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- Convenors:
-
Lorena Anton
(University of Bucharest)
Rodica Zane (University of Bucharest)
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- Track:
- Movement, Mobility, and Migration
- Location:
- Roscoe 3.5
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In taking as main object of inquiries the management of mobility across national borders, our panel will focus on ethnographies of experiences and strategies in contemporary European migration.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary Europe is a sum of complex spaces, in which mobility occupies a place which has become, over the years, more and more important. The management of this mobility across national borders is shaped between the individual, the family, the State(s) and the global (i.e. European Union regulations), determining more than once contradictory strategies in everyday life.
How this transnational mobility arrive to be so present in contemporary Europe, and what are the different individual strategies to approach it? To what extent is the management of this mobility gendered, and dependent on different ages of life? Is staying mobile empowering, and until what limits? What are the negative effects of continuous mobility, and how individuals are dealing with those effects between personal and institutional management of mobility?
We welcome ethnographies of experiences and strategies of contemporary European migration which will challenge and overcome the above mentioned research questions. [N.B. Working languages will be English and French.]
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -Rodica Zane (University of Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
Taking as a case-study the migration practices in the postcommunist Romanian village, the paper proposes an analysis of the way the family’s projects and decisions to emigrate are influenced by the management of mobility between here and there, at home and abroad.
Paper long abstract:
In the migration practices of postcommunist Romanian, the village represents a place where families are projecting their existence in close relation to the opportunities of work-migration abroad. The networks which are formed in the process of migration determine, in many cases, the circulation of the entire family in different European spaces. The present study is constructed around an analysis on the way the family's projects and the decisions to emigrate are influenced by the management of mobility between here and there, at home and abroad.
The paper is based on a long-term fieldwork in a number of villages from Campulung region, Romanian, where migration is a current phenomenon in which the status of the family and its prestige are playing a central role. Travelling legally and working illegally, without proper papers or a work-permit, often determine the migrant family to acknowledge the fact the places chosen to emigrate are incompatible with the reproductive function of the body. The status of temporary immigrant, without or waiting for proper official papers, excludes the family with an active reproductive body. Consequently, the migration projects are reconfigured and the return 'back home' becomes the only solution in such cases.
Alina Ioana Branda (Babes-Bolyai University)
Paper short abstract:
Interpreting collected narratives of migration,I approach specific contexts, dynamics of migration, push factors as they are configured nowadays, in post 2007 Romania. Through this, I intend to identify and analyze the blurred entity of the “state”, as it is profiled in these narratives, following the logics of the tensions structure/agency.
Paper long abstract:
My paper aims to offer an understanding of migration, not via structure but more from the side of agency. In more practical terms, I choose some case studies: communities of rural migrants from the very western part of Transylvania, experiencing migration to different places in other European countries (Italy, Spain, France). They usually describe what it was already labelled as temporary/circular migration. This phenomenon has several consequences both for the groups of migrants (constituted by individuals, with certain feelings, subjectivities, personal ways of experiencing, perceiving, internalizing cultural phenomena but also conditioned culturally) and for those remaining home.
Interpreting collected narratives of migration, I approach specific contexts, dynamics of migration, push factors as they are configured nowadays, in post 2007 Romania. Through this, I intend to identify and analyze the blurred entity of the "state", as it is profiled in these narratives, following the logics of the tensions structure/agency. Empirical data allow us to describe such a frame.
Elena Popa (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a case study from contemporary rural Romania this paper examines the rural labor migration pattern towards Western Europe emphasizing cross-cultural aspects, the commissioned workload in the host country, the migrants’ homecoming and how their experience abroad influenced the community.
Paper long abstract:
This paper tackles the labor migration process in the Romanian villages taking as a case study a contemporary rural Romanian community. The analysis is based on extensive oral history research dating from 2007, when I started to look into the identity of Romanian rural communities after EU accession, as well as parallel documentation relating to the issue. The paper deals with migration from two different vantage points: one is the sedentary perspective of the non-migrants, who experience a second-hand impact of migration through family members or other fellow-villagers who went to work abroad; the other one is the mobile perspective, featured by the case of one family of migrants. Moreover, taking in consideration these two perspectives the paper shows how the migration experience is categorized by non-migrants as well as by migrants. In addition, the paper examines the migration process as a rite de passage emphasizing the voyage and arrival of the migrants in the host countries, cross-cultural aspects and the commissioned workload in the destination countries, the migrants' homecoming and how their experience abroad influenced the community.
