Master of Arts Thesis
EurocultureRijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands Jagiellonian University Krakow, Poland
January 2012
Negotiating Cultural Identifications:
Somali Immigrants and the Receding Multicultural Leanings in the Netherlands
Submitted by: Dilalew M. Mekonnen Student number: 2041170 Grote Leliestraat 7B 9712 SM Groningen The Netherlands 0031 (0)617825576 dilmil2005@yahoo.com Supervised by:
Dr. Pieter Boele Van Hensbroek Dr. Marcin Galent
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MA Program Euroculture Declaration
I, Dilalew M. Mekonnen hereby declare that this thesis, entitled ―Negotiating Cultural Identifications: Somali Immigrants and the Receding Multicultural Leanings in the Netherlands‖, submitted as partial requirement for the MA Program Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within it of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in the text as well as in the List of References.
I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about the regulations pertaining to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion rules for the Master of Arts Program Euroculture.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One ... 6
INTRODUCTION ... 6
1.1. Background of the Study ... 6
1.2. Statement of the Problem ... 10
1.3. Statement of Motivation ... 12
1.4. Objective of the Study ... 14
1.5. Scope of the Study... 14
1.6. Significance of the Study ... 15
1.7. Thesis Organization... 16
Chapter Two... 18
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE: ... 18
Ethnicity and Culture ... 18
2.1. The Concept of Ethnicity ... 18
2.2. Culture and Identity in Multicultural Societies ... 25
2.2.1. Cultural Identity Defined ... 26
2.2.2. Understanding Multiculturalism ... 31
2.2.3. Critiques of Multiculturalism ... 35
Chapter Three... 39
THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE STUDY: ... 39
Trends of Migration among Somalis ... 39
3.1. Somalis‘ Historical Background ... 39
3.2. Immigration Trends of the Somalis in Europe ... 45
3.3. Somalis in the Netherlands and their Integration ... 48
Chapter Four ... 53
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: ... 53
Research Design and Procedure ... 53
4.1. Qualitative Research: Philosophical Underpinnings ... 53
4.2. Recruitment Procedure and Participants ... 58
4.3. In-depth Interviews and Data Generation Procedure ... 60
4.4. Data Analysis Approach and Procedure... 63
Chapter Five ... 68
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE DATA: ... 68
Somalis in the Netherlands and Acts of Cultural Identification ... 68
5.1. Multiplicity of Cultural Identifications ... 68
5.1.1. Hybrid and Cross-cutting Identity Locations ... 70
5.1.2. Negotiating Cultural Differences... 72
5.2. Contingency of Cultural Identifications upon Contextual Factors... 78
5.2.1. Identity Salience ... 79
5.2.2. Dialectical Tensions between Identity Ascriptions and Identity Avowals. ... 82
5.3. Navigating Structural Constraints versus Exerting Levels of Agency ... 84
5.3.1. Identity Processes Hinging on Structural Constraints ... 85
5.3.2. Resistance and Agency through Critiquing ... 89
5.4. The Relationship between Psychological Security and the Feeling of ‗Home‘ ... 94
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Chapter Six... 103
CONCLUSION ... 103
Appendix: ... 109
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Preface
This thesis is a product of a year‘s worth academic research. The scholarly curiosity on my part with the phenomenon of identity and immigration began while I was attending the first semester of my master‘s study of Euroculture at the University of Groningen. Later during my stay in Krakow, Poland, doing an exchange program, I was able to further develop and fine tune the topic, and I have to admit that I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by knowledgeable scholars. Their critical comments and suggestions are partly responsible for the successful completion of this thesis project.
I must also acknowledge that the writing of this thesis has not been an easy task, especially given the initial obstacles I found myself confronted by: finding informants and convincing them to take part in the project. Despite all the ups and downs, I feel that I have learned a lot from both the theoretical works I reviewed and the empirical contribution I made. I would not have been able to finalize this report without the help and encouragement of teachers, friends, contacts, and informants themselves. It would certainly take up the entire space if I even begin to thank everyone involved in my thesis one way or the other. I would, however, express my indebtedness for all the support I received during the entire endeavor.
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Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
1.1. Background of the Study
Although migratory movements have always been present in Western Europe, the unprecedented surge in immigration over the last few decades has led to the transformation of Europe into one of the major immigration destinations in the world. Citing Hollifield, Koopmans et al. write, ―… the nations of Western Europe have become immigration countries largely unintentionally and reactively, and often against the explicit will of sizeable parts of both the political elite and the native population.‖1
This unsettling realization can be exemplified by the growing nationalistic discourse aimed at alienating immigrants in the Netherlands, and the situation in Germany, where, despite the huge number of immigrants currently residing in or entering the country annually, we observe counterfactual insistence on Germany not being an immigration country. In fact, this can be taken to symbolize the fact that Western European societies are being challenged at the moment by the reality that millions of immigrants from a variety of religious, cultural, and racial backgrounds have come, and are still coming, to settle in their midst.2
One might ask what the consequences of such unexpected inflows of people were and how Europeans responded to them. Castles and Davidson come up with three observable consequences, which they suggest include the sudden increase in racist violence, the right-wing movements against immigrants, and the politicization of border control issues.3 The significant part of the political controversy surrounding immigration revolves around the ‗threat‘ immigration poses to cultural integrity voiced by the right-wing conservatives, whom Baumann calls ―the defenders of national cultures,‖4
on the one hand, and various mobilizations by the
1
Ruud Koopmans et al., Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 1.
2 Ibid. 3
Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 2000), 57.
4 Gerd Baumann, The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities (New York:
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segment of the general public, either in support of or against migrants, on the other. This, combined with the debates at the European level, constitutes the tone of the general discourse on the issue of immigration.
This brings us to an explicit statement of what this thesis aspires to accomplish. To begin with, I am of the strong belief that the negative connotation that immigration has acquired in Europe is an outcome of the polarization that put immigrants and local European people in antagonistic positions. The ill-informed demonization of immigrant groups, which is also facilitated by the asymmetrical power relations between the two sides, seems to be dominated by negative representations for which the media and various right-wing popular parties take the blame. Therefore, in order to come to a better, if not a fuller, understanding of the complex phenomenon of immigration in Europe and its outcome vis-à-vis identity politics, it would be crucial to not only study the intersection between immigration experiences and identity issues but also take into account the voices of the immigrants themselves.
