Abstract
When studying the ways of structuring social life in general, and the socialization processes of children in particular, ethnicity is often taken for granted as a basic axis along which people distribute themselves into groups. Most anthropological studies describe and classify agents in ethnic terms. This articles argue that ethnicity is not always a relevant principle of order in the social fields of children, at least in the ethnographic cases studied. The article provides a critical reflection on the theoretical frameworks and methodologies based on the idea of ‘ethnic groups’ as a starting point for doing anthropological research.
Introduction
When studying the ways of structuring social life in general, and the socialization processes of children in particular, ethnicity is often taken for granted as a basic axis along which people distribute themselves into groups. For this reason, most studies describe and classify subjects in ethnic terms: we study anthropological issues with Mexican 1 children, Gypsy children, Peruvian children and so on. The purpose of this article is to argue that ethnicity might not be a relevant principle according to which children structure their social world, even when this is apparently the case. When children are the agents of social construction, there are other criteria that are much more relevant to them. When the structure of social networks depends on the agency of the parents and adults of the domestic group, ethnicity becomes more or less important depending on several factors. When it comes to bureaucratic institutions such as the school, ethnicity becomes hyper-relevant. Thus, when we start our studies about children by classifying them into ethnic groups, we are reproducing the bureaucratic discourse but we are not taking the children’s perspective into account. In other words, we are adopting a bureau-centric perspective (see Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). From this point of view, I provide a critical reflection on theoretical frameworks and methodologies based on the idea of ‘ethnic groups’ as a starting point for doing anthropological research.
My argument is not that ethnicity plays no role in children’s social life. Rather, I argue that it is relevant only in some ways and we should be able to distinguish which aspects of their social life are shaped by ethnicity and which ones are not. That is why I move between the three different dimensions of ethnicity: belonging, political struggle and structuring. The main argument is that children (a) shape some of their belongings ethnically and (b) try to empower themselves in some situations through ethnic symbolization, but (c) do not structure their peer groups following ethnic criteria. This text is built around this last idea. I argue that ethnicity has been understood as a structuring principle in children’s lives because these three dimensions have not been differentiated. To support this idea, I draw on empirical evidence from a neighbourhood in Andalusia where, according to the voice of most teachers, ‘Gypsy children don’t want to mix with Moroccan children’ and there is a ‘big problem of racism among the children’. Even in such an apparently obvious case of ethnic structuring, after long-term fieldwork I found out that, for the children, ethnicity was not actually a relevant principle of social structuring.
The research context
This work draws on the results of my doctoral dissertation. From 2002 to 2007 I conducted fieldwork in two ethnographic settings. Two sites were chosen for comparison, both of them in Spain: the first one was a series of neighbourhoods in Madrid where many families that call themselves Dominicans live and the second one was a particular neighbourhood in Andalusia, that I will call Los Churumbeles, where approximately half of the families came from Morocco and the other half consider themselves to be Gypsy or non-Gypsy Spaniards. Fieldwork consisted mainly of participant observation with different families. As I wanted to take part in a wide variety of situations that were important for the children’s social life, I lived for some months in their homes, joined them for family meetings, religious celebrations and parties, played with them in the streets, went to cafes, bars, the beach and other frequent places of socialization with them and their parents, and joined them at school. I tried to leave the school for the last part of fieldwork because a great deal of research has already been done in this context and because, following Díaz de Rada, I expected school would be the least important context of socialization from the children’s point of view (see Díaz de Rada, 2006). Later on I could confirm in the field that this idea was right. Most of the children were between 8 and 13 years old. I worked in contexts where there were also adults because I did not perceive children as an isolated and exotic social group but as a part of society-at-large (see Spyrou, 2010). I did participant observation, interviews and life stories as well as collected and analysed various documents and statistical data. As a result, I produced a total of 22 fieldwork diaries, 51 interviews, 11 discussion groups and recorded public events, 12 life stories and 75 documents (newspapers, legal documents, leaflets, etc.) from the field.
