Abstract
The recent arrival of refugees in rural Sweden has raised hopes that they might stave off the depopulation of the country’s periphery and lead to its development. Despite these visions in policy and in some academic literature, there is little research on how immigrant encounters with development and integration practices take shape on the ground. Critical research on immigrant integration in Sweden focuses on urban areas where most immigrants live. Rural areas, with sparse populations, weak economic positions vis a vis cities and increased policy pressures to define themselves as uniquely competitive, stand at a crossroads as they grapple with developing their areas and integrating newcomers. A less visible, but no less decisive crossroads is the vision of multiculturalism grounded in current institutions for democracy, in contrast to the road that I suggest we need to take – one that turns a critical eye on the relations that constitute the culture and institutions for integration and rural development. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork in the province of Hälsingland and on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of misrecognition as well as critical race theories, I probe the ‘misrecognition’ of the rural and of institutions for integration and democracy in Sweden. I argue that the misrecognition of voluntary associations as the template for democracy for all and dominant discourses on what constitutes rural culture, inadvertently embody racial undertones that need to be confronted – both in theorizing and in practice – if aspirations for a multicultural democracy are to be taken as seriously as they must.
Introduction
The recent arrival of refugees to Sweden 1 has stirred diverse reactions in the country. Racist groups have clamored to put a stop to further immigration and decry the drain on the exchequer. This influx has also raised hopes that the placement of immigrants in rural areas might be the solution for rural development and the depopulation that has haunted the country’s periphery for several decades. In the meagre research on immigration to rural areas in Sweden, researchers have called attention to the potential vitalization of the countryside by pointing to the immigrants’ rich networks and cultures (e.g. Hedberg and Carmo, 2012). While these may seem to promote discourses of a convivial multiculturalism, scarce attention has been given to how such hopes and visions propounded in rural research and in policies on multicultural democracy actually take shape on the ground in rural areas within the context of an increasingly racialized political discourse in the country. 2
Critical research on integration and multiculturalism in Sweden (Dahlstedt and Hertzberg, 2007; Hubinette et al., 2012; Schierup and Ålund, 2011), has tended to take urban areas, where most immigrants live, as its point of departure. There is little to show in mainstream policy or academic debates in Sweden on immigration/integration or rural development as to how rural contexts fit into an idea of multicultural democracy that forms the current basis of integration policies. With sparse populations, weak economic positions vis a vis cities and increased policy pressure to define themselves as unique in order to be competitive, rural areas stand at a crossroads as they grapple with developing their areas and integrating newcomers. Yet, as I bring into view here, a less visible but no less decisive crossroads is between the vision of multiculturalism, based upon a belief in current institutions for democracy, in contrast to the road that I suggest we need to tread – one that turns a critical eye on the relations that constitute the culture and institutions for integration and rural development.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the province of Hälsingland in several periods between 2007 and 2014, I study what grounds there might be for the happy confluence of integration and rural development. Based on stories from both native Swedes, government authorities and those who have immigrated or been given asylum in Hälsingland, 3 I outline a picture of everyday integration and development practices as imbued with hitherto unexamined assumptions about culture, race and ethnicity. In mainstream debates, questions of racism are predominantly associated with racist party politics or with the structures of labor and housing markets (SOU, 2005:41). Instead, I highlight the need to theorize race as a part of institutional authority and power – not only as overt racist acts – that play out in specific ways in rural contexts. I do so by drawing on conceptualizations of misrecognition (Bourdieu, 1977; Burawoy, 2012; Swartz, 1997) that shed light on the contradictory practices that make up the institutional context for integration and development but that often remain untheorized and hence invisible. Empirically, I study the openings available for immigrants to engage in local life and rural landscapes and theorize on how local institutions for ‘integration’ and democracy and discourses on the ‘rural’ provide the space for them to do so, and on how culture and race are at the heart of immigrant encounters with the rural.
In the following section, I discuss conceptualizations of misrecognition that I use to analyze debates on multiculturalism/integration and the rural. In the section on ‘Material and methods’, I present the material generated during fieldwork in Hälsingland and the discursive analysis of stories told in the field. The section, ‘Rural development and integration in Hälsingland’ is an analysis of the institutional practices that shape rural development and integration in Hälsingland. The section, ‘Misrecognition of the rural’ shifts attention to processes of misrecognition in the discourses that pervade rural policies and projects on the ground. In ‘The rural as becoming: Transgressions and counter discourses’, I turn my attention to the transgressions that challenge dominant imaginaries of the rural, of democratic organizing well as the boundaries of social relations. I end with reflections on the misrecognized crossroads at which we stand and the urgent need to theorize further the racialization of multiculturalism/integration and rural development.
