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Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe
Author(s) -
Koning Anouk,
Vollebergh Anick
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13207
Subject(s) - racialization , sociology , politics , narrative , public sphere , body politic , aesthetics , white (mutation) , ethnography , media studies , gender studies , everyday life , anthropology , art , political science , race (biology) , literature , law , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents’ sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [ urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe ]