Adelson Castiau Award - Katerina Seraïdari, EURIAS Fellow 2012/2013

La ville, la nation et l’immigré. Rapports entre Grecs et Turcs à Bruxelles.

Katerina Seraïdari, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2012. 

Katerina Seraïdari, EURIAS Fellow 2012/2013, received in 2015 the Adelson Castiau Award (Royal Academy of Belgium) for her book La ville, la nation et l’immigré. Rapports entre Grecs et Turcs à Bruxelles.

Based on extensive fieldwork research and ethnographic data, this book examines the social and commercial relationships between Greeks and Turks in Brussels since the 1950s. The interactions between these groups have been defined by three tendencies: a) affinity (networks of collaboration and practices of solidarity, discourses of fraternity and claim of common characteristics); b) confrontation (discourses of hostility or restraint); and c) indifference (the relationship between Greeks and Turks is not considered as either problematic or preferential). The choice of affinity has often been linked less to convictions (sharing of common values and cultural patterns) than to necessity, both groups being migrants and, thus, subject to multiple difficulties in the host country. From the very beginning, solidarity has been related to the manual and unskilled worker’s condition, the need of maintaining good neighbourly ties and the sharing of the same physical space (Brussels’ popular neighbours). These relations constituted an optimal way of urban appropriation, local rooting and commercial development.