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Portes, Alejandro, and Mm Zhou. 1993. "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants among Post-1965 Immigrant Youth," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 535; 74-96.
Pries. Ludger. 1997. "Neue Migration im Transnationalen Raum" Transnationale Migration, Soziale Well, Sonderband 12: 15-46.
Sassen, Saskia. 1988. The Mobility of Capital and Labor. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press.
-. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
——. 1996. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. New York:
Columbia University Press. Schmitter Heisler, Barbara. 1979. Immigration and Citizenship in West Germany and
Switzerland, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University
of Chicago.
-. 1984. "Sending States and Immigrant Minorities: The Case of Italy." Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 325—34.
-. 1985. "Sending Countries and the Politics of Emigration and Destination," International Migration Review 19: 469-84.
-. 1998. "Contexts of Immigrant Incorporation: Locating Dimensions of Opportunities and Constraints in the United States and Germany," in Hermann Kurthen, Jürgen Fijalkowski, and Gert Wagner, eds., Immigration, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Germany and the United States, pp. 91—106, Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press.
Smith, Robert. 1995. LosAusentes Siempre Presentes: The Imagining, Making, and Politics ofTransnational Community between Ticuani, Puebla, Mexico andNewYork City, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology. Columbia University.
-. 1998. "Transnational Localities: Community, Technology and the Politics of
Membership within the Context of Mexico-US Migration," in Michael Peter Smith and Luis G. Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below, vol. 6, pp. 196-238, Comparative Urban and Community Research. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Soysal,Yasemin. 1994. Limits to Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in
Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, W. L, and Florian Znaniecki. 1927. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.
New York: Alfred A. Knop f. Waldinger, Roger. 1994. "The Making of an Immigrant Niche," International Migration
#ewVH'28:3-30.
.........—. 1996. Still the Promised City? African-Americans and New Immigrants in Post-Indusnial New York. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Waldinger, Roger, and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, eds. 1996. Ethnic Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage.
Warner, Lloyd, and Leo Srole. 1945. The Social System of American Ethnic Groups. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Weber. Max. 1965 [1922]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated
by A. M. Henderson and T Parsons, part I, pp. 88-115. New York: Free Press. Weil. Patrick. 1998. "The State Matters: Immigration Control in Developed Countries."
New York: United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, Population
Division.
Wilson, Kenneth, and Alejandro Portes. 1980. "Immigrant Enclaves: An Analysis of the Labor Market Experience of Cubans in Miami," American Journal of Sociology 86: 296-319.
Yancey, William, Eugene Erikson, and Richard Juliani. 1976. "Emergent Ethnicity: A Review and Reformulation," American Sociological Review 41: 391-402.
CHAPTER 5
Theorizing Migration in Anthropology
The Social Construction of Networks, Identities, Communities,
and Globaiscapes
Caroline B. Brettell
In the late 1920s, while conducting fieldwork in Manus, New Guinea, Margaret Mead, made note of the fact that young boys spent two, five, sometimes seven years away from their villages working for the white man. "This is the great adventure to which every boy looks forward. For it, he learns pidgin, [and] he listens eagerly to the tales of returned work boys" (Mead 1930:119). Similarly, 52 percent of the Chambri (Tchambuli) men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were working as migrant laborers and therefore absent from the Papua, New Guinea, village where Mead was living in 1933. Despite these observations, Mead's ethnographic descriptions of life in New Guinea at this time are largely portraits of discrete and timeless cultures unaffected by the outside world.1 This mode of representation was characteristic of the anthropology of Mead's time and of the functionalist paradigm that shaped much anthropological analysis until 1960. It was an anthropology that contained a "sedentarist bias" (Malkki 1995:208) and a rooted definition of culture, both of which explain why anthropology, by comparison with a range of other social science disciplines, did not give the study of migration high priority as an area of research until the late 1950s and early 1960s. As anthropologists progressively rejected the idea of cultures as discretely bounded, territorialized, relatively unchanging, and homogenous units, thinking and theorizing about migration became increasingly possible.
Ultimately, of course, anthropologists had to-pay attention to migration because in those regions of the world that had traditionally been their arenas for ethnographic fieldwork—Africa, Oceanian and increasingly Latin America and the Caribbean—people were beginning to move in significant numbers from the countryside to the growing urban centers of the underdeveloped and developing world. In the city these rural villagers were finding employment as unskilled or semiskilled workers and living in neighborhoods with people of their own ethnic group or home community. The interest in migrants
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and migration grew in conjunction with the growth of both peasant studies and urban anthropology as anthropologists began to focus on peasants or "tribesmen" in cities (Mangin 1970; P. Mayer 1961; Plotnicov 1967; Sanjek 1990).
Since the 1970s, migration studies within anthropology have expanded significantly both with respect to the questions examined and the cross-cultural coverage.2 Research has been extended to the populations of Europe, the United States, Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Increasingly, international migrants, as well as those moving from town to town or city to city, have come under consideration. Numerous ethnographic monographs have been published—for example, on Jamaicans, Sikhs, Pakistanis, and Barbadians in England (Bhachu 1985; Foner 1979; Gmelch 1992; Werbner 1990); the Senegalese in Italy (Carter 1997); the Portuguese in France (Brettell 1995); Dominicans, Brazilians, Italians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, and El Salvadorans in the United States (Chavez 1992; di Leonardo 1984; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Mahler 1995a; Margolis 1994; Nash and Nguyen 1995); Palestinians in Honduras (Gonzalez 1992); Yemeni Jews in Israel (Gilad 1989); theYoruba in northern Ghana (Eades 1980); and Shanghai Chinese in Hong Kong and London (Watson 1975)—culminating in a case studies series edited by Nancy Foner that includes volumes on Haitians (Stepick 1998), Asian Indians (Lessinger 1995), Hmong (Koltyk 1998), Vietnamese (Freeman 1995), and Soviet Jews (Gold 1995) in the United States.3
In anthropology, as in other disciplines, theorizing about migration has been shaped by a particular epistemology that generates a specific set of questions. For anthropology, a discipline sensitive to place but also comparative in its perspective, these questions have focused less on the broad scope of migration flows than on the articulation between the place whence a migrant originates and the place or places to which he or she goes. This includes exploration of how people hi local places respond to global processes. Equally, anthropology's focus on culture, which includes the study of the interaction between beliefs and behavior, of corporate groups, and of social relationships, has resulted in an emphasis in migration studies on matters of adaptation and culture change, on forms of social organization that are characteristic of both the migration process and the immigrant community, and on questions of identity and ethnicity. In this chapter, I address the anthropological perspective on migration, beginning with a discussion of the formulation of typologies and moving from there to theories of articulation between sending and receiving societies, to a discussion of the social organization of migration and processes of adaptation and change that includes a consideration of the relationship between gender and migration, and finally to an analysis of connections between theorizing migration and theorizing identity and ethnicity.4
THE FORMULATION OF TYPOLOGIES
Since its beginnings as a comparative and cross-cultural science, anthropology has relied on typologies as a way to theorize about similarity and difference. Anthropologists have delineated distinct and diverse kinship and marriage systems, classified forms of religious behavior and belief, and distinguished between different types of economic exchange or political organization. Springing from this tradition, Nancie Gonzalez (1961) offered an early formulation of five types of migratory wage labor and looked at the impact of each of these on family organization. She argued that migration would be "reflected in social organization in different ways depending on the nature of the sociocultural system affected as well as the type of migration itself" (Gonzalez 1961:1278). The five types of migration identified by Gonzalez, based largely on her research in the Caribbean region, were "seasonal," "temporary nonseasonal," "recurrent," "continuous," and "permanent." Gonzalez's typology underscores the fact that population movements, especially those across international boundaries, cannot be defined exclusively as one-way and definitive. In the African context, anthropologists identified some migrants as weekly commuters, others as seasonal and circular movers, and still others as temporary sojourners or permanently displaced (DuToit 1975). In the Asian context, similar variations in rural-urban migration patterns were identified in terms of the degree of commitment to the city (McGee 1975). All of these types encompass theories about the motivations for migration, about how migration is shaped by local, regional, national, and international economies, about the linkages between sending and receiving societies, and about the relationship between migration on the one hand and family structure and household strategies on the other.
