Speaking across disciplines is always easier said than done. Engseng Ho's thought-provoking article strives to do just that (and achieves the goal nicely), with its broad overview of the literature, the numerous examples that it draws on, and the ambitious conceptual innovations it proposes. As the only sociologist invited to comment on Ho's article, I see my task as bringing Ho's article into fruitful conversation with my own discipline, which is known to be indifferent (if not hostile) to area studies and which (unfortunately) remains largely missing in Ho's imagined audience. I do so by drawing on my own work and some of the theoretical developments in the broader discipline in the past two decades or so. To make intelligible where my comments are coming from, let me begin by briefly introducing what sorts of questions interest me as a sociologist.
My research addresses struggles over categorization and identification that unfold in the context of international migration, especially when such struggles have significant implications for the unequal distribution of material and symbolic goods on the local, national, and global levels. I examine the ways in which categories of membership and belonging—especially to states, nations, ethnoracial groups, families/kin, and religious communities—are created, mobilized, embraced, contested, and redefined through such struggles. To grasp the variability, historicity, and contingency of these struggles and their consequences, I situate each empirical case I study in broader comparative and historical contexts. I also seek to grasp through an ethnographic lens how these struggles shape the ways individuals present their identities, seek to establish the identities of others, and develop varying and shifting levels of commitment to different categories of membership and belonging. My first book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Kim Reference Kim2016), engages these issues through a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the diaspora politics in and around the Korean peninsula during the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods. And my current book project examines the asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds by drawing on multisited ethnographic research in northeast China, South Korea, and the United States.
Inter-Asian Concepts and Korean Transborder Membership Politics
Some of the critical and conceptual interventions Ho makes in his article resonate deeply with my own work. Ho's “outside-in analysis” is what first comes to my mind. My book, Contested Embrace, builds on the so-called “transnational turn” in the fields of immigration, nationalism, and citizenship. The incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation have long preoccupied scholars in these fields. The primary focus, however, has been the challenges that various types of internal others, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, pose to the presumed isomorphism among state, society, and culture—the regulatory ideal of the modern nation-state system. Yet over the last two decades or so, scholars have become more cognizant and critical of the implicit “methodological nationalism” underlying the existing scholarship, that is, the prevalent tendency in social sciences to take the current nation-state as a seldom-questioned unit of analysis. This epistemological shift has made clear that the upward mobility strategies, political claims making, and identity formations of migrants are not necessarily contained within their current state of residence. The membership politics engendered by the relationship between the state and “its” external members—a different configuration of the incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation—has thus begun to attract scholarly attention.
It is in this spirit that I approach what I call transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea. Transborder membership politics involves political claims, institutionalized practices, and discursive representations oriented to or generated by those who have durably resided outside the territory of the state (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, or ethnonational kin populations), yet are perceived as belonging to that state or to the nation associated with that state (Kim Reference Kim2016, 8). I observe that the literature on ethnic Koreans in Japan and China has tended to place them squarely within the territorial boundaries of postwar Japan or the People's Republic of China. Studies of ethnic relations in Japan, for instance, have shown how Japan's transformation from a multiethnic empire to a self-stylized homogeneous nation-state entailed the transformation of its Korean residents from colonial subjects to a hidden ethnic minority that was legally disenfranchised, socially excluded, and culturally assimilated and thus rendered invisible. The few existing accounts of Korean Chinese history, by contrast, have uniformly highlighted the progressive integration of this “model minority” into the People's Republic of China in a teleological and triumphalist fashion. Inquiries about the genealogy of Korean ethnic nationalism or colonial and postcolonial state building, for their part, have limited their analytic focus largely to the Korean peninsula. The massive outward migration to the Japanese archipelagos and Manchuria that coincided with the rise of Korean nationalism and the uneven incorporation of these transborder Koreans into the colonial and postcolonial state-building processes have been largely missing or mentioned only in passing in these studies.
