Reflections on Super-Diversity by an Urban Anthropologist

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‘Reflections on Super-Diversity by an Urban Anthropologist, or “Superdiversity So

What?”’

Ralph Grillo (University of Sussex, April 2015

email: [email protected], http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/1090/research

Contents

Foreword

Super-Diversity and the Search for Complexity

Super-Diversity in the USA and Britain

Varieties of Super-Diversity: ‘Lite’ and ‘Heavy’

Diversity > Super-Diversity > Hyper-Diversity: Tipping Points?

Super-Diversity and the City: A Comparative Perspective

(a) Preindustrial-Patrimonial Cities

(b) Colonial Cities

(c) Modern, Industrial, Capitalist Cities

(d) Fractal Cities

Some Methodological Considerations: Five Principles

(a) No macro without micro, no micro without macro

(b) No local without the global, no global without the local

(c) No present without the past

(d) No personal without the political, no political without the personal

(e) No Fetish of Fieldwork

Super-Diversity - So What? Some Discussion Points

Appendix: The Many Dimensions of Super-diversity

References

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Foreword

This is a somewhat revised version of a talk that was originally presented in Berlin in April 2015

as a ‘Masterclass’ at the ‘Academy of Urban Super-Diversity’, organised by the Max Planck

Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (based at Göttingen), under the direction

of Prof. Steve Vertovec. For the purposes of participants, speakers were asked to suggest a short

list of articles and books which those attending might read beforehand. My list included a

number of venerable items, one of which (Louis Wirth’s) was originally published some 80 years

previously (1938). I proposed such texts (along with much more recent references) because it is

important to grasp the long-term trajectory of work in the broad field of urban diversity, and also

understand how to read these older writers, who still have something to tell us.

The original title of the presentation was ‘Super-Diversity Through the Lens of

Anthropology’, but I have devised a slightly different title for this version: ‘Reflections on

Super-Diversity by an Urban Anthropologist, or “Superdiversity So What?”’ I should add that it

is largely concerned with developments in Europe, and principally the UK.

The talk was followed by a period of lively discussion in small groups and a concluding

plenary session. I very much enjoyed the Berlin Academy, and felt honoured to be part of it,

gaining a lot from interacting with the students and the other ‘masters’.

Super-Diversity and the Search for Complexity

If super-diversity is a form of complexity, characteristic of, but not confined to, major urban

centres in an era of globalisation and transnationalism, then it is not alien territory for (some)

anthropologists. What guidance does the historical experience of urban anthropology (e.g. in

Africa or North America) offer contemporary research, and reciprocally what are the

implications of studying super-diversity for urban anthropology?

It is important to situate the idea of super-diversity in the socio-historical context in

which it emerged (see also Berg and Sigona 2013). If we take a long view we can place the

concept within a venerable tradition in the social sciences which was especially important in the

19th and early 20th centuries. This was the attempt by sociologists and social historians, among

others, to grasp what had happened and was happening in their societies in an era of rapid social,

economic, technological and organisational change, principally of course through

industrialisation and urbanisation. I am thinking of scholars such as Comte, Maine, Spencer,

Marx, Durkheim, Weber, or Tönnies, or much more recently Castells and Giddens.

In the 19th

century there were, very crudely, two sorts of benchmark against which such

changes were measured: rural Europe on the one hand, and the world outside Europe which was

then rapidly being colonised. The new urban, industrial, technocratic Europe was contrasted with

old, rural Europe, and the so-called ‘primitive’ world out there. Sometimes this development was

seen in biological, indeed racist terms, and often pejoratively. Didn’t Marx in the 18th Brumaire

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characterise the French peasantry as akin to potatoes in a sack?1 Without developing this

argument any further, I will simply make the point that the idea of super-diversity falls into place

as one of a number of concepts, through which at different historical moments intellectuals have

observed that something different appears to be happening, and that things are becoming more

complex.

Now the idea of complexity itself has puzzled anthropologists for some fifty years. An

important moment was an edited book published in 1966, entitled quite simply: The Social

Anthropology of Complex Societies. One of the chapters was by the Manchester School

anthropologist, Clyde Mitchell (1966), entitled ‘Theoretical Orientations in African Urban

Studies’ which addressed a number of theoretical and methodological questions which I think

still have relevance today. Not least because Clyde Mitchell was Steve Vertovec’s DPhil

supervisor (and as it happens the external examiner for my PhD), and we can detect his influence

on Vertovec’s analysis of super-diversity; see, for example, what they say about categories. Both

were trying to get a handle on the rapidly changing complexity of urban societies, and think

about how to study them. I will return to methodological questions later, but let me first reflect

on the way the super-diversity idea emerged, and about its significance in the specific context in

which it did.

