Transnational Lives
From Urban Press
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Contents |
Preface
Where ever expatriates were, whatever they did, boundaries between the orderly insides of their houses and the chaotic streets, between Western food served at home and street vendor's fare outside, and between the cocooned Western expatriate communities and a sprawling third-world ceity which surrounded them.(Fechter 2007, p i)
Expatriates: Who are they?
You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see?(Hemingway quoted in ibid, pp 1-2)
Being labelled an 'expatriate' signifies their embeddedness in the mechanisms of global captialism, which they have no control over, and they hence cannot be held accountable for the resulting inequalities. The basis for such reasoning is what could be called a 'hardship ideology', which also underpins the 'expatriate package'... One element of this is the concept of expatriation as a state of deprivation, including the idea of a 'hardship' post. It is used, or used to be, the assumption underlying corporate expatriation schemes that a relocation abroad is in many ways a time of scarcity - that is, as measured against the kind of life that the employee would be able to lead at home, and for which he has to be compensated.(ibid, p 3)
Expatriates - the Making of an Object?
A risk in using [the term expatriate] is that i may conceptualise expatriates as a bounded homogeneous group. The aim here is to utilise the term 'expatriates' as an analytical tool that avoids shoehorning Western foreigners into a single category, and instead explores the range of their attitudes, practises and experiences of life in Indonesia...One way of talking about 'expatriates' as a diverse group whose members yet have significant connections, is through using Strathern's notion of 'partial connections' (Srathern 1991). The concept allows for the discussion of a heterogeneous group of people, or places without having to assume that they share a fixed set of 'group characteristics'. Instead, Srathern suggests, the researcher can explore, and produce, meaning ful connections between them.(p 6)
Nationality
Although I did not specifically set out to do so, in hte course of my research many of my conversations and interviews were conducted with women. This was due to the fact that most wives ewere not in paid employment, and therefore had more time available than their husbands to participate in my research... This only held for the group of 'family expatriates', though, and amoung the younger generation, my informants consisted equally of men and women.(p 9)
Although i conducted interviews with Indonesian-born men and women, especially with regard to their interactions with expatriates, I eventually decided not to include them here. INstead I chose to represent Indonesia and Indonesians in the form and to the extent that they feature in expatriates lives. If they appear to be largely absent from the text this reflects their absence from expatriates' lives... Indonesian nationals, apart from domestic staff, do not play major roles from expatriates. The social life of the latter mainly takes place within the epatriate secto, and there tend to be few social contacts, let alone friendships, with Indonesians. {Despite this] Indonesians are certainly the object of discussion amoung expatriates, though not as individuals, but as a collective, imagined Other. For example, at expatriate womens' meeting, a considerable part of the conversations focuses [sic] on how members view Indonesians. In such discourses Javanese typically appear as being polite, but 'false', lazy and slow learners; while the ethnic Chinese are considered greedy; Indonesian motorists reckless and selfish; and the general populace careless in the way they litter the streets of the capital.(p 11)
Fieldwork
In addition to material gathered through participant observation, I draw on debates held on an Internet discussion forum... This provided me with valuable information regarding the activities of the forum, its contributors, and expatriate community associations. While discursive data in general, and Internet forums in particular warrant careful interpretation (see Miller and Slater 2000; Hine 2000), I suggest that they provide key complementary data to material gained in other ways, especially in relation to discussions on 'racism'. In relation to data gathered from the Internet, it has been argued that such forums not merely represent but encourage the production of radical discourses, and therefore off somewhat distorted perspectives (Zickmund 1997)... Close interactions with a small group of expatriates, including some readers and contributors to the forum, made it possible to probe and trace connections between views aired on the website and everyday life conversations with expatriates. I maintain that embedding these postings into non-virtual ethnographic contexts, while recognising their limitations enables me to exploit their epistemological potential.(pp 14-15)
Transnational Lives and Their Boundaries
Plenty of expats live in the "expat bubble". They spend outrageous prices buying pre-packaged foods like they eat in their home countries. Some of them do not even learn to speak the language.(a forumpost quoted in ibid, p 17)
