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From Identity' To Belonging' in Social Research Plurality, Social Boundaries, and The Politics of The Self

The document presents a theory of belonging that emphasizes its dynamic nature, contrasting it with traditional identity research. It argues that belonging encompasses shared values, mutuality, and attachments, while also addressing the complexities of social boundaries and the politics surrounding inclusion and exclusion. The analysis draws on various fields, including ethnicity and immigration studies, to highlight the importance of understanding belonging in contemporary societies.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
16 views20 pages

From Identity' To Belonging' in Social Research Plurality, Social Boundaries, and The Politics of The Self

The document presents a theory of belonging that emphasizes its dynamic nature, contrasting it with traditional identity research. It argues that belonging encompasses shared values, mutuality, and attachments, while also addressing the complexities of social boundaries and the politics surrounding inclusion and exclusion. The analysis draws on various fields, including ethnicity and immigration studies, to highlight the importance of understanding belonging in contemporary societies.

Uploaded by

3liy85
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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European Scientific Journal, ESJ ISSN: 1857-7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857-7431 December 2020

Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

From ‘identity’ to ‘belonging’ in


social research: Plurality, social
boundaries, and the politics of
10 years ESJ the self
Special edition
Abstract
This text develops a theory of belonging
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka critically building upon identity-research -
Bielefeld University, Germany
while doing more justice to the dynamic
nature of social constellations and to the
Submitted: 31 August 2020
multipositionality of social actors. The
Accepted: 02 November 2020 concept of ‘belonging’ is introduced as a
Published: 31 December 2020 combination of commonality, mutuality,
and attachments. A vital opposition is
Corresponding author:
made between the collective
Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka constellations of belonging and the
DOI: 10.19044/esj.2020.v16n39p113 individual navigations through multiple
collective assemblages during the life
Copyright 2020 Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka
course. It is argued that these navigations
Distributed under Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND 4.0 OPEN ACCESS entail tackling manifold forms of
boundary dynamics as collective
belonging creates regimes that guard
collectivities against the outsiders and also
against the members’ attempts to abandon
‘their’ collectivities. The analysis draws
upon ethnicity research, immigration
research and globalisation research, i.e. in
fields where issues of belonging are as
vital as they are challenged, and therefore,
they are often politicized. Rather than
taking a specific collective belonging for
granted, e.g. ethnic, religious or national,
this contribution addresses the situated
nature of individual positionings, the
possibility of combining different
dimensions of belonging, and the
necessity to belong together in
contemporary societies.

Keywords: identity, belonging, social


boundaries, plurality, collectivities,
politics of the self

Cite as:
Pfaff-Czarnecka, J. (2020). From ‘identity’ to ‘belonging’ in social research: Plurality, social boundaries, and the
politics of the self. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 16(39), 113. https://doi.org/10.19044/esj.2020.v16n39p113
113
European Scientific Journal, ESJ ISSN: 1857-7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857-7431 December 2020
Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

Introduction
During his appeal hearing at the regional court in Dresden, Germany,
in July 2009, Alex Wiens, a right-wing extremist of Russian-German origin
attacked Marwa El-Sherbini with a knife, stabbing her to death. Marwa El-
Sherbini, a hijab-wearing 33 year-old academic of Egyptian origin – had taken
him to court for abusing her during an encounter on a children’s playground
in Dresden. Before killing her on the court’s premises, Alex Wiens asked
Marwa El-Sherbini what on earth she was doing in Germany. He also
confronted the authorities present in the courtroom, asking why, in the
aftermath of 9/11, Muslims were not deported in their entirety to where they
came from. “I could not understand,”- a direct quotation from his statement
during the subsequent murder trial in November 2009 – “why she came to
Germany, to this potentially unfaithful country that many Muslims hold in
contempt. I (Alex) came to Germany because I have German roots and
therefore this is my original home. I (Alex) could not understand” - and here
comes the sentence that I find particularly striking – “... I could not understand
why and how she could feel at home, here in Germany”.
Three facets of this testimony are in the forefront of this article1. First,
the importance of feeling at home. Currently, discourses of home and
belonging are abound in public communication and they increasingly inspire
academic research. Given its current attraction, it will be the aim of this text
to reflect upon the concept of belonging and to propose analytical tools for
capturing its salience. The empirical backdrop of this inquiry will consist
mostly of Western immigrant contexts, but this reflection is meant to
accommodate other social constellations as well. Second, the heavily and
emotionally charged quest to belong is perennially impeded by others and
systemically restricted. When she was murdered, Marwa El-Sherbini was
ultimately denied making Germany her home. Alex Wiens – as can be inferred
- could not imagine feeling at home in Germany when people like Marwa felt
comfortable there. Belonging is thus an object of continuous negotiations
between individuals and collectivities. This results in tensions and
accommodations as well as an on-going process of setting, transcending, and
blurring social boundaries. In order to understand belonging, it is crucial to
know how it evolves within the protective confines of a specific life-world and

1
Some ideas underlying this article were jointly developed together with Gérard Toffin (see
the jointly written ‘Introduction: Belonging and Multiple Attachments in Contemporary
Himalayan Societies’, Pfaff-Czarnecka and Toffin (2011)). Nevertheless, this is a novel
approach, going far beyond the scope of the previous text, concentrating on Western
immigrant societies, and considering individual aspects of belonging in particular. The author
should like to thank Peter Geschiere, Lara Jüssen, Raphael Susewind and Richard
Wartenweiler for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this text.

