polycentricity and interactional regimes in ‘global neighborhoods’

Polycentricity and interactional regimes in‘global neighborhoods’

■ Jan BlommaertGhent University, Belgium

■ James CollinsUniversity at Albany, New York, USA

■ Stef SlembrouckGhent University, Belgium

A B S T R A C T ■ Focusing on multilingualism in late-modern urbanenvironments, this article argues for the neighborhood as a unit ofpractice mapped by field-specific relations. We show how language useand multilingualism are given social form by conditions of polycentricityand regimes of interactional practice. We present a preliminary typologyof different places in an immigrant neighborhood in Ghent (Belgium) thatorganize different patterns of language use and language assessment.Streets, shops, public health centers, schools, and bars all function as‘centers’ in the neighborhood, but each one of them allows for or invitesdifferent interactional regimes, including perceptions of what counts as anacceptable set of (enacted) language resources from its users. Such denselylayered patterns of multilingualism allow us to analyse the production oflocality in the globalized era in which old and new forms of transnationalmovement and intra-national response intermingle.

K E Y W O R D S ■ multilingualism, neighborhood culture, urbanmigration, polycentricity, globalization, Belgium

graphyCopyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com Vol 6(2): 205–235[DOI: 10.1177/1466138105057557]

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This article investigates the polycentric and scalar nature of semioticeconomies in Late-Modern urban neighborhoods characterized by whatAppadurai (1996: 10) calls ‘vernacular globalization’ – a grassroots dimen-sion of globalization expressed, amongst other things, in dense and complexforms of neighborhood multilingualism. This kind of grassroots globaliz-ation results, according to Appadurai, in more complex and unclear formsof locality, ‘more than ever shot through with contradictions, destabilizedby human motion, and displaced by the formation of new kinds of virtualneighborhoods’ (1996: 198). As we shall see, one domain of such complexforms of locality is interaction, and in the neighborhood we investigatepatterns of interaction are closely tied to spatial and scalar dimensions inthe organization of multilingual repertoires.

The disciplinary viewpoint from which we address these issues is that oflinguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, and our treatment of writtensigns will be reminiscent of approaches within the New Literacy Studies.These (sub-)disciplines emphasize the contextualized nature of language,the non-randomness of its occurrence in social environments, and itssensitivity to changes in society as well as its contribution to such changes(for surveys see Collins and Blot, 2003; Duranti, 1997; Meshtrie, 2001).Sociolinguistic patterns are part and parcel of the structure of society. Tothe extent that globalization has an effect on the structure and compositionof contemporary societies, it also reflects in (and is sustained by) thelanguage patterns in these societies. In fact, language or semiotic patternsmay be one of the clearest and most sensitive indicators of globalizationprocesses ‘on the ground’, as we shall see.

We will extend the theorizing of space and scales as sociolinguistic issuesinitiated elsewhere (Blommaert et al., 2005), and the argument we shallelaborate can be summarized in the following points.

Neighborhoods have a reality of their own; they very often are namedand identified by name by both inhabitants of the neighborhood and peopleexternal to that neighborhood. In local policies they often emerge as unitsof policy implementation, as ‘districts’ in policing, administrative organiz-ation and service allocation, and in the collection of data (e.g. demography,crime statistics, and unemployment rates). Furthermore, the neighborhoodcan flag its own existence by means of a variety of activities: the election oflocal boards and councils, the organization of street barbecues, of neigh-borhood festivals, the mobilization of inhabitants in favor of or in protestagainst local authority decisions, and so forth. In sum, neighborhoods areoften the kind of real material and symbolic space in which people anchora dense complex of symbolic and material practices and to which they referin performing these practices (in relation to language, see for instance,Johnstone, 1990, 1999; McCormick, 2003).

Neighborhoods are often defined categorically – ‘good’ neighborhood

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(i.e. autochthonous, wealthy, middle-class: safe) versus a ‘bad’ one (i.e. highpoverty and unemployment rates and a high percentage of immigrants:unsafe). Furthermore, such categorical judgments are often convertedeconomically in equally categorical value assessments: a small house in a‘good’ neighborhood’ is often more expensive than a spacious house in a‘bad’ neighborhood. Despite these homogenizing tendencies, it is obviousthat no single neighborhood can be characterized by one dominant, uniform‘culture’. All neighborhoods have multiple ‘centers’ which impose differentorders of indexicality on their users – different codes and norms as to whatis accepted as ‘right’, ‘good’, ‘marked’, ‘unexpected’, ‘normal’ and ‘special’semiotic behavior (Blommaert, 2005; Blommaert et al., 2005). Peopleinhabiting or using such spaces need to orient themselves towards verydifferent sets of norms and expectations, often simultaneously. There is afractal quality to the general processes of distinguishing between ‘good’ and‘bad’ neighborhoods, in the sense that such distinctions – distinctions ofevaluative perception and behavior organized accordingly – operate at awide variety of scales, ranging from the ‘ultra-micro’ to the ‘macro’, so tospeak. Neighborhoods are polycentric spaces, and examples of this will begiven below.

Understanding multilingualism in such neighborhoods therefore requiresan understanding of the connections between different centers and theirorders. What counts as ‘good’ communicative behavior in school may notqualify as such in the mosque and what is acquired successfully, andperformed as ‘successfully acquired’, in one center may be subsequentlydisqualified in another.1 Criteria for the assessment of semiotic practices andtheir outcomes – meaning, identity – will depend on the relationshipbetween the various centers, and the kinds of scalarity discussed inBlommaert et al. (2005) will be important features here. For instance, theinteractional regime valid in a Turkish bakery operates in a rather obviousway at a different scale (and hence, it has different effects and consequences)than the one valid in a school, a police station or a mosque.

We shall elaborate this argument in the following way. First, we shallsketch the different features involved in the kind of polycentricity weinvestigate. Two features stand out: (a) types of spaces and (b) the multi-functionality of spaces. Both features have an effect on semiotizable prac-tices in spaces (practices that can acquire ‘ordered’ indexical meanings inspecific spaces). The main imagery we shall employ in this sketch is that ofmultiplicity and layering. We shall relate these features to issues of globaliz-ation, and more particularly with the question of the production of localityunder conditions of globalization.2

A cautionary note on terminology is in order here. Categorizing termssuch as ‘autochthonous’ and ‘allochthonous’ (as well as the nationalcategories of belonging they invoke) are derived from widespread public

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discourses on alterity emphasizing essentialist identity notions. Thoughobviously dis(re)putable both theoretically and empirically, such discourseshave a major impact on public perceptions of social reality, and onactions undertaken by individuals and authorities in this respect: they areFoucaultian discourses of truth on diversity in Belgium (cf. Blommaert andVerschueren, 1998). Our use of these notions should not prevent a criticaldeconstruction of the categories they describe – the point of this article isto do precisely that, and to demonstrate that such public perceptions ofdiversity are shot through with contradictions (to borrow Appadurai’sterms) and demand a far more nuanced and polymorphous approach. Butin doing so, we shall have to ironically use the loosely descriptivecategorizing terminology of the public debate. Our procedure is to adoptthese categories (e.g. ‘of Turkish descent’, ‘overwhelmingly Moroccan’,‘Belgians’) and move them into a different analytic field, where space,activity, authority are brought in as more accurate diacritics for understand-ing diversity.

The neighborhood

Our discussion will be based on findings from one particular neighborhoodin the city of Ghent: Brugse Poort. This neighborhood is situated in the ringof 19th-century housing – broadly speaking, the northwest corner of thecity center (see Figure 1).

