POPULATIONS
The ethnographic study of migration, complex societies, and transborder processes is not new to anthropology. (Foner 2003, p.10) Beginning with focus on countryside to urban movements, anthropologists featured mainly ties to home communities while also addressing the question of whether urban migrants were sojourners or settlers.
Anthropologists documented cyclical and seasonal patterns of movement between home communities and urban areas in their efforts to sort out the underlying factors that cause people to migrate or return at various stages in their lives. An illustration of this focus in anthropological inquiry is in William Shack’s comments, in the Urban Anthropology
collection, on Africans in town retaining their tribal identity and membership in the rural society. (Shack 1973:. 251) Most early ethnographies of migration were characterized by the predominance of urban factors as the guiding epistemological framework in the analysis of human movement. The study of ethnic diasporas was the beginning of a combination of urban and rural factors. According to Foner, this was also the beginning of the study of how cultural and social patterns from the home country or region were transformed as migrants settled in vastly different places around the globe. (2003: 13) Brettell (2003) calls attention to the stories of individuals and couples in the spirit of what Lila Abu-Lughod described as particulars of individual life as manifestations of the effects of extralocal and long-term processes. In her study of Portuguese migrants, Brettell acknowledges that the particulars of their lives permitted her to emphasize several aspects of the migration experience that are not always featured in the social science literature. She also suggests that a handful of personal narratives can teach us a
good deal about pattern, structure, culture, and the role of the individual in the migration process, by revealing what may have been distinctive about a specific immigrant
population movement, and experiences that may be comparable with other immigrants in other places and other times. This, she claims, would enhance generalizability. (pp. 23- 24)
Narratives and life histories in ethnographic research are also acknowledged by Sarah Lamb (2001) as one of the practices by which people reflect, exercise agency, contest interpretations of things, make meanings, feel sorrow and hope, and live their lives. (p. 28) Earlier, Fielding (1992) observes that “the feelings associated with
migration are usually complicated, the decision to migrate is typically difficult to make, and the outcome involves mixed emotions.” (p. 201) Fielding laments that when anthropologists study migration scientifically, the fact that it is a statement of an individual’s worldview, and, therefore, an extremely cultural event, seems to be forgotten. He does not agree with the implied suggestion of the pure rationality of the decision of a migrant to choose individual advancement only as a response to the economic signals of the job and housing markets. This choice, in his view, could not come about because of a migrant’s rational choice to reject “feeling like a virtual prisoner of his or her class position”, that subjects him or her to “powerful structural economic forces set in motion by the logic of capital accumulation.” Fielding’s views fit with Foner’s observation of the welcome paradigm shift in the study of ethnic diasporas that emerged as anthropology’s focus moved from the urban only, to a combination of urban and rural factors. This combination foregrounded cultural and social patterns, and their transformations, as migrants settled, and should intensify the need for the study of the
migration process as they apply to the individual particulars. The particular, as Brettell (2003), and Lamb (2001) suggest, are enlightening, and can be richly mined using the methodology of narratives and life histories in ethnographic research.
Beyond the shift from an urban focus to a combination of the urban and the rural, the paradigmatic changes away from assumptions that persons could belong to only a single country, and that [US] migrants had to choose between their home country and the new land, moved the spotlight to transnationalism and transborder living, with
multiculturalism, not assimilation, as the mode of integration. This is also a move from the static to the fluid, and to the importance of immigrant social integration processes. As in most traditions of anthropological inquiry, how culture is conceptualized drives most approaches to ethnographic studies. Nina Glick Schiller (in Foner, 2003) states that past ethnographies of migration have followed anthropologists’ definitions and
understandings of culture and that the study of transnational migration has encompassed social relations, social structure, and transgenerationally transmitted patterns of action, belief, and language. (p.101) Transnational studies focus on the embeddedness of people in two or more societies as determined by the nature and impact of social, economic, religious and political relationships. This suggests diasporic consciousness among other implications of the relationships.
After a remarkable period of distraction, the intensity of the academic gaze on globalization gave way to a clearer view and significance of the epistemological frameworks offered by transnationalism for the study of migration. Broad based interdisciplinary interest created the study of transnational processes of which
confusion and concerns, diaspora studies started with narratives of identity that were based on myths of common origin and global dispersal. (Clifford, 1994)
The development of the term, transnational social fields, is of paramount
importance for the study of the multilocal or transborder lives of migrants. This concept was developed by Glick Schiller and her colleagues to separate and contrast it with the concept of network analysis which they viewed as egocentric. (Foner, 2003: 107) Social field was preferred over network analysis because it was sociocentric as opposed to directing attention to the density and types of relationships of a specific individual. Social field focuses on alterations in social actions, ideas, and values as people are linked together by means of multiple interlocking networks. They are, therefore, Schiller explained, “not metaphoric references to altered experiences of space; they comprise observable social relationships and transactions.”