The politics of misrecognition: Discourses on multiculturalism, integration and the rural through the lens of race and culture
In the literature on integration and multiculturalism, scholars have pointed to critical disjunctures between ideology and practice in Sweden. These have taken the form of prescribed ‘equality’ versus existing discrimination and a hierarchic division of labor, freedom of choice versus documented exclusiveness and segregation and partnership versus bureaucratic control and technoscientific monitoring (Ålund and Schierup, 1991: 4; Dahlstedt and Hertzberg, 2007; SOU, 2005:41; SOU, 2005:112). I argue that Bourdieu’s theorizing on the inseparability of the symbolic and material aspects of social life with respect to how culture and ideology get embedded in social practices, provides an excellent conceptualization for understanding and interrupting these disjunctures and contributes to furthering the theoretical debates on immigration/integration and rural development. 4
For Bourdieu (1977), an ‘aura of factuality’ permeates what is actually the arbitrary nature of what becomes ‘culture.’ Material structures of relations between groups (such as the sexes, age or class) are inserted into the structure of a system of symbolic relations. This system of symbolic relations helps to legitimate oppositions or hierarchies that organize social groups by presenting them in misrecognizable forms (97). ‘Misrecognition’ denotes ‘denial’ of the economic and political interests present in a set of practices. Individuals and groups who benefit from the transformation of self-interest into disinterest obtain what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic capital’ that disguises the underlying intended relations as disinterested pursuits (Swartz, 1997: 89–90). This mise en scen (Bourdieu, 1977: 133) is intended to impose on these social practices a collectively proclaimed symbolic value, a ‘realized myth’ (163), which may be the exact opposite of their socially recognized and no less objective truth. Their practices are ritualized and assigned time relatively independent of external necessities. Bourdieu uses the concept of ‘doxa’ to explain this naturalization of arbitrariness. Doxa is the absolute form of recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness that precludes the recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs (164–168).
It is the doxa on integration and multiculturalism and its critique that I examine next. I begin by turning to literature that helps pin down misrecognitions inherent in multiculturalism, integration and the making of rural culture, before I go on to examine them in vignettes from Hälsingland.
Fractures in the multicultural and integration doxa
Sweden has long been regarded as exemplifying a multicultural regime with its generous extension of substantial citizenship, welfare and labor rights to migrants, not conditional on integration achievements such as language competency as well as equality for all groups and cultures (Ålund and Schierup, 1991; Borevi, 2014). 5 In a Parliamentary Bill in 1998 (Prop.1997/98:16), moving away from a prior focus on ‘assimilation’ that was seen as stigmatizing ‘the other,’ immigration policy officially became integration policy. The premise of integration continued to be a multicultural democracy but now also with ‘integration as a two-way process whereby minority groups and the majority population participate in the process of change on an equal footing’ (Phillips, 2010).
Despite its multicultural policies, Sweden showed evidence of exclusions, segregation and discrimination. According to Ålund and Schierup (1991), with multiculturalism, social conflicts got relegated to cultural discrepancies and defined according to standards of normality set by the ordering practices of institutional ideologies, thus masking real structures of power. While integration denotes the desirability of integration as a two-way process, the expectation in Sweden as in most of Europe, writes Phillips, is that most of the adaptation will be undertaken by the minority ethnic population (2010: 214). Pointing to the disjuncture between Swedish integration policy and its aspirations for a multicultural democracy, Dahlström (2004) observes that the practice and routines of integration have continued to follow the path of an assimilationist model and regardless of rhetoric, the objectives of dissemination about ‘Swedish’ society remain most important. Significantly, even the information efforts and the nature of information have remained much the same.
This disjuncture in the policy and practice of integration can be seen to arise from a misrecognition wherein ‘abstract principles of egalitarianism of liberal multiculturalism subsume a set of shared values whose core components remain unspoken (and dominant) rules’ (Gordon and Newfield, 1996). Lentin argues that the problems of multiculturalism in Europe today ‘arise from the hushing up of race’ (Lentin, 2008: 497). In this view, the use of culture as a viable conceptualization of human difference and its inextricable relationship with racism in the history of modernity often goes unchallenged in present day scholarship (Lentin, 2005). Discriminatory practices get subsumed within a theory of cultural differences that denies the relevance of ‘race.’ It results in what Blaut (1992) terms, ‘cultural racism,’ where theories might change – with their basis in religion, biology or culture – but where empirical beliefs sustain. Following this thinking, I address racism, not as theory but as practice.
In Sweden, scholars working on postcolonial theory and race have drawn attention to how racist practices are reproduced and reinforced by a belief in benevolent notions of Nordic exceptionalism (Schierup and Ålund, 2011; Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012). According to Dahlstedt and Hertzberg (2007: 186), ‘by reiterating discourses on Swedish democracy, it becomes the job of Swedes to “enlighten” “immigrants” to become good “Swedish democrats”.’ This conceptualization of democracy, founded on the ideal of an archaic national community, is incapable of including the whole population on equal terms. In a similar vein, ‘Swedish gender-equality’ is given a unique position in official and everyday discourse by distinguishing itself from other not-as-developed or gender-equal countries (Arora-Jonsson, 2009). It is meant to be learnt by both migrant men and women, glorifying the Swedish welfare state and reinforcing the image of the nation through a narrow focus on white, heterosexual women (Liinason, 2010).
