Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

By Beth S. Epstein

The banlieue, the mostly poor and working-class suburbs located on the outskirts of major cities in France, gained international media attention in late 2005 when riots broke out in some 250 such towns across the country. Pitting first- and second-generation immigrant teenagers against the police, the riots were an expression of the multiplicity of troubles that have plagued these districts for decades. This study provides an ethnographic account of life in a Parisian banlieue and examines how the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their collective life. The book focuses on the French ideal of integration and its consequences within the multicultural context of contemporary France. Based on research conducted in a state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, the book also provides a view on how the French state has used urban planning to shore up national priorities for social integration. Collective Terms proposes an alternative reading of French multiculturalism, suggesting fresh ways for thinking through the complex mix of race, class, nation, and culture that increasingly defines the modern urban experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780857450852

Beth S. Epstein

Beth S. Epstein has lived and worked in France as a filmmaker and anthropologist since the early 1990s. She is Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at NYU in France.

Book preview

Introduction

COLLECTIVE TERMS

On 27 October 2005, violence broke out in a poor, working-class suburb of Paris, France. Two young teenagers—both of them immigrants, one from Mali and the other from Tunisia—had died tragically seeking refuge in an electric power station as they ran from the police. As word got out, their friends and peers took to the streets. Within days the violence spread around the country, engulfing over 250 cities and towns in riots that continued, night after night, for a period of three weeks. It was the most serious uprising to shake French society since the student and labor strikes that had paralyzed the country in May and June of 1968. On 8 November, President of the Republic Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency—the first time a head of state had taken such measures in metropolitan France since the Algerian War. One person was killed during the November riots (although it is not clear that his death was directly related to the events), while numerous police were injured and thousands of cars, businesses, and local institutions were torched during the nightly skirmishes between teenagers—most of them male, and most of them young—and the police.

Paris Burns screamed the headlines on CNN. But in fact it was not Paris that burned during the weeks of upheaval, but its suburbs. This is a crucial distinction: viewed from the centers of influence in Paris, the suburbs are a world apart, cities in which the foundations of the social contract have somehow been left to crumble. La banlieue: in France, the word alone summons images of the drab box-like housing projects constructed quickly after World War II that rise up at the edge of Paris and other cities both large and small around the country. The suburbs have come to stand for virtually everything that is wrong with contemporary France, from sustained unemployment to youth violence and urban decay, and perhaps most notably the millions of people of immigrant origin who have not been able to find their place, or so the popular perception goes, in French society. The riots in late 2005 confirmed for many what they have known for upwards of two decades: that les banlieues are dangerous places, beset by a multitude of social problems.

In the mid 1990s I conducted anthropological research in a city located 35 kilometers outside of Paris that many characterize as a dangerous and difficult suburb. A state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, first conceived in the 1960s as part of a vast regional planning project, the city of Cergy was meant to be an improvement on the unwieldy, and often desolate, mid-rise developments that typify the banlieue of people’s fears. But the social and economic problems that beset the city, and the way its residents rally to them, reflect many of the same tendencies found in other poor and working-class cities that circle Paris. In Cergy–St. Christophe, the neighborhood at the center of my study, residents worry that they are living in a difficult ghetto, even as their neighborhood was intended to be the central showcase of the New Town. There, the problems of unemployment, youth disaffection, and what the French call social exclusion figure significantly, and in late 2005, Cergy too suffered its share of car burnings, vandalism, and riot police.

I have since settled in France and continue to live in Cergy, not far from Cergy–St. Christophe. As the riots made headlines in late 2005, and as the helicopters whirred overhead on a nightly basis, I received calls and e-mails from concerned friends and family in the United States wanting to know if my family and I were all right (we were), and what I thought about the current crisis. Based on my research and ongoing involvement with the city of Cergy, this book is an effort to provide a response.

In the immediate wake of the riots, attention turned almost unanimously to the long-simmering issue of the multiethnic makeup of the French banlieue, many of which are disproportionately populated by first-and second-generation immigrants, frequently of North and West African origin. Debates in the French and, to a more limited degree, international media have continued almost unabated about the extent to which these incidents reveal lacunae in French society and specifically in its capacity to make room for its immigrant populations. Difference, many contend—differences of culture and habits of mind—has long been anathema to the French republican tradition; the trouble in the suburbs, they argue, simply provides more evidence that this is so.¹ These are questions that have compelled me since I first began to work in France in the early 1990s. As an anthropologist, and as one-half of a mixed marriage—my husband is from Benin, in West Africa—I have long been intrigued by what inquiry into French social organization might hold for an understanding of these issues, in particular the significance of race and culture as they play out within culturally plural contexts. In this book, I take the French management of these questions as my starting point, both to gain a more critical view of the trouble in the suburbs, and to reflect more broadly on the opportunities and challenges posed by the complex cultural configurations of life in modern cities.

The perception of the Paris suburbs as anarchic and hazardous places dates back over 100 years. Starting in the late nineteenth century, as the capital thrived, the suburbs developed apace at a rate too rapid to be sustained. The lower- and working-class towns that are located largely to the north and east of the city are a direct, and some would say negative, consequence of the city’s success, that from the outset provoked unease: the untenable living conditions of the industrial working classes who lived there were perceived as dangerous, especially in light of the close proximity of the prosperous city that lay just beyond their view. Initiatives to correct the imbalances of the suburbs began as early as the 1920s and reached their apogee with the launching, in the 1960s, of the New Towns—a massive planning project that was to bring order to the Paris region, said at the time to be spreading like an oil stain during the prosperous decades following World War II. Rational expressions of an era of rapid social and economic change, the New Towns were imagined as brave new worlds where people from all walks of life would come together to build viable new communities on a human scale, in direct contrast to the purportedly inhuman suburban projects that had preceded them.

The city of Cergy is considered the most successful of the five New Towns that lie at the outer edges of the region of Ile de France. There, the city’s planners sought deliberately to build a socially diverse city that would engender what they considered to be a healthy community life. They envisioned neighborhoods made up of people from different social classes, where children would grow up alongside the elderly, and college students would lend a hand in community affairs. But now, some forty years after its inception, whole districts of the city, and most notably the neighborhood of Cergy–St. Christophe, have been deemed failures, having fallen short of the objectives laid out at the city’s foundation. In Cergy–St. Christophe, many contend, there are too many immigrants and troubled youth, too many unemployed, too many children performing poorly in school, too much vandalism and petty crime. The neighborhood is said to be in difficulty, an assessment that induces some to leave, while motivating others to take on with energy the work that they see as necessary to save it from further demise.

Most notably, the city is comprised of people of a multitude of backgrounds—from North, West, and Central Africa, from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, from the Caribbean, from Southern and Central Europe, and from France—who live together in mixed neighborhoods and apartment buildings that are meant to sustain a balance of people of different ethnic and class backgrounds. In this, their residential arrangements reflect French social policy, which has actively sought to avoid the formation of ethnic ghettos for at least the past forty years. Now, however, the deliberate mixing championed by the city’s planners has brought the city’s residents face to face with the knotty questions of cultural pluralism. Differences of culture, race, and nation that, ideally, were meant to constitute various pieces of a diverse, balanced, and harmonious urban whole, have emerged instead as significant sites of social and political struggle. As they seek to resolve and regulate the problems that arise in their housing projects and public parks, at their shopping centers and in their children’s schools, the city’s residents must also contend with their differences in education, social class, history, language, skin color, religious belief, and cultural orientation. More significantly, they must contend with the differential access to economic and political resources that these distinctions portend.