The pictures, however, look very different, if one situates ethnic Koreans in Japan and China not simply at the margin of their respective state of settlement but also at the transborder margin of their states of origin, that is, the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula. Despite a widespread, deeply entrenched, and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the colonial and the two postcolonial states, North and South Korea, has been selective, shifting, and recurrently contested. My book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. I do so by analyzing the vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan, various forms of cross-border transactions between China and North Korea (including authorized and unauthorized migration) amidst the Cold War confrontation and the socialist transition in both countries, and the post–Cold War struggles of ethnic Korean “return” migrants from China to South Korea to gain belated recognition as members of the rediscovered affluent homeland. Such analysis shows that war-making, state-making, and nation-making and unmaking in the Korean peninsula and beyond cannot be explained without considering these transborder contestations. It is for this reason that I agree with Ho's claim, “Without a systematic understanding of the full dimensions of the external, of the entangled mobile societies that constitute it, and of how its potentials may be harnessed and brought to bear internally, one is missing half the story.”
Ho's critique of presentism in globalization and transnationalism scholarship—“the ‘local = past/global = present’ lockstep of space and time assumed by globalization”—also well captures another intervention that I make in my book. Over the last two decades or so, scholars have debated whether globalization has undermined the presumed congruence among territory, citizenry, and nation. Those focusing on the challenges that increasing immigration poses to affluent liberal democracies in the North have argued that nation-states’ monopolistic claim to the loyalty, belonging, and identity of their domestic populations has been considerably weakened by the rise of the postnational, multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan forms of membership and belonging. Those focusing on the thickening ties between developing countries in the South and their emigrant or diaspora populations in the North, for their part, have argued that globalization has produced “deterritorialized nation-states” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc Reference Basch, Schiller and Blanc1994), “long-distance nationalism” (Anderson Reference Anderson1998), and “diasporic public spheres” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996), often suggesting a fundamental shift in the territoriality of the nation-state and nationalism in “a world that has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996, 188). The transformation of South Korea in the last two decades into one of the major migrant-destination countries in East Asia has also been characterized in a similar fashion: from ethnic nationalism to multiculturalism and globalism.
Transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea, however, suggests that the claim about the novelty of the phenomenon—that is, the decoupling of territory, citizenry, and nation as a product of intensifying globalization and the resultant rise of transnational forms of membership and belonging—is exaggerated. Transborder membership politics in Korea emerged earlier, in the first half of the twentieth century, when the rapid incorporation of Northeast Asia into the expanding interstate system engendered large-scale cross-border migration, solidified international borders, and gave rise to competing nationalist projects, all at the same time. The infrastructural scaffolding of the Korean nation constructed by the colonial state—its legal definition of “Koreans,” the concrete bureaucratic techniques it used to establish this legal identity, and the entrenched organizational practices through which it engaged with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony—left an enduring imprint on the nationality laws; consular practices; and minority, repatriation, and immigration policies of the succeeding states in the region during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods.
For example, the colonial family registry (koseki/hojŏk)—which had served as the ultimate documentary foundation of membership in the Korean nation—came to constitute the “memory of the state” (Matsuda Reference Matsuda1996), enabling the postcolonial state to distinguish its members from nonmembers and substantiate transborder Koreans’ claims to national membership. In addition, the category of tongp'o (coethnics)—which had been used to invoke the affective attachment among all Koreans and to exhort the colonial state to act as their custodian—continued to serve as an important symbolic resource for transborder nation building, especially when coethnic “return” migrants sought access to the territory, labor market, and citizenship of their “homeland.” These infrastructures not only informed ensuing transborder membership politics but also were transformed by them. For instance, the term Chosŏn, which had become an unchallengeable ethnonym during the colonial period, later became a politicized marker closely associated with North Korea—an association that was embraced, promoted, or stigmatized by transborder Koreans and their states of settlement in Cold War Japan and China. By exploring the genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of transborder nation building and showing how these infrastructures have woven the complex tapestries of transborder membership politics for subsequent decades, my book highlights the deeply historical nature of transborder membership politics. Instead of claiming an epochal transition from nationalism to transnationalism, we need to examine more carefully how long-term institutional legacies from the time when national and transnational forms of membership were co-constituted continue to shape immigration, citizenship, and transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization.
