Paper short abstract:

Surrounded by the quest for social mobility, the street cleaners of Centro Havana's, in fact, struggle to survive. Their strategies are remarkably individualistic, focused on the cultivation of good relations to management and the negotiation of individual favors, not seldom at the expense of peers.

Paper long abstract:

The signs of social change are increasingly visible in the neighborhood of Centro Havana as remittance flows and transnational marriages finance the renovation of houses into casas particulares. The quest for social mobility through the tourist industry or migration is ubiquitous and yet there are also those whose household does not include remittance flows and who need to survive at the bottom of the socialist labor market, with minimal chance of attracting income from foreigners. The garbage collectors and street cleaners of Centro Havana are a typical such collection of workers whose desire for "social mobility" in practice is often little more than a desire to survive. Their strategies of doing so are remarkably individualistic, focused on the cultivation of good relations to management and the negotiation of individual favors (what Sarah Ashwin termed "alienated collectivism"), not seldom at the expense of other workers. Under these conditions, solidarity - though held in high esteem - is very fragile and the "lack of respect" (falta de respeto) that workers feel from society at large, just as easily becomes a source of conflict amongst workers themselves. Envy, moreover, most often gets directed towards peers than upwards, threatening to turn the workplace into a "house of witches".

Paper short abstract:

People's projects of social mobility may both adopt and resist neoliberalist understandings in complex ways. Through a focus on housing, this paper explores how neoliberalism shapes low-income Havana residents' ideas and experiences of social mobility and a good life in the midst of Cuba's changes.

Paper long abstract:

A desire to obtain social mobility is often central to people's aspirations for a good life. Neoliberalism importantly shapes such pursuits by introducing individuals to new ideas, practices and imaginings of desirable lives. However, in practice, the possibilities for people to obtain better lives is highly inequitable and constrained by multiple factors, many of which emerge from neoliberalist policies.

Contemporary Cuba provides a fascinating place to examine how neoliberalism shapes people's ideas, practices and possibilities for social mobility because its socialist egalitarianism is currently transformed by neoliberalist economic policies and inequalities. These structural developments create new possibilities, desires and restrictions for social mobility for Cubans that enter into a complex interaction with older, socialist ideas and practices. Drawing on ethnographic research amongst low-income Cubans, this paper examines people's desires, experiences and imaginings of "getting ahead" in contemporary Havana. However, while Cuba's structural developments have brought new opportunities to some, in practice many Habaneros feel that their search for a good life is stagnated by powers beyond their control. Focusing on my Cuban friends' quest for social mobility, I will show that their endeavours centre on their homes, but in ways that differ from home ownership as a neoliberalist investment. These individual aspirations are complexly restricted and enabled by state policies that have shifted from socialist control towards neoliberalist competition. The paper argues that people's experiences and imaginings of social mobility are entangled with their ideas of the good life and may both embrace and reject neoliberalism.

Paper short abstract:

French Hindus in La Réunion reveal an intrinsic relation between their religious learning projects and wishes for social mobility. This paper highlights the tension between aspirations toward preferred selves expected in neoliberal societies, and structural constraints that the latter entail.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects upon the relation between religion, social mobility, and recognition. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst Hindus in the French overseas department La Réunion, an outermost region of the European Union in the Indian Ocean.

"To advance in one's life" is the wish that Reunionese Hindus express over and over again. As descendants of South Indian indentured laborers who came to La Réunion in the nineteenth century and did not have much contact with India afterwards, some socially aspiring Reunionese Hindus started to orient themselves toward India in the 1970s with the aim to acquire knowledge about Hindu religion. Combining their perceived expectation to create successful neoliberal selves with the felt expectation to know about their origins, they engage in optimizing self-making projects wherein learning about Hindu religion becomes a major quest of their lives. Reunionese Hindus' biographies suggest an intrinsic relation between their religious learning projects and their wishes for social mobility. But cultural capital in the form of religious knowledge can only lead to social mobility when recognized by others, notably by the French state.

Reunionese Hindus' strive for religious knowledge highlights the tension between an imagined development through continuous self-optimization to social status and economic success, and the structural constraints of this neoliberal French society. These constraints include a difficult job market, but also the fact that creative self-making needs (official) recognition from others.

