Superdiversity changes the world and people in it

One of the long-established identity categories has been ethnicity, which is related to belonging to a particular cultural group. Ethnic identity is a social construct used as a “frame in which individuals identify consciously or unconsciously with those with whom they feel a common bond because of similar traditions, behaviors, values, and beliefs.” (Chávez and Guido-DiBrito, 1999, 39)

"We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race." – Kofi Annan

However, this construct has been used interchangeably with the concept of racial identity, which used to viewed in biological terms (ibid), but can also be viewed as a social construct regarding a sense of group belonging among people from a particular racial group (ibid). An explication of the interchangeable use of this concept has been illustrated in a paper by Phillimore et al. (2010). In their work, they analyse a superdiverse situation in a Birmingham neighbourhood, where they state: “At this time the largest ethnic group was white (37%) followed by Indian (19%), Black (15%) and Pakistani (14%)” (ibid, p. 8). A question of the definition of ethnicity, racial identity and nationality and of generalization arises here. Can we really say that all 'white' people share traditions and beliefs? 'White' people, from all parts of the globe, differ in language, traditions, behaviour, culture among others. The same question can be asked about 'black' people within the aforementioned categories. Furthermore, how can the categories of ‘white’ and ‘black’ be parts of the same classification with categories ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’, which refer to countries rather than to mere skin colour?

 

Back to top

Challenges of identification with a group

These problematic questions point out the complexity of the contemporary world and show the rigidness and inadequacy of usage of the traditional categories characterizing identity. At present, migration patterns include more countries of origin, as well as more countries of destination. At the same time, motives and patterns of residence vary to great extent (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011, p. 1). A mixture of these factors result in effects on the cultural organisation of societies, where the ‘features’ and ‘characteristics’ of migrants are unpredictable (ibid). If we are to explore superdiversityits implications and realitythere emerges the need to rethink and redescribe the obsolete categories and characteristics and instead, focus on fluidity of the varied phenomena.

Hammack (2008) explains why the identification with a group may be challenging, especially in the economic sphere of globalization, and what difficulties it can bring: 

“individuals can no longer look to their local communities for assurance of security because local economies are linked to one another in the larger global economy. With exposure to globalization comes the greater possibility of identity conflicts both between and within individual…” (ibid, p. 225)

Self-categorization in the realm of social identity is based on shared similarities with other people belonging to particular social categories, as opposed to other social categories (Turner et al., 1994, p. 454). However, this categorization is not strictly fixed, but rather exhibits “relative, varying, context-dependent properties” (ibid, p. 456). It can be argued that instead of looking at cultural groups as boxes, we can see them as permeable entities. The reason is that social identities of many of the post-1991 migrants cannot be contained into those boxes, and should be considered as depending on context.

Take, for instance, a simple  of a child, born in the Netherlands, who is a daughter of Turkish-born immigrants living in the Netherlands. She has Dutch citizenship but she may identify herself as a Turkish while in the Netherlands, based on her blood ties, language spoken at home, or some degree of stigmatization from the majority society. On the other hand, on arrival to Turkey, she may not feel as a part of the group, due to, for example, an accent while speaking Turkish, and therefore, starts feel more like a Dutch person. Which group does she belong to, then? There is no clear answer and the social identity of this child cannot be seen as fixed, but rather as dependent on situation.

 

Back to top

Omnipresence of superdiversity

Although Vertovec “sought closer attention to the human, cultural and social intricacies of globalisation, focusing on very specific migrant trajectories, identities, profiles, networking, status, training and capacities” (Rampton et al., 2015, p. 4), when defining superdiversity, this term can be understood in a wider context of globalization, which is “the increasing interaction among and integration of diverse human societies in all important dimensions of their activities--economic, social, political, cultural, and religious” (Aninat, 2001). This interaction enables creation of flows and trajectories not only of migrating people, but also of markets, products and ideas in an extremely complex way. Superdiversity is, accordingly, “a term for the vastly increased range of resources, linguistic, religious, ethnic, cultural in the widest sense, that characterize late modern societies” (Jørgensen and Juffermans, 2011). Even in Slovakia, which had the lowest number of immigrants per 1,000 inhabitants in the European Union (Eurostat, 2015), is touched upon by superdiversity, in a sense that lives of those people are entwined, intentionally or not, with the rest of the world, whether through the internet, products used, food eaten, business, travelling and uncountable other activities.

 

In the future research of this phenomenon, it will be necessary to take into account the immense impact of superdiversity not only on the lives of the people who migrate and societies they live in, but also on understanding of the concepts of social identity and its subcategories, such as cultural or ethnic identity. These should be reconceptualized as variable, fluid and context-dependent, rather than hard-line and definite, as this understanding is insufficient in the contemporary fast-changing world of instability and transformation.