“Transnational” Socio‐Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants' attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation‐states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants' extra‐local socio‐cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.     

Mobility,education and life trajectories: new and old migratory pathways

Travel for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This special issue examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the articles explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional and transnational relations in which they are embedded. Three key issues emerge from the analyses: firstly, the central role of temporality in terms of both the overall historical conditions and the specific biographical circumstances shaping educational opportunities; secondly, the complex agendas informing individuals’ migration and the adjustment of these agendas in the light of the vagaries of migrant life; and thirdly, the importance of migrants’ self-perception as ‘educated persons’ and the invention of new, and the maintaining of old, identities that this involves.     

New neighbours in a time of change: local pragmatics and the perception of asylum centres in rural Denmark

Asylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres’ arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the opposed poles of xenophobia and humanitarianism. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines the meanings and consequences of asylum centres for rural Danish communities. Drawing on anthropological theory on the mutuality of social life we argue that asylum centres become embedded in pre-existing relations within local communities and between them and the centralising Danish welfare state. Local communities sometimes were initially sceptical about asylum centres, but they generally developed a collective, pragmatic approach towards them in contrast to the divided, ideological cast of national debates on asylum. By shifting focus from the national to the local, from the urban to the rural, and from the migrants to the neighbouring communities, a less polarising and more everyday mode of relating to the arrival of asylum seekers becomes visible.     

Migrating for a profession: becoming a Caribbean nurse in post-WWII Britain

Youths from the Global South migrating for further education often face various forms of discrimination. This Caribbean case study discusses how conditions in the home country can provide a foundation for educational migration that helps the migrants overcome such obstacles and even develop a strong sense of agency and self-empowerment. In the post-WWII period, numerous Caribbean women trained in nursing at British hospitals that have been described as marred by race and gender related inequality and associated forms of exploitation. Yet, the nurses interviewed about this training emphasised its high quality and downplayed the problems encountered. This positive attitude, it is argued, must be understood in the light of the key ideological role of education, particularly for a profession, as an avenue of social and personal mobility in the late-colonial Caribbean societies and the ways in which it enabled these Caribbean women to stake out a new life for themselves.     

Narrating deglobalization: Danish perceptions of a lost empire

Abstract According to Ulf Hannerz, globalization, viewed as a historic process of increasing interconnectedness, implies the possibility of an opposite process of deglobalization involving a delinking of interconnectedness. This study of Danish engagement in the Danish West Indies, a colony sold to the United States in 1917, exemplifies deglobalization. This case shows that while globalization can be reversed in terms of interconnectedness, it may continue unabated in stories of former global ventures. Indeed, the delinked Danish West Indian past has offered a rich, imagined resource for Danish narratives of past achievements on the global arena that bear little relation to the modest Danish contribution to colonial history. Globalization therefore does not just involve actual interconnectedness, but cultural interpretations of global engagement, past or present.     

Sampling Methods for Wallenius' and Fisher's Noncentral Hypergeometric Distributions

Several methods for generating variates with univariate and multivariate Walleniu' and Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distributions are developed. Methods for the univariate distributions include: simulation of urn experiments, inversion by binary search, inversion by chop-down search from the mode, ratio-of-uniforms rejection method, and rejection by sampling in the τ domain. Methods for the multivariate distributions include: simulation of urn experiments, conditional method, Gibbs sampling, and Metropolis-Hastings sampling. These methods are useful for Monte Carlo simulation of models of biased sampling and models of evolution and for calculating moments and quantiles of the distributions.     

Calculation Methods for Wallenius' Noncentral Hypergeometric Distribution

Two different probability distributions are both known in the literature as “the” noncentral hypergeometric distribution. Wallenius' noncentral hypergeometric distribution can be described by an urn model without replacement with bias. Fisher's noncentral hypergeometric distribution is the conditional distribution of independent binomial variates given their sum. No reliable calculation method for Wallenius' noncentral hypergeometric distribution has hitherto been described in the literature. Several new methods for calculating probabilities from Wallenius' noncentral hypergeometric distribution are derived. Range of applicability, numerical problems, and efficiency are discussed for each method. Approximations to the mean and variance are also discussed. This distribution has important applications in models of biased sampling and in models of evolutionary systems.     

A wedding in the family: home making in a global kin network

Rituals such as weddings and funerals are significant for transnational family networks as events where scattered relatives meet and validate shared kinship and common origins. They are particularly important when taking place at a family ‘home’ that has been a centre of social and economic relations and locus of emotional attachment. This article analyses a wedding on a Caribbean island involving a large global family network, which occurred at a critical point in the family’s history. It became an occasion when members asserted their notions of belonging rooted in the ‘home’, not just as members of a common kin group, but as persons whose life trajectories had involved them in different social, economic and geographical contexts. Individually they had dissimilar interpretations and expectations of their place in the home, and these were played out at the wedding. The gathering allowed a display of family solidarity, but was also a site where differing views of individuals’ contribution to the global household were expressed, and rights to belong in the family home and, by implication, the island were contested.