Greece in a didactic role. Yet it also raised significant ire for what some cited as lack of meaningful attention to the struggles of Greek people after years of austerity and to the thousands of displaced people stuck in Greece. Many of my Athenian acquaintances marveled at the art installations, exhibits, and performances taking place throughout the city, many of them free of charge. Others noted neo-colonial overtones and, at times,

H. Cabot (*) Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_11

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directly exploitative dimensions. For instance, one event involved a guided visit to a city center neighborhood in what amounted to a “poverty tour,” in the words of one of my close acquaintances. I was told by friends working at d14 of the low pay that they received, and the problematic ways in which Greek nationals (particularly those of color), as well as refugees and migrants, had been treated by some artists and visitors as empty, non-agentive vessels for inspiration. Indeed, as Yalouri and Rikou write, “one could not help feeling that the idea of learning from this particular city could either be interpreted literally or with a hint of sarcasm” (Rikou and Yalouri 2017). Alongside the efflorescence of artistic production accompanying d14 (in the wider context of Athens’ thriving contemporary art scene), counter-­movements emerged which themselves became part of the d14 experience. Particularly illustrative is the oft-cited bit of stenciled street art that appeared throughout the city that spring, in Greek as well as English, so that foreign visitors would also understand: “DEAR DOCUMENTA: I REFUSE TO EXOTICIZE MYSELF TO INCREASE YOUR CULTURAL CAPITAL.  SINCERELY, THE NATIVES.”1 On April 10, 2017, a collective identifying themselves as “Artists Against Evictions” disseminated a letter to “participants, cultural workers, and visitors” associated with d14 addressing these people as “our guests.” The letter discussed squatted buildings in Athens which had, since the “refugee crisis” of 2015, emerged as unofficial housing for thousands of recently arrived border-crossers (but which themselves have a long history as part of Greece’s strong anarchist tradition). The squats had struggled under the threat of closure and eviction, even under the ostensibly leftist government of Syriza, in power from 2015 to 2019. The (then) mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis had stated that the squats were “degrading the city.” The open letter argued that by staying silent about the threats facing the squats, the international artists and activists purporting to “learn from Athens” were contributing to the precarity and invisibility of those positioned in marginal spaces of the city. Among my friends and colleagues in Greece, where the letter circulated widely on social media, the message was received sympathetically for how it underscored the forms of exploitation that imbued some of d14’s attempts to fuse art and activism. Analytically, this letter is

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particularly interesting for how it describes a shared project of resistance uniting migrants/refugees and (implicitly Greek) artists while using the language of hospitality to position d14 participants as “guests” and outsiders. The letter thus produces a vision of a we speaking against d14 and its interlopers. This “we” (implicitly those marginalized insiders) refers to artists, activists, and refugees who, together, are framed as together coexisting in a shared space of solidarity.2 Take here the following, particularly illustrative, excerpt: The precursor events of documenta 14…spoke of the voices of resistance, transgender voices, the voices of the minority. Well, we are those voices, we are genderless, we are migrants, we are modern pariahs. (Artists Against Evictions April 2016)

Over and against the clear distancing move of framing potential readers as “our guests,” the we employed here performs a claim to shared struggle across radically diverse groups comprising Greek artists, activists, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as migrants, refugees, and other urban “pariahs.” Yet who is this “we” that simultaneously incorporates a struggling artist and a refugee, a Greek/European citizen and a deportable migrant? What holds these different positionalities together, in and through such a “we?” And what work does this “we” do in acknowledging, confronting, eliding, or digesting difference? Such an assumed we, and the notions of solidarity underlying it, is replicated in larger trends in diverse brands of both Greek and international lefts active in Athens over the past few years. These notions of solidarity emerge in a variety of sites, across relationships of power. Take, for instance, documenta 14’s goal to “learn from Athens” through the shared project of art, and the attempt to produce solidarities across the problematic histories that have long shaped relationships between European norths and souths—so painfully revivified in the age of austerity. “Artists Against Evictions” underline that this attempt at European North/South solidarity may merely reproduce exclusion and exploitation. However, as Plantzos (2019) shows in a recent article on documenta 14, such forms of resistance may also be in danger of reproducing the very romanticized, Orientalist stereotypes that they attempt to resist. What inclusions and

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exclusions are enacted through visions of common marginalized voices living and struggling in solidarity together? In solidarity projects, confronting and managing difference—whether conceived in terms of position, needs, or cultural background—is a core dilemma. This chapter interrogates larger trends in the shifting meanings of solidarity with and in Greece, of which d14 is only one example, asking how notions of solidarity variously produce, consume, elide, and transform difference. My goal is not to give an exhaustive account of any of the movements or initiatives that I discuss but to analyze how certain solidarity projects have sought to deal with questions of difference during a period of increasing socio-cultural and racial diversity in Europe, and when Greece has become a crucial site for refugee arrival, reception, and processing in European border work as well as various forms of socio-­ political experimentation. The possibilities and limits of solidarity in Greece have a particular salience now, as I write in December 2019. Radical attempts to live and struggle across difference in Greece have recently come under brutal attack by the New Democracy (ND) government, which acceded to power by a strong majority in national and municipal elections in July 2019. Often framed as a party of the center right, New Democracy’s current regime follows four and a half years in which Alexis Tsipras of Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left) was in power. After Tsipras’ euphoric victory in January 2015, which routed the dynasties (including ND) that have dominated Greek politics for decades, Syriza’s fraught stint in power entailed multiple negotiations of austerity memoranda, mass influxes of seekers of refuge in 2015–16, and the ongoing socio-political and economic instability accompanying austerity. While Syriza’s radical left credentials have come deeply under fire, the Syriza period was, overall, tolerant—and often downright encouraging— of solidarity projects. Indeed, I have even heard interlocutors and scholars alike critique Syriza for essentially outsourcing the work of providing for precarious populations through their celebration of solidarity networks and tacit support for informal refugee housing (see Ivancheva and Krastev 2019 for a similar critique in the cases of Sophia, Bulgaria, and Caracas, Venezuela). Now, however, “Greece’s New Police State” (ManoussakiAdamopoulou and Dignan 2019) has shown itself to be dangerously

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antagonistic to both migrants and mobilizations on the left—and specifically, the squats. In a frightening enactment of the very threat cited by Artists Against Evictions, numerous evictions of squatted buildings in Athens took place in Fall 2019, and a government order was issued for all squats to close on December 5, 2019. Some of these evictions entailed mass arrests of occupants (sans papiers and activists alike), with multiple accounts of police brutality and humiliation. The question at the heart of this edited volume—how to live and flourish together in an increasingly diverse Europe—is also the dilemma that animates solidarity initiatives. This challenge has incited projects both pragmatic and utopian (and always imperfect), and which suggest alternatives to forms of violence such as that which the current Greek government seems to endorse. Yet solidarity projects also have their own dangers of closure and exclusion (Zaman 2019). The notion of a we—while performing claims to solidarity across difference—conjures what Haraway (1997, 71) describes as the “sacred image of the same.” She writes how, in politically progressive projects, a dominant language of shared humanity often serves to coopt and elide constitutive forms of difference that take shape through diverse histories of colonialism, and racialized and gendered forms of exclusion. Solidarities with and in Greece, despite their many political possibilities, have often invoked such notions of sameness. However, at other times solidarity projects have emphasized transformation through difference, a kind of transubstantiation entailing the mutual encounter of each by the other in heterogeneous, always power-infused, venues. Dealing with difference ultimately emerges both as dangerous to, and at the core of, solidarity.

