Anthropology Migration
by
Tilman Lanz
  • LAST REVIEWED: 26 September 2018
  • LAST MODIFIED: 26 October 2023
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0098

Introduction

Migration is the movement of people from one locality to another. Anthropology is invested in studying this phenomenon in its cultural and social dimensions. Anthropological studies of migration can be divided into three categories. First, there are studies that emphasize the aspect of immigration itself. These studies focus on the way immigrants are perceived by the societies into which they enter as well as how they respond to these perceptions. Second, there is a sustained interest by anthropologists in the process of migration itself. Third, anthropologists have also begun to study contexts of migrations, including reactions to immigration by local actors, legal issues, ontological security, the relevance of borders, or migrant long-distance relations. Anthropologists interested in migration have frequently taken recourse to transnational scholarship as well as postcolonial and cultural studies, fields that have developed a rich experiential and conceptual apparatus to characterize migrancy. Anthropologists study migration frequently through a holistic approach, tying together many different aspects of complex migration processes. The majority of anthropological work on migration benefits greatly from disciplinary collaboration with neighboring fields such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, economics, history, political science, international relations, legal studies, sociology, and geography. Historically, the study of human migrations was not a focus in anthropology until well into the 1950s. Until then, anthropology focused largely on the study of small-scale localities, such as villages and face-to-face communities in non-Western contexts. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, anthropology contributed to the study of migration by illuminating the implications of people’s movements from rural, “nondeveloped” areas of the non-Western world to urban, industrialized centers in the West. Important theories in the social sciences, such as world-systems theory, were used to map out large-scale processes that induced migratory patterns like the slave trade across the Atlantic. These approaches focused on how economic and political undercurrents affected individual people, small groups, or whole cultures and civilizations as they were swept up in these forced migratory steams. In the 1990s, cultural and social contexts of migration increasingly took precedence over earlier political and economic ones. This change was induced by two larger undercurrents of research in the social sciences and humanities as a whole. First, the cultural dimension of late modern, industrialized societies came into much larger focus in the social sciences in the wake of the works by Gramsci and, later, Laclau and Mouffe who emphasized the importance of sociocultural aspects in political economy. Second, the rise of postcolonialism contributed to a more complex understanding of migration processes and their effect on people beyond the economic dimension. Anthropologists and cultural critics began to research migration as embedded in global flows, relations to the former homeland, and new homeland contexts. This diversification inspired a variety of interests in studying the relationship between culture and human migrations such as ethnic versus civic identities, negotiations of belonging, long-distance migrant relations, questions of gender, and sociocultural networks of migrants as well as local-migrant relations.

Bibliographies and Overviews

There are three important overviews that link anthropological work with migration, all interdisciplinary in scope. Brettell 2016 offers perhaps the most comprehensive overview of anthropological literature on migration. The essay covers issues such as experiences of migration, migrant social networks, gender and migration, multi-sited ethnographic work on migration, transnationalism, ethnic and civic identities, immigration and citizenship, superdiversity, and epistemologies of inclusion and exclusion as well as multiculturalism. Castles, et al. 2014 discusses a wide range of works, organized by specific topics and with extensive commentary; this work is widely used by students of migration and is now available in its fifth edition. Brettell and Hollifield 2023 focuses more specifically on the role of culture in a discussion of available works in migration research; yet, the volume is likewise geared toward embedding anthropological accounts within the social sciences. A slightly more dated resource, Kearney 1986 is useful to understand the development in anthropological studies on migration up to the mid-1980s, while Reed-Danahay and Brettell 2008 offers a variety of ethnographic studies on migration in Western Europe and North America. Some anthropologically inspired bibliographical works have focused on specific migration cases, such as White 1995 on the migration of Turks to Germany. Foner 2005, a quantitative-cum-qualitative study, shows, from a perspective of immigration, the historical dimension of people coming to New York City. In the context of this work, Foner also provides a very extensive overview and discussion of the literature on immigration from the perspective of many different immigrant groups as they arrived in this location. Foner 2003 more generally introduces readers to anthropological studies of immigration, both contemporary and historical. Rosenblum and Tichenor 2012 is a more general view of international migration, including but not limited to anthropological perspectives. A useful online resource is the Migration Information Source, which provides several subcategories that offer initial information on a variety of themes and regions. It includes a section on each country, a specific focus on immigration to the United States, and a section with general articles about aspects of migration.

  • Brettell, Caroline. 2016. Perspectives on migration theory—anthropology. In International handbook of migration and population distribution. Vol. 6. Edited by Michael J. White, 41–68. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science+Business Media.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-7282-2_4Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive overview of recent works in the anthropology of migration. It links up anthropology’s interest in migration with both conceptual and empirical research of related works in other fields.

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  • Brettell, Caroline, and James Hollifield, eds. 2023. Migration theory: Talking across disciplines. 4th ed. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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    This volume provides a comprehensive and extensive overview of migration theories throughout the social sciences. Now in its fourth edition, it focuses on strengthening interdisciplinary ties in the study of migration with a focus on cultural developments.

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  • Castles, Stephen, Hein de Haas, and Mark Miller. 2014. The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world. 5th ed. New York: Guilford.

    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-36639-8Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This work takes the perspective that migration is foundational to our contemporary age of globalization. A standard work in the study of political, economic, and cultural effects of migration, it includes historical cases and contemporary research on specific migrant groups as well as outlines for possible future developments.

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  • Foner, Nancy. 2005. In a new land: A comparative view of immigration. New York: New York Univ. Press.

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    The value of Foner’s work lies in her erudite discussion of the anthropological literature as well as historical process of immigration to North America in general and New York City specifically. As such, it provides a useful entry point for those interested in immigration.

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  • Foner, Nancy, ed. 2003. American arrivals: Anthropology engages the new immigration. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.

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    This work provides a good overview of contemporary studies of immigration to North America. It also includes a valuable historical dimension to this field.

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  • Kearney, Michael. 1986. From the invisible hand to visible feet: Anthropological studies of migration and development. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:331–361.

    DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.15.100186.001555Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article is one of the first anthropological texts dealing with the general concept of migration. It provides a Marxist perspective, specifically taking up world-systems theory to explain various economic and cultural phenomena that the author associates with migration. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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  • Migration Information Source.

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    This website provides a general starting point for information on any migration-related scientific matter. It furnishes a wealth of information on specific topics related to migration as well as particular areas or locations of migration. The site references both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

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  • Reed-Danahay, Deborah, and Caroline Brettell, eds. 2008. Citizenship, political engagement, and belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

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    This volume provides a variety of case studies on the issue of migration and, specifically, the cultural implications of the arrival of migrants in many different places in the Western world. It specifically deals with the relations between the societies in the new homelands and migrant groups.

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  • Rosenblum, Marc R., and Daniel J. Tichenor, eds. 2012. The Oxford handbook of the politics of international migration. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195337228.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This handbook aims to outline the main currents in contemporary migration research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. As such it provides a valuable entry point for those wanting to quickly gain an understanding of important themes and issues in migration studies in the early twenty-first century.

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  • White, Jenny B. 1995. Turks in Germany: Overview of the literature. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 29.1: 12–15.

    DOI: 10.1017/S002631840003042XSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    A specific overview of the literature on migration of Turks to Germany. An example of bibliographical works on migration focused on a particular location or/and migrant group. Available online by subscription.