Hector Guazon (University of the Philippines)
Paper short abstract:
This study analyzes the idioms Filipino Catholics associate with Roman Catholicism to mark out their identity and, as they are translated in the context of the creation of the Filipino Chaplaincy in Brussels, embody the Filipino Catholics' self-interest in their handling of diasporic experience.
Paper long abstract:
Building on researches that problematize the ways in which Filipinos embrace in varying degrees Roman Catholicism, my study looks into the production of meanings Filipino migrants associate with Roman Catholicism for legitimizing the creation of the Filipino Catholic Chaplaincy in Brussels, Belgium. As this study demonstrates, among the Roman Catholic principles and concomitant resources that Filipino Catholics translate, along with their fellow Filipinos in Brussels, "standing for the marginalized" becomes a potent force for church authorities as well as Filipino religious and civic leader's claim to cooperation, leadership, and dejection. However, this study shows that Filipino Catholics' translation is novel and particular even as it is shared by Filipino Catholics in Brussels. Hence, this study probes further the sociopolitical circumstances in Belgium and the interpersonal relations within the Filipino community that make the Filipino Catholics strategic in their moves in their want to create the Filipino chaplaincy in Brussels and, correspondingly, yield favorable results in their handling of their diasporic drama, given their social position. In doing so, this study provides a canapé on the malleability of Roman Catholicism in the lives of Filipino migrants who belong to the Filipino Catholic chaplaincy in Brussels, Belgium.
Magdalena Elchinova (New Bulgarian University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the forms of adaptation of the 1989 female re-settlers from Bulgaria to Turkey, focusing on the role of gender in the processes of adaptation in the society of arrival.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses the forms of adaptation of the 1989 female re-settlers from Bulgaria to Turkey. It tackles the issue of how gender has become the key concept through which the identities of the Bulgarian-born Turks who fled to Turkey in the summer of 1989 were re-assessed and re-defined in the society of arrival.
In 1989, Bulgaria's Turks massively fled from Bulgaria to Turkey, thus crossing the border between two conflicting states and two antagonistic ideologies. They entered a country, where they were welcomed as 'ethnic kin', only to face soon another form of differentiation and exclusion, based on the discrepancy between gender regimes in the society of origin and the host society. In the years after 1989, migration from Bulgaria to Turkey has continued, this time driven by economic forces and the exclusion of the labour migrants by local Turks on the grounds of different understanding of gender roles and patterns has become even sharper. I will discuss how migrant Turkish women from Bulgaria try to balance between their image of 'impure women' in the host society and bread winners in the family. The discussion draws upon fieldwork conducted in the cities of Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne.
Lorena Anton (University of Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
The aims of this paper are to present the intersubjectivities between past and present when analyzing the relations between mobility and reproductive health in postcommunist Europe, in taking contemporary Romanian women migrants to South-West France as a case study.
Paper long abstract:
Reproduction control in Ceușescu's Romania (1966-1989) is considered to have been one of the most repressive political demographies in twentieth century Europe. Immediately after the fall of the communist regime, the new Romanian government legalized abortion on request (in the first trimester of pregnancy and under the supervision of the medical profession). This change, along with intensive migration, is considered to be the cause of the demographic drop of almost 1.5 million recorded in the first two post-communist decades, a demographic decline never experienced before.
The consequences of Ceausescu's pronatalism continue to affect Romanian women's reproductive health to this day. Although the legacies of the past are not being debated publically in post-communist Romania, their negative effects become visible at both national and international level when Romanian citizens migrate. Romanian women who migrate to France (to study or work, legally or illegally) are forced to assimilate into and embody another public health system. Intersubjectivities are thus developed between old practices and new places, in terms of reproductive health. The analysis is based on a long term oral history fieldwork on the memory of abortion in communist Romania, as well as related documentation and archives, and an anthropological fieldwork in progress on the Romanian immigrants in South-West France, their reproductive health practices and health-care access.