Old World Topic, New Discussion: A Look at Migration and Belonging

Who migrates, when they migrate, where they migrate, and why they migrate has a huge effect on cultural identity, acceptance and belonging. This is a hot current topic on news cycles worldwide, but it is certainly not a new phenomenon. Looking from a European perspective, editors Steven King and Anne Winter add an important contribution to this discussion with Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500-1930s: Comparative Perspectives, to be published this month. Below, the editors discuss the volume and their aim to make sense of these experiences across borders of place and time.

________________________________________

The British print and online media has for the last year been awash with compelling stories about abuses of the welfare system: the mother who has 11 children and feels the state should fund her life choices; the recent immigrants who are entitled to welfare benefits notwithstanding a lack of accumulated contribution; the ‘disabled’ welfare claimants who are exposed as professional dancers or scuba divers.

Continue reading “Old World Topic, New Discussion: A Look at Migration and Belonging” →

Care and Anti-Care in Greece

In her book Capricious Borders: Minority, Population, and Counter-conduct between Greece and Turkey, published earlier this year, Olga Demetriou examines the mechanisms through which particular groups of people are turned into “minorities.” At the center of these processes she identifies naming, genealogy and state care, as key modes of governmentality. Discussing a recent incident of biopolitical policing, the author shows here how “state care” continues to have more relevance as a repressive rather than an empowering mechanism in the minoritization context.

______________________________________

In Greece, the “management of population” (in the sense of a Foucauldian biopolitics of demography, spatial order, classification, and knowledge production) has long been racialized.

This racialism has fluctuated through different political conjunctures yielding differing policies of birth rate monitoring and incentivization. Last month “care” emerged as a tool of biopolitical policing in a discussion that went well beyond the bounds of Greece, after authorities arrested a couple raising a child who was “not their own.” The couple was Roma, the child at first assumed not, and much of the racialized presentation of the incident turned on the stereotypical discourse about “Gypsies stealing children.”

Continue reading “Care and Anti-Care in Greece” →

Key to Transformation is Understanding the ‘Fatherland’

The parallels between the political environment of the “Arab Spring” countries and Cold War Germany can be striking, according to Alexander Clarkson, author of Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1980. In these cases, when diaspora communities returned to their countries of origin, there was an energy for activism and a flurry of political activity. Following, Clarkson notes that taking a page from West German history could prove useful in modern Libyan, Syrian and Tunisian politics.

____________________________________________

In the chaotic days after the Ghadaffi regime lost control of the city of Benghazi in February 2011, hundreds of exiled Libyans returned to the liberated parts of their country to help play a role in the transformation of a state that had been under authoritarian rule for more than forty years.

Continue reading “Key to Transformation is Understanding the ‘Fatherland’” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

Newly released titles from Berghahn’s Anthropology, Colonialism, Economics, Politics, and History CorsinAnthropological lists:

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora, Ping-Ann Addo

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

An Anthropological Trompe L’Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge, Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Framing Africa Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, Nigel Eltringham

Tax Justice and the Political Economy of Global Capitalism, 1945 to the Present, Jeremy Leaman and Attiya Waris

Routes into the Abyss Coping with Crises in the 1930s, Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner

Bedouin of Mount Sinai: An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy, Emanuel Marx

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Family Upheaval Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark, Mikkel Rytter

Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge, Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka

Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology, Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

The Gaddi Beyond Pastoralism: Making Place in the Indian Himalayas, Anja Wagner

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, Anton Weiss-Wendt

The Origins of Wind Over Water

Wind Over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context, edited by David W. Haines, Keiko Yamanaka, and Shinji Yamashita, was published by Berghahn Books in November 2012. Here, the editors discuss the origins and motivations for the collection.

Wind over Water grew out of a concern to see East Asia – and East Asian scholars – better represented in the literature on contemporary human migration. Perhaps its most important purpose has been to show the full range and import of migration in East Asia rather than attempt any particular theoretical or policy argument. Thus the volume ranges, as the back cover blurb will tell you, “from Korean bar hostesses in Osaka to African entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, from Vietnamese women seeking husbands across the Chinese border to Pakistani Muslim men marrying women in Japan, from short-term business travelers in China to long-term tourists from Japan who ultimately decide to retire overseas.” While there are limitations to this kind of inclusive approach, it has the decided advantage of forcing a consideration of East Asia migration in its entirety: whether short-term or long-term, whether internal or across national borders, whether for economic or social purposes. Furthermore, it does so for countries that are closely linked politically and culturally but divided quite sharply between those with already rather well-developed economies, like Japan and South Korea, and those with still developing ones, such as China and Vietnam.