Integrating Strangers in Society

Perspectives from Elsewhere

Jos D. M. Platenkamp, Almut Schneider, Jos D. M. Platenkamp, Almut Schneider

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030167028
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030167035
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a uniquely positioned contribution to the current debates on the integration of immigrants in Europe. Twelve social anthropologists—"strangers by vocation"—reflect upon how they were taken in by those they studied over the course of their long-term fieldwork. The societies concerned are Sinti (northern Italy), Inuit (Canadian Arctic), Kanak (New Caledonia), M?ori (New Zealand), Lanten (Laos), Tobelo and Tanebar-Evav (Indonesia), Banyoro (Uganda), Gawigl and Siassi (Papua New Guinea) and a township in Odisha (India). A comparative analysis of these reflexive, ethnographic accounts reveals as yet underrepresented, non-European perspectives on the issue of integrating strangers, enabling the reader to identify and reflect upon the uniquely Western ideals and values that currently dominate such discourse.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jos D. M. Platenkamp and Almut Schneider (eds.)Integrating Strangers in Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16703-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jos D. M. Platenkamp¹

(1)

Münster University, Münster, Germany

Jos D. M. Platenkamp

End Abstract

This book presents texts written by an international group of professional anthropologists with research experience in societies of the Canadian Arctic, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Southern Europe. They all address the question how they were received by the people among whom they lived and worked. After we had discussed their experiences earlier at a conference at Münster University in Germany,¹ we decided to publish their texts because we are convinced that their relevance exceeds that of mere ethnographic reports of societies other than our own.

The current debates in European countries about the presence of strangers within their borders—migrant labourers, war refugees, political asylum seekers—are generally conducted in European frames of reference. Whether their presence is assessed in positive or in negative terms, the debates invariably draw on some of the basic values upheld in the societies concerned. These values may be articulated as religious or ethical virtues, or as legal, economic or politico-ideological principles. Such virtues and principles are mobilised to argue the case for an inclusion of strangers in one’s own society or for their exclusion from it. A Christian identity of European cultures may be mobilised to deny adherents of other religions their contribution to the moral foundation of society, or, conversely, to advocate the application of Christian virtues such as charity and compassion to the stranger in its midst. Legal precepts laid down in State Constitutions or in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be applied to assign to foreign citizens a unified and universal legal identity while denouncing cultural traditions that do not support these precepts. But they may also be mobilised to demand respect for the different conceptions of law and human identity that are part of other cultural traditions. The paradigmatic assumptions of market economics may ascribe to all humans the same rationality of needs satisfaction, or they may acknowledge the cultural determination of human needs, conceding that different societies set different economic priorities. And, last but not least, one may adduce a presumably collective and uniform identity of the Nation and its People as a criterion of exclusion of strangers, or on the contrary perceive in the exclusive membership of the Nation by ‘blood’ (ius sanguinis) or ‘birth’ (ius soli) an ideological construct of mythical proportions and shallow historical depth.

Whatever the arguments advanced in favour or against the presence and acceptance of strangers in our midst, in drawing on these principles the debates are inevitably enclosed in European self-referential frames. One does not take notice of how strangers are incorporated in societies situated beyond the own ‘Western’ cultural hemisphere, as if such knowledge were principally redundant. It is as if the uniqueness, if not the economic, civilisational and moral superiority, ascribed to one’s own society and culture made any comparison with other societies and cultures an a priori irrelevant undertaking.

We consider the intellectual complacency that such opinions radiate unwarranted, given the manifold social, political and economic problems, that accompany the integration of strangers in European societies. In view of these problems, the extension of one’s knowledge horizon, taking cognizance of alternative procedures of social integration and of potential assessments of socio-cultural differences, cannot but make a valuable contribution to an intellectually informed and morally grounded public debate.

