ABSTRACT
The narratives of immigration, told by six Algerian males who have married British women and settled legally in Britain, may help to make intelligible some of the links between ethnicity, individuals and cultural pluralism. The term ‘ethnicity’ denotes, here, a more elastic concept than the sharing - whether imagined or real - of some common blood. In social theory ethnicity is a changeable status which, like class-consciousness, may or may not be voiced in particular contexts. Use of the term ‘ethnic identity’ marks a slippage between personal histories and histories of race, nations and cultures. It is these boundaries between the individual and the collective that will be examined in exploring this broad question: how do Algerian men become immigrants in Britain?
