Panel: Migration, Identity and Belonging
Convenor: Jelena Tošić, University of Vienna

This panel aims at addressing the interdisciplinary issue of migration, identity and belonging form an anthropological perspective. The starting point of the panel will be contemporary research on migrants in Europe while taking into account both the national and transnational (implicit and explicit) politics of in-/exclusion and thus of identity and belonging the European context.
The speakers will be invited to reflect upon and comparatively discuss their research while critically referring to relevant theoretical paradigms (such as e.g. transnationalism, diaspora studies, citizenship studies, multiculturalism, (super)diversity etc.) and envisage relevant future trends in European migration policy and research.

Abstracts
Janine Dahinden, University of Neuchâtel

Migration and belonging: Going beyond the ‘national lense’? Transnationality, non-ethnic-boundary making and diverse forms of mobility

As a result of migration movements, European societies are getting more and more diverse in regard to their linguistic, religious and ethno-cultural composition. Until this very day, these diversified societies are generally conceptualized as composed of a mosaic of ethnic or nationally defined groups, each having inherent characteristics and its own dense fabric of ethnic organization and clearly demarcated boundaries. The questions that follow from such a conceptualization are how those ethnically defined groups assimilate into the main society (assimilation paradigm), and how the cultural specificities of such groups could be recognized and valorized in order to allow their full participation in national societies as cultural minorities (multicultural incorporation paradigm). The aim of my paper is to show that those two “classical” paradigms have important theoretical shortcomings when discussing questions of identity and belonging, especially under the contemporary conditions of globalization and transnationalization.
My arguments are as follows. First, the two paradigms are anchored in the idea of a “container-model of society”, which views society as existing within the boundaries of a given nation-state and takes it as the implicit and natural entity to understand questions of belonging. Such a “national lense”, however, is too narrow to give adequate consideration to transnational forms of identifications and belongings. Second, the above models incorporate the idea that ethnicity would be the most important criteria for questions of identity and belonging, blending out other relevant forms of identifications. Third, these “classic ideas” understand migration as a one-way process, which is followed by permanent settlement,  as the ‘courant normal’. However, research increasingly shows that there exist diverse types of mobilities, which have varied effects on migrants’ identities and belongings.
Using examples from my  research, I will show that in order to understand current forms of belongings – as well as the related processes of inclusion or exclusion - we need to take into account the neglected aspects of transnationality, non-ethnic ways of boundary making and diverse mobilities.

Janine Dahinden is professor of Transnational Studies at the University of Neuchâtel and director of the Center for the Understanding of Social Processes (MAPS). Her research interests cover the topics of mobility, migration, ethnicity, transnationalism, social networks, gender and culture. (see also www.unine.ch/janine.dahinden).

Recent publications:
(2010). Zwangsheirat: Hintergründe, Massnahmen, lokale und transnationale Dynamiken. Reihe: Questions de genre / Geschlechterfragen. Zürich: Seismo [with Yvonne Riaño]
(2009). "Are we all transnationals now? Network Transnationalism and Transnational Subjectivity: The Differing Impacts of Globalization on the Inhabitants of a Small Swiss City." Ethnic and Racial Studies, 32 (8): 1365-1386.



Heike Drotbohm, Freiburg University

„It’s like belonging to a place which has never been yours.“
The burden of contradictory belonging in the context of forced return migration.

In migration cultures such as Cape Verde, border-crossing is perceived as a life-making process and particularly for young people it can be compared with a rite de passage, which they are supposed to undergo in order to become respected members of their society. While current changes in migration theory manage to capture the diversity of mobile life words, the fact that our times at the same time are characterized by increasing involuntary immobilities is widely neglected.
Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde as well as its diaspora, this paper elaborates on forced return migration, or deportation. Those who did not make their lives abroad successfully, but are brought back ‘home’ by state force are confronted with a mix of hostilities and rejections on the one hand as well as idealizations and envy on the other hand and have also to cope with the fact, that their own life-making is blocked. Being Cape Verdean citizens per passport but belonging culturally as well as socially to the United States or to Portugal becomes expressed in certain habits of consumption and individual life aesthetics that help to articulate the distance towards local ways of living, where mobility is the central feature of social recognition.

Heike Drotbohm teaches Social Anthropology at Freiburg University, Germany. She carried out anthropological fieldwork in Creole cultures in the Caribbean (Haiti) as well as in West Africa (Cape Verde), where she concentrated on the transformation of religious imaginaries in migratory circumstances as well as on the entanglement of social and spiritual obligations within transnational networks. Recently, she shifted her interest on the travelling moralities within transnational family networks and focused in particular on the impact of forced return migration on transnational ethics of care.

Recent Publications:
(2010) Haunted by Spirits: Balancing Religious Commitment and Moral Obligations in Haitian Transnational Social Fields. In: Gertrud Hüwelmeier und Kristine Krause (Hg.): Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities. Oxford, New York: Routledge: 36-51.
(2009) Horizons of long-distance intimacies. Reciprocity, contribution and disjuncture in Cape Verde. In: The History of the Family. An International Quaterly. (Special Issue: Families, Foreigness, Migration, Now and Then.), 14(2): 132-149.



Marc Maguire, NUI Maynooth

Violence, Memory and Vietnamese-Irish Identity

In August 1979 a small number of refugees from Vietnam arrived in Dublin. Many of the refugees told harrowing tales of violence and persecution. These were the so-called ‘Boat People’. In the years after they would live through ad hoc resettlement in a country unused to immigration, where memories of violence loom large. Twenty-five years later, while writing an ethnography on Vietnamese-Irish identity, an elderly man asked to show me something that expressed better than words his memories of his flight from home: he opened an old shoe box in front of his family and tipped out more than thirty refugee camp-identity cards. ‘This is who we were,’ he said. ‘I, we, keep them … we keep this to know about our family and who we are.’
This paper discusses ethnographic material on violence, memory and identity among the Vietnamese-Irish. In part, I draw on the anthropological contribution of Veena Das to discuss how violence enters in to the ‘recesses of the ordinary’, but I also explore the work of Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen to show how memory and violence connect to personal and political identities and to belonging.

Mark Maguire is a Social-Cultural Anthropologist working on anthropological and ethnographic approaches to emergent technologies of mobility control, especially biometric security. He draws on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre and is interested in issues related to space, bio-power and governmentality. 
His early work is on violence, nationalism and memory in Ireland. More recently, he shifted towards the anthropological interface with Migration Studies. His doctoral research and book, Differently Irish, looked at Vietnamese programme refugees and is concerned with notions of belonging, ‘integration’ and trans-nationalism. This line of research continues into questions related to asylum and integration, especially in the IRCHSS-funded project ‘After Asylum’.

Recent Publications:
(2009) The Birth of Biometric Security. Anthropology Today 25(2) (April): 9-15.
(2007) Enshrining Vietnamese-Irish Lives, Anthropology Today 23 (2): 9-13. [with Jamie Saris]