“Mobile Societies” as the Conceptual Building Block?
Ho identifies several developments in the disciplines of history and anthropology in the past two decades or so that contributed to expanding our imagination of space and time, helping us overcome the epistemological blinders imposed by the modern interstate system. A comparable development in the discipline of sociology, however, is largely missing in his account. This is not a trivial omission. After all, in the broader disciplinary division of labor in social science, it was sociology that came to claim the nationally bounded “society” in the modern industrial world as its object of analysis proper—with anthropology in charge of the nonindustrial world, history the past, and international relations the external. Given that “an internalist and constitutionalist view of what society is” made sociology a veritable social science discipline, it is no surprise that sociology has been said to undergo lately an identity crisis of sorts, as globalization made this view increasingly untenable. What I would like to do in the remainder of my comments is thus to bring Ho's transregional research program into conversation with a few notable attempts to reconstitute sociology on a new ontological and epistemological basis, heeding some productive tensions that this conversation creates in Ho's argument. My critical engagement concerns two concepts, “society” and “mobility,” and their relation.
Invoking the now familiar critique of methodological nationalism, Ho proclaims that “The trap is not the nation, but society.” But as his key term “mobile societies” reveals, Ho is not yet ready to jettison the concept of “society.” In his view, the integrative ambition of classic social theory that endowed the notion of “society” with the sui generis nature is essential to produce a thick account of transregionalism. This is a curious analytic move, if we compare Ho's position with other responses to the similar problématique. For one, the late British sociologist John Urry, who pioneered the so-called “mobility turn,” presents “mobility” as a new, alternative pivot of sociology, which can replace its erstwhile central concept, that of “society” (Urry Reference Urry1998, 30). For Urry and many others in the mobility study, the concept of “society” is too tightly tied with territorialization to accommodate the alternative deterritorialized topographies of “networks” and “fluids,” which are essential to analyze our increasingly globalizing world. Suggestively enough, one of Urry's programmatic books that came out at the beginning of the new millennium is entitled Sociology Beyond Societies (Reference Urry2000). What makes Ho, unlike Urry, sanguine about the marriageability of the notion of society and that of mobility? Is there something distinctive about the experience of inter-Asia before the arrival of “globalization” that makes this marriage not only possible but also desirable for Ho's transregional research program?
American sociologists across the Atlantic, who have largely kept their distance from the “mobility turn,” may have a different reason to be skeptical about taking “mobile societies” as the fundamental building block of a new research program. For example, in his influential article “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” Mustafa Emirbayer (Reference Emirbayer1997, 287) states: “Relational theorists reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pre-given units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis.” The core problem of the concept of “society” in this case is that it is too tightly tied with the substantialist perspective. The substantialist perspective begins analysis with various kinds of presumably self-subsistent entities, whether they are individuals, societies, structures, social systems, communities, or subalterns, and only then considers the dynamic flows in which they subsequently involve themselves. This view unwarrantedly “detaches elements … from their spatiotemporal contexts, analyzing them apart from their relations with other elements within fields of mutual determination and flux” (288).