There are hardly any ethnographies of highly skilled Europeans and Americans living and working in non-European countries; there few exceptions include Amit Talai (1998), Fechter (2005), Fechter and Coles (2007), Hindman (2002, 2007) and Walsh (2006a,b, 2007).(p 17)
One reason why this group has received relatively little scholarly attention, especially in anthropology, may be that privileged migrants represent a case of "studying up" (Nader 1972, Gusterson 1997).(p 18)
Malinowski for example disparagingly describes the Whites he encountered at his fieldsite on the Triobriand Islands as "men who had lived for years in the place with constant opportunities of observing the natives and communicating with them, and who yet hardly knew one thing about them really well', though he does mention some friends of him [sic] as notable exceptions (Malinowski 1922:5-6).(pp 18-19)
Transnational Migration and the Discourse of Flows
A significant tendency in the literature on transnationalism and globalisation is to celebrate the emergence of 'global flows'... The celebratory discourse praises movement as inherently liberating, especially in relation to 'culture'. James Clifford sets the tone as he declares that 'there are no traditionally fixed, spatially and temporally bounded cultural worlds from which to depart and to which to return: all is situated and all is moving' (1986:22). Ulf Hannerz describes the new state of the world as being composed of 'cultural flows in space' (1992:68). Rapport and Dawson, in their much cited volume Migrants of Identity, discuss 'the universal way in which human beings conceive of their lives in terms of a moving-between - between identities, relations, people, things, groups, societies, cultures, environments, as a dialectic between movement and fixity' (1998:33). The present, it seems, is fluid, and universal tropes of movement seem to indicate the liquidising of culture. Such enthusiasm is fuelled by the insight that globalisation consists of the movement of capital, goods and people as well as of ideologies and cultures, which challenges traditional concepts of culture as bounded (Appadurai 1996)... Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, the early theorists of transnationalism, argue that 'the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations ... link together their societies of origin and settlement' (1994:7). This definition allows them, they argue, 'to analyse the "lived" and fluid experiences of individuals who act in ways that challenge our previous conflation of geographic space and social identity' (1994:8)... Transnational practices are seen as "'counter-narratives of the nation" which continually evoke and erase their totalizing boundaries' (Bhabha 1990:300). Such flows also play a key role, for example, in Appadurai's theory of global scapes, which constitute the conditions 'under which current global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes,finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes' (Appadurai 1990:301).(p 20)
the "old" anthropology... describes cultures so grounded that they could not move out of place. This anthropology imprisons its objects in a cell: interconneetlon and movement in the forn of "global flows" are thus experienced as a forn of liberation... these flows fit most neatly inside the discipline when, in deference to past teachers and conventions, the boundedness of past cultures goes unchallenged; global flows can then take the discipline, and the world,into a freer future. This "freeing-up" variety of globalism is both exhilarating and problematic.(Tsing 2000 quoted in ibid, pp 20-21)
As van der Veer reminds us, 'free movement of persons and commodities, a dogma of economic liberalism, was in many places restricted to the enlightened, Western coloniser (1997:91). Similarly, Kearney notes a lack of critical awareness in Appadurai's work: somewhat theoretically detached from political economy is Appadurai's notion of the global spaces in which current cultural flows occur' (Kearney 1995:553). A sustained critique of the discourse of flows based on its apparent obliviousness to persisting inequalities has been formulated by Smith and Guarnizo, who note that 'authors celebrating the liberating character of transnational practices often represent transnationals as engaged in a dialectic of opposition and resistance to the hegemonic logic of multinational capital' (Smith and Guamizo 1998:5). Instead, they argue that 'the dialectic of domination and resistance needs a more nuanced analysis than the celebratory vision allows' , and they aim to 'bring back into focus the enduring asymmetries of domination, inequality, racism, sexism, class conflict, and uneven development in which transnational practices are embedded and which they someetimes even perpetuate'(Smith and Guarnizo 1998:6).(p 21)
