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The Everyday, ‘Ordinary’ Citizens, and Ambiguous Governance Affect in Antwerp

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Digesting Difference

Part of the book series: Global Diversities ((GLODIV))

Abstract

In Belgium, the rise of the Flemish populist far-right instigated the creation of an affective governance of neighborly interactions and civic dispositions in pluri-ethnic urban spaces. Taking as an extended case the development of a so-called diversity trajectory in Antwerp, this chapter argues that this governance of samenleven (living together) co-opted the populist notion that everyday neighborhood life of ‘ordinary people’ forms a distinct, authentic realm. This construction of everyday life generates contradictory governmental pushes and pulls—fascination, desire, suspicion, indifference—around different categories of residents and vernacular practices of incorporation, which I describe as an oscillation between Romanticist and Enlightenment affect. As a result, actually existing relations between white working-class and Moroccan-background residents—the residents whom governance actors deemed ‘ordinary’ and viewed as authentically immersed in neighborhood life—were unintelligible to governance actors as ethical practices in their own right and dismissed as deficient living together.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The fieldwork on which this chapter is based took place from 2008 to 2010 and was focused on the ethics and politics of samenleven in two Antwerp neighborhoods. In 2011, the new Flemish-nationalist party New Flemish Alliance won the Antwerp municipal elections after over thirty years of socialist rule. My material does not speak to that significant reversal in political power.

  2. 2.

    This dichotomy is a strong simplification of the anthropological debate on morality and ethics. It also does not do justice to the diversity of European philosophical traditions that have explicitly engaged with the notion of the everyday (see for an overview: Gardiner 2002).

  3. 3.

    I had spoken to both men on several occasions, and they had informed me about the presentation of the reconstruction plans. Upon my request to examine the diversity trajectory as an extended case, I was granted permission to follow the steering team’s meetings and access the project documents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Anick Vollebergh

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  1. Anick Vollebergh
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Correspondence to Anick Vollebergh .

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA

    Kelly McKowen

  2. Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    John Borneman

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Vollebergh, A. (2020). The Everyday, ‘Ordinary’ Citizens, and Ambiguous Governance Affect in Antwerp. In: McKowen, K., Borneman, J. (eds) Digesting Difference . Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49598-5_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49598-5

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