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Transnational Migration and the Quest for Wellbeing

(please note: new title, the previous title was Diaspora and well-being)

Research seminar on Migration and wellbeing, with participation of Marita Easmond, Göteborg Universitet, Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, Lillehammer, Karsten Pærregaard, Mikkel Rytter and Henrik Vigh, Department of Anthropologi, University of Copenhagen, and more. The seminar takes place in English. 

Time and venue
October 26 at 13:00-17:45
CSS, Øster Farimagsgade 5
1353 København K
lokale 16.1.62 (see map)

Participation
Please contact Kirsten Gelting 

Paper presenters:

Henrik Vigh, University of Copenhagen - henrik.vigh@anthro.ku.dk
Marita Eastmond, University for Gothenborg - marita.eastmond@globalstudies.gu.se
Mikkel Rytter, Aarhus University - mikkel.rytter@hum.au.dk
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, University College of Lillehammer - anne.gronseth@hil.no
Karsten Paerregaard, University of Copenhagen - karsten.paerregaard@anthro.ku.dk

PROGRAMME

13.00-13.10 Welcome, by Anne Sigfried Grønseth and Mikkel Rytter
13.10-13.50 paper, Marita Eastmond
13.50-14.30 paper, Karsten Paerregaard

Break - 15 min.

14.45-15.25 paper, Anne SigfriedGrønseth
15.25-16.05 paper, HenrikVigh

Break - 15 min.

16.20-17.00 paper, Mikkel Rytter
17.00-17.15 ‘Wrap up' by Zachary Whyte
17.15-17.45 General discussion of Transnational Migration and Wellbeing

Abstracts

Marita Eastmond, Göteborg Universitet:

The Quest for "Normal Life": Bosnian Refugees and the Post-War Experience
The paper analyses how historically formed cultural understandings of welfare and wellbeing inform the struggle for ‘normal life' among Bosnians after the recent war, as means to organize experience and give direction towards a desired outcome. While focus will be on Bosnian refugees in Sweden and how they have addressed the challenges of rebuilding new lives in the context of the new country, the paper also notes the ways in which the quest for ‘normal life' takes on somewhat different meanings in the everyday post-war Bosnian context, as people there confront ‘social reconstruction'. Both processes inform transnational positions and negotiations. A related issue concerns the ‘politics of trauma', contrasting Bosnian refugees' emic understandings of the effects of social violence on health and wellbeing with those that have shaped both policy and practice in the reception of refugees.

Karsten Pærregaard, University of Copenhagen

From Well- to Hell-being: The Impact of Remittances on Migrants' Lives
International organizations and development planners often assume that migrant remittances are an untapped and unlimited resource to finance the development of their place of origin. Underlying this assumption of migration and development is a notion of migrants as being naturally attached to their home countries and therefore morally obliged to contribute to its economic progress. In this paper I take issue with conventional ideas of migrant remittances and critically discuss the implicit expectations they create to migrants as economic donors to their countries and regions of origin. The paper draws on field data gathered among Peruvian migrants in the United States, Spain, Italy, Japan, Argentina and Chile. My argument is that even though many migrants remit large amounts of money home they mostly do this because they are concerned with the wellbeing of feel the close relatives they left behind when they emigrated. I also argue that this commitment to support their families at home is a Janus-faced engagement that provides migrants with a strong sense of personal satisfaction but at the same time implies huge sacrifices. Thus, while remittances both contribute to the wellbeing of migrants' relatives at home and enhance their own sense of wellbeing they also curb their possibilities of pursuing other aims. Moreover, to many migrants remittances not only imply a constant economic drain in their modest income but also a difficult and often irreconcilable commitment to meet the many needs of their relatives, close as well as remote. Indeed, many migrants complain that their families often make unjustified claims on their money and have little understanding of the burdens their remittances imply. I therefore suggest that remittances have a high cost, economically as well as personally, for many migrants and that they sometimes significantly reduce their sense of wellbeing in the receiving society.

Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, University College of Lillehammer:

Becoming Migrant: Exploring wellbeing from an ethnographic view
This paper departs from a study of Tamil refugees' experiences of illness and wellbeing in Norway. As the Tamils are thorn out of traditional principals that regulate social and religious relations, they experience insecurity in relations and self-identity. While employing methods of participant observation with an emphasis on sharing experiences and engaging in everyday life it appeared how Tamils social life is practiced and shaped on the borders between a Tamil and Norwegian life-world. Exploring life on the borders, issues of continuity and change appear as vital for Tamils sense of wellbeing, joy and success. The Tamils, as migrants generally, carry with them fragments of the familiar while they simultaneously are confronted with a new and unknown life-world. Highlighting the migrant condition of living in-between as it is embodied and experienced by senses of self, emotion and consciousness in everyday life, this paper proposes to cast light on perceptions of wellbeing and pleasure as it relates to the human existential disposition of making sense of ones surrounding and achieving a life of ones own.

Henrik Vigh, University of Copenhagen:

"Here Nothing is Sweet": On distant delights and local misery
This paper explores how young Guinea-Bissauians imagine and position well-being in space and time. It illuminates the perceived illusive and distant nature of bemestar,well-being, seen from my informants' perspective, and connects this to imagined migration and migrant imaginaries. Taking its point of departure in fieldwork among would-be migrants in Bissau it sheds light on the way young men from Bissau position the decline and destruction that characterize their city in relation to the peace, prosperity and progress they see elsewhere. In doing so, it illuminates a world that appears characterized by very uneven levels of happiness and misery: a world that is divided into different zones of mastery over social, political and economic processes. Finally, the paper dwells on the consequences of this imagined global order and its effect on the acts and strategies of young migrants and traces the realization of their hopes for the good life into Europe.

Mikkel Rytter, Aarhus University

Quest-ioningWellbeing: Religious Restoration of Family Relatedness
In general Pakistani migrants in Denmark have achieved levels of social mobility, material belongings and economical prosperity that the first generation of labour migrants could only dream of before they left Pakistan in the 1960s. Still, their success has come at a price. Currently basic ideas of what it implies to be and do family are being renegotiated within local and transnational families. This paper will discuss how Danish-Pakistanis rely on the help and guidance of pirs, charismatic Islamic healers, in order to cope with afflictions of everyday life. The quest for wellbeing is not only related to the pains and suffering of ‘the individual body', but also to a large extent to ‘the social body' of family and kinship relations, and seems to outline a new kind of diffuse transnational engagement with the potential of reshaping notions of identity, belonging and connections between Pakistan and Denmark.