Super-Diversity in the USA and Britain

Contemporary societies are all in varying degree multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, and ‘super-

diversity’ emerged in the mid-2000s as a way of grasping what was happening in the first

instance to ethnic diversity in Britain. It had an important precedent in David Hollinger’s

reflections in the mid-1990s on ethnicity in the USA, in which he talked about ‘diversification of

diversities’. In a book about US multiculturalism, Hollinger criticised what he called the ‘ethno-

racial pentagon’, the five categories which characterised conventional representations of US

diversity: ‘African American, Asian American, Euro-American, Indigenous, and Latino’.

‘Diversity has become too diversified’, he argued, ‘to be contained within that pentagon’, and

called for what he termed a ‘postethnic perspective’ (Hollinger 1995: 12).

Turning to the British context, from the mid-1960s for some 40 years the general

perception of ethnic diversity in British society emphasised two broad categories: people who

were migrants from, or descended from migrants from, the Caribbean on the one hand, and from

South Asia on the other, differentiated by culture and language, and in some eyes, ‘race’, in

inverted commas. Although some observers and activists saw these two groups as having a

common status as racially subordinated, formerly colonised subjects, and linked them together

through the political category ‘black’, as for example in the feminist organisation Southall Black

Sisters, other things were happening through the 1980s and 1990s which changed the picture (see

inter alia Grillo 2015a, Chapter 13).

1 ‘Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous

magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’ (available at

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/18-brum/ch07.htm).

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First, the way of characterising these populations, especially from South Asia, shifted

from ‘race’ (or ‘colour’), through culture and language, to ‘faith’, most obviously but not

exclusively, in the case of populations who were adherents of Islam. Secondly, and this was

especially important for the emergence of the concept of super-diversity, migration and

settlement no longer involved only people from South Asia and the Caribbean, but from a huge

range of countries and cultures, speaking a vast array of languages. Thirdly, contemporary

arrivals in the 1990s and 2000s entered via different routes and with different legal and other

statuses. But fourthly, complicating the picture, new diversities did not mean that old diversities

simply vanished, diversity was increasingly ‘layered’, as it has been called, with different waves

of diversity co-existing, sometimes side by side.

Varieties of Super-Diversity: ‘Lite’ and ‘Heavy’

Steve Vertovec’s 2007 article took on board these developments and in doing so emphasised the

multidimensional character of what he now called ‘super-diversity’. I want to make two points

about the way the concept has been taken up.

First, many adapters have fastened on the idea that it simply means a great deal of ethnic

diversity – I can vouch for this from various research applications I have had to look at in recent

years. In doing so they have ignored other aspects of super-diversity’s multidimensionality.

Vertovec himself has written about this.2 We can, therefore, identify two kinds of super-

diversity: ‘Super-diversity Heavy’ (à la Vertovec) and ‘Super-diversity Lite’.

For heuristic purposes, super-diversity can be envisaged, in the first instance, as

happening along two axes (see Diagram in Appendix). One axis (x) refers simply to ethnicity;

the second axis (y) refers to socio-legal and political status – these are the two dimensions

emphasised by Vertovec and some other writers. With Super-diversity Lite the emphasis is

principally on the (x) axis, ethnicity, while Super-diversity Heavy takes on board both (x) and

(y), ethnicity and socio-legal and political status. We might, however, identify a third axis (z),

distinct from ethnicity, which relates to socio-cultural diversity (for example, language and

religion), and indeed a fourth axis (w), in many ways the most important, which refers to

diversity of economic status and opportunities for earning a livelihood, that is to say various

forms of inequality. And of course gender must come into it throughout.

The multidimensional character of super-diversity perhaps needs no stressing, but there is

another factor what does need emphasis. That is the combinatorial effects, the interaction

between the elements which constitute the dimensions: for instance, how ethnicity interacts with

socio-economic and legal statuses, AND religion, AND gender, for instance, among young

Muslims in Britain. If I may put it this way, the superdiverse subject must be located in n-

dimensional social space, and perhaps this is where the theory of super-diversity might be linked

with that of intersectionality.

2 http://www.mmg.mpg.de/online-media/blogs/2013/reading-super-diversity/, and of course in

his 2015 book.

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Diversity > Super-Diversity > Hyper-Diversity: Tipping Points?

Secondly, I always think of super-diversity as a process rather than a state: ‘super-

diversification’ (see Grillo 2015a, Chapter 12, originally Grillo 2010) - I have asked Steve

Vertovec’s permission to copyright the term). Diversification is happening for complex reasons

and at some point what might be thought of as simple diversity ‘becomes’, or is perceived as, or

both, super-diversity, or indeed ‘hyper-diversity’. And it is important to understand how and why

this happens (see further below).

As an example let me take the relationship between law and cultural difference which has

assumed increasing importance in recent decades for several reasons.

The plurality stemming from immigration, which is increasingly a family matter, has

often brought individuals, families, sometimes whole communities, within the purview of

the law, especially if they try to live transnationally. The world of migrants, refugees, and

settled minorities is often multi-jurisdictional and trans-jurisdictional, for example where

marriage is concerned.

Secondly, some people may seek to maintain practices potentially at odds with those of

the societies in which they have settled and therefore seemingly ‘problematic’ so far as

the law and public policy are concerned. I emphasize ‘some’, and add that legal problems

may arise from what is happening within migrant and minority families (in the internal

dynamics of those populations) as much as from what is happening between minorities

and majorities.

Thirdly, internationally people are turning to religion to guide their conduct, and seek

advice on how to comport themselves in societies which may be seen as individualistic

and immoral. We are increasingly in a post-secular world, as the German philosopher,

Jürgen Habermas, puts it. This may seem paradoxical given that, for example in Britain,

the 2011 census showed a decline in belief and practice among adherents of the historic

Christian churches. But against that there has been a rise of new forms of Christian

religiosity (the evangelical movement, the Black majority churches and so on), along

with new forms of spirituality, and the increasing visibility of non-Christian faiths,

including Hinduism, Sikhism, and not least Islam.

Besides this, there has been a proliferation of international conventions of human,

cultural, religious and gender rights.

One consequence of the combination of all these, in conjunction with other factors, is that in

Western societies there is now a multiplicity of culturally differentiated and often conflicting

norms, which pose a major challenge, not least in a legal context. What we find is a plurality of

overlapping, intersecting and interacting moral beliefs and practices (conceptions of the good life

and how to live it), in brief, a super-diversity of moral universes, the interaction between which

is often challenging.

Super-diversity, Lite or Heavy, are not, however, bounded categories: now you have it,

now you don’t. There is a long-term process of diversification, and at some point actors may

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become aware of this and cast around for suitable language through which to articulate their

sense of what is happening - super-diversity is one such term. There may indeed be a tipping

point when suddenly rather than gradually actors (including social scientists) believe that

something qualitatively different is occurring, as when it is thought that Britain has become ‘too

diverse’, or there is an ‘excess of alterity’, as Italian political scientist, Giovanni Sartori put it

(2002). There is now, in fact, much political rhetoric in which the overriding narrative is

diversity has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.

Although Vertovec originally rejected ‘hyper-diversity’ as an alternative to ‘super-

diversity’, I think it does have its uses to refer to situations where the actors (including the

powers that be) think they cannot handle diversity any more, that things are out of control. In the

UK I think we reached a tipping point in the 2000s, roughly at the time Vertovec was writing his

paper. This was in a period when the broad consensus on the principles underlying Britain as a

multicultural society were increasingly being challenged. The public mood had shifted against

multiculturalism which was criticised on all manner of grounds, and held responsible for all

manner of terrible things (see Grillo 2015a, Chapter 13). In the latter part of the 2000s that

criticism reached a crescendo with alarm about ‘parallel lives’, ghettoisation, radicalisation of

young people, unfair access to resources, and so on, exemplified in the seemingly irresistible rise

of right-wing populist, anti-immigrant parties, both in the UK and more generally in Europe.

This reaction was exacerbated by both internal developments, and external events, as is the case

with the growing antipathy to the Muslim presence.

But if contemporary (urban) super-diversity is the outcome of a process rather than a

state, what drives it? In the case of a city like London, super-diversification would seem

manifestly at the very least in part an outcome or product of the current global ecumene, as Ulf

Hannerz called it (1992), which is of course a neo-liberal ecumene, as spelled out by Castells

(2002) and Soja (2005). But this raises a number of questions.

