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term for many different kinds of population movement which are for the most part inadequately recognized, let alone understood. People have been in movement from time immemorial, and past and contemporary evidence would suggest that those who are economically least developed are among the most mobile (McNeill 1984). Frequent redistribution is a major strategy for survival among hunter-gatherers and traditional pastoralists, and in the past the survival motive was dominant for many who moved. Today there are those who are forced to move to survive, influenced by major environmental and political factors, but for those who are involved in a high degree of mobility in economically developed societies the dominant motivation involves not survival but satisfaction. Everett Lee (1966) in a restatement and clarification of the laws of migration set out by Ravenstein in the 1880's, summarized migration as involving positive and negative factors which influence movement in source and in destination areas, and those who move have to contend with intervening obstacles. These factors are complexly related with one another, and we are a long way from providing adequate and convincing explanations for movements as a basis for better policy measures not only for those who move but also those who do not. We are without doubt in part constrained by our limited comprehension of what we are trying to explain (Prothero 1985). The umbrella-term migration is conventionally defined as a move between two specified places that has occurred between two specified points in time, and by implication the move is definitive in character. It is this mobility which is recorded in standard census enumerations. There is the tendency to think of movement in these uniform terms, to neglect the reality of the diversity which occurs, for there are many movements taking place which are inadequately recognized and cannot be recorded in the usual forms of data collection. These movements are receiving insufficient attention from both the positive and negative aspects of their impact. These general statements apply to both the more and the less developed parts of the world. The latter are more demanding of attention, for their populations present more pressing problems, and some alleviation of them through redistribution is more immediately required. Yet our understanding of mobility in the less developed parts of the world is more limited, and has until recently been dominated by concepts and models which are derived from the now developed parts of the world. This limited understanding has characterized the thinking of those who have gone to work in developing countries, but also that of researchers from those countries who have been trained in and have adopted western Eurocentric approaches to their work.