Keynote lecture:

Is mobility a useful concept in an anthropology of diasporic culture?

Author
Ghassan Hage
Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory
Anthropology and Development Studies
School of Social and Political Sciences
University of Melbourne

Abstract
The association of mobility-as-migration with diaspora is often taken for granted. And for good reasons. There is no diaspora without migration. Using my ethnographic material on Lebanese transnational migration, I nonetheless want to ask this counter-intuitive question to highlight some of the difficulties associated with thinking mobility anthropologically. I want to use these reflections to work on differentiating the sociological from the anthropological moment in the social analysis of migration. To be sure, this is not about disciplinary policing. I consider both moments crucial to any anthropological inquiry.

Session 1: Theorizing the migration industry and mobility: Empirical and ethnographic evidence

Chair
Carla Dahl-Jørgensen
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Introduction
Once obscure and somewhat shadowy, the migration industry has emerged into the center of attention in the maelstrom of events that are defining this era. Yet this industry remains understudied and poorly understood, as are its interactions with migrating peoples and States (e.g., see Castles, de Hass and Miller 2014). A focus on the migration industry reveals a complex interplay among its varied actors, including those that are legally incorporated, those that operate outside the rule of law, those that are private sector, public sector, civil society based, or faith based. It is often “more than difficult” (Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013:18) to distinguish among actors working legally or illegally in a given situation. Today, these varied actors interact with one another, with States, international agencies and migrating peoples to produce flows of migrants and refugees that stream across borders with more or less regard for policy. In this session we intend to focus on diverse ethnographic cases highlighting the complexity of actors, roles, interactions, operations and contexts of the migration industry as well as different types of entrepreneurship that have created situations which mitigate the risk of migrating for some categories of labor migrants and refugees, while placing others at risk of exploitation. We also will focus on the migration industry as part of a complex relational field that structures not only mobility but also immobility of different categories of individuals and groups. In accord with a focus on mobility, we would like presenters to dwell on the added value of the mobility concept in understanding the migration industry, if at all, as well as focus on how, and in what way, the migration industry contribute to the production of different kinds of mobilities? The propose session will be emphasizing the migration industry as an analytical and theoretical concept as well as discussing its complexity with the use of diverse empirical and ethnographic examples.

From migrant identity to migration industry

Author
Ninna Nyberg Sørensen
Danish Institute for International Studies

Abstract
For at least the last hundred years, the study of international migration has constituted an important area of interest and conceptual reflection within the social sciences. Attendance to the importance of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, broader socio-cultural dynamics impeding or sustaining migratory flows, or even transnational structures have shifted over time. Most understandings, however, have been insufficient or detrimental to understanding what facilitates and what constrains human mobility across international borders. Especially in the early 21st century, where the possibilities of living lives across borders have changed profoundly. In this talk, I pay attention to the changing conditions on the right to move and settle, increasingly strict migration regimes, and the concomitant rise in high-risk migration. I suggest to extend the well-established transnational research tradition with insights from forced migration studies, research on (in)voluntary (im)mobility, and work around the migration industrial complex, including not only actors involved in migration facilitation (the traditional migration industry), but also control and humanitarian rescue actors.

Migration Industries and the State: Guestwork Programs in East Asia

Author
Kristin Surak
Department of Politics and International Studies
SOAS, University of London

Abstract
Studies of “migration industries” have demonstrated the critical role that border-spanning businesses play in international mobility. To date, most research has focused on meso-level entrepreneurial initiatives that operate in a legal gray area under a state that provides an environment for their growth or decline. Extending this work, I advance a taxonomy of the ways states partner with migration industries based on the nature of their relationship (formal or informal) and the type of actor involved (for-profit or non-profit). The analysis focuses on low-paid temporary migrant work programs – schemes that require substantial state involvement to function – and examines cases from the East Asian democracies with strong economies that have become net importers of migrants: Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. I conclude by discussing the properties and limits of each arrangement based on the degree of formality and importance of profit.

Immigration Made Easy: The role of consultants in the migration industry in Canada

Author
Turid Sætermo
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract
Based on Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen’s (2013) understanding of the term migration industry, this paper provides an overview of some significant actors in the Canadian context. It further briefly outlines the migration policies that frames and alters the terrain of operation for these actors while at the same time locating them on different sides of the line of legality. Based on empirical material from my own research, the paper focuses more specifically on the role of migration consultants and how their activities are shaped by various political, economic and social factors in and outside Canada. Migration consultants function as pathfinders in the borderland between inclusion and exclusion which is the corner stone of immigration systems. Their activities bring forth the complexity and contingency of the landscape of migration and thus illustrate the necessity of open and dynamic understandings of the constitution of the migration industry.

