Ordinary Icons

Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe

Bibliographic Data

ID7568420
AuthorsAnouk De Koning (0000-0001-8177-534X, Department of Anthropology and Development Studies Radboud University Nijmegen The Netherlands, corresponding author), Anick Vollebergh (0000-0002-1835-7847, Department of Anthropology and Development Studies Radboud University Nijmegen The Netherlands, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume121
Issue2
Pages390-402
Publication date2019-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13207
PMID31217624
OpenAlexW2921542734
LanguageEN
Citations received24
References cited45

Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of ordinary iconic figures as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents’ sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [ urban anthropology, political anthropology, racialization, iconic figures, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Europe

Aesthetics · Art · Body politic · Ethnography · Everyday life · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Race (biology · Racialization · Sociology · White (mutation · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Public Spaces through Art

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Open DOISci-HubOpen Access