Umut ErelMigrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu in Migration StudiesSociology 2010 44: 642The online version of this article can be found at:DOI: 10.1177/0038038510369363http://www.sagepublications.com

Migrating Cultural Capital: Bourdieu inMigration Studies_ Umut ErelOpen University, UK

ABSTRACT

A Bourdieusian concept of cultural capital is used to investigate the transformationsand contestations of migrants’ cultural capital. Research often treated migrants’ culturalcapital as reified and ethnically bounded, assuming they bring a set of culturalresources from the country of origin to the country of migration that eitherfit ordo not fit. Critiquing such ‘rucksack approaches’, I argue that migration results innew ways of producing and re-producing (mobilizing, enacting, validating) culturalcapital that builds on, rather than simply mirrors, power relations of either thecountry of origin or the country of migration. Migrants create mechanisms ofvalidationfor their cultural capital, negotiating both ethnic majority and migrant institutionsand networks. Migration-specific cultural capital (re-)produces intra-migrantdifferentiations of gender, ethnicity and class, in the process creating modes of validationalternative to national capital.The argument builds on case studies of skilledTurkish and Kurdish migrant women in Britain and Germany.

KEY WORDSBourdieu / cultural capital / ethnicity / gender / intersectionality / migration / migrationspecificcapital / national capital / transnational habitus / women

Introduction

When I was researching the agency and subjectivity of skilled migrant womenfrom Turkey in Germany and Britain I observed that whilst most were

affected by the non-recognition of qualifications and by racist labour marketstructures, some were better able to get into skilled jobs than others. Whatresources do migrants draw on to access skilled employment? How can the notionof cultural capital help us think through these experiences? While migrationresearch suggests that cultural capital plays an important part in migrants’ occupationaland social mobility, this article critiques the tendency to reify cultural capitalin ‘rucksack approaches’, arguing that migrants exercise agency by creatingnew forms of migration-specific cultural capital. Cultural capital, according toBourdieu (1986), appears in three states: embodied, institutionalized and objectified.The two former are of interest here: in the embodied state cultivation is incorporated,perhaps best expressed in the concept of habitus, which includes bodilycomportment and speaking as markers of distinction. Institutionalized culturalcapital includes formal education. Yet cultural capital consists also ofinformaleducation transmitted through the family, political parties, cultural groups, etc.The convertibility into other forms of capital (economic, social, symbolic) distinguishesmere cultural resources from cultural capital.The notion of cultural capital has been widely deployed to understandskilled migration. My research also looked at skilled migrants but prompted meto rethink the notion of cultural capital. In the first section I contextualize thesocial construction of skilled migration to Britain and Germany. The secondsection critiques ‘rucksack approaches’ in migration studies for reifying culturalcapital as transported from one country to another. Instead, the case studies inthe third section analyse how migrants create mechanisms of validating theircultural capital, through dominant institutions and by engaging with migrants’networks. The fourth section argues that a migrant group does not hold homogeneouscultural capital; instead, cultural capital is both the product of and productiveof differentiations of gender, ethnicity, and class within the migrant group.This differentiated migrant group cultural capital can constitute forms of validating

cultural practices as capital alternative or oppositional to frameworks ofnational belonging. The conclusion summarizes the problems of a rucksackapproach. To address these issues, the article explores the following questions:How do migrants actually create cultural capital out of cultural practices? Whatis the role of intra-ethnic power relations in creating practices of distinctionwithin the locality of residence? How are inter-ethnic relations and forms ofcrossing ethnic boundaries reflected in the ways in which migrants createcultural capital?

1. Context: National Capital and DifferentialMigrant Incorporation

Notions of skill in migration are historically and geographically specific. Migrationregimes, professional regulations and national policies play an important partin the construction of the category of ‘skilled migrant’ and indeed, manymigrants experience a devaluation or non-recognition of their skills (Kofmanand Raghuram, 2005, 2006; Williams, 2006). The validation of skills changesboth within the time span of migrants’ life course and with wider socio-economicdevelopments (cf. Liversage, 2009). Migrants actively constitute their culturalcapital to fit in with the ethnically dominant culture of the society ofresidence.Resources and assets such as language knowledge, accent or light skin can beconverted into ‘national capital’, to legitimize belonging (Hage, 1998: 53). Thenegotiation of ‘national capital’ is important for understanding cultural capitalin migration. Germany and Britain present different pictures of incorporationof migrants from Turkey. In Germany, mass migration from Turkey began withthe recruitment of ‘guestworkers’ in the 1960s, with family migration and politicalrefugees prevailing in the 1980s. In 2006, 1.7 million Turkish citizenswere resident in Germany, constituting a quarter of the foreign population(Migrationsbericht, 2006: 158). Migrants from Turkey have long been constructedas the culturally and socially most distant Other (Finkelstein, 2006;Mandel, 2008). They are overrepresented in unskilled occupations in

industryand services as well as among the unemployed. Despite the increasing educationalsuccess of second generation migrants, they still experience difficultyaccessing skilled jobs (Granato, 2006). One of the few sectors where migrantshave been able to access skilled employment is in social and educationaljobs ascultural ‘mediators’ (Lutz, 1991), specifically catering to a migrant client group.Migration from Turkey1 to Britain began in the mid 1960s, as a small numberof students, professionals and migrants on the work permit scheme entered(Dokur-Gryskiewicz, 1979). As a consequence of the 1980 military coup d’étatin Turkey, politically and economically motivated migration increased. Since1989, asylum-seekers from Turkey, mostly Kurds, make up the majority ofmigrants. While locally concentrated in parts of London, on a national scalemigrants from Turkey remain invisible (Enneli et al., 2005). For a variety of reasons(Keles et al., 2009; Ku.ukcan, 1999; Uguris, 2001), it is difficult to determinethe numbers of migrants from Turkey: estimates vary from 54,000 to 150,000(King et al., 2008: 9–11). Migrants from Turkey have been largely ‘invisible’ inpolicy discourse as they are ambiguously positioned in regard to the‘black–white dichotomy’ that long structured British multiculturalism (Enneli et al.,2005; Erel, 2009; Vertovec, 2007). In Britain, migrants from Turkey are concentratedgeographically in London and economically in small and medium ethnicenterprises (Keles et al., 2009; King et al., 2008). During the 1970s tolate1990s they worked mainly in textile sweatshops, often owned by TurkishCypriots, and later by Turks and Kurds. However, with the increasing outsourcingto other countries, currently the main employment sectors are restaurantand retail industries (Keles et al., 2009; Ku.ukcan, 1999). Self employmentin the UK has long constituted an important strategy for (skilled) migrants,while in Germany, foreigners’ legislation restricted self employment of migrantsuntil the 2000s (Alberts, 2003). While in Germany racist representationsexplicitlytarget ‘Turks’, in the UK they tend to be constructed through the categoriesof ‘Muslim’ or ‘refugee’ rather than nationality or ethnic origin.These differential socio-economic conditions form the backdrop to my

argument. Rather than examining the role of British and German systems ofmigrant incorporation, this article focuses on distinctions within the group ofmigrants from the same country of origin. The concept of migration-specificcultural capital explores the field constituted by ‘being from Turkey’. It examinesthe transnational, though locally specific, articulation of ‘being from Turkey’rather than the field of Germanness or Britishness.

2. Migration, Culture, Forms of CapitalWhile there have been diverse theorizations of cultural capital in migrationstudies, one prevalent feature has been a ‘rucksack approach’ to cultural capital:this views migrants as bringing with them a package of cultural resources thatmay or may not fit with the ‘culture’ of the country of residence. I identify thisrucksack approach as a latent but salient tendency in migration studies.Thearticle makes explicit the elements of a rucksack approach dispersed in differentworks of migration research rather than attempting to single out a particulargroup of scholars for critique. I choose the term ‘rucksack approaches’ ratherthan the notion of a ‘rucksack school’ of migration research to refer toelementsof theorizing cultural capital that appear in many diverse places.Human and Ethnic Capital ApproachesHuman capital approaches assume that ‘different ethnic groups possess identifiablecharacteristics, encompassing cultural values, practices, and social networksthat were formed in the homeland and transplanted with minor modificationsby immigrants in the new land and there transmitted and perpetuated fromgeneration to generation’ (Zhou, 2005: 134). These approaches foregroundtheassumed culture of the ethnic minority as an explanatory factor of how thegroup fares according to measures of integration and social mobility. Cutleret al. develop the notion of ‘ethnic capital’ defined as ‘the set of individualattributes, cultural norms, and group-specific institutions that contribute to anethnic group’s economic productivity’ (2005: 206). This definition collapses the

levels of individual and ethnic group, glossing over intra-ethnic differentiationsand hierarchies. It conceptualizes culture as ethnically bounded and assumes acausal relationship between cultural traits of a group and economic performance.Ethnic and human capital approaches assume that ethnic group boundariescan be assigned in a straightforward manner. But many scholars haveargued that group boundaries are contested in struggles over who can definethe content and boundaries of a group (Anthias, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 2006).Cultural practices and forms can be invoked for different social and politicalprojects that are advanced or legitimized in the name of the ethnic group. Cutleret al. (2005) further suggest that ethnic capital is inter-generationally transmitted.However, other scholars argue that the meaning of ethnically specificresources changes across generations, as do identifications (Erel, 2009;Fischer,1986; Inowlocki, 1995; Lutz, 1995).Human and ethnic capital approaches to migration take the ‘cultural stuff’of an ethnic group to constitute capital without exploring the process throughwhich resources are made convertible, which is how Bourdieusian approachesview the constitution of cultural ‘capital’. Ethnic and human capital approachesdo not differentiate states of capital (embodied, institutionalized, objectified)and their alignment or mis-alignment in migrants’ trajectories, missing out onan important layer of complexity.Attempting to combine human capital concepts with Bourdieusian theorizationsof forms of capital, Nee and Sanders develop the notion of ‘humanculturalcapital that is fungible in the host society’ (2001: 386) as a heuristicdevice. The fungibility of human-cultural capital depends on how well culturalpractices and forms from the country of origin serve social mobility in the culturaland institutional context of the society of residence (cf. Zhou, 2005). Thisassumes that the society of residence assesses the cultural value of migrants’ culturalresources neutrally. It neglects that measures of cultural capital are shapedby policy constructions of national economic interests, and protectionist professionalpolicies. More generally these approaches are limited by their reliance

on ‘methodological nationalism’; that is, the tendency to analyse socialphenomenathrough the lens of the interests of the nation-state (Wimmer and GlickSchiller, 2003). Furthermore, the idea of fungibility is based on an ethnocentricview of ‘success’ rather than migrants’ own potentially conflicting measures ofsuccess (cf. Werbner, 2000).

Bourdieu’s Theory of Forms of Capital in Migration Studies

In the wider social sciences, Bourdieu’s theorizing of forms of capital has beenuseful for exploring the role of capital, asset and resources in the study of socialstratification (Savage et al., 2005). Feminists critically examine uses of Bourdieu’sideas for understanding gender (e.g. Adkins and Skeggs, 2004; Silva, 2005,2008), critiquing Bourdieu’s tendency to view women simply as repositoriesand transmitters of cultural capital rather than looking at how they produceand use it (Lovell, 2000). Yosso (2005) assesses the potential of Bourdieusiantheorizing for revaluing the cultural capital of people of colour in theUS.Weenink (2009) employs the notion of cultural capital to analyse how Dutchparents construct a cosmopolitan habitus for their school-age children and projectits usefulness for a globalized job market.In migration studies, Putnam’s theorizing of social capital has been moreinfluential then Bourdieu’s work. Some migration scholars have attributed greatexplanatory potential to theories of social capital. However, this has been critiquedby some authors for paying insufficient attention to qualitative, temporal andspatial differentiations experienced by migrants (Ryan et al., 2008). Furthermore,it has been critiqued for insufficiently taking gendered and classed power relationsin the constitution and uses of networks into account (Anthias, 2007).2Social capital is important for understanding the ways in which individuals arepositioned in fields. Yet Bourdieu’s theory enables a thicker description as it engageswith how economic, cultural, social and symbolic forms of capital interact. Italso enables a deeper description by differentiating between different

states ofinstitutionalized, embodied and symbolic capital. Bourdieu and Wacquantemphasize the importance of the composition of an individual’s overall capital,made up of cultural, economic and social capital. This is further mediated byindividuals’ ‘position-taking’ (2007: 99); that is, how they strategize to employtheir capital. The structure and volume of capital must be contextualized withan individual’s ‘social trajectory’ (2007: 99) of gaining and valorizingcapital.This is particularly relevant for understanding migrants’ uses of capital, as thetemporal and geographic trajectories and dimensions of constituting and mobilizingcapital are key to understanding how migrants make use of them. A centralnotion in Bourdieu’s theory is that different forms of capital (social, cultural,economic and symbolic) are interlinked. Indeed, what distinguishes merecultural resources from cultural capital is that the latter is convertible into otherforms of capital.My interest is not in measuring the forms of capital attached to the positionof ‘a migrant woman from Turkey’. Rather, I investigate the meanings ofcultural practices and forms, analysing some of the struggles about articulatingor challenging these meanings. Bourdieu and Wacquant suggest our studiesshould be judged by their ability to specify theoretical claims (2007: 77). Thus,this article contributes to the effort of specifying theories of migrating culturalcapital by exploring the intersection of ethnic, gendered and class positions.Bourdieu’s analysis in Distinction (1996) focused on how cultural capitalreproduces existing hierarchical structures of economic, cultural, social andsymbolic capital. Indeed, he has been critiqued for dismissing the complexcontradictions and dissonances in people’s positioning (Bennett et al., 2009).Bourdieu has rarely explored how forms of capital are activated for resistantpurposes, yet he argues:

A capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field. (…) As a space ofpotential and active forces, the field is also a field of struggles aimed at preservingor transforming the configuration of these forces. (Bourdieu and Wacquant,2007: 101,emphasis in original)

