The Places We Share

Migration, Subjectivity, and Global Mobility

Edited by Susan Ossman

Not available to order

Publication date:

09 February 2007

Length of book:

240 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739158890

While some people study globalization, others live their lives as global experiments. This book brings together people who do both. The authors or subjects of these studies are of diverse national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. What they have in common is a connection to Morocco. It is from this shared space that they draw on personal stories, fieldwork, and literary and linguistic analysis to provide a critical, socially reflexive response to the conceptions of culture, identity, and mobility that animate debates on migration and cosmopolitanism. On the trail of the Bedouin or Europe's new nomads and of Zaccarias Moussaoui Places We Share explores the relationship of mobility to subjectivity, and how physically moving can be a way of escaping the stigma of being an immigrant. Reading Rushdie, listening to Moroccan women converse in the UAE, or examining how the experience of serial migration can shape comparative ethnography we become more aware of how moving pushes us up against the limits of global experience. These limits must be recognized. They can be positively embraced to develop new ways of conceiving of ourselves, the world and our connections to others.
Because of the thematic...emphasis on Morocco, this collection will be of particular interest to social scientists working in the region, but it also makes a strong contribution to anthropology, the literature on migration, and critical media studies. Scholars of religion will find useful the essays demonstrating the complex facets of religious and cultural identity. The nuanced way many of the authors critique the notion of cosmopolitanism through lived experience is refreshing, and the diverse perspectives highlight the complex social positions of serial migrants in a world where movement among multiple cultures does not imply rootlessness but rather complex attachments to space and place.