Experiencing Ruptures in Migration: The Ordinary and Unexpected Journeys of Global Migrants
Résumé
This book aims to portray migratory experiences, documented in the form of biographical narratives. We are interested in the dynamic aspect of migration, which effectively becomes a complex trajectory, made up of stages, returns, and circulations and no longer simply, as in the industrial era, a bipolar exile (there and here). In these complex and dynamic movements, many trajectories become bifurcations, by which we mean shifting fates. In these stories we found paths, events, and bifurcations, all combined together, in terms of biographical construction based on accumulated experiences. These narratives are both very banal and very unusual journeys, portraying a new international human globalization. They are simultaneously stories of barriers to be crossed in chaotic situations interspersed with peaceful events in quiet contexts. These journeys reveal not only the weight of migration policies, but also the certification policies implemented and developed by various countries.
This book presents itineraries, social logics of mobility; the routes become the analysts. If statistics record regularities, the personal approach captures specificities that produce meaning and contribute to a reinterpretation of current forms of mobility.
“The superb collection of ethnographies that the reader will find in the pages to follow provide yet further insight into the ways in which movement across state borders represents a creative accomplishment. With cases selected from around the world – the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe – the chapter in this book demonstrate that migration is undertaken not only against states and their bureaucracies, but in tension with and possibly in opposition to migrants’ closest associates – precisely the people whom social capital theory paints as the font of the resources that make migration possible. ”
– Roger Waldinger, University of California Los Angeles, USA