scholarly journals Fragmenting the Family? The Complexity of Household Migration Strategies in Post-apartheid South Africa

Author(s):  
Katharine Hall ◽  
Dorrit Posel

AbstractThe disruption of family life is one of the important legacies of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history. Families were undermined by deliberate strategies implemented through the pass laws, forced removals, urban housing policy, and the creation of homelands. Despite the removal of legal restrictions on permanent urban settlement and family co-residence for Africans, patterns of internal and oscillating labor migration have endured, dual or stretched households continue to link urban and rural nodes, children have remained less urbanized than adults, and many grow up without coresident parents. Although children are clearly affected by adult labor migration, they have tended to be ignored in the migration discourse. In this study, we add to the literature by showing how a child lens advances our understanding of the complexities of household arrangements and migration processes for families. In a mixed-methods study, we use nationally representative panel data to describe persistence, and also change, in migration patterns in South Africa when viewed from the perspective of children. We then draw on a detailed case study to explore what factors constrain or permit families to migrate together, or children to join adults at migration destination areas.

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-639
Author(s):  
Duduzile S. Ndlovu

Abstract:Migration debates tend to focus on the numbers of people moving, whether they are economic migrants or asylum seekers, deserving or not of protection. This categorization usually rests on national identity, necessitating simplified one-dimensional representations. Ndlovu uses a case study of Zimbabwean migrants memorializing Gukurahundi in Johannesburg to highlight the ways in which migration narratives can be more complex and how they may shift over time. She presents Gukurahundi and the formation of the MDC in Zimbabwe, along with xenophobic violence in South Africa, as examples of the ways that the meanings of national and ethnic identities are contested by the migrants and influenced by political events across time and space.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Parrish ◽  
Tim Colbourn ◽  
Paolo Lauriola ◽  
Giovanni Leonardi ◽  
Shakoor Hajat ◽  
...  

Both climate change and migration present key concerns for global health progress. Despite this, a transparent method for identifying and understanding the relationship between climate change, migration and other contextual factors remains a knowledge gap. Existing conceptual models are useful in understanding the complexities of climate migration, but provide varying degrees of applicability to quantitative studies, resulting in non-homogenous transferability of knowledge in this important area. This paper attempts to provide a critical review of climate migration literature, as well as presenting a new conceptual model for the identification of the drivers of migration in the context of climate change. It focuses on the interactions and the dynamics of drivers over time, space and society. Through systematic, pan-disciplinary and homogenous application of theory to different geographical contexts, we aim to improve understanding of the impacts of climate change on migration. A brief case study of Malawi is provided to demonstrate how this global conceptual model can be applied into local contextual scenarios. In doing so, we hope to provide insights that help in the more homogenous applications of conceptual frameworks for this area and more generally.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Flynn ◽  
Luc van Doorslaer

AbstractResearch in Translation Studies has witnessed an increased interest in translation phenomena in cities as well as in links between translation and migration. Although non-institutionalized translation is not at all new, contemporary migration realities offer opportunities for innovative research in this area. Outside more immediate immigration flows, many European cities have both longer and more recent histories of translational interaction between local populations and immigrants. This paper deals with non-professional translation among such groups both within and outside the family. To do so it presents the results of a case study on forms of non-professional translation in a social housing project in Ghent (Flanders, Belgium).The article focuses on such issues as the actors, circumstances, and the degrees of stereotyping and/or stigmatization involved in non-professional translation practices. The case study draws on qualitative and quantitative research that addresses the following questions:– Who translates and who has translated what and under which circumstances?– What is the exact position of translation, language and cultural transfer in the daily life of the residents of the block of flats in Ghent?– To which extent are these translational exchanges illustrative of contemporary life in our cities?


Author(s):  
Н. Мосиенко ◽  
N. Mosienko ◽  
А. Черепанова ◽  
A. Cherepanova

<p>Residents of monotowns face a specific range of problems affecting their social well-being. The purpose of the study was to identify and describe the types of life strategies of monotown residents with a focus on the place of residence and the location of the attractiveness of the urban environment and migration attitudes in them. The study employed a case-study strategy of an in-depth interview with residents of Sayansk, a monotown that displays risks of socio-economic deterioration. To describe the context, the authors used statistical data on the population and migration of the Sayansk population, as well as historical chronicle of the town. Based on two indications (perception of the quality of the urban environment and the migration attitudes), the authors have constructed a typology of life strategies and described the related characteristics of inhabitants. The study shows that the life strategies of the inhabitants reveal, on the one hand, a spectrum of migration patterns (depending on the characteristics of the inhabitants), and, on the other hand, various degrees of satisfaction with the quality of the urban environment, which makes the city attractive or unattractive in the eyes of the population.</p>


