Daniel Muriel

The management of otherness beyond the state: integration policies and inclusive citizenship as a government paradigm in the Basque Country

If identity and difference in the modern West are questions that fall within the field of government of institutions responsible for the question of citizenship, how is cultural difference to be governed from sub-state institutions, whose powers do not cover these questions? On the basis of fieldwork developed between 2010 and 2012, this text analyses the efforts made in the Basque Country to give shape to the problematic concept of ‘inclusive citizenship’. The construction of this concept involves different planes, from the theoretical-moral plane (where concepts like alterity, race, difference or social exclusion intervene) to the practical-administrative one (where the government of alterity is considered from the perspective of administering social vulnerability). Analysis of this concept helps to confront a paradox: how is the problem of administering cultural difference to be faced when it is exercised from administrative structures that are not those of the central state, which is precisely the empirical correlate of what we think about cultural difference?

El entramado experto en la construcción de identidades en la contemporaneidad

In this article I explore how the expert knowledge participates in the construction of identities in contemporary societies. After alluding to social figures such as the (pre)modern intellectual along with other contemporary actors, I describe the current social context as marked by the political rationalities of advanced liberalism, ethico-politics and the emergence and consolidation of an expert culture. From there, three consequences can be drawn: firstly, the most important knowledge agent in contemporary societies is collective, the network of experts; secondly, those networks of experts have a great capacity to produce transformations thanks to their grade of permeation throughout social fabric; thirdly, the network of experts acts as a social reality production agent similar to a dispositif that answers to a historical matter of urgency – the necessity of constructing meaning in the contemporaneity – but without a particular willing that guides its strategic orientation.

La mediación experta en la construcción del patrimonio cultural como producción contemporánea de «lo nuestro»

En este articulo se presentan los resultados derivados de una investigacion que busca estudiar los procesos expertos que median en la construccion de referentes de sentido colectivo a traves de la produccion y gestion del patrimonio cultural. La investigacion fue llevada a cabo en el ambito de la Comunidad Autonoma del Pais Vasco y se utilizo una metodologia de indole cualitativa (entrevistas personales y trabajo etnografico). El resultado es una cartografia con los principales procesos expertos implicados en la construccion de una relacion entre el patrimonio cultural y la comunidad, grupo o sociedad que lo consideraba como parte de su identidad.

Immigration, Labour and Management of Otherness: Inclusion Policies in a Rural Area of the Basque Country

Debates over immigration, ethnic diversity, inclusion policies and regimes of equality and solidarity are now frequent in European societies. In this article we analyse the representations of alterity in the field of work and the inclusion policies developed in a rural area of the Basque Country as an expression of such debates. International immigration, which began to arrive in the area in the 1990s, has occupied a hegemonic role amongst these representations of the Others and is the object of policies that interpellate it under the paradigm of social inclusion. The ‘normalising’ vocation of these policies and the welfare institutions leads to vulnerability being the form of identifying and grasping those Others. The vulnerability of the Other confronts social policies with an order of differences that generates tensions in the local societys regimes of equality. In the article we discuss the conflict of values the treatment of ethnic diversity faces in relation to social cohesion and the social welfare institutions.