Researchers observe that in practice, ensuring a multicultural democracy has been left to the initiative of Sweden’s institutions and to an enlightened technocracy, rather than to communicative public interchange, and in this way undermining multiculturalism as it was being formulated (Ålund and Schierup, 1991: viii). The Swedish state, from the 1970s onwards, produced ‘official ethnicities’ and through their associations arranged for their highly formalized, structured participation in the polity. This was done through clear top-down and centralized policies (Soysal, 1994). The importance of associations in promoting one’s interests and for individuals to acquire knowledge and experience to engage in political life continued as an article of faith also in integration policy (Prop.1997/8). Associations in Sweden have a deep-rooted history in folk movements that have been regarded, both in academic and policy discourses, as the voice of the people, a ‘realized myth’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 133) as research has also pointed to the male and white dominance in such forums (Arora-Jonsson, 2017; DS, 2004:49; SOU, 2005:112). Civil society scholars warn that associations, rather than providing political voice, are turning into service providers, taking over activities no longer provided by the state (Lundberg, 2012). This is particularly evident in rural areas where cut-backs in public services in past decades have led to pressure on local communities to organize service provision, coinciding also with rural policy and EU efforts that have turned to rural groups to engender ‘development from below.’ This imperative to ‘develop’ the rural has led to a range of struggles over defining the ‘rural’ and consequent misrecognitions.
Misrecognition of the rural
In official definitions, ‘rural’ includes physical place, a population structure and distances in relation to urban spaces. The ‘rural,’ however, is more than the material and is a category that requires theorization. It is a representation with politics and cultural currency (Ashwood and MacTavish, 2016) that has far reaching implications for attempts at development and integration. Scholars have shown how hegemonic ‘social representations’ of tranquility, goodness, wholeness and problem-freedom associated with rural areas are often divorced from their referent, that is, from the rural locality itself and its’ relationships of gender, class and power (Cloke, 2004; Halfacree, 1993). Others have drawn attention to how the construction of rural space becomes an active component of hegemonic power in relation to the urban norm and also within rural areas. They call attention to questions of race, ethnicity and indigeneity to help unsettle definitions of rurality itself and warn against unproblematically theorizing landscape representations and cultural narratives as exclusionary of multiple histories and experiences (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010; Neal and Agyeman, 2006: 7; Panelli et al., 2009).
Racial modalities are often central to discourses on rural heritage (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010). In Sweden, Högberg (2013: 23–24) demonstrates how heritage projects have involved distilling from the plurality of experiences and memories – through sorting, choosing, preserving, managing, activating, using – collective narratives of the past, present and future that are considered institutionally important today. For him, there is little understanding among those working with heritage conservation of the selective ways in which they choose material artifacts, mythologies, memories and traditions as resources for the present. Unreflective and essentialist connections are made between individuals’ backgrounds, experiences, place of birth and their ascribed cultural heritage. In such cases, ‘culture is conceived along ethnically absolute lines, not as something intrinsically fluid, changing, unstable, and dynamic, but as a fixed property of social groups rather than a relational field in which they encounter one another and live out social, historical relationships’ (Gilroy, 1990b: 266). In the following pages, I examine the ways in which ‘culture’ becomes an arbiter of power in how rural space is defined, by whom and how ideas about race and ethnicity are central to it.
Culture, race and ethnicity
Taking race to be socially and politically constructed, I analyze how, like gender/sex and in intersection with them, race as a ‘visible social identity,’ marked on the body itself, guides if not determines the way people are perceived and judge others and are perceived and judged by them (Alcoff, 2006). ‘Race’ serves as codes and as manifestation of power (Essed and Goldberg, 2002). The terms race and ethnicity are often used interchangeably. While ethnicity tends to emphasize a rhetoric of culture and lifestyle, race tends to be associated with physical distinctions. Both rest not on objective criteria, but on perception. Differences between them are matters of tendency, not absolute distinction (Sollors, 2002). In Sweden, Hubinette and Lundström (2011: 44) argue that ‘the difference between the bodily concept of race and the cultural concept of ethnicity has collapsed completely within the national imaginary, such that whiteness is Swedish, and Swedishness is whiteness.’ Whiteness may be ‘indicated less by its explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or even, denies, racist indications. It occupies central ground by deracializing and normalizing common events and beliefs’ (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000: 394). In Bourdieu’s terminology then, whiteness may be seen to operate as a ‘symbolic capital’ (1977) that succeeds in disguising underlying relations of power. Elaborate ideological work is done in order to maintain the different forms of racialization that have characterized capitalist development (Gilroy, 1990a). Race is a prime lens through which the construction of the nation-state in modernity – as a regime for exclusion or inclusion – may be viewed (Goldberg, 2002) and I study how these take shape in the discourses I study.
Simultaneously, it is important to study the fragile nature of discursive constructions. ‘Collective misrecognition’ is more contingent than Bourdieu acknowledges and perhaps not as deep and universal (Burawoy, 2012). I pay special attention to social and symbolic representations of rurality, but also to counter-discourses that rupture dominant meanings. The presence of new ‘transgressive’ groups in the rural landscape reflect newer, dynamic and shifting boundaries of rural social relations (Neal and Agyeman, 2006) and they ‘bring the undiscussed into discussion’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 168). I direct attention to these encounters to study the ‘constant becomingness’ of the rural as it is subject to different claims, desires and values’ (Neal and Agyeman, 2006: 110), as a ‘sphere of dynamic simultaneity … constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations’ (Massey, 2005: 107). I analyze the everyday and ‘ordinary’ as an important dimension where mundane routines constitute and reproduce but also contest larger ideological, social, structural, and cultural forces in imagining rural Sweden.
