Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr Anna Bagnoli
To cite this article: Dr Anna Bagnoli (2007) BETWEEN OUTCAST AND OUTSIDER:
CONSTRUCTING THE IDENTITY OF THE FOREIGNER, European Societies, 9:1, 23-44, DOI:
10.1080/14616690601079424
Anna Bagnoli
Leeds Social Sciences Institute, Beech Grove House, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
1. Introduction
DOI: 10.1080/14616690601079424 23
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have a mere ‘imaginal’ quality (Hermans et al. 1993), yet still a significant
centrality to our lives.
The dialogical model allows an appreciation of the impact of different
identity narratives on one’s self-constructions, whether they respond to
the logic of dominant, context provided identities, or to alternative
discourses and narratives of resistance (Smith 1993). It can therefore
account for the ways in which people position themselves and negotiate
between different discourses, allowing the asymmetries in power existing
in societies between different cultures and social groups to emerge in their
complexity (Hermans 2001a). This perspective thus supersedes the
paradigm of acculturation studies (Berry and Sam 1997), which,
presupposing a linear model of cultural change, view cultures as mutually
distinct and internally homogenous. Provided it ever had any theoretical
validity, such a static view definitely cannot hold in the age of
globalisation, when cultures are making contact and mixing to an
unprecedented degree (Bhatia and Ram 2001), and people may easily be
part of both the in-group and the out-group at the same time
(Chryssochoou 2000).
The migration case study that this research has investigated is one type of
movement which is typically experienced by young people in contempor-
ary Europe. Migration in the globalised world is a reality which involves
very different people. On the one hand there is the migration of the ‘post-
industrial migrants’ (King 1995): the asylum seekers, the refugees, the
economic migrants of today. These are people who migrate mainly due to
push rather than pull factors, that is to say they migrate more in order to
escape difficult situations at home than because of what they may find in
their countries of destination. On the other hand there is the migration of
the ‘global nomads’ (Bauman 1998), the highly qualified people who
migrate to find jobs that are adequate to their skills and qualifications.
These two very different worlds of migration co-exist in connection with a
demand for labour which is polarised between the highly skilled and
competitive positions and the unskilled jobs, which may be filled by people
who are available to take them at any low rate of pay.
This research has studied one case of migration in the ‘global nomads’
category: the move of young Europeans within the Union, a new form of
migration made possible by recent economic and political changes. By
moving, these young people are actively taking advantage of the new
possibilities for internal movement that the European Union has recently
granted to its own citizens. These young European migrants may be
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1. This project was supported by the European Commission with a Marie Curie TMR
Fellowship.
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according to the directions that they preferred, and who put great
enthusiasm in the project.
4. Migration stories
My interest here was seeing what sort of changes, if any, would emerge in
young people’s identities with the experience of migrating. The quality of
these changes would obviously be related to the specific characters of the
migration stories. Only first generation migrants, whose migration had a
time frame of at least six months, were included in the sample. Three of
these young people had migrated with their family, the rest individually.
One common feature in these stories was that what one was moving away
from was usually clearer than the direction one was going towards. Often
associated with an experience of loss, such as finishing school, changing
jobs, or breaking up with a partner, the decision to migrate appeared
related to three main motives: education, employment, and relationships.
Within individual stories, however, these motives often intertwined.
Education is by far the most common reason for migrating. For young
Italians in particular, a study programme abroad, typically a period of
language study, is the most popular ways of first leaving home. Studying
abroad is often undertaken within specific educational exchange pro-
grammes, such as the Erasmus project. Others move without the help of
an educational institution, often arranging to stay with a family as an au
pair. Among the English young people it is also very common to take a
year out. Employment may also motivate a move, either to find a job, to
avoid unemployment, or to change jobs. Finally, relationships may be
associated with migration either as a push factor, typically in the cases of a
relationship break-up and of parental divorce, or as a pull factor, when
joining one’s partner abroad.
The unclear direction which characterises most of these stories may
allow one to read them in terms of ‘moratorium’ (Erikson 1982)
experiences, that is to say, migration experiences which allow some degree
of experimentation of different possibilities, before any commitment is
taken. Migrating may therefore be, for these young Europeans, one way to
explore with different identities. However, not everyone in the sample
changed their identities substantially as a result. For at least seven young
people, time spent abroad, although important in many ways, was sort of
put in brackets within their lives, and did not appear to have any especially
significant impact on identities. I have labelled these ‘moratorium’
migrants. For the remaining 13, the experience of living in an unfamiliar
environment became instead so meaningful to produce some peculiar
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Migrant types
outsiders moratorium
9 7
4
outcasts
total number in sample: 20
Emma : Everyone said: ‘You know you’ve got a very good job in London’ (. . .)