It is a typical neighborhood in the sense of our descriptions above: it iswell-known with a name and a reputation of its own, and it is one ofGhent’s main immigrant neighborhoods. It is densely populated, and itspopulation is ‘mixed’: autochthonous Belgian inhabitants are blended witha large immigrant population of (numerically dominant) Turkish andMaghrebians. The neighborhood has a long history of being in the socio-economic margin of the city. In the 19th century, it housed the emergentworking class (many of whom immigrated to the city from rural areas)supplying labor to Ghent’s booming textile industry, and it remained aworking-class neighborhood until the decline of the textile industry in the1970s. The press shop (Figure 2) is located more or less across the roadfrom one of the visible remnants of the textile industry: one of the oldfactory buildings of UCO, a cotton-spinning company; the factory closeddown in the 1970s and has since been revamped into a shopping mall.Several similar but smaller former factory and workshop buildings arestrewn around the neighborhood. Immigration into the neighborhoodstarted in the early 1960s, as part of a state-organized labor-immigrationwave from the Mediterranean into western Europe, and attracted by theprospect of salaried labor in the textile factories. This influx of immigrants

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continued a process of (physically and spatially visible) layering in theneighborhood, in which the lower middle class – mainly shops – occupiedthe ‘front’ of the neighborhood (the main traffic arteries), thus giving theneighborhood an appearance of prosperity, while the working class clus-tered in the side streets. The immigration from the Mediterranean resultedin an overlap between space, social class and ethnicity: new immigrantslanded in the working-class areas of the neighborhood, while the middle-class areas were overwhelmingly autochthonous. This, then, led to the kindof ethno-socio-spatial stratification characterizing many historicallyworking-class neighborhoods in urban centers in Europe.

The decline of the production industries in the 1970s caused severeunemployment problems in the neighborhood, since few of its inhabitants


Figure 1 Map of Brugse Poort.


(autochthonous as well as allochthonous) possessed labor skills or qualifi-cations that offered mobility within the labor market. This phenomenonreshuffled the stratification of the area and led to a general perception of‘deterioration’: the middle-class shops gradually closed down or moved outdue to lack of business in the neighborhoods; empty shop windows becamea feature of the appearance of the neighborhood, and some of the premiseswere in time taken by ‘ethnic’ shops: Turkish bakeries and groceries, tele-phone shops, launderettes, ‘ethnic’ bars and cafés. This, to some extent, ledto a degree of socio-economic recovery: the current average income in theneighborhood is lower than the general average for the Ghent area, butBrugse Poort is not among the poorest areas, while unemployment rates are(officially) not significantly higher than the Ghent average (8.7 percent ofthe population, but with strong concentrations of unemployed people in thenorthern neighborhoods of the city).

Since the early 1990s, the neighborhood has witnessed an influx ofimmigrants from other parts of the world as well: the Balkans, EasternEurope and the Far East, which again has reshuffled the stratification in thearea. The clandestine status of many of these new immigrants, also caused

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Figure 2 Newspaper shop, International Press Store Rooigem, Rooigemlaan/Brugse Steenweg.


many social issues to remain hidden from official view. In addition, due tosharp increases in real estate prices in the 1980s, a relatively ‘cheap’ areasuch as Brugse Poort attracted (modest numbers of) highly educated youngpeople in search of affordable housing. This new ethno-national mix andoverall lower-than-average socio-economic status is reflected in shops, cafés,restaurants, as well as in other services and institutions. The schools in theneighborhood, for instance, are perceived as ‘immigrant’ schools (popularlycalled ‘concentration schools’ referring to a high concentration of immi-grant pupils), and several welfare and outreach organizations have a bureauin the Brugse Poort. The general image of the neighborhood is one of a poor,‘bad’ immigrant neighborhood. Later in the article, we will return to a morenuanced description of the Brugse Poort, in light of our findings on multi-lingualism.

Fieldwork was conducted in Brugse Poort and a number of otherneighborhoods in Ghent in the summer and fall of 2003 and the spring of2004. Slembrouck and Collins investigated some sites discussed in thisarticle (the neighborhood clinic, Café Istanbul and the theater), recordingspontaneously occurring interaction and interviews with neighborhoodinhabitants and collecting a corpus of pictures of physical sites, inscriptionsand other public displays of language and identity. In addition, in thecontext of a fieldwork training course at Ghent University co-supervised bythe authors in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004, groups of studentscollected a vast corpus of data – recordings of interaction, fieldnotes, inter-views and visual material – in several neighborhoods in Ghent. Together,this yielded a rich and extensive ethnographic data collection, only part ofwhich can be discussed here.

Polycentricity and interactional regimes

Let us now elaborate our main theoretical concepts and suggest how theyapply to the neighborhood taken as a unit of analysis. As already hinted atabove, polycentricity is a property at the level of Brugse Poort as a neighbor-hood. It entails hybridity and multiplicity at the level of centers, involvingspaces or places that allow one or more centering forces. This is so becausespaces and places are typically multi-functional, but in our case such multi-functionality is heightened by the presence of multilingual, national andethnic diversity. Such diversity, understood through the specter of thecategorizing terms discussed above, adds a wide variety of semiotic (iconic,emblematic) attributes to perceptions of identity, converted, often, indensely flagged ‘centers’ (e.g. the official language Dutch in Figure 3). Theconnection between centers and interactional regimes is an aspect of theproduction of space and of the theorizing of power therein, calling into



question both strictly material concepts of space and strictly immaterial(symbolic) concepts of discourse. A full discussion of the theoretical impli-cations of this is beyond the scope of this article (Blommaert et al., 2005offer some first suggestions in that direction).

Each center is characterized by the presence of at least one interactionalregime. By interactional regime, we understand minimally a set of behav-ioral expectations regarding physical conduct, including language. Oneaspect of the interactional regimes may be activity-interwoven distributionsof functional repertoires. Some of these regimes are elaborations of long-established ‘old’ regimes, which have been challenged by conditions ofethnolinguistic diversity (e.g. primary schools in the neighborhood are stilldominated by Dutch, but they have accommodated to – and often live inuncomfortable relationship to – the use of other, especially non-European,languages in areas of activity which were previously monolingual, forinstance, in the playground or during classroom interaction). Other regimeshave surfaced locally as a direct result of contact – for instance, the use ofDutch as a lingua franca for customer–client transactions in a Turkishbakery or in Café Istanbul. They often originate exclusively in practice, in

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Figure 3 Language immersion class in primary school, Sint-Jan Baptist,Reinaertstraat.


the sense that they are quite removed from state-supported institutions withan official language policy. They often result from small business activitiesor local-community efforts to establish immigrant-friendly places. Thedifference between ‘emergent’ and ‘established’ here echoes Voloshinov’s(1973) distinction between ‘established’ ideologies and ‘behavioral’ ideol-ogies (here extended to the terrain of language ideologies).

