03 July 2006

ROADS PAVED WITH GOLD

My blogging days are numbered since we return stateside toward the end of July. For now I’ve got a few more interviews lined up and a few more soccer matches to watch.

It’s a challenge at this point to try and come up with large, sweeping generalizations about what I’ve learned these past months—I don’t necessarily even see the point in such an exercise.

Nevertheless, I can say that migrants of all kinds are shaped in great part by various juggling acts. One is between their expectations and experiences—the balance between the two defines an individual’s life as a migrant. Another is how an individual’s identity develops through a kind of back and forth between how that individual sees himself/herself and how others see him/her. Neither of these ideas is new to migration studies, but it’s been useful for me to be reminded of them firsthand, as it were, by people’s stories.

It’s in part because of this constant exchange that the experience of young children is intriguing to me—their expectations are by definition limited and thus their experiences seem on some level less mediated. Stories recounted from this, dare I say, “innocent position” potentially reveal more directly the relationship between power, identity, and culture.

At the same time, I’ve also been fascinated by those individuals who have given some consideration to their experiences of mobility. That is, they seem to have given some thought to the effect that moving around has had on their lives, the different perspective it has afforded them. It would be a stretch to say that they’ve theorized their migrancy, but that is in a sense what they’ve done (Gramsci’s “all men are philosophers” idea works here). This goes as much for a recent immigrant from the former USSR as it does for someone who returned from Belgium thirty years ago. And unlike what you might expect, education level doesn’t seem to determine how much someone has reflected on the large historical forces that have influenced the course of his or her life.

Alla prossima…

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