Culture, ethnicity and class among Punjabi Sikh women in 1990s Britain

Abstract

A substantial majority of British Sikh women are, in the 1990s, either born or raised in Britain. This article proposes a more complex conceptualisation of their economic and cultural locations than is conveyed in current literature and by media images, where British Sikh women are frequently represented as ‘working class victims’, forced to struggle with their ‘oppressive cultural systems’. Yet Sikh women actively engage with the British economy and the different occupational niches that they occupy within it exert a strong influence on cultural patterns and consumption styles, examined here through an analysis of marriage and dowry patterns. These are as determined both by ‘ethnic’ values and by class, or rather sub‐class positions. As British citizens, Sikh women's cultural locations are constantly renegotiated and filtered through the same economic, political and media forces that affect white ‘indigenous’ women.

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