Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality

Abstract

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of translocal inequality by highlighting the multi-faceted nature of inequality and its manifestation across multiple places, times and forms. Examples are offered to demonstrate how factors as diverse as a parent’s health, a child’s education and the specifics of agricultural livelihoods continue to influence individuals’ behaviour and wellbeing regardless of distance. However, as argued in this chapter, the impact of material differences across space is only part of the story. Rather, as Chapter 1 posits, such persistent, translocal inequalities in mobile contexts are sustained by narratives shaped by the interplay of economic, ecological, and embodied factors. In highly mobile and dynamic contexts, it is shown, these narratives of stigma and praise, inclusion and exclusion, are the constant that facilitates the persistence of inequality. Arguing that the large-scale nature of much scholarship on inequality serves to mask this subtle role, Chapter 1 then introduces the six linked case studies that comprise the book’s empirical sections, outlining how their combination reveals inequality to be a “total social fact” rooted in translocal networks of association, affection and obligation.