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This paper investigates the social ties forged by Romanians in London with migrants of different origins in work and non-work contexts to offer a more nuanced view of ‘bridging’ social ties and related discussions of ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the overemphasis on ethnic ties seen as a form of bonding in migration research, the paper shows how Romanians bridge informally with many other migrants based on shared ‘non-native’ status. Alongside non-ethnically marked commonalities, ethnicity emerges as an important ingredient of cosmopolitan socialization, yet without necessarily signalling coexisting ethnic identities, as commonly assumed. Romanians' experiences further show that despite providing significant social and cultural capital, bridging ties with migrants, rather than natives, rarely accrue effective resources for social mobility. The findings suggest the need to disaggregate and qualify current understandings of ‘bridging’ social ties usually depicted in positive terms and uniformly as cross-ethnic relationships, or only linked with the ‘mainstream’ population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how migrants negotiate and construct their identity in London. In particular it discusses how they position themselves in relation to other ethnic groups - English people and other migrant and ethnic minority groups within British society. The discussion draws upon qualitative research with recent Polish migrants in London. In addition to key informants from a range of community and voluntary groups, 3 focus groups and 30 individual interviews were carried out with migrants across various locations in the city. Participants were drawn from a range of occupations and included equal numbers of men and women. Rather than attempting to select a representative sample, the research sought to capture the range and diversity of Polish migrants. The paper examines how ethnic identity is mediated through language, gender, whiteness and European-ness. Using Goffman's concepts of 'normality' and 'stigma' the paper also discusses the ways in which participants engage with Polishness through multifaceted and complex interactions with or, indeed, avoidance of 'Poles abroad'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood ethnic diversity in London to be positively related to the perceived social cohesion of neighbourhood residents, once the level of economic deprivation is accounted for. Ethnic segregation within neighbourhoods, on the other hand, is associated with lower levels of perceived social cohesion. Both effects are strongly moderated by the age of individual residents: diversity has a positive effect on social cohesion for young people but this effect dissipates in older age groups; the reverse pattern is found for ethnic segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Items in the anthropology collections of the Horniman Museum in London that originate from those parts of the world which today make up the modern state of Malaysia number approximately 1,200, a relatively small collection built up over a period of about 150 years. In many ways the changing nature of museum collections of ethnographic artefacts reflects the history of the anthropological museum in Britain as well as the changing relationships between Britain and the parts of the world where items have been collected. This article examines the Museum's Malaysian material, whether donated, purchased or collected in the field by curators and considers both how it fitted in with the changing concepts informing museum practice and what it tells us about the views it expresses of 'other' cultures in general, and the Malay world in particular. Drawing on the Museum's correspondence files, registers and handbooks, as well as the collections themselves, the article seeks to explore how ideas about the Malay world were formed and expressed in the way material was interpreted and displayed. The picture revealed, especially in the early period, is one of a network of British people, chiefly academics, with a shared view of what kinds of material culture from the Malay world should be collected and how that material should be interpreted. Underlying this, however, are suggestions of an increasingly wide range of relationships between people of the Malay world and Britons abroad, embodied in the material which found its way for whatever reason into the cases or storage shelves at the Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey of recent historical writing, this article points to a profound divide within British propertied classes in the eighteenth century, and in particular within the ‘middling sorts’, along cultural lines, between an aristocratically oriented, London-based ‘national society’, and an alternative communal-provincial culture, reasserting local values and loyalties. Many studies have in fact depicted cultural clashes along those lines, though often trying unsuccessfully to fit them into other social schemes. The various political divisions of the second half of the century can be seen as manifestations of this basic cultural divide. Finally, the article suggests a different approach to the ‘emergence’ of a ‘middle class’ at the turn of the century — appearing as an assertive and politically charged self-definition of one side within the ‘middling sorts’ — now realigned according to positions regarding Pitt's war policies of the 1790S — rather than as a coherent socio-economic formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]