In line with this conviction on my part, I was interested in undertaking an interpretive analysis of discursive accounts and narratives which presumably shed a light on and provide insight into how cultural identities are negotiated by a selected group of Somali immigrants in the Netherlands. Before I proceeded with the topic and engaged with the task of gathering the empirical data required, I needed to review the relevant literature available in the field. Constituting a standard practice in research, carefully examining the literature has proved to be invaluable, not only because it allowed me to draw on them, but also because it helped me to situate my study in the rich array of qualitative studies done in the area in different parts of the world.
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Israel, Liebkind from Finland, and Vedder from the Netherlands, and it addressed the issue of immigration and ethnic identity and its implication for the adaptation and adjustment of immigrants by reviewing current theories and research in the field.5 The latter is a study that is entirely conducted in the Netherlands by the authorship of Van Geel and Vedder. Published in 2010, this work empirically addresses the adaptation of Muslim immigrant adolescents through surveys in a school setting.6
The works reviewed include studies dealing with processes of adaptation and integration of various immigrant groups by categorizing them on the basis of such variables as age, country of origin, and generation. In addition, studies on Turkish immigrants in various Western European countries in general and in the Netherlands in particular constitute part of the available literature that I had to sift through. What can reasonably be claimed at this point is that a significant amount of research has been devoted to the investigation of such phenomena as immigration, ethnic identity, adaptation, and integration, but I would argue that much less has addressed these phenomena among Somali immigrants. This gap in singling out this group and trying to understand their cultural identity processes seems to stand in contrast to its growing presence and visibility in the Netherlands. In that sense, it is hoped that this study helps to fill the gap in the literature (mostly of the ones in English) by providing an account of identity mobilization and negotiation among Somali immigrants, which seems to be in shortage, if not lacking, from the literature.
One of the things that most of these studies have in common is that they tend to give prevalence to the psychological and sociological processes involved in the adaptation of immigrants to Western societies. While this can represent one of the legitimate ways of addressing ethnic identity formation processes vis-à-vis immigration in Western Europe, it can by no means be taken to be adequate for making sense of the more complicated and nuanced processes of cultural identity formation and negotiation. By taking a more cultural and anthropological turn to the investigation of the phenomenon, the present study adopted an
5 Jean S. Phinney et al., ―Ethnic Identity, Immigration, and Well-being: An Interactional Perspective,‖ Journal
of Social Issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 493-510, accessed May 20, 2011, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/1887/16666/2/JSI2001.pdf .
6 Mitch van Geel and Paul Vedder, ―The adaptation of non-western and Muslim immigrant adolescents in the
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interpretivist and constructivist approach in trying to make sense of how the participants perceive and negotiate their cultural identity/ies within the West European metropolitan context of the Netherlands.
With this primary aim of the current study in mind, I was also drawn to other works with similar topics, although they were done in countries other than the Netherlands, ranging from countries of the Global North such as the USA, Canada, and Norway to South Africa and Israel. Two of these works were particularly relevant to my study in the sense that I drew inspiration from them – both theoretically and methodologically speaking.
Both of these articles were written by Mary J. Collier, a communication professor based in the University of Southern California. The first one was published in 2005 under the title of ―Context, Privilege, and Contingent Cultural Identifications in South African Group Interview Discourses.‖ Conducted in two periods of 1992 and 1999 in South Africa, this study addressed
―issues of context, levels of privilege, and the contingency of cultural identifications.‖7 In the importance she attached to participants‘ own narratives, the author showed how interpretive approaches could be used in order to examine the complex meanings and nuances in people‘s active engagements with identification processes. In addition to an interpretive approach, she also employed a critical perspective in order to uncover power asymmetries involved, privileging whites over blacks.
The more recent work by her is entitled ―Contextual Negotiation of Cultural Identifications and Relationships: Interview Discourse with Palestinian, Israeli, and Palestinian/Israeli Young Women in a U.S. Peace-Building Program.‖ Although part of the study was done in the USA and part of it in Israel, all the interviewees were drawn from participants in a U.S. peace-building dialogue program during 1997-1998. Like the aforementioned work by the same author, this study adopted a combination of both critical and interpretive perspectives, showing the author‘s dedication to not only understanding people‘s meaning-making but also revealing the unequal power relations involved. According to her findings, Israeli, Palestinian, and Palestinian/Israeli identified participants‘ discourse reveals themes that identity negotiation is characterized by complexity, multiplicity and contextual dependence, not to mention the possibility that ―the context both enables and constrains their relationships with each
7 Mary J. Collier, ―Context, Privilege, and Contingent Cultural Identifications in South African Group Interview
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other.‖8
After reviewing her works on cultural identity negotiation intensively, I deemed it necessary for my analysis to draw on them as theoretical frameworks. Accordingly I was able to synthesize certain analytical tools which were found to be apparent and relevant in my analysis of the immigrant group‘s experiences and stories, which will be taken up in a greater detail in chapter five.
1.2. Statement of the Problem
The terrain of identity as a concept is problematic in the sense that it is surrounded by diverse definitions and contestations. Insightfully enough, Hall makes a distinction between two ways of looking at identification – naturalizing and discursive approaches. In the former, identification is thought to constitute a form of solidarity on the basis of some common origin and shared features with people, whereas the latter, which Hall seems to be in favor of, views identification ―as a construction, a process never completed – always ‘in process‘‖.9 What is derivable from this distinction is Hall‘s argument that identity should not be seen as something stable and unchanging, preferring instead to conceptualize it as something never completed and always in the making.
The question of identity being a fluid construction that is always in the process of change is also intensified by the fact that we live in a globalised world. Tomlinson, in his attempt to define globalization, talks about the concept of ―de-territorialization‖, which countries experience as the cultural outcome of globalization, as a process depicting ―the loss of the ‗natural‘ relation of culture to geographical and social territories, where there is no longer necessarily any connection between identity and locality.‖10
He maintains that the concept of de-territorialization ―…helps us understand broad transformations in the place-culture relationship in the context of global modernity.‖11 It is within this broad conceptual framework that the
8 Mary J. Collier, ―Contextual Negotiation of Cultural Identifications and Relationships: Interview Discourse
with Palestinian, Israeli, and Palestinian/Israeli Young Women in a U.S. Peace-Building Program,‖ Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 2, no. 4 (2009): 344-368, accessed September 6, 2011, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&hid=24&sid=e33bf5ea-b3af-41bc-a608-1e06422336c5%40sessionmgr13.
