Suchergebnisse

The works under consideration in this essay all explore identities, relationships, and ways of life that have intersected, in one way or another, with Portugal's intertwined history of emigration, empire, and nation-making. Two of them—Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism, by Wenona Giles, and The Portuguese in Canada: From the Sea to the City, edited by Carlos Teixeira and Victor M.P. Da Rosa—focus on a relatively recent component of Portugal's diaspora. The other two—D'Albuquerque's Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement, by Margaret Sarkissian, and "Brazilians in Portugal, Portuguese in Brazil: Constructions of Sameness and Difference," by Bela Feldman-Bianco—explore contemporary manifestations of Portugal's history as a colonial power.

Many observers of the German scene have argued that the long-termnon-German resident populations have become de facto permanentmembers of German society. Beginning in the 1980s, the termHeimkehrillusion, the "illusion of returning home," gained prominencein accounts of the guest workers' trajectories, as many social scientistsand policy makers came to dismiss the continued assertions of somemigrant populations of their intention to eventually return "home."The increasingly accepted view was that "even though many [migrants]have the goal to return sometime, this goal becomes increasinglyunlikely the longer they stay in Germany. For many families who haveestablished themselves here, there are no possibilities left in the countryof origin" (Institute für Zukunftsforschung, 15). The evidence that"most of the 'guest-workers' would not return to their home countries"continues to be pointedly cited in more recent efforts to push the Germanstate into reforming citizenship laws and taking responsibility forthe multicultural reality of German society (Hagedorn 2000, 4). Thepermanence of the non-German population and their growing commitmentto life in Germany has, over the years, been the cornerstone ofprogressive arguments that non-German residents merit full membershipin the German polity and that notions of "Germanness" must bede-ethnicized and made more permeable. Explicit reference toHeimkehrillusion has largely dropped out of current discussions of citizenshipreform and forms of belonging, but the conclusion that all residentmigrants in Germany are unambiguously there to stay has cometo form the unquestioned basis of contemporary debate.

Movement, dislocation, and contingent, multilocal forms of belonging are increasingly prevalent and normalized ways of life. Ethnographers of transnationalism are documenting the various ways in which people connect the complex geographies of their lives and attempt to forge meaningful identities within multiple and protracted disjunctures. According to this literature, mobility, travel, transience, and liminality are the common themes of latetwentieth-century existence (Appadurai; Clifford; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, "New Migration"); the notion of "home" is increasingly uncoupled from the location of daily life (Amit-Talai; Berking; Goldring; Olwig; Rapport and Dawson, "Home"; Smith); and citizenship is not the only status through which people acquire social and political rights or national identities (Kearney; Soysal). Recent explorations of transnational migration have expanded traditional conceptualizations of the subject and site of anthropological research in order to capture the complex experiences of these on-going global interconnections (see, e.g., Rouse; Mountz and Wright). These efforts have successfully challenged assumptions that movement is unidirectional, that migration is a circumscribed and temporary event in individuals' lives, and that daily lives and imagined futures are always firmly anchored in a single location (see Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, Migration; Rapport and Dawson, Migrants).