Before We Go Transnational: (Un)packing Our Theoretical Baggage

There is clearly something in the idea that distance lends enhancement, if not enchantment, to the anthropological vision.

If Arab Detroit is too close, too “in-between” to attract the attention of Middle East area scholarship, it is now suddenly near enough to attract the attention of anthropologists, among whom distance is losing its visionary charms. With the steady growth of global communication and transportation networks, the ethnographer’s ability to move through remote, physically distant worlds is no longer unusual; in fact, it is not even a necessary component of anthropological practice. Today most American anthropologists do their Ph.D. fieldwork in North America (Givens and Jablonski 1995, 11–12); and with the growing appeal of theory and historicism to the discipline, more and more fieldwork is being done in the library, the archive, and (just as likely) the coffeehouse.

As ethnographers settle down, the “natives” become increasingly mobile. They regularly enter—indeed, they suffuse—urban culture in the metropolitan West, where “remote areas,” now unexpectedly near, are sold to us as ethnic villages, cultivated as political constituencies, mined for cheap labor, developed as points of entry into foreign markets, or cordoned off as crime-ridden slums. These new immigrant communities are not bereft of singularity. One could hardly mistake Arab Detroit for New York’s “Little Brazil” (Margolis 1994) or Los Angeles’s “New Persian Empire” (Naficy 1993). Still, it is hard to conceptualize this singularity using the old logic of place. Among Arabs in Detroit, a popular alternative idiom is one anthropologists are leaving behind: “distance.” Coming to America and becoming American are acts that require movement: specifically, movement in an occidental direction. Arab immigrants are often called mughtarabeen, or people who go West, and the Arab community in Detroit calls itself al-jaliya, a term that conjures up images of an ethnic enclave living far from its place of origin.

The idea of an ancestral place—expressed in terms of nostalgia, estrangement, and enduring obligations—is a leitmotiv of immigrant experience. It is especially strong among Arab Detroiters, most of whom trace their origins to about a dozen peasant villages in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. The new idiom of transnationalism, however, often seems designed to swamp these imaginative yet somehow too simple communions in a wash of cultural flows, fragmentation, mix-up, deterritorialization, and other splintering metaphors. The rhetoric is relentless; one sees it everywhere, and everywhere it accentuates the same litany of themes.

Migrations are producing cultural heterogeneity; diasporic conditions for increasing and increasingly large groups of people are redefining geographic loyalties and commitments; rapid and spreading urbanization is transforming traditional social relations and conceptions of selves; the communications revolution is redefining local and global relations, and the constitution of subjects. Identities, in the light of these dramatic changes, are tending increasingly to cut across traditional political boundaries. (Goldberg and Zegeye 1995, 3)

Clearly, this is a metanarrative. Why, in our postmodern age, does it not inspire greater incredulity? On close inspection the conditions described in this passage are not as novel as they seem. The “new world” they conjure up bears an uncanny resemblance to Henry Ford’s Detroit, circa 1920: a city teeming with immigrant labor, intermingled diasporas, transnational associations, rampant urbanization, and new political identities. Communities of this sort are perhaps more common today, and the global processes that create them occur at a more dizzying pace. But the power globalization rhetoric now enjoys among social scientists, historians, and litterateurs springs from other sources.

Like most big narratives, the globalization story “has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats” (White 1987, 14). The sense of disruption and the lack of closure that mark the transnational metanarrative are positively valued by many of the analysts who invoke them (Clifford 1988; Appadurai 1991; Bhabha 1994), and this celebratory tone reflects the increased tactical mobility Western intellectuals (and the college-educated metropolitan classes) bring to their ongoing management of the borderlands between human communities. Although the most articulate proponents of transnational studies often hail from the “elite sectors of the postcolonial world” (Appadurai 1993, 411)—a quick glance at almost any issue of Public Culture will prove this point—the sudden appearance of the “Third World in the First” (Rafael 1993) has not provoked the latest round of moralistic, transnational storytelling. Rather, it is the relentless spread of metropolitan social forms into postcolonial domains that makes global systems (and narratives of globalization) possible. As the structures, practices, and attitudes that define modernity are imposed on wider territories and larger numbers of people, “new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view” (Said 1993, xxv).

But the emerging view is still notoriously fuzzy, with the result that, for the metropolitan intellectual, (1) cultural forms are no longer convincingly old or new—invented traditions flourish alongside cultural schemas of demonstrable antiquity—and (2) human communities are no longer categorically Other. Instead, they can be alien and admissible, remote and near to hand, all at the same time, all in the same place. This has not made ethnography harder to do; nor has it “liberated” anthropology from its traditional fascination with local worlds. In his discussion of advertising agencies in Trinidad, for instance, Daniel Miller (1995a) suggests that local advertisers profit from the demand for global consumer products by convincing foreign companies that imported goods will not sell there unless they are attached to tastes and desires unique to the island. Only commercials produced in Trinidad, they argue, can secure such attachments. This lucrative exercise in “cultural translation,” undertaken on behalf of highly deterritorialized, transnational corporations, is not unlike the work of anthropologists, who profit from their ability to ground knowledge of humanity—itself a metropolitan, highly deterritorialized construct—in knowledge of particular human communities. That is why ethnography, more than most disciplines, is well placed to “reveal the internal contradictions and differences that emerge when one insists that the global form is always to be located also in its specific local manifestation” (Miller 1995a, 9).

The “desire to moralize” that animates critical brands of transnational storytelling^[5] has little to do, then, with a Bakhtinian carnival of identities supposedly unleashed by collapsing boundaries and withering states. It alerts us, instead, to new hegemonies capable of (re)bounding local and translocal identities alike. The globalizing logic that Richard Wilk detects in the staging of beauty pageants in Belize is, not surprisingly, the logic behind almost all forms of cultural representation now available to the ethnographer: those made by groups and individuals, by selves and others, in public and in private.

The global stage does not consist of common content, a lexicon of goods or knowledge. Instead it is a common set of formats and structures that mediate between cultures; something more than a flow of things, or of the meanings attached to things, or even the channels along which those things and meanings flow.…[T]he connections between localities are created by widespread and common forms of contest for the exercise of power over what to produce, consume, watch, read and write. These contests follow channels that put diversity in a common frame, and scale it along a limited number of dimensions, celebrating some kinds of difference and submerging others. (Wilk 1995, 111)

Arabs in Detroit, for instance, bear countless marks of Otherness. Their political and religious beliefs, their ideas about gender and family life, their ways of doing business—all differ markedly from those of the larger society. Yet for all their peculiarities Arab immigrants come to Detroit already immersed in modern institutions: nation-states, public schools, secular universities, consumer-oriented market economies, and the (rather narrow) spectrum of political ideologies that accompany these forms. The result is a disorienting mix of similarity and difference, an open cultural flow in which metropolitan social forms, hegemonic and imperfectly shared by immigrants and locals alike, become the context in which mainstreams are continually re-created. Labor, commodities, and ideas circulate in these mainstreams, which are also called communities. Unlike Said’s “new alignments,” however, which coalesce across “borders, types, nations, and essences,” I argue that Arabs in Detroit use precisely these typological ideas to build communities that cohere despite (and because of) their problematic relationship to place.