The conference at which this paper was originally presented was entitled the ‘Academy of

Urban Super-diversity’ (my emphasis), and some reflection on ‘urban’ would seem necessary, and perhaps

salutary. Thus, does the culturally and economically diverse, porous city, the metaphor used by

Charles Taylor (1994) among others - what Castells (2002) calls the ‘transnational city’ - with its

complex interactions of class and ethnicity under conditions of neo-liberal globalisation, to what

extent does such a city remain an appropriate and unproblematic unit of social relations and

investigation? And what are the implications of porosity for people like me who might think of

themselves as urban anthropologists?

Some years ago, a colleague of mine was asked by a publisher if he was interested in

writing a book about rural France. We discussed this, and came to the conclusion that rural

France did not exist! This Baudrillard-like position was in some ways absurd. Of course rural

France exists, though it is not the kind of ‘Year in Provence’ France the publishers were hoping

for. On the other hand, in Western Europe, city and town dwellers co-exist within a common

framework of political, economic, legal, and by and large social and cultural institutions and

conventions. Castells, indeed, long ago taught us that the study of an urban and industrial milieu

could not be divorced from the study of the social and economic system in which it is located

(1976, 1977). Thus a study set in a city (which is not necessarily of a city) is about the wider

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social and economic system of which the city is a manifestation. Castells, of course, originally

said this in the 1970s, and since then we have discovered globalisation and transnationalism.

Super-Diversity and the City: A Comparative Perspective3

I will return to the question of what drives urban super-diversity below, but it will be helpful if

we first place the phenomenon in a comparative, socio-historical and political context. For if, as

Saskia Sassen says cities ‘concentrate diversity’ (1996: 188) , they do so in different ways.

Indeed, many cities, in many epochs, have been ethnically and culturally diverse, sometimes

highly diverse. Super-Diversity Lite, if not everywhere, is certainly common. But is Super-

Diversity Heavy peculiar to certain global cities under present conditions of globalisation and

transnationalism? That is to say, does it have any comparative value outside those conditions?

Back in 2000 I tried to look at various cities which shared the fact of diversity, but

offered contrasting ways of constructing and reacting to it. My assumption was that the inter-

related working of state, economy, and technology provided a framework within which to

examine how dominant groups construct, and handle, and sometimes create, difference, and

organize ‘others’. Thus I sought to compare what Aidan Southall (1985: 18) called ‘different

modalities of ethnicity’, in different forms of city, within different kinds of political economy. In

doing so I identified four ideotypical configurations of city, society and polity (preindustrial-

patrimonial, colonial, modern-industrial-capitalist, neoliberal-postmodern-global). There were

therefore four stories to tell.

I should add that these are ideal types, and not the only ones, and in reality there is much

overlapping. In the light of subsequent reflection I would now add at least one further type, the

rapidly expanding, highly diversified, post-colonial mega-cities of Africa, Asia and Latin-

America, in which there is great inequality, and a vibrant informal, often illegal, economy. One

example might be Mexico City, which I have visited several times in recent years for personal

reasons. One striking feature of Mexico, as of other similar cities, is the depth and extent of

inequalities. These are economic of course – the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, is a

Mexican who lives alongside the many millions earning not much more than a dollar a day – but

there are other inequalities of power and culture which must also be taken into account. Indeed,

inequality of all kinds – cultural exclusion, for example, Grillo 2011 - are a significant feature of

super-diverse cities. But to return to the four types I originally discussed. They are:

(a) Preindustrial-Patrimonial Cities

Briefly, in preindustrial-patrimonial societies, governance involved the exercise of power on the

basis of personal authority. At the core was the extraction of products and labour to support

rulers, their entourages, and their public and private enterprises. Rulers were concerned less with

the ethnicity of subordinate minority populations than their ability to render tribute, taxes, and

labour. Difference was handled predominantly via accommodative incorporation, e.g. through

3 For various approaches to the city mainly from within urban anthropology, see among many

others Hannerz (1980), Huyssen ed. 2008, Low 1996, Rogers and Vertovec 1995, Sanjek 1990,

Smith 2011, Southall 1998, Wirth 1938.

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the co-option of elites, or separation into distinct settlements as in the ghetto. In writing about

this I had in mind cities such as ancient Rome, Constantinople under Ottoman rule, and

Tenochtitlan, the pre-Hispanic Aztec capital, all of which could in some sense be considered

super-diverse. All three were imperial cities drawing on the resources (material and human) of

far-reaching empires, and that was a significant factor in shaping their diversity.

