Betwixt and Between: Trajectories and Projects of Transmigration

There were a number of problems with the anthropology of transmigration in the 1990s which have gradually been addressed. It is now well understood that transmigration is not a singular phenomenon: there are different ways of being transnational, and transnationalism affects people in different ways—e.g. by gender. There was also a tendency to treat transmigration as a static phenomenon, whereas it is a long-term process which may be viewed, from an analytical perspective, as a trajectory, or rather as a multiplicity of potential trajectories. The paper examines these trajectories in the light of various terms such as cosmopolitan, translocal, hybrid, and l'homme des confins that have been used to characterise actors who in some sense transcend traditional boundaries. Frequently, however, these terms are employed in ways which tend to decontextualise and conflate different personal and institutional subject positionings, and in doing so analyses may overlook the extent to which transmigrants remain bound to nation and class.