ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and Identitythe terms “immigrant” and “migrant”, the former denoting someonewho has come to stay, “having uprooted from their old society” and thelatter being “transients who have only come to work” (1994: 4).The nature of displacementAthough displacement is often seen as disruptive, uprooting anddecentralising, migration and movement are also attributed positivequalities of the modern human condition. Modern culture seems tobe practiced through wandering. The contemporary world is experiencedmore through oneself rather than a constant point of reference—the home. Indeed, displacement signals the loss of, rooted locality.However, creativity is seen to develop from crossing borders,hybridity, adapting, changing one’s identity and challenging one’s origins,be it willingly or not, as in the case of refugees and exiles. Constantsare formed, however. Olwig argues that the very detachmentsthemselves develop attachments; they are not flimsy but rather formnew loci (1997: 35). Without a more or less geographic point of referenceavailable, the displaced, moving and moved, develop individualsystems of reference.States of seeming volatility and movement become states ofstability by migrants developing or maintaining attachments to oneanother, and creating social networks that have a common base. Thiscan vary greatly from a personal or symbolic link to their country oforigin, to an arguably “imagined” community, linked by the Internet ormedia, to an organised community of migrants, brought together bycommon language, religion, and tradition (Anderson 2006; McDowell2005). Chambers writes:Migrancy, [..], involves a movement in which neither the pointsof departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls fora dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantlysubject to mutation (1993: 5).123