Here, I am concerned with how actors can get into the field, not only toincreasetheir capital but ‘to transform, partially or completely, the immanent rules ofthe game’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007: 99). I explore how migrant womenchallenge and transform existing classificatory systems of cultural validation, inthe process constituting and contesting what I term migration-specific culturalcapital. There is an intimate relation between the formation of specificforms ofcapital and of fields: ‘People are at once founded and legitimized to enter thefield by their possessing a definite configuration of properties. One ofthe goalsof research is to identify (…) these forms of specific capital’ (Bourdieu andWacquant, 2007: 108, emphasis in original). Thus, this article explores howcultural capital is constituted in a migration-specific field: how are culturalresources valorized as capital, recognized, circulated and interlinked with socialand economic capital? The very act of migration disrupts ideas of linearreproductionof cultural capital, since migration means that ‘the conditions of productionof habitus’ are not ‘homologous to its conditions of functioning’ (Bourdieu,1990, quoted in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007: 131–2, footnote 84). Indeed, ifthe state holds the monopoly of symbolic power, as Bourdieu asserts, racializedand ethnicized migrants experience a further discontinuity of their cultural capitalas incongruous with the legitimate symbolic capital of the state they live in. Beforediscussing migrant women’s lifestories, let us consider how Bourdieusiantheorizationof cultural capital has contributed to the study of migration and skill.A Bourdieusian notion of cultural capital helps explain how educationaland professional institutions exercise nationally-based protectionism bynotrecognizing qualifications acquired abroad, i.e. institutionalized cultural capital(Bauder, 2003). Even where ‘foreign’ qualifications are formally recognized,employers invoke criteria such as the lack of local professional experience. Thisturns apparently neutral job specifications into ‘national capital’ (Hage, 1998)and enables privileged access to skilled jobs for those considered properly part

of the nation – i.e. not migrants (Bauder, 200; Erel, 2003). This tacit nationalcapital contains elements of embodied cultural capital, such as the ability toparticipate in locally-shared professional cultures. The concrete practices of professionalprotectionism differentially influence migrants’ trajectories. A Swissstudy of skilled female migrants found that although married migrants attainSwiss citizenship quickly, they were categorized as dependants and therefore didnot qualify for financial and institutional help with (re-)skilling or recognitionof ‘foreign’ qualifications (Riaño and Baghdadi, 2007). Independent migrantswith access to this help were better able to realize their cultural capital (ibid.).Racist and sexist stereotyping, such as gendered ethnicization as ‘Muslim woman’,emphasizes the differential validation of embodied cultural capital and hampersaccess to skilled employment (Erel, 2009; Gutierrez Rodriguez, 1999; Riañoand Baghdadi, 2007). While some migrant women use their embodied culturalcapital of language skills and cultural knowledge to access intercultural jobsworking with migrants or ethnic minorities (Lutz, 1991), these jobs often entailprofessional downgrading, offering little upward career mobility (Liversage, 2009).On the other hand, migrants whose institutional cultural capital is transnationallyvalidated can use it for professional and geographic mobility. Thus acomparative study of German professionals working in Third World countriesand highly skilled migrants from the Third World in Germany found thatGerman professionals do not depend on the local cultural capital of the countriesthey work in because their ‘western’ cultural capital is universalized. Despitehaving outstanding, transnationally validated credentials, migrants fromThirdWorld countries were, however, disappointed by their slow career progression(Weiss, 2005). These findings elucidate the differential validation of particular,nationally inflected forms of cultural capital in transnational contextsbut donot address how cultural capital from the migrant’s country of origin articulateswith locally validated cultural capital, which I address below.Migrants use transnational spaces of agency by translating ‘the economic

and social position gained in one political setting into political, social and economiccapital in another’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992: 12). Kelly and Lusis (2006) arguethat Filipino migrants’ cultural capital in Canada is articulated transnationally:Migrants whose institutionalized cultural capital is devalued in Canada compensateby validating their cultural practices, forms and assets as capital in theirplace of origin in the Philippines. On the other hand, Filipino-ness signals ahabitus of being caring and reliable to Canadians, at once enabling and limitingFilipino migrants’ employment opportunities, notably in health and childcare.Kelly and Lusis disregard significant internal differentiations ‘according toplace of origin in the Philippines, socio-economic class, gender, lengthof residencein Canada, etc.’ (2006: 835); conceding that this simplification is ‘admittedlyproblematic’ (2006: 835), their focus is on the transnational scale. Here Ibuild on and widen their perspective to include the transformative aspects ofmigration-specific capital. Intra-group differentiations need to be taken intoaccount, so as not to reify national identity as the key organizing category forcreating cultural capital. The case studies explore this issue to answerthe overarchingquestion of how migrants create new forms of cultural capital andvalidation in migration.Before that, I want to return to the problem of the rucksack approach. Ihave critiqued human and ethnic capital approaches, but Bourdieusian approachesto cultural capital, while sensitive to power relations, could enable a fullerexploration of the dynamic role and agency of migrants to form and transformcultural capital. Where human capital theorists conceptualize cultural capital asa key that the migrant puts into her rucksack and, once in the country of immigration,unpacks to see if it fits the ‘keyhole’ of the cultural system of the countryof immigration, Bourdieusian scholars view migrants’ cultural capital asatreasure chest consisting of language skills, knowledge about customs andlifestyles, professional qualifications, etc. Again, these are put in the rucksack,

