Equality and exclusion: 'Racism' in a Swedish town

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Equality and exclusion: ‘Racism’ in a Swedish townKarin Normana Stockholm University, Sweden

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ethnos, vol. 69:2, june 2004 (pp. 204–228)

karin norman

Equality and Exclusion:‘Racism’ in a Swedish Town

Karin NormanStockholm University, Sweden

abstract Research on racism is prolific but ethnographic studies of what could betermed racism in everyday local social life are much less common. The article exam-ines local Swedish classifications of difference and belonging in relation to meaningsof racism and considers how ideologies of equality relate to forms of exclusion andracist expressions. The aim is to discuss the articulation of distinctions of exclusionand inclusion in everyday contexts through the presence of the refugee Other. Thematerial is based on fieldwork conducted during the first half of the 1990s in a smalltown in central Sweden. The establishment of a refugee reception center in the townhad concrete and symbolic repercussions on the local residents, making people’ssense of belonging and processes of exclusion more openly conflictual.

keywords Racism, refugees, everyday life, exclusion

a local newspaper from 1992, two smiling young blonde women in denimjackets are photographed, holding up a sheet of paper with lists of names.The bold black caption heading the article reads An emphatic NO to re-

fugees. These young women had spent the previous few days diligently gatheringnames on their petition protesting against plans to enlarge the newly estab-lished refugee reception center to include their own small town neighborhood.’We are not racists, but we don’t want this place to be turned into a refugeecamp,’ one of the women is quoted as saying.

Accusations and denials of racism have flourished in recent years in bothSwedish local and national media. Racism is also a topic of conversation anddebates among friends, in schools and at workplaces. ‘You can hardly open aSwedish newspaper without coming across the term in one or the other sen-sa tionalistic context,’ as one researcher stated a few years ago (Lange 1997:11;my translation). Most people in Sweden will not want to identify themselves

In

© Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, on behalf of the Museum of Ethnographyissn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/0014184042000212867

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205Equality and Exclusion


as racists, but may much more easily identify others in such terms. Groupsthat are organized in an active adherence to a racist ideology are easily under-stood and dismissed as racist. But it is more difficult to interpret and evaluatethe less explicit, sometimes unintentional ‘racisms’ of everyday acts and atti-tudes surrounding us and of which we are a part.

Social science research on racism is extensive and seems to be increasing,but ethnographic studies of what could be termed racism in everyday localrelations and social interaction are much less prolific. My aim in this articleis to consider local Swedish classifications of difference and belonging in re-lation to meanings of ‘racisms’ or ‘racist expressions’ (Goldberg 1992). Theissues that concern me are both conceptual and experiential. How are differ-ences conceptualized and dealt with in the shifting local world of ideas andexplanations? How do ideologies of equality relate to forms of exclusion andracist expressions? I attempt to show how various distinctions of exclusion andinclusion, of ‘us and them’, become articulated in everyday contexts throughthe presence of the refugee Other, nourishing antagonism by essentializingsocial and cultural differences.

Such processes of distinction and exclusion raise conceptual dilemmas.To some Swedish researchers, racism has a more restricted meaning, assumingthe adherence to an ideology or doctrine that hierarchically valorizes ‘naturalgroupings’ (e.g. Lange 1997, Lange & Westin 1993). Others argue that this de-limitation of the meaning of racism overlooks and cannot account for the cul-turalizing aspect of the ‘new racism’, or ‘cultural racism’ (cf. Sander 1995) orthe ‘underlying racism’ (as opposed to the explicit and ideological racism called‘open racism’) which would include ‘hostility toward foreigners, explicit pre-judices about ethnic groups, as well as cultural, structural or institutional, andeveryday racisms’ (Wigerfelt 2001:35–36, my translation). A common way ofconceptualizing hostility and discrimination is the seemingly more neutral ex-pression främlingsfientlighet (literally, hostility toward strangers/foreigners).1

In exploring local social relations and forms of interaction, such different argu-ments about the meaning of ‘racism’ have influenced my understanding ofparticular acts and utterances of social and cultural exclusion. In turn, theethnographic material has reminded me that people’s ideas and acts are ambig-uous and shifting and not so easily pinned down as either racist or not racist.

The material is based on several periods of fieldwork conducted primarilyduring the first half of the 1990s in a small town of about 8,000 inhabitantsthat I call Gruvbo, located in central Sweden (cf. Norman 1993, 1994). Theestablishment of a refugee reception center in the town, about a year after

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my first arrival, had concrete and symbolic repercussions on the local residents,making people’s sense of belonging and processes of exclusion more openlyconflictual and poignant, thus highlighting debates on what was termed racism.

As in most other Western European countries, contemporary Swedish formsof ethnicized/culturalized exclusion and hostility or racist expressions arecommonly understood and explained — in research agendas, policy debates andmedia depictions — as linked to post-war immigration (cf. Wrench & Solomos1993; Broberg & Tydén 1996). However, as others have maintained, migra-tion and immigration cannot in themselves explain racism, but immigrantsand refugees of today do often become its main targets. Most writers arguethat racism is ingrained in the ideologies and policies of modern national-isms (e.g. Essed 1991, 2002; Gullestad 2002a; Miles 1993; Stolcke 1995; Wie-viorka 1997) working through many-facetted social, economic, historic, andcultural distinctions of inclusion and exclusion. To understand the hostilityand exclusionary practices, it is necessary to consider particular social andpolitical processes of class and gender relations, and local articulations of themeanings of the national (cf. Cole 1997). Thus, how nation-state ideologiesand government practices articulate with local and subjective conceptionsand experiences is complex and diffuse. In everday life, people are not neces-sarily aware of the complexity and ambiguity of their feelings, intentions oracts, nor of the many unintended consequences that may arise.

The title of Allan Pred’s recent and eccentrically unwieldy book on ‘racismsand racialized spaces’ in Sweden, Even in Sweden (2000), plays on assumptionsheld both about and by Swedes that Sweden should have been free from racism,given its policy of equality and solidarity. However, ideas about race and theoccurrence of racialized practices are not new to Sweden. Forms and processesof exclusion on more or less explicitly racist grounds are part of the Swedishmodern nation-building project (Broberg & Tydén 1991, 1996). The classifica-tions and subsequent hierarchizations of peoples according to ideas aboutbiological types or races have been both a way of marking boundaries in relationto internal Others, like the Sami, Gypsies, Travellers (tattare), and to ‘foreigners’,such as Jewish groups. Racial ideas became widespread, and gave antagonismtowards immigrants and foreign peoples a new power in the early 1900s. Thedifferent discursive and practical endeavors to homogenize the Swedish po-pulation have contributed to the image many Swedes have tended to endorse,that Sweden is culturally and ethnically homogeneous (Löfgren 1993). Thisassumed homogeneous heritage can be highly valued, sometimes in nostalgicovertones, but also invoked as an explanation of parochialism and intoler-

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ance or hostility toward immigrants. In turn, the Swedish post-war history ofimmigration and refugee policy has been significant for the contemporary Swed-ish experience of the Other and of Swedishness. It is some of the twists andturns of this process of othering as it emerged in local discourse and socialacts in the town of Gruvbo that I will consider in this article.

