Russell King - Links to the Diasporic Homeland: Second Generation and Ancestral Return Mobilities

One of Ravensteins famous laws of migration, set out in two papers published more than 120 years ago, was that every migration has a counter-current going in the opposite direction to the main migratory flow (1885, 1889). Ravenstein was imprecise about the exact nature and timing of the counter-flow: the implication was that it developed simultaneously with the main flow and was mainly made up of a different set of migrants rather than returnees from the principal migration. It was not until the 1970s that return migration started to be systematically analysed, categorised and theorised, Bovenkerks (1974) extended essay being the starting-point (see also Gmelch, 1980; King, 1978; Richmond, 1984). One of Bovenkerks types of return migration was ancestral return, but, after briefly mentioning the Back to Africa movement of the Rastafarians and the return of the Jews to Israel, he quickly dismissed this as return that is not return (1974, p. 19). We take issue with this throwaway remark, and the papers in this special issue illustrate the importance, richness and variety of return mobilities to ancestral and parental homelands. We disregard the issue of whether the statistics record this as return or not (much depends on how migration is measured by birthplace, nationality, ethnic origin etc.); what is important, we assert, is the emic perspective of the migrants themselves; if they believe they are returning to a homeland to which they have an emotional and historical connection, then it is the ontology rather than the statistical measurement of return which is the overriding criterion.