Does the fact that Ho's “mobile societies” are territorially unmoored, and part of broader connections and circulations, exempt this concept from the charge of substantialism? Another well-known critique of the substantialist, entity-like understanding of “society” may disagree. Here I'm thinking of Rogers Brubaker's (Reference Brubaker2005) influential article, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” (Note that Ho sees “mobile societies” and “diasporas” as more or less interchangeable terms.) Brubaker notes that the fast-growing scholarship on diaspora continues to conceive of diaspora as a bounded entity, if a nonterritorial one at that. In his view, diaspora studies may have overcome “the metaphysics of the nation-state as a bounded territorial community” (11), but they have failed to remain vigilant against “the metaphysics of ‘community’ and ‘identity’” (12). In Brubaker's view, scholars often unwarrantedly endow the notion of diaspora with “a non-territorial form of essentialized belonging” (12). For Brubaker and many others sharing his stance, the trap is, to paraphrase Ho, not the nation, but a substantialist view of society, mobile or not. In the language informed by the Bourdieusian field theory, Brubaker alternatively proposes that we treat diaspora as an idiom, a stance, or a claim, that is, a category of practice invoked, mobilized, and contested by social actors themselves, not as a category of analysis signifying a thing, an ethnodemographic entity out there. Ho's theoretical aspiration, however, seems to point to the opposite direction. Ho aims to produce an integrative, thick account of transregionalism to render visible “mobile societies” that had maintained their boundedness and distinctive identities over an expansive space and a longue durée. See, for example, the following comment: “Mobile societies make and remake connections, and a rigorous spatial focus combined with a plastic sense of time allows them to emerge into view.” Given that an increasing sensitivity to mobility, connections, and circulations has put the substantialist view of society under close scrutiny in the discipline of sociology, why has the same impetus encouraged Ho to attempt to resubstantialize rather than desubstantialize mobile societies? What justifies this particular analytic choice?
Lastly, I would like to ask Ho about the place of “immobility” in his theoretical ambition. The prevailing tendency that equates the past with the local/immobile and the modern or the late-modern with the global/mobile can be criticized in two ways. On the one hand, one can show how the past was as global, transregional, and mobile as the present, which seems to be Ho's strategy. On the other hand, one can also demonstrate how the contemporary phase of globalization is characterized profoundly by containment, bordering, and involuntary immobility. From traditional migration scholarship through the heavily Foucauldian critical border study to the mobility study that I previously mentioned, scholars have begun to pay more attention to this paradox of our mobile world. They have explored the institutional, organizational, and everyday practices that make cross-border mobility “the uppermost among coveted values … a scarce and unequally distributed commodity” (Bauman Reference Bauman1998, 2), interrogating the hitherto neglected relationship between spatial and social mobility. My current project on migration careers and legalization strategies of asylum-seekers, for example, suggests that circular and serial migration is as much a manifestation of immobility and containment that they are subjected to (both in the spatial and social senses) as an expression of their mobility and circulation. Shifting the analytic focus from the notion of borders to the practice of bordering (Côté-Boucher, Infantino, and Salter Reference Côté-Boucher, Infantino and Salter2014) and border struggle (Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013), other ethnographic studies have also illuminated how kinship, capitalist market, and sovereign state together function as complex global mobility regimes, determining who can move to where, how, and at what costs. They have focused especially on how different categories of difference (e.g., class, gender, sexuality, ethnoracial/ethnoreligious identification, nativity, and so on) profoundly shape, and are shaped by, the operation of these regulatory regimes (see Nicole Constable's comments on Ho's essay). Observing how a proliferation of borders is transforming migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life of our time, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013) even propose that we treat the border not as a research object but as the prime epistemic framework with which to examine the seemingly ever more mobile and fluid world of today: the title of their book is (again, suggestively enough for our purpose) Border as Method.
Given these developments in the field I surveyed (if selectively) above, Ho's proposal, mobility as method, seems to stress, rather one-sidedly, mobility, connections, and circulations, without exploring their dialectic relationship with immobility, containment, gate-keeping, ghettoization, bordering, and so forth and so on. A more lucid theoretical articulation of these dialectics would help Ho identify the logics shaping “the patterned configuration of directions, circuits of mobilities, clusters of association in one place, election to office, marriage partners there and elsewhere, and so on.”
