Guest editorial

Environment and Planning A 2006, volume 38, pages 805 ^ 808

DOI:10.1068/a37212

Guest editorial

Transnational geographies: rescaling development, migration, and religion The ideas for this themed issue emerged from a series of paper sessions on the politics and geographies of transnationalism presented at the 2004 meetings of the Association of American Geographers.(1) Papers in the sessions provided critical examinations of the concept of transnationalism through research substantively focused on the grounded practices that connect uneven development to migration and religion across national borders. The paper sessions were followed by a lively roundtable in which participants debated the value of particular definitions of transnationalism, the methodological challenges associated with studying transnational processes, and whether and to what extent these processes can still be understood through the lenses of classical spatial metaphors. The papers built upon the well-established insight that transnational subjects, wherever they may be located geographically, are powerfully and distinctively constrained in their capacity to navigate borders creatively and engage hybrid identities (Mitchell, 1997). The `transnational', while not evacuated of agency, was understood to be subject to a range of violences, including the geographic imaginaries of powerful religious organizations, state policies and nationalist agendas, the deprivations of poverty, dislocations of war, and the historical ^ structural constraints of colonial administrations and neoimperial regimes (Harvey, 2003; Sparke, 2004; Yeoh, 2003). Rather than analytically subsuming `culture' under the structures of global neoliberal capitalism, the study of transnationalism has emphasized the cultural, social, and economic linkages that exist across the boundaries of nations, and the ways in which national spaces are sustained and reworked through the everyday activities of people and communities (Lowe and Lloyd, 1997). Networks have been a central thematic for understanding the quotidian processes that make up transnationalism `from below' (Portes, 1997; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998). Anthropologists Aihwa Ong (1999) and Arjun Appadurai (1996), among many others, have developed transnational approaches that move beyond vulgar nationalist frameworks to examine the dynamism and processual nature of subjectification and place making. Transnational frameworks have provided a broad, flexible conceptual apparatus that has been adopted across disciplines to examine the interconnections between global economic restructuring, the politics and cultures of diasporas, ethnicity and race, class, community, gender, and the nation (Mitchell, 2003; Pratt and Yeoh, 2003). The focus of much research on `transnationality', according to Katharyne Mitchell (2003, page 74), is ``on relations between things and on movements across things.'' Such an emphasis on border crossings, and specifically movements and connections that occur across national borders, ``forces a reconceptualization of core beliefs in migration and geopolitical literatures ..., a rethinking of economic categories ... , [and] a rethinking in broader areas of epistemological inquiry.'' Following her lead, the papers seek to push forward various aspects of these reconceptualizations, and thereby expand (1) The paper sessions were organized by Sarah Radcliffe (Geography, University of Cambridge), Rachel Silvey (Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder), and Elizabeth Olson (Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder). Papers sessions were divided according to three primary substantive areas, specifically: development (Sarah Radcliffe, Giles Mohan, Anthony Bebbington, and Andres Vallejo), migration (James Tyner, Emily Yeh, Brad Jokisch, Alexander Diener, Philip Kelly as discussant), and religion (Elizabeth Olson, Gregory Knapp).

