Migration as Hope: Space, Time, and Imagining the Future

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. In this paper, I look at different contexts of economic migration in the Polish highlands in the cities of Łó dzánd Lublin. I consider what social and economic factors make migration an investment and a belief in a better future and what other factors may lead to rejection of the possibility of migration. The periods I am considering are the years of crisis during the late socialist era, the period of structural adjustment following the end of socialism, and the period following accession to the European Union. I focus on kinship and households and the way in which formal and informal economic activities, networks of care and reciprocity, and the possibilities of migration are negotiated within and among them during these very different economic periods. I argue that migration is both a future-orientated and a backward-looking process and one that involves movement between different temporalities, spaces, and regimes of value. New inventions or creations are not about replacing the old with the new, but adding to the old, producing new articulations.