9
Stuart Hall, ―Introduction: Who Needs ‗Identity‘?‖ in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul duGay (London: Sage, 1996), 2.
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proposed research tries to look at how immigrants, particularly Somali immigrants in the Netherlands, negotiate their identity and culture in a detteritorialized context.
The central question of my proposed research is: How do Somali immigrants in the Netherlands make sense of and mobilize their identities and cultural experiences as part of their day-to-day activities in a deterritorialized context? In other words, attempt will be made to investigate what meanings these immigrants derive from their encounters with the Dutch society and how they negotiate their cultural identities as part of their lived experiences. Displaced from their local roots and situated in metropolitan spaces of Western Europe, refugees and migrants are often thought to occupy a cultural island or enclave of symbolic significance to them, which is neither global nor local in the strictest sense of the terms. According to Gikandi, the refugee is trapped in a special zone of locality demarcated within the Western metropolis, and this alternative cultural narrative that they construct and reconstruct ―in a third zone between metropolis and ex-colony‖ renders them the ‗other‘ to the cosmopolitan.12
However, it sounds worthwhile to reflect on whether or not there is enough reason to believe that this image of Somali immigrants as held in various public and media discourses in the Netherlands is a reflection of their inassimilable conditions, posing a threat to the increasing demands for integration. Casting aside the possibility of them ever adopting transcultural tendencies within their new transnational space, the dominant discourse reduces them to the claim that they are radically attached to the cultural forms and values which they brought with them from their local roots. Practicing Islam, wearing headscarves, and other signs which we normally associate with Islamic cultures have often been viewed by some scholars and the general public in the West as a form of cultural resistance. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask the question: Where and how do we draw the line between these outward signs of cultural identification and the more complex and intricate transcultural experiences people from different cultures inhabiting culturally diversified metropolitan space are bound to indulge in?
The journey that the refugee and the migrant is said to have embarked on can legitimately be interpreted as a conscious attempt on their part to get away from the impoverished and marginalized sectors of the South to the ideals and institutions of the North. And Europe undeniably represents one of these spaces of hope where people of such temperament come to,
12 Simon Gikandi, ―Between roots and routes: Cosmopolitanism and the claims of locality,‖ in Rerouting the
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and aspire to come to, dreaming of a better future. This is likely to raise the question: To what extent are Somali immigrants drawn by ideals and institutions that are closely associated with Europe when they move to the Netherlands? The decision on the part of the Dutch government to allow them to immigrate might be viewed as a position informed partly by the postmodernist idea of cosmopolitanism which concerns itself with notions of obligation to others. Closely linked as it is with globalizing processes, this trend is part of what Bull, quoted in Wheeler and Bellamy, calls that growing sense of ―cosmopolitan moral awareness.‖13 Is this cosmopolitan tendency reciprocated by the immigrants in terms of trying hard to integrate into the Dutch society? The proposed study will thus be carried out to seek answers for questions of this sort, with these same questions serving to guide the whole research endeavor.
1.3. Statement of Motivation
Lindlof once wrote, ―The qualitative researcher usually begins a study out of personal and scholarly fascination with a phenomenon.‖14
My desire to endeavor an inquiry into the phenomenon comes from both personal experience and scholarly curiosity. As far as the former is concerned, I had the firsthand experience of noticing and reflecting on the magnitude of the refugee crisis a segment of the Somali community in Ethiopia have been experiencing. Owing to the fact that the Somali state system has failed for almost two decades now and due to some sense of neighborly duty, Ethiopia has been engaged in the effort to provide protection to a large number of Somali refugees. Most of them are staying there temporarily until they are able to finalize the legal procedures for their immigration to countries of the West, which tend to be their final destinations.
It was not until I started my visa process at the Dutch Embassy in Addis Ababa to come to Europe for study purposes that I realized for the very first time that the Netherlands is actually one of the destination countries for this immigrant group. What strikes me as rather intriguing is to see how this community with strong communal, religious and ethnic consciousness and attachment would look at their deterritorialized position within Europe, in general, and the
13
Nicholas J. Wheeler and Alex J. Bellamy, ―Humanitarian intervention in world politics,‖ in The Globalization of World Politics: An introduction to international relations, ed. John Baylis and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 574.
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Netherlands in particular. This initial fascination, to a greater degree, informs my decision to conduct an investigation into the phenomenon of cultural identity negotiation among immigrants. In connection with this, I cannot help but ask the question whether these Somali immigrants view the change in their cultural space within the Netherlands as an opportunity for a new sense of identity formation or as a challenge for keeping their former identity intact against the new encounters with the wider Dutch society.
On a more academic level, I started to think about this phenomenon in a new light within the context of multiculturalism and transculturalism. Premises of multiculturalism look at the opportunities the phenomenon presents and the challenges different cultures face, while living together, and proceed from the existence of clearly distinguished, in themselves, homogenous cultures.15 Transculturalism, on the other hand, is based on the notion of ‗culture‘ as networked, intermingling, and overlapping process, implying that cultures, instead of being closed entities, are in constant flux, constantly interacting with each other.16 Informed by these two opposing theories of culture, I plan to inquire into the phenomenon of cultural identity of the immigrants by engaging with systems of meanings that they mobilize in order to make sense of their identity and practices in settings far removed from their place of origin.
As an international student from Ethiopia, I made a choice to investigate the lives of Somali immigrants, and as I have explained it earlier, it was a conscious decision on my part. Although my position as an international student in the Netherlands with scholarship benefits puts me in a slightly asymmetrical relationship with some, if not all, of them, I am strongly convinced that the other positions I occupy as a black man from the Horn of Africa would provide me as a researcher and the Somali immigrants as active research participants with dialogical resources. By maintaining dialogical relationship with them and also engaging with their meaning-making processes vis-à-vis their own identity negotiation processes, one of my roles would be to ensure that the group gets their own voices heard. Overall, by empirically analyzing the phenomenon under investigation, the challenge for this thesis is to contribute to the theoretical, as well as empirical, discourse on issues closely related to identity of and migration
15
Wolfgang Welsch, ―Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,‖ in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999), accessed October 7, 2011, http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/Papers/transcultSociety.html.
