ABSTRACT
This article discusses specific ethnographic examples of the migrant experience in West Germany. In doing so it attempts to locate identity and situate ethnicity in the specific context of the culture of migrants. The ethnographic setting described here spans several countries and centuries. Most immediately, the focus is on the contemporary situation of labor migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany. This context will be shown to set in motion the emergence of separate identities which, previous to the migration, were either unexpressed or differently valorized. Of the many possible instances of identity negotiation and revalorization within this migration, I discuss a number of examples illustrative of differing populations; I deal with minority populations already defined as such before the migration — such as Kurds and the Muslim Alevi minority – as well as emergent identities specifically as a result of the migration, such as the category of Almancilar (see below). 1 In addition, on a more general level, the interactions of German to non-German or Turk, and of Turk to Greek is brought into the analysis.
