Page - 144 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

144 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings Language is as often essential as religion or occupation for outlining a diaspora. You mentioned how craftsmen were settling in proximity of one another, eventually resulting in ethnically and professio- nally specialising suburbs. What prompted the emergence of such clusters? This differentiation is linked to chain migration where people follow relatives, friends and neighbours into the place that the first people had migrated: You need to know somebody to start with. And you may practise the same occupation as the person in whose house you live and whom you knew in your village back home. And so you get these clusters. In the eighteenth century in Paris many chimney-sweepers came from Savoy, they simply took over that occupa- tion. In London, to day car-washing is very often done by people form Eastern Europe. We have a flat in London where it is Albanians who have the local car-wash. It is very explicable; it may create a problem, in the sense that because they live together the newcomers are more visible. And that disturbs the older inhabitants more than if they came one by one and were more scat- tered over the city. But for the migrants this is a strategy of defence and survival, you feel safer if the street is occupied by people from your home country speaking your language. More than two hundred and fifty first languages are spoken by children in London schools now. Recently, an Arab friend said, “You [Europeans] have already had your religion wars, we [Muslims] need another 300 years in order to arrive in your cultural position”. Is this a debatable everyday understanding of “history”, or is it a legitimate comparison of assumedly asynchronous series of events? The hostility between Sunni and Shia goes back quite a long way. But there are interesting ana- logies with the Protestant reformation of the 16th century and the Muslim reformation today, analogies which a number of scholars have pointed out. Especially the role of new media which allow the participation of ordinary people in religious debate. In protestant Europe it was the new printing press. And today in the Muslim world it is the video of lectures or sermons. Because people can play the video at home and then they are discussing, they are not simply fol- lowing what the Imam says, but they are discussing themselves who is a good Muslim and who is not. But I don’t want to link that change to the violence because I think that the history of the violence is much older – though much more acute now – than your friend was suggesting. Muslims were fighting Muslims in the past for religious reasons. If you are thinking of the Syrians, it is necessary to give them a few years. Because you don’t know months after you arrive what kind of life you are going to have, but in ten years’ time maybe. Whilst history humbly explores concrete cases, the grand universalistic human rights’ discourse seems to have re-gained momentum. Is this more than compensatory wishful thinking? It is a big problem, because there are these two traditions of thinking which were very well ana- lysed by Karl Mannheim14 who talked about the French tradition of universalism culminating 14 Karl Mannheim. Ideology and utopia. An introduction to the sociology of knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan 1952 (1936))