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Val Colic-Peisker, Migration, Class, and Transnational Identities: Croatians in Australia and America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 2008)
IN THIS WELL-WRITTEN book, Val ColicPeisker offers, using concepts and theories from sociology and anthropology, a significant insight into a variety of important social processes, including the issue of migrant integration; the relationship between ethnic identity and ethnic values; "ethnic" versus "cosmopolitan" transnationalism, and the class issue in migration. In turn, the findings of this study contribute substantially to broader topics of sociological interest, such as sociology of migration, ethnicity, multiculturalism, global mobility, and labour markets.
The book is based upon original ethnographic data, collected among Croatian migrants in Western Australia, combining sociological and anthropological methods of data collection and analysis. Through a comparative analysis of two Croatian migrant cohorts, the book gives a comprehensive description of Croatian migration to Australia, and "illustrates how the process of incorporation evolves differently for people differently endowed by human and cultural capital even when they share an 'ethnic' origin." (10) While the working-class cohort tends to see their ethnic identity as central, the more recent middle-class migrants recognize their profession as the focal point of their identity. As a result, the transnationalism of the working class, rooted in localism/ nationalism, is conceptualized as "ethnic transnationalism." By contrast, the transnationalism of the professionals is theorized as "cosmopolitan transnationalism," for it transcends the ethnic/ national principle, often resulting in cultural hybridity, and global mobility.
Colic-Peisker's conceptual contribution and guiding principle in this study is the recognition of the importance and therefore the need for révaluation of the place of class analysis in the migration process. She observes: "Over the past decades... the ethnicity perspective has dominated migration studies and class has been neglected as an analytical axis." (16)
The author's class analysis uses "Weber's idea of market-determined life chances;" the differentiation between "working class" and "middle class" is made "on the basis of the performance of manual versus high-skilled white-collar work." (18) Upon migrating to Australia,...