In this article, I focus on the case of Los Churumbeles, as most teachers and other bureaucrats working there regarded it as a good example of ethnic structuring and children’s racism. From their point of view, children rejected socializing with ‘ethnic others’ and tended to form groups ‘among themselves’. Thus, many of them thought that Moroccan children made their own social world apart from the rest and so did Gypsy children. This neighbourhood was a marginal urban setting segregated from the rest of the town, and it was very often represented in the media as a place of drug dealing, with high rates of unemployment and children’s absenteeism from school. As the police and other bureaucratic agents of control were hardly ever present, it became a perfect place for undocumented people coming from North Africa to live in. At the time of my fieldwork (1997–2002), half of the population living there had migrated from Morocco.
What is ethnicity? A three-dimensional model
The objective of my dissertation was to describe and analyse the dynamics of ethnicity in children’s social life. I avoid the use of the term ‘identity’ for conceptualizing ethnicity (cf. Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). Instead, I understand ethnicity to be a set of discourses that take place in three simultaneous dimensions: belonging, political struggle and structuring. In order to build and describe these dimensions, I started from an overview of anthropological debates about ethnicity presented by Banks (1996). As we shall see, the authors who have participated in the debate tend to stress one or two of these dimensions as the most important. Belonging and political struggle have been described as the ‘primordialism-instrumentalism’ debate (Banks, 1996). From my point of view, all three dimensions are always present but one of them becomes more relevant than the others depending on the situation.
Belonging is the set of processes by which social subjects consider themselves linked to a community that is imagined (Anderson, 1983), created and recreated in social situations. This dimension is closely related to psychological processes of self-identification. For example, Linda 2 (9 3 ), one of the girls in my study, was dancing flamenco at a family party and her mother said to her smiling: ‘how Gypsy my girl is!’ and the girl smiled with pride. The mother was in this way reinforcing Linda’s sense of belonging to an ethnic community.
Political struggle is a dimension of ethnicity which is based on the idea that ethnicity is created to pursue some kind of political objective (see the pioneering work of Abner Cohen, 2004 [1969] on this). Thus, people organize themselves around ethnic symbols in order to empower themselves with a strong sense of unity. For example, a teacher did not allow Gracilla (11) to go back home during school time. Gracilla reacted accusing her of being a paya (non-Gypsy) racist against Gypsies. In this way, Gracilla was using ethnic means to convert an individual problem of disempowerment into a collective and historical problem. 4
Structuring refers to the ways children make groups, build social networks and organize daily interactions. This third dimension is independent from the previous ones. For example, Kelly (10) said to me once ‘I hate Moors’ 5 in order to get my attention at school while I was playing with a group of girls from Morocco (political struggle 6 ). Later on that week I saw Kelly with her family in the wedding of Fatima (17), a girl from Morocco. Fatima was her neighbour and friend and part of her family’s solidarity networks (structuring).
Situational ethnicity and power relations: The concept of social field
These three-dimensional ethnic discourses do not take place in a vacuum, but in a context of power relations. I follow the idea of situational ethnicity according to which actors create diverse ethnic discourses depending on the concrete situation in which they are participating (Díaz de Rada, 2007; Jenkins, 1994; Okamura, 1981) and which are different depending on the distribution of power. Bourdieu’s idea of social field (1987: 153) is highly relevant for my argument here. Instead of defining social categories as groups, which may lead us to an essentialist comprehension of the social world, Bourdieu uses a spatial metaphor. The level of access to desired resources is what makes people be closer to another person or more distant in this imagined diagram. For example, two people who are situated far away from each other in social space (e.g. a boss and one of his/her employees) may coincide in physical space (e.g. meet in the street), chat for a while and even pretend there is no social distance between them. Or, just the opposite, two people who are very close to each other in social space may pretend they are far apart and create dynamics of distinction. In this way, it is matter of negotiation. This idea is much more dynamic than the classic one of closed boxes containing social classes. This way, there is much more room for understanding the phenomena of contextualization, essential to ethnicity (see Okamura, 1981).