We insist on using the term ‘regime’ in order to emphasize not only acondition, a normative, taken-for-granted dimension which regimentssituated understandings of language, but also the importance of inequalityof resources and power. Regimes involve the production of subjectivitiesand may be transitory; regimes can be overthrown or they can be hegem-onic (it would be hard to export the interactional regime of a mosque toother neighborhood sites, while the interactional regime of a Turkish bakeryis more susceptible to being overtaken by a Dutch-first pattern). We alsoinsist on using the term ‘interactional’ in order to emphasize the necessarilyemergent nature of social processes; in other words, that the conditionedand normative nevertheless unfolds in the contingencies of situated activity.In this view, language and other forms of activity are seen as interdepen-dent, and language may regulate activity or activity may regulate language.3

As an example of unplanned outcomes which underline facts of inequality,consider the common occurrence of functionally specific and limited/trun-cated Dutch. The use of such Dutch as a lingua franca was never plannedbut it is found across a range of sites and is a structural effect of languagedominance. Further, there is very little prestige attached to this truncatedvariety of Dutch. It may be negatively evaluated in official settings such asschools; however, its usefulness can be observed in a wide range of localsettings, and it constitutes a major resource for interethnic contact in theneighborhood of Brugse Poort.

Types of places

A densely mixed neighborhood such as Brugse Poort is obviously a patch-work of very different spaces, places and activities, often functioning ascenters imposing or offering particular interactional regimes to their users.Though a full and detailed description of such spaces and places is stillunder construction, we can offer a tentative typology of places here, basedon prevailing tendencies and salient differences in the general make-up ofcommunicative patterns in the places as observed in fieldwork.

The major distinction we shall make is that between monologic placesand dialogic places. Other options were available: we could have chosen asurface-descriptive distinction such as ‘monolingual’ versus ‘multilingual’,or ‘monoglot’ versus ‘polyglot’. But the distinction between ‘monologic’ and



‘dialogic’ offers us an interpretive angle, in which we focus on the regimen-tation of communicative practices, either in the form of imposing singularregimes (‘monologic’), which often converts into the dominance ofmonoglot and monolingual practices, or in the form of allowing multipleregimes in one space, possibly distributed differentially over a range ofactivities (‘dialogic’). The latter often converts, in practice, into polyglot andmultilingual practices. We have observed that there is a constant concern inmonologic places with the containment of dialogic tendencies, and thatdialogic spaces often display tendencies towards monologicity. The distinc-tion should therefore be seen as representing the two extremes of a gradient,as well as indexing the tensions between official language policies, publicface, users’ intentions and actual practice – in other words, as indexing thecross-cutting of different scales (Blommaert et al., 2005).

Such differences between monologic and dialogic regimes may be theresult of deliberate and strategic choice of language so as to target specificgroups, while excluding others, or so as to attain specific professional orpolitical objectives (e.g. multilingualism as a necessary condition for theprovision of adequate health care; the choice of Dutch as an instrument of‘integration/assimilation’). A third type occurs when dialogic regimes arethe result of a de facto, unplanned situation. Thus, we distinguish betweenthree roughly delineated types.

Officially monologic places

There are places in Brugse Poort where a particular monologic interactionalregime is imposed or treated as normative. Such places would include:

The mosque

The North African mosque in one of the side-streets off the main shoppingstreet is operated by people from the Maghreb, and while the actual use oflanguage during mosque activities is heterogeneous, the focal language ofIslamic practice there is Arabic, both during worship services and duringQur’an classes in the weekends. Children learn how to recite the Qur’anand receive Arabic calligraphy training. ‘Good’ performance in Qur’anclasses usually means good performance in Arabic, even though otherlanguages – notably Dutch, Turkish and Berber – may to varying degreesbe adopted as secondary media of communication and instruction.

The primary schools

All official schools in the neighborhood are government-subsidized and areconsequently subject to the language laws of the country, stipulating the

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(exclusive) use of Dutch as the medium of instruction. Despite this legalrequirement, different degrees of enforcement can be seen in classroompractices (e.g. allowing immigrant children to talk in their mother tongueversus prohibiting the use of languages other than Dutch), and the schoolplaygrounds are obviously spaces where ‘Dutch-only’ policies are hard toenforce (compare with Heller, 2001). ‘Good’ performance in schools,though, typically means good performance in (standard) Dutch.

Intentionally dialogic places

Other places in Brugse Poort have consciously adopted a multilingual,dialogic regime in which several languages are allowed or encouraged,either in order to attain professional goals, or as an expression of political-ideological principles (viz. outreach and multiculturalism). Such placesinclude:

The Wijkgezondheidscentrum (WGC, ‘neighborhood health center’)

This general practice started as a non-profit organization in the mid-1970sand has grown into one of the largest neighborhood-based clinics in Ghent.It operates a multilingual policy of interviewing and assessing patients; itdoes so through an active lingua franca policy among its staff, and bydrawing upon a range of externally provided translation and interpretingservices. In the late 1990s, when faced with challenges provided by Russian,Albanian and Slovak, the WGC also developed its own set of translationinstruments (a chart-flow manual for bilingual medical consultation) for thebenefit of its physicians and health workers (see Collins and Slembrouck,2004 for a detailed analysis of the center, its practices and multilingualresources). Here, the finality of the dialogic regime is to attain professionalgoals, viz. to provide adequate frontline health care to any patient, regard-less of ethnic, national or linguistic background.

The news shop

This large newspaper shop specialized in professional magazines, whichcater for middle-class/professional customers. At the same time, the ownersof the shop have for years provided basic literacy services to immigrantsfrom the neighborhood (and beyond), and a multilingual, dialogic regimeis in place in these activities, largely revolving around literacy and transla-tion tasks. The motive behind this is personal-and-political, viz. an individ-ual commitment from the shop owners to assist refugees in need.



De Vieze Gasten (‘the filthy companions’)

Brugse Poort also harbors one of Ghent’s oldest political theater groups. DeVieze Gasten are explicitly left-wing, and they operate from a rather largetheater complex in Brugse Poort (formerly a concert hall dedicated to under-ground rock music). The complex has a small theater, several offices andmeeting rooms and a car park, and apart from theatrical activities, thegroup also offers space for several local groups and organizations lookingfor meeting space. Outreach efforts and meetings are often aimed atallochthonous populations and may be plurilingual in the announcing andconduct of their business. The car park is used by immigrant children as aplay area during the day. Dialogicity here is a conscious expression ofprincipled multiculturalism. At the same time, the staff at the theater centerare overwhelmingly Flemish-autochthonous.

As-necessary dialogic places

A third type of place is marked by a de facto dialogic, multilingual regime.This is the outcome of factual arrangements or a result of the particulardemographic and spatial patterns in the neighborhood. Such patterns canbe consensual as well as conflictual, and two examples can illustrate this.

Café Istanbul

This originally Turkish café is run by a Bulgarian Muslim man speakingTurkish. The customers – all male – are mainly Turkish, and the inside ofthe café is dominated by the banners of Istanbul’s three main soccer teams(Turkish soccer games being a major feature of the TV programs broad-casted in the café). At the same time, the café also counts quite a few peoplefrom Macedonia and Albania among its customers, so apart from Turkish,one can also hear Albanian being used in the café, and a vernacular varietyof Dutch is being used as lingua franca in cross-ethnic interaction. Thecomposition of the customer population is the effect of recent immigrationfrom the Balkans, and Café Istanbul definitely has the feel of a Turkish-cosmopolitan place. Coffee, for instance, is served in a very ‘Belgian’ way– using a huge espresso machine (rather than the typical Turkish/Greekcoffee preparation) – and a chocolate egg accompanies the coffee. On thetables, one can find Turkish as well as Belgian newspapers.

Bus stop and playgrounds

There are several such areas in the neighborhood, and one of the mainfeatures one can observe is that they often become densely multilingual and

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multi-activity meeting places for all kinds of small groups of youngsters.They congregate there using the seating space in the bus shelter or theequipment on the playground, and are often perceived as ‘intruders’ bypeople using these places for their ‘proper’ functions – waiting for the busor bringing small children to the playground. So here we often have aconflictual dialogic regime, leading to contests over ownership and properusage of the space.

