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Name change anddestigmatization among MiddleEastern immigrants in SwedenMoa BursellPublished online: 25 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Moa Bursell (2012) Name change and destigmatization amongMiddle Eastern immigrants in Sweden, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35:3, 471-487, DOI:10.1080/01419870.2011.589522

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Name change and destigmatization among

Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden

Moa Bursell

(First submission June 2010; First published July 2011)

AbstractResearch has shown that individuals in Sweden with foreign-soundingsurnames who take on more Swedish-sounding or neutral surnames havea positive earnings progression compared to individuals who keep theirforeign-sounding names. This article explores the strategies underlyingthese surname changes. I draw on forty-five interviews from a populationof individuals with Middle Eastern backgrounds who changed surnamesduring the 1990s. Drawing on stigma and destigmatization theory, I arguethat immigrant name change, a strategy typically associated with culturalassimilation, is a destigmatization strategy aiming for pragmatic assim-ilation. Through passing (as either Swedish or non-Middle Eastern),immigrants may keep the benefits of maintaining ethnic identity in theirprivate life and the benefits of more easy public interactions outside theethnic group. This study also illustrates how the institutional enabling ofname change both creates and enables pragmatic assimilation.

Keywords: Stigma; immigrants; pragmatic assimilation; name change; ethnic

discrimination; Sweden.

Introduction

When Tarik Hasan received a notification from his local post office inHarryda, a small community east of Gothenburg in Sweden, that hehad a package to pick up, he got an unpleasant surprise. A post officeemployee had typed ‘Blatte’ (a term generally used in a degradingmanner about dark-featured individuals) on the address line next tohis surname. Shocked by the incident, he reported it to theOmbudsman against Discrimination (a government agency), whichfiled a lawsuit against the post office. Interviewed by a dailynewspaper, Hasan said that he could forget the incident if the person

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 3 March 2012 pp. 471�487

# 2012 Taylor & FrancisISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlinehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.589522

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who insulted him apologized. Lacking any apology, he hoped that thelawsuit would prevent similar things happening to other people.Executives at the post office announced that they deeply regrettedthe incident and that they had taken steps to prevent similar incidentsfrom occurring in the future (Stahl 2009).

This incident can be analysed by drawing on research emerging fromthe growing field of research that focuses on ordinary people’s varyingresponses to racism, stigma and discrimination in everyday life (asopposed to the responses of the intellectual elite or social movementactivists) (Essed 1991; Feagin 1991; Lamont, Morning and Mooney2002; Lamont and Fleming 2005; and the contributions of this specialissue). Most studies within this tradition focus on individual-levelresponses that challenge racism and stigma by emphasizing ethnic orracial identity or by contesting the meanings of the stereotypesassociated with ethnic or racial group membership. The present studyadds to this field by investigating immigrant name change, a strategymostly associated with cultural assimilation, from a ‘responsesto racism’ perspective drawing on stigma (Goffman 1963) anddestigmatization theory (Lamont 2009).

I approach this issue by building on Arai and Skogman-Thoursie(2009). They compared the annual income of immigrants who changedtheir Asian, African or Slavic surname to a more Swedish-sounding or‘neutral’ surname in the 1990s with immigrants with similar char-acteristics who had not changed their surname. They found morepositive earnings progressions for the name changers and argued thatthe name change must be a response to discrimination. However, theresults triggered new questions about what happens at the individuallevel. How can name changes result in earnings increases? Are ethnicboundaries weak and negotiable, enabling assimilation? Stated differ-ently, are the name changes successful passing strategies? I approachthese questions by drawing on interviews with a subset of MiddleEastern individuals from the same data set used in Arai and Skogman-Thoursie’s study. Linking their macro-level findings with an analysis ofindividual-level accounts of name changes, I probe the motives forname change and ask how the interviewees perceived reactions to thisstep. I argue that immigrant name change, a strategy typicallyassociated with cultural assimilation, may be better understood as adestigmatization strategy characterized as pragmatic assimilation. Therespondents changed their names to achieve social recognition (i.e. tobe recognized by others as equal human beings), as well as to avoiddiscrimination in the labour market. Through passing (as eitherSwedish or non-Middle Eastern), immigrants retained the benefits oftheir original ethnic identity in their private life while acquiring thebenefits of easier public interactions outside the ethnic group.