Material and methods
The analysis builds on ethnographic work (interviews, participant observation, attendance at meetings) in municipalities of Hälsingland between 2007–2008 and 2013–2014 and on a reading of policy documents and project evaluations (cited in the text) on rural development and integration. I lived in the area for seven and a half months, approximately two months at a time. In-depth interviews were carried out with native Swedes, government authorities and people from other countries who had immigrated there over the years. 3 I reached people through associations listed at the municipality and through snowball sampling wherein one person led me to the next. These were mostly men (often chairs), and I made a conscious attempt to interview more women, interviewing 14 women and 25 men. Only two immigrant associations had women as chairs, one of which was an ‘ethnic’ women’s association. Most immigrants were refugees who had been given asylum in Sweden and were Kurdish, Eritrean, Arab (mainly from Iraq), Finnish and Somalian. I also attended local meetings on integration. Except for the Finns, the immigrants were people of color. All women’s groups and municipal authorities were white with the exception of one person working at an integration unit. All interviews were carried out in Swedish (with the exception of one in English) and all translations are my own.
Interview/meeting transcripts and journal notes are treated as narratives that describe the participants’ social relations and as text that forms the basis of a discourse analysis. I analyze how discourse actively constructs reality, not just represents it (Wetherell and Potter, 1992). While the focus is on the ethnographic material, I also draw on a reading of official documents to analyze their definitions of the rural, integration and development. In language and action, I identify practices that strive to establish meanings and assumptions about race, ethnicity and gender taken for granted in these constructions – such as in that of an idyllic rural past, exploited women or ethnic association. I analyze how discourses may mystify and obscure relations; how the arbitrariness that gets naturalized and fixes the ‘culture’ of rural spaces and peoples is shaped by the selective adoption of ‘traditions’ and by current relations of power (Bourdieu, 1977); and how that comes to illustrate and shape dominant notions of what is considered valuable in a nation, a region or a locality. To that end, I focus on how knowledge about integration and development is created and how notions to do with ‘race’ (not a tracking down of racist practices) are constituted within institutional practice (Wetherell and Potter, 1992: 79) and identify practices of misrecognition to be able to challenge them.
Rural development and integration in Hälsingland
National and EU rural programs seek to stimulate rural areas to define their vision and construct their identity and unique images so as to become more attractive and competitive. By doing so, they are meant to increase their market share and attract potential residents, investments and tourists. Following the EU’s Leader methodology, 6 the Swedish Rural Program (RP) (Regeringskansliet, 2007), 7 funded both by EU and the national government, build on the work of local groups and organizations in rural development. Local actors are encouraged to develop an area by using ‘endogenous development material’ and through funding obtained for development projects from the RP.
According to the RP, Local Action Groups (LAGs) – the prime association for rural development formed to disburse RP funds within every Leader area – need to comprise representatives from public, private and voluntary sectors and represent a cross-section of society, especially women and immigrants. In interviews, it became clear that no immigrants were involved in the LAGs as stipulated by the RP nor did they have any knowledge of them. 8 A few had a vague notion about there being EU funds. Systemic reasons account for this absence and inability in incorporating new peoples and perspectives into the RP. As a governmental inquiry showed, the LAGs that redistributed funds in the first period of the Program were drawn from older networks of people active in various EU programs. These networks, while strong within their own ranks ‘reproduced and strengthened existing power relations and their right to define rural development, thus contradicting the rural programs’ hopes of ‘integration and innovation’ (SOU, 2007: 390–392).
Similarly, none of the people of color whom I interviewed were involved in local associations, except for a few young men who were part of sports organizations (mainly soccer clubs). The only two non-native members of village associations that I was told about were a man from Russia and a woman from the Philippines. Immigrants who had tried to work with projects on integration had done so from within their own ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ associations (as they were called locally) and these were regarded by the authorities as a primary tool for immigrants’ social and political integration into rural life.
The construction of the ‘ethnic’ association
The oldest ‘immigrant’ associations were Finnish. The chair of one regretted that their membership was diminishing as the younger generation was becoming more Swedish – ‘marrying Swedes, speaking only Swedish and losing touch with their culture.’ One reason for this, according to her, was that the schools in the past told parents to speak to their children in Swedish rather than in their own language, even if their Swedish was rudimentary. There was also a shift in native Swedes’ perception of Finnish outsider status, in part due to the moving in of new non-white immigrants, There has been in recent times an influx of people into Sweden. So, earlier we were the ‘bloody Finns’ all the time, but now when there are other ethnic groups (folkgrupper) … brown and black … the Finns count as Swedes.