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to the EU, particularly in terms of adding to the works already done, hence having a wider implication for the argument of the EU as a transcultural space.
1.4. Objective of the Study
All the preceding sections and the ones that follow, have made references – explicit or implicit – to the underlying research question in this study; however, an explicitly articulated objective statement would sharpen the focus of the study. Therefore, to put it in a nutshell, the overall goal of the current study is to examine emergent cultural identities and identity negotiation processes among Somali immigrants in the Netherlands within the context of immigration and in relation to wider societal cultural structures. To that end, hermeneutic interpretive approach is adopted in this study. In this regard, it can be claimed that this study aspires to understand and shed light on the complexity of how multiple cultural identities are shared, negotiated, contradicted, resisted and transformed. This is attempted through an interpretive analysis of interview discourses with the immigrants.
1.5. Scope of the Study
Now that we have specified the overarching objective of the study, it is essential that we draw a boundary for issues that lay within the scope of this investigation. Whether the ‗Somali immigrant‘ category label is assigned by out-group or affirmed by in-group, the reality of the group‘s collective identity is beyond question, although it is important to be wary of the risk of falling for the ―myth that there is always a single valid definition for any given identity.‖17 Therefore, the current study is not so much concerned with such notions as categorization and labeling as it is with the meanings that such identification processes with cultural groups entail.
The relatively limited scope of this study in relation to the number of participants drawn from Somali communities in only two cities in the Netherlands means that there is still a great deal of research needed dealing with other aspects of the communities. This study attempts to provide firsthand insights into the communities‘ cultural identity negotiation processes. Owing to the complexity of such processes, it makes no claim to offer firm conclusions and comprehensive
17 Stephen Riecher and Nick Hopkins, Self and Nation: Categorization, Contestation and Mobilization
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knowledge vis-à-vis the communities. Nevertheless, it makes much more sense to think of it as a starting-point (specifically in the English language), along with other works done so far in the area, on a modest scale, yet contributing to our understanding of the intra-community dynamics of the group and its relationship to the host society within the context of immigration.
My complete reliance on works written in English only has meant that I was forced to exclude studies in Dutch due to language constraints. I recognize the potential significance of cross checking such works against those written in English. The impossibility of exercising this form of cross-referencing on my part might constitute one of the limitations, and I suggest that future researchers should take that into consideration in informing their research practice. Owing to time constraints, I was not able to conduct more than a dozen interviews. The selection of participants should have been carried out in such a way that a more systematic comparison can be made between those who are from small Dutch villages and those from big cities. Researcher interested in such topics can take up where I left off in this study by adopting a slightly different approach to the question.
1.6. Significance of the Study
One of the unstated justifications for wanting to do this study relates to the fact that the Somali community in the Netherlands constitutes a group with increasing demographics and that most of its members are first generation immigrants and their children. This factual background underlies my decision to explore their cultural identity negotiation and adjustment processes. Compared to other minority groups such as Surinamese and Indonesians, Somalis tend to constitute one of the recent groups of immigrants. This, among other things, raises the question as to whether and how they are fitting in and dealing with issues of integration.
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paradoxical manner, some politicians seem to distinguish between the two – both in the media and political discourse. What is more, the criminalization of such Muslim minority communities as the Somalis and their frequent portrayal by the media as being responsible for certain crimes such as gang fighting, theft and/or involvement in terrorist acts have put them in a bad light, contributing to their negative image in the eyes of the wider society.
The relevance of the current study can thus be seen in terms of its contribution to the attempts being made to challenge simplistic and biased images to immigrant groups in Europe in general and in the Netherlands in particular. It is also important to recognize the fact that Somali immigrants, like all other immigrant communities, are caught between two cultures, each with its own values, belief systems, expectations, traditions, and roles. Speaking of this dialectical tension that immigrant groups tend to find themselves in, Kim asserts the inevitability of the contradiction that exists between ―the desire to retain old customs in keeping with the original identity, on the one hand, and the desire to change behavior in seeking harmony with the new milieu, on the other.‖18
Coming to the Netherlands for the Somalis would mean that they must try to integrate, if not assimilate completely, into the ‗Dutch culture‘ and ways of life. There is also the pressure of maintaining their Somali cultural heritage which often times collides with the equally powerful pressure of conformity to the host culture. The implication of this is that they are faced with the enormity of the challenge to reconcile the various elements of the two cultures. All of these complex processes can be better understood by deconstructing the identity negotiation processes that the immigrants mobilize in their constant search for their changing and contested identity locations. And addressing the complexity of those processes is precisely what this study is all about.
1.7. Thesis Organization
The present thesis comprises six chapters. The first chapter constitutes the introductory chapter which has concerned itself with laying out the background to the topic inquired into and with showing the form that the thesis takes. It has been classified into subsections that have
18 Y.Y. Kim, ―Adapting to a new culture: An integrative communication theory,‖ in Theorizing about
17
thoroughly dealt with such issues as background of the study, problem statement, topic delimitation, potential significance of the study, and so forth. The second chapter is dedicated to the literature review, and it discusses some of the literature available on concepts of ethnicity and culture, as well as some of the contemporary anthropological and sociological theories on identity construction. This chapter also looks at the main theoretical propositions of multiculturalism and their criticisms which would be highly useful in articulating an alternative version based on the premises of transculturality. Chapter three is devoted to reviewing and discussing some factual information on the genesis and nature of immigration into the Netherlands of Somalis in relation to their general pattern of immigration in Western Europe.
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Chapter Two
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE:
Ethnicity and Culture
This study explores how Somali immigrants make sense of their ethno-cultural identity in the Netherlands as part of their day-to-day activity. Therefore, the two concepts implied in the primary focus of the present study are ethnicity and culture. Instead of approaching these social concepts in a pretty much casual manner, I recognize the absolute necessity of clarifying what is meant by them and how they are being used in this study in relation to the Somali immigrants, who are the subject of my inquiry. What I will be doing in this section hence is that first of all I will discuss how the notion of ethnicity is understood by different scholars. Secondly, I will give a brief account about the conceptualization of culture, and how it feeds back into the notion of ethnicity. In the process of doing this, I will make an attempt to briefly relate my discussion of these concepts to the specific case of the Somalis and show how I have operationally defined their category as a unit of analysis in my study, all in the light of the literature I explored in the area.
