Ethnographic experiments in transnational mobility studies

Introduction

If the flâneur – the well-dressed stroller in Paris as portrayed by Charles Baudelaire and analysed by Walter Benjamin (1983) – was an iconic image of 19th-century bourgeois modernity, the international migrant has emerged as a central figure of 21st-century global capitalism. ¹ The migrant embodies and epitomizes a range of central concerns of the day, including those of citizenship, human rights, multiple identities, flexible accumulation, nationalism, and transnationalism.

This begs the question - who is ‘the migrant’? He/she can be a Filipino maid in Hong Kong, a Mexican cleaner in San Francisco, a Chinese peddler in Rome, a Senegalese singer in Barcelona, or a South Korean student in Singapore. Anyone can be a migrant at a certain point of time, just like the flâneur who ‘enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes’ (Benjamin, 1983: 55). One may become a migrant because he/she wants to be, or because he/she has to be, or because of a combination of both. We can never fix a singular, or even a typical, migrant subjectivity. It is precisely its unstable, transitory, pervasive yet somehow elusive nature that makes the figure of the migrant a productive lens for discerning the current global condition. Migration as an aggregate phenomenon is an equally challenging topic. Heterogeneous and constantly changing, migration flows are notoriously difficult to theorize. Various models – from Ravenstein’s (1885) ‘laws of migration’ to Lee’s (1966) push-pull model, from the network paradigm and ‘cumulative causation’ (Massey et al., 1987; Massey, 1990) to the ‘migration systems theory’ (Mabogunje, 1970; Fawcett and Arnold, 1987; Fawcett, 1989; Kritz and Zlotnik, 1992) – shed important light on different aspects of migration, but hardly succeed in providing a general explanation about migrations across contexts.

This, however, does not necessarily mean that migration is unknowable. Despite its heterogeneity, contemporary international migration takes place in the common global condition shaped by nation-states and capitalism. Historical evidence shows that migration as we know it today is intrinsically a product of the modern global system (e.g. Sassen, 1999; McKeown, 2008; Torpey, 2003). The very fact that the infinitely diverse population flows are lumped together under the single category – ‘migration’ – is itself a result of the modern regulatory regime that is now almost universal.

While attempts to discover ‘laws’ of migration as a quasi-natural fact may be likened to chasing our own shadow, we can profitably take migration as a lens for examining wider social issues. How can we, then, incorporate individuals’ migratory experiences – which are always context-specific and can never be essentialized – into institutional, structural and, historical analyses? This special issue aims to tackle just that. Sociologists have long attempted to bridge individual and structure with symbolic interactionism and structuration among the best known theories. The articles in this issue explore ethnographic methods rather than theoretical frameworks. Hence, instead of seeking general, stylized mechanisms of how individual actions result from and in turn change structure, we look for sites and moments where links between individual activities and structural forces become most visible. We refuse to assign empirical observations to the micro- (e.g. individual behaviours), meso- (e.g. social networks) and macro-levels (e.g. state policies and international relations), and insist on treating experiences at every movement as simultaneously visceral, bodily, historical, and structural. The key to our task is to delineate the interface between mobility and structure. We may liken migration to amorphous but immediately observable ‘wind’, and structural forces to stable but opaque ‘woods’; ethnographic examinations of the interface between the wind and the woods will shed light on both mobility and the structure.

To explore the interfaces ethnographically is to do so in ways that are specific to the case, the context, and the intellectual and political concerns of the researcher. This issue presents a number of specific ethnographic experiments. They explore ‘multi-scalar’, ‘tandem’, ‘multi-media’, ‘centripetal’, and ‘lateral’ ethnographies as modes of field research, writing, and analysis. Xiang elaborates on ‘multi-scalar ethnography’ by showing how ‘scale’ is a useful device in disentangling the relations between the Chinese state and migrations in and from China. Multi-scalar ethnography delineates how movements are constituted at different scales (smooth flows at one level can be disruptions or encapsulations at another), and how migrants’ scale-making projects intersect with states’ scale management. In doing so, multi-scalar ethnography explains why some mobility is more consequential than others, and identifies strategic sites where critical engagement with social changes can be grounded. Multi-scalar ethnography is not meant to replace multi-sited ethnography, but aims to make it more practically feasible and theoretically productive. It sheds light on what different sites mean to each other and to the actors, and thus helps to locate the sites analytically.

Molland proposes ‘tandem ethnography’ as an innovative solution to the methodological difficulties resulting from the destabilization of bounded territory and sitedness, particularly in the case of human trafficking. This methodological anxiety is not unique to ethnographers. International organizations, government, and NGOs also find it hard to pinpoint traffickers and their victims. To address this shared concern, Molland argues that ‘tandem ethnography’ – ethnography that oscillates between the policy domain of anti-trafficking and the social world of sex commerce – can enable strategic points in which we gain new insights into what the displaced phenomena are all about. The task is neither to deconstruct nor to essentialize ‘site’, but to investigate empirically what ‘sitedness’ means to different actors, and how it becomes privileged in different contexts. The concern about sitedness becomes the central link of the co-constructing yet diverging processes between the trafficking and anti-trafficking worlds. As such, the old anthropological principle of comparisons can be productively brought into the field.

Kang tackles the elusive and multifaceted nature of transnational mobility in the case of children’s mobility. Children’s experiences of transnational migration and relations are hardly articulated because they are hard to articulate. Kang develops ‘multimedia ethnography’ as a child-friendly method in her work with South Korean pre-college students in Singapore. Multimedia ethnography foregrounds communication as social practices, and stresses the importance of both the means and content of communication. Analyses of children’s multiple modes of communication – including drawings, diaries, and conversations among peers – provide adult researchers with the means to systematically understand children’s imaginations and experiences, which are hardly accessible through adult researchers’ typical interview protocols. After all, transnational mobility is a heavily mediated process, with meaning-making being a central part. Kang demonstrates that children’s perceptions and experiences are simultaneously conditioned by strong global discourses and localized daily encounters.

While the preceding articles highlight the fluidity and expansiveness of transnational processes, Aguilar proposes a strategy in the opposite direction – ‘centripetal ethnography’. A migrant’s journeys and networks may be constantly unfolding and unpredictable, but the migrant has his or her own history, is always socialized into certain social norms, and embedded within certain relationships. These norms and relationships provide a surprisingly stable, even stubborn, centre that the transnational relations revolve around. Based on detailed ethnographic study of village life in the Philippines, Aguilar shows that we can significantly deepen our understandings of transnational migration by revisiting the centre of the culture of relatedness – in this case, the house as a strategic site of enquiry. Far from becoming irrelevant, we argue that classical-style anthropological studies on kinship provide a unique angle for examining transnationalism.

Finally, Nyiri returns to the fundamental question of this issue: how can we link the immediately observable to the structurally and historically significant? He places this question in an even larger context. While the nature of transnational mobility requires more open and sustained engagement between researchers and the researched and renders research outputs less predictable, universities demand more control, more planning, and more predictability about each project. Based on wide-ranging reflections on the methodological challenges and opportunities of his 20 years’ research on Chinese migrants abroad, Nyiri suggests juxtaposition between different cases across time and space, and within and outside the ‘field’ as an important method. The significance of particular ethnographic moments often becomes clear in hindsight, with the benefit of juxtapositions with other experiences, both academic and non-academic. This is particularly true given the rapid changes in the global geopolitics that we are going through and the fact that we no longer have the luxury of following a particular case over a long period of time. As such, lateral ethnography – ethnography that provides illuminating views ‘from the side’ through juxtaposition – can be a crucial means for understandings transnational mobility in the long term.