Remigration and Social Change - Prospects for the Migrant Worker Sending Countries of the Middle East

Abstract

This study is about culture. It suggests that migrants adopt, collectively, new cultural attitudes which they will attempt to maintain after getting re-settled back home. Here, migrants are not seen as "mere actors of social change", nor as abstract rational fulfillers of the logic of capitalist accumulation. Migrants are individuals who have shared a collective cultural experience which will influence their re-integration into their native societies. Given the case of peasants, migrating as low-skilled workers to the oil-producing countries of the Gulf, we face a specific and, in many ways, a unique type of migration: