300175 Multiple-Belonging in the World Society: Boundary Dynamics and the Politics of Self (S) (WiSe 2011/2012)

This Seminar reflects and discusses the increasing popular and academic attention vis-à-vis the concept of ‘belonging’. In the course of the last ten years, this concept has become subject of uncountable academic publications and conferences. Why now? -Is one question that requires a thorough reflection. Such obvious ‘candidate answers’ as globalisation, transnationality and translocality; immigration and the challenges of conviviality; recent forms of politicization and new social movements as well as the on-going reflection on the present-day modalities of governmentality can only be taken as approximations towards grasping this phenomenon and the reasons of its current appeal.

In the course of this seminar, belonging will be discussed as a recurrent topic in the intellectual debates on the nature of modernity, its inherent social forms and fears, and modernity’s effects, both challenging communal forms of social cohesion, but also reinforcing them. Such modern phenomena as nationalism, ethnicity formation and the growing salience of religious communities will be introduced as important constellations of belonging. Given the communitarian underpinnings of these notions, the ambivalences of belonging become apparent: the imagery and the ideological nature of these concepts, the social closures they imply and instigate, their inspirational strength, but also their coercive nature – vis-à-vis the outsiders and insiders.

Against this backdrop, the new possibilities (and impossibilities) of belonging will be discussed throughout the Seminar - that make for the increasing appeal of this concept. It will be necessary to contour the notion of belonging against that of ‘community’ as well as ‘identity’, i.e. any holistic, homogenising, and static understandings of collective forms. Top-down and collectivising approaches to understanding the forms of sociability will be contrasted with individual and collective understandings of the self and the possibilities of political action – that also engenders new forms of belonging (creating belonging) under the conditions of spatial and social mobility.

The Seminar will be structured in three thematic blocks:

(1) Grasping the major dimensions of belonging through conceptualising the modalities of commonality, mutuality and attachments, i.e. imaginaries of collective boundedness, habitual forms and shared forms of knowledge, reciprocity, commitment and participation (‘Teilhabe’ and ‘Teilgabe’) as well as spatialisation, embodiment as well as the complex relations between humans and artefacts (belongings).

(2) Mapping out the multiplicity of belonging as well as the diversity of collective forms in the contemporary world, and understanding the possibilities of social positioning as well as the biographic navigation between different constellations of belonging, taking under special consideration relationality as well as the processes of social boundary-making.

(3) Reflection upon the modalities of current collective politics ranging from nostalgic assertions of autochthony and exclusion to visionary projects of individual and collective shifting of social locations as well as creating belonging through social and political action – in particular, such political action that challenges the pitfalls of identity politics.

Relevant literature:

Anthias, F. 2006. ‘Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: Rethinking
Translocations’, in N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, and U. Vieten
(eds), The Situated Politics of Belonging, pp. 17–31. London: SAGE.

Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper. 2000. ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29:
1–47.

Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York/
London: Routledge.

Crowley, J. 1999. ‘The Politics of Belonging: Some Theoretical Considerations’,
in Andrew Geddes and Adrian Favell (eds), The Politics of Belonging: Migrants
and Minorities in Contemporary Europe, pp. 15–41. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Dieckhoff, A. 2004. ‘Introduction: New Perspectives on Nationalism’, in Alain
Dieckhoff (ed.), The Politics of Belonging: Nationalism, Liberalism, and
Pluralism, pp. 1–15. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO: Lexington Books.

Favell, A. 1999. ‘To Belong Or Not to Belong: The Post-national Question’, in
Andrew Geddes and Adrian Favell (eds), The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and
Minorities in Contemporary Europe, pp. 209–27. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Flinders, C. L. 2002. The Values of Belonging. San Francisco: Harper.

Fortier, A.-M. 1999. ‘Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)’,
Theory, Culture & Society, 16(2): 41–64.

Geschiere, P. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and
Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Giddens, A. 1991. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

Glick Schiller, N. 2007. ‘Transnationality’, in David Nugent and Joan Vincent
(eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, pp. 448–67. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing.

Glick Schiller, N. and G. Fouron. 2001. Georges Woke up Laughing: Long-distance
Nationalism and the Search for Home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

hooks, bell. 2009. Belonging: A Culture of Place. London: Taylor & Francis.

Kannabiran, K. 2006. ‘A Cartography of Resistance: The National Federation of Dalit
Women’, in Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran, and Ulrike Vieten (eds),
The Situated Politics of Belonging, pp. 54–73. London: SAGE.

Latour, B. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: La Découverte.

Lovell, N. 1998. Locality and Belonging. London/New York: Routledge.

Migdal, J. S. 2004. ‘Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints. Struggles to Construct
and Maintain State and Social Boundaries’, in Joel S. Migdal (ed.), Boundaries
and Belonging: State and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local
Practices, pp. 3–27. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

Neidhardt, F. 1979. ‘Das innere System sozialer Gruppen’, Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 31(4): 639–60.

Pfaff-Czarnecka, J. and G. Toffin (Hgs.) 2011. The Politics of Belonging in
the Himalayas. Local Attachment and boundary-dynamics. Los Angeles et al.: Sage.

Sassen, S. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.
Princeton/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tyrell, H. 2008. Soziale und gesellschaftliche Differenzierung: Aufsätze zur
soziologischen Theorie. Hrsg. B. Heintz, A. Kieserling, S. Nacke,
and R. Unkelbach. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

White, J.B. 2004. ‘Belonging to a Place: Turks in Unified Berlin’, City and Society,
8(1): 15–28.

Wimmer, A. 2008. ‘Elementary Strategies of Ethnic Boundary Making’, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 31(6): 1025–55.