Place and ethnicity in two merchant diasporas: a comparison of Sindhis and Jews in Gibraltar

Abstract

In this article I offer a comparative view on two merchant diasporas residing in the British crown colony of Gibraltar: the Sindhi Hindus and the Sephardic Jews. Diasporic groups have often been defined through their relationship to their homeland and/or place of residence. Based on fieldwork among these two groups I argue that their identifications, their culture and their social structure cannot be understood by focusing solely on local life and on the relationship to the homelands. A complete understanding must take account of a third spatial connection: the links between the individual communities that create a new and unique field of discourse, symbols and practice. This third connection is emblematic for the working of pre-and postmodern capitalist networks. The article examines this issue in relation to religion, education, politics and other arenas of life in Gibraltar and wider diasporas, drawing upon anthropological concepts of boundaries and borders, which are here conceived as 'zones-in-between'. The research demonstrates how both local and global changes since 1945 have resulted in the contrasting paths taken by Sindhis and Jews in Gibraltar.Diasporic groups have often been defined through their relationship to their native land and/or to their place of residence. However, diasporic organizations are also marked by a third spatial connection, the relationship between the individual communities.1 In this article I show how the process of ethnification informed by these three spatial relations is created, performed, maintained, lived and given sense locally, using the example of two ethno-religious diasporic merchant communities, the Hindu Sindhis and the Sephardic Jews of Gibraltar. My argument is based on the assumption that both public discourse and counter narratives about Gibraltar, Israel/India and the diasporic web are expressions of various power struggles over the control of place and social control.The analysis that follows is divided into three parts. It starts with a short overview of diaspora definitions, which makes apparent that diasporas are defined mainly according to place but that the relations between individual communities have been largely ignored. The second section presents some basic facts on the relationship of the two groups to Gibraltar, to their homelands and to their respective diasporic webs. It focuses on the structure of the communities in a historical perspective; this is especially relevant, for both communities have been in Gibraltar for a long time and their embeddedness in and with community, homeland and web has undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years. Part three, which is mainly based on

Let it flow

“…Everywhere she carried out her multilocal research, be it on the Caribbean island of Nevis; in New Haven, Connecticut; Leeds, England; or on the US-Virgin Islands, she met people whose siblings or children lived in another place in the web, who themselves thought about migrating to another place or who already had carried out a migration. The same is true for two groups I worked on in a one-year anthropological field research (Haller, 2000(Haller, , 2001(Haller, , 2003 -the Jewish Sephardic community and approximately 600 members of the Sindhi community. Both are groups of the British crown colony Gibraltar and are mainly merchant communities.…”

“…The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Department of Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology of EUROPA Univerität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder supported field research. The results of this research are published in Haller (2000Haller ( , 2001Haller ( , 2003. I thank Jonathan Friedman and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.…”

“…Family bonds amongst Sindhis are strong; they not only serve emotional, social and personal needs but also economic interests, 'by mobilizing savings, facilitating the accumulation of capital, pooling skills and ensuring employment to family members' (Parekh, 1994: 610). Regular visits to other places on the globe, where the younger generation meet potential partners for marriages -often during the wedding of a cousin -are common (Haller, 2003). Many families have their own newsletters, which they send to relatives abroad, and a journal edited in Hong Kong, Bharat Ratna, creates, accentuates and maintains global communities -not to mention Sindhi chat lines on the web.…”