Editor’s Note
This article examines how migration reshapes women’s lives, tracing the evolution of scholarly perspectives over the past 30 years. It highlights the diverse and often competing frameworks—from economics to psychology—that now inform this complex field of study.
How does the migration experience transform the situation of women? Issues related to this field of analysis are increasingly studied. Over the past three decades, these questions have been addressed through various interpretive frameworks, themselves situated within different, sometimes opposing, paradigms. The proliferation of work explains why these questions are now articulated through a multitude of approaches, both from disciplinary (economics, society, geography, psychology, etc.) and geographical (immigration space, emigration space, transit space…) perspectives. Research from diverse fields yields heterogeneous results, highlighting the decisive role of social, economic, spatial, and historical context (Agunias, 2006; Taylor et al., 1996), challenging the dominant structuralist stances of the 1980s.
Despite the multiplication of studies, this article explores this question in the little-studied context of mining rushes. Indeed, although the geography of migration is particularly fertile and despite the growing number of works specifically questioning women’s migrations (De Haas et al., 2010; Catarino et al., 2005, etc.), analyses focusing on “frontier zones” (Arnauld De Sartre, 2005) and the very specific migrations that are rushes remain extremely rare. Migration phenomena linked to frontier zones are specific in many respects, and within this set, mining frontiers can also be distinguished from agricultural frontiers. Survival migrations generated by the search for precious minerals (gold, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds…) are often more brutal and anarchic than population movements produced by the development of land for agriculture. A form of competition takes place among migrants to get hold of the first stones, the best deposits, etc. The unfolding of the migration phenomenon, the characteristics (especially family structures) and the objectives of the migrants cannot be equated with what is observed in the major land-clearing regions of the Global South. This world is often imagined as a strictly masculine one. In this picture, the role of women is reduced to the status of miners’ wives confined to the domestic sphere or prostitutes dependent on brothels run by criminals. While this caricature reflects part of the realities, it cannot faithfully render the complexity of situations observed in small-scale mining frontiers.
Madagascar offers numerous grounds for questioning these issues in the specific context of rushes for precious stones. The Ilakaka region is the main Malagasy frontier zone for small-scale mining. From October 1998 (Guerin et al….