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Signalling attachment to the Swedish culture is also perceived to resultin assimilation rewards.

This study also illustrates the role of institutional enabling in theframing of destigmatization strategies. More specifically, it shows howthe legal context of name change both elicits and structures immigrantname change.

The finding that name change is a case of pragmatic transformationresonates with Todd’s (2005) discussion on the privatization andadaptation of collective identity in response to in-group change insocial status. It also extends this discussion to the case of immigrantincorporation and displays how institutional enabling plays a key rolein the shaping of destigmatization strategies. It speaks to theimmigrant incorporation literature, which deals with the variousways in which immigrants incorporate into a new society (e.g. Conzen1991; Portes and Zhou 1993; Alba and Nee 1997; Modood 2005). Italso resonates with studies of stigmatized minorities in other nationalcontexts where assimilation strategies do not always work or are eveninconceivable because of the rigid and impermeable nature of ethnicboundaries (cf. the case of Muslim citizens in Israel analysed byMizrachi and Herzog 2011).

I begin with a brief socio-historical account of the Middle Easternimmigrant group in Sweden. Next, I outline the theoretical frame-work. This section is followed by an account of the name-changingprocess and methodology. Thereafter, I present the findings and reflectupon them in the concluding discussion.

Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden

Like several other countries in Europe, Sweden has gone fromexperiencing a small to a large flow of immigrants in a relativelyshort period of time. In 1940, only 1 per cent of Sweden’s populationwas foreign born. The Swedish economy was booming during thepost-war decades and thousands of European migrants came toSweden to work. When the economic expansion slowed down in the1970s, labour migration was cut off but Sweden continued to have acomparatively generous refugee policy. From the 1970s to the present,refugee and family migration from South America, the Middle Eastand Africa dominated the immigration flow. Today, 14 per cent ofSweden’s 9.3 million inhabitants are foreign born and approximately280,000 originate from the Middle East.

Sweden has had a multicultural integration policy since 1975, withthe explicit goal to ensure that the foreign-born population has thesame access to welfare and opportunities as natives but withoutrequiring cultural assimilation (Soininen 1999). Nevertheless, researchshows that this goal has not been successfully realized for all ethnic

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groups. As far as labour market equality is concerned, non-Westernimmigrants are unemployed to a much higher extent than natives andWestern immigrants (Martinsson 2002) and they lag behind inearnings even after having lived twenty years in the country (le Grandand Szulkin 2002).

During the 1990s � the decade upon which I focus in this study �Sweden suffered from a deep economic recession, particularly duringthe period 1991 to 1994. Immigrants were among those who sufferedthe most, with an unemployment rate peaking at 17 per cent in 1996,compared to 8 per cent for the native population. A large share of theimmigrants who came to Sweden during the 1990s was of MiddleEastern descent; the group was at the centre of attention whenimmigrant policies were discussed and became the primary target foranti-immigrant attitudes.1 In a survey conducted in 1990 by the SOM-Institute at Gothenburg University, 65 per cent of the Swedishpopulation expressed negative attitudes towards Islam, and 75 percent were of the opinion that immigration from Muslim countries toSweden ought to decrease (Hvitfelt 1991). A populist party, NewDemocracy, made its way into the Swedish Parliament between 1991and 1994, calling for stricter policies on immigration and restrictionson immigrants’ access to welfare.

To understand how this socio-historical context, and the negativeattitudes toward the Middle East in particular, might have influencedindividual decisions to change a surname, I now turn to the content ofthese attitudes and discuss Swedishness and stereotypes about theMiddle East.

Swedishness and the Middle East

Swedish history is marked by an absence of frequent historicalencounters with Muslims and the Middle East. Stereotypes of theMiddle East are thus heavily influenced by stereotypes originating inother Western countries that had colonies in the Middle East (see Said1978). In Berg’s (1998) ethnographical study of Orientalism in Swedishpopular culture, people from the Middle East are defined in sharpcontrast to the ideal type of the Western man. Muslim men areportrayed as violent and Muslim women are seen as oppressed anddependent. In a study of Swedish TV news reports during the period1992 to 1995, Hvitfelt (1998) found that violence was highly over-represented in news related to Islam.

