Spicing Up a 150-Year-Old Porcelain Factory: Art,Localism and Transnationalism in Arita's Happy Lucky Kiln

The Kouraku Kiln, a 150-year-old Japanese porcelain factory in the traditional rural pottery town of Arita, has been struggling with the economic decline brought by the burst of the bubble in the mid-1990s, rural migration and changes in lifestyle and tastes. Using ethnographic fieldwork, I look at the independent innovative activities that the Kouraku Kiln factory has put into place to overcome such problems: an artist-in-residence program and a treasure hunt, both coordinated by Brazilian ceramic artist and cultural agitator Sebastião Pimenta. By making use of the local history, identity, and infrastructure to attract visitors from all over the world to the production site, Kouraku Kiln has changed its focus from its products by selling knowledge and experiences. Besides contributing to the revitalization of the local economy, the constant presence of Pimenta and other international artists at the factory has added to the creation of multicultural exchanges in the local community, raising issues about social integration and local citizenship. With this case study, I aim to add to discussions about the revitalization of rural places and the regeneration of Japanese traditional crafts through the acknowledgment of globalization and mobility. By addressing issues related to the impact of transnational flows in rural communities, this article argues for the contributions of migrants in their communities of destination and examines the transforming relationships between art, society, and local development.     

Bridging the territorial divide: immigrants’ cross-border communication and the spatial dynamics of their kin networks

The transnational perspective emphasises the persistence of immigrants’ home country connections, yet existing research adds little to our understanding of the mechanisms by which cross-border ties are maintained. We use nationally representative data of immigrants in Spain to describe changes in their kin network and study how two characteristics, migration stage (whether kin already resided in Spain at the time of emigration and whether any kin remained in the birth country (BC) at the time of interview) and relationship-specific locations of kin (children, parents, spouse, siblings), influence the frequency of cross-border communication. We find an expansion in the total number of kin largely due to childbearing and marriage. The average fraction of migrants’ immediate kin in Spain shifts from 6% to 41%. The presence of at least one kin in the BC increases the frequency of cross-border communication, but with the exception of siblings, the presence of family already in Spain at the time of emigration does not. Siblings and parents were far more likely to retain a BC presence, but they were less likely than spouses or children to be contacted daily. While these ties are generally long-lasting, communication wanes as immigrant embeddedness in the receiving country grows.     

The Khachchara of Kathmandu – mobility,situatedness and ethnic identification

This paper investigates the role of mobility and settlement in reworking ethnic identification among the Khachchara in Kathmandu, Nepal. The Khachchara are a small group of around 350 families, the descendants of Tibetan mothers and Newar fathers, who predominantly worked and lived as traders in Tibet. After the Chinese occupation of Tibet, the Khachchara had the option of obtaining citizenship, yet many returned to Nepal with their spouses and children. On relocating to Nepal, caste considerations of purity came into play for the descendants of mixed marriages, forcing the Khachcharas to re-evaluate their ethnic identities as well as their place in Nepali society. Exploring Khachchara genesis through their history, mobility stories and their present hybrid affiliations shows how mobility disembeds identity and engages elective belonging. In this paper, the paradox of Khachchara ethnicity negotiating common ground in terms of their distinctiveness as a group, particularly through self-help organisations such as the skyid sdug (Tib.), and their assimilation into other ethnicities, is set in a discussion of translocal and transnational geographies, addressing both situatedness and de-territorialisation.     

Je suis un Italien de Paris: Italian migrants’ incorporation in a European capital city

ABSTRACT

Italy has experienced a new wave of population outflows, in particular since the end of the 2000s, with France as one of the top destinations. This paper investigates the structural and socio-cultural integration of Italian migrants in Paris. The paper is based on a mixed-methods approach, using in-depth interviews, census data and an online survey. We found that the profile and incorporation patterns of post-crisis migrants reflects a long-term trend of middling migration out of Italy. Similar to other studies, we show that current Italian migrants are prevailingly highly skilled and employed in non-manual jobs. As for socio-cultural integration, the paper highlights the symbolic value of the host city, to which migrants are strongly attached. Moreover, the longer the Italian’s stay in Paris, the higher his/her integration in Italy-oriented activities, both within Paris and in Italy. This indicates a complex incorporation model that is at odds with assimilation but at the same time departs from ethnicised and community-based patterns. Italian migrants combine being both Parisian and Italian in a ‘synergistic balancing act’ (Erdal and Oeppen 2013. ‘Migrant Balancing Acts: Understanding the Interactions between Integration and Transnationalism.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (6):867–884.) of integration and transnationalism.     

Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions

The study of new media use by transnational social movements is central to contemporary investigations of social contention. In order to shed light on the terrain in which the most recent examples of online mobilization have grown and developed, this paper combines the interest in the transnational dynamics of social contention and the exploration of the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for protest action. In specific terms, the study investigates how early twenty-first century social movement coalitions used Internet tools to build symbolically transnational collective identities. By applying a hyperlink network analysis approach, the study focuses on a website network generated by local chapters of the World Social Forum (WSF), one of the earliest social movement coalitions for global justice. The sample network, selected through snowball sampling, is composed of 222 social forum websites from around the world. The study specifically looks at hyperlinks among social forum websites as signs of belonging and potential means of alliance. The analysis uses network measures, namely of cohesion, centrality, structural equivalence and homophily, to test dynamics of symbolic collective identification underlying the WSF coalition. The findings show that in early twenty-first century transnational contention, culture and place still played a central role in the emergence of transnational movement networks.     