The town and region of Gruvbo, historically dominated by iron ore miningand steel industry, are not socially and culturally homogeneous and local peoplemake a number of distinctions of belonging especially in relation to kinship,place of birth, and to some extent gender. In this way, some people are deemedto be ‘authentic’, others are seen as ‘in-movers’ (Norman 1996). The Finnswho settled in Gruvbo during the expansive industrial era of the 1950s and1960s are neither authentic nor in-movers, but in most situations they arerecognized more or less as ‘folks like everyone else’. The refugees who havebeen arriving since the late 1980s, however, qualified neither as in-moversnor as folks like everyone else. Any differentiations they themselves madewithin their various ethnic groups most often went unrecognized. To the re-fugees, in turn, even to those who had lived some years in Gruvbo, local peoplealso appeared much less differentiated than they were, since they so rarelyassociated on a regular, everyday basis. Gruvbo people therefore became ‘theSwedes’ to most refugees.

Through the media, yet other distinctions of belonging and otherness weremade. In the early 1990s, television journalists traveled around in Swedenreporting on the ‘most racist places’, among them Gruvbo. In the fall of 1993,a television crew set out to make a documentary about Gruvbo on the issueof ‘hostility toward strangers/foreigners’. The film was called I’m Not A Racist,But... I saw my informants from the steel plant, neighbors in the working-class housing area and some local politicians. The scene was set with dark,heavy November clouds, doorsteps with rows of family shoes (the kind refugeeswere said to steal), the dreary-looking coffee room at the plant, workers tellingthe interviewer what they really think. We are presented with a social worldclosed in upon itself, full of prejudice and backwardness — as much the Otherto the urban sophisticates as any refugees or immigrants are to people in Gruvbo.2

‘Spreading the Burden’:The Establishment of a Refugee Reception Center in Gruvbo

Throughout the whole post-war period, immigration policy and immigrantexperiences have been inseparable from the shifting ideologies and practicesof Swedish labor and welfare policy. The trend has been from labor recruitment

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of migrants to an almost exclusively refugee-oriented immigration and asubsequently high unemployment rate among refugees and immigrants (Gra-ham 1999; Hammar 1999; Westin & Dingu-Kyrklund 1997). In the early 1990s,about 40,000 refugees arrived in Sweden from former Yugoslavia where warwas raging. Other large groups of refugees were primarily from Iraq and Somalia.Looking for means of accommodating the many asylum-seekers, the NationalImmigration Bureau began renting apartments in towns and villages all overSweden. Due to lack of employment opportunities and out-migration of localresidents, many so-called peripheral municipalities already had trouble findingtenants for their many excess apartment houses. At that point, the ImmigrationBureau could fairly easily find available housing for its refugee reception cen-ters or ‘camps’, as they are commonly called. This made the government policyof ‘spreading the burden of international solidarity’ (Ålund & Schierup 1991)easier to implement. Furthermore, state subsidies ensured that these ‘camps’would entail an economic gain for the municipality. Refugees were thus de-fined as a (temporary) local resource. On a government policy level, though,refugees were mainly referred to as ‘a problem’ that must be solved.

In 1992, the National Immigration Bureau rented more than a hundredapartments in two working-class housing areas in Gruvbo, owned by the muni-cipality, to provide for a refugee camp. About 1,100 refugees passed throughGruvbo in the two years the refugee reception center was there, with around700–800 persons staying in the housing areas at any one time. In addition tothe refugees staying in the camp, there already lived in Gruvbo about a hundredformer refugees, persons with permanent residence permits who had beengiven accommodation in Gruvbo some years earlier. These persons were main-ly from the Middle East.

In the fall of 1994, the refugee reception center was closed down. The stategovernment had enforced stricter control mechanisms to keep refugees fromentering the country (Hammar 1999), and there was no longer any need forall the refugee reception centers. As I stood looking out over the grounds ofthe oldest neighborhood, where I also rented an apartment while conductingfieldwork, only a few people were in sight. There was no sign that only veryrecently the place had been full of life with a great number of refugees andsome local residents living there. It had become a quiet place, hardly anychildren around, no men perched on benches, no women sitting together inthe grass. Because there were no tenants, several of the red-brick three-storyapartment buildings had already been torn down. Some of the refugees hadbeen deported, others were moved to other receptions centers, continuing

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their wait for a possible residence permit. Those who finally had received a per-mit moved to other towns and cities. What had happened in these two years?

The following ethnographic description revolves around images of the re-fugee Other among Gruvbo residents, local politicians and bureaucrats. Localresidents experienced the refugees’ presence as an intrusion, like a dismantlingof the boundaries of place and person, which in this situation became morefixed than they had previously been felt to be. In describing a local anti-racistmanifestation, I also attempt to show how the ambiguity of ideologies of equal-ity and solidarity made room for declarations of various personal agendasand worked their way into the sometimes disheartening construction of goodintentions.

‘Is there Racism in Gruvbo?’‘Is there racism in Gruvbo?’ Lena, who teaches Swedish to immigrants,

asks her class of participants. Everyone in the class has been confronted withsome unpleasant and hostile comments and behavior from Gruvbo residents– but is that racism? – they do not feel quite convinced. ‘Yes!’ Lena announcesemphatically. And she tells them what had happened the previous Fridaynight in a neighboring town when The Latin America Association had ar-ranged a party and about twenty skinheads had attacked the place and thepolice had to be summoned. Lena describes these young skinheads by settingthem apart from ‘us’. They are afraid, she says, and cowardly, and have a lotof social problems. She is eager to make distinctions between such peopleand herself. However, this is the easier part. For Lena, it appears more difficultto sort out concepts and ideas when confronted with the troublesome issueof the Swedes, who often are reserved or hostile towards the strangers/for-eigners that come to Gruvbo, Swedes who never associate with the newcom-ers, never invite them to their homes, seldom talk to them when they meet inthe stores or in the apartment buildings. As in so many other similar situa-tions, Lena excuses these Swedes vaguely, referring to the economically ‘badtimes’ and a more or less naturalized ‘fear of strangers’.

