Migrants in liminal time and space: an exploration of the experiences of highly skilled Indian bachelors in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds light on the relationship between individual agency, transnational social relations, geographic place, and cultural constructions of life phase and gender among highly skilled Indian migrants to the Netherlands. Amsterdam is attracting an increasing number of Indian migrants who work primarily in the fields of information technology, engineering and business management. The nature of this highly skilled work requires mobile, flexible workers, and therefore mainly attracts single men between 25 and 34. Their migrant experiences and choices are marked by a ‘performance of liminality’: migration is part of a coming of age ritual that both structures their lives and is structured by circumstances and agency. The experience of bachelors in particular can be understood as a ‘double liminality’ in that it is both temporary and spatial. Many of our bachelor informants felt they were ‘betwixt and between’ the socio-cultural expectations they grew up with and what they perceive to be Dutch or Western culture, and between those that pertain to childhood and to adulthood. They live on a metaphorical threshold, shaped by their masculine ideals, beliefs about ‘Indian culture’, their expected life trajectories, and their experiences in and expectations of the Netherlands and the city of Amsterdam.     

Caste,kinship and the realisation of ‘American Dream’: high-skilled Telugu migrants in the U.S.A.

ABSTRACT

Literature on the Indian diaspora domiciled in the U.S.A. largely portrays the group as educated, highly skilled migrants in pursuit of their American Dream, without critically engaging with the regionally particularised migration trajectories that predispose only certain groups to become skilled migrants from the global South to the North. Migration studies bracket skilled migrants as those who make rational choices and choose formal routes to migrate whereas unskilled migrants often rely on informal channels of kinship or ethnicity to migrate. Unsettling this proposition, in this article, based on an ethnographic study of the high-skilled Telugu professionals in the U.S.A. and their families living in Coastal Andhra, India, I show how aspirational and topographical migration pathways from Coastal Andhra to the U.S.A. are created and sustained through networks of kinship, caste and endogamous transnational marriage alliances. These high-skilled migrants (doctors, engineers and scientists) from the dominant castes have successfully manoeuvred spatial mobility and social upward mobility by utilising ‘caste capital’ within a transnational social field. Moreover, decades of migration from the dominant castes have shaped a caste-inflected transnational habitus among its members who see migration of their youth to the U.S.A. as desirable, and at times, also inevitable.     

Big fat Assyrian/Syriac weddings: rituals and marriage traditions among Middle Eastern Christians in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Weddings can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ and also as ‘symbolic struggles’ since their glamour appears to be a new indicator of status for many families, especially migrant ones. A mixture of traditional as well as reinvented wedding customs serves a community searching for ethnic identity markers that can help it to embrace all of its descendants. This article presents a case study of how Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and marriage traditions that are being performed and transformed in the migratory context of Sweden over the last 50 years. Among the Middle Eastern Christians, who have been emigrating from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq since the 1960s, and which today numbers 120,000 individuals, marriage is a very serious business – a permanent union between spouses and their respective families. The purpose of the article is to analyse Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and to discuss how they have shaped the modern Assyrian/Syriac identity. It also explores how local marriages connect and reconnect migrants of this ethno-religious group(s) and how it differentiates them from their peers in the surrounding Swedish society – religiously, socially and even aesthetically.     

Labour migration brokerage and Dalit politics in Andhra Pradesh: a Dalit fabric of labour circulation

ABSTRACT

Why and how do labour migrant brokers engage with henchmen of bosses, small-time criminals and violent politicians? What significance do labour brokers’ political relations have in the fabric of labour circulation? This article argues for migration brokerage to be examined along a broad continuum of brokerage to explore the local fabric of labour circulation in the Indian construction sector. Considering migration brokerage as part of a broader landscape of brokerage firstly allows look at how migration brokers concretely navigate the worlds of labour and politics to pursue their activities and to further their own agendas. It secondly offers insight into how the everyday relations between migrant brokers and henchmen of bosses shape the lives of migrant labourers in the urban construction sector. Based on a detailed ethnography of the relation between a Dalit labour maistri and a Dalit henchman of a boss in a context of violent criminal political economy, this article explores the roles of Dalit politics in shaping the Dalit fabric of labour circulation and labour broker’s trajectories in South India. It further looks at the ambivalent production and mobilisation of Dalit identities in the making of an ideal Dalit migrant labourer.     