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Journals

Anthropological work on migration is published in a number of peer-reviewed/refereed journals. Some of these journals are concerned with specific intradisciplinary concerns while others are distinctly interdisciplinary in character. Among anthropological journals frequently publishing articles on migration are Current Anthropology, a journal sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; Cultural Anthropology, sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology; and American Ethnologist, sponsored by the American Ethnological Society. Interdisciplinary journals publishing specifically on migration include the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, which mainly publishes work situated in Europe; Migration Letters, an international journal dedicated to publishing empirical and theoretical work on migration; and Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化, which aims to bring perspectives on migration and transnationalism together from a variety of different disciplinary and geographical perspectives. International Migration Review is arguably the most prestigious and long-standing journal publishing work on the subject though it is not specifically focused on anthropological research. Ethnic and Racial Studies is another journal publishing research on migration of a general character.

Historical Background

There are a number of works that are useful to understand the historical development in anthropological studies of migration. Watson 1977 is a good example for an early study of the phenomena of migration and culture. Schiffauer 1991 is an example of ethnographic work, which traces individual migrant cases of Turkish migrants from one specific village to various large German cities. In the 1990s, a whole range of different works appeared in anthropology and related fields that implemented the consequences of the postcolonial turn for the study of migration in anthropology. This work was based on the critical assessments in Fanon 1963 and Fanon 1967 of the colonial situation and on Gramsci’s proposal to link up analyses of culture with those of Marxist political economy (see Gramsci 2011). Asad 1995 engages with the impact of colonization in non-Western context, taking as a specific example the British colonial empire. Appadurai 1996 aims to provide a framework for the study of culture in contexts of globalization. Bhabha 1994, in turn, focuses on the relationship between the emergent field of cultural studies, anthropology, and contemporary critical theory as the author develops his version of postcolonial thinking. Soon after the rise of postcolonial theory, the concepts of transnationalism and globalization became of central concern in migration studies. Here, the work of British cultural studies was seminal as it allowed the opening up of the concept of culture to a wider, more general definition, which abandoned the until-then-prevalent distinction between “high” and “low” culture. British cultural studies, for instance Hall 1986, also first established the crucial connection between Marxist universalism and cultural contingency, including cultural aspects of migration. These critical developments in conceptualizing culture allowed a denationalization of the concept of culture and, in turn, made it possible to understand migrant cultures as malleable, changing, and constantly in flux—understandings of migrancy and culture that are indispensable in early-21st-century globalization. For a historical overview of migration, Lucassen, et al. 2010 provides a thorough overview in both European and world historical perspective.

Concepts and Theories

Conceptually, migration has in the past often been understood in a binary manner, as determined by pull and push factors and as embedded in dominant paradigms of modernization theory. In this understanding, it was assumed that migration happens as a rule between two distinct places—a sending and a receiving location. Perceiving of migration in such a dualistic way made sense in a world dominated by nation-states with relatively firm control over their subject populations (i.e., a situation in which nation-states could allow or deny their citizens to move abroad or return). This situation was given in many places of the world throughout the twentieth century. Nation-states were in many cases able to control the international and internal movements of their populations. As a consequence, migration theories in the past often focused on this international dimension of migration, assuming a relatively stable migration process in which subjects would move, for various reasons, from one place to another and where it would be possible to accurately assess their motivation for moving by analyzing the factors that made them leave the sending location (push factors) and what attracted them to move to the receiving location (pull factors). Emblematic of such dualistic theories of migration is Lee 1966. Frequently, such dualistic understandings of migration have been embedded within the larger framework of Marxist ways of thinking, perhaps most frequently within the context of Immanuel Wallerstein’s development of world-systems theory (see Wallerstein 1974). As Castles and Miller 2009 shows, this focus on dualistic metaphors and theories of migration significantly changed in the second half of the twentieth century, as far more complex understandings of migration processes began to emerge. These understandings are discussed in detail under the subheadings Citizenship and Belonging, Transnationalism, Globalization, and Cultural Hybridity. In recent years, the concept of superdiversity has been developed by Vertovec and has fast gained acceptance in migration studies, including anthropology. Vertovec 2023 summarizes the author’s extensive earlier work on the concept and shows how it can accommodate social processes within highly diverse social formations where several layers of diversity are active at the same time, both in bearing on social situations but also on the identities of participants in such superdiverse interactions. This concept has been widely employed for research in migration contexts. Padilla, et al. 2015, for instance, combines the concepts of superdiversity and conviviality (also see Erickson 2011, cited under Locality) to examine how people from vastly different backgrounds organize their daily lives in two Mediterranean cities. The researchers found that, in both cases, superdiversity and the aim to constructively live together were highly compatible.

  • Castles, Stephen, and Mark Miller. 2009. The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world. 4th ed. New York: Guilford.

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    In their introductory chapters, Castles and Miller explain the historical trajectory of migration research, including a section of the importance of pull and push factors in early sociological and anthropological studies of migration. They also emphasize the importance of economics for early studies of migration in the mid-twentieth century.

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  • Lee, Everett S. 1966. A theory of migration. Demography 3.1: 47–57.

    DOI: 10.2307/2060063Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The most widely cited source for migration analysis of push and pull factors. Like most arguments adhering to the push/pull dualism, Lee’s theory is largely based on economic factors. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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  • Padilla, Beatriz, Joana Azevedo, and Antonia Olmos-Alcaraz. 2015. Superdiversity and conviviality: Exploring frameworks for doing ethnography in Southern European intercultural cities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 38.4: 621–635.

    DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2015.980294Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This qualitative study shows, in relation to the example of Lisbon and Granada, how highly diverse urban populations organize and live their lives together. The text argues that superdiversity and conviviality are very much compatible.

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  • Vertovec, Steven. 2023. Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge.

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    In societies that are increasingly characterized by encounters of high linguistic, social, cultural, or ethnic complexities, essential social processes such as identification of others is increasingly important, requiring very different social skills from actors than those of the nation-state-dominated societies of the mid-twentieth century. The concept of superdiversity is both an analytical tool to assess such negotiating processes and, crucially, also a way of approaching the problematic of identification in social setting.

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  • Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The modern world-system: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.

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    World-systems theory, as developed by Wallerstein, has been the specific brand of Marxism that has most influenced early anthropological studies of migration in their focus on economic aspects.

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Migration and the Nation-State

The nation-state as a political formation has always viewed migration, whether internal or international, with suspicion and mistrust, grounded in fears about state stability and challenges to internal coherence. In its fundamental self-understanding, the nation-state is, almost without exception, embedded within ideologies that tie its raison d’être closely to occupying a specific territory or homeland. Based on this identity between the political formation of the nation-state and its territory, national forms of belonging (such as citizenship, access to the nation-state’s resources, etc.) are organized. As works such as Morris 1997, Sassen 2006, and Soysal 1994 point out, international migrants pose a problem to this nation-state ideology and its pragmatic consequences: migrants do not easily fit within a world organized by nation-states because their experiences, practices, and, often, also their loyalties are distributed across different localities (nation-states, regions, cities, towns, villages, etc.). As migration increased in the second half of the twentieth century, its researchers became increasingly aware of these problems and began to develop concepts to both understand and possibly remedy them. A pertinent recent example for how such insights can be processed ethnographically is provided in Ewing 2008, which argues that the image of immigrant Muslim men in Germany is essential to the construction of a German national identity. In a similar vein, Ticktin 2011, a study of humanitarianism’s consequences in France vis-à-vis immigrants, engages with constructions of national identity as benevolent caregivers, aiming to protect the weak. Ticktin 2011 argues that such humanitarian views often have unexpected consequences for both the caregivers and those in their care. Willen 2007 falls into a similar category. This special issue in the journal International Migration focuses on the often-precarious status of migrants and how migrants cope, in individual and collective ways, with the insecurities that come with their status as generic nonnationals.