You have
Access
Speaking across disciplines is always easier said than done. Engseng Ho's thought-provoking article strives to do just that (and achieves the goal nicely), with its broad overview of the literature, the numerous examples that it draws on, and the ambitious conceptual innovations it proposes. As the only sociologist invited to comment on Ho's article, I see my task as bringing Ho's article into fruitful conversation with my own discipline, which is known to be indifferent (if not hostile) to area studies and which (unfortunately) remains largely missing in Ho's imagined audience. I do so by drawing on my own work and some of the theoretical developments in the broader discipline in the past two decades or so. To make intelligible where my comments are coming from, let me begin by briefly introducing what sorts of questions interest me as a sociologist.
My research addresses struggles over categorization and identification that unfold in the context of international migration, especially when such struggles have significant implications for the unequal distribution of material and symbolic goods on the local, national, and global levels. I examine the ways in which categories of membership and belonging—especially to states, nations, ethnoracial groups, families/kin, and religious communities—are created, mobilized, embraced, contested, and redefined through such struggles. To grasp the variability, historicity, and contingency of these struggles and their consequences, I situate each empirical case I study in broader comparative and historical contexts. I also seek to grasp through an ethnographic lens how these struggles shape the ways individuals present their identities, seek to establish the identities of others, and develop varying and shifting levels of commitment to different categories of membership and belonging. My first book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Kim Reference Kim2016), engages these issues through a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of the diaspora politics in and around the Korean peninsula during the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods. And my current book project examines the asylum-seeking of unauthorized migrants on religious grounds by drawing on multisited ethnographic research in northeast China, South Korea, and the United States.
Inter-Asian Concepts and Korean Transborder Membership Politics
Some of the critical and conceptual interventions Ho makes in his article resonate deeply with my own work. Ho's “outside-in analysis” is what first comes to my mind. My book, Contested Embrace, builds on the so-called “transnational turn” in the fields of immigration, nationalism, and citizenship. The incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation have long preoccupied scholars in these fields. The primary focus, however, has been the challenges that various types of internal others, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, pose to the presumed isomorphism among state, society, and culture—the regulatory ideal of the modern nation-state system. Yet over the last two decades or so, scholars have become more cognizant and critical of the implicit “methodological nationalism” underlying the existing scholarship, that is, the prevalent tendency in social sciences to take the current nation-state as a seldom-questioned unit of analysis. This epistemological shift has made clear that the upward mobility strategies, political claims making, and identity formations of migrants are not necessarily contained within their current state of residence. The membership politics engendered by the relationship between the state and “its” external members—a different configuration of the incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation—has thus begun to attract scholarly attention.
It is in this spirit that I approach what I call transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea. Transborder membership politics involves political claims, institutionalized practices, and discursive representations oriented to or generated by those who have durably resided outside the territory of the state (e.g., emigrants, diasporas, or ethnonational kin populations), yet are perceived as belonging to that state or to the nation associated with that state (Kim Reference Kim2016, 8). I observe that the literature on ethnic Koreans in Japan and China has tended to place them squarely within the territorial boundaries of postwar Japan or the People's Republic of China. Studies of ethnic relations in Japan, for instance, have shown how Japan's transformation from a multiethnic empire to a self-stylized homogeneous nation-state entailed the transformation of its Korean residents from colonial subjects to a hidden ethnic minority that was legally disenfranchised, socially excluded, and culturally assimilated and thus rendered invisible. The few existing accounts of Korean Chinese history, by contrast, have uniformly highlighted the progressive integration of this “model minority” into the People's Republic of China in a teleological and triumphalist fashion. Inquiries about the genealogy of Korean ethnic nationalism or colonial and postcolonial state building, for their part, have limited their analytic focus largely to the Korean peninsula. The massive outward migration to the Japanese archipelagos and Manchuria that coincided with the rise of Korean nationalism and the uneven incorporation of these transborder Koreans into the colonial and postcolonial state-building processes have been largely missing or mentioned only in passing in these studies.
The pictures, however, look very different, if one situates ethnic Koreans in Japan and China not simply at the margin of their respective state of settlement but also at the transborder margin of their states of origin, that is, the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula. Despite a widespread, deeply entrenched, and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the colonial and the two postcolonial states, North and South Korea, has been selective, shifting, and recurrently contested. My book explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as “their own,” and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. I do so by analyzing the vehement competition between North and South Korea over the allegiance of colonial-era Korean migrants who remained in Japan, various forms of cross-border transactions between China and North Korea (including authorized and unauthorized migration) amidst the Cold War confrontation and the socialist transition in both countries, and the post–Cold War struggles of ethnic Korean “return” migrants from China to South Korea to gain belated recognition as members of the rediscovered affluent homeland. Such analysis shows that war-making, state-making, and nation-making and unmaking in the Korean peninsula and beyond cannot be explained without considering these transborder contestations. It is for this reason that I agree with Ho's claim, “Without a systematic understanding of the full dimensions of the external, of the entangled mobile societies that constitute it, and of how its potentials may be harnessed and brought to bear internally, one is missing half the story.”
Ho's critique of presentism in globalization and transnationalism scholarship—“the ‘local = past/global = present’ lockstep of space and time assumed by globalization”—also well captures another intervention that I make in my book. Over the last two decades or so, scholars have debated whether globalization has undermined the presumed congruence among territory, citizenry, and nation. Those focusing on the challenges that increasing immigration poses to affluent liberal democracies in the North have argued that nation-states’ monopolistic claim to the loyalty, belonging, and identity of their domestic populations has been considerably weakened by the rise of the postnational, multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan forms of membership and belonging. Those focusing on the thickening ties between developing countries in the South and their emigrant or diaspora populations in the North, for their part, have argued that globalization has produced “deterritorialized nation-states” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc Reference Basch, Schiller and Blanc1994), “long-distance nationalism” (Anderson Reference Anderson1998), and “diasporic public spheres” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996), often suggesting a fundamental shift in the territoriality of the nation-state and nationalism in “a world that has become deterritorialized, diasporic, and transnational” (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996, 188). The transformation of South Korea in the last two decades into one of the major migrant-destination countries in East Asia has also been characterized in a similar fashion: from ethnic nationalism to multiculturalism and globalism.
Transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea, however, suggests that the claim about the novelty of the phenomenon—that is, the decoupling of territory, citizenry, and nation as a product of intensifying globalization and the resultant rise of transnational forms of membership and belonging—is exaggerated. Transborder membership politics in Korea emerged earlier, in the first half of the twentieth century, when the rapid incorporation of Northeast Asia into the expanding interstate system engendered large-scale cross-border migration, solidified international borders, and gave rise to competing nationalist projects, all at the same time. The infrastructural scaffolding of the Korean nation constructed by the colonial state—its legal definition of “Koreans,” the concrete bureaucratic techniques it used to establish this legal identity, and the entrenched organizational practices through which it engaged with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony—left an enduring imprint on the nationality laws; consular practices; and minority, repatriation, and immigration policies of the succeeding states in the region during the Cold War and post–Cold War periods.
For example, the colonial family registry (koseki/hojŏk)—which had served as the ultimate documentary foundation of membership in the Korean nation—came to constitute the “memory of the state” (Matsuda Reference Matsuda1996), enabling the postcolonial state to distinguish its members from nonmembers and substantiate transborder Koreans’ claims to national membership. In addition, the category of tongp'o (coethnics)—which had been used to invoke the affective attachment among all Koreans and to exhort the colonial state to act as their custodian—continued to serve as an important symbolic resource for transborder nation building, especially when coethnic “return” migrants sought access to the territory, labor market, and citizenship of their “homeland.” These infrastructures not only informed ensuing transborder membership politics but also were transformed by them. For instance, the term Chosŏn, which had become an unchallengeable ethnonym during the colonial period, later became a politicized marker closely associated with North Korea—an association that was embraced, promoted, or stigmatized by transborder Koreans and their states of settlement in Cold War Japan and China. By exploring the genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of transborder nation building and showing how these infrastructures have woven the complex tapestries of transborder membership politics for subsequent decades, my book highlights the deeply historical nature of transborder membership politics. Instead of claiming an epochal transition from nationalism to transnationalism, we need to examine more carefully how long-term institutional legacies from the time when national and transnational forms of membership were co-constituted continue to shape immigration, citizenship, and transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization.
