ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to show that Bosnians integrated into Austrian society by understanding their socio-economic position in Austria as a very particular form of transnationalist in-between-ness. A majority of Bosnians were able to develop behavioral strategies, professional trajectories and identity orientations that set them apart from other segments of Austria’s immigrant population. These
patterns and configurations, although they are frequently conflated, can be best analyzed in ideal-typical transnational actors’ models, symbolizing a variety of states of transnationalism. An ideal type is a common mental construct in the social sciences derived from observable reality although not conforming to it in detail because of deliberate simplification and exaggeration. it is not ideal in the sense that it is exceptional, nor is it an average; it is, rather, a constructed ideal used to approximate reality by selecting and accentuating certain elements. The concept was developed by the German sociologist Max Weber, who used it as an analytic tool for his historical and sociological work. For the purpose of describing immigrant ideal types in the current Austrian society, i have developed the following models: (a.) the translocal traditionalist-living “local to local” in Austria and his/her particular region of origin. Transnational structures and technology are mostly used to connect these two locations. Only one single community exists within what Roger Rouse (1991:13-14) calls a “transnational migrant circuit” because it “effectively evokes the circulation of people, money, goods, and information, the pseudo-institutional nature of the arrangement (over purely individual ties), and the qualified importance of place (over purely social linkages)” (Grillo 2007: 207). Few additional locations are relevant. However, the translocal traditionalist is concerned with maintaining the group’s traditions and customs, its language, religion and way of life. (b.) the transitional hybrid, whose life trajectory is situated between societies. The transitional hybrid is currently in a limbo between possible trajectories but might in the future turn into either a translocal traditionalist, an ethnic urbanite or a cosmopolitan. (c.) The ethnic urbanite holds on to his/her mostly regional, ethnic roots but can no longer escape the pull of the host community, and has developed language and other cultural capital that led to his/her relative integration in the host society. (d.) The cosmopolitan transcends the host community’s integration and has become a global hybrid. ideal types in the Weberian sense, these constructs apply to the rich guestworker tradition in Austria. For the purpose of this essay, these four ideal types signify immigrants and refugees who arrived in Austria in three distinct flows; the guest worker migration from (a) Yugoslavia and (b) Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s and (c) the Bosnian war expellees in the 1990s. To be sure, the ideal types described here do not exist in their pure forms, rather a large amount of hybridization of identity has been taken place resulting in various forms of multirootedness and in-between-ness.