Several of the negative stereotypes found in the media correspondedwith attitudes found in the Swedish population. The SOM survey of1990 revealed that a large majority of the Swedish populationperceived Islam as threatening and unwilling to embrace values

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associated with ‘Swedishness’, such as democracy and gender equality(Hvitfelt 1991).

But what does Swedishness refer to? Weber (1968 [1922]) arguedearly that the nature of ethnicity is vague and ungraspable. In Swedishsocial science and public discourse, ethnicity is generally treated as adichotomous category, operationalized on the basis of either region ofbirth (native � immigrant), origin and kinship (native born to nativeparents � immigrants and their children), or citizenship. In everydayspeech, Swedishness also refers to the (erroneous) idea of a peopleidentified by phenotypical features (blond hair and blue eyes) withparticular ‘racial’ characteristics. Another frequent criterion is culture,where embracing a certain set of values demarcates what it means tobe Swedish (Mattson 2001).

Immigrant incorporation

The theoretical approaches to immigrant incorporation that have beenmost concerned with the micro level are the segmented assimilationand multicultural approaches. The former suggests that externalfactors combined with group characteristics result in different patternsof economic assimilation for different immigrant groups (Portes andZhou 1993). While not denying the importance of these factors inimmigrant incorporation, the multicultural approach focuses on howethnic minorities that are not absorbed into the majority cultureinteract with the host society to reshape and reinvent ethnic identity.Part of this literature has also studied how ethnic minorities work tomaintain group boundaries, adjust their ethnic culture and transformthe host society (cf. Conzen 1991; Modood 2005). I discuss immigrantname change (a strategy traditionally associated with culturalassimilation) in relation to these theories of immigrant incorporation,particularly with respect to Todd’s (2005) discussion of differentmodes of collective identity transformations as responses to socio-political change. Todd has suggested that individuals or ethnic groupsmight privatize ethnic identity or pragmatically adapt to a new socialorder out of necessity, without changing the core elements of collectiveidentity. I extend this discussion to the case of immigrant incorpora-tion and pragmatic assimilation in a social context where institutionsare not undergoing radical social change but where institutionalenabling plays a key role in the shaping of destigmatization strategies.More specifically, I analyse a case where the government puts in placeinstitutional tools that facilitate pragmatic assimilations.

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Stigma and destigmatization strategies

In the present study, I draw on Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma andon Lamont’s (2009) work on destigmatization strategies (see alsoLamont and Mizrachi 2011) in my understanding of the respondents’accounts of the name changes. Goffman treats ‘stigma’ as an attributethat is ascribed negative meanings in certain contexts and thatassociates the individuals possessing the attribute with moral infer-iority. Carrying a stigma damages or ‘spoils’ the social identity of thestigmatized individual. Members of stigmatized ethnic or racial groupsmay be less vulnerable to internalizing stigma if the in-group providesa competing definition rejecting the negative stereotypes ascribed to itscollective identity. Nevertheless, when individuals perceive stigmatiza-tion, negative emotions such as feeling underestimated, distrusted orfeared by others are likely to arise. Goffman also showed howindividuals with stigmatized social identities take on the responsibilityof managing social interaction to prevent discomfort in others. Onesuch strategy is passing � i.e. disguising the stigmatized attribute by,for instance, name change.

While Goffman discussed various kinds of stigma, Lamont (2009)has theorized on ethnic and racial stigmas explicitly in her work ondestigmatization strategies. Destigmatization strategies refer to themicro-level responses that are employed either to cope with stigma ineveryday life (e.g. hiding a stigmatized ethnic identity through a namechange, ignoring a racist incident, etc.) or to challenge stigma, eitherby rebutting negative stereotypes or by transforming group bound-aries. Lamont also emphasized that destigmatization strategies areboth enabled and constrained by the availability of strategic tools inthe specific cultural and structural context. In this study, I illustratethe role of institutions in responses to stigma by analysing the role thatthe state agency, which regulates surname changes, has had in theinterviewees’ name-changing processes.

