"Women in the Migratory Process": A Reductionist Outlook

The point of my title is to indicate my ever-increasing malaise respecting the spurious reification of as a unit for anlaysis-a unit I see as ideologically generated, not scientifically. The category seems to me a rhetorical one, not one which has (or can be proved to have) generic scientific utility. The category, at best, is only useful contextually, i.e., with reference to special social situations or societies, where, in any case, it is better rendered conceptually as women's roles which entail also, of course, men's roles. I suppose, epistemically, methodologically, there is a certain utility in organizing an inquiry such as this symposium dealing with the question of in the migratory process in order that its essential emptiness of scientific content can become manifest-as occurred in the symposium. Not really surprisingly, what turned out to be significant were households, extended kin networks, and sometimes other social groupings, both in places of origin and in migratory meccas. I shall argue, as one major part of my comment, that the use of the category women, here and of course, generally-like other personalistic categories-is a reductionist and individualistic outlook, a paradigm characteristically part of American rhetoric emphasizing the individual, the psychological, Calvinistic internalizations of norms and self-reliance, etc.; all at the expense of the structural, the organized, the collective, the socio-culturally determined. Emphasis on the individual and on internalized norms and personal motivation, furthermore, tends to obscure the socially-determined strategies (as opposed to the motivations) in individual and group action within social-structural contexts. I shall return to the reductionist question later. During the symposium, Judith-Maria Buechler commented that the world of women is also the real world of men and the real world