At one of the regular meetings held at the local immigration bureau, a simi-lar question was posed, but this time by one of the immigrants. Are thereracists in Gruvbo? he asked. Rita, head of the office, answered him:

‘Some of you must have encountered racism. But maybe we should clarify whatthe term means. Racism comes from the word race, and means that someone isconsidered less worthy because of belonging to a certain race’. One of Rita’s assist-ants told them about a conference she recently had attended: ‘A female researcher

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had studied racism in Sweden and found that only about 500 persons were regist-ered in racist organizations, and of these about 50 were actively committing crimes,some of them are in prison. There have always been racists in Sweden, but in lateryears this has come up to the surface. These racists not only turn against non-Europeans but also against homosexuals and socially destitute persons. So, remem-ber, these racists are few, most Swedes are not like that’.

The question, ‘well, then, what are most Swedes like?’ hovered over us, butwas never posed. Instead, attention turned to the more dramatic 500 racists.

Racists, those who adhere to racist ideologies and organizations, are setoff as largely isolated groups or persons who occasionally menacingly springinto our awareness. Racists are often referred to in the media or in generalpolitical discussions as persons with social problems, as persons living at oddswith ‘society’, on the margins. They are not a part of anyone’s everyday life;racists only associate with each other. But talking about racism in terms likethese make it harder to see how racialized thinking seeps into everyday socialpractice and one’s view of the world, one’s perception of ongoing social lifeand the position of Others. ‘Racism’ and discrimination on an institutional,structural level can be indirect or hidden under layers of ideological rhetoricand economic calculations. On the more interactive, face-to-face level it ap-pears more observable and accessible and it may be assumed that so-calledordinary people are much more prejudiced, racist, or hostile than the con-stituencies that represent and control them. Just as Rita and her assistants atthe immigration bureau can unite with the refugees in distancing themselvesfrom the ‘500 racists’, thereby avoiding troublesome ambiguities and conflictswith everyday hostility, so through the television film we can distance our-selves from ‘the racists in holes like Gruvbo’. However, this unduly simplifiesthe complexities that conceptualizations of difference and the practices ofcoping with such perceived differences entail.

Swedes in general will avoid the term race; many will agree that there areno races. But, as Banton notes, ‘social differences are often taken for grantedwhen they seem to have a physical basis’ (1988:8) and people will nonethelesstend to classify immigrants, refugees, and foreigners into different cultural ca-tegories according to cultural perceptions of phenotypical variation or phys-ical appearance, such as ‘Arab-looking, black, Indian, Korean’, and the like.However, physical appearance alone does not suffice to induce people to makeantagonistic distinctions. It is rather in combination with culturalist assump-tions about how they are that evaluations and rankings become noticeablewhich also may end up having stigmatizing effects.3

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Notions of Dirt and Theft: Transforming GruvboRacist discourse and practice among ordinary people can be evasive and

hard to grasp. It may either appear too intentional or too unintentional. Thatis, it may appear too out of the ordinary (as for example with racist activistgroups) or too elusive and harmless (as among fairly innocuous neighborswho grumble and complain). In Gruvbo, I found that people could not soeasily be pinned down with one or the other opinion. Their ideas shifted overtime and from one situation to the other. Sometimes these opinions wereloudly articulated, sometimes they passed almost unnoticed. Among Gruvboresidents, the whole spectrum of feelings and opinions about refugees waspresent – from the greatest hostility to a tolerant indifference or a certaincompassion. Least prevalant was any active interest or attempts to associatewith any of the refugees. The refugees’ contacts with Gruvbo residents con-sisted almost exclusively of relations with the Swedish language teachers andreception center staff.

This avoidance is not exclusively directed toward foreigners, refugees orimmigrants but to anyone coming new to a neighborhood. Strangers ornewcomers give rise to some curiosity but at a distance, and it will take timeto find friends and be invited into people’s homes, the place where peoplemainly associate with their kin and close friends. Common stereotypes aboutSwedes, also endorsed by many Swedes themselves, are that they are reservedtoward strangers, wary of inviting someone unknown, a newcomer, to theirhome (Bengts et al. 2003; Daun 1994). In practice, the position of newcomers,strangers, varies regionally, locally and situationally, which does not denythe fact that being a stranger in a Swedish community may be experienced assomewhat of an (initial) ordeal, something a few Swedish newcomers to Gruv-bo mentioned to me (cf. Ekman 1991, 1996; Norman 1996). However, a personseen as Swedish, or at least ‘like us’, will appear to have a more reasonablecause to be in Gruvbo: employment, a husband or wife, a family, and willsoon learn how to talk to people in stores and queues. He or she will generallynot end up as much of an outsider as a refugee, especially a non-European one.

Local politicians worried about the upsurging hostility among Gruvbo peopleand the violent expressions it took among a number of young men. In thelocal newspaper and at town meetings, the politicians implored people torestrain themselves. The staff at the local immigration bureau distributedinformation folders with facts and figures about government refugee policy,also stating that ‘Sweden can afford to receive those who need our help’. Butthey never really attempted to help people find ways of communicating or

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associating over cultural boundaries. The aim of government policy is now-adays to promote ‘multiculturalism’, but policies work ambiguously on severallevels. Politicians and bureaucrats make declarations and decisions purport-edly based on ideological principles, and current laws and regulations, and,less openly, on more short-term political and economic interests and calcula-tions. People in Gruvbo would sometimes point out that politicians did whatthey pleased, ‘they run over us, tell us that now there’s to be a refugee camphere so move if you like, or stay. But we’re the ones that have to live withtheir deals and decisions — they themselves live somewhere else.’

On the whole, people in Gruvbo were quite disconcerted about havinghundreds of refugees in their midst. ‘There are so many of them, they’re allover the place,’ was a common complaint. And as one woman formulated it:‘I feel like I’ve become a stranger in my own home, my own town.’ In thehousing areas where the refugee camp was situated people felt even moreconstrained by ‘all these strange people’. ‘You feel like an outsider in your ownneighborhood!’, as another woman expressed it. In the stairways and out-doors on the widespread lawn, they were met by a variety of sights and sounds.Unfamiliar languages filled the air, curtains were seen hanging in strangearrangements. Children were running around seemingly unattended andcomplaints and gossip often concerned how those children defecated in thebushes and urinated in the stairways.

To Gruvbo residents, belonging seemed all of a sudden jeopordized. Resi-dents expressed anger that the local politicians were not taking any respon-sibility. The confrontation with the refugees was a confrontation with con-flicting moral demands made by a national ideology of solidarity and equalityand a local reality of inequality and communal economic gain. In their attemptsto explain and cope with their perceived predicament and their problem-atic demarcations of belonging and identity, local Gruvbo residents variouslyappealed to the symbolic meaning and value of locality, property, honestyand pollution.