The Shifting Field of Solidarity Athens is not just a “field” for me but an elective city where my research cannot be easily sectioned off from the “academy.” My long-term work in Athens as a non-Greek researcher (since 2004) studying, and engaging in advocacy and activism around, refugee-related issues in Greece forms a key part of the backdrop for my observations here (see Cabot 2014). Since January 2015, I have also conducted fourteen months of

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ethnographic research on Greek solidarity movements and, specifically, Greek social solidarity clinics and pharmacies’ (Cabot 2015a, 2019a): grassroots sites where pharmaceuticals and care are redistributed to address gaps in the Greek healthcare system under austerity. I have witnessed Greece  shift from a site of “marginality” (Herzfeld 1987b) to a center of global attention thanks to the overlapping “crises” that have unfolded there: the debt crisis and the European crisis of refugees (Fernando and Giordano 2016). In 2014–15, amid international fervor over the rise of Syriza, Euro-skeptics of many stripes descended on Athens en masse. Meanwhile, the emergence of Greece as the frontline (Papataxiarchis 2016a) for the arrival of around a million seekers of refuge in 2015–16 attracted huge numbers of activists, volunteers, and humanitarian professionals from outside Greece (Cabot 2019b). International academics visited and made appearances at both activist and intellectual sites (including Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Sandro Mezzadra, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek). With the election of Syriza in 2015, some Greek academics and intellectuals who had previously seen themselves as working against the state entered the political field themselves or were recruited to take on advisory roles for the government. Even after the failed referendum of July 5, 2015, when many former supporters defected from Syriza’s ranks, the worlds of academia and activism remained tightly entwined. As an international academic myself, but with a comparatively long-term investment in Athens, my own position has thus been a complex one to navigate. The topics of both my former and current research are particularly charged politically and, in the past few years, I have been interpellated variously as someone with “local” knowledge, an outside “expert,” and an interloper. I thus write here about encounters that bridge the worlds of advocacy, activism, and academia, in which I too am involved to varying degrees, and where the topic of solidarity across difference has become an issue of urgent concern. Solidarity, allileggii in Greek, emphasizes proximity across difference, meaning to be close to or near the Other. As played out in the various facets of what has come to be known as Greek Solidarity Movement, solidarity is a heterogeneous and shifting concept. These grassroots initiatives are extraordinarily diverse, yet they generally seek to offer services that

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the Greek state under austerity has not had the capacity or will to provide; in addition to pharmacies and clinics they include grocery outlets, clothing distribution networks, housing assistance, and continuing education centers. Most seek to perform their work via lateral or horizontal relationships between volunteers, and between volunteers and beneficiaries, and many focus on assisting Greek nationals, long-term residents, and newly arrived border-crossers alike, though some (like the squats) have focused specifically on border-crossers. Solidarity initiatives are most often framed by their adherents as working against the gaps and power imbalances that they associate with both charitable and humanitarian aid (Rozakou 2016; Theodossopoulos 2016; Cantat and Fesichmidt 2019; Cabot 2019a). Solidarity in Greece may thus be approached as a kind of “bridge,” which situates people in relation, proximity, and interdependence (Rakopoulos 2016, 143), though not necessarily through assumptions of sameness. The movement includes practices and ideas that are diverse, inconsistent, and often contradictory. Politically, those active under the self-defined rubric of solidarity may run the gamut from various brands of anarchism to ongoing supporters of Syriza. However, the focus on shared struggle across differences of class, race, gender, and cultural and national background—evidenced in comments such as “we are all in the same boat,” “I could be in the other’s place,” or, as in the motto of one of my fieldsites, “one for all, all for one”—emphasizes shared or common struggles as opposed to difference. The specter of the “same” thus haunts solidarity initiatives both in and with Greece and is itself part of the very diversity that shapes these projects.

International Solidarity and Cryptocolonialism Greece has long been framed as inhabiting a marginal position in Europe and also internationally (Herzfeld 1987b; Knight and Stewart 2016). I have thus been surprised to see Athens become a hub for activists and volunteers from throughout Europe and North America, seeking to build solidarities transecting differences of culture, language, and power.

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During the lead-up to the elections of 2015, I met many Italians and Spaniards who had come to celebrate the rise of Syriza and what many at the time hailed as a reemergence of a European radical left (specifically in conjunction with Podemos in Spain). Via the social clinics and pharmacies, I encountered French, Finns, Germans, and Italians who collected medicines and clothing to send to Greek solidarity networks. Some “internationals” moved to Greece for extended periods of time—many of them young, students, or in between jobs and degrees, some with enough expendable capital to fund these stays (including unemployment payments from home countries, which go much further in Greece than in Northern Europe, for instance); combined with frugal living and networking (as well as participation in squats or simply couch-surfing). Older leftists from elsewhere in Europe traveled to Greece and undertook outreach in home countries to educate fellow citizens about the struggles of Greek people. Nothing in this international solidarity with Greece in and of itself problematic. And yet, such international solidarities—between Greece and the powers of the European North, especially—also carry the potential for “cryptocolonial” relations (Herzfeld 2002). Herzfeld defines cryptocolonialism as follows: the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence. (900)

Herzfeld’s emphasis on apparent nominal independence is important for underscoring how colonial relations often underlie apparent forms of sovereignty. This is certainly the case in Greece’s relations with the European Union, with regard to both austerity and migration management. It is also relevant for international solidarities with Greece—even those that may seek to work against imperialism and the forces of European intervention. Importantly, such lasting colonial relations are

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necessarily crypto and, for this reason, less likely to be addressed directly by those expressing solidarity with Greece and, in some cases, Greeks themselves. Cryptocolonial histories also shape contemporary modes of cultural performance and identity in Greece, particularly vis-à-vis those from the European North and North America. Further, Herzfeld’s description of an “aggressive” nationalism fashioned to suit foreign models also underscores a self-orientalizing tendency, evident sometimes even in “positive” stereotypes of Greekness so easily celebrated on a European and international stage. As many scholars have shown, the Modern Greek nation state in part acquired its ideological purchase through the involvement of Philhellenes and Greeks educated and living in the European West and North. The recuperation of a Europeanized ideal of ancient Greece as an ideological and moral backbone was key to building the “new” Greece—through language, the archeological landscape, education, and history (Gourgouris 1996; Athanassopolou 2002; Brown and Hamilakis 2003). And yet, Greece persistently has been said to slip repeatedly into its “oriental” tendencies, and Greek nationals themselves also variously comment upon, resist, invoke, and even perform these orientalist stereotypes (Herzfeld 1997; Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016; Plantzos 2019). As such, despite the critical thrust of the anti-documenta 14 graffito cited earlier, moments of self-orientalism frequently emerge through a kind of mimesis in often unexpected ways, as Greek nationals have at times fulfilled, and at other times resisted, such roles and identities, which themselves are, in part, products of cryptocolonial relations (see Kalantzis 2016). Potential problems with Herzfeld’s model include how it calls attention to overarching patterns and stereotypes and does not recognize as clearly the gaps and variations in such patterns; and further, how the model of cryptocolonialism itself can overdetermine interpretations of inter-cultural encounter, producing notions of incommensurability across difference. Here, however, I want to emphasize that the very aspects that some “internationals” (whether anthropologists or activists) often find attractive about Greece—its apparent friendliness, its unruliness, its commitment to resistance—are the very elements that, with a little orientalist twist, also marginalize Greece from the dominant insides of “Europeanness.”

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Protesters across Europe marched in support of Greece during the notoriously problematic debt negotiations in 2015, many carrying signs  with the slogans “We are all Greeks.” One should, however, ask what cryptocolonial work this  image of “the same” accomplishes in such demonstrations of solidarity.3 In the fascination with Athens that has emerged over the last few years among an international left, there are also aspects of the love of the “good” oriental: a people seen to fight and resist austerity and welcome refugees on the margins of Europe. While such images are “positive,” so to speak, they are also inverted images of those that vilify Greece for its unruliness in the face of debt (and Greeks’  supposed aversion to tax paying and work, and love for vacation—to cite just a few racialized stereotypes that have emerged since the debt crisis). In the name of solidarity, then, new forms of exclusion may be produced through attempts to transect or even erase difference.

Democracy Rising In my own experience as a philhellene anthropologist, the dilemmas surrounding cryptocolonial aspects of international solidarity with Greece became most glaring in exchanges and encounters that surrounded the “Democracy Rising” conference in Athens in July 2015, organized by the Global Center for Advanced Study. This conference was organized after Syriza came to power in January 2015, in part as a way to celebrate the government of a “truly radical left” coalition in Europe. The event was explicitly pro-Syriza in its conception, the conference website looking, as one of my colleagues put it, more like party propaganda than an academic event. Young and old academics and activists from around the world (though mostly the global north) came to Athens for what promised to be an enlivening set of discussions—and also to see Athens at a historic time. Yet as an international left descended on Athens, the Greek left itself was undergoing painful reconfiguration. The conference took place in the difficult aftermath of what many have described as Tsipras’ capitulation, when his government notoriously signed onto austerity measures after the historic “No” vote in the referendum of July 5, 2015 (see Kouvélakis

