Migration and Ethnicity: Some Aspects of Constructing the Event's Horizontal Space

Abstract

by Igor Markov

This article is based on the results of the author’s study of processes of Ukrainian labor migration to EU countries. Migration is a field for the study of «social frontier» or, in the words of the German sociologist T. Feist, «the borders of social formations», and not only in the territorial-cultural, but also in the temporal and spatial dimension. The article is devoted to the study of horizontal space of communication that is created by migrants’ social networks. Usually migrants neither integrate in the host society nor reintegrate in the society of their origin but rather create a horizontal space of coexistence, which reproduces the patterns of ethnicity. This is due to the changes of the types of social identities and principles of social identification. The author tries to trace how the factor of ethnicity is implemented in the construction of social identities in the horizontal space of coexistence.