| dc.description.abstract | Palermo is adored by many because of her colours, her scents, the food, and the people. The beating heart of Palermo are her markets: Ballarò, market of the people. Its streets are filled by a colourful assembly of stalls, lined with fresh fish, fruits, vegetables and even household items. Quite recently however, lots of refugees and immigrants have found their residency in and around the neighbourhood of Ballarò, and work and shop alongside the local Palermitans. Ballarò is now more than ever a commingling of cultures. It is in this dynamic place that we can see global processes of movement, mixing, dis- and re-embedding ground, and hence forms the ethnographic setting of this thesis. Specifically, this thesis focuses on the construction of local identity in the context of increasing diversity, caused by the accelerated arrival of refugees and immigrants . During my ten weeks of anthropological fieldwork I was able to unravel how global forces ground on the specific locality of the Palermitan streetmarket of Ballarò, and what this means for the construction of identity and the understanding of difference. These often complicated and at times even contradictory realities will be presented in the empirical chapters, linked to concepts from both anthropological theory of globalization and identity, and postcolonial theory of difference. From this intersection, this thesis will show that the mechanisms employed by Palermitan marketvendors to construct their local identity and make sense of difference are imbued with economic and political power relations of (in)equality. | |