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and Cukier 2015). The week of the conference, where key Syriza members were set to speak (academics and politicians alike), there were numerous resignations, including such high-profile figures such as then finance minister Yannis Varoufakis and head of parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou. Many of my Greek friends, colleagues, and mentors were on opposite sides of this reconfiguration—and a great many others were still trying to navigate their way through. Numerous politically engaged academics stayed with Syriza. Athena Athanasiou (see Athanasiou 2012; Butler and Athanasiou 2013), an Athens-based scholar who has engaged for years in feminist and queer activism and intersectional antiracist struggle, spoke at the conference of the “tragic” nature of Tsipras’ referendum: the impossibility of the decision itself creating a productive space for democratic process. Many of my younger friends and colleagues, of more radically left or anarchist leanings, expressed angry frustration at Tsipras’ “betrayal.” Hard words were exchanged between colleagues and friends. This appeared to me, above all, as a Greek drama playing out within a space claimed for international solidarity. I took it for granted that I, and the other internationals who had come there, were spectators—not direct participants. But this was not the case for many of the international participants at the conference. In a heated plenary panel, two academics who took a more moderate view of Tsipras’ actions and who ultimately (if ambivalently) supported the Syriza party were joined at the last minute by a pro-Grexit economist (see Rakopoulos 2015; Cabot 2015b; Anastasiou and Souvlis 2015 for a discussion of this heated exchange). All of the participants were men based at top-tier, non-Greek educational institutions, and all spoke for well over their allotted times. Yet one of those who defended Syriza was booed off the stage by a vast number of Greek and international audience members who apparently were impatient to hear the contributions of the last-minute addition to the panel. The reaction to the economist’s plan for a Grexit by Greek members of the audience was mixed, but a majority of international participants clapped heartily. The exchange—and particularly the tough treatment of the one panelist—inspired me to write a rather vehement critique of international political participation in the name of “solidarity” (Cabot 2015b). The points I tried to make were that it is easy to clap at a Grexit when you do

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not have to live with its direct consequences; that Greece has a long history of neo and cryptocolonial involvement by “friends” from the west and north seeking to participate in politically relevant interventions; and finally, that Greek people did not need to be told what to do, least of all in the name of solidarity. In this way, I too—borrowing from Herzfeld— underscored incommensurable difference, under the presumption that “not being Greek” limited my capacity for participation and, thus, solidarity; and conversely, that “being Greek” united people across key differences of (in this case) class, gender, and country of residence. My intervention was shared quite widely on social media in the aftermath of the conference and garnered both positive and very irate commentary that emphasized various elements of both difference and shared struggle. “Οχι was about Europe too,” wrote one commentator. Helena Sheehan, an Irish leftist intellectual and activist, in her book about her own investment in the rise and break-up of Syriza (Sheehan 2016), cited the piece as an example of a kind of “foreign insider” position seeking to “police the discourse” on Greece (though I do not know a great many other such “foreign insiders” besides my anthropologist colleagues). I had, she explained to me in a personal exchange, overstated my insider/ outsider position and understated the true international significance of Syriza for an international left. This conference exchange—as well as my intervention and these commentaries—highlighted just how little many international participants had unpacked the cryptocolonial nature of their own involvement. But it also confronted me with how little I had acknowledged the diverse stakes of those who positioned themselves within these international forums of leftist struggle and the ways in which such solidarities both bridge and produce difference. One woman, for instance, told me she had booed because she was tired of yet another all-male panel (“manel”). Meanwhile, even though a number of my Greek colleagues applauded my intervention, others told me that it read a bit as a foreign apology for Greek exceptionalism. One of my Greek colleagues told me: “you sound more nationalist than many of us!” This exchange was, for me, emblematic of how “international solidarity” may resuscitate long-standing patterns of philhellenic involvement and orientalist fascination in Greece (including my own), and subsequent

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forms of cultural mimesis. Under the banner of international solidarity, Greeks are often expected to appear appropriately resistant and unruly; when they refuse to do so, they are often susceptible to being booed off the stage, so to speak. On the one hand, it is dangerous not to acknowledge the power differentials, and the asymmetrical stakes, of an internal political crisis, and, on the other hand, the larger international struggles into which Greece have, in many ways, been coopted. Yet reifying cultural and national difference, as I did, also has potentially violent effects. My own argument, overemphasizing difference between internationals and Greeks, neglected differences of class, gender, and position within the category of “Greek,” which I had implicitly characterized in terms of sameness. To revert to difference as a defining framework assumes that some distinctions matter more than others and that forms of parallel struggle may not have purchase. Indeed, in highlighting some forms of difference one may neglect or elide others, also producing (similarly dangerous) visions of sameness.

Welcoming Refugees Toward the end of that difficult summer of 2015, the economic crisis and austerity had been eclipsed by the thousands of refugees arriving on Aegean shores, sparking a crisis of reception and bald humanitarian need. The “refugee crisis” initiated extraordinary projects of Greek and international assistance that unfolded under the ideological rubric of solidarity, which dealt in crucial ways with problems of first response (Rozakou 2016). Greek solidarity groups, many already with years of experience assisting in the informal reception of refugees, mobilized at a massive scale on the islands (Papataxiarchis 2016b; Tsoni 2016), as well as in Athens and the North, as recently arrived individuals sought to travel elsewhere in Europe through the “Balkan Route” (El-Shaarawi and Razsa 2019; Cantat and Fesichmidt 2019), which was for all intents and purposes shut down in March 2016, leaving thousands stranded in the mud in Idomeni in Northern Greece. There is much to explore in this moment of solidarity with refugees in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, which highlights both the capacity of

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citizens to respond and how informal citizens’ initiatives often end up working alongside and filling in for modes of state and international governance. But here I want to underscore how this marked a new moment in discourses and practices of solidarity not just between international participants and refugees but, especially, between various Greeks on the left and border-crossers. Greek nationals, often framed as marginalized Others in Europe, became increasingly hailed as brokers of solidarity to Europe’s more radical Others. This project of solidarity between Greeks and refugees thus bears many of the familiar dilemmas that solidarity projects entail in terms of acknowledging and managing difference. One facet of the response in Greece and elsewhere in Europe was the “refugees welcome” language (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017), which borrowed in quite obvious ways on hospitality metaphors and the “matrix” (Papataxiarchis 2006) of host/guest relations. As literature on Mediterranean hospitality has highlighted, hospitality—and welcoming practices more broadly—marks the stranger as other even as they (sometimes quite aggressively) emplace that person within a set of social relations (Campbell 1964; Papataxiarchis 2014; Candea and da Col 2012; Rozakou 2012). In Greece, the xenos, stranger, may be someone from another household, village, or even nation, and, in the current context, it may be variously applied to tourists (Herzfeld 1987a), international volunteers, and refugees. As these studies show, hospitality has its own form of violence: in welcoming the outsider, the insider claims both territorial authority and the moral capacity to offer care or assistance to the person seeking help in one’s “house.” Hospitality—or what Shahram Khosravi calls “hos(ti)pitality” (Khosravi 2010)—thus underscores socialities grounded on notions of difference, hierarchy, thresholds, borders, and exclusion through inclusion, as opposed to shared struggle. In this way, hospitality differs from solidarity’s intentional emphasis on lateral relations and proximities. Even so, in practice solidarity initiatives themselves may reinstantiate socialities not dissimilar to those evident in hospitality frameworks (Rozakou 2016). In 2015, “refugees welcome” practices in Greece, particularly on the islands, made clear use of the house as both a concrete space and a trope: old couples inviting refugees to shower or eat in their houses; people bringing refugees fruit from their gardens (which one interlocutor of

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mine in a social pharmacy described to me as “always the best fruit, since you know its provenance”). The extraordinary “welcome” that refugees received in Greece was celebrated the world over, as “Europe’s poorest country” was praised for its hospitality for refugees. Within Greece, this praise was, in both obvious and more cryptic ways, yoked into an alternative national narrative: that Greeks, despite their own experiences  of exclusion, were more welcoming even than the rest of Europe (Cabot 2017). And this was a narrative that drew, explicitly and implicitly, on Greece’s own Orientalized positioning: Greeks, victims themselves, had yet again displayed the famed warmth of their Mediterranean hospitality (itself a “positive” form of orientalism) (Kirtsoglou and Tsimouris 2016). Through the framework of hospitality, Greece—in its own position on Europe’s margins—was positioned as a giver to those who were even more marginal. Pushing back against such clear uses of the host/guest metaphor in receiving refugees in Greece, counter-discourses and practices of solidarity emphasized, instead, forms of parallel struggle and horizontal positionings. A presentation at a squat in Athens providing housing to new arrivals emphasized: “while this [project] is focused on refugees, it is everyone’s struggle.” In various solidarity structures, I heard more and more about Greece’s own refugee history in the 1923 population exchange (Hirschon 1989), suggesting that this history of displacement made Greeks somehow more able to share in solidarity with new arrivals. Among a number of my interlocutors in Greek solidarity  initiatives, I also encountered the sentiment that Greeks were uniquely able to connect with refugees since they were, themselves, “internal refugees,” referring to the ongoing precarity of Greeks under austerity. I have heard people without family, and young people without jobs, variously framed as struggling with their own forms of displacement. Similar arguments are made by people on the political right as a way to assert that Greeks have things just as bad and that there is preferential treatment for refugees (or “racism against Greeks”). On the left, however, such discourses are often invoked as grounds for solidarity across shared forms of precarity. Elsewhere (Cabot 2019a) I have argued that the socio-political displacements of austerity must be understood alongside cross-border population displacements for what they say about the collapse of the state of