Double Vision: The Roles of Migration Industry Actors, Language Policy and Mobility in Norway

Authors
Marietta L. Baba
College of Social Science
Michigan State University

Carla Dahl-Jørgensen
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract
The increasing importance of international migration as a means by which States and other actors (e.g., corporations) endeavor to address shortages of highly skilled and less skilled personnel in the short term has highlighted the role of the migration industry in the logistics of personnel recruitment and relocation within and across the regions of the globe. From the standpoint of institutional field theory, the migration industry may be viewed as a set of actors that provide networks, resources and knowledge that span boundaries or fill gaps between employers in destination countries and prospective migrant workers in countries of origin. They also participate in mobility/relocation(s) of workers after their initial placement. In this paper we will examine our empirical study of transnational labor migration from Poland to Norway and the role of the migration industry among higher and lower skilled migrant workers. The paper reflects upon the ways in which migration industry actors have contributed to language policy and work and social mobility.

Session 2: Trans/local families: Mobility, belonging and affective place-making

Chair
Øivind Fuglerud
Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology
Museum of Cultural History
University of Oslo

Introduction
Migration- and diaspora studies have shed much light on the position of transnational families vis-à-vis national borders and regimes of control, but has so far had less to say about the inner logic of families and the way they create a sense of relatedness and groundedness. Like nations, families are imagined communities. One is born into a family, and a nation, but the subjective feeling of belonging is a matter of choice, emotional investment and interpersonal management. The focus of the panel will be on how dispersed family-members enact their sense of being part of the same family, and how they negotiate family solidarity, local community interaction and affective place-making in creating a home in a world of mobility.

Mobility, Movement and Affective Placemaking

Author
Maruška Svašek
Queens University Belfast

Abstract
This paper investigates how first generation migrants in Northern Ireland experience feelings of home, belonging and relatedness after their settlement in the new location. The assumption is that their sense of physical, psychological and social wellbeing is not only influenced by pre-migration memories of emplaced sociality, but also by sensuous and affective atunement to, and manipulation of, changing socio-spatial and material environments. Facing a ‘disruption of embodied memory’ (Maehara 2013: 112), the migrants seem to negotiate belonging across time and space through local and translocal embodied practices. The analysis zooms in on two young mothers of Chinese and Indian descent who, married to Irish and English partners, have stayed in touch with their relatives in China and India, and (in different degrees) interact with other migrants and Belfast-based diasporic organisations. The paper asks to what extent the perspectives of ‘affective placemaking’ and ‘trans/local relatedness’ can contribute to a better understanding of human predicaments in a mobile world.

The pain over the divided “death-house”

Author
Stine Bruland
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (previous affiliation)

Abstract
In this paper I discuss the emotional work of a dispersed Sri Lankan Tamil family in times of mourning and grief caused by a family member’s death. In particular, attention will be given to images and real-time audio-visual streaming in the endeavour to overcome absence in order to be emotionally present in order to process one’s loss and sorrow. Tamil families in the diaspora now experience the death of elder siblings and parents in Jaffna more frequently. This raises the issue of traveling to Sri Lanka to participate in the ritual “death-house” and funeral. Many cannot make it, primarily due to their engagement in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and obligations of work and children in their country of residence. Desiring to be together across geographical distance in such events, family members half a world away from the ritual site are increasingly participating in mourning and funeral rites through Skype and photographs. I emphasize how such communication technology and new digital platforms for social media play an increasingly significant role within the social relationships of those in Jaffna and in the diaspora. For those unable to travel, images and live audio-visual transference becomes valuable substitutes for presence, enabling important emotional work in times of crises as much as sore reminders of their absence.

