With rising interest in the gender dimensions of migration and the amplification and diversification of worldwide transborder mobility patterns, the discussion of marital migration and globalization processes gains critical weight in migration studies. Uzbek migrants in Germany share commonalities of globalized migrants and their peculiarities. This paper emphasizes the phenomena and reasoning of the contradictory dynamics between their cross-cultural claims for adaptive development and their traditional paradigm, dilemma, and their moral reorientation and self-consistency.
Through a 12-month fieldwork in Germany with participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted in Berlin, I found the following developmental features in the course of Uzbek female immigrants' life in Germany as development of economic status, independence degree, and the self-consciousness: abandonment of the negative constraints of the traditional morality (based on the patriarchal social system) of the society of origin, which is limited to the development of female self-consciousness; escape/unbinding in the form of migration; active and passive cultural adaptation; intimacy dilemma and subjectivity of passive moral self-consistency and balance. Through an Uzbek indigenous cultural paradigm of mobility “reproduction”, they are manifested with localized micro-hegemony in transnational context.
