ABSTRACT
Over the past ten years, the interest in social security has received a remarkable boost in social anthropology and development studies. Until the 1980s, social security was almost entirely associated with the welfare state of modern industrial society. Social security is always a complex mixture based on very diverse sources, regulations, financial resources, and services in which different social relations and social networks come together. Persons living under conditions of legal pluralism typically have to use a variety of mechanisms for social security. The specific history of the Dutch Moluccan population gives a clear view of the shifts in ideologies, organizations, and normative conceptions of social security that occur under conditions of migration. In a fundamental way, migration disrupts the links between past, present, and future that are entailed in social security arrangements. Migration changes the composition of circles of solidarity at the place of origin, for demographic reasons first of all.
