Cities are the favoured places of merantu, the customary journeys of the Menangkabau and other Indonesian men beyond the boundaries of their own culture, whence they return with booty and stories worthy of their manhood. The Malay community in Mecca is second in size only to that of the Arabs. Some remain on the haj for 10 years or more; some are delayed for years, returning via Africa or India (Provencher 1976). The Mexican villagers working in Redwood City, California, and the Samoans in San Francisco likewise intend to return, an eventuality for which they prepare by sending money back to relatives, telephone calls and periodic visits to their native places, by sending their children home for visits or schooling and otherwise maintaining their natal ties and building their status in their former and future home. Can Samoans, Malays, Oaxacans, Africans, Filipinos, Peruvians, Thais—the millions of people now cycling between the ‘peripherae’ and metropolitan centres of the modern world-system—be content to return to a bucolic existence ‘after they’ve seen Paris’? Is it not true (as the medieval proverb goes) that Stadt Luft macht Frei? Or if not free, proletarians forever? However true in an earlier European history, today the huge phenomenon of circular migration is creating a new kind of cultural formation: a determinate community without entity, extending transculturally and often transnationally from a rural centre in the so-called Third World to ‘homes abroad’ in the metropolis, the whole united by the toing and-froing of goods, ideas and people on the move. ‘The geographic village is small,’ writes Uzzell of Oaxacan campesinos, ‘the social village spreads over thousands of miles’ (1979:343).

Taking shape as urban ethnic outposts of rural, ‘tribal’ or peasant homelands, these synthetic formations remained unrecognised as such by the Western social scientists studying them for a long time. Or rather in studying urbanisation, migration, remittance dependency, labour recruitment or ethnic formation, Western researchers presented a spectacle something like the blind men and the elephant, each satisfied to describe the cultural whole in terms of one or another of its aspects. No doubt the Euro-American history of urbanisation had a stranglehold on the anthropological imagination. The general presumption was that urbanisation must everywhere put an end to what Marx called the idiocy of rural life. Relations between people would become impersonal, utilitarian, secular, individualised and otherwise disenchanted and detribalised because of the very nature of the city as a complex social and industrial system,. Such was the trend in Robert Redfield’s ‘folk-urban continuum’. As the beginning and end of a qualitative change, countryside and city were structurally distinct and opposed ways of life. ‘After the rise of cities,’ Redfield wrote, ‘men became something different from what they had been before’ (1953:ix). British social anthropology of the period was hung up on the same dualist a priori. Max Gluckman was the father of the African version: ‘The African in the rural areas and in town,’ he said, ‘ is two different men’ (1960:69).

Enlightenment was soon in coming. Explicitly taking on the folk-urban continuum, Edward Bruner demonstrated the continuity of identity, kinship and custom between Toba Batak villages of highland Sumatra and their urban relatives in Medan. ‘Examined from the structural point of view, the Toba Batak communities in village and city are part of one social and ceremonial system’ (1961:515). Speaking more widely of Southeast Asia, Bruner wrote that ‘contrary to traditional theory, we find in many Asian cities that society does not become secularised, the individual does not become isolated, kinship organisations do not break down, nor do the social relationships in the urban environment become impersonal, superficial and utilitarian’ (1961:508). By the mid 1970s such observations had become common in the Latin American homeland of the folk-urban continuum as well as in ethnographies by Gluckman’s colleagues and others throughout sub-Saharan Africa. As the gestalt shifted from the antithesis of the rural-urban to the synthesis of the ‘translocal’ cultural order, study after study groped for a suitable terminology. The scholars spoke variously of ‘a bilocal society’, ‘a single social and resource system’, ‘a non-territorial community network’, a ‘common social field’ uniting countryside and city, a ‘single community spanning a variety of sites on both sides of the border’, ‘a single social field in which there is a substantial circulation of members’ or some new species of the like.