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

how it is restricted within asymmetric power relations between those included


and those remaining outside – with the modalities of inclusion and exclusion
being two sides of the same coin (Luhmann 1997).
Third, Alex Wien’s suspicion that an Egyptian Muslim could feel at
home in Germany reveals – unintentionally – that it is possible to belong to a
new social place when one’s origins are elsewhere, and that it is possible to
belong when one’s identity (in this case, religious identity) does not conform
to the national mainstream. We need to distinguish, therefore, between
‘identity’ and ‘belonging’. Both concepts are often used interchangeably –
which is empirically confusing and analytically wrong. Would it serve a
purpose to introduce the new term ‘belonging’ into social research if the old
‘collective identity’ was enough?
It is obvious that it wasn not, and that it is not only important to
distinguish both terms analytically, but also to delve into the implications of
this distinction for envisaging the possibilities of living together in the
transnationalised contemporary world. As will be argued here, the concept of
belonging, while taking up important preoccupations of the identity-concept,
does more justice to the complexities, dynamics, and subtleties of human
interrelating, to its situative and processual character than that of ‘collective
identity’.
This analysis develops a theory of belonging by drawing upon the
author’s empirical research conducted over the last four decades. The different
phases of research always centered on collective orderings, boundary
dynamics and the tension between individual freedom and the safety
collectivites can offer to their members: caste-system and ethnicity formation
in Nepal (see especially Pfaff-Czarnecka 1989; Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. 1999;
Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. 2007; Gellner et al. 2008); accommodation of religious
difference in middle European immigration societies (see especially Pfaff-
Czarnecka 2009); critical social movements (see especially Pfaff-Czarnecka
2007; Gerharz and Pfaff-Czarnecka 2017) and globalisation of social spaces
under the conditions of mobility (see especially Toffin and Pfaff-Czarnecka
2014). Thus, methodologically, the theory of belonging presented here builds
a bridge for the previous analyses of collective constellations.

What is belonging?
What is belonging? To put it briefly: belonging is an emotionally-
charged social location. People belong together when they share values,
relations, and practices (Anthias 2006: 21). Belonging is a central dimension
of life that is easily felt and tacitly experienced and very difficult to capture
through analytical categories. Nevertheless, given the growing scholarly
interest in this notion, it is worth trying to do so. In my view, belonging as an
emotionally charged social location combines (1) perceptions and

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Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

performances of commonality; (2) a sense of mutuality and more or less


formalized modalities of collective allegiance, and (3) material and immaterial
attachments that often result in a sense of entitlement. How these dimensions
come to intersect, that is “when do we belong?”, is an empirical question that
can be explored once we have agreed on their centrality for grasping this
notion.
Before proceeding further, it is important to differentiate between the
individual’s relation to a collective, on the one hand, and collective belonging,
on the other. The German language makes a clear-cut distinction here that is
not immediately discernible in the English word ‘belonging’. The German
term Zugehörigkeit denotes an individual’s belonging to a collective (as does
the French term ‘appartenance’ – that with its connotation ‘à part’ pinpoints a
tension inherent in belonging, namely a distance between the self and a we-
collective); whereas Zusammengehörigkeit stands for ‘togetherness’. This
distinction becomes of interest when one shifts the perspective from group
dynamics geared at maintaining the collective status quo to a consideration of
an individual’s embeddedness in a collective, e.g. seeking access to it or trying
to abandon it. While distinguishing ‘belonging with’ (Zusammengehörigkeit)
from ‘belonging to’ (Zugehörigkeit), this text starts with the former – that
ideally combines commonality, mutuality and attachment.

Commonality
‘Commonality’ is a perception of sharing, notably, sharing a common
lot as well as cultural forms (language, religion, and lifestyle), values,
experiences, and memory constructions. It is individually felt and embodied
while collectively negotiated and performed. Commonality is often perceived
through a social boundary-horizon that helps discern between the insiders and
the outsiders. It thus relies on categorisations, mental checkpoints, everyday
life distinctions, and public representations that often buttress the collective
boundary-maintenance (Migdal 2004). This is precisely where commonality
is likely to attain the form of collective identity that requires the other / the
outside for engendering a perception of internal sameness. But we must not
restrict our understanding of ‘commonality’ to ‘collective identity’.