The Swedish Name Act

Name change in Sweden is regulated by the Swedish Name Act (SNA),in which family names are protected in a way similar to the protectionof trademarks.2 There are two ways to change your surname inSweden: through marriage (which is administered by the tax authority)or by applying for a name change through the Swedish Patent andRegistration Office (SPRO). The SNA allows people to change theirsurname to one that has been in the family for at least two generationswithin the last 100 years, or to a new surname. However, even the mostcommon surnames, such as ‘Andersson’, carried by many thousands ofSwedes, are unavailable to name changers. Because immigrants usually

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do not have a Swedish surname in their family, they are forced to applyfor a new surname to a greater extent than native Swedish namechangers. Changers have to resort to made-up names that are either oftheir own making or computer generated.3 As a result, these namesmay often be recognized as atypical names, which run the risk of beingmarkers of difference even though the intention is to blend in. Thename change legislation thus makes assimilation more difficult bypreventing the adoption of traditional Swedish surnames.

Simultaneously, there is an assimilation intent underlying the SNA,expressed in the criterion demanding that new names be linguisticallycompatible with the Swedish language, and that the meaning of thenames has to be acceptable in Swedish. Whether the names meet thesecriteria is determined by the SPRO. The SPRO provides guidance onnew names through a software program on its website that randomlycomputes unique names by arranging components of existing Swedishsurnames into new combinations.4 Before the internet era, the SPROprovided a similar service through a name catalogue. In sum, theSPRO is a striking example of institutional enabling of a destigmatiza-tion strategy. The SPRO encouraged this strategy by enabling namechange in the first place. Simultaneously, the rules for how this ‘game’of assimilation is played are strict and are determined by the SPROthrough legislation.

Methodology

Interviewees were identified through contact information from Araiand Skogman-Thoursie’s project (I will refer to these data as the totalpopulation of name changers). Their data contained the addresses of198 Middle Eastern name changers aged twenty-one to fifty-nine yearswho adopted a new surname during the period 1991�2000 that wasidentified as Swedish or neutral sounding.5 All of these individualswere contacted by mail and phone and were invited to participate.Forty-five of the seventy-eight individuals we reached agreed toparticipate in the study and were interviewed over the telephone.

The interviewers (the author and an assistant) have Swedish-sounding names. We believe that this did not have a negative effecton the responses. Research in the USA suggests that intervieweesadjust their answers to perceived expectations linked to the inter-viewer’s race (Anderson, Silver and Abrahamson 1988). The issueinvestigated in this study is the name change, not the existence ofethnic discrimination. If anything, it is possible that the risk of biasedanswers would be higher if interviewers had Middle Eastern-soundingnames since the respondents may be concerned to be perceived asbetraying the in-group.

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The anonymous interviews had a combined structured and semi-structured design and lasted for approximately forty-five minutes.6 Iensured anonymity by giving each respondent a fictitious MiddleEastern name and, to use in this paper in describing responses, Icreated alias Swedish-sounding names using the SPRO website. Theinterview consisted of asking respondents to discuss their motives forchanging their name, what their thoughts had been on what kind ofnew name to take on, and their perception of the reactions of otherpeople towards the new name. These accounts have helped meestablish whether respondents use name change as a destigmatizationstrategy and what impact their name change has had on jobopportunities and other aspects of their lives. The interviews weretranscribed in detail and analysed using the software programATLAS.ti.

Biographical background on the respondents

As is often the case in social science research, women and individualswith a university education are overrepresented. Among the respon-dents, there were 44 per cent women, 56 per cent men, and 49 per centwith a university education. This should be compared to the 34 percent women, 66 per cent men and 21 per cent with a universityeducation in the total population of name changers.7 On all otheravailable characteristics represented in the data, the respondentsresemble the total population of name changers � for instance, mostlive close to larger cities in the southern part of Sweden and the agedistributions are similar. I compared the motives briefly described inthe original applications to the SPRO by the total population of namechangers and the interviewees and did not find any substantialdiscrepancies. Thus, the greater representation of women and uni-versity-educated respondents among the interviewees does not intro-duce significant biases. Note that there were also no significantdifferences between the motives that the respondents stated in theiroriginal applications compared to their responses in my interviewsconducted in spring 2008.

