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The present article explores perceptions and cultural constructions of the terms capitalism or capitalistic West among ex-Soviet, highly qualified Jewish migrants from Russia and Ukraine after their emigration to Germany between 1990 and 1996. It seems that migration offers a unique opportunity to migrants to realise knowledge that is normally taken for granted, behaviour schemes and values, and to reflect on them. How do they acquire such presumed capitalist knowledge of the new society and new social world, how do they create it, and with what concrete contents do they connect the illusion about monolithic cultural, economic and political capital, the illusion which contributes to group formation and which serves as action orientation? As my research shows, immigrants try to disparage much of what appeared to them in the Soviet Union as normative, right and appropriate; now they often act by way of categories, which were defined in the previous context as "capitalist" and were interpreted as immoral. Without exact ideas or knowledge about behaviour codes, unspoken norms and silent values from the new society, many immigrants orient themselves towards the opposite of what was counted as morally proper in the origin society. Simultaneously they revive old system through the establishing and development of a Russian language enclave. Nevertheless this enclave is not located in a vacuum of "dusty" memories from the past, but build transnational cross-border space connected and corresponding to the processes of to-day's CIS and with the life of those relatives and friends who still live there, und with whom the emigrants share intensive social networks.
A version of this paper was originally written for a plenary session about "The Futures of Ethnography" at the 1998 EASA conference in Frankfurt/Main. In the preparation of the paper, I sent out some questions to my former fellow researchers by e-mail. I thank Douglas Anthony, Jan-Patrick Heiß, Alaine Hutson, Matthias Krings, and Brian Larkin for their answers.
Spacially dispersed transnational professional communities can be perceived of as cultural formations living in a global frame of reference, transgressing existing political and cultural boundaries. In their capacity as members of local technical and knowledgebased elites, they take part in circulating and connecting cultural meanings that are both locally produced, and continuously re-working non- local flows. I argue that those elites can be described as actors at cultural interfaces, taking part in shaping and mediating social change. The aim is twofold: one, to point to mutually opposed tendencies, and ambivalences in the framework of a „culture of change“, and two, to look into the question how such situations and groups can be methodologically approached.
Die vorliegende Fallstudie zu den Anciens Combattants in Diébougou ist das Ergebnis einer Lehrforschung der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Institut für Historische Ethnologie, die vom 24. August 2001 bis zum 16. Dezember 2001 unter der Leitung von Prof. Carola Lentz, und der Betreuung durch Dr. Katja Werthmann, Dr. Richard Kuba sowie in Kooperation mit der Universität von Ouagadougou (Département d’Histoire et d’Archéologie) in Burkina Faso stattfand. Allen genannten Personen und Institutionen sei an dieser Stelle ausdrücklich gedankt. Die Fallstudie reichte ich im Februar 2004 als Magister-Abschlussarbeit am Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften (Historische Ethnologie) der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, bei Prof. Carola Lentz und Prof. Karl-Heinz Kohl ein. Der Großteil der ursprünglich im Anhang der Magisterarbeit enthaltenen Dokumente, Karten und Photos wurde ausgelagert, und der Text erfuhr eine geringfügige Überarbeitung. Im Anschluss an einen vierwöchigen Dioula-Sprachkurs in Bobo-Dioulasso folgte die dreimonatige Erhebungsphase in Diébougou, sowohl Hauptort (chef-lieu) der Provinz Bougouriba im Südwesten Burkina Fasos, Markt- als auch Verwaltungszentrum mit 11 637 Einwohnern (siehe http://www.ambf.bf/f_mairies.html). Interethnische Beziehungen, Siedlungsgeschichte und Bodenrecht waren die übergeordneten Themen des ethnologischen Teilprojekts A9 des Sonderforschungsbereichs 268 "Kulturentwicklung und Sprachgeschichte im Naturraum Westafrikanische Savanne" der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, der die Durchführung der Lehrforschung finanziell unterstützte, und dem ich gleichsam danken möchte.
Challenging and confirming touristic representations of the Mediterranean : migrant workers in Crete
(2006)
From the perspective of Western Europe the Mediterranean is shaped by the imagery of tourism and migration. During the time of the “guest worker”-migration in the 1960s and 70s the notion of the hopelessly underdeveloped South of Europe which pushes “guest workers” towards the rich North became prevalent here. It offered a contrast which let the beginning prosperity in the North appear even clearer. (see von Osten 2006) Besides the attractions “sea, sun and sand” it was exactly this conception of backwardness which – reinterpreted in authentic and traditional Mediterranean lifestyle – made the area attractive for tourist consumption. Today it is again pictures of the Mediterranean, which represent migration dynamics in Europe. In the meantime, however, the countries of origin of the “guest workers” have become countries of immigration and European Union member states or candidates for accession. The representation of the Mediterranean as an area of migration is dominated now by pictures of desperate refugees and illegal immigrants, who risk their life by crossing the sea, in order to enter the “fortress Europe”. In these current representations the “colonial narrative of migrants as members of a territory of underdeveloped” is continued (ibid.). A translation of the migrant area into the tourist area seems, however, more difficult than at the times of the “guest worker”-migration. What constitutes the Mediterranean as a tourist destination seems to have no longer anything in common with the Mediterranean as an area of migration.....
This paper discusses the implications of transnational media production and diasporic networks for the cultural politics of migrant minorities. How are fields of cultural politics transformed if Hirschmann’s famous options ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ are no longer constituting mutually exclusive responses to dissent within a nation-state, but modes of action that can combine and build upon each other in the context of migration and diasporic media activism? Two case studies are discussed in more detail, relating to Alevi amateur television production in Germany and to a Kurdish satellite television station that reaches out to a diaspora across Europe and the Middle East. Keywords: migrant media, transnationalism, Alevis, Kurds, Turkey, Germany
During the past decade, processes associated with what is popularly though perhaps misleadingly known as globalization have come within the purview of anthropology. Migration and mobility ‐ and the footloose or even rootless social groups that they produce ‐ as well as the worldwide diffusion of commodities, media images, political ideas and practices, technologies and scientific knowledge today are on anthropology's research agenda. As a consequence, received notions about the ways in which culture relates to territory have been abandoned. The term transnationalisation captures cultural processes that stream across the borders of nation states. Anthropologists have been forced to revise the notion that transnationalisation would inevitably bring about a culturally homogenized world. Instead, we are witnessing a surge of greatly increasing cultural diversity. New cultural forms grow out of historically situated articulations of the local and the global. Rather than left-over relics from traditional orders, these are decidedly modern, yet far from uniform. The essay engages the idea of the pluralization of modernities, explores its potential for interdisciplinary research agendas, and also inquires into problematic assumptions underlying this new theoretical concept.