but when unpacked in the country of migration, rather than looking for a‘fit’,according to Bourdieusian approaches the migrant engages in bargaining activitieswith institutions (such as professional bodies or universities) and people(such as employers or managers) about the value of these treasures. In the processof bargaining, the migrants’ treasures are often undervalued, as she haslimitedpower over the rules of the game (Kelly and Lusis, 2006: 836). Yet, she canalso add new skills and treasures to her chest that may not be seen as particularlyvaluable in the country of immigration but are considered treasures in hercountry of origin, thus negotiating and benefiting from differential ‘exchangevalue’ (Bauder, 2003) of cultural resources, practices and forms in two nationalcontexts.I want to focus on two related processes that have not been given sufficientattention so far: first, migrants do not only unpack cultural capital from theirrucksacks, instead they create new forms of cultural capital in the countries ofresidence. They use resources they brought with them and others they developin situ to create quite distinct dispositions. Second, migrants engage in creatingmechanisms of validation for their cultural capital. These do not only rely onthe dominant institutions and people but also engage with migrants’ networks.There has been considerable discussion about the role of migrant networks inthe formation of social capital (Anthias, 2007; Ryan et al., 2008, 2009;Sumption, 2009). However, the ways in which cultural capital both buildsonexisting distinctions and creates new forms of distinction within migrant groupsmerit further scrutiny. Migration-specific cultural capital negotiates existingdistinctions and creates new categories of distinction within a migrationspecificfield. In this sense, cultural capital in migration is one way of elaboratingsystems of value alternative or oppositional to the ‘national capital’ (Hage,1998) validated by the nation-states of residence and origin.

3. Differentiating Forms of Capital within Migrant Groups

Within a migrant group cultural capital is differentiated according to gender,class, educational status and ethnic affiliation. This influences how social andcultural capital can be mobilized (cf. Anthias, 2007). The following close readingsof lifestories of migrant women from Turkey in Germany and Britainunderline the situatedness of migration-specific cultural capital. The lifestoriesof skilled and highly educated migrant women from Turkey in Britain andGermany were elicited between 1998 and 1999 (Erel, 2009); thus, the articledoes not intervene in current policy debates, but instead engages the lifestoriesto refine the analytical concept of cultural capital. Lifestories evidence the tensionbetween self-presentations and regulatory structures of migration regimes(Erel, 2007). Interview partners were approached as skilled migrants: this incitedparticular stories about professional ‘success’, often against the odds.Thefollowing in-depth studies tease out how migrants create new cultural capitaland validation mechanisms.Nâlan: Left-wing and Feminist Social and Cultural Capital as EnablingMobility

Since she was a teenager, Nâlan strongly identified with a left-wing, socialistsubculture in Turkey, which affected her choice of profession, her social networksand her alternative gendered lifestyle. As a consequence of the 1980 coupd’état her political networks were destroyed, as comrades were imprisoned orpersecuted. Indeed, Nâlan herself had to go underground for a while. At thesame time she was a young mother and experienced a change in her genderedascription as part of a ‘normal family’. She became part of the fledglingwomen’s movement in Turkey, the only alternative political movement toleratedin the post coup d’état period. When her marriage broke down, she wantedtoescape the economic and social pressures of living as a divorcee in Turkey.Nâlan took up the offer from a friend in the women’s movement to join her inthe UK. This friend and others from left-wing and women’s movement

networks‘took me by the hand’ to find accommodation and a job and to regularizeher residence status. Thus, her geographic mobility was enabled by thesetransnational networks built around a shared political and cultural identity. Sheremained in unskilled work for the first few years of her migration. After gainingsome legal and financial security and learning English, Nâlan integratedherexperience of political organizing acquired in Turkey, and as a migrant activistin the UK, with her newly acquired knowledge of Britain and the professionaljargon of social work that her political friends shared with her. She capitalizedon this combination of transnational and local habitus and cultural resourcesby converting them into employment in the social work sector. Thus, makingher transnational embodied cultural capital of political activist (whichis ethnicallyinflected but cannot be reduced to ‘ethnic capital’ in Cutler et al.’s 2005sense) relevant to the local British professional environment of social work waskey to converting her cultural resources into capital. This first job enabled herto access higher education and eventually become a professional. This realignedthe embodied and institutionalized states of her cultural capital from Turkeyand the UK. Nâlan’s trajectory demonstrates the creation of a very particularform of migration-specific cultural capital. This cultural capital was generatedin left-wing and women’s political organizations both in Turkey and the UK,however, cannot be counted as ‘ethnic capital’. Instead, it contains elements ofcultural practices and resources that are subcultural within Turkey and withinTurkish migrant groups, as well as non-nationally defined forms of culturalcapital such as left-wing and feminist organizing principles and political ideas(cf. Erel, 2009). These organizations also constituted a form of migration-specificsocial capital that enabled her access to key information: first for settlingand later for occupational mobility. Nâlan was able to build on this combinationof resources; that is, the political migrants’ organizations in the UK also

functioned as mechanisms for validating her cultural resources and makingthem usable and convertible in the UK context.In the next case study I argue that such validation of particular forms ofsocial and cultural capital depends on and goes hand in hand with a devaluationof other cultural competences and resources that are defined as ‘lack’ andfound wanting.

