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When Marion Dakin died in 1974, a bundle of letters was found in her desk -- all in Swedish. Years before she died Marion had given her granddaughter "old family rings" to use for her wedding -- one came from Eric Helsten, or so she thought. Her grandfather Eric Helsten was a tanner who immigrated from Sweden in 1845, initially settling in Haviland Hollow NY and then in Gaylordsville CT. He married another immigrant, Mary Hearty, who came from Ireland in 1848. These letters are from Eric's mother and twelve siblings dating from 1845 until he died in 1903. This is the story of Eric and Mary's life, in the US with the accompanying story of life back home as told through these 86 letters and documents. Included are two chapters with genealogical information on Eric Helsten's maternal and paternal ancestors in Sweden -- including Swedish family names of Alfvars, Bouvin, Chevet, Dandanell, Dubois, Gilljam, Hellsten, Hultman, Krutmeijer, Martin, Österman, Pousette, Robbert, Tillman, Tussin.
Tracy Pintchman sheds light on the spiritual creativity and religious life of the Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan. Drawing on fifteen years of field research, Pintchman reveals how Karumariamman, the goddess honored by the temple, embodies the border-and-boundary-crossing dynamics of the lives of many of the congregants who worship at her temple, which in turn has become a site of religious innovation.
Rural areas are often viewed as isolated and stagnating areas and urban areas as their opposites. Against such a backdrop, this book seeks to unveil a set of dynamics that view rural areas as ‘translocal’ in the sense that they are ‘changing’ and ‘interconnected’. Social transformations take place in rural areas as the result of intense exchanges between different people, settings and geographies. Accordingly, rural-urban but also rural-rural interrelations on international and national scales are strongly contributing to rural change. Translocal ruralism is exemplified through the analysis of local and global migratory flows, the activities of rural firms in national and global ...
The words ‘precarity’ and ‘precariousness’ are widely used when discussing work, social conditions and experiences. However, there is no consensus on their meaning or how best to use them to explore social changes. This book shows how scholars have mapped out these notions, offering substantive analyses of issues such as the relationships between precariousness, debt, migration, health and workers’ mobilizations, and how these relationships have changed in the context of COVID-19. Bringing together an international group of authors from diverse fields, this book offers a distinctive critical perspective on the processes of precarization, focusing in particular on the European context. The Introduction, Chapters 3 and 8, and the Afterword are available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Contemporary immigration processes, such as forced migration and labour-induced mobility, as well as lifestyle and leisure-oriented movements, increasingly affect areas in Europe that are considered as peripheral or rural. This edited collection sheds light on the diversity of in-migration, its specific implications for development and strategies for coping. Contributions from various sub-disciplines of the social sciences, including human and cultural geography, sociology and spatial planning with different regional foci, encourage theoretical discussions, enhancing empirical knowledge and providing stimuli for practitioners involved in migration and development issues. The structure of the volume therefore follows four main themes: (1) conceptual reflections on immigration to peripheral rural areas and development prospects; (2) patterns and types of immigration processes, drawing on various case studies from all over Europe; (3) realms of integration: namely, housing, economy and social life; (4) immigration management with a special emphasis on regional and local strategies, undertaken by policy-makers, the private sector and civil society.
For most people, surfing is associated with Hawaii, California, and Australia – with sun, sand, and scantily-clad bodies. However, after the Second World War, surfing also found a more unlikely home: the north coast of Scotland. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first people to surf the Pentland Firth’s world-class waves braved brutal weather conditions, poor (or no) wetsuits, and baffled locals. Equally as unlikely as surfing’s presence on the north coast was its first permanent community, founded amongst workers at a nuclear research facility with a notoriously poor safety record. This book discusses the existence and evolution of surfing in the region, from the 1960s to the present day. It does not, however, focus just on surfing: it also acts as a history of the region itself, and examines the possibilities and limits of surfing, sport, and activities like them being used as a means of reinventing communities. This book is therefore a valuable tool for historians, sport practitioners, and economic policymakers alike: what can surfing tell us about the modern Highlands and Islands, and indeed contemporary Scotland?
Dipping in to the North explores how changing mobility and migration is affecting the social, economic, cultural, and environmental characteristics of sparsely populated areas of northern Sweden (and places like it). It examines who lives in, works in, and visits the north; how and why this has changed over time; and what those changes mean for how the north might develop in the future. The book draws upon deep expertise and knowledge from a range of social scientists, presenting valuable insights in an accessible style for a broad audience.
This book explores the phenomenon of familyhood across borders, examining the experience of translocal familyhood and the manner in which lifelines in and between countries are formed when individual family members spend long periods away from home. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it considers the emotions, social relations, materialities and discourses that occur within family lives between Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Russia and Sweden. With attention to the ways in which gender, generation, class and geography create and reinforce inequalities, strengths and vulnerabilities within and between families, it combines ethnographic, descriptive work with shorter photography-based chapters in order to allow textual and visual methods to complement one another. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology with interests in migration, transnationalism and the sociology of the family.
Migrant Emotions explores the interrelationships and tensions between mobility and immobility, emotions, affects and experiences, inclusion and exclusion, as well as narratives and representations in both local and global discourses. The overall objective of the volume is to underscore the significance of emotions in the analysis of mobile lives in the past and the current socio-political climate. The book provides a new framework that brings together the study of emotions and migration by focusing on the feelings or emotions of exclusion and inclusion through a range of theoretical lenses. Specifically, it offers a series of complex, interconnected studies on diverse experiences, responses,...
The Natural Border tells the recent history of Mediterranean rural capitalism from the perspective of marginalized Black African farm workers. Timothy Raeymaekers shows how in the context of global supply chains and repressive border regimes, agrarian production and reproduction are based on fundamental racial hierarchies. Taking the example of the tomato—a typical 'Made in Italy' commodity—Raeymaekers asks how political boundaries are drawn around the land and the labor needed for its production, what technologies of exclusion and inclusion enable capitalist operations to take place in the Mediterranean agrarian frontier, and which practices structure the allocation, use and commodification of land and labor across the tomato chain. While the mobile infrastructures that mobilize, channel, commodify and segregate labor play a central role in the 'naturalization' of racial segregation, they are also terrains of contestation and power—and thus, as The Natural Border demonstrates, reflect the tense socio-ecological transformation the Mediterranean border space is going through today.