Excursion: reaching beyond the lens of ‘identity constructions’


Human preoccupations with ‘identity’ – be it collective activism, the
language used in everyday talk, or even academic research and analysis – have
been inundated by the individual and collective aspirations and resulting
positionings, normative considerations and the actions derived from this
notion (Jenkins 1996). On the one hand, ‘identity’ seems to have acquired a
natural property, becoming essentialized and reified, by being so extensively
invoked during the past decades. While on the other hand, the incredible boom

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

of this term has instigated a great deal of critique, that was best formulated by
Brubaker and Cooper (2000). In their seminal, ‘Beyond “identity”’, they make
a number of important observations: first, the term ‘identity’ has become so
ubiquitous, combining ‘categories of practice’ with ‘categories of analysis’,
that it carries a huge number of connotations. “Identity,” they argue, “tends to
mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when
understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity)”
(2000: 1). Second, given the substantial range in the meanings used by actors
and by scholars, the central connotations of this term can clash with one
another as is the case with essentialising vis-à-vis constructivist approaches.
Third, ‘collective identity’ transports homogenising notions of commonality
and it endorses methodological ethnicization by delineating clear-cut
collective boundaries of the social.
Most important is Brubaker’s and Cooper’s contention that ‘identity’
does not do justice to the full range of human forms shaped by commonality,
mutuality and affiliations / attachments such as self-understanding or
connectedness. Still, to suggest abanding the term ‘identity’ would be to enter
into a struggle against windmills. It is more fruitful, therefore, to sharpen the
analytical tools when venturing into the preoccupation with ‘belonging’ – a
term that is more and more present in everyday use and that recently has
become the object of a rapidly growing number of academic inquiries. The
term does not have more analytical precision than that of ‘identity’, but
capturing this term will help scholars to uncover the multiple, subtle and
shifting modalities of forging and thinking about the collective dimensions of
social life and the dynamic nature of social boundary-making.
It is important to highlight some major differences between ‘identity’
and ‘belonging’: ‘Identity’ is a categorical concept while ‘belonging’
combines categorisation with social relations. Identity is relational in the sense
that it positions itself vis-à-vis the other. Belonging’s relationality consists in
forging and maintaining social ties and in buttressing commitments and
obligations. Identity caters to dichotomous characterisations of the social
while belonging rather highlights its situatedness and the multiplicity of
parameters forging commonality, mutuality, and attachments. Identity relies
on sharp boundary-drawing, particularism, and is prone to buttressing social
divisiveness. Theorists may argue otherwise, for instance deploying the
concept of identification that, unlike ‘identity’, entails situative and processual
connotations; at the same time, identity politics have time and again revealed
the exclusionary properties entailed in this notion. As has often been the case,
the politics of belonging (see also below) are equally prone to affecting social
exclusion as well as the opposite - widening borders, incorporating former
outsiders, and defining new common grounds. This is precisely one of the

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Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

reasons why the notion of belonging currently enjoys growing popularity in


migration research.
Coming back to the discussion of commonality, one can infer that the
term ‘identity’ highlights homogeneity of any given collective unit, whereas
‘belonging’ stresses commonness, but not necessarily sameness. Commonness
tends to build upon a common cultural denominator, but it can also be created
anew and re-shaped. The former German President Christian Wulff created
quite an uproar when he expressed his conviction that Islam has a place in
Germany (“Islam gehört zu Deutschland”). This statement is a perfect
example of future-oriented possibilities in forging belongingness by
incorporating new elements into the existing parameters of togetherness. In
this vein, one important aspect of belonging is the commonality of purpose.
For this reason, important characteristics of commonness entailed in the
concept of belonging are mutuality, commitment and ‘something’ that is
collectively at stake. The commonality entailed in belonging can be conceived
by actors that especially relate to the past and, therefore, caters to nostalgia
(see Geschiere 2009), but it can also be future-oriented – as Kannabiran
claims, seeing not only the possibilities of being, but also of becoming in
‘belonging’. As will be discussed below, the politics of belonging often entail
a visionary element geared toward re-shaping the individual or collective
social location. By contrast, the politics of identity claim an established
collective narrative that seeks its political realisation. The dynamic properties
of belonging are entailed in its multidimensional composition; in the
‘thickness’ of this term.
Commonality is a multi-layered condition, but the academic focus on
collective identities has narrowed down its understanding. The concept of
belonging underlines that people share significantly more than merely
common identity markers. Belonging together – whether sharing collective
identity or not – means sharing experience and of what goes without saying,
the tacit self-evidence of being, jointly taking things for granted and sharing
common knowledge and meanings. It is important to stress this point because
shared meanings undergo continuous change. Belonging evolves in social life
worlds where collective knowledge reservoirs are perennially recreated in
social interactions. They are realised in social practices, in established
modalities of negotiation, conflict, compromise and accommodation, and also
in a continuous overt and covert reflection on the validity of norms that persist
in a given social world. Shared are the continuous negotiations over any social
life world’s modalities as habitualised, institutionalised and legitimized. They
can crystallise in common boundary perceptions through identity politics, but
also open up and blur social boundaries (Zolberg and Long, 1999).

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Special Edition: Contemporary Sri Lankan Society and Politics: Felicitation volume in honour of renowned Sri
Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