(b) Colonial Cities

Secondly, colonial cities, for instance of the mining towns of the Zambian Copperbelt, described

by Clyde Mitchell (1966) or A.L. (‘Bill’) Epstein (e.g. 1958), and elsewhere in sub-Saharan

Africa - what Aidan Southall (1961) called ‘Type B’ towns, which attracted much attention from

anthropologists. They were fundamentally migrant cities whose highly variegated population

included ‘expatriates’ and settlers from Europe, African migrants from rural areas, and in many

cases, especially in Eastern Africa, migrants from the sub-continent. Their economic and

political order was based on organising and differentiating this population in terms of supposed

hierarchies of ‘racial’ distinctions, but if race was fundamental it was not the only mode of

differentiation. The ethnicity of groups and individuals speaking different languages and

espousing different cultures – what in colonial language were called ‘tribes’ – was also highly

significant. In some cases religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, Muslim) was also important,

as increasingly in the lead up to decolonisation, was class. One example would be Kampala,

Uganda, where I studied in the 1960s (Grillo 1973). Outside Africa other examples might include

Singapore or the cities of the Far East for which Furnivall employed the term ‘plural’ (1948).

Nonetheless, while colonialism sought to categorise populations on racial and ethnic

lines, lumping them together and keeping them apart, it could not prevent flows of people,

language and culture between those blocks. But this called into play yet another set of categories,

and in all colonial contexts we find many terms, such as mestizo, in Latin America to refer to

people in between, or ‘mulatto’; ‘cholo’, ‘zambaigo’; ‘pardo’, and so on. Sometimes the degree

of categorisation and sub-categorisation was quite extraordinary. In Madrid’s Museo de América

there is a sequence of colonial paintings from mid-18th century Mexico (‘Serie de ‘Escenas de

Mestizaje’) which portrays the issue of sexual congress between, for example, a Spaniard, and

black woman (‘mulatto’), a Spaniard and an Indian (‘mestizo’), an Indian and a mestiza

(‘coyote’), and so on for every possible permutation. What comes through from these paintings is

the idea of mixed, but separate – each category and sub-category in its own little cell. And this

contrasts with a later imagination of Mexican mestizaje in the work of the 20th century painter,

Diego Rivera, in murals and paintings which have an iconic place in contemporary Mexican self-

representation.4

This, then, is another kind of super-diversity, and in describing all such cities in their

contemporary manifestation it is important to bear in mind the colonial legacy which left such a

heavy mark on them.

4 See, for example, the representation of Mexican history in the mural on the staircase of the

Palacio Nacional, in Mexico City, or the painting ‘Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda

Central’, in the "Museo Mural Diego Rivera" art gallery (may be viewed online, e.g.

http://www.artecontacto.net/site/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7)

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(c) Modern, Industrial, Capitalist Cities

Thirdly, modern-industrial-capitalist cities, also dependent on flows of migrant labour, from both

internal and external sources, were keenly interested in the form and content of social relations

and identities, and sought homogeneity through assimilation, or, where certain groups

(specifically ‘races’) were thought unassimilable, through exclusion. Paradigmatic examples

would be the industrial cities of North America at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. For the

Chicago School of sociology the ethnic heterogeneity of such cities was crucial. ‘Never before’,

said Louis Wirth, ‘have such large masses of people of diverse traits as we find in our cities been

thrown together into such close physical contact as in the great cities of America’ (In Reiss ed.

1964: 79). As Nancy Foner (2007) has shown, a hundred years ago New York was pretty much

as ethnically diverse as it is now.

The city of Lyon, France, where I studied in the 1970s (Grillo 1985), was also such a

city, based inter alia on motor vehicle production and chemical industries, and heavily reliant on

immigrant labour. Decades later cities of that kind were often described as ‘in crisis’, a condition

perhaps linked with shifts towards post-industrial and postmodern forms of sociality in a

globalized, transnational, world, in societies which to greater or lesser degrees espoused

neoliberal economic and social policies, along with contested forms of ‘multiculturalism’. This

leads me to a fourth type, Fractal Cities.

(d) Fractal Cities

Writing in 2000, my paradigmatic fractal city was Los Angeles, my sense of which was heavily

influenced by the geographer, Ed Soja (but see also Davis 1992). With hindsight, I now see that

my analysis would have been aided if I had had the advantage of reading Steve Vertovec’s paper

published several years later.

