Land, Migration and Belonging

Land, Migration and Belonging
Author: Joseph Mujere
Publisher: Eastern Africa
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781847012166

A new history of the Basotho migrants in Zimbabwe that illuminates identity politics, African agency and the complexities of social integration in the colonial period. Tracing the history of the Basotho, a small mainly Christianised community of evangelists working for the Dutch Reformed Church, this book examines the challenges faced by minority ethnic groups in colonial Zimbabwe and how they tried to strike a balance between particularism and integration. Maintaining their own language and community farm, the Basotho used ownership of freehold land, religion and a shared history to sustain their identity. The author analyses the challenges they faced in purchasing land and in engaging with colonial administrators and missionaries, as well as the nature and impact of internal schisms within the community, and shows how their "unity in diversity"impacted on their struggles for belonging and shaped their lives. This detailed account of the experiences and strategies the Basotho deployed in interactions with the Dutch Reformed Church missionaries and colonial administrators as well as with their non-Sotho neighbours will contribute to wider debates about migration, identity and the politics of belonging, and to our understanding of African agency in the context of colonial and missionary encounters. Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa

Belonging in Oceania

Belonging in Oceania
Author: Elfriede Hermann
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782384162

Ethnographic case studies explore what it means to “belong” in Oceania, as contributors consider ongoing formations of place, self and community in connection with travelling, internal and international migration. The chapters apply the multi-dimensional concepts of movement, place-making and cultural identifications to explain contemporary life in Oceanic societies. The volume closes by suggesting that constructions of multiple belongings—and, with these, the relevant forms of mobility, place-making and identifications—are being recontextualized and modified by emerging discourses of climate change and sea-level rise.

Land and the Mortgage

Land and the Mortgage
Author: Daivi Rodima-Taylor
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1800733496

The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods. Combining findings from archives, printed records, and live ethnography, the book describes the changing and problematic assumptions surrounding mortgage. It shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.

Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa

Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa
Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253009579

Focusing on an area of the savannah in northern Ghana and southwestern Burkina Faso, Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa explores how rural populations have secured, contested, and negotiated access to land and how they have organized their communities despite being constantly on the move as farmers or migrant laborers. Carola Lentz seeks to understand how those who claim native status hold sway over others who are perceived to have come later. As conflicts over land, agriculture, and labor have multiplied in Africa, Lentz shows how politics and power play decisive roles in determining access to scarce resources and in changing notions of who belongs and who is a stranger.

The Perils of Belonging

The Perils of Belonging
Author: Peter Geschiere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226289664

Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands. In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the cold war fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows Geschiere to examine the emotional appeal of autochthony—as well as its dubious historical basis—and to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.

Beyond the Borderlands

Beyond the Borderlands
Author: Debra Lattanzi Shutika
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2011-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520950232

Over the last three decades, migration from Mexico to the United States has moved beyond the borderlands to diverse communities across the country, with the most striking transformations in American suburbs and small towns. This study explores the challenges encountered by Mexican families as they endeavor to find their place in the U.S. by focusing on Kennett Square, a small farming village in Pennsylvania known as the "Mushroom Capital of the World." In a highly readable account based on extensive fieldwork among Mexican migrants and their American neighbors, Debra Lattanzi Shutika explores the issues of belonging and displacement that are central concerns for residents in communities that have become new destinations for Mexican settlement. Beyond the Borderlands also completes the circle of migration by following migrant families as they return to their hometown in Mexico, providing an illuminating perspective of the tenuous lives of Mexicans residing in, but not fully part of, two worlds.

Landscape of Migration

Landscape of Migration
Author: Ben Nobbs-Thiessen
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1469656116

In the wake of a 1952 revolution, leaders of Bolivia's National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) embarked on a program of internal colonization known as the "March to the East." In an impoverished country dependent on highland mining, the MNR sought to convert the nation's vast "undeveloped" Amazonian frontier into farmland, hoping to achieve food security, territorial integrity, and demographic balance. To do so, they encouraged hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians to relocate from the "overcrowded" Andes to the tropical lowlands, but also welcomed surprising transnational migrant streams, including horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Mexico and displaced Okinawans from across the Pacific. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen details the multifaceted results of these migrations on the environment of the South American interior. As he reveals, one of the "migrants" with the greatest impact was the soybean, which Bolivia embraced as a profitable cash crop while eschewing earlier goals of food security, creating a new model for extractive export agriculture. Half a century of colonization would transform the small regional capital of Santa Cruz de la Sierra into Bolivia's largest city, and the diverging stories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants complicate our understandings of tradition, modernity, foreignness, and belonging in the heart of a rising agro-industrial empire.

Citizenship and Belonging

Citizenship and Belonging
Author: James Hampshire
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2005-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230510523

James Hampshire explores the politics of immigration in postwar Britain and shows how ideas of race, demography and belonging intertwined to shape immigration policy. It is the first book to explain immigration in terms of the politics of demographic governance - how states manage and regulate their populations - and provides a much needed historical context to current debates. In addition, the book develops new perspectives on the ways in which racialized ideas influenced politics and policy-making.

People of Ras Al Khaimah

People of Ras Al Khaimah
Author: Anna Zacharias
Publisher: Medina Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9781911487210

PEOPLE OF RAS AL KHAIMAH is an important book. This photography book documents the stories of the people who shaped Ras Al Khaimah's great economic, political and social transformation in the second half of the twentieth century. The accounts here show what this transformation meant in human terms. In their own words and accompanied by over 100 stunning photographs, it features more than 50 portraits and oral histories of the Emiratis and immigrants who call the Emirate home. They came together to create a warm and welcoming society in the open spaces in the north of the United Arab Emirates. Anna Zacharias and Jeff Topping spent three years talking to residents, teasing out their personal stories and photographing them at work and play in all their diverse backgrounds.

Migration, Belonging and the Nation State

Migration, Belonging and the Nation State
Author: Alperhan Babacan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443821020

The book questions how modern migration and globalisation have impacted upon notions of belonging and identity within nation-states across the world. This book provides theoretical and empirical accounts of the relationship between identity, rights nationalism, race and ethnicity. The authors cover the complexity of the topic as identification has become much more multifaceted. The authors cover difficult and cutting edge issues relating to citizenship, nation formation, identity, remittances, transnational families, migration and asylum in the context of Australia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. These critical issues inform and shape key policy and program responses of many governments and are subject of topic in international relations forums between nation states.