Abstract

The emigrant, who transgresses the boundaries of belonging, brings into question the meaning of boundaries as the interface between opposites. What are these boundaries? What is their origin? How do they affect the emigrant and vice versa? Do they apply to the new world-order defined by mass migration, mass media, and global inter-networking? ;Boundaries, real or imagined discontinuities, differences, or transitions, identify or differentiate units of space, time, conventions, ideas, people or communities. Boundaries organize, divide, define, distinguish, limit, protect, insure, secure, motivate, or discourage. Concepts of boundaries can be traced to rudimentary experiences of the body. Boundaries are the bulwarks of the body's 'stronghold'---protection from perceived 'dangers'. Boundaries are simultaneously the body's 'threshold'---the selective interface for assimilating the 'good' or healthy and rejecting or excreting the 'bad' or harmful. Hence body boundaries frequently become binary, separating perceived opposites "where there are not opposites but differences in degree." Such binary boundaries become models for social boundaries, defining and delimiting identity in the home and community or more generally in a place embedded in a time that becomes a history. These social boundaries, mediated by communication, define the interface between 'sameness' and 'difference', separating familiarity from ambiguity and expectations from uncertainty. It is such 'sacrosanct' boundaries of belonging that are transgressed and transformed by the emigrant. ;The emigrant as the radical other, n/either 'friend' n/or 'foe', shatters and restructures the boundaries of belonging and re-initiates a process of identification. Identification is the process of reconstituting a relevant identity, which emerges from the depths of confusion by re-establishing communication in some form. The process of communication is being influenced by the current revolution in communication technologies, which distorts time, space, and place, and impact the meaning of identity and therefore what it means to be an emigrant. These new modes of communication define unprecedented cultural narratives in which the emigrant's 'de-centered', disoriented perspective may have adaptive advantages. Images of social boundaries that combine the emigrant's emergent 'stronghold/threshold' with the constellation of networks define new boundaries of belonging. The sense of belonging has become about balancing inclusivity and exclusivity with the complex and multiple attachments arising from relocations and displacements, which are always already transgressed