To me, one of the most fascinating and engaging aspects of studying history is its cooperation with a multitude of different disciplines. Anthropological, sociological, political, economic, linguistic and other writings are thus right up my alley. It is also what interested me about this history course: it is based in the study of a methodology rather than content like a specific region or time period or theme. As recommended for this week, I started off with Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller’s essay, ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration’ (2003). Written by an anthropologist and sociologist, some of the jargon was unfamiliar. I regularly find myself having to look up definitions and concepts while reading articles, but I can sometimes feel a bit over my head when even the search engine summaries cannot guide me. Yet, despite its considerably theoretical discussion of the origin and modus of the social sciences and migration studies over the past two hundred years, this article was honestly a pleasure to read. It is magnificently signposted, allowing me to seamlessly organize my notes to mirror the structure of the essay’s argument while reading.
In ‘Methodological Nationalism’, Wimmer and Schiller confront the social sciences’ conceptual tendency to naturalize the unit of the nation-state in an epistemic structure in which variants of methodological nationalism intersect and reinforce each other, perpetuating a static analytical approach in postwar migration studies. They outline isomorphisms between the citizenry, the sovereign, the solidary group, and the nation in nation-states and examine how migrants’ disruption of these isomorphisms led to their control, supervision, limitation, and exclusion by nation-states. Postwar theories of immigration presupposed a dynamic in which a nation-state society and its incoming immigrants were diametrically opposed: one on the inside, and one on the outside. Not only has this epistemic approach alienated migrants, invalidated migrant experiences, and even villainized entire immigrant communities, it also largely ignores migrations within nation-states. This creates a problematic double standard for who is allowed to claim national affiliation and for who is classified as a migrant and subsequently treated as a foe. The institutionalization of immigration control in the interwar period generated an erasure of historical memories of the transnational and global processes by which nation-states formed and the role of migration in those processes. By the Cold War era, patriotism had become a social necessity for human belonging. However, parallel to this was the rise of the Civil Rights movement in the US, which validated diasporic identities and cultural pluralism.
The emergence of the transnational paradigm made serious headway for the historical acknowledgement of diasporic identities and long-distance nationalism, but residue of methodological nationalism still persists. As an avid linguistic learner, I especially appreciated the example of the semantic breakdown of ‘transnational’: ‘national’ counterproductively reproduces a view of the world as divided into nations by referring to the ‘nation’ as the entity that is crossed or superseded. Equally important, just as ‘internal’ migration was overlooked, migrant communities united by forms of identification other than national constructions – e.g. religion, cultural connections, languages – are only now beginning to be examined with migration studies. Through a classic mythological reference to Charybdis and Scylla, Wimmer and Schiller advise transnational historians, scholars of migrant studies, and social scientists alike to distance themselves from the bounds of nationalist thought, but to not stray into to the realm of extreme fluidism. “While it is important to push aside blinders of methodological nationalism, it is just as important to remember the continued potency of nationalism”.
This discussion of migration, sovereignty, and belonging resonated with my project on maritime resource allocation, Native sovereignty, and international commerce in Alaska in many ways. Returning to Wimmer and Schiller’s point on the dynamic betweem a nation-state society and its incoming immigrants being diametrically opposed, Alaska employs a diametrically opposed dynamic between a nation-state society and its Native population. It is a place in which those with the most essential sense of belonging to the land, Alaska Natives, have had to fight the hardest for patriotic recognition. Meanwhile, from the Russian-American company to the United States, immigrants to Alaska have held militaristic, legislative, and economic power over Native populations. In their discussion of nation-states and patriotic belonging, Wimmer and Schiller have made the methodological choice to examine only two players. I wonder how their analysis might have tackled the introduction of a third player, Indigenous groups.