Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation

Abstract

Migration studies have focused attention on ethnic institutions in global and gateway cities. This ethnic lens distorts migration scholarship, reinforces methodological nationalism, and disregards the role of city scale in shaping migrant pathways of settlement and transnational connection. The scale of cities reflects their positioning within neoliberal processes of local, national, regional, and global rescaling. To encourage further explorations of nonethnic pathways that may be salient in small‐scale cities, we examine born‐again Christianity as a means of migrant incorporation locally and transnationally in two small‐scale cities, one in the United States and the other in Germany.

Are we all transnationals now? Network transnationalism and transnational subjectivity: the differing impacts of globalization on the inhabitants of a small Swiss city

“…Recently, such 'community studies' have come under fire within transnational research, not only for their tendency to groupism (Brubaker 2004) in treating ethnically and nationally defined groups as substantial and natural entities to which interest and agency can be attributed, but also for their underlying methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). These criticisms triggered a paradigmatic shift, and scholars now propose study designs that do not start with an ethnic or national group as their unit of analysis, or as their sole object of study (Baumann 1996;Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen 2006). In this line of reasoning, I have chosen a specific geographical space, the small Swiss city of Neuchâtel, and followed a 'cross-cutting-ties' approach, asking how the inhabitants of Neuchâtel Á different types of migrants as well as nonmigrants Á live out transnationalism.…”

El debate entre transnacionalismo y nacionalismo metodológico como marco teórico para la comprensión del papel del empleo en la gobernabilidad de la inmigración en España

“…Así, los más recientes trabajos de Glick-Schiller (Schiller y Caglar, 2009;Schiller et al, 2006;Schiller y Caglar, 2007), basados en las posibilidades analíticas de la perspectiva transnacional en oposición a las limitaciones del nacionalismo metodológico (Wimmer y Schiller, 2002b, 2003, nos han proporcionado ideas muy sugerentes para nuestro análisis. Por ese motivo, no hemos seguido profundizando en la cuestión cultural del transnacionalismo, ni en el estudio de los inmigrantes a nivel individual o de sus redes familiares (Portes, 2001), ni en las comunidades transnacionales, ni en si el transnacionalismo es una forma de asimilación (Kivisto, 2001) o una alternativa (Guarnizo et al, 2003).…”

“…El trabajo crítico de Kivisto (2001) es una buena aportación desde el punto de vista de la metateoría o de la epistemología de la perspectiva transnacional, pero no acaba de satisfacernos la excesiva crítica que realiza al trabajo antropológico de Schiller y compañeras, cuando, en concreto, Schiller ha seguido haciendo muy notables aportaciones al avance y a la maduración de esta perspectiva con sus trabajos posteriores (Schiller y Caglar, 2009;Schiller et al, 2006;Schiller y Caglar, 2007). Así mismo, nos parece que el trabajo de Portes se salva de otras críticas por la precisión de su metodología, por la cuantificación de sus resultados, por la concreción tan exhaustiva de su unidad de análisis.…”

Scale and ethnicity in Southeast Poland: tourism in the European periphery1

“…These critics have emphasised the importance of perceiving ethnicity as a mode of social and economic incorporation that is related to the relative position of cities and regions in the global economy. The latter position, understood as "city-scale" for example, incorporates a number of non-ethnic pathways, of which multiculturalism is one, along which small and peripheral cities operate as they try to position themselves on the world map in order to attract investment and particularly the tourism industry (Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen 2006). Ethnicity, as part of tourism development, should thus not be treated as the sole quality of individuals identifying with a group through symbolic means.…”

“…Some of these changes have meant the commercialisation of cultural models already in practice, others have been more substantial like the changing Catholic liturgy after the Second Vatican Council or the growth of the electronic media sectors (boissevain 1992: 16, 1996). The authors Glick Schiller, Caglar and Guldbrandsen (2006) have shown how hard local officials in peripheral cities have to work to attract capital. They need to market their cities by recasting their localities as centres of specific knowledge and emphasise a city's cultural specificity (2006: 616).…”