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Everyday autochthony. An ethnography of culturalization in the Netherlands

[T]he world of human kind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes. (Eric Wolf)

[B]efore familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its unconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be, it will now be labelled as something unusual. (Bertolt Brecht)

I am a social anthropologist interested in populism and the politics of belonging in post-Fordist Europe. I am currently writing my dissertation, based on ethnographic field work in Amsterdam New West, focusing on the culturalization of citizenship and the construction of 'autochthony' in the Netherlands. The study takes an ethnographic and relational approach and takes into account the intersections of cultural, class and urban politics, and struggles power, entitlement and representation. This project is part of a NWO-funded research on the 'Culturalization of Citizenship', in which sociologists and anthropologists cooperate.

Another focus of my work has been the emergence of sexual nationalism in Europe, concentrating on the entanglements of 'homonormative' representations of gay rights politics with Dutch neonationalist populism and anti-Islam discourses. In 2010, I published a co-authored article 'Sexual politics, Orientalism and multicultural citizenship in the Netherlands' in Sociology 44(5). In January 2011, I co-organized an international conference at the University of Amsterdam, on Sexual Nationalisms: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in the New Europe.

Interests include: ethnography, neoliberalism / post-Fordism in Europe, nationalism and sexuality; populism and the radical right; heritage and the politics of place; architecture; time.

Forthcoming:
(2012) 'Gewone mensen. Populisme en het discours van verdringing in Amsterdam Nieuw West'. Sociologie.

(With Justus Uitermark and Jan Willem Duyvendak). ‘Progressive politics of exclusion. The populist framing of Islam in the Netherlands’. (Under review)

Link to articles:


(2010) 'Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands'. Sociology 44 (5). October 2010.

(2012) 'Populisme en het discours van verdringing in Amsterdam Nieuw West'. Sociologie (8) 1. May 2012