Global pathways. Working class cosmopolitans and the creation of transnational ethnic worlds*

Abstract

The current interest in new diasporas and globalisation processes raises the question of what a transnational subjectivity might be like? What does it mean to be, in some sense or other, at home in the world? The present article responds to debates on cosmopolitans and transnationals, hybridity and globalisation through a consideration of the transnational world created by south Asian migrants. It argues that labour migration forges global pathways, routes along which people, goods, places and ideas travel. The need is, the article argues, to recognise the class dimensions of this movement and the significance of both strong and weak ties in determining emergent forms of cultural transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The ethnic and religious worlds discussed in the paper – of Pakistani Muslim religious sufis and working class Pakistani ‘cosmopolitans’ – cut across national boundaries and are centred beyond Europe. The global highways along which Pakistani labour migrants travel also carry goods, brides and tourists. Like the Melanesians of whom Strathern writes that they make places and sentiments ‘travel’, Pakistani migration involves the metonymic movement of ceremonial objects such as food, clothing, cosmetics and jewellery which personify moral ‘places’. And it is through these that new global ethnic social worlds are constituted. Global families and trans-national marriages reconfigure the local through global connections, while still being marked by economic class and status.