Social Analysis

In their search for better lives, migrants encounter numerous hardships. Structural violence, inequality, and precarity have long been central to migration research, but an exclusive focus on these dimensions risks narrowing the anthropological imagination and overlooking the reasons why many move in the first place. The contributions to this special issue examine how migrants navigate moral dilemmas and pursue meaningful lives by reflecting on value and well-being, through the lens of humor and irony, and by improvisation. Taken together, the articles propose a reorientation of migration studies that foregrounds ethnographic attention to moral experience and ordinary ethical life while remaining attuned to the structural conditions that shape mobility and immobility.

This article focuses on a ‘day off’ spent at a Moroccan beach with ‘irregularized’ migrants from Central and Western Africa. For these young men on a dangerous quest for dignity and a better life, engaging in humorous exchanges and laughter was crucial to cultivate, maintain, and display the ‘right mentality’ while facing violent border regimes. This was an important feature in the articulation of their lives and journeys as ‘adventurers’ abiding by the imperative not to give up in the face of violence, uncertainty, and the risk of failure. The article also highlights how a focus on the workings of humor and laughter in the study of (‘illegal’) migration is important to foreground and acknowledge the inequities at the core of ethnographic encounters.

This article examines the moral deliberations and value-creation strategies of Cuban and Ecuadorian return migrants who question the common-sense view that upward social mobility drives migration and strive to reimagine life in their homeland accordingly. By reassessing notions of virtuous economic practice and activating moral repertoires outside the field of migration, returnees attempt to carve out a ‘simple life’ oriented toward frugality, modest consumption, and meaningful sociality. We show that sustaining such projects requires ongoing moral work and justification amid persistent expectations of visible socio-economic success. The precariousness of such endeavors stresses the high stakes of returnees’ responses to migration-related expectations and pressures, namely, the possibility of maintaining significant relationships while cultivating a valuable social life.

This article engages with anthropological discussions about the relation between imagination and migration, using the concept of ‘reorientation’. This notion is explained with ethnographic examples and then conceptually synthesized, incorporating anthropological analyses about space (in the sense of spatial orientation) and time (in the sense of orienting toward the future). The article describes the rural-urban mobility of Gujarati Muslims in western India and the transnational mobility of overseas Gujarati Muslims in the UK and the US. A shift in orientation in space and time has occurred among the region's residents and their transnational kin, who have come to see the town of Anand as a relatively new regional center. This change has been prompted by simultaneous processes of urbanization and violence-induced residential segregation. These stories of Anand draw attention to powerful rural-urban dichotomies and to assessments of how and where religious minorities can be safe and live a better life.

In this article I will look at the relationship between offline suffering and online happiness through the example of two young entrepreneurs living in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya who strongly leverage social media for their business. From a basic communication device, the smartphone has become the door to a world of seemingly glamorous self-representation and a tool for future-making. I trace the young professionals’ motivations and inspirations for their work, and how they make a ‘brand’ in efforts to find a way of being self-reliant. In showcasing what they want and aim to be, these entrepreneurs actively engage in creating a self-image that is ‘beyond suffering’, one that can widen the gap and exemplify the ambiguous relationship between their real-world uncertainties and online images of success.

Social, cultural, and affective forces influence and shape migratory experiences and decisions in consequential ways. In this article, I explore the role of humor and affect in navigating restrictive mobility and its associated suffering to gain a more nuanced understanding of everyday migrant life. Increasing focus on these aspects aids in two ways. First, at a theoretical level, it helps bridge the gap between analyses that emphasize the suffering victim and those that focus heavily on the resilient agent. Second, at the ethnographic level, it helps capture the dynamic and inventive ways in which migrants overcome obstacles, make decisions, and pursue well-being despite structurally imposed immobility, suffering, and vulnerability. The article will show that migrants facing restrictive policies cannot be reduced to a single subjectivity. The complex entanglements they encounter require us to study migration more holistically.

It is striking how any anthropological engagement with migration bears the echo of core existential fault lines in the discipline: universalism versus cultural relativism, phenomenology versus structuralism, radical solidarity versus conceptual analysis, colonial historiography versus indigenous cosmography, anthropologies of the dark versus anthropologies of the good. Few anthropologists of migration would classify their work in terms of impermeable theoretical camps. However, it is true, as this special issue captures, that the analytics of ‘suffering’ seems to have a peculiar kind of pull in migration research, despite the fact that it tends to crystalize rather than blur classic anthropological fault lines.