Transnational ethnification: Re-territorialized descent and rooted cosmopolitanism in immigrant identity strategies and practices

Abstract

The paradigm of transnationalism prevailing in current anthropological studies of international migration encourages other approaches applicable to address current global flows of human (dis)locations as well as re-territorializations. One of it – identity politics – as an analytical category, well elaborated by Friedman (2002, 2004), Glick-Schiller (2001, 2011), Vertovec (2009) from a migration perspective, is taken in this article as focal to understand migrant identity strategies and practices which draw on ethnic belonging.
It is argued that ethnic dimension is not only important to nation state as well as multicultural state ethnic policies but is crucial in immigrant politics of identity. Migration is associated with processes of ethnification where ‘territorial in-rootedness’ is maintained transnationally and re-territorialization of descent, heritage and homeland is enacted in transnational ethnification. Fieldwork research among East European and in particular Lithuanian immigrants in the USA is used to exemplify the configurations of current post-ethnic (Hollinger 1995) American ethnification which is quite often shaped as multiethnic bricolage and could be understood as rooted cosmopolitanism. It is believed that this is one of the  romising ways in approaching contemporary migrant identity fragmentation.