Selin: Migrating Gendered and Ethnicized Marginalization

Growing up in a rural area as a girl from an ethnic and religious minority(a Kurdish Alevi) structured Selin’s access to formal education through unequaldevelopment and structural gendered and ethnic discrimination. The unavailabilityof secondary education in the village, her family’s inability to arrangeforaccommodation in the town and the difficulty of getting a place at schoolbecause of her ethnic identity limited her access to education. Despite her struggles,first to receive permission from her family to attend secondary school intown and then to gain the school’s admittance, she only received primaryeducation,thus had a low level of institutionalized cultural capital in Turkey. Shesuccessfully evaded her family’s plans to marry her as a teenager and insteadused her family’s social standing in the community to become the first femalemanager of a business in the local small town. In this role she gained esteem forher personal integrity and helpfulness and was regularly consulted by the villagerson official matters. Still, she did not feel that she fitted in with expectations of‘appropriate’ sexuality. This motivated her migration first to a city inTurkey,then to the UK. In both migrations, she made use of her family-based socialcapital. Yet these networks limited her scope for economic and politicalagencyand for accessing alternative modes of doing gender. In the UK, Selin becamevery active, doing voluntary work in Kurdish community centres. Like Nâlan,she gained awareness of British multicultural and local government structures

and became involved in feminist migrant circles of the late 1980s and early1990s. She appreciated these for providing her with lived models of alternativefemininities: ‘I admired their freedom, their independence.’ At the sametimeshe critiques the hierarchies within this group built on transnational dynamicsof distinction, such as the performance of cultural preferences for theatre orclassical music. Selin underlines that she felt inferior in relation to thesewomen’s groups because of her lack of knowledge of both Turkish high cultureand English language and culture:

Look, I had no idea about any of these things, you know. Neither the theatre, northe music, whatever, [all of this was] Turkish, Turkish! Let alone [English culture],this was Turkish [culture that was unknown to me]! And I wanted to catch up withall of this, you know.

As Selin experienced it, the women who were prominent in these networks hadembodied cultural capital of an urban, western-oriented educated middle class.They combined these shared cultural forms with new, locally developed feministcultural practices. They furthermore adapted local, British multiculturalistdiscourses to validate their cultural capital as representatives of ‘Turkish-speaking’women. This claim to ‘representing’ Turkish-speaking women thus convertedtheir cultural resources into both political capital, as leaders of organizations,and economic capital in the form of professionalizing this expertise to accessemployment in the public and third sector as service providers for ‘Turkishspeakingwomen’ migrants. This category of ‘Turkish-speaking women’ was meantto include the subaltern Kurdish women who ‘cannot speak’ for themselvesastheir language and ability to speak are denied.One service provider for Turkish-speaking women shared a ‘success story’of one of their clients with me:

This Kurdish woman came to the UK through family reunification, and was sociallyisolated in the home where her husband mistreated her. Through the effortsof theservice provider, the client first learned Turkish and then attended literacy classes.She then learned English and could participate in British society. This empoweredher to divorce her husband.

While this story certainly shows how the client became able to participate morefully and independently in the society she lives in, it begs the question whylearning Turkish should be a precondition for accessing these services in the firstplace. It exemplifies how speaking Kurdish was constructed as not being ableto speak at all in a way that merits public recognition.In this discourse, speaking Kurdish features not as a cultural resource in itsown right but as lack of being able to speak standard Turkish well. Thus, forSelin, being part of these migrant feminist groups had ambiguous effects: itenabled her to access alternative forms of femininity; at the same time herKurdish cultural identity was re-inscribed as ‘lack’ (of western-oriented Turkishhigh cultural competence). In contrast with Turkish-identified urban, formallyeducated women embodying middle-class cultural capital, she felt that her partin this movement was that of the ‘represented’. It did not allow her to capitalizeon her cultural resources for occupational and social mobility. The ‘socialvaluation of population categories (e.g. women, migrants), both within aminority ethnic context and within the wider society, can affect the value oftheir resources as well as their ability to use them’ (Anthias, 2007: 801). HerTurkish feminist friends were able to present their own cultural resources ofknowing the language and culture of migrants from Turkey as ‘representative’.They thus gained an institutional validation of their cultural resourcesthroughgaining employment or funding for NGOs. They could capitalize on their culturalresources and convert them into political and economic capital. Selin, onthe other hand, was not able to validate her embodied knowledge of Kurdish asa ‘valuable’ cultural resource, although in fact the majority of migrants fromTurkey in the UK are Kurds. I return to this point below.