In an ever-increasing literature on migration... skilled Western migrants do not feature very prominently, even though they could justifiably be regarded as exemplary cases of transnational migration, if we understand transnationalism as 'multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation states' (Vertovec 1999:447). The fact that 'skilled migration' is a marked term further demonstrates that migration is commonly thought of as non-skilled. These tendencies not withstanding, there is a growing segment of the field devoted to skilled migration (see Iredale 2001 for a categorisation). Within this area, however, a similar bias is evident insofar as priority is given to skil!ed migrants from developing countries... whereas European, American and Australian globally mobile professionals tend to be systematically neglected. This holds even though they broadly match the criteria set out by Castles for example: namely being 'highly skilled workers, such as managers, financial experts and technicians [who] migrate on temporary employment contracts' (Castles 2000:102)... What distinguishes Western expatriates from the nationals of developing countries whom Castles presumably has in mind is their privileged position. Unlike their non-Western counterparts, the position of expatriates in their host society is not precarious, but rather comfortable; Issues of citizenship and legal restrictions do not usually trouble them, and they do not expect to settle in any host country, but either return home or move on to another postion.(pp 21-22)
The theoretical approaches which do include expatriates are less likely to be situated in migration studies, but rather in the globalisation literature concerned with 'global cities', the 'information society', and other, often fuzzy, concepts. As Favell, Feldblum and Smith describe it, "to put in in the parlance of global city theorists... the virtual'space of flows on which new global networks of capital and trade are based, must also be peopled by mobile persons who, it is assumed, are embodied by the world s growmg cadre of international highly skilled migrants' (Favell, Feldblum and Smith 2006:2). These are described as...technocratic financial-managerial elite' (2000:445), who inhabita 'secluded space across the world along the connecting lines of the space of flows' which characterises the network society (2000:447)... Friedman,in his theory on global class formation, locates them at the top of a global hierarchy, as members of a 'transnational elite (Friedman 1999)... Furthermore, this group is often thought of as cosmopolitan... They are afluent and open-minded, feel free to engage or disengage in local scenarios, add or delete parts of 'other cultures' from their personal repertorre at their choice. [Hammerz] calls them 'the new class', whose main characteristic is their 'decontextualised cultural capital' (1996:108). In a related fashion, Mickiethwait and Woolridge identify these people as 'cosmocrats', who are 'definedby their attitudes and life~tyles rather than just their bank accounts' (200I :230). Both of these claims regarding the elite status and cosmopolitan attitudesof skilled migrants have been questioned. Weiss, for example argues that they are more accurately described as part of an emerging transnational middle class rather than a transnational elite (Weiss2005, 2006).(p 22)
Conradson and Latham point out that the popular narratives on globalisation provide littlo sense of the 'everyday texture of the globalising places we inhabit' (Conradson and Latham 2005:228). Smith and Ouarnizo's appeal that 'the image of transnational migrants as deterritorialized, free-floating people ... deserves closer scrutiny' (1998:II) applies as muchto transnationalelites as to those on grassroots level.(p 23)
Based on his work on mobile professionals within the European Union, Favell...finds that their lives are significantly affected by boundaries,for instance those determiningaccess to housing markets or education, health and pension systems. He argues that it is the 'sedimented structures of middle class social power that provide the most difficult obstacles to foreigners' transnational lifestyles' (Favell 2003:423). In a similar fashion, Willis, Yeoh and Fakhri observe that 'while the ease of mobility for these groups maybe greater than for their lower-skilled counterparts, they do not live in a "frictionless world" (2002:505). (p 23){{{2}}}
Meyerand Geschierein['s] observation that, given the interrelatedness of flows and boundaries, 'people's awareness of being involved in open-ended global flows seems to trigger ... determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries' (1999:2). Significantly, their speculation emphasises the active role of individuals in producing such boundaries.(p 23)
I suggest that expatriates could also be regarded as victims of boundaries, albeit of those which they themselves construct, maintain, and negotiate. The boundaries in question here are primarily those of race, nationality and gender.(p 24)
[Barthes (1969) proposes that boundaries themselves should be the site of investigation, rather than the 'cultural stuff' enclosed by them. I follow Barth in asking what kind of boundaries expatriates construct, and explore the spaces that are created through the drawing of such boundaries, without reifying the 'cultural stuff' that might be placed within.(p 24)
See Also
Favell's Games without Frontiers?.
