Living in the Intersections of Cultures, Societies, Emotions, Politics, and Economies: Deterritorializing Culture

Abstract

This concluding chapter crystallizes and elaborates on the knowledge offered in this book. Promoting different ideas and ways in relation to intersectionality analysis, often combining such analysis with the ideas of the convertibility of cultural, social, and economic capital across national boundaries, allows us to generate fine-grained and contextual analysis of the astonishingly wide diversity in the experiences of transnational migrants in Asia. Being able to differentiate between diverse intersections among larger societal structures, and the migrants’ different amounts of capital and strategies, which they attempt to employ to access to new and desired resources, allows informed in-depth discussion of the diversity of the migrants’ experiences. This diversity is expressed and reflected in the migrants’ transnational positions, which are accounts of their relations with people and organizations in the different societies in which they lived. Demonstrating and proofing such diversity has new implications for understanding the reproduction of social inequalities under increasing conditions of globalization; and of what can happen to people, collectivities, and societies that come be more and more embedded in transnational or global contexts. One under researched scenario of cultural transformations that emerges from our analyses is the possibility of increasing cultural disidentification, that is, an increasing irrelevance of culture as a driving force for action. Such new knowledge provides a novel and complementary view to the well-known modes of culture contact, which are hybridization, the clash of cultures and civilization, and ruptures and disjunctures in cultural identifications.

Thanks to Chan Kwok-bun for his comments on earlier versions of this chapter and help with copyediting.