Nepalese support networks in the UK

Author
Florence Gurung
University of Oxford (previous affiliation)

Abstract
In Nepali society, extensive kinship networks are often mobilised to provide various kinds of practical, financial and moral support and a strong sense of family duty compels individuals to offer such help when and where they are able. In the UK, however, faced with the absence of large numbers of relatives, many migrants have to turn to other sources for certain kinds of support. This paper explores the extent to which alternative networks and support systems that have emerged within the Nepali community in the UK replace, complement or compete with kinship networks. It argues that the many welfare organizations serving the community provide much valued help, particularly to struggling elderly migrants, standing in for families where kinship networks are limited or supplementing assistance provided by kin. However, it also shows that kinship remains an important concept and valued ideal amongst Nepalis in the UK, with many retaining a strong sense of duty towards close and distant family members and some new support networks formed on the basis of expanded notions of kinship. It further suggests that despite attempts by the leadership of community associations to create bonds and a sense of unity and mutuality on the basis of ethnicity, religion or region of origin, kinship ties continue to exert a much stronger pull on loyalties. These loyalties can, at times, undermine efforts to create broader, more inclusive, support networks.

The intergenerational effects of free movement in ‘Brexit’ times: the children’s perspective

Author
Elisabetta Zontini
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham

Abstract
Many of the UK foreign-born residents are from countries of the European Union. These European free movers, who have started to arrive in the UK in large numbers during the 90s, have now children either born in the UK or moved there when very young. These parents migrated as aspiring professionals in what they saw as an integrating Europe; they have weak national identities and have been described as the prototype of post-national, European subjects (Favell 2008). This paper explores what happens to their children who grow up in the UK at a time of renewed nationalism, Euroscepticism and potential ‘Brexit’. How is their sense of identity and belonging shaped by these familial and socio-political contexts?

The paper draws on a project conducted with children born in the UK from at least one Italian parent. It focuses on the intergenerational effects of their parents’ mobility on their identity and sense of belonging and explores the effects that living among different worlds and cultures has on them. The paper documents the everyday practices and experiences of this particular type of childhood and highlights its advantages and disadvantages from the children’s perspective. The project developed against the backdrop of increased South to North European migration at a time of growing anti-immigration, Eurosceptic and nationalist discourse developing in the UK and exacerbated during the run up to the referendum on EU membership.

Session 3: Movement; Control and Subversion

Chairs
Jennifer Hays
Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology
University of Tromsø

Ada I. Engebrigtsen
Norwegian Social Research
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences

Introduction
Based on the general perspectives of the conference this workshop focuses on mobile societies and control regimes. Mobility is enabled, restricted and exploited through both forced and voluntary attachment and detachments to the spatial and the social (Harvey 1989; Baumann 2000). The current academic interest in different modes and levels of movement has thus evoked a substantial body of work on mobility which criticize what authors have seen to be romanticizing visions of mobility (Salazar 2012, Noyes 2010). This workshop will discuss how states and authorities perceive and attempt to control, hinder, but also force mobility - and on the ways that people relate to and subvert such control regimes. In particular, we will look at societies that traditionally practice mobility as a way of life, as well as on people recently forced to mobility as a result of war and upheaval.

Social, economic and geographic mobility among the Juǀ’hoansi of Namibia: Local strategies vs external priorities

Authors
Jennifer Hays and Velina Ninkova
Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology
University of Tromsø

Abstract
The Ju|'hoansi, a group of former hunter-gatherers living in Namibia and Botswana, are often described in both academic and popular literature as “nomadic” and “egalitarian.” Anthropological and archaeological research has shown that the Ju|'hoansi (and other San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa) previously had specific territories of resource utilization, within which they moved seasonally, and they depended upon broad social networks spread over a large area to secure access to resources. Although these patterns are changing as the San have largely been dispossessed of their land and are experiencing social stratification, recent research shows that the Ju|'hoansi continue to rely upon mobile strategies to maximize access to resources.

This paper examines intersecting patterns of socio-economic and geographic mobility among the Ju|'hoansi, highlighting the ways in which their strategies differ significantly from the priorities implicit in the approaches of government and NGOs to ‘development’. While powerful outsiders see their measures as providing increasing access to economic opportunities, for the Ju|'hoansi and other San they result in a restriction of movement and access to other critical resources. This clash of priorities (and a lack of recognition of the mobile cultural patterns) creates a situation in which the Ju|'hoansi are increasingly subject to – and consistently resisting – outsiders’ efforts to impose measures of control.

