Lena Gerholm, Stockholm University

This project aims to analyse how different views and practices regarding gender, sexuality, and religion, are symbolically contested and negotiated in arenas such as the family, the housing area, at work, in the mosque, in the media, and in court. In studies number one and two on transmigrant parenthood, this aim has been operationalised into questions about changes in family patterns when people move between contexts marked by diverging ideals, values, and everyday practices. How do Muslim mothers and fathers enact their parenthood when affected by the tensions between gender hierarchy/segregation and egalitarian/gender neutral order? A shift has been made so that the analyses now concern motherhood more than fatherhood, as a consequence of the fact that the researcher responsible for the fatherhood part left the project for a permanent position. The confidence that he had gained among the informants could not be transferred to any one else and this study was ended. Study number three examines new gender patterns among ethnic Swedish women in housing areas dominated by Muslim norms for gender and sexuality. Study number four looks at men with a background in North Africa and West Asia and their ways into the Swedish labour market. In study number five the guided tours of the mosque in Södermalm, Stockholm, are analysed by focusing on negotiations between Swedish/secular and Muslim/religious values about gender, family, and sexuality. Finally, study number six, on "honour killing", has evolved into an analysis of the public debate about this phenomenon rather than its judicial management.

A general result is that meetings and interactions of the studied persons are rather smooth and free from conflicts. However, the project has focused on the different ways in which conflicting situations are dealt with. The results concern problems of categorizations and stereotyping. Strong symbols such as the Orient and the West intervene in people's life worlds, media representations, and societal institutions. Three main results have been singled out: two of them stem from analyses of everyday meetings on the studied arenas, while the third forms the analysis of the media debate about honour killing.

First. The strategies to escape the constant threat from orientalising and stigmatising identities have been duly observed. People try to neutralise the dominant images ascribed to them by others. Strong stereotypes about "patriarchal immigrant men", "easily available Swedish women", and "oppressed Muslim women", have the power to make individuals both visible and invisible. At the same moment as men are made visible as immigrant men, women as either easily available Swedes or veiled victims, they are made invisible and excluded from other ascriptions that could confirm them as individuals. One example of strategies for wriggling oneself free from limiting ascriptions in the mosque, in the school, in the housing area, and at work, is strategic syncretism, that is, a set of processes where positive self-presentations are being sewn together from the persons' own experiences as well as from other people's prejudices. Persons in a minority position are contemplating which traits in the majority culture can be perceived as salient and desirable, and how they can be used in order to influence the dominant images of one's self. As a consequence, there are processes of both self-orientalising and self-westernising to be noticed, that is, expressions of adaptations to essentialising conceptions of "the Orient" and "the West".

Second. Another result is the notification that the informants are not only trying to wriggle themselves free from dominant stereotypes and their attached associations: through various techniques, they are also trying to overcome the symbolic distance that comes along with categorisations such as "the Orient"/"the West". They make efforts to present themselves as comprehensible and available to each other by carving out spaces for mutual identification. A peaceful coexistence is achieved through playing down differences and emphasizing similarities. The strategies to establish identification work only to an extent. They often cease to work in negotiations about the meaning of religion, individual rights, equality, and sexuality. Thus, the informants, in action and in their daily meetings in the housing area, in the school, in the mosque, and at work, try to escape stereotyping ascriptions and actively overcome symbolic distance. The media portray another picture.

Third. This result proceeds from an analysis of the public debate that began after "Sara", "Pela", and "Fadime". From the start it looks structured into two formations: the cultural advocates on the one side, those who argue that these murders should be understood in terms of different culture, and the cultural critics on the other, who argue against that, in favour of other interpretations. Unwillingness to acknowledge validity in the opposite side's views is detected, marking a difference from the pattern that has been noticed in the everyday processes of negotiations in the other arenas studied. One explanation of the fact that the debate soon turns into irreconcilability is that it is enacted against the background of the most severe dilemmas of our age, such as conflicting demands on cultural acknowledgement and respect for individual rights, and controversial views on how to counteract racism and dominance. As a result, the real persons, women who met a violent death, are reduced to signs that may be filled with contents of all sorts. The cooptation of the victims for various rhetorical purposes is most distinct in the exploitation of Fadime Sahindal as a symbol of integration.

Beyond that, three domains stand out as especially contested: democracy, the individual, and sexuality/equality. As such, they prove themselves as surfaces of conflict that recur also in a larger European context. Comparative research is needed among countries with different history and conditions, such as Sweden, England, France, the Netherlands, and Turkey. It is important to compare the strength, the content, and the coherence in and between such domains. Also, it is crucial that another under-researched area is thoroughly explored, dealing with those who experience being a minority, in spite of the fact that they, in another sense, belong in a national majority. They are ethnic Swedes who deny official Swedish values concerning, for example, gender equality. They live in, and are formed by, surroundings where the local majority has a Middle-Eastern background. We lack knowledge about what this position looks like and means. In more homogeneous milieus people tend to be convinced, in a taken-for-granted and unreflecting way, that they represent the norm, being self-reliant and self-sufficient. In more heterogeneous milieus some vulnerability and awareness of being deviant in the local surroundings are exposed. The results of these kinds of revised processes of acculturation are, however, unknown.

In the anthology "Orienten i Sverige: Samtida möten och gränssnitt" [The Orient in Sweden: Contemporary Meetings and Interfaces], 2006 (eds. Simon Ekström and Lena Gerholm) results from the project are presented and discussed. Symbolic and real meetings in various local arenas, and ways of understanding and interpreting specific situations in the interfaces between different symbolic universa, are analysed through thick ethnographic descriptions.

In the monography "Miljonsvennar. Contested places and identities" Maria Bäckman analyses the strategies developed by young, ethnic Swedish women in a suburb where "Swedishness" is not the norm, but the deviance. In this context, to be a Swede has no immediate positive associations, and the women are making efforts to play down this identity in order not to be perceived as naïve and provocative. They stress similarities; being children of the suburb, not Swedes; wearing long skirts, not short ones; sporting dark dyed hair, not blond. They are ethnifying themselves and tend to abjure, as their self-image becomes what is projected on them by their surroundings.

Results have been presented at interdisciplinary conferences such as The 30th Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference in Stockholm, European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Bristol, and Société Internationale d'Éthnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) in Marseille. The members of the group have actively participated in radio, tv, newspapers, and in more popular contexts. See further "Publications".

Regular seminars have been held in the project group, as well as in a wider circle. The latter has included researchers with their own related projects at VR and FAS, and PhD students financed by the Faculty of Humanities of Stockholm University. Three of them have contributed with articles to the anthology from the project The Orient in Sweden. Some seminars have contained readings of central texts, others have included critical reading and discussion of our own material and texts. This way of working together has created a dense and creative research environment. The Faculty of Humanities has awarded the project group with extra financing, for being an especially good research environment, meant to broaden seminar activities in the faculty. Thanks to that contribution a collaboration with the Department of Middle Eastern Studies could start and joint seminars were held with the participation of members of various departments of the Faculty of Humanities, including international guest lecturers. The group has developed into a closely knit research group planning continued projects together. Crucial in this development has been the fact that everyone was assigned special responsibility for a specific area, such as special seminars, the acting as chairperson or opponent, network responsibility. One person was designated as project assistant and Simon Ekström as deputy project leader.