The example of the bus stop and the play areas already suggests thatpolycentricity is accompanied by another feature: the fact that several placeshave multiple functions, and that such multi-functionality often convertsinto complex, plural and sometimes unexpected interactional regimes. Thiswill be elaborated in the next sections.

Dimensions of multi-functionality

Neighborhood places and spaces come with multiple functions as well aswith populations of regular users who are differentially networked inrelation to populations inside and outside a neighborhood-demarcated area.Such multi-functionality is ‘normal’, so to speak, though, as we shall see, itis often overlooked as a feature of social space. Typologies of spaces suchas we have just offered beg a dimensional analysis which is both scalar andsensitive to the ‘politicized’ edges of practice. A discussion of these dimen-sions reveals through its detail how the multi-functionality of spaces issubject to fine-grained, value-laden boundaries of spatial occupation,practice and participation.

Multi-functionality is often overlooked, as we said above. This dimensionof the relative (in)visibility and (un)expectedness of multi-functionalitybecame apparent to us throughout our fieldwork. One striking example ofinvisibility and unexpected multi-functionality was our discovery that theup-market newspaper shop (Figure 2), in addition to its function as a highlyspecialized outlet for magazines, newspapers, videos and DVDs in majorwestern European and immigrant languages, also functions as a center forliteracy services for fourth-world residents as well as for local and non-localimmigrants.

The theoretical point of multi-functionality is not an unusual one tomake. Indeed, it is rare to come across a space which is strictly mono-functional. Also, the observation that the space of the newspaper shop hostsa second, ‘unexpected’ and ‘less predictable’ activity turns out to be true formost spaces in the neighborhood (as, no doubt, in every neighborhood).These spaces are regularly inhabited by alternative activities and practices,which, from a certain perspective inside or outside the neighborhood,remain ‘secluded from view’. That is, to ‘normal’ users, they come across



as ‘unexpected’, as ‘marked’, and may be experienced as ‘a source ofirritation’ or even ‘conflict’, and will be talked about on certain occasionsas ‘not participated in’ or ‘simply not done’. The sidewalk is an area for allto walk and for young children to play and cycle; only for some, it is alsoan area to sit outside on a chair and engage in talk with neighbors andacquaintances passing by. Another example is the bus shelter on Segher-splein, the square across the church. As mentioned earlier, it is a waitingarea for passengers but also a regular meeting place in late afternoon andearly evening for allochthonous adolescents. The older ones often park theircars in one of the bays adjacent to the stop. And the mosque, finally, is apublic institution, but it is not recognizable from the outside. The twoadjacent buildings that host it look like terraced houses from the outside,and unless one is knowledgeable in such matters and spots the small featuresthat mark the buildings as a mosque, one will have difficulty finding themosque in the neighborhood (Figure 4).

Each of these examples also illustrates another key point. Some activitiesare predictably and visibly present because their regularity of occurrence ismaterially inscribed into the place (permanently, e.g. the bus stop sign orthe school sign and logo next to the front door, or regularly, e.g. the bamboo

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Figure 4 Mosque, Beukelaarstraat.


sticks which mark the soccer goal posts in the park). In the case of themosque the inscriptions are restricted to the spaces inside the building;facing the street, there are only the two brick facades painted in identicalblue; this sets the two houses aside from the surrounding houses (andprobably functions as a major point of reference in directions given to firstvisitors). Other activities are established in a usurping way, in the form oftransient occupations which are layered over the inscriptions made for‘official’ activities (e.g. the redefinition of the bus shelter as a clique zone).

Activities may thus be co-present but kept from mutual view (e.g.Flemish newspaper buyers who are unaware of the letter-writing practicesin the shop). Co-presence may also be openly visible but enacted sequen-tially. For instance, during the day De Vieze Gasten theater frequently hostsa city department-organized meeting with local allochthonous parents withchildren who go to school in the neighborhood (interpreters for Arabic andTurkish are also present). In the evening the place is populated by theater-goers and performers from all over Ghent (and beyond) who conduct theiractivities exclusively in Dutch. Co-presence may also mean that a space willbe occupied for a particular activity only if it is not already taken up forsomething else (e.g. the bus passenger who first checks whether the busshelter is not already saturated with another activity before deciding to useit; his alternative is to await the trolley bus a few meters away from thestop). Co-presence may thus also lead to tension, become a source ofconflicting views, the subject of a petition, an official complaint or a face-to-face dispute.

One further important dimension therefore is that of the durability ofthe space-inhabiting activities. This dimension includes their susceptibilityto the kind of intervention that is oriented to a redefinition of the space.Both dimensions are affected directly by the relative openness/restrictednessof access to a space. Open/restricted is first of all a matter of who can enterthe space and enact a certain activity. At one end one can think here of thedoctor’s cabinet in the neighborhood health clinic. Access to the cabinet isrestricted to doctors and individual patients and whoever accompanies them(relatives, nurses, interpreters). At the other end, one can think of thebasketball ground at Fonteineplein. This paved area is open in principle toanyone, but, in practice, it is occupied on a regular basis by various localgroupings (mostly youngsters) for all kinds of purposes. It can be soccer,basketball, skateboarding, cycling, etc. as well as hanging around andchatting. Access of course is a precondition for an engagement in space-defining activity. Indeed, one of the questions to be asked here is who can(re)define the use of (part of) a space, and at what sort of scale does the(re)defining happen? The latter aspect can be shown in the differencebetween, on the one hand, the group of eight- to ten-year-olds who, actingat the level of streets adjacent to the square, make sure they get to the



ground in the evening ‘before anybody else does’, so as to appropriate thebasketball ground as a soccer pitch (see Figure 5), and, on the other hand,the police calling upon national identity procedure to effectively dismantlea gathering of adolescents suspected of drugs dealing on the same square.

The latter example literally brings out the dimension of activities being‘policed’. Relevant questions include: How well is the activity-specific spacesheltered from interruptions, competing activities which may (or not) clashwith intended destinations, etc.? How susceptible is its poly-functionalityto space-defining and space-transforming ‘moves’ by regular participants,by overseeing bystanders and institutionally grounded actors? At whatlevel are the place and its activities being ‘policed’? The latter questionincludes the kind of legitimacy that the space regulations can claim forthemselves. One exemplary contrast here would be the effective policingperformed by the presence of a guard dog in the back of a shop which, uponarrival of the actual police, is rendered an illegitimate instrument ofintimidation (compare with Figure 5).

The capacity to use certain spaces for certain activities and to enactspatially grounded activities is thus subject to relationships of power and

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Figure 5 Worn sign on public basketball ground, Fonteineplein: BY POLICEORDER, PLAYING SOCCER FORBIDDEN.


inequality in ways which connect populations and users to the distributionof material resources in an area. What we have called interactional regimesare linked to centers, the spatial functions described in this section, and thedistribution of material resources. One obvious starting point here is a graspof the sort of spaces people can afford to inhabit in the first place, as wellas the number of activities that by necessity are organized within one andthe same space. The better-networked and resourced a group is, the betteralso its chances of ‘containing’ and ‘channeling’ multi-functionality and ofcontrolling interactional regimes. It will tend to do so partly by differenti-ating between and spreading a range of activities over specifically designatedplaces. This also renders them less likely to be challenged (especially ifaccess is better-controlled).

The global in the local: neighborhoods as units of analysis

Because of their densely occupied, semiotically layered, provisionallybounded character, immigrant neighborhoods are good places to studymultiple and at times competing activities; the differing centers which theseinhabit, enact, and transgress; and the range of mediating actors who seekto reconcile activity and language, place and people (whether a shopkeeperlinguistically sizing up a customer, a child accompanying a parent to abenefits office, a social worker designing multilingual brochures, or acommunity theater hosting ‘school information’ sessions in multiple immi-grant languages). In our analyses, we will attempt to present the historical,spatial, and linguistic density of Brugse Poort without slighting themetropolitan, national, and international dimensions that inform this ‘localneighborhood’, the ‘history of the production of locality’ in Appadurai’sterminology (1996: 182). We emphasize polycentricity and multi-functionality, believing that each is necessary to an adequate sociolinguisticethnography of this place; yet, we recognize that centering and function areboth subject to ‘relations of power and inequality’ and that, like activities,centers and functions are always open to challenge. In this article, we givepride of place to communicative regimes, but we do so by paying attentionto places and activities, to context and conduct, as well as communication.In focusing on a local place that encompasses the domestic and personal aswell as the institutional and impersonal, the bar and street as well as thechurch and school, we are striving for an understanding and account of theglobal-as-local (Appadurai, 1996; Burawoy, 2001; Englund, 2002). We seekto advance understanding of the general processes that underpin matters ofmigration and multilingualism, debates about language and nationalbelonging, by studying specific places and situated language encounters.

Given our general interest in spatiality, polycentricity, and interaction,



we face the question of how to ground our discussion empirically. Wepropose to do so with reference to a particular immigrant neighborhood,but then face the question of why this unit of analysis? Taken separately,there is little in our various analytic-theoretical questions that requires aneighborhood analysis. The problem of space-and-scale can refer to streetcorners or Global Information Systems, and everything in between (Harvey,1996). Similarly, multiple centers are found in single neighborhoods, andcentering institutions are networked and can extend (in field-specific ways)well beyond the limited geographical boundaries of neighborhoods(Bourdieu, 1990). Interaction, while requiring co-presence, can be ‘located’in specific micro-spaces, say of the sidewalk encounter, or the generic spacesof institutions – think of the doctor’s consulting room or the lecture room(Goffman, 1972). Despite their apparent factuality as named places withunderstood boundaries and predictably recurrent activities, much thatoccurs in neighborhoods does not require a neighborhood as a frame ofreference. Immigrant neighborhoods, for example, are by their very naturelocal places containing people from other countries.

We regard these matters as reasons to question our ‘unit of analysis’, butnot to abandon it. Immigrant neighborhoods do exist, indeed it is acommonplace observation across the world that immigrants congregatetogether upon arriving in lands of destination. The question is what to makeof this gathering, this congregating amidst cultural-linguistic difference andmaterial inequalities. As we noted earlier, neighborhoods are places oftennamed and identified by residents and non-residents alike; they are placesofficialized for policing, administration, and social service provision; andthey often have their own rituals of identity, whether elections or festivals,protests or barbecues. Focusing upon a neighborhood challenges us with adensity of overlapping associations, with multiple centers: layers of materialaccumulation, cultural value, and forms of inhabitation (Blommaert, 2005).In that challenge we see an opportunity, to explore the ‘implosion’ of theworld into a neighborhood; put otherwise, to describe and analyse aneveryday tangibleness that has global dimensions (Appadurai, 1996;Giddens, 1991).

We have discussed earlier how neighborhoods are spaces with multiplecenters (often oriented towards different scales), polycentric spaces. Somecenters are due to life-world activities, locally performed, often relativelysmall-scale and short-term, and not inscribed in the physical environment.Adolescent boys congregate for a few months or years at a given bus stop,there to learn and perform the rituals of clique against the backdrop ofneutral transport signage and bypassing others, who come and go whiletaking buses to work or other destinations, perhaps amused or threatenedby the youthful clusters. Old émigré men gather regularly at a café, thereto exchange news, converse in familiar tongues, assert old hierarchies, thus

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orienting themselves towards a remote center, while always aware that inother parts of the neighborhood other tongues and other hierarchies areencountered. Some centers are local sites for longer-term and even moredistant, large-scale institutions. They are often durably inscribed in theneighborhood environment. Consider a mosque/church or a school. Eachhas a specialized site and typically a specialized architecture, carefullydemarcating inside and outside; its buildings dominate over a local area (e.g.the sudden surge of people in the street when class/service is over). Each hasits own communicative regimes, concerning, for example, the priority ofsacred or national languages over other varieties, the relative or absolutesanctity of the written over the spoken; each has its internal spaces (foyersand prayer rooms; hallways and classrooms), and each opens onto streets,streets wherein differing orders are possible, differing centers may prevail(hence the frequency of religious lament against ‘the world’ and schoolishlament against ‘the environment, the neighborhood’). When we speak ofpolycentricity, we thus necessarily speak of (a) different orientations toscale, (b) structure and fragmentation, and, related to that, (c) mediators ormediating agencies.

Focusing upon neighborhood presents us with an opportunity, and anobligation, to confront the variegated nature of linguistic competencies.Confronting the diverse, changeable landscape of competencies displayedand attributed forces us, in turn, to explore the interplay of representationsand practices, accounts and situated doings. The whole field of the socio-linguistics of multilingualism is caught up in indexicalities of collectivities,in which individuals are apprehended as members of groups, and as suchas having linguistic competence: as ‘Turks’ or ‘Moroccans’ or ‘Flemish’ (seee.g. Fishman, 1974; Spolsky, 1998). Such reflexivized collectivities arerepresentations, which embed or have projected onto them ‘orders ofindexicalities’ (Blommaert, 2005; Silverstein, 1998, 2003), in this case,assumptions about which languages are likely, possible, and unlikely. Thetendency to understand multilingualism in terms of represented, construedor imagined collectivities is not simply an academic reflex or habit; rather,in situations of heightened interlingual/interethnic contact, there is atendency for everyone to view other individuals as members of ethno-linguistic groups. This is one side of ‘heightened awareness of difference’(Whiteley, 2003: 715). In our ethnographic data we find that shopcustomers and bartenders, school teachers and social workers, allochtho-nous and autochthonous, use national categories; all speak of national types– ‘The Turks’, ‘The Flemish’, ‘The Bulgarians’ – and attribute languagecapacities on the basis of such categorizations. We do not view this percep-tion as incorrect so much as one-sided. It is a collectivizing perception andjudgment, one form of the more common process of social classification(Bourdieu, 1984; 1990; Holland et al., 1998), and it reveals the legacy of



nationalist ideologies of ‘a language and a people’, as they live on inacademic accounts and quotidian encounters (Bauman and Briggs, 2003).We must insist, however, that this presumed, attributed, taken-for-grantedotherness is constantly subjected to the pressures of practice – encountersand activities that may underwrite or force revision of projected identities,competencies, and indexicalities. Put otherwise, we find that upon shiftingattention from imagined collectivities to specific, recurring activities inneighborhood settings, we find crossing as well as code-allegiance,multiplicity as well as centering, and mediators as part of the practice ofmultilingualism.

