Are trauma and loss the only modes of reading gendered experiences of Partition; or is it important to explore the meanings people made and strategies they employed for adaptation post-Partition? What role does community and ethnic identity play in these post-Partition adaptations; and how is community identity forged, adapted, or preserved by migrating individuals?
While researching women and the Sindhi community post-Partiton, I felt the need for a theoretical framework which accounted for my respondents as active agents, forging identities and adapting cultural practices, without discounting the trauma they experienced and their membership in cultural and ethnic communities which were often restrictive. I also discovered that whereas patriarchal structures shifted post-Partition and in many ways, Sindhi women experienced new freedoms—new forms of patriarchies were ever-present, and often embraced.
Here, I very briefly outline two conceptual frameworks that I found useful for my exploration of displacement; which factor in individual agency, without discounting collective trauma.
Differentiating migrating cultural capital
The Bourdieusian framework of cultural capital has in recent years been applied to migrant groups to understand how they navigate their social locations and generate resources, create networks, and engage with the social spaces of their country of residence. Bourdieu (1986) developed his theory of capital to account for how, in his analogy, society did not function like Roulette—as a game of perfectly equal chance and opportunity—but to explore what factors weighted the dice, so as to speak. Simply put, “the core argument is that it is not just about how much money you have, but your friends and networks and the resources they give you access to (social capital), your education, cultural knowledge, tastes and ways of interacting with people (cultural capital), as well as how you present your position and status to the outside world (symbolic capital).” (Cedeberg 2012: 61)
Umut Erel (2010) links the Bourdieusian framework of social and cultural capital to a need to also theorize the role of agency in terms of social and cultural capital, and acknowledge that this capital is not static and passively transmitted and carried across borders but is actively used and produced by migrants. She suggests that “a migrant group does not hold homogeneous cultural capital; instead, cultural capital is both the product of and productive of differentiations of gender, ethnicity, and class within the migrant group.” (Erel 2010: 643) Thus, skills and cultural capital take on different valuations in the new country of residence, and diasporic groups actively create and reorganize their forms of cultural capital to integrate with the culture of the dominant, majority group. (Erel 2010) Cultural capital then, is not a reified commodity that is bartered, but is a dynamic set of practices, identities, experiences and memories, and women actively engage in generating, selecting and downplaying specific forms of cultural resources and capital, in their negotiation of the new social spaces they encountered post-Partition.
Gendered geographies of power
Pessar and Mahler (2001) in their work on gender and migration offer a framework for exploring what they identify as the “gendered geographies of power.” Migrant women find themselves not only navigating new geographical spaces with new social systems and gender regimes, but also having to reorganize and revalue their own skills and cultural identities. Thus Pessar and Mahler suggest that theirs is “a framework for analyzing people’s social agency—corporal and cognitive—given their own initiative as well as their positioning within multiple hierarchies of power operative within and across many terrains.” (Pessar and Mahler 2001: 8) They emphasize that gender is relational, structural, and spatially and temporally contextual, and suggest that gender relations are an integral structural part of migration and settlement experiences. They use the spatial term “geographies” to emphasize that “gender operates simultaneously on multiple spatial and social scales (e.g., the body, the family, the state) across transnational terrains.” (Pessar and Mahler 2001: 5) Thus they see migration as both gendered and gendering.
Pessar and Mahler (2001) suggest that migration often results in a contradictory engagement with national patriarchies, and that though migration itself is often associated with the dissolution of the nation state, migrant communities often participate in the fortification of national patriarchal structures. This becomes relevant in context of diasporas, where there is a process of selective reclamation of specific social configurations; in terms of efforts at re-institutionalizing pre-displacement patriarchal models, as well as refashioning of new social structures. Their framework thus advocates the importance of an individual’s historical and intersectional location in power configurations; while also creating analytical space for accounting for women’s agency in these processes, drawing on Massey’s model of “power geometry.” Massey articulates that particular conditions of modernity have placed people in very distinct locations regarding access to and power over flows and interconnections between places; but that people exert power over these forces and processes as well as being affected by them. Massey (1994) suggests: “some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it...[There are] groups who are really in a sense in charge… who can really use it and turn it to advantage... but there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all.” (Massey quoted in Pessar and Mahler 2001: 7)
Thus it is important to balance a historical and structural understanding of power and power relations, while engaging with how agency is claimed and negotiated differently by individuals. This is vital for studies of diasporic communities; where there is a need to unpack the notion of community, and locate individuals as differentiated, socially situated agents, actively identifying as members of a cultural group; rather than as passive recipients of cultural identity.
References:
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2011. “The Forms of Capital (1986)” in Cultural Theory: An Anthology edited by Imre Szeman, Timothy Kaposy. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing. 81-92.
Cederberg?, Maja. 2012. “Migrant networks and beyond: Exploring the value of the notion of social capital for making sense of ethnic inequalities”. Acta Sociologica 55 (1): 59-72. doi: 10.1177/0001699311427746.
Erel, Umut. 2010. “?Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration Studies”. Sociology 44 (4): 642-660. doi: 10.1177/0038038510369363.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Pessar, Patricia R. and Sarah J. Mahler. 2003. “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In”. International Migration Review, 37 (3): 812-846. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30037758
---. 2001. “Gender and Transnational Migration”. Paper presented at the conference on Transnational Migration: Comparative Perspectives at Princeton University, Princeton, 30th June-1st July.
