The Relevance of Family in the Context of Inter-Ethnic Material and Moral Competition

In post-colonial Europe, immigration can be represented as a partially uncontrolled historical process that occurs in a historically organised world (Wallerstein 1973), with geo-strategic, political, economic, technological, and identity hierarchies, competitions and vulnerabilities. This process of reversed colonisation (Ballard 2003), based upon, and reinforcing, the collapse of empires, has brought once more to the fore a kind of group identity competition that was supposedly surpassed. This competition develops at a moral level, through the comparison of several types of socio-historical dynamics (gender and intergenerational relations, values about desired or undesirable performances and relational patterns, different uses of religions, etc.), as well as at the material and political level, through processes of inter-group and interpersonal competition oriented towards obtaining a certain amount of social power, which threaten and transform established hierarchies (Leach 1954).

In this framework, different types of families, with different types of gender and intergenerational relations, making different uses of ‘community’ connections and religiosity as a cultural asset, in different cultural ecologies typical of different ‘receptive’ countries, encounter different types of economic and inter-ethnic opportunities and support different types of pressures to social integration and ‘moral acculturation’ or to racist marginalisation or exclusion. With their rituals, values and tensions, families and webs between families also provide a significant scenario of negotiations to maintain or change specific ‘cultural’ differences. The process of growing and relative emancipation of juveniles requires never-ending decisions and negotiations about changing degrees of autonomy and responsibility in different shifting levels (educational patterns, school performances, management of sexuality and violence, equilibration of intra-family and peer relations, economic needs and opportunities, etc.), which introduce instability inside families. At the same time, inter-ethnic and inter-strata comparison of duties, controls and liberties, namely in school, frequently introduces the construction of vulnerable, non-homogeneous and conflictive solutions and strategies of cultural continuity and transformation, since different and incompatible interests are at stake. Moving in different social fields, men and women, young and old, have different opportunities, powers and interests, and relate to locals at different inter-ethnic levels. Internal cultural change or continuity can be interesting to some of them and very menacing to others.