Conceptzcalizing Simultuneity:
A Transnational Social Field
Perspective on Society’
Peggy Levitt
Wellesley College and Haruard University
Nina Glick Schiller
University of New Hampshire and Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology
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.
Social scientists have long been interested in how immigrants are incorporated
into new countries. In Germany and France, scholars’expectations that
foreigners will assimilate is a central piece of public policy. In the United
States, immigration scholars initially argued that to move up the socioeconomic
ladder, immigrants would have to abandon their unique customs,
language, values, and homeland ties and identities. Even when remaining
ethnic became more acceptable, most researchers assumed that the importance
of homeland ties would eventually fade. To be Italian American or
Irish American would ultimately reflect ethnic pride within a multicultural
United States rather than enduring relations to an ancestral land.
Now scholars increasingly recognize that some migrants and their descendants
remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home
country or by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see
‘This is a co-authored article, jointly conceived and written by both contributors.
0 2004 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
0197-9183/04/3803.0147
ZMR Volume 38 Number 3 (Fall 2004):1002-10391002
CONCEPTUALIZINGS~MULTANEITY 1003
migrants’ crossborder ties as a variable and argue that to understand contemporary
migration, the strength, influence, and impact of these ties must
be empirically assessed. They call for a transnational perspective on migration
(Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1994).The resulting analyses,
in combination with other scholarship on transnational dynamics, are building
toward a new paradigm that rejects the long-held notion that society and
the nation-state are one and the same.
This article is not intended as a comprehensive review of the transnational
migration scholarship. In fact, a special volume of this journal, published
in Fall 2003, does just that. Instead, we explore the social theory and
the consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration.
We argue that central to the project of transnational migration studies,
and to scholarship on other transnational phenomena, is a reformulation of
the concept of society. The lives of increasing numbers of individuals can no
longer be understood by looking only at what goes on within national
boundaries. Our analytical lens must necessarilybroaden and deepen because
migrants are often embedded in multi-layered, multi-sited transnational
social fields, encompassing those who move and those who stay behind. As
a result, basic assumptions about social institutions such as the family,
citizenship, and nation-states need to be revisited.
Once we rethink the boundaries of social life, it becomes clear that the
incorporation of individuals into nation-states and the maintenance of transnational
connections are not contradictory social processes. Simultaneity, or
living lives that incorporate daily activities, routines, and institutions located
both in a destination country and transnationally, is a possibility that needs
to be theorized and explored. Migrant incorporation into a new land and
transnational connections to a homeland or to dispersed networks of family,
compatriots, or persons who share a religious or ethnic identity can occur at
the same time and reinforce one another.
Our goals in this study are fourfold. 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.
Instead, we suggest thinking of the transnational migration experience as a
kind of gauge which, while anchored, pivots between host land and transnational
connections. 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, undertaken
1004 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW
by scholarsof transnational processes in a variety of fields, to reformulatethe
concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with or
confined by the boundaries of a single nation-state.
FOUNDATIONAL APPROACHES TO THIS FIELD
There have alreadybeen severalwaves of transnational migration scholarship
that have fine-tuned concepts and analyzed transnational relations in a much
more nuanced manner than earlier formulations. Researchers have explored
transnational identity formation and the economic, political, religious, and
sociocultural practices that propel migrant incorporation and transnational
connection at the same time (see, e.g., Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton
Blanc, 1994; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998; Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Laguerre,
1998; Itzigsohn et al., 1999; Smith, 2003; Levitt, 2001a, b; Glick
Schiller and Fouron, 2001a, b; Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2002; Kyle, 2001;
Ostergaard-Nielsen,2003; Fitzgerald, 2003; Landolt, 2001; Goldring, 2002;
Vertovec, 2003; Gold, 2002; Koopmans and Statham, 2001; Riccio, 2001;
Van der Veer, 2001; Abelman, 2002; Morgan, 1999; Faist, 2000a, b; Schiffauer,
1999; SMair, 1998; Itzigsohn, 2000; Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt,
1999; Kivisto, 2001; Mahler, 1998; Duany, 2000; Morawska, 2003b, Eckstein
and Barberia, 2002). They have proposed typologies to capture variations
in the dimensions of transnational migration. The extent to which
transnational migration is a new phenomenon or whether it shares similarities
with its earlier incarnations has been the subject of much debate (see
Foner, 2000; Glick Schiller, 1999; Smith, 2002; Morawska, 2003b; Weber,
1999). Several studies examine the scope of transnational practices among
particular immigrant populations (see Portes, Haller and Guarnizo, 2002;
Guarnizo, Portes and Haller, 2003; Itzigsohn and Saucedo, 2002). Finally,
an emerging body of research tries to explain variations in transnational
practicesacross groups (Levitt, 2OO2b; Itzigsohn and Saucedo,2002; Portes,
Haller and Guarnizo, 2002; Guarnizo, Portes and Haller, 2003).
To develop our theory and methodology further and to address the
implications of simultaneous incorporation, we begin with a brief synthesis
of the scholarship on transnational migration to date upon which a new
theoretical synthesis can be built. We see four distinct traditions developing
among scholars of transnational migration: the research done by sociologists
and anthropologists in the United States; studies done by the Transnational
Community Programme based at Oxford University; a literature on trans-
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1005
national families; and an effort to reformulate notions of space and social
structure. Underlying these developments is a fundamental problem of social
theory - how to rethink society if we do not take national boundaries for
granted.
Transnational migration scholarship in the United States has been
shaped by its critique of the unilinear assimilationist paradigm of classical
migration research (Glick Schiller, 1999; Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton
Blanc, 1994; Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton Blanc, 1995). Some studies
have focused on the kinds of networks that stretch between a sending community
and its migrants (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Levitt, 200la; Rouse,
1992; Smith, 1998; Kyle 2001). Others have sought to determine the conditions
under which migrants maintained homeland ties and identities and
how commonplace transnational practices were among the migrant population
as a whole (Morawska, 2003b; Levitt, 2003b; Basch, Glick Schiller
and Szanton Blanc, 1994). These studies revealed that a small but nonetheless
significant number of migrants engage in regular economic and political
transnational practices (Portes, Haller and Guarnizo, 2002; Guarnizo, Portes
and Haller, 2003) and that many more individuals engage in occasional
transnational activities. Some studies explore the relationship between migration
and development, categorizing transnational migration as a product
of late capitalism which renders small, nonindustrialized countries incapable
of economic autonomy and makes them dependent on migrant-generated
remittances (Itzigsohn, 2000; Portes, 2003; M.P. Smith and Guarnizo,
1998). The ways in which sending and receiving states continue to play a
critical role in migrants’ lives has also received a good deal of attention
(Smith, 1998; Goldring, 2002; Levitt and de la Dehesa, 2003). More recent
research on the second generation is in many ways a continuation of the
debate on assimilation, with proponents of the classic approach arguing that
transnational migration is an ephemeral first-generation phenomenon.
Meanwhile, some transnationalists speak of new forms of transnational connection
or replace the term second generation with transnational generation
to encompass youth in the homeland and the new land (Levitt and Waters,
2002; Glick Schiller and Fouron, 2002).
While many U.S. researchers have focused on homeland/newland connections,
the Oxford Transnational Communities Programme used a much
broader definition of transnational ties (see, e.g, Koopmans and Statham,
2001; Riccio, 2001; Van der Veer, 2001; Abelman, 2002; Morgan, 1999;
Faist, 2000a; Schiffauer, 1999; Sklair, 1998; Castles, 1998). In this project,
1006 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
transnational connections forged by businesses, the media, politics, or religion
were all examined under the rubric of community. This work demonstrated
that migrants are embedded in networks stretching across multiple
states and that migrants’ identities and cultural production reflect their
multiple locations. Among the important findings of the Transnational
Communities project was the need to distinguish between patterns of connection
on the ground and the conditions that produce ideologies of connection
and community (Gomez and Benton, 2002; Ostergaard-Neilsen,
2003).
Some of the U.S. and Oxford studies (Ballard, 2000) urge a reconceptualization
of transnational kinship, although research in this area has
developed a trajectory of its own (Chamberlin, 2002; Bryceson and Vuorela,
2002). Studies of transnational kinship document the ways in which family
networks constituted across borders are marked by gendered differences in
power and status. Kin networks can be used exploitatively, a process of
transnational class differentiation in which the more prosperous extract labor
from persons defined as kin. Kin networks maintained between people who
send remittances and those who live on them can be fraught with tension.
A fourth group of scholars use a transnational approach to migration
to challenge social theory. Morawska (2001a, 2003a) proposes a conceptualization
of migration as structuration to posit the continuing dynamic
between structure and agency that extends into a transnational domain. Faist
(2000a, b), reasoning along similar lines, strives to conceptualize a domain
of crossborder social relations he refers to as transnational social spaces. He
privileges social relations and institutions, defining these spaces as characterized
by a high density of interstitial ties on informal or formal, that is to
say institutional, levels (Faist, 2000b:89). Guarnizo (1997) and Landolt
(2001) refer to a transnational social formation.
Much of this work, however, views the social formations engendered
by transnational migration as unique. Instead, we propose that they are one
indication, among many, that the nation-state container view of society does
not capture, adequately or automatically, the complex interconnectedness of
contemporary reality. To do so requires adopting a transnational social field
approach to the study of social life that distinguishes between the existence
of transnational social networks and the consciousnessof being embedded in
them. Such a distinction is also critical to understanding the experience of
living simultaneously within and beyond the boundaries of a nation-state
and to developing methodologies for empirically studying such experiences.