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rights for both citizens and noncitizens in Europe. And yet, it is also important to recognize the danger that such sentiments pose for eliding critical aspects of difference in people’s positions, stakes, and needs in order to highlight shared struggles. Just as notions like “we are all Greeks” risk silencing and eliding marginalized perspectives, solidarities forged between Greeks and refugees bear the danger of coopting transnationally displaced people into solidarity projects that are—owing to divisions of power, position, and experience—driven primarily by Greeks and internationals (Zaman 2019) despite, in some cases, meaningful forms of refugee participation. One way in which some activists in Greece have sought to produce solidarities that resist hierarchical frameworks of welcoming and hospitality is through projects of cohabitation, specifically the squats. A key goal of these initiatives was powerfully captured in the slogan of City Plaza, a squat that received significant international attention: “we live together, we fight together.” In July 2019 City Plaza closed after finding more permanent solutions for existing residents and after housing at least 2500 refugees since its inception in 2016. In these sites of shared living, emphasis is placed on the sociabilities and struggles of everyday life. A number of squats play on the idea of the “hotel,” such as Hotel Oneiro or City Plaza itself, a former hotel (until 2008), inverting hospitality metaphors. In the words of one of the key organizers of City Plaza, “it looks like a hotel but it is not” (Lafazani 2018). The squats are particularly socially complex for the significant role of internationals from the European and global norths in their operation, emerging as sites where shared solidarities between Greeks, internationals, and refugees might transform what living (and fighting) together might look like.4 Undergirding such logics of solidarity, however, are the dilemmas posed by forms of radical difference, as well as the specter of sameness and shared humanity with its potential for cooptation and elision. One form of managing difference in projects of cohabitation is to overemphasize the power of shared struggle, horizontalism, and participation in and of itself—which instantiates new hierarchies of power that are less visible (indeed crypto), and thus also less susceptible to critique. To return to the statement from Artists Against Evictions, in addressing those positioned as outsiders (“guests”) the letter emphasizes parallel struggles faced

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by precarious activists and artists and refugees in the squats. While this is certainly a statement born of political pragmatism, it rests on a politics of the same which elides or minimizes difference, much as commentaries described above emphasizing close connections between precarious Greeks and recent arrivals. I also saw this vision of sameness enacted through public talks given by delegates of various squats in Athens who spoke, for instance, unproblematically at a panel at the 2017 Anti-racist Festival in Athens of how “participation by all” (including refugees) had been enacted in these initiatives, despite vast difference in language, political subjectivities, and cultural background. Even when challenged on this point by an activist of refugee background in the audience, speakers continued to insist on the success of this participatory, inclusionary approach to living together. Tahir Zaman (2019), however, in his research on squats in Athens, thanks to his knowledge of Arabic and Urdu, gives compelling data regarding how some refugee inhabitants felt excluded from these initiatives. I am less interested in pointing fingers, however, and more interested in the various strategies through which difference is (or is not) acknowledged and managed through solidarity work. In some cases, as we see here, difference is sometimes framed as a threat, and thus obscured and elided. Yet there are other approaches to solidarity that frame contradictions, inconsistencies, power relations, and even exclusions as constitutive of such projects. These approaches promise not elision of difference but a kind of transubstantiation: that something new will emerge through mutual forms of encounter. Olga Lafazani (2018), one of the key figures in the establishment of the City Plaza squat, writes of the difficulties and dilemmas that abounded in the project from the start. City Plaza’s everydayness is based on encounters among people who come from totally different backgrounds with different social, political, and cultural references, with different needs, strategies, and plans, and who happen to coexist for a shorter or longer period of time. (897)

This statement emphasizes struggle, tension, imperfection, and shifting grounds of difference as constitutive of solidarity as lived and practiced in the everyday. The vision articulated by Lafazani—also reiterated

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in City Plaza’s closing statement—highlights that forms of difference in positioning and power should not be ignored or elided in such projects but are, rather, at the core of solidarity: “We cannot be equal just because we wish to be, believe we are, or want to be” (902). The ongoing recognition and management of shifting forms of difference is here not characterized as a threat but instead as crucial to the daily work through which solidarities are produced in practice, perhaps also carrying transformative potential.

Conclusion Lafazani’s analysis characterizes solidarity as a field of parallel engagement that also has difference at its core, and she highlights the political possibilities of modes of everyday encounter through which all parties might (or might not) transform. Such an approach is reminiscent of  what Neni Panourgiá (2019) defines as “a politics that is—ideologically and ethically—inclusive, welcoming and expressly committed to the production and re-production of communitas,” but which hinges on sites of encounter or “contact points,” and must bend to the exigencies of its actualization (233). In a famous speech from the early 1990s, Stuart Hall (2006) emphasized the importance of forms of political positioning and struggle grounded on shifting and relational forms of difference as opposed to notions of sameness. One of the key elements he proposed for such projects is the importance of ongoing and active dialogue, and real disagreement—which the left(s) in Greece and elsewhere most certainly have embraced on many fronts. Another point he raises was not to present politics as somehow “closed,” as having everything worked out or fixed. Solidarity, as a practice and an idea, certainly holds the potential for the ongoing and relational projects that Hall describes. Still, in both international solidarity with Greece and Greek solidarity with refugees, there has been a persistent valorization of the “same” and a concomitant propensity to elide the very forms of difference on which such projects are based. Within projects that claim to carve out space for all, difference very often gets a bad name, and the image of the same—with its tendency

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toward remaining hidden, and its capacity for exclusion and erasure— may find its way back in. Yet solidarity is not necessarily about sameness, and indeed, through solidarity with and within Greece, difference is variously recognized and elided depending on the contingencies of the particular moment or context. This management of difference may entail incorporation, elision, and transformation—often at the very same time.

Notes 1. Another example of resistance as art in documenta 14 included the ingenious theft of a piece of art by the collective LGBTQ + Refugees in Greece protesting what they saw as the event’s exploitation of refugees and migrants in Greece (both conceptually and practically), and what might be described as the impotence of art in the face of real problems. See: https://hyperallergic.com/382407/lgbtq-refugee-rights-groupsteals-artwork-from-documenta-in-athens/ 2. The full text of the letter can be seen here: https://conversations.e-flux. com/t/open-letter-to-the-viewers-participants-and-cultural-workers-ofdocumenta-14/6393. An interview AAE can be found here: https://www. berlinartlink.com/2017/06/09/activism-documenta-14-an-interviewwith-artists-against-eviction. The interview states that “AAE works closely with groups like LGBTQI + Refugees in Greece, but acts as a self-­ organised, swarm-like cultural social structure situated predominantly in and around Exarcheia, Athens… AAE is a collective of people who identify as artists and offer an alternative structure for a different future, by opening houses and communities that are beyond the state’s external authority. AAE tries to offer a haven for thousands of displaced bodies across Europe through culture and self-expression.” 3. The claim that “we are all x or y” is clearly an important trope in many forms of international solidarity (see, for instance, Je suis Charlie). This has more recently been problematized in language such as “I stand with___,” as in recent international solidarity with German sea captain Carola Rackete. 4. In this chapter, I am drawing on material that is publicly available and publicly known. I took part in City Plaza’s initiatives in April, May, and June 2016, and was a volunteer seeking to be part (in a very limited way) in what was a powerful and important project. I did not set out to

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conduct research there, and so this chapter cannot in good faith reference any material in what I witnessed and participated in. I remain enormously impressed at the projects of the squats. Further, leaders in the squats in Athens—many of them social scientists and even anthropologists—are deeply reflective of their work. As such, I highly doubt anything I say here is particularly new to this potential audience. What I do want to highlight, though, is the dangers associated with an uncritical approach to solidarity with refugees in Greece, which remains a powerful organizing frame for advocacy and activism more broadly.

