Nacimiento de nuevos hijos del alimentante

In the last few years, several scholars have scrutinised in detail the responses given to stigmatisation by migrants and members of ethnic minorities around the world (see for example:

Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999, Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010, Witte 2017, Morosanu and Fox 2013, Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Holtz, Dahinden, and Wagner 2013).

Following Lamont et al. (2016: 6), I conceive stigmatisation as “a wide range of subjective experiences, namely, incidents in which respondents experienced disrespect and their dignity, honor, relative status, or sense of self was challenged.” Such situations arise, for example, when people feel insulted, negatively stereotyped, underestimated, subjected to jokes, neglected or ignored (Lamont et al. 2016). This approach represents another way of exploring ethnicity and nationhood. In particular, it makes it possible to examine the consequences of the ethnic and national classification of individuals and the reactions they trigger in terms of ethnic, national or other forms of discursive constructions (Morosanu and Fox 2013, Dahinden 2012).

Migration scholars have in particular demonstrated how foreign-born people are often subject to stigmatisation and negative stereotypes in their country of settlement (see for example Morosanu and Fox 2013, Ryan 2010, Portes 1999). Migrants might be the target of different types of stigmatisation regarding, for example, their socio-economic status, occupation or legal condition (Morosanu and Fox 2013). In Switzerland, Italian migrants were stigmatised and ethnicised due to “what was perceived to be improper behaviour in public space” in the early years of migration between the 1950s and 1970s (Wessendorf 2008: 206). While stigmatisation against “Italians” has completely disappeared in Switzerland today, the “Italians” have been replaced by migrants of Muslim origin (Wessendorf 2008). They are perceived as unable to integrate fully into Swiss society on the grounds of essentialised constructions that focus on strict, unequal gender relationships and other family-related questions (Wessendorf 2008).

Responses to stigmatisation might be classified into two main types: situational reactions and boundary work responses (Witte 2017). The first category includes direct reactions to stigmatisation, such as confronting the stigmatisers and de-emphasising or ignoring the stigmatisation (Witte 2017). The second category does not include direct reactions to a particular act of stigmatisation but rather discursive strategies that situate one according to specific categories (Witte 2017). By scrutinising how individuals respond to stigmatisation, the researcher will be in a position to analyse the boundary negotiation processes (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Wimmer 2008a, Morosanu and Fox 2013). In this section, I will start by examining boundary work theory and then survey the different forms of possible responses. I will not, however, examine the situational reactions, as these were not important in this research, that was mainly based on interviews.

Academics have frequently resorted to a boundary approach to explain the different practices and discourses that result in national identification, national and ethnic positioning or ethnic and gender inequalities (Lamont and Molnar 2002). This approach makes it possible to avoid theories that see ethnicity as fixed and given by birth (Wimmer 2008a, Lamont and Molnar 2002). Based on the work of sociologists and ethnologists like Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Frederik Barth, the boundary perspective recognises that “nation” or “ethnicity” are “not primarily conceived as a matter of relations between pre-defined, fixed groups […] but rather as a process of constituting and re-configuring groups by defining the boundaries between them” (Wimmer 2008a: 1027). The boundaries are the result of the contests and negotiations between the actors within a particular social field over shared representations and social classification (Wimmer 2008a).

This theory has been complemented by sociologists (Lamont and Molnar 2002) and particularly by Jenkins (2008: 42), who has demonstrated the “internal-external dialectic” that produces both group identification and categorisation. On the one hand, in their relationships with others, individuals define common standards and develop a sense of group belonging with other individuals. On the other hand, they are (or not) defined and identified by others as a collective formation with particular traits, so identification is constituted by a double process of self-definition and external categorisation (Jenkins 2008). Self and external self-definition can be mutually reinforcing while, in some cases, they might not match (Jenkins 2008). Thus, people might be assigned to unwanted categories that they do not identify with or share. Furthermore, Barth (1969) has underlined how the boundaries can be constructed on varying “cultural stuff”.

In the particular case of nationhood, the existence of a national “imagined community”

(Anderson 1989) is commonly established around a constructed common past and traditions (see Hobsbawm 1995, Schöpflin 2000, Eriksen 2002). Frequently, these particular attributes are expressed through narratives that define who does and does not belong to the group (Somers 1994). Smith (2000: 67), for example, explained:

Of particular importance are myths, symbols, and memories of ethnic origins, election, homeland, and the golden age… Along with shared memories, these ancestry myths define the distinctive character of specific ethnies. The myth of being ancestrally related, even if it is purely fictive and ideological in character, endows the members of a community with a powerful sense of belonging.