First of all, I see children as subordinated agents in an adult social world. From this point of view, I have identified three main kinds of social fields: in each one, the agents who can decide how, when and with whom children are allowed to socialize differ. These fields are: (1) bureaucratic 7 fields where there are adults representing bureaucratic institutions (mainly teachers at school); (2) domestic fields where there are adult members of the domestic group socializing with children (e.g. family celebrations, visits to relatives, daily situations at home or walking through the weekly street market; and (3) play fields, when children organize their relations without (and sometimes, by deliberately avoiding) any adult supervision.
Sometimes there are tensions between these social fields. For example, a group of mothers used to go to watch their children during the Los Churumbeles school break time and screamed at the teachers when they thought their children were not being properly attended to; in this way, these mothers configured a domestic field that was trying to invade a bureaucratic field. Also, children tried to shape play fields in what was thought to be a bureaucratic field by ignoring the teacher during class or messing about and laughing; that is, by challenging the teacher’s authority. The most important point here is that ethnicity was constructed in a different way in each social field. The question now is: how is each one of these fields structured and how far is ethnicity shaping (or not) this structure?
The structuring of bureaucratic fields
Bureaucratic fields are the fields organized by expert institutions. Some of them are meant to deal with child social subjects. The most important is school, although there are also after-school activities managed by associations, social welfare or religious institutions. What they all have in common is that the social situation they produce is organized distally, that means decided at desks far away from the logic of real and concrete everyday life. Bureaucratic fields produce a first structuring of the social field of children.
First of all, expert bureaucratic systems (state bureaucracy) structure urban space following the criterion of the price of land. In this way, the social space in Bourdieu’s terms (1987) becomes coincident with the physical distribution of residential space. The creation of marginal peripheral areas is a clear aspect of this phenomenon, and Los Churumbeles, the ethnographic setting in Andalusia, is a good example. As a consequence, families’ possibilities for building social networks through relations with neighbours are constrained by their income.
A second axis of bureaucratic structuring is (1) the way the law determines access to certain jobs (for example, demanding diplomas) and (2) how the diverse ways of obtaining an income are declared legal or illegal. The international economy and labour market are the general context in which the nation produces norms that classify people as citizens and foreigners. Each category is associated with a different legal status, so that national law produces a labour structure that constrains workers’ opportunities for socialization.
Third, school bureaucracy distributes children following the various logics of spatial structuring of the town. According to school norms, children must go preferentially to the school closest to their place of residence. It seems to be quite a logical way of organizing schooling from a practical point of view, but it forces children to remain together with others with a similar economic situation, so that they do not have the opportunity to socialize with children from other neighbourhoods and economic situations. Socialization processes directed by school prevent (in principle) diverse children from mixing. Once they are distributed into schools, children are labelled, divided and grouped following criteria defined at far-away desks. For example, the classroom unit is based upon the criteria of age, capacity for school tasks and number of students that a teacher can deal with. Times of socialization are organized following criteria that have nothing to do with local ways of experiencing time but with efficacy according to the objectives of the institution. For example, school timetables are always in the morning, with pauses and periodicity marked by clock time. Spaces of socialization are also prefigured from far-away locations in a similar way for many different concrete schools, for example, the school building, classrooms and playground. Everything is done within the limits of the general norm, and children have little room for negotiation. Even if they succeed in convincing a concrete flesh-and-blood teacher to make a certain rule more flexible, the teacher does not have too much power to change the system; teachers just embody a set of distal norms. In fact, school is the most distal of all the fields that constitute children’s social life (at least for the children of this ethnography). For this reason, it is the most frustrating and limiting for children’s agency, and it becomes a scenario of conflict, especially in contexts of ‘antagonist acculturation’ (see Wolcott, 2005 [1974]) such as Los Churumbeles. In such conditions, the strategies that children develop to expand their capacity of action become quite dramatic (including fighting, shouting, throwing insults 8 ).