2.1. The Concept of ‘Ethnicity’
According to Eriksen, the etymological root of the term ‗ethnicity‘ is the Greek word ethnos, which was derived from the word ethnikos, and it was initially used to refer to people thought to be heathen until it later gained a sense of representing racial characteristics.19 However, its contemporary usage is generally related to a reference it makes to denoting a collective cultural identity. Although one can acknowledge the fact that the term ‗ethnicity‘ started to be used recently, what remains to be the point is that the notion of ethnicity captures a sense of perceived kinship among group members, solidarity and common belonging, not to mention common
19 Thomas H. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 1993),
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culture, all of which can be recognized on the basis of them being as old as available historical records.20
It is interesting to note that the recurring discourse regarding ethnicity seems to be preoccupied with equating ethnic groups with national minorities or other subordinate groups.21 In other words, there seems to be a tendency to exempt majorities or other dominant groups within, for example, nation-state structures from the discussion of ethnicity. Despite this inclination in everyday language to use the word ethnicity in the sense of ‗minority issues‘ and ‗race relations‘, Eriksen notes that ―in social anthropology it refers to aspects of relationships between groups which consider themselves, and are regarded by others, as being culturally distinctive.‖22
Therefore, ethnicity refers both to the self identification of individuals as belonging to a certain culturally and linguistically constituted collective and to the ascription of a collective cultural identity to members of the group by others. It also makes more sense to think of ethnicity as applying to both majorities and minorities than to reduce it only to the realm of minority group identification.
A number of scholars have variously been theorizing about ethnicity; however, the predominant discourse in their conceptualization can be classified into theories of primordialism and instrumentalism. Spencer, for instance, claims that theories of primordialism can vary from ones that focus on the relationship between ethnicity and shared traditions and cultural ties to those which emphasize genetically inherited features of a group.23 Thus, at one extreme of the continuum, we find definitions of primordialism which tend to essentialize ethnicity by claiming it to be genetically drawn and passed on as well. Biological and cultural determinism seems to be the hard-line explanation given by proponents of this theory regarding the formation of certain ethnic bonds and behaviors. On the other hand, what we tend to find on the other end of the primordial ethnicity continuum focuses on traditional ties among members of an ethnic group, which in Spencer‘s argument sounds more reasonable. Recognizing the importance of kinship attachment and heritage for many people in the world, this particular definition of primordialism
20
John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, ―Introduction,‖ in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3.
21 Floya Anthias, ―Evaluating ‗Diaspora‘: Beyond Ethnicity?‖ Sociology 32, no. 3 (1998): 558, Accessed
November 25, 2011, http://soc.sagepub.com/content/32/3/557.
22Thomas H. Eriksen, ―Ethnicity, Race, Class and Nation,‖ in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D.
Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 28.
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suggests that traditional ties, customs, and cultural practices are passed along to members of a defined ethnic group24.
The other category of theories concerning ethnicity is presented in various forms of instrumentalism. Broadly speaking, instrumental views of ethnicity focuses on the notion that there are some intentional or conscious interests and strategies behind identity formation (ibid., 78). In other words, ethnic communities maintain ties and form special bonds for the sake of gaining strategic goals that would benefit both individual members of the community and/or the collective at large. Theories of rational choice, which represent one form of instrumentalism, ―seek to predict the conditions under which collective action emerges‖ as members go about pursuing scarce resources on the basis of rational motives (ibid., 78-79). The question here is if members of an ethnic group, for example, are pursuing their individual interests, how is it possible to maintain social conformity and solidarity within the group. According to Spencer, the Durkheimian – Parsonian answer to such a question would be that ―people obey because they share certain common values and belief‖25
which they tend to internalize, enabling them to conform to the norms of social relation (ibid.).
Because of the materialistic premises of instrumentalist views in their explanations of the ethnicity dynamics, they are subjected to criticisms. One of such criticisms, for instances, concerns itself with the notion that instrumental views of ethnicity tend to disregard the idea of ethnic durability (ibid.). What Spencer meant by ethnic durability is that ethnic groups are historically grounded in the sense that they are long-standing and long-lived cultural collectivities, and that instrumental ethnicity seems to overlook that feature of ethnic groups. The second criticism has to do with the fact that ―they ignore mass passions evoked by ethnic ties and cultural symbols.‖26
In other words, instrumental views of ethnicity fail to consider the affective aspect of people‘s identification with an ethnic community. The third criticism of such views is that ―they assume the ethnic nature of organizations.‖27
21
Closely related to the notion of ethnicity are the two concepts of ‗ethnic identity‘ and ‗ethnic origin‘. Hutchinson and Smith maintain that the former describes an individual‘s sense of belonging to a particular culturally defined collectivity whereas the latter entails an individual‘s sense of ancestry.28 Therefore, one could argue that both concepts can be taken as denoting people‘s identification with a cultural entity on the basis of common cultural values and perceived blood ties. Quoted in Huchinson and Smith, Schermerhorn defines an ethnic group in a particularly interesting way, and his notion of ‗ethnicity‘ tends to be comprehensive in terms of clearly spelling out the characteristic features of an ethnic group.
An ethnic group is defined here as a collective within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry … Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group.29
A closer look at one aspect of Schermerhorn‘s conceptualization of an ethnic group, which he defined as a collective within a larger society, reveals his bias in the sense that he views an ethnic category as constituting a minority which is an integral part of a larger society or a majority. However, by drawing on Eriksen, I have tried to show earlier that the view pretty much taken in this paper is that ethnicity applies to majorities in the same way as it does to minorities. Leaving this aspect of the definition aside, the other elements seem to make a strong sense. Translating this conceptualization to the circumstances of Somalis as a group, one can recognize that Somalis as an ethnic group represent a named group of people with myths of common ancestry tracing its roots to the Prophet Mohammad, and shared memories, which can probably be linked to the sense of a common history. One can look at an account of the kinship and clan systems which, argues Johtel, have played a central role in the socio-political organization of Somali people, and the fact that they have been transmitted from generation to
22
generation renders them vital cultural processes in the collective memory of the Somali society as a whole.30
In addition, other defining features of this group can be a perception of one or more elements of common culture such as language and religious affiliation, a tie with a homeland and a sense of solidarity among at least some of its members. If we take Islam as a useful starting point for our discussion of Somalis as an ethnic group, we find that it constitutes one of the fundamental elements of their culture as can be evidenced by its centrality in organizing the daily lives of most members. The introduction of Islam as early as in the 7th century also adds to the historical importance of Islam to the Somalis as a religious heritage. In fact, Van Heelsum claims that the first Muslim communities were thought to have developed along the coast of present day Somalia in the 7th century, engaged as they were in trade activities with the Middle East.31 Therefore, it sounds reasonable to argue that Islam constitutes not only a religious heritage but also a cultural one, as it helped facilitate trade relations over the centuries, both within the region and with the outside world.
