Nina Glick Schiller

Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society

This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nation-state.

FROM IMMIGRANT TO TRANSMIGRANT: THEORIZING TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION

Contemporary immigrants cannot be characterized as the « uprooted » . Many are transmigrants, becoming firmly rooted in their new country but maintaining multiple linkages to their homeland. While in the United States and Europe, most social scientists and public policy makers have ignored these interconnections, anthropologists are currently engaged in building a transnational anthropology and rethinking their data on immigration. Migration proves to be an important transnational process that reflects and contributes to the current political configurations of the emerging global economy. In this paper, the AA. use their own studies of migration from Haiti, St. Vincent, Grenada and the Philippines to the United States to delineate some of the parameters of an ethnography of transnational migration and explore the reasons for and the implications of transnational migrations. They conclude that the transnational connections of immigrants provide a subtext for current efforts to redefine the nature of citizenship in relationship to the global economy

Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration

Our earlier conceptions of immigrant and migrant n o longer suffice. The word immigrant evokes images of permanent rupture, of the uprooted, the abandonment of old patterns and the painful learning of a new language and culture. Now, a new kind of migrating population is emerging, composed of those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies. Their lives cut across national boundaries and bring two societies into a single social field. In this book we argue that a new conceptualization is needed in order to come to terms with the experience and consciousness of this new migrant population. We call this new conceptualization, “transnationalism,” and describe the new type of migrants as transmigrants. We have defined transnationalism as the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement. Immigrants who build such social fields are designated “transmigrants.” Transmigrants develop and maintain multiple relationsfamilial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders. Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and feel concerns, and develop identities within social net-

Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology

The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study of transnational migration, is linked to periods of intense globalization such as the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet transnational studies have their own contradictions that may reintroduce methodological nationalism in other guises. In studying migration, the challenge is to avoid both extreme fluidism and the bounds of nationalist thought.

Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]

This paper views cultural citizenship as a process of self-making and being-made in relation to nation-states and transnational processes. Whereas some scholars claim that racism has been replaced by cultural fundamentalism in defining who belongs or does not belong in Western democracies, this essay argues that hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference intersect in a complex, contingent way to locate minorities of color from different class backgrounds. Comparing the experiences of rich and poor Asian immigrants to the United States, the author discusses institutional practices whereby nonwhite immigrants in the First World are simultaneously, though unevenly, subjected to two processes of normalization : an ideological whitening or blackening that reflects dominant racial oppositions and an assessment of cultural competence based on imputed human capital and consumer power in the minority subject. Immigrants from Asia or poorer countries must daily negotiate the lines of difference established by state agencies as well as groups in civil society. A subsidiary point is that, increasingly, such modalities of citizen-making are influenced by transnational capitalism. Depending on their locations in the global economy, some immigrants of color have greater access than others to key institutions in state and civil society. Global citizenship thus confers citizenship privileges in Western democracies to a degree that may help the immigrant to scale racial and cultural heights but not to circumvent status hierarchy based on racial difference

Towards a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies: Migrant Incorporation and City Scale

Building on the scholarship that theorises the restructuring of cities within neoliberal globalisation, this article calls for a comparative scalar approach to migrant settlement and transnational connection. Deploying a concept of city scale, the article posits a relationship between the differing outcomes of the restructuring of post-industrial cities and varying pathways of migrant incorporation. Committed to the use of nation-states and ethnic groups as primary units of analysis, migration scholars have lacked a comparative theory of locality; scholars of urban restructuring have not engaged in migration studies. Yet migrant pathways are both shaped by and contribute to the differential repositioning of cities. Migrants are viewed as urban scale-makers with roles that vary in relationship to the different positioning of cities within global fields of power.

Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe

Mobility studies emerged from a postmodern moment in which global ‘flows’ of capital, people and objects were increasingly noted and celebrated. Within this new scholarship, categories of migrancy are all seen through the same analytical lens. This article and Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power, the special issue of JEMS it introduces, build on, as well as critique, past and present studies of mobility. In so doing, this issue challenges conceptual orientations built on binaries of difference that have impeded analyses of the interrelationship between mobility and stasis. These include methodological nationalism, which counterpoises concepts of internal and international movement and native and foreigner, and consequently normalises stasis. Instead, the issue offers a regimes of mobility framework that addresses the relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and transnational connection, experiences and imaginaries of migration, and rootedness and cosmopolitan openness. The introduction highlights how, within this framework and its emphasis on social fields of differential power, the contributors to this collection ethnographically explore the disparities, inequalities, racialised representations and national mythscapes that facilitate and legitimate differential mobility and fixity. Although the authors examine nation-state building processes, their analysis is not confined by national boundaries.

Transnational social fields and imperialism: Bringing a theory of power to Transnational Studies

Transnational Studies have allowed scholars to move beyond a methodological nationalism that conflates society and the nation-state. Yet rather than addressing globe-spanning systems of power, Transnational Studies that focus on transnational communities or diasporas obscure important relations of power. More recently there has been a spate of publishing on the ‘new’ imperialism that offers global theories of power. However, much of the emerging scholarship on imperialism fails to examine the processes that legitimate and assist imperial control. By theorizing transnational social fields, transnational migration studies offer insights into the social and cultural processes of imperialist intervention. Drawing from ethnographic research with fundamentalist Christians and Haitian long-distance nationalists, the article argues that our scholarship must examine the relationship between the transnational social fields and imperialist power.

All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation‐State

Over the years, feminist scholarship has illuminated the ways in which genders are differentiated and gender hierarchies are constituted as part of the way women and men learn to identify with a nation‐state. Much less has been said about the social reproduction of gender in transnational spaces. These spaces are created as people emigrate, settle far from their homelands, and yet develop networks of connection that maintain familial, economic, religious, and political ties to those homelands. The task of this paper is to begin to explore the ways in which gender and nation are mutually constituted within the transnational social fields that link homeland and new land. This paper is exploratory, using a case study of Haitian transnational connections as a catalyst for future investigation.

Defining cosmopolitan sociability in a transnational age. An introduction

Abstract This special issue features ethnographies that examine the trajectories of mobile people within particular places, moments and networks of connection. Critiquing the ready equation of cosmopolitanism with experiences of mobility, we examine the encounters of pilgrims, migrants, missionaries or members of a diaspora. Defining cosmopolitanism as a simultaneous rootedness and openness to shared human emotions, experiences and aspirations rather than to a tolerance for cultural difference or a universalist morality, the authors explore the degree to which mobility produces cosmopolitan sociability.