Learning to be Lebanese : fashioning an ethnicised habitus in multicultural Australia

Popular and fictional accounts of migration typically highlight the sensuous dimensions of resettlement - the tastes, sights, smells and sounds of a place different to home, and the experience of being different, that mark the movement from a known setting to an unfamiliar one in which the migrant has to once again make themselves 'at home' in a new country. Hout, drawing on the work of Peters, argues that El Hage's The Last Migration, like the novels of EI-Zein, demonstrates the diasporic condition of the necessity of living among strange lands and strange people. Yet rarely have the phenomenological dimensions of the dialectic of difference and adaptation been the subject of sustained empirical and theoretical enquiry. This paper is born of an interest in the ways cultural differences play out in the everyday lives of migrants, their children and the worlds they inhabit. Central to this has been a preoccupation with the nature of difference and belonging, but such questions have largely been approached through the narrow prism of identity politics and representation (TABAR, NOBLE and POYNTING 2010). The migrant foregrounds quite powerfully, however, issues around the embodied nature of difference and belonging; the ways we understand the relationship between one's corporeal capacities, born of a lifetime of socialisation in one world, and the varied environments in which those capacities are brought to bear upon a newer world. This paper will draw on the notion of the habitus to move away from identity-based understandings of migrancy and ethnicity to analyse the embodied transformation of the migrant into an inhabitant of the country of settlement. Bourdieu develops the idea of the habitus to comprehend the system of dispositions we possess - but focuses primarily on the ways social relations and history are internalised and experienced as 'second nature'. He emphasises the 'ontological complicity' of the habitus with the 'field', the social game, in which it is enacted. But what if the habitus doesn't fit? Drawing on Lebanese 1nigrants' experiences of resettlement, this paper will explore the ways that these transformations open up the pedagogical dimensions of migration and belonging: how we learn to be otherwise. It will argue that these transformations entail the inhabiting of a peculiar condition of embodied ambivalence, not just as a diasporic condition of inhabiting contradictory subject positions structured by the binary of mainstream and minority (ABDELHARDY 2011: 45), but as a consciousness of being located within multiple and different differences. It is crucial then that we also move away from the binary of assimilation or diaspora as the dominant form for analysing resettlement. We will characterise this embodied ambivalence as the acquisition of an ‘ethnicised habitus’, because it repositions the migrant as a subordinated member of the field of national belonging according to multiple logics of differentiation.