ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, such a dual perspective is also emphasized, seeking to take account of people’s grounded realities and meanings as well as the contextual conditioning factors, opportunities and constraints within
and through which transnational lives are lived. This chapter begins with one of the most commonplace – yet surely one of the most significant – infrastructures fostering and shaping transnational lives: the telephone network. Telephones (especially mobiles), their extension and the decreasing costs of international calling have enabled the most fundamental social aspects of transnational life, namely everyday communication across long distances and around the world. Following a look at the phenomenon and impact of cheap calls, we will have a brief look at transformations across an exemplary range of socio-cultural dimensions surrounding transnational life: these include families, gender structures and roles, the ‘habitus’ or worldviews shaped by living here-and-there, and what we might call inter-cultural behavioural competences (otherwise described as cosmopolitanism). The chapter concludes with a discussion of migrant transnationalism in relation to one of the hottest topics in most migrant-receiving countries, that of so-called immigrant integration or assimilation.
