Bridging the Gulf: Global Horizons, Mobility and Local Identity among Muslims in Mumbai

Abstract

People always think of their city, their neighbourhood or their locality as a place in the world. They have more or less elaborate notions of a larger ‘global horizon’ that enframe what they do and say, and how they make sense of their own lives. Such horizons are formed and produced by a range of knowledge, fragments of narratives, images, icons — some of them authorized by governments and educational systems, others transmitted through personal narratives, and yet others flowing through films, television and other media. I will propose that we may think of such horizons as ‘ideological fantasies’ — phantasmic structures that govern perceptions of reality, imaginings of possibilities and choices in life, fundamental ideas of the self and the other(s), and so on. Fantasies should in this context not be understood in the strictly Freudian sense as illusions structuring (mis)conceptions of reality. As Slavoj Zizek argues, ‘ideological fantasies’ are modern ideologies’ general and effective form (Zizek 1989: 33), that work through mythical constructions that are so naturalized and sedimented that their truthfulness is beyond questioning, and the contingencies of their construction have been effaced. In Barthes’s terms such modern mythologies constitute ‘a second order of signification’ — crystallized and stabilized webs of meaning that provide relatively stable matrices of knowledge, generally not amenable to modifications on the basis of facts or arguments (Barthes 1970).KeywordsMigrationEuropeIncomeBeachExpenseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.