Migration and Flight as a Research Field within Globalization StudiesM igration and flight movements constitute a relatively new field of research in social and cultural anthropology, which has developed within studies on globalization. Our current world is characterized by transnational interconnections rather than homogeneous, clearly bounded and locally defined research spaces, making more complex research questions and methodologies relevant for social and cultural anthropology. Ethnologists investigate modes of dealing with the new and the different, questions of incorporation of unfamiliar things and ideas, as well as with the issue of cultural interpretation and reinterpretation (Hauser-Schäublin and Braukäm-per, 2002: 10-11).Research on modes of dealing with cultural and ethnic diversity in times of increasing globalization lies within the present focus of social and cultural anthropology. Anthropological approaches in migration and globalization studies offer ways to capture effects of migration and flight movements. The research process must address juxtapositions of changing social, territorial and cultural forms of the reproduction of group identities. When groups migrate, they recompose in new settings, they reconstruct their histories and their ethnic concepts. In this way, the 'ethnic' in the group context is endowed with a non-localized, harder to define quality, which ethnographic praxis needs to tune into. The landscapes of
In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them “stuck” in continuous loops of “motion”. By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.
This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept of localized Islam as an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans.
Ⅲ ABSTRACT: Th is contribution introduces the collection of texts in this special section of Migration and Society exploring contemporary patterns of im/mobility between Africa and Europe. It proposes an ontological-epistemological framework for investigating present-day movements via three core dimensions: (1) a focus on im/mobility explores the intertwinement of mobility and stasis in the context of biographical and migratory pathways and thus goes beyond a binary approach to migration; (2) an existential and dialogical-ethnographic approach zooms in on individual experiences of im/mobility and shows that the personal-experiential is not apolitical, but represents a realm of everyday struggles and quests for a good life; and (3) a genealogical-historical dimension explores present-day migratory quests through their embeddedness within legacies of (post)colonial power relations and interconnections and thus counteracts the hegemonic image of immigration from Afri ca as having no history and legitimacy. Ⅲ KEYWORDS: existential anthropology, experience, genealogy, history crisis, im/mobility, migration, (post)colonialIn this special section of Migration and Society we shed light on diff erent patterns of im/mobility in, from, and between Europe and Africa. By focusing on migrants' perspectives on their struggles to reach European shores and cross borders, including their experience of being stuck in transit, their dreams and experiences of Europe as well as their decision to leave it behind, we explore the long-standing and unequal interconnectedness of Europe and Africa. We suggest that rather than fortifying divisions, migratory movements are a testimony to the strong social, historical, and political connections between the two continents and that current patterns of im/mobility cannot be understood outside of these long (postcolonial) histories of interrelationship.Embedding migratory trajectories between Africa and Europe in their historical and experiential contexts is of particular importance in the current political climate in Europe, where the 2 Ⅲ Jelena Tošić and Annika Lems fi gure of the African migrant has turned into a signifi er of crisis. In the aft ermath of the momentary breakdown of Europe's rigid border regime in the summer of 2015, the unusually high number of migrants and refugees making their way to European Union member states quickly came to be framed as a "crisis. " Th e "crisis, " invoked by journalists, politicians, and concerned citizens, did not refer to the chronic uncertainty, violence, and lack of perspectives marking the lives of the people making their way to Europe on leaky boats or across deserts and mountain ranges. Rather, the idea of crisis permeating the public discursive arena in Europe in the aft ermath of 2015 reversed the focus from crisis as the cause of migratory movements to crisis as an eff ect of human mobility (Carasthathis et al. 2018: 5;Strasser 2015).Th e dominance of discourses of a migration "crisis" threatening the social and cultural order of things in Euro...
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