Diversity and similarity beyond ethnicity : migrants’ material practices

Ethnicity paradigm in migration research - looking at migrants as ‘members’ of ethnic communities and ‘bearers’ of ethnic identities – hinders the understanding of diversity and similarity beyond ethnicity. This article promotes ethnographic research that treats the importance of ethnicity as an empirical question, while focusing on migrants’ material practices. It proposes a shift of interest from material representations of social relations to the very materiality of objects in transnational contexts of migration, and to what people actually do in order to maintain vital connections that constitute transnational social fields. Those connections are often dependent on objects that migrants bring along, send, receive, and use