Move on, move on: Searching for a place to stay

Author
Marie Louise Seeberg
Centre for Welfare and Labour Research
Norwegian Social Research
Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences

Abstract
This paper will take as its empirical basis interviews conducted as part of a commissioned research project about dynamics between the Dublin agreements on the one hand and the onward migration of asylum seekers in Europe on the other. The interviews took place at reception centres for asylum seekers in Norway, where staff had recruited asylum seekers with ‘Dublin cases’ for us to interview about their reasons for moving on within Europe. It turned out that their reasons were as different as they were, yet the interviews seen as a whole convey a sense of urgency, of having to move on, as a means of retaining one’s humanity: life, hope, dignity, and agency. Mobility was their only option, yet immobility was their goal. They were running to stay in one place, as the ground fell apart beneath their feet. Mobility thus emerges as their mode of existence in a world where immobility is the norm and mobility is strictly controlled.

Living landscapes – ecologic and social foundations of pastoral mobility

Author
Marius Warg Næss
High North Department, Fram Centre
Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU)

Abstract
Mobility has led governments to look at nomadic pastoralists as ‘backward’, lacking the technological level and skill to exploit successfully their existing adaptation. Thus, in many areas of the world large governmental sedentarisation programmes have been established to raise the technological level, to enhance the profit of pastoral production, and develop pastoral societies. Territoriality has been conceptualized in terms of cost-benefit models focusing on economic defendability: territorial behaviour is expected to occur when the cost of exclusive use and defence are outweighed by the benefits gained. A territorial system is most likely under conditions where critical resources are abundant and predictable: resources must be monopolizable before they are economically defendable. Nomadic pastoralists have been found to be territorial in relation to livestock because livestock are both abundant and predictable. In contrast, grazing areas are rarely, if ever, defended because grazing resources are both patchy and unpredictable. This perspective provides both an ecologic (resource distribution) and economic rationale (cost of defence) for why pastoralists are mobile and loosely organised.

Coping with Everyday Bordering: Roma Migrants and gatekeepers in Helsinki

Authors
Anca Enache
Department of Social Anthropology and Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies
University of Helsinki

Miika Tervonen
Centre for Nordic Studies CENS
University of Helsinki

Abstract
The presentation is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Helsinki, 2014-2016, and analyses the local realities and politics of intra-European borders through the case of Eastern European Roma in Helsinki. Precarious EU migrants outside the Nordic labour markets have formed a class neither ‘in’ nor ‘out’ of national welfare structures. We argue that various level authorities have responded to the loss of direct control over legitimate yet unwanted migrants by mobilising municipal workers and police as everyday gatekeepers. Policy towards the Roma migrants is ethnicized (conceptualizing ‘the Roma’ as a category requiring special measures) and ‘NGOized’ (relegating elementary social provision to third sector and private actors). Their presence of is not formally challenged, yet they are effectively without access to social rights and pathways to permanent residence. Meanwhile, the migrants strive to improve their disadvantaged position through mobile livelihood strategies, which are actively adapted to the shifting Finnish and European borderscapes.

Session 4: Theorizing mobility and ritual

Chair
Kjersti Larsen
Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology
Museum of Cultural History
University of Oslo

Introduction
How should we theorize relations between mobility and ritual? How is mobility ritualized? How does mobility and people’s experiences of mobility fashion ritual? On the one hand, people ritually enact, negotiate, and emplace identities in time and space, socially and geographically, and ritually mark transitions across boundaries and between states. On the other hand, spirits and rituals are, comparable to persons, things, and ideas, mobile. Spirits share mobile histories with people, many ritual complexes interconnect circulation and exchange with routes, and annual pilgrimages, such as to Mecca, implies massive mobilization and mobility of persons and resources as well as social and religious upward mobility. To what extent would mobility promote continuously emerging forms of speech and performative code-switching? What is the added value—methodologically, analytically and empirically—of theorizing social and spatial mobility as ritual and ritualization? In what manner would a mobility perspective provide new insights into the study of ritual?

Transnationalism without moving: Levantine migrants and their Argentine descendents

Author
Lorenzo Cañás Bottos
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract
Some years ago, I argued that the concept of transnationalism let methodological nationalism creep in through the back door when used acritically. At the time, I tried to show that the Old Colony Mennonites migration and settlement through Russia, Canada, Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina was better understood used through the concept of transtatalism, as the members of these groups, although having travelled through different state territories, had refused to adopt their national identities. In this presentation, I want to resume a continuation of this line of thought, showing how, in the contrasting case of Levantine immigrants and their descendents in Argentina, national and cultural allegiances are performed and ritualised. These show how, through the carving of symbolic niches in the the usual exclusivist claims of national dominant ideologies, shifts in national allegiance as well as the holding of multiple allegiances are sustained and navigated.

