Convivencia, myte eller virkelighet? : erfaringer av Melilla som flerkulturelt sted

My fieldwork was conducted in the spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa, where I spent eight and half months between July 2000 and August 2001. The focus is on the relation and discrepancy between an official discourse emphasizing social harmony between four different religious groups ( Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindues), what I call "the discourse of convivencia", and the social relationships as experienced by Melillas muslims. Taking a different approach to discourse than Michel Focaults focus on its exteriority, interpreting discourse to match Roland Barthes concept of "myth", I primarily relate discourse to the motives of the producers, the catholic middle class. The message of convivencia ( "coexistence", "cohabitation" in harmony) is first of all presented to people living outside Melilla: It is used instrumentally to attract tourists, to get funds from the EU, to attract investors, and clean up Melillas bad reputation in Spain and abroad. The great majority of both my Catholic and Muslim informants are negative to the content of the discourse, experiencing it does not reflect how relations really are. Many factors work against the content being accepted. First of all Melilla went through a social upheaval in 1985, what I call a "social schism". This year muslims stood up for civil rights in the face of a new law of immigration threatening to expell most of them to Morocco, at the same time as most catholics demonstrated in favour of the law. This layer of "social memory" is still active, influencing relationships between the groups negatively on both sides. Apart from that I also show how muslims today are discriminated institutionally and are cognitively excluded by catholics. The celebration of Melilla as a "Spanish" city in public events, the conception of "Muslim" as defined in opposition to "Spanish", and the essentializing content of the official discourse parting groups strictly according to religion, all work together to exclude muslims and present them as "the Others". The last part of my work relate to how the exclusion experienced by Muslims gives birth to different kinds of resistance against the catholics, albeit the resistance is far from monolittic, like it was in 1985. The Muslims are fragmented into different groups with conflicting interests, concerned about different forms of discrimination, and are applying different discourses of resistance. ( The thesis is written in norwegian)