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1007
BUILDING TO A TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL FIELD THEORY
OF SOCIETY
To further develop transnational migration studies, we revisit the concept of
society as it has been generally deployed and put aside the methodological
nationalism that has distorted many basic social science concepts (Martins,
1974; Smith, 1983). Methodological nationalism is the tendency to accept
the nation-state and its boundaries as a given in social analysis. Wimmer and
Glick Schiller (2003) identified three variants of methodological nationalism:
1) Ignoring or disregarding the fundamental importance of nationalism
for modern societies. This tendency often goes hand and hand with 2)
naturalization, or taking for granted that the boundaries of the nation-state
delimit and define the unit of analysis. Finally, 3) territorial limitation
confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries
of a particular nation-state. According to Wimmer and Glick Schiller
(2003:578), the three variants may intersect and mutually reinforce each
other, forming a coherent epistemic structure, a self-reinforcing way of
looking at and describing the social world.
Because much of social science theory equates society with the boundaries
of a particular nation-state, researchers often take rootedness and incorporation
in the nation-state as the norm and socialidentities and practices
enacted across state boundaries as out of the ordinary. But if we remove the
blinders of methodological nationalism, we see that while nation-states are
still extremely important, social life is not confined by nation-state boundaries.
Social and religious movements, criminal and professional networks,
and governance regimes as well as flows of capital also operate across borders.
Recent developments in social theory have also challenged the nationstate
container theory of society and provide insights into the nature of
transnational flows that we build upon. Sassen, for example, reconfigured
our understanding of the geography of cities by highlighting that some
locations become global cities (Sassen, 1992). Discussing flexible capital
accumulation, Harvey (1989) explored the time-space compressions that so
revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to
alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves
(p. 240). Other scholars have highlighted the interconnectedness of
societies through flows of media, capital, and people (Held et a!., 1999).
However, much of this work, according to Ulrich Beck (2000), continues to
envision states as the primary unit and treats globalization as a process of
interconnection between states. Such theories, Beck argues, continue “the
1008 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
container theory of society” on which most of the sociology of the first age
of modernity is based. He calls for a new paradigm that changes not only the
relations between and beyond national states and societies, but also the inner
quality of the social and political itself which is indicated by reflexive cosmopolitization
(p. 1).
Along with Beck, Faist (200Oa), Urry (2000) and a growing number of
social theorists, we seek ways to move beyond the container theory of society.
Many of these scholars,however, tend to underplay the concept of the social
as they reconfigure the concept of society. Beck‘s formulation of reflexive
cosmopolitization and much of the related literature on cosmopolitanism,
for example, largely abandons an exploration of social relations and social
context. In Beck‘s (2000) cosmopolitanism, as in Luhmann’s world society,
communication technologies become key. Global media flows and consumerism
lead to a new form of consciousness. Social relations and social positioning
fall out of the analysis; the individual and the global intersect.
Without a concept of the social, the relations of power and privilege exercised
by social actors based within structures and organizations cannot be
studied or analyzed. In addition, by trying to move beyond methodological
nationalism, much of this theory-building neglects the continuing power of
the nation-state. Transnational migration studies, with their concrete tracing
of the movement and connection of people, provide a useful corrective to
these oversights by highlighting the concept of social field.
We propose a view of society and social membership based on a
concept of social field that distinguishes between ways of being and ways of
belonging. The notion of social field exists in social science literature in
severaldifferent forms. We draw here on those proposed by Bourdieu and by
the Manchester school of anthropology. Bourdieu used the concept of social
field to call attention to the ways in which social relationships are structured
by power. The boundaries of a field are fluid and the field itself is created by
the participants who are joined in struggle for social position. Society for
Bourdieu is the intersection of various fields within a structure of politics
(Jenkins, 1992:86). According to Bourdieu, either individuals or institutions
may occupy the networks that make up the field and link social positions.
While his approach does not preclude the notion of transnational social
fields, he does not directly discuss the implications of social fields that are
not coterminous with state boundaries.
The Manchester School also informs our framework because these
scholars recognized that the migrants they studied belonged to tribal-rural
localities and colonial-industrial cities at the same time. Migrant networks
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1009
stretching between these two sites were viewed as constituting a single social
field created by a network of networks. By understanding society in this way,
these researchers focused on a level of social analysis beyond the study of the
individual.
Despite its importance, the term social field within transnational migration
research has not been well defined. Building on Basch, Glick Schiller
and Szanton Blanc (1994), we define social field as a set of multiple interlocking
networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and
resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed (see also
Glick Schiller and Fouron, 1999; Glick Schiller, 1999, 2003). Social fields
are multidimensional, encompassing structured interactions of differing
forms, depth, and breadth that are differentiated in social theory by the
terms organization, institution, and social movement. National boundaries
are not necessarily contiguous with the boundaries of social fields. National
social fields are those that stay within national boundaries while transnational
social fields connect actors through direct and indirect relations across
borders. Neither domain is privileged in our analysis. Ascertaining the relative
importance of nationally restricted and transnational social fields should
be a question of empirical analysis.
The concept of social fields is a powerful tool for conceptualizing the
potential array of social relations linking those who move and those who stay
behind. It takes us beyond the direct experience of migration into domains
of interaction where individuals who do not move themselves maintain
social relations across borders through various forms of communication.
Individuals who have such direct connections with migrants may connect
with others who do not. We should not assume that those with stronger
social ties will be more transnationally active than those with weaker connections
nor that the actions and identities of those with more indirect ties
are less influenced by the dynamics within the field than those with direct
transnational ties. In any given study, the researcher must operationalize the
parameters of the field they are studying and the scope of the networks
embedded within it, then empirically analyze the strength and impact of
direct and indirect transnational relations.
For example, there may be one central individual who maintains high
levels of homeland contact and is the node through which information,
resources, and identities flow. While other individuals may not identify with
or take action based on those ties, the fact that they are part of the same
transnational social field keeps them informed and connected so that they
can act if events motivate them to do so. Recognizing that this individual is
1010 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
embedded in a transnational social field may be a better predictor of future
transnational behavior than if we simply locate him or her solely within a
nationally delimited set of relationships.
The concept of social field also calls into question neat divisions of
connection into local, national, transnational, and global. In one sense, all
are local in that near and distant connections penetrate the daily lives of
individuals lived within a locale. But within this locale, a person may participate
in personal networks or receive ideas and information that connect
them to others in a nation-state, across the borders of a nation-state, or
globally, without ever having migrated. By conceptualizing transnational
social fields as transcending the boundaries of nation-states, we also note that
individuals within these fields are, through their everyday activities and
relationships, influenced by multiple sets of laws and institutions. Their daily
rhythms and activities respond not only to more than one state simultaneously
but also to social institutions, such as religious groups, that exist
within many states and across their borders.
A social field perspective also reveals that there is a difference between
ways of being in social fields as opposed to ways of belonging (Glick Schiller,
2003; 2004).2Ways of being refers to the actual social relations and practices
that individuals engage in rather than to the identities associated with their
actions. Social fields contain institutions, organizations, and experiences,
within their various levels, that generate categories of identity that are ascribed
to or chosen by individuals or groups. Individuals can be embedded
in a social field but not identify with any label or cultural politics associated
with that field. They have the potential to act or identify at a particular time
because they live within the social field, but not all choose to do so.
In contrast, ways of belonging refers to practices that signal or enact an
identity which demonstrates a conscious connection to a particular group.
These actions are not symbolic but concrete, visible actions that mark belonging
such as wearing a Christian cross or Jewish star, flying a flag, or
choosing a particular cuisine. Ways of belonging combine action and an
awareness of the kind of identity that action signifies.
Individuals within transnational social fields combine ways of being
and ways of belonging differently in specific contexts. One person might
have many social contacts with people in their country of origin but not
’Some analysts, such as Thomas Faist (2000a), contrast social ties with “symbolic ties.” By
emphasizing ways of being, rather than social ties, we develop a concept that decouples social
relationships from a notion of common interest or norms.
CONCEITUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1011
identify at all as belonging to their homeland. They are engaged in transnational
ways of being but not belonging. Similarly, a person may eat certain
foods or worship certain saints or deities because that is what their family has
always done. By doing so, they are not signaling any conscious identification
with a particular ethnicity or with their ancestralhomes. Here again, they are
not expressing a transnational way of belonging.
On the other hand, there are people with few or no actual social
relations with people in the sending country or transnationally but who
behave in such a way as to assert their identification with a particular group.
Because these individuals have some sort of connection to a way of belonging,
through memory, nostalgia or imagination, they can enter the social
field when and if they choose to do so. In fact, we would hypothesize that
someone who had access to a transnational way of belonging would be likely
to act on it at some point in his or her life.
If individuals engage in social relations and practices that cross borders
as a regular feature of everyday life, then they exhibit a transnational way of
being. When people explicitly recognize this and highlight the transnational
elements of who they are, then they are also expressing a transnational way
of belonging. Clearly, these two experiences do not always go hand in hand.
Finally, locating migrants within transnational social fields makes clear
that incorporation in a new state and enduring transnational attachments are
not binary opposites (Morawska, 2003b; Levitt, 2003b). Instead, it is more
useful to think of the migrant experience as a kind of gauge which, while
anchored, pivots between a new land and a transnational incorporation.
Movement and attachment is not linear or sequential but capable of rotating
back and forth and changing direction over time. The median point on this
gauge is not full incorporation but rather simultaneity of connection. Persons
change and swing one way or the other depending on the context, thus
moving our expectation away from either full assimilation or transnational
connection but some combination of both. The challenge, then, is to explain
the variation in the way that migrants manage that pivot and how host
country incorporation and homeland or other transnational ties mutually
influence each other. For example, Portes and his colleagues found that
transnational entrepreneurs were more likely to be U.S. citizens, suggesting
that by becoming full members of their new land, it became easier for them
to run successful businesses involving their homeland. Similarly, some Latino
communities use the same organizations to promote political integration
in the United States that they use to mobilize around sending-country
issues.
1012 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW
In this vein, Glick Schiller, Calgar and Karagiannis (2003) have proposed
a useful distinction between mere connection and the kinds of connections
that engage individuals institutionally in more than one nationstate.
One can have friends, colleagues, or co-religionists with whom one
communicates and exchanges information or objects across borders without
ever coming into contact with the state or other institutions. But if one
belongs to a church, receives a pension, or has investments in another land,
one must necessarily negotiate his or her way through a set of public and
private institutions that grounds those connections more firmly. His or her
“pivot” is rooted in two or more legal and regulatory systems, encouraging
a greater sense of embeddedness in the transnational social field and making
the connections within it more likely to endure.
METHODOLOGY
Methodology and theory have an intimate relationship. To develop a transnational
framework for the study of migration, we need a methodology that
allows us to move beyond the binaries, such as homelandlnew land, citizen/
noncitizen, migrant/nonmigrant, and acculturation/cultural persistence, that
have typified migration research in the past. On the other hand, a framework
that privileges transborder processes rather than incorporation-oriented activity
may not capture the interrelationship between transnational connection
and social relationships within a single nation-state.
Using a transnational framework implies several methodological shifts.
First, we need to focus on the intersection between the networks of those
who have migrated and those who have stayed in place, whether in the new
land, homeland, or some other diasporic location. This focus allows for
comparisons between the experiences of migrants and those who are only
indirectly influenced by ideas, objects, and information flowing across borders.
Although multi-sited research is ideal for studying these two different
experiences, the impact of transnational relations can be observed by asking
individuals about the transnational aspects of their lives, and those they are
connected to, in a single setting.
Second, we need tools that capture migrants’simultaneous engagement
in and orientation toward their home and host countries. And these dynamics
cannot just be studied at one point in time. Transnational migration is
a process rather than an event. Transnational practices ebb and flow in
response to particular incidents or crises. A one-time snapshot misses the
many ways in which migrants periodically engage with their home countries
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1013
during election cycles, family or ritual events, or climatic catastrophes- their
attention and energies shifting in response to a particular goal or challenge.
Studying migrant practices longitudinally reveals that in moments of crisis or
opportunity, even those who have never identified or participated transnationally,
but who are embedded in transnational social fields, may become
mobilized into action. Such a research strategy would help explain the transition
from a way of belonging such as a diasporic identity - Armenian,
Jewish, or Croatian - to direct engagement in transnational practices.
Each of the research methodologies used to study transnational migration
has particular strengths. We believe that ethnography is particularly
suited for studying the creation and durability of transnational social fields.
Participant observation and ethnographic interviewing allow researchers to
document how persons simultaneously maintain and shed cultural repertoires
and identities, interact within a location and across its boundaries, and
act in ways that are in concert with or contradict their values over time. The
effects of strong and weak indirect ties within a transnational social field can
be observed, and those connections, whether they take the form of institutional
or individual actors, can be studied. Like surveys, ethnographic research
can also begin with a random sample of persons who migrate and who
have no intention of returning home.
POWER
When people belong to multiple settings, they come into contact with the
regulatory powers and the hegemonic culture of more than one state. These
states regulate economic interactions, political processes and performances,
and also have discrete nation-state building projects. Individuals are, therefore,
embedded in multiple legal and political institutions that determine
access and action and organize and legitimate gender, race, and class status.
Foucault (1980) wrote that the experience of power goes beyond mere
contact with the law or the police. Rather, power pervades and permeates all
social relations because what is legitimate, appropriate, and possible is
strongly influenced by the state. People living in transnational social fields
experience multiple loci and layers of power and are shaped by them, but
they can also act back upon them.
Most migrants move from a place where the state has relatively little
power within the global interstate system to a more powerful state. At the
same time, many migrants gain more social power, in terms of leverage over
people, property, and locality, with respect to their homeland than they did
1014 INTERNATIONAL.MIGRATIONREVIEW
before migrating. It is this complex intersection between personal losses and
gains that any analysis of power within transnational social fields must
grapple with. Furthermore, migration often opens up the possibility for
transnational migrants to contribute, both positively and negatively, to
changes in the global economic and political system. For example, long
distance nationdist movements have long influenced nation building and
national transformation. Lithuania would not have become Lithuania without
immigrants in the United States first imaging its emergence and then
mobilizing to make it a reality (Glazer, 1954). Former Iraqi exiles are now
playing a critical role in rebuilding the Iraqi state. Transnational migrants
can also strengthen, alter, or thwart global religious movements like Islamic
fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, or Hindu nationalism.
Not only can migrants potentially shift the position of states within the
world economic order, they can also influence the internal functions of states
as well. They may be forces for privatization because they want telephone
systems that work and private schools and hospitals where their family
members will be well attended. They may pressure states to institute conservative
legislation that preserves traditional values. Acting within their
transnational social fields, migrants may also fuel movements for rights,
social justice, and anti-imperialist struggles.
Transnational migrants also shift power by redefining the functions of
the host state. There are many instances, such as in the Cuban, Israeli, and
Irish communities, in which migrants have successfully mobilized host country
legislatures to support their homeland projects. The Mexican state and
Mexican transnational migrants living in the United States have altered the
ways in which some U.S. institutions categorize and process individuals. The
Mexican state’s issuing of the matricula consular, a consular ID card, to legal
and unauthorized Mexican migrants in the United States has enabled migrants
to pressure banks, motor vehicle bureaus, and car insurance companies
to be more responsive to them.
Using a transnational social field perspective allows for a more systematic
study of the social processes and institutions that have been routinely
obscured by traditional migration scholarship and even by some studies of
transnational migration. New perspectives emerge on a number of issues,
including the effect of migration on gender hierarchies and racialized identities;
family dynamics; the significance of nation-states, membership and
citizenship; and the role of religion. In the following section, we discuss each
in turn.
CONCEPTUALIZINGS~MULTANE~TY 1015
HOW CLASS, RACE, AND GENDERARE MUTUALLY
CONSTITUTED WITHIN T’SNA TIONAL SOCL4L FIELDS
Scholars have tended to study class, race, and gender as discrete realms of
experience. Here we build on feminist theory by recognizing that since these
sociallocations are mutually constituted, we must discuss them together. We
approach all three as hierarchical positions that entail differential social
power. Data on these varying statuses illustrate the analytical limits of methodological
nationalism. Social scientists often use national income statistics
to assess the socioeconomic status of migrants without considering the other
statuses that they occupy. But when society differs from polity and is made
up of sets of social relationships in intersecting and overlapping national and
transnational social fields, individuals occupy different gender, racial, and
class positions within different states at the same time. Recognizing that
migrant behavior is the product of these simultaneous multiple statuses of
race, class, and gender makes certain social processes more understandable.
For example, a transnational perspective can help explain contradictory
data on the political attitudes and actions of immigrants. In some cases,
immigrant women, who find themselves racialized in their new homes,
appear to be quite conservative with respect to struggles for rights and
recognition. Poor migrants of color in the United States, for example, often
strive to differentiate themselves from African Americans rather than join
efforts to advance minority group civil rights (Waters, 1999). They may
re-enforce or even reinvent gender distinctions and hierarchies that are more
rigid and traditional than those in their ancestral homes (Espiritu, 1997;
Lessinger, 1995; Caglar, 1995). They accept low-status jobs in their new
home, tolerate employment discrimination, and resist political projects or
labor protests that would redress these wrongs. Ironically, this heightened
gender stratification often occurs in households where immigrant women
have entered the workforce and men have begun to share the responsibility
for childrearing and housekeeping, thereby redefining other aspects of gender
dynamics in more egalitarian terms.
Consideration of migrants’ multiple positions within transnational social
fields helps explain this seemingly conservative and contradictory behavior
(Pessar and Mahler, 2003). When individuals elaborate markers of
gender after they migrate, they may be preserving or creating status in other
locations within the transnational social field. Conservative positions of
women and men in relationship to struggles for rights or “familyvalues” may
be linked to the class position of migrants in the homeland. Migrants who
1016 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
are laborers, home health aides, or domestic workers in countries of immigration
may also be educated and middle-class homeowners or business
people in their homelands. Men who may have higher status than women at
home are generally more interested in maintaining political homeland connections
and identities (Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991). In contrast, women
migrants may use income they earn abroad to improve their social standing
at home. Transnational religious systems, such as Islam or Charismatic
Christianity, also provide venues for asserting one’s enhanced status and for
acquiring social capital and resources (Peterson and Visquez, 200I).
T M S N ATIONAL FAMILIES
Much work on globalization and transnational phenomena focuses on production.
But reproduction also takes place across borders and is an important,
if understudied, aspect of the migration experience. Just as transnational
migration studies prompt us to rethink the terrain in which social
processes take place, they also challenge our understanding of social repro-
duction.
Numerous studies illustrate the ways in which the boundaries of family
life change over the life cycle. Members of the second and third generations
in Europe and the United States continue to return to the Middle East and
South Asia to find marriage partners (Hooghiemstra, 2001; Lesthaeghe,
2002; Levitt, 2002b). Increasing numbers of women have joined the ranks
of men who head transnational families (Parrenas, 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo
and Avila, 2003). Transnational family life entails renegotiating communication
between spouses, the distribution of work tasks, and who will migrate
and who will stay behind via long distance (Pessar and Mahler, 2001).
Nonmigrants also imagine the gendered lives of their migrant peers and
change their ideas about successful marriages and suitable marital partners.
Levitt (2OOIa) found that the young women in the Dominican village she
studied only wanted to marry men who had migrated because they were
considered the ideal breadwinner and life partner.
While adults make family decisions, children are the central axis of
family migration and often a critical reason why families move back and
forth and sustain transnational ties (Orellana et al, 2001; Zhou, 1998).
Adult-centered studies obscure the ways in which child raising actively
shapes families’ journeys, the spaces they move in, and their experiences
within those social fields. This is particularly true as children mature into
young adults. Kandel and Massey (2002), for example, found a culture of
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1017
migration so deeply embedded in the Mexican communities they studied
that transnational migration became the norm. Young men, in particular,
came to see migration as an expected rite of passage and as the way to achieve
economically what they could not attain in Mexico.
