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We [Filipinos] are now a quasi-wandering people, pilgrims or prospectors staking our lives and futures all over the world - in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America, Australia and all of Asia; in every nook and cranny of this seemingly godforsaken earth.
E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory
Introduction and theoretical framework
Within the field of migration studies, the Philippines are known as a 'place of origin' of marriage as well as labour migrants (cf. Constable 2004, Parrenas 2001). Of the approx. 190,000 Filipinos married to foreigners, over 90% are women. The United States and Japan are the most preferred destinations for marriage immigration. Compared with the huge percentage of foreign partners from these countries (30% to 40%), Germany, with approx. 4% is comparatively marginal in terms of Filipina marriage migration (cf. Commission on Filipino Overseas 2004). Considering the historical, colonial and postcolonial ties between the Philippines and the countries of destination, this geographic distribution of the foreign partners is not surprising.
This paper draws upon long-term and multi-sited ethnographic research both in Germany (between 1993-1996) and in the Philippines (between 1996-1998) (cf. Lauser 2004, 2003, 2005a, b). It is informed by an anthropology of transnational spaces and "global ethnoscapes" (Appadurai 1991, 1995; Glick-Schiller et al. 1992, 1994, 1995; Kearney 1995; Marcus 1995, 1998; Ong 1999; Parrenas 2001).
Following Arjun Appadurai, who provides a framework for examining the "new global cultural economy as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centerperiphery models" (Appadurai 1996:32), I look at various forms of female marriage migration. Corresponding to Appadurai's conceptual metaphor of "scape" I understand the transnational marriage "landscape" as a site - a marriage-scape. This site is not "fixed" as a typical landscape, but - depending on context and perspective - of various, disjunctive sizes, amorphous and flowing. Marriage-scapes are shaped and limited by existing and emerging cultural, social, historical and politico-economical factors. They are also shaped by what Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler call the "gendered geographies of power", which inform all transnational migration as so they tell us "gender operates simultaneously on multiple spatial and social scales (e.g. the body, the family, the state) across transnational terrains. It is both within the context...