The main complaint about the refugees was that they ‘dirty the area andsteal our belongings’. The Bosnians, and especially the Albanians, were saidto steal the children’s bicycles and ‘they steal our shoes — we can’t even leaveour shoes outside the apartment door like we used to.’ People in the one-family houses in other parts of Gruvbo accused refugees of looking throughtheir mailboxes, stealing apples from their gardens and even snatching thelaundry hung out there to dry. The refugees were felt to encroach on theboundaries of home, of privacy and Gruvbo exclusiveness. They thereby

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demonstrated a terrible ungratefulness towards Sweden and the Swedes whoshowed their solidarity and were willing to help them.

Ideas about pollution and purity are socially powerful, as Mary Douglashas shown us (1966), and metaphors of pollution have great force becausethey work on and through embodied experiences of self and belonging, link-ing social and individual identities. Ideas about property and ownership maybe considered from a similar perspective. Property is not only a concrete re-source, but may be symbolic of the person or the group. Acts of trespassingand stealing were reformulated in terms of pollution. The refugees litteredthe area and became themselves transformed into litter, as it were.

Store owners were uneasy and angered by refugees possibly shop-liftingand soon they had put up notices warning that theft would be prosecuted.With evident contempt, people gossiped about refugees even stealing fromthe Red Cross bazaar. When any dark, foreign-looking person entered a store,owners and staff would be on the alert to check that none of them stole any-thing. The ‘old’ refugees in Gruvbo (the Kurds, Iranians, and Syrians, whomthe Immigration Bureau placed there in the late 1980s, after they had receivedpermanent residence permits) were once again reminded of their uncertainposition. They sensed that the Swedes would not bother to make any distinc-tion between themselves and the newcomers, ‘the Yugoslavs’, who they them-selves started to dislike. Now they feared that they would be just as suspectedand controlled as ‘those refugees’. They wished no contact with these newrefugees and as one Lebanese man said to me, ‘if I wasn’t an immigrant I’dbecome a racist!’

Many considered moving away from Gruvbo, and within a year or twomost of them actually had left the town. There were many reasons for moving;however, the presence of the new refugees merely hurried up a process thathad started much earlier. Gruvbo could not offer any work, and the townseemed almost dead by seven in the evening, there was nowhere to go, nothingto do. The immigrants could never get backstage, as it were, they only spenttime with each other, strolling down Main Street, never quite understandingand finally not really caring about what the Swedes were up to. When therefugee camp was closed down not many people were left in the housingareas. The residents’ experiences of losing spatial control had transformedfrom a sense of being invaded by strangers to a sense of being forsaken byeveryone. Some said they were glad that the refugees were not there any-more, others shrugged their shoulders and implied that the refugees weren’tso bad after all. ‘It’s quiet now, all right, almost too quiet’, as one man said.

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The establishment of the refugee camp had underscored the inequalities ofbelonging, class and political power with which the different Gruvbo peoplewere already acquainted and their hostility was primarily directed at thosewho were housed there, the refugees. When they left there was no compensa-tion, just empty grounds.

The Political Appropriation of CultureFor politicians, the issue of appearing racist is very sensitive and a sign of

being almost un-Swedish. Hence, politicians will usually be careful not tomake hostile or ‘prejudiced’ comments. Culturalist references have insteadbecome legion and can sustain the claim to tolerance and solidarity (cf. Stolcke1995). This should not be dismissed as purely manipulative, for it also con-cerns good intentions and their ambiguous and contradictory meanings andconsequences.

In the early and mid-1990s, the alleged thefts in places like Gruvbo ap-peared to be the most disturbing and had become a nationwide issue. In theattempt to calm ‘national fury’ over the ‘wave of thefts’ and to explain whyrefugees were stealing, various politicians and government representativesstepped forth and publicly denounced the ‘thieves in our midsts’ or tried tomake people understand why this could happen. The refugees from Yugo-slavia were said to be overwhelmed by all the goods in the stores, they didnot have much money and the temptation became too great. In a seeminglymore enlightened attempt to understand and explain, the Minister of Immi-gration at the time4 stated on the television news that it was a part of ‘their[the Albanians’] culture’ to not distinguish in terms of ownership, that theydid not differentiate between mine and yours (alluding, one may assume, toa kind of Communist heritage and/or a rural-traditional way of life).5 Althoughmany people could not take her explanation seriously and made her into atarget of much joking, her culturalist explanation (she was also Minister ofCulture) was a politically very sinister demarcation, however unwittingly, inrelation to processes of othering. Since that time some of the Albanians Ihave come to know still feel the urge to unbutton their coats when they gointo a store, wary of being suspected of stealing although the political andlocal turmoil around the issue has by now subsided.

Against a general adherence to ideas about humans being ‘the same’, whichin other contexts finds its way into political and bureaucratic rhetoric, con-trasting meanings of personhood were being constructed. The Yugoslavs’(Albanians) individual acts were here assumed to be determined by outside

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factors which they could not control by their own will, whereas Swedes actin relation to an inner will (and conscience) that distinguishes between rightand wrong, and yours and mine. Culture and person were essentialized andreified under the auspices of cultural tolerance: everyone has a right to ‘theirculture’, but what constitutes their culture turns out to be a set of traits thatmake people more or less comprehensible and acceptable.

In addition, thefts have been used as a reason for not granting persons aresidence permit. Swedish law makes a distinction between shoplifting andtheft, the former is delimited to a value of less than a thousand kronor and ispunishable by fines, whereas theft can lead to imprisonment. This means thatshoplifting according to Swedish law is illegal but not a severe criminal offence.However, refugees not only received fines for shop lifting (which they meticul-ously paid, in contrast to many Swedish offenders, according to a local lawyer),but could also be expelled, thereby giving them double punishment for some-thing in other contexts not deemed to be a serious crime. The enforcementof such rules set refugees seeking asylum apart from the protection of modernjurisprudence, according to the lawyer, and in effect put into practice theMinister’s menacing rhetorics of difference and ‘good intention’.

