‘All chapters of this volume are about identity and diversity in some way’, the opening chapter of this book tells us. A dozen different authors then present a widely differing set of papers on different national, ethnic, religious and cultural groups in various parts of Europe. Some are enlightening; others less so.
Among the enlightening chapters is Marlene de Vries’ consideration of Jews in the Netherlands and their various ties to Judaism. An older, highly educated and urbanised group, they are ‘a socio-economic upper crust’, reminding us that minorities (including minorities facing discrimination) are by no means all on the breadline or below. Her interesting suggestion is that there may be a ‘semiconscious or subconscious’ aspect to the transmission of ethnic ties, with secular postwar-born Jews accepting the non-continuance of Judaism by their children while still hoping for Jewish continuity.
Aitor Ibarrolo-Amendariz's study of perceptions of health and education issues in the Basque country is a helpful and sensitive study that dares to make the point that ‘immigrants are not free from their own share of responsibility’. It keeps free of jargon and makes practical suggestions – school officials should have a zero tolerance policy on bullying, doctors should know about the diseases that are particularly likely to afflict migrants.
Mário Artur Machaqueiro's article on frontier identity in Russia and Portugal is a fascinating study of these two countries on different edges of the continent. He makes the very good point that Northern Europeans have used the same debasing qualifiers such as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ of those (like the Portuguese and Russians) on the edge of Europe as they have used for people overseas. It is dangerous to talk of a ‘European’ attitude towards ‘the other’, without recognising that Europeans are perfectly capable of seeing ‘the other’ from within – those ‘black immigrants’ taking ‘our’ jobs can easily mutate into Polish plumbers. Portuguese colonialism can therefore be read as an attempt to ‘redeem the poor image some northern Europeans had attributed to the Portuguese, as lazy and not quite white’, the familiar theme that victims make the worst oppressors. Tsarist Russia, ‘a highly complex intersection of ethnicities and cultures, partly European and partly Asian’, in which the proportion of ethnic Russians never surpassed 50%, displayed a similar tendency. ‘The requirements of identity self-assurance’ drove both countries in the direction of colonialism, conquering parts of Asia so that they could feel properly European (something other parts of Europe appeared to deny them), and reducing all the conquered territories, whether Muslim, Buddhist, Shamanic or (in the case of Georgia and Armenia) with ancient Christian traditions, to the same ‘barbarous’ level.
Like a number of other contributors, Machaqueiro recognises that migrant communities are often prejudiced against one another and display ‘an identity competition’ with other minorities (the Gujaratis who come to Britain from former British colonies are pitted against the Gujaratis from former Portuguese colonies). The same point comes through from Marta Vilar Rosales’ very interesting article on Goans (mostly from an elite group that was closely linked to the Portuguese government) who were converted to Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then migrated to other Portuguese colonies such as Mozambique and Brazil (her article concentrates on Mozambique). Their strategy in Mozambique was to stress their Portuguese identity, separate themselves form other migrant communities and avoid forms of dress (like saris) that might identify them as Indians. They sought to become more Portuguese than the Portuguese. Other migrant groups with their frequently-expressed grievances were merely a hindrance to this strategy.
José Bastos’ analysis of six ethnic groups is a very practically-oriented study of the role of various religious affiliations in the ethnic-minority populations of Greater Lisbon. Once again we are reminded that ethnic minority groups often have bitter hatreds against each other at least as great as those against the ‘host’ population, often rooted in a contemporary event that represents a controversial decision of the Indian (say) government rather than the US. We also find that there is a huge difference between different groups in terms of their willingness to blame the host community for their woes. Approval levels where the statement ‘we did not succeed more only because many people are racists’ range from 14% to 82%. Moreover, one of the most difficult situations to be in is that of a ‘minority within a minority’, such as those gypsies in Lisbon who find the Gypsy Church their only escape route from the stifling sexism of traditional gypsy life.
Sometimes the chapters produce an effect that is not quite what their authors intended. It is difficult to read Flip Lindo's study ‘A streetcar named desire: lifestyle and identity of street kids in multi-ethnic Rotterdam’ without a sense less of diversity than of sameness. ‘Young people living in run-down urban areas …’, ‘bleakest forms of lower vocational education …’, ‘fathers completely out of the picture or at home only sporadically …’, ‘an organised (petty) criminal vocation …’, ‘stealing cell phones …’, ‘a pupil stabbed a teacher, who was in hospital for a considerable length of time …’, ‘use cannabis regularly and excessively …’. We could be in any number of European cities, with any number of kids of any number of ethnic backgrounds with a difficult ‘task of maintaining or achieving an integrated image of the self’, as Lindo puts it. This streetcar could be running anywhere and there are a thousand different groups of kids who could be riding it.
There are two articles about Cape Verdeans, but we get little sense of who they are. Pedro Góis sees them emerging as a ‘deterritorialised transnational nation’, but then immerses us in a lot of sociological jargon about globalisation and little in the way of concrete exploration of this idea. It is with relief that we read that he is ‘coming back to our example’ a few pages before the end, but the reconnection with Cape Verdeans doesn't last very long and we are plunged once again into the complexities of complexity theory.
At the end of the book there is a very long article by José Bastos and Susana Bastos, ‘What are we talking about when we talk about identities?’, which once again reads more like a general sociological discussion than a summary inspired by the different chapters of the book. The conclusion is entitled ‘After theory, what?’ – how much better if it had been ‘After what has been said in earlier chapters, what?’! In fact the ‘conclusion’ is simply a list of generalised statements about further work needed, which reads suspiciously like a shopping list for more grants. Compare the way in which Machaqueiro's chapter concludes with a proposal for further research that arises clearly and naturally from the topic that has been covered earlier, namely how Russians with an ‘Eastern frontier identity’ find difficulty living in Portugal with a ‘western frontier identity’.
There is much that is good in this book, but the editors make it a whole that is less than the sum of its parts.
