Nyiri Pal

Nyiri Pal

University :University of Oxford

Country: United Kingdom

Title: The snakehead's concise guide to Europe

Panel: Social Anthropology and Sociology

Abstract: Geography, as narrative of space, is specific to world-systems, social spaces within them, and finally individuals. Particular world-systems have generally accepted geographical narratives that are defined by essential elements attached to the landscape: economic, cultural, educational, industrial, and natural features, and their relative prevalence one over another. Such broadly defined narratives may vary strongly between communities or social spaces taking part in the world-system, depending on their prevalent modes of material and cultural consumption and travel. For example, if we compare a Let’s Go guidebook of Europe to a Knaur’s Kulturführer and a Japanese guidebook, we will obtain mental maps that have more or fewer dots on them representing cities and villages, and the dots will be of varying relative size. On some maps, vineyards and national parks will be larger than Eurodisney, on others the other way around. Yet the essential features will be the same: the Tower of London; the Rhine; the casinos of Monte Carlo. Speaking to recent Chinese migrants to Europe over the past decade and reading their press, I have realised that in their particular world-system – which, apart from distinctive modes of production, consumption, and human relations, is characterised by distinctive and complicated patterns of travel – the map of Eur ope looks radically different from what I am used to. There is no Tower of London, Rhine, or Monte Carlo: there are the Eiffel Tower, the Danube, and the casinos of Budapest, but next to these, more prominently, stand the 13th district of Paris and the Four Tigers Market in Budapest. Red Square is dominated by Lenin’s mausoleum, and on the road between Budapest and the funny-named Shandandan there is German Village, so called because it has many German tourists, where one can pick strawberries and bathe in a thermal spring. This map of Europe is built partly from standard travelling and cultural clichés channelled into Chinese popular media both before and after the Communists came to power, but it – particularly its largely blank eastern half – has been supplemented by lowbrow accounts of recent migrants themselves, which, starting from their local publications, penetrated the printed and to some extent the audiovisual media in China itself. These accounts see Europe as a network of Chinatowns, markets of Chinese goods, restaurants, and trade distribution routes. Between the nodes of this network are “foreigners” – police, tax officers, Gypsies, Arabs – and their casinos, parks, shopping malls, and swimming pools. This map is almost certainly different from that of older Chinese immigrants to Europe. It is more sophisticated, because they move around Europe much more, and much earlier in the course of their stay on the continent, than earlier migrants who typically saw little of it outside the neighbourhoods of their own restaurants. It is also less informed by European travel clichés, because unlike earlier migrants, they can rely on Chinese travel agencies, interpreters, and a network of business acquaintances across Europe that can help a newly arrived student, worker, or trader create a picture of the continent within a few months. In this paper, I collected accounts of European countries by migrants and migration brokers I have spoken to various European countries and China, as well as from Chinese newspapers in Hungary, Spain, Italy, and Russia, all of them established since 1994 by new migrants, and from books published by new migrants since 1992. Put together, they produce a narrative of Europe that could be a “guidebook” provided by a migration broker or a migrant trafficker, a “snakehead”, to a potential client or a friend still in China who intends to travel to Europe.