Body Politic or Bodies of Culture?

Abstract

South Asian settlers in Britain differ from most other migrants in Europe by 'enjoying' full civic status as British citizens. This starting-point would seem to favour civic integration and promise speedy political incorporation. The observable social processes, however, document a different logic. While the centralized legislative and executive organs of the British nation-state strive to maintain and confirm a 'culturally neutral' civic equality, the relatively independent organs of jurisdiction and local government do the opposite. The judiciary is active in ethnicizing religious difference, and the local state employs processes of registration, congregationalization, and functional devolution, in order to carry out civic and secular tasks of the body politic as a whole. This culturalist approach leads to the encorporation of religious congregations into putative bodies of culture, and it delays the incorporation of new citizens into the body politic. In the process, the nation-state goes against one of its foundational tenets, namely, to achieve civic integration on the basis of a secularist public sphere. The argument, based on fieldwork in London's most densely populated immigrant district, can thus be read as a refutation of the secularization theory.