Relocation Diffusion
Relocation diffusion refers to the spread of an idea, innovation, or cultural trait through the physical movement of people from one place to another. This process involves the transfer of the idea or trait to a new location, where it may be adopted and integrated into the local culture. Relocation diffusion can lead to the blending and exchange of different cultural elements across regions.
6 Key excerpts on "Relocation Diffusion"
eBook - ePub- Jack David Eller(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Diffusion refers to the spread of cultural elements between societies and therefore across social boundaries. This presupposes contact between peoples and flow of ideas, practices, objects and individuals between groups. While this process has sometimes been seen as foreign, even destructive, to local culture, it is really nothing more than normal cultural transmission (learning and sharing) except translocally. Neither innovation nor diffusion typically entails the simple automatic acceptance of new cultural elements. Usually, a complex and unpredictable process follows, in which some members of the group may adopt the change, while others do not. Those who adopt it may still modify it to substitute familiar materials or to conform to local tastes and values or to find new uses, applications or meanings for it. When I was traveling in Japan years ago, I discovered Japanized pizza; it is only sensible that Japanese people, who do not have the Western taste for sausage and pepperoni, would top their pizzas with ingredients like seaweed and shrimp. At the same time, people might resist a cultural change—as Americans resist the metric system—because it is too difficult or costly or merely foreign. If culture contact is sustained over a long period of time, and if it is especially asymmetrical (that is, one society is more powerful than another), then acculturation may occur. Whenever contact occurs, culture flows in both directions, but the flow may be highly imbalanced, with one society accepting—voluntarily or involuntarily—more content than the other and being more profoundly changed. During the colonization of North America, European settlers certainly acquired bits of culture from the Native Americans, including knowledge of new plant species and many new words, especially place names like Mississippi and Dakota. Native cultures were more extensively, and often intentionally, changed by this encounter...
eBook - ePubMigration Theory
Talking across Disciplines
- Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield, Caroline B. Brettell, James F. Hollifield(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Geographical Theories of Migration Exploring Scalar, Spatial, and Placeful Dimensions of Human Mobility Marie Price DOI: 10.4324/9781003121015-7 Geography is a discipline closely associated with maps and spatial reasoning. Maps, especially thematic ones, challenge us to visualize spatial distribution of phenomena across space and over time at various scales. Anything that is unevenly distributed is eminently mappable and thinking in maps invites us to consider spatial arrangements. The varied movement of people has been an irresistible subject for geographical inquiry and theorization since the inception of the modern discipline. Why is a cluster of migrants located in one place and not another? How are clusters linked through networks and how do these distributions influence space and place? What structural or environmental forces are driving human mobility? Mapping forces one to select a scale of analysis; consequently, geographers have a proclivity to shift scales, from the local to the global, and even jump scale when necessary. Not limited to any single container of convenience, such as the territorial state, geographers consider various socio-legal containers when theorizing about migration from neighborhoods, to cities, to meta-regions such as Europe or Africa. Geographic scholarship is increasingly interested in how these containers are enforced, deformed, and reconstituted in response to migration. Finally, geography is concerned with a deeper understanding of context and placemaking, seeing space as layered with information such as: the physical environment, the ethnic composition of residents, and their socioeconomic well-being. Human mobility is often a response to and a catalyst for these layers, and thus the social and environmental contexts of areas of departure and reception invite geographical theorization. This chapter will consider some of the foundational theories that shape geographical understandings of migration and human mobility...
eBook - ePubThe Urban Community
A World Perspective
- Nels Andersen(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The result was more roads, more and improved types of transportation, and improved methods of communication, all of which stimulated greater movement of goods and greater mobility of people. Networks of transportation and communication, centering in the cities, served both to increase the economic power of cities and to enhance their social influence over outlying areas. In the cities the migrants from different places mix and the social changes taking place there radiate outward, both to stimulate change over wide areas and further to stimulate a kind of continuous mobility which might be called chronic. Although in the history of human migration force or stress have been compelling factors, most of the migrations associated with the rise of the industrial society have been, in great measure, migration by individual choice. A person who migrates may need to change from one type of work to another (professional mobility), and while learning new work he may need to move from one work place to another, even changing his place of residence. If moving to new work means economic advance, that may mean moving from one level of social status to another (social mobility). As one moves upward or downward socially that may also call for residential mobility. In many ways moving about may force changes in the community class structure. Physical, professional, and social mobility are Interrelated, and this is especially evident in growing urban places. Following the move into a place, if the migrant adapts to and is accepted in the community of destination, he has become assimilated. But there are degrees of assimilation. If his presence is tolerated and he finds a role in which he is accepted, a sort of special status, that is sometimes called accommodation. An accommodation relationship is more likely to be found in a more static society, less likely in a changing city. Barriers of skin color may prevent assimilation in some countries and in some communities more than others...