References Anastasiou, Katerina, and George Souvlis. 2015. Reflections on the Conference Democracy Rising. Analyze Greece, August. Athanasiou, Athena. 2012. Η Κρίση Ως Κατάσταση “Έκτακτης Ανάγκης”. Athens: Savvalas. Athanassopolou, Effie-Fotini. 2002. An ‘Ancient’ Landscape: European Ideals, Archaeology, and Nation Building in Early Modern Greece. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2): 273–305. Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. The Concept of Stimmung: From Indifference to Xenophobia in Germany’s Refugee Crisis. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135. Brown, Keith S., and Yannis Hamilakis, eds. 2003. The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. Lanham: Lexington Books. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Malden: Polity. Cabot, Heath. 2014. On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2015a. The Banality of Solidarity. Occasional Papers, 7. ———. 2015b. Hubris and Humility in Academic Activism: Reflections on the GCAS Democracy Rising Conference. Analyze Greece, July. http://analyzegreece.com/topics/solidarity-resistance/item/303-heath-cabot ———. 2017. Philia and Phagia: Thinking with Stimmungswechsel Through the Refugee Crisis in Greece. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 141–146. ———. 2019a. The European Refugee Crisis and Humanitarian Citizenship in Greece. Ethnos 84 (5): 747–771.

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———. 2019b. The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Regime. American Ethnologist 46 (3): 261–275. Campbell, John Kennedy. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Candea, Matei, and Giovanni da Col, eds. 2012. Special Issue: The Return of Hospitality: Strangers, Guests, and Ambiguous Encounters. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Siii–S217. Cantat, Celine, and Margit Fesichmidt. 2019. Conclusion: Civil Involvement in Refugee Protection—Reconfiguring Humanitarianism and Solidarity in Europe. In Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe: Springer, ed. Margit Fesichmidt, Ludger Pries, and Celine Cantat, 379–399. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. El-Shaarawi, Nadia, and Maple Razsa. 2019. Movements upon Movements: Refugee and Activist Struggles to Open the Balkan Route to Europe. History and Anthropology 30 (1): 91–112. Fernando, Mayanthi, and Christiana Giordano. 2016. Refugees and the Crisis of Europe. Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots. https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/911-refugees-and-the-crisis-of-europe Gourgouris, Stathis. 1996. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2006. Old and New Identities. In Thinking Critically About Global Issues, ed. Beyond Borders, 167–173. New York: Worth Publishers. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_ Meets_OncoMouse. New York: Routledge. Herzfeld, Michael. 1987a. ‘As in Your Own House’: Hospitality, Ethnography, and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society. In Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean, ed. David D.  Gilmore, 75–89. Washington: American Anthropological Association. ———. 1987b. Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography on the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State. Oxford and Providence: Berg. ———. 2002. The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): 900–926. Hirschon, Renée. 1989. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Ivancheva, Mariya, and Stefan Krastev. 2019. Eyes Wide Shut: Il/Legality and Solidarity in Housing Struggles in (Post) Socialist Sofia and Caracas. Focaal 84: 18–32. Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2016. Introduction—Uncertain Visions: Crisis, Ambiguity, and Visual Culture in Greece. Visual Anthropology Review 32 (1): 5–11. Khosravi, Shahram. 2010. Illegal. In Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth, and Giorgos Tsimouris. 2016. ‘Il Était Un Petit Navire’: The Refugee Crisis, Neo-Orientalism, and the Production of Radical Alterity. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Occasional Papers 9: 1–14. Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe. History and Anthropology 27: 1–18. Kouvélakis, Stathis, and Alexis Cukier. 2015. La Grèce, Syriza et l’Europe Néolibérale. Paris: La Dispute. Lafazani, Olga. 2018. Homeplace Plaza: Challenging the Border Between Host and Hosted. South Atlantic Quarterly 117 (4): 896–904. Manoussaki-Adamopoulou, Ioanna, and Keira Dignan. 2019. Greece’s New Police State. New Internationalist, November. https://newint.org/features/2019/11/30/greece-new-police-state Panourgiá, Neni. 2019. Recognition: Exarcheia, Mon Amour. Journal of Greek Media & Culture 5 (2): 231–249. Papataxiarchis, Evthymios, ed. 2006. Peripeties Tis Eterotitas: I Paraghoyi Tis Politismikis Dhiaforas Sti Simerini Elladha. Athens: Alexandria. ———. 2014. Ο Αδιανόητος Ρατισμός: η Πολιτικοποίηση Της ‘Φιλοξενίας’ Την Εποχή Της Κρίσης. Συγχρονά Θέματα 127: 46–62. ———. 2016a. Being ‘There’: At the Front Line of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ – Part 1. Anthropology Today 32 (2): 5–9. ———. 2016b. Being ‘There’: At the Front Line of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’ – Part 2. Anthropology Today 32 (3): 3–7. Plantzos, Dimitris. 2019. We Owe Ourselves to Debt: Classical Greece, Athens in Crisis, and the Body as Battlefield. Social Science Information 58 (3): 469–492. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2015. Solidarity, Ethnography, and the De-Instituting of Dissent. Occasional Papers, 6. ———. 2016. Solidarity: The Egalitarian Tensions of a Bridge-­Concept. Social Anthropology 24 (2):142–151.

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Rikou, Elpida, and Eleana Yalouri. 2017. Learning from Documenta: A Research Project Between Art and Anthropology. On Curating, 33. https://www.oncurating.org/issue-33-reader/learning-from-documenta-a-research-projectbetween-art-and-anthropology.html#.XksJ_ihKhPY Rozakou, Katerina. 2012. The Biopolitics of Hospitality in Greece: Humanitarianism and the Management of Refugees. American Ethnologist 39 (3): 562–577. ———. 2016. Socialities of Solidarity: Revisiting the Gift Taboo in Times of Crise. Social Anthropology 24 (2): 185–199. Sheehan, Helena. 2016. The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. New York: Monthly Review Press. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2016. Philanthropy or Solidarity? Ethical Dilemmas About Humanitarianism in Crisis Afflicted Greece. Social Anthropology 24 (2): 167–184. Tsoni, Ioanna. 2016. ‘They Won’t Let us Come, They Won’t Let us Stay, They Won’t Let us Leave’. Liminality in the Aegean Borderscape: The Case of Irregular Migrants, Volunteers and Locals on Lesvos. Journal of Human Geography 9 (1): 25–46. Zaman, Tahir. 2019. What’s So Radical About Refugee Squats? An Exploration of Urban Community Based Responses to Mass. In Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles, ed. Celine Cantat, Eda Sevinin, Ewa Maczynska, and Tegiye Birey, 129–162. Budapest: Central European University.

12 Afterword: The Work of ‘Integration’ Steven Vertovec

Regardless of their academic discipline, many scholars really do not like the concept of migrant integration. Nevertheless, many begrudgingly employ it—often, with some kind of disclaimer—for the purpose of engaging policymakers or gaining grants (e.g., one current EU Horizon 2020 research funding stream is entitled ‘Inclusive and innovative practices for the integration of recently arrived migrants in local communities’). Other academics are less abashed, using the concept in a seemingly unquestioning manner, accompanied with quantitative indicators. Academic doubts and debates notwithstanding, the concept is ubiquitous and pervasive in the non-academic public sphere, comprising the stuff of political utterances, government institutions, policy measures, media representations, civil society organizations, and everyday discourse. (Here, I place in quotation marks ‘integration’ when referring to this concept in the public sphere.) In this Afterword, after noting several academic critiques of the concept, I go on to probe the question: “if it’s so bad, why is ‘integration’ so successful in the public sphere?”

S. Vertovec (*) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_12

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The Problems of ‘Integration’ First, the problems with ‘integration’. Kelly McKowen and John Borneman (2020, this volume) skilfully lay out ‘issues that plague thin concepts of integration’. These hold for both academic and public uses, and include the observations that ‘integration’ 1. asserts a linear and teleological process, assuming a common startpoint and a known endpoint; 2. is something ‘done to’ immigrants by authorities and their programmes; 3. offers only a partial account of where relevant processes unfold (such as the labour market or education system); 4. emphasizes citizenship, rights, and obligations that should filter down to the realm of individual tastes and habits; 5. is framed almost exclusively in terms of membership to a nation-state; 6. is based on a ‘groupist’ understanding of immigrants (i.e., that they inherently belong to externally bounded groups that homogeneously share ‘culture’, values, and status; cf. Brubaker 2004). These issues—considered problematic by social scientists because they convey false or unfounded or normatively undesirable phenomena—are just a few in a long litany of academic criticisms of ‘integration’ (see, among others, Favell 1998, 2003, 2019; Bertossi 2011; Finotelli and Michalowski 2012; Van Reekum et al. 2012; Schinkel 2017; Korteweg 2017; Rytter 2019; Meissner and Heil 2020). Such further critiques include the points that ‘integration’ also 7. regularly fails to answer the question ‘integration into what?’ The term’s vagueness means that—as many immigrants themselves have stressed—no matter what one does by way of education, employment, language competence, social interaction, and so on, it is ever possible that one can be deemed ‘un-integrated’ by a member or institution of the ‘native/host’ society;

