CULTURES OF MIGRATION: THE GLOBAL NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY MOBILITY
Published Jun 28, 2012 · L. McDowell
Ethnic and Racial Studies
6
Citations
1
Influential Citations
Abstract
Cultures of migration is the outcome of a cooperation and a debate between an anthropologist (Cohen) and a geographer (Sirkeci) about the nature of migration. Their main focus is on the movement per se, looking at both internal and international migration, although they also include an analysis of non-movers those who stay behind. They raise the pertinent question not of why so many people leave but rather why so few. Despite a significant number of people living outside the nation state in which they were born, in the twenty-first century only something like 3 per cent of the world’s population are transnational migrants. Cohen and Sireci argue, however, that movement at different spatial scales is a defining characteristic of humanity. While recognising this universal nature of migration and the multiple causes that connect global migrations with individual decisions to leave, Cohen and Sirkeci provide a succinct and careful argument to justify their analytical focus on what they term the meso level. This is the level, they argue, where culture matters, defining culture as ‘the traditions and practices that frame, reframe and finally form responses and outcomes that allow people to make sense of what is going on around them’ (p. xi). Explanations at this meso level thus fall between the micro-level individual decisions to leave home and macro-level explanations rooted in national or global economic and political forces, including war, famine and economic inequalities between regions and nation states. Whether this distinction is as selfevident as Cohen and Sirkeci assume, is not entirely obvious. Cultural attitudes about gender roles and responsibilities that are adduced to explain why Mexican men move internationally and women within the nation state seem to me to operate at the scale of the wider society just as much as economic inequalities. Nevertheless, their approach is interesting in the way it opens questions about the connections between family, household and community members, about the links between the leavers and stayers and about the multiple reasons for mobility. Their definition of migration is a catholic one, including movement within as well as between nation states: the former is the subject of chapter 3 and the latter of chapter 4. They also include multiple forms of mobility permanent and transitory, for pleasure as well as work and different categories of migrants pilgrims, travellers, refugees, forced and unforced migrants, the powerful and the powerless, carefully noting the ways that these differences and the social inequalities among migrant populations influence both the choice (and lack of choice) of destination and the opportunities that face immigrants. After a clear introductory chapter setting out the broad bones of their approach, the authors start the empirical illustration of their theoretical claims at the level of the household: a focus that they note is ‘not surprising’ (p. 17). This may be so to the extent that everyone, even single people, lives in some form of household structure, when broadly defined, but it is perhaps not such a uniformly central factor in explaining the decision to move as the authors claim. The large-scale decision, for example, to abduct single men and women as slaves in many societies, is not amenable to a meso-level analysis focusing on the household, nor perhaps, to take a more recent example, is the movement of young Muslim men from the West for religious training in madrasas in cities in Pakistan, although it is undeniable that it has Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 35 No. 8 August 2012 pp. 1503 1517