Iraqi women in Denmark

Ritual performance and belonging in everyday life

Marianne Holm Pedersen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780719089589
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526102775
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

Iraqi women in Denmark is an ethnographic study of ritual performance and place-making among Shi'a Muslim Iraqi women in Copenhagen. The book explores how Iraqi women construct a sense of belonging to Danish society through ritual performances, and investigates how this process is interrelated with their experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Denmark. The findings refute the all too simplistic assumptions of general debates on Islam and immigration in Europe that tend to frame religious practice as an obstacle to integration in the host society. In sharp contrast to the fact that the Iraqi women's religious activities in many ways contribute to categorising them as outsiders to Danish society, their participation in religious events also localises them in the city.

Written in an accessible, narrative style, this book addresses both an academic audience and the general reader interested in Islam in Europe and immigration to Scandinavia.

I

Contextualising the study

1

Setting the scene:
ritual performance and place-making in everyday life

Since the 1970s, the field of migration studies within anthropology has grown significantly and the questions it poses have developed along with general trends in anthropology (Brettell 2008: 114). Most importantly, the isomorphism of place, culture, identity and people that still dominates public discourse has long since been deconstructed (see Clifford 1992; Fardon 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Malkki 1992; 1995; Olwig and Hastrup 1997). Leaving behind previous perceptions of place and culture as static, homogeneous and congruent entities confined within nation states, towards the end of the twentieth century anthropology shifted towards emphasising the fluidity and continuous remaking of these notions. Furthermore, the world is no longer seen as made up of discrete places, but instead conceptualised as an interrelated whole. This has led studies of migration away from researching migration primarily as a linear movement from one country to another that would eventually lead to the assimilation of migrants into the host society. Since the 1990s, studies of transnational relations have directed attention towards how migrants ‘develop and maintain multiple relations – familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political – that span borders’ (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: ix). Migration is thus approached as a process and research has highlighted the fact that migrants’ maintenance of close ties with their places of origin is not incompatible with their incorporation into the host society (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004: 1003). However, as argued in the Introduction, there is still a need to explore how migrants construct belonging in relation to a local context.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the analytical approach and the fieldwork that form the basis of this book. I will start by presenting the theoretical framework. I perceive belonging as a sense of attachment to place that is constructed in social relations and practice, but which is also negotiated and contested in both personal relations and broader processes of inclusion and exclusion. Belonging is both relational and situational, and the construction and negotiation of a sense of belonging is thus not a once and for all achieved state of being. In order to examine the processual dimensions of both migration and belonging I have adopted an ethnographic approach that gives attention to how migrants engage in different social relations and practice. I start this chapter by arguing that ritual performance can be used as a ‘cultural prism’ to shed new light on important themes in anthropological research on migration: social networks, processes of place-making and the reproduction of practice. I then claim that places are relational and that migrants’ relations to place can be understood by examining their notions of relatedness to others. Subsequently, I discuss how belonging is constructed and negotiated in processes of place-making. Finally, I suggest that change and continuity in migrants’ ritual performances may elucidate more general processes of cultural reproduction and transformation in migration.

In the second part of the chapter, I will describe my fieldwork and discuss the analytical and methodological constructions of the field. I often find that these topics are given fairly little attention in monographs. They appear to be considered scholastic exercises that students should master in order to convince their teachers they are able to do the trade, but which more experienced anthropologists primarily discuss in designated methodology publications. Yet, methods, access and social position are so central to the kind of data we construct and the knowledge we produce. I have therefore chosen to provide a fairly lengthy discussion of my fieldwork with some of the challenges that it entailed.

Ritual performance as a cultural prism

The sociality involved in ritual has been the subject of ritual analyses ever since the works of Arnold van Gennep (1960 [1909]) and Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]). Hence, the study of ritual is a classic theme in anthropology, yet rituals are rarely studied in relation to migration and belonging. Migrants’ cultural performances have to a large extent been the domain of cultural studies or studies of diaspora, which tend to focus on cultural representations such as films, aesthetics, poetry, public demonstrations, etc. (e.g. Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Werbner 2002b). Such cultural expressions are generally performed by a small elite and they therefore tell us little about how ordinary people construct notions of belonging while living in exile. In contrast, the rituals I have studied were organised, performed and interpreted by Iraqi women during their daily lives in Copenhagen. The book thereby takes its starting point in women’s own cultural expressions (cf. Bruner 1986a: 7).

