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Globalizing Culture and the quest for belonging: Ethnographies of the everyday

Sociology and Anthropology

Programme leaders
Programme leader: Niko Besnier; Annelies Moors Refer to dhr. prof. dr. N. Besnier mw. prof. dr. A.C.A.E. Moors

Scope and position of the programme


Globalisation is a factor that frames lives in virtually every corner of the world. From the centres of global capital to the farthest corners of the world, almost everybody live within a global horizon. The circulation of people, things, images and ideas has increased manifold in speed, intensity, and magnitude, yet in highly uneven ways and with divergent effects. One of the main effects of globalization is the fact that new forms of uncertainty and risk pervade social life, as the global perspective has opened both wider horizons of hope and new depths of despair. The pleasurable mobility of some - social and physical - is often based upon the forced displacement or immobility of many others. Outside the centres of prosperity, living through the uncertainties of a crisis is not an aberrant phenomenon but defines ordinary existence. The increased significance of global horizons for everyday life across the world has created more and stronger desires for belonging and identity, both for individuals and collectives. A heightened awareness of the proximity of very different cultural styles and convictions - religious, ethnic, ideological and social - has undermined habitual certainties, with the lines between friend and enemy, neighbour and stranger, and war and peace often blurred and uncertain. Older senses of secure and self-evident nationhood in Europe, or claims to origin and autochthony in Asia and Africa, are experienced as being under threat by the presence of multiple cultural minorities that on a global level may turn into majorities, While for some local ethnic and religious traditions represent a solution to perceived fragmentation and chaos, elsewhere they are seen as impediments that block access to new, modern and globalized communities of belonging and conviction. All over the world, groups and individuals seek to produce some form of stability and existential closure around otherwise precarious lives. The research program Globalizing cultures and the quest for belonging: ethnographies of the everyday investigates how people experience these globalized conditions, partake in their production and are affected by them; how they strategize, accommodate, resist or simply make do within the strictures of their daily existence. The unifying question running through the research programme is how people in diverse places and from distinct vernacular and historical traditions interpret and remake themselves in the tension between cultural ideals and practical necessities and strictures imposed by global economic, political and cultural flows. We explore how people develop a sense of belonging in a larger modern world, while simultaneously often feeling excluded from it because of a lack of material resources, geographical isolation or other forms of marginality. This quest for belonging can take the form of a politics of gradual inclusion, but can also engender experiences of permanent exclusion, for instance when citizenship is not merely a legal obligation but is also defined as a deep sharing of cultural values. Faced with increasing hostility, permanent stigma and social, cultural and physical walls, many minorities across the world turn to alternative communities and modes of identification, which are often just as global in character as dominant discourses. Here they find promises of religious and cultural purification, alternative aesthetics, or a fetishization of the authentic - be it things, words or locations, as well as new imaginaries and forms of connectivity. The research program is unified by a shared commitment to understand the global from the point of view of the local, the vernacular, the mundane and the everyday. We seek to understand how people in radically different places and cultures in the world act and imagine with the tools and concepts that are at their disposal: beliefs, convictions, bodies, adornments, emotions, or desires. We analyze these dynamics in order to provide a strong, nuanced and embedded analysis that complements and challenges the highly aggregated reliance on statistics or other research methods that generally are unable to explore the day-to-day experience of subjects. The program is unified by a shared commitment to ethnographic methods based on long-term, sustained, and empirical research grounded in local knowledge and that of the vernacular. Starting from the point of view of our interlocutors enables us to better understand how people experience their own condition with its ambiguities and contradictions. Placing local-global dynamics in a historical and transnational perspective, and aiming at comparisons between different fieldwork sites enables program researchers to firmly ground their ethnographic work within wider fields of scholarly and societal debates. Taking ethnography seriously requires the recognition of how theoretical and empirical insights feed onto each other. It also enables a broadening of the conventional notion of societal relevance (valorisation) to include a range of non-western settings and the points of view of the people with whom we conduct fieldwork. The researchers in the program engage explicitly and enthusiastically with theoretical and methodological issues that remain central to a broader tradition of social theory, anthropology, history and sociology. We share the view that no innovative work on the contemporary world can be done without knowing and critically relying and renewing this broader canon. We also share a commitment to explore the unique historical archive and senses of history in our field sites. Instead of indulging in the simplistic affirmation of the de-territorrialization of cultures and people in the global process of change, we emphasize the continued importance of places and their historical location within a larger global structure of power. Ethnographies of the everyday points to a style of doing research (theoretically informed and empirically grounded) as well as to a culturally sensitive and potentially non-conventional style of writing and communication of findings. Such a perspective is inclusive in terms of the sites and foci of our research. Combined with theoretical openness and regional diversity, the shared ethnographic focus and ethos form the basis for creative synergy within the programme and an openness to aligned and interested colleagues from other research fields and disciplines, within and outside the social sciences.

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