This classificatory system has real consequences for children’s lives, confined in closed spaces for hours every morning with other children whose company they did not choose. But how far is ethnicity relevant for structuring bureaucratic fields in Los Churumbeles? It is highly relevant. First, school produces difference by classifying students in ethnic categories which are practical for its goals. For example, children labelled Moroccan are sent to a specific Spanish-language course. In this way, they are separated from the rest of the so-called Spanish students. Second, religious bureaucracies lead to a construction of time and space that is shared by all their followers. In this way, they distribute families in different places of worship, they organize meetings periodically and signal certain special dates for gathering (for example, Muslims meeting every Friday, Evangelists meeting every day).
The structuring of domestic fields
In domestic fields, children have more possibilities for action when it comes to directing their own socialization processes. For this reason, the strategies they employ to do so are rather different from those displayed at school. The child social subject, as a social strategist, makes efforts to improve his or her techniques for empowering him- or herself and adapts to the characteristics of each field.
Domestic groups try to get over their situation of economic vulnerability by organizing collective strategies, which are much more effective and safe than individual ones. The unit of action and subsistence is the domestic group and it establishes networks of solidarity with other domestic groups. These networks are really interesting for our analytical purposes because children are part of them and socialize mainly within them.
In some cases, ethnicity becomes a very effective symbolic tool for creating attachment to these subsistence networks while in other cases this does not happen. When it does happen, ethnicity becomes an important structuring principle (never the only one) of these domestic networks. But we must not misunderstand, thinking that the same thing happens in the opposite direction. People do not gather together because they are Moroccans or Gypsies and therefore lock themselves into closed networks of poverty. Actually, when people are in a situation in which they lack resources, Moroccan-ness, Gypsy-ness or whatever label is considered relevant is an effective symbol for creating and strengthening the important social links that shape these networks of solidarity. The greater the vulnerability, the more strength ethnicity (or religious identifications) can acquire as the glue that holds the pieces of this social group together.
How far is ethnicity relevant for structuring domestic fields in Los Churumbeles? It depends on the case. For example, there are two religious communities 9 with a strong ethnic component of union, the Muslim community (associated with Moroccan-ness) and the Evangelist Culto community (associated with Gypsy-ness). But there are also other communities, such as the (illegal) weekly street market or the informal care- giving networks for the neighbourhood children, where this ethnic principle of structuring is absent.
The structuring of play fields
How does children’s agency shape the structure of the social groups they participate in, within this larger social context that children did not choose? Play fields are the ones where children rule. Sometimes there are no adults present while at other times adults and their social rules are simply ignored. These are the fields that allow children the greatest capacity for political action. In this case, power dynamics depend on the children alone. They build their own cultural conventions in order to create differences of status, and these are not necessarily in line with those produced by adults. On the basis of these hierarchies of children’s power, they negotiate who will do activities together and how, when and where they are going to do them. Adults usually refer to this kind of situations as ‘children playing’, and that is why I have decided to name them play fields. A good deal of children’s social life takes place in these play fields; they are not merely a preparation for adult social life, but a whole field of action with their own characteristics, meaningful in the moment the action happens (not in reference to a future moment) (Holmes, 1998; Spyrou, 2010).
