I've been doing a lot more teaching of late, some of it a bit out of my comfort zone. Having researched 'extremism' for a long time, I do sessions on this and related topics all the time. However, recently I've been teaching corruption, and classical social theory, meaning that I'm revisiting ideas and theorists I haven't read for years.
This week I was talking about the Chicago school and gangs. While I remember reading some of the gang literature I the past, I didn't relate it to my work on extremists. Now I've revisited it, and also found the likes of Simon Hallsworth and James Densley, I can see real parallels between the al-Muhajiroun group I spent time with and the street gangs they describe. So we can see how ‘corner kids’ can mutate into a group looking for a purpose, ideology or just something to do; there's the big question of whether the franchise or the belonging to a group makes for any difference (would they have been extremist without the group?); who belongs to the category of member and who is just hanging out?; how does the response of authority solidify the group? For me, two questions stand out. First, there’s the important question of which set of social facts we are trying to explain by invoking the gang or the extremist group, and why. Hallsworth argues that the focus on the gang is misplaced partially because most crime and violence comes from people not involved in gangs. Similarly, I argue that the focus on extremist groups in misplaced for the same reason: while the activists of extremist groups might be responsible for more ‘facts on the ground’ per person, they are so few in number that they don’t come close to being the explanation for many of these ‘facts on the ground’. So even if a group of far-rightists or radical-Islamists are more likely to do illegal things (violence/ incitement), or acts which somehow upset societal harmony (controversial statements), there aren’t enough of them to make much of an impact, in and of themselves. So where I researched there were about four to six regular radical Islamists, and about a dozen or so far-rightists, and these were spending time doing street-based campaigning with the police watching. There was plenty of other communal conflict/ violence, and lots of controversial words spoken and written offline and online: direct impacts of any conflict are largely nothing to do with the extremist groups, but are diffuse and messy. The group, however, is an easy story to tell, so media and academics can research them and the subsequent reporting allows us to view any conflict through the lens of organised groups. Then, the public associate the problems with such groups, and not with the messier reality. Second, there’s the question of how the dynamics between the group and wider society can drive radicalisation. The first thing I talked about this week was Thrasher’s The Gang, and the theory that a play group can turn into a gang as they come into conflict with authority and other groups of kids, so solidifying group identity. This is also the case with extremists: once they are in conflict with society, if society (the mainstream or ‘the powers that be’) kicks back then they have nowhere to go. This is intimately related to the jujitsu politics described by McCauley and Moskalenko in Friction: if a reaction is pretty much guaranteed, then the actions of a member of the group that wind up those on the outside, can bring a response that cements his position and his group. So Anjem Choudary said something controversial, got slapped down and his group became more cohesive, and more angry. Indeed, it is this ‘us against the world’ narrative I’ve been thinking about most. One young Islamist told me of his arguments with teachers (classic Birmingham school), which developed into rebellion, arguments with the ‘feds’, smoking weed and staying on the streets, Tupac and 50 Cent, properly discovering Islam (the religion of his parents) and eventually getting into much bigger trouble as an Islamist. Throughout, it seems that anger with the world is because he feels the world is against him, and the gang is the only way. This case, and many others, is leading me to be developing a research proposal called Get the Caliphate or Die Tryin’, of which more at a later date.
0 Comments
In a research interview, an interviewee once said something which caught me off guard, and to which I should have given a much better response. I was talking to a young and visibly Muslim woman (hair covered, but no more) about Islamophobia. Along with the usual instances described - name calling, threatening gestures, veil ripping and so on - this interview mentioned an act of omission, and one I disagree is Islamophobic. She said that when people she meets don't ask her about her religion, that is a form of Islamophobia[1]. While I didn't respond at the time, what I should have said is that if I asked her about her religion that would be Islamophobic, or at least discriminatory, as in my day-to-day dealings with people I don't talk about religion.
This, of course, is not because I have no interest in religion. I do, but individual religiosities and practices are low in my list of salient topics. It's also something that we don't talk about in Britain anyway, like money and sex: it's not seen as polite. Further, I can look up information about how a religion works as an institution in a book or online, and it's likely that this source would be more authoritative than the individual. I could ask people about their individual experiences of religion, but as a life-long atheist they wouldn't make sense to me: I can't comprehend. Instead, if I'm meeting someone, becoming friends or acquaintances, I'm approaching the encounter with my salient topics... work, music, culture, comedy, global culture, football, and they theirs. In a dialogue, it seems natural that conversation will cover those topics that have a degree of salience for both. So with the interviewee I did end up chatting about work and culture, but not football, music (my topics) or religion (hers). This makes me think that much of what society says about identity (and community) starts from the wrong premises. I agree with Amartya Sen in his Identity and Violence: we are tending to put all the focus on one or two aspects of identity - a combination of what we call religion, nationality, ethnicity, and 'race', which I end up calling ethno-religious - and make everything else secondary. In essence, there needs to be no necessary relationship between the official, national, or societal model of identity, local versions of same, and individual interpretations. An aspect of identity can be important in some circumstances and not in others. It can also be perceived as unimportant, while having effect: most obviously, if most people have X and this is not challenged by anything, then X is normal, unproblematic and invisible. There are also elements that do not compute - asexuality for example - within the standard understandings of how a particular identity works. Thus, trying to work out some kind of universal scale or framework is nonsense, as we don't necessarily agree on the initial premises. This is not to say that we can't find patterns and structures. I'm sure that the status of Islam as a pariah religion makes my interviewee feel her religious identity more strongly. However, in a dialogue I have to be myself. I'm not immediately interested in religiosity or religious identity: I know people who are observant Christians, Jews, Muslims and other (although I also know a lot more unobservant/atheistic/agnostic people with backgrounds in all faiths!), but I don't ask them about their Sunday morning, Friday lunchtime or whatever. If I started by asking Muslims, then I'd be Islamophobic. [1] I use Islamophobia as I'm following current practice, but I'm not sure we shouldn't be using anti-Muslim racism instead. Last time the Swedish electro-pop band The Knife played the UK, gigs were sold out months in advance. Now the touts are struggling to shift spare tickets, despite this being their last tour ever. Those who stayed away, perhaps put off by the bad reviews of last year, missed something strangely special. Not a gig, as such, but a show, in which the queer and feminist theory inspired brother-sister duo - with their 'group' - proved themselves the anti-Abba.
After a warm-up of Death Electro Emo Protest (DEEP) aerobics, eleven figures emerge, all wearing blue or purple metallic jumpsuits. For the next hour or so we are treated to fizzing percussion, piercing synths, and vocals from the duo or perhaps from others. How much was played live or not is irrelevant: the Knife's raison d'être seems to be to disrupt pop's norms, so triggering electronic loops was replaced by androgynous theatrics, and by the end the dancers were clubbers like the rest of the crowd. From a distance, though, it would be hard to tell who's doing what, and so the deliberate undoing of traditional boy-girl dynamics - no skirt twirling and removal here - could be missed. While the ecstatic sound and light is joyous and fun, the show misses the visceral in-your-face-ness of their recent videos, which take ordinary situations and turn them into a polysexual cabaret. Taken as whole, however, the career of the Knife makes a lot of sense. The Scottish referendum throws up some interesting questions about nationalism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and so on. After all, if Scotland does vote to become a separate nation-state, there will be people on both sides of the border who will change from living in their own country, to suddenly finding themselves living in another country. Obviously we're not looking at partition, but I'm guessing that citizenship and passport regimes will change. But will that mean that people's attitudes to each other will change?
Personally, I don't think that on the day of independence (if it ever happens), the English in Scotland and vice versa, will suddenly feel out of place, and needing to negotiate their foreignness. They'll presumably still have the same jobs, houses, families, friends. The same goes to people living in 'their' country, but knowing people who've migrated from over the border. For me, this suggests that naive views about nationalism and cosmopolitanism that take the national border as a determining factor are misguided. The border is a historical and social construct that may or may not be an accurate reflection of the lives of people, and certainly isn't the only determining factor. One question I have is whether someone from Glasgow, living in London, should be considered to be in any way cosmopolitan or part of a multicultural society. For it seems to me that the both words are loaded: the first pertaining only to the elite, and the second only to people with darker skins. The Scottish are neither... but perhaps we should be thinking about 'difference' here too (and difference between Mancunians and Londoners, and so on, into ever