Accommodating Places: a migrant ethnography of two cities (Hong Kong and Sydney).

Abstract

This ethnography is based on fieldwork in two very different cities, Hong Kong and Sydney. It traces the movements of subjects from Hong Kong through the analysis of differing modes of inhabiting urban space. The texture of lived spaces provides an analytic focus for examining a highly mobile migrant group. This ethnography explores the mesh of objective structures and migrant subjectivities in a mobile field of migrant ‘place’. A basic assumption of this study is that people from Hong Kong have acquired a common array of dispositions attuned to living in a specific environment. Hong Kong’s dense and challenging urban space embodies aspects of the singular historical ‘production of space’ underpinning a colonial entrepôt that has expanded into a major global economic node. The conditions of lived space are examined through an historical analysis of urban space in Hong Kong and an ethnographic analysis of spatial practices and dispositions. The sprawling spaces of suburban Sydney clearly differ sharply from that of Hong Kong. Interview accounts of settling in Sydney are used to investigate the ‘gap’ in spatial dispositions. Settling entails both practical accommodations to new and unfamiliar localities and an interweaving of cultural and ideological elements into the expanded everyday of migrant subjectivity. Language and speech are integral to spatial practices and provide means of referencing and evaluating ongoing social relations and trajectories. The ‘discourse space’ of interview accounts of settlement in Sydney and movements back to Hong Kong are closely examined, yielding an array of perceptions and representations of different, and contested styles of urban life. All the senses are brought into play in accounts of densities and absences in people’s everyday worlds. At the same time this thesis provides a perspective from which to interrogate contemporary interpretations of ‘transnational’ migration, suggesting the need for an analysis grounded in a specific economy of capacities and dispositions to appropriate social and symbolic goods.