The studies we describe attest to the fact that in migrant households
that are constituted transnationally and across generations, living transnationally
often becomes the norm (Nyberg Sorenson and Fog Olwig, 2002).
How must we rethink conventional wisdom about the family in response?
First, using a transnational lens reveals the changing nature of the family as
a socioeconomicstrategic unit and how family ties are worked and reworked
over time and space. Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (2002) use the
term relativizing to refer to the ways in which individuals establish, maintain,
or curtail ties to specific family members. Within transnational social fields,
individuals activelypursue or neglect blood ties and fictitious kinship. Based
on their particular needs, individuals strategically choose which connections
to emphasize and which to let slide. Second, in many cases, socialization and
social reproduction occur transnationally in response to at least two social
and cultural contexts. Even children who never return to their parent’s
ancestral homes are brought up in households where people, values, goods
and claims from somewhere else are present on a daily basis. Similarly, the
children of nonmigrants are raised in social networks and settings entirely
permeated by people, resources, and what Levitt (1999) has called social remittances
from the host country. For these individuals, the generationalexperience
is not territorially bounded. It is based on actual and imagined experiences that
are shared across borders regardless of where someone was born or now lives.
Locating migrants and their families squarely within transnational social
fields requires rethinking the notion of generation and the term second
generation (Click Schiller and Fouron, 2002). Conceptualizing generation as
a lineal process, involving clear boundaries between one experience and the
other, does not accurately capture the experience of living in a transnational
field because it implies a separation in migrants’ and nonmigrants’ socialization
and social networks that may not exist. It also fails to take into
account that generational experiences are shaped by common experiences
during youth that create a shared worldview or frame of reference which
influences subsequent social and political activism (Mannheim, 1952; Eckstein,
2002).
While many researchers now acknowledge the salience of transnational
ties for the immigrant generation, many predict these ties will weaken among
their children. In the United States, these researchers find that the transna-
1018 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
tional activities of the second generation are confined primarily to certain
groups who are, by and large, physically and emotionally rooted in the
United States and lack the language, cultural skills, or desire to live in their
ancestral homes. Since these individuals are only occasional transnational
activists, and their activities are confined to very specific arenas of social life,
they are likely to have minimal long-term consequences (Rumbaut, 2002;
Kasinitz et al., 2002).
But whether or not individuals forge or maintain some kind of transnational
connection may depend on the extent to which they are reared in
a transnational space. Clearly, transnational activities will not be central to
the lives of most of the second generation, and those who engage in them
will not do so with the same frequency and intensity as their parents. But
surveys concluding that transnational practices will be inconsequential may
be short sighted. They may overlook the effect of the many periodic, selective
transnational activities that some individuals engage in at different stages
of their lives (Levitt, 2002b; Click Schiller and Fouron, 2002; Smith, 2002).
They may also fail to differentiate between ways of being and possible ways
of belonging - that the desire and ability to engage in transnational practices
will ebb and flow at different phases of the lifecycle and in different contexts.
At the point of marriage or child rearing, the same individuals who showed
little regard for a parental homeland and culture may activate their connections
within a transnational field in search of spouses or values to teach to
their children (Espiritu and Tham, 2002). The children of Gujaratis who go
back to India to find marriage partners, the second generation Pakistanis
who begin to study Islam and Pakistani values when they have children, or
the Chinese American business school students who specialize in Asian
banking are doing just that.
THE NATION-STATE:THE PoLrTraL LIMITS AND
EXTENSIONS OF TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL FIELDS
The use of a transnational social field perspective and the concept of simultaneity
also draws attention to the changing nature of political activism and
the nation-state and how these are shaped and shape the transnational social
fields in which they are embedded. Both migrants and refugees continue to
engage in a variety of cross-border political practices directed at their home
and host countries. Some of the early work on transnational migration
predicted that these activities would weaken or, in some cases, bring about
the decline of the nation-state. Instead, what we see is a reformulation of the
CONCEPTUALIZING SIMULTANEITY 1019
state as it assumes new functions, abdicates responsibilities for others, and
redefines who its members are. Future research needs to explore why some
states change in response to their increasingly transnational constituencies
and others do not. We also need to ask which functions states abandon,
under what conditions, and what new roles they assume. Finally, we need to
identify the new kinds of organizations and collectivities that step in to fill
the gap left by the changing state.
It is within sending states that we find the greatest changes in laws,
state policy, and migrant practices on both the national and local levels.The
vulnerable geopoliticalposition of many peripheral sending states, increasing
poverty in the wake of structural adjustment policies, and the racial barriers
migrants encounter explain recent trends toward extending the boundaries
of citizenship (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, 1994; Guarnizo,
2003; Itzigsohn, 2000).The governments of many states, even within Western
Europe, see the utility of having access to populations settled elsewhere.
Ireland, Greece, Italy and Portugal have recently developedboth policies and
rhetoric that embrace their communities abroad.
States have developed a range of policies that reflect who they are
redefining as their membership. Some states pursue homelands policies that
encourage state contact with temporary migrants to facilitate their return.
Other states develop global nations’ policies that encourageenduring links to
permanent settlers abroad to ensure their continued national membership
and loyalty rather than their return (Goldring, 2002; Smith, 1998). But not
all sending states are the same. They vary with respect to how willing and
able they are to encourage transnational activism and how willing they are to
give emigrants and their descendants political rights, including the right to
vote while living abroad. We suggest the following categorization to capture
the variation in possible arenas and types of state responses toward emigrants.
States vary with respect to law or the degree to which they extend
political rights. They vary with respect to rhetoric or the kind of ideology of
nationhood that is promulgated. And they vary with respect to public policy
or the kinds of programs and policies that they pursue.
The Extension of PoliticalRights
The extension of rights is mandated by law. Some states distinguish between
two categories of membership - citizenship and nationality. Citizenship
delineates the character of a member’s rights and duties within the national
polity. Nationality legally delineates a category of belonging without granting
full citizenship rights.
1020 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
Sending states have promulgated a range of legal distinctions to delineate
categories of citizenship and nationality: 1) the denial of dual citizenship
or any form of dual access to rights - countries such as Haiti and Germany
allow no dual sets of right^;^ 2) dual nationality with the granting of some
legal privileges to emigrants and their descendants but not full dual citizenship
- Mexico and India have taken this position, legally recognizing nationals
in some way; 3) dual citizenship in which emigrants and their descendants
are accorded full rights, when they return to the homeland, even
if they also hold the passport of another country - states as disparate as
France, Ireland, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal
follow this policy; and dual citizenship with rights while abroad - people
living abroad, from countries such as Colombia, have the right to elect
representatives to the home-country legislature.*
The expansion of dual nationality or citizenship, in their different
forms, means that even persons who are not active participants in transnational
politics or even situated in transnational social fields, have access to
those memberships if they want to claim them. As an identity strategy, an
investment strategy, or even an exit strategy, multiple memberships endow
the individual with several potential positions with respect to the state.
Ideology of Nationhood
States like China, Ireland, Portugal, and Haiti propose a national selfconcept
based on blood ties linking residents around the world to their
respective homelands (Glick Schiller, forthcoming). They have redefined
their territories to include those living outside them. They may do this, as in
the Haitian case, without granting dual citizenship or nationality. For this
reason, it is useful to distinguish legal connections from ideologies of longdistance
nationalism. Building on Anderson’s original concept, Glick
Schiller and Fouron (2001a) define long-distance nationalism as a set of
ideas about belonging that link together people living in various geographic
locations and motivate or justify their taking action in relation to an ances-
3However, Germany allows dual citizenship for Ausiedler, Jews, and persons whose countries
do not allow the repudiation of citizenship; and Haiti, without altering citizenship laws,
considers its diaspora as a part of the Haitian nation.
‘The number of countries permitting some form of dual belonging is increasing rapidly. In
Latin America alone, ten countries allowed some form of dual nationality or citizenship in
2000 while only four countries had such provisions prior to 1991 Uones-Correa, 2002).
Other countries recognize dual membership selectively, with specific signatories.
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1021
tral territory and its government. As in other versions of nationalism, the
concept of a territorial homeland governed by a state that represents the
nation remains salient, but national borders are not thought to delimit
membership in the nation. Citizens residing within the territorial homeland
view emigrants and their descendants as part of the nation, whatever legal
citizenship the CmigrCs may have.
These ideologies of nationhood shift over time, at different periods of
nation building (Glick Schiller, forthcoming). Globally, before World War
I, science endorsed the concept of nation as based on race. In the middle of
the twentieth century, when the rhetoric of blood and race was discredited
and the populations of nation-states became viewed as only those who lived
within national territories, states tended not to make claims on their emigrant
populations. Dictators such as Salazar of Portugal or Duvalier of Haiti
denounced expatriates, who often organized in opposition to their regimes.
Since the 1970s, during the current period of globalization, a language of
blood has once again emerged and is deployed by a variety of states. Malaysia
uses descent to differentiate populations considered native Malaysians with
full citizenship rights from other populations such as persons of Chinese and
Indian ancestry (Ong, 1999; Bunnell, 2003). Portugal has reclaimed its
emigrant populations, allowing dual citizenship and organizing councils of
Portuguese abroad. In promoting its case for entrance into the European
Union, Portugal argued it would bring special access to countries like Brazil
as well as a special relation to Lusophonic populations in Africa (FeldmanBianco,
2002).
CbangingFunctions of the State
States adopt some tasks and abandon others in response to transnational
migration. In Levitt and de la Dehesa’s (2003) review of transnational migration
and redefinitions of the state, they found that Latin American governments
instituted several different programs and policies toward emigrants.
