Sociodicies of (im)mobility: moral evaluations of stasis,departure and return in an emigrant village (Shenzhen,China)

Inhabitants of Pine Mansion, a former emigrant village in a present-day Chinese megacity, hold an ambivalent and nuanced morally laden discourse about migration. This paper takes up several of the challenges issued by the ‘regimes of mobility’ approach, and focuses on people’s moral justifications of (im)mobility. I build upon Boltanski’s sociology of critique to analyze how these narratives constitute sociodicies, explanatory schemes that retrospectively justify and evaluate past ‘choices’ and compare the destinies of those who stayed in the village and those who migrated abroad. Paying attention to sociodicies of (im)mobility fosters an understanding of the dynamics of change in the representations of migration and of the interplay between local understandings and state nationalist discourses. They furthermore reverse the tendency to present stasis and departure as the respective expressions of a deprivation and a manifestation of agency.