The condition of transnationality

Abstract

Anthropologists have always striven to understand the relationships between local and supra-local realities, the integration of smaller socio-political economic and cultural units into larger wholes, the creation of political and economic systems. In this paper, transnationalism is interpreted within the realm of debates on levels of integration, shrinking of the world and the creation of new realities that challenge existing forms of coping with life and inherited understandings within the social sciences. The discussion on transnationalism has frontiers and similarities with subjects such as globalization, world system and the international division of labor. But I argue that its own distinction lies in the fact that transnationality points to a central issue: the state/citizenship relationship, or to put it in a more abstract fashion, the relationship between territories and the different forms of socio-cultural and political arrangements that orient the way people represent their membership to a certain level of integration. The emergence of transnationalism is recent and it endangers the logics and effectiveness of the other pre-existing collective representations on socio-cultural and political membership. Although we may clearly speak of transnationalism, transnationality as such keeps in many regards potential and virtual characteristics. This is why I'd rather consider the condition(s) of transnationality and not its existence in itself. I will explore this subject by briefly presenting six clusters of conditions that are separable only for analytical and exposition purposes.