Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I give voice to Latin Americans as a small, low-profile migrant community in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. I explore their positing in the urban social matrix with particular reference to New Zealand’s official policy as a bi-cultural nation, aspiring an equal partnership between indigenous Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealanders).

Paper long abstract:

Migrants' experiences in Auckland are mediated by New Zealand migration politics and the country's official definition as a bi-cultural nation, based on an idea of equal partnership between indigenous Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealanders), as articulated in the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 by Māori chiefs and the Crown. Due to the country's revised immigration laws in the late 1980s, the cultural composition of Auckland has changed enormously in the last decades. Increasing non-white immigration has challenged New Zealand's national identity as a bi-cultural, but predominantly white society in the South Pacific. However, it is unclear where other ethnic groups are situated in this bi-cultural framework. In this paper, I give voice to the relatively small, low-profile Latin American community in Auckland and explore their experiences of cultural belonging and social positioning in this particular urban setting. Based on ethnographic interviews and discursive accounts, I scrutinise their understanding of bi-culturalism in a cosmopolitan context. I am particularly interested in their self-positioning in the wider social matrix and in the contested forms of (self)-inclusion and exclusion. I situate these practices in migrants' biographies as they are shaped by political ideas, class, and economic opportunities. I argue that these conditions affect migrants' perceptions of 'belonging' and 'being in the right place' in the urban ambit.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring current controversies about the knock-on effects of de-industrialisation and globalisation, this paper argues that the creation of the white working class as 'a new (and most marginalised) ethnic group' is the logical outcome of the political vacuum created by multiculturalism's right-wing implications and new-Labour's effort to hold the centre ground in politics.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst Bermondsey people lament the death of an industrial, inner-city community based on closely knit ties of kinship and residence or 'born and bred' criteria of belonging - and are preoccupied with trying to defend their way of life - learning 'how to have an explicit cultural identity', to be a 'new ethnic group' in order to compete in a multicultural social climate - the political and economic struggles which have historically defined what it means to be working class in Britain are forced into the background. This highlights the present danger, which is that even as we celebrate multiculturalism in Britain or wonder whether it has past its sell-by date, little emphasis is placed on those institutions - political or economic - through which relatively poor people - black, white and Asian - might once have come together to know themselves collectively as working class.

Eager to capitalise on this shift in the political landscape the British National Party promotes an agenda of racial and cultural nationalism, gaining votes in areas of the country where the white working classes feel increasingly at unease about a Labour government which no longer speaks their language but talks of 'community cohesion' and national integration. Exploring recent controversies about the position of the white working classes in Britain, this paper argues that at the margins of the mutuality, which was multiculturalism's promise, there is profound alienation from a society which dreams of equality but no longer understands how social relations are structured in practice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the subjective experiences of cosmopolitanism of Moldovan migrant domestics and their elite employers in Istanbul. Following Abu-Lughod (1999), it argues that we shift the anthropological lens from a focus upon the diversity of "cultures" to an understanding of the differing and at times overlapping configurations of "cosmopolitanisms."

Paper long abstract:

Border and bridging East and West, Istanbul has long been celebrated as a cosmopolitan city. More recently, this assertion has been combined with its theorization as a "global city" marked by a neoliberal service economy. One indication of this is the concurrent increases in a wealthy Westernized elite and the presence of irregular migrant domestics from the former socialist states who help this class fulfill their new lifestyles. Based upon 14 months of ethnographic research in Istanbul and Moldova, in this paper, I deploy the concept of "cosmopolitanisms" (Abu-Lughod 1999) to explore the subjectivities not only of these jet-set elites, but also of their migrant domestics from Moldova. The latter's cosmopolitanisms derive from particular combinations of education, travel, wealth, labor, urbanity, and (as part of a postsocialist diaspora in Istanbul) a renewed identification with an "internationalist" Soviet past. I illuminate the kinds of cosmopolitanisms these women workers gain and lose in the context of their mariginalized lives as irregular migrants; exploring how they use a nostalgic sense of Soviet cosmopolitanism to resist and/or (re)occupy their marginalization from Turkish society on their own terms. By deploying "cosmopolitanisms" as an analytic tool in this manner and by remaining attentive to its emic meanings, we can better understand these women's positionalities and practices. In so doing, we also shift from a focus upon the diversity of "cultures" to an examination of the different configurations of cosmopolitanisms -- tracing these to specific experiences of power, wealth, education, labor, and gender located in particular places.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of Kyrgyz labour migrants on large “international” building sites to explore the relationship between precarious labour, legal uncertainty, social differentiation and cosmopolitan coexistence.