Pakize: Mobilizing and Transmitting ‘Valuable’ Culture

Pakize comes from a western-oriented, urban middle-class family who valuededucation only as preparation for an appropriate marriage. She married

youngand had two children. Her divorce led to her being declassed and Pakize sawmigration as the only way to support herself and her children. In Germany shefelt this declassement acutely as she not only worked in a factory but alsoshared accommodation with largely working-class women from Turkey: thesewere people ‘whose language I could not even understand’. Through friendshipswith Turkish urban middle-class women outside her workplace, whosehabitus she shared, she established contacts to enter white collar employment,thus realigning her institutionalized cultural capital to fit with her habitus fromTurkey. Pakize worked for this insurance company for 10 years, dealing withtheir migrant customers from Turkey. However, when the firm downsized shebecame unemployed. During her job search, a friend from the Turkish classicalchoir (see below) informed her about a new, funded opportunity for migrantsto retrain as educators. Pakize enrolled. When, shortly before her graduation, abilingual intercultural kindergarten approached her college to recruitTurkish–German bilingual staff, Pakize applied. However, she doubted:

Will they take me? There are very good young Turkish and Kurdish women. Andthese are alternative people, they will rather work with Kurds, etc. (…) Igot an invitationfor interview. (…) They were very happy with the other applicant. But theysaid we want you, because we want a person who speaks Turkish well.

Language is a salient marker of distinction within the migrant group: theconversion of the cultural capital of speaking ‘good Turkish’ into economiccapital is a relational process based on the devaluation of other cultural forms– i.e. the vernacular mixed language of second generation migrants or ruraldialects, deemed unworthy of transmission. Moreover, there are other ethnicgroups in Turkey for whom Turkish is a second language. Indeed, Pakize’sexplicit fear that ‘alternative’ people might prefer employing Kurds rather thanTurks manifests an ‘(anti-) political correctness’ discourse within the migrantpopulation, where actual power relations are fantasized as inverted.In her leisure time Pakize actively reproduces Turkish cultural forms: aclassicalTurkish music choir and Turkish theatre group are focal points of hersocial life. She enjoys participating because ‘they teach you how to speak nicely

and the poetry too’. Thus, Pakize reproduces cultural forms valued in Turkey,but also produces a social network in Germany to validate these forms. Thesecultural activities form part of her self-production as a cultured person, competentin Turkish cultural practices. This is a marker of distinction and animportant professional asset: her investment in embodied cultural capital isvital for realizing her institutionalized cultural capital. Of course, the institutionalcontext is also vital: in this case, a Turkish–German parent group lobbiedthe council to establish a bilingual intercultural kindergarten. This was the conditionfor creating the role of bilingual, intercultural educator in the first place.The interplay of these wider socio-political factors (the establishment of ‘intercultural’institutions in Germany) and the negotiation within the migrant groupfrom Turkey (over which ‘Turkish’ cultural forms should contribute to the‘intercultural’ mix) created opportunities for Pakize to validate her culturalresources as capital.

4 Disaggregating Forms of Capital

These case studies show the dynamic character of cultural capital in migration.First, they exemplify the ups and downs migrant women experienced in thevalidationof their cultural resources. While I focus here on the post-migrationperiod, the migrant women arrived with particular, internally differentiatedforms of cultural capital created in Turkey. The migrant women acquired,accumulatedand lost cultural capital at times in unexpected ways. This process cannotbe reduced to individual resources but is bound up with wider historical,socio-political and institutional factors, even if these have only framed, ratherthan focused, my discussion here. However, these case studies demonstrate thatindividual and collective agency are important for creating new culturalresources in migration and transforming cultural practices into capital.Second, the case studies show that speaking of the cultural or social capitalof an ethnic migrant group is not useful as it glosses over intra-group hierarchicaldistinctions and exclusions. In the case of migrants from Turkey in

Germany and Britain, the most important social divisions articulating culturaldistinction were class, rural–urban divisions, western cultural orientation,belonging to and identification with Turkishness or an ethnic minority identityin Turkey, of which Kurdish identity is the most salient, and gender. The way inwhich migrants identify or disidentify with these intermeshing social positionsenables them to mobilize particular forms of social capital. In the process,boundaries of ‘Turkishness’ and the ‘cultural stuff’ associated with it changedtheir meaning. Migrants built on, but did not mirror, social divisions of thecountry of origin in creating new forms of intra-migrant group distinction.Third, by creating distinction, some actors privileged their own claims topolitically or professionally ‘represent’ the ethnic group. The outcomesof suchprocesses of validation, I argue, cannot be taken for granted. Migrants constitutea migration-specific field in the local context of migration. Thus, Nâlanand others were able to mobilize their cultural resources for gaining employmentin the social sector as representing the interests of ‘Turkish-speaking’migrants in late 1980s’ multicultural progressive local authorities. As a consequenceof the 1980 coup d’état, at this time in Turkey these left-wing intellectualswere prosecuted and not unproblematically able to capitalize on theircultural resources. Neither can we deduce the way in which cultural resourcesare validated from their ‘use value’: Selin’s Kurdish language knowledgewasconstructed as ‘lack’ despite the fact that most migrants from Turkey inthe UKare of Kurdish ethnicity. The ability to convert cultural and social resources intocultural capital depends on the socio-political ability of actors to define theboundaries and content of the field of migration-specific cultural capital.The historical socio-political contingency of this process becomes moreevident in the example of Kurdish language in the UK. Selin’s story about thedevaluation of her Kurdish cultural knowledge refers to the 1980s and early1990s. In this period, Kurdish identity in the UK was subsumed under thenotion of ‘Turkish-speaking communities’, encompassing Turkish migrants