Just like adults, children do not structure their play fields based only on individual criteria, but on collectively constructed conventions. Children group themselves in communities of secrets, so that they share valuable information that must be kept secret from those outside the group (see Finger, 2005; Simmel, 1927). This characteristic of the secret makes sense since children are a subordinated group: they need to develop strategies that imply hiding information from the adults who hold power over them. However, the criteria on which these groups are based are not universal, but defined in each cultural context. In the case of Los Churumbeles, there are at least five main principles: seniority in the group, age, gender, kinship and habitus (Bourdieu, 1988). (1) Seniority refers to the idea that children acquire the recognition of belonging to the group through time and by going through experiences together. The longer a child has been part of the group, the higher his/her status is. (2) Age is also one of the main principles of children’s hierarchy. In general, younger children are expected to respect older children. As a result, the oldest boys and girls are usually the leaders of the group. (3) Gender always plays a role, although it might differ depending on the concrete children’s culture. Some groups composed only of girls openly refuse to allow boys in their group, and vice versa. However, for other girls, the presence of boys is desirable but restricted to cousins, or to certain practices such as dancing or playing certain games. (4) Kinship constitutes a strong structuring principle in my ethnographic settings. Care-giving social networks in the domestic field are mostly structured by kinship, and thus the children under the same adults’ supervision socialize together on a daily basis. (5) Habitus or the set of embodied styles of communication and ways of value appropriated for a given context (see Bourdieu, 1988) is constructed collectively by the children and it is more flexible than age, gender or kinship. Some groups are built around a common activity, such as basketball, a certain type of dance or a musical style. To conclude, ethnicity is the most ephemeral and weakest principle for structuring groups. What is the role of ethnicity in the process, then? In what follows, I analyse the role that ethnicity plays in shaping these social groups.
Is ethnicity the glue that binds children together?
The answer I propose here is ‘no’. Children do use ethnicity to express the kinds of relationships they have among themselves, but it is not the criterion for deciding whether they will socialize with each other or not. Behind an apparent distribution of children in ethnic groups there is something else going on. When children do not share cultural codes of communication (and this is the case of recent immigrants), it is hard to socialize, but as time passes, this situation changes. The main principle here is habitus, and the key to building a shared habitus is time. In other words, children’s refusal to socialize with other children in Los Churumbeles can be explained in the following way: the children recently arrived from Morocco are not rejected because they are seen as Moroccans, but because they are new in the neighbourhood. That is, this apparent ethnic structuring is just one phase of a cycle of socialization, in an extraordinarily dynamic context (Los Churumbeles), where there are new children arriving from Morocco every day. Local children do not place the boy who came from Morocco seven years ago, who speaks the local language perfectly and moves and expresses himself like the rest of the children around him, in the same emic category that will be applied to the boy who has just arrived. Although both of them are perceived in the same way as Moroccans by teachers (and some researchers), children in the neighbourhood establish a clear difference between the first case and the second one. However, it is not only about time passing but also about the processes time allows: a progressive change of habitus and a gradual construction of shared cultural patterns. Struggles and conflicts among children of different ethnic backgrounds are not a proof of a refusal to socialize; on the contrary, they are part of the socialization process. In this case, the ethnonym translates communality or distance of habitus and belonging to the group. Let me illustrate this by means of an ethnographic example.
Within children’s groups, there are leaders who make important political decisions, such as allowing new members into the group through politics that I will call godmotherhood or godfatherhood: it means that a new child in Los Churumbeles, the neophyte, is put under the protection of a group or group leader and he/she owes them loyalty. This is the first phase of belonging. For example, Jimena (9) is one of the leaders of a group that I will call The Baby Girls. In the course of one week, she decided to take a new girl, Yasmina, whom she did not like at first, under her protection. Jimena was in fifth grade and she met her school friends, The Baby Girls, every day she went to school. I accompanied her throughout the school day for one week. In the classroom, I sat beside her and tried to see the social world from the point of view of these children. Approximately half of the children in Yasmina’s class were girls and half boys. With regards to ethnicity, half of the children were classified by the teachers as Moroccans and the other half as Spaniards. In general, there was a good ambience of friendship among the children. The only exception was Yasmina, who remained isolated at the back of the class.
