Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging

Through a series of case studies from Southern and Eastern Africa, Oceania, and Europe, Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging explores the analytical usefulness of the concept of «mobility» for anthropological thought and theorization.

The book scrutinizes mobility through long-term ethnographies that encompass life histories of individual persons, cyclical household developments, and the evolution of communities and networks. It shows how the social and spatial complexity of mobility increases with time and how socio-political and economic changes affect values, ideas, and practices in local life-worlds.

The case studies examines mobility from below and as processes constitutive of society and identity – processes through which mobility is perceived and experienced as part of life. How do people see their own local life-world and its (un)connectedness to other societies? To what extent can a mobility approach advance our understanding of the complex relationship between migratory practices, experiences of belonging, and the kinds of movement and connectivity that make and re-make people as well as their societies?

Movement and Connectivity: Configurations of Belonging re-questions and re-thinks relationships between space, time, and livelihoods and explores how differently motivated geographical movements may be perceived and lived as part of wider social complexities.

Jan Ketil Simonsen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the co-editor of the Norwegian Journal of Anthropology. He has done extensive field research in Zambia, and his research interests include migration, kinship, ritual studies, childhood studies, and visual anthropology.

Kjersti Larsen holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oslo, Norway. She is Professor at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. She conducts research in and has published extensively on Muslim societies in East Africa, in particular on the Swahili Coast, East Africa and in the Bayoda desert, Northern Sudan.

Ada I. Engebrigtsen is a Research Professor at Norwegian Social Research, Centre for Welfare and Labour Research, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Her main research topics are minorities, interethnic relations, mobility, Roma issues, family and children. She has published extensively on all these issues in both Norwegian and English.