The Government’s refugee policy and its concomitant discourse on cul-ture and difference, and in other contexts that of solidarity and generosity,wound its way into a local discourse based on specific life experiences and aSocial Democratic ideology. Anders is a case in point, a man in his late fifties.Anders had worked in the steel plant since he settled in Gruvbo togetherwith his Finnish wife in the early 1960s. In relation to the refugees he categor-ically demanded that they prove their worthiness to remain in Sweden – theyshould show gratitude, adjust to our ways, be hard-working, have simple habitsand make no material demands. He is a righteous, but not a heartless man.Anders grew up under meager economic circumstances, he has had to manageon his own from an early age and has always worked very hard. Now he isgetting old and looks forward to a life without having to go to the factory. Heis part of the generation who has ‘built this country’s welfare’. But now thatseems to have lost its value; not just economically, but culturally as well. Hispersonal life experience merges with that of the establishment of the wel-fare state. He gives voice to a social worry which finds its particular logic inthe Social Democratic trade union version of nation-state building and citizen-formation. He identifies with the struggles of its political and social projectand he and his kind have the right to reap the fruits from it. Equality is forthem. To share with newcomers, the refugees and immigrants, is like devalu-

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ating its very essence. ‘They’ have paid nothing. He feels that the Social De-mocrats have been ‘selling out our welfare’ and since the early 1990s the in-creasing privatization of welfare institutions seems to go hand in hand witha ‘too generous’ refugee policy.

The ‘Anti-Racist Manifestation’:The Cultural Construction of Well-Meaning

In 1991–92, several serious incidents had occurred in Sweden where immi-grants had been attacked more or less brutally, a trend which continued allthrough the 1990s with several immigrants being harassed, beaten and evenkilled. Gruvbo was no exception to attacks against immigrants. Gruvbo peoplecould read in the local newspaper that the apartment of a pizzeria owner,who was an immigrant, had been demolished and the walls had been sprayedwith bss (Bevara Sverige Svenskt, ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’).6

The local immigration bureau held monthly meetings for those refugeeswho lived in Gruvbo and had permanent residence permits. At one such meet-ing, Rita asked the twenty-five assembled persons, mainly men, if they hadheard about the so-called immigrant strike being planned for the 21st of Feb-ruary. The term strike alluded to worker solidarity and trade union power.Considering that most refugees or immigrants had little to go on strike from,except maybe Swedish language lessons, the term was somewhat hollow.Yes, they had all heard about it. ‘Would you like to arrange something thatday?’ Rita asked, adding that, ‘one of the local politicians, who also has animmigrant background, wants to arrange a manifestation in Gruvbo againstracism and hostility toward foreigners. It’s important that many participate.’The politician was a Finnish immigrant, which in this context was meant togive him some extra legitimacy. ‘Will Swedes participate, too?’ one man asked.‘Well, yes – it’s for everyone who feels inclined to take part,’ Rita said, hervagueness giving the impression that she did not count on many Swedesparticipating. Which proved to be correct.

Women in Adult School

The day before the planned anti-racist manifestation, the teacher in oneof the classes of the municipally run adult school, Komvux, brings up the sub-ject of the manifestation. The class consists of young and middle-aged womenattending the course in social service. The teacher distributes the latest schoolbulletin where there is a notice about the manifestation on February 21st, Fora future without violence and hostility toward foreigners, to be held at the Salva-

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tion Army chapel. ‘A future without violence, maybe, but not without hostilitytoward foreigners,’ Sanna and Lisa declare loudly. Sanna is a young womanwho enjoys being provocative. She complains exaggeratedly that all any ofthese foreigners ask her is if she is married. The others laugh.

A discussion of sorts ensues. They all agree that ‘they [refugees] are toomany’, but otherwise they put the emphases somewhat differently. Theirexperiences vary, some are much less bothered by the refugees than others.The teacher knows that as a teacher she has a responsibility to be balancedand she, like the others, is also aware of my presence. She cannot let Sannabe too domineering. She reminds them that ‘Sweden is an old immigrant coun-try’ referring explicitly to the Walloons, Finns, and Germans of yesteryear.‘Without them Sweden would not be what it is today.’ But that’s different!Lisa exclaims. And they all seem to agree. European immigration and theturns of history are not really relevant in relation to the situation of today. It’s‘these refugees’ (the Arabs, Muslims, Somalians, Yugoslavs, Albanians) thatcome to mind, people who come from what appear to be very different placesand cultures wanting things, taking a place in their world without knowinganything about it. The implication is that ‘they’ do not want to be Swedish,they just want a better life at our expense. The teacher emphasizes that ‘cer-tainly things must be fair and equal’, that the refugees/immigrants shouldnot receive or demand more help or favors than others get. ‘Of course, thegovernment shouldn’t let more people into the country than it can take careof and help, it’s not fair towards the refugees themselves or to us,’ she says.They should also have to learn to ‘make our local customs into their own’ (taseden dit man kommer), they should have to learn a lot more about Swedenbefore they were allowed entry, one young woman adds.

In educational contexts, immigrants are referred to as an asset, especiallythe historical immigrants – without them Sweden would not be Sweden. Butit is the present refugees, with their seemingly incomprehensible ways, thatencroach on the well-being of this Sweden. Ideologically, the teacher stayswithin moral and legal bounds by speaking about equality and fairness whichare meant to include Swedes and refugees alike. As I see it, by referring to thekey concept of fairness in connection with equality, she indirectly makes herstudents sense that she is really against the immigration of ‘all these foreign-ers’ without saying as much. Given her formal position, she legitimizes con-tinued hostility toward foreigners.

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The Ambiguity of Solidarity

On February 21st 1992, the anti-racist manifestations were scheduled allaround Sweden. However, in Gruvbo the immigration bureau had not man-aged to arrange anything, and of the three bureau women only Rita partici-pated, although she did not stay long. The event was arranged by the Salva-tion Army and the first half of the manifestation took place in their chapel.Later it moved over to the municipal hall, losing half of the participants onthe way. Lena, the Swedish language teacher, felt that it was embarrassingthat the Salvation Army and not the school, the immigration bureau or themunicipality had arranged the manifestation. She took it as a sign of incom-petence and lack of good will on the part of ‘official Gruvbo’ and she mutteredabout her dislike of the ‘naïve piousness’ that the Soldiers put on display.

At first there were very few persons present in the old sparsely decoratedwooden building with its rows of narrow, uncomfortable wooden benches.Those present all sat in the back and to the sides, the middle section wasempty. All the participants were from Komvux, some of the teachers, the prin-cipal and some of their immigrant pupils, but far from all of those residing inGruvbo. After a while more people arrived, mainly students from various Kom-vux classes, commanded there by the school. None of the women from thesocial service course attended and neither did their teacher. Three well-known‘tough guys’ seated themselves in the front row. The most provocative andtroublesome of the three was a young man who subsequently was asked byone of the presiding Soldiers which country he came from. The Soldier waspretending he did not know that the boy was Swedish. ‘Good for him!’ theschool principal commented afterwards, ‘he got a taste of his own medicine.’

