Migration and Culture

Abstract

Moving from country to country is a dislocating experience. This chapter is concerned with such dislocations and relocations in an age of transnational migration. These movements generate two paradoxes of culture. The first and perhaps obvious paradox is that in order to put down roots in a new country, transnational migrants begin by setting themselves culturally and socially apart. The second, more theoretical, paradox is that in such encapsulated communities culture is open, changing, and fluid and yet experienced as a powerful imperative. As transnational migrants settle in a new country, they transplant and naturalize cultural categories, not simply because this is their tradition or culture, but because as active agents they have a stake in particular aspects of their culture. Culture as a medium of social interaction confers agency within a field of sociality and power relations. Yet the mere mention of culture in studies of migration invokes a conceptual minefield. Following Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), culture has come increasingly to be grasped as an essentializing concept that reifies, stereotypes, orientalizes, racializes, exoticizes, and distorts an "Other." Such critiques of culture have been repeatedly leveled by postmodernist and deconstructivist postcolonial and anthropological critics, 1 as well as by skeptical sociologists and social anthropologists. 2 A further conceptual conundrum in the study of culture and migration arises from the fact that culture is never merely individual, a portable piece of baggage

Migration, everyday life and the ethnicity bias

“…Following from this, our third strategy is to develop an approach that is sensitive to ethnicity in the empirical world, but which does not impose it where it is not (Anthias, 2002; Jackson, 2012; Werbner, 2012). Ethnicity matters in certain contexts, at particular times, and in specific ways (Schaeffer, 2013).…”