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Portes et al's (1999) delimitation of transnationalism as the dense, on-going networks linking immigrants across two nations. We define transnationalism as the accelerated exchange across national borders of information, labor, `culture', and capital by nonstate actors in ways that challenge, rework, and/or reinforce those borders and their relationships to states. We recognize that with this relatively expansive definition, we run the risk of undoing the intellectual order that Portes et al (1999) sought to bring to the field. However, we argue that expanding this definition can, paradoxically perhaps, contribute greater interpretive power and coherence to geographic understandings of transnationality. The papers presented here expose the operation of relationships between processes and institutions that might at first seem separate, but are in fact linked in complex ways to the histories and geographies of nation building and to the reorganization of relationships between nations and states. The papers in this collection reflect each author's (or two coauthors') central topical interest in either development, migration, or religion, but they also place analytical emphasis on the productive tensions and synergies that lie at the crossroads of these foci. We argue that these relationships between development, religion, and migration are critical for understanding the ways in which various forms of power and meaning travel and are embedded in place in the contemporary global neoliberal order. Our aim is to ``begin to uncover the embedded activities and ramifications of transnational movements in specific, contextually grounded sites'' (Mitchell, 2003, page 84). In bringing these concerns together we seek to respond to Mitchell's call for transnational studies to ``cast a wider net in order to capture the nuanced cultural changes associated with the new networks.'' Combining these studies in one journal issue will, we hope, bring into focus specific mutual constitutions of transnational migration networks, religious organizations, and economic development processes. There are three common themes that run through the analyses. First, each of these essays places importance on institutions, including explicit attention to development organizations, organized religious bodies, and government agencies. The papers ask how specific institutions are implicated in the construction of particular transnational processes and, in turn, how transnational dynamics may influence both `traditional' institutions and the ways in which we understand them. By focusing on the practices of institutions, the papers provide a response to the now almost axiomatic criticism that much research on transnationalism, particularly within cultural studies, is too abstract (Ong and Nonini, 1997). By contrast, the authors here pay close attention to the historical and geographic specificity of the institutions they examine, and they ground their observations in the context of material political ^ economic processes (Crang et al, 2000). Specific institutions, including colonial and nongovernmental organization networks in development (Bebbington and Kothari) and state regulatory agents controlling religious broadcasting in Singapore (Kong), serve as key entry points for examining transnationalism. In his paper on development and diaspora, Giles Mohan analyzes the institutions of the `home' and the state to specify the ways in which social obligations operate across national spaces among Ghanaians in the diaspora. His fieldwork, carried out in both the United Kingdom and Ghana, explores what he terms the `moral community' of Ghanaians in the United Kingdom and `at home'. He illustrates the ways in which institutional pressures on migrants are mediated through shifting scales of meaning and affiliation. With similar attention to the role of institutions in rescaling processes, Elizabeth Olson focuses on Catholic and Evangelical religious institutions and their associated development practices in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The two churches intervene in very different ways in rural development,

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and local people tend to understand these differences as representative of broader divergences between the two religions. The outcome, Olson suggests, is the mapping of distinct `transnational' religions onto `local' development processes in these rural communities. Attention to these different religious institutions then provides a mesolevel lens through which, again, to analyze the changing relationships between various scales of cultural and economic practice. A second theme, closely related to the first, is the interest we share in understanding the differences and specificities within and across groups of transnational subjects. The papers all work to decenter homogenizing assumptions about community, whether these be imagined `transnational immigrant communities' (Yeh and Lama; Kelly and Lusis) or disembodied, frictionless global religious brotherhoods (Kong). In the cases presented here, we witness transnational flows altering social boundaries around `communities' while simultaneously reinforcing existing hierarchies and disparities. Emily Yeh and Kunga Lama explore the social and cultural differences that exist within the US Tibetan community. By focusing on the opposing influences of `white' sponsorship and hip-hop culture, Yeh and Lama examine the racialized politics of the Tibetan diaspora. In reference to Ong's (2003) classification of Asian migrants, the authors suggest that the multiple identities and positions of Tibetan migrants situate them in a unique economic and social position relative to other migrants, and with multiple contradictions within their own community. Lily Kong also examines questions of community as they relate to transnationalism. In her study of religious broadcasting in Singapore, she argues that technology cannot be assumed to contribute to a transnational Islamic community. Rather, Islamic broadcasting provides a space for national intervention in religious transnationalism, and the subsequent forms that transnationalism takes emerge in complex and nonlinear relation to nationalism. Kong's analysis also highlights a point that is echoed throughout the collection and has become a hallmark of geographic interventions in globalization research (for example, Cox, 1997). That is, place and place-based notions of community have not been made obsolete in the face of transnationalism. To the contrary, transnational processes continue to be rooted in local contexts. A third theme, one which is made more explicit in some papers than others, is the need to develop innovative methodologies to capture the complexity of transnational processes. The study of transnationalism necessitates approaches that allow information to be collected about flows and exchanges across places without sacrificing either the vital details or the broader structural picture. Thus, none of these studies is framed in a classical geographic research `fieldsite'. Philip Kelly and Tom Lusis contribute to methodological debates about transnationalism. They argue that Filipino-Canadian immigrants' transnational linkages supersede the scales at which they tend to be studied, and that Bourdieu's concept of habitus can assist with linking the critical scales of analysis. Kelly and Lusis emphasize that attention to the flows of a variety of capitals (social, economic, and cultural) uncovers the complex ways that habitus is scripted and modified through relationships tying Filipinos in the Philippines to those in Canada. Anthony Bebbington and Uma Kothari also develop methodological and analytical tools for the study of transnationalism. Specifically, they explore the potential of combining two methods for conducting institutional ethnographies, and they employ their methods in an analysis of different development agents. First, they provide an interpretation of the life histories of British colonial officers, which they use to examine the continuities between colonial and postcolonial British administrative rule and the establishment of contemporary overseas development agencies. The life histories expose the racism and classism produced among the colonial officers, and they

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illustrate the foundational nature of these subjectivities for postcolonial development institutions. Second, to complement the depth of the life histories, the authors discuss a multisited, qualitative network analysis. They employ this `thinner' comparative approach to understand the relationships between Dutch and South American nongovernmental organizations, and they reveal the ways in which path dependencies of aid chains reproduce the uneven development rooted in colonial historical geographies. Blended together, these two approaches, and the combination of the two research projects, contribute to understanding how uneven geographies of development are produced through interlinked histories of institutional practice and subjectivity formation. As a collection, the papers are aimed at continuing the discussion of specifically geographic contributions that can be made to research on transnationalism. The papers represent grounded, relational analyses of transnational practices and institutions, as these are embedded in particular networks and places, and as they operate to entrench the unevenness that characterizes the contemporary global neoliberal order. Elizabeth Olson, Lancaster University Rachel Silvey, University of Colorado References Appadurai A, 1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) Cox K, (Ed.), 1997 Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (Guilford Press, London) Crang P, Dwyer C, Jackson P, 2003, ``Transnationalism and the spaces of commodity culture'' Progress in Human Geography 27 438 ^ 456 Harvey D, 2003 The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Lowe L, Lloyd D, 1997,``Introduction'', in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital Eds L Lowe, D Lloyd (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) pp 1 ^ 32 Mitchell K, 1997, ``Transnational discourse: bringing geography back in'' Antipode 29 101 ^ 114 Mitchell K, 2003, ``Cultural geographies of transnationality'', in Handbook of Cultural Geography Eds K Anderson, M Domosh, S Pile, N Thrift (Sage, London) pp 74 ^ 87 Ong A, 1999 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, Durham, NC) Ong A, 2003 Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA) Ong A, Nonini D (Eds), 1997 Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (Routledge, New York) Portes A, 1997, ``Immigration theory for a new century: some problems and opportunities'' International Migration Review 31 799 ^ 825 Portes A, Guarnizo L, Landolt P, 1999, ``Introduction: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field'' Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 217 ^ 237 Pratt G, Yeoh B, 2003, ``Transnational (counter) topographies'' Gender, Place and Culture 10 159 ^ 166 Smith M, Guarnizo L, 1998 Transnationalism from Below (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ) Sparke M, 2004, ``Political geographies of globalization (1): dominance'' Progress in Human Geography 28(3) Yeoh B, 2003,``Postcolonial geographies of place and migration'', in Handbook of Cultural Geography Eds K Anderson, M Domosh, S Pile, N Thrift (Sage, London) pp 369 ^ 380

ß 2006 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain