Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.11567/met.30.3.2
Catastrophes and Migration: A Critical Hermeneutic Approach
Vjeran Katunarić
orcid.org/0000-0002-7979-9577
; Department of Sociology, University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
Abstract
Departing from Sorokin dualistic (“internal” and “external”) explanations of movement and from an extended critical hermeneutic understanding of the life-world, the article first analyzes some examples of mythologems/ideologems of migration. Furthermore, it discusses the connection between catastrophes and migrations in the animal and human world, the movements of things and ideas, especially the myth of the “migration of souls”. The main (hypo)thesis relates to the contemporary blockade of mass migration of people from the South to the North, which is taken as a result of the collapse of key development projects arising from the ideology of liberalism and socialism, where, as an anti-modernization response, a part of the South reactivates myth of the “migration of souls”. Catastrophic events thus cause (mass) migration, interpreted as a phenomenon of the life-worlds in two ways: firstly, as an object of religious and scientific worldviews that postulate nothingness or disappearance of (individual) species as a precondition for creation (of a new world or new species); secondly, catastrophes are reinterpreted from the perspective of the concept of multiple universes, which is more hermeneutic than analytical. In imperial cosmologies material or ideal element of the monistic assumption of the universe prevails. The prevalence is expressed as the conceptual split between the immortal “migrant” soul and decaying “indigenous” body (idealistic solution) or combined (materialistic solution). The exodus as a motif occurs in many cultures along with the myth of “migration of souls”. Nowadays, the myth is reactivated among populations obsessed by militaristic idea of the “holy war”. The aggression against the life-worlds is thus composed of two long-term processes that undermine (utopian) hope for a better life. One process relates to the expansion of the capitalist markets that leads to the impoverishment of most people in the South. The second process relates to substituting secular migration to safer areas by illusory, i.e. apocalyptic scenarios of survival. The author argues that only rational answer to the destructive threat is translating ideas about the multiple universe into new, yet alternative, global investments into the development of the South (and the North). This way, a potential immigrant participates in the building of his/her local environment, whereby his/her (e)migration becomes unnecessary or the subject to free choice.
Keywords
catastrophes; evolution; development; migration; mythologhems; “migration of souls”; critical hermeneutics
Hrčak ID:
135714
URI
Publication date:
31.12.2014.
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