Constructing Immigrant Identities in Consumption

Constructing Immigrant Identities in Consumption: Appearance Among the Turko- Danes Giiliz Ger, Bilkent University Per 0stergaard, Odense University

ABSTRACT Understanding the behavior of immigrant consumers is becoming central to an understanding of increasingly pluralistic global consumption paltems and dynamics. Based on that premise, we explore the consumption of clothes as it shapes and is shaped by identity among Turko-Danish students. We investigate how these second-generation immigrants in Denmark construct and negotiate their identity in their consumption of clothes and how different cultural and subcultural forces are felt and refiected in dress. The research reported examines consumer experiences and meaningsof clothes based on the analysis of interviews, photo albums, and participant observation. Findings about the pattems, strategies, and processes of picking and mixing of appearances offer insighte into consumption among subcultures. Consumption of clothes refiect the negotiation of the contradictions shaped by diverse cultural forces and, especially for females, by the ambiguity and fluidity of contextual appropriateness in divergent private and public contexts. We live in an era in which boundaries across national cultures are dissolving and consumers are increasingly seeking and expressing subcultural, ethnic, and personal identity in consumption. In the multicultural worid, with global flows of people, money, technology and information, media images, and ideologies (see Appadurai 1990), cultures encounter more of each other, in person and in the form of each others' products and images. All over the worid, Mexican restaurants, Indian clothes, African jewelry, worid music, and Go expose consumers to the "other" and provide opportunities to cross boundaries through the consumption of the objects of the "other." As people of the globe encounter more of each other, identity, a dynamic challenge of sameness and difference, becomes moreofanissue(seee.g.,Friedman 1994). Amajorencounterwith the "other" is provided by the increasing global fiows of people, such as immigrante, across borders. This study is an attempt to understand consumption among immigrants in the globalizing multicultural worid. Wanted or not, immigrants are crossing borders in increasing numbers and intensifying the global fiows of people. They carry cultures, bidirectionally, across borders and foster diversity and hybridization of global consumer cultures. They are caught inbetween and move in-between two cultures: old and new homes. In that in-between state, maintenance, expression, and visibility of one's immigrant identity may or may not be desirable. Consumption of a particular set of goods in a particular pattem personalizes the cultural forces and dynamics. Consumption is at once a personal and a social process—it relates to expressing identity, belonging, and differentiation (see e.g., Belk 1988; Csikszentmihaiyi and Rochberg-Haiton 1981; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Lunt and y vingstone 1992). However, there has been little research on consumption and identity negotiation among the people who move across borders in this increasingly mobile worid. Although there are a few studies of consumer behavior of immigrants and ethnic groups (e.g., Costa and Bamossy 1995; Mehta and Belk 1991; Peiialoza 1994), the understanding of consumption when people cross borders is far from satisfactory. We explore how immigrants establish and

reinforce their selfhood through consumption, in their own unique context and in dealing with the necessary contradictiois, changes, and uncertainties of their lives. We address issues such as how immigrantsadaptandacculturate, mask or revive theirrcots, struggle and resist, reconfigure meanings of goods, and, maybe more often, negotiate ambivalence and contradictions by creolization (for creolization in global consumption see Ger and Belk: 996a), We explore the consumption of clothes as it si apes and is shaped by identity among Turko-Danish students. We focus on how the acts and meanings of clothing are experiencec and used in identity negotiation while encountering numerous, sometimes contradictory, cultural forces that shape unique clothing ir eanings and experiences. We examine how consumption of clothing serves the construction, reconstruction, maintenance, negotiaton, expression, and making visible or masking of social and personal identity for second-generation Turkish immigrants in Denmark. As offsprings of working-class and old-country parents, Tjrko-Danish youth face multiple sociocultural forces in family, community, and peer relations, as many immigrants do. We explore these forces experienced and refiected in appearance in the process of constructing lives as young and modem TurkoDane males i.nd females, members of small Turkish community with roots in a particular rural locale in Turkey and with varied ethnicities, an 1 students or employees in Danish institutions. Based on qualitaiive data, we discuss how the forces of peripheric immigrant cul tun mingle with the "center" in the consumption of clothes when a young immigrant faces multiple centers (Westem, European, Danish, urban Turkish) and peripheries (Danish immigrant, European Imn igrant, rural Turkish). We focus on clothes, which are among the most commonly desired, the most frequently purchased and used consumer goods (Ger and Belk 1996b; Lunt and Livingstone 1992). Dressing is a daily ritual involving the body, which is integral to identity. Clothes are expressive props. They are costumes we put on tc feel the part. We may change identities as we change clothes. Clothes, costumes changed quickly and close to the body, provide arichijomd for the study of how consumption shapes and is shaped by identity and how elements of several cultures are used to interpret lunctions and meanings of goods, such as comfort, modesty, and display in the case of clothes (see Berger 1992; Craik 1994; Davis 1992; Eicher 1995; Lurie 1981; Solomon 1985; Morris 1978; Tiompson and Haytko 1997). Therefore, clothes, so close to the bo