This article explores the social theory and consequent methodology that underpins studies of transnational migration. First, we propose a social field approach to the study of migration and distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging in that field. Second, we argue that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. Third, we highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional migration scholarship but that become clear when we use a transnational lens. Finally, we locate our approach to migration research within a larger intellectual project, taken up by scholars of transnational processes in many fields, to rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nationstate. Social scientists have long been interested in how immigrants are incorporated into new countries. In Germany and France, scholars’ expectations that foreigners will assimilate is a central piece of public policy. In the United States, immigration scholars initially argued that to move up the socioeconomic ladder, immigrants would have to abandon their unique customs, language, values, and homeland ties and identities. Even when remaining ethnic became more acceptable, most researchers assumed that the importance of homeland ties would eventually fade. To be Italian American or Irish American would ultimately reflect ethnic pride within a multicultural United States rather than enduring relations to an ancestral land. Now scholars increasingly recognize that some migrants and their descendants remain strongly influenced by their continuing ties to their home country or by social networks that stretch across national borders. They see

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Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society

The term "access" is frequently used by property and natural resource analysts without adequate definition. In this paper we develop a concept of access and examine a broad set of factors that differentiate access from property. We define access as "the ability to derive benefits from things," broadening from property's clas- sical definition as "the right to benefit from things." Access, following this definition, is more akin to "a bundle of powers" than to property's notion of a "bundle of rights." This formulation includes a wider range of social relationships that constrain or enable benefits from resource use than property relations alone. Using this fram- ing, we suggest a method of access analysis for identifying the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable various actors to derive benefits from re- sources. Our intent is to enable scholars, planners, and policy makers to empirically "map" dynamic processes and relationships of access.

A Theory of Access.

Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico-legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an institutionally pluralist context are processes of everyday state formation. Through the discussion of this theoretical proposition we point to legitimizing practices, territoriality and violence as offering particular insights into the recursively constituted relations between struggles over access and property regarding natural resources, contestations about power and authority, and state formation.

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Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority

Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

(1981). Forum Shopping and Shopping Forums: Dispute Processing in a Minangkabau Village in West Sumatra. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law: Vol. 13, No. 19, pp. 117-159.

Forum Shopping and Shopping Forums: Dispute Processing in a Minangkabau Village in West Sumatra

This paper introduces this Special Number. The work of the Project Group Legal Pluralism at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle aims to continue the rapid expansion of recent decades of studies of legal pluralism. The recently much discussed phenomenon of globalisation has provoked a wide variety of local responses. Encounters are occurring between state laws, transnational laws, customary laws and religious laws, all of which are liable as a result to be transformed by processes of adaptation, appropriation and vulgarisation. This may lead to increasing pluralisation of laws, but can also in some cases produce homogenisation, or de-pluralisation.The notion of ‘law’ should not be limited to state, international and transnational law, but should be used to refer to all those objectified cognitive and normative conceptions for which validity for a certain social formation is authoritatively asserted. Law becomes manifest in many forms, and is comprised of a variety of social ph...

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The dynamics of change and continuity in plural legal orders

List of Maps, Figures and Tables Chapter 1. The Properties of Property Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber Chapter 2. Ownership in Stateless Places Charles Geisler Chapter 3. The Romance of Privatisation and its Unheralded Challengers: Case Studies from English, Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet History Esther Kingston-Mann Chapter 4. Beyond Embeddedness: a Challenge Raised by a Comparison of the Struggles Over Land in African and Post-socialist Countries Pauline E. Peters Chapter 5. Land as Asset, Land as Liability: Property Politics in Rural Central and Eastern Europe Thomas Sikor Chapter 6. Property, Labour Relations and Social Obligations in Russia's Privatised Farm Enterprises Oane Visser Chapter 7. Cooperative Property at the Limit John R. Eidson Chapter 8. Who Owns the Fisheries? Changing Views of Property and its Redistribution in Post-colonial Maori Society Toon van Meijl Chapter 9. How Communal is Communal and Whose Communal is It? Lessons from Minangkabau Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann Chapter 10. Moving Borders and Invisible Boundaries: a Force Field Approach to Property Relations in the Commons of a Mexican ejido Monique Nuijten and David Lorenzo Chapter 11. 'The Tragedy of the Private': Owners, Communities and the State in South Africa's Land Reform Programme Deborah James Chapter 12. The Folk Conceptualisation of Property and Forest-related Going Concerns in Madagascar Frank Muttenzer Chapter 13. Property Rights, Water and Conflict in the Western U.S. Edella Schlager Chapter 14. Appropriating Family Trees: Genealogies in the Age of Genetics Gisli Palsson Chapter 15. Cultural Property, Repatriation and Relative Publics: Which Public? Whose Culture? Melanie G. Wiber Notes on Contributors Index

Changing Properties of Property

The properties of property

Recent analyses of the ‘revitalisation of tradition’ have rekindled earlier discussions of the ‘creation of customary law’ in colonial states. For Indonesia, critics have deconstructed a ‘myth of adat’, arguing that adat law was an invention of the adat law scholar Van Vollenhoven and his followers. The assessment of that period also shapes interpretations of developments in Indonesia after 1998. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that in some respects the critique of colonial scholarship was misconceived, and that these misconceptions hamper a proper understanding of the current revitalisation of adat in Indonesia. Many interpretations of colonial legal science and practice have become anachronistic and stereotypical. We argue that most interpretations were and are largely based on a legalistic conception of ‘law’ and ‘customary law’, that authors selectively generalise interpretations from specific contexts, and that they do not take into account what such interpretations say over legal realities beyond these contexts. Lastly we think that the target of the critique is somewhat misconceived as it is directed at those scholars who were aware of the danger of legal ethnocentrism and criticised it, while not looking at those colonial scholars and courts, who grossly misinterpreted local normative systems in terms of Dutch legal categories. We argue that some assumptions and propositions of these earlier and contemporary critical deconstructions are in need of re-evaluation. Given its presence in current analyses, reconsidering Van Vollenhoven and his followers is more than a return to a history long gone by. We substantiate our propositions with a discussion of the history of the village commons, ulayat, in West Sumatra, which has always been a central illustration in all discussions of adat law.

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Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Papers

Forum Shopping and Shopping Forums: Dispute Processing in a Minangkabau Village in West Sumatra

The dynamics of change and continuity in plural legal orders

Changing Properties of Property

The properties of property

Myths and stereotypes about adat law : a reassessment of Van Vollenhoven in the light of current struggles over adat law in Indonesia