Forming associations did have positive effects. Many immigrants organized themselves in their own ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ associations. The chair of one who had recently escaped from his African country marveled at the ease in forming associations in Sweden. According to him, in the war-torn country from which he came, every attempt at forming associations needed to be vetted by the government and in most cases, was denied permission. The meeting places used by many immigrant associations, in contrast to those of local associations, were visited frequently. Evenings were busy with study circles on ‘cultural conflicts’, language courses and other activities. Several older members (usually men resident in Sweden for a longer period) helped newcomers with paperwork and translations, in many ways fulfilling the formalistic part of integration policies by easing the transition of its members into the Swedish system. Members also spoke about their associations as a conduit for culture, for their way of life and language. The chairman cited above continued, for us it is a support network.. for helping each other … sharing information, experiences … . A platform from which to integrate. We should integrate ourselves … not expect … . wait for the Swedish communities to integrate us, but we have to assimilate ourselves and integrate in the society … .we will transfer also our values and practices to our young … They have the same possibilities as Swedes to start associations. We have information about society, about starting associations … what is an association … . Many are not used to democracy … come from different systems … it isn’t easy … These are difficult questions … .It takes time for us to teach them … In our work we try to go out and inform … what is a refugee? … also, for example in laundry rooms, many don’t know … they leave lint in the dryer.
Local women’s groups in Hälsingland were concerned that Thai women married to Swedish men were being exploited and oppressed by the men. Symptomatic in such discourses was the absence of Thai voices. Despite concern by women’s organizations for immigrant women exploited by men who bring them into the country, there was an inability to talk with the women instead of about them. This was prompted dually by the perceived inability among women’s organizations to reach out to migrant women in their homes as it could be interference in private matters and in part by assumptions about knowing already what the Thai women’s problems were – their status as victimized women unable to assert gender equality. The latter was evident at a meeting on integration in one municipality where no invitations were extended to any of the people they wanted to ‘integrate.’ It could also be seen in the limits that immigrant associations encountered in their work with integration. A chairman (originally from West Asia) who had lived in Hälsingland for many years said in frustration, It leads to nothing, I mean … I was very critical … that from the start they (the municipality) say … we have two, three, four million (for integration activities) … We are going to invest in this and that … .Will it help that we go in the morning and tell twenty students that today we will learn how to build a bird box? What does that mean? How is that going to help integration? It is just a waste. It is useless. I mean … this isn’t integration … ’Today we are going to make dolma’ … How is dolma going to help integration? ‘Today … we are going to bake a cake.’ Okay, cake is delicious. We can eat it but then how is that going to help … through that we eat cake? How are we going to integrate ourselves?
The assumptions that pervade thinking, based on a lack of knowledge or understanding of each other contributed to racialization where difference was assigned value. Unacknowledged racial undertones of superiority in questions of democracy or gender equality forestalled any change in the institutions itself or a two-way interaction that acknowledged a changing society. Macro-structures of exclusion were reproduced in micro relations and in the lack of interrelations between people (Essed and Goldberg, 2002: 180). Not knowing how to bake a cake or how to clean out the lint in a dryer become superimposed as constructions of ‘cultural incompetence’ (Cloke, 2004: 29). Exclusions were reinforced by categories decided beforehand in the discourses and routines of integration authorities and other well-meaning organizations, unable to confront their own assumptions about culture and race. These were reinforced by a misrecognition of the rural itself.
Misrecognition of the rural
Although the native Swedish population far exceeds immigrants in Hälsingland, there has been an increase in the proportion of foreign-born residents in recent times. 10 National figures show a shift in the demography of Hälsingland – a shift that is not quite reflected in Swedish rural policy (RP 2007–2013) that despite professing integration as a general principle, has few concrete references to how to go about it – creating an invisibility that widens the ‘misrecognition’ that I discuss further below.
One way to increase integration was to link immigrant organizations to the work of the Rural Network, 11 the working group responsible for questions of ‘integration’ at the national level. Incongruously, considering its name, the Rural Network directed its integration projects mainly to immigrants living in urban areas. The two main objectives of its ‘integration group’ were to inform desk officers of the match between immigrants and rural areas and the second to inform the target group itself, immigrants living in urban areas, about the possibilities available in rural areas (Estmalm and Lennartsson, 2014: 12). Past research has shown no positive effects of marketing campaigns on in-migration among native Swedes (Niedomysyl, 2007). This course of action for immigrants seemed equally misplaced. That most immigrant populations live in urban areas diverted attention from those actually working with those present in rural areas. Once again, the urban mindset seemed to overshadow rural policy (Arora-Jonsson, 2013).
Similarly, in a ‘green integration’ project, there were hopes to benefit from immigrants’ knowledge of agriculture in order to revive the green sectors in Sweden. As a municipal officer explained, immigrants should be engaged in agriculture ‘since they have so much to contribute to vegetable cultivation that the Swedes have forgotten.’ None of the immigrants I spoke to professed the knowledge needed for agriculture in Swedish conditions and did not regard it as a realistic option. While agriculture is part of a landscape that forms a vital part of people’s experiences of the place, policy belief in their role in the local labor economy is more ‘doxa’ than actual practice. An economic evaluation of the RP pointed to how the focus on agriculture had not yielded results and had instead inhibited economic activities that might otherwise have been possible (Rabinowicz, 2013).
