Preceding chapters have traced the transformation and re-negotiation of cultural, symbolic and economic capital in the processes of migration and settlement. Particular cultural practices are emphasised to maintain a sense of ethnic honour or to consolidate cultural and economic capital – similar strategies are employed by the autochthonous members of immigrant-receiving societies. Indeed, they are an integral part of what I have called ‘the politics of culture’ in all societies. But they are not always conscious strategies; they often arise from beliefs that have dropped below the level of consciousness and become taken-for-granted, apparently ‘natural’. (It is not irrelevant that migrants are ‘naturalised’ rather than ‘nationalised’.) Moreover, those beliefs and practices that have the status of boundary markers (especially language and religion, but also other attributes of ethnic honour) can have immense emotional and motivational power, as well as the capacity to mobilise resistance against discrimination, racism and more subtle forms of negative identification. We have also seen instances of both positive and negative aspects of shared ethnicities.

Analyses based on static notions about the maintenance of traditions or the separation of sets of relations labelled ethnic – or gender or class or religious or linguistic – cannot convey the constant interweaving of processes of transformation and cross-referencing in heterogeneous societies.