What did I learn from Soja? Soja (2000) proposed that we are now in what he calls a

fourth ‘Urban Revolution’, in which a new form of urbanism is emerging: the ‘postmetropolis’,

which among other things he characterises as a ‘Fractal City of intensified inequalities and social

polarization’. This is what he says about Los Angeles:

Everywhere seems also to be in Los Angeles. To it flows the bulk of the transpacific

trade of the United States ... Global currents of people, information and ideas accompany

the trade ... today Los Angeles has become an entrepot to the world, a true pivot of the

four quarters, a congeries of east and west, north and south. And from every quarter’s

teeming shores have poured a pool of cultures so diverse that contemporary Los Angeles

represents the world in connected urban microcosms, reproducing in situ the customary

colours and confrontations of a hundred different homelands (Soja 1989: 223.)

However, he also adds that if the postmetropolis is ‘fragmented and polarized’, it is ‘the scene of

creative new “hybridities” and a cultural politics aimed not just at reducing inequalities but also

preserving difference and fostering flexible “transversal” identities’ (Soja 2000: 155).

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‘Fragmentation’ is indeed a key metaphor, also employed by Castells and George

Marcus (1995). Often seen as a defining feature of postmodernity, urban fragmentation

resembles what Maffesoli called ‘neotribalism’ (1988): the multiplicity of eclectic life styles and

representations of self, which generate mutual sympathies of an extremely fluid and fluctuating

character. Of course, we must avoid reading super-diversity as simply a matter of style. London

may well be a city of multiple differences, but for many it is also a city of division. Indeed, in

such cities we find extreme differences in opportunities for earning a living and massive,

widening and deepening inequalities of economic and other kinds, locally and globally, within

and between societies.

A further thought. To what extent does this kind of super-diversity underwrite the neo-

liberal subject, and in doing so undermine the possibilities for traditional forms of collective

action, for example through trade unions? On the other hand, in some places we also find

increasing adherence to religion among some populations, alongside a secularism which is

hegemonic among public institutions, leading to vibrant and sometimes violent debates about

religiosity. The term ‘post-secular city’ (refs) may be premature, but in some cases we may find

another type of city in this neo-liberal world, one which is super-diverse, transnational, porous,

globalised, and post-secular city, or rather in which the secular/religious is a site of contestation

(see further below on this concept).

What I am saying through these four examples, and others could be cited, is that there are

different modes of super-diversity, certainly of Super-Diversity Lite, but I am tempted to equate

Super-Diversity Heavy, or perhaps Super-Diversity Super-Heavy, with Soja’s Fractal cities, and

the kind of cities described by Castells. Certainly fragmentation characterises cities like London

or New York, as the various articles on the extended reading list illustrate. Different things are

happening at the same time in different places, and at different times in the same place, and

many trajectories are apparent: hybridity, yes, but also integration, with varying degrees of

cultural diversity; assimilation and ‘parallel lives’.

Some Methodological Considerations: Five Principles

What are the implications of all this for the anthropologist setting out to study super-diversity?

How should we approach the porous city? It’s often said that you can’t teach an old dog (like

me) new tricks, and I must confess that I still find the overall approach, and methodologies

pioneered by the Manchester School of Anthropology or the Chicago School of Sociology highly

relevant. Yet there are limits to these under conditions of super-diversification in a neo-liberal

ecumene, and I think that applies to some extent to the methodological route chosen by the

Gobladivercities project which, to oversimplify, prioritises informal interaction in public spaces.

So I am proposing a small set of principles which might build on past research, correct some of

the deficiencies, and help us find our way through the maze of super-diversity:

No macro without micro, no micro without macro; No local without the global, no global

without the local; No present without the past; No personal without the political, no

political without the personal; and ‘No fetish of fieldwork’.

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(a) No macro without micro, no micro without macro

First, no macro without micro, no micro without macro. Traditionally in urban anthropology

researchers selected little niches and looked intensively at what goes on within them: Street

Corner Society (Whyte 1955, 1993), for example. This produced detailed, rich ethnography of

what actually happens, on the ground. But connections must always be made with the wider

context. ‘Seeing the universe in a grain of sand’, as one anthropologist, quoting William Blake,

has put it.

