Return Migration: the Changing Faces and Challenging Facets of a Field of Study
Return Migration: the Changing Faces and Challenging Facets of a Field of Study

Summary/Abstract: Various conceptualizations of return migration – understanding it as a “myth”, “illusion”, “natural homecoming”, etc. – point out dominant approaches and research paradigms within migration studies as well as hidden ideological and political agendas. It is argued that the latter had a different impact on migration studies in emigration and immigration countries. Contemporary circumstances of enhanced global mobility have diversified the categories of return migration so that researchers have added various qualifications to the generic term. They speak of imagined and provisional return, (co-)ethnic return, ancestral or roots return, partial and virtual return, etc. The new research paradigm of transnationalism which embraces these new conceptualisations, can thus be said to have enlarged rather than dissolved the meaning of the term. Finally, based on the broad spectrum of possible studies on return in the ethnographically probing Croatian context, it is argued that return – as part of an ongoing and reversible migration process – might be studied as just another kind of immigration.

• Details
• Contents