Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies

Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra, Jane Vincent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136513466
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Migrants and diaspora communities are shaped by their use of information and communication technologies. This book explores the multifaceted role played by new media in the re-location of these groups of people, assisting them in their efforts to defeat nostalgia, construct new communities, and keep connected with their communities of origin. Furthermore, the book analyses the different ways in which migrants contribute, along with natives, in co-constructing contemporary societies – a process in which the cultures of both groups are considered. Drawing on contributions from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics, it offers a more profound understanding of one of the most significant phenomena of contemporary international societies – the migration of nearly a billion people worldwide - and the relationship between technology and society.

Theme 1

Conceptual Perspectives of
Migrants in Post-Modern
Societies

1 New Media, Migrations
and Culture

From Multi- to Interculture

Giuseppe Mantovani

INTRODUCTION

The new media are socio-cultural environments in which people live their everyday experiences, globally and locally situated (Fortunati 2005). They offer not only new ways to connect with other people but also spaces for projects, feelings and imaginations unthinkable before. The approach of cultural psychology used in this chapter provides a strong foundation for exploring this topic based on the concepts of mediation and artifacts. For cultural psychology the advent of the new communication technologies (artifacts) affects, of necessity, the ways people experience reality, create its structure and find its internal boundaries. Using new media in everyday life has enlarged and somehow complicated the ways people have of making sense of the situations in which they find themselves (Mantovani 1996a, 1996b, 2002). Furthermore, the contribution that cultural psychology brings to research on new media is clarified through comparison with the way cross-cultural research views cultures and cultural differences (Berry 1997, 2001).

The concept of culture is critical to understanding migration processes in which different cultural worlds experience close contact. Further, the meaning of concepts such as community, identity and transnational depend on the framework (multicultural or intercultural) that is adopted. The multicultural approach is built on an idea of culture as a distinctive property of a social group. This is a community, internally homogeneous and separated from the others, whose members share a fixed identity assigned to them by tradition. The intercultural approach, on the contrary, embodies a narrative, pluralistic, open concept of culture: borders of every kind are continuously crossed by people with different backgrounds in interchanges that mix commodities as well as experiences, ideas and imaginations. The development of the new media has been, and still is, the strongest support for the growth of intercultural processes; it is not even possible to draw a sharp separation between the development of the new media and that of the current intercultural exchanges (Castells 1996). Using the concept of diaspora (Appadurai 1998; Pertierra, this volume) implies the adoption of an intercultural view of migration focused on mobility rather than on stability. In the following pages the differences between multiculture and interculture are presented from the situated point of view of a social psychologist committed to the intercultural perspective.

TWO ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF “CULTURE”:
“REIFIED” AND “NARRATIVE”

The first conception, that of reified culture, is centered on social groups and their identity. Culture is constructed as an identity marker, something that both identifies and separates a group from the other groups. Culture is an objective property of a group, a badge that makes manifest to which group a person belongs and separates its members from non-members on the basis of a set of objective characteristics. Metaphors such as heritage, roots and traditions are often used in association with the central concept of identity. Identity comes from inside the group, unaffected by the relationships it can have with other groups. Consider for instance the genealogy of Europe (the traditional basis of Western identity) thought to be born in Athens (and later, partially, in Rome) in isolation from the surrounding societies. Groups are internally homogeneous and neatly separated from the other groups. Borders among groups are strictly controlled to defend the purity of the group (its orthodoxy, its heritage and so on). Baumann (1996, 1999) calls this conception reified because it treats culture as a datum, what one might refer to as a “thing-in-the-world-out-there”, something that requires only to be acknowledged. A member of a culture has only to register its presence as something already-existing-out-there.

The second and alternative conception, narrative culture, is centered on people's agency: people are not cultural clones but active, creative, and fully responsible social actors. Culture is not a badge, a property, a thing that people share with the other members of their groups, but a social construction, a concept, a tool—used mainly by outsiders—to organize, administer and/or categorize aspects of a given society. Culture is a concept used to address some social processes; it is not a super-individual independent agent dictating people's everyday choices. Culture in this second sense has been presented in various and converging ways: as a mediation device (Cole 1996), as a set of resources for action (Mantovani 2000, 2002, 2004a), as a narration “shared, contested, and negotiated” (Benhabib 2002, 1). This image emphasizes—in contrast with the first conception of culture—the plurivocal, polyphonic, pluralistic character of culture which refers to a social construction not only (somehow) shared but also contested (as every social actor has peculiar circumstances, goals, resources) and negotiated. Negotiation is not an occasional but a basic activity among humans. Groups are neither homogeneous nor separated, as the first conception of culture imagined: borders are always more or less porous and people continuously cross them, sometimes even live on them. Identities do not grow in isolation but are born through enduring patterns of interactions, e.g. early European culture and identity incorporated important elements from Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia and so on; the Hebrew parenting of early Christianity and the powerful Islamic influence on many aspects of European life in past centuries are further instances of the intense exchanges taking place across borders.

