Mari Kivitalo

Social and Public policy

University of Jyväskylä

Abstract

The Trajectories of Migrants to Rural Town

The spatial dissolution of the Finnish society between rural and urban areas seems to become socially, culturally and economically distinctive. Individuals and assets, like cultural and economical capitals, are more and more concentrated to the growth-centres while rural areas loose their population and their position in societal reproduction. Spatial differences seem also to become crucial to individual’s position in a society. On a contrary to Pierre Bourdieu’s thought of social proximity, have social distances in “paper” become more real distances in a society? Does the polarisation mean that the new spatial order of the society evidently alters the significance of traditional communities and their capacity to empower individuals and their capitals? My hypothesis is that a small peripheral town opens up different kinds of opportunities for migrants depending on his or her amount and composition of individual capitals and how one can set them in motion in this specific space (which is historically and structurally constituted).

The interest in this paper is to research if moving from one spatial context to another actually changes people’s positions (and dispositions) in a society. In order to reveal these possible changes, as a theoretical tool I use the bourdieusian concept of trajectory. It is a notion of capital, a set of positions that agents (habituses) possess within fields and across the fields in time. Trajectories can be rising, descending or stationary. Empirical analysis will be based on a comparison of a set of capital-based indicators that reveal the positions that migrants have before and after moving from one community to another. Empirical data is collected by using survey-method among migrants to town in a municipality of Keuruu.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how migrants’ trajectories (capitals) are developed when moving to a small periphery town. The results show what kinds of migrants are enchanted and who are to be alienated from this space.