What any and all these descriptions express is the structural complementarity of the indigenous homeland and the metropolitan ‘homes abroad,’ their interdependence as sources of cultural value and means of social reproduction. Symbolically focused on the homeland, whence its members derive their identity and their destiny, the ‘translocal’ community is strategically dependent on its urban outliers for material wherewithal. The rural order itself extends into the city, inasmuch as the migrants associate with each other in the urban context on the basis of their relationships at home. Kinship, community and tribal affiliations acquire new functions, and perhaps new forms, in the relationship among migrants: they organise the movements of people and resources, the care of homeland dependents, the provision of urban housing and employment. Insofar as people conceive their social being and their future in their native place, the material flows generally favour the homeland people. The indigenous order is sustained by earnings and commodities acquired in the foreign-commercial sector. But should we speak of ‘remittances’ as the foreign economic experts do? Epeli Hau’ofa has argued on occasion that this flow of money and goods is better understood by the norms of ‘reciprocity,’ since it reflects the migrants’ obligations to homeland kin, even as it secures their rights in their native place. ‘Reciprocity’ as opposed to ‘remittances’ appropriately shifts the analytic perspective from a geographic village that is small to a social village spread over thousands of miles. Rather than lament the fate of a village that lives on ‘remittances’ one might, with Graeme Hugo, commend its success in reversing ‘the parasitic function traditionally ascribed to cities’ (1978:264). In spanning the historic divide between traditional and modern, the developmental distance between centre and periphery and the structural opposition of townsmen and tribesmen, the translocal community deceives a considerable body of enlightened Western social science.

Indeed this capacity of indigenous peoples to move freely and improvise culturally obliges us to reconsider certain presuppositions about the precolonial order—presuppositions whose source, incidentally, could never have been ethnography but rather the folklore of the civilising mission. Typically the cultural scheme was universal, and in the spaces beyond, true human beings were other kinds of persons and powers, which need to be appropriated as a pre-condition of local society. From exploits that transcended the community borders, men—most often men—returned with trophies of war or the chase, with goods acquired in raid or trade, with visions, songs, amulets, potions and cults, things familiar or new that could be consumed, sacrificed, exchanged, given away or otherwise disposed of in order to reproduce and develop the indigenous form of life. If in spite of all this it could be thought these peoples were historyless or closed to innovation, it is probably because they sought novelty in the things they considered to have reproductive virtues, which might have been a new kind of valuable shell or magical formula, not exactly what a development-economist would consider a ‘capital investment’. It follows that few if any of the peoples known to anthropology were culturally sui generis. Their supposed closure was, as I say, a myth that owes more to enlightened prejudices about their isolation than to any ethnographic observation. We have not been playing with amateurs, then, in games of construction-of-the-Other. This helps explain Marilyn Strathern’s observation, regarding Melanesians: ‘It has been something of a surprise for Europeans to realise that their advent was something less than a surprise’ (1990:25).

It should not now come as a surprise that ethnographers working in New Guinea and Vanuatu, in Mexico, Indonesia and the Amazon Basin, have seen a certain continuity, or more precisely a develop-man, of ancient custom in the modern phenomenon of circular migration. Since 1858 certain Xhosa have been working in the mines and towns of southern Africa. Their crossing into the dangerous terrain is still explicitly conceived and ritually protected as an excursion of war—from which they return with the booty of civilisation, to be celebrated as ‘good and moral men’ (McAllister 1980). In highland New Guinea too: ‘Just as the blind Homer sang of the journeys and heroes of Troy, so recent Enga poets have praised their heroes and immortalised their deeds through images of commemorative chants’ (Lacey 1985:93). This travelling tradition has seen exponential growth through the colonial and post-colonial periods, and their journeys now take Enga men to coastal towns and foreign lands, but even in pre-colonial days the heroes returned with means of cultural innovation and transformation. The whole highlands culture, as presently constructed, is a few centuries old or less, following the European expansion that brought the sweet potato into the Pacific.