THE EXAMPLE OF CONSTRUCTING “SECOND
GENERATION IMMIGRANTS”

Let me now consider the differences between the two conceptions explained in the last section through an example, namely the ways in which so called “ second generation immigrants” are categorized by researchers, social operators and policy makers. The differences between these two approaches are apparent in the way the borders separating (for the first) or connecting (for the second) cultures are seen. In the first case borders are assumed as impregnable and the characteristics of people crossing borders are minimized and stigmatized as belonging neither to one nor to the other community. In the second case borders are seen as porous and people crossing them are considered a potentially precious resource for themselves and for the social groups to which they belong. The way borders are treated summarizes the way cultures are considered.

It is curious, as Baumann (1996) asserts, that persons born in the country try who are therefore legal citizens of it can currently be labeled as immigrants, although they are at least one generation removed from the first point of immigration. In the U.K. the label most often applies only to the children of families from Asia, Africa or China—few would call a person born in the U.K. of a family of German or Swedish origin a second generation immigrant. Nevertheless second generation immigrants are judged at risk because they are seen as suspended between two cultures. Why, asks Baumann, should these persons be precariously suspended between rather than belonging to two (or more) cultures? The choice between the two visions depends on the conception of culture one adopts. If the reification concept is accepted—and groups are conceived of as homogeneous and separate—the very idea of people belonging to more than one group will appear improper. The situation of a person who is at the same time seen to be a U.K. citizen and a Muslim from Pakistan may be judged by some differently from a person who has indigenous U.K. origins. The second generation immigrants, in this perspective, are not accepted by some as true, pure, authentic British citizens simply because of the origin, religion, color of the skin and so on of their parents. At the same time they are not accepted as true, pure, authentic Muslims from Pakistan, or Sikhs from East Africa, or West Indians from the Caribbean because of their U.K. birth and education. Thus for this first conception of culture the second generation immigrants are persons internally divided and socially problematic, a potential threat for themselves, their relatives and both their country of birth as well and their parents’ country.

For the narrative interpretation of culture the second generation immigrants are not a problem at all. On the contrary, they are considered a precious resource enabling the persons involved to speak more than one language (language is the meta-artifact that supports every cultural system), to understand multiple voices and to participate in different histories. The double (or triple) heritage of the second generation immigrants can be fortuitous not only for the individuals but also for the societies in which they live: the more permeable the borders are, the more a society is ready to participate in the ongoing global world negotiations. The idea of culture proposed about seventy years ago by Michael Baktin, a Russian critic of literature, illuminates the global landscape which is opening before our eyes:

One must not imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial whole having boundaries but also having internal territory. The realm of culture has no internal territory: it is entirely distributed along the boundaries. Boundaries pass everywhere, through its every aspect. Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries: in this is its seriousness and significance. Abstracted from boundaries it loses its soil, it becomes empty, arrogant, it degenerates and dies. (1981, 61)

For this second concept of culture, the real risk that second generation immigrants meet because of their origins is that they are in danger of becoming victims of the fundamentalist vision of culture that depicts them as a potential threat to themselves and to their communities.