The first day I entered the classroom I asked Jimena who her friends were. She answered: ‘my friends are Coral and Clara’, but then added ‘well, no, also Lubna . . . and Laila . . . well, actually all of the girls you can see in the class are friends of mine, everyone but that new girl, Yasmina, she is bothersome. I don’t like that Moor’. Yasmina had arrived just a few days earlier from Morocco and she did not speak a word of Spanish. Nobody spoke to her, not even other children who could speak Moroccan Arabic. However, the following day, in math class, I witnessed the following scene: During math class, we go on with polygons. Jimena has many problems drawing them. The teacher passes by Yasmina’s table and he says: ‘Well done, Yasmina, you have done it very well. You all, look how well Yasmina has drawn the polygons’ and he shows her work to everybody. Jimena says: ‘Please, Yasmina, help me’. She comes immediately and she starts drawing the polygons for Jimena. Jimena smiles and says: ‘Shukran,
10
Yasmina’ many times. Yasmina smiles. The teacher comes and makes Yasmina go back to her seat. As soon as he turns away, she comes again to Jimena’s table and goes on drawing the polygons for her. . . . There was a fight during the break and the children are still discussing it. I ask about it and Khadija says: ‘Laila hit Yasmina and now she says that it was me.’ Laila says: ‘No, I took Yasmina by her braid and it was Khadija who pushed her to the floor, it wasn’t me.’ Jimena is arguing in a very passionate way, and I ask her afterwards: ‘Why did you mess with that fight? It is not your business’ and she says: ‘Because I have told them that I don’t want anybody to touch Yasmina, she has done nothing to them, if I find out . . . Poor girl, she doesn’t mess with anybody, that Moroccan is my friend.’ (Fieldwork diary, May 2006)
Initially, Yasmina is totally disconnected. Jimena and her friends, The Baby Girls, do not communicate with her. Even though Laila and Lubna could speak to her in Moroccan Arabic, they do not. They do not see her as having anything in common with them; she is a stranger and as such she occupies the lowest rank on the scale of social prestige among these children. Nevertheless, the teacher helps bring about a change in Yasmina’s position. In school bureaucratic fields, the group needs allies to solve school tasks. And this new girl happens to have good abilities for that; in this way, connecting with her provides an advantage. Jimena tries to approach her and she receives a favourable response. In this way, there is a change in the structure as The Baby Girls allow for the admission of a new member. Ethnonyms play a central role in the way of constructing the social tie: when a child is labelled as Moroccan, he/she belongs to the group to a higher degree than when the child is labelled as Moor. But this dynamic process of categorization is not what determines whether a child will be accepted or not in the group.
How far are children’s social networks determined by adults?
The structure of the bureaucratic and domestic fields in which children socialize imposes conditions on their possibilities for establishing relations with others. But this does not mean that children’s agency is entirely curtailed; instead it means that children’s agency is limited. That is, the dynamics of these fields do not determine the social life children produce. Children very often follow the lines drawn by adults, but sometimes they are also able to resist or ignore them and impose their own criteria. Let us think about Islamic religious bureaucracies and their local adaptation to domestic fields, such as the Muslim community of Los Churumbeles. To begin with, the calendar produces a structuring of time that divides Muslim and non-Muslim children into two communities on particular days of religious celebration. Nevertheless, I observed that children were able to cross these separation lines and find their own spaces of socialization. Let us see this in the following ethnographic example.
There was a series of events that Muslim children and teenagers awaited during the year. The holidays implied a break in the daily routine and gave them the opportunity to gather with family and friends, not go to school, eat delicious food and wear nice clothes. There were specific events such as weddings, circumcisions or the naming of a baby. Moreover, there were cyclical religious holidays, mainly the feast of the lamb (one month after the end of the month of Ramadan) and the small party or fiesta chica (the day after the month of Ramadan finishes). I had the opportunity to join a group of children during the fiesta chica: they were from the Sous region (in southern Morocco) and the leaders were two girls, so I will call them The Girls from the Sous.
