On the Cross-Cultural Study of Circulation

Abstract

Among the greatest faults of which we are guilty in migration research is being locked into the same kinds of questions related to the same concepts of migration that were developed years ago for a particular setting at a particular time (Goldstein 1976:428). Internal migration, conventionally defined, involves a shift in perma? nent residence from one place to another. The qualifying adjectives used by scholars from many disciplines indicate that movements of moderately long duration do not necessarily eliminate an eventual, and equally 'permanent' return to the original place. Thus the notion of 'return migration' is basic to formal demography (e.g. Feindt and Browning, 1972); the economist Walter Elkan (1967) uses 'circular migration' to describe wage-labor movements in East Africa; and Breese (1966:83), a sociologist focusing upon Third World urbanization, speaks of 'floating migration'. Pierre George, the French geographer, finds the fluidity of wage-labor mobility in West Africa to be so persistent that he dispenses with both the term migration and its several adjectives in favor of one evocative word?turbulence (George 1959:200). One clear implication of all these terms and distinctions is that the concept of internal migration only faintly captures the full meaning of territorial mobility. Many movements involve the interchange of people between points of origin and destination, such as villages and towns, both individually and in small groups. All of the movements, however, have in common the characteristic that they begin and ultimately terminate in the same community and consequently involve no change in permanent place of residence. Being repetitive and perhaps cyclic, such movements have been termed circulation by both the anthropologist J. Clyde Mitchell (1961) and the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky (1971). For the people in-