CONCEIVING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AS ONLY
QUANTITATIVE: CROSS-CULTURAL RESEARCH

There appears to be little agreement on how cultural differences can be understood. One position affirms that differences among cultures are only quantitative while the other states that differences can be also qualitative. According to the quantitative approach cultures are perfectly comparable; differences consist only in the scores marked by members of different societies when responding to the same standard items. In contrast, the qualitative approach thinks of cultures as incomparable: every language resists perfect translation; every social structure is unique and emotions and cognitions produced in a given culture are impenetrable by persons living in other cultures. The first of these two positions is explicitly assumed as the basis for cross-cultural research while the second supports the recent advancements in cultural psychology (Cole 1995, 1996; Cole, Gay, and Glick 1971; Shweder 1991, 2003). Cross-cultural research assumes that cultures have comparable structures (homologues) and are made by the same elements; this is why cultural differences can be studied by comparing the results obtained from the application of standard tools (usually items of Likert scales (1932) for the study of attitudes) to members of different societies. Typical cross-cultural research findings are, for example, that members of traditional societies prefer a collectivist Self while U.S. citizens favor an individualist Self (Triandis 1989), Japanese people develop an interdependent Self while U.S. citizens develop an independent Self (Markus and Kitayama 1991) and so on. Furthermore, cross-cultural research tends to consider Western societies as a homogeneous block, comparing them with the similarly homogeneous block of Oriental or Japanese or traditional (i.e. non-Western) cultures (and ignoring in both instances what historians, anthropologists, linguists and even political scientists would say about differences within the imaginary Western and non-Western blocks).

The theory and methodology embodied in cross-cultural research are also open to criticism on various points. Exploring theory first: the difficulties created by the colonial opposition of “the West versus the Rest” of the world conveys a strong ethnocentric prejudice about Western superiority (Mantovani 2004a). Contrasting the West with the Rest (or with particular areas of the Rest) is a trait of cross-cultural research that can be traced from the first cross-cultural field study, the expedition promoted by the University of Cambridge in 1895 (Jahoda 1992) to the Torres Straits, dividing Australia from New Guinea, in which natives’ eyesight was compared with Europeans’.¹ A further theoretical exemplar concerns the use of very large categories devoid of precise analytical references such as Western, non-Western, traditional, Orientals, Chinese and so on, which infringes the deontology norms that forbid psychologists to promote stereotypes that can hurt people of non-Western societies because of the ignorance of the peculiar characteristics of their societies. For example Chinese and Japanese, Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistani, Balinese and Kashmiri may consider it offensive to be amassed under the dismissive label of “Asians”.

I turn now to the use of standard questionnaires that categorize and measure different cultural contexts (usually Likert attitude scales). The presumption here is that not only the terms used in the questions (and in the answers given by the participants to the cross-cultural research) but also the general sense that participants can make of the question-answer situation will be exactly the same in different cultural contexts (this is the core of the application of a questionnaire: see Schwarz 1999). This seems hardly acceptable to linguists, conversation analysts, cultural anthropologists and social psychologists sensitive to the role of context (Duranti 1994, 1997; Duranti and Goodwin 1992). Another methodological concern regards the approach that establishes a global and massive comparison between (members of) different cultures such as, for example, Americans and Japanese. This is open to criticism for at least two reasons: First, the persons who respond to the questionnaires are neither representative of large categories such as Americans or Japanese (setting apart the fact that the source of these psychological data are often college students) nor of sub-categories such as African American; Irish American; Japanese American and so on. Second, as is apparent from the last point, the categorization which under-lies all the research programs of cross-cultural research adopts—explicitly or tacitly—a reified, fundamentalist conception of culture. For cross-cultural research one is, for example, American or Japanese or Chinese or Mexican, but what of a child born from a Chinese American mother and an Irish American father? He/she will not enter in the research because his/her responses to the questionnaires would blur the clear distinction on which the cross-cultural research program lies. The above child will be discarded just because he/she is non-representative of his/her group and is, in effect, suspended between two cultures.

ACKNOWLEDGING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AS
QUALITATIVE: CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

In addition to considering the quantitative approach favored in cross-cultural studies I now examine the qualitative approach that enables the exploration of cognition, emotion and ethics which are different in our diverse human societies. Emotions that some know well as anger are unknown in other societies; even emotions some consider to be natural and innate such as fear seem ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Migration, Diaspora and InformationTechnology in Global Societies
• Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface: Mediating a Restless World
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Migrations and Diasporas—Making Their World Elsewhere
• THEME 1 Conceptual Perspectives of Migrants in Post-Modern Societies
• THEME 2 Gender and Generation Intertwining with Migrations
• THEME 3 Looking at the Migrations and Diasporas Through the Lens of the New Media
• THEME 4 Religion, Mobility and Social Policies: How Migrants’ Use of the New Media Is Shaping Society
• THEME 5 A Case Study: China, Its Internal Migrations, Diasporas and Expatriates
• Contributors
• Index