Managing a Polyethnic Milieu: Kinship and Interaction in a London Suburb
Author(s)
Baumann, Gerd
Abstract
The 60,000 inhabitants of Southall do not form an ‘ethnic group’ or ‘community’, never refer to having a ‘culture’ in common, and certainly do not share the same system or even conceptions of kinship. The majority of local heads of households were born in former British colonies and came to Southall in the course of the great labour migrations of the 1950s and 1960s. The 1991 census of the densely-populated area counted some 50 per cent. of residents as ‘Indian’, 10 per cent. as ‘Pakistani’ or ‘other Asian’; 30 per cent. as ‘white’, one in ten of them ‘Irish’; and 5 per cent. as ‘Black-Caribbean.’ Among teenage youth, with whom this article is mainly concerned, about half are Sikh, some 20 per cent, each are Hindu and Muslim, and about 10 per cent are Christian. Such enumerations of percentages, however, need to be read with caution. Contending national loyalties cut across religious identifications, as is the case between pro-Indian and pro-Khalistani Sikhs, and Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims; religious commitments cut across ‘racial’ identities, as is the case among ‘white’, ‘black’ and Asian’ Christians; and differences of migratory history cut across religious loyalties, as in the case of East African-born Asians’ faced with fellow Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims born on the Indian subcontinent. To inquire into Southall youths’ ideas of peer kinship is thus to address the dynamics of kinship in a polyethnic, culturally plural environment
