The migration process : capital, gifts, and offerings among British Pakistanis /

A detailed and convincing ethnographic analysis of the economic and social activities that enabled Manchester's large population of Pakistani immigrants to move rapidly into self-employment. It also explains how, in that process, they turned business success into distinctive forms of relationship and cultural meaning. When entrepreneurial immigrant peddlers and market traders became affluent manufacturers and wholesalers, they channeled substantial portions of their capital into ritual gifts, public offerings, and the formation of large social networks and "circles of trust" that recontextualized traditional groupings such as the South Asian biraderi (brotherhood). In doing so, however, the entrepreneurs simultaneously contributed both to the definition of an essentially egalitarian moral community and to the reproduction or reinvention of values of inequality. Throughout the study the processual nature of migration and migrant ethnicity is shown to involve social reconstruction, cultural relativism, communal expansion, consolidation, and internal differentiation. Based on field research carried out between 1975 and 1979, Werbner's study makes a valuable and readable contribution to the comparative literature on gift-economies in "capitalist commoditised" societies. Recommended for all serious collections in anthropology and sociology. -C. Morrison, Michigan State University