Community as Urban Practice by Talja Blokland

Author:Talja Blokland [Blokland, Talja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Importantly, intimacy does not have anything to do, theoretically, with positive and nice experiences. Intimacy constitutes a relational setting in which fine-grained but harsh boundaries with direct consequences for individuals can be easily drawn. Conflicts in families are good examples here, when the family honour is violated and members of the family are disowned, if not worse. Honour killings can be surrounded by secrecy, as in the case of Medine Memi, killed in Adiyaman, Turkey, for having male friends. Or they can take the form of public shaming when intimate behaviour becomes public; for instance women can be stoned to death for having an affair, as happens in Kismaayo, Somalia. Moreover, intimacy can produce a community that becomes suffocating: lack of control over information may impact our ability not to adhere to social norms, to follow our own wishes and ambitions, and to depart from what is seen as acceptable. Young gay people who perform their sexuality or are ‘found out’, or young people who date in circles in which dating is seen as unacceptable experience how harmful lack of control over one's personal information can be in certain communities. This is beautifully illustrated in Mustang (2015), a Turkish–French film directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. In this film five sisters in a small Turkish village are ‘caught’ playing in the sea with some male classmates from school; to the resulting gossip, their family reacts by depriving them of all their liberties. Two of them escape to the big city and become free in its anonymity. Again, space matters here: young Muslim women in a predominantly Arab part of a neighbourhood in Berlin, whom we visited in their school as part of one of our projects, reported going to the cinema in the most touristic part of the city rather than in their own neighbourhood, because they were able to cuddle with their boyfriends at low risk of being seen by people who knew them.

In the most anonymous relational settings, where control over information is highest, we typically do not find durable engagements or personal networks but rather fluid encounters. Fluid encounters are those interactions with others in which we meet only incidentally, as we happen to be in the same place at the same time as others, but we are not necessarily – although we could be – directed in our actions towards these others. They can include both transactions and interdependencies. Such encounters differ from durable engagements not just in that the latter often recur. They also come with different sets of expectations. In Blokland, Giustozzi and Krüger (2016), we show how sub-Saharan immigrants accessed resources through accidental, unplanned interactions with other ‘Africans’ on the subway; they expected at least to be greeted, because the other was ‘African too’. But they did not expect as much as they did from ‘brothers and sisters in the church’, with whom they were involved in durable engagements.

Boundary work takes place through performances in fluid encounters too, but is of a categorial nature

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.