smaller groups). Furthermore, given that the people/cultural forms post-independence are just the same as now, shouldn't we consider movement to London (internal migration) as creating multiculturalism too. That said, I think that the idea of the border also sets us up to think of those who do the moving as making the multiculturalism or being the cosmopolitan. However, these ideas have to be relational: just like the movement of objects in space, movement of A towards the stationary B and vice versa are equivalent. Of course, one person moving from Moscow to Manchester will become a lone Russian surrounded by Mancunians. But if lots move to Manchester, then populate a street where one Mancunian lives, then in some respects it is as though the Mancunian had moved to Moscow. It's thus possible to be cosmopolitan or living multiculturally, having stayed still but having had the world move. Indeed, the term cosmopolitanism is often associated with the kind of people who have gone to work overseas and then later return. However, they are often doing just as the Muscovites mentioned before: they are in particular enclaves, sending their kids to international schools, and being with other expats as opposed to 'locals'. This looks a bit like the ghettoisation associated with 'ethnic others' coming from the other side of the world, but because it's the elite doing it, it's judged very differently. I'm not convinced it really is cosmopolitanism: real cosmopolitanism can be seen in the urban kids (including 'locals') who have friends from everywhere, and just live with it, without making a fuss, and without engaging the state... but often they're not the kind of cosmopolitans the elite wants. This version of cosmopolitanism ends up being called multiculturalism, and is seen as problematic because it's not the elite. I've long found the comparisons between ordinary places in the UK with places that are a bit more... exotic, let's say, to be highly amusing. In my current work, I've ended up quoting John Humphrys saing 'I'm in Luton but it could be Lahore'. It reminded me of the 1980s comparisons between Stoke-on-Trent and Beirut. This was at the time of the Lebanon war, and our TV screens had images of entire neighbourhoods suffering from bombs, such that blocks of flats would have their sides knocked away, as in this image of the Green Line in 1982: (wikimedia) Now, nowhere in Stoke ever really looked like that. However, at this time the word ' Beirut' became disconnected from the reality, and just meant 'a down at heel area'. Thus the image that 'Beirut' now conjures up is a down at heel area, without the need for a war. It's a bit like the phrase 'it looks like a bomb's hit it' being used for an untidy child's bedroom. Obviously this wouldn't actually look like it would if a bomb had actually hit. The choice of Beirut is also amusing because of what Beirut actually looks like, when we are not just looking at war-ravaged neighbourhoods. So when a local newspaper headline says £8.4million project to transform Beirut of Stoke-on-Trent complete it's worth remembering what Beirut looks like: (wikipedia)
This is a city known as the Paris of the East - advertised for holidays with pictures of beautiful women, the sea, and luxury hotels - and also contains the regional UN offices and so on, making it a second-rank 'global city' (alongside Rome). Blurton, however, is one of Stoke's suburbs that's not one of the 'towns' but does have its own shops, community spaces and so on. It's suffered a bit, but it's nowhere near the worst place around, and is conveniently next to the Britannia stadium. In fact, there's nothing remarkable about the place: obviously it doesn't compare to Beirut on either description, and doesn't deserve a bad reputation. We know many people are bad at maths. However, most mistakes are easily spotted through experience and common sense. But sometimes, common sense is lacking: here I’m talking about the Conservatives gaff on teenage pregnancy.
So first, the Conservatives. A few days ago they launched a document called Labour’s Two Nations, that was supposed to show how there is great inequality in Britain today (let’s ignore the fact that the rise in inequality happened in the 1980s). What they wanted to point out was that under-18 girls in the most deprived areas are three times more likely to become pregnant than in the least deprived areas (Guardian). It’s not clear what this means with regards to ‘most deprived’ and ‘areas’ – I think it’s top and bottom centiles and districts – and I’m sure I could find a more shocking figure if I chose a harsher definition of most and least deprived. The mistake they did make, though, was to divide 54 by 1000 and come up with 54% not 5.4%. That’s if they did a calculation: some social statistics come as ‘per 1000′ or ‘per 10,000′ and it’s important to notice this. This matters for two reasons. First, because 54% v 18% is a big difference and much more significant than a difference between 5.4% and 1.8% (significant though this is). Second, because anyone with any sense would realise that 54%, that is over half, is completely absurd. Anywhere with 54% of its teenagers pregnant would have babies everywhere. Either the writer and editor just missed this, or they genuinely believed that there could be such a place and they are massively out of touch with normal life. A few days ago I woke up to hear Melanie Phillips talking about community cohesion type issues, and she said that most people are more comfortable with people like themselves. However, we need to be asking what 'people like us' actually means: I remain convinced that it is not inevitable that race, ethnicity, religion, or whatever, is the element of our identity that divides people. Like Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence, I believe that we can focus on other aspects of life, and it's a historical accident that we've ended up seeing the world in this way.
