Rethinking Community in Migration Studies: Lessons from Transnational Families for Rethinking the Relationship of ‘Community’ and ‘Society’

Abstract

This chapter explores the concept of community in relation to the notion of society, using the example of transmigrant families. Although migratory processes have always shaped societies, the scope of migration across national borders has gained a new dimension within the past decades. By constituting and maintaining transnational communities, migrants do not only accommodate to their host societies and create new symbolic spaces of attachment, but they also challenge nationally connoted notions of social belonging and societal borders. This gives rise to a number of questions, such as: When migratory trajectories create interconnections across borders, then to whom does ‘we’ refer in our contemporary, globally connected society? How does belonging relate to participation, depending on whether a collective understands itself as a community or a society? And, how do migrants organise their (transnational) lives spatially? Drawing on perspectives from classical sociology, critical migration research, and transnational studies, this chapter first sketches the history of the term ‘community’ in migration studies. Using the example of the transmigrant family, it second discusses the relationship between belonging and participating in the world society and the spatial constitution of transmigrant family life. In doing so, the authors evaluate the meaning of space in relation to place for maintaining a community.