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9781538167915

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Across Europe, race and ethnicity have been recast as culture. In this closely observed and acute analysis of the politics of 'convivencia' in Salt, Martin Lundsteen untangles the politics of integration, collaboration, and resistance. He exposes how convivencia obscures class and raced origins of social conflict and the commonalities shared by 'migrants' and citizens and traces opportunities for new kinds of politics. Convivencia by Martin Lundsteen is a fine-grained and multi-scalar ethnography of contemporary ideologies regarding ethnic and racial urban conflicts. In the flood of books on immigration, urban ethnic tension, and gentrification, Convivencia stands out for its multi-scalar design, the elegance of its theory, and the richness of its field data. Lundsteen takes the reader deep inside a small town of Catalonia to show how global forces, national crisis, and local institutions mesh to produce economic dislocation and class polarization as well as their obfuscation by a discourse of cultural alterity. Convivencia is a first-rate contribution to critical anthropology of the present. In this innovative take on contemporary migration in Europe, Martin Lundsteen shows us how migration and urban transformations play out and are perceived in a small town in Catalonia. However, the analysis does not stop there. In contrast to much literature in migration studies, the detailed ethnographic analysis here is quite audaciously articulated within the larger framework of the global forces at play in current forms of economic, political, and social structures. This way, Lundsteen combines the world as most people understand it with the world as it is actually, evolving towards an extreme form of capitalism. This is a powerful, highly relevant, and timely book, recommended to anyone interested in migration and urban studies. This book is an on the spot urban governance ethnography in a hotspot of urban racialized conflict that demystifies the Spanish/European polemics around immigration, conviviality, xenophobia, and youth violence and poverty on the ground in an era of neoliberal urban gentrification.

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Martin Lundsteen (PhD in social anthropology) currently serves as Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the University of Barcelona.

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