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American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration
Published on: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 09:06:15 GMT
American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration. Edited by Nancy Foner. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2003. "All research with migrants is political. . . .
In an era of large-scale migration and anti-immigrant reaction in the United States and other immigrant-receiving regions across the globe, this insight offered by medical anthropologist Jennifer Hirsch points to the broad implications of the outstanding collection American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration that transcend both the United States and the anthropological discipline. This collection is the fruit of a seminar and collective intellectual process of key anthropologists of U.S. migration sponsored by the School of American Research in October 2001. According to editor Nancy Foner, "the time is ripe to reflect on where migration anthropology has been and where it is going; to evaluate the discipline's perspectives, theories, and methods as they pertain to U.S. immigration and to begin developing a research program for the future" (p. 4). As a book that works on multiple levels, it offers a strong conceptual overview of the anthropology of migration for students. The collection also serves more advanced scholars who wish to critically contemplate this field, to understand the state of art in its key subfields, and to think-through its potential contributions to some of the great intellectual and political challenges of the day.
In her insightful introduction, Foner lays out a core purpose of the volume: to shed light on the ways that anthropologists may contribute to the interdisciplinary study of immigration while "carv[ing] out a distinctive role for anthropology" (p. 5). The study of U.S. migration has long been central to sociology. Yet, it has often been peripheral to cultural anthropology for reasons that include the discipline's marginalization of U.S. study (other than work on its indigenous populations). The anthropological study of U.S. migration has blossomed over the past two decades with the accelerated migration to the United States of persons in regions throughout the world that anthropologists have traditionally researched. Foner reminds us that anthropologists bring the key concept of culture into migration studies, although they bring no uniform definition. Another major disciplinary contribution is the use of ethnographic methods to capture "subtleties in meaning and behavior" (pp. 26-27). As part of an interdisciplinary project studying migrant populations, many anthropologists also integrate quantitative data into the research. The editor predicts a future where ethnographers will increasingly collaborate with large-scale survey researchers and other social scientists to develop holistic understandings of U.S. migrant populations and issues.
Although collective volumes on U.S. migration are often arranged by immigrant group, the book is productively organized around thematic areas to which anthropologists have made important contributions. Eight essays deal with globalization, gender, education and generation, cities as context, medical anthropology, and law and culture. A 48-page reference list provides a select bibliography of historical and current work on U.S. migration focused in anthropology, yet incorporating sociology, political science, psychology, law, and economics. In one important chapter, Patricia Pessar, a key theorist of gender and migration, discusses the past and proposes future directions for feminist ethnography of migration. While the subjects of migration research were assumed to be male through the 1960s, she argues that, since then, anthropology has played a key role toward engendering migration studies through its challenges to positivist approaches and their capacity to capture women's experience. Early feminist ethnographies of migration, produced in the 1970s and deeply embedded in Western feminist perspectives, tended to stress its emancipatory aspects for women. For example, some celebrated women's entry into the labor force despite its uneven effects for those at the bottom of industrial hierarchies. Pessar sees the promise of third-wave feminist analysis that is more adept at capturing the complexities and contradictions in migrant women's lives, such as the "contingent agency" (p. 83) of women in migrant households.
In two chapters, Leo Chavez and Jennifer Hirsch urge fellow medical anthropologists to resist framing immigrants' medical problems in terms of their culture and to focus on the structural inequalities that impact immigrant health. Chavez reminds us that the lack of adequate health services for many U.S. immigrants reflects a broader U.S. medical culture where health care is considered a privilege rather than a right. The politics of the denial of health care to immigrants is a symptom of their ambivalent reception and the limits of their membership in the nation-state. Hirsch argues that as migration researchers, our work is used by members of immigrant-receiving societies to understand how immigrants fit (or not) into their host cultures and societies, and the forms of assistance and services with which they should (or should not) be provided. She proposes that migration researchers practice a "liberation anthropology" (p. 232) inspired by the work of medical anthropologists, including Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Paul Farmer.
In her piece on ethnography and transnational migration, Nina GlickSchiller provocatively asserts that ethnography is ". . . the most appropriate methodology for the study of transnational migration" (p. 100). The anthropologist challenges charges that ethnography is largely anecdotal, and argues for its importance in building grounded migration theory and depicting transnational social fields. These social fields represent an important, alternative conceptualization of "society" that challenges nation- state borders. As an interesting counterpoint to Click-Schiller's perspective, Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick fruitfully deploy both ethnography and longitudinal survey research to examine the relationship of immigrant youth to identity and academic orientation. For these anthropologists, ethnographic and survey methods are "complementary" (p. 132). Their combined use is critical toward understanding the disjuncture between many immigrant youths' behaviors and beliefs, such as their Americanized presentation and reclamation of ethnic identification.
These lively methodological debates point to the varied perspectives represented in the volume that offer a rich landscape of the field. This thoughtful collection is marred by a pithy yet unfortunate title that elides the difference between "America" and the United States, despite cultural anthropology's charge to decenter European and U.S. standpoints. This problem is countered by the various intellectual histories of the anthropology of migration offered by contributors. These include discussions of the first wave of urban anthropology, the diffusionist school of anthropology, including work by Franz Boas, and the birth of the field of transnational migration studies. Together, these anthropological schools challenged unidirectional paradigms of migration and assimilation. They scrutinized continuing connections between sending and receiving communities, and the interactions and power struggles of various ethnic and religious groups. They depicted the movement of persons and cultural exchange, rather than bounded nation-states, as the natural human condition.
In combination with the understanding of the political role of migration research, these tendencies point to the potential contributions of anthropology to the interdisciplinary study of migration and the politics of migration in the contemporary era. In order for the discipline's insights and contributions to flourish, it is important to claim a significant role for cultural anthropology and ethnographic research in the interdisciplinary project of U.S. migration studies. Within the anthropological discipline, we must challenge its continued marginalization of U.S. migration studies and build an "anthropology of liberation" or public anthropology that delivers our critical insights beyond the ivory tower.
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