A study of life trajectories of youth born in rural areas shows that agriculture has not been a viable livelihood since long before 1965. The authors observe that considering how marginal agriculture has been for employment in rural areas for such a long period, its position in rural research and policies seems exaggerated (Hedlund and Lundholm, 2015). The need for immigrants to become ‘modern Europeans’ (Soysal, 1994) appears to be juxtaposed in rural areas with a yearning for an assumed past that migrants carry with them – a tradition of agriculture, of being close to nature – rather than looking to the skills that the immigrants might have brought with them. Policy is implicated in a process of misrecognition as discourses on what constitutes the ‘rural’ intersect with defining immigrants’ place within that. Race intersected with class in this thinking as agriculture was an option considered for African and Asian immigrants in particular. Race was also invisible yet present in defining rural culture as I show below.
In the shadow of the Rural Program: Discourses of an idyllic past
The interviews and reading of project documents made clear how both ‘rural’ and ‘culture’ were produced in rural development projects. The focus of many development projects was not on ‘the here and now’ but on a cultural past constructed for the present, and promoted actively by local and national authorities. Harkening back to an idyllic past and the idea of tradition stood out clearly in many big rural projects, such as that of the rural homestead associations, the archetype rural association characterized by its ideal of going back to an originating ‘folk culture,’ or the network around the fäbodar (the summer farms in the forests). Nowhere was it more apparent than in the Hälsingegårdars project – the mobilization around a heritage project that has since then been accepted as an UNESCO heritage site.
The involvement of government agencies and their interpretation of EU policies was significant in shaping local projects. According to an official at the county’s Cultural Unit, people living in their cottages in Hälsingland were unable to see the whole picture. The official pointed out that from the county authorities’ point of view, this meant making sense of ‘culture’ that those living in these farms did not seem to realize they actually had. As the officer explained, in the Hälsingegårdars project, it was in fact the Cultural Unit and County museum authorities that over the years, developed the farmhouse project that today symbolizes Hälsingland for those outside and forms the bedrock of the UNESCO project.
The official painted a vivid picture of how a Hälsinge identity was created in a project that spanned several municipalities, included many different associations, entrepreneurs, farm owners in Hälsingland, various government agencies and university researchers. Associations applied for funding from the RP for activities associated with the project. The official observed that even the name, Hälsingegård, the Hälsinge farm house, was not a given as farms had several different names in the past before the project began. The official pointed out with pride that they, made it into a concept and into a saleable package … Now Hälsingland can be launched as a cultural landscape … .where nature is important, but it is culture that is the important part … And Hälsingland has become a much more known concept … in ..the country and … .in the world, one could say, for before it was not known one tiny bit.
Taking farm houses as symbolic of the culture and history of all of Hälsingland had deep-seated implications for the place itself. Discourses on the Häsingegårdar not only proclaimed a cultural superiority of an agricultural class but these claims were also embedded in gendered exclusions. The Hälsingegårdar referred to a past populated exclusively by white native Swedes and as the official admitted, the importance of male inheritance of the farm houses was well grounded among both men and women, despite changes in inheritance laws. Kindstrand writes, In Hälsingland this has meant that the complex historical context, the oppressive gender order, the patriarchal economy, the landless proletariat and so on are pushed away. … A distance of about a 100 years is enough for a simpler, more harmonious, more ‘genuine’ life, distant enough from uncomfortable questions of diversity and gender. At the same time, the 1800s are close enough for the tourist industry to use the fetishes needed when dreams are formulated: tangible artefacts, patterns, buildings. (SOU, 2007:50: 392)
In an effort to include diversity perspectives, a sub-project involved getting immigrants to come and visit the sites where they were told about the farm houses. Ironically, as Högberg (2013) writes, an immigrant group was picked out to be informed about the project while the majority of native inhabitants remained uninformed. While the immigrant group was meant to represent ‘diversity’ in the larger project, the native majority was automatically welded into what de Lima (2004) calls the ‘myth of the common rural culture’, imagining society and social processes as stable, homogeneous and unchanging over time and ‘tacitly privileging one form of affective response to the landscape as universal’ (Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010: 2316).
Much like the Hälsingegårdar, the fäbodar, summer farms in the forests acquired ‘cultural’ value. In wanting to keep the farms alive, many villagers found themselves in the company of the nationalist and extreme right wing party, the Sweden Democrats (SD) who took up the fäbodar as a symbol of the authentic ‘old Sweden.’ Academic debates on settlement remains were appropriated by SD to trace a white ‘Swedish’ history from the iron age. 12 Important in their agenda of restoring the old imagined Sweden is to stop immigration into the country. In looking for an unchanging past, the rural comes to symbolize this ‘melancholic yearning for an old Sweden’ (Hubinette and Lundström, 2011) regardless of its histories and peoples – both immigrant and native – and becomes a symbol not only of the rural but of the nation. The most recent and insidious sign of this is the increased support that the SD have garnered in rural Hälsingland from a population that has long felt marginalized by central policies.
