1 Migration, Transnationalism, and Cultural Change

Understanding migration

Migration describes movement away from a person’s usual place of residence, either within a country or across an international border. It may be temporary or long-term, voluntary or forced, and shaped by multiple motives. These categories describe different aspects of movement and can overlap; for example, someone may move internationally for work while facing pressures that limit their choices.

Terminology can vary across legal, policy, and research settings. A study should therefore state how it uses its terms.

Cross-border ties and cultural change

Transnationalism describes social processes and connections that cross national borders. Migrants and their families may sustain relationships across countries through communication, travel, care, religious or cultural activities, political engagement, and exchanges of money or knowledge. These relationships and practices can form transnational social fields linking places of origin and destination.

The frequency and importance of transnational ties vary. Migration does not necessarily make every migrant strongly transnational.

Cultural transformation refers to change in shared meanings and practices, including language use, foodways, music, religious life, identities, family expectations, and ideas about belonging. Migrants, their descendants, and communities in both receiving and origin settings may participate in these changes. Cultural change can involve retaining traditions, adopting practices in a new setting, combining influences into new forms, or challenging existing norms; it is not necessarily one-way or uniform.

How mobility can reshape culture

Migration brings people into new social settings, but it does not simply sever their previous relationships. Cross-border connections can carry ideas, practices, resources, and identities between places. Alongside everyday interaction in destination communities, these exchanges can reshape culture in both settings. Migration can therefore be studied as a process connecting mobility, cross-border relationships, and social change, rather than only as movement from one national container to another.

For example, a migrant living abroad might send money to relatives, join family celebrations by video, and visit when possible. Family members may use the resources and exchanges to maintain or adapt traditions, while the migrant learns local practices and forms new relationships in the destination. Over time, relatives and communities in both places may influence one another. This illustrates possible connections, not a pattern shared by every migrant.

Concepts for analyzing change

Several concepts help describe different aspects of cultural change and belonging:

• Diaspora refers to communities formed through migration and its histories, often with shared identities or continuing relationships with places of origin. Diasporas are diverse; members may disagree about identity, belonging, or ties to a homeland.

• Assimilation and integration describe different ways of thinking about participation and change. Assimilation commonly involves increasing adoption of practices associated with a receiving society, sometimes alongside reduced use of heritage practices. Integration is often framed as participation and mutual adaptation between migrants and receiving communities. Neither process has a single presumed path or timetable.

• Cultural persistence, exchange, and recombination describe how people may maintain practices, adapt them to new circumstances, exchange influences, or create new forms. These processes can occur together.

• Power and inequality matter because access to resources, recognition, and decision-making is unequal. Analysis can ask whose practices are treated as legitimate or mainstream, who is expected to adapt, and who benefits from cultural exchange.

• Methodological nationalism is the tendency to treat the nation-state as the natural boundary for social analysis. A transnational perspective asks whether families, networks, and practices extend beyond one national frame.

Approaches to research

A useful study specifies what changes, for whom, where, and over what period. It can then combine approaches suited to different dimensions of the process.

1. Follow connections across places. Map relationships, communications, travel, and exchanges among people and institutions in origin, destination, and, where relevant, transit locations.

2. Study everyday practice. Interviews, observation, and life histories can show how people understand belonging and maintain or adapt practices in daily life.

3. Compare perspectives and locations. Research in more than one community can reveal how a practice or relationship is understood differently across settings.

4. Track change over time. Generational comparison or repeated interviews can help distinguish short-term adjustment from longer-term transformation.

5. Examine institutions and power. Laws, schools, workplaces, media, religious organizations, and community groups can shape who interacts, which practices circulate, and how cultural difference is recognized.

No single approach captures every dimension. Analysis should not treat cultures as internally uniform or assume that national borders neatly contain cultural life. Cross-border and local processes interact: transnational ties matter, as do neighborhood relationships, institutions, and unequal conditions in each place.

Connecting the concepts

Migration is movement within or across borders; transnationalism describes continuing social connections across them; and cultural transformation refers to change in shared meanings and practices. Studying their relationship means tracing how people, networks, and institutions connect places and shape change over time. Strong analyses recognize two-way influence, diverse experiences, and the role of power, without assuming that all migrants maintain the same ties or follow the same cultural path.