  • Ewing, Katherine Pratt. 2008. Stolen honor: Stigmatizing Muslim men in Berlin. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1515/9780804779722Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Ewing argues in this volume that, ultimately, not women but men are the victims of discourses about femininity in modern and Islamic contexts. She argues that migrant Muslim men’s positionalities are fixated in discourses about Muslim migrant women so that a national nonmigrant, gendered identity can be maintained.

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  • Morris, Lydia. 1997. Globalization, migration, and the nation-state: The path to a post-national Europe? British Journal of Sociology 48.2: 192–209.

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    This text discusses the implications of the European unification process as a postnational phenomenon for migrants in the European Union. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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  • Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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    An extensive historical assessment of the territory/nation-state dialectic and its consequences for a globalized, postnational world.

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  • Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu. 1994. Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

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    One of the first works raising the issue of rights of immigrants as a fundamental problem for the modern nation-state.

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  • Ticktin, Miriam I. 2011. Casualties of care: Immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

    DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520269040.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    In her ethnographic study of governmentality, Ticktin engages with the question of whom to allow to pass through tightly controlled borders of Western nation-states. She criticizes the French practice of making these decisions on a purportedly humanitarian basis.

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  • Willen, Sarah, ed. 2007. Special issue: Exploring “illegal” and “irregular” migrants’ lived experiences of law and state power. International Migration 45.3.

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    This special volume gives a variety of ethnographic perspectives on the lived realities of migrants as they cope with insecurities about their legal, economic, and political status. It critically engages with many different ways of deploying state power to regulate and administer migrant populations. Available online by subscription.

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Citizenship and Belonging

Questions and modes of belonging have been of central concern in anthropological works on migration since the early 2000s. Arguably initiated in Yasemin Soysal’s discussion of the legal implications of citizenship for migrants (see Soysal 1994), anthropologists have taken an active interest in this topic over time and in various different locations, making clear that citizenship and belonging are as much a legal as they are a sociocultural matter. Balibar 2004 provides a key theoretical text informing the debates on cultural as well as transnational citizenship from a philosophical point of view. Ong 1999, on the flexibility and limits of the concept, is a further key text. Reed-Danahay and Brettell 2008 focuses more specifically on the European context. The debate about citizenship among European anthropologists has been lively, as evidenced by the disagreement between Craith 2004 and Neveu 2005 about the role of citizenship in relation to the nation-state. The importance of citizenship for migrants is derived from their need to belong to a particular nation-state and their need to partake in the affairs of the society in which they live. For migrants this is often problematic as their legal status assigns them to one specific nation-state while their lives happen in another. To account for this, anthropological discussions of migration have frequently revolved around the notion of “cultural citizenship” as evidenced in the texts cited throughout this section. Coll 2010, on Latina immigrants in the United States, is a good ethnographic example for the stakes in citizenship debates. How governments address this issue—that is, how flexible or rigid they will be with regard to granting citizenship as a form of belonging to their migrant populations—is of utmost importance in determining the fate of many Western societies. Questions of citizenship will likely continue to play a major role in anthropological studies of migration. The importance of these issues is documented in Siu 2005, which is crucially located outside the Western domain, investigating citizenship practices among Chinese migrants to Panama. Cağlar 2015 summarizes the debates and contributions in an overview article.

  • Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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    This volume addresses the problematic relationship between territory and citizenship as maintained by the nation-state concept. The author explores alternatives to this concept as they emerge in the late twentieth century, not least by way of the European project of unification.

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  • Cağlar, Ayşe. 2015. Anthropology of citizenship. In International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences. 2d ed. Edited by James D. Wright, 637–642. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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    This is a brief but comprehensive overview of the citizenship debates in anthropology, chronologically tracing their origin and development since the late twentieth century.

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  • Coll, Kathleen M. 2010. Remaking citizenship: Latina immigrants and new American politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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    This volume argues for a gendered view of the concept of citizenship in the context of immigration from Latin America to the United States. Through careful ethnography, Coll shows that the stereotypical image of the Latina welfare mother is inaccurate and that more flexible understandings of the concept of citizenship would help to avoid negative stereotypes about immigrant women.

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  • Craith, M. Nic. 2004. Culture and citizenship in Europe: Questions for anthropologists. Social Anthropology 12.3: 289–300.

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    In this article, Craith argues that questions of culture and citizenship should, in the present world, be studied together—especially in research about migrant populations. Available online by subscription.

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  • Neveu, Catherine. 2005. Discussion: Anthropology and citizenship. Social Anthropology 13.2: 199–202.

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    Arguing against Craith 2004, Neveu holds that citizenship is not an essential building block of the modern nation-state and therefore should not be the main venue for allowing immigrants a sense of belonging. Available online by subscription.

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  • Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

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    This ethnography brings together empirical research and theoretical analysis concerning variations in citizenship practices in different countries of Asia.

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  • Reed-Danahay, Deborah, and Caroline B. Brettell, eds. 2008. Citizenship, political engagement, and belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.

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    This volume brings together a number of different anthropological perspectives dealing with migrants in the Western world (Europe and the United States).

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  • Siu, Lok C. D. 2005. Memories of a future home: Diasporic citizenship of Chinese in Panama. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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    Embedded in an extensive historical account, Siu’s ethnography discusses practices of citizenship among Chinese migrants to Panama as they are embedded in an identificatory triangle of the Chinese homeland, their place of residence in Panama, and the (post)colonial space dominated by the United States.

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  • Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu. 1994. Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

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    This article shows how and why place-based conceptions of citizenship cannot work in the age of migration, since migrants do not necessarily fit place-based categories of belonging established via conventional notions of citizenship.

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Multiculturalism

As Taylor 1994 argues, multiculturalism aims to organize an active and participatory body of citizens (and, sometimes, noncitizens) in their plurality and diversity through communication with each other in the public domain. One criticism stated that multiculturalism was not going far enough to accommodate the cultural, ethnic, religious, or social differences displayed by a vast number of different immigrant groups. The essays in Modood and Werbner 1997, for instance, criticize that multiculturalism is often merely a covert way to retain power on the part of the nonmigrant majority of society. For the specific German context, this critique is also made in Leggewie 1991, which calls for a furthering of multicultural politics to allow for a true diversity of cultures not covertly controlled and managed by the nonmigrant majority. Migrant scholars themselves have also written critiques of multiculturalism along the same lines (see Şenocak 1993, Yildiz 1999, and Lanz 2009). Another, entirely different critique of multiculturalism holds that multiculturalism has actually gone too far in affording migrant groups freedoms that are in conflict with fundamental values of Western democratic societies. While many of these critiques are reactionary and revisionist in character, some are quite nuanced and balanced, seriously engaging the intricate problem between particular rights of minority groups and general, universal values for the whole of society. Benhabib 2002, a highly insightful and balanced critique of multiculturalism, for instance, proposes to split the concept. According to Benhabib, strong multiculturalism champions the treatment of individual cultures as organic wholes where no single aspect can be criticized from the outside without putting in question the validity of the whole minority culture. Against such simplistic understandings, Benhabib 2002 posits the concept of a weak multiculturalism that weighs in each instance the relative importance of particular aspects of a particular culture and the needs or requirements of the society as a whole. As multiculturalism has come under attack in a number of former bastions of the concept such as the Netherlands or Denmark, anthropologists have studied these processes. Buruma 2006, for instance, carefully approaches the question of how the killing of Theo van Gogh stands as a symbol for the failure of multiculturalism in the Netherlands. Likewise, Unni Wikan’s account of a particular honor killing stands as exemplary for a careful and adequately balanced ethnographic assessment of the relation between universal values and the demands of particular cultures (see Wikan 2008). Eriksen 2015 gives a good overview of the debates and its key aspects, while Bowen 2007 furnishes a detailed ethnographic example from France where Muslim headscarf debates have provided a discursive arena to voice radically different opinions on multicultural policies. Along the same lines, Favell 2022 criticizes the concept of integration, widely used in national discourses on migration to denote the incorporation of immigrants into the national communities. In a similar vein, Ahmadi 2017 analyzes the usages of the concept of diversity within the city administration of Toronto to show that such terms can be misused to extend the control and surveillance of immigrant populations behind a veil of political correctness.