One of the female Soldiers stood up front and spoke to us. ‘In the face ofGod, all humans have the same value. It is in communion with God that wecan help and support each other. Through Jesus we can together erase allevil [alluding to hostility against foreigners].’ And she sang with a high-pitchedvibrato, her plump face shining. Thereafter the male Soldier stood up andcalled out: ‘jag älskar alla invandrare! (I love all immigrants!) They come hereand help us, taking the jobs we Swedes don’t want! Tack! (Thank you!)’ There-after he wanted to know from which countries people came. ‘Iran? Anyonefrom Iran?’ No answer. Somalia? Silence. Africa? Finally, Emanuel said hecame from Eritrea. Someone in the back said Kurdistan, another Syria. ‘Youare all welcome here!’ the Soldier called out. ‘We all have the same God, evenif we have different religions, even if you are Mohammedans! We all wanderthe same path,’ he continued. After more singing and declarations of good

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will we were all to stand up and hold hands. Even the tough guys stood thereup front holding hands. No one refused. Thereafter the school principal tookthe stand and thanked everyone, saying how glad she was that so many hadcome and she really wanted to second what the Soldier had said, ‘we all reallydo have the same path to wander.’ When the ceremony was over we marchedover to the municipal hall, but by then only the teachers and the ‘foreigners’were left. All others had disappeared.

Once we had gathered in the small conference room, the Komvux principalagain stood up saying how pleased she was that so many had come, that it isvery important that we all care. The only Swedes present by then were theteachers and myself, the rest were immigrants/refugees. She then introducedLars, the local politician, with whom we were there to discuss and ask ques-tions. He started by telling us about his own background as an immigrantfrom Finland. He came to Sweden in the 1950s as a young child. ‘Sure, I lookSwedish, but I am an immigrant’. His message is, however, that ‘inside we areall alike’ – we can look different, speak different languages, but behind allthat we are the same. He told us that his workmates at the plant could becomequite perplexed when he suddenly would remind them that he is an immi-grant when they start making immigrant hostile remarks. ‘This hostility showslack of knowledge, and we transmit that to our children. Children are not ofthemselves prejudiced about immigrants or that which is different,’ he declared.Instead, he felt that, ‘the difficult economic situation in the country breedsfear, which is turned against that which is different and unknown.’ The dis-cussion turned into more small-group chats while we were being served coffeeand pastries. To end it all the principal wanted us to sing a song, ‘The morewe are together, together, together, the merrier we’ll be’. She wrote the Swed-ish words on the blackboard and dutifully, albeit haltingly, we all sang.

To avert and explain ‘racism and hostility’, the Soldier, the principal andthe politician from the anti-racist manifestation constructed their specific cul-tural messages respectively about God, the economy, knowledge, and humannature. From their varying vantage points, and with good intentions, theystrained themselves to convince the immigrants that they stand on their side,that they are neither hostile nor racist. The overarching ideological claim isthat we are all the same, that inside or behind what we perceive as differentdwells the real (undifferentiated) person. This is a very complex statement inits simplistic guise as it is made in a social context where difference is theissue. What is inside and outside? How does outside relate to inside, where isthe boundary? In effect, the claim of sameness denies the meaning and value

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of difference, for in the end there should be none. This points to an aspect ofgenerally uttered Swedish notions of equality and individualism which tendto transform cultural difference into a lack or an anomaly, which was whatthe Minister was doing (see above).

As these interactions highlight, well-meaning is ambiguous and even thebest intentions may misfire and reveal naïvety in relation to power and domi-nance or even hide hostility. By uncritically endorsing ideological ‘truths’,the performance of these good intentions in locally public contexts as withthe Minister’s attempt at enlightening the people may rather nourish con-tinued hostility than contribute to its cessation.

Gender and Consumption as Idioms of ExclusionIn facing and constructing difference, which was what concerned many

Gruvbo residents, antagonism is cloaked in various cultural idioms, of whichgender and sexuality are common, consumption is another. On many occasionsI met Sanna and her friends who attended the Komvux school and I spentmany hours in class with them. These women gave voice to racializing notionsand emotions that can recur in varying forms in other social contexts whererefugees and immigrants are the topic of conversation. The notions are enmesh-ed in their own local experiences and ideas about class and gender, belongingand exclusion. Relations with men, marriage and ways of consuming standforth as the main tropes for how they conceive of belonging and difference.

For example, Sanna, who had been one of the young blonde women ap-pearing in the local newspaper protesting against the refugee camp, does nothave anything against the refugees who are already living in Gruvbo, she says,except maybe the Iranians, ‘those men who harass women’ (like herself andher friends).7

Like many others, Sanna is mostly concerned with the men and she andsome of her Komvux classmates talk about ‘all these men hanging around’outside their houses or in the town square. She sometimes visits a friend inthe neighboring town. The friend lives in a housing area with many immi-grants/refugees. ‘There they just stand around and call out to you, makingobscene gestures, even when their women are around!’ Which is accordingto her a blatant sign of the oppression of their women. She just ‘can’t standthat’, she exclaims. This is perhaps one of the most common views aboutimmigrant men and the gender relations of immigrants, vaguely implying Mus-lims and Arabs, namely that the women are suppressed and treated demean-ingly. Sweden hails gender equality and people will sometimes express them-

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selves very contemptuously about others’ gender relations, as if indignantthat they do not adhere to the same kind of gender relations ‘we’ do. In thisvein, it is especially the plight of (young) immigrant (Muslim) women thathas concerned Swedes recently, in particular through the murder of two youngwomen by their close male kin, what soon came to be labeled ‘honor murders’.These events have been used in media debates to highlight issues of ‘culturedifference’ underscoring and essentializing the otherness of certain categor-ies of immigrants.8

Other people in Gruvbo had less to say about gender but a lot to say abouthow the refugees consumed, what food and furniture they bought, and whatclothes they wore. Ways of shopping, dressing, preparing food, and decoratinghomes and other spaces have social and cultural meanings that often are hiddenfrom the outside observer. Between Gruvbo residents and the refugees therewas a mutual lack of comprehension in relation to their respective habits orpatterns of consumption and material presentations of self and home.

