ABSTRACT
Migrants, like all human beings, are always simultaneously influencing and being influenced by others, perceiving the world and evolving within it even when they appear to be standing still. 1 The immediate effects of migration on individuals are mostly experienced in synchronic moments – events lived at particular points in time as a cluster of culturally, socially, and linguistically managed encounters and entanglements with others. Migration is at the same time an unfolding diachronic process: a singularly marked instantiation of social life involving movement, transformation, and continuous becoming.