  • Ahmadi, Donya. 2017. Is diversity our strength? An analysis of the facts and fancies of diversity in Toronto. Architecture and the Built Environment 12:57–80.

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    In this text, the concept of diversity is critically analyzed in action with specific reference to the case of the city of Toronto. It is argued that diversity is, in many cases, used to control and police migrants in the city rather than fostering constructive communication and openness.

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  • Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1515/9780691186542Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This seminal critique of multiculturalism provides an insightful reassessment of the concept in view of the problem of reconciling universal values with particular (cultural) traditions.

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  • Bowen, John R. 2007. Why the French don’t like headscarves: Islam, the state, and public space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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    This volume engages with the impact of Muslim migration in France. It especially discusses representations of religious identity and the specific French case of the public sphere and Muslim visibilities in this sphere.

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  • Buruma, Ian. 2006. Murder in Amsterdam: The death of Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance. New York: Penguin.

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    In this (auto)ethnography, the author examines the complex political, cultural, and social processes that have led to the rescaling of multicultural politics in the Netherlands, a traditionally strong bastion of the concept.

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  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. Anthropology of multiculturalism. In International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral science. 2d ed. Edited by James D. Wright, 28–33. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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    This text provides a brief overview of the debates on multiculturalism primarily within European contexts.

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  • Favell, Adrian. 2022. The integration nation: Immigration and colonial power in liberal democracies. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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    In this book, the author argues that integration is frequently used by agents of nation-states to denote a vast variety of measures that aim to assimilate immigrants into national communities. The main argument is that integration is merely a cover for profoundly colonial practices of assimilation, hidden beneath the term.

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  • Lanz, Tilman. 2009. Behind the fantasy screen of multiculturalism: Turkish immigrant comedy in Germany. In Turks in Europe: Culture, identity, and integration. Edited by Talip Küçükcan and Veyis Güngör, 7–34. Amsterdam: Turkevi Research Centre.

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    This article engages the question of who is actually served by multiculturalism. Lanz argues that multiculturalism merely serves as a screen for a tacit politics of exclusion of immigrants in Germany.

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  • Leggewie, Claus. 1991. Multi Kulti: Spielregeln für die Vielvölkerrepublik. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag.

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    Leggewie argues that even in a multicultural society, decisions by the majority are made about those elements of migrant cultures that are permissible and those that are not.

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  • Modood, Tariq, and Pnina Werbner, eds. 1997. The politics of multiculturalism in the new Europe: Racism, identity, and community. London: Zed Books.

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    This collection of essays is exemplary for the study of multiculturalism in the 1990s. The essays, by and large, argue that multiculturalism, as it has de facto been implemented, is still controlled by a majority population and that true multiculturalism has yet to be actualized.

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  • Şenocak, Zafer. 1993. Atlas des tropischen Deutschlands. Berlin: Babel Verlag.

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    This polemical critique of multiculturalism shows why the notion of the (Turkish) foreigner is constitutive of contemporary understandings of German identity.

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  • Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt7snkjSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    A short but poignant collection of essays by leading philosophers and social scientists on the concept of multiculturalism.

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  • Wikan, Unni. 2008. In honor of Fadime: Murder and shame. Rev. ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

    DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226896908.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This erudite ethnography about so-called honor killings engages the case of Fadime Sahindal, child of a Kurdish immigrant family to Sweden who was murdered by her own father. Wikan discusses in great detail the ethical ramifications of the collide of a specific cultural practice and universal rights (e.g., human rights).

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  • Yildiz, Erol. 1999. Fremdheit und integration. Bergisch-Gladbach, Germany: BLT.

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    In this insightful critique of multiculturalism, German-Turkish anthropologist Yildiz engages with the problematic of inhabiting a migrant world defined by multicultural politics. He emphasizes the problem of alterity and citizenship.

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Gender and Migration

In recent years gender has become an important aspect of migration studies in anthropology, as works such as Pessar 2003 show. Indeed, it can be argued that anthropologists have been instrumental in putting the question of gender on the map in studies of migration. As Brettell 2008 points out, the emphasis in both network analysis and transnational studies of migration has shifted from individual actors to households and social networks among migrants. In this context, gender roles have increasingly become important. Especially the role of women has been understood as crucial in maintaining support networks for migrant families, shifting the study of migration away from understanding it as predominantly driven by men as breadwinners toward women as builders and sustainers of local and transnational social networks. A good example for studies of women’s networks sustaining migrant family connections across borders in a transnational setting is O’Connor 1990, which describes Mexican women’s migrant networks in California to their former homeland. Another set of studies interested in gender and migration has focused on the fact that migrant women are often part of the workforce in much higher numbers than nonmigrant women. As Kibria 1993 and Foner 1997 show, women’s increased participation in the workforce also helps to increase their social and kinship standing within migrant groups. Conversely, however, migrant women are also far more vulnerable precisely because of their exposed and solitary position in the workplace, as Ong 1987 and Goldring 2003 document. Women migrants are frequently subject to economic and sexual exploitation, especially if they work in the domestic services. In more theoretical terms, Low 1997 aims to show that migrant cosmopolitan spaces are very much gendered when the author speaks of the gendered (migrant) city. Low 1997 attempts to denote with this term that the spaces or life worlds inhabited by migrants are highly determined by gendered customs from their specific cultures. By and large, anthropological studies of gender and migration focus on the role of women, largely neglecting male aspects. One notable exception is Ewing 2008, which studies Muslim migrant masculinities in Germany. Nolin 2020 investigates in detail the transnational connectivities of Guatemaltecan immigrants in Canada with a focus on aspects of gender.

  • Brettell, Caroline. 2008. Theorizing migration in anthropology. In Migration theory: Talking across disciplines. 2d ed. Edited by Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield, 113–160. New York: Routledge.

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    An article that discusses, among other aspects of anthropological studies of migration, the role of gender in the context of these studies.

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  • Ewing, Katherine Pratt. 2008. Stolen honor: Stigmatizing Muslim men in Berlin. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1515/9780804779722Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This ethnography studies the specific masculinities assigned and self-assigned to Muslim men in Germany and the function of these specific gendered roles in public discourse.

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  • Foner, Nancy. 1997. The immigrant family: Cultural legacies and cultural changes. In Special issue: Immigrant adaptation and native-born responses in the making of Americans. Edited by Josh DeWind, Charles Hirschman, and Philip Kasinitz. International Migration Review 31.4: 961–974.

    DOI: 10.2307/2547420Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This article shows how migrant women’s roles change as they increasingly participate in the workforce (often out of economic necessity) in their new homeland. It argues that this can be a source of empowerment for women. Available online by subscription.

