Ivan V. Small

Department of Anthropology

Director of Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University

“Southeast Asian Ethno-mobilities: Legacies of Transpacific Migration”

Noon, Friday, Sept. 6

Peters Campus Life Building 100 and online (registration required for online attendance)

This talk reflects on ethnicity and mobility as intersectional analytics in my research trajectory as a cultural anthropologist, which has encompassed migration, money, transportation and diasporic community formations in Southeast Asia and the United States. I relate key themes, ethnographic insights and theoretical interventions across three primary projects: 1) Postwar migration and the social dynamics of resultant remittances between the U.S and Vietnam; 2) Automobile market transitions in Southeast Asia facilitated by transnational capital circulations; and 3) Southeast Asian American community formations in the U.S. in response to dispersion resettlement policies. I reflect on the analytical potentials and limitations of the mobilities turn in the social sciences that frame and link understandings of such developments. I propose that mobility studies can be put into more substantive conversation with other interdisciplinary fields of inquiry such as infrastructure and transnational studies. These analytic intersections would afford more precise investigations of migratory and capital circulations in the global economy, and offer opportunities for critically reflecting on what constitutes the epistemological contours and comparative relevance of Southeast Asian studies.

In addition to being the new director of NIU's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Ivan V. Small is a sociocultural and economic anthropologist. His research considers mobility, circulation and capital transformations in a trans-Pacific context, with a focus on Southeast Asia and the United States. He has held a number of research fellowships, most recently as a visiting senior fellow with the Yusof Ishak Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in 2021, and is currently on the Fulbright specialist roster. He has worked and consulted for nonprofits, foundations and think tanks including the Smithsonian, Ford Foundation and World Policy Institute. He completed graduate studies in International Affairs and Anthropology at Columbia and Cornell Universities. Professor Small's work has been published in prominent disciplinary and area studies journals including the Journal of Cultural Economy, TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, Journal of Consumer Culture, Mobility in History, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Visual Anthropology. 

Small’s research has been particularly engaged with Vietnam and the Vietnamese American diaspora. His first book, "Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam" (Cornell 2019), examines the changing social, spatial and material dimensions of migration and remittances between the U.S. and Vietnam since 1975, drawing on fieldwork in San Jose and Orange County California, and Saigon and Quy Nhon Vietnam. It considers the affective role of remittances in mediating trans-Pacific kinship networks, contests the symmetrical relationality assumed in the domesticated analytical category of “the gift” in anthropology and the humanities, and offers a transnational lens focusing on how diasporic mobility affects not only processes of refugee and immigrant community formations in the United States, but also the orientations, desires, and expectations of those who stay behind. Examining the qualitative correlation between reception of remittances and aspirations for migration, Small demonstrates how the characteristics of the remittance gifting medium of U.S. dollars in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, come to partially define the relationships and aspirations of the exchange participants. The book traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer channels from 1975 to present: from material and black market forms to formal bank and money service transfers. Transformations in the social and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany these shifts, demonstrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the economic realm to which they are typically consigned. 

Small is also co-editor (with Bill Maurer and Smoki Musaraj) of the book "Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion and Design" (Berghahn 2018), featuring comparative ethnographic work on technological financial inclusion initiatives driven by Global North entrepreneurial development stakeholders and their reception in the Global South. This includes monetary exchange, transfer and accounting practices including rotating credit associations and digital mobile money – in countries such as Kenya and the Philippines, but also their value ecology conceptualizations by experts in research and development nodes like New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C;. and London. Small remains involved in various emerging global financial technology research projects related to the anthropology of money, including the Human Economy Research Programme at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. 

In recent fieldwork, Small extends his analyses of mobility to transportation consumption patterns shaped by international and regional trade agreements in Southeast Asia, in particular the ASEAN Free Trade Area. Examining how mobility service providers – including automotive manufacturers and multimodal transportation concept labs – are projecting the future of mobility and the technologies that shape them onto emerging Asian markets, Small interrogates how generalized conceptions related to automobility, Asian culture, technological futures, and environmental sustainability are mobilized and modeled by marketers, designers, planners, and engineers. He also examines how the emergent mobility infrastructures produced by these transportation stakeholders are apprehended and embodied by consumers of transportation commodities and services in rapidly expanding Vietnamese megacities. 

Small’s current research agenda triangulates post-1975 first, second and third wave migration, remittance, transportation and investment patterns by Southeast Asians moving between the Northeast, Midwest, California, and sunbelt cities in the South. He is interested in comparative Southeast Asian American community formations and transnational connections as they relate to the aesthetics and affordances of ethno-suburban development. This includes how Southeast Asian ethnoburbs have been formed as an agential response to structural resettlement policies intended to disperse and assimilate refugees. He is conducting archival and ethnographic research on how Southeast Asian American communities have been formed and shaped over time by changing domestic and international migration and capital circulations, contributing to growing demands for visibility and inclusion in practices of place making.