The global neighborhood

Let us now have another close look at the neighborhood, and revisit someof the features given earlier in this article. As we noted, Brugse Poort issituated in the ring of 19th-century housing. It was historically a Flemishworking-class neighborhood, subsequently populated by immigrants as wellas a mixture of educated young Flemings seeking affordable housing. Thearea is bounded by a dual carriageway to the west, the Bruges canal to theeast and a side-arm of the Leie to the south (see Figure 1). Although placeboundaries are often flexible constructs (there may, for example, be someuncertainty as to whether Brugse Poort ends in the south at the arm of theLeie or slightly below at Nieuwe Wandeling), there is general agreement byresidents and non-residents alike that Brugse Poort is a distinct neighbor-hood. For example, it is frequently contrasted by Turkish residents with theneighboring area of Rabot or, further east, the area of Muide, both of whichhave a sizable Turkish population.

Brugse Poort has two elementary schools, Acacia and St Jan Baptist,which are differently organized, and which serve a catchment area roughlythat reported above; the Wijkgezondheidscentrum discussed earlierconsciously sees itself as serving Brugse Poort; and when a rival mosquebroke off from the one in Rabot, it found a location across the BrugesCanal, thereby becoming ‘the North African mosque in Brugse Poort’.

Official socioeconomic statistics are kept by the city of Ghent for itscentral area, surrounding suburbs, and for numbered-and-named censustracts.4 Brugse Poort encompasses four such tracts: Brugse Poort, Drongens-esteenweg, Rooigem, and Groendreef. As of 2003, out of a total 13,092population in the area, 4202 people are listed as ‘ethnolinguistic-culturalminorities’. Of these, the big groups are Turkish (950) and Morrocan (583),and there is an even larger group, ‘minorities with Belgian citizenship’(2272), most of whom will be of Turkish or Moroccan descent. There arealso smaller groups, of 50 and fewer, reported as refugees (an administrative

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category incuding several nationalities) and for immigrants from Tunisia,Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Ghana. The smallest groups, typically of10 or fewer, come from more than 15 other countries.5 Although we do nothave precise counts for Brugse Poort, on citywide counts the large groups– the so-called ‘migrants’, from Turkey and North Africa – show higherlevels of poverty and lower levels of education than the general population.6

People of Turkish and Moroccan descent, although classified among the‘migrants’ are, however, the non-autochthonous groups who have been inBelgium the longest. They are most likely to have citizenship (indeed morethan 50 percent do), and are more likely to speak fluent Dutch and have agood sense of how the system works.7

The relatively large number of people of Turkish and Moroccan descentin Brugse Poort is reflected in the large number of immigrant-run businesses:the main axis, Bevrijdingslaan-Seghersplein-Phoenixstraat, for example, hasa number of Turkish bakeries, of bazaar-style general goods shops, and ofcafes and VZWs8 explicitly aimed at immigrant populations: for example,‘Balkan’ and ‘Café Istanbul’. In the windows of such businesses, passersbycan also read notices and posters in various languages announcingcommunity events, social services, or travel services. As noted earlier, thereis also a mosque on a side street in Brugse Poort. One also sees, on thestreets and in certain shops, many women wearing the chador. The presenceof more recently arrived residents from countries in the Balkans and theformer Soviet Union, often commented upon by residents and serviceproviders, explains the multi-functionality noted above of the news shop: itcaters to a Flemish clientele for newspapers and magazines, which also doesa ‘behind the counter’ business in providing both forms and help in fillingout forms for refugees and asylum seekers as they interact with the Belgiansocial service bureaucracies.

The presence of immigrants from many different countries results inthings which are less obvious but of durable significance, such as schoolsthat have responded in their policy to diversity and immigration. The AcaciaSchool is a city primary school, and it has a two-track system. One trackhas a majority of allochthonous students, but the other reflects a consciouspolicy of measured integration: It has a 60 percent Flemish-autochthonousmajority and a 40 percent immigrant-allochthonous minority. Elsewhere inthe neighborhood, the school of St. Jan Baptist is part of the publiclyfunded, private system,9 but has been able to opt out of the standardcurriculum, using instead a Taalbad (language immersion) program whichit presents to its diverse and almost entirely immigrant student body (seeFigure 2).10

The ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic diversity of Brugse Poort alsoresults in the relative salience of intercultural, interlingual mediators.11

Schools employ outreach social workers, who grapple with language issues



in their communications with student families. Thus also, for example, thechild and family welfare branch in the neighborhood is explicitly orientedto Turkish and Moroccan populations and has brochure-stickers and othertranslated materials in languages such as Albanian, Slovakian, and Russian.Similarly, the staff at the WGC are aware of the need to provide interpret-ing and translation services to their clientele, and they developed a multi-lingual consultation manual in response to a spike in immigrants in the1990s (Collins and Slembrouck, 2004).

The theater De Vieze Gasten, discussed earlier, offers theater productionsfor Flemish and occasionally for allochthonous audiences; it is also a sitefor several social service and social work outreach efforts that explicitlytarget allochthonous populations. Two of our most knowledgeable field-work consultants on the contemporary ethnic diversity of Brugse Poort areemployed or based at the theater. One of them, a Flemish man we will callGeert, was quick to point out some of the hidden complexities within the‘national’ populations. He reported, for example, that so-called ‘Moroccan’families were often of Berber background; that the men and children mightspeak Arabic and Berber, but the women would typically speak only Berber;and that given their own colonized and Moroccan-dominated histories, theywere especially leery of officials (and this had linguistic and cultural impli-cations for providing social services). He reported also that among theTurkish population, many in Brugse Poort came from the Bayrampas ̦aneighborhood of Istanbul, and that they were Muslims of Turkish descentwho originally lived in the former Yugoslavia, Albania, and Macedonia, hadmigrated to Turkey in the 1950s, and thence to Belgium in the 1960s. Oursecond consultant encountered through the theater, who we will call Nezat,was such a person. His family was ethnically Turkish but lived originally inMacedonia; they immigrated to Istanbul in the mid-1950s, and to Belgiumin two stages, in 1965 and 1967. Nezat spoke Albanian as well as Turkish,and indeed provided translation services for incoming Albanians during the1990s. A man in his mid-40s, he spent the overwhelming majority of hislife in Belgium, indeed in Brugse Poort, and had learned Dutch beforeTurkish (taking separate classes for the latter). He had worked with Geerton social outreach projects in the 1980s.

A final aspect of Brugse Poort as an immigrant neighborhood is thecommon occurrence of community-centers and gathering-places whichare simultaneously minority-oriented while quick to present an ‘open-to-anyone’ face. Café Istanbul (Figure 6) can serve as an example. Uponentering, we were immediately aware of a large number of men of Turkishand likely Balkan background, but only one or two who looked Flemish.Notices were in Dutch and Turkish (including, for example, a handwritteninjunction in the WC not to put cigarettes in the urinal). There werepennants for the major Turkish football clubs hanging from the back wall,

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04_057557_Blommaert (JB-D) 21/9/05 2:22 pm 6

and we were later informed that the large screen TV, also against the backwall, provided live broadcasts of games by the major Turkish clubs. Byaccident, we encountered Nezat, who was sitting at a table with a group ofmen, one of whom was his father, and who were conversing in Turkishand Albanian. Nezat joined our table for a coffee, telling us about thestrenuous courses he was attending in preparation for setting up a truckingbusiness with his brother. He also talked about the ethnolinguistic ecologyof the café: that the waiter was a recent immigrant from Bulgaria, but aMuslim, who spoke Bulgarian and Turkish but little Dutch as yet (matchingour interactions with the man); that the table immediately behind us hadmen from Macedonia speaking Macedonian; and that people from Turkeyand the Balkans were at his father’s table and thus using Albanian as wellas Turkish. Nezat was quick to insist that Café Istanbul was ‘open toanyone’, though few Flemish people entered, and he argued also that peoplemight say that ‘they’, the immigrants, had ‘taken over the neighborhood’,but their own experience had been that the Flemish residents left andimmigrants took over, and fixed up, both houses and businesses.

