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Title: Movement and Connectivity

Movement and Connectivity

Configurations of Belonging

by Jan Simonsen (Volume editor) Kjersti Larsen (Volume editor) Ada Engebrigtsen (Volume editor)
Edited Collection VIII, 228 Pages
Science, Society & Culture

Summary

Through a series of case studies from Southern and Eastern Africa, Oceania, and Europe, Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging explores the analytical usefulness of the concept of «mobility» for anthropological thought and theorization.
The book scrutinizes mobility through long-term ethnographies that encompass life histories of individual persons, cyclical household developments, and the evolution of communities and networks. It shows how the social and spatial complexity of mobility increases with time and how socio-political and economic changes affect values, ideas, and practices in local life-worlds.
The case studies examines mobility from below and as processes constitutive of society and identity – processes through which mobility is perceived and experienced as part of life. How do people see their own local life-world and its (un)connectedness to other societies? To what extent can a mobility approach advance our understanding of the complex relationship between migratory practices, experiences of belonging, and the kinds of movement and connectivity that make and re-make people as well as their societies?
Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging re-questions and re-thinks relationships between space, time, and livelihoods and explores how differently motivated geographical movements may be perceived and lived as part of wider social complexities.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author(s)/editor(s)
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction (Kjersti Larsen / Jan Ketil Simonsen / Ada I. Engebrigtsen)
  • Anthropology and the question of mobility
  • Mobility from below
  • Mobility through time, transformative processes and societal continuity
  • Bibliography
  • 1 Migration From Eelam (Sri Lanka): Terrorists, Model Citizens, and the People Left Behind (Øivind Fuglerud)
  • Regimes of mobility
  • Transformation of the Tamil refugee
  • Integration and transnational engagements
  • Networks and social capital
  • Success with a cost
  • Transcontinuity: The larger picture
  • Bonding, bridging and linking social capital
  • The people left behind
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 2 Mobile Subjects: Power Relations and Tactics for Survival (Ada I. Engebrigtsen)
  • Mobility, nomadism, mobile subjects
  • Migrating Romanies and Norwegian Roma
  • Tactics and strategies
  • Methods
  • The Roma … Who are they? Historical background
  • Romanian Roma: Looking for greener pastures
  • Norwegian Roma: A national minority, surviving as Roma
  • Social organization and cultural traits
  • Ritual separation
  • Ethnic groups or network
  • Strategies and tactics: Nomadic and sedentary power modes
  • Migrants, tourists, and EU citizens: Controlling mobility
  • Mobility: Creating and recreating the social
  • Tactics of dichotomization and complementarization
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 3 ‘This Is Where We Belong’: Migration and Intersecting Mobilities in Zanzibar Town, Zanzibar (Kjersti Larsen)
  • Methodological and ethnographic considerations
  • Mobility and connectivity
  • When mobility appears plausible, yet becomes impossible
  • Feeling stuck in a world of envisioned mobility
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 4 Vertical and Horizontal Mobility among the Ju|’hoansi of Namibia (Jennifer Hays / Velina Ninkova)
  • Mobility, socio-economic status and identity
  • Nomadism and the San
  • Background: Culture, land tenure, and social relations
  • Colonization and Namibian independence
  • The Omaheke
  • Nyae Nyae
  • Mobility axes
  • Socio-economic mobility among the Ju|’hoansi
  • Horizontal social mobility
  • ‘Vertical’ social mobility
  • Schooling and social mobility
  • Risks linked to vertical social mobility
  • Can one simultaneously maintain horizontal networks and pursue vertical pathways?
  • Geographical mobility: Village/Town/International
  • Horizontal geographic mobility
  • Vertical geographical mobility: Windhoek
  • International travel
  • Mobilities square
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 5 Moving Moorings, Nurturing Flows: Scales of Tongan Mobilities (Arne Aleksej Perminow)
  • Histories of Polynesians on the move
  • Tauhi vaha‘a: ‘Nurturing the space (between)’
  • Pusiaki: Everyday constitutive flows of persons and things
  • Re-moving moorings, re-scaling flows
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 6 Kinship and Mobility in Urban Zambia (and Beyond) (Jan Ketil Simonsen)
  • The case of an unexpected visitor
  • Trajectories of mobility
  • Relatedness beyond Zambia
  • Kinship, urbanization and mutual aid: A view from earlier migration studies
  • Flexibility of kinship terms and patterns of mobility
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Epilogue: A Mobility Perspective and the Writing of Existential Power (Nigel Rapport)
  • Preamble
  • A look back
  • The book’s tenets
  • The book’s contributions
  • A look forward
  • Anthropology’s tenets
  • Anthropology’s contribution
  • Bibliography
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index

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Acknowledgements

This book is a result of collaborations between researchers who carried out ethnographic field research in different parts of the world, and who share a common interest in migration and the relation between livelihood and shifting modes of social organization. The collaboration was motivated by the idea of approaching processes of migration and movement through the concept of ‘mobility’. The aim has been to rethink our ethnographies within a conceptual framework of the anthropology of (im)mobility. Our method has been to bring our diverse and individually produced ethnographies on movement in time and space into dialogue with each other at a higher level of abstraction for the purpose of more systematically probing the theoretical implications of a turn to ‘mobility’; re-questioning and re-thinking the relationship between space, time and livelihoods, and how differently motivated geographical movements are perceived as part of a wider social complexity. We thought this a viable way of unpacking and questioning the legitimacy of the tacit sedentarist assumptions of social research.

The project has been a collaboration between researchers from Norwegian Social Research (NOVA) at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences; the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, at the University of Oslo; and the Department of Social Anthropology at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. Staff at these departments constitute the core members of the Norwegian Network for the Anthropology of Mobilities, supported by the Norwegian Research Council, Program for Institutional Development and Collaboration (grant no. 222825). Earlier drafts of the chapters were presented at the Biennial Trondheim Colloquium in Social Anthropology, organized by the Department at NTNU. We are grateful to Nigel Rapport, Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, for generously writing an epilogue to the chapters.

Jan Ketil Simonsen, Kjersti Larsen, and Ada I. Engebrigtsen
Trondheim and Oslo, January 2017

Details

Pages
VIII, 228
ISBN (Softcover)
9781787075504
ISBN (PDF)
9781787075511
ISBN (ePUB)
9781787075528
ISBN (MOBI)
9781787075535
DOI
10.3726/b11108
Language
English
Publication date
2018 (January)
Keywords
Social anthropology Mobility Belonging
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2018. VIII, 228 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Jan Simonsen (Volume editor) Kjersti Larsen (Volume editor) Ada Engebrigtsen (Volume editor)

Jan Ketil Simonsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the co-editor of the Norwegian Journal of Anthropology. He has done extensive field research in Zambia, and his research interests include migration, kinship, ritual studies, childhood studies, and visual anthropology. Kjersti Larsen holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo, Norway. She is Professor at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. She conducts research in and has published extensively on Muslim societies in East Africa, in particular on the Swahili Coast, East Africa and in the Bayoda desert, Northern Sudan. Ada I. Engebrigtsen is a Research Professor at Norwegian Social Research, Centre for Welfare and Labour Research, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Her main research topics are minorities, interethnic relations, mobility, Roma issues, family and children. She has published extensively on all these issues in both Norwegian and English.

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