Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized main- stream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migra- tion. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d'horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation-state building pro- cesses in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of 'transnational communities' - the last phase in this process - was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodo- logical nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory. After the first flurry of confusion about the nature and extent of contemporary pro- cesses of globalization, social scientists moved beyond rhetorical generalities about the decline of the nation-state and began to examine the ways in which nation-states are currently being reconfigured rather than demolished. That nation-states and nationalism are compatible with globalization was made all too obvious. We wit- nessed the flouring of nationalism and the restructuring of a whole range of new states in Eastern Europe along national lines in the midst of growing global interconnec- tions. The concomitance of these processes provides us with an intellectual opening to think about the limitations of our conceptual apparatus. It has become easier to under- stand that it is because we have come to take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states that we see nation-state building and global inter- connections as contradictory. The next step is to analyse how the concept of the nation-state has and still does influence past and current thinking in the social sciences, including our thinking about transnational migration. It is our aim in this article to move in this direction by exploring the intellectual potential of two hypotheses. We demonstrate that nation-state building processes have fundamentally shaped the ways immigration has been perceived and received. These perceptions have in turn influenced, though not completely determined, social science

Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences

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

/pdf/conceptualizing-simultaneity-a-transnational-social-field-1g8zn87miw.pdf

Conceptualizing simultaneity: a transnational social field perspective on society

As the use of ‘diaspora’ has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamental change in the social world; and proposes to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim.

http://prodiasporaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Blubaker-2005-The-diaspora-diaspora.pdf

The ‘diaspora’ diaspora

This review examines current anthropological literature concerned with migration and other forms of population movement, and with the movement of information, symbols, capital, and commodities in global and transnational spaces. Special attention is given to the significance of contemporary increases in the volume and velocity of such flows for the dynamics of communities and for the identity of their members. Also examined are innovations in anthropological theory and forms of representation that are responses to such nonlocal contexts and influences.

/pdf/the-local-and-the-global-the-anthropology-of-globalization-4zxtqv5wfn.pdf

The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism

This article presents evidence of the scale, relative intensity, and social determinants of immigrants’ transnational political engagement. It demonstrates that a stable and significant transnational field of political action connecting immigrants with their polities of origin does indeed exist. The results help temper celebratory images of the extent and effects of transnational engagement provided by some scholars. The article shows that migrants’ habitual transnational political engagement is far from being as extensive, socially unbounded, “deterritorialized,” and liberatory as previously argued. Transnational political action, then, is regularly undertaken by a small minority, is socially bounded across national borders, occurs in quite specific territorial jurisdictions, and appears to reproduce preexisting power asymmetries. The potential of transnationalism for transforming such asymmetries within and across countries has yet to be determined.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/375195

Assimilation and Transnationalism: Determinants of Transnational Political Action among Contemporary Migrants1

Contemporary immigrants cannot be characterized as the « uprooted » . Many are transmigrants, becoming firmly rooted in their new country but maintaining multiple linkages to their homeland. While in the United States and Europe, most social scientists and public policy makers have ignored these interconnections, anthropologists are currently engaged in building a transnational anthropology and rethinking their data on immigration. Migration proves to be an important transnational process that reflects and contributes to the current political configurations of the emerging global economy. In this paper, the AA. use their own studies of migration from Haiti, St. Vincent, Grenada and the Philippines to the United States to delineate some of the parameters of an ethnography of transnational migration and explore the reasons for and the implications of transnational migrations. They conclude that the transnational connections of immigrants provide a subtext for current efforts to redefine the nature of citizenship in relationship to the global economy

N. Glick Schiller

Papers

From immigrant to transmigrant : Theorizing transnational migration