布朗族女性婚恋方式的变迁及其影响

本文以田野调查资料为依据,从民族学的角度记述了20世纪90年代以来云南布朗山布朗族女性择偶条件与婚恋方式的变迁。文章认为,内地青年男女择偶的价值追求为布朗族女性嫁往内地提供了条件。文章还探讨了布朗族女性大量嫁往内地这一现象对布朗族社会文化的影响。     

Ethnic,gender and class identities of Polish migrant mothers: intersecting maternal narratives with transnationalism and integration

ABSTRACT

Based on a doctoral study of Polish migrant mothers living in Germany and the United Kingdom, this paper examines women's narratives pertinent to ethnicity, gender and social class, as well as the mutual entanglements of these dimensions. While the ethnic identity matrix often evokes dimensions of transnationalism and integration, the addition of the femininity component illustrates the diversity among contemporary Polish migrant women in Western Europe with regard to their identity practices. The analyses of transnational, translocal and cosmopolitan orientations highlight their binding to a contextualized understanding of femininity – its various markers and corollary epitome of motherhood, particularly in the Polish context. The main findings comprise an ideal-type based typology of migrant mothering, which sheds light on how mobility and gender intersect. The discussions adopt the social class lens in an attempt to focus on the implications of certain maternal and migrant identities among Polish women. By underscoring the value of both integration and transnationalism perspectives, the paper calls for additional aspects of translocality and hybridization, seeing them as noticeable social markers of the Polish female migrants’ biographies.     

Somali Transnational Activism and Integration in the UK: Mutually Supporting Strategies

This paper considers the simultaneous processes of transnational?activism and integration amongst Somalis living in the UK. It argues that, rather than challenging integration, diasporic Somalis' involvement in transnational activism may actually support integration, and vice versa. Transnational engagement?fulfils?a range of?functions that relate not only to the country of origin, but also to community formation in the UK. Such practices may, in some cases, promote integration while, in others, they create a space in which those who experience difficulty integrating can still forge meaningful relations both in the country of settlement and with the dispersed transnational Somali community. In the context of the 2011 famine in Somalia, Somali community activism in the UK rose to new heights, helping to reinforce the integration–transnational activism relationship.     

Dignity,happiness and being able to live a ‘normal life’ in the UK – an examination of post-accession Polish migrants' transnational autobiographical fields

This article examines data from a qualitative study of post-accession Polish migrants living in the UK. We examine themes from our interviews such as ‘dignity’, ‘normality’, ‘happiness’ and the ‘affordability’ and ‘ease’ of life in the UK (compared to Poland). We focus on the autobiographical or intra-personal discursive practices that define what Habib calls migrants' continuing relationship with their ‘homeland’. We draw on Emirbayer and Mische's analysis of the relationship between ‘agency’ and what they call ‘embedded temporalities’ to examine the interaction between our participants' recollections of life in Poland and their evaluation of their present lives in the UK in order to examine the impact of these on their future plans (to stay in the UK or return to Poland). We locate this analysis in what we call a transnational autobiographical field which is a modification of what Levitt and Glick Schiller call a transnational social field. Rather than examine, for example, how decisions to migrate, settle and re-migrate are embedded in inter or trans-personal social relations and networks, in this article we examine the self-dynamics associated with our participants' articulation of their intra-personal and autobiographical embedded temporalities. Our argument is that articulations of individuals' pasts, presents and anticipated futures are also significant factors shaping their migration, settlement, and re-migration decisions.     