If one considers Somali immigrants in the diaspora, one has to acknowledge the fact that their group dynamics tend to reflect the descriptions above with the exception of probably a physical link with their homeland. They cannot possibly claim to occupy a given territory or homeland in the Netherlands, but this does not exclude the fact that they constitute an ethnic community in the Netherlands. Although one might argue that they are uprooted from their original locality—Somalia and other parts of the Horn of Africa—the existence of transnational ties among members, which many studies have confirmed, speaks of the real and/or symbolic link that they tend to maintain with their homeland. This has arguably been described as being important for them to sustain a sense of Somali ethno-cultural identity in spite of the fact that they are geographically dislocated. Useful as it may sound to acknowledge the distinctiveness of the Somali ethno-cultural identity, it is equally crucial to stay away from reductionist and essentialist views which perceive ethnic identity as being static and impermeable. Rather, one should think of ethnic identity as being malleable, not to mention the fact that it overlaps with
30
Kaija-Mari Johtela, ―‗Somalia lives with me‘: Homeland and Religion in the Lives of Finnish Somalis‖ (MA thesis, University of Helsinki, 2010), 19, accessed October 26, 2011,
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/19219/somalial.pdf?sequence=2.
31
Anja van Heelsum, ―Why Somalis move? An investigation into migratory processes among Somalis‖ (paper presented at the ECAS Conference, Uppsala, Sweden, June 15-18, 2011), 5, accessed July 8, 2011,
23
other kinds of social identity that people have to negotiate socially as part of their day-to-day life.32
Having discussed so far about what constitute ethnicity and how we could define ethnic groups, let us now redirect our attention more specifically to what counts as the core elements of ethnicity, which are often mobilized in order to distinguish one ethnic group from the other. Nash argues that the existence of groups at a certain place and time entails some sort of boundary, which has to be maintained and reproduced through certain mechanisms.33 These boundary mechanisms are what he calls cultural markers of difference. This sense of boundary that demarcates one ethnic group from the other is clearly captured by Brass‘s definition of ethnicity. Quoting De Vos, he argues that ethnicity refers to a sense of ethnic identity which consists of the ―‗subjective, symbolic or emblematic use‘ by ‗a group of people … of any aspect of culture, in order to differentiate themselves from other groups.‘‖34
This notion of symbolic use by members of an ethnic group of elements of their culture is not only something that they mobilize to stress their difference but it can also be manipulated by outsiders in order to identify the group along those markers of difference.
Nash classifies these markers of cultural difference or symbols of ethnicity, as he sometimes likes to call them, into two or three levels on the basis of their relative significance as cultural pointers of difference. He argues that the primary symbols of ethnicity are ―cultural markers of blood, substance, and cult that separate ethnic groupings from other kinds of social aggregates, groups, and entities.‖35
Markers of blood, according to him, refer to a sense of common ancestry that engenders solidarity among members of the group and at the same time separates them from other groups. Markers of substance, on the other hand, have to do with observable cultural practices that tend to be unique to the group in question, an example of which can be the way how members of the group socialize or eat together, whereas that of cult relates to the system of religious beliefs and practices that is taken to be specific to that group.
In circumstances where it is difficult to grasp or overtly see the basic symbols of ethnicity during social interactions, other surface markers of cultural difference are employed, and due to
32 Hutchinson and Smith, ―Introduction,‖ 6.
33 Manning Nash, ―The Core Elements of Ethnicity,‖ in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24.
34 Paul R. Brass, ―Ethic Groups and Ethnic Identity Formation,‖ in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony
D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 85-86.
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their secondary nature to the primary symbols or ―basic recursive metaphors of ethnicity,‖ in Nash‘s words, they tend to be ―more mutable overtime and less psychologically central to group identity.‖36
The most common surface markers, among others, are dress, language, and physical features which tend to be explained in cultural terms. Nash further maintains that, in the final analysis, all of the secondary and tertiary cultural pointers of group difference stand for and feed back into the basic symbols of ethnicity listed above.37
In connection with Nash‘s classification of symbols of ethnicity, it might be useful to have a brief look at Edwards‘ conception of ethnic markers before we end this section. By alluding to a distinction he made between communicative and symbolic language, he argues that on a more general level ethnic markers can be classified into public and private ones.38 Edwards also maintains that, on the one hand, public and non-symbolic markers, with their tendency to hinder social mobility, are susceptible to extinction as a minority group attempts to either assimilate or integrate into a majority group. He further goes on to make the point that ―private and symbolic markers, on the other hand, continue to exist because they promote the continuation of group boundaries‖39
given the fact that they are practiced in the private realm, causing little threat to the dominant culture at large.
A point that can be made here is that both Nash and Edwards claim that language, along with other surface markers such as dress and different outward features, tend to be less significant and can only be taken at surface value compared to basic symbols of ethnicity, in Nash‘s words, and public markers of ethnicity, according to Edwards. If we take this at an empirical level, we find that many of the ethnic minorities in Europe, of which Somalis are one, in most cases use their language privately, making it a symbolic marker of their ethnic consciousness. In the public arena, they ‗ought‘ to speak the dominant language in the society in which they are living, and their inability to do so would legitimize their exclusion from public participation.
The same can be said about other outward markers of cultural difference, such as dress and ornamentation. What happens so often is ―that they may disappear as ordinary markers of
36 Ibid.
37
Ibid., 26.
38 John Edwards, ―Symbolic Ethnicity and Language,‖ in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 228.
25
group life while persisting (or re-emerging) as symbolic markers, albeit public ones‖40 as it happens in special festivals and events. For instance, most Somali men back in Somalia wear trousers or a flowing sarong-like colorfully patterned traditional kilt known as macawiis. Due to Somalia‘s Islamic heritage, some of them might also wear long dresses known in the Arab and Islamic worlds as khameez. However, it is unlikely to find Somali men in the Netherlands in such tribal costumes apart from occasions of prayer or religious festivities, making the western dress code dominant among them.
