Migration
Authors: Lanz Tilman 
Published: July 2013

Migration is the movement of people from one locality to another. Anthropology is invested in studying this phenomenon in its cultural and social dimensions. Anthropological studies of migration can be divided into three categories. First, there are studies that emphasize the aspect of immigration itself. These studies focus on the way immigrants are perceived by the societies into which they enter as well as how they respond to these perceptions. Second, there is a sustained interest by anthropologists in the process of migration itself. Third, anthropologists have also begun to study contexts of migrations, including reactions to immigration by local actors, legal issues, ontological security, the relevance of borders, or migrant long-distance relations. Anthropologists interested in migration have frequently taken recourse to transnational scholarship as well as postcolonial and cultural studies, fields that have developed a rich experiential and conceptual apparatus to characterize migrancy. Anthropologists study migration frequently through a holistic approach, tying together many different aspects of complex migration processes. The majority of anthropological work on migration benefits greatly from disciplinary collaboration with neighboring fields such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, economics, history, political science, international relations, legal studies, sociology, and geography. Historically, the study of human migrations was not a focus in anthropology until well into the 1950s. Until then, anthropology focused largely on the study of small-scale localities, such as villages and face-to-face communities in non-Western contexts. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, anthropology contributed to the study of migration by illuminating the implications of people’s movements from rural, “nondeveloped” areas of the non-Western world to urban, industrialized centers in the West. Important theories in the social sciences, such as world-systems theory, were used to map out large-scale processes that induced migratory patterns like the slave trade across the Atlantic. These approaches focused on how economic and political undercurrents affected individual people, small groups, or whole cultures and civilizations as they were swept up in these forced migratory steams. In the 1990s, cultural and social contexts of migration increasingly took precedence over earlier political and economic ones. This change was induced by two larger undercurrents of research in the social sciences and humanities as a whole. First, the cultural dimension of late modern, industrialized societies came into much larger focus in the social sciences in the wake of the works by Gramsci and, later, Laclau and Mouffe who emphasized the importance of sociocultural aspects in political economy. Second, the rise of postcolonialism contributed to a more complex understanding of migration processes and their effect on people beyond the economic dimension. Anthropologists and cultural critics began to research migration as embedded in global flows, relations to the former homeland, and new homeland contexts. This diversification inspired a variety of interests in studying the relationship between culture and human migrations such as ethnic versus civic identities, negotiations of belonging, long-distance migrant relations, questions of gender, and sociocultural networks of migrants as well as local-migrant relations.