Tourist brides and migrant grooms: Cuban–Danish couples and family reunification policies

ABSTRACT

As a development strategy mass tourism often precipitates social changes, expected and unexpected. Emigration through marriage may seem to be an unlikely by-product of the expanding tourist industry in Cuba, but the increasing number of Cubans emigrating through marriage to a foreign partner has paralleled the influx of tourists since the mid-1990s. This article explores how gender dynamics in the Cuban tourist milieu intersect with gendered underpinnings of family reunification policies in Denmark by focusing on the marriage migration pattern of Cuban grooms with Nordic brides. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark among Cuban marriage migrants and their spouses, the study shows a cross-border migration pattern shaped by multiple factors including global economic asymmetries, the eroticisation of Cuban culture in the tourism industry, and the gender egalitarian welfare state of Denmark.     

Reconciling transnational mobility and national social security: what say the welfare state bureaucrats?

The welfare state was constructed to ensure the well-being of a sedentary population, consisting of citizens living within the territorial boundaries of the nation. However, mobility patterns change, and more people lead lives that criss-cross national borders while drawing on different sources of transnational social protection – the welfare state included. Now, the daily work of bureaucrats involves delivering national social security benefits to transnationally mobile recipients. Through encounters and casework processes, these welfare state bureaucrats observe how ‘transnationals’ deal with complex regulations and make use of the social security system. This article explores bureaucrats’ perceptions of individuals’ agency and behaviour as they reconcile their transnational mobility with national social security. It builds on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in the Norwegian welfare administration, including 36 interviews, participant observation and informal conversations. The analysis identifies an institutional perspective of transnationals’ agency as shaped by their level of regulatory awareness and compliance. The bureaucrats observe some types of transnational behaviour to be more prevalent than others. As the article concludes, these bureaucratic perspectives have major implications for transnational social security delivery and how the welfare state accommodates transnational mobility.     

Labour and life in the global Asian city: the discrepant mobilities of migrant workers and English teachers in Seoul

ABSTRACT

Transnational mobilities are often conceived as interconnected with cities as ‘magnets’ for migrants, ‘nodes’ in mobility trajectories or ‘destinations’ for settlement. This paper frames the urban as critical to conceptualising the manner that mobility is actively and contingently assembled across the border and in the constitution of migrant lives. This argument builds on understanding the relationship between urban life and migration regimes in South Korea where the state and infrastructures of migration play a strong role in moulding the forms and outcomes of transnational mobilities in the everyday spaces of cities. The paper examines the urban lives of two differently positioned mobile populations in the Seoul Metropolitan Region: migrant workers in the manufacturing industries and English teachers working in schools, private academies and universities. Drawing on Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ analysis, the paper explores the ways in which these migrant lives overlap and diverge: in recent political-economic transformations and the regulation of migration, the urban geographies of labour and life, and the timing of migration. In doing so, the paper offers a window into Seoul’s emerging reliance on and differential incorporation of migrants and demonstrates the critical interlinkages between the governmental technologies of border crossing, everyday life and possibilities for the future.     

The ‘nuclear family paradigm’ as a marker of rights and belonging in transnational families

This article examines the legal regulation of transnational families in the context of family reunion. In defining the legal categories of ‘family’ and ‘child’ the law bases its understanding of the family and family life on the image of the nuclear family, which is perceived as a fundamental and natural unit of society. This understanding of the family, the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, has important implications for transnational belonging. This article focuses on these implications in the context of family reunification. In the case of a married minor child, the ‘nuclear paradigm’ is used to legitimate a line of legal reasoning that takes into account neither human rights norms nor the social reality of relatedness. Yet in certain other cases of family reunion, namely in the case of (suspected) marriages of convenience, the social reality of the relationship is a decisive factor determining the right to family reunion. The argument presented in this article is that through the ‘nuclear family paradigm’, the conceptual framework of private law concerning recognition is smuggled into public law and treated as universal while at the same time the legal reasoning on family reunion remains quite capable of examining de facto family life in order to refuse the rights that would otherwise follow from recognition of a marriage.     

Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa

Colonial ties constitute the basis upon which Indian migration to the UK occurred. In the post-war years, while Punjabi migrants more than fulfilled the gap in expanding British industry, Indian elites also arrived to take up professional jobs. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of increasingly restrictive (and racially politicized) immigration legislation, there was a significant settlement of the so-called East African Indians, among them an important percentage of East African Gujaratis who had close links with England long before the processes of Africanisation began. Since the 1990s, those East African families also were the ‘hosts’ of a considerable number of Portuguese Indians of Gujarat origin, most of whom had been born in Mozambique during the colonial period and had lived in post-colonial Portugal. This paper will attempt to show how different experiences of intersubjectivity between colonizers and colonized in British and Portuguese African colonial contexts still constitute a source of (re)invention and pluralization of identities within post-colonial Gujarat diasporas settled in the UK. An analysis of these narratives in process will serve to underline the significance of dialectic processes of remaking colonial and post-colonial experiences in order to understand post-colonial identity formations, their ex-tensions and in-tensions, as well as the identity strategies of postcolonial subjects to deal with ‘old’ and ‘new’ multicultural dilemmas.     

Italians with veils and Afros: gender,beauty, and the everyday anti-racism of the daughters of immigrants in Italy

This paper explores the everyday anti-racist practices of the female children of immigrants in Italy. We analyse two case studies: first, a group of Muslim young women in Italy who have publicly re-appropriated what is popularly known as ‘Islamic fashion’; and second, a group of young Afro-Italian women who meet both online and offline to share resources about the care of ‘natural’ Afro-textured hair. We argue that transnational feminist analysis can shed light on the complex ways that aesthetics and the female body are implicated in struggles for social and legal recognition in Italy among the so-called second generation.     

Marketing an imagined Muslim woman: Muslim Girl magazine and the politics of race,gender and representation

This article examines the magazine Muslim Girl (started publication 2007) and explores how the representations on the magazine's pages construct a particular type of identity for Muslim women: an ‘idealized’ Muslim woman who is both North American/Western and Muslim. Such a woman is portrayed as liberal, educated, fashionable, a ‘can-do’ woman, who is also committed to her faith. This ‘ideal’ woman is situated squarely as a neo-liberal subject in an increasingly consumerist world: she is ‘marketable’ (and marketed) as the ‘good Muslim’ (Mamdani, 2004) and is positioned as the ‘familiar stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000) in North America. This so-called ‘modern’ Muslim (read: ‘good Muslim’) is juxtaposed both against the ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim (read: ‘bad Muslim’) and the ‘normalized’ white North American subject. Against the discourse of post 9/11 nationalism and within the context of (gendered) Orientalism, this article argues that such idealized representations present easily recognizable tropes, which serve important political, ideological and cultural purposes within North American society. An analysis of these representations – and the purposes which they serve – provides an important window into the nuances of the structured discourses that seek to control and discipline the gendered Muslim body. On the one hand, the representations in Muslim Girl focus on the so-called ‘integrated North American Muslim’ – a ‘modern’ or ‘good’ Muslim – within the context of the multicultural, neo-liberal and post 9/11 nation-state. On the other hand, these representations also highlight examples of Muslim women, who seemingly remain committed to their faith and community. Such representations of hybridized North American Muslims speak powerfully to the forces – ideological, cultural, political and social – that are at play in the post 9/11 world. In analyzing the representations found in Muslim Girl, this paper provides an insight into some of these forces and their implications.     

The present of forgetting: diasporic identity and migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong

Against current privileging of diasporic identity as the (trans)migrants’ challenge to the normativity of national identity and belonging, this paper considers the case of contract migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong to explore the critical potential of diasporic identification in challenging hegemonic national discourses outside much-discussed European and American contexts. While acknowledging the transnational connections and linkages migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong maintain with their home communities, the paper argues the significance of attending to the simultaneous importance of forgetting in their own understanding and representation of their situation. In light of the common refrain of forgetting observed among these migrant women, the paper elucidates the politics of diasporic identification in their situation, especially the dependence of diasporic identification on consolidating national identity and allegiance through the mediation of gendered norms of family duties.     

Heritage corridors: transnational flows and the built environment of migration

ABSTRACT

In settler nations such as Australia, which have high migrant intakes, a category of cultural heritage practice has emerged that focuses on the material record of immigration. Currently, a nation-bounded approach tends to be taken to the recording and interpretation of this heritage, an approach that largely ignores the transnational social fields to which the immigrants who created the heritage places and buildings belonged. I propose the concept ‘heritage corridor’ to aid in conceptualising the transnational connectivity between migrant heritage sites in Australia and overseas locales as well as the bi-directional flow of ideas and capital that is often materially evident in the built environments, both rural and urban, encompassed by such a corridor. Focusing on Chinese overseas migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I describe how transnational remittances were instrumental in the building of houses, temples, schools, shops, roads and bridges in Guangdong Province, many of which are now regarded as heritage items. As an example of how the field of heritage studies may productively dialogue with migration studies, new thinking on material agency is drawn upon to account for the way remittance-built houses become entangled in the lives and aspirations of those at opposite poles of a heritage corridor.     

Challenging Europe’s external borders and internal boundaries. Bosnian Xoraxané Xomá on the move in Roman peripheries and the contemporary European Union

ABSTRACT

This paper explores, from an ethnographic standpoint, the mobility of a Bosnian Romani community in relation to the xenophobic and anti-Romani discourses that are pervading contemporary Italian and European society in the time of the so-called migrant crisis. The analysis focuses on some so-called Xomá families who live dispersed among illegal shanties in the Rome and whose movements and social network protract into other Italian and European cities. The question of mobility is addressed both in terms of local movements within the Roman peripheries and of wider transnational trajectories. Romani mobility appears as a tactical response to processes imposed from above that challenges the forms of governmentality related to the policing of borders and the production of boundaries of the EU and its member-states.     

Educational performance of children of migrant parents in Ghana,Nigeria and Angola

There is no empirical research on the school performance of children who live separated from their parents in sub-Saharan Africa—a major migrant sending region in the world. This study uses survey data from junior and secondary school children and youths in Ghana (N?=?2760), Angola (N?=?2243) and Nigeria (N?=?2168) to examine how different transnational family formations such as internal or international parental absence accompanied by migration or divorce, who is the migrant parent and who is the caregiver, the stability of the caregiving arrangement and remittances relate with the school performance of children who stay behind. School performance is measured through an index of grades in language, mathematics and science. The results show that international parental migration (Ghana), the internal parental migration accompanied by divorce/separation (Nigeria) and migration of both parents (Ghana and Nigeria) are likely predictors for decreased school performance. No effects are observed when parents are abroad and divorced/separated, when only one parent migrates, when children are in a stable care arrangement or when children receive remittances or not. The analyses show that the overall relationship between parental absence and education varies by the transnational dimension being analysed and by context.     

Beyond breadwinning: Ghanaian transnational fathering in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This article probes how gender norms and male migrants’ legal and socio-economic position shape transnational fathering amongst Ghanaian-born fathers, residing in the Netherlands, who have one or more children living in Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic research with Ghanaian transnational fathers, this article compares fathers’ attitudes and actual practices. In conformity with cultural expectations of fatherhood in Ghana, the men in this study primarily addressed their paternal role in terms of financial support for their families as ‘breadwinners’. Alongside breadwinning responsibilities, however, over three-quarters of the Ghanaian fathers espoused more ‘engaged’ parenting ideals, challenging stereotypes of the uncaring and distant migrant father who neglects his ‘stay-behind’ children’s emotional needs. Our analysis shows that fathers’ legal and socio-economic status largely determines men’s possibilities to perform their material and ‘emotionally engaged’ paternal ideals across borders. The emotional distance was particularly pronounced for undocumented and low-income migrants who were legally or financially incapable of bridging the emotional gulf arising from physical distance.