Prospects for Multicultural Encounters and Identification Processes - Insights from Case Studies among Migrants in Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyses how multicultural encounters have shaped groupism processes and notions of identities among migrants in contemporary Brazil. To do that, the paper contextualises the particular sense of hybridity built in the Brazilian multiculturalism approach, and how it enabled certain encounters and senses of belonging beyond nationhood-oriented groupism and sometimes beyond ethnicity-oriented groupism. The paper brings insights from a fieldwork study held among a hundred migrants living in the two main charity shelters in Sao Paulo-Brazil, demonstrating how these individuals operate different senses of belonging through encounters according to different aims. It explains how they operate their belonging to migrant categories (and the vulnerabilities associated with it) for claiming for dignity, rights and access to basic services in Brazil. The paper also explains how these migrants operate other belongings beyond such migrant status and nationality categories (such as belongings related to gender, age, language, profession, religion, etc.) in other encounters with different aims and dynamics. Overall, the paper also aims to contribute to scrutinising the reified concept of 'group' which dominates mainstream literature, indicating how the perspective of encounters might allow us to identify more fluid and spontaneous categories which seem to better comprehend contemporary multicultural relations.