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8. is founded on a structural-functional assumption that national societies comprise singular, pre-existing, historically unchanging, ‘integrated’ wholes (but again, without specification of the elements comprising such a whole); 9. is premised on the idea that aspects of (or milestones on the road to) integration are measurable, countable, and comparable (again, for whole entire groups as the units in question); 10. implies, following the previous point, that the White, middle-class ‘native’ is the yardstick for measurement (some critics therefore propose that the concept is fundamentally racist and neocolonialist); 11. conveys the idea that (racial/ethnic and/or cultural) ‘difference’, as an outcome of migration, is inherently problematic—an idea of ‘not fitting’—if not an explicit threat to the assumed functional whole of the nation-state; 12. assumes, following both the structural-functionalist model and the threat narrative, an understanding that society is normally stable and that immigration causes a condition of instability that must be remedied by return to a steady state; 13. insinuates the prospect of ‘failed integration’, the implications of which run from a drag on the social welfare state to an active threat to the nation-state society; 14. links, also by way of threat, the assumption of mis-fit to aspects of security (underlining a narrative that the un-integrated are vulnerable if not prone to radicalization, crime, violence, and terrorism); 15. entails, through its groupist thinking and indicators, an inherent ranking of migrant populations along a scale of ‘good/more integrated’ to ‘bad if not dangerous/not integrated’ groups; 16. leads to a ‘blaming the victim’ orientation (i.e., immigrants are responsible for their own predicament, social standing, economic outcomes; group stereotypes often ensue, from those considered too lazy or intellectually challenged to integrate, to those who purposefully resist due to cultural intransigence. In Germany, this gives rise to the specific term Integrationsverweigerer, meaning someone who is considered to be actively holding out against becoming ‘integrated’); 17. is usually only identifiable by its absence (as in poor education attainment, unemployment, continued adherence to pre-migration

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c­ ultural habits; this is the same problem as identified with integration’s conceptual bedfellow, ‘social cohesion’, see Vertovec 1999); 18. is underpinned by the tendency for zero-sum thinking: in this case, that migrants-as-outsiders intrinsically take away something (welfare, healthcare, school places) from natives and therefore leaves them undercut, such that the whole will only be restored and once again evenly distributed if the outsiders become indistinguishable citizens; 19. reinforces the role of the nation-state and its institutions as tools of social engineering; 20. seems to address certain aspects of inequality (e.g., lack of good jobs) while doing nothing about the sources of them (including power differentials, discrimination, etc.). This list of problematic features of the immigrant ‘integration’ concept is not exhaustive but arises from a brief survey of relevant academic literature. Clearly, as denoted by a variety of social scientists, the concept’s continued use can and does reproduce negative views of immigrants in many ways. For some social scientists (often depending on their politics), such negative outcomes are considered to be purposefully produced by a racist state apparatus (and its unwitting accomplices, namely fellow social scientists). My purpose here is not to agree or disagree with such a reading, but rather to ask thus: with so many problematic features, why is ‘integration’ such a successful public concept in the first place and why is it so widely used and effectively reproduced?

The Work of ‘Integration’ My basic answer to the previous question is that, for many if not most people (outside academia), ‘integration’ works. There are several senses of how ‘integration’ works: it works as a cognitive organizing principle in people’s heads, and it thereby, subsequently, works as an organizing or central reference concept for a set of public policies and practical mechanisms. To say that ‘integration’ works does not mean it is therefore a normatively desirable term: I merely mean that it functions effectively,

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for many, as an accepted conceptual and organizational tool. The concept is able to do this through various means by way of which it is socially constructed and reproduced, repeatedly, within given social and political contexts. These include the following:

Common Sense ‘Integration’ is a common sense notion, that is, a kind of down-to-earth, taken-for-granted (albeit social constructed) knowledge, a practical way of perceiving or understanding that is widely assumed across a public. Here, it is based on a presumed natural process whereby something from outside of a bounded unit joins, becomes part of, or gets absorbed. With such a common sense basis, most people (‘natives’ and immigrants themselves) will say that society is broadly a cohesive entity and that newcomers obviously have to learn a lot of things to start new lives for themselves and their family and to become successfully established (regardless of what that might entail and look like to them). In this way supports a kind of folk structural-functionalism. Like many forms of ‘common sense’, this premise is overly simplistic and underpins the ‘thin’ notions of ‘integration’ outlined by McKowen and Borneman.

Social Imaginary Beyond a common sense understanding of outside elements coming in, ‘integration’ is also part of and reinforced by a social imaginary. Mikkel Rytter (2019) employs Charles Taylor’s (2007) concept of social imaginary specifically to understand the ways ‘integration’ is embedded in Danish discourse (similarly to what I did with the broader rise of the concept of ‘diversity’; Vertovec 2012). Taylor describes social imaginary as a set of presumptions that people have about their collective social life (usually within the confines of a nation-state, giving rise to all kinds of methodological nationalism in public as well as academic thinking). Taylor (2007: 23) states that a social imaginary entails unarticulated, unquestioned, and largely non-conscious “ways that people imagine their

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social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”. He considers that a shared social imaginary enables “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (ibid.). In this way, the social imaginary also presents a moral order, a sense of how we ought to live together. ‘Integration’ discourses, policies, programmes, and indicators both draw from and serve to comprise the social imaginary: a sense of how society works, how people should relate to each other, what they should have in common, and what they collectively should seek.

Framing, Heuristics, Logic The common sense understanding and social imaginary underpinning of ‘integration’ is regularly reproduced by the concept’s regular use as a sense-making tool. This is accomplished in part by serving as a framing device, a fundamental style of representation that influences perception, interpretation, and public discourse surrounding a social issue. ‘Integration’ is also a heuristic instrument, a manner of reasoning especially for the purposes of decision-making and solution-finding (in the case of ‘integration’, what to do about immigrants’ socio-economic outcomes). The concept also entails a mode of logic, a causal sequence purporting how one thing effects another in a chain-like manner. Together, these sense-making attributes help the work of ‘integration’ by presenting it as a concept that is ‘good to think with’ when—as members of the general public, as policymakers and practitioners, as journalists, and often as members of migrant groups themselves—people try to figure out what the impacts of migration are and normatively should be.

Polysemy and Performance Despite the ways that all of the above attributes might point to a singular meaning for a concept like ‘integration’, it is in fact marked by polysemy

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or multiple meanings across multiple audiences. This attribute goes hand in hand with the ways that ‘integration’ is used as a kind of performance by different actors as well. For instance, through vague and polysemic uses of ‘integration’, government authorities can assure multiple publics that they are doing something about a significant social issue, immigration. That is, with one or another take on ‘integration’, the government can address anti-immigrant xenophobes by saying ‘look, we’re making the immigrants do this and that so they won’t disrupt us’; they can address pro-immigration citizens by saying ‘look, we’re all in this together, our accommodating programmes and dialogues show that we’re not anti-­ immigrant’; and they can address migrants themselves by saying ‘look, we are welcoming and extending a helping hand through our integration courses, social services and more’. Beyond government, immigrant organizations themselves can point to all of the ‘integration’ initiatives they undertake and the results they produce in order to demonstrate that they are worthwhile participants in society; members of the public who are pro-diversity (a lion’s share, as most European polls show) can rest assured that their views are justified by iterating how ‘diversity and integration’ sit well together; heterophobes who fear the diversification of society can urge politicians to ensure absolutely that newcomers are non-threatening by insisting on ‘integration’ measures (especially concerning societal values); and xenophobes who simply dislike if not hate foreigners can point to ‘integration’ concerns—particularly examples of what they deem ‘failed integration’—as reasons for restricting immigration. Each such constituency uses a slightly different interpretation of ‘integration’— albeit sharing certain underlying understandings (as per common sense, social imaginary, etc.)—for their own discrete purposes. Such polysemy and performance underline keys to the ‘integration’s’ success as a publically embraced concept and way of thinking. Social commentator Max Czollek (2019) describes the pervasiveness of such Integrationsdenken (integration thinking) as played out in various acts in a public Integrationstheatre (theatre of integration). Such acts take many forms, from nation-state—to municipal government—to citizen-­ driven policies and practices.