The respondents originated from countries that were represented byfairly large immigrant groups in Sweden: Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon,Afghanistan, Syria and Bangladesh. There were also a small numberof women with European backgrounds who had adopted a MiddleEastern name through marriage, and one respondent had one nativeSwedish parent. Most of the respondents lived with a partner and hadtwo children on average. A majority of the respondents (twenty-eight)were employed, only two were unemployed, but a substantial number(eleven) were on sick leave. Two respondents were retired and one wasstudying.

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Motives for name change

The respondents often gave several motives for the name change.Thirty-three of the forty-five respondents changed name because theyfrequently experienced situations in which they felt stigmatized ordiscriminated against. They hoped that the name change would givethem greater social recognition.8 Twenty-five respondents mentionedspelling and pronunciation as problematic. Ten Assyrian and Kurdishrespondents had been forced to adopt Arabic or Turkish names whileresiding in Turkey or Iraq. They changed to Assyrian or Kurdishnames to strengthen their ethnic identities, which were contested intheir native lands.9,10 Family conflicts came up in nine of theinterviews. Because the focus of the present study is to show howname change is a destigmatization strategy in Sweden, I will focus onthe thirty-three accounts related to stigma and discrimination.

Stigma and name change as a destigmatization strategy

As the sociologist Ferguson (2009, p. 82) notes regarding the strongidentification between names and identity: ‘We are readily insulted byour name being mispronounced or misspelled. . ..’ When individualsalso perceive an ethnic stigma, such feelings are likely to be amplified.

Mahsa Nasabi had lived in Sweden for eleven years when she madethe decision to change her Iranian first and last name to MikaelaStornell. Today, she is forty-six years old and runs her own business ina small community on the Swedish west coast. In the followingaccount, she describes how ‘Swedes’ used spelling and pronunciationdifficulties with her original name as a tool to stigmatize her:

I had very negative reactions, humiliating, when I had to write myname and all that. It was their way of oppressing immigrants, tohumiliate. My name was not difficult to spell and if they wanted meto spell it they could have asked me in another, nicer, way. Therewere simply unpleasant reactions to my original name.

Stigmatizing incidents were linked by the respondents to the lowerworth ascribed to individuals of Middle Eastern descent.11 Sixty-fourper cent also referred their decision to the desire to be recognized as anequal human being. For instance, when asked about the most positiveeffect of the name change, Eva Brickforsen, formerly Esrin Baba, anassistant nurse from Turkey, explained: ‘People treat me like a humanbeing!’ Nils Rexhamre, formerly Nemir Rashid, a computer engineerfrom Iraq, responded to the same question with: ‘I was nothing before.Now I am somebody.’ This finding suggests that there are culturaloutcomes (e.g. social recognition, cultural inclusion) at stake in

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addition to increased earnings (the focus of Arai and Skogman-Thoursie’s study).

The finding that social recognition is achieved through passing mayto some appear as counterintuitive; in the ‘politics of passing’literature, recognition of difference implies a refusal to pass (Johnson2002). Although ethnic ‘difference’ is clearly not recognized throughpassing, ethnic identity is not all that a person is. Recognition as ahuman being has had value for the interviewees even at the price ofunder-communicating their ethnic heritage. Omitting to defend ethnicidentity is not necessarily a sign of assimilation; it may just as well be asign of a strategy resembling privatization of collective identity or(pragmatic) adaptation as described by Todd (2005).

Fifty-eight per cent of the respondents mentioned labour marketdiscrimination as a motive for name change. Several were unemployedat the time of the name change. Others had experienced or wereworried about job discrimination. Bilingual Abdul Haddad, forty-twoyears of age, was born in Lebanon to a Swedish mother and aLebanese father. He moved permanently to Sweden at the age ofseventeen with his parents to one of Stockholm’s wealthiest areas. Bythe time he changed his name to Carl-Johan Ragnedal, he hadgraduated from university and had been unemployed for more than ayear. Summing up the situation for many of the respondents, heexplained:

It [the name] was an obstacle in my career. Like I said, I applied for150 jobs and was only invited to one interview. After I changed myname, I applied for eleven jobs, was invited to six interviews and gotthree job offers. . . . I became a financial analyst right away. Doorsopened up.

The name changes are thus not expressions of a wish to culturallyassimilate, but to achieve recognition and equal access to Swedishsociety’s structure of opportunity.

