My Foreign Self as Privileged Outsider: Differing Lines for Marginalization and Inclusion of Swiss Living Abroad

Abstract

Based on ethnographic field research in Northern Europe and China amongst Swiss nationals, this paper explores how such relatively privileged migrants negotiate their identities with respect to their society of origin and their host societies. By doing so, they participate in and produce a variety of discourses of inclusion and demarcation that are often ambiguous and fleeting. In this context, the paper concludes with an outline of those 'third positions' , which are liminal by being neither fully 'in' nor 'out' , and which draw into question any spectra for expanding inclusion. These positions develop from past and present experiences of our respondents as simultaneous insiders and outsiders, but are importantly shaped by relative social privilege as opposed to political or economic need.