Sociale boulimia en ‘de Marokkaan van hier’: de invloed van insluiting en uitsluiting op sociale identiteit en thuisgevoel van ‘Marokkanen’ in Nederland

In the last four decades, Dutch society is attempting to include Moroccan immigrants and their descendants both socio-economically and socio-culturally. Yet, from the nineties onwards, these ‘Moroccan Dutch’ have also been experiencing social exclusion and stigmatization through public discourse and social interactions in their daily lives. This article studies the influence of these two contradictory societal processes – that are called social bulimia – on the social identity of Moroccan Dutch men and their feeling at home in the Netherlands, through an analysis of qualitative interviews with Moroccan Dutch men. This analysis reveals that social bulimia firstly, leads to uncertainty about their Dutch social identity and their feeling at home, for which they use several coping strategies. And secondly, to the construction of the social type of ‘the Moroccan from here’, who identifies himself with Dutchmen and Moroccans, yet disidentifies with ‘autochthonous’ Dutch and Moroccans living outside the Netherlands. These findings show that the Dutch societal desire for socio-cultural and socio-economic integration of ‘Moroccans’ into Dutch society and the associated inclusionary processes are largely disrupted and/or neutralized by the simultaneous exclusionary processes that Moroccan Dutch experience in the Netherlands.