We should note that, although Brugse Poort has a clear, diverseimmigrant presence, there remain a number of Flemish residents and a large


Figure 6 Café Istanbul, 74 Phoenixstraat.


number of Belgian-run businesses. It is interesting that such accounts, ofcafés and businesses being ‘open for everyone’ and of the neighborhoodbeing renewed, rather than being taken over, were reported to other fieldteams in other immigrant neighborhoods in Ghent. This is one way in whichminority populations reply to the dominant discourse that ‘they’ areclannish and exclusive and ‘taking over’. Clearly, such majority andminority discourses are only indirectly related to statistical demographicfacts about population or commercial ownership.

Talking feet

In his discussion of the production of locality under conditions of globaliz-ation, Appardurai emphasizes that:

The many displaced, deterritorialized, and transient populations that consti-tute today’s ethnoscapes are engaged in the construction of locality, as astructure of feeling, often in the face of the erosion, dispersal and implosionof neighborhoods as coherent social formations. (1996: 199)

Adding that the phenomenon itself is not new, Appadurai neverthelessdistinguishes the disjuncture between these processes and the mass-mediated discourses and practices that now surround the nation-state as anew (problematic) feature in the production of locality. Transnational flowsof images contribute substantially to this disjuncture, as they allow peopleto construct or engage with ‘delocalized’ alliances, loyalties and conflicts.12

The issue of locality, we would argue, is even more complex when onetakes language use as one’s point of departure. Substantial and diverseimmigrant populations interacting with each other and with autochthonousresidents and institutions, seen from the streets of a given neighborhood,bring into view the existence of centers and polycentricity: interactionalregimes are found in ‘Turkish’ cafes where Albanian speakers are habitués,in the Wijkgezondheidscentrum oriented to immigrant clientele, and inDutch immersion schools where a variety of languages jostle on the play-ground. Briefly put, the ‘close quarters’ of the neighborhood perspectivebring out both hierarchy and multiplicity of sites, languages, and routines.Locally encountered, such hierarchies and multiplicities often have trans-national origins and orientations, as we can see in the example of CaféIstanbul.

The name ‘Istanbul’ defines it as marginal within the city of Ghent;simultaneously, it refers to a capital for Turks, and it is an accessibly attrac-tive semi-center to Albanians (through reference to a historical legacy ofOttoman rule and Islam and a 1950/60s reality of actual migration). In thisway, Istanbul illustrates polycentricity: multiple possible centers and

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orientations, grounded in the life trajectories of immigrants as well ascontemporary practices of sociability (such as watching Turkish footballteams compete on the café’s large-screen television set). Such polycentricityalso entails interactional regimes. As noted, when possible, patrons willswitch between Turkish and Albanian, but Dutch remains a lingua franca.This is unlike other parts of Belgium. Café customers infrequently employinternationally prestigious lingua francas like English or French, relyinginstead on vernacular Dutch as a lingua franca for local inter-ethnic contact.This latter practice underlines the role of the Brugse Poort neighborhood asa center. This is a historically Flemish, working-class area of the city,without extensive Anglophone or Francophone commercial ties. For theFlemish inhabitants of the neighborhood, the up-market shopping center isVeldstraat, Ghent’s only entry in the Monopoly game and a shoppingprecinct which is oriented to international (and Anglophone and Parisian)shopping chains. However, for the Turkish population of Brugse Poort, theup-market shopping center is Muide/Sleepstraat (with many substantialrestaurants, food shops, restaurants, and fabric import-export businesses,advertising in Turkish and Dutch). The key point is that one place is at thesame time central, peripheral, semi-central, and semi-marginal, and this hasimplications for the interactional regimes one is likely to encounter.

A place like Café Istanbul allows semiotic orientations to differentcenters active at different scales: the strictly local scale of the street or theneighborhood, the scale of Ghent, the scale of Turkey, the scale of Turkeyand its neighboring countries, and so on. The different orders of indexicalitythat emanate from orientations to such centers allow for a generous,multiple register of interactional patterns. Yet, such registers are structured:orientations to different centers on different scales produce evaluativeeffects proper to that scale. Concretely: when ‘good Arabic’ is highly valuedin the Qur’an school, it is because ‘good Arabic’ relates to a transnationalIslamic community in which Arabic provides part of the uniformity ofpractices. Good Arabic, however, has no currency whatsoever in theTaalbad school in which ‘good Dutch’ relates to the national Flemish scaleon which Dutch linguistic homogeneity is seen as a national ideal. Thus, achild who performs well in the Qur’an school will not necessarily beperceived as a good pupil in the official school, and vice versa. Similarly,knowledge of Turkish soccer teams and soccer results may be symboliccurrency among Turkish youth, while the results of Belgian soccer teamsdraw no interest whatsoever among them. Yet, the same youngsters can beplayers on a neighborhood soccer team active in a regional (Belgian)amateur competition.

This is what makes the neighborhood a ‘global’ one: the fact that severalsemiotic trajectories lead from the neighborhood to transnational centersand that such trajectories sediment into sets of hierarchically organized,



local interactional regimes which, as we have seen, often co-occur in specificplaces and activities. This results in highly intricate, but altogether notunpredictable patterns of prestige attribution and evaluation, whichtogether form the kinds of local knowledges that allow people to constructand recognize the various membership categories and relations thatorganize the neighborhood. In Appadurai’s words, ‘[l]ocal knowledge issubstantially about producing reliably local subjects as well as aboutproducing reliably local neighborhoods within which such subjects can berecognized and organized’ (1996: 181). We see at the level of the neighbor-hood not only imaginings of various communities, intensified by trans-national electronically mediated flows of images (as Appadurai wouldstress), but also interactional patterns embedded in such imaginings and –importantly – in material-spatial contexts that provide a tangible reality tosuch communities. This reality is interactional: it is people talking andcommunicating, and by doing that, producing and reacting to subjectivitiesthat either fit or do not fit the categories of the neighborhood.

The latter aspect has a methodological implication, of course, andhence our project of studying neighborhoods as empirical ground for poly-centricities and interactional regimes. The materiality of space and the wayin which it organizes subjectivity and neighborhoods defies containmentwithin recognized institutional domains, societal fields and neat distinctionsof public and private. Macro-processes have their feet on the ground, so tospeak (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992; compare also with Le Roy Ladurie,1998), and they have ‘talking feet’ if we may make a point via a bad pun.Macro-processes always occur in real places, and such places are neverneutral and always have effects on what can and does happen in communi-cative and other conduct. It is so easy to overlook this and to focus on theideational-cultural complexes occurring in those places. But the reality isthat the child from Brugse Poort in all likelihood enters one of the localprimary schools, takes Qur’an classes in the local mosque, buys bread inthe local bakery and plays soccer on the car park inside the compound ofthe Vieze Gasten. It is this ethnographic given that should prevent us frombeing too quick in dismissing the basic materiality and semiotic dimensionsof space as unproblematic. What happens in the school, the mosque andthe Vieze Gasten playground is an effect of a history of becoming, and thislinguistic and cultural history is anchored in space as well as time.