Passing as Swedish or non-Middle Eastern

Practically all the respondents who changed their surnames because ofstigma and discrimination referred to name change as a ‘passing’strategy � i.e. as a way to disguise their Middle Eastern background inselected contexts. To disguise a Middle Eastern background, asurname change must generally be accompanied by a first namechange. Sixty per cent of the respondents also changed their first name(access to the established first name is not restricted). Of the 40 percent who did not, some already had names that ‘blend’ into the

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Swedish first name tradition. Kazi Rahman, a fifty-three-year-old busdriver from Bangladesh, changed his name to Casper Rosevik:

I got a new job soon after and I believe that the new name helped. Ithink that I would have been unemployed much longer if I had keptthe old name. When I sent my application to the position as a busdriver, I had pretty much just sent them my name and telephonenumber, but they still called me right back and I got the job. I thinkthat maybe the employer wanted a Swede. The kids are fluent inSwedish and many people think that it’s a Swede who they’remeeting if they have only spoken [to them] on the phone. It happensto me too.

In fact, the interviews confirm that as members of a ‘visible minority’,the occasions when the respondents could pass as Swedish werelimited to telephone conversations and email correspondence � crucialmoments of gate-keeping in our increasingly technological societies.However, the respondents also perceived assimilation rewards forsignalling attachment to the ‘Swedish culture’ through their newnames. Casper Rosevik continues: ‘. . . I get a more positive responsefrom authorities. In interaction with new people, it’s easier to makecontact now. People are not scared like they were with my previousname.’ This finding resonates with Modood’s (2005) writings oncultural racism against people from the Middle East, which suggestthat Muslim culture is perceived as a threat to Western democracy.Signals of assimilation thus weaken the otherwise strong and rigidethnic boundaries drawn towards the Middle East.

Another, slightly different and more successful strategy in terms ofpassing, was to choose a name that the respondents consider to be‘neutral’, ‘international’ or ‘European’ (non-Swedish). Maria Samener(formerly Sayyed), a Polish-born assistant nurse married to a manfrom Afghanistan, explained that the motive is still to be ‘bettertreated by Swedes’. However, the strategy is somewhat different, asSimon Gerdener clarified:

I wanted to have a more European name that was hard to definewhere it came from. I wanted to blend in more, be more adjusted tothe culture so I thought that I could change origin . . . I would notpersonally like to change to Andersson [wife’s surname], it would bea little bit too much. I want to blend in, but I want a name that youdon’t really know where it’s from.

As Goffman (1963) noted, stigmatized individuals are typicallydefined by their stigmatized attribute; hence, one way of managingstigma is to direct attention away from the stigmatized attribute. By

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taking on a name that is not easily linked to a specific region orculture, the respondents can pass without continually being defined interms of their stigmatized ethnic identity. These respondents hesitateto take on names that signal Swedishness, either because they cannotrelate to such an identity or because they think that such a passingstrategy would fail. A neutral name provides anonymity that a nameassociated with a specific region would not. Other respondents chosenames that resembled the names of another, non-stigmatized, ethnicgroup. For instance, the respondents recognized that they could passas southern Europeans due to their phenotypical characteristics andforeign accent (apparent in most of the interviews). Research confirmsthat southern Europeans incorporate well into the Swedish labourmarket (le Grand and Szulkin 2002). Thus, these respondents did nothide being foreign, but did try to disguise their Middle Eastern

background.

The institutional enabling of passing

Just like other destigmatization strategies, name change in Sweden isrestricted by institutional settings � in this case, the SPRO. Goodlanguage skills are important in coming up with a new name thatsounds genuine. Small, subtle linguistic divergence from the traditionalsurname structure can make a name sound fictitious to native-bornSwedes.12 In addition, the process of choosing a new name isconstrained by institutional intervention. The SPRO intervened inthirty-four of the forty-five cases studied here, by rejecting nameapplications or by requiring a different spelling of the suggested name(primarily because the name was judged too similar to an alreadyexisting surname). Eight of the respondents picked their name fromthe lists of Swedish-sounding surnames provided by the SPRO.However, being computer generated, these lists do not always resultin a genuine-sounding name. This is noted by Casper Rosevik whochanged his name at the age of forty after having lived in Sweden fortwenty years. When all of his own surname suggestions were rejected,he chose a name from the SPRO’s list. He is happy with the name but‘[a] lot of people can tell that it’s a changed name. Some people withliterary skills say that it’s poetic. Many people say that it’s beautiful.’This finding illustrates Lamont’s (2009) point about the importanceof cultural and institutional context for the understanding ofdestigmatization strategies and their outcomes. In this case, it is thelegal context that both enables and restricts the outcomes of a creativeplay with social identity as a response to stigmatization.

