Taking Transnationalism Seriously: On Methodological Renewal in Anthropological Studies of Migrations

Abstract

The first part of the article reconstructs the international academic debate on the concept of transnationalism, conducted from the early 1990s to the 2010s. I focus on the theoretical vulnerabilities of this concept and question the critics’ claim that the term transnationalism does not refer to a new subject, but rather to a new perspective on an already existing subject. The second part is a reflection on the recently published collective work that makes the first systematic attempt to apply the instruments of transnationalism to research on post-Soviet migrations and, in particular, migrations from Central Asia to Russia. The main advantage of this work, as I argue, is that it enables scholars to analyze the social changes related to migrations without resorting to the usual theoretical framework – namely, to the concept of “integration”. As for the theoretical deficiencies of this work, they result, in my view, from insufficient reflection on the specifics of the post-Soviet case.