Abnaau Marj Elzhour Lebanese Migration And Citizenship In Wollongong Fadi Baghdadi by Fadi Baghdadi instant download after payment.

The confessional system in Lebanon was designed in response to the diversity of cultures and religions in Lebanon’s sectarian society. However, Lebanese immigrant communities are commonly understood through their shared national identity. In Australia, the majority of Lebanese migrants emigrated from Northern Lebanon and settled in Western Sydney. This has resulted in the dominant image of Lebanese living in Australia constructed academically and discursively in the national imaginary through the experiences of Western Sydney Lebanese who emigrated from Northern Lebanon. Drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews from four generations of Lebanese migrants from Marj el-Zhour living in Wollongong, this study explores how Lebanese Muslim migrants living in Wollongong maintain the social relations of their transnational diaspora village, navigate questions surrounding their citizenship and political loyalty, and form their own localised ethnic and religious identities in the contemporary globalised multicultural nation-state.

Like many high immigrant intake Western nations, Australia’s immigration policy in the 1970s and 1980s was one which asked unskilled migrants to assimilate and succumb to their proletarianization. However, a fundamental morality of social reciprocity fostered in the village of Marj el-Zhour, challenged the process of individuation and independence promoted by an individualist Australian capitalism. I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of field, habitus, capital, and illusio to understand how the social relations of reciprocity that are fostered in Marj el-Zhour continue to orient and guide the migrants when navigating the new social, political, and economic environments they entered in the migration process.

Migration studies documents the ways multicultural societies are comprised through the formation of ethnic communities. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Renato Rosaldo, I chart the increasing visibility of Lebanese ethnicity as