This is a book, then, about the way in which the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their commonly held collective life. It is about the struggles that occur at the level of the everyday as people seek to make sense of the city’s diversity—or rather, as they seek to understand the extent to which that diversity matters in the working-out of local concerns. The book presents an alternate view of the fractious French suburbs, breaking with popular perceptions of the cultural or ethnic clashes presumed to be happening there. The issues that this book addresses are common to people everywhere who are seeking to sort through the complex mixing of race, class, nation, and culture that has increasingly come to define the modern urban experience. Indeed, questions about how to live with diversity, about multiculturalism and its effects, and about the significance of cultural identities in urban life hold a prominent place in debate about life in modern complex societies. These concerns reflect substantive transformations in the constitution of modern cities as a result of changes wrought by new technologies, the globalization of capital, and shifting relations of public and private space as formerly disenfranchised groups make claims on the public sphere.

At the same time—and this is one of the primary concerns of this book—contemporary concerns about identity suggest transformations in the ways that we think about diversity and its significance in modern life. As an American, I have found the French case to be of interest precisely because the social processes that I examine here urge a reconceptualization of the terms commonly used to describe people and the groups to which they allegedly belong. In order to make sense of the ways in which residents of Cergy negotiate their experience and the multiple exigencies of city life, I have sought to break with the categories—ethnocultural, racial, national—commonly used in popular and social science writing on multiculturalism. What I aim to do here, rather, is see how such categories are constituted as a result of the push and pull of everyday life. At its most basic level, I ask in this study how people make something—the local community—out of the many things that they are, and at a more ideological level, how contested and symbolically charged notions of community, belonging, and exclusion shape the ways people come to their understandings of themselves and others. These questions lie at the center of the debate on immigration and the place of difference in France at the current time. And perhaps more prosaically, they cut also to the heart of the history of Cergy as a New Town, where the problem of how to build a vibrant city where not long ago there were only farmers’ fields, is of paramount concern.

Recent decades have witnessed what many contend is a rising tide of xenophobic and nationalist sentiment in France, as in much of Europe. An outpouring of concern in the popular media and scholarly literature has been matched by an abundance of policy initiatives designed to define and control the region’s immigrant problem in order to regulate the flow of migrants to and within the receiving countries of Europe, as well as to administer the institutions intended to receive them. Since the 1970s, the issue has risen repeatedly to the top of the French domestic agenda, defining political campaigns and serving as a highly visible social problem in the popular press. Many charge that French civil society does not make room for the cultural differences of those whose origins are rooted in another place, with some claiming that their race and their culture make them subject to nefarious forms of discrimination. Others argue that, to the contrary, France has always been a nation of considerable diversity, with democratic institutions broad enough, and generous enough, to allow successive waves of immigrants to come its shores. Finally, at another extreme, are those who contend that the country has no room left for foreigners, and who seek to limit therefore the terms by which individuals can legitimately call themselves French. Questions about the capacity of French society to tolerate diversity, about the nature and meaning of Frenchness and difference, origins and assimilation, and the opportunities available to young people from the suburbs with brown or black skin and names like Abdel, continue unabated.

I maintain that it is necessary to move beyond these debates in order to gain perspective on these questions, which all too often cast notions of self and other in unbending terms. I aim to see rather how people’s understandings of themselves and others are derived through their ongoing interactions, both in relation to the histories—and their understandings of those histories—that they carry with them, and as a piece of their regular engagement with the public sphere. The extent to which people in Cergy, or elsewhere in France, contend that the differences between them matter is, I argue, a function of the ways in which they define themselves in relation to the larger whole. These dynamics are especially charged in the current period because of a more general anxiety about forms of social breakdown that many see as a consequence of the loosening and transformation of certain kinds of community ties, and that are especially associated with the country’s fractious suburbs. As cities with relatively short histories, the suburbs, or more precisely the housing projects that are at the center of current polemics, are feared to be lacking a strong collective core. In these districts, many contend, the center does not hold, giving way to social instability.