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  • Goldring, Luin. 2003. Gender, status, and the state in transnational spaces: The gendering of political participation and Mexican hometown associations. In Gender and U.S. immigration: Contemporary trends. Edited by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, 341–358. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

    DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520225619.003.0016Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Goldring’s extensive ethnographic analysis shows primarily the possibilities and limitations for political agency of women in the context of migration. In addition, it discusses various forms of exploitation of migrant women in the workplace.

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  • Kibria, Nazli. 1993. Family tightrope: The changing lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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    In this ethnography, the author thematizes the problem of migrant women needing to work in the new homeland to sustain their families and to send remittances to family members in the former homeland. It discusses in detail how these practices impact the gender roles of women migrants in view of the example of Vietnamese migrants to the United States.

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  • Low, Setha M. 1997. Theorizing the city: Ethnicity, gender and globalization. Critique of Anthropology 17.4: 403–409.

    DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9701700406Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This brief article introduces the important and widely used concept of the gendered city in cosmopolitan studies as well as studies of gender and migration. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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  • Nolin, Catherine. 2020. Transnational ruptures: Gender and forced migration. Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge.

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    This ethnography provides a detailed mapping of the complexities of gender in forced migration situations. It focuses on migrants from Guatemala to Canada.

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  • O’Connor, Mary I. 1990. Women’s networks and the social needs of Mexican immigrants. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 19.1–2: 81–98.

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    This article shows the role of women in sustaining migrant networks among Mexican immigrants to California. It argues that women mainly sustain the complex networks that both connect migrants to their former homeland and keep them anchored in their families in the new homeland. Available online by subscription.

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  • Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: Factory women in Malaysia. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.

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    In one of the first ethnographies focusing on gender and migration, Ong shows how Malay migrant women are exploited in (post)capitalist conditions.

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  • Pessar, Patricia R. 2003. Anthropology and the engendering of migration studies. In American arrivals: Anthropology engages the new immigration. Edited by Nancy Foner, 75–98. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.

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    This text gives a very useful overview of the work in anthropology on gender and migration up to 2003. It also further elaborates on the shift in emphasis toward gender in anthropological studies of migration during the 1990s.

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Internal Migration

While much of early-21st-century scholarship on migration focuses on transnational migratory flows, internal migration patterns may arguably constitute a much larger portion of the total migration happening across the globe. As Schrooten 2011 shows, these internal migrations take place within the boundaries of one nation-state and often constitute massive movements from rural areas to urban or cosmopolitan centers. Since these migratory practices do not involve the crossing of nation-state borders, they are far less monitored by scientific research and the nation-states themselves. As Cohen 2004 explains, such migrations come with the perpetual problem of the impossibility to verify numbers and, often, even the general direction of the patterns. In Turkey, for example, ongoing migration brings millions of people every year from the more rural areas of the country to its large urban centers, especially Istanbul and Ankara. In these large cities, the newly arrived migrants set up squatter settlements on public land. Those settlements bear a revealing name: gecekondu—to mushroom at night. Other examples of internal migration might be as varied as the migratory patterns of many elderly people to southern states (e.g., Florida) in the United States or the rather forced migration of workers in the 1950s from rural areas of Franco’s Spain to Catalonia to “pacify” its supposedly wayward Catalan minority. Cohen 2004 also crucially points out that internal migration is often merely a prelude to transnational migration. Ye, et al. 2013 discusses internal migration and, also, the possibility of it leading to transnational migration in the case of China. The researchers provide contemporary qualitative accounts as well as historical narratives and data for internal Chinese migration.

Transnationalism

The term transnationalism denotes any kind of movement or mindset that transcends national borders. In this sense, any migration movement that involves the crossing of a national border constitutes a transnational movement. The term, however, goes further in suggesting that national borders become less and less relevant as the movement of people, services, and goods between nation-states continues to increase. The term also denotes a contemporary condition where organizations as varied as the European Union, the United Nations, Greenpeace, or Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens (ATTAC) operate largely and intentionally beyond the control of nation-states. In terms of the migration of people in this context, a variety of important concepts have been developed over the past two decades that circumscribe important aspects of this transnational condition. Hannerz 1996, for instance, provides one of the first and, until this day, most comprehensive incorporations of the concept of transnationalism into anthropology. The author specifically discusses the important anthropological question of the relation between local and global aspects in contexts of transnational movements and migrations. He asserts, as one of the first among the students of transnationalism, that the local remains a truly important aspect in any endeavor of constructing meaningful cultural practices. Hannerz 1996 and Foner 1997 give comprehensive overviews of important developments in transnationalism and anthropology. Hannerz 2000 provides an easily accessible overview of key concepts in transnational anthropology. Vertovec 2009 discusses a variety of issues in conjunction with transnational migration such as homeland politics, transnational social networks, and remittances of migrants to their former homelands as well as different conceptualizations of diaspora among migrant groups.

Long-Distance Nationalism

This term long-distance nationalism was first used in an anthropological context in Glick Schiller, et al. 1992, an edited volume bringing together various anthropological studies of migration. The authors’ intent was to find a conceptual grasp on the fact that many migrants retain important ties to their former homelands in spite of being away from these places for many decades. Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001, an ethnography on the relation of Haitian immigrants in New York to their former homeland, further developed the concept. The term was first used in Anderson 1996 as a salient way to understand how migrants relate, in complex and often ambiguous ways, to their former homeland. Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001 touches on important aspects of Haitian immigrant identity in the United States such as gender relations, legal aspects of immigration, and how understandings of race and national identity are shaped in a situation of transnational migrancy. In a similar vein, Wolbert 1995 studies the return migration of Turks from Germany to Turkey. This work focuses on migrant images of migration as a whole process, from departure to return. In this ethnographic work, Barbara Wolbert shows how and to what extend migrants narrate their migration adventure as an exercise in social upward mobility and how this exercise is firmly embedded within the concept of the modern nation-state. In such contexts, long-distance nationalism is conceptually useful as it allows for accessing the often complex and not always easily detected attachments that individual migrants or whole groups of migrants maintain to their former homelands. Often, such attachments take up a significant amount of time and energy among migrants and shape their relation to the new homeland in major ways, resulting in a dialectic of the migrant situation that can truly be called transnational.

  • Anderson, Benedict. 1996. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso.

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    One of the most important critiques of the modern concept of nationalism, in which the author shows in minute detail how national imaginaries are constructed.

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  • Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, eds. 1992. Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

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    This edited volume brings together a range of different anthropological case studies of migration. In the volume, the term long-distance nationalism, first used in Anderson 1996, is employed to understand the cultural and national complexities of migration as they relate to issues of race, gender, class, and ethnicity.

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  • Glick Schiller, Nina, and Georges E. Fouron. 2001. Georges woke up laughing: Long-distance nationalism and the search for home. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv1134fmkSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    A succinctly written ethnographic account of migrancy that shows how the relations between former and new homeland shape migrants’ lives in many different ways.

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  • Wolbert, Barbara. 1995. Der getötete Paß. Rückkehr in die Türkei: Eine ethnologische Migrationsstudie. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

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    This ethnography shows how Turkish remigrants from Germany retain a national pride in their homeland and how these feelings of pride change in the context of remigration.

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Diaspora

Traditionally, diaspora has referred to the Jewish existence in exile after the destruction of the temple by Roman forces in 70 CE and the subsequent Jewish expulsion from Palestine. As Dufoix 2008 points out, it is frequently assumed that the term denotes the Jews’ continued, century-long efforts to maintain a common religious and ethnic identity as a group despite the lack of a homeland. However, the term originally referred to the threat, for Jews, of being put in exile as a punishment for lack of piousness. In more recent times, the term has nevertheless been widely used to circumscribe any population that is displaced from its present or historical homeland while maintaining a distinct group identity. The widespread use of the concept in the past few decades is due to its importance for understanding the cultural, sociological, ethnic, and ideological implications of migration—especially in its group dimension. As is exemplified in Cohen 1997, the concept of diaspora allows, ideally, for a nuanced assessment of a migrant group’s continued attachment to the former homeland and its simultaneous need to interact with various different groups in the new homeland. Such an understanding of the concept of diaspora is productively used in Werbner 2002, an ethnographic study of Pakistani Muslims in the British city of Manchester. This volume shows how the diaspora is practiced in lived reality.

Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization

Deterritorialization was coined in Deleuze and Guattari 1983 in the development of the authors’ nonimmanentist, antiessentialist philosophical system. The concept quickly disseminated into social scientific research; among other fields it found its way into postcolonial theory. Here, it featured prominently in Bhabha 1994 and Spivak 1990, which aim to establish a Third Space inhabited by the postcolonial subject, a deterritorialized subject, inhabiting a space of the “neither here nor there”—neither being in the here of the world of the (former) colonizer nor in the precolonial world of the there. Deterritorialization aimed to capture the lived reality of many migrant people who had come to their former colonizers’ homelands to live. Specifically, deterritorialization aims to liberate postcolonial subjects from the oppressive colonial and the equally oppressive precolonial past. Lanz 2005 shows that the notion of deterritorialization captures merely one part of contemporary migrant existence. Construction of a postcolonial subjectivity as a noncommittal, nonlocalized form of identification misses the crucial insight that most migrants, despite or even because of their deterritorialized condition, aim to reterritorialize by inserting themselves into accessible localities in their new homelands.

  • Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The location of culture. New York: Routledge.

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    In this work, Bhabha develops the concept of deterritorialization to characterize the subjective position of the postcolonial critic. The purpose of this political move is, according to the author, to take the postcolonial critic out of his or her “stuckness” in a colonialized position that is, because of its very positionality, always considered inferior to that of the (Western) colonizer.

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  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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    This volume engages the problem of psychoanalysis’s essentialism and proposes an alternative philosophy that is nonimmanentist and nonessentialist. Deterritorialization features prominently among the concepts put forth by Deleuze and Guattari to achieve such a nonimmanentist way of thinking.

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  • Lanz, Tilman. 2005. The formulation of Turkish immigrant subjectivities in the German region of Swabia. PhD diss., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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    This ethnography examines the multitude of ways through which Turkish immigrants in contemporary Germany insert themselves at the local level to actively partake in the production of local cultural imaginaries and practices.

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  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues. Edited by Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge.

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    One of the most insightful volumes on postcolonial theory. Deterritorialization is explained as both the condition of postcoloniality and as a concept to understand the postcolonial subject.

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Transmigrants

Contemporary migration is often characterized by the continuous movement of people along transnational, globalized trajectories that might take them to one location today and to another tomorrow. Glick Schiller, et al. 1995 and Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004 propose the term transmigrant to capture this increasingly common phenomenon. In situations of transmigrancy, people are often prevented from forming any meaningful attachment to a new homeland because their duration of stay is minimal or, at the very least, not sufficiently long enough to build meaningful connections. A highly pertinent example for this form of migration is found in the global trafficking of women as sex workers, as shown in Parreñas 2011. In these instances, perpetual mobility is part of the migrants’ very lives. Here, it is especially interesting to research how perpetual mobility influences migrants’ views of the host locations as well as of their former homeland.

Locality

The notion of locality has traditionally been a concern of anthropology, not only since Clifford Geertz celebrated its importance for ethnographic research in Geertz 1983. With the onslaught of postcolonial theory in migration studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the importance of locality, local attachments, and local knowledge was greatly diminished in favor of the celebration of transnational spaces that could, in the imagination of proponents of transnationalism and globalization, replace parochial and backward attachments to a specific place or time. Not until the late 1990s did anthropologists and other social scientists begin to see the value of combining nonessentialist, largely constructivist theories of transnationalism and globalization with the robust empiricism of traditional ethnographic work. Sassen 1999 is one of the first indicators for this change. More recently, Tsing 2005, an ethnography of globalized Asia, and Ong 2006, an ethnographic account of sovereignty and citizenship, are examples that further explore the connection between the local and the global. They also offer important reflections on the continued relevance of locality in ethnographic work. Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2010 rigorously recaptures the notion of locality in anthropological migration studies. The authors assert that migrants need to be understood beyond the traditional migrant-native divide as flexible subjects that are part of urban landscapes in specific ways. Erickson 2011 follows this call for reinserting the local by offering a detailed account how in a Catalan town, such subjective flexibility can work out well if the local population is open to accommodate migrants. Taking a different approach in the same setting (Catalonia), del Màrmol 2020 traces how imaginaries of an idealized rurality led to urban migrants substantially changing local historical narratives to fit their worldview. Similarly, Palladino 2020 shows that imaginaries of a return to a “simple” rural life are fraught with more pitfalls for refugees of cosmopolitanism. The text discusses urbanites who try their hand at rearing sheep in the Pyrenees mountains. These works are indicative of anthropological studies of migration increasingly focusing on local settings of migration while also including new forms of migration such as tourism. In addition, these works belong to a growing body of scholarship, emphasizing the complexity of sustained local-migrant encounters.

  • del Màrmol, Camila. 2020. Cultivating disconnection: Imaginaries of rurality in the Catalan Pyrenees. In Imaginaries of connectivity: Novel spaces of governance. Edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt, and Maarten Meijer, 177–198. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

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    The essay engages the development of tourism in a specific Pyrenees town to fit the expectations of urban tourists. Specifically, the case of traveling female turpentine sellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is discussed to show how these women are today made into early heroes of gender equality when their social position at the time was, in fact, very precarious, making them social outcasts.

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  • Erickson, Brad. 2011. Utopian virtues: Muslim neighbors, ritual sociality, and the politics of “convivencia.” American Ethnologist 38.1: 114–131.

    DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01296.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The text analyzes several examples where “convivencia” (living together) is employed as a social virtue to accommodate newcomers and to facilitate their integration into the local setting of a small Catalan town. Local cultural forms such as the Castellers (human towers) are discussed in their openness or closedness toward migrant participation.

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  • Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

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    In this volume, Geertz emphasizes, against the rising tide of cultural studies claims to the contrary, that studying specific cultural localities, in all their density or thickness, must remain the main focus of anthropological research.

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  • Glick Schiller, Nina, and Ayşe Çağlar, eds. 2010. Locating migration: Rescaling cities and migrants. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

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    Through rigorous ethnographic scholarship, the contributors to this volume reinsert the importance of locality in anthropological studies of migration. They assert that locality matters—especially in cosmopolitan contexts, where the production of local spaces is a key element for the success of migration. Examples are mostly from Western Europe and North America.

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  • Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv11hpgzcSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The author engages with the problematic how nation-states tackle the question of citizenship and sovereignty under globalizing conditions, thus showing how malleable and adaptable the nation-state is in the contemporary world.

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  • Palladino, Paolo. 2020. Organisms, nodes and networks. In Imaginaries of connectivity: Novel spaces of governance. Edited by Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Suvi Alt, and Maarten Meijer, 199–218. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

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    This text engages with cosmopolitan migrants in the Pyrenees who pursue a more rural, purer life and the problems that emerge when they engage in activities such as sheepherding. It also shows how such cosmopolitan migrants can fundamentally change the social structure and cultural practices within small Pyrenees mountain communities when they come in larger numbers.