The situation might be slightly different for Somali women. Such distinctive features of dress as headscarves, hijab, or other traditional Muslim coverings have been seen to mark out Somali women in more or less similar way as the rest of Muslim women in the West. One may frequently observe that Somali women in the West, especially younger ones, tend to mix the
hijab with more modern and western styles of clothing. The hijab is often seen as representing
conformity to religious and cultural heritage, whereas western dress code a level of integration into the dominant culture. It is such expressions of cultural fusion and composition that have come to be known as forms of cultural hybridity.41 However, most Women in Somalia mainly wear a long, billowing dress which one may typically associate with that region. It is also important to mention that among some conservative and radical Muslim Somali women both in Somalia and in the West, it is common to wear the Jalabeeb which is a dress covering them from head to toe. The fact that such diverse forms of dressing tend to persist publicly, as it is the case with a large number of Somali women immigrants, seems to do with the possibility that ―they are both public and symbolic‖42 [italics in original].
2.2. Culture and Identity in Multicultural Societies
The focus in the previous section has been on ethnicity, and the justification for discussing it at length relates to the fact that this paper deals with Somali immigrants whom I have already identified as representing an ethno-cultural group. Clearly, the discussion of ethnicity is often times injected with particularistic notions of identity on the basis of features ranging from
40 Ibid.
41
See Hall, Stuart, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora,‖ in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990); and Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic (oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
26
kinship to certain shared cultural elements that a group is claimed to possess. That was what the previous section has attempted to address. Given the infusion of cultural explanations into discussions of ethnic belonging and solidarity, it was deemed essential to review what the contemporary literature in the field has to say about culture and cultural identities in multicultural societies. Accordingly, this section will address the question of how culture and cultural identities are understood by different scholars and how they feed back into ethnic identity. Besides, my assertion that multiculturalism constitutes the contextual backdrop against which the immigrant group‘s negotiation of their cultural identity takes place warrants the necessity of mapping out the various conceptions of multiculturalism, along with their criticisms.
2.2.1. Cultural Identity Defined
Culture has been defined in a variety of ways in the literature. One explanation for these myriad ways of understanding culture might have to do with the fact that culture tends to be so pervasive that it touches every aspect of human life. Culture, claims Parekh, ― is a historically created system of meaning and significance or, what comes to the same thing, a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives.‖43
Being a system of moral beliefs and social practices, culture constitutes a means which human beings employ in order to organize and understand their lives. In addition to its pervasiveness in terms of structuring human life, it provides people with a framework of meaning which they can mobilize and use to make sense of their lived experiences.
Phillips is particularly of the belief that culture is an indisputable phenomenon in the sense that it constitutes part of the ways in which people give meaning to their world. Seen this way, it becomes ―an important element in self-ascribed identity.‖44
Broadly speaking, what we call cultural identity comes down to people‘s sense of belonging to and solidarity with a certain cultural community. It is important to recognize the fact that this sense of belonging to a given cultural community is usually based on commonly shared cultural values and heritage which may be real or imagined. Therefore, we are safe to assume that cultural identity provides people
43 Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, 2nd ed. (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 143.
27
with the resources for their easy self-identification with and secure sense of belonging to a cultural group they feel they have in common with.45
The importance of cultural identity in anchoring people‘s social identification with a cultural community is unquestionable. The problem, however, is how we go about making sense of cultural identity, for there are various ways of conceptualizing what constitutes cultural identity. For instance, Hall, in one of his articles on cultural identity negotiation, makes a reference to at least two opposing ways of thinking about ‗cultural identity‘. The first position, which has been popular for decades, views cultural identity as being dependent on shared culture which underlies all the internal differences within a community, implying a sense of oneness and common belonging. Hall further points out that the terms of this conception are based on the assumption that a community‘s cultural identity reflects the historical experiences and cultural codes that its members have in common.46 Such conception of cultural identity also emphasizes those common historical experiences and shared cultural codes, claiming their necessity for making available to people certain stable and continuous systems of meaning and points of reference. In fact, these ‗unchanging‘ frames of reference are essential for anchoring a group‘s cultural identity in spite of what Hall calls ―the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.‖47
What underlies this understanding is, thus, that by systematically playing down the possible internal heterogeneity of a cultural community, it proceeds to assert the perceived unity of the community‘s culture.
The second position on cultural identity is different from the first one in the sense that it recognizes both the points of similarity and difference that constitute the internal dynamics of a cultural group. This notion of cultural identity warns against the danger of a single unified identity and alerts us to the importance of acknowledging the discontinuities and differences within the image of a cultural group. This essence of cultural identity has been captured by Hall when he defined it as ―a matter of ‗becoming‘ as well as of ‗being‘.‖48
This contention of Hall‘s has serious and far-reaching implication for a better understanding of how cultural identity works because it opens up a space for a number of points pertinent to identity, identification, and identity negotiation. For example, this notion of cultural identity throws light on the idea that
45 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 89.
46 Hall, ―Cultural Identity and Diaspora,‖ 223. 47 Ibid.
28
identities are not fixed. While they are grounded in historical contexts in terms of their emergence and development, they are always under constant pressure of transformation, and that is exactly what Hall tries to capture by his metaphor of ‗being‘ and ‗becoming‘.
In light of such contrast, the view that is pretty much taken in this study is in line with the second notion of cultural identity as conceptualised by Hall. According to him, ―cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture.‖49
This view particularly resonates with the theoretical assumption underlying my inquiry into the cultural identity negotiation processes of Somali immigrants in the Netherlands. By looking at cultural identities not as essences but practices of positioning and identification, it takes a radical break from the much more contested notion of identity which essentializes cultures and cultural identities along the lines of their boundedness and ‘elusive’ unity.
