‘Migration and Culture,’ in Mark Rosenblum and Daniel Tichenor (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of International Migration. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 215-243 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Connecting culture and migration Introduction
Migration and Culture, Robin Cohen and Gunvor Jónsson (eds) , 2011
We open this essay by engaging with the idea of 'culture'. Precise definitions of this difficult, multi-faceted and capacious word somehow seem to elude us. The idea of culture is so tantalisingly out of reach, yet so necessary for us to grasp. We situate culture in its popular and academic usages, noting particularly two provenances, those stemming from the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Drawing mainly from the second tradition we examine how separated societies were seen to embody separate cultures and what happened when these societies became connected through exploration, trade, missionary activity and, crucially, migration and settlement. We discuss the evolution of shared cultures using the concept of creolization. We also argue, however, that the 'third spaces' that emerge between societies do not necessary result in stable and coherent cultures with neat boundaries. Instead, fuzzy frontiers and complex, ambiguous and situationally-specific forms of social interaction arise when culture and migration intersect. Culture and migration also connect in a more direct sense, creating what is sometimes called 'a culture of migration' or a 'migration culture', namely a considerable intensification, in certain settings, of dispositions and predilections that favour migration as a solution to social stasis, unemployment and relative deprivation. While scholars have described cultures of migration at a number of levels (family, village, region or nation), we show how the phenomenon has been portrayed with varying degrees of theoretical sophistication and empirical rigour. We use a rough periodization, suggesting that the connections between migration and culture during the 'modern era' are somewhat different from the connections characteristically found in the contemporary or 'global era' (both periods being defined below). Finally, we furnish a conclusion drawing attention to the cultural turn in a number of fields and disciplines.
Political moves: Cultural geographies of migration and difference
2013
The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural-geographic studies of migration. Indeed, in a recent review of migration studies, population geographer Russell King (2012: 143) points out that not only have cultural geographers been major contributors to recent studies of migration, but also "migration geographers . . . [have become] some of the key protagonists of the new cultural geography, and their papers have contributed an ever-increasing share of the contents of the leading journals in human geography since the mid-1990s." This expansion of interest is a response to both empirical changes in global migration and shifts in theoretical priorities in geography and cognate fields. As places and "cultures" have grown increasingly deeply interconnected across space and as growing absolute numbers of migrants have traveled to rising numbers of places in increasingly complex patterns, the migrant has emerged as a key figure embodying, enacting, and representing the fears and hopes attached to globalization. The cultural politics of migration, thus, have required attention not only to the spatial demographies of migration but also to the social processes of meaning-making in relation to citizenship, borders, identities, and labor markets, as well as discourses and histories of racialization and gender relations. Through attention to migrants' lived geographies, recent research brings to life the political dimensions of migrants' cultural geographies. In this chapter, I argue that cultural geography, and in particular feminist cultural geography, offers conceptual tools that have been especially illuminating for the rapidly changing lived politics of migration.
Migration and culture (edited with Gunvor Jonnson pp. 781)
2011
Cohen and Jónsson have assembled an impressive array of contributions that will interest researchers, teachers, and students who wish to understand the complex relationships between migration and culture. They begin with their own original essay on the complicated relationship between culture and migration. Informative and wide-ranging, it performs the important task of defining culture. . . This introductory essay provides a good, substantive overview of issues surrounding the topic of migration and culture. . . This book deserves the attention of all scholars who study migration. The contributions vividly reflect the international character of research on migration and culture, demonstrating that social scientists around the world, analyzing migration in its many different contexts, are profoundly advancing knowledge about the relationship between it and culture. . . In addition, the collection convincingly reveals that ethnographic methods of investigation are shedding new light on the noneconomic causes and consequences of migration that have been unduly neglected by quantitative studies. Economists, sociologists, and geographers would gain an appreciation of this brand of qualitative research by consulting the volume. Finally, the contributions provide rich evidence that the traditional model of migration, settlement, adaptation, and assimilation that has guided research should be replaced by a fresh theoretical approach that conceptualizes migration in terms of transnational identities and transnational communities. Robert L. Boyd, Journal of Regional Science
Introduction: Migrations and Diasporas—Making Their World Elsewhere
Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies
cultural adaptation process of migrants in a taken-for-granted community of practices of the host society. The host society, as well as migrants, is considered as a kind of fixed cultural reality which is not subject to any internal or external process of change and with which "the other" has to come to terms. Although widespread, the term integration does not reach a large consensus: sometimes it is connected to desegregation, other times to the attempt of bringing minorities' cultures into the mainstream of cultures and their social structures, including rights and services. Our stance in this book is that one should talk of co-construction, which starts from the presupposition that each society is a dynamic system which meets and maybe clashes with other cultures, but in so doing enriches itself and consequently changes. The coconstruction is a process in which locals and migrants give life to a different society in which both cultures are considered in their interaction and where both cultures have the concrete possibility to learn, reflect on and modify particular aspects of their everyday life. This concept develops the term "cultural co-traditions" advanced by Ferrarotti (1999, 158), in which the acceptance and coexistence of different cultures in a society is seen as the only way out of the problems posed by migrations. In particular, our glimpse is on the socio-technical systems that migrants and natives co-construct inside contemporary societies.
The Translocation of Culture: Migration, Community, and the Force of Multiculturalism in History
Sociological Review, 2005
In his work on a Welsh border village, Ronald Frankenberg showed how cultural performances, from football to carnival, conferred agency on local actors and framed local conflicts. The present article extends these themes. It responds to invocations by politicians and policy makers of 'community cohesion' and the failure of communal leadership, following riots by young South Asians in northern British towns. Against the critique of self-segregating isolationism, the article traces the historical process of Pakistani migration and settlement in Britain, to argue that the dislocations and relocations of transnational migration generate two paradoxes of culture. The first is that in order to sink roots in a new country, transnational migrants in the modern world begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. They form encapsulated 'communities'. Second, that within such communities culture can be conceived of as conflictual, open, hybridising and fluid, while nevertheless having a sentimental and morally compelling force. This stems from the fact, I propose, that culture is embodied in ritual and social exchange and performance, conferring agency and empowering different social actors: religious and secular, men, women and youth. Hence, against both defenders and critics of multiculturalism as a political and philosophical theory of social justice, the final part of the article argues for the need to theorise multiculturalism in history. In this view, rather than being fixed by liberal or socialist universal philosophical principles, multicultural citizenship must be grasped as changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive, a negotiated political order. The British Muslim diasporic struggle for recognition in the context of local racism and world international crises exemplifies this process. 1 This article was initially presented as an inaugural lecture at Keele University in October 2002. It seems an appropriate tribute to Ronnie Frankenberg, who was the founder Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Keele.
2023 in Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies, edited by Margit Fauser & Xóchitl Bada , 2023
Offering an epistemological approach to migration, this chapter highlights the relationships between the changing ways migration is viewed by states, political actors, and researchers and the reorganization of intersecting, globe-spanning, multiscalar networks of power, dispossession and desire. Challenging the separation of studies of migration, including its transnational processes, from analyses of the restructuring of the global capitalist economy, the chapter argues that such restructuring is simultaneously an economic, political, and cultural process in which we are all actors and subjects. The chapter frames the contemporary moment of reorganization within an over view of migration in human history and the formation of migration regimes. This stance discards the binary between mobility and stasis and migrants and non-migrants. It helps situate the rise and fall of transnational studies within specific conjunctural transformations of the networks within which capital and power are accumulated and legitimated. The epistemological approach to migration also makes visible the processes that are constituting a dispossariat, producing political rage globally, and fueling authoritarian racialized nationalism. At the same time, this approach highlights the processes that are dispossessing both people classified as migrant and non-migrants, which creates the basis of a politics of equality, social justice, and climate action.