Modernity and Globalization

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Modernity and Globalization

• Anton Popov

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The Transnational Family

• Week 17

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Globalization and Transnationalism

• Globalisation often refers to the
  intensification of global interconnectedness and
  suggests that the world we now live in is full
  of movement and mixture, contact and linkages,
  and persistent cultural interaction and exchange
  (Inda and Rosaldo 2002 2)
• One of the most visible manifestations of
  globalisation is transnationalism which is
  characterised by the high intensity of
  exchanges, the new modes of transacting, and the
  multiplication of activities that require
  cross-border travel and contacts on a sustained
  basis (Portes et al. 1999 219).

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Globalisation, Modernity and Culture

• The transnational flow of people, ideas, goods,
  images and capital challenges the notion of
  culture as a production and exchange of meanings
  between members of a localised and territorially
  bounded community.
• Thus globalisation is often referred to as a
  driving force of modernity which is sometimes
  defined as a form of expansive civilisation
  advancing upon localised, and increasingly
  marginalised, traditional cultures (Hannerz
  1996).
• The opponents of this scenario argue that, the
  transnational flow of goods, ideas and people
  goes in both directions and brings the cultural
  diversity of the periphery to the centres of
  Western culture as well. (Clifford 1988 17).

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Transnational Migrant Circuits

• A transnational migrant circuit as a
  multi-sited but single community which is
  constituted by the continuous circulation of
  people, money, goods, and information (Rouse
  2002 162).
• The transnational migration from less affluent
  countries to Western cities is an example of what
  Rouse calls the social space of postmodernism
  where, alongside the capitalist penetration of
  the periphery goes peripheralization at the
  core.
• In order to understand the process of
  transnationalism different agencies involved in
  transnational circuits including such networks of
  social relations as families and friends have to
  be brought into the light (Portes et al. 1999).

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Critiques of the Household Approach to Migration

• Phizacklea (2004) criticizes the household
  theories of migration developed during the 1980s
  (see for example Stark 1984 and 1999), by arguing
  that these theories simply shifted the family
  into a position of effective decision-making
  unite ignoring the individual.
• Such accounts of the transnational family do not
  recognize the households implication in gendered
  ideologies and practices.
• They are also usually not applied to Western
  societies but cast that members of Third World
  households as traditional meaning that they are
  not burdened by the individualism of the West
  and resolve to cooperate willingly and
  completely to collectively lift the burden of
  their poverty (Gross and Linquist 1995 328, cf,
  Phizacklea 2004 125).
• Empirical data provide evidence of complex
  decision-making process within households
  migration, for example, can be seen by women as
  an escape from repressive forces of patriarchal
  society.

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Transnational Families Social Agency in Focus

• Family constitutes a support network for
  transnational migrants for example, it often
  operates as a channel for migrants cross-border
  movement.
• Family networking connects home communities with
  their diasporas, making them effectively a
  single community spread across a variety of
  sites (Rouse 2002 162).
• Theories of transnational migration and emerged
  to significant extent as a critique of what
  Roberts et al. (1999 253) call overtly
  structural approach, which suggests that
  migrants are mainly passive subjects coerced by
  states and marginalized by markets (cf.
  Phizacklea 2004 129).
• Thus focus on transnational social networks, and
  families in particular, stress decision-making
  capabilities of individual migrants. This,
  according to Phizacklea, restores an
  analytically coherent view of the relationships
  between structure and agency (2004 129).

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Steamship Routes, 1900
http//qed.princeton.edu/main/MG/Maps
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Transnational Life Past and Present

• Robert C. Smith Transnational life and
  reciprocal effects of assimilation and migration
  are not new but they require a new theoretical
  lens to them as such (2006 8-9)
• The main aspects in which the present
  transnationalism is different from its earlier
  forms
• Communication and travel technologies
• Different regimes of assimilations (e.g. in the
  USA Americanisation - in the past but
  encouragement of ethnic identification and links
  with the home country now)
• National identities rather then local/village
  identities of migrants
• International system exerts contradictory
  pressures on migration the remote control of
  the migration through passports and other state
  controls, and promotion of economic and cultural
  globalisation

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Relativisation Imagining the Transnational
Family

• Bryceson and Vuorela define transnational
  families as families that live some or most of
  the time separated from each other, yet hold
  together and create something that can be seen as
  a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely
  familyhood, even across national borders
  (2002 3).
• Individuals establish, maintain or curtail
  relational ties with other members of
  transnational families through the relativisation
  process.
• Transnational family relations are created by
  active pursuit or passive negligence of family
  blood ties and the possible inclusion of
  non-blood ties as family members...
  Relativisation refers to modes of materializing
  the family as an imagined community with shared
  feelings and mutual obligations (Bryceson and
  Vourela 2002 14).

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The Transnational Family as an Imagined Community

• There are several similarities between ways how
  belonging to family, nation and ethnic group is
  perceived by people. In all three cases belonging
  is imagined rather than natural.
• A metaphor of family is often used towards the
  nation with naturalising connotation.
• One may be born into a family and a nation, but
  the sense of membership can be a matter of choice
  and negotiation (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002 10).
  
• The nation-state has an effect on how migrants
  families are defined. Thus citizenship, visa and
  immigration regulation intertwine with family
  relations in the process of relativisation.

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The Transnational Family and the Nation-State

• Perhaps it is too early to speak about the world
  of globalisation and transnationalism as a
  post-national world (Appadurai 1996 21).
• Rather, as Sørensen (1998 262) argues,
  transnational migration has not eroded the
  nation-state but the transnational space becomes
  a contested space which contains several national
  and bi-national identities.
• Transnational migrants do not lose the sense of
  belonging to territorialised nations, because
  they, perhaps more than anyone else, are aware of
  the nation-states desire to control its
  territory as well as the movement of people
  across its borders.
• It is possible to say that, to a certain degree,
  the space of the nation-state has expanded as
  transnational practices and identities continue
  to be shaped by the state policies and identity
  politics of both home and host nations.

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The Case Study Pontic Greek Transnational
Families

• The construction of the Greek national and ethnic
  identity of the migrants is coupled with the
  (re)creation of their family network in time and
  space. This gives new meaning to the migrants
  Greek-ness as belonging to the family rather than
  to some imagined Greek nation. It also assumes
  that the family itself is rethought, for it now
  includes relatives who are remote historically
  and geographically. The goal of migration to
  Greece could be economic, but the way to it lies
  through rethinking Greek identity and creating
  new meaning for the family and the homeland. They
  leave for Greece under the pressure of economic
  difficulties, but arrive there to meet their
  families, both imagined and actual.

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Conclusions

• Transnational families are in a way an embodiment
  of the globalizing processes they make visible
  the way in which the world systems discourses
  penetrate the local reality, making it a part of
  the world system itself.
• Although transnational communities exist in, and
  as, a transnational circuit, they rarely identify
  themselves as transnationals and continue to
  speak about their attachment to particular
  nations, ethnicities, places and countries.
• As imagined communities transnational families
  are both the sites of reproduction of, and shifts
  in, gender, ethnic, national and class identities
  of their members.

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Questions

• Why is relativisation important for
  (re)production and functioning transnational
  families? Give examples of relativisation
  practices from ethnographic studies you have read
  (from the further reading list).
• Does the emergence of the transnational family
  challenge ideas of the traditional? Discuss
  using examples of gender relations, citizenship
  and national/ethnic identity.
• Why can the transnational family be seen as an
  imagined community?