“Mobile Societies” as the Conceptual Building Block?
Ho identifies several developments in the disciplines of history and anthropology in the past two decades or so that contributed to expanding our imagination of space and time, helping us overcome the epistemological blinders imposed by the modern interstate system. A comparable development in the discipline of sociology, however, is largely missing in his account. This is not a trivial omission. After all, in the broader disciplinary division of labor in social science, it was sociology that came to claim the nationally bounded “society” in the modern industrial world as its object of analysis proper—with anthropology in charge of the nonindustrial world, history the past, and international relations the external. Given that “an internalist and constitutionalist view of what society is” made sociology a veritable social science discipline, it is no surprise that sociology has been said to undergo lately an identity crisis of sorts, as globalization made this view increasingly untenable. What I would like to do in the remainder of my comments is thus to bring Ho's transregional research program into conversation with a few notable attempts to reconstitute sociology on a new ontological and epistemological basis, heeding some productive tensions that this conversation creates in Ho's argument. My critical engagement concerns two concepts, “society” and “mobility,” and their relation.
Invoking the now familiar critique of methodological nationalism, Ho proclaims that “The trap is not the nation, but society.” But as his key term “mobile societies” reveals, Ho is not yet ready to jettison the concept of “society.” In his view, the integrative ambition of classic social theory that endowed the notion of “society” with the sui generis nature is essential to produce a thick account of transregionalism. This is a curious analytic move, if we compare Ho's position with other responses to the similar problématique. For one, the late British sociologist John Urry, who pioneered the so-called “mobility turn,” presents “mobility” as a new, alternative pivot of sociology, which can replace its erstwhile central concept, that of “society” (Urry Reference Urry1998, 30). For Urry and many others in the mobility study, the concept of “society” is too tightly tied with territorialization to accommodate the alternative deterritorialized topographies of “networks” and “fluids,” which are essential to analyze our increasingly globalizing world. Suggestively enough, one of Urry's programmatic books that came out at the beginning of the new millennium is entitled Sociology Beyond Societies (Reference Urry2000). What makes Ho, unlike Urry, sanguine about the marriageability of the notion of society and that of mobility? Is there something distinctive about the experience of inter-Asia before the arrival of “globalization” that makes this marriage not only possible but also desirable for Ho's transregional research program?
American sociologists across the Atlantic, who have largely kept their distance from the “mobility turn,” may have a different reason to be skeptical about taking “mobile societies” as the fundamental building block of a new research program. For example, in his influential article “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology,” Mustafa Emirbayer (Reference Emirbayer1997, 287) states: “Relational theorists reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pre-given units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points of sociological analysis.” The core problem of the concept of “society” in this case is that it is too tightly tied with the substantialist perspective. The substantialist perspective begins analysis with various kinds of presumably self-subsistent entities, whether they are individuals, societies, structures, social systems, communities, or subalterns, and only then considers the dynamic flows in which they subsequently involve themselves. This view unwarrantedly “detaches elements … from their spatiotemporal contexts, analyzing them apart from their relations with other elements within fields of mutual determination and flux” (288).