Indeed, one way to disrupt this is to think of the people we are comfortable with, what we have in common and what we talk about. These last two might not always coincide either: some things we have in common might be always left unsaid - they seem obvious and/or unimportant, whereas some we might spend lots of time talking about and exploring our commonality, because we see them as important. Importantly, these change depending on who we are with, where we are and what we are doing: it's all about how we navigate our sociality. And this can lead to situations where people see the same situation in very different lights. A few months ago I was interviewing a young woman as part of my work, and we were talking about Islamophobia. And what stuck in my head was her saying that she thought it Islamophobic if people didn't ask her about her religion (she was visibly Muslim, wearing the veil). I hadn't asked her about her religion. Afterwards I thought about the absurdity of this position, from my perspective. I'm atheist, and I don't really care about someone's personal religiosity although I do take an interest in the relationship between religion and society. That's not to say that I would shy away from talking about religious views, but I don't think it's something I need to ask people about in normal conversation. This is why I don't ask religious friends about their practice or beliefs: I currently spend time with a few Christian ministers, but I don't talk to them about religion. If I asked the young woman about her religion, I'd be being Islamophobic. At the same time, the young woman could either a) enjoy talking about religious beliefs with religious friends (whether Muslims or other), and/or b) think that religious identity is important (and everyone agrees), so that on meeting someone of a different religion, this would be a natural conversation. Thus, religion would be something that one would automatically talk about, but only in certain contexts. However, thinking about what I want to talk about is very different. Like many people with a middle-class job (and not only them, for sure), I partially define myself by my job... that's why 'what do you do?' is a common question. With friends I often talk about work - more than friends who are in what are euphemistically called 'routine occupations'. On a more random note, I think I must define myself a bit by my transport choices: I cycle a fair bit, and so end up chatting to other commuters about taking bikes on trains, asking how they find it, what their ride is like and so on. And then there is the problem of British social awkwardness... We don't like it if we don't know whether we'll have something to talk about when we meet someone new, and are wary of offending people. There's a great piece by Bernard Guerin about racial discrimination without assuming racism or racists (http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/view/120/152), which demonstrates how not knowing what to do or say, in a situation where 'race' is assumed to make a difference, can result in unintentional racial discrimination. We shouldn't assume that someone is racist, or Islamophobic, or anything else, based on them not being sure of exactly how they should act when encountering difference. Indeed, it would be all so much easier if the ethno-religious identity was the only important thing for everyone. We'd all have our box - there'd be a finite number - and we'd know how we should act. But people are so much more interesting... I'm not Islamophobic because I want to talk about work or music to the woman in a veil, and she isn't a religious obsessive because she's interested in my take on religion. And given an hour or so of a wide-ranging natter, we'd be able to work this out. Assuming that a particular divide is going to make things awkward is a sure-fire way to make sure it does. We social scientists often like to compare: one place with another, one group with another, one time with another. So when we do quantitative analysis with large numbers of cases we can say ‘crime’s higher in X than Y’ or whatever. And even in qualitative work, when we have few respondents and long interviews, say, we can relate findings to some ‘common sense’ theory, or some assumption about the way of the world. But when events are of a kind that is extremely rare, there may be no comparison.
Which leads me to a most amusing quote. In Surrey a body has been found in a wheelie bin. A neighbour told the BBC: “It’s a very quiet place, it’s where you bring up your family. I’ve lived here for 30-odd years and it’s the first thing like this that’s happened.” (BBC) Really? The ‘first thing like this that’s happened’? Where I live this kind of thing happens so often the council have added a new bin to our collection. Grey is for normal rubbish, green is for paper, glass and that, brown for garden waste, and the bright red bin is for corpses and body parts. From the last world cup (June 2010). I've seen similar this world cup too.
--- A better class of England fan A bit of stereotyping here, courtesy of the police and the BBC: it was “refreshing” to see some England supporters congratulating the Algerians, many of whom were celebrating the surprise draw”… Considering the number of supporters that were there I think they have been extremely well behaved”… many of the supporters were “well-heeled” and “not your normal England followers”… “It’s a different set of supporters than we would normally see.” According to this, it’s working-class people that are the problem, whereas the middle class are lovely people who never put a foot wrong. Perhaps we should all be “well-heeled”. I used to blog somewhere else, but moved to this site a couple of years back... I've decided to republish some old pieces here... From November 2010:
A long time ago I worked for a company specialising in researching the ‘hard to reach’, by which we meant the poor, the needy, including the elderly, drug users, asian Muslims, the white working class. Essentially, the kind of people that don’t respond to mail surveys as often as other groups. And in order to talk to these people we went to where they were: the street, bingo halls, community centres, drug treatment centres. Which is why the headline ‘Church of England eyes £5m of state funds to combat extremism’ (Guardian) made me laugh. The CofE claims it can enable “Mr and Mrs Smith, Mr and Mrs Patel, and Mr and Mrs Hussain” to engage with each other through coffee mornings and so on. First, they will use money so that vicars and imams can get to know each other. Fair enough, but there’s plenty of that going on already, and I don’t think vicars and imams are failing to get on (unless we’re thinking about the fundamentalists and crazies and they aren’t invited). But once this has happened, then what. In a working-class estate where I’ve worked recently, of around 7,000 residents only 50 or so have any regular involvement in the church. The vast majority of UK adults go to church less than once a year, probably for weddings and funerals (tearfund) and as I expected, it’s the middle classes (AB) and pensioners that are most likely to attend church. Now forgive me if I’m wrong, but the government isn’t worried about middle-class pensioners starting riots. The kids that fight each other over their backgrounds won’t be reached through the church, and many won’t be reached through the mosque either. Contrary to stereotype, Muslim youth also ‘stop going’, rebel against their parents. If government wants to bring people together why not invest in the truly public sphere: make our parks more appealing, set up sports events, invest in council housing with genuine public spaces where neighbours can get to know each other. |
Archives
May 2022
Categories |