Immigrants and refugees were not familiar with various Swedish distinc-tions between inside and outside. They applied their own distinctions. Forthe local Gruvbo residents, the home is of central value and the interest inhome decoration and especially the arrangement of curtains is a favoritepreoccupation of the women. The window presents a controlled and beauti-fied view of the family to the outside gaze; curtains are hardly ever drawn to-gether and they are regularly changed in relation to season and to fashiontrends (cf. Rosendahl 1985). To the unknowing outsider, the boundary betweeninside and outside may seem surprisingly permeable, especially consideringthe wariness in contacts with outsiders/strangers. However, the point is to seethe window, the arrangement, glimpse the life inside but not really look be-yond this transparent barrier. For the Gruvbo residents, it was strange to seethe way some curtains of the refugee families just hung drabbly or were gath-ered in a knot. The refugees (in this case the women) were giving Gruvbo animpression of disorder, a disregard for the home. The Immigration Bureaurents and furnishes apartments for all refugees, alloting a certain amount ofspace, furnishing, and daily spending-money per person. Calculations areapproximated to a Swedish minimum existence standard. However, whenthe refugees who had residence permits could afford it, found bargain pricesor had contacts they often bought a complete living-room set, with leathersofas and dark wooden coffee tables and matching bookcase. Among theSwedish residents this elegance was then instead considered too extravagant,even in bad taste.

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The purchase of food was another issue that sometimes gave rise to avoid-ance and critical glances in the shops and at times disparaging gossip amongthe locals. The refugees usually bought large quantities of vegetables, sugar,flour, oil and so on, especially when there were bargain prices. But in orderto maintain their food preferences and their codes of hospitality where foodoften plays an important part, the local stores did not suffice and their priceswere too high. Soon, most refugees could benefit from contacts with kin oracquaintances living in other parts of Sweden or from already establishednetworks of material transactions, networks of immigrants living in variousparts of Sweden. For their part, Gruvbo residents only saw the great amountsthe refugees put in their shopping carts and sometimes reacted as if the re-fugees were hoarding food at their expense.

Clothes and manner of dressing were also significant in establishing dis-tinctions of difference and belonging (cf. Norman 1997). In general, Gruvbowomen and men dress very casually in slacks, jeans, T-shirts, shirts, and soon. Except for old women, women rarely use skirts and dresses, and littlemake-up. Cosmetics are more for teenagers. People seldom, if ever, dress upin a more festive or formal way, although when going out to dance halls,which is very popular among all adult age groups, they will take a greaterinterest in how they dress. The refugees, especially the women, usually madea clearer distinction between dress at home and outside. They gave Gruvbopeople the impression of being too dressed up. The clothes and heavy make-up used by some refugee women looked to the Swedes more like party dress,or just ‘cheap’. For the refugees, all known boundaries and symbolizations ofbelonging lost their relevance in this new social space which for some of themseemed to increase a sense of loneliness and estrangement.

Equality and Exclusion: Some Concluding RemarksWhat people look for in political discourse relates to their own life expe-

riences. They use memories, implicitly and explicitly, as rationalizations andmotivations and as points of reference when they relate to policy issues andthe discourse on immigrants and refugees. Ideas and attitudes people adhereto about others are often indistinct, inconsistent, contradictory and situationalas ideas usually tend to be. Such ideas may turn into non-negotiable truthswhen people are confronted with and subordinated to the non-negotiabilityof political decisions.

The establishment of the refugee camp changed local residents’ percep-tion of Gruvbo as place and home. Certain themes – of place, dirt, consumption,

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theft, gender — kept recurring when people were grappling with conflicts ofbelonging and trying to explain what was wrong. But Gruvbo residents didnot necessarily see their own or others’ ideas or acts in terms of racism oreven as hostility. Local Gruvbo people were angry and disturbed by ‘all theserefugees’ in their midst, a state of affairs no one had wanted, they said, ex-cept the politicians. Anger and discomfort were voiced in local idioms of ex-clusion and with reference to personal life experiences.

Local and government politicians, and other persons in influential posi-tions (teachers, for example) never found convincing means to deal with thehostilities. They saw the problem as one of prejudice, which is often thoughtof as possible to overcome through more information (about what is neverquite clear, cf. Lööw 1995; Sander 1995), and appeals to solidarity. In a Gov-ernment report, it is, for example, stated that ‘the grounds for hostility towardforeigners/strangers are: lack of knowledge, fear of the unknown, lack of soli-darity, etc.’ (sou 1989/13:31). Fear is linked to lack of knowledge and eveneconomic difficulties and unemployment are taken to explain fear of the un-known, as the local politician, Lars, told us at the anti-racism manifestation.However, the linkage is never clarified and placed under scrutiny. We areexpected to accept such psychological reductionisms at face value and neverquestion the grounds on which they rest.

In addition, a commonly heard explanation for hostility and all kinds ofpractical problems and conflicts and even violence, was that the refugees weretoo many and that they arrived all at once. Such statements are seldom, ifever, qualified or countered, but rather constantly repeated and accepted, inGruvbo, as all over Sweden. Also among some researchers it is assumed thatto a small local population, the number of refugees and their sudden arrival‘amounts to something of a culture shock on both sides’ (Björgo 1993:34).Everyone, politicians, bureaucrats, friends and neighbors, are expected to ac-cept such assumptions without question but there are no real clues for deter-mining where the limit goes. Some years earlier, in the late 1980s, refugeeswho had received residence permits came to live in Gruvbo; all in all theywere never more than 100–150 persons living there. But this much smallernumber of persons also had some difficult times in Gruvbo. Already in 1930–40 ‘[T]he attitude [in Sweden] toward immigrants was often negative in spiteof – or due to – the fact that they were so very few’ (Broberg & Tydén 1996:96).Amounts or numbers are observable and conveniently taken as an appropriateexplanation for that which moves in other, less visible political and subjec-tive dimensions.

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To be the same, which refers to every human being, is a message Gruvbopersons with political and bureaucratic positions recurringly present to therefugees – which contradicts assumptions about ‘fear of the unknown’ — where-as the local Swedish residents are preoccupied not with sameness so muchas difference. The refugees are different, too different and they transgress theboundaries of Gruvbo place and home, which become polluted. Local Gruv-bo people also embrace the ideology of equality as a statement about basichuman value, but in practice they experience the workings of inequality anddifferences in terms of class, political power and local belonging. They aregenerally critical of local and national politicians and the lack of influencethe ordinary person has over political decision-making. Such critique has im-plicit or explicit reference to class differences (‘politicians decide what theyplease, but they don’t live here, we do’). It is the ‘ordinary’ residents of Gruvbowho must confront and cope with this difference which underscores theirown difference, that is, their own lesser equality, as it were. To them the issueof fairness has more to say than equality, and it is also fairness that can beappealed to in order to justify a less ‘generous’ refugee policy, as the teacherin the Komvux class did.