Mutuality
Shared understandings significantly buttress the sense of mutuality –
the second dimension of belonging. Norms steering mutual expectations and
obligations create common horizons in the here and now, stabilising them as
norms of reciprocity, loyalty, and commitment. Mutuality means
acknowledging the other which often results in compliance to rules ordering
social relations (Simmel 1908, Weber 1921; Tyrell 2008). Families expect
obedience and loyalty as well as pooling of resources. Associations and
organisations expect participation, acceptance of common goals, and a
sufficient contribution of time and resources. Belonging to a nation means
sharing in a given polity’s well-being and enjoying civic rights, while
reciprocating via performing civic duties, in particular, by paying taxes. To
enter a national space and durably remain, migrants need to present themselves
as particularly deserving. Also cliques and friends jealously monitor a mutual
allocation of obligations and debts. These calculations - that can be more overt
or covert - result in ‘regimes of belonging’, that is institutionalised patterns
insisting upon investments of time and resources, loyalty and commitments –
the ‘prices’ people have to pay for belonging together, and when these ‘prices’
are not paid, most collectives can resort to sanctions, such as exclusion or
ostracism.
The unlikely term, ‘regimes of belonging’, combines the cosiness of
the human forms of commonality, the warmth of communitarian existence,
with its putative opposite, i.e. ‘regime’ as something authoritative and
constricting. A ‘regime’ is, according to the political scientist Stephen Krasner
(1982), a „set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-
making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area
of international relations“. Any self-imposed rules can be equally
overwhelming and oppressive as those imposed by external rule. ‘Own rules’
within communitarian patterns can be even more imposing as consent and
subjugation represent themselves as voluntary – i.e. voluntary
acknowledgment of the authority and wisdom of the (often male) elders. In
transnational immigrant regimes, the valid norms are forged by members of
the national we-groups (Elwert 1997; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2009) that also extend
to immigrants. Most newcomers usually do not fit into the national
frameworks of values and norms and do not share cultural repertoires – at least
in the perception of the autochthonous population. Under these conditions,
forging civic commonality is an onerous process.
Both, social inclusion and social exclusion underlie regimes of
belonging. All bounded collective units, e.g. states, ethnic and religious
organisations, associations and families, make use of devices buttressing
commonality, mutuality, and attachments while simultaneously excluding
outsiders. States, in particular, have a tremendous regulatory force - guarding

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

boundaries, regulating access criteria and the modalities of stay, and


demanding the performance of numerous duties from denizens. Migrants
coming to Western metropoles must show themselves to be ‘deserving’. If
they do not enjoy full citizenship rights, migrants endure a restricted set of
rights while performing the full range of civic duties expected from people
living in a given national territory. While paying taxes and when formally
employed usually enjoying social rights at the place of destination, immigrants
are incorporated into frameworks of generalised reciprocity (re-distribution of
taxes), but are often denied creating attachments through restrictions of buying
land and restrictions of displaying their ‘being there’ – as the Swiss debate of
the minarets has revealed (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2009).
Regimes of belonging are not only structured by restrictive state rules,
whereas, public opinion is often dominated by voices celebrating the
inlanders’ cultural authority in determining values and norms underpinning
the national or local commonality. The more mistrust vis-à-vis aliens, the less
public acknowledgment of their presence and the more suspicion that a
migrant would not know how to socially navigate in his or her new home, the
more cumbersome the process is of creating new belonging in a new place.
“Your homeland is where you can offer criticism” – This phrase, formulated
by a migrant of Greek origin living in Switzerland, perfectly brings to light the
intricacies of belonging and the subtle power of immigration regimes.

Attachments
Attachments, the third dimension discerned here, follow different
patterns in creating belonging (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2010). Attachments link
people to material and immaterial worlds (Flinders 2002; hooks 2009).
Attachments make people belong to spaces and sites, natural objects,
landscapes, climates, and material possessions. These are forged through such
disparate links as embodiment, resonance of smells and tastes (as with Marcel
Proust’s famous Madeleine) as well as rights and citizenship, and in particular,
property rights. Growing up in a locality can create a strong sense of belonging
– and so does the ownership of land or a house. Whenever people leave an
airplane, they are told: ‘take your belongings with you’ – which brings one
property of material attachments to light. It is difficult to forge attachments,
but they can be created. Religious sites such as cemeteries and places of
worship can be conducive here. Muslim immigrants have for instance created
such places of attachment in many European places, but they usually had to
struggle hard for this. Denying immigrants the right to erect visible religious
structures marking their durable presence in the places of their arrival – as
happened through the Swiss federal vote against the minarets - expressed the
Swiss majority’s reluctance to accept that Muslims could make Switzerland
their new home.

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

In their combination, commonality, mutuality, and attachments


stabilise belonging, rendering collective sociability durable. They forge a
strong and binding sense of naturalness that is obvious to the insiders and
keeps the outsiders at bay. Claims to normality / naturalness of a given social
order reduce complexity by clearly discerning between the inside and the
outside. And this state of affairs is likely to institutionalise power relations
governing the social life between and also within any given collective. Shared
knowledge, practices and norms are products of sometimes restrictive social
practices and of unequally distributed chances and resources. Therefore,
belonging often comes at the price of subjugation vis-à-vis norms guiding and
guarding the collective life. To put it simply: belonging can be cosy, but also
exclusionary and oppressive. It almost always comes at a price.

