Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part I Migration studies and the problem of culture
- Part II Practising cultures
- Part III Constructing identities: gender, class, and ethnos
- Chapter 7 The cultural construction of gender in modern Greece
- Chapter 8 Generating identities: age, social bodies and habitus
- Chapter 9 Intersections: gender, ethnicity, class and culture in Australia
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - Generating identities: age, social bodies and habitus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgements
- Part I Migration studies and the problem of culture
- Part II Practising cultures
- Part III Constructing identities: gender, class, and ethnos
- Chapter 7 The cultural construction of gender in modern Greece
- Chapter 8 Generating identities: age, social bodies and habitus
- Chapter 9 Intersections: gender, ethnicity, class and culture in Australia
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.
Hall, 1987, p.44Preceding chapters have traced the transformation and re-negotiation of cultural, symbolic and economic capital in the processes of migration and settlement. Particular cultural practices are emphasised to maintain a sense of ethnic honour or to consolidate cultural and economic capital – similar strategies are employed by the autochthonous members of immigrant-receiving societies. Indeed, they are an integral part of what I have called ‘the politics of culture’ in all societies. But they are not always conscious strategies; they often arise from beliefs that have dropped below the level of consciousness and become taken-for-granted, apparently ‘natural’. (It is not irrelevant that migrants are ‘naturalised’ rather than ‘nationalised’.) Moreover, those beliefs and practices that have the status of boundary markers (especially language and religion, but also other attributes of ethnic honour) can have immense emotional and motivational power, as well as the capacity to mobilise resistance against discrimination, racism and more subtle forms of negative identification. We have also seen instances of both positive and negative aspects of shared ethnicities.
Analyses based on static notions about the maintenance of traditions or the separation of sets of relations labelled ethnic – or gender or class or religious or linguistic – cannot convey the constant interweaving of processes of transformation and cross-referencing in heterogeneous societies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Another PlaceMigration and the Politics of Culture, pp. 121 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992