1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
BARRY STAPLETON

In recent years the analysis of individual communities in England has shed increasing light on their economic, social, demographic, cultural and religious development during the three centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporaneously, and to some extent resulting from these local studies, there has been a growing interest in the family and patterns of inheritance. Similarly, among social anthropologists there has been the development of the concept of ‘strategy’ with writings on marriage, fertility, inheritance and migration strategies, although these may be regarded as components of general family strategies. Whereas in some writings strategies are shown as being pursued by individuals for their own purposes, others focused on family strategies, particularly ones designed to keep a family landholding from being divided. However, whether these studies of social organization in continental Europe and Asia can be applied to the English experience remains to be seen. To begin with they are all concerned with peasant landholding and as such may not be appropriate to the English experience where the debate on whether a peasantry even existed was begun by Macfarlane's The origins of English individualism in 1978.Secondly, there is no universal agreement on what kind of strategies were being followed, either individualistic or familial. Thirdly, there remains the question as to whether the strategies were intentional and the outcome of rational decision-making, or subconscious and rooted in implicitly accepted and long-established principles. These could have been that a landholding should remain undivided, that men had primacy over women in inheritance, that primogeniture would be practised and that younger brothers would not challenge their eldest brother's inheritance. A refinement of these approaches has been the view that family strategies could be very different. Some may have wished to hold on to the family estate and pass it on to the next generation. Others wanted to enlarge it and may have needed to do so for familial reasons, and yet more families may have wanted to create an estate where none yet existed. But in all cases, it is stated, there were families consciously planning and pursuing a strategy for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, it is said that these strategies could only be pursued by families above the level of the poor and only became possible in western Europe in the sixteenth century as a result of changing attitudes and growing individualistic commercialism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Halil Can

Building on a long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research project, this article illustrates and interprets the transformation processes and empowerment strategies pursued by an originally Zazaki-speaking, multigenerational Alevi family in the Turkish-German transnational context. The family, which includes a number of Alevi priests (seyyid or dede), hails from the Dersim4 region of eastern Anatolia, and their family biography is closely bound up with a traumatic mass murder and crime against humanity that local people call “Dersim 38“ or “Tertele.“ Against the background of this tragedy, the family experienced internal migration (through forced remigration and settlement) thirty years before its labor migration to Germany. This family case study accordingly examines migration as a multi-faceted process with plural roots and routes. The migration of people from Turkey neither begins nor ends with labor migration to Germany. Instead, it involves the continuous, nonlinear, and multidirectional movement of human beings, despite national border regimes and politics. As a result, we can speak of migration processes that are at once voluntary and forced, internal and external, national and transnational. 5 In this particular case, the family members, even the pioneer generation labor migrants who have since become shuttle migrants, maintain close relationships with Dersim even as they spend most of their lives in a metropolitan German city. At the same time, they confront moments of everyday in- and exclusion in this transnational migration space that define them as both insiders and out- siders. Keeping these asymmetrical attributions in mind, I examine the family's sociocultural, religious, and political practices and resources from a transna- tional perspective, paying close attention to their conceptualization of identity and belonging as well as their empowerment strategies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62
Author(s):  
Kalyani Vartak ◽  
Chinmay Tumbe ◽  
Amita Bhide

This article examines a particular village—Kunkeri—in Konkan, Maharashtra, characterized by persistent mass outmigration for over five decades, by combining a field study in 2017 with detailed ethnographic and statistical baseline data collected by the Census of India in 1961 and 1987. It documents the increase in outmigration rates, catch-up in outmigration intensities by the lowest castes to those of the upper castes, diversification of household migration strategies and outmigrants’ occupations, the lessening of single-male migration strategies, the presence of a diasporic association and the growing significance of commuting and migration for education. Yet, despite mass outmigration and a general rise in the standard of living across castes, we observe strong continuity in the distribution of castes and land ownership structures within Kunkeri. These findings point to both the transformative and status-quo preserving features of persistent mass migration from rural India. JEL: O15, J61, N35


The Auk ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana C. Outlaw ◽  
Gary Voelker

Abstract The evolution of avian migration continues to be an intriguing research subject, even though relationships between migration and factors such as seasonality clearly exist. The question remains whether these relationships are evident within phylogenies containing both sedentary and migratory taxa. We explore the evolution of migration in the family Motacillidae by evaluating existing hypotheses for the evolution of migration in a comparative, phylogenetic framework at the interspecific level. Many hypotheses to explain the evolution of avian migration—such as the “evolutionary precursor” hypothesis (Levey and Stiles 1992, Chesser and Levey 1998) and the “stepping-stone” hypothesis (Cox 1968, 1985)—are based on New World migratory systems. The central components of these hypotheses should apply across biogeographic realms (i.e. the Old World), given that seasonality and habitat regimes are similar in the New and Old worlds. Using a molecular phylogeny containing most species in the Motacillidae, we investigated the potential interactions of seasonality and ecology with migratory and sedentary behavior. Our results suggest that habitat and migration are not correlated in the manner predicted by the evolutionary precursor hypothesis, but they also suggest the importance of increasing seasonality in explaining the patterns of the evolution of migration, an expected but previously unexamined evolutionary relationship. While understanding the limitations of applying generalizations to a complex evolutionary system such as migration, we have delineated here a broad methodology for testing hypotheses about the evolution of migration within a phylogenetic context. Pruebas Filogenéticas de Hipótesis sobre la Evolución de la Migración: Un Estudio de Caso en la Familia Motacillidae


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document