Home  About us  Contact
 

Transnational Practices (transnational + practice)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
Christina Schwenkel
Recent years have seen the diversification of knowledge, memory, and meaning at former battlefields and other social spaces that invoke the history of the "American War" in Vietnam. Popular icons of the war have been recycled, reproduced, and consumed in a rapidly growing international tourism industry. The commodification of sites, objects, and imaginaries associated with the war has engendered certain rearticulations of the past in the public sphere as the terrain of memory making becomes increasingly transnational. Diverse actors,including tourism authorities, returning U.S. veterans, international tourists, domestic visitors, and guides,engage in divergent practices of memory that complicate, expand, and often transcend dominant modes of historical representation in new and distinct ways. [source]

Family and nation: Brazilian national ideology as contested transnational practice in Japan

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2008
PAUL GREEN
Abstract Studies of Brazilian Nikkeis (Japanese emigrants and their descendants) living in Japan tend to conceptualize ,family' and ,nation' as two distinct entities. Such distinctions are filtered through mutually exclusive discourses and understandings of national and ethnic identity. In this article, however, I view national attachments and migrant experiences in Japan through the lens of ideology, embodied experience and kinship relations. Treating national ideology as lived process sheds fresh light on the dynamics of state,society relations in transnational social spaces. I suggest that the ability of Brazilian state actors to impose social, moral and economic regulation on its citizens in Japan is compromised by the extent to which such discourses are ontologically grounded in the social relations of migrant family life. It is through these kin ties, I argue, that people set the tone and rules of play for state interests to encroach or otherwise on their everyday lives in these transnational social spaces. [source]

Post-return experiences and transnational belonging of return migrants: a Dutch,Moroccan case study

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2010
JUNE DE BREE
Abstract In this article we explore the links between return migration, belonging and transnationalism among migrants who returned from the Netherlands to northeast Morocco. While transnationalism is commonly discussed from the perspective of a receiving country, this study shows that transnationalism also plays a vital role in reconstructing post-return belonging. Return migration is not simply a matter of ,going home', as feelings of belonging need to be renegotiated upon return. While returnees generally feel a strong need to maintain various transnational practices, the meanings they attach to these practices depend on motivations for return, gender and age. For former (male) labour migrants, transnational practices are essential for establishing post-return belonging, whereas such practices are less important for their spouses. Those who returned as children generally feel uprooted, notwithstanding the transnational practices they maintain. The amount of agency migrants are able to exert in the return decision-making process is a key factor in determining the extent to which returnees can create a post-return transnational sense of home. [source]

Stabilizing flows in the legal field: illusions of permanence, intellectual property rights and the transnationalization of law

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2003
Paul Street
In this article I examine some of the problems that ,modern' legal theory poses for a consideration of the extended reach of social actors and institutions in time and space. While jurisprudence has begun to engage with the concept of globalization, it has done so in a relatively limited manner. Thus legal theory's encounters with highly visible transnational practices have, for the most part, resulted not in challenging the prevailing formal legal paradigm, but in a renewed if slightly modified search for a general jurisprudence that ultimately takes little account of the manner in which the work of law is carried out transnationally. In the first part of this article I examine how legal theory's concern to maintain its own integrity places limitations on its ability to examine the permeability of social boundaries. In the latter part I draw on critical human geography, post,structuralism and actor,network theory (ANT), to examine the manner in which transnational actors have been able to mobilize law, and in particular intellectual property rights (IPRs), as a necessary strategy for both maintaining the meanings of bio,technologies through time and space, and enrolling farmers into particular social networks. [source]

Transnational migration: taking stock and future directions

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2001
Peggy Levitt
Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants' resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States. [source]

Regrounding the ,Ungrounded Empires':localization as the geographical catalyst for transnationalism

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2001
Yu Zhou
The emerging literature on transnationalism has reshaped the study of immigration in the USA from ,melting pot' and later ,salad bowl', to ,switching board', which emphasizes the ability of migrants to forge and maintain ties to their home countries. Often under the heading of ,transnationalism from below', these studies highlight an alternative form of globalization, in which migrants act as active agents to initiate and structure global interactions. The role of geography, and in particular, localization in transnational spaces, is central to the transnationalism debate, but is yet to be well articulated. While it has been commonly claimed that transnationalism represents deterritorialized practices and organizations, we argue that it is in fact rooted in the territorial division of labour and local community networks in immigrant sending and receiving countries. We examine closely two business sectors engaged in by the Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles: high-tech firms and accounting firms. Each illustrates, respectively, the close ties of Chinese transnational activities with the economic base of the Los Angeles region, and the contribution of local-based, low-wage, small ethnic businesses to the transnational practices. We conclude that deeper localization is the geographical catalyst for transnational networks and practices. [source]

Religious transnationalism among Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto: a binary logistic regression analysis

THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 3 2008
JOSEPH MENSAH
immigration; analyse logistique; transnationalisme religieux; Toronto Thanks to pioneering work within anthropology, students of international migration acknowledge that most immigrants do not sever their ties with the homeland, but rather maintain them through a variety of cross-border relationships. While scholarly work has proliferated, since the early 1990s, over the transnational economic and political activities of immigrants, to date, only few analysts have examined the religious practices with which immigrants sustain memberships in multiple locations. In addition, most available studies on transnational migration has dwelled on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, focus groups discussions and in-depth interviews with a handful of informants, with little or no inclination towards the quantitative measurement of key variables implicated in the process. The prevalence of ethnographic methods in this area of research has, quite understandably, engendered charges of exaggeration, given the tendency of such techniques ,to sample on the dependent variable', to borrow the phrase of Alejandro Portes. Using data collected from a survey among Ghanaian immigrant congregations in Toronto, this study seeks to statistically predict the propensity to engage in transnational religious practices by way of a binary logistic regression analysis. In addition, the study examines how the transnational religious activities of the sampled immigrants relate to, overlap with, and differ from other kinds of transnational practices they pursue. Le transnationalisme religieux chez les immigrants ghanéens de Toronto: une analyse de régression logistique binaire Grâce à des travaux pionniers en anthropologie, les étudiants qui s'intéressent à la migration internationale reconnaissent aujourd'hui que la plupart des immigrants ne vont pas rompre les liens avec leur terre d'origine mais, au contraire, les renforcer par un éventail de relations transfrontalières. Si les travaux universitaires portant sur les activités économiques et politiques transfrontalières des immigrants sont en plein essor depuis le début des années 1990, peu d'études ont abordé les pratiques religieuses par lesquelles les immigrants conservent leur adhésion à une multitude d'endroits. De plus, l'essentiel des études disponibles sur la migration transnationale insistent sur les méthodes qualitatives telles que l'observation participante, la tenue de groupes de discussion et les entrevues en profondeur auprès de quelques informateurs. Les variables principales comprises dans ce processus n'ont pas vraiment fait l'objet d'une évaluation quantitative. Les méthodes ethnographiques prédominent dans ce domaine de recherche, à qui on reproche d'être tombé dans l'exagération. Dans cette étude, les données recueillies à partir d'entrevues réalisées auprès d'immigrants ghanéens dans les congrégations de Toronto sont utilisées dans une analyse de régression logistiques binaire pour faire des prédictions statistiques sur la propension à s'engager dans des pratiques religieuses transnationales. De plus, cette étude examine comment les activités religieuses transnationales des immigrants compris dans l'échantillon s'apparentent, se superposent et se différencient par rapport aux autres types de pratiques transnationales auxquelles ils se livrent. [source]