Similarly, individuals within migrants’ populations might develop narratives that offer a self-definition regarding a particular group and differentiate it from others. Such narratives are often based on a constructed history of the group. It creates the particular group on the basis of its perceived past as the “cultural stuff”. Recently, two different concepts have emerged in order to distinguish these forms of meta-narratives: “diaspora memory” and “exilic memory”

(Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013: 687). The former emerged in order to describe a collective representation of the past that “is not structured by a narration of the point of origin per se but, rather, is the outcome of a collective migratory trajectory, with the diaspora’s sense of distinctiveness, and of forming a minority, having thus appeared throughout the course of their emigration” (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013: 687). The “diasporic memory”

contrasts with the “exilic memory”, seen as a shared representation that emphasises forced emigration from the homeland (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013). These two concepts testify to the current “imaginaries of belonging” (Huyssen 2003: 150) constituted by the individuals sharing them. The type of memory chosen and the specific events remembered (and forgotten) reflect the group’s position “towards the ‘others’, be they sending and receiving state authorities, or other diasporic groups” (Lacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013: 689).

Turning now to the responses to stigmatisation, scholars have demonstrated that individuals are not only the passive victims of external categorisations and attributions but that they also resort to various strategies in order to cope with and fight against the demeaning images applied to them. Andreas Wimmer (2008a), in particular, has underlined the malleability and changing-nature of boundaries and individuals’ positions. Wimmer (2008a) identifies five types of ethnic boundary-making strategies, defined as “different ways in which individual and collective actors can relate to an existing, established mode of classification and closure, and how they can attempt to enforce their vision of the legitimate divisions of society” (Wimmer 2013: 44).

These are: 1- the expansion of the boundary to incorporate further members; 2- the contraction of the boundary to reduce membership; 3- the transvaluation that implies a normative change;

4- individual or collective boundary crossing; and 5- blurring the boundaries by emphasising other attributes of belonging (Wimmer 2013). While the first two strategies seek to modify the position of the boundaries, the latter three do not challenge their location but, rather, attempt to change their meaning or influence by contesting the hierarchical order of the categories, shifting one’s location in respect to the boundary or asserting other categories besides ethnicity (Wimmer 2008a). As this last strategy reveals, migrants might respond not only in ethnic or

national terms but also according to other categories, such as class, gender, religion or profession (Dahinden 2012).

Research shows that stigmatised people are not free to choose which strategy they wish to follow. They are especially constrained by the context in which they are embedded. Indeed, as emphasised by several authors (Wimmer 2008a, Dahinden and Zittoun 2013), boundary work does not occur in a vacuum but in a specific environment that influences individuals’ responses.

First, the capacity to impose, resist, maintain and affirm self-definition and external categorisation rely on the power relations developed in the specific contexts (Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010). For example, in Switzerland, there exists a widely-shared and institutionalised picture of the “Albanians” based on negative and essentialised notions of culture, tradition and gender (in)equality (Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010). Given the very broad acceptance and normalisation of the boundaries that exclude Albanian-speakers from the majority group, individuals face great barriers when attempting to change this situation (Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010). Second, people rely on the discourses available in their environment to craft their responses. For example, with regard to migration, they might rely on the “political traditions and public narratives” shared in their immediate surroundings as well as on the further discourses on migrants conveyed in their national and transnational environments (Dahinden, Duemmler, and Moret 2014: 34).

Finally, a review of the literature within migration studies on stigmatisation shows that the majority of scholars continue to focus on the situation of migrants in their country of settlement despite the transnational turn in migration studies. They concentrate on the different forms of discrimination and stigmatisation as well as the responses to these acts in the country of settlement of migrants. In some cases, researchers have turned to analyses that incorporate the transnational character of the responses made to stigmatisation in the country of establishment.

Landolt et al. (1999), for example, demonstrate how the hostile reception of Salvadorians in the United States in the 1980s strengthened their need to sustain a relationship with their homeland.

Several scholars have also demonstrated the tensions, divisions and misunderstandings between migrants and non-migrants originating from the same country (see for example: Morosanu 2012, Wessendorf 2007). Scholars have, however, only rarely looked in detail at the responses given to these differences and more specifically the stigmatisation in both the country of origin and the transnational space in which the migrants’ practices might be embedded. Only very recently has a researcher underlined the “double-sided othering” of migrants in both the home

and host countries and scrutinised the responses to stigmatisation (Genova 2017: 37). This article has shown that migrants must negotiate their position contextually between their countries of establishment and origin respectively (Genova 2017).

In the second article presented in this study, I examine the narratives of homeland engagement as one type of response made by the former activists to the stigmatisation in their homeland.

Based on Lamont et al. (2016: 6), I conceive a particular form of stigmatisation: the challenges to the “relative status” of the former activists through situations of neglect, lack of recognition and stereotyping. Following Wimmer (2008a), I conceive the responses to stigmatisation as boundary-work strategies and follow the typology that he suggests. I thus scrutinise the strategies adopted by the former activists in order to be accepted into the “Albanian nation”.

Moreover, I add a transnational perspective to the analysis by considering the forms of stigmatisation and responses that occur in a social field that broadly stretches between Switzerland and Kosovo.