American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration

4. The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration Seeing the Wetland Instead of the Swamp

Anthropologists were among the first scholars to propose “a transnational perspective for the study of migration” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992b). Today the study of transnational migration is a shared project that stretches across disciplines, with scholars in anthropology, sociology, geography, and history employing the same terms and, to some extent, citing one another’s work. However, terms such as globalization, transnationalism, transnational community , transnational network, transnational social field, deterritorialization, and transmigrant often are deployed differently and are undefined. The definitional jungle is difficult to traverse because within it lies a methodological quagmire. Although one scholar’s wetland is another’s swamp, the current moment seems an appropriate time to survey the development of the field, clarify concepts, and explore issues of methodology. In this chapter I explicate theoretical, methodological, and substantive contributions ethnographers have made to the study of transnational migration and suggest future directions for research. Exploring the epistemological assumptions residing within ethnographic approaches to transnational migration, I briefly note the 99 4 The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration Seeing the Wetland Instead of the Swamp Nina Glick Schiller 99 venerable but often forgotten history of migration studies within anthropology. Before beginning these various explorations, I define some of the key terms of transnational migration studies. To underscore the ethnographic perspective on transnational migration, I contrast it to the way the same topic appears when approached by means of social surveys. Even though the ethnographers who study migration are not a homogenous lot and there has been valuable cross-fertilization among the practitioners of different methodologies, ethnography is, I argue, the most appropriate methodology for the study of transnational migration. Ethnography is a methodology that includes more than participant observation. Ethnographers obtain and use a variety of quantitative data and utilize various kinds of questionnaires. However, they do this in a very different relationship to theory, and their understanding of the ways in which categories of data are defined differs from the positivist approach of other social scientists (Schensul, Schensul, and LeCompte 1999). DEVELOPING A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE FOR THE STUDY OF MIGRATION At the end of the 1980s, scholars in a number of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, and geography, became fascinated by the various flows of people, ideas, objects, and capital across the territorial borders of states. Anthropologists working in the United States proposed a new paradigm for the study of migration, called “transnationalism ” (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992b and c; see also Kearney 1991; Rouse 1991). As early as 1916, Randolph Bourne had used the term to describe the transborder relations of immigrants to the United States. Political scientists addressed the topic in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1986. By 1990, anthropological use had begun (Georges 1990; Glick Schiller and Fouron 1990).1 However, not until the 1990s did the term refer to an approach to the study of migration and become a topic of sustained interest in migration studies. The new paradigm in migration made visible the multiple, cross-border relationships of many migrants, enabling researchers to see that migration can be a transnational process. Nina Glick Schiller 100 Building on research on Caribbean migration that Basch had conducted with Caribbean sociologists (Basch et al. 1990), Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, and I (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992c:1) called persons who live their lives across borders “transmigrants .” Not coincidentally, some of the first scholars to conceptualize transnational migration worked in the Caribbean and Mexico, two areas of the world that had long, continuous histories of migration and cultures of migration. It was easier for scholars working in those two settings to break out of the dominant paradigm that assumed that persons could belong to only a single country and that US migrants had to choose between their home country and the new land. Anthropologists emerged as key theorists of transnational migration by drawing on a heritage of ethnographies of migration. This heritage may surprise persons in various disciplines who believe that anthropologists’ concern has been with social actors living in local, “traditional ” settings (Morawska 2001b:3–4). Even in anthropology, the long, rich history of migration studies often goes unacknowledged, and one can find anthropologists who write as if the ethnographic study of migration, complex societies, and transborder processes is something new to their discipline (Marcus 1986; Rosaldo 1989...