ABSTRACT
As Zolberg (1989, p. 403) observed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the International Migration Review, there is a certain convergence among scholars advancing *the stimulating newer approaches* to migration research and theory, and they share four characteristics. These are, (1) historical in attending to "changing specificities of time and place', (2) 'structural rather than individualistic,..with special emphasis on the dynamics of capitalism and the state*, (3) globalist in the sense that they to how local conditions within nations are affected by transnational processes, and (4) critical in seeking to demystify adverse conditions affecting nations and migrants. Nevertheless, although migration studies have now emerged as a more or less coherent field of theory and research, each of the social sciences that deal with human migration - sociology, economics, political science, demography, history, and anthropology - has a distinctive signature with to its definition of research problems, theory, and methods.1 The general features noted above, when combined with those of anthropology noted below, define the special dispositions that anthropology brings to the study of migration that derive from its unique history and its constitution as a discipline that embraces the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.