Nevertheless, there are always ruptures in dominant discourses and these became clear when immigrants were seen to transgress integration and rural boundaries – by claiming space in the landscape and in public discourse or in challenging conventional ways of organizing democracy.
The rural as becoming: Transgressions and counter discourses
An African association wanted to celebrate their national day through ‘service for Swedish society that had taken them in their time of need, when they needed to flee from war and repression in their own country.’ They asked the municipality if they could do something for the community-such as cleaning local beaches or parks to ‘give thanks.’ These plans foundered on labor rules that did not allow voluntary work of this kind. Eventually, they reached an agreement with the municipality that they would plant trees in a park and invite all inhabitants for food and to celebrate their national day. They received extensive positive coverage in the local media. However, three days later, the trees were cut down at night with a chainsaw. The chairman related how he tried to reassure people in his community, They could be racists but it could even be some mad guy. But it seems like, kind of, they wanted to teach us a lesson you know. … It was intentional. Now, we are going to plant them and we don’t want to highlight … .I mean we want to have a very low profile. … Now I told them, don’t mention it in the news or radio like before … because it’s kind of creating more problem, it’s kind of promoting hatred. Maybe … we can’t plant it ourselves but they can plant it, we can plant through Swedish hands.
The tyranny of associations?
Integration through associations was not self-evident for all immigrants. A young chairman of another African association faced a great deal of resistance from within his community to the idea of an association. Some members accused him of forcing the association on them. He complained, There is a lack like … of knowledge about associational life in this country, how it works … They think the chair is doing this to get money into his account … But the young really want to keep this meeting place … .
Both he and another woman from the community related how many men chose instead to meet at the mosque while women from the community chose to organize themselves in their own association although they were part of the same ethnic group. Some associations were organized solely around kin groups. 14 With the exception of one, there were no women as chairs in the African and Asian associations. The chairwoman told me that ever since they had organized themselves into their own women’s association, she had been approached for advice by other immigrant women on forming their own associations. There appeared to be a need for gender-segregated spaces beyond ‘ethnicity.’ Several immigrant women that I spoke to were in employment and some had come to Sweden before or without their husbands. For them to conform to associational life dominated by men (Arora-Jonsson, 2017) might even be seen as Ålund and Schierup (1991: 61) write, a (re)patriarchalization of gender relations in formal life.
The response of the men and women who opted out of ‘ethnic’ associations was a reflection of the structures of exclusion where others made the rules and set the norms, where they were declared incompetent and needed to learn how to organize – ‘a continuation of the assimilationist approach’ (Dahlström, 2004). Their own practices and autonomous organizing or how they chose to define themselves were disregarded both by the authorities and the young chairman. The chairman who was also employed at the integration unit was perhaps seen as pushing a governmental agenda onto them and relations between him and several community members were conflictual. Referring to another man who had been taken into the local Social Democratic party, the chairman of a West Asian association observed that local political parties and authorities tend to take in individual immigrants as token representatives of the entire immigrant population, instead of dealing with and acknowledging their differences and their associations at a formal level. This helped to invisibilize and individualize the question of ethnicity (and race) instead of changing the relative position of the groups. Rather than dealing with society’s structures of power and acknowledgement of group differences, integration thus becomes ‘reduced to the tale of various individuals succeeding or failing on their own personal terms and driven only by the demand that you be more like the dominant culture than you are’ (Gordon and Newfield, 1996: 90).
One could also argue that their outside position provided newcomers with a vantage point that native Swedes, with a history and belief in the civil society as a realm of freedom, did not have. Immigrants looking in from the outside, had reason to be skeptical about the role of associations that they saw increasingly as service providers (cf. Arora-Jonsson, 2017) or as avenues for some to advance themselves, rather than as a political forum. This provides a somewhat different explanation as to why immigrants are less likely to organize in associations than natives. Their indifference might not necessarily hinge upon a lack of knowledge and attitude toward associations as is sometimes assumed (DS, 2004:49: 224) but a recognition of the lack of democracy afforded to them by these forms.
Their suspicion and refusal to be part of the associational system may be seen as an opting out of a ‘collective misrecognition’ (Bourdieu, 1977) about the universality of associations as exemplars of civic democratic practice. It also disavows the notion that being from the same country or even the same ethnicity was automatically the main locus of their identities. As the example of the women’s associations shows, other axes exist around which they liked to organize themselves and their interests.
Conclusion: The rural at a (racialized) crossroads
At first glance, the ‘rural’ may be seen to be situated at the crossroads of two opposing currents in policy-making. The first, integration policy, emphasizes the importance of integrating newcomers into society. The other current, typified by rural policy, invokes the rural in development projects as the repository of the stable, the traditional and cultural, making rural space a static category, thus contradicting the efforts of the first. However, a closer examination of the economic and political interests present in these sets of practices reveals the misrecognitions in the assumption of an integration-development crossroads. I have argued that this misrecognition is rooted, one, in the reluctance of mainstream rural and integration literature to theorize race as part of the culture of institutional authority and power and not necessarily restricted to overt racist acts and two, in the misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of what comes to represent rural culture and that fails to recognize diversity and change. Realizing misrecognition of social practices with race at its center brings to the fore the racialization of both integration and development practice and brings the much needed ‘undiscussed into the discussion’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 168) on rural development and integration in a number of ways.
First, it helps challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about immigrants as non-democratic, gender-unequal and problematic that pervaded official thinking. These assumptions willfully ignore the fact underscored in the interviews that many of those who had escaped dictatorships and persecution have a heightened and embodied sense of what democracy is and especially what it is not. Thai women in Hälsingland were considered exploited and victimized, though none of the women’s organizations had yet made contact with them. Neither were immigrants considered capable of working with their own ideas for integration by the authorities. This had to be left to the authorities and civil society associations who were seen as understanding the context better. White communities, both associations and local authorities found it difficult to include immigrants in meetings and in the larger integration agenda (benevolent as it may be) and tended to ascribe identities (such as being skilled in agriculture or unaware of what it means to be free or democratic) without evidence. These were not necessarily the result of ill-will but of processes of racialization where value was assigned to visible difference. Integration practices were very much about assimilation into a framework in which immigrants, regardless of whether they had been living in Sweden for a while, had little voice.
Second, misrecognition as a lens brings the ‘undiscussed into the discussion’ and sheds light on racialized place-making processes bound up in development practice, in definitions of the rural and in policy. The faith in conventional agriculture in rural development policy and programs and the role assigned to immigrants in relation to it reveal a misrecognition of both current rural practices and immigrants’ role in it. The focus on agriculture tended to narrow the gap of what constituted the rural and disregarded immigrants’ own experiences and histories. Further, official practices codified static and white representations of rural areas in their effort to conform to European Union and national policy-making. In looking for an unchanging past, the discourses on the farms and fäbodar attempted to ‘fix culture’ and created a ‘melancholic yearning for an old Sweden’ (Hubinette and Lundström, 2011), the rural becoming a symbol for the nation. Immigrants were assigned an ambivalent position in this schema – somewhere between needing to be modern but also as bearers of a natural tradition lost to modern Swedes. The irony is that while the white farmer of the past and farm-houses are glorified, the one who is thought to farm today is an African or Syrian who falls outside of these representations of the past.
Third, it was evident that associations, with formal rules for behavior, are not regarded as the template for democracy by all. Indeed, for some, the Swedish culture of associational life was seen with suspicion – as a space where their experiences counted for little and they were to be taught to be Swedish in singular ways; where how they needed to organize took precedence over their issues of concern and integration got reduced to the integration of amenable citizens. That people may want to organize in alternative ways has not been taken into account in assumptions about the importance of associations for democracy, even among voices that have criticized associations for their exclusions (DS, 2004:49; SOU, 2005:112: 153–188). Paying attention to ‘misrecognitions’ thus enabled a scrutiny of cultural assumptions embedded in current institutions.
Lastly, despite the current toward a singular form and culture supported by development policy and projects and reproduced on the ground, daily life is not static. The immigrants embodied experiences with the landscape – for example in their use of the park to commemorate their past and present and disrupted ‘the moral geography of the landscape as embodying a singular (Swedish) sensibility,’ (cf. Tolia-Kelly, 2007). New relations were evident in the desire of immigrants to associate in ways other than in ‘ethnic’ associations and in efforts to set up a citizen office across ‘cultures.’ Several in the Hälsingegårdar project resisted the idea of the Hälsinge identity assigned to them, demonstrating that white identities are also multiple and changing and open to transformation. The support that the immigrant association garnered when it bore the brunt of what was regarded as a racist act and networks in Hälsingland that hide refugees threatened with eviction from the country, show multiple ways in which native Swedes challenged state authority and/or racism.
Attention to the arbitrary yet ‘interested’ making of culture (Bourdieu, 1977) is vital to ensure that state and rural narratives do not inadvertently become cultural projects of dominance. Difficult to see in the everyday is how body politics is embedded in the political economy of rural spaces such as in official definitions of rural Hälsingland, or that ‘white attitudes need not be racist to have a racially differentiating effect’ (Gordon and Newfield, 1996: 105). Analyses of ‘race’ are central in prying apart these misrecognitions that are in turn, imperative in understanding shortcomings in attempts at integration and development and in seeing new openings. The crossroads that does need attention, is one between multiculturalism as the co-existence of multiple cultures within a normative framework and the road that I argue we need to take – where muliticulturalism opens up that framework for a radical critique of power relations and a debate on what or who constitute the rural and how one engages in it. While it is critical to recognize the potential contributions that immigrants bring with them, we also need to understand the possibilities of their doing so and turn a critical gaze onto how notions of race get constituted in cultures and institutional contexts.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank The Swedish Research Council, Formas, for their generous funding of this research, Stefan Arora-Jonsson, Louise Fortmann, Emery Roe and Patrik Oskarsson for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper and the three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s)(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I would like to thank The Swedish Research Council, Formas, for their generous funding of this research (grant #253-2006-958 and 250-2009-1460).