They reformed ministerial and consular services to be more responsive
to emigrant needs. They put into place investment policies designed to
attract and channel economic remittances. They granted dual citizenship or
nationality, the right to vote from abroad, or the right to run for public
office. They extended state protections or services to nationals living abroad
that went beyond traditional consular services. Finally, they implemented
symbolic policies designed to reinforce emigrants’ sense of enduring mem-
bership.
1022 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
Sending states institute these policies for a variety of reasons. For one
thing, remittances far exceed the funds received for official development
assistance or foreign portfolio investment in many less-developed countries
(Naim, 2002). According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB),
“in 2002, remittances to Latin America alone rose by 18 percent to $32
billion from 2001 levels, or 32 percent of the $103 billion worldwide estimated
to be remitted to developing countries” (University of California,
Davis, 2003). But sending nations’ economic motivations to sustain strong
ties to migrants go beyond remittances. Immigrants trade with their home
countries and bring in large quantities of tourist dollars. Successful entrepreneurs
from countries as diverse as India, Israel, China, Brazil, Taiwan,
Mexico and Pakistan not only contribute money but entrepreneurial and
technological energy and skills. Brain drain can become brain circulation or
brain gain (Saxenian, 2002). Finally, states court emigrant loyalties because
they see them as a potential political force in the host country that can
advance their economic and foreign policy interests (Mahler, 2000; Levitt,
200la). Some states even promote host-country political integration so that
emigrants are better situated to act on their behalf.
States are not the only political actors that define their constituencies
transnationally or that carry out activities across borders. Political parties
may operate abroad, especially if emigrants have settled in sizeable numbers
and with sufficient ties to influence elections in the homeland. Mexican,
Dominican, and Haitian politicians campaign in the United States on a
regular basis. Each of the three principal Dominican political parties has a
U.S.-based organization trying to capture support among Dominicans along
the eastern seaboard. In the Turkish case, parties with dominant religious
and nationalist agendas, like the nationalist Milli Hareket Partisi or the
religious Saadet Partisi, frequently send leaders to northern Europe to rally
support (Ostergaard-Nielsen, 2003).
Regions of large countries, such as Brazil or India, may also begin to act
as transnational agents, regardless of the national government’s stance. This
is especially true in situations where the majority of emigrants leave from a
few regions or provinces. Substate policies are different from the transnational
activities of national governments in that regional governments do not
control immigration and formal citizenship and their transnational activities
are driven by efforts to promote extraterritorial regional or local loyalties
rather than nation-building (Baubock, 2003). In the Brazilian case, the
municipal government of Governador Valadares and the state government of
Minas Gerais created investment funds and business promotion schemes
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1023
designed to build on migrants’localized loyalties.The money raised was used
to support projects directed at municipal development. Likewise in India,
the Gujarat State government has instituted a number of initiatives to encourage
long-distance economic projects, including offering tax breaks and
bureaucratic support to potential investors, that are separate from any efforts
by the national government or political parties to stimulate Non-Resident
Indian (NRI) involvement (Levitt, 2OO2b).
Even units as small as towns may define themselves transnationally and
engage in development-oriented activities. In such cases, the actors are usually
emigrants living abroad who organize hometown associations. For example,
Mexican, Salvadoran, and Dominican hometown associations now
fund and implement numerous community development projects that were
previously the purview of the state (Goldring, 2002; Landolt, 2001). They
assume this role in an age of neoliberalism in which states increasingly
eschew roles they were rarely able to fulfill in countries beyond the capitalist
core.
Based on their stances towards emigrants with regard to law, rhetoric,
and public policy, we identify several broad categories of migrant-sending
states.
Some states have become Transnational Nation-States in that they
treat their emigrants as long-term, long-distance members. Consular oEcials
and other government representatives are still seen as partially responsible for
emigrants’ protection and representation. These states also grant emigrants
dual citizenshipor nationality. Often these are states, or specific regions within
them, that have become so dependent on remittances that transnational migrants’contributions
and participation have become an integral part of national
policy (Guamizo,Portes and Haller, 2003). States such as El Salvador,Mexico,
Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil fall into this category.
More common are Strategically Selective States that encourage some
forms of long-distance economic and political nationalism but want to selectively
and strategically manage what immigrants can and cannot do. Like
transnational nation-states, these states also recognize the enormous political
and economic influence migrants wield, on which they have come to depend.
On the one hand, they want to ensure the continued home country
involvement of emigrants, whom they recognize are unlikely to return. On
the other hand, they want to maintain some level of control over emigrants’
home ties, lest migrant interests conflict with those of the state. Such states
offer partial and changing packages of tax privileges and services to emigrants,
encourage long-distance membership, but never grant the legal rights
1024 INTERNATIONAI.MIGRATIONREVIEW
of citizenship or nationality or the franchise. They walk a fine line between
providing enough incentives to reinforce long distance membership while
not over-serving migrants and making nonmigrants resentful. India, Barbados,
Ireland, the Philippines, Haiti, and Turkey have all tried, at various
times, to obtain support from populations abroad without granting full
participation in their internal political activities.
These arrangements are by no means static. Diasporic agitation for
dual citizenship led the Filipino government to pass legislation in 2003 that
allows dual citizenship and restores Filipino citizenship to those people who
previously lost their citizenship by becoming citizens of other countries. The
Senate President remarked when the Citizenship Retention Bill was signed,
“It is our affirmation to the age-old adage that ‘once a Filipino, always a
Filipino”’ Uavellana-Santos, 2003). The same year, India granted persons
four generations removed from migration and citizens of specific countries
such as the United Statesand Great Britain dual citizenship (Khanna, 2004).
A third type of state is the Disinterested and Denouncing State. States
adopting this stance treat migrants as if they no longer belong to their
homeland. Any overtures migrants make vis a vis their ancestral home are
viewed as suspect because migrants are seen as having abandoned the homeland
or even as traitors to its cause. This stance was more common prior to
the current period of globalization. Even today, however, when governments
face vocal and powerful political opposition abroad, they may try to discredit
emigrants’ influence. Cuba’s relationship to Cubans in the United States
provides one such example that is particularly interesting since remittances
factor so importantly in Cuba’s economic life (Cervantes-Rodriguez, 2003;
Eckstein and Barberia, 2002). Slovakia kept populations abroad at arm’slength
following the Cold War, allowing them no representation within the
new political system (Skrbi, 1999).
MEMBERSHIPAND CITIZENSHIP
Understanding migration from a transnational social field perspective also
entails revisiting the meaning of nation-state membership (Yuval-Davis,
1997; Delgado and Stefanicic, 2003). While states grant membership
through laws that accord legal citizenship and nationality, people also make
demands of states regardless of their legal status. Therefore, persons without
full citizenship may act as substantive or social citizens, claiming rights or
assuming privileges that are, in principle, accorded to citizens (Flores and
Benmayor, 2000). This is the case when immigrants without citizenship
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1025
fight and die as members of a host country’s military, protest in the streets
about public policies, and access various socialprograms and serviceswithout
being citizens. Individuals connected through social networks to a transnational
social field make claims, take actions, and may even see themselves as
members of a country in which they have not lived.
Substantive citizenship as exercised within transnational social fields
differs from findings of proponents of post-national citizenship (Soysal,
1994). These scholars put aside the domain of nation-states and look to
global rights regimes to protect and represent individuals living outside their
homelands. Persons in transnational social fields who are refugees or religious
or racial minorities may draw on plural legal systems in their quest for
rights. But the international rights regime, as has often been noted, is still
very much dependent on individual states for enforcement (Foblets, 2002;
Woodman, 2002)
Persons living within transnational social fields may not make claims
on states as legal or substantive citizens until a particular event or crisis
occurs. They may engage in lobbying, demonstrating, organizing or campaigns
of public information to influence either the government of the state
in which they now reside, their homeland, or some other state to which they
are connected. Simply focusing on legal rights and formal membership
overlooks this broader set of people who, to varying degrees, act like members
of a society while not formally belonging to it. By so doing, they
influence and are influenced by the state. Click Schiller and Fouron (2001a)
propose the term “transborder citizens”to reflect those who may or may not
be citizens of both their sending and receiving polities but who express some
level of social citizenship in one or both.
Partial membership in two polities challenges core aspects of governance
in at least two ways. First, dual belonging calls into question the very
notion of governance because it is not readily obvious which state is ultimately
responsible for which aspects of transnational migrants’ lives. Where
should those who live across borders get health care, pay taxes, or serve in the
army? Which state assumes the primary responsibility for migrants’ protection
and representation? What happens when migrants are sentenced to the
death penalty in their host country while the death sentence is prohibited in
their country of origin?
Furthermore, transborder citizens’ multiple experiences of governmentality
and political socialization do not occur in isolation from one another.
Persons in transnational social fields are exposed to different ideas of citizen
1026 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
rights and responsibilities and different histories of political practice. As a
result, they enter the political domain with a broader repertoire of rights and
responsibilities than citizens who live only within one state. The fact that
migrants may also have direct experience with international rights regimes
provides them with grist to reconceptualize their relationship to the state
(Pessar, 2001; Levitt and Wagner, 2003). Migrants bring ideas about governance
with them that transform host-country politics, they reformulate
their ideas and practices in response to their experienceswith host states, and
they communicate these social remittances back to those in their homelands
or members of their networks settled in other states. The kind of political
culture that emerges and the kinds of claims made of states vary as a result.
Haitian migrants, for example, infused the U.S. political systemwith calls for
a Haitian government that was more responsible to its people (Glick Schiller
and Fouron, 2001a). Shared experiences of democratic incorporation in the
receiving state may feed back into transnational activities that lead to more
transparent politics at home (Shain, 1999).
RELIGION: FIELDS OF BEING AND BELONGING WITHIN
AND BEYOND THESTATE
While most scholars acknowledge the salience of migrants’ transnational
economic, political, and sociocultural practices, they have only recently begun
to pay attention to the relationship between transnational migration and
religion. In contrast to the other sections of this article, where we focus on
the implications of research findings to date, our goal in this section is to
summarize the emergent literature on religion and suggest directions for
further work.
Religion as an ideology or as a set of practices is not coincident with
the borders of nation-states. Its very lack of fit might partially explain why
social scientistshave largelyignored religion. Grand sociological theory in its
various unilinear forms posited an evolution of society from religion to
reason. Immigration theorists expected immigrants to develop religious institutions
in the new land as part of the process of incorporation, but these
institutions were expected to lose their force over several generations.
Religious cross-border connections are not all linked to migration;
however, migrating populations may identify as religious diasporas rather
than cling to a nation-state identity or use religious arenas to express membership
in two polities. Conceptualizing society as intersecting transnational
social fields that exist within and across the borders of states provides us with
powerful tools for mapping and researching religious domains. Perhaps the
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1027
most productive distinction to be made is between religious ties that connect
people to a homeland state and religious ties that form transnational networks
of connections that are not state based, such as charismatic Christianity.
A fairly large body of work charts the course of Christian, Hindu,
and Muslim beliefs and institutions that cross national borders and link
various populations (Beyer, 2001; Robertson, 1991; Vertovec and Peach,
1997). Global religious institutions shape migrants’ transnational experiences,
while migrants chip away at and recreate global religions by making
them local. Migrant institutions are also siteswhere globally diffused models
of social organization and individuals’local responses converge and produce
new mixes of religious beliefs and practices. The study of transnational
migration and religion, therefore, provides an empirical window into ways of
being and belonging that cannot be encompassed by a nation-state (Levitt,
2003a). At the same time, these practices and ideas can be mobilized for
specific state projects by transnational migrant populations, as in the case of
support for Hindu nationalist politics on the part of Indian migrants who are
fully incorporated into the United States.
Research on transnational migrants’ religious practices has addressed a
set of common themes and questions. Some of these studies are concerned
with the kinds of religious institutional connections produced by transnational
migration (Ebaugh and Chafetz, 2002; Yang, 2002; Levitt, 2004).
Other studies ask how religion encourages or impedes transnational membership
(Wellmeier, 1998; Menjivar, 1999; Peterson and Vhquez, 2001;
Kastoryano, 2000). A third set of questions focuses on the relationship
between religion and politics and how it changes when actors are engaged
transnationally. Such questions touch on ways of belonging, whether to two
or more states or to a transborder religious community, asking whether
access to the power of God or Gods is a way of gaining protection from the
power of states (Peterson and Vbquez, 2001; Menjivar, 2002). Migrants
denied citizenship and excluded from mainstream economic institutions
often look to their religious communities as sites for establishing alternative
identities (Guest, 2002).Transnational migrants often use religion to create
alternative geographies that may fall within national boundaries, transcend
but coexist with them, or create new spaces that, for some individuals, are
more meaningful and inspire stronger loyalties than politically-defined terrains
(Levitt, 2003a). By doing so, they extend the boundaries of their
spiritual practices and superinscribe them onto the actual physical landscape
where they settle (McAlister, 2002). By building and conducting rituals at a
shrine to their national patron saint, Cuban exiles in Miami created what
I028 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW
Tweed (1999) calls transtemporal and translocative space. The rituals enacted
within it enable migrants to recover a past when they lived in Cuba and
to imagine a future when they will return.
EXPANDING THE CONVERSATION
Clearly, migration is only one of a range of social processes that transcends
national boundaries. Numerous social movements, businesses, media, epistemic
communities, and various forms of governance are also organized
across boundaries. Persons living in transnational social fields can engage in
multiple transnational processes at the same time. The transnational identities
and institutions that emerge in response to these other processes are not
well understood. Although they are the subject of an increasing body of
scholarship, more often than not this research treats transnational economic,
political, and social processes as if they were not connected to each other. We
must explore how transnational practices and processes in different domains
relate to and inform one another to understand how these developments are
defining the boundaries of social life.
Migration scholars can begin this conversation by systematically examining
the forms and consequences of different kinds of transnational
activities and collectivities, analyzing how they relate to one another, and
exploring how they define and redefine our world (Khagram and Levitt,
2004). How do migrant cross-border activities compare to those engaged in
by indigenous rights proponents and religious group members? How do
organizingstrategies, diffusion of ideas, and cultural negotiations compare in
transnational social movements to those undertaken in transnational professional
groups or production networks?In what ways do these different kinds
of transnational memberships complement or subvert one another?What are
the rights and responsibilities that actors and institutions associate with
transnational belonging?
New methodological and conceptual tools are needed to understand
these processes. Because the social sciences originated in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries as part of the project of creating modern nation-states,
terms like government, organization, and citizenship carry with them embedded
nationalist assumptions that impair our capacity to see and understand
transnational processes. Our conceptual categories implicitly take as
given that the nation-state is the natural default category of social organization.
The best that social science generally does is compare corporations,
migrants, or institutions across national contexts rather than focus on firms
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1029
and markets as parts of transnational fields of investment, production, distribution,
and exchange. Persons can engage simultaneously in more than
one nation-state and a nation-state does not delimit the boundaries of meaningful
social relations. We need new analytical lenses that can bring to light
the myriad social processes that cross boundaries. We need new conceptual
categories that no longer blind us to these emergent social forms or prevent
us from reconceptualizing the boundaries of social life.
REFERENCES
Abelman, N.
2002 “MobilizingKorean FamilyTies: Cultural Conversationsacross the Border.”Working
Ballard, R.
2000 “The South Asian Presence in Britain and Its Transnational Connections.” Paper
presented at the International Workshop on Transnational Research,sponsored by the
Social Science Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council
(U.K.), Oxford University.
Paper, Transnational Communities Programme, WPTC - 0-1 1.
Basch, L., N. Glick Schiller and C. Szanton Blanc, eds.
1994 Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and DeterritorialBaubock,
R.
2003 “Towardsa Political Economy of Migrant Transnationalism,” InternationalMigration
Beck, U.
2000 “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity,” British
Journal of Sociology, 5(1):79-107.
Beyer, P.
2001 “Introduction.” In Religion in the Process of Globalization. Ed. P. Beyer. Wurzburg,
Germany: Ergon Verlag. Pp. I-XLIV.
Bryceson, D. F. and U. Vuorela
2002 The Transnational Fumily: New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Oxford and
New York: Berg.
Bunnell, T.
2003 “Repositioning Malaysia: High-tech Networks and the Multicultural Rescripting of
Caglar, A.
1995 “German Turks in Berlin: Social Exclusion and Strategies for Social Mobility,” New
Communiv, 21(3):309-323.
Cascells, M.
1996 The Rise of Network Socieq. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Castles, S.
1998 “New Migrations, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Southeast and East Asia.” Paper
delivered to the Transnational Communities Programme Seminar Series at Oxford
University. June 12.
i z d Nation-States. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach.
Review, 37(3):700-723.
National Identity,” Political Geography, 21:105-1 24.
1030 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
Cervantes-Rodriguez, M.
2003 “Exile,Identities, and Cuba’s Nation-building Project a Century Later.” Unpublished
Chamberlin, M.
2002 “Language, Identity and Caribbean Families: Transnational Perspectives.” Paper presented
at the Conference Caribbean Migration in Metropolitan Countries: Identity,
Citizenship and Models of Integration, Maison de Sciences de I’Homme, Paris.
Delgado, R. and J. Stefanicic, eds.
2003 Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Second Edition. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
paper.
Duany, J.
2000 “Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identities in Puerto Rico and the
Diaspora,” American Ethnologist, 27(1):5-30.
Ebaugh, H. R. and J. Chafetz
2002 Religionacross Borders: TransnationalReligious Networks. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira
Press.
Eckstein, S.
2002 “On Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Meaning of Immigrant Generations.” In
The ChangingFace of Home: The TransnationalLives of the Second Generation. Ed. P.
Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publications. Pp. 367-399.
Eckstein, S. and L. Barberia
2002 “Grounding Immigrant Generations in History: Cuban Americans and Their Transnational
Ties,” International Migration Review, 36(3):799-838.
Espiritu, Y.
1997 Asian Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Espiritu, Y. and T. Tran
2002 “Viet Nam, Nuoc Toi (Vietnam, My Country): Vietnamese Americans and Transnationalism.”
In The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second
Generation. Ed. P. Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publication. Pp.
367-399.
Faist, T.
2000a The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration. New York: Oxford University
Press.
2000b“Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of CitiFeldman-Bianco,
B.
2002 “Brazilians in Portugal, Portuguese in Brazil: Constructions of Sameness and Difference.”
In Colonial Continuities: The Portuguese Experience. Special Issue Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, 8(4).
zenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(2):189-222.
Fitzgerald, D.
2003 “Beyond ‘Transnationalism’: Mexican Hometown Politics at an American Labor
Flores, W. V. and R. Benmayor, eds.
2000 Latino Cultural Citizenship:Claiming Identiiy>Space, and Rights.Tempe, AZ:Bilingual
Union,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27(2):228-247.
Review Press.
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1031
Foblets, M. C.
2002 “Muslims,a New Transnational Minority in Europe?Cultural Pluralism, Fundamental
Libertiesand Inconsistencies in the Law.” Paper deliveredat the conferenceMobile
People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Max Planck
Institute for SocialAnthropology, Halle, Germany. November 7-9.
Foner, N.
2000 From Ellis Island toJFK. New Yorkj Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven:
Foucault, M.
1980 Power/Knowledge:SelectedInterviewsand Other Writings,1972-1977. New York: Pan-
theon.
Gabaccia, D. and F. Iacovetta, eds.
2002 Women, Gender,and TransnationalLives: Italian Workersof the WorU.Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Glazer, N.
1954 “Ethnic Groups in America: From National Culture to Ideology.” In Freedom and
Control in Modern Society. Ed. M. Berger, T. Abel and C. Page. New York: Van
Nostrand.
Forthcoming “Transborder Citizenship: Legal Pluralism within a Transnational Social
Field.” In Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting
World.Ed. F. Bender Beckman and K. Bender Beckman. London: Ashgate.
Forthcoming “Long Distance Nationalism.” In Encyclopedia of Diarporas:Immigrant
and Refigee CulturesAround the Workd Vol. 10. Ed. M. Ember, C. R. Ember and I.
Skoggard. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Yale University Press.
Glick Schiller, N.
Forthcoming “Blood and Belonging: Long-DistanceNationalism and the World Beyond.”
In Complexities:Beyond Nature and Nurture. Ed. S. McKinnon and S. Silverman.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2004 “Transnational Theory and Beyond.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics.
Ed. D. Nugent and J. Vincent. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
2003 “The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration: Seeing the
Wetland Instead of the Swamp.” In AmericanArrivals. Ed. N. Foner. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research.
-__
2003 “Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the U.S.
Immigrant Experience.” In The Handbook of InternationalMigration. Ed. C. Hirshman,
P. Kasinitz and J. DeWind. New York The Russell Sage Foundation.
Glick Schiller, N., L. Basch and C. Blanc-Szanton
1995 “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,”Anthropology
Quarterb, 68(1):48-63.
Glick Schiller, N., A. Calgar, and E. Karagiannis
2003 “SimultaneousIncorporation of Migrants.” Paper delivered at the Max Planck Institute
of SocialAnthropology, Halle, Germany. July 17, 2003.
1032 INTERNATIONALMIGRATIONREVIEW
Glick Schiller, N. and G. Fouron
2003 “Killing Me Softly:Violence, Globalization, and the Apparent State.” In Globalization,
the State and Violence.Ed. J. Friedman. Oxford: Altamira.
2002 “The Generation of Identity: Redefining the Second Generation within a Transnational
Social Field.” In The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the
Second Generation. Ed. P. Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publications.
2001a Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2001b“I am Not a Problem without a Solution: Poverty, Transnational Migration, and
Struggle.” In New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Politics, Policy and Impoverished
People in the US. Ed. I.Good and J. Maskovsky. New York: New York University
Press.
1999 “Terrains of Blood and Nation: Haitian Transnational Social Fields,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 22(2):340-366.
Gold, S.
2002 The Israeli Diaspora. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Goldring, L.
2003 “Gender Status and the State in Transnational Spaces: The Gendering of Political
Participation in Mexican Hometown Associations.” In Genderand US. Immigration.
Ed. P. Hondagneu-Sotelo. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002 “The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of
Membership and Participation,” Latin American Research Review, 37(3):55-99.
Gomez, E. T. and G. Benton
2002 “Transnationalism and the Essentializing of Capitalism: Chinese Enterprise, the State,
and Identity in Britain, Australia, and Southeast Asia.” Paper delivered at Transnational
Communities Final Conference, Keeble College, Oxford. July 2.
Grasmuck, S. and P. Pessar
1991 Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Guarnizo, L. E.
2003 “The Economics of Transnational Living,” InternationalMigration Review, 37(3):666-
699.
1997 “The Emergence of a Transnational Social Formation and the Mirage of Return
Migration among Dominican Transmigrants,” Identities: GlobalStudiesin Cultureand
Power, 4(2):281-322.
Guarnizo, L. E., A. Portes and W. Haller
2003 “Assimilation and Transnationalism: Determinants of Transnational Political Action
among Contemporary Migrants,” American Journal of Socioloa, 108(6):121-148.
Guest, K.
2002 “Transnational Religious Networks among New Yorks Fuzhou Immigrants.” In Re-
CONCEPTUALlZlNG SIMULTANEITY 1033
ligion across Borders. Ed. H. R.Ebaugh and J. Chafetz. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
Pp. 149-165.
Harvey, D.
1989 The Condition of Postmodernity:An Enquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt and J. Perraton
1999 Global Transformations.Cambridge: Polity.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. and E. Avila
2003 “I’m Here but I’m There: The Meaning of Latina Transnational Motherhood.” In
Gender and US. Immigration. Ed. P. Hondagneu-Sotelo. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Hooghiemstra, E.
2001 “Migrants, Partner Selection,and Integration: Crossing Borders?”Journalof Comparative
Family Studies, 32(4):601-628.
Itzigsohn, J.
2000 Immigration and rhe Boundaries of Citizenship: The Institutions of Immigrants’
Political Transnationalism, InternationalMigration Review, 34(4):1126-1 155.
Itzigsohn, J., C. Dore Cabral, E. Hernindez Medina and 0.Vizquez
1999 “Mapping Dominican Transnationalism:Narrow and Broad Transnational Practices,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(2):217-237.
Itzigsohn, J. and S. Giorguli Saucedo
2002 “Immigrant Incorporation and SocioculturalTransnationalism,” InternationalMigration
Review, 36(3):766-799.
Javellana-Santos,J.
2003 “Citizenship Retention Act signed into Law,” Philippine News Online. Accessed at:
<http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view article.html?article
idt70769de28b7244b86a587d6490538b>.
Jenkins, R.
1992 Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
Jones-Correa, M.
2002 “Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its Consequences for the
United States,”InternationalMigration Review, 35(4):34-67.
Kandel, W. and D. Massey
2002 “The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis,” Social
Kasinitz, P., M. C. Waters, J. H. Mollenkopf and M. Anil
2002 “Transnationalismand the Children of Immigrants in Contemporary New York.” In
The ChangingFace of Home: The TransnationalLives of the Second Generation. Ed. P.
Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publication. Pp. 96122.
Kastoryano, R.
2000 “Settlement, Transnational Communities, and Citizenship,” ISS’ 165:307-3 12.
Khagram, S. and P. Levitt
2004 “Conceptualizing Transnational Studies.” Hauser Center Working Paper No. 24.
Harvard University.
Khanna, R.
2004 “Indian Parliament Approves Dual Citizenship.” Accessed at: <http://www.
Forces, 80(3):981-1004.
immigration.com/newsletter I/dualpio.html>.
1034 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW
Kivisto, P.
2001 “Theorizing Transnational Immigration: A Critical Review of Current Efforts,”Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 24(4):549-578.
Kooprnans, R. and P. Statham
2001 “How National Citizenship Shapes Transnationalism: A Comparative Analysis of
Migrant Claims-making in Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.” Working
Paper Transnational Communities Programme, WPTC-01-10,
TransnationalPeasants. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Kyle, D.
2001
Laguerre, M.
1998 Diasporic Citizenship. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lamont, M.
2002 “Ordinary Cosmopolitans: Strategies for Bridging Boundaries among Non-College
Educated Workers.” Working Paper Transnational Communities Programme,
WPTC-2k-03.
Landolt, P.
2001 “SalvadoranEconomic Transnationalism: Embedded Strategiesfor Household Maintenance,
Immigrant Incorporation, and Entrepreneurial Expansion,” GlobalNetworks,
1:217-242.
Laslett, B. and J. Brenner
1992 “Feminismand the Family:Two Decades of Thought.” In RethinkingtheFamily:Some
Feminist Questions. Ed. B. Thorne and M. Yalom. Boston: Northeastern University
Press. Pp. 3-30.
Lesthaeghe, R.
2002 Turks and Moroccans in Belgium:A Comparison. Seminar presented at the Center for
Lessinger,J.
1995 From the Ganges to the Hudson. New York: Allyn and Bacon.
Levitt, P.
2004 “Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging: The Institutional Character of TransnaPopulation
and Development Studies, Harvard University.
tional Religious Life,” Socioloa of Religion, 35(1):174-196.
2003a “ ‘You Know, Abraham Really Was the First Immigrant’: Religion and Transnational
Migration,” InternationalMigration Review, 37(3):847-873.
2003b “Keeping Feet in Both Worlds: Transnational Practices and Immigrant Incorporation.”
In Integrating Immigrantsin LiberaI Nation-States:From Post-Nationahto Transnational.
Ed. C. Joppke and E. Morawska. London: Macmillan-Palgrave.
2002a “The Ties that Change: Relations to the Ancestral Home over the Life Cycle.”In The
ChangingFace of Home: The TransnationalLives of theSecond Generation.Ed. P. Levitt
and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publication. Pp. 123-144.
2002b “Why Should I Retire to Florida When I Can Go To Lahore?:Defining and Explaining
Variations in Tramnational Migration.” Paper presented at the Emerging Archi-
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1035
tectures of Transnational Governance Conference, Harvard University. December
2002.
2001a The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2001b “Transnational Migration: Taking Stock and Future Directions,” Global Networks,
1(3):195-2 16.
1999 “Social Remittances: A Local-Level,Migration-Driven Form of Cultural Diffusion,”
InternationalMigration Review, 32(4):926-949.
Levitt, P. and R. de la Dehesa
2002 “Transnational Migration and a Redefinition of the State: Variations and ExplanaLevitt,
P. and S. Wagner
2003 “Refugee Rights and Wrongs: Global Cultural Diffusion among the Congolese in
South Africa.” Working Paper #23, Inter-University Committee on International
Migration Rosemarie Rogers Working Paper Series. September.
Levitt, P. and M. Waters
2002 The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation. New
York: Russell Sage Publications.
Mahler, S.
2000 “ConstructingInternational Relations:The Role of Transnational Migrants and Other
Non-State Actors,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7:197-232.
tions,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26(4):587-611.
1998 “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions toward a Research Agenda for Transnationalism.”
In Transnationalismfjom Behw: Comparative Urban and Community Research.
VoL. d Ed. M. P. Smith and L. Guarnizo. New Brunswick and London:
Transaction Publishers.
Mannheim, K.
1952 “The Problem of Generations.” In Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. Ed. P. KeckMarshall,
T. H.
1964 Class,Citi.zensh+, and SocialClass:Essays by T H. Marshall. Garden City, NY:DoubleMartins,
H.
