Cultures of Transnationality in European Migration

Subjectivity, Family and Inequality

Karolina Barglowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351365413
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Transnational mobility in the EU has become a key factor for supranational integration, equal life chances and socioeconomic prosperity. This book explores the cultural and social patterns that shape people's migration, the historical and contemporary patterns of their movement, and the manifold consequences of their migration for themselves and their families.

Exploring the links between social and spatial mobility, the book draws attention to the complexity of moving and staying, as ways in which social inequalities are shaped and reinforced. Grounded in research conducted in Germany and Poland, the book develops the concept of "cultures of transnationality" to analytically frame the variety of expectations involved in migration, and how they shape migration dispositions, opportunities, and outcomes.

Cultures of Transnationality in European Migration will be of broad interest to scholars and students of transnational migration, European development, cultural sociology, intersectionality and subjectivity. Specifically, it will appeal to scholars interested in the cultural ramifications of moving and staying as well as those interested in the interplay of gender, ethnicity and class, in the making of social inequality.

1 Migration, culture and inequality through the lens of expectations

Introduction

Social sciences face challenges in accounting for the various relational, personal, structural and cultural factors that shape trajectories of migration and settlement. This chapter suggests an analytical framework through which to explore these various dimensions from an actor-perspective. Commonly, the study on inequality of migrants focuses on the social mobility prospects of migrant populations in immigration countries. From a more emigration country-orientated perspective, some analyses have also focused on the developmental effects of migration. The endeavour in this book is to broaden this perspective towards the ways in which inequality permeates the whole process of migration, from its initiation or impediment to the experiences of people when moving and settling. It also applies a transnational perspective on the complex issue of inequality, which extends the dichotomy of emigration and immigration country (Faist 2000, Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, Faist 2012). The notion of inequality here follows cultural sociological thinking, which accentuates the hidden logics of power and inequality that produce and are produced through people’s interpretations and actions (Schwalbe et al. 2000, Lamont and Molnár 2002, Harris 2003a, 2003b, Lamont et al. 2014). These interpretations take place within symbolic structures that entail different arrays of action and decision making (Bourdieu 1985, 1989, 1998). Following an anthropological understanding, “culture” itself is a “symbolic system”. Social definitions and cultural boundaries that are entailed in “culture” have performative effects because they frame options for being and behaving. From a micro-sociological account, “culture” comes into existence and becomes “real” through the ways of speaking and acting and is thus not external to actors. Cultural and social processes are thus intertwined, if ever separable. The perspective on inequality is thereby shifted from conceptions on inequality as equaling the distribution of resources (“inequality of outcome”) or the differential access to them (“inequality of opportunity”) to the ways in which these outcomes and opportunities are culturally mediated. The idea that inequality ultimately emerges from social and cultural processes that produce and perpetuate outcomes and opportunities is deeply rooted in the micro-sociological and constructivist tradition. As Harris (2003b: 223) argues, “constructionist analysis starts from a different and, arguably, deeper understanding of contingency: the idea that equality and inequality are interpretive accomplishments”.

The study of such processes requires taking the actor-perspective as the unit of analysis. It also means to acknowledge that people act within particular social and cultural frameworks. Expectations provide a powerful tool through which to grasp the cultural logics of migration and inequality. Used as a “sensitizing concept” (Blumer 1954) that operates like a spotlight to classify, sort and make sense of data, expectations inform the empirical analysis in this book. It is a concept with a long-standing tradition in both sociology and migration scholarship. In social theory, expectations have taken a central place for understanding the reproduction of social order and predictability of social situations at the more structural level of “generalized expectations” (Luhman 1969) or as incorporated in people’s habitus (Bourdieu 1989). Mead (1934) has offered a more subjective perspective, in that he has emphasized that people become social actors by internalizing sets of expectations from their outside surroundings. Troyer and Younts (1997) summarize that expectations are related to two different levels, to “first order” (personal) and “second order expectations” (social or relational). Expectations seen as the genuine logics underlying social practices have also been an informative concept in the investigation of migration decision-making (De Jong and Fawcett 1981). Nowadays, owing to a critique of the “normative paradigm”, as a deterministic epistemology, less norm-driven notions like orientations and aspirations are more common in the analysis of people’s practices. However, it is the very normativity and its sociological foundation as an integrative mechanism between various levels of social life (cultural beliefs, social positions, individual and relational) which makes it a viable concept through which to study patterns of inequality and transnational migration. Deterministic notions of expectations can be omitted through cultural sociological reformulations of expectations as “experiences of the future” (Keller 2012). In that view, expectations are seen to be a sequential frame within which people organize their lives more than a rule that people mechanically follow. Webs of expectations are anchored in the symbolic structure of spaces, but they do not affect the potential realization of equality or inequality unless people apprehend and make sense of them. Methodologically, symbolic structures will not be analysed per se, but from the micro-sociological perspective of the actors involved.

