Rethinking migration, ancient to future

Abstract

Immigration as a framework in which to analyse the vast movements and interactions of people in the contemporary world tends to highlight recent movers and the legal apparatuses and ideologies of citizenship pertaining to them. Nation states, however, contain other, non-immigrant groups whose circumstances of arrival in many cases preceded nation states or a fully embordered globe, and who also need foregrounding if ethnocultural political sentiments and the deeper meanings of postmodern 'intermingling' are to be understood. Surveying a wide-ranging body of anthropological and historical studies of human migration and interaction over the past 150,000 years, a new synthetic framework is proposed. Contemporary nations all encompass diverse origins and arrivals that may be interpreted in terms of seven historically emergent and still ongoing processes: expansion, refuge-seeking, colonization, enforced transportation, trade diaspora, labour diaspora and emigration. Together they define the complex terrains upon which contemporary immigrants arrive.Rising tides in the movement of information, commodities and people characterize the contemporary world, and scholars have been vigorous in charting these proliferating forms of transnational circulation (: 2, 9) discerns 'a general rupture in the tenor of intersocietal relations [marking] the recent past (or the extended present)', and attributes this to, first, the impact of electronic media, and second, the pace and ubiquity of contemporary migration. Of the latter, he writes, 'few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or co-worker who is not on the road to somewhere else or … coming back home' (Appadurai 1996: 4).By the year 2000 some 130 million human beings lived outside their nation of birth (Suarez-Orozco 2000). In social anthropology the dominant concept for investigating this massive intercourse of people has been immigration -the self-directed movement of individuals from one nation state to another (

Diachronic Investigations of Mitochondrial and Y-Chromosomal Genetic Markers in Pre-Columbian Andean Highlanders from South Peru

“…The comparison of the diversity observed in the upper valley populations with modern and pre-Columbian coastal and highland populations will permit us to determine to what extent cultural interactions between the coastal and the highland areas were accompanied or influenced by human population dynamic processes. Since types of human migration and mobility can be sex specific processes (Sanjek, 2003) matrilineal and patrilineal genetic markers are observed.…”

Climate change underlies global demographic, genetic, and cultural transitions in pre-Columbian southern Peru

“…It is plausible that the enhanced hydrological conditions of the lower valleys in the LIP may have boosted the carrying capacity of the agronomy acting as a primary pull factor for this migration (5), with the increasing social and demographic complexity as a secondary pull factor (34,41). In turn, aridity and droughts in the southern highlands in the mid-12th century and the decline of the highland empires are possible push factors.…”

“…Depending on the type of migration, mobility can be sexspecific (41). Directed colonization and elite dominance, which presumably were used by the Wari and Tiwanaku in the MH to increase their sphere of political influence (42), mostly involve limited numbers of dominating males (41).…”

“…Directed colonization and elite dominance, which presumably were used by the Wari and Tiwanaku in the MH to increase their sphere of political influence (42), mostly involve limited numbers of dominating males (41). Mass movements or folk migration are alternative forms of migration involving equal proportions of males and females (41).…”

“…Directed colonization and elite dominance, which presumably were used by the Wari and Tiwanaku in the MH to increase their sphere of political influence (42), mostly involve limited numbers of dominating males (41). Mass movements or folk migration are alternative forms of migration involving equal proportions of males and females (41). The fact that we find support for migration from mtDNA data, describing the female population history, therefore further corroborates our interpretation of the past population dynamic processes: Demographic pressure at the end of the EIP and in the LIP forced large numbers of people regardless of their sex to migrate.…”