Equality is a central precept in Swedish legislation and political rhetoricas well as in Swedish cultural notions about being a person and about ‘society’,and Swedes may be tempted to think of Sweden as the most equal of all nation-states (Rabo 1997). Fairness and solidarity are closely linked to the conceptionof equality. The social good should be fairly distributed through the solidaryworkings of the state and its citizens. But social reality does not so readilyconform to such ideals, the social good is not evenly, or fairly, distributed be-tween different categories of persons, and social and political practices makesolidarity into a contested issue. Yet there must exist differences if ideas aboutindividual uniqueness, and subjectivity, which people also adhere to, are tohave any ideological and experiential validity. However, not all differences areculturally and politically accepted and egalitarianism can in practice becomea demand for sameness, setting up quite impenetrable boundaries of inclusionand exclusion (cf. Dumont 1986; Herzfeld 1992; Kapferer 1988). Given suchcontradictions, real and imagined social and cultural differences can be trans-formed into anomalies which bear the potentials of personal or political threat.Those who are classified as different enough to ‘make a difference’ can be-come dirt and encroach on that which is perceived as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’.

When the refugees entered the world of Gruvbo, they took up a place ina world of contradictions and conflicts, reminding local Gruvbo people that

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belonging and equality are scarce resources. Such revelations may well pro-voke hostility — which is then displaced upon the messenger, that is, the refugeesand their difference, rather than on the source of social and political inequality.That the refugees were too many is then no surprise. Under such circum-stances, almost any number could be ‘too many’.

In much Swedish debate, as among local Gruvbo people, hostility towardstrangers/foreigners and racism tend to have similar meanings, used inter-changeably, but many people will feel disinclined to use the more severe con-cept ‘racism’. Contemporary hostility and racializing expressions in Swedenare in practice mainly directed toward immigrants and refugees — or thosewho ‘look (or sound) like immigrants’ and it is difficult to separate the twoissues of racism and immigration, politically and analytically. The hostilitiesand processes of exclusion in Gruvbo, and even the specific attempts at in-clusion at the anti-racist manifestation, for example, did take on racializingforms. Ethnicity, culture, and refugeeness came to resemble irreversible (natu-ral) traits, setting groups of people off from others and placing them in a sub-ordinate position. From that point of view, these varying expressions couldbe conceptualized as racism even if they were not based on a racist ideologyand even if they were unintentional or simply well-meaning. Admittedly, usingthe term racism does create other kinds of dichotomies of exclusion and other-ing, of a ‘we’ (who are not racist) and ‘they’ (who are), but referring to formsof racism (such as ‘cultural racism’) highlights the common and more sin-ister tendencies to reify and naturalize cultural differences and subordinatesocial positions.

AcknowledgmentsI wish to thank Marianne Gullestad and Peter Hervik for their valuable comments.Also many thanks for helpful comments from colleagues in Stockholm, MonaRosendahl, Annika Rabo, Mark Graham, Eva Poluha, and Johan Norman. Thanksalso to the anonymous reviewers and the Ethnos editors for their perceptivecomments.

Notes 1. In English, the comparable term is xenophobia, to my mind a misnomer. A

phobia is a medicalizing term, used to describe fearful displacement-avoidance.The avoidance in relation to refugees and immigrants is not based on fear, althoughfear is often used as a kind of explanation of antagonism assuming that strangersand foreigners ‘naturally’ evoke fear. ‘Xenohostility’ would be more to the point,denoting contact, conflict and forms of exclusion.

2. Gruvbo has more disreputable forerunners in the small town of Sjöbo in southernSweden. Together with another community, Klippan, in the same region, Sjöbobecame almost synonymous with hostility toward immigrants and ‘racism’. In

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the late 1980s, a year before the government launched a more restrictive asylumpolicy, Sjöbo politicians actively refused the establishment of a refugee recep-tion center after a local referendum to that effect which was actively supportedby leading politicians in Sjöbo (Fryklund & Peterson 1989). Some years later, inthe town of Klippan, a young West African refugee was murdered by a group ofexplicitly racist youth (Wigerfelt 2001).

3. This is an especially sore issue in relation to persons brought as infants fromvarious non-European countries for Swedish adoption. They are Swedish butcan end up being conceived of as not only having ‘foreign’ physical appearancebut also as representatives of a ‘foreign culture’ of which they themselves haveno experience.

4. Those years, the government was constituted by a coalition of non-socialist par-ties. However, when it came to issues of refugee and immigrant policy and itspolitical rhetoric this did not differ from the Social Democrats in any significantways.

5. However, it is not certain why the Kosovo Albanians, in particular, were thosemost often accused of thefts. They were never accepted as ‘real’ refugees, that is,in a political sense, and to Swedes the Bosnians were the victims, not the KosovoAlbanians. They were at the time defined by the government as economic refugeeswhich justified their expulsion. However, other groups of asylum-seekers werealso defined in such terms. The occurrence of accusations and suspiciousnessmay also have been reinforced by a more general view of Albanians as morebackward and primitive than others in Europe, except ‘Gypsies’.

6. bss was often seen scrawled with anti-immigrant, racist grafitti. bss is an organi-zation which first made its public appearance in 1980 (Lööw 1995).

7. Iranian refugees had earlier been one of the largest groups of refugees and manyhad been sent to municipalities in central Sweden where Gruvbo lies. ‘Iranian’ isthen here used as a general antagonistic label, instead of the previously moreoften heard ‘damn Turk’. In a brief newspaper article, a Swedish-Iranian anthropol-ogist scrutinizes the social position of being a ‘Middle Eastern male’ in Swedentoday and also poignantly compares how much less desirable his ‘Middle Easternperson’ is in Swedish homes than the coveted carpets from his own home re-gion in Iran (Khosravi 2003).

8. In these contexts some Scandinavian anthropologists have also made varyingcontributions in or about the media on the position of immigrants, nationalism,and the meanings and political uses of culture and gender (e.g. Gullestad 2002b;Kurkiala 2002; Talle 2003; Wikan 2002).

ReferencesÅlund, Aleksandra & Carl-Ulrik Schierup. 1991. Paradoxes of Multiculturalism: Essays

on Swedish Society. Aldershot: Avebury.Banton, Michael. 1988. Racial Consciousness. London/New York: Longman.Bengts, Marie, Uli Bruno & Silvia Nilson-Puccio. 2003. What Makes the Swedes so

Swedish? KnowWare Publications.Björgo, Tore. 1993. Terrorist Violence Against Immigrants and Refugees in Scandinavia:

Patterns and Motives. In Racist Violence in Europe, edited by Tore Björgo & RobWitte. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Equality and exclusion: 'Racism' in a Swedish town

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