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  • Sassen, Saskia. 1999. Cities: Between global actors and local conditions. College Park, MD: Urban Studies and Planning Program, Univ. of Maryland.

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    This volume examines how global influences on local conditions can be incorporated into practices, taking global and local dimensions into account.

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  • Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1515/9781400830596Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The author proposes deploying the concept of friction to understand how local and global forces of various proveniences weigh down on transnationalized subjects in the contemporary Asian world.

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Homeland

The notion of homeland is pivotal in virtually all studies of migration because of its importance to the migrants themselves. Homeland denotes a place of origin from which migration initially started. As Goodson-Lawes 1993 points out, the concept gains in importance once migration has occurred. In this moment, the former homeland takes on the role of a utopia, a happy place where everything was much better. The obverse can also be frequently observed when migrants give dystopic, highly critical depictions of their former homeland. At the same time, the migrants now have a new homeland. The migrant condition can thus be circumscribed by the coexistence of two or more homelands. In most cases, the acceptance of a new place of residence for migrants as the true, new homeland takes years or decades, in some cases even generations. Likewise, severing ties to the former homeland is often a painful, long process of detachment, only occasionally eased by complementary attachments in the new homeland. Silverstein 2004 shows, for instance, why it takes Algerian immigrants to France several generations to sever their close ties to their former Algerian homeland. A good conceptual resource for an understanding of the concept of homeland is Blickle 2002, which examines the German concept of Heimat (roughly translatable as “homeland”) as it relates, among other things, to migration. Aydemir and Yaghoobifarah 2021 argues that the notion of Heimat is used, in the German context, to exclude migrants and to emphasize and maintain a symbolic difference between locals and migrants. Thus, while localizing is often an issue with high priority for immigrants, this text shows that localizing themselves is frequently made difficult by the local population.

  • Aydemir, Fatma, and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, eds. 2021. Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum. Berlin: Ullstein.

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    This text argues that many Germans consider Heimat (homeland) a space where they can protect what they consider their culture from immigrant influences through denying immigrants’ access to it. The volume collects a number of immigrant perspectives on this issue and thus shows the sustained impact of such exclusionary practices on immigrants in Germany.

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  • Blickle, Peter. 2002. Heimat: A critical theory of the German idea of homeland. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

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    In this volume, Blickle brings together ethnographic analysis and theoretical reflection to explicate the German concept of Heimat (homeland), which has, in many ways, influenced English understandings of home as a space and place.

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  • Goodson-Lawes, Julie. 1993. Feminine authority and migration: The case of one family from Mexico. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 22.3–4: 277–297.

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    In this text, Goodson-Lawes shows that the trope of the lost homeland is primarily sustained by women. In the event that a migrant return actually occurs, it is also women who mainly push for it. Available online by subscription.

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  • Silverstein, Paul A. 2004. Algeria in France: Transpolitics, race, and nation. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

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    This ethnography deals with various issues of relations between the former and the new homeland. It also touches on aspects of long-distance nationalism.

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Globalization

As Inda and Rosaldo 2008 points out, globalization is frequently defined as an increasing interconnectivity of human interactions and exchanges across the globe, especially in matters of economy. As anthropologists’ works such as Wolf 1983 show, however, global interconnectivity existed long before globalization became popular in the late 1980s—see also Sloterdijk 2004. Given such critiques of the novelty of globalization, it is important to stress that early-21st-century globalizing processes are characterized first and foremost by the speed with which they take place. While we might speak of an interconnected world even five hundred years ago, the speed with which global exchange happens today is certainly a distinctive characteristic of our age. This has primarily technological causes. The dissemination of modern forms of travel (especially airplane travel) and modern communication technologies have, as Castells 1996 and Virilio 1997 point out, ushered in an age of rapid communication and exchange. This increase in speed is also observable in global migration patterns. Nation-states are increasingly losing control over migration processes because the technological means through which migration is facilitated increase its speed significantly. Technological innovation allows migrants today to interact instantly with their former homelands with the effect that their connection to these stay strong and they continue to exert significant influence in their affairs. In the early twenty-first century, theories of one-world globalization (such as Wolf’s) have increasingly come under critique for their tacit dissemination of Western models as relevant for the whole world. In the context of the ontology debate in anthropology, Blaser 2013 argues that fundamentally different understandings of globality need to emerge to assuage Western biases within global processes. Similarly, Latour 2018 points out that one world globalization, as it was imagined in the 1990s and 2000s, proves to be an unattainable goal. Globalization not only produces ever-closer connections across the planet but, at the same time, distinct disconnectivities that work against the idea of one-world globalization. Latour 2020 lists and describes at least seven fundamentally different ways to inhabit the globalized world, making the argument that the dream of one-world globalization has vanished some time ago, breaking up into various different forms of being global, local, or uniting both aspects in some form. These cautionary voices have been well heard by anthropologists working in contexts of migrancy, inducing a shift of the research perspective to incorporate local settings as highly relevant despite the presence of global processes.

  • Blaser, Mario. 2013. Ontological conflicts and the stories of peoples in spite of Europe. Current Anthropology 54.5: 547–568.

    DOI: 10.1086/672270Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    The text argues that we need to move away from the notion of one single global reality, dominated by the West, and toward understanding that each culture (ontology) brings with it its own realities that need not necessarily be compatible with the one-world perspective.

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  • Castells, Manuel. 1996. The rise of the network society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

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    This is the first volume in Castells’ monumental, three-volume series on the global age. It argues that increasingly interwoven networks among people, helped by modern technology, are bringing about fundamental changes to human societies across the globe. Castells aims at tracing these changes in various locations.

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  • Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo, eds. 2008. The anthropology of globalization: A reader. 2d ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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    This reader brings together a host of important anthropological texts on globalization.

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  • Latour, Bruno. 2018. On a possible triangulation of some present political positions. Critical Inquiry 44 (Winter): 213–226.

    DOI: 10.1086/695376Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Globalization has become unreachable for us. This is the main argument of this text, which invites us to finally land on planet earth to investigate its condition.

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  • Latour, Bruno. 2020. “We don’t seem to live on the same planet”—a fictional planetarium. In Critical zones: The science and politics of landing on Earth. Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 276–281. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

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    One-world globalization has not materialized in the way it was expected in the 1990s. Instead, the global world has disintegrated into at least seven different “planets,” all ambiguously related to the notion of globalization but in very different ways.

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  • Sloterdijk, Peter. 2004. Sphären. Vol. 3, Schäume. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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    In this work, the author goes to great lengths to show that globalization is not a recent phenomenon.

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  • Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open sky. Translated by Julie Rose. London: Verso.

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    This volume argues that the increase in speed of communication generates a host of problems that can be subsumed under the (post)modern label of globalization.

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  • Wolf, Eric. 1983. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

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    This account of cultural and economic developments across the globe and over the past five centuries makes, among other things, the point that globalization is not a recent phenomenon because the world was interconnected long before the twentieth century through trade, migrations, and technological dissemination.

