Since the late 1990s, Vietnamese women’s participation in international marriage migration has garnered academic and media attention. In contrast, internal marriage migration, a key driver of overall internal migration flows, has received scant consideration. In this paper, we examine marriage and migration dynamics in four rural communes that have “lost” significant numbers of their single women to international marriage and gained brides through internal migration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013 in four villages and analysis of local marriage registration data and census data, this article examines internal and international marriage migration. We probed marriage migration vis-a-vis marriage markets, internal labor migration and gendered mobility patterns. The increased diversification of marriage with respect to spousal places of origin indicates a reconfiguration of marital norms and practices and changing social constructions of a desirable wife and daughter-in-law. Results underscore the role of labor migration and interprovincial networks in expanding mate-seeking circles among rural youth and in altering marital norms. Female international marriage migration is one piece of a larger puzzle whereby various forms of mobility are intertwined with changes in the realms of gender, family and marriage.

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A series of peat monoliths was collected from Hjálmarvík, Kúðá and Bægístaðir, three abandoned farm sites located on a transect extending from the coast to 18 km inland in the Svalbarðstunga region (northeastern Iceland) in order to document the impact of human occupation and patterns of land use on landscape change and vegetation. Svalbarðstunga is of considerable interest because of the geographical and ecological features that distinguish it from other regions of Iceland, in particular by the more direct influence of the cold East Greenland Current (EGC). Plant and insect macrofossils and diatoms identified in peat monoliths provided proxy indicators of human settlement and land use that in some cases corroborate, and in others expand upon, existing archaeological and historical dates. Based on the presence of ecofacts (calcined bones, fish bones and charcoal), synanthropic insects and some anthropogenic plant‐indicators (e.g. weeds), we showed that there was a consistent occupation and use of the coastal site of Hjálmarvík since AD 970. At Kúðá, the scenario is quite different. Two periods of occupation or land use were identified: from prior to c. AD 960 to 1190 and from c. AD 1650 to 1870. In the 15th and into the 16th centuries, the decrease in the deposition of traces of fuel wastes around the inland farm sites (Kúðá and Bægístaðir) suggests that they were used much less frequently. The decline of such proxies for human occupation occurred shortly before the occurrence of the coldest conditions from the 16th to the 17th centuries as well as prior to the V1477 eruption, suggesting that these natural factors may not have been the primary or unique driver of changing modes of tenancy. A scenario of famine‐related depopulation would have played a significant role in this decrease in the human impact on vegetation.

Migration stands as a livelihood strategy for households in Southeast Asia. Recent literature calls for the study of migration at the household level and for the consideration of care needs among the determinants of migration. Based on the case of Vietnam, this article contributes to past research by providing a longitudinal analysis of how household care needs may influence the use of internal migration as a livelihood strategy. Using a household life-course perspective that recognizes how family care needs evolve over time, this article tests if care needs influence the propensity for a household to have one or more new member-out-migrants over time. We operationalize care needs through the household dependency ratio, health care and education expenditures. Multivariate analyses are based on longitudinal data from three passages of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey of 2010, 2012, and 2014. Results indicate that households needing to cover costs of children’s education are more likely to engage in migration than those with health care needs. These results reinforce the idea that migration requires certain conditions to occur and that the immediate care needs that require co-presence tend to prevent, rather than incite, migration at the household level. Overall, the analysis indicates that evolving care needs and household members’ capacities to provide for modify the way households organize and deploy their workforce over space and time.

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