Abstracts
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Abstracts |
The boundedness of cultures and cultural difference have gained new prominence in contemporary debates on European unity and the "problem" of Third World immigration no less than in anthropology in the past two decades. Contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric postulates a propensity in human nature to reject strangers. This assumption underlies a radical opposition between nationals and immigrants as foreigners informed by a reified notion of bounded and distinct, localized national-cultural identity and heritage that is employed to justify the call for restrictive immigration policies. This rhetoric of exclusion goes hand in hand with population policies attempting to combat European women's lack of procreative enthusiasm and the consequent aging of the Old World. International agencies, by contrast, insist in Europe's growing need for immigrant labour. National and immigrant women's specific experiences in this context of national closure, have, however, received less attention. In this conference I will plead for the need of anthropology not only to explore how globalization affects the discipline's traditional outlook and subjects but also examine the new ways in which cultural differences and cleavages are conceptualized in popular opinion. And I will emphasize how and why notions of bounded identities and national belonging inevitably limit in particular women's autonomy by transforming them into the mothers of the expanded European fatherland.