Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews | 2021
Transnational Return and Social Change: Hierarchies, Identities, and Ideas
Abstract
Based on a project originally funded by the Romanian Council for Scientific Research, Transnational Return and Social Change: Hierarchies, Identities, and Ideas focuses on return migration. This is a well-established topic in the literature. The volume consists of eight chapters plus an introduction authored by Remus Gabriel Anghel and Margit Fauser, two of the volume’s editors, and an afterword by the third editor, Paolo Boccagni. The volume is the result of the authors’ and editors’ long-term cooperation, and that is reflected in the writing of the individual chapters. Unlike many other edited volumes, there is a remarkable thematic coherence throughout its pages. The volume is structured into three parts, each with a distinct focus. Part I consists of three chapters that address different ways in which return migration affects social hierarchies. Part II consists of two chapters that address the reshaping of returnees’ collective identities. Part III consists of three chapters that examine the impact of return migration on local social change, especially with regard to affecting local knowledge and norms or questioning the status quo. In the volume’s introduction, Anghel and Fauser offer a very brief overview of the field of return migration and describe their notion of transnational return. That is the key theoretical contribution of the project in the literature on migration. The editors argue in favor of distinguishing between transnationalization and globalization. Furthermore, they suggest a two-way relationship between return and transnationality (pp. 7–8): on the one hand, there is the extent to which ‘‘transnational social formations and practices shape, and often motivate, return’’ (p. 8); while on the other hand is the extent to which ‘‘return [itself] produces new forms of transnationality’’ (p. 8). In order to develop their ‘‘meso-level’’ approach, they focus on the following questions: What is being transferred by return migrants? What is being changed by transnational return? How does this change occur? (p. 10). In order to answer these questions, individual chapters report results from qualitative research carried out in Romania, Poland, Latvia, Turkey, and Ghana. While most chapters focus on return migration within European countries, the chapters about Ghana also address return migration from Libya and Ivory Coast. The empirical cases reported within the individual chapters include the return experience within Romania’s Roma community; the case of ethnic Germans’ ‘‘returning’’ to Romania’s Transylvanian region after the fall of communism; the involuntary return of workers from Libya and Ivory Coast to Ghana; the relationship between religion and return migration among ethnic Romanians returning to their home country; identity issues among Latvia’s return migrants; the emergence of hybrid identities among German-speaking returnees in Turkey and Romania; the experience of migrants returning to Ghana from Germany; the social remittances involved in the return of immigrants to Poland; and the cosmopolitan identities of the Turkish returnees from Germany who have resettled in the city of Antalya in Turkey. As the mere enumeration of individual cases shows, the volume examines mostly, but not exclusively, instances of return migration about or within East European countries. Given the consistent flows of post-1989 outward migration from the region, this volume is most definitely a welcome addition to the literature. For a long period of time the region was conventionally seen as economically and socially underdeveloped—but that is certainly no longer the case (as several countries have, in recent years, experienced higher GDP growth than their Western European counterparts). Hence, this volume helps capture important trends that are not always visible to the broader public or even the sociological community. It is of course reasonable (and certainly expected) that Romania features dominantly among the cases studied. Still, the editors have successfully included additional cases that enable the articulation Reviews 27