Global Asia, 4. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, in close collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); Chicago: University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2015. 201 pp. US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-8964-658-3.
Putting together an edited volume has many challenges, the biggest of which is the issue of thematic and substantive coherence. This edited volume by Baas meets this challenge very effectively as all the chapters are well crafted essays that provide a rich body of ethnographic and historical data to show the diversity and dynamics of the “irrational, illogical, or even bipolar” meanings (19) attributed to the decisions, intentions, and actions of “returning home.” It is particularly exciting and refreshing to see several authors address the issue of non-return or resistance to return—the Japanese-Americans in the early twentieth century (Kaibara), the overseas Vietnamese students in France during the Franco-colonial period (Nguyen), and the Filipina dependent students in Ireland (Nititham). The decision to move is no less important than the decisions to stay, but policy emphasis has disproportionately focused on people on the move, thus creating, in my opinion, a biased academic focus on mobility and an unspoken dismissal or neglect of immobility. In a similar vein but for different reasons, studies of entrepreneurship and business focus almost singularly on success rather than failure, yet there is much to learn from business failure.
Using a “migrant-centred approach,” this volume addresses the question of “what does ‘return’ mean to migrants?” (9). While the notion of “home” is not problematized explicitly as an objective of this project, the data contained in this volume speak loudly of the migrants’ expressed contested understanding of what constitutes “home” and the rejection of the idea that home always refers to a primordial cultural and territorial destination. The younger Nikkei-Brazilian’s idea of “onward migration” mentioned by von Baeyer (37) is a prime example of this discourse and understanding. In all, this edited volume is built on the social analysis of transmigration practices and/or discourses in eight studies involving anthropologists (Baas, Koh, von Baeyer), sociologists/urban studies/feminist studies (Anwar, Bhatt, Nititham), and historians (Kaibara, Nguyen). The disciplinary diversity nicely complements the regional diversity covered by these studies: Japanese-Brazilians in Japan and Brazil (von Baeyer), Indian students in Australia (Baas), Indian IT returnees and their family from Seattle (Bhatt), Filipina dependent students in Ireland (Nititham), Japanese-Americans in the U.S. in early twentieth century (Kaibara), second generation overseas Vietnamese returnees in Ho Chi Minh city (Koh), Vietnamese students in France in the early twentieth century (Nguyen), and Burmese-Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi illegal migrants in Pakistan (Anwar). With the exception of the three historical chapters by Kaibara, Koh and Nguyen, all the other chapters deal with contemporary situations and conditions.
A strength of this volume is the uniformly excellent job by each author in providing a full context of the many structural/historical legacies and conditions, social-cultural specificities, and other legacies that affect and are affected by the meanings and imaginings about mobility that is the subject focus. This holistic approach is indeed an important contribution of this book, because as Baas rightly points out, the notion of “return is imbued with meaning that goes well beyond what statistical models, structural approaches, or even a focus on the complexity of network can lay bare” (18). Human actions are always rooted in meanings and logics embedded in social and cultural contexts; our behaviour is an outcome of social construction that cannot be fully understood outside the personal and subjective. Yet it is imperative to avoid reducing our research focus and observation down to a single individual or a few individuals, thus removing our capability to answer broader questions about the human experience and the conditions of our existence. It is thus with a great deal of discomfort to note that several authors in this edited book referred to an extremely small sample of case studies for the evidence in their analysis: one Indian student out of a total of 120,490 in Australia (Baas, 42, 54), two young Filipina dependent students out of 20,000 in Ireland (Nitiham, 76), and four Indian female returnees from the United States in Bangalore among the many thousands of returnees in the IT sector in India (Bhatt, 60–61). While Bhatt and Nitiham mention that they spoke with many more people than the few case studies they included in their chapter, and I assume that Baas also had a larger number of case studies to draw from, it is still a concern that they chose to include only a very small number of case studies in their contribution to this volume. I thus recommend this book to any reader interested in the broader issue of transmigration with an emphasis on Asians and Asia, but readers are cautioned that some of the analyses presented in this volume should be considered exploratory in nature due to their limited body of evidence, and thus any conclusive statements or observations made in these chapters should best be viewed as tentative and preliminary.
Josephine Smart
University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
pp. 101-102