This book explores the interrelation between diversity in migrants´ internal relations and their experience of inequality in local and global contexts. Taking the case of Hamburg-based Iranians, it traces evaluation processes in ties between professionals - artists and entrepreneurs - since the 1930s, examining migrants´ potential to act upon hierarchical structures. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival work, the book centers on differentiation, combining a diversity study with a focus on locality, with a transnational migration study, analysing strategies of capital creation and anthropological value theory.
The analysis of migrants´ agency tackles questions of independence and cooperation in kinship, associations, transnational entrepreneurship and cultural events within the context of the position of Germany and Iran in the global politico-economic landscape. This material will be of interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, migration, urbanism and Iranian studies, as well as Iranian-Germans and those interested in the entanglement of global and local power relations.
