Judith-Maria Buechler

Migrants in Europe: The Role of Family, Labor, and Politics.

The 12 articles in this collection document migration fields which are social systems that include the places or origin and destination of migrants. In such systems social political and economic changes that take place in one point in the field have an immediate impact on other parts of the same field. Government policies regarding migration in both sender and host countries as well as specific treaties between countries may regulate movements within such fields. But migration fields have dynamics of their own which sometimes run in opposition to the wishes of bureaucrats and lawmakers. These integrative mechanisms include chain migration; clandestine networks that facilitate illegal movements between countries; the periodic return of migrants to their places of origin; migrant remittances to parts of families who remained behind; payments to boarding schools in the home country where the children of migrants have been sent; and investment in land construction and small businesses in the home country.

Farmers, conflict, and identity in eastern Germany

This article, based on our research in eastern Germany, examines the manner in which farmers—including managers of the cooperatives that emerged out of former agricultural collectives, newly independent eastern German individual farmers, and newcomers from the West—define their roles and identities in the newly unified German state. We analyze this process within a framework that combines social‐interactional, social network, and cognitive models, taking into account fluidity and contradictions in behavior and in its symbolization. Identity formation unfolds in an arena characterized by competition for land based on differential access to various sources of power. Historical identities from the pre‐communist past, the recent communist past, and those developed in western Germany during the period of separation all provide the basis for emerging identities. The logic and reality of this redefinition are embedded in wider political and economic interests that are themselves inconsistent and in flux.