Paper short abstract:

Notions of social mobility in neoliberal Ulaanbaatar are inextricably related to claims and expectations over care and respect. The paper explores the generational negotiations over "a share in fortune," contextualize these historically and tackle the interface of ethical formation and governing.

Paper long abstract:

Present-day Ulaanbaatar has become a center of rural-to-urban migration particularly in postsocialist times. The available infrastructure of educational and health facilities as well as the hope for employment have become "central". Social mobility is imagined in terms of personal vitality khiimori, tangible in outer appearance, an individual's share in collective fortune kesig, urban migration and the salvific effects of knowledge. Women in particular face the challenge of "caring for themselves" in order to "care for others" in the "wolf economy." (Ganhuyag 2009, Empson 2011) Moreover, expectations of "care" and "respect" are historically integral to relations of seniority and are projected onto government-citizen/superior-inferior relations. Unemployment, undocumented residence and alcoholism are the three most widespread threats to social mobility. Finally, the 90s have left many persons suffering from disfiguring illnesses of malnutrition like rickets. Their challenge is to overcome the stigma of having "deserved" their condition through Buddhist conceptions of moral causality in the afterlife. Against this background the paper will compare ethnographic narratives of different generations, the challenges of fulfilling relational expectations in contexts of need, the strife for progress and the inherent self-fashioning. Moreover, it will explore the interrelation between the moral impulse in governing others, and the ethical formation in governing the self (Fassin 2012) in these neoliberal contexts.

Paper short abstract:

Many young Cameroonian men see training and playing football as the most attractive opportunity to migrate abroad and avoid becoming labeled as "useless" by their families. But opportunities in football are limited, and young men turn to Pentecostal Christianity for solutions to social immobility.

Paper long abstract:

In 2005, a prominent football club in Southwest Cameroon assembled a team of 22 players and flew them to Italy to take part in a youth football tournament. One week later, when the time came to board a return flight, ten players went "missing", and "fled" the team in order to stay in Europe. Some of them emerged in Italian football clubs, but encountered allegations of carrying "fake" documents. Others found work elsewhere in Europe. A well-known "incident" in Southwest Cameroon, the event brought to light issues and dilemmas of young Cameroonian men who are increasingly considering football as a migration trajectory: what counts as legitimate work and migration; what constitutes "cheating" and what does not; and the notion of self-responsibility in the face of novel and alluring, but highly uncertain possibilities. Strikingly, many young footballers consult Pentecostal Christian "Men of God" and join denominations that promote individual responsibility, continuous struggle despite hardships, and possibility of miraculous success. Dilemmas of young Cameroonians who aspire to migrate through football, a transnational industry grounded in neoliberal principles of deregulation and free enterprise, reveal the changing ways that young men seek social mobility in the post-structural-adjustment period, and how they articulate their efforts in terms of millenarian spiritual ideologies. Pentecostalism allows the young men to deal with the "cruel optimism" (Berlant 2011) of the sport industry, but also to challenge a model of virile masculinity often associated with footballers, all part of an effort to overcome social and geographical immobility.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to reveal the trajectories of social mobility of people who stayed behind in Çorum, an Anatolian province of Turkey where more than half of its population have migrated to larger cities and some of those who remained has thrived in the production and export of industrial machines.

Paper long abstract:

Turkey has experienced a very intensive rural to urban migration since the 1950s. Triggered by industrialization and modernization in agriculture, masses of rural migrants (White 2010) became actors of the rapid social change and urbanization in metropolitan cities (Stirling 1993) creating new trajectories for social mobility. Hence, the settlers' impact on the trends of urbanization, economic growth, identity formation has received scholarly attention a lot more than those populations who remained in their hometowns with limited chances of social mobility. In the popular imagery, "the province" signifies a unified and undifferentiated mass of people who are poor, backwards and deprived (Zeybek 2012). However, this imagery has been challenged as a result of their increasing economic and political power due to the reallocation of production to the peripheral locations and articulation to the global production chains since the late 1980s.

This paper aims to reveal the trajectories of social mobility of those people who stayed behind in Çorum, an Anatolian province of Turkey where more than half of its population have migrated to metropolitan cities in the last four decades and some of those who remained have thrived in the production and export of wheat- related industry machines. Based on my long-term ethnography in a family-run manufacture firm, I explore father-employers' and their family members' individual and collective desires and expectations for social mobility and status, and their failures and limitations within a paternalistic social structure that inevitably brings about power struggles among them based on age, gender roles and skill.