A small example I came across when visiting social scientists in Finland. In one of their

case studies they reported an incident on a ferry in which a Finnish woman had snatched off a

headscarf worn by a teenage Muslim girl. Trying to interpret the significance of this episode led

us into a discussion of whether it represented an instance of Islamophobia or racism, or the fury

of a secularist enraged by the ostentatious display of religiosity, or a feminist critique of the

subordination of women in Islam, or all three. No matter we couldn’t decide, we had to engage

with all those wider considerations. In fact, most interestingly the researchers also had data

concerning internal debates in Muslim families between parents and young women over what

they should wear in public (the girls actually wanted to wear headscarves). And this interacted

with public debates about women and Islam. The two - the public and the private, the micro-

micro and the wider world - met there in that incident.

That is one way in which old-style urban anthropological community studies are no

longer viable; the macro is always already present in the micro, as Max Gluckman showed long

ago with his pioneering technique of ‘situational analysis’ (1940, see also Mitchell 1956, and

most recently Chimienti and van Liempt 2015).

(b) No local without the global, no global without the local

Secondly, no local without the global, no global without the local. This is familiar territory and I

won’t dwell on it, but briefly, consider transmigration. Part consequence of, part attempt to come

to terms with globalisation and policies of neoliberalism, contemporary transmigration:

Entails manifold socio-economic, political and cultural linkages across frontiers;

Gives rise to populations that have multiple orientations: to receiving societies, to

sending societies, to transnational diasporas;

Raises questions about identification, rights and entitlements;

Problematises bounded conceptualisations of race, ethnicity, culture, class, nation and

the city.

It is one reason why many cities across the globe (perhaps all) are becoming increasingly porous.

And it is the porosity of the contemporary city that demands attention. If a city is, as urban

studies would argue, a space, a site, a location, it is one which is finite but unbounded (to echo

network analysis.)

For many of us George Marcus, writing some 20 years ago about multi-sited fieldwork,

was very helpful in this regard, with his injunctions to:

12

Follow the people; Follow the thing; Follow the metaphor; Follow the plot; Follow

the life; Follow the conflict

Wherever these things take you, as, for example, when investigating the shops on a street in

South London (Hall 2015) or sewing circles in Hackney (Wessendorf 2013, 2014).

(c) No present without the past

Thirdly, no present without past. I said earlier that while super-diversity is often characterised as

a state, it is best viewed as a process: super-diversification. But there is another issue. Social

anthropology has often been accused of ‘presentism’; we ignore the past because we can’t see it.

But that misses the point that the past impinges on the present in multiple ways. One of these I

mentioned earlier in connection with the UK - super-diversity was compared with a previous

state of affairs characterised by the existence of two principle groups - migrants and their

descendants from the Caribbean, and their counterparts from South Asia. But those old

diversities coexist alongside the new diversities. Thus, while cities such as London or New York

are experiencing new ‘super-diversities’ this does not mean that ‘old’ diversities have simply

disappeared. That said, I have encountered some researchers and policy makers who believe

that the old diversities are the only ones there are. Many also continue to describe relations with

those diversities through the traditional language of racism and racialisation, when in fact we

lack an adequate vocabulary through which to depict, analyse and evaluate contemporary forms

of ‘othering ‘ in the super-diverse city.

(d) No personal without the political, no political without the personal

Fourthly, no personal without the political, no political without the personal: the question of

power must always be present, at all levels. In this connection I have always found the concept

of ‘site of contestation’ helpful. The late Gill Seidel (1985: 44) characterised a ‘site of

contestation’ as a ‘terrain, a dynamic linguistic and, above all, semantic space in which social

meanings are produced or challenged’.

In Europe and North America, for example, Islamic beliefs and practices, notably those

implicating gender relations and human rights, previously perhaps tolerated, are now seen as

major challenges to the governance of diversity, nationally and internationally. In that context

the Muslim family has come under increasing scrutiny by political and religious leaders, by third

sector activists, and by the media, and caught up in social and cultural power relations in society

at large. In short, it has become a highly politicized site of contestation.

This may be observed in speeches by politicians and religious leaders, on Internet

discussion groups, in academic papers, and in everyday conversations in different social and

institutional locations (local, national, international, transnational), and in intersection with other

debates, e.g. over education. Employing a multiplicity of competing narratives actors articulating

different social and cultural interests, from the viewpoint of different moral universes, engage in

a struggle over meaning, and crucially also about practice, and rights and duties (who may or

should do what, where and when). But voices are unequal, and questions of ‘representation’, in

two senses, are critical.

