Ulla D. Berg's Mobile Selves serves as a splendid – and important – anthropological study examining how migrants are defined and define themselves through the experience of global migration. Migration from Peru is not as large as from many other Latin American countries, is a relatively recent phenomenon that began in large numbers in the 1980s, and relies more on air travel than overland or sea routes. However, it is these factors that interest Berg, who has set out to investigate how the economics, politics and technology of our globalised and neoliberal era have influenced the processes of migrant identity and formation.

Berg divides her book into three larger sections each containing chapters analysing the refashioning of the migrant self. The first, ‘Cosmopolitan Desires’, uses two chapters to explore what makes migrants want to travel outside of Peru and how they must redefine their identity to take such measures. In this section, Berg exemplifies the use of transnational analysis by looking beyond and within the national boundary by tracing the long historical legacy of racialised divisions between the urban and rural in Peru as well as that of the transgressive figure of the cholo who both dares and is forced to operate in both spheres. Berg argues that the decision to migrate is not just a question of economics, but a historical, social and cultural desire of migrants to escape such definitions. To do so, Berg analyses how migrants re-make themselves to orient and often subvert the maze of post-9/11 policies designed precisely to exercise state power over the flow of people. Berg is careful to balance the theme of agency in this process, noting how migrants successfully refashion their identity while reminding us of the larger, often restrictive, state forces in which they must act.

The second section of the book, ‘Transnational Socialites’, traces the links that migrants maintain between Peru and the United States. Berg examines the paradoxical nature of modern technology that has made communication easier yet simultaneously uneasy in the globalised era. Although videos, cell phones, DVD, and Skype have made communication more constant, Berg documents that the same questions of reciprocity, estrangement and the affective become more fraught. What can now be more easily seen can also be more easily exposed to criticism over what life in the United States or Peru ‘should’ look or feel like. These interactions become more heightened when they are brought into the public sphere during ‘fiesta videos’ documenting community patron saint festivals. Often these festivals provide an opportunity for migrants to donate to civic life in their former communities. In return, communities must reciprocate their appreciation for such donations through public ceremonies which promise to be both moments of affection, but also potential rumour mills and points of conflict.

The final section of the book examines how Peruvianness is exercised by migrants. The first chapter provides an analysis of the prominent Peruvian Parade that takes place in the large migrant enclave of Patterson, New Jersey. Berg illustrates how the parade is not a display of a static Peruvian identity, but rather a process unto itself. The parade is a scenario where participants, many of whom would be considered outsiders by Lima's elite, can redefine themselves as true representatives of Peru. Likewise, the parade also offers Peruvians the opportunity to present themselves and their culture as a positive contribution to an idea of civic life in the United States. The final chapter analyses how migrants have negotiated with the Peruvian state which, in recent years, has sought to cultivate economic and political ties with citizens living abroad in the ‘Quinto Suyo’. Berg documents how, despite these efforts, most migrants serve as ‘phantom citizens’ still isolated from the levels of power of the Peruvian state. However, these ‘phantom citizens’ retain the ability to contest and influence the Peruvian state from abroad, as Berg shows in one case where migrants living in Maryland pool resources for the legal defence of their village in Mantaro after it committed extrajudicial violence against thieves.

The limits of this review (in both its space and my background as historian rather than anthropologist) do not allow me to describe in detail Berg's engagement with existing anthropological scholarship in Mobile Selves. However, Berg goes to great lengths to insert her research into multiple, current scholarly debates involving (but not limited to) transnationalism, state power, communication and kinship, media, ritual and citizenship. In fact, readers of Mobile Selves hoping to find a central, overarching conclusion regarding race and migration in the Americas may be a bit disappointed. In this case, Berg is more focused on using the case of migration between Peru and the United States to deepen and expand our understanding of the meaning of race and belonging when viewed through a transnational lens.

To use the analogy of migration, it is the journey, not the destination, that is most informative. One of the clearest themes repeated through Mobile Selves is a call to rethink ethnography in a globalised era. Berg argues for what she terms ‘ambulant ethnography’ which ‘sees migration as a social practice and as a profoundly generative process for other social forms and categories, including self and personhood’ (p. 30). Berg's fieldwork appropriately reflects this claim. Although the bulk of her ethnography is based on tracing migration from several villages in the Mantaro valley of Peru to foci of migrants, especially in suburban Maryland, Berg also visits several important sites along the migrant journeys including Lima's mini-industry of document forging, the US embassy, highway combis, parades and civic gatherings.

Even though Berg's ethnographic reach is expansive, her careful attention to her subjects and their social environments is constant throughout her analysis. Mobile Selves succeeds in impressing the reader simultaneously with its global reach and very human focus.