This article integrates insights from the sociology of the body and the sociology of immigration to examine the role of the body in the immigrant incorporation process. Drawing on three years of participant observation in a West African immigrant community, I show how immigrants from a predominantly agrarian society must adapt and retrain their bodies, often under great pressure, to meet the demands of American social institutions. Immigrants' ability to move their bodies in socially prescribed ways affects three crucial aspects of the incorporation process: identity formation, economic mobility, and transnational practices. Immigrants who struggle to execute the host society's normative bodily movements (1) interpret their bodily challenges as evidence of their outsider identity, (2) struggle to acquire the material resources necessary to achieve more traditionally studied forms of economic incorporation, and (3) face limitations in their ability to maintain transnational networks even as those networks play an increasingly important social role in the face of their blocked mobility. These findings indicate that bodily incorporation is a critical precursor to full incorporation into the host society. © The Author 2016.

Incorporation Refugees Immigration embodiment Body

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