13

First, how minority families and what happens in them are conceptualized by themselves

and by members of the majority society, and secondly, how those conceptualizations become

hegemonic, and instrumental in public arenas. Who has the power to define the situation of

Muslim men, women, and families, and carry that definition into the policy arena? What space

(if any) is made for alternative, ‘demotic’ counter-narratives, as Gerd Baumann (1996, 1997)

called them, which challenge dominant ones? In this connection, the role of the media is highly

significant, as is that of the many NGOs, minority and other, including, significantly, feminist

and human rights activists.

Examination of disputes about Muslim families reveals how they are embedded in

complex political processes and power relations, and tells us much about the state of

multiculturalism in contemporary societies, something I have explored in my recent book

Muslim Families, Politics and the Law (2015b). On a wider front, the Muslim umma, the

collectivity of Muslims world-wide, is a much-contested site of meaning and practice, globally,

but with highly significant implications for what happens locally, and vice versa.

(e) No Fetish of Fieldwork

This relates to a final point concerning the range and location of material one is obliged to take

into account. When in the past the discipline had to define itself anthropologists often referred to

their subject matter as ‘face-to-face communities’, sometimes described tautologously as ‘the

kind of societies anthropologists study’. As a graduate student I was brought up in a field-

working tradition regarded as essential for investigating such societies, and correspondingly

urged to find out ‘what actually happens, on the ground’, through participant observation.

While this remains fundamental to the discipline’s method, any approach to complex,

multi-sited phenomena, such as super-diversity, which confined itself to observed events ‘on the

ground’ would be jejune indeed. In a neo-liberal ecumene, with powerful states, and often

equally powerful (or indeed more powerful) international corporations and organisations, where

pertinent things happen on many different interconnected levels, and in multiple interconnected

sites, we cannot remain slaves to what Gupta and Ferguson (1997) called the ‘fetish’ of

fieldwork.

There are several complementary ways of addressing the deficit, none of them

satisfactory on their own. One, which I have followed in recent writing (and see what Castells

has to say about this, e.g. 2002: 557), is to draw extensively on the analysis of a huge corpus of

materials found in ‘texts’ of all kinds (contemporary and historical), including letters, emails,

newspapers, newsletters, Websites, leaflets, speeches, television talk-shows and documentary

programmes, autobiographies, novels, plays and films, as well as findings from more

conventional anthropological research based on fieldwork and participant observation.

These ‘texts’ are subjected to analyses which pay special attention to vocabularies,

phrases, tropes, and instances used in argument, extracting themes which protagonists address,

and the narratives through which they address them. The method involves what I call the

‘discursive ethnography’ (discourse viewed and contextualised ethnographically) of certain

14

contested ‘sites’, tested against the reality, or reported reality, of the lived experience of those

involved, where necessary and possible.

This is by no means the whole story, but hopefully it takes us at least part of the way.

Super-Diversity - So What? Some Discussion Points

At this stage of the presentation I declined to offer any conclusion, but rather suggested to

participants that they might break into groups to consider some of the issues that had been raised.

Without wishing to be directive, I did, however, propose some questions they might think about.

They included the following:

Is Super-Diversity simply a label (useful or not) for what is happening to major urban

centres in the current conjuncture?

Does the distinction between Lite and Heavy help or hinder?

Does the concept of Super-Diversity Heavy à la Vertovec have any comparative value

outside of the contemporary context of cities under conditions of neo-liberal

globalisation?

What makes the city you study ‘super-diverse’, and in what ways is it

similar/different from other cities which also attract the label?

What are the methodological implications of super-diversity for the work of

anthropologists?

In fact, there were very lively discussions which (wisely) went off into different, highly

significant questions. For example, it was suggested that unequal economic and power relations,

integral to contemporary super-diversity, badly needed investigation, with diversities of an

ethnic, cultural or religious character mapped onto diverse inequalities. Equally pressing is the

question of what might be done to make super-diverse cities habitable, and lives sustainable.

15

Appendix: The Many Dimensions of Super-diversity

The (x) axis refers simply to ethnic diversity;

The (y) axis refers to diversity in terms of political and legal status;

Super-diversity Lite emphasises the (x) axis;

Super-diversity Heavy takes on board both (x) and (y) (à la Vertovec)

In addition ...

A third axis (z) refers to socio-cultural diversity (for example, language and religion)

A fourth axis (w) refers to diversity of economic status and opportunities for earning a

livelihood, i.e. various forms of inequality

16

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