Hybridity, belonging, and mobilities: the intercontinental peripatetics of a transnational community

Abstract

Historical movements through the western Indian Ocean and beyond have led to the constitution of groups of spatially mobile individuals who claim belonging in a number of places on their itineraries. This paper looks at the movements of some of these people and suggests how their cultural and social strategies allow them to belong in these different places. However, their social points of reference (anchored in what Bourdieu calls doxa) and the dispositions that they carry with them (habitus) are often at variance with those of the groups with whom they interact. I suggest that the concept of partial belonging is useful in understanding these people and that this concept may be developed through rethinking habitus and may equally be extended to other, less mobile social groups.

Economic Incorporation, Civil Inclusion, and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow, Russia

“…Return migration today is an increasingly complex process reflecting the heterogeneity of migrants' characteristics, circumstances and life trajectories (Constant and Massey, ; de Haas and Fokkema, ). Return migrants in various parts of the world engage in continuing circulation and re‐migration (Black and King, ; Stefansson, ; Walker, ). The “dual consciousness” (Agnew, ) and “dual orientation” (Vertovec, ) of many contemporary migrants underlie and cement the transnationalization of international migration through a web of multiple connections between migrants, their homelands, and host countries.…”

Plug&Play Places: Lifeworlds of Multilocal Creative Knowledge Workers

“…It is often supposed that the transnational experience of nearly all parts of the national societies leads to the emergence of more hybrid or multiple identities on the individual level (Walker 2011). Therefore, in particular the individual experience of transnationalism is an interesting field for sociological research.…”

Transnationalising Resources: Three Biographies

“…Farhan is aware that different places offer different resources, and that nurturing his connections with the relevant places in his trajectory can be an asset. Depending on the circumstances and the development of his own projects, he might favour one place over another and build on the links he has maintained with this place (see also Walker 2011). Mobility is thus an important way through which these connections are sustained and nourished.…”