Migrants and their cultural world. When things teach us about lives. (original) (raw)

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materialising the transient

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representin...

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materializing the transient

UCLPress, 2022

Introduction: The 'Material Turn' in Migration Studies

Introduction: The 'material turn' in migration studies , 2016

This introduction firstly discusses the ongoing paradigm shifts in the study of transnational migration, in particular the emergent interest in the convergence of migration and material culture as the starting point of our investigation. Then it highlights three aspects that this Special Issue could further in the current study of migration and materialities: namely, historical consciousness in materialising the migration experience and the notion of generational transmission; the everyday experience of body as the site for mutual constitution between subject and object; and the unique value of a language-based, interdisciplinary-oriented approach. In the final part, it summarizes the four articles that follow, highlighting the contribution that each makes to our overall objective of making a 'material turn' in migration studies, and discusses some ways it could be further developed

Framing movement experiences: Migration, materiality and everyday life

Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 2018

This article aims to discuss contemporary migrations from the perspective of material culture. The discussion presented here assumes that material culture plays a significant part in all migration processes by establishing lines of continuity between present and past, confirming and reproducing identity and belonging, framing everyday life and displaying new positioning strategies. Beginning with two snapshots of recent ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazil and Canada, I hope to contribute to the discussion of contemporary migration through studying the lens of materiality and the role it plays in these processes. It will be argued that material culture is a productive tool, not only to address the grounds, motivations and resources people activate in order to utilize migration as an effective option, but also to discuss the relationships between movement, settling, cultural reproduction and innovation.

Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures

While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between 'migrant worlds' and 'material cultures' and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of migrancy into some areas of concern that have been of long-standing importance within anthropology (the gift, temporality, translation), but have not necessarily been those raised most frequently in relation to migration studies.

Diversity and similarity beyond ethnicity: migrants’ material practices

Ethnicity paradigm in migration research - looking at migrants as ‘members’ of ethnic communities and ‘bearers’ of ethnic identities – hinders the understanding of diversity and similarity beyond ethnicity. This article promotes ethnographic research that treats the importance of ethnicity as an empirical question, while focusing on migrants’ material practices. It proposes a shift of interest from material representations of social relations to the very materiality of objects in transnational contexts of migration, and to what people actually do in order to maintain vital connections that constitute transnational social fields. Those connections are often dependent on objects that migrants bring along, send, receive, and use.

The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2020

Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This modern migration entails a material, sensual experience in time. The craft of archaeology has traditionally engaged with the material, the sensual, and the temporal. Archaeologists who study the materiality of modern undocumented migration embrace activist-engaged research that applies the craft of archaeology to the contemporary world. They study the materiality of migration to reveal and comprehend the lived experience of displaced persons. They seek to understand the barriers erected to that journey, the things migrants acquire and leave on the trail, migrant placemaking, their stranded lives, how they build new lives, what the migrants have left behind in their home countries, and the heritage of forced migration. They approach this work in critical solidarity with displaced peoples.

Migration and Culture

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012

Moving from country to country is a dislocating experience. This chapter is concerned with such dislocations and relocations in an age of transnational migration. These movements generate two paradoxes of culture. The first and perhaps obvious paradox is that in order to put down roots in a new country, transnational migrants begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. The second, more theoretical, paradox is that in such encapsulated communities culture is open, changing, and fluid and yet experienced as a powerful imperative. As transnational migrants settle in a new country, they transplant and naturalize cultural categories, not simply because this is their tradition or culture, but because as active agents they have a stake in particular aspects of their culture. Culture as a medium of social interaction confers agency within a field of sociality and power relations. Yet the mere mention of culture in studies of migration invokes a conceptual minefield. Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), culture has come increasingly to be grasped as an essentializing concept that reifies, stereotypes, orientalizes, racializes, exoticizes, and distorts an "Other." Such critiques of culture have been repeatedly leveled by postmodernist and deconstructivist postcolonial and anthropological critics, 1 as well as by skeptical sociologists and social anthropologists. 2 A further conceptual conundrum in the study of culture and migration arises from the fact that culture is never merely individual, a portable piece of baggage

Migrants and their cultural world. When things teach us about lives. (original) (raw)

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