Abstract
With this conclusive chapter, the multiple strands of analysis developed across the various chapters are rearticulated in an effort to frame some key remarks and notes for a research agenda on nation, kinship and migration. Focusing on the connection between national boundaries and identity, the analysis stresses the need to more systematically consider how and when categories of nationality may be effectively imposed among migrants and minorities as criteria of exclusion despite their incoherent and controversial character. At the same time, the chapter addresses the highly complex relationship between kinship and nation. This point highlights in particular the way national metaphors draw on the sphere of loyalty and recognition represented by kinship to accrue meaning and forge collective imaginaries. It therefore reveals how, in contemporary contexts, mobility engages the state-kinship relationship in an ever more pressing way, thereby invoking processes of classifying and certifying nation-state belonging. Lastly, exploring the nexus between nation, mobility and kinship, migrant agency is considered not as a simple act of resistance but rather as a complex articulation that emerges at the intersection of the state, the law, identity and intimacy.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109–137.
Alba, R. (2005). Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second generation assimilation and exclusion in France, Germany and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28, 20–49.
Amselle, J. L., & M’Bokolo, E. (Eds.). (1985). Au coeur de l’ethnie. Ethnie, tribalisme et État en Afrique. Paris: Èdition LaDécouverte & Syros.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, A. (1996a). The production of locality. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), Modernity at large: Cultural dimension of globalization (pp. 114–137). Minnepolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Appadurai, A. (1996b). Number in the colonial imagination. In A. Appadurai (Ed.), Modernity at large: Cultural dimension of globalization (pp. 178–199). Minnepolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Asad, T. (2004). Where are the margins of the State? In V. Das & D. Poole (Eds.), Anthropology in the margins of the State (pp. 279–288). Santa Fe: School for American Research Press.
Barth, F. (1969). Introduction. In F. Barth (Ed.), Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference (pp. 9–38). Boston: George Allen & Unwin.
Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Chakraborty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Das, V., & Poole, D. (Eds.). (2004). Anthropology in the margins of the State. Santa Fe: School for American Research Press.
Das, V., Kleinman, A., Ramphele, M., & Reynolds, P. (Eds.). (2000). Violence and subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Faubion, J. D. (2001). Toward an anthropology of the ethics of kinship. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), The ethics of kinship. Ethnographic inquiries (pp. 1–28). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herzfeld, M. (2005). Cultural intimacy. Social poetics in the nation-state. London: Routledge.
Lambek, M. (2013). Kinship, modernity and the immodern. In S. McKinnon & F. Cannell (Eds.), Vital relations: Modernity and the persistent life of kinship (pp. 241–260). Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Lamont, M. (1992). Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and American upper-middle class. Chicago: University Chicago Press.
Lamont, M., & Molnar, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195.
Lee, C. (2013). Fictive kinship. Family reunification and the meaning of race and Nation in American immigration. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.
Malkki, L. (1992). National geographic: The rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugee. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 24–44.
McKinnon, S., & Cannell, F. (Eds.). (2013). Vital relations: Modernity and the persistent life of kinship. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Nash, C. (2003). ‘They’re Family!’: Cultural geographies of relatedness in popular genealogy. In S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A. M. Fortier, & M. Sheller (Eds.), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration (pp. 179–203). New York: Berg Publishers.
Ortner, S. (2006). Anthropology and social theory. Culture, power and the acting subject. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sciortino, G. (2012). Ethnicity, race, nationhood, foreignness, and many other things: Prolegomena to a cultural sociology of difference-based interactions. In J. C. Alexander, R. Jacobs, & P. Smith (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of cultural sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tilly, C. (2005). Identities boundaries and social ties. Boulder: Paradigm Publisher.
Wimmer, A. (2013). Ethnic boundary making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Decimo, F., Gribaldo, A. (2017). Key Remarks and Research Notes on National Boundaries, Kinship and Migration. In: Decimo, F., Gribaldo, A. (eds) Boundaries within: Nation, Kinship and Identity among Migrants and Minorities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53331-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53331-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-53329-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-53331-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)