A large number of studies in anthropology and sociology have debated the definitions or interpretations of ritual, moving across the broad spectrum from defining ritual as concerning strictly religious practice to being an aspect of all human action (e.g. Bell 1997: 80; 1992; Durkheim 1995 [1912]; Goody 1977; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 64; Moore and Myerhoff 1977). I use Gardner and Grillo’s heuristic definition of rituals as ‘purposive and expressive ceremonialized performances’, which, in the cases discussed here, serve to mark significant calendrical and life-cycle events (Gardner and Grillo 2002: 183).¹ By approaching ritual as performance, I draw on a range of studies in anthropology which have focused on how the production of meaning in ritual takes place in social interaction rather than in symbolic communication (MacAloon 1984a; Schieffelin 1985; 1998; Sjørslev 2007a; Turner 1992; Turner and Bruner 1986).

The Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren has considered the celebration of major holidays as ‘a cultural prism which enlarges or rather concentrates conflicts, utopias, and ideals of family life, which may otherwise lie hidden or forgotten in the humdrum of everyday life’ (Löfgren 1993: 218). I suggest that this ‘cultural prism’ can display notions of relatedness and possibilities for place-making more broadly. Ritual events and performances make up condensed forms of sociality that allow us to obtain a glimpse of kinds of sociality that are otherwise less explicit (Sjørslev 2007a). By looking at these specific events, therefore, it becomes possible to acquire an understanding of social relations more generally and to investigate the norms, values and obligations that are inherent in different kinds of relations (cf. Löfgren 1993). Whereas traditional studies of ritual claim that the normal order of everyday life is suspended within the ritual frame (e.g. Stewart 1986 on carnival), more recent approaches argue that ritual performances are not different from everyday life, but rather synthesise it (Kapferer 1984; Sjørslev 2007a: 18f.). Some rituals, such as the Muslim prayer, are part of everyday life, while others become particular events that mark the calendrical rhythm or the development of the life-cycle. Nevertheless, their performance is still thoroughly grounded in the living conditions, social relations and practices of daily life (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Kapferer 1984; Langen 2002). As Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad has noted, the notion of the everyday tends to play down social, economic and cultural differences. The fact that we all have an everyday life makes it less apparent that there are many different versions of it (Gullestad 1992). As I will discuss in the following, the processes of inclusion and exclusion that Iraqi women experience are closely related to the social networks that they can construct.

Social networks and notions of relatedness

The study of networks in anthropology is not new (see e.g. Barnes 1954; Hannerz 1980: 163ff.; Mitchell 1969), but the ‘transnational turn’ of the 1990s in particular directed attention towards how migrants’ lives were affected by their relations to different places. For example, studies of transnational familial relations have illustrated how migrants’ lives are grounded in networks of care and exchange, as well as relationships of obligation and expectation (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002a; Gardner 2002a; 2002b; Gardner and Grillo 2002; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001; Menjívar 2000; Olwig 2007a; Salih 2002a). These studies have also shown that places are ‘relational’ (Gardner 2002a: 120), meaning that the social relations that migrants construct or maintain in a particular place will affect their sense of belonging and inclusion there. For instance, Danish anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig points out that migrants’ places of origin may remain important sites of belonging as long as they still maintain social relations with people living there, whereas they may become more abstract places of identification if the centre of migrants’ social relations shifts elsewhere (Olwig 2005: 189). In her study of three widely dispersed Caribbean family networks, Olwig (2007a) also shows how members of the extended family primarily remain connected to their Caribbean background through their membership of the family network. Rather than relating to their ‘Caribbeanness’ as an ethnic identity, they focus on their family backgrounds. Since both place and family are social and cultural constructions, the study of how people give meaning to kinship may shed light on how migrants’ notions of belonging to a family interrelate with their attachment to their places of origin (Olwig 2007a).

Although the above studies are primarily concerned with migrants’ relations to their places of origin, the analytical points they make may be transferred on to migrants’ new places of residence as well. If people create ties to a particular place through social relations, then it becomes relevant to examine which kinds of social relations Iraqi women construct in Denmark. This concerns the kinds of network they are able to create and the local forms of community of which they may or may not become part, in addition to the transnational relations they may maintain with their extended families abroad.

