Thomas A. Tweed 2 Flows and Dams: Rethinking Categories for the Study of Transnationalism The authors of this volume offer a number of rich case studies about religion, space, and transnationalism in Asia and Africa. For most contributors, network is a key category, though some also employ other terms that have been influential in the past few decades. My modest contribution is to reflect on those categories, surface the underlying metaphors, and ask how future researchers might modify their interpretive language to attend to the broken transnational connections, consider the links between time and space, and recognize the interplay between cultural and biological forces. Turkish Muslims in Berlin To ground that abstract analysis, a case study might help. Let me start – and con- clude – by thinking about Turkish Muslim migrants in Germany. I began doing so in fall 1984, when I toured a Turkish school in Kreuzberg, West Berlin. It’sa memory that I’ve returned to over the years as I have tried to understand transna- tional spaces. 1 Those Turks had come as “guest workers” between 1961 and 1973, and when an undeclared civil war broke out in Turkey in 1984, asylum seekers followed, settling in that working-class neighbourhood adjacent to the Wall, which had its transnational sites – Turkish cafes, video stores, Koran schools, and courtyard mosques. 2 I had visited with a delegation from a US university that was invited by a group in West Berlin. Our hosts fondly remembered the US 1 My description of Turkish migrants in West Berlin here and below relies on multiple sources, including the following: S.T. Vierra, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, especially pp. 163–192; W. Kil and H. Silver, “From Kreuzberg to Marzahn: New Migrant Communities in Berlin”, German Politics and Society 24 (2006) 4, pp. 96–100; P. Gupte, “Germany’s Guest Workers”, New York Times, 19 August 1984. I am grateful to my research assistant Danae Jacobson for help with the research for this chapter. 2 On the periods of Turkish migration and the changing conditions in Turkey and Germany, see T. Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, pp. 60–95. Faist suggests that 21,900 Turkish asylum seekers arrived in Germany between 1983 and 1985, constituting two-thirds of all Turkish refu- gees to Western Europe in that period (see Table 3.1). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110690101-002