It was the morning of Thursday, 3 November 2005, a special day when Muslim families celebrated the small feast or ‘aid-al-fitr (fiesta chica) just after finishing the fasting month of Ramadan. I met the members of The Girls from the Sous while I was taking a walk in Los Churumbeles: there was Fadua (10), her best friend Iman (10) and their younger cousins and siblings. We spent the morning roaming the streets visiting their relatives and buying candy. In each house we entered, the children kissed and hugged adults. They were invited to sit and drink tea and eat little cakes. These visits would not last more than 15 minutes, and the adults would also give them a little money. At the end of these visits, the children went to a candy shop where they bought candy, sweets and dried fruits and nuts with the money they collected. Following that, we continued roaming around. At the time of the school break, Fadua proposed going to the school to laugh at the children who had to attend classes. We went there, but rather than laughing at them, they chatted and bought candy for their friends who were inside the school.
The ethnic discourse built into bureaucratic fields (religious and school ones) predicts that there will be two different experiences of time for children labelled as Arabs and Spaniards. The former will enjoy a holiday with their families while the latter will attend school. The two groups are not supposed to interact on that day: their fields are divided by the bureaucratic lines. Nevertheless, these children do not assume or adopt this structuring system. The logic of play fields is made more relevant in the middle of the morning when Fadua thinks about those who are constructed as ‘others’ that day: the ones who are locked behind the walls of the school and who are not participating in the celebration. And she decides to go and visit them. This is a local innovation that would not be possible, for example, if they were in Morocco. She puts it as a way of asserting themselves over the others, ‘Let’s laugh at them’. That would mean reinforcing the structure created by school and religious instances. But in the end this is not what happens. When they approach the school fence, what they do is talk, exchange information about what has been going on during the morning and collaborate in economic tasks such as buying candy. The school fence becomes a metaphor of the ‘ethnic border’ that children do not take seriously; instead of respecting it and reinforcing it, they communicate through it. The principle of structuring that becomes relevant is that of play fields while ethnicity ceases to be relevant. The children get through the cleft of time (15 minutes of school break time) and the cleft of space (the air between the bars of the fence). Relations bloom in this small hole left open by bureaucratic institutions, like wildflowers growing through the cracks in cement.
However, if ethnicity is not a relevant criterion for shaping children’s groups, and if children can pass over the ethnic structuring of bureaucratic and domestic fields, is there any situation in which ethnicity becomes important for organizing play fields?
In which situations does ethnicity become relevant for children as a structuring force?
This occurs in situations of certain games, constrained to specific times and spaces. Certain structuring processes are much more stable through time, such as those for conforming groups of friends, while others are much more ephemeral, such as the organization of a game or specific activity. Throughout the day, children pass from one form of structuring to another. Consider the following example when children from the Los Churumbeles high school decided to organize a football game during the break time by forming two teams, one team of Moroccans and another one of Christians. The children called it Moors against Christians. The Moroccan link worker11 got angry and called it a racist act, but all the children involved laughed about it and saw it as a very funny way to organize their football matches. In this case, the children had created an ethnic discourse of the body in a play field. Although the Moroccan intercultural link worker sees it as a situation of struggle, it is more accurate to say that the main dimension is structuring. The children are making a rule all together to organize the shared game, so they are all part of the shared activity. Nobody is imposing norms on anyone else and it is a coordinated game. It would be a struggle if, for example, some children were expelled from the playground because they are labelled Moroccans, but this is not the case. The structuring is as ephemeral as the game: when it finishes, each boy goes back to his group where ethnonyms are not a structuring principle. It is especially interesting that the children are reinterpreting the historical symbol of the battles of ‘Moors against Christians’, but they adapt it to their local reality and the context of a football match. It should be added that it is not so surprising that they decide to organize the game this way: professional football clubs are organized following national, regional and ethnic lines. So these children are simply doing the same thing that is considered logical in this kind of sport context.