And I was leaving to what I thought at the time was just a seasonal work (. . .) I
thought it was just going to be until October and then I didn’t know what I was
going to be doing with my life. So everyone thought that was a big risk, but it
was the best thing I have ever done. Because I believe in fate and fate has
brought me back to Florence.
Emma : I took a year out between school and university and studied here in
Florence, that was when I first fell in love with Florence (. . .) I just fell in love
with it from the moment . . . The first moment I ever came here with my
mother when I was still . . . just turned eighteen, and then started studying
2. All names are fictional and have been chosen by participants themselves.
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here. Stayed here for about six months and then had to come back (. . .) I knew
I wanted to come back here.
Emma : I was meant to be doing history of art and French at university, but /
em / then I had to do a re-take in my year off (. . .) I re-applied to universities
and they didn’t have any places left to do history of art and French. So my
mother speaks Italian and loved everything about Italy, and so she said ‘Well
why don’t you do history of art and Italian?’ So I got into university to do
history of art and Italian.
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Like Emma, Pamela is a travel agent and has moved for employment
reasons, but her story of migration is very different. In the following
passage, she explains her reasons for migrating to London at the end of
school:
Pamela : Finding a job, given that in Italy almost everyone is unemployed and
you cannot find a proper job (. . .) My town is not a big one and you would have
to move anyway. Move North, I am not speaking of the South, because, you
know, there’s nothing much, and you’ve got more choice in the North of Italy
than in the South, and . . . Well, I came here in England to learn the language
and to find a job here.
Indeed in the South of Italy, where Pamela comes from, the unemploy-
ment rate among young women is as high as 60.1%, 46.1% for men
(ISTAT 2001). Though not occurring in her own family, out-migration is
thus a familiar experience for her background:
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Dear Diary,
My name is Pamela and I am Italian, sadly it has already been six years since
I moved to England for work. I say sadly because in a way I miss Italy, the sun,
but especially my family, and my countryside where as a little girl I would have
long walks with my dogs.
11/11/98, 19.30
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entanglement, which makes the self long for a place when living in
another, identifying with home when abroad, and with abroad when home
(King 1995).
Johnny : I thought I really do love this place. I would like to speak the language,
I would like not to be a tourist here, to spend some time, to understand the
country, because it’s not all wonderful, there’s a lot of bad things too, it’s a
functioning country, you can’t . . . stereotype it, em . . . And it became a
passion, really.
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Johnny : I’m now in the middle position in that I’m a foreigner, I speak a little
Italian, and I live in the town, but I’m not a Florentine, I never will be a
Florentine, but sometimes you’re in the middle of these two camps and that’s a
difficult position (. . .) You can’t hide it . . . and you have to accept it. I think
you have to just accept it, or . . . or go, in a way, because otherwise it makes you
very unhappy, I think. I don’t know anyone here who is English or American or
from another country, even if they’ve been here twenty years, who still isn’t a
foreigner.
Bianca : I went back (. . .) and they were still the same, as if time had stopped.
And many things which used to make me laugh before, things we would say
and do, which I would always be the first to say and do . . . Now they are still
doing them, and to me they are nothing (. . .) I felt really distant . . . I don’t
know, I have had this feeling that I could never integrate there anymore, or that
in order to try and reintegrate back into their group I should go back, and
there’s no way I will do that, since it did take me a while to take the decision
and detach from all that.
Bianca felt ‘distant’ and estranged from the people who used to be
important to her, she had changed so much since leaving that she no
longer perceived any connection to her old friends. As she says, she does
not think that she will ever be able to ‘reintegrate’ in her friends’ group:
the concept of ‘integration’ is reputed to be, in the classic parameters of
acculturation studies (Berry and Sam 1997), the most successful and
adaptive outcome of migration. It refers to migrants being able to maintain
their own cultural diversity whilst also being full participants in the host
culture. Since, however, the acculturation paradigm cannot adequately
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Michelangelo : The feeling of being an outcast may have nothing to do with your
pronunciation but . . . it is that feeling 3 of a foreigner being in the group, every
time there is a new dish, or you see something, everyone is asking: ‘Will the
foreigner like it?’ (. . .) When they ask you the question: ‘What about Italy . . .?’
That really bothers me, because it makes me feel different.
Michelangelo does not like being the foreigner in the group, because all
social interaction will be based on that difference which inevitably defines
him as the outcast and the token Italian. He would much rather pass as
English if he could:
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Jo : People say that I’m becoming more Italian. They say it’s just the way I
speak, the way I use my hands a lot more when I speak, the way I’m a lot more
confident, and little words that just keep coming out in Italian that I can’t find
in English, words like magari. 4 In English I can never find an equivalent, so I
always say: ‘magari ’.