In order to explore the different contents and meanings attributed to different kinds of relations, I examine how women construct notions of relatedness with others. Relatedness implies ‘a continuous process of becoming connected to people’ (Carsten 2000: 16). Studies of relatedness have generally focused on the making of kinship relations, but they have complemented studies of more formal kinship structures (e.g. the lineage) with a focus on ‘the lived experience of kinship’ (Stafford 2000: 37), i.e. how notions of kin and family are actually produced. This perspective may also be applied to social relations more broadly (Stafford 2000: 37). Notions of relatedness can draw on many different sources. They may involve perceptions of biology, shared blood and genes, but they may equally be made and maintained in mundane everyday interactions, shared housing and the fulfilling of obligations (Bodenhorn 1988: 3; Carsten 2000: 18; 1995). In this way, notions of relatedness need to be practised. Close social relations do not exist by themselves; they require effort and reciprocity. They are also sensitive to changes and may be difficult to maintain across geographical distance (Amit 2002a: 24). Furthermore, belonging is not just created in intimate relations, but also in experiences of consociation and the recognition of familiar faces (Dyck 2002; cf. Amit 2002a: 23). In this book, I use the concept to examine Iraqi women’s understandings of what familial relations entail, but I also extend it to explore the practices, obligations and expectations involved in non-familial relations. Exploring with whom rituals are celebrated and with whom migrants think they ought to be celebrated may tell us a lot about migrants’ sense of connectedness with different people. I thus seek to understand how women’s relations with their extended families, neighbours, friends and consociate relations (Dyck 2002; Sansom 1980) connect them with particular places in different ways.

Making place

The fact that places are relational means that they are continuously attributed with meaning. We practise them, we narrate them and we live them, thus constructing their meanings through social interactions over time. Places are also historically produced in social, economic and political processes (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Hastrup and Olwig 1997; Massey 1994). In understanding places as cultural constructs, Iraqi women do not just arrive in a new place of settlement to which they have to adapt, they also actively take part in turning this place into a specific locality. They do this through social practice, e.g. by creating everyday routines (Al-Ali 2002a; Grünenberg 2006; Rapport and Dawson 1998), telling narratives, performing rituals and appropriating places (de Certeau 1984).² These practices may have unforeseen effects, for example the development of a sense of belonging to one’s local area (cf. Rosaldo in Hastrup and Olwig 1997: 8). From this perspective, the construction of belonging takes place as both an active choice of identification with a particular place and a more unconscious process of developing a sense of social immediacy (cf. Appadurai 1995). Notions of belonging and the meaning of place can never be taken for granted, but must continually be reproduced.

The local often has positive associations. However, it is necessary to explore what meanings are attributed to the sense of being local and how this locality is lived (cf. Anderson 2006; Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 6; Lidén 2003). Studies of belonging within British village life have demonstrated how belonging to a locality is continuously negotiated with reference to factors such as family origin, cultural practices, the use of place and ideas about similarity and difference from others (Cohen 1982a; Edwards and Strathern 2000; Strathern 1981). In his introduction to a collection of studies on rural Britain, Anthony Cohen (1982b) attributes value to the sense of being local, as this seemingly implies belonging, tradition and the fusion of family genealogy and place. The sense of local belonging is thus intricately connected with social memory of that particular place (cf. Lovell 1998: 4). In an urban Danish context, where Iraqi families cannot claim historical association with the place, being local easily becomes associated with negative social practices. For example, the majority society may perceive a large number of immigrants living in one neighbourhood as rootless refugees entrenched in an urban ghetto without connections to the wider society. The comparison between indigenous British village life and immigrant life in an urban Danish context thus reminds us never to take the positive implications of locality for granted. Even if the place of residence does become a kind of home, home is not necessarily a ‘happy place’ (Olwig 1998: 230). Iraqi women’s notions of belonging or not belonging in Denmark relate to what kinds of places they have been able to make and which places they can act in (cf. Edwards and Strathern 2000: 151ff.). Since places are constructed in social interaction, there is constant negotiation about how places should be conceptualised and used (Olwig and Gulløv 2003: 13).

The (re)production of practice

The ritual described in the Introduction exemplifies how the construction of relatedness and the making of place happen in ritual performance. Women commemorate together and they do so in particular places in the city, thereby giving meaning to their social relations and the place where they are living. On the one hand, they are reproducing a tradition, but on the other hand, they are creating something new. According to Edward Bruner: ‘Cultural change, cultural continuity, and cultural transmission all occur simultaneously in the experiences and expressions of social life’ (1986a: 4). This makes it very difficult to ‘measure’ when practices are changing and when they are reproduced. However, both ritual performance and the act of migration are instances where processes of change and continuity may become especially visible. Several studies of performance have argued that rituals are occasions when individuals are particularly reflexive abou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction Challenges of belonging
• Part I: Contextualising the study
• Part II: Ritual as a cultural prism
• Part III: Notions of belonging revised
• Glossary
• References
• Index