1974 “Time and Theory in Socioiogy.” In Approaches to Sociology: A n Introduction to the
Major Trends in Sociology. Ed. J. Rex. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pp. 246-294.
sckemeti. New York: Oxford University Press.
day and Co.
McAlister, E.
2002 Rara! Vadou, Power, and Pefomzance in Haiti and its Diaspora. Los Angeles and
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Menjivar, C.
2002 “Living in Two Worlds? Guatemalan-Origin Children in the United States and
EmergingTransnationalism,”Journal ofEthnicand Migration Studies,28(3):531-552.
1999 ReligiousInstitutions and Transnationalism:A Case Study of Catholic and Evangelical
1036 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW
Salvadoran Immigrants,” InternationalJournal of Politics, Culture, and Socieq, 12(4):
589-61 1.
Morawska, E.
2003a “DisciplinaryAgendas and Analytic Strategiesof Research on Immigration and Transnationalism:
Challenges of Interdisciplinary Knowledge,”InternationalMigration Review,
37(3):611-640.
2003b “Immigrant Transnationalism and Assimilation:A Variety of Combinations and the
Analytic Strategy It Suggest.” In Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in
Liberal Nation-States. Ed. C. Joppke and E. Morawska. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan. Pp. 133-176.
200la “Structuring Migration: The Case of Polish Income-Seeking Travelers to the West,”
Theory and Society, 3:47-80.
1989 “Labor Migrations of Poles in the Atlantic World Economy, 1880-1914,” Comparative
Study of Society and Histmy, 31(2):237-270.
1987 “SociologicalAmbivalence: The Case of Eastern European Peasant-Immigrant WorkMorgan,
G.
1999 “Transnational Communities and Business Systems.”WPTC-99-14.
Naim, M.
2002 “The New Diaspora: New Links between Emigrks and Their Home Countries Can
Become a Powerful Force for Economic Development,” Foreign Policy, 131:96-99.
Nyberg Sorenson, N. and K. Fog Olwig, eds.
2002 Work and Migration: LifG and Livelihoodc in a Globalizing World (Transnationalism).
London: Routledge.
Ong, A.
1999 Flexible Citizenship: The CulturalLogics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Orellana, M. F., B. Thorne, A. Chee and W. S. E. Lam
2001 “Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family
Migration,” Social Problems, 48(4):572-592.
Bstergaard-Nielsen, E.
2003 “The Politics of Migrants’ Transnational Political Practices,”International Migration
Review, 37(3):760-786.
Parrenas, R. S.
2001 “Mothering From a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in
Filipino Transnational Families,” Feminist Studies, 27(2):361-391.
Pessar, P.
2003 “Anthropology and the Engendering of Migration Studies.” In American Arrivals:
Anthropology Engages the New Immigrants. Ed. N. Foner, Sante Fe, NM: School of
American Research.
ers in America, 1880s-l93Os,” Quulitative Sociology, 10(3):225-250.
~
2001 “Women’s Political Consciousnessand Empowerment in Local, National, and Trans-
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEITY 1037
national Contexts: Guatemalan Refugees and Returnees.” In Gendering Transnational
Spaces. Ed. S. Mahler and P. Pessar. Special Issue. Identities: GlobalStudies in Culture
and Power,7(4):461-500.
Pessar, P. and S. Mahler
2003 “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In,” International Migration Review,
37(3):812-843.
2001 “Gendered Geographiesof Power: AnalyzingGender across Transnational Spaces.”In
Gendering TransnationalSpaces. Ed. S. Mahler and P. Pessar. Special Issue. Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7(4):441460.
Peterson, A. L. and M. Vksquez
2001 “Upwards: Never Down: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Transnational Perspective.”
In Christianity, Social Change, and Globalizution in the Americas. Ed. A.
Peterson, P. Williams and M. Visquez. New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversityPress.
Portes, A.
2003 “Conclusion: Theoretical Convergencies and Empirical Evidence in the Study of
Immigrant Transnationalism,” International Migration Review, 37(3):87&892.
Portes, A., L. Guarnizo and P. Landolt
1999 “Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent ResearchField,” Ethnic and Racial
Portes, A,, W. Haller and L. Guarnizo
2002 “Transnational Entrepreneurs: The Emergence and Determinants of an Alternative
Form of Immigrant Economic Adaptation,” American Sociological Review, (67):278-
298.
Riccio, B.
2001 “Disaggregatingthe Transnational Community: SenegaleseMigrants on the Coast of
Ernilia-Romagna.”Working Paper, Transnational Communities Programme, WPTC-
01-1 1.
Robertson, R.
1991 “The Globalization Paradigm: Thinking Globally.” In New Developments in Theory
and Research: Religion and the Social Order VolumeI. Ed. D. G. Bromley. Greenwich,
CT: JAI Press. Pp. 204-224.
Studies, 22:463-478.
Rouse, R.
1992 “Making Sense of Settlement: Class Transformation, Cultural Struggle,and Transnationalism
among Mexican Migrants in the United States.” In Towurdca Transnational
Perspectiveon Migration: Race, ClassEthnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered. Ed. N. G.
Glick Schiller, L. Basch and C. Blanc Szanton. New York: New York Academy of
Sciences.
Rumbaut, R.
2002 “Severedor Sustained Attachments? Language, Identity, and Imagined Communities
in the Post-Immigrant Generation.” In The ChangingFace ofHome: The Transnational
Lives of the Second Generation.Ed. P. Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage
Publication. Pp. 43-95.
Sassen, S.
1992 Global Cities. Princeton, N J : Princeton University Press.
Saxenian, A. L.
2002 “Local and Global Networks of Immigrant Professionals in Silicon Valley.” Public
Policy Institute of California.
1038 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW
Schiffauer, W.
1999 “Islamism in the Diaspora: The Fascination of Political Islam among Second Generation
German Turks.” Working Paper Transnational Communities Programme,
W T C 99-06.
Shain, Y.
1999 Exporting the American CreedAbroad. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sklair, L.
1998 “Transnational Practices and the Analysisof the Global System.” Paper delivered at the
Skrbis, Z.
1999 Long Distance Nationalism: Diasporas, Homelands and Identities. Aldershot, England:
Smith, A. D.
1983 “Nationalism and Social Theory,” British/ournal of Sociology, 34(1):19-38.
Smith, M. P. and L. Guarnizo, eds.
1998 Transnationalismfiom below: ComparativeUrbanand Community Research. Volume6
New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Smith, R.
1998 “Transnational Localities: Community, Technology, and the Politics of Membership
with the Context of Mexico-US. Migration.” In TransnationalismftDm Below: Comparative
Urbanand CommunityResearch, Volume6. Ed. M. P. Smith and L. Guarnizo.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Transnational Communities Programme Seminar Series. May.
Ashgate.
Smith, R. C.
2003 “Diasporic Memberships in Historical Perspective: Comparative Insights from the
Mexican, Italian and Polish Cases,” InternationalMigration Review, 37(3):724-759.
2002 “Life Course, Generation and Social Location as Factors Shaping Second-Generation
Transnational Life.” In The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the
Second Generation.Ed. P. Levitt and M. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Publication.
Pp. 145-168.
Soysal, Y.
1994 Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership Europe. Chicago and
Stichweh, P.
2000 “SystemsTheory as an Alternative to Action Theory?The Rise of ‘Communication’ as
a Theoretical Option,” Acta Sociologica, 43:(1):5-14.
Tweed, T.
1999 Our Lady of Exile. New York: Oxford University Press. University of California.
University of California, Davis
2003 Latin America, Remittances, Migration News, 10(2), Accessed at <http://
London: University of Chicago Press.
migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/moreentireissue.php?idate=200304& number=2>.
2000 “TheGlobal Media and Cosmopolitanism.” Paper presented at Transnational America
Conference, Bavarian American Academy, Munich, June 2000, published by the
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at <http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/
sociology/soc056ju.html>.
Urry, J.
CONCEPTUALIZINGSIMULTANEIN 1039
Van der Veer, P.
2001 “Transnational Religion.” Working Paper Transnational Communities Programme,
Vertovec, S.
2003 “Migration and Other Modes of Transnationalism: Towards Conceptual CrossVertovec,
S. and C. Peach
1997 Islam in Europe: The Politics of Religion and Community. London: Macmillan Press,
Waters, M. C.
1999 Black Identities: WestIndian Immigrant Dreams andAmerican Realities. New York and
Weber, D.
1999 “Historical Perspectiveson Mexican Transnationalism: With Notes from AngumacuWellmeier,
N. J.
1998 “SantaEulalia’s People in Exile: Maya Religion, Culture, and Identity in Los Angeles.”
In Gatheringsin Diaspora:Religious Communities and the New Immigration.Ed. R. S.
Warner and J. Wittner. Philadelphia:Temple University Press. Pp. 97-123.
WPTC-01-08.
Fertilization,”InternationalMigration Review, 37(3):641465.
Ltd.
Cambridge, MA: Russell Sage Foundation.
tiro,” SocialJustice, 26(3):1043-1 578.
Wimmer, A. and N. Glick Schiller
2003 “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences and the Study of Migration: An
Woodman, G. R.
2002 “Customary Laws of Ethnic Minorities in the U.K.” Paper deliveredat the conference
Mobile People, Mobile Law: Expanding Legal Relations in a Contracting World. Max
Planck Institute for SocialAnthropology, Halle, Germany. November 7-9.
Yang, F.
2002 “Chinese Christian Transnationalism: Diverse Networks of a Houston Church.” In
Religions across Borders: Transnational Religious Networks. Ed. H. R. Ebaugh and J.
Chafetz. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Pp. 175-204.
Yuval-Davis, N.
1997 Gender and Nation. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Zhou, M.
1998 “ParachuteKids in Southern California:The Educational Experienceof Chinese ChilEssay
in Historical Epistemology,”InternationalMigration Review, 37(3):576-610.
dren in Transnational Families,”Educationat Policy, 12(6):682-704.