Paper long abstract:

For rural school-leavers of southern Kyrgyzstan, "going to town" to work as irregular labourers on the construction sites of Moscow has become a significant right of passage, with the remittances thus earned crucial to sustaining rural livelihoods and ritual expenses. Yet this overwhelmingly undocumented labour, in what for many young Kyrgyz people had been, imaginatively, a paradigmatically cosmopolitan space - the capital of the erstwhile "international" Soviet polity - is fraught with legal contradictions and moral ambiguity. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of Kyrgyz migrants move between domains of "legal" and "illegal" residence and employment, developing complex and often friendly relations with local policemen, Russian pensioners and fellow villagers in order to remain nominally "documented". On the other, Kyrgyz migrants are acutely aware of the different degrees of legal protection, physical mobility, earning potential and vulnerability to police extortion that are felt to attach to the various groups of post-Soviet citizen (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Moldovans and Ukrainians) of which Moscow's migrant building-brigades are typically composed. Nationality, far from losing relevance in the space of competitive labour, comes indeed to figure centrally in migrant narratives as a key category of economic competition and legal differentiation. This paper draws upon the experiences of Kyrgyz labour migrants on large "international" building sites to explore the relationship between precarious labour, legal uncertainty, social differentiation and cosmopolitan coexistence. In so doing, it seeks to interrogate the place of law (and the ambiguous figure of the "illegal immigrant") in normative accounts of cosmopolitanism.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the impact of prolonged urban identity conflicts on poor children in violence-affected neighbourhoods. My ethnographic landscapes are Bombay and Hyderabad, where expansive slum areas remain the criminal strongholds of anti-cosmopolitan, anti-minority political parties amenable to violence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that unguided and unguarded contact with diversity and syncretism can generate social and moral anxieties in marginalised children. According to the slum children in Bombay and Hyderabad, their search for

stable, insular and communal selves led them to organise violent collective resistance to cosmopolitanism, discourses on mutual tolerance and diffused

urban identities. From a theoretical perspective, this paper seeks to contribute to a growing corpus of research trying to uncover the problems of aggressive children principally through the concept of child agency. I take a

step away from the vulnerability paradigm to highlight the initiatives of children to survive marginalization in peripheral, urban 'warscapes'. My research also makes a contribution to recent studies on child soldiering, and

tries to rectify their limited impact on peace policies. Academic and activist literature on child militancy focuses primarily on forced or voluntary child

recruits within larger, self-styled militias, marginalising the accounts of local children's groups who operate as informal armies. The experiences of

the latter children need to be considered while negotiating peace, as failing discourses on violence and social exclusions get refreshed and rearticulated

through children's organised quest for survival in volatile social environments.

Paper short abstract:

Post-Soviet Odessa promotes its identity as a traditionally cosmopolitan city, professing various discourses on tolerance. This paper explores the ways in which economic, marriage and interpersonal strategies among two trading minorities - the new Afghan migrants and local Gypsies - put the new spectrum of tolerance to test.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Orange revolution, official celebrations of multiethnic diversity in Ukraine have aimed at dismantling the legacy of the uniform Soviet man. In the new nation-state, the Soviet discourse of internationalism with its links to former Russian supremacy has been replaced by Western-style rhetoric of tolerance. Based on fieldwork in the port city of Odessa, famous for its cosmopolitan roots, but now experiencing emigration of its former minorities and inflows of transnational migrants, this paper explores various economic, marriage and interpersonal strategies among two trading minorities, which put the new spectrum of tolerance to test. It focuses on recent Afghan migrants and local Ukrainian Gypsies as representing different modalities of exclusion from the city's wider circles of sociality. Inspired by Sheldon Pollock's discussion of "non-compulsory" cosmopolitanism (the universal) and "avoidable" vernacularism (the national), I argue that these two trading minorities in Odessa are able to create their own forms of engagement with difference and affiliation with the wider world in ways that we can understand as "endogamous" or "selective" forms of cosmopolitanism.