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Practical Integrationism For example, in Germany, such policies and practices—and especially the traits of polysemy and performance—can be seen at the overarching level of the federal state. Here, the Interior Ministry plays a major role in promoting notions of ‘integration’.1 On its website, the Ministry declares that “Deutschland ist ein weltoffenes Land. Die Integration der auf Dauer und rechtmäßig in Deutschland lebenden Zuwanderinnen und Zuwanderer ist eine der wichtigsten innenpolitischen Aufgaben. Ziel von Integration ist es, alle Menschen, die dauerhaft und rechtmäßig in unserem Land leben, in die Gesellschaft einzubeziehen.” (“Germany is a cosmopolitan/liberal-minded country. The integration of permanent and legal migrants is of the highest domestic political tasks. The goal of integration is to incorporate/ include/engage/involve in(to) society all people who live permanently and legally in our country.”) Elsewhere on the site, it is stated that “Dabei betrifft Integration uns alle – Alteingesessene ebenso wie Zugewanderte.” (“In this way integration affects us all—long-established residents as well as immigrants.”). This is almost a kind of doublespeak: ‘integration’ is about immigrants and it’s about everyone. The federal government directly funds numerous integration projects2—almost entirely directed at immigrants, however. Germany also has a Federal Integration Commissioner (Integrationsbeauftragte) who promotes a National Integration Action Plan,3 again mainly directed at immigrants. While the above federal instruments appear rather top-down, the Chancellor also convenes an annual Integrationsgipfel (integration summit). This entails government officials meeting some 100 migrant and minority-based organizations.4 It is highly likely that many participants may well share several of the academic critiques of ‘integration’ but are willing to engage in broad discussions with government representatives for a greater good. In 2020, the integration summit was focused on measures to combat racism, especially following racist murders in the city of Hanau. This was actually, indeed, a discussion about, and directed at, the German general public rather than immigrants. At the municipal level, every large German city has an explicit integration strategy (e.g., Munich5, Stuttgart6, and Hamburg7). Stuttgart, for

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instance, highlights that “Integration ist eine Gemeinschaftsaufgabe.” (“Integration is a community task.”) It would seem that, from the federal to the city level, the government has taken on board the criticism that ‘integration’ should not just be for immigrants. But a look through the various German sites shows consistently that practically all focus remains on immigrants. In London, by way of a different example, the not-just-migrants approach is stated even more strongly. Indeed, immigrants are not even mentioned in its vision statement and key policies. The Mayor’s social integration strategy asserts: At its core, social integration means shaping a city in which people have more opportunities to connect with each other positively and meaningfully. It means supporting Londoners to play an active part in their communities and the decisions that affect them. It involves reducing barriers and inequalities, so that Londoners can relate to each other as equals. It is about our bonds as citizens, and how we interact with one another. The usual definition sees social integration as being simply about interactions between people of different nationalities, ethnicities or faiths. The Mayor’s approach goes beyond this. The story of London, shaped for centuries by the movement of people, art, food and ideas, is much more complex. In the Mayor’s ‘all of us’ approach, social integration is a matter for everyone, which involves and benefits us all. (Mayor of London 2020: 4, 6)

The approach that all in society—not just immigrants—are responsible for integration is the basis of the claim that integration is ‘two-way street’. It is certainly a slogan not only voiced by governments, but by migrant organizations as well (e.g., Migrant Voice, a British grassroots organization led by and for migrants8). Yet the ‘all of us’ approach is arguably more than cliché in many quarters, as is born out in the ethnographic description of Norwegian parents self-organizing what they consider everyday ‘integration work’ to help children from immigrant families (Bendixsen and Danielsen 2020, this volume) and accounts of neighbourhood-­focused services and projects that the Antwerp municipality and community work organizations jointly create to promote living-together (Vollebergh 2020, this volume). Similarly, Maria Schiller (n.d.) observes an “emic

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mobilization of an integration discourse” when local residents of a German city discuss the pending arrival of asylum seekers. While one set of local residents point to the state’s responsibility to integrate foreigners, another set comprises people who take it upon themselves. Schiller typifies the latter as “‘keep calm and do it yourself ’ integrationists”. For both sets of residents, “there was little emphasis on integration as something that only migrants have to perform” (Ibid.). In Germany (at least), another complication for the criticism that ‘integration’ is just something migrants have to do is the fact that ‘integration’ is also a key concept in other spheres. It has been used to assist disabled people in accessing schools and the labour market. Here, too, there is a government Integrationsamt9 (Integration Office) promoting disabled people’s rights, issues of physical access, combatting discrimination, providing support in training and education. Here, the same means of common sense, framing/heuristics/logic, polysemy, and performance reproduce certain ways of thinking with and through ‘integration’. Somehow, government agencies, NGOs, and members of the general public seem to be at ease in considering immigrants, disabled people, and ‘all of us’ as variably addressed by a common notion of ‘integration’. Further, the German model of the Integrierte Gesamtschule (integrated comprehensive school) is based on the idea of having children of many learning levels—including disabled children of various kinds—within the same school. Finally, the German Lesbian and Gay Association (LSVD) also refers to the integration of the gays and lesbians. In this way, again, ‘integration’ is not just a matter of immigrants in German public discourse and thinking—but it is a concept that nonetheless rests on some of the same underlying premises (of common sense, social imaginary, etc.). Across Western Europe, given the proliferation of integration ministries, national integration plans, municipal integration departments, integration officers, and integration projects, it is certainly easy to get the impression of a wholly top-down directive aimed at immigrants. Indeed, Rytter (2019: 692) concludes that “Integration is solely the vocabulary of power, a prerogative of the nation-state and the indigenous majority population that, intentionally or not, tends to objectify, stigmatise and exclude Muslim immigrants from the Danish social imaginary of the

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nation-state and its population.” Although in many ways and in some quarters this may well be true in Denmark and many other contexts, for me this sounds too state centred. As I have described in this brief essay, ‘integration’ is ubiquitous and successful because it entails several deep-­ seated cognitive and communicative functions across a range of actors and members of the public. If it were just a state prerogative, it could and would be more readily contested. Top-down decisions and initiatives are certainly prominent, as evidenced in German federal policies. But ‘integration’ is also practised and reproduced horizontally if not bottom-up, in a manner that works by being persistent and banal. The fact that the concept—indeed, an entire paradigm—works for so many—including those towards whom ‘integration’ is aimed—presents it as something far more difficult to dismantle and replace. People who employ or work under the aegis of ‘integration’ should not (as insinuated by critics like Schinkel) automatically be considered as dupes of the state, as closet racists or neocolonialists, or as working under a kind of false consciousness. To suggest or imply so is elitist, unbecoming, and insulting. It reminds me of an earlier era, when Terence Turner (1993) castigated anthropologists who criticized the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ without trying to understand what ‘multiculturalists’ were trying to do. There are untold numbers of people—as volunteers, activists, members of civil society organizations, and indeed officers of the national or local state—who are seriously helping newcomers gain educational credentials, jobs, access to healthcare, family support, language competence, and a clear pathway to legal status, rights, and entitlements, alongside trying to combat racism, xenophobia, and discrimination. Their efforts should not be rebuked because they might tend to invoke the almost inescapable concept and language of ‘integration thinking’. As McKowen and Borneman (2020, this volume) rightly suggest, “identifying the limitations of a concept is not meant to discourage study of the phenomena it seeks to describe”.

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Conclusion Notwithstanding the forms of good that might be accomplished by various actors working with the concept of ‘integration’, serious problems with the concept—as summarized at the outset of this essay—remain. Although I tend to think that his state-centred conclusion is rather narrow, I do agree broadly with Rytter (2019: 692) when he says that “Integration is not the solution, it is a significant aspect of the problem, and therefore more talking, thinking and ‘writing against integration’ is needed.” In order to do this, however, one needs a better understanding of the modes of thinking, processes, and outcomes purportedly encompassed by ‘integration’. There is also a need to study the concept’s variable meanings, uses, impacts, and reproduction. It is not a singular notion, although it purports to be one. Because it works in so many different ways, the concept of ‘integration’ cannot be done away entirely within public discourse. Therefore, a productive way forward is for social scientists to follow McKowen and Borneman (2020, this volume) by offering ‘thicker’ ways of conceptualizing modes of migrant incorporation into new societies and localities. Among the ways they suggest this might be done through a kind of conceptual adjustment regarding processes involving immigrants, Kelly and Borneman emphasize that • social processes should be understood as uneven, fluctuating, intersubjective, and multiscalar; • identity should be appreciated as multiple, nested, and situational. This includes acknowledging other affiliations with a local city and neighbourhood, unions, occupations, religious groups (and, I would add, transnational affiliations of the same kinds)—in ways that decentre the nation-state. Such a conceptualization reflects an attempt to deflect a groupist understanding (while recognizing that people categorize in these terms much of the time); • belonging should be a notion open to understandings of the ways that newcomers bring meanings, goods, practices, and habits into their

