Translating Transience to Togetherness: The Hmong Identity within the Conviviality in Europe

This research focuses on the Hmong in Europe, especially on their effort to maintain their identity and navigate conviviality in the European context. My focus is on the Hmong identity in the context of living together with neighbors from various linguistic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Specifically, this research aims to provide an answer to the following questions: how have the European Hmong adapted and adjusted to their local context or 'integrated' in the past forty years? How have they taken care of the vulnerable members of their population? How have they maintained their ethnic language in the context of the multilingual environment in Europe? How have they emotionality functioned in food practice? How do individual members of this group practice memory and identity through material culture? How do emotional and intimacy labor support these individuals in their rituals? How do these individuals articulate their experience through art? This research aims to scrutinize the profound role of emotional and intimacy capital in ethnic refugees' daily lives through kin-network support, which provides strong psychological support for relieving frustration, overcoming transient moments and contributing to the construction of a convivial community in the context of integration policies.Archival and ethnographic research are the main methods for collecting data in this field. I've decided to check archives to establish the historical context. The ethnographic data collection was based on multi-sited fieldwork and participant observation. The snowball sampling method and online recruitment are two common ways to select interlocutors by considering age, gender, civil status, location, profession and amount of leisure time. The interlocutors included first-generation, 1.5-generation (born in refugee camps) and second-generation (born in Europe). In total, the ethnographic study involved 26 extended Hmong families in France and five German Hmong families. Drawing on empirical data, my main argument in this dissertation is that the European Hmong community is able to cope with living in superdiverse European societies thanks to kin-networks, a traditional caring culture, family and community language acquisition and planning, code-switching, convivial foodways, adaptive rituals, creative artwork, and more. Emotional and intimacy capital is been created, circulated and reproduced in the process of integration and daily convivial life. As a result of their coping strategies and efforts, the European Hmong community has managed to maintain its ethnic identity and contribute to solidarity and conviviality in the superdiverse European context.The findings of some previous studies on the Hmong resettlement in Europe were confirmed in my fieldwork. I confirmed that the kin network still plays an essential role in Hmong society in Europe, as it did before the diaspora. In addition to attending marriages, working together in business and keeping each other company, kin members are responsible for taking care of the vulnerable members of their population, offering shelter, and, in return, sharing care work. While cohabitating, individuals' emotional and intimacy labor accumulates in carework, helping others cope with daily frustrations and anxieties. My research suggests that the mechanism of emotional and intimacy capital translates transient moments into togetherness and reproduces joy through foodways, material culture, and leisure activities. These efforts help the Hmong cope with daily life in the community and among neighbors of various ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds.This dissertation presents a nuanced conceptualization and investigation of how emotional and intimacy capital emerges in the process of integration and is expressed through multiethnic interactions with neighbors in the host society. This qualitative and comparative study helps assess refugee resettlement in Europe at the microlevel, thereby adding to findings on the identity and social cohesion of individuals of Southeast Asian descent.

Jaar van publicatie:2021

Toegankelijkheid:Embargoed