The Ethnography of Imagined Communities: The Cultural Production of Sikh Ethnicity in Britain

Ethnographers for nearly a century have been entering the everyday worlds of immigrants and their children to learn about the process of becoming American. We have studied immigration by "being there," by engaging in ethnographic encounters in the places where immigrants and their children live their everyday lives. Numerous classic ethnographies have been produced, yet studying immigration ethnographically could still be considered paradoxical. For while ethnographers traditionally attend to localized everyday experience, immigrant incorporation involves the interplay of transnational, national, and local processes.