Creating belonging
To belong in the modern world means to reflexively consider the
meaning of home and a person’s sense of place. Time and again, individual
and collective belonging have been encroached upon, challenged, fought
about, and protected. State rule, market forces, forced displacement,
transnationalisation, pluralisation, acceleration of social change, and the
widening horizon of human aspirations have rendered belonging contested –
from outside and from within. The more it is contested and made explicit, the
less likely it is to just be and tacitly shared. The value, then, can lie in keeping
one’s protected space, often at the high price of self-subjugation under the
governmentality of their own collective as well as at the price of excluding
others. Also, people oftentimes, jealously guard the boundaries of the small
world of their we-collective. The other option of belonging is to render the
boundaries of the social permissible, creating space for negotiations of new
and expanded meanings of mutuality and togetherness.
And yet there is another – highly interesting - property of belonging,
namely, the possibility to forge new ties of collective boundedness. The
concept of belonging provides a tool to inquire how horizons of togetherness
are and can be widened to incorporate newcomers – how to extend collective
we-understanding by including former strangers. In the climate of politically
charged passions about belonging, social exclusion seems to be a norm in
shaping relationships between we-groups and those considered outsiders.
Nevertheless, throughout history all around the world, new constellations of
belonging have been forged and will continue to come into existence in the
future. Bounded and exclusive belonging becomes increasingly problematic,
given the pluralising nature of contemporary societies and given the
differentiated character of any given collective social space that the regimes
of belonging seek to cover up.

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

The multiplicity of belonging


So far, this text highlighted the bonding properties of belonging as they
are found, for instance, in the common understanding of ethnic groups. But it
is necessary to distinguish between ethnicity’s (or nation’s or a family’s) self-
representations, on the one hand, and the properties of relations within
collectivities, on the other. The multifaceted and dense concept of belonging
allows us to disentangle collectivizing notions such as ethnicity for at least
three reasons. First, from the point-of-view of social actors, belonging is
always multiple. Any given constellation of boundedness competes with other
constellations of belonging that vie with each other for membership and their
members’ commitments. Second, coming back to the distinction between
‘belonging with’ and ‘belonging to’, it is crucial to conceptualise belonging as
created by individual persons in negotiated collective constellations, or put
another way, how people navigate through the diverse constellations of
belonging they encounter in their life-courses. Third, collectives are internally
differentiated. Taking ethnicity as one life-world is highly misleading, given
the internal plurality that accompanies the intersections of socio-economic
differentiation, gender, spatial distribution, and internal subdivisions by
language, dialect or religion as well as all kinds of personal orientations such
as political leanings or sexuality - that may collide with community norms.
Belonging in today’s world is a complex affair; ethnicity is a case
inpoint. As soon as one goes beyond groupist representations, (to use Rogers
Brubaker’s concept) ethnic collectives are characterized by internal plurality.
Within any given collective unit, everyone differs in his or her social location
and positionality. Gender, socio-economic status, political networks,
resources and convictions, geographic location, lifestyle and aspirations,
skills, profession and organisational memberships, religion and other
commitments make for internal differentiations as well as for a multiplication
of personal spaces to which one belongs in any given moment.
The concept of belonging provides an analytical tool to see collective
boundedness as structured by regimes of belonging, catering to, for instance,
identity representations, while simultaneously pointing to the possibilities of
moving across social boundaries as well as the options for negotiating their
meanings. The discussion has been centred so far on the collective dimensions
of belonging – be that nation-states, ethnic groups, associations, or families,
all are acting as regimes of belonging. Exclusions, dichotomisations,
particularist orientations and clearly delineated boundedness are important
properties of such constellations, highly buttressed by identity politics. In
order to understand how we-constellations widen their horizons and how they
may render their boundaries permissible, it is important to reverse the point of
observation and to grasp how people navigate between the diverse
constellations of belonging over the courses of their lives.

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Lankan Sociologist Professor ST Hettige

From the point of view of the individual, belonging is always multiple,


and should be evident from the above discussion. Throughout the life-course,
everyone copes with the interplay between commonality, mutuality, and
attachment by living simultaneously and subsequently in diverse
constellations of belonging. Some forms of collective boundedness are
ascribed – such as within family or one’s ethnic group; others are acquired –
such as belonging to a university, a class, or a profession. Some are more
exclusive (family, religion) than others (a hobby-club). Some forms of
belonging are easier to obtain than, say, naturalization in an immigrant
country. Some forms of intersectionality are easier to combine than others –
think of a white male Anglo-Saxon American Protestant, on the one hand, and
a well educated hijab-wearing Muslim in Dresden, on the other.
Over the course of time, everyone’s belonging will shift. People go to
school, study, learn a profession, and enter a working place. A person probably
will marry or enter a partnership and from then on, less time is available for
friends and relatives in the nuclear home. People acquire new status vis-à-vis
their relatives and peers; they position themselves anew. Some passages in the
life-course demand abandoning a former location of belonging. This
especially holds true for people who are socially mobile: time and again people
of low socio-economic status are accused of treachery by their former peers
for climbing the social ladder. Elites usually do not suffer this kind of
alienation. An underprivileged socio-economic background – the key
dimension of inequality, besides gender and race – is likely to impose special
restrictions upon an individual. The writer, Bruno Preisendörfer, described,
using his own life as an example, how higher education can cause children of
parents with little formal education to be alienated from the nuclear home. One
of the many privileges of children from upper strata - besides the material
benefits and the ability to combine cultural dispositions and to simultaneously
move in different social spaces – is that they are not compelled to change
milieu while acquiring higher education.
In today’s world, (1) people can simultaneously belong to two or more
countries; (2) they can change belonging while passing through different
stages in life – changing age groups and passing through different stages of
status. (3) There is a situational multiplicity – people divide their time between
home, school, friends, hobbies, and religious organisations. (4) There are also
diverse horizons of belonging: family, ethnic group, nation-state, and the
world – and these horizons can coexist in a manner that is full of tensions.
Some forms of belonging are significantly more durable and
constraining. The estates of the Middle Ages come immediately to mind as a
form of social ordering leaving little room for manoeuvre. The Hindu caste
society continues to be similarly restrictive, but some degree of social mobility
is currently observable in India and Nepal. Some dimensions of collective