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Pragmatic assimilation

Name change might initially appear to be a symptom of internalized‘spoiled identity’ (Goffman 1963), resulting in a wish to culturallyassimilate. However, as already mentioned, the interviewees appearedto make a pragmatic use of their new name. All except for one of theinterviewees have what I have interpreted as a pragmatic approach tosocial incorporation, which involves a desire to ‘pass’ in specificsituations when they interact with majority group members. Thus, theywant to have the benefits of maintaining ethnic identity in private life(which seems to primarily include in-group members or other foreignborn) and the benefits of more public interactions outside ethnicgroups:

My friends from the Middle East still call me Mohammed. Iwouldn’t want them to call me anything else. The purpose iscamouflage, that I am more assimilated in the eyes of the Swedes.So the name change is directed towards the Swedish segment [ofthe community]. But I haven’t changed my personality. (SimonGerdener)

The notion of pragmatic assimilation resonates with Todd’s (2005)discussion of collective categories and different modes of collectiveidentity transformation, where both privatization and adaptation referto the necessity to adapt to the practices required in a new social orderwithout changing the core elements of a person’s identity. Manyrespondents in fact referred to the name change as a necessity. LilyFolklunden (formerly Lily Amirzadeh), a forty-seven-year-old phy-siotherapist, recalled her friends’ opinion about her name change:‘They thought I should stand up for who I am. But that doesn’t putfood on the table. You have to conform to what the society approvesof, unfortunately.’

Adaptation or privatization and the pragmatic assimilation depictedhere differ on two dimensions. The first difference concerns the role ofchange in the triggering of strategies. While change in in-group socialstatus is the starting point of Todd’s discussion of collective identitytransformation, change has not played a key role in triggering thestrategy of pragmatic assimilation. Most of the respondents had livedin Sweden for several years before the name change and had thus notexperienced a recent change in social status, nor had they experienceda radical change in the distribution of societal resources. Pragmaticassimilation is a strategy to combat a stigma that the respondents hadstruggled with for a long time. Second, and perhaps more importantly,unlike Todd, the analysis points to the role of institutions instructuring destigmatization strategies, as is the case when a

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governmental agency puts in place a legal mechanism that makes itpossible for individuals to change their names, with certain constraintsthat prevent full assimilation with the majority population.

Conclusion

In Invitation to Sociology, Berger (1963 p. 148) wrote metaphoricallythat ‘[s]ociety gives us names to shield us from nothingness’. Becauseof the perceived intimate link between names and identity, it is oftenassumed that abandonment of ethnically stigmatized names is anattempt to deal with stigma, or to assimilate. This article developsour understanding of this process by adding a new dimension to thelatter � i.e. by arguing that immigrant name changes to Swedish namesis a case of pragmatic assimilation that combines ethnic identitymaintenance in private life and assimilation in public settings. Itfacilitates interaction with the majority group in such settings orprovides approbation for signalling attachment to Swedish culture orwillingness to ‘fit in’. Contrary to what has been in focus in previousliterature (Arai and Skogman-Thoursie 2009), interviewees seek notonly economic mobility, but also recognition as an equal human being.Finally, the study has also highlighted the role of institutional enablingin responses to stigma and discrimination, where the SPRO enabledand set the rules for name change as a response to stigma.

How do I account for name change as a destigmatization strategy?Although I have shown that name change is a coping strategy meantto manage stigma in everyday life, destigmatization strategies can alsobe framed as responses that challenge stigma (e.g. the case of TarikHasan in the introduction above). Intentionally or unintentionally,name changers challenge the meanings attached to being ‘Swedish’and ‘Middle Eastern’ and weaken ‘us and them’ distinctions. If nameslose their ethnic connotation, what it means to go by a Swedish nameis bound to change (cf. Inness 1997).