By contrast, the same children who also played on the same afternoon in the official club of the neighbourhood did not organize the game along the same lines. When I spoke to the trainer, he said to me that if any boy dared to use words such as Moor, he would be immediately expelled from the team. But, he added, they never used them anyway. They went to play together every Sunday against other teams and they were high in the town rankings. They were proud of forming, all together, the ‘Los Churumbeles Sports Club’. So, in this situation, ethnonyms played no role.
Conclusions: On the irrelevance of ethnicity
Who is classifying children?
If we start fieldwork by classifying the social subjects of the ethnography using ethnonyms, we put our analysis in a mistaken perspective. The common practice of reifying ethnic categories, seeing them embodied in children, will inexorably lead us to the conclusion that they gather together on the basis of ethnicity. This practice prioritizes ethnicity as an explanatory principle by placing ethnicity in the first stage of our analysis as if it were something that explains phenomena, as a means for building a theory of social dynamics. Throughout this article I have argued that children as agents are characterized and perceived, above all, as social beings who develop diverse political strategies in order to achieve their goals. Some of these strategies imply using ethnicity while others do not. The main criterion for distinguishing between social actors is not ethnic labels, but the place they have on a social map characterized by great structural inequalities. Starting from the assumption that children live their lives in this structural framework that they did not choose, the following step is to analyse the ways in which they make decisions about socializing with other children, and the role ethnicity plays in them. In general, as my ethnographic study has shown, ethnicity is irrelevant.
However, this does not mean that ethnicity is irrelevant in children’s lives; I have argued that it plays an important role in the dimensions of belonging and political struggle, but not in structuring. This is why distinguishing between the three dimensions is very important. From my point of view, when it seems that children are structuring their social world in ethnic terms, there is, in fact, something else going on. In the case of Los Churumbeles, I have shown with ethnographic examples that (1) what looks like social linking according to an ethnic criterion is actually a first phase of strangeness and adaptation among children who display a rather different habitus; in this context, children use ethnicity as a symbolic vehicle that translates cultural proximity or distance and degree of belonging to a certain group. I have also shown that (2) bureaucratic institutions, based on the network of the distal rules they create, are the real obstacle for socialization among ethnically different children. This is not, however, a determining factor. Even under these conditions, children are able to create their own strategies to find spaces and times to interact. Finally, (3) I have offered an example of how dynamic the structuring and destructuring processes of children’s social life are in order to avoid a reified vision of their socialization and to put ethnonyms in the appropriate dimension of relevance.
The perception of teachers that ‘they only mix among themselves’ makes sense within a particular context. First, it is limited to what happens in bureaucratic school fields. In fact, the presence of the teacher, as a figure of authority, is what shapes the situation as a bureaucratic field. School becomes a context of struggle, especially in settings like Los Churumbeles where antagonistic acculturation takes place. In this context, ethnonyms become a weapon that children throw at one another when there are teachers on the scene. This is the reason that teachers have the feeling that there is a general ethnic conflict in the neighbourhood. However, children’s processes of social structuring follow other lines, as I have tried to demonstrate. Second, bringing the habitus of recently arrived children closer to that of the rest of the children happens, in most cases, by separating themselves from school culture; having good relationships with other children implies making the teacher a common enemy. These processes are interpreted by teachers as something that is undesirable, and they usually call them bad influences. It is necessary to detach ourselves from the point of view of school bureaucracy and its objectives in order to acquire a wider perspective of the social processes that take place at school (Díaz de Rada and Jiménez, 2011). The school is not just a spectator that is independent of the course of these phenomena but one of the main actors in the drama. Once this perspective is achieved and reproduction of bureaucratic categories and discourse is avoided, the conclusion reached is that ethnicity is probably the weakest and most ephemeral principle for structuring children’s play fields.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.