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boundedness such as ethnicity and religion appear to be perennial and


overpowering upon individuals, but in fact, such ascriptive dimensions can be
chosen by those individuals. It is an empirical question whether a person opts
for engaging in ethnic activism, whether she strives to abandon or at least
reduce her allegiance to the communal ties, or whether she is compelled to
abide to communitarian rules having hardly any choice.
The personal navigation through the diverse constellations of
belonging consists of more or less conscious choices. Also, people encounter
more or less permissible or restrictive rooms for manoeuvre in the process of
constructing the self when they develop new normative orientations, when
they engage in negotiations and when they position themselves socially.
Belonging is hard work, and means maintaining relations and displaying
loyalty and commitment. Diverse belongings must be combined and are
usually weighed against each other. For any person, it is a central question
which constellations of belonging create new possibilities and which have
rather restrictive effects. Today’s societies are so heterogeneous that it is
impossible to assess which forms of collective boundedness open doors and
which erect tight boundaries, i.e. which forms of collective boundedness have
an ‚enabling’ or a ‚constraining’ bearing upon people.
There is a myriad of tight boundaries and restrictions impacting
personal navigation. Creating new belongings can be especially cumbersome.
William Crowley (1999) describes belonging using the metaphor of a disco
that people want to gain entry to. Outside, at the door of the disco, people
queue asking to be allowed inside. Similar imaginary queues can be found at
the borders of immigration countries. The aspirants are to present documents,
then they are assessed regarding how they will fit in and they need some
money. Whether they are deemed suitable will be evaluated through more or
less explicit criteria. There is a significant disproportion between the ‘inside’
and the ‘outside’. The more exclusive the entrance standards are and the more
you stand in the cold, the more you desire access. And the opposite may be
true as well. The Jewish comedian, Groucho Marx, once said that he would
not want to join a club that was desperate enough to accept people like him.
But what if the club a person has entered does not want this person to
leave? This is a frequent constellation. All kinds of minorities have faced such
severe pressures that they close their ranks and jealously guard collective
boundaries – e.g., ruling against exogamous marriage. Family offers
protection, recognition, and warmth, but demands that members are firmly
committed demanding loyalty, consensus, and often subordination. Clubs and
organisations and all kinds of former peers accuse their members of
dissidence, or even treachery, when they try to sever mutual ties, and oscillate
in the direction of another life-world.

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It is therefore necessary to consider the challenges people face when


trying to get out of “their” collective. Such situations are not unusual. Facing
majoritarian challenges, minorities often feel compelled to guard their
boundaries, from outside and from within. Minority members often face
restrictions when opting for an exogamous marriage, when not abiding to
communitarian norms (e.g. being homosexual) or when trying to lessen the
confines of collective belonging by spatially moving away. Enjoying the
warmth, solidarity and protection of one’s nuclear home and / or the extended
network of kinship comes at the price of loyalty, displays of consensus (often
submission) and the pooling of resources. Remaining inside entails displays
of being – or displays of pretending to be – alike, which poses particular
problems for those who have partly moved into new social spaces, especially
while acquiring higher education or when opting for alternative forms of
living. ‘Belonging together’ restricts attempts at social boundary-crossing
(Lamont 2002) from outside and from within. In the same vein, collective
belonging is under siege from outside and from within.
On the one hand, the desire to ‘belong to’ confronts people with the
rules of collective boundedness, of ‘belonging with’. On the other hand, it is
through personal navigation that constellations of ‘belonging with’ change
their shape, and one effect of personal navigation is that collective boundaries
may come under stress. Recent research on processes of collective boundary-
maintenance has indicated how and when social boundaries are blurred and
shifted, for example, in immigrant contexts, after individual mobility has
coalesced into collective patterns. The major value of belonging research lies
in its not taking collective boundedness for granted. By combining the
dimensions of commonality, mutuality, and attachments it indicates social
closures as well as the possibilities of their opening-up, rather than falling prey
to methodological collectivism. The belonging approach indicates the
tremendous tensions people endure while navigating between social and
spatial worlds. It is obviously cosier and less dangerous to maintain a home
where one’s religious or ethnic identity is not questioned. Marwa El-Sherbini
paid the ultimate price for somebody else’s insecurity and inability to
acknowledge that belonging is not fixed.

Discussion: the embattled politics of belonging in the contemporary world


Belonging is paradoxical due to a basic tension. On the one hand,
belonging is something cosy, a condition that is taken for granted. People
belong together when things go without saying. To belong in the modern
world, on the other hand, means reflexively reconsidering home and one’s
sense of place. This means that a basic property of human life that was
previously prescious due to its tacit property has become more and more overt
and contested. Time and again, individual and collective belonging have been

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encroached upon, challenged, fought about, and protected. State rules, market
forces, forced displacement, transnationalisation, pluralisation, acceleration of
social change, and the widening horizon of human aspirations have rendered
belonging contested – from outside and from within. The more it is contested
and made explicit, the less people can just ‘be’, share, and join in. Thinking
about one’s belonging explicitely can result in defending the protected space
against all kinds of intrusions.
Belonging, resonating in ‘be-long-in’, displays strong past-oriented,
nostalgic connotations. As an object of political action, it is very much an
element of the present. The concept also has a strong aspirational, future-
oriented element. Kannabiran (2006) distinguishes between belonging and
becoming, suggesting that political struggles thrive upon ideas indicating
where a given collective is heading to and what it is aiming for. So far, this
text has concentrated on personal navigation between different social spaces
of belonging and the entailed politics of the self. But the past decades have
also witnessed pronounced collective mobilisation coalescing into a different
politics of belonging. At least three global trends have instigated these politics.
The first trend has usually been depicted as a third wave of democratisation
and was significantly buttressed by the fall of the Berlin wall and the
inspiration provided by civic action in Eastern European countries. Almost
simultaneously, civil society movements gained momentum in many parts of
the globe. Previously colonized populations “have reversed the colonial flow
from centre to periphery with increasing intensity” (Comaroff and Comaroff
2009: 46-7). Challenging established West-dominated normative orders,
displaying alterity, and forcing the “problem” of difference into the public
(ibid.) realm, collective activism has shifted from deeply subjugated positions
to self-conscious positions reclaiming oppressed spaces of resistance
(Kannabiran 2006). These movements have embarked on a challenging path,
deploying techniques and technologies that are products of globality and
transnationality (means of communication, networking), while organising
against detrimental impacts of neo-liberalism. Large-scale infrastructural
projects as well as the attempts of transnational corporations to secure
intellectual property rights on items such as food grains or medicinal plants
have greatly instigated the local sense of place and a spirit of local resistance
(that I examined in my ‘Challenging Goliath’, see Pfaff-Czarnecka 2007).
The second trend buttressing collective politics of belonging came
about with the global indigenous peoples’ movement (see Pfaff-Czarnecka at
al. 2007). This movement has reached a world-wide scope combining the
politics of identity, entitlement, recognition and rights (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2009: 47). This movement, initially carried out by the US-American
and Canadian First People as well as by a growing number of ethnic activists
in Latin American countries and in the Asian-Pacific region, has importantly

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gained in terrain with the establishment of the UN Working Group on


Indigenous Populations in 1982 – this was followed by the Draft Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the ILO-Convention 169 as well as by
the UNDRIP (UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) -
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/drip.html. One important platform
that helped in gaining momentum for indigenous politics arranged the Rio-
conference in 1992. The deliberations of this conference revealed the
interconnection between the cultural (confining indigenous cultures to the
private realm) and social dimensions (socio-economic and political power
differentials and detrimental race politics) of indigenous peoples’ existence
within the territorial dimensions of space and place (confinement to societies
peripheries; encroachment upon indigenous peoples lands). Both these trends
have greatly instigated the collective politics of the self – i.e. modalities of
agreeing upon common representations and developing practices of mutuality,
geared indispensable toward pursuing projects of becoming (Kannabiran
2006). The politics of the self are embedded in the regimes of belonging and
combine common visions of the future, entrepreneurship (or even ‘ethno-
preneurialism,’ as Comaroffs, 2009, calls certain ethnic measures), measures
of self-care as well as forms of self-fashioning buttressed by the idea of shared
essence and common destiny. In this vein, they are important elements of
governmentality.
The third trend comes with the transformative impact of neoliberalism
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 47) that has created newer and ever denser
interconnections between different regions of the world, transpiring through
financial flows as well as the displacement of production sites and workers.
Important interconnections occur between countries “sending” and
“receiving” migrants. These global, international, and transnational
developments have greatly shaped societal change, impinging upon state’s
sovereignty, buttressing transnational social flows and exchanges, and
challenging national we-group understandings.
Under these – often intersecting – conditions, a variety of politics of
belonging came into existence, or – if they already existed before - gained
public attention. The first form of collective ‘politics of becoming’ is currently
and often depicted with a slightly confusing quest for ‘social inclusion’:
collective mobilisation aimed at ‘uplifting’ a collective social position within
a universally conceived social structure (Brubaker and Cooper 2000).
Collective politics of belonging seek to abandon deeply subjugated social
positions by generating new types of resources geared toward regaining the
space of resistance and power. The language of rights has opened up new
avenues for individual and collective mobility, be it the right to education (e.g.
through quotas as in India), the right to different types of social welfare
provisions, the right to self-determination (as in a number of South-East and

