American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration

3. Anthropology and the Engendering of Migration Studies

Migration studies encourage collaboration across disciplines (for example, Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Massey, Durand, and González 1987). Such collaboration has challenged migration scholars to develop theories and methods reflective of the conceptual frameworks and explanatory strategies informing research in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, political science, law, and economics. In most cases, scholars of international migration have shared a common concern: to elucidate the nature of those structures and processes that generate and sustain cross-border migration and condition its effects. They also explore continuities and changes in the lives of immigrant and refugee populations, as well as the structures of socioeconomic opportunities and constraints that pattern the incorporation of newcomers and their children into the host society and place of origin. Within this shared project, a dynamic and evolving division of labor among migration scholars has developed. Within this division of labor, anthropologists have been at the forefront in insisting, first, that women be accorded their rightful place among the subjects of our research and, second, that theories of migration recognize the fact that 75 3 Anthropology and the Engendering of Migration Studies Patricia R. Pessar 75 migration is a gendered process (Brettell and DeBerjeois 1992; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991).1 It is not surprising that anthropologists should have spearheaded such revisionism. First, anthropologists were pioneering in the development of feminist theory and research methods (Martin and Voorhies 1975; Reiter 1975; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Visweswaran 1997). Second, because of the discipline’s concern with theorizing the relationship between structure and agency, ethnographers found binary models of migration on maximizing either actors or macro political-economic structures wholly inadequate. Their research pointed to the importance of mediating units such as households , families, and social networks. These, they argued, facilitated and sustained international migration, as well as channeled its effects. Feminist ethnographers, in turn, challenged the ways in which much of the scholarship on migration, in general, and on households and social networks, in particular, neglected important matters of gender hierarchies, inequality, and conflict. I should note that I use the term feminist ethnographers, instead of the more generic term anthropologists, advisedly. I refer to that group of scholars who, irrespective of discipline, share certain epistemological assumptions and research strategies associated with the traditions of feminist scholarship and anthropological fieldwork.2 These include the conviction that quantitative, positivist approaches to social science research commonly fail to contextualize the data collected or redress gender-linked biases in research design. Feminist scholarship often aims to uncover those gendered beliefs, structures, and practices that constrain the individual and collective pursuits of women and men. Ethnographic enquiry that positions people ’s meanings and understandings at the center facilitates the defining of solutions that reflect and respect local knowledge (Benmayor, Torruellas, and Juarbe 1997). Feminist ethnographers have operated on three fronts. They have explored why and how migration is a gendered process. They have demonstrated how a concern for gender increases our understanding of the causes, consequences, and processes of international migration. In certain instances, their scholarship has even overturned widely held beliefs about migration that were the product of earlier research in which gender was not treated (Pessar 1999b; Wright 1995). Last, they have contributed to scholarship on women and on gender by explorPatricia R. Pessar 76 ing how women’s status vis-à-vis men is affected by migration structures and processes and by deconstructing the notion of an essentialized female subject. THE MIGRANT AS MALE To underscore the existence of gender bias in the literature on migration, in the mid-1980s I wrote, “Until recently the term ‘migrant’ suffered from the same gender stereotyping found in the riddles about the big indian and the little indian, the surgeon and the son. In each case the term carried a masculine connotation, unless otherwise speci- fied. While this perception makes for amusing riddles, the assumption that the ‘true’ migrant is male has limited the possibility for generalization from empirical research and produced misleading theoretical premises” (Pessar 1986:273).3 To appreciate why women were largely absent from empirical research and writings produced in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, it is useful to review the theoretical assumptions guiding much of the migration scholarship produced by anthropologists and other researchers of that period.4 Most scholars were influenced by neoclassical theory. According to one popular variant, those individuals with the ability to project themselves into the role...