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Borderlands

Migration often involves the crossing of borders. However, as Anzaldúa 1987 argues, these crossings are not done and completed in one instance, in a moment. These borders begin to run through the subjectivities of migrants for the rest of their lives. With this argument, Anzaldúa created the study of borderlands as of spaces of migrancy, of migrant subjection and identification in the betweenness so characteristic of these spaces. Over the more than three decades since the publication of Anzaldúa’s seminal work, anthropologists have followed her call to study these spaces, temporalities, and places defined by their liminality. Chavez 2013 takes this to the “other” side and examines discrepancies between media representations of Latino/as in mainstream US media and compares these images with the realities on the ground, finding that there is significant misrepresentations of Latina/o migrants over time. Slack, et al. 2018 focuses on the implementation of the US-Mexico border regime in its material manifestations as well as its impact on the local population on both sides of the border and migrants trying to cross it. Heyman 1999 examines immigration control schemes at the US-Mexico border and pursues the question of who gets to cross and why and who is interdicted. Heidbrink 2014 focuses on Guatemaltecan youth migrants in the United States as well as their (former) homeland. This work is noteworthy because of its steadfast dedication to employ a multi-sited ethnographic perspective that examines both the former and the new homeland of the migrants, tracing (dis)connectivities emerging for young migrants as they aim to carve out a life in the United States but also try to maintain meaningful ties to their former homeland. It focuses on the impact of increasingly strict border regimes with the constant threat of deportation, even for youth, on those same young people.

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands—La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lutte.

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    This work is regarded as seminal for borderland studies across many geographical spaces, not just the Mexican-US context. It establishes the longevity of experiences and feelings of in-betweenness of migrants as they move from one nation-state to another.

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  • Chavez, Leo. 2013. The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. 2d ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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    This volume extensively analyzes how and why Latina/os in the United States are misrepresented as a threat when the facts speak a very different language. Migrants from Spanish-speaking countries are seen in the United States as the proverbial “other,” representing all that against which US citizenship and self-representations of the nation are constructed.

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  • Heidbrink, Lauren. 2014. Migrant youth, transnational families, and the state. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

    DOI: 10.9783/9780812209679Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    Focusing on young migrants from Guatemala, this ethnography examines how families and, especially, young migrants cope with border restrictions, xenophobia, and negative images of themselves pervading throughout US society.

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  • Heyman, Josiah. 1999. Why interdiction? Immigration control at the United States-Mexico border. Regional Studies 33.7: 619–630.

    DOI: 10.1080/00343409950078666Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This work examines how the border regime is constructed, represented, and maintained at the US-Mexico border. It specifically examines on what bases passage of the border is allowed or denied.

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  • Slack, Jeremy, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford, eds. 2018. The shadow of the wall: Violence and migration on the U.S.-Mexico border. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.

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    This edited volume unites various different topics of borderland studies with a particular focus on the violence at the actual border as well as its representation the US publics creates.

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Third Space

The concept of Third Space was developed by postcolonial thinkers in the 1990s as pertinent to characterizing the positionality of the subaltern or postcolonial subject. This subject is imagined by theorists such as Bhabha (see Bhabha 1994) to be in a subaltern position vis-à-vis the former colonizer but simultaneously in a position of strength because it eludes the full grasp or gaze of the former colonizer through the ambiguity and liminality of its own subjectivity as both partially within and beyond (post)colonial contexts. With the development of this concept, postcolonial thinkers aimed directly at empowering disenfranchised immigrant populations from former colonies in the West. Former colonial powers, especially those such as England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, are today home to large migrant populations from former colonies. Their relationship to their former colonizers and present hosts is, at best, ambiguous. In this context, the concept of Third Space has aimed to give migrant populations an alternative beyond full assimilation and eternal stigmatization. An interview, Chen 1996, describes the author’s own diasporic identity in close analogy to the concept of a Third Space. In applied anthropological work, this concept is useful to empower subaltern populations and to help them formulate meaningful identities around the ambiguity of their position; used in the extreme, the concept can also lead to the isolation of specific immigrant populations.

  • Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The location of culture. London and New York: Routledge.

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    The notion of a Third Space is posited by Bhabha to denote the fact that the postcolonial subject can be associated neither with the position of the colonizer nor with that of the colonized. Stuck in an ephemeral in-between of these two positions, the postcolonial subject (and critic) is able to speak and articulate his or her own positionality above and beyond the duality of being colonizer or colonized.

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  • Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 1996. The formation of a diasporic intellectual: An interview with Stuart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen. In Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. Edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 486–505. New York: Routledge.

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    In this interview, cultural critic Stuart Hall takes his own biography as an example to describe the ambiguity of his position vis-à-vis Western (British) society as defined by his subalterity.

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Cultural Hybridity

The concept of cultural hybridity, like Third Space, was coined and widely used in migration studies in the 1990s. Its main goal was to break with the older concept of push and pull factors determining migrants’ condition because it was realized that depicting migrants as eternally torn between their former and current homeland would effectively deny them subjectivity and agency. Largely following a deconstructive framework, theorists’ works such as Pieterse 2020 and Kraidy 2005 argue that hybridity is the driving force of globalization since every culture contains fragments or traces of every other culture, making exchange between them and cultural hybridity not only possible but also the dominant form among globalized cultures.

Retirement Migration

Much of anthropological research on migration focuses on movements from less to more “developed” places, putting the economic question at the heart of migration processes. This economic side of migration processes is, however, also relevant for migrations from wealthy to less affluent locations. This is specifically a feature of so-called retirement migration, where retirees decide to migrate to places where they find more favorable conditions to enjoy the final years of life. Williams, et al. 2000 is a first text examining this phenomenon, stating that it started to emerge in the 1980s. It looks at retirement migrants from Northern Europe who moved to the southern parts of the continent, focusing on their motivations, choice of location, and how such retirement migration is related to the broader phenomenon of tourism. King 2013 uses the term “sunset migration” to characterize the phenomenon. The term plays on the dreams and aspirations of elderly migrants when they move to the sunny South for the last part of their lives. It does so because they are rarely met in reality—especially over time—as the chapter shows in reference to several examples, again from Southern Europe. Oliver 2007 provides a first detailed ethnographic account that focuses again on the migrants themselves in reference to examples from Spain. The text argues that migration itself, with all its attendant complexities, provides the largest obstacle for a successful migration of the elderly as they need to spend much time to get to know their new homeland while also trying to maintain meaningful ties to the former homeland. More recently, the phenomenon has taken on a more global dimension. Mayumi 2014 ethnographically charts the fortunes of Japanese retirees who have moved to Malaysia. The text specifically focuses on the relationship between tourism and retirement migration, the former being a catalyst for the latter.

  • King, Russell. 2013. Sunset migration. In An introduction to international migration studies: European perspectives. Edited by Marco Martinello and Jan Rath, 282–304. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press.

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    This text is focused on retirement migration in Southern Europe. It uses the metaphor of “sunset migration,” coined by King to capture the phenomenon. It shows that migrant hopes for a prolonged life in the sunny South do not materialize in fact. It also comments extensively on the impact of relatively affluent Northern Europeans coming to rural areas in Southern Europe, driving up housing and living costs for the local populations.

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  • Mayumi, Ono. 2014. Commoditization of lifestyle migration: Japanese retirees in Malaysia. Mobilities 10.4: 609–627.

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    This article traces Japanese retirement migrants to their new homeland of Malaysia. It focuses on the relationship between tourism and migration, specifically how tourism can lead to decisions for migration.

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  • Oliver, Caronline. 2007. Retirement migration: Paradoxes of ageing. New York: Routledge.

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    This ethnography studies Northern European retirement migrants to Spain. It focuses on narratives of success and failure of individual migrants and how they assess their decision a few years after having migrated.

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  • Williams, Allan, Russel King, and Guy Patterson. 2000. Tourism and international retirement migration: New forms of an old relationship in Southern Europe. Tourism Geographies 2.1: 5–27.

    DOI: 10.1080/146166800363420Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

    This is one of the first academic texts focusing on the somewhat novel phenomenon of retirement migration. It introduces the phenomenon in reference to various cases from Southern Europe, focusing on the retirement migrants and their perspective.

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