International migration is a global phenomenon that is growing in scope, complexity, and impact. According to UNHCR, the number of displaced people, 65 million, or 1 out of every 113 people on Earth, is at its highest ever, surpassing even post-World War II numbers (Ramsay, 2018). An estimated 258 million people, or 3.7% of the world’s inhabitants, now live in a country other than their country of birth. At the same time, various groups of people are expressing their identities in nationalist terms; ethnic and racial tensions are on the rise. How anthropologists research and explain, these simultaneous trends have changed over the decades. This paper is a short account of the tools, and theories anthropologists have used over the years.
In the 1990s, the most prescient method was used by anthropologists multi-sited ethnography. In other words, the researchers followed and stayed with the people in their migrations. According to Marcus (1995), migration studies were the most popular genre for their use of multi-sited ethnography. Sometimes, it is not about following an entire group as they disperse with time but tracking them and studying their history. Pajo (2008) writes about Lumturi, who, for 18 years, was a literature teacher at a prestigious high school in Durres. However, while displaced, Lumturi has occupied over fifty different menial jobs form domestic cleaner to a hotel maid and kitchen help.
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By following the lives of the immigrants, anthropologists not only get to explain and account for the large-scale observable patterns. Anthropologists also gain insight into largely ignored topics like the misery of the immigrants (Pajo, 2008) or how they live like second class citizens. Sometimes, however, anthropologists do not get to initiate the research but respond to outside forces of renderings of matters relating to migrations and anthropology in general. For instance, the recent trends in displacement and popular discourse created a contemporary experience where it ceased to be an exceptional occurrence and became a guaranteed fact of daily life (Ramsay, 2019).
Displacement, however, has come to be presented in public and research as a crisis. This started with the mass refugee influx into Europe from 2015 and garnered public and political attention. However, by equating displacement with crisis, the language of anthropological research being published changed, the topics pursued by graduate students, and university syllabi. Of special significance, however, is the availability of funding for research projects (Ramsay, 2019). This view by Ramsay (2019) is important as it shifts the narrative from the methodologies used by researchers to research and explain emerging and contemporary trends to whether such discourses appeal to anthropological inquiry.
By critiquing the contemporary narrative of displacement and its synonymity with crisis, Cabot (2016) points out and warns about the older anthropological critique about the problem of bounded categories that reinforce categorization rather than contest them. For instance, by continuing to reinforce the difference between immigrants and natives through the temporality of displacement, anthropologists create a theoretical perpetual state of crisis and indefinite indeterminacy that the immigrants cannot escape. The temporality of displacement is not confined to immigrants, however, according to Ramsay (2019). Research by Bear (2016) has shown, using precarity and austerity, that the temporality of uncertainty is the modus operandi for most people across the globe, both natives and immigrants.
In conclusion, this paper has given a short description on how anthropologists research and explain the recent and simultaneous trends has varied over the years. Such work has also become more nuanced, evidenced from the research and discoveries on the temporality of displacement and the anthropologist’s role in shaping or reinforcing the popular narrative.
References
Bear, L. (2016). Time as technique. Annual Review of Anthropology , 45 , 487-502.
Cabot, H. (2016). Crisis, hot spots, and paper pushers: A reflection on asylum in Greece.
Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual review of anthropology , 24 (1), 95-117.
Pajo, E. (2007). International migration, social demotion, and imagined advancement: An ethnography of socioglobal mobility . Springer Science & Business Media.
Ramsay, G. (2019). Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object. Anthropological Theory , 1463499619840464.
