Migration Aspirations and ‘Glocal Ideas of the Good Life’ in Two Rural Communities in Southern and North-Eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

This chapter looks at how ‘ideas of the good life’ interacted and coevolved with aspirations to, and experiences and effects of, youth migration abroad, in two rural communities in Ethiopia. Aspirations are conceived as a social construct, in which an individual’s representation of her desirable future is formed from her experiences and social interactions. The chapter shows that in both sites, migration aspirations were shaping and being shaped by ideas of the good life and social norms about self-worth that drew on a ‘glocal’ cultural and normative repertoire formed through the continuous inter-penetration of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’. In a complex evolution also influenced by urbanisation, education and communications, migration aspirations and acts embodied the agency of the youth who constructed it through both, their desire for change, and their locally embedded search for recognition, just as generations of young people have done before them.