Gendered Global Ethnography

The US immigration literature clusters around two key questions: why do people migrate and how can we understand their integration into host countries? This reflects a well-established division in migration studies in which scholars tend to either study the sending country or the receiving country but rarely both. ² The bulk of migration research occurs in the receiving site where the focus is on economic, ³ occupational ⁴ and political integration. ⁵ Studies that engage with the sending site have often done so through abstract models. ⁶ Recently there is a small but growing ethnographic literature that looks at how sending states ‘manage’ their populations abroad. ⁷ I argue that this division between research on sending and receiving sites obscures the different effects that contrasting migration patterns can have in the sending country. With the collapse of the iron curtain, capitalist market relations, ideals and moralities have flooded into Ukraine. Ukraine’s dominant national project at this historical moment is the construction of Ukraine as an independent nation-state in the global arena. ⁸ A confluence of gendered processes of economic transformation and nationalism inside Ukraine has encouraged emigration to Italy and California, the two largest receiving sites of post-1991 Ukrainian emigrants. I suggest, however, that these two migration streams are not simply about two different destinations for migrants, but rather they produce two divergent migration patterns that are not equally tied to Ukraine’s gendered processes of transformation. I maintain the migration pattern to California—a permanent migration of families—is a drain on Ukraine’s resources and is both structurally and discursively peripheral to Ukrainian nation building. In contrast, the migration pattern to Italy—the temporary migration of middle-aged women, mostly grandmothers—has a different set of effects in Ukraine. I argue this migration pattern is a constitutive element in Ukraine’s nation building process that, in this post-Soviet context, involves a gendered reorganization of family and work relations.