The study of pragmatic name change also speaks to the immigrantincorporation literature and to the literature on collective identitytransformation. By considering institutional enabling, it extendsTodd’s (2005) discussion of strategies of privatization or adaptationwhere collective identity is preserved but downplayed by consideringhow institutions facilitate this strategy. A topic for future researchcould be to further explore the ways in which institutions cancompensate for social inequality and promote destigmatization. Theconcept of pragmatic assimilation also expands the discussion ofcollective identity transformation by relating it to immigrant incor-poration and responses to stigma in settings were the social order is byand large stable � settings far more common than those of radicalsociopolitical change.

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I have suggested that pragmatic assimilation enables the mainte-nance of ethnic identity in private life. But are there substantialdifferences that concern ethnic identity between individuals whoemploy pragmatic assimilation strategies as compared to those whodo not? Future research should explore this issue further. For instance,do these groups differ in terms of level of integration into local ethniccommunities, a process that involves attachment to ‘imagined com-munities’ (Anderson 1983) and homeland culture?

Future research should also focus on the impact of name changerson symbolic and social boundaries: do they maintain a MiddleEastern identity while making durable changes to social identificationprocesses? Are there differences among the various Middle Easterngroups? Is pragmatic assimilation found only in the first generation?Finally, we should explore the contingent and contextual nature of theinterplay between identity and identification in pragmatic assimilationprocesses.

Acknowledgements

Thanks especially to Mahmood Arai for participating in the initialphase of this project. Thanks to Carl le Grand, Magnus Bygren,Michele Lamont, Nissim Mizrachi, Steve Caton, Barbara Hobson,Jens Rydgren, Hilary Silver, Herrick Chapman, Lambros Roumbanis,Rebecca Lawrence, Karin Hallden, and three anonymous reviewers fortheir valuable comments. I thank Stockholm University LinnaeusCentre for Integration Studies for financial support.

Notes

1. This being said, it should be kept in mind that Sweden has the lowest level of

xenophobia, as measured by the World Value Survey and the European Social Survey

(Cochrane and Nevitte 2009, Finseraas 2009).

2. I have not been able to trace the original intention behind the Name Act.

3. To my knowledge, Sweden and Finland have the strictest law on names in Europe.

Denmark and Norway have similar but more liberal name laws. In other European countries

(France, Germany and Belgium), name change is also regulated, but immigrants are

encouraged to assimilate by adopting national surnames.

4. See the SPRO website: http://wwwm.PRV.se/NAMTWeb/default.jsp

5. The actual number of Middle Eastern name changers is much higher. There is today no

data available on immigrants and first name changes only or surname changes by marriage.

For an account of how the data on changes to new surnames was collected, see Arai and

Skogman-Thoursie (2009).

6. The interview guide can be provided by the author upon request.

7. The total population refers to all of the 641 immigrant name changers in Arai and

Skogman-Thoursie (2009).

8. By ‘social recognition’, I refer to the universal human need to be acknowledged by

others as an autonomous and moral person capable of contributing to the community

(Honneth 1995).

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9. These respondents have been included in the total population of name changers

because the new names they have chosen are more phonetically compatible with the Swedish

language than their original names (Arai and Skogman-Thoursie 2009).

10. Strengthening one’s ethnic identity is also a destigmatization strategy, but these

interviewees have responded to stigmatization in their native lands. Nevertheless, some of

these respondents also mentioned that they had experienced an Arabic stigma in Sweden

with the Arabic name that had been forced upon them. Changing to an Assyrian or Kurdish

name, they also hoped to avoid being associated with the stigmatized Arabic group.

11. Some names within non-stigmatized ethnic groups are also linguistically difficult in the

Swedish context (e.g. Hungarian names). Individuals with such names may change name for

practical reasons. There is, however, little reason to assume that these individuals would

experience these linguistic difficulties in as negative a way as individuals also perceiving an

ethnic stigma.

12. There are few linguistic guidelines in the making of surnames � if you master the

Swedish language you just have a feeling for what sounds good and what sounds awkward.

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