Flerkulturella identifikationer i ett svensk-uganda-indiskt sammanhang

Sammanfattning: Global integration and international migration has led to an increased ethnic and cultural diversity in contemporary societies, one consequence being that social identities are changing in these new multicultural settings. This is particularly evident for people who have been brought up with two or more ethnic and/or cultural contexts. What can we learn from their experiences concerning new ways of understanding social identities in multicultural societies?This qualitative study explores the meanings of, and ways of relating to, ethnic and cultural identity categories among young people brought up in Sweden, whose parents migrated to Sweden as a result of the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 young Hindus and Muslims, both men and women. The data were analyzed and interpreted through a hermeneutical approach.The analysis of meaningful social categorizations in the young peoples’ accounts of themselves and their everyday lives showed that identity categories like “Indian”, “Swedish” and “Swedish-Indian” can refer to many different connotations depending on time and place. The participants define themselves in terms of various forms of pluricultural identifications, which reveal an active social identity work, where on the one hand they experience a continuously changing integration of different, sometimes opposing, self identifications, and on the other hand have to negotiate their self definitions with family and the wider society, where cultural contexts sometimes must be kept separate. These pluricultural identifications appear to be positive social identities and show a strong sense of subjective integration in the Swedish society.