eBook - ePubPopulation Geography
A Systematic Exposition
- Mohammad Izhar Hassan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge India(Publisher)
...These movements do not involve any permanent or semi-permanent change in the place of residence to qualify as migration. The study of migration occupies an important place in population studies, as together with fertility and mortality, migration determines the size, distribution and growth of population along with its composition and characteristics. As compared with the other two components, migration has been a more popular subject of interest for population geographers. Interestingly, demographers have paid very little attention to this component of population change. Population geographers have since long been concerned with the relationships between movement of people, distance and interacting areas (Woods, 1979:165). Along with its various demographic, social and economic effects, population geographers have also been concerned with the environmental influences upon migration streams and consequences in areas of departure and destination (Clarke, 1972:130). Mobility and migration: general terms and concepts As noted previously, migration refers to permanent or semi-permanent change in the place of residence of an individual or a group of individuals from one location to another. Hence, it is different from the more general term mobility, which refers to all types of movements of people (Rubenstein and Bacon, 1990:75). Thus, the term mobility includes both permanent (and semi-permanent) and temporary movements of people over the earth. With regard to temporary movements, the examples of which have already been cited, a distinction is generally made between a cyclic and a periodic movement. A cyclic movement includes short duration trips to place of work (i.e. commuting), or frequent business trips of people in business, or movement of nomads, which is comparatively irregular in timing. A periodic movement, on the other hand, involves a longer period of residence away from home base than that in the cyclic movement (Blij and Muller, 1986:103)...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Population Geographies
Lives Across Space
- Holly R. Barcus, Keith Halfacree(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 5 Placing human migration 5.1 INTRODUCTION: DEFINING MIGRATION 5.1.1 What is migration? Migration remains the most widely studied and examined element within Population Geography (Boyle 2003, 2004). Moreover, whilst Geographers have played a pivotal role in shaping our contemporary understanding of it, the topic is of interest to numerous academic disciplines, including Demography, Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Anthropology (Brettell and Hollifield 2008a). In this respect, approaching migration as it occurs within the life course has considerable potential for bringing together a scattered body of scholarship often fragmented by “disciplinary partitioning” (Olwig and Sørensen 2002: 7). But what exactly is migration? Initially put, as in a recent textbook, it is “the movement of people to live in a different place” (Holdsworth et al. 2013: 96) or a “permanent change in residence.” It is residential relocation. Or, as expressed in UK and US censuses, a migration is deemed to have occurred when one’s “usual address” has changed within the last 1 or 5 years, respectively (ONS 2013; USCB 2013). Simple, then, one might think! However, as Holdsworth et al. (2013: 98) also noted, careful consideration of these definitions immediately raises a host of questions: what precisely is meant by “different place,” “live in,” “permanent,” or “usual address”? Consequently, by the end of the present chapter, “migration” will have been demonstrated to be at least as complex and multi-dimensional a concept as Chapter 4 revealed “fertility” to be. Starting with the idea of “different place,” the type of areal unit(s) involved in a migration is an initial important consideration when defining it specifically. A crucial starting point is whether a political boundary is crossed during a move. For example, an individual could move from one county to another within the same US state or from one state to another...
eBook - ePub- Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Dirk Jacobs, Riva Kastoryano, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, Dirk Jacobs, Riva Kastoryano(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It proposes that migration can be understood as a specific type of movement that is defined by the crossing of territorial borders and explores three conundrums concerning the relation between borders and migration. When migration is perceived in relation to territorial borders, the size of territory and the shifting of borders have paradoxical implications for the measurement of migration. These puzzles lead to a more general lesson that macro-level studies of migration need to assume a stable background of bounded territories and sedentary societies, whereas micro-level studies may adopt a mobility perspective by taking migrants’ life courses as the basic unit of analysis. The fourth section considers mobility as freedom of movement across and within borders and suggests three pathways to enhanced free movement under conditions where states retain immigration control powers. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the new mobilities paradigm, the emergence of which is closely associated with economic globalization, technological, and cultural changes around the turn of the millennium. These have greatly increased the volume, distances, and paces of geographical movements and have led mobilities scholars to question statist perspectives that dominate in migration studies. We should, however, not assume that this is an irreversible trend. A possible decline in geographic mobility in the next decades is likely to affect also the distinct conceptual perspectives of migration and mobilities studies. 2 Human movement in time and space Unlike most plants and fungi, humans are animals that need to move around in order to find food and partners for procreation. Moreover, humans belong to a group of animals that have evolved to adapt to very different climates. However, unlike for some fish, birds, or whales, it was until very recently impossible for individual humans to move over very long distances...