This chapter begins with a discussion of cultural approaches to inequality both from structuralism (Bourdieu 1985, 1989, 1998) and micro-sociology and interactionism (Schwalbe et al. 2000, Harris 2003b, 2003a, Lamont et al. 2014). Both provide fruitful vantage points to analyse the emergence of structures through actors’ active and interpretative accomplishment of boundaries that are perpetuated within symbolic orders. Symbolic orders and boundaries will be framed from an intersectional and transnational perspective, which are both indispensable for this study, because nowadays, and with regard to migrants in particular, social life cannot be assumed to “end” at the boundaries of nation-states. Location in transnational spaces are particularly prone to entail “interpretative moments” (Calarco 2014), when otherwise unconscious knowledge becomes expressed through people’s sense-making of boundaries. Such moments become visible when people feel that images and expectations of “gender” diverge, when they encounter a sense of “ethnicity” in interaction with others or because they encounter an ambiguity of their status positions in the process of migration. Drawing from diverse bodies of literature (cultural, transnational and intersectional), this chapter establishes the concept of social expectations as a heuristic tool for integrating the various dimensions of migration and social inequality, the sociospatial levels involved from an actor-centred perspective.

Cultural approaches to migration and inequality: combining structuralism and interactionism

Although “culture” has become an important concept in migration scholarship, it has not been often investigated as to its inequality dimensions. Also, scholarship on European migration has been not as much interested in “culture” as is research on other parts of the world, most importantly Mexican-US migration (Kandel and Massey 2002, Cohen 2004, Cohen and Sirkeci 2011). These studies focus on beliefs and norms of sending communities regarding which people should migrate and where they should go, as well as whether migration is a normal and sensible way of making a life, captured in the notion of “migration cultures”. As one important exception, the study by Horváth (2008) has used the migration culture optic to make sense of the patterns of migration in Romania. Conversely, European migration scholarship tends to focus on economic or material aspects of migration. Such a view, Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2008) argue, may be framed by the ideology, which is also constructed and perpetuated by the EU’s official rhetoric, that cultural “differences” between the EU member states are low. Obviously, “difference” and “culture” matter a lot to the experiences of EU citizens. On the surface, it is aptly visible in the recent political upheavals in many parts of Europe, which are also shaped by the reluctance towards immigration from outside but also inside the EU (Garapich 2016). “Culture”, as will be elaborated in this book, when understood in a more encompassing way as a “symbolic system”, plays a particular role in shaping dispositions, opportunities, perceptions and outcomes of intra-European migration.

Most prominently, Pierre Bourdieu has offered a theoretically rich account of the cultural patterns underlying the (re-)production of social orders. He has seen the two principles of differentiation and distribution as equal sides of social orders (Bourdieu 1985: 724). While distribution refers to the allocation and disposition of economic, social and cultural capital, differentiation refers to the systems of classification and recognition which define the value of capital and actors’ access to it:

Thus the perception of the social world is the product of a double structuring: on the objective side, it is socially structured because the properties attributed to agents or institutions present themselves in combinations that have very unequal probabilities (…). On the subjective side, it is structured because the schemes of perception and appreciation, especially those inscribed in language itself, express the state of relations of symbolic power. (…) Together, these two mechanisms act to produce a common world, a world of commonsense or, at least, a minimum consensus on the social world

(Bourdieu 1989: 20)

In this respect, the “social” and the “symbolic” cannot be separated from each other, because they are both inherent parts of social space and its unequal structures. The boundaries or distinctions that are drawn between different actors and collectives (“groups”) lead to unequal access to valuable forms of capital. Often, these processes of distinction are not regarded as “inequality” because the symbolic order of social space tends to legitimize the unequal participation of some collectives as natural or normal. This is mainly because those in high positions within a given social space are the ones with the power to define categories (which usually include those who are “like them”). Bourdieu described the interrelationship by which the symbolic order and the “wrong” types of cultural capital can lead to the reproduction of inequalities in education. The performance of children from families with less valuable forms of capital, particularly cultural capital, are commonly evaluated worse than the performance of children from higher social positions, regardless of their actual attainments (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Accordingly, the boundaries defining what “good” students are cannot be separated from how well they speak or what they look like – traits they usually acquire in the family. In more theoretical terms, valuations of achievement cannot be separated from the embodied cultural capital, i.e. habitus, of the students, which they acquired during their socialization. These practices of evaluation are largely conducted unconsciously. Thus, people usually do not know that evaluations are grounded in the symbolic order and the categories it provides for selecting “good” and “bad” performance, but by how lazy or unwilling to perform the student is considered to be. The symbolic structures, namely the generation and reproduction of categories and their status in conjunction with the regulation of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion affecting those categories, lead to the production and reproduction of unequal social spaces.