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own performative repertoire, as refashioned co-productions together with longstanding residents. For the kind of reasons suggested earlier, it is very difficult to dismantle ‘integration thinking’ in the public sphere. Through better engagement with public debate, however, as social scientists we might be able to nudge it into recognizing that, yes, a newcomer can become an engaged participant in a new context but not just in one way, through a unitary process, into a singular socio-cultural entity. Ideally such nudging should be in the direction of fostering a kind of ‘complexity thinking’ that is able to consider the presence of newcomers—indeed, all manners of ‘difference’—in terms of non-groupist understandings, non-linear trajectories, diverse and overlapping networks and identities, and multiple modes of belonging. This kind of call is certainly not new—indeed, it is evident in policy shifts concerning immigrants that were already identified by Rogers Brubaker back in 2001. This includes “a shift from thinking in homogeneous units to thinking in terms of heterogeneous units”, “a general openness to cultural diversity”, and “a shift from a holistic approach… to a disaggregated approach that discards the notion of assimilation as a single process, considers multiple reference populations, and envisions distinct processes occurring in different domains” (Brubaker 2001: 543–4, emphasis in original). In Germany, again by way of example, such shifts have been evident in the emergence of policies and government approaches recognizing modes of incorporation vis-à-vis the diversity of immigrants—a kind of policy framework described by Schönwälder and Triandafilopoulos (2016) as ‘the new differentialism’. Such a view of immigrants and receiving contexts is also taken by a wide range of scholars invoking ‘super-diversity’ as a device for describing new complexities of immigrant characteristics, social formations, identities and belongings, and patterns of incorporation (see Meissner and Vertovec 2014; Vertovec 2019; Meissner and Heil 2020). To be sure, many people among the general public already exercise such capacity for complex thinking about migration and diversity (Schönwälder et al. 2016). This kind of approach, recognizing ‘complex immigrants differentially incorporating into complex societies’, would be able to accomplish more

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far-reaching (and less discriminatory) outcomes than many currently remaining, restrictive, and singular ideas of ‘integration’—however successfully they seem to work.

Notes 1. See https://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/themen/heimat-integration/integration/integration-node.html 2. https://www.bamf.de/DE/Themen/Integration/TraegerLehrFachkraefte/ TraegerProjektfoerderung/Integrationsprojekte/integrationsprojekte.html 3. https://www.nationaler-aktionsplan-integration.de/napi-de 4. https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/vor-integrationsgipfel1726982 5. https://www.muenchen.info/soz/pub/pdf/399_integrationconcept.pdf 6. https://www.stuttgart.de/integration 7. https://www.hamburg.de/integration/service/115238/integrationskonzept/ 8. https://www.migrantvoice.org/home/headlines/integration-is-a-twoway-street-060117151302 9. https://www.integrationsaemter.de/Fachlexikon/Integrationsamt/ 77c439i1p/index.html

References Bendixsen, S., and H. Danielsen. 2020. Hierarchical Forms of Belonging in an Egalitarian Society. In Digesting Difference, ed. K. McKowen and J. Borneman. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bertossi, C. 2011. National Models of Integration in Europe: A Comparative and Critical Analysis. American Behavioral Scientist 55 (12): 1561–1580. Brubaker, R. 2001. The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (4): 531–548. ———. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Czollek, M. 2019. Desintegriert Euch! Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Favell, A. 1998. Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. London: Palgrave.

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———. 2003. Integration Nations: The Nation-State and Research on Immigrants in Western Europe. Comparative Social Research 22: 13–42. ———. 2019. Integration: Twelve Propositions After Schinkel. Comparative Migration Studies 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0125-7. Finotelli, C., and I. Michalowski. 2012. The Heuristic Potential of Models of Citizenship and Immigrant Integration Reviewed. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 10: 231–240. Korteweg, A. 2017. The Failures of “Immigrant Integration”: The Gendered Racialized Production of Non-belonging. Migration Studies 5 (3): 428–444. Mayor of London. 2020. Social Integration in London: A Snapshot of the Mayor’s Approach. London: Greater London Authority. McKowen, K., and J.  Borneman. 2020. Digesting Difference: Migrants, Refugees, and Incorporation in Europe. In Digesting Difference, ed. K. McKowen and J. Borneman. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Meissner, F., and T. Heil. 2020. Deromanticising Integration: On the Importance of Convivial Disintegration. Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/ migration/mnz056. Meissner, F., and S.  Vertovec. 2014. Comparing Super-Diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38 (4): 541–555. Rytter, M. 2019. Writing Against Integration: Danish Imaginaries of Culture, Race and Belonging. Ethnos 84 (4): 678–697. Schiller, M. n.d. Towards a Differentiated Notion of the Mainstream: Involved Residents, Conceptions of Integration and Strategies of Emplacement in a German Neighbourhood. Unpublished manuscript. Schinkel, W. 2017. Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schönwälder, K., and T.  Triandafilopoulos. 2016. The New Differentialism: Responses to Immigrant Diversity in Germany. German Politics 25 (3): 366–380. Schönwälder, K., S.  Petermann, J.  Hüttermann, S.  Vertovec, M.  Hewstone, D.  Stolle, K.  Schmid, and T.  Schmitt. 2016. Diversity and Contact: Immigration and Social Interaction in German Cities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Taylor, C. 2007. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Turner, T. 1993. Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should Be Mindful of It? Cultural Anthropology 8 (4): 411–429.

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Van Reekum, R., J.W. Duyvendak, and C. Bertossi. 2012. National Models of Integration and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: A Critical Comparative Perspective. Patterns of Prejudice 46 (5): 417–426. Vertovec, S., ed. 1999. Migration and Social Cohesion. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. ———. 2012. “Diversity” and the Social Imaginary. Archives Européennes de Sociologie/European Journal of Sociology LIII (3): 287–312. ———. 2019. Talking Around Super-Diversity. Ethnic and Racial Studies 42: 125–139. Vollebergh, A. 2020. “The Everyday” and Ambiguous Affect in the Governance of the Diverse Neighborhood in Antwerp. In Digesting Difference, ed. K. McKowen and J. Borneman. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Index1

B

E

Belonging, 2, 3, 6, 7, 14, 17–21, 23, 30, 33, 41, 42, 44–46, 67, 71n4, 75–77, 86, 95, 100n8, 130–144, 149–162, 189, 201, 220, 262, 263

Erotic, 5, 19, 23, 38, 75–97

C

Crisis, 4, 23, 65, 149–162, 228, 232, 236, 239 D

Deportation, 22, 24, 42, 48n11, 191, 192, 199, 200, 209–214, 216, 217, 219, 221–223, 223n6

I

Incorporation, 1–24, 29–46, 53, 57, 60, 62, 67–69, 75–97, 105–109, 113, 122, 123, 130–132, 135–139, 141–144, 169–172, 175, 176, 180, 211, 224n8, 245, 262, 263 Integration, 2–9, 13, 14, 17–19, 22–24, 29, 30, 36, 44, 45, 51–70, 92–96, 100n8, 105, 113, 131, 132, 138, 161, 170, 185, 186, 188–196, 198–202, 203n10, 209, 210, 252–264 Islam, 32, 38–40, 43, 83, 99n3, 109

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 K. McKowen, J. Borneman (eds.), Digesting Difference, Global Diversities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5

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268 Index

100n9, 132–134, 138, 151, 185–202, 202n1, 202n2, 203n9, 203n11, 204n16, 204n17, 204n18, 228–230, 232, 236, 239–244, 245n1, 245n2, 246n5

K

Kinship, 2, 8, 11, 21, 97, 149, 161, 162 L

Law, 5, 12, 38, 41, 43, 46n3, 58, 131, 151, 201, 212–215, 221 S M

Mimesis, 19, 54, 57–61, 63, 66, 68, 69, 235, 239

Solidarity, 12, 23, 76, 227–245, 245n3, 246n5 W

P

Parenting, 21, 132–134, 138, 140–143 Policy, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 24, 30, 37, 46n1, 53, 92, 105, 107, 113, 114, 120, 121, 131, 132, 151, 162, 191–192, 209–212, 214, 216, 221, 222, 223n6, 254, 256–259, 261, 263 Precarity/The precariat, 68, 199, 228, 241 R

Refugees, 1–24, 29–46, 51–70, 75–77, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95–97, 98n2, 99n4,

Welfare state, 16–19, 29–46, 47n4, 47n5, 132–133, 135, 144, 159, 186, 188–190, 199–202, 202n2, 253 Work, 1, 3, 5, 10, 14, 22, 29, 34–37, 39, 42, 43, 53, 55, 61, 62, 76, 77, 83, 95, 99n8, 108, 109, 135–139, 144, 152, 155–157, 160, 162, 169, 173, 179, 185–187, 189, 194, 195, 198, 204n17, 211, 214, 215, 217, 222, 229–231, 233, 234, 236, 243, 244, 246n5, 252–264 X

Xenophobia, 65, 100n8, 261