4. Magari is an adverb expressing a hypothetical situation and a wish with few chances of
success. The Hazon English/Italian Dictionary translates it as: even; perhaps, maybe;
even if; if only (Hazon 1981).
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disrespectful of the norms and bridging the gaps without the aid of
translation. Grasping the concept of ‘magari’ enables Jo both to add new
significance to her existing repertoires, and to play differently with them,
so that a difficulty of translation may even become a resource. The
migrants’ hybrid speech makes a creative use of language which reflects
the acquisition of new dimensions of meaning as well as the changing of
identities.
Johnny : I know that I can’t walk into another world, another culture, and
immediately everyone presumes that I’m part of it, I’m not. But I wouldn’t
enjoy it, or look at it, in a certain way, if I wasn’t an outsider, I mean, my
perspective is of an outsider (. . .) you can look at something slightly detached,
which for me is interesting, because I like to write about these things, and so
for me it’s almost a positive.
Being an outsider allows one to look at the society around them with a
degree of detachment. Not all the people who move have the willingness
or indeed the resources necessary to achieve cultural competence into an
alien structure of meaning. Those who do, like Johnny, are true
‘cosmopolitans’ (Hannerz 1992), characterised by an open attitude that
enables them to make their way into the culture of the other. Johnny
greatly appreciates the advantages of the foreigner’s ‘middle position’:
being ‘in between’ two cultures he can participate in both, elaborating for
himself a third dimension where to construct a hybrid identity (McDowell
1999). He creatively puts to work the privileged and detached view he can
have of society by writing about it, and also, as he says in his diary, by
interpreting the role of the foreigner in a home-movie to be made by some
friends:
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We all went to a bar and discussed a ‘filmino ’5 they want to make / they do this
regularly apparently. They want me to be in it / as guess what?: / ‘Lo
straniero ’6 / of course. Perhaps always.
10/10/98, 02.00 am (11/10/98)
Johnny : Until recently I found it very hard to stick to one thing! (. . .) I think I
would like to have more self-discipline, more self-discipline to write, more self-
discipline to learn the language, these things, but I’m very . . . like a butterfly,
you know, I land and . . . I forget.
‘Like a butterfly’, Johnny has been moving from one experience to the
next without sticking to any, as well as without having any definite plan of
landing anywhere. His avoidance of commitment, while offering him
possibilities for self-reconstruction, also makes him feel he ought to ‘be
better’ and have more ‘self-discipline’. Yet the labour market may render a
more disciplined or committed trajectory harder to trace: it is in fact the
light and discontinuous flight of the butterfly which may be more easily
undertaken (EGRIS 2001).
By offering a privileged dimension from which to experience the world,
being a foreigner opens wide possibilities for alternative scenarios in which
to reconstruct the self. Mark, a 23-year-old PhD student, enjoys the ‘sense
of freedom’ that he experiences living in Italy:
Mark : You’re a foreigner, which puts you in a category outside all other
categories of the society you’re living in (. . .) you’re like the joker in a pack of
cards, the wild card: no one quite fits you in, because you come from another
category, so you are much sort of freer, no one really knows quite what to
assume about you, except that you’re a foreigner.
Like ‘the joker in a pack of cards’, the foreigner enjoys a special freedom of
being outside all known categories: the only assumption which can
reasonably be made about the self regards one’s nationality, all the rest is
undefined. That leaves the migrant with a vast array of possible selves to
play with, reinventing one’s own identity at pleasure. Identity construction
is thus essentially an individual task which lacks any sense of commitment,
5. Filmino / home-movie.
6. ‘Lo straniero ’ / ‘The foreigner’.
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Bianca : I do not feel this need to go back home. I mean, if I could find a good
job, something here, I would take it. If by going back home I could find a job
which made me travel all the world I would take it. I am a bit of a nomad, I do
not get that attached to places, or to people . . . and then of people you can meet
so many that it is not a problem.
7. Conclusion
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Acknowledgements
References
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Erikson, E. H. (1982) The Life Cycle Completed, New York: W.W. Norton
& Company.
Gabaccia, D. (2000) Italy’s Many Diasporas, London: Routledge.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Goffman, E. (1968) Stigma. Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,
London: Penguin.
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Milano: Garzanti.
Hermans, H. J. M. (2001a) ‘The dialogical self: towards a theory of
personal and cultural positioning’, Culture & Psychology 7 (3): 243 81. /
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Towner, J. (1985) ‘The grand tour: a key phase in the history of tourism’,
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