The ‘native’s point of view’ in the anthropology of migration

Abstract

Under contemporary conditions of “globalization, ” any anthropology of migration must confront the seeming paradox that our “globalized” era is profoundly marked by a proliferation of new (historically-specific) formations of the cultural politics of nativism (or what may be otherwise depicted in terms of “autocthony,” or “xenophobia”). Notably, during this same period, we have likewise witnessed the ascendancy of a reanimated anthropological dogma of cultural essentialism, in the guise of (pseudo-) “ontological” notions of irreducible and essentially incommensurable “difference.” This article examines the implications for an anthropology of migration that contemplates seriously the implications of the affinities between the sort of disciplinary nativism that derives from the pluralist commitments of cultural essentialism with the anti-immigrant politics of nativism that has become a defining and increasingly pervasive feature of our global political present.