Judith-Maria Buechler - Böcker

This is an oral history of a second-generation, urban-born woman who struggles to survive in the poor, Andean city of La Paz. It shows how her identity shifts over time, shaped by the major events in her life. Topics range fron social networks to magical interventions and clairvoyant dreaming.

Although studies have been made of individual aspects of the problem, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of both the theoretical issues and the scope and variety of present-day migratory movements in Europe, together with their historical antecedents. In his introduction, Hans Buechler reviews significant previous research and outlines the theoretical framework of the present volume. The primary focus of the chapters that follow is the experience of migrants and of household members who remain at home, analyzed within the total context of migration in both host and sender countries. The effects of migration on family economy and kin relationships are examined in detail. Among the issues explored are economic decision-making processes in migrant households, the implications of migration for family landholding, ties between migrants and family left behind, and kin, friendship, and neighborhood networks. Other topics considered are the working and social environment experienced by migrants; labor policies and restrictions relating to employment, work permits, and workers' families; and the problems connected with returning home. The final section, a bibliographic essay by Judith-Maria Buechler, helps to put the various individual contributions in a wider perspective.

Examines the privatization of agriculture in eastern Germany since 1989.This analysis of the privatization of agriculture in eastern Germany captures the turbulent times after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of the two Germanies. Based in large part on oral histories provided by cooperative managers, newly independent family farmers, and westerners who established farms in the east, the authors examine the competitive struggle involved in the transformation from communism to capitalism. Linking the personal to the local, regional, national, and global, they develop a theory of the construction of identities out of past experiences and new challenges, in order to account for the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the core relations and ideas that constitute the new Germany.