Transnational Ethnographies and Anthropological Imaginings of Migrancy

Abstract

Accounts of transnationalism are increasingly using ethnography to explore the nuanced details of everyday life in transnational contexts. An ethnographic focus arguably enables researchers to document the many ways in which migration, in association with processes of globalisation, transforms everyday life such that people might sustain connections across time and space in spite of their mobility. In this paper, I discuss some of the features of ethnographic methodologies and their application to understanding migrancy and the transnational. I point to an ongoing tension in ethnographic approaches: between a methodological focus on social relationships that are tied to particular places, and an anthropological assumption of the migrancy of the researcher. I use this tension to consider the extent to which understandings of the transnational might be an outcome of ethnographic research, or, rather, a lens through which ethnographers have come to see the world.

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