Migration Theory

Talking across Disciplines

Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield, Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000600032
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The revised fourth edition of Migration Theory continues to offer a one-stop synthesis of contemporary thought on migration.

Editors Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield remain committed to include coverage that is comparative and global in scope while enhancing similarities and differences between one academic field and the next. All chapters have been revised to highlight cutting-edge issues in the field of migration studies today. The fourth edition welcomes two new authors, Professors Marie Price and François Héran, to offer a fresh approach with their chapters on geography and demography, respectively.

Designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in migration studies, a primary goal of the text is to assist instructors in guiding students who may have little background on migration, to understand important issues and the scientific debates. This ensures Migration Theory is a highly valuable guide not only to the perspectives of one's own discipline but also to those of cognate fields.

1 Historical Migration StudiesTime, Temporality, and Theory¹

Donna R. Gabaccia

DOI: 10.4324/9781003121015-2

Hasia Diner’s argument (2008: 31–32) that theory matters little in migration history is accurate only if we limit the definition of theory to the creation of models that can predict future outcomes with great generality and certainty. Prediction is key to theorization in the natural sciences, but it is less characteristic of the social sciences and almost completely absent in the humanities. In migration studies, as in the social sciences generally, theory more often explains than predicts. It offers explanations for the causes, consequences, structures, experiences, and dynamics of migration (Brettell and Hollifield, this volume). Migration historians, too, typically seek to explain; in so doing they may use theory from history,² humanities, or social sciences. Even for those historians presenting their arguments as chronological and interpretive “narratives” or stories (Cronon 2013), it is explanation, not prediction, that predominates.³

No distinctive theory, method, or particular type of evidence defines the discipline of history, which is instead marked by theoretical, methodological, and evidentiary eclecticism. While history certainly studies the past, so do many other disciplines: in migration studies, both humanities and social science scholars sometimes analyze the past (e.g., Ingleheart 2011; Baker and Tsuda 2014). This means that history might best be understood as episteme—a distinctive way of seeing or knowing. Consistent awareness of time (dating), timing (sequencing, chronology, conjuncture), and temporality (scales of analysis) have forged disciplinary lenses that mark history as much as space, place, and spatiality create geography’s distinctive disciplinary lenses.

This chapter focuses on the analytical use of time and temporality in migration studies. It argues that periodization—the selection of start and end dates to create temporal scales of analysis—constitutes history’s main theoretical contribution to migration studies. Differing periodizations quite literally create different knowledge. Finally, this chapter will also seek to demonstrate how periodization has shaped the kinds of cross-disciplinary exchanges this volume aims to nurture.

Discipline and Methodology

Historical studies suggest that disciplines are ever the constructions of centers of learning, with early documented roots in ancient China and the ancient Mediterranean (Martin 2010). Because history numbers among the earliest of ­disciplines, it is often imagined in today’s world as Janus-faced for it gazes simultaneously toward the theories, methods, and evidence of humanities and the social sciences. Even today’s most important sites of learning—universities—disagree about history’s place in their curricula and physical infrastructure: in some universities, historians share buildings and co-teach with colleagues in literature, philosophy, or arts; elsewhere, history shares turf and co-listed courses with sociology, anthropology, or economics. Many historians of migration are most comfortable positioning themselves among social scientists (as in this volume), but considerable numbers instead prefer affiliation with the humanities. In this chapter, I focus most attention on interactions of historians and social scientists within migration studies.

While the study of theory and method are required components of advanced training in the social sciences, historians are more often required to study historiography. Historiography is the history of researching or writing history; it offers historians an introduction to the methodological, theoretical, and evidentiary eclecticism that defines their discipline. This eclecticism is another product of history’s long history as a discipline. The earliest historians recorded events in chronological sequences, usually by drawing on their own lived experiences (much like ethnographic “chroniclers” of a particular dynastic state, kin group, or monarch) or on the memory of elders, as captured through oral histories. Mastery of chronology was understood to inform both statecraft among narrow elites and the moral development of all humanity. In Renaissance Europe’s Catholic universities, by contrast, history co-existed with other humanistic disciplines— grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy—that shared a common methodology based on the recovery and critical reading of Greek and Roman texts. With the rise of the modern nation-state after 1700, history increasingly became a discipline defined by analysis of state archives. Archival methods so powerfully reinforced history’s association with statecraft and nation building through state activism that the discipline came to be understood as the study of past politics. Within that era’s secularizing universities, archival methods sharply differentiated history from newer, positivist disciplines in the social sciences—anthropology, with its commitments to field work, or sociology, with its surveys or analysis of “data.”

One of the most striking characteristics of universities in the second half of the twentieth century was the development of interdisciplinarity: increasingly, history adopted and adapted methods from other disciplines, and archival methods were increasingly taken up in the social sciences and humanities as well (e.g., Corti 2004; Steedman 2013). As a result, new scholars in history can experience the recent historiographies of scholarship on human movement as vertigo-inducing. Until a decade or two before I began my own advanced studies, immigration history seemed dominated by “filiopietistic” studies that highlighted immigrant “contributions” to American politics and life. In the 1970s and 1980s, my scholarly generation instead wrote social or “ethnic” histories of individual ethnic and national groups, using quantitative methods (Ruggles and Magnuson 2020), demographic and historical survey data (with significant influence from theorization within the social sciences or oral histories). Beginning in the 1980s, historians shifted dramatically away from social toward cultural analysis. As newer scholars attempted to “bring the state back in” and to “de-construct” migrant groups through analysis of race, class, and gender, archival methods and textual critiques again became popular, as did theories emerging from literary studies and the humanities. As this chapter will show, the methodological and theoretical twists and turns of historians studying human mobility persistently engaged them in cross-disciplinary exchanges. However, even the experience of vertiginous change failed to dislodge the discipline’s central focus on time, timing, and temporality. Periodization became and has remained a challenge to interdisciplinary dialogue.

Periodization as Theory

Migration historians work with widely variable temporal scales or “periodizations.” A short periodization may encompass a single year, an individual biography of multiple decades, or analysis of...