As a New Town, Cergy was meant to ward off such eventualities. The New Towns were designed in a deliberate attempt to push against the forces of social disintegration thought to be at work in the rapidly growing suburbs of the Parisian periphery. They were to control anticipated urban growth and to improve upon the postwar housing construction that had turned the Paris region into an unwieldy mass of anonymous suburbs and hazardous shantytowns. As cities in their own right, the New Towns were to break with the monotony and lack of services that characterized the unplanned growth of the commuter suburbs that preceded them. They would, their planners proclaimed, recapture the sense of community that had, by some accounts, been given up as lost with the great postwar leap into the consumer age, even as they created radically new urban silhouettes on the formerly rural landscape. With roots firmly planted in the French republican tradition, the normative model of social organization built into the cities’ plans was to fashion cohesive social wholes, to encourage residents to work for a sense of common good that would outweigh their allegiances to more particularist concerns. According to this schema, the particular is to be overlooked in the interest of the universal, an imperative that places working for the larger collectivity at its core.

In Cergy, the conflicts that arise in the working-out of daily life—disputes over litter, vandalism, and teenagers who pass their time idling in the streets, concern for the mediocre education that parents worry is being passed on to their children in the classroom, and disputes over noise, smells, and general upkeep between neighbors sharing common residential spaces—provide occasion for the city’s neighbors, with their range of cultural backgrounds, to come together to resolve local problems or locate their causes, and to give expression to their varying experiences of city life. Often, residents discuss such problems in relation to the abstract principles of responsibility, fairness, and local participation that for them constitute the essential pillars of community life. Others turn to the classifications of culture, race, or nation to explain feelings of commonality or discomfort that they do not otherwise know how to name. It is within these sites of everyday exchange that differences of race, culture, and nation are attributed meaning, as they are used by groups and individuals both to challenge and to make a claim to the normative processes of community-building and maintenance that hold dominion within the city as a whole. As I examine the ways in which Cergy’s residents and administrators join in collective action to realize their sometimes disparate visions of collective life, I aim to show how and in what sense their differences have come to matter.

Identity as a Social Process

In an editorial that appeared in the New York Times a few years back, Salman Rushdie asks what we are to do with the problem of culture. In response to those who would act in defense, as he puts it, of the world’s precious localness: the Indianness of India, the Frenchness of France, he asks if cultures actually exist as separate, pure, defensible entities … Is not mélange, adulteration, impurity, pick’n’mix at the heart of the idea of the modern, and hasn’t it been that way for most of this all-shook-up century? (New York Times, 5 March 1999). Of course Rushdie—both the literature and the man—is emblematic of much of what is all-shook-up about the times we live in. Against the perils of cultural and religious essentialisms, he argues that we need to be more attuned to the generative and dynamic mixes of the contemporary world.

James Clifford raises similar problems in his book The Predicament of Culture. There he examines the ambiguities of the concepts of culture and cultural identity within the context of a world in which people and things are increasingly out of place. Straining, he says, for a concept that can preserve culture’s differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often discontinuous inventive process, he writes that culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot yet do without (Clifford 1988: 6, 10). The predicament that culture poses—for Clifford, for Rushdie, for other anthropologists and critics, and, I suggest, for people living in cities like Cergy—is how to contend with the different histories and ways of being in the world that culture is meant to signify, without then presuming those cultural differences to be totalizing and fixed. How, in Rushdie’s words, do we grasp the dynamic pick’n’mix of modern cities, their polyglot communities, their profusion of consumer goods and pop culture products from the world over, the creative possibilities of such juxtapositions and the strong emotions that they provoke, without recourse to concepts—culture, nation, race, ethnicity—that seem impervious to such dynamic and power-inflected flows? And how, in turn, do we take into consideration the different practices, belief systems, and historical and life trajectories that such concepts seek to express without then enclosing people into categories to which they only partially belong?

