3rd Global Conference
Friday 16th November - Sunday 18th November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 5a: Shifting Boundaries of Identity
Chair: Luis Cabrera
Giving up on Given: The Making of Identity in the Contact Zone
Pamela D. Ryan
Director of the School for Graduate Studies,
College of Human Sciences,
Unisa, South Africa
The theme of this paper is indebted to the ideas of several theorists, most notably James Clifford (1), from whom the notion of contact zones is derived. It is written at a time and from a place where rootlessness and routes loom large in my mind as thousands of Zimbabweans cross the border into my own country, South Africa, squeezing through barbed wire fences, crossing the Zambezi, fleeing from white vigilante farmers fed up with incursions across their lands, and, if they are lucky, ending up on the streets of Johannesburg, looking for work, looking for shelter. These hapless people are in transit, like so many people in the world today. There will come a time when policing of borders, influx-control, indeed, the whole idea of illegality in terms of citizenship will collapse in the face of the sheer numbers of people on the move. That is my hypothesis anyway.
James Clifford is bold in his assumptions: that ‘human location [is] constituted by displacement as much as by stasis’ (1997:2). His seductive (I find it so) idea is that identity holds cultural currency only as long as the performance of such can be traced to the idea of a homeland. But, increasingly, such homelands are policed spaces with borderlines, acts of control, strict demarcation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Clifford suggests that ‘the making and remaking of identities takes place in the contact zones, along the policed and transgressive intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales’ (1997:7). Taking his cue from Mary Douglas (2), Clifford shows how stasis and purity, of culture, of blood, stand in juxtaposition to ‘historical forces of movement and contamination’ (1997:7).
Using Edward Said’s idea of contrapuntalism, I want to place, next to this main hypothesis, theoretical ideas that may provide us with constitutive paradigms for thinking about identity in the future while also telling a story about one Zimbabwean man whose life became entangled with my own. His name was Given.
Finally, what lies behind the style and the thinking of this paper is the distinction proposed by Franco Moretti between thinking theoretically and ‘doing Theory’. I shall be engaging in the former, following a line of thinking that is experimental, open-ended and, hopefully, productive.
Interpreting Global Identities and Transnational Citizenship: Case of Nursing Sector
Workers
Shoba Arun
Department of Sociology,
Manchester Metropolitan University,
Manchester
United Kingdom
The boundaries and definition of citizenship in contemporary society are being challenged by the increased porosity of territorial borders and the continuing international
migration. A key dimension of migration further complicating citizenship rights and
obligations is the tendency for migrants and diasporic members to construct ‘multiple ties
and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states’
(Vertovec 1999) thus creating transnational third spaces that ‘exist above and beyond the
social contexts of national societies’ (Pries 2001, Levitt 2001 and Voigt-Graf 2004). The
new wave of skilled migrants to western countries is suggestive of different experiences
and concerns from those of unskilled economic migrants (Colic-Peisker 2002, Kennedy 2004, Contreras and Kenney 2002). The phenomenon of international nurse migration has received great attention at various levels. The evolving care industry is formed by complex relationships, conceptualized as ‘global care chains’ (eg Hochschild, 2000) with
implications for gender identities and the reproductive economy (Dunway 2001; Yeates,
2004; Raghuram and Koffman 2002; Yeates 2004) as well as the ‘masculinisation’ of the
nursing sector. Thus, the contemporary and substantial flows of skilled migrant workers
from the South into the western countries offer a unique test case for improving our
understanding of issues of social conflict and the contested meanings of citizenship. This
case study will examine the specific case of South Indian nurses, both male and females
who are employed in the UK Health sector. It will enable us to examine whether the
maintenance of multiplex ties between host and home communities – and the forms these
take- constitute a key aspect of their migrant experience and whether in this respect they
occupy some kind of intermediate position between the cosmopolitanism of skilled migrants from wealthier countries and the dense transnational links constructed by poor economic migrants. This, in turn, will add to our theorization of how the social networks -constructed through the minute daily actions of innumerable individuals pursuing
interpersonal relationships within and across borders –continuously activate, lubricate,
intersect and mesh with vast global supply chains, in this case care chains, partly
engineered by corporate actors attempting to cope with impersonal market forces.
A Question of Identity: On the Israeli Identity of Arab and Jewish Students on Two College Campuses
Dan
Soen, , Nitza Davidovitch, Michal Kolan
Ari’el University Centre, Ari'el, Tel-Aviv, Israel & Western Galilee
College, Acre, Israel
Israel is a bi-national society (with a 76% Jewish majority and a 20% Arab minority) immersed in a conflict. The Arab-Jewish conflict termed “an intractable conflict” by some researchers evolved from what were grasped as mutually exclusive national rights. The conflict is grounded in a political and social power struggle over self-determination. It has been ostensibly accompanied by a psychological process, which defined the dispute as a zero-sum situation. All in all, this concept enhanced the construction of societal emotions, perceptions and attitudes towards the self as well as the “other” that warranted coping with the situation through the use of radical measures. Othering, marginalizing, excluding and stygmatising were typical of the majority-minority group relations. Enhancing real pluralism, inclusion and a real sense of common citizenship is recognized as a complex problem.
The paper (based on field research) tries to examine whether any difference exists in the sense of Israeliness of Arab and Jewish students on two campuses of higher education in Israel. The main focus of the paper is the Arab students. The point of departure of the research team was that the Israeli Arab citizens feel divided between their (Arab) nation and (Israeli) State. Analysis of the participants’ responses to the questions posed to them points to a series of interesting findings. Of foremost importance is the fact that the Israeli identity component in the overall aggregate identity of the Arab students is significantly smaller than that of their Jewish colleagues. Yet, this sense of Israeliness is nevertheless deeper than the one revealed formerly in similar studies on other campuses. A favourable surprise is to be seen in the fact that differences in the Israeli identity between Arab and Jewish students do exist, however- they are not dramatic.
Two other findings of the study are important. First, the level of Israeli identity among Jewish students was found to be significantly lower than that indicated forty years ago among Jewish high school students in Tel-Aviv. Second, a significant minority among the Jewish students states that the term “Israeli”is altogether inappropriate to describe their sense of identity. Which raises a very interesting question.