ABSTRACT
The construction of masculinity and group identity are central to this. These have changed over the men’s lives, partly as a result of their own journeys through their life cycles but also owing to the changing political and economic conditions in which they have lived. Rather than a single discourse of masculinity, however, ‘being a man’ has meant many different things to individuals over their lives and involved a range of shifting performances and bodily expressions. Their narratives are therefore multi-layered, diverse and sometimes contradictory. Attention to the voices of ordinary people can also help destabalize some of the assumptions inherent within macro-narratives of globalization. This is particularly the case when those people are migrants or transnationals who continually move between places: their identities and roles are never fixed. Displacement, disjunctive and so on are often presented as distinctive features of the post-modern period; yet, as Van der Veer has pointed out, movement between places is nothing new.