It has become almost commonplace to note the extent to which the current moment has given rise to an especially acute sense of things being out of place. The de-localizing of the local through capital’s global reach, and the shrinking of the global via such technologies as the internet and satellite communications, have heightened and transformed the disjunctions that constitute the very idea of the modern experience (Berman 1982; Harvey 1989b). Congruities between peoples and cultures, the spaces they live in, and the nations they call home have increasingly become fractured, not least because the certainties with which such distinctions were once described are themselves being questioned and revised (Appadurai 1991; Benhabib 2002; Clifford 1994; Fraser 1993; Gilroy 1993; Gupta 1992; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Hannerz 1989). Increasingly, it is difficult to know what people living in shared national spaces mean when they speak of their cultural differences. When the French-born teenage children of foreign-born residents of France demand, for instance, that they be granted the right to be different in reaction to what they see as an oppressive drive toward cultural homogeneity in France, what exactly is the different culture they are claiming as their own?

What is particularly significant, however, about such forms of oppositional politics is that they are being posed in cultural terms, thereby reproducing commonsense notions about people’s identities and the groups to which they purportedly belong. Concern about the ambiguities and hybridities of cultural identities in contemporary contexts aside, much popular and scholarly writing about cultural pluralism and its effects continues to presuppose the existence of such groups in ways that confirm their validity as social facts. In France—and, I suspect, in other countries of Europe (e.g., Baumann 1996: 1)—reference is made frequently to the troubled youths of the so-called second generation, who are said to be perilously suspended between cultures, a vivid image that confirms again the existence of separate and enclosed cultural spheres. Similarly, when I first began scouting around for a field site in France I was repeatedly told I should narrow my search to focus on a particular immigrant group, advice that, had I followed it, would have prevented me from seeing the broader context within which such commonsense notions are made and given meaning.

A preliminary glance at many of the ethnographic studies of immigration in Europe reflects this tendency to denote a particular immigrant community as object of study—Algerians, Antilleans, Turks and Portuguese in France (Beriss 2004; Brettell 1982; Kastoryano 1986; Keaton 2006; MacMaster 1996; Silverstein 2004), Senegalese in Italy (Carter 1997), and Turks in Germany (Mandel 1990), to name a few. Taking as their point of departure the languages, traditions, religious orientations, economic activities, and historical trajectories that members of these groups share, these studies examine how the immigrant experience fits into, and calls into question, prevailing notions of self and other in the European context. To the extent that they define an immigrant group as maintaining a shared sense of orientation and purpose, however, they neglect to examine the processes by which such orientations are made, and thereby maintain the self/other distinction largely along immigrant/European lines.

If we are to take seriously, therefore, the theorizing that has gone on in anthropology and other social sciences regarding the dynamism and mutability of culture, then surely we must work against the tendency to accept such distinctions as ready-made. In this study, I seek to turn these questions around: what do members of any given collectivity make of the differences between them? Why do these identities matter, and how do they matter? More specifically, to what extent are the definition and articulation of these differences tied to other sets of concerns? Indeed, it is my contention in this book that concern over the meaning and place of cultural difference in France at the current time has far more to do with anxiety about shifting social and economic relations than it does over the people and practices that embody those differences. This is not a study, then, of how people of different cultural backgrounds manage their lives in France, but rather how, through their everyday negotiations over forms of behavior considered appropriate to community life, people of both French and immigrant origins derive their definitions of what is difference and what is French.

To do otherwise—to take the ethnic community as my starting point—would be to run counter to the French republican tradition of social and political life, which posits, at least in its ideal form, the inexistence, or rather the superfluousness, of ethnic communities. It would be to impose categories and ways of seeing on the functioning of everyday life that many people in France would find erroneous. We don’t have [ethnic] communities here, one of my interlocutors told me when I explained to him the object of my research. Communities are divisive, each one living in his little group. We don’t have a lot of that here.

At the same time, such a theoretical positioning places me in a bit of a bind, but that is nonetheless generative of many of the questions I hope to raise in this book. As an American I