It belongs to the expertise of social anthropology to cast a comparative light on these issues. Anthropologists conducting long-term researches in other societies are strangers by vocation. From the first days in the field onwards, they experience what it means not to speak a local language, not to be familiar with the basic codes of social interaction, not to understand the rules of decent behaviour, in brief, not to be recognised as a civilised human being. But whatever efforts the anthropologists make to come to grips with the awkwardness of such situations, it is the hosts who decide how they will be taken as temporary residents into their society, what roles there are to be played and what status there is to occupy. When the anthropologists wish to take the initiative, they experience its futility: their inclusion is imagined and performed in ways that they can neither anticipate nor enact themselves.

Their experiences offer us a glimpse of how other societies engage the strangers who appear in their midst. We do not claim that these modes of engagement are immediately transposable to our own European societies. Given the cultural specificity of the processes at stake, such a claim would contradict the very arguments advanced here. But we do argue that the contributions collected here allow us to grasp the alternative modes of interaction with strangers and in this perspective to recognise the idiosyncrasies that haunt the current debates about the integration of strangers in European societies.

The Contributions

In Becoming a Sinta: Learning to See Dreams and Relating to the Dead (Chap. 2), Elisabeth Tauber tells of a process of integration in another society that is probably the most comprehensive of all cases described. As a gaği,² a female “outsider”, she married a Sinti husband and became intimately related to the members of her family-in-law living in a caravan site in an Italian town. It is largely a women’s world that she depicts: her gradual integration entails interactions with her mother- and sisters-in-law—one of the latter being an outsider like she is—while her father- and brothers-in-law remain in the background.

She is expected to join her mother-in-law in the peddling and begging that secures the family its income. She initially experiences this task, performed in the streets where she grew up and “with a university degree in my pocket”³ as utterly embarrassing. But her mother-in-law teaches her that she need not be ashamed. She implies that Sinti and gağe do not live in the same social and moral universe, so that Sinti values neither need to be corroborated nor can they be questioned by outsiders. To become part of that universe, performing her woman’s role in accordance with Sinti expectations did not suffice. Although Elisabeth Tauber, like her gaği sister-in-law, took great care to conform in speech and conduct to the role of wife and daughter-in-law imposed on her, her interactions with the living lacked the essential cosmological dimension that would entitle her to the status of a fully integrated person. It was the birth of her stillborn son that revealed to her the extraordinary importance of the dead in view of the relations among the living. As a result of this tragedy, she had become personally connected to a deceased Sinti relative. It had granted her the status of an accomplished Sinti person, whose opinion in family matters had acquired the authorisation of the dead. This cosmological sanctioning of the social relations that were initiated by marrying into a family completed the process of integration into Sinti society.

In this remarkable case, the integration by marriage into another society required that the person in question fully adopts the cosmological and social identity that this society provides to its members. It is not Elisabeth Tauber’s outsider provenance as gaği that is explicitly valued, but the fact that she has shed that identity in favour of becoming an ancestrally sanctioned Sinti person.

An incorporation of the type described by Elisabeth Tauber entailing the renouncement of one’s identity as outsider and complete adoption as a member of the host society appears to be unimaginable to Canadian Inuit. The ethnographer Rasmussen (1931: 61) had reported how in the early twentieth century Inuit identified strangers—categorically labelled qallunaat—with “spirits of misfortune” against which women and children must protect their sledges and dogs. But once being addressed in their own language, their anguish vanished and they became “very good friends”. Much has changed since. In “You are like Geese”. Working and Drum Dancing with Inuit Elders in Nunavut (Canada) (Chap. 3), Frédéric Laugrand describes how in the mid-1990s he and his colleague Jarich Oosten developed a programme to facilitate the transmission to younger generations of Inuit of the cosmological knowledge, and shamanic wisdom in particular, that the elders deemed “still relevant”. But even though they were speaking the Inuit language and adapting to Inuit life as best as they could, they remained to be perceived as ‘migratory geese’—stranger-friends who come and go again.

Laugrand refers to an Inuit myth that relates how Indians, White People and “the unseen people who show up as caribou” all descend from an Inuit mother and a dog-father. They all share with Inuit a primordial maternal origin of life, but they have come to inhabit different regions on earth and are ascribed different human characters. While Indians are violent, the Whites—apparently modelled on the whalers with whom Inuit had been in contact for centuries—are friendly but moody people, possessing useful tools but the “minds of small children”. In spite of their superior technology they are not completely human and therefore do not qualify as Inuit, “human beings”. Laugrand rightly insists that this is not a racist aberration but a social and cosmological statement. Since the strangers do not carry Inuit names, hence are not connected in namesake relations with Inuit ancestors, they are destined to remain outsiders. A comparable significance is ascribed to names and naming by the Bunyoro in Uganda (see von Weichs, Chap. 10).

Yet their position as outsiders also qualified Laugrand and Oosten to partake as guests in the drum-and-dance ceremonies, in which Inuit traditionally shared the abundance of a game with whoever happened to be present as guest. By inviting them, remarks Laugrand, their Inuit hosts “managed to transform us from outsiders into local participants connecting us with their values and with their world”. And as among the Sinti, the communication with the dead plays a key role, for the drummers are said to see the deceased while dancing. Therefore, the fact that nowadays the drums are played whenever outsiders visit the Inuit communities is particularly significant. The songs, sung of old in a competitive or even aggressive manner, express grief and joy, the failures and achievements of hunting, virtues such as modesty, or the presence of the dead and invisible beings. They invoke, in other words, an Inuit universe of sociality, cosmos and morality, and it is this universe that the visitor is invited to witness—not to become fully assimilated as Inuit persons, but in order for the differences between them to be meaningful and properly valued.

While Stuckenberger also conducted research in an Inuit community, her experiences differ in some important respects. As Laugrand reported from the Kivalliq region several thousand kilometres to the west, likewise the Inuit of Qikiqtarjuaq projected the image of Qallunaat on her. In Being the Other in Inuit Society (Chap. 4), she describes how this image entitled her to their hospitality and support, but it also set limits to what she could accomplish. Addressing her by an Inuit name would have been out of the question, since she is not part of the names circulating among ancestors, the living and the unborn. Particularly as a female anthropologist, however, her Qallunaat identity was qualified by the gender-specific tasks and role conduct expected from women.

For those non-Inuit Canadians who live among them, the gender distinction is irrelevant in their professions as teachers, civil servants and commercial entrepreneurs. But even though they have been Christianised and are familiar with the presence of Qallunaat for a long time already, Inuit still assign to men and women different tasks and ground that distinction in a pre-Christian cosmology. The importance and value of hunting—a male task par excellence—by far exceeds that of securing an economic income. Sanctioned by ritual injunctions, it serves to support a cosmological cycle, in which animals, humans, spirits and ancestors “share sentience and a spiritual component called inua”. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Becoming a Sinta: Learning to See Dreams and Relating to the Dead
• 3. “You are like Geese”. Working and Drum Dancing with Inuit Elders in Nunavut (Canada)
• 4. Being the Other in Inuit Society
• 5. An Anthropologist in Kanaky. Modulations of Belonging and Otherness
• 6. A Stranger-Anthropologist as Advocate of Māori Development Projects
• 7. On Becoming a Ritual Master Among the Lanten—Yao Mun—Of Laos
• 8. To Be Made Part of the Tobelo Society (North Moluccas)
• 9. Welcome to Tanebar-Evav: Can One Be Incorporated in a Village Society?
• 10. “What Is Your Empaako?” Naming and Becoming a Munyoro in Western Uganda
• 11. Placing the Newcomer: Staying with the Gawigl of Highland Papua New Guinea
• 12. Mythical Beings from the Swamp Among the Siassi, Papua New Guinea
• 13. The Variegated Integration of an Anthropologist in an Eastern Indian Steel Town
• Correction to: Being the Other in Inuit Society
• Back Matter