Samoan Transnationalism: Cultivating ‘Home’ and ‘Reach’

Abstract

Declaring the need to rethink conceptions of international migration, anthropologists Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc defined their understanding of transnationalism:We define 'transnationalism' as the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement.Immigrants who build such social fields are designated 'transmigrants.'Transmigrants develop and maintain multiple relations-familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political that span borders.Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, feel concerns, and develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously (1994, 1-2).Issues which have dotted the field in recent years include arguments about the intensity and relevance of transnationalism in certain migrant communities, the significance of investigating the logic of transnationality, and the methodologies to be employed in transnational studies.Transnationalism has not come without its critics.Much transnational scholarship in geography has focused on economic globalisation, particularly the growing international flows of commodities, services, money, and information of the last two or three decades.In analysing the effects of political forces at both international and national scales, numerous geographers have focused in particular on the contemporary geopolitics of the nation-state (Baia 1999;Mitchell 1997;Vertovec 1999).Advances in technology have facilitated globalisation processes and further enabled the presence of global restructuring.While this 'new vision' is welcome, analysis of the mobility of goods and services and the general capitalist expansion worldwide often relies on a homogeneous vision of global processes.As Mitchell points out:Assumptions and hegemonic narratives of modernity are assumed as standards-standards which are, of course, transformed in various ways upon contact with local regions, but which nevertheless contain a form and explanatory potential that is inviolate.The origin of these processes recedes from view, and their power and ability to expand and diffuse take on the characteristic of the self-evident (1997, 104).

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