Among methodological concerns about transnationalism research addressed by anthropologists is the question of generalizability, excessive reliance on case studies, and sampling that enables only a univariate design. In her discussion of the ‘centrality of ethnography’ in transnational studies, Glick Schiller (Foner, 2003) notes that the concept of hypothesis testing in ethnographic studies differs from its application to other social studies that involve scientifically generated samples. In ethnographies, anthropologists generate hypotheses which they subject to rigorous probing, explorations and revisions that allow them to readjust their focus as needed, and as unexpected phenomena and facts arise from the research process. Despite the possible utilities of the ethnographic
approach in the study of human phenomena, including one as interconnected as transnational populations, the concern that the data generated from this approach falls
short of developing and substantiating theory, seems to persist, at least among scholars from other social sciences.
In the area of immigrant incorporation, anthropologists, (Wimmer and Glick 2001: 301) have challenged theories of modernization and assimilation, and have brought into closer connection the already connected global changes in the world economy and changes in the patterns of migrant incorporation. They also repudiate the notion of the nation-state as the unit of analysis that is common in some social sciences and
humanities, a notion they have called in their analysis, methodological nationalism,
defined as “the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world.” This view has a conceptual commonality with an analysis of the nation-state presented by Inda and Rosaldo, (2002). They commented on the inability of western nation-states to fully produce proper national subjects that are defined by residence in a common territory, a shared cultural heritage, and an undivided loyalty to a common government… the inability to construct a monolithic national community… the incapacity to turn immigrants into proper national objects. (pp.20 - 21) This also
represents the general neoliberal view that market forces have minimized the power of the nation-state.
Foner (2003) in her editorial commentary extolled the benefits of ethnographies of intergroup dynamics and their usefulness in revealing not only sites of contention and consensus but also processes of identity construction and incorporation. (p. 30) As evidenced in Foner’s analysis, the value of this stronghold of anthropological inquiry remains high as is the acclaim it has received for its accomplishment and potentials in immigration studies. Foner sees the value of ethnographic studies of immigration in
showing the shifting and situational nature of the racial and ethnic identities, the meanings people attach to them, and how these identities evolve in the context of changing social, economic and political conditions. She illustrates the advantage of ethnographic studies over surveys with their role in panethnic studies where ethnographic studies are needed to show how and why panethnic identities become salient in particular contexts, how they can be invoked or put aside in different moments for different
purposes and take on different meanings, depending on the circumstances or sites of interaction. (p. 29)
Foner also reaffirms anthropology’s loyalty to fieldwork and attributes to it a serendipity and flexibility that can have theoretical benefits. Faith in fieldwork
methodology is often defended by the idea of finding things you never knew existed and were not expected within the limits of the initial study design. Clifford (1997) further explores the idea of ‘field’ in fieldwork, usually conceptualized as earthbound, “a cleared place of work” that the anthropologist professional can go out into, a spatial distinction between a home base and an exterior place of discovery where one can keep out “distracting influences”. (p. 53)
Within the context of travel or spatial practices, Clifford, invokes anthropology’s charge of the production of deep cultural knowledge, and affirms the need to
reconceptualize ‘field’ in fieldwork as having unstable borders that are constantly renegotiated. He invites anthropologists to rethink their view of ‘field’ as “a distinct place with an inside and outside, reached by practices of physical movement.” (p. 54) He rejects the positivist underpinnings of fieldwork with its attendant colonial historical associations. The field, to Clifford, is everywhere and anywhere relational practices take
place along with the shifting identities of the people and issues the anthropologists seeks to represent. For these reasons, a reworking of the concept of ‘field’ in anthropological research and how it is negotiated will be of special benefit to “indigenous”,
“postcolonial”, “diasporic”, or “minority” attachments. Travel, Clifford explains, denotes practices of leaving familiar ground in search of difference. He therefore locates
fieldwork in a long “increasingly contested tradition of Western travel practices”, and suggests that other travel traditions and diasporic routes can help renovate methodologies of displacement, leading to metamorphoses of the field. (p. 90)