Does the fact that Ho's “mobile societies” are territorially unmoored, and part of broader connections and circulations, exempt this concept from the charge of substantialism? Another well-known critique of the substantialist, entity-like understanding of “society” may disagree. Here I'm thinking of Rogers Brubaker's (Reference Brubaker2005) influential article, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” (Note that Ho sees “mobile societies” and “diasporas” as more or less interchangeable terms.) Brubaker notes that the fast-growing scholarship on diaspora continues to conceive of diaspora as a bounded entity, if a nonterritorial one at that. In his view, diaspora studies may have overcome “the metaphysics of the nation-state as a bounded territorial community” (11), but they have failed to remain vigilant against “the metaphysics of ‘community’ and ‘identity’” (12). In Brubaker's view, scholars often unwarrantedly endow the notion of diaspora with “a non-territorial form of essentialized belonging” (12). For Brubaker and many others sharing his stance, the trap is, to paraphrase Ho, not the nation, but a substantialist view of society, mobile or not. In the language informed by the Bourdieusian field theory, Brubaker alternatively proposes that we treat diaspora as an idiom, a stance, or a claim, that is, a category of practice invoked, mobilized, and contested by social actors themselves, not as a category of analysis signifying a thing, an ethnodemographic entity out there. Ho's theoretical aspiration, however, seems to point to the opposite direction. Ho aims to produce an integrative, thick account of transregionalism to render visible “mobile societies” that had maintained their boundedness and distinctive identities over an expansive space and a longue durée. See, for example, the following comment: “Mobile societies make and remake connections, and a rigorous spatial focus combined with a plastic sense of time allows them to emerge into view.” Given that an increasing sensitivity to mobility, connections, and circulations has put the substantialist view of society under close scrutiny in the discipline of sociology, why has the same impetus encouraged Ho to attempt to resubstantialize rather than desubstantialize mobile societies? What justifies this particular analytic choice?
Lastly, I would like to ask Ho about the place of “immobility” in his theoretical ambition. The prevailing tendency that equates the past with the local/immobile and the modern or the late-modern with the global/mobile can be criticized in two ways. On the one hand, one can show how the past was as global, transregional, and mobile as the present, which seems to be Ho's strategy. On the other hand, one can also demonstrate how the contemporary phase of globalization is characterized profoundly by containment, bordering, and involuntary immobility. From traditional migration scholarship through the heavily Foucauldian critical border study to the mobility study that I previously mentioned, scholars have begun to pay more attention to this paradox of our mobile world. They have explored the institutional, organizational, and everyday practices that make cross-border mobility “the uppermost among coveted values … a scarce and unequally distributed commodity” (Bauman Reference Bauman1998, 2), interrogating the hitherto neglected relationship between spatial and social mobility. My current project on migration careers and legalization strategies of asylum-seekers, for example, suggests that circular and serial migration is as much a manifestation of immobility and containment that they are subjected to (both in the spatial and social senses) as an expression of their mobility and circulation. Shifting the analytic focus from the notion of borders to the practice of bordering (Côté-Boucher, Infantino, and Salter Reference Côté-Boucher, Infantino and Salter2014) and border struggle (Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013), other ethnographic studies have also illuminated how kinship, capitalist market, and sovereign state together function as complex global mobility regimes, determining who can move to where, how, and at what costs. They have focused especially on how different categories of difference (e.g., class, gender, sexuality, ethnoracial/ethnoreligious identification, nativity, and so on) profoundly shape, and are shaped by, the operation of these regulatory regimes (see Nicole Constable's comments on Ho's essay). Observing how a proliferation of borders is transforming migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life of our time, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013) even propose that we treat the border not as a research object but as the prime epistemic framework with which to examine the seemingly ever more mobile and fluid world of today: the title of their book is (again, suggestively enough for our purpose) Border as Method.
Given these developments in the field I surveyed (if selectively) above, Ho's proposal, mobility as method, seems to stress, rather one-sidedly, mobility, connections, and circulations, without exploring their dialectic relationship with immobility, containment, gate-keeping, ghettoization, bordering, and so forth and so on. A more lucid theoretical articulation of these dialectics would help Ho identify the logics shaping “the patterned configuration of directions, circuits of mobilities, clusters of association in one place, election to office, marriage partners there and elsewhere, and so on.”
Acknowledgments
I appreciate Saeyoung Park's insightful comments on the earlier version of this commentary. The discussion at the “JAS at AAS: The Flow of Migration beyond the Nation” panel at the AAS annual meeting in Toronto (March 2017), where the abridged version of this commentary was presented, also helped me sharpen my arguments during the revision.