Notes

1 See Goffman’s ‘Radio Talk: A Study in the Ways of Our Errors’ (1981b).Goffman makes the important point that even adequately acquiredcompetence can be dismissed because of ‘maladroit performance’ (p. 199).

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Competence is performed by default – it goes unnoticed. But any hiccup inperformance invites remedial interactive work that is enacted in order toreinstate or restore competence claims; the hiccups are more pronouncedwhen there are simultaneously contending centers in one site or locale.

2 Research for this article was finalized during Jim Collins’ tenure as a Fellowof the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB),January–May 2004. We are grateful to the KVAB for the opportunity tocollaborate closely and intensively on this project. We also wish to thankthe various teams of students for providing comparative perspectives andadditional material/insights derived from their fieldwork projects. Finally,we are grateful to Henk Meert (Institute for Social and Economic Geography,Leuven University) for assisting us with the social-geographic conceptual-ization of the neighborhoods and for protecting us from a vast series ofbeginners’ mistakes.

3 Goffman’s work on ‘frames’ raises a range of issues relevant to the analysisof interactional regimes in polycentric spaces (Goffman, 1974, 1981a). Ina very fundamental way, frames analysis is about understanding spaces asinteractional arenas which are both wide and complex. The concept’sanalytical scope crucially includes the transition from readings of physical‘spaces’ to understanding the enactment of sequentially unfolding ‘organ-ized activities’. Both perspectives are needed to develop a situated, inter-actionally grounded understanding of communicative regimes. Frames alsocount as ‘frames of reference’, and are therefore an important dimensionof contextualization practice. Finally, frame analysis also comes with avocabulary of taxonomic opposites such as ‘dominant/subordinate’,‘frontstage/backstage’ and ‘focused involvement/loose co-presence’, etc.These distinctions echo analyses of ‘center/periphery’ (albeit in a non-politicized way) and may therefore be instrumental in understanding thecomplex interdepedencies of ‘locality’ and ‘network’ in relation to inter-actionally enacted participation frameworks. An example drawn fromanother neighborhood in Ghent is the African shop, Sandaga, which at onepoint of observation was characterized by the simultaneous presence of atleast three frames: one frame that could be drawn around three regularswho were having a drink; a frame which entailed the shopkeeper and acustomer at the counter involved in a transaction; and, finally, a framewhich included, at one end, the co-presence of a caller in the phone boothand his physically absent interlocutor in Ghana at the other end of the line.Note in addition that Sandaga is also frequently used as a passage betweentwo streets: one can thus add to the participation frameworks the passer-through who is an overseeing bystander to each of these activities andconstrues for herself a particular meaningful reading of the place and itsactivities. For a detailed discussion of the work of Goffman in this light,see Blommaert et al. (2005).



4 Source: ‘Kansarmoedatlas’ (‘Atlas of poverty of opportunity’), Stad Gent,‘Oude nationaliteit ECM’ url: http://www.gent.be.

5 As with all sources, the statistics must be interpreted in light of all evidence:There are very small numbers reported, for instance, of people fromAlbania, Slovakia, and Macedonia, while residents in Brugse Poortfrequently refer to people from these countries. When asked about the lownumbers reported in the official statistics, local sources reply ‘Of course,because most of these people do not have papers’. This is an aspect ofgovernmentality: Although such people, typically refugees, are not officiallyregistered, they must live somewhere, and they need services such as health,bringing them into contact with local residents and institutions.

6 Source: ‘Kansarmoedatlas’ (see note 4), files on citywide and suburbanincome and employment.

7 This is stated by staff in the Wijkgezondheidscentrum and at the regionaloffice of Kind and Gezin (a national child-care organization), as well as bylocal residents. It matches also our experiences as fieldworkers. Both weand the student teams we worked with encountered people of Turkish back-ground who spoke and wrote Dutch comfortably.

8 The concept of the VZW (‘Vereniging zonder Winstoogmerk’, literally:non-profit organization) acquired a new meaning in the context ofimmigration. Originally, the term refers to an association and designates aparticular administrative status, which allows the association to performcertain commercial transactions without a registered trading licence – forexample, to serve drinks. In cities like Ghent, the term has become a short-hand for ‘unlicensed’ immigrants’ clubs. It has been reported to us thatquite a number of VZWs in the neighborhood have recently been‘upgraded’ to fully licensed cafés.

9 Like many other countries, the Belgian educational system makes a distinc-tion between public schools (these include state schools, city/municipalschools and provincial schools) and private schools (there are commonlycalled ‘free schools’, the overwhelming majority of them run by the RomanCatholic Church). However, following a major political compromise in the1950s, schools both within the private and the public system receive fullpublic funding. In return, state schools were from then onwards granted‘unrestricted settlement’, in other words they could compete with the freeschools in all areas and no longer just in regions or tiers where privateeducational provisions were insufficient. All schools are equally subject tothe national curriculum.

10 St Jan Baptist has the highest number of so-called ‘anderstaligenieuwkomers’ (ATNs, new immigrants not knowing Dutch) in the Ghentarea. The city schools have introduced a system of dispersion of ATNs, soas to keep the number of such pupils per class and school at a relatively

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low level. ATNs receive at least one full year of Dutch immersion classbefore being integrated in the regular school system.

11 Such mediators are exactly the people to whom fieldworkers would bereferred: both are in the business of knowing cultural strangers.

12 Appadurai focuses on ‘the more educated and elite members of diasporiccommunities’ and argues that electronic communities ‘do not directly affectthe local preoccupations of less educated and privileged migrants’, though‘they are not isolated from these global flows’ (1996: 197). Appadurai takespolitical activity as his prime example here: elections in Punjab can beinfluenced by émigré Punjabi intellectuals using the Internet from the US.One might object to the generalizing thrust in this argument about elites.Drawing from our experience with ordinary immigrant neighborhoods, theuse of electronic media for constructing, or engaging with, transnationalcommunities is a multiplex phenomenon, in which the TV broadcastingTurkish soccer games in a VZW may be as powerful a mobilizing device asa videotape of a speech by a religious leader from Kashmir or a website ofa Congolese opposition movement.

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■ JAN BLOMMAERT is professor of African Linguistics andSociolinguistics at Ghent University. His research interests includelanguage ideologies, multilingualism and discourse analysis in Eastand Southern Africa and Europe. His main publications includeDebating Diversity (with J. Verschueren, Routledge, 1998),Language Ideological Debates (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999) andDiscourse: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press,2005). He is a member of the international editorial board ofEthnography. Address: Ghent University, Department of AfricanLanguages and Cultures, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.[email: [email protected]] ■

■ JAMES COLLINS is professor of Anthropology and Reading atthe University at Albany/SUNY. His research interests includemultilingualism, discourse analysis, social theory, ethnographies ofliteracy and language in Native North American and urbansettings. His main publications include Understanding TolowaHistories (Routledge, 1998) and Literacy and Literacies (withR. Blot, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Address: University atAlbany, Department of Anthropology, Albany, NY 12222, USA.[email: [email protected]] ■

■ STEF SLEMBROUCK is professor of English Language andDiscourse Analysis at Ghent University. His research interestsinclude institutional discourse analysis, the theory and practice oflinguistic ethnography, and contemporary social change in urbanenvironments. His main publications include Language,Bureaucracy and Social Control (with S. Sarangi, Longman, 1996)and co-edited special issues of Text (1999), Critique ofAnthropology (2001), Pragmatics (2003) and Language &Communication (2005). Address: Ghent University, EnglishDepartment, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.[email: [email protected]] ■



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