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Italian-Speaking settlers at Daylesford: many of them operated efficient businesses
while continuing to identify in other contexts as peasants; and male inmiigrants often
reacted in ways inconsistent with the women, their gender cross-cutting v^th their
ethnicity to influence their attitudes and behaviour. As Stuart Hall has suggested,
these cross-cutting 'positionalities' are the means through which a person negotiates
his or her life.^
Often, discussion and analysis of such 'positionalities' has privileged national
ethnic identification as the most important or critical 'positionality' through which
other aspects of identity are refracted. However, as E. J. Hobsbawm has conunented,
official ideologies of states and movements are not necessarily accurate guides to what
is in the minds of even 'the most loyal citizens or supporters'.' Even when such
'national' identification exists, it cannot be assumed that it excludes or is even superior
to the other identifications which constitute the social being.
In fact, it is always combined with identifications of another kind, even
when it is felt to be superior to them ... [NJational identification and what
it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of
quite short periods.^
Other aspects of ethnic identity explored in this thesis have been discussed by
Benedict Anderson, who suggests that the phenomenon exists when members of even
the smallest groups have a feeling of community with members they never know, meet
or even hear o£^ In their imagination, he says, they experience a 'deeply felt,
horizontal comradeship'.^" The intensity of this 'imagined' kinship varies between
groups of people according to differing circumstances. Drawing upon the experiences
of Javanese villagers, he says that these people have always believed they are