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Eastern European countries) or simply more rights for local participation and
self-rule (through measures of decentralisation and devolution of power). The
term ‘social inclusion’ is misleading in the very sense that a possibility of
newcomers ‘joining in’ in established orders is implied by it – whereas,
innumerable examples of social struggles reveal that ‘social empowerment’ is
usually accompanied by a thorough transformation of any given society and
its institutional orders.
The second type of politics of belonging, coming to light especially
with indigenous activism, is largely driven by identity politics. Such politics
are usually oriented toward the past, with the activists highlighting the
common origins and genealogies as well as the reasons of having been there
first, and the ensuing rights to particular territories. The politics of identity
tend to highlight particularism, take recourse to strategic essentialism, cater to
homogenising images of the collective self and thrive upon sharp ethnic
boundaries that often discriminate between the collective we-groups and
outsiders. Politics of identity turn into politics of belonging when collective
mobilisation reaches beyond the contested space of identity representations.
The indigenous politics of belonging struggle for political self-rule, reversing
past wrongs such as encroachment on ancestral lands, and in doing so insist
upon decentralising the realm of national political economic realms. In his
most pertinent analysis of the perils of belonging, Peter Geschiere (2009)
demonstrated how such forms of emancipatory action is likely to go hand-in-
hand with a problematic collective particularism, excluding others to such an
extent that they are denied the right to dwell in territories claimed by a
particular ethnic group. Geschiere’s argument is all the more powerful as he
draws a parallel between the particularist ethnic politics of belonging
occurring in local realms of African national spaces and equally exclusivist
we-group self-understandings voiced by claustrophobic voices in numerous
Western immigrant societies. In both cases, the exclusivist politics of
belonging have been buttressed by the infrastructure of identity politics,
discriminating between insiders and outsiders, and erecting tight social
boundaries around the collective units.
Against this backdrop, a third type of politics of belonging appears
particularly crucial. This type of politics has recently been described in the
literature of recent migration flows as well as political reconfigurations
asserting alterity and recognising differences within the terms ‘co-habitation’
and ‘conviviality.’ Judith Butler, who coined the term ‘co-habitation’ stresses
that we can no longer decide ourselves in regards to whom we are living with.
We are therefore compelled to maintain the pluralist character of living
together – which does not follow our own choice – active. Paul Gilroy (2004)
argues in his ‘Postcolonial melancholia’ along similar lines. The ways of
finding common ground in living together, despite differing identities,

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convictions, and forms of life, are multiple and, indeed, possible. The options
for creating civic commonality stand in opposition to exclusivist national we-
group identity politics as they have prevailed in the assimilationist ethos used
against new-comers. Currently, belonging is becoming an object of
politicization. Protecting one’s home, keeping migrants at bay, or engaging in
rivalries regarding who is more deserving to make a place his or her home are
all entailed in the politics of belonging. But the more boundary-constructions,
boundary-restrictions and boundary-protections become part and parcel of
global reflexivity, the more wide-spread the awareness of the possibilities to
transcend and to mould boundaries and to create new possibile spaces for our
living together.
This discussion reveals the complexity of the key notion of belonging:
‘social location’. (This notion is strongly intertwined with, but cannot be
reduced to, geographical location.) Having defined belonging as an
‘emotionally charged social location’, it was the intention of this text to
suggest avenues for understanding belonging as combining different key-
dimensions of social existence and experience that significantly channel
different forms of political action. According to Brubaker and Cooper, in
identitarian theorizing, ‘social location’ is defined as a “position in a
multidimensional space defined by particularist categorical attributes (race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation)” (2000:7). In instrumentalist theorizing,
‘social location’ describes a position in a universally conceived social
structure,for example, a position in the market, an occupational structure, or a
mode of production (ibid. – italics by the authors). The concept of belonging
suggests that ‘social location’ is the combination of both aspects. After all, the
social structures of contemporary societies evolved in a combination of
diverse parameters and resources as well as capabilities (Sen 1999; Alkire
2010). The challenge of grasping the central features of the belonging concept
is even greater given the fact that the contemporary self-reflexivity under the
conditions of peoples’ globalised and transnational experiences renders the
human preoccupation with territorial space and local attachments particularly
pertinent.

Conclusion
This article stressed the necessity to distinguish between the concepts
of collective identity and belonging, while proposing the latter as a well-suited
lens for grasping the dynamics of sociability in the contemporary world. It
proposed avenues for thinking of human forms of togetherness by combining
tacit and overt understandings and performances of commonality with
practices of mutuality, loyalty, and commitments and with different forms of
material and immaterial attachments. Bringing these different elements

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together provides a significantly denser and more dynamic vision of collective


constellations than the concept of identity, alone.
The analysis addressed the problem of homogenisation and sharp
boundary-drawing in social science research and also in diverse forms of
national, ethnic, or religious activism. Contrary to many collectivist self
representations and practices of othering, the concept of belonging helps in
grasping the processes of moving, shifting and transcending the boundaries of
the social. It provides social research with a tool to think about the social
practices of negotiating collective boundedness understood to be in continuous
flux, selection, and combination between diverse parameters of belonging.
This analysis revealed that belonging and boundaries are two sides of
the same coin. As long as belonging remains tacit, boundaries may not be at
the forefront of experiencing togetherness. When belonging is ‘what goes
without saying’, then the sense of togetherness is buttressed by what is shared
in a given situation. In the present-day politics of belonging, however,
boundaries, frontiers, and limits of the social acquire a central stage in human
negotiations of their social locations in the world. As a heightened sense of
belonging can result in manifold exclusions, humans can also shape their
politics of becoming by creating belonging that is open-minded and inclusive.

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