Paper short abstract:

Many people in an Iranian settlement, well-off from real estate from the 1962 land reform, are now frustrated in hopes for more materialism and (especially for females) companionate marriages. They wish to leave Iran, believing emigration will provide them with their desires for social mobility.

Paper long abstract:

People in an Iranian settlement, after becoming well-off from land turned into real estate by the 1962 America-pressured land reform, gained urban-style, higher standards of living. Men, instead of living as share-croppers and low-level itinerate traders like their fathers, took up work as entrepreneurs and urban workers. Most people moved away from their mud-brick homes of rooms around a courtyard in the walled village into urban-style, fired brick nuclear family homes with a private front courtyard, and were able to live much like middle class urbanites with telephones, cell-phones, TV and internet, modern kitchens and home shower rooms. Secondary and even higher education increased, especially among females, widening their worlds, and among many increasing their aspirations for companionate marriages. With exposure to education, lives of earlier emigrants, global communications, and Aliabadis who moved to Shiraz, expectations for urban, upper-middle class, prosperous living styles grew, and when frustrated by the economic downturn of the last decade, has turned into bitter dissatisfaction among many. By fall 2015, many men and even some women talked about their desires to leave Iran, believing that emigration would solve their problems and provide them with their desired social mobility of life style, standards of living, and (for females especially) relationships transformed by modernity. This paper is based on anthropological participant observation in the rural village of "Aliabad," now a suburb of Shiraz, for some three years between 1978 and 2015, and also with some people of Aliabad who have migrated to Shiraz, Sweden, and Turkey.

Paper short abstract:

How is social mobility imagined and experienced by millenial Portuguese migrants in London? In this paper I examine how individualised understandings, discourses and experiences of 'opportunities', 'good life' and 'becoming someone' are mediated by wider structures of class, education and kinship.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore how social mobility is imagined and experienced by university-educated Portuguese migrants of the millennial generation who came to London in the years following the 2011 austerity measures in southern Europe. I maintain that 'social mobility' is embodied and understood by my interlocutors as the search for 'opportunities', 'a good life' and 'becoming someone' via the action of migration. I examine the role of imagination and memory in creating hope and aspirations and ask how individual imaginations, hope and expectations of 'becoming someone' exist alongside historical and imagined household constructions of success, precarity and 'the good life' (Fischer 2014).

Furthermore, I argue that the notion of social mobility needs to be historically embedded, taking into account how imagination and memory are mediated by wider structures of class, education and kinship. I thus interweave temporal concepts of imagination and memory into an analysis of the structural conditions that led to the development of imaginations of social mobility during the pre-austerity years and the arresting of socially mobile imagined futures in subsequent times of precarity (Pine 2014). I suggest that imaginations of social mobility in Portugal are precarious and cyclical, ebbing and flowing over generations (Ortner 1998) and dwelling within webs of social relations, affective reactions and strategies which intersect with local, global and transnational fields of power.

Paper short abstract:

Educational aspirations make people migrate spatially and socially and in their imaginaries and politics of the self. This contribution focusses on the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education as well as to the affective tensions unfolding in family constellations.

Paper long abstract:

Mobility through education is among the major projects and challenges families face all around the world, today. Educational aspirations make people migrate spatially, socially as well as in the realms of imaginaries and politics of the self. They challenge in different ways the affective dynamics in inter-generational constellations. This contribution draws special attention to the nexus of mobility and in/equality in the realm of higher education as well as to the affective tensions and related processes of contested belonging that unfold within intergenerational family constellations. In analyzing family constellations as "regimes of belonging," the contribution details the different modalities inherent to belonging such as rules of commonality, including norms and emotions, and rules of reciprocity, including mutual commitment or loyalty, and how both, parents and children deal with these modalities in sometimes differing and/or opposing ways, thus triggering, in fact, inter-generational dramas. Focusing in particular on the children, who move to the universities in order to perform specific educational desires as sought by their parents, it is shown that universities may become protected realms of relatedness within which the students experience new forms of personal freedom and belonging - apart from the rules of commonality and reciprocity as envisaged by their families back home.