from Northern Cyprus and Turkey and Kurds. This was a result of a politicalalliance to demand recognition and resources within the London multiculturalistlocal government framework of the 1980s. In consequence, resources fortranslation, interpreting or advocacy were not specifically targeted at Kurdishmigrants, in effect reproducing aspects of the ethnic and social marginalizationthey had experienced in Turkey (Erel, 2009; King et al., 2008; Uguris, 2001).Since then, a confluence of global, transnational, national and local developmentshas led to an increasingly vocal socio-political articulation of Kurdishness inBritain. On the global level, the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 contributedtoincreasing international recognition and empowerment of Kurdish identity. InTurkey, this in conjunction with other factors (such as EU candidacy negotiations)led to a partial de-criminalization of expressions of Kurdish identity. On thelocal level of London, Kurdish migrants have become more visible, partlythrough economic success as small and medium business owners and effectivepolitical lobbying. Finally, within the group of Kurds from Turkey, culturaland linguistic factors have gained prominence. There are negotiations aboutintroducing Kurdish language as an examination subject at London schools,local government publications are translated into Kurdish and advertise Kurdishinterpreting services, and local Kurdish language media have been established.This thumbnail sketch points to the multiple levels on which socio-politicalconditions for valuing cultural resources as ‘capital’ are created. Thus, overtime, knowledge of Kurdish language may increasingly become established notas a ‘lack’ but as a resource to be turned into cultural capital.

Conclusion: What’s Wrong with the Rucksack Approach?

I have analysed new forms of migration-specific cultural capital: migrantsactively create dynamics of validating cultural resources as capital, resulting innew forms of intra-migrant distinction. This distinction can be used foroccupationalmobility and/or to claim to culturally and politically represent the

community. These complex dynamics cannot be understood through a rucksackapproach that reifies the cultural resources of migrants.The problem with the rucksack approach is that it views particular culturalresources (e.g. Turkish language) and practices as ethnically bounded. This doesnot take account of the multiple cultural practices and forms within a migrantgroup (such as speaking Turkish and/or Kurdish). Furthermore, cultural practiceswithin a migrant group are differentially validated in gendered, classedandethnic ways. Cultural practices acquire different meanings and validationsaccording to the local, national and transnational context. Rucksackapproaches do not adequately take account of the struggles over particular culturalpractices and the differential ways in which cultural practices articulatewith forms of femininity, ethnicity and class to create complex hierarchies ofdistinction. In order to understand how cultural capital signifies distinction andproduces recognizable social identities and positionalities it is important to considerthe meanings the actors give to cultural practices. While the migrant groupis an important site for creating and validating cultural capital, migrants alsoactively co-construct institutions for validating their cultural capitalwithin thesociety of residence. Migration studies should move beyond a rucksack approachto analyse migrants’ creative agency in constructing new forms of migrationspecificcultural capital.

AcknowledgementI would like to thank Parvati Raghuram and Engin Isin for their close critical engagementand insightful comments on several drafts and the Feminist Reading Group atthe Open University and Elizabeth Silva for generous feedback. I am also grateful totwo anonymous referees for their close readings and constructive suggestions.

1 Turkish Cypriots are numerically significant in the UK (60,000 according to Kinget al., 2008); however, in this article I refer to migrants from mainland Turkey only.

2 Putnam’s social capital approach in migration has already been debated andcritiqued in detail (e.g. Anthias, 2007; Ryan et al., 2008). Therefore I focus hereon notions of cultural capital within a Bourdieusian framework.

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Umut ErelIs RCUK Academic Fellow at the Centre of Citizenship, Identities and Governance, atthe Open University. Her research interests are on gender, migration, ethnicity and citizenship.Her recent publications are ‘Constructing Meaningful Lives: BiographicalMethods in Research on Migrant Women’ Sociological Research Online 12(4) andhermonograph Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship. Lifestories from Germany and Britain(Ashgate, 2009). She is currently working on mothering, migration and citizenship, andon conceptualizing issues of migration, gender and care in Europe.Address: Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, Faculty of Social Sciences,The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.E-mail: u.erel@open.ac.uk

Date submitted March 2009Date accepted September 2009