The major reason why the symbolic order tends to be reproduced is that it is commonly conceived of as the normal and natural way of social life. This view is commonly shared because individuals socialize the symbolic order and its “doxa”, which is “a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view” (Bourdieu 1998: 57) in what Bourdieu called their “habitus”. Habitus mediates structure and agency because it consists of social structures and individual dispositions and yields social practices in accordance with its principles of vision and division (Bourdieu 1998: 8). Habitus also shapes people’s expectations, as will be argued in more depth later on in this chapter. In his account, the credo would be that people expect what they can expect as to their social position. Collective imaginations of normality or “discourses” in the sense of what is “normal” are the essential medium behind the construction and perpetuation of a predictable and legitimate social order. Normality is “almost invariably normative” (Misztal 2001: 313) because it prescribes how things should be done, who ought to do what, what one should look like, as well as appropriate social appreciation. In its inherent dichotomy, it separates the “normal” from the “abnormal” and makes individuals and societies want to regulate and orient themselves in compliance with such conceptions.

Understandings of normality are performative in the sense that they drive people’s actions. In the case of Poland, post-socialist conceptions of normality are interlinked with cultural imaginaries resulting from the long and ruptured history of migration. And, as will be shown in the more empirically informed chapters in this book, conceptions of normality are still driving forces of people’s mobility patterns. The idiosyncrasy of post-socialist conceptions of normality also enriches conceptual understandings on “normality”. In social theory, normality usually refers to a common way of being in contexts that are familiar to people. For scholars like Bourdieu, conceptions of normality are inscribed in the symbolic order of spaces and entail classification of who should do what, how one should look and so on. Being and doing “normal” things is thus a main guiding logic for social actors. While conceptions of normality thus relate to the “own” and “common” found in the local surrounding, in post-socialist countries normality is often related to the not own and the “other” (Harsanyi and Kennedy 1994). As to the long history of East-West divide, where the East was considered as “inferior”, the “normal” equates “Western” lifestyles. Thus, migration has been and continues to be framed by the longing for leaving an “un-normal” system for a more “normal” one. The following chapters will shed a more nuanced and empirical light on these issues. It is important to mention here that these conceptions are by far not straightforward: they contain a variety of counter-narratives. Conceptions of normality are also not only related to space, but also to time. People develop different frames for assessing normality in accordance with their life-course experiences and particular life stages, as will be elaborated on in depth in the next chapters. From the vantage point of sociological and empirical conceptions of normality, migration cannot be readily reduced to one single motif, like “earning more money”. Instead, it needs to be seen as patterned by wider imaginaries of migration and the ways relate to them when organizing their lives. After all, migration is usually a risky endeavour, as it means leaving familiar settings for something new. In contexts with traditionally high rates of mobility, particular cultural frameworks may emerge that frame migration as a common, thus “normal”, practice, inscribed into the “symbolic order” of spaces.

In this book, “symbolic order” and normality will be interpreted from the actor perspective. Such a view shifts from a more structuralist perspective to micro-logics of social life. Such a view grounds on actor-centred and interactionist approaches, which do not analyse social structures per se, but study the everyday interactions that produce and delimit what individuals think and how they act. Epistemologically, structures and relations of daily life are not deterministic or mechanistic, but emerge from past interactions and actors meaning-making practices (Blumer 1969). Inequality in such a way of thinking is not seen (merely) as a structural phenomenon of the unequal distribution of goods, resources and status. Equally, power is not “something that stably inheres in particular structural settings” (Dennis and Martin 2005). An interactionist stance on the worl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Migration, culture and inequality through the lens of expectations
• 2 Cultures of East-West migration: the case of Poland
• 3 Transnational subjectivity in post-socialist spaces
• 4 Inside the transnational family
• 5 Gender, class and culture: unequal opportunities for moving
• 6 Cultures of transnationality: cultural beliefs and capacity to move as dimensions of social inequality
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index