Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Migration Studies and Colonialism - Lucy Mayblin страница 13

Название: Migration Studies and Colonialism

Автор: Lucy Mayblin

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Социология

Серия:

isbn: 9781509542956

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      Finally, the conclusion brings the key themes and threads together and calls again for readers to appreciate the urgency with which migration studies scholars need to engage with the history and ongoing structures of colonialism.

      Introduction

      This chapter discusses a central concern for scholars working with postcolonial and decolonial theory: modernity. These debates are vital for centring colonialism in migration studies. The idea that some parts of the world became modern through, inter alia, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and beyond, and that others did not, is fundamental to much social scientific enquiry (Bhambra 2007). Some of the key features of modernity are scientific progress, democracy, human rights and capitalism. Where these features are absent, it is often suggested that they must be promoted in order that societies who are ‘behind’ might ‘catch up’. This distinction between the ‘modern’ world and the ‘traditional’ world endures today in distinctions between developed and developing countries. It has also structured the academic division of labour in terms of the legitimate objects of study, and particularly the legitimate societies for different types of enquiry. Sociology, for example, tends to focus on ‘modern’ societies such as France or Australia, countries which are not within the purview of development studies. In turn, this framing then has significant implications for how migration is researched and understood in, and between, different parts of the world.

      The penultimate section discusses a specific idea, that of ‘development’, and how ideas of development follow colonial ways of understanding the world. The final section asks whether Eurocentrism can be overcome since, as Walter Mignolo argues, we are all trapped in the colonial matrix of power. We present some perspectives that have sought to overcome or think from the borders of modern/colonial thinking as indications that this work is indeed being done already. As a whole, these discussions lay the groundwork for much of what follows in the book and as such the discussions follow through and are elaborated through the subsequent chapters.

      Colonial expansion led to the proliferation of forms of knowledge for making sense of the world, as well as ways of organizing this knowledge (Mignolo 2005). As the social sciences developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the divisions between the disciplines often followed colonial modes of thinking about the world in relation to ‘modern’ societies and, conversely, ‘traditional’ societies. For example, sociology historically (and to a large extent contemporaneously) dealt with ‘modern’ societies and the conditions of living in modernity (Bhambra 2007), while anthropology and human geography dealt with ‘traditional’ societies and ‘primitive’ peoples (Asad 1979; Deloria 1988). Disciplines such as political science and economics started from the position of understanding politics as a western phenomenon (usually originating in ancient Greece), or the capitalist economy as a product of modernity, and later expanded out from this geographical starting point (Hay 2002; Marx 1990 [1887]; Skinner 1979; Waltz 1959; for debates on this in international politics, see Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015; Hobson 2004). Modernity, then, has both explicitly preoccupied many social scientists and implicitly provided the underlying framework from which the world today is understood. That is, as comprised of, for example modern and traditional, developed and developing, societies. For migration studies, this dichotomous way of construing the world, distinguishing between developed and developing countries, or more recently the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’, has been the central assumption upon which all else rests.