Cosmologies and migration: on worldviews and their influence on mobility and immobility

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the concept of ‘cosmologies of destinations’ is a useful theoretical tool to provide an emic understanding of the social and moral meanings of migrants’ journeys. By this concept, I refer to the hierarchical representations of the world that orient migration journeys. Drawing from my multi-sited ethnography with Eritreans at home and abroad, I illustrate how migration destinations were mapped by my informants along an implicit but widely shared normative and moral scale, with different levels of perceived safety, individual freedom, social recognition and economic achievements. After charting the theoretical field concerning social imaginaries and cultures of migration, I show the importance of symbolic and moral structures for understanding my informants’ mobility choices at different stages of their migration process. I conclude by highlighting the potential of this concept to study the interplay of mobility and immobility, particularly in the framework of increasing constraints.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmologies
• mobility and immobility
• moralities
• imaginaries
• culture of migration
• journeys

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The empirical material presented in this article has been developed in Belloni 2019a.

2. Destination, rather than present home, was what anchored her informants’ narratives and source of meaning. This is what she defines as ‘politics of destination’, a play on words inspired by Max Weber’s politics of predestination (Chu 2010, 12).

3. This does not mean that first world inhabitants would be praised in all aspects. At times, Europeans, for instance, were morally judged by my informants for their lack of care for the elderly, for the coldness or for their deviant sexual attitudes towards homosexuality.

4. Historically developed stereotypes towards Ethiopians have been discussed by Sorenson (1990) and Bereketeab (2010). Complex interethnic relations between Eritreans and Sudanese are described by Kibreab (1995) while looking at the specific challenges faced by Eritrean refugee women in Khartoum. The colonial legacy on categories of dirty/clean, developed/underdeveloped are examined by Marchetti (2014) in relation with labour relationships, and Treiber (2010) in relation with urban development in Asmara.

5. Pajo’s (2008) work on Albanian international migration analyses the resilience of imaginaries connected to migration in spite of the significant social demotion that Albanians face in Greece and Italy. He highlights the hierarchic aspects of their social imaginaries picturing Albania as the worst of possible worlds and other countries ordered along several lines such as freedom, development and work opportunities.

6. However, South Sudan has already lost its volatile popularity in the wake of independence due to the violence in many parts of the country.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flemish Research Foundation [ref. 12Z3719N].