The Lebanese diasporic field: the impact of sending and receiving states

What is a diaspora? Can it be distinguished from a ‘transnational community’? This paper discusses the Lebanese migrants abroad and their relationships with Lebanon by deploying the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’. It argues that Bourdieu’s concept of field helps to capture the dynamic character of diasporic relations and the power relations that underpin them. It also enables the researcher to better delineate the boundary of a diasporic community and at the same time to treat this boundary as flexible enough to identify the specific terms for entering and exiting the ‘diasporic field’. It also argues that at a time when diasporic relations are cross-national, that specifically revolve around a real or imaginary ‘homeland’, they encompass individual, group and institutional actors that belong with varying degrees to the country of origin and the countries of settlement. Finally, the paper concludes that the ‘diasporic field’ is a useful analytical tool to capture the complexities of increasingly ubiquitous diasporic relations.     

Globalization and migration in the contemporary world order: an insight into the postnational condition and the diasporas

In the new millennium, nations and nationalism persevere despite scholarship that has both anticipated and declared their demise. Globalization, which brings flow of capital, goods, ideas, people and technology, has a tremendous undeniable impact on every sphere of the contemporary world. The growing connectivity amongst the nation-states at physical, imaginative and virtual levels facilitates transnational networks that produce new types of migrants who do not respect national borders. The diaspora communities today are no longer confined in the homeland/hostland binary. The globalized economy, technology and the world society provide enough space for those with hyphenated identities to survive as a connecting link not only with the homeland but also with other diasporic nodes with common origin and cultural/ethnic background. Thus, a new diaspora is taking shape which is highly mobile and interconnected. Viewed in this perspective, this paper aims to explore the changing configurations of diasporic identities in the context of a much eulogized postnational condition engendered by increasing transnational activities that defy the stringent idea of nation and its state’s territorial boundaries questioning the very viability of nation-states in the present era of globalization.     

Risky business and geographies of refugee capitalism in the Somali migrant economy of Gauteng,South Africa

Research on migrant livelihoods in South Africa reveals links between social exclusion and migrant ‘cosmopolitan tactics’, including multi-sited socialities, diverse spatial business strategies and orientations precluding integration into a ‘xenophobic’ host society. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic research, this study explores how Somali migrants’ business practices and tactics of mobility within and beyond Gauteng Province, South Africa (which encompasses Johannesburg and Pretoria) articulate with both broader transnational flows and investments in the local economy. Since the end of apartheid, Somalis and other migrants from the Horn of Africa have carved out an economic niche in peri-urban townships where high risk and frequent movement characterise workers’ lives. The Somali enclave in the neighbourhood of Mayfair, Johannesburg, links local and national circulations of people, goods and money to international circuits of the Somali ethnic economy—an economy that also involves non-Somali groups, mainly from Kenya and Ethiopia. These diverse dynamics of human mobility and financial circulation complicate bounded conceptualisations of transnationalism and also illustrate how tactical cosmopolitanisms may be grounded in spatial and social arrangements. The convergence of migrant mobility and financial flows produces distinctive patterns of livelihood embedded in a multi-scalar geography of movement, remittance, investment, risk and opportunity.     

Conceptualising youth mobility trajectories: thinking beyond conventional categories

Research has shown that migration impacts youth outcomes, including educational performance and mental and physical health. It is, however, unknown whether differing patterns of mobility affect young people differently. This is because scholarship and policy-making on youth and migration simplify youth mobility by conceptualising youth either as immobile (when they ‘stay behind’ while their parents migrate) or as moving only once (when they follow parents or migrate independently). Between these extremes is the possibly more common phenomenon of youth who engage in sustained mobility patterns prior to, during, and after their first international move. This paper explores how youth mobility can be conceptualised to include the often-complex mobility patterns exhibited by youth in today’s global cities. Through an analysis of detailed mobility data collected using mixed methods among young Ghanaians growing up in and between the Netherlands and Ghana, we propose a typology of their mobility trajectories that highlights the variety of mobility patterns that youth engage in. Such a typology helps move research beyond the ethnic lens and rigid dichotomies between internal and international migration. We argue that the diversity of youth mobilities needs to be taken into account in order to understand how migration affects youth.     

Intonation,identity and contact‐induced change among Polish‐speaking migrants in the U.K.

This article examines intonational variation in a language contact situation. The study contributes to sociolinguistic research on the social meaning of intonational variation (Podesva 2006 ; Levon 2014 ). Intonation is studied in a multilingual context of global mobility: within a group of Polish‐speaking migrants in Britain who, thanks to cheap transportation and new channels of communication, could make use of linguistic resources unlimited by territorial boundaries from the beginning of their transnational experience. The study shows that speakers with seemingly similar linguistic and cultural profiles make use of intonation patterns in different ways in the context of the narrative of the self: speakers oriented towards the global economy and the English‐speaking world incorporate a mainly English intonational pattern, the fall‐rise, with increased frequency to do interactional work that it does in English, while other groups maintain Standard Polish norms. As shown, intonational variation participates in the creation of fluid identities that blur linguistic and sociocultural boundaries.