Migratory Stratification. A New Analytical Perspective for a Stratigraphy of Human Mobilities, Socio-Territorial Transformation and Cultural Change

Migration, whether international or internal, constitutes both a driving force and a manifestation of the profound social, cultural, economic, demographic, and territorial transformations affecting contemporary societies. Migration processes are deeply intertwined with global dynamics, by which they are shaped and which, in turn, they contribute to transforming at both national and local scales. Drawing on Mauss’s formulation, later applied to human mobility by Sayad, migration may be interpreted as a total social fact: a phenomenon that interdependently involves human practices and experiences across their social, economic, political, cultural, and religious dimensions, together with systems of world representation. Starting from these premises and adopting a diachronic perspective, it becomes possible to observe, on the one hand, the transformations that migration processes produce within societies of origin, transit, and destination and, on the other, the progressive sedimentation of different migratory epochs, shaped by changing global and local scenarios and embedded within material artefacts and socio-cultural practices. The contributions presented here focus, through specific empirical cases, precisely on this sedimentation and, therefore, on what may be defined in terms of migratory stratification, an expression through which we refer to the superimposition of different migratory phenomena that, during partially overlapping historical periods, affect the same socio-territorial context.