Although culture is an important concept both empirically and theoretically, the broad-based understanding of it sometimes invites a bit of confusion. For example, we might often come across, in the literature, the tendency to approach culture as if it was synonymous with society. However, Parekh, citing Carrithers, argues that the two should not be confused with each other for the simple reason that they differ in their focus and orientation.50 Acknowledging the fact that culture and society are inseparable in the sense that we cannot imagine one without the other, he makes a distinction between the two. He writes, ―Broadly speaking, society refers to a group of human beings and the structure of their relations, culture to the content and the organizing and legitimizing principles of these relations.‖51
This way of making a distinction between culture and society is essential for it allows us to distance ourselves from the contested conception of culture being a homogeneous whole. Arguing against this notion of culture as a unified whole, which he calls a communitarianist ideology, Touraine writes:
Being open to exchanges and change, no modern society has a truly unitary culture, and cultures are constructs which are constantly being transformed as they reinterpret new experiences. Attempts to find an essence or a national soul are therefore artificial, as is the attempt to
49 Ibid., 226.
29
reduce a culture to a code of behavior. What is more important, the idea of a communitarian culture implies the existence of an absolute power that can impose juridical norms, respect for the rules of collective life and an educational system. Communitarianist ideology is, by its very nature, political, not cultural.52
It should, therefore, be noted that culture is something that is contingent and always evolving as a society moves forward with new experiences, the interpretation and reinterpretation of which requires new cultural tools. However, this is far from implying that one cannot talk of cultural communities as different from each other. In fact, it is crucial to recognize the fact that cultures are internally heterogeneous as they are externally diversified. Alluding to the internal variation and heterogeneity of cultural communities, Parekh points to the idea that membership in a cultural community does not necessarily entail similar interpretations and allegiances to the culture‘s underlying beliefs and practices.53
He contends that some members might share all its beliefs and others only a few, and their subjective reasons for doing so might range from social, cultural to religious or to a combination of the three.54 An individual‘s observation of a culture‘s system of beliefs and engagement in its practices do not necessarily show that he or she is inspired by and identify with the community‘s cultural values and codes. People might do what they do, among other things, out of fear of the consequences of nonconformity to a society‘s norms.
As it is important to recognise the internal heterogeneity of a cultural community, it is equally essential to step out of the narrow tendency to equate people‘s behaviour with their culture. This tendency is always responsible for putting up a wall between different cultures, which in turn feeds back to the binary construct of cultural identity on the basis of ‗us‘ and ‗them‘ arguments. Phillips particularly brings our attention to the fact that ―the perception of people as products of their culture, and culture as the all-encompassing explanation of what people do, is worryingly prevalent as a way of understanding people from minority or non-Western cultures.‖55
The problem with such line of thinking about cultures and cultural communities is that it essentializes cultures, claiming them to be isolated entities with no chance
52 Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2000), 165.
53 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, 148. 54 Ibid.
30
of mingling with other cultures and evolving in the process. That is why Parekh insists that ―since a culture‘s system of beliefs and practices, the locus of its identity, is constantly contested, subject to change, and does not form a coherent whole, its identity is never settled, static and free of ambiguity.‖56
In the previous section, I made a reference to language as being one of the cultural elements that certain ethno-cultural groups are likely to share. I was particularly pointing to the various ways in which minority groups use their language in different ways in order to assert part of their cultural identity. In fact, there is a direct correlation between the kind of space where minority language is being used and the kind of identity that is being affirmed. The more confined to a private domain a minority language becomes, the higher the chances for it to function as a marker of symbolic identity, and vice versa.
By the same token, we can also mention the role religion plays in the process of cultural identification. Justifiably enough, it cannot possibly be argued that religion plays a significant role in the lives of all minority groups that are in existence in Europe at the moment. For example, if we single out Muslims and Islam in the West and examine their reality, we would be surprised to find the Muslim communities and their practices of Islam are as diverse as their places of origin. In fact, Saeed argues that it is highly misleading to assume the Muslim community in the West constitutes one unified Islamic culture for the people who are thought to belong to it range from those who are deeply committed Muslims to those whom he calls ―nominal or ‗cultural‘ Muslims.‖57
Let us narrow down our empirical point of reference to Somali immigrants and attempt to explain how Islam assumes a central role in structuring their socio-cultural life. According to Ajrouch and Kusow, nearly all Somalis profess to Islam, with their particular sect of belonging being Sunni. 58 Mindful of all the internal variations of religious beliefs and practices subsumed under the all-encompassing label of Islam, what this implies is that religious affiliation does not represent a cultural marker of internal social difference as such. Nevertheless, it implies that
56
Ibid.
57 Abdullah Saeed, ―Muslims in the West and their attitudes to full participation in western societies: some
reflections,‖ in Secularism, Religion and Multiculturalism, ed. Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Tariq Modood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 203.
58 Kristine J. Ajrouch and Abdi M. Kusow, ―Racial and Religious Contexts: Situational identities among
31
Islam ―provides a central cultural frame of reference; it is the predominating value system that informs daily life.‖59
For these Somali immigrants, Islam represents a major and integral part of their cultural repertoire both in their country of origin, Somalia, and their host societies in the West. In other words, it could be argued that although the role Islam plays in their spiritual and cultural life might be difficult to fathom in a more precise manner, the organizing and legitimizing power it assumes in affecting various aspect of the lives of most Somalis is beyond dispute. Religious identity is strong and influences many aspects of life. Tempting as it may sound to take it for granted that Islam constitutes an important part of Somali culture, it is equally important to acknowledge the fact that its possibility to affect everyday life is contingent upon a variety of factors, and adherence to it varies in the community.
2.2.2. Understanding Multiculturalism
The discourse about culture and cultural diversity is often accompanied by that of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, which one can assume sets the context for cultural pluralism within nation-states, has recently attracted a considerable amount of controversy both in the academic world and in politics. Part of the contestation surrounding the phenomenon of multiculturalism is tied with the fact that ―the term ‗multiculturalism‘ covers many different forms of cultural pluralism,‖60
which according to Kymlicka raise different kinds of challenges. Although there are pronounced variations in the ways different scholars approached the phenomenon of multiculturalism, both against the risk of running into extreme simplicity and for the sake of exposition, I would like to make three basic distinctions in terms of how it is discussed and understood by various stakeholders. These distinctions are to be made between the levels of socio-cultural reality, political policy and theoretical ideology. For example, Kymlicka, among others, seems to take a stand in focussing on and supporting ‗multiculturalism‘ as a social fact to be reckoned with. He argues that a state is said to be multicultural as long as it comprises different nations or ethnic groups for a whole variety of reasons ranging from conquest and colonisation to immigration.61 This view is also shared by Levy when he noted that
59 Ibid.
