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- Convenors:
-
Nicola Mooney
(University of the Fraser Valley)
Pauline McKenzie Aucoin (University of Ottawa)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Anthropology in movement/Mondes en mouvement: Anthropologie en mouvement
- Location:
- MRN Aud
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the relationships between culture, mobility, and ethnography with particular attention to how these intersections are reflected in the cultural poetics of several cultures on the move. How does culture move, and what are the potentials and frictions of cultures in motion?
Long Abstract:
While cultures have always been in motion, people now live in an unprecedented age of movement. How are we to best craft ethnographies of cultures in motion? As peoples cease to be tied to places, they enter new spaces of cultural encounter, production, knowledge and scrutiny. It is now commonplace that cultures and peoples unmoored from their local and particular origins - through colonialism, urbanization, industrialization, migration, conflict, travel, and the embrace of modern and globalized imaginaries - see their notions of ancestry, history, memory and identity ungrounded, and from these deterritorializations new quests for emplacement, attachment, fixity and meaning may spring, What are the frictions and potentials of cultures in motion? How are their cultural poetics and identities reconfigured so as to bear new and continuous meanings? Who sets the terms of these renegotiations? How do they enlist or redeploy traditions, homes, affects, and representations. What are the dangers of their becoming adrift? What are the intersections of cultures in motion or en route with identity, nationalism, diaspora, globalization, hybridity and nostalgia? Do place, space, and time bear privileged positions in understanding and conceptualizing them? Or, does the lens of consumption hold sway? Papers focusing on the ways in which cultural poetics - broadly construed in terms of ritual, heritage, landscape, literature, and other aesthetic and/or mediated forms and interventions - might engage with, respond to, and disrupt cultural movement, encounter, revitalization, continuity, and change are particularly invited. We also encourage participants to consider the crafting of ethnography in such contexts of movement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Chiara Carbone (University Roma Tre)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I would like to compare my ethnography in New Zealand and South Italy focusing on the construction of a new identity space, where indigenous and migrants women can stay in-betweeness living and moving between different cultures and worlds.
Paper long abstract:
Mobility is a term used to explain the ability to move or to be moved. We can also refer this word to the social mobility or to the ability to move between different levels in society or employment. But the real meaning is not just spatial, temporal or social, often a deep conceptualization of mobility helps the ethnographer to understand how this dynamic concept works and drives identities into different cultural belongings.
The poetics of "Roots and routes" are in the same frame for those women who migrate and left their country of origin and for those women who reconstruct their indigenous identity in a post colonial society. In this paper I would like to compare the construction of different poetics of belonging related to the reshaping of the women identity in two contexts: Italy and New Zealand.
I would like to focus on my field research in New Zealand and in South Italy, exploring how Maori women and African women migrated to South Italy reconfigure a new space - a place in betweeness, where they live and experience different cultures and belongings, using their agency to build a new cultural identity… always on the move.
Dorothea Breier (University of Helsinki)
Paper short abstract:
How do the possibilities of people with migrant background influence their feeling of belonging and life-course they chose? On what grounds do they decide to move to one country or the other, and how do the experiences they have shape them?
Paper long abstract:
Mobility and migration do not end with people moving from one country to the other. One of the results of such movements is an increasing number of people with migrant family background. Those people often grow up with the influence of two or more cultural frameworