Arjan de Haan - Labour Mobility and Rural Society

LABOUR MOBILITY AND RURAL SOCIETY

ECONOMIC MOBILITY AND POVERTY DYNAMICS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Edited by Bob Baulch and John Hoddinott

MEN AT WORK

Labour, Masculinities, Development

edited by Cecile Jackson

THE WORKERS STATE MEETS THE MARKET

Labour in Chinas Transition

edited by Sarah Cook and Margaret Maurer-Fazio

DEVELOPMENT AND THE RURAL-URBAN DIVIDE

edited by John Harriss and Mick Moore

BEYOND URBAN BIAS

edited by Ashutosh Varshney

LABOUR MOBILITY AND RURAL SOCIETY

Editors

Arjan de Haan and Ben Rogaly

First published 2002 by

FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2002 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Labour mobility and rural society

1. Migration, Internal Social aspects Asia 2. Migration, Internal Social aspects Africa 3. Labour mobility Asia 4. Labor mobility Africa 5. Asia Rural conditions 6. Africa Rural conditions

I. Haan, Arjan de II. Rogaly, Ben III. Journal of development studies

307.212095

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Labour mobility and rural society / edited by Arjan de Haan and Ben Rogaly.

p. cm.

includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Migration, Internal Developing countriesCase studies. 2. Labor mobilityDeveloping countriesCase studies. 3. Developing countriesRural conditionsCase studies. I. Haan, Arjan de. II. Rogaly, Ben.

HB2160 .L32 2002

331.127-dc21

2002005008

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on Labour Mobility and Rural Society of The Journal of Development Studies (ISSN 0022-0388) 38/5 (June 2002) published by Frank Cass.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

ISBN 13: 978-0-714-65334-1 (hbk)

Contents

ARJAN DE HAAN and BEN ROGALY

This introduction draws on the authors own research on the topic. Sections III and IV on migration as a social process and the political economy of labour mobility were first drafted by Rogaly based on work-in-progress with colleagues (for details of this ongoing research project, see Rogaly, Coppard, Rafique, Rana, Sengupta and Biswas, this collection; Rogaly, Biswas, Coppard, Rafique, Rana and Sengupta [2001]).

There is no dearth of literature on migration in and from Asia and Africa. Yet the literature insufficiently accounts for one of the most important forms of population mobility: migration of rural people for various forms of work elsewhere, often returning to the place they started from. Much migratory work, particularly for poorer migrants, is seasonal, temporary, and remains within rural areas. Employment in areas of origin may be scarce or even unavailable; yet the daily earnings for migrants at the destination may be only marginally higher. Migrants undertake this work to maintain or slightly improve their situation at home.

Too little is known about this type of migration, its contribution to the livelihoods of migrants and their households, and how it interacts with wider changes in rural societies. This collection provides a set of studies, based on recent empirical research, dealing with these themes, from South and South-east Asia (India, Indonesia) and Africa (Burkina Faso, Mali, Kenya, Lesotho). The contributions provide detailed analyses of labour migration as a social process, showing how it is structured by gender, class and ethnicity, and how migration in turn affects social relations and structures. It moves away from seeing migrants as helpless victims, and describes migration as a highly dynamic process. This view remains rooted in an understanding of the political economy of rural society, of the way in which migration is shaped by wider forces of economic change or development, and the way this complexity is influenced (intentionally or otherwise) by public policy.

The collection thus bridges a gap between two kinds of studies. On the one hand, studies of rural change tend to assume, sometimes driven by data availability, static populations, or ignore population movements and remittances. On the other hand, migration studies have paid too little attention to the interaction of migratory movements with broader changes in the areas of origin, in effect isolating migration as an exceptional phenomenon. In both cases, there is a tendency to see migration as a disjuncture. In contrast, the contributions to this collection taken together show this type of employment migration to be a central feature of most, if not all, rural societies even though its role is context-specific and changes over time. The contributors examine the ways in which migration is structured by, and in turn structures, societal norms and relations.

The analyses provide detailed descriptions of a variety of migration streams. The first two are about the highly unpredictable environment of the Sahel, where labour mobility has historically been a predominant way of managing risk. But even within this environment, patterns of mobility are complex: Hampshires study focuses on the mobility of young men in and out of agro-pastoral production; de Haan et al. show contrasting pictures of differently endowed areas, the role of various forms of seasonal migrations, and the unique pattern of migration to small plantations in Ivory Coast that villagers from Mali have cultivated for a number of decades.

Three studies focus on India. For western India, Mosse et al. analyse the seasonal labour migration among the Bhil community, mainly to urban areas, and differentiation within this, with slightly less poor migrants developing different patterns of migration. The subject of the study by Rogaly et al. is seasonal migration within rural areas of eastern India, involving a comparison of four streams with very different social compositions converging on the same destination for the same kind of work. Whereas these two contributions describe contemporary migration streams, de Haans essay about Bihar, one of Indias poorest states, suggests that labour mobility has been a common feature of rural South Asia for centuries, and has significantly influenced the social and economic structures of many areas.

While the analysis in all the contributions is gendered, describing the differences between the ratios of men and women involved in migration in different contexts and analysing how gender relations influence migration patterns and are changed by it, Elmhirst focuses explicitly on gender relations, on relatively recent female labour migration to Greater Jakarta and the way gender ideologies changed when migration became a more established and accepted strategy. The effect of predominantly male migration, and particularly return migration, on household power relations and bargaining, are explored in an analysis by Francis based on work in Lesotho and western Kenya.