Recently Gonzalez has added "conflict migration" (Gonzalez 1989,1992) to the list of types of migration to describe population movement that is stimulated by violent conflict in the home society. Not only has she linked this type of migration to ethnicity (Gonzalez and McCommon 1989), a topic to which I return, but so-called conflict migration also raises the issue of whether and how to differentiate between migrants and refugees. The latter are assumed to be people who leave their home region involuntarily, but their experiences, once abroad, are not unlike those of migrants with the exception of their inability to return readily and freely to their homeland. Malkki (1995:496) has argued that "refugees do not constitute a naturally self-delimiting domain of anthropological knowledge" and that they can be theorized in much the same way as other displaced peoples. DuToit (1990) has made a similar suggestion and called, in addition, for consideration of those involuntary migrants displaced by planned relocations.
If typologies delineate various migration strategies, then they also serve to
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identify differing immigration policies of receiving societies and their relationship to the migrant experience (Callier-Boisvert 19S7; Caspari and Giles 1986; Goodman 1987). Thus the post-World War II German concept of gas-tarbeiter (guest worker) came into common use to describe a particular approach to foreign labor reminiscent of the United States bracero program (Mandel 1989,1990,1991,1994;Rhoades 1978b). In addition, the categories of undocumented migrant worker or illegal alien have become well known within the United States (Chavez 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994; Chock 1991), in post-World War II Europe (as the illegal or clandestine immigrant), and in a host of countries in the developing world. It is important to emphasize that anthropologists, who perceive the disjunction between the ideal and the actual as a fundamental characteristic of human experience, tend to look at immigration policy from the perspective of the immigrant who acts, adapts, and often circumvents. This emphasis is equally shaped by a theoretical shift in the discipline from an emphasis on structure to an emphasis on practice (Bour-dieu 1977; Ortner 1984).
Since the late 1970s, in part in association with the emergence of the multi-sited approach to fieldwork that George Marcus (1995) suggests is now characteristic of much contemporary anthropology, some scholars have studied so-called return migration in different parts of the world (Brettell 1979; Gmelch 1980, 1983, 1987, 1992; Guarnizo 1997; Kenney 1976; Lockwood 1990; Rhoades 1978a; Stack 1996; Taylor 1976; Thomas-Hope 1985). Gmelch (1980) has drawn attention to typologies of return migration, a basic distinction being between emigrants who intend their departure to be permanent and those who intend it to be temporary. Gmelch (1980) points out that most studies indicate that strong family ties, rather than economic factors (failure to achieve financial success), are the major incentive for return. Stack (1996:xv), for example, finds this to be the case among African Americans from northern cities who were "called back home" to the rural south. "The resolve to return home is not primarily an economic decision but rather a powerful blend of motives; had times back home can pull as well as push. People feel an obligation to help their kin or even a sense of mission to redeem a lost community ... or simply a breathing space, a refuge from the maelstrom." In other cases, for example Western Europe after 1973, migrants have been encouraged to return by the host society and offered specific monetary packages to do so. Finally, return migration can be related to experiences of racism and discrimination (Taylor 1976).
Return can also be part of the initial migration strategy, albeit frequently postponed. Thus the concept of sojourner has been introduced as a distinct type of migrant. For example, Margolis (1995:31) notes that Brazilians in the United States see themselves as sojourners, target earners who are motivated "by the desire to save money to meet some specific goal back home—buy a house or apartment, a car or telephone, start a business, or perhaps return to
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school." The question of settler or sojourner has also been raised in connection with Mexican immigrants (Chavez 1988) and is part of a literature on migration ideology that dates back to Philpott's (1973) research on West Indian migration (see also Dahya 1973; Rubenstein 1979). In the Portuguese case (Brettell 1979), this ideology is linked to the culturally embedded concept of saudade—nostalgia for the homeland. Saudade, Feldman-Bianco (1992:145) argues "is a cultural construct that defines Portuguese identity in the context of multiple layers of space and (past) time."
The ideology of return is conceptually similar to what Massey et al. (1993, 1994), drawing largely on anthropological research, have referred to as the culture of migration where migration is part of behaviors and values, a kind of rite of passage like baptism or marriage. For members of Mexican rural households, migration is a survival strategy that occurs at certain phases of a household cycle (Arizpe 1981). These peasant households control the circulation of their children in a form of relay migration. Holmes (1983) makes a similar argument in his reconceptualization of the European worker-peasant. He is able to show that migration is a strategy of great historical depth in some parts of the world a strategy that has allowed peasant households to persist into the twentieth century. The life course or household life cycle approach to migration is characteristic of other research in European historical anthropology (Brettell 1986; Kertzer 1984).5 In this historical work, as well as in work with contemporary societies, anthropologists have described a powerful relationship between different patterns of inheritance and patterns of migration (Douglass 1974; Iszaevich 1974).
Some of the research on return migration demonstrates that those who do return often remigrate, leading Margolis (1995), based on her research among Brazilian immigrants in New York City, to formulate the concept of "yo-yo migration" as yet another type. She contrasts this type of migration with cultural commuters or shuttle migrants "who regularly migrate back and forth between home and host country with no particular intention of staying in either place for good" (Margolis 1995:32). Since much of this research on return migration is conducted in both sending and receiving societies, it also examines both the impact of out-migration on those left behind and the reintegration of those who have returned after many years abroad (Gmelch 1992; Philpott 1970; Taylor 1976). Ruth Mandel (1990) describes the pain and disorientation characteristic of adolescent Turkish returnees, and in another essay she alludes to the creation of a new ethnic category for Turks who have repatriated—Alamanyali, the "Germanlike" (Mandel 1989). As such, rather than being accepted and respected, they are mocked. Similar categories exist for returned Portuguese migrants, be they the brasileiros of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or Xhefranceses of more contemporary times (Brettell 1979, 1986).
Anthropologists still rely on typologies to capture different migration
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strategies, but they also recognize that typologies generally offer a static and homogenous picture of a process that is flexible over the life course of an individual migrant or the domestic cycle of a household, varied within a population, and subject to change over time as larger contextual conditions change. Nevertheless, the typologies formulated by anthropologists have directed research to the diverse nature of the process and to the fundamental relationship between sending and receiving societies, whether conceived in the macroterms of a global economy or in the more microterms of social networks and emotional relationships that link households and individuals to both areas. They also help to achieve some of the comparative theoretical goals of the science of anthropology.6
ARTICULATING THE MICRO AND THE MACRO: MODERNIZATION THEORY, TRANSNATIONALISM, ANDTHE POLITICAL-ECONOMY OF MIGRATION
The delineation of types of migration is one way to theorize the way sending areas are articulated with receiving areas (Kearney 1986). The issue of articulation has been explored by anthropologists according to two distinct analytical approaches, one rooted in modernization theory and the other in an historical-structuralist perspective ultimately grounded in broader theory of political economy and the impact of global capitalism (Georges 1990; Kearney 1995).
Much of the early work on migration within anthropology was influenced by modernization theory and a bipolar framework for analysis that separated and opposed sending and receiving areas, and the push factors of out-migration from the pull factors of in-migration. This approach emerged, as Kearney (1986) has noted, from the folk-urban continuum model originally formulated by Robert Redfield (1941), a model that opposed city and country and contrasted two distinct ways of life, one traditional and one modem. Focusing on the motivations of individual migrants, some anthropologists working within a modernization theory framework have emphasized the rational arid progressive economic decisions made in response to differentials in land, labor, and capital between where a migrant lives and the locale to which he or she has chosen to migrate. Wage labor is viewed by these individuals as offering more opportunities than subsistence farming (Mitchell 1969) and can, in fact, provide the cash needed to succeed in the rural context—to accumulate bride-price, provide a dowry, or buy a home. Others, arguing what DuToit (1990) has recently characterized as the "bright lights" theory (Gulliver 1957; P. Mayer 1961), have emphasized less the attraction of wage jobs than the excitement of urban life which draws young migrants, especially young men, to it.
One of the underlying assumptions of modernization theory was that the movement of people from areas that had abundant labor but scarce capital to
areas that were rich in capital but short of labor would ultimately contribute to economic development in both sending and host societies. Modernization theory, in other words, encompassed an equilibrium model of development, the result of which would be a more equitable balance between resources and population pressure and the ultimate elimination of differences between rural-agrarian and urban-industrial areas. Migrants, through savings and investment, would become agents of change in their home communities. However, as much of the work on emigrant remittances and return migration has demonstrated, migrant savings are often spent on conspicuous consumer items, rather than for economic investment, and the skills learned abroad cannot be easily applied to the rural home context (Donnan and Werbner 1991; Gardner 1995; Gmelch 1980; Gregory and Cazorla 1987; Rhoades 1978a; Thomas-Hope 1985). Rather than being a form of development aid given by rich countries to poor countries, population movements have often resulted in migration-dependent communities and the generation of further migration through the diffusion of consumerism (Massey et al. 1994).
Although the push and pull elements of modernization theory still prevail to order discussions of why people migrate, the shortcomings of the equilibrium model of linear development with which modernization theory has been associated have stimulated interest in a historical-structuralist approach. This approach shifts attention from the motivations and adaptations of individual migrants to the macrolevel processes that shape and sustain population movements. As Lessinger (1995:71,72) has recently phrased it, "Current research* sees the impetus to migration as more complex both for individuals and for entire groups of people. Often push and pull factors operate simultaneously... and there is no single profile of a typical migrant."
This historical-structuralist approach draws broadly on Marxist thought and more specifically on the work of dependency theorists such as André Gunder Frank (1967), and world systems theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). It frames migration in the context of a global economy, core-periphery relations, and the development of underdevelopment. Within this perspective, concepts such as the international division of labor or the internationalization of the proletariat have emerged to describe the inequities between labor-exporting, low-wage countries and labor-importing, high-wage countries. Rather than stemming migration, development encourages it because development creates inequality and raises awareness about the larger society and hence enhances a sense of relative deprivation (Gonzalez and McCommon 1989). The net economic value of migration accrued to the city and not the countryside, to the core and not the periphery.
The unit of analysis in this body of theory is not the individual migrant, but rather the global market and the way that national and international economic and political policies, and particularly capitalist development, have disrupted, displaced, or even attracted local populations, thereby generating particular
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migration streams. Thus Eades (1987:13) argued more than a decade ago that "the anthropology of migrant labor... has become the anthropology of a world social order within which people struggle to make lives for themselves, sometimes helped, but much more often hindered, by the results of international flows of capital and the activities of states over which they have no control."
Dissatisfaction with what was almost exclusively, although perhaps unintentionally, a macroapproach that portrayed migrants not as active agents but as passive reactors manipulated by the world capitalist system, has resulted in a new form of theorizing about the articulation between sending and receiving societies, theorizing that is rooted in the concept of transnationalism. Transnationalism, which continues the critique of bipolar models of migration (Rouse 1992), is defined as a social process whereby migrants operate in social fields that transgress geographic,;political, and cultural borders (Glide Schiller, Bäsch, and Szanton Blanc 1992:ix; see also Bäsch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). As a theoretical construct about immigrant life and identity, transnationalism aptly suits the study of population movements in a world where improved modes of transportation as well as the images that are transmitted by means of modern telecommunications have shortened the social distance between sending and receiving societies. TransnatipnaJ^srr^emergecl^ from the realiza^njhat jrrrmigr^tsjbjoad^amtain their tie|_toJ]iei££0U[ir trjesjsforir^
|^fvIargorisT^5^9)>From^ 1ransnational^r^.ecJ:we,jnigrarrtsi arencjonger "ujB^tecl,^utjuther Dive :':vcl> li.uk anifqrth across intermtional borders and betwe^_clifferenrcu^toesl^cl^social systems (Georges 199Ö; Glick ScMierl997TGlicrSchiller, Basch^nd^zantohBlanc 1992,1995; Grimes 1998; Kearney 1991,1995; Levitt 1998b; Rouse 1991; Smith 1993,1997; Sutton 1987). These migrants bring change^to loc^lize^corrrmunities not only through ec6nc^ic^e"mi{^f;es,r!Üt also social remittances (Levitt 1998b). C3licE"Scntrier et al. (1995:49) argue that trM'snatiörTalism in anthropology is "part of an effort to reconfigure anthropological thinking so that it will reflect current transformations in the way in which time and space [are] experienced and represented."
Transnationalism reflects the more general move in anthropology away from bounded units of analysis and localized community studies (Hannerz 1996, 1998; Ho 1993). Conceived as social action in "a multidimensional global space with unbounded, often discontinuous and interpenetrating sub-spaces" (Kearney 1995:549; see also Appadurai 1991 and Rouse 1995a), transnationalism is closely linked with broader interests emerging from postmodernist and feminist theory to theorize space and place in new ways (Feld and Basso 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992,1997). Indeed, new thinking about the nature of community and how people become members of a community, including consideration of so-called border cultures (Alvarez 1995: Kearney 1991) and exploration of the relevance of Anderson's (1983) concept of the "imagined
community" to immigration (Chavez 1991,1994; Smith 1993), have been part of the new research on global space.7 Gupta and Ferguson (1992:11) have argued that immigrants "use memory of place to construct imaginatively their new lived world," while Chavez (1991) views the imagining of community as two pronged—both from the point of view of immigrants and from the point of view of the host society. A sense of belonging emerges among the undocumented when they have "overcome feelings of isolation, developed a network of family and friends in the local community, acquired local cultural knowledge, and reconciled themselves to the possible threat of deportation" (Chavez 1991:272). Migrants themselves describe this process in terms of an emic (i.e., their own) notion of adaptation. Etically (i.e., from the analyst's point of view) Chavez draws on the idea of transition as formulated by Arnold Van Gennep to describe incorporation as a process of moving from outsider to insider. However, full incorporation, Chavez argues, requires that the larger society also "imagine" immigrants as members of their community.
Chavez's research is important because it focuses attention on issues of reception and representation of the "immigrant other." This topic has been explored from a number of different theoretical perspectives. Judith Goode (1990) reframes the relations between newcomers and established residents in a community in Philadelphia as host-guest relations and argues that hosts welcome newcomers "if they try to learn the rules" (126). In this community some of the immigrants are more educated and wield more economic power than the established residents, a difference that generates tension. Goode points to the contested arenas and military metaphors, such as "stand the ground," that residents use to express their concern. She also describes the expectations (including being a loyal American) that they hold for newcomers. Cole (1997), in a study of immigrants in Italy, calls for theorizing immigrant reception in relation to institutional or structural racism as well as class and regional identities, while Borneman (1998) draws on discourse analysis, theories of representation, and Goffman's (1963) work on stigma and labeling to explain the negative reception of Marielitos in the United States who were classified as communists, criminals, and homosexuals.8 Finally, Koptiuch (1996) takes the question of reception in a somewhat different direction with an incisive, critical analysis of the legal strategy of "cultural defense" that characterizes some cases involving Asian immigrants that are brought into the courtrooms of the United States. Thus the attorney for a Hmong "tribesman" brought before a judge to answer criminal charges of kidnapping and rape of a Hmong college coed argues that his client is simply carrying out the cultural ritual of marriage by capture. Criminal charges in this case were dropped in favor of a lesser sentence. But, in Koptiuch's view, this is a form of paternalist and orientalist colonial discourse applied to the empire within. "From a spectacular collapse of space, time, and subjectivity, the law takes license to retrieve a non-historical, primitivized, feminized image, of Asia that facilitates ... the denial of
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coevalness between Asia and the United States" (Koptiuch 1996:229). This work offers an excellent, albeit rare, example of how anthropology and the law have come together in the study of the implications of the persistence of cultural patterns among immigrants.
To conclude, transnationalism offers an alternative to and a critique of earlier manifestations of articulation theory that "posit a primeval state of autonomy (usually labeled precapitalist), which is then violated by global capitalism" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:8). It has generated new ideas about the representation and incorporation of immigrants and the deterritorializa-tion, if not the actual disintegration, of nation-states (Appadurai 1996; Gupta 1992; Hannerz 1992); and it lies behind efforts to merge migration studies with diaspora studies (Clifford 1997). Immigrants in the transnational and global world are involved in the nation-building of more than one state; thus national identities are not only blurred but also negotiated or constructed. "We live in a world where identities increasingly come to be, if not wholly deterri-torialized, at least differently territorialized. Refugees, migrants, displaced and stateless peoples—these are perhaps the first to live these realities in their most complete form" (Gupta and Ferguson 1992:9). Some anthropologists have recently argued that the transnational arrangements constructed by "ordinary migrants, their families and their friends, have undermined both the political dominance exerted by the state and its cultural authority" (Rouse 1995a:358; see also Appadurai 1996 and Kearney 1991) and are therefore beginning to address the question of citizenship from a transnational perspective. Borne-man (1997), for example, compares the exclusion from citizenship of immigrants in Germany who are legal residents and who have become culturally and linguistically German with the inclusion of ethnic Germans who have resided elsewhere in the world, sometimes for more than two centuries, and who are in fact linguistically and cultural distinct.
THEORIZING THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MIGRATION: KINSHIP, NETWORKS, GENDER, AND ETHNIC ENCLAVES
The anthropologist generally locates transnational processes within the lives of individuals and families and particularly in the personal, economic, and social connections that articulate the world they have left with the world they have entered (Goodson-Lawes 1993; Mahler 1995; Min 1998; Pessar 1995a; Wong 1998). In other words, if the roots of the discipline are in the study of kinship and social organization, then these roots are also at the core of migration research in anthropology and revolve in particular around the concept of social network, which gained importance as anthropologists turned their attention to the study of complex societies and urban populations (Boissevain and Mitchell 1973; Mitchell 1971,1974).« Although considered by many to be no more than a tool of research and a method of analysis, in fact theories about
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how social relationships are forged and how social systems are constructed are at the foundation of network analysis.
In a wide range of cross-cultural contexts, anthropologists have examined the role of networks, based largely on ties of kinship and friendship, in the process of chain migration or what Wilson (1994) has recently labeled "network-mediated migration" (Butterworth 1962; Fjellman and Gladwin 1985; Gardner 1995; Graves and Graves 1974; Margaret Grieco 1995; Elizabeth Grieco 1998; Ho 1993; Kearney and Nagengast 1989; Kemper 1977; Massey et al. 1987). Often, these anthropologists have emphasized multiple destinations rather than a bipolar model linking one sending society to one receiving area(DuToit 1990; Ho 1993; Uzzell 1976; Wilson 1994). "Network-mediated chain migration does not necessarily mean that prospective migrants or migrant families are given only one or a few options as to where they will
go____[Migrants... seek work first one place, then another, where they have
kin and friends. In retrospect this can appear as a step migration pattern to an ultimate destination to which a migrant recurrently returns or where he/she finally settles in with or without his/her family" (Wilson 1994:272). Wilson goes on to argue (1994:275) that migration networks must be conceived as facilitating rather than encapsulating, as permeable, expanding, and fluid rather than as correlating with a metaphor of a rigid and bounded structure. She prefers this network approach to a market theory approach that involves immigrants in a cost-benefit analysis of the most favorable destination. Thus she concurs with the conclusion drawn by Massey et al. (1993:449) who suggest that networks can become self-perpetuating to migration because "each act of migration itself creates the social structure needed to sustain it. Every new migrant reduces the costs of subsequent migration for a set of friends and relatives, and some of these people are thereby induced to migrate, which further expands the set of people with ties abroad." The theory of network-mediated migration is quite distinct from theories rooted in the rational-choice and decision-making models preferred by some economists and political scientists. Indeed, it is only with a network-based model that Chapin (1992) could formulate her argument that lower-class emigrant tourists who return to the Azores for vacations stimulate the emigration of upper-class individuals.
Both transnationalism and the study of social networks have shifted the unit of analysis from the individual migrant to the migrant household (Briody 1987). Households and social networks mediate the relationship between the individual and the world system and provide a more proactive understanding of the migrant than that provided by the historical-structuralist framework. In other words, the effort to combine macro- and microperspectives of analysis through the filter of the household not only brings the migrant-as-decision-maker back into focus, but also reintroduces the social and cultural variables that must be considered in conjunction with economic variables. This synthetic approach permits an analysis of subtle differences between those local
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communities or social classes that become extensively involved in migration and those that do not. It also provides more understanding of how migration streams are perpetuated despite changes in economic and political policies that serve to constrain or halt them. Grasmuck and Pessar (1991:15,13) have made the case most pointedly: "It is not individuals but households that mobilize resources and support, receive and allocate remittances, and make decisions about members' production, consumption and distribution of activities.... Social networks and households simultaneously mediate macro structural changes, facilitate the migration response to these changes, and perpetuate migration as a self-sustaining social process."
While anthropologists have recognized the significance of networks of kinship and friendship to the process of migration, they have also paid a good deal of attention to and hence theorized about the role of networks in the process of settlement and adaptation in the society of immigration—that is, how networks provide social capital. Lomnitz (1977), for example, found that kinship networks were the basic units of production and consumption among rural-urban migrants in Mexico. In his work among undocumented Central Americans in Houston, Rodriguez observes the "larger the social network that serves for organizing undocumented migration, the greater are the social and economic resources that can be mustered for settlement, leading to greater household stability" (Rodriguez 1987:17; see also Anwar 1995; Benson 1990; Brettell and Callier-Boisvert 1977; Buechler 1976; Gold 1989; Grieco 1998; Lamphere, Silva, and Sousa 1980). Ho (1993) looks carefully at the sharing and reciprocity that occurs within kinship networks that cross national boundaries to create international families and a common practice of child fostering that aids migrants in achieving their goals (see also Nelson 1987; Soto 1987; Spiegel 1987). Finally, Werbner (1990), in a fascinating study of the relationship between labor migration and the gift economy, stresses the central role of networks not only in the processes of distribution and credit among Pakistani entrepreneurs in Manchester, England, but also as the foundation for complex relationships of gift exchange that bind the community together. "Through gifting migrants transform persons who are strangers into lifelong friends. Through such exchanges, not only men but whole households and extended families are linked, and exchanges initiated on the shop floor extend into the domestic and inter-domestic domain" (Werbner 1990:332; see also Werbner 1995 and White 1997). Although she does not invoke it directly, Werb-ner's analysis fits squarely into the interactionist theoretical approach that has its roots in Marcel Mauss's classic essay The Gift.10
Immigrant women are often at the center of these immigrant networks. They both initiate and maintain them (Kossoudji and Ranney 1984; Smith 1976; Stafford 1984; Werbner 1988;'Yanagisako 1985; Zavella 1988). O'Connor (1990) describes the female-centered informal networks based on the Mexican tradition of confianza (trust) that emerge among Mexican women work-
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ing in a wholesale nursery in California. These networks help immigrant women to cope successfully "with the conditions imposed by the Anglo-dominated political and economic structure" (O' Connor 1990:97), or to "discover ways to negotiate patriarchal barriers" (Hondagenu-Sotelo 1994:94). Married women in particular use them to facilitate their own migration, often without the knowledge of their husbands.
Despite Ravenstein's (1885) claim more than a century ago that women dominated short-distance population movements, women were generally ignored in the study of migration until quite recently.! 1 If women were considered at all, then it was as dependents and passive followers of the initiating male migrant. Alternatively, women were the ones who waited in the countryside, assuming many of the responsibilities that had once been in the hands of men.12 This particular conceptualization of the relationship between women . and the process of migration suited modernization theory—women represented the traditional pole of the continuum and men the pole of modernity. Today it is apparent that not only are women often the first to migrate (sometimes they receive the initial job contract), but they also outnumber men in some international migration streams—for example, among Caribbean immigrants to the United States. Gender has been shown to be important in the decision to migrate (when, where, and who) as well as in the process of settlement in the receiving society.
Anthropologists have been at the forefront in theorizing about the significance of gender in migration (Brettell and deBerjeois 1992; Brydon 1987; Buijs 1993; Chavez etal. 1997; Goodman 1987; Ho 1993; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992, 1994; Morokvasic 1984; Phizacklea 1983; Simon and Brettell 1986; Westwood and Bhachu 1988). This research focuses on the role and experiences of women in migration and on the changes that occur in family and kinship patterns as a result of migration (Foner 1997a; Kibria 1993). It examines the labor force participation of immigrant women (it is high), the impact of salaried employment on domestic roles and domestic power, health issues, and issues of political consciousness-raising. Much of this research can be squarely situated in relation to analytical models at the heart of feminist anthropology— the domestic-public model that explores women's status in relation to different spheres of activity and the model springing from Marxist feminism that addresses the interrelationship between production and reproduction. Among the questions explored are whether wage earning serves to enhance the power and status of immigrant women within their households, whether greater sharing of household activities emerges as a result of the work obligations of women, and how changes in employment, family structure, and lifestyle affect women's own assessments of their well being (Fernandez-Kelly 1990; Frei-denberg et al. 1988; Hirsch 1999; Lamphere 1987; Meintel 1987; Mills 1998; Stafford 1984). Chai (1987a, 1987b), for example, explicitly applies the conceptual scheme of domestic/public to an analysis of Korean inimigrant women
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in Hawaii. Middle-class and well-educated Korean women have been relegated to the domestic sphere in their home society, hut as immigrants they take waged work outside the home. This wage earning "may lead to a more flexible division of labor, decision making and parental responsibility, as well as to less sex segregation in social and public places" (Chai 1987b:229). Korean women who tire of the menial jobs to which they are relegated in the public domain often revert to working in family-owned businesses and construct their own public domain with its own ladder of achievement within the Korean ethnic community. Bhachu (1988:76), in a study of the waged work of Sikh immigrant women in Britain, moves "beyond the simple thesis that wage labour equals liberation" to argue that "women's increased ability to develop more self-defined roles has been aided by their increased access to cash, which has allowed them to invest and consume in their own interests and for their own benefit." She also argues that specific cultural values and social patterns have undergone radical changes as a result both of migration and women's waged labor. Although the waged work of Dominican immigrant women in the United States leads to improved domestic social relations and ideology, "these household level changes do not in turn stimulate modifications in female workers's consciousness and demands for improved conditions in the workplace" (Pes-sar 1984:1189). By contrast, in Stockton, California, the informal economic activities in which Cambodian refugee women engage to generate extra earnings, as well as the fact that there are more job opportunities for women in this particular local economy, provide the basis for their emergent leadership roles within a community where they are the primary breadwinners (Ui 1991).13 The new sense of control that women gain as immigrants has raised questions for some anthropologists about the varying attitudes of men and women toward both life abroad and return migration. While some immigrant women yearn for the homeland (Goodson-Lawes 1993), research has more often demonstrated that women are often more reluctant to return to the sending society than are migrant men because it will mean giving up some of the advantages they have gained while abroad (Barou 1996). Gmelch and Gmelch (1995), in a comparative study of returnees to several countries of origin, found that women were less satisfied than men to be "home" and had greater problems of readjustment. They suggest that this is due not to differential motivations for return but to limited employment opportunities and specific social conditions that constrain women's social relationships. Goodson-Lawes (1993), inher study of Mexican women in Mexico and California, argues that the central issue is one of authority and power. In some cases women may feel that they have more power, even if more covert than overt, in their home village: "The type and extent of feminine authority wielded may be altered with immigration and thus affects the decision to emigrate or to return. In large part this decision can be understood as the product of a tension between desired control and imagined opportunity. When the possibilities of the North surpass,
in a personal equation, the need to maintain a sense of personal control, one is enticed toward the border" (Goodson-Lawes 1993:293).
In general, anthropological research on immigrant women that is framed in relation to the domestic/public model, the opposition between production and reproduction, or issues of power and authority, all of which are central to feminist anthropological theory (Moore 1988, 1994), indicates a set of complex and varied responses to the necessity of balancing work and family life. In some cases greater equality between men and women is the result, in others it is not. The differences must be explained by a close examination of cultural factors (including gender ideology) and economic constraints. Recently, Pessar (1995b) has argued that the study of immigrant women challenges claims of feminist theorists about the nature of unpaid domestic work and the relationship between waged work and women's emancipation. Drawing from postmodern feminist theory, she adopts an inner subjectivity to stress that immigrant women do not necessarily view their situation as oppressive and that in fact many forge multiple and complex identities.14
Working within a political-economy theoretical framework, research on how the social position of immigrant women is affected by the social, economic, and political policies of states has also been a topic of research. Some theorists have described a "triple invisibility" for migrant women based on factors of class, ethnicity, and gender (Chavira-Prado 1992; Lamphere 1986; Marshall 1981; Melville 1988; Morokvasic 1983; Segura 1989). Segmented occupational structures funnel immigrant women into a few sectors of the economy, the garment industry and domestic service in particular (Fernandez-Kelly and Garcia 1985; Neale andNeale 1987; Repak 1995). Colen (1990) describes the West Indian household workers who had to put up with the long hours and myriad responsibilities to obtain their green cards with the help of an employer-sponsor. She argues that "a system of reproduction operates, encouraged by the state, which is highly stratified by class, race, place in a global political economy, and migration status" (Colen 1990:110). For some immigrant women the segmented labor market has meant downward mobility (Chai 1987a; Gold 1989; Margolis 1990). One Haitian woman complained, "The job I do is for an animal. It's the same day after day. I used to be a schoolteacher in Haiti. Now I'm doing a job that doesn't even require me to think" (Stafford 1984:181). Exploring the questions of gender, migration, and exploitation from a somewhat different angle, Margold (1995) describes the disintegration of self and the dismemberment of masculinity among Filipino male migrants in the Middle East who are referred to as "dogs" and "slaves," while Mills (1998) addresses how Thai female migrants negotiate gendered identities in relation to courtship and marriage in the context of the hegemonic forces of global capitalism. She concludes that "migrant women's encounters with dominant notions of Thai modernity engage them in the pursuit of new models of self-fulfillment andpersonal autonomy that focus their concerns on
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individual gendered dilemmas and choices rather than broader structures and relations of power" (Mills 1998:325).
While many immigrant women internalize the discrimination that ensues from this employment situation, others, in rarer instances, have become part of group-based political action (Giles 1991, 1992, 1993; Groves and Chang 1999; Ong 1987; Salzinger 1991). Much of this work is informed by broader thinking within feminist anthropology on formal and informal strategies of resistance that is itself shaped by the work of James Scott and by Anthony Gid-dens' theory of agency (Giddens 1984; Scott 1985; see also L. Abu-Lughod 1990; Moore 1994; Ortner 1995). It also challenges widely accepted notions that cultural constraints and a tight-knit ethnic enclave preclude immigrant women from engaging in political and leadership activities within and on behalf of their communities.
Of particular interest is Ui's (1991) study of female leadership in the Cambodian refugee community in Stockton, California. She argues that the rapid growth of the enclave has resulted in an expansion of service programs for Cambodians, which has in turn created employment opportunities that are disproportionately filled by women. These positions become the basis for obtaining economic and social power and hence leadership roles. Her conclusion offers a hypothesis that can be tested within other immigrant communities: "Despite traditional culture and gender roles, female leadership will develop and emerge when groups are in a situation in which ethnic identity and unity are strong, the employment opportunities for women are greater than those for men, and the intervention of the welfare state is significant" (Ui 1991:175).
Ui's study indicates that the concept of the ethnic enclave, addressed quite extensively by sociologists, is also of some importance to anthropological thinking about institution building, community formation, insertion into a particular urban economy and society, and the creation of ethnic space among immigrant populations (Harbottle 1997; Herman 1979; Kwong 1997; Werb-ner 1987; Wong 1998). Brettell (1981) has asked whether an ethnic enclave or community is inevitable in a broader comparative context, and points to immigration policy, laws about small business proprietorship, and the structure of cities as important variables to consider. Similarly, Werbner (1990), in research on Sikhs in Britain, addresses the question of whether and how enclave economies are formed, relating this process in some cases to the relative weight of ethnic versus class resources as principles of social organization within an immigrant community. Finally, based on research among Latinos in Washington, D.C., Pessar concludes that the emergence of social solidarity and an ethnic enclave is not inevitable and is unlikely where "immigrants do not face major hurdles to full participation in mainstream social and economic institutions" (Pessar 1995c:391).
Studies of ethnic enclaves in sociology are also linked with theories about the extent to which the ethnic economy and self-employment deter or promote immigrant incorporation and social and economic mobility. These are also
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questions explored by some anthropologists. Alvarez (1990), for example, challenging widely held notions that Mexican immigrants have a low level of involvement in entrepreneurship and the ethnic economy, outlines their activities in the Los Angeles produce industry. He finds it necessary to move beyond dual economy and labor market theory to anthropological theories about market hierarchies, formulated initially in the study of peasant societies in Asia and Latin America, in order to explain what has happened. Boissevain and Grotenbreg (1986) have examined variables such as experience and feeling about management, access to loyal and cheap labor, a patriarchal family structure, access to capital, the ability to control the administration of credit, access to a network of contacts, ambition and willingness to take risk, and a desire for independence to explain differences in the degree of self-employment among Surinamese of various ethnic backgrounds (Hindustani, Creole, Chinese, Javanese) who reside in Amsterdam. In another essay, Boissevain and Grotenbreg (1989) address the legal constraints on the self-employment of immigrants. Their research can be situated in relation to the theoretical debate within sociology (specifically in the work of Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich 1988) between cultural background and structural conditions as explanations for rates of entrepreneurship. They conclude that the harsh analytical distinction is inappropriate.
The work on ethnic enclaves and the ethnic economy within anthropology can also be related to a separate literature within urban anthropology that focuses on "the city as context" as an important framework within which to examine the process of adaptation and institution building among immigrant populations (Foner 1987a; Lamphere 1992; Rollwagen 1974a, 1974b; M. Smith 1974). In an attempt to "theorize the city," Low (1997) distinguishes between ethnic cities, gendered cities, and global cities. She delineates two different approaches in research on ethnic cities. One describes the ethnic city as a "mosaic of enclaves that are economically, linguistically and socially self-contained as a strategy of political and economic survival." The other focuses on ethnic groups defined "by their location in the occupational structure, their position in the local immigrant social structure, their degree of marginality, and/or their historical and racial distinctiveness as the basis of discrimination and oppression" (Low 1997:405; see also Low 1996). Low's formulations suggest a profitable new direction in research, one that reunites theories of migration and theories of urbanization.
THEORIZING MIGRATION/THEORIZING ETHNICITY AND IDENTITY
Clearly, anthropological studies of ethnic enclaves and entrepreneurship among migrant populations also underscore the close connections between theorizing migration and theorizing ethnicity. Indeed, Kearney (1995:559) has observed that "at the heart of current anthropological concerns with trans-
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nationalism, identity politics, migration, and human rights is the persistence, ! resurgence, or de novo emergence of ethnicity at a time when, according to modernization theory, it was to have been attenuated by robust nation states." ' He links the growing interest in the concept of identity and by extension ethnicity to the "implosion" of the concept of culture.15
Anthropological consideration of ethnicity has its origins in the research :' of the first generation of urban anthropologists working in Africa. Seminal work such as J. Clyde Mitchell's (1957) study of the Kalela Dance in Rhode- j sia (now Zambia), Epstein's (1958) monograph, Politics in an Urban African , Community, and Abner Cohen's (1969) analysis of how Hausa traders used ethnicity for their own political and economic ends, challenged the assumption that detribalization was the inevitable outcome of the movement of rural r dwellers to cities—clearly another critique of modernization theory. Much of this early work wrestled with the conceptual differences between "tribe" and "ethnic group" and resulted in the delineation of three distinct theoretical ]■ approaches to the study of ethnicity.16 The primordialist approach, which pre- f vailed until the 1960s, argues that ethnic identity is the result of deep-rooted [■ attachments to group and culture; the instrumentalist approach focuses on ethnicity as a political strategy that is pursued for pragmatic interests; and the situational approach, emerging from the theoretical work of Frederik Barth (1969), emphasizes the fluidity and contingency of ethnic identity which is constructed in specific historical and social contexts (Banks 1996).
In studies of migration by anthropologists, the latter two approaches have attracted the most attention, not only because they suit the more emergent and interactive understanding of culture and the poststructuralist emphasis on the multiple and shifting basis of self-representation (Gupta and Ferguson 1997), but also because the act of migration brings populations of different backgrounds into contact with one another and hence creates boundaries. It is the negotiation across such boundaries, themselves shifting, that is at the heart of ethnicity.17 Ethnicity is a strategic response, invoked in particular situations j; (Durham 1989). Thus, Lyman and Douglass (1973:350) have argued that to j: treat ethnic identity "as a group phenomenon in which recruitment of membership is ascriptive forecloses study of the process whereby individuals make use of ethnicity as a maneuver or strategem in working out their own life chances in an ethnically pluralistic social setting." This is precisely the approach that Rouse (1995b) takes in his study of Mixtec migrants from the ] municipio of Aguililla in central western Mexico who are residing in Redwood City, California. "Most Aguilillans who migrated ... did not negotiate a shift from one set of identities to another but instead moved from a world in which |. identity was not a central concern to one in which they were pressed with increasing force to adopt understandings of personhood and collectivity that privileged notions of autonomous self-possession and a formal equivalence between the members of a group" (Rouse 1995b:370).18 Lessinger (1995:6) I
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follows a similar line of argument in her research on Asian Indians in the United States. "For many Indian immigrants and their children, ethnic group identity and ethnicity, have become the point of entry into U.S. society, and
the vehicle for carving out a social role____When Indians first migrate to the
United States they think of themselves as Indians living abroad, then begin to envision themselves as Americans. Very quickly, however, they realize that U.S. society divides itself along ethnic and racial lines. A great many Indian immigrants conclude that it is preferable to develop an ethnic group identity rather than accept a racial categorization."
Negotiating race and ethnicity is also part of the Jamaican and Haitian immigrant experiences in the United States (Foner 1985, 1987; Stafford 1987) and has led several anthropologists to argue that race and ethnicity need to be considered together in any theoretical formulations of the construction of immigrant identity (Banks 1996: Goode and Schneider 1994; Williams 1989). Stepick (1998) describes how Haitian immigrant youth construct their identity in relation or in contrast to that of African Americans. He characterizes the first case as a "Haitian cover-up" and reveals some intriguing differences between boys who choose to be monocultural (either Haitian or African American) and girls who choose to be multicultural (both Haitian and African American).
Similar issues and approaches arise in research among immigrants in the European context. The identity of Sikh immigrants in Britain is crosscut by .differences of class and caste as well as by differences between "twice migrants" and direct migrants (Bhachu 1993). Mandel (1989), emphasizing how social context influences the expression of identity, describes Greeks and Turks who are bitter enemies in the homeland but who join in a common purpose as immigrants in Germany. At issue, she suggests, "are the ways self and other articulate, historically and in the migratory situation, with shifting hierarchies of'others"' (Mandel 1989:62). White (1997:754) comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that Turkish identities in Berlin "are forged from class, ethnic, and religious loyalties, from institutional and media ethnoscapes (created by Germans and by Turks themselves), from shared regularities of interpersonal expectations of generalized reciprocity, and in reaction to how Turks are defined (and redefined after reunification) by Germans." She focuses on the processual, community-building aspects of identity rather than on those that rely on fixed and external markers such as language. All these scholars of immigration suggest that ethnicity, which Ronald Cohen (1978:387) has defined (from the situational perspective) as "series of nesting dichotomiza-tions of inclusiveness and exclusiveness," provides a foundation for constructing social cohesion and allegiance. It organizes and legitimizes responsive action. It is the "location and reason for the maintenance of a we/they dichotomization" [that has become], in Cohen's view (1978:385), "the crucial goal of research and theorizing."
However, some anthropologists have explored the symbols or ethnic
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markers around which such dichotomizations are formulated or constructed. Beriss (1990), for example, analyzes the so-called Foulard Affair, the 1989 incident in France in which three young girls were expelled from a school for wearing Muslim scarves in class. At the center of the conflict were the issues of French national identity and the integration of immigrants. Gross, McMur-ray, and Swedenburg (1996) explore the role of a musical genre, rai, not only in the construction of Franco-Maghrebi identities in Paris and Marseilles but also in the recasting of contemporary French identity in less exclusive and more syncretized form. Koltyk (1993) discusses how story cloths and home videos become the focus for the definition of self and the reinforcement of ethnic affiliation among Hmong refugees in the United States. Drawing on the theoretical work of Clifford and Marcus (1986), she views the videos in particular as a form of ethnic voice by which Hmong can write their own history and take control of their future, including the process by which they are integrated into American society. Finally, and in a somewhat different vein, Har-bottle (1997) analyzes how Iranian immigrants in Britain who are involved in the catering trade disguise and protect their ethnicity through their work with specific types of non-Iranian food.
Mandel (1996), in an essay that links ethnic entrepreneurship to the symbols of ethnic identity, describes shopkeepers in Kreuzberg, the "little Istanbul" of Berlin, who have used the fear of haram (forbidden meat) as well as that which is obligatory or permitted (helal) to their advantage, the result being a proliferation of shops that cater exclusively to Turks and the creation of a Muslim space in Germany that is then subdivided by religion, either Sunni or Alevi. This "commercial self-sufficiency," she argues, "is another way the
migrants have recreated the place for themselves, and in their own terms____
In this new place, by their own actions and decisions, they are setting new precedents, as they project an agency of their own design, reshaping the Kreuzbergs of Europe into novel and heterogeneous communities" (Mandel 1996:163-64). Along similar lines, Brettell (1977) has used the concept of ethnic entrepreneurship to discuss those individuals in a Portuguese immigrant neighborhood in Toronto, Canada, who serve as gatekeepers, maintaining the boundaries between an immigrant community and the larger city and culture in which it is located. She draws, in particular, on theories about patron-client relationships and cultural brokers to illustrate how ethnicity is manipulated and negotiated. From a more critical perspective, Kwong (1997:366) argues that within the Chinese community in New York ethnic solidarity "has increasingly been manufactured by the economic elite ... to gain better control over their co-ethnic employees." Employers convince their employees, many of whom are illegal immigrants, that the larger society is hostile and racist. In what he views as a form of class exploitation, these coethnic elites control the boundaries of the ethnic community and promote ethnic identity to serve their own ends.
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Within the migrant spaces such as those described by Brettell and Mandel, immigrants engage in a host of community activities that become expressions of their ethnic identity. Anthropologists have been particularly interested in religious institutions and activities.19 Ralston (1992), for example, has explored the role of religion in the formation of personal and social identity among South Asian immigrant women in Canada. In the absence of residential concentration, it is the collective activities in religious institutions that provide the context for ethno-religious consciousness. Indeed, she argues that in the context of a Canadian policy of multiculturalism religious activities may be more prominent as markers of identity abroad than they are at home. In a somewhat similar vein, Park (1989:290) suggests that many Korean immigrants "go from being non-religious to becoming believers." In New York City, where a new Korean church was founded every six days in the mid-1980s, the church provides an ethnic forum for socializing and status seeking. She contrasts the double role of Christian churches to both promote Americanization and preserve Korean identity with the emphasis on the preservation of Korean culture in Buddhist churches. In particular, Park explores the meaning of being "born again" and its links to spirit possession in Korean shamanistic ritual.
McAlister (1998) also explores the fusing of religious traditions in the context of transnationalism in her description of the participation of Haitian immigrants in the feast of the Madonna of 115th Street, a feast originated by Italian immigrants (Orsi 1985). Several other ethnographers have documented the survival, if not elaboration, of Afro-Caribbean, spirit-based religions such as Voodoo and Santeria among West Indian immigrants in the United States (Brown 1991; Gregory 1987; Murphy 1988). Among the most interesting is Tweed's (1997) monograph on the shrine of Our Lady of Charity which serves the Cuban community in Miami. Tensions between prescribed religion and religion as practiced, between official Catholicism and Santeria rituals are apparent. But Tweed's broader argument is that Cuban exiles see the shrine in Miami as a place to express diasporic nationalism and construct a translocal identity. Levitt (1998a) also draws on ideas about translocal identity to describe a transnational religious system connecting Dominican immigrants in Boston with their home island. These religious connections are part of what she labels social remittances, the "ideas, practices, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending-country communities" (Levitt 1998a:76). Religious life in the home community has changed as a result of immigrant religious life, while the Catholic Church in Boston has succeeded where political and economic organizations have failed in forging pan-ethnic coalitions.
This interest in religion is also manifested in anthropological studies of ethnic festivals. Schneider (1990) has analyzed the ethnic parades of Poles and Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia as symbolic presentations that encode ideas about being an immigrant and being anAmerican. Parade commentators stress unity and community self-identification as messages conveyed by these events.
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Similarly, Kasinitz and Freidenberg-Herbstein (1987) have compared a West Indian American Day Carnival and a Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York as manifestations of ethnic pride and civic politics. Abner Cohen (1980, 1993) has studied similar festivals among West Indian immigrants in Britain. Finally, Werbner (1996) describes the processions of Muslim men to celebrate anniversaries of death and rebirth that wind their way through the streets of immigrant neighborhoods in Birmingham, Manchester, and London, England. Through these processions Muslims "stamp the earth with the name of allah" and thereby "make territorial claims in their adopted cities... and assert their equal cultural claims within the society" (Werbner 1996:182).20 All of these studies challenge unidirectional theories of assimilation, add agency and fluidity to the process of adaptation, and reinforce the theory that ethnicity is culturally constructed. As Glick Schiller (1977) suggested more than twenty years ago, "ethnic groups are made, not born."
CONCLUSION
Although migrants around the globe have common experiences, migration itself is a complex and diverse phenomenon. Migrants can be differentiated by sex, class, ethnicity, the nature of their labor force participation, their reasons for migrating, the stage of the lifecycle at which they move, the form of the migration (internal, international, temporary, and so on), and the nature and impact of global economic and political policies that affect population movement. A consideration of all these factors, from a comparative perspective, offers the best understanding of the process of migration and of migrant culture. It assumes that migrants act and are "acted upon" with reference to their social, cultural, and gendered locations.
But for anthropologists whose central interest is in the human dimensions of this global process and the lived experience of being a migrant, there are further considerations that guide their research. These considerations have their roots in several key concepts of the discipline that in turn ground anthropological theory. Thus, the distinction between nature and culture is at the foundation of theories of ethnicity that reject a primordial and inherent identity in favor of one that is socially constituted. The connections between society and culture, as well as an understanding of community that has both local (micro) and global (macro) dimensions helps to explain how migrants as transnationals can operate in or between two (or more) worlds. An acceptance of the common disjunction between the ideal and the actual permits more complex formulations of the processes of change and adaptation that are part of being a migrant. An awareness of the differences between participant's models (the emic perspective) and observer's models (the etic perspective), lends subtlety to our knowledge of similarities and differences and solidity to our theories about the particular and the general in the experience of migration.
Furthermore, an observer's model rooted in the interaction between structure and agency accepts the fact that migrants shape and are shaped by the context ; (political, economic, social, cultural) within which they operate, whether in the sending society or in the receiving society.21 Finally, the holistic perspective draws anthropologists to an exploration of a range of social and cultural phenomena (religious rituals, for example) that both have an impact on and are affected by migration.
Much of what is written by anthropologists on the subj ect of migration may, at first glance, be dismissed as largely descriptive ethnography, but a closer examination indicates that while generally "located" in the study of a specific migrant community or population, most of this research is implicitly, if not explicitly, theoretical. If a theory is defined as "an explanation of a class of events, usually with an empirical referent, providing insight into how and what is going on, and sometimes explaining why phenomena exist" (Barrett : 1997:40), then much of this ethnographic work makes a significant and sometimes unique contribution to our theoretical conversations across the disciplines.
NOTES
1. For a discussion of the essentializing character of Mead's work, see Gewertz and Errington 1991. More recently, Lavie and Swedenburg (1996:2) have posed the question of what Margaret Mead would have "made of Samoan gangs in Los Angeles, or of the L.A.-Samoan ganstarap group the Boo-Yah Tribe, named after the Samoan term 'boo yah!' for a shotgun blast in a drive-by shooting."
2. This taming point was marked by thetheme ofthe 1970 volume of the proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Migration and Anthropology, edited by Robert F. Spencer. Five years later, two volumes dealing with migration were the result of the World Anthropological Congress (Du Toit and Safa 1975; Safa and Du Toit 1975). In these volumes, migration was linked to urbanization and development.
3. Other volumes in this series are Margolis 1998; Min 1998; Pessar 1995a; Mahler 1995; and Wong 1998. For a review, see Brettell 1999.
.4. A preliminary and much shorter discussion ofthe study of migration in anthropology appeared in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology published by the Human Relations Area Files; see Brettell 1996.
5. Escobar, Gonzalez, and Roberts (1987:59) also argue that stage in the life- and household cycle can also influence the place of destination. For farther discussion of the historical relationship between migration and the peasant household, see Moch 1992, and Brettell forthcoming.
6. Arguing in support of the role of typologies in anthropological theory, Schweizer (1998:74) claims that "types are theoretical idealizations that can be illustrated by empirical cases and that are approximated by other cases belonging to a given type. The typology is refined in light of new empirical and theoretical evidence obtained by research." This contrasts with Portes's (1997:806) assessment that typologies simply "assert differences without specifying their origins or anticipating their consequences." These varying points of view speak to the distinctions in the nature of both theory and method in anthropology and sociology.
7. Alvarez (1995) cites Linda Whiteford's (1979) early work on the extended community as the first to emphasize an unbounded and cross-border community. From
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this point on, Alvarez suggests "it became the task of anthropologists to clarify how people arranged and located themselves in these binational and extended communities" (Alvarez 1995:457). Many of those scholars who were working with return migration in the 1970s were also thinking within a transnationalist framework, yet they were not using the concept itself (Brettell 1979; Buechler and Buechler 1975; and an essay or two in the volume edited by Rhoades 1979). Most recently, Foner (1997b) has asked what is actually new about transnationalism in a comparative analysis of immigrants to New York at the turn of the century with those in more recent decades.
8. For additional discussions, see some of the essays in Lamphere 1992. For additional research on the reception and representation of immigrants in European countries, see Grillo 1985; Mandel 1989; McDonogh. 1992; andZinn 1994.
9. J. A. Barnes (1954) first recognized the analytical utility of the concept of social network in his research on a Norwegian fishing community. Social networks received a good deal of attention from British social anthropologists working among urban migrants in Africa in the 1960s (Epstein 1961; Gutkind 1965; Mayer 1966; Mitchell 1971, 1974). For a more recent discussion of social network analysis as a "theory-net," see Schweizer 1998.
10. See Layton 1997, for a complete discussion of this approach within anthropology.
11. This is equally true of much historical research. Several excellent monographs focusing on immigrant women have emerged hi recent years to compensate for this lack of attention (Diner 1983; Friedman-Kasaba 1996; Gabaccia 1994). Most recently, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) has correctly argued that gender is an analytic category that should equally be applied to an understanding of men's migration.
12. Examples of research that addresses how wives who remain behind manage remittances and maintain the reproductive and productive activities of the home community can be found in Brettell 1986; Connell 1984; Georges 1992; Hammam 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992. See also Domian and Werbner 1991.
13. Several volumes in the "New Immigrant Series," edited by Nancy Foner, address gender issues. See Brettell and deBerjeois 1992, for a more thorough development of the scholarship on gender and migration within anthropology. Recently, Hirsch (1999:1346) has argued that a focus on "the causes of women's empowerment has limited our understanding of gender and migration." We miss, she suggests, the inter-relatedness of wage labor, on the one hand, and broader cultural and legal differences of life in the receiving society, on the other. Furthermore, we tend to assume that migration is always beneficial to women, which may not be the case.
14. See L. Abu-Lughod 1993 for a good example of the postmodern feminist approach.
15. For recent discussions of the concept of cultural identity, see Bammer 1994; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Rouse 1995b; Williams 1989.
16. For a more thorough discussion than can be offered here, see Banks 1996. Earlier reviews can be found in R. Cohen 1978; Jenkins 1986; Reminick 1983. See also Wallman 1978, 1986. R. Cohen (1978:384), in particular, addresses the difference between "tribe1' and "ethnic," the former characterized as isolated, primitive-atavistic, non-Western, bounded, systemic, and objectively identified; the latter characterized as nonisolated, contemporary, universally applicable, a unit in relation to others where the degree of systemic quality varies, and both objectively and subjectively identified. While the traditional/modern dichotomy underlies these differences, it is nevertheless apparent how the transfer from thinking about tribes to thinking about ethnic groups was influenced by a reconceptualization of the concept of culture.
17. Wallman (1986:229-30) has argued that anthropologists looking at ethnic relations "take account of the effect of context on the marking and meaning of ethnic difference, and since it is impossible to understand contextual factors without noticing
change, it is the variability of ethnic boundaries which catches the anthropologist's eye, and the logic of ethnic boundary processes which holds the profession's atten-
.-. .tion____Differences between groups ofpeople turn into ethnic boundaries only when
heated into significance by the identity investments of either side." For another appli-
■■■ cation of this approach, see Talai 1986.
is. In what is quite apparently a challenge to an outsider perspective and to the ques-.. . tion of rights pursued by some political scientists, Rouse (1995b) suggests that few of these Mixtec migrants construed their problems in terms of prejudice and dis-■  crimination or by recourse to the language of rights.
19. Several of the authors who have contributed monographs to the "New Immigrant Series" edited by Nancy Foner include sections that deal with the significance of religious institutions in the formation of community and ethnic identity. Of course this interest in religion is not unique to anthropologists. Historians have also written about the role of religious institutions among immigrants in America. A recent book edited by Warner and Wittner (1998) includes a number of interesting chapters by scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds.
20. Anthropologists have also looked at the impact of returning migrants on the revi-talization of festivals in the home community. See Brettell 1983; Cruces and Diaz de Roda 1992; Kenna 1992; and Levitt 1998a. Two ethnographic films, Mayordo-mia: Ritual, Gender and Cultural Identity in a Zapotec Community and Oaxacali-fornia, also deal with this topic. Feldman Bianco's film Saudade, about Portuguese immigrants in New Bedford, Massachusetts, opens with the celebration of the Day of Portugal in that community.
21. Ortner (1996:12) conceptualizes this interaction as "the challenge to picture indissoluble formations of structurally embedded agency and intention-filled structures, to recognize the ways in which the subject is part of larger social and cultural webs, and in which social and cultural "systems" are predicated upon human desires and projects."
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