“The lucky among the unlucky ones”: Social navigation and mobility in a Tibetan exile

Author
Inger Kristin Vasstveit
Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology
Museum of Cultural History
University of Oslo

Abstract
A majority of the Tibetan diaspora lives in South-Asia, particularly in India. Still, most of the Tibetans I worked with during my fieldwork in Dharamsala, India, seem to imagine that a good life for themselves, and their close kin, could only be realized if one of the family members settled in the “West”. While some Tibetans are able to migrate further afield, many Tibetans who try to obtain a visa to the USA, Canada or Europe time and again experience that their attempts fail. Thus, there is a gap between people’s expectations regarding both spatial and social movement and the actual possibilities for migration.

The aim of this paper is to explore how Tibetans perceive and practice what they see as their potential to accomplish the commonly shared aspiration for out-migration. Attentive to the basic parameter in contexts of migration, that is, international and national laws and regulations for immigration control and thus what is often referred to as the “regimes of mobility” (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), I shall here discuss how Tibetans navigate in order to confront existing migration / immigration control. In particular, in order to fulfill their expectations regarding migration, they are constantly preoccupied with the performance of certain ritual practices which are understood to strengthen individual’s embodied potentials of luck and fortune. This shows that while people recognize the politics of international immigration control, they also trust their chance to transgress or circumvent it. Thus, my ambition in this paper is to argue that to understand the processes through which mobility is locally produced and practiced in diaspora communities, one needs to investigate people’s capabilities and initiatives in the context of local conceptualizations of personhood and configuration of individual capacities. In this endeavor, the analytical focus should be placed on the dynamics between those who leave and those who stay behind, as well as on how sedentariness and movement becomes interconnected.

When the groom is gone: Marriage by proxy, migration and the productive potential of absence in urban Gambia

Author
Tone Sommerfelt
PhD Social Anthropology
Senior researcher, Fafo

Abstract
This paper explores the ritual substitution of grooms in wedding ceremonies in urban Gambia, in which brothers stand in for absent grooms who for different reasons cannot leave their current country of residence. It takes a wedding ceremony that took place in the town of Serrekunda in 2003 as its point of departure, and focuses on proxy marriage and the innovation of ceremonial roles brought about by out-migration. I explore the productive potential of absence, and discuss the ritual role of the proxy groom in terms of innovation, continuity and the reconstitution of relationships. I argue that the ritual substitution of the groom with a brother should not be glossed over as a limited stand-in exercise there and then, in which the ‘proxy groom’ simply represents his absent brother. Instead, the participation of the proxy groom establishes moral entanglements and mutualities; visualizes and effectuates new care relationships, and claims to care, in the husband’s absence – that enables future absences. In order to make this argument, I link vernacular interpretations of the Serrekunda ceremonial event to the family’s biography of emigration before and after 2003, and to patterns of care among those left ‘behind’ in the compound. In the discussion of ritual practice, I thus emphasize the importance of a broader horizon of mobility that encompasses not only biographies of migration but that opens up a future perspective of anticipated movements, absences and prosperity.

Returns to the earth wombs: Notions of spatial and temporal movements in a cosmology of shifting cultivators

Author
Jan Ketil Simonsen
Department of Social Anthropology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract
An aim of the so called ‘mobility turn’ has been to contravene the “sedentary metaphysics” inherent in social theory and assess mobility and movement as constitutive of societies and cultures. However, should all types of movement in space and time be analysed from a perspective of ‘mobility’? Based on the premise that ritual performances ideate, transmit and transform key cultural notions, I examine notions of temporal and spatial movements in the traditional cosmology of the Mambwe-speaking people of Zambia, manifest in their life-cycle rituals. Historically, the Mambwe consisted of egalitarian, village communities that practices slash and burn cultivation, and have a political structure that links kinship and blood to control over land. The overall theme of their ritual performances is fertility and regenerations of people and land, and, as such, they may be deemed a typical “sedentary society”. The theme of fertility and regeneration is pivotal also to the life-cycle rituals Mambwe migrants in urban areas perform. A mobility perspective has little to offer in analysis of the spatial and temporal dynamics in this worldview. However, that does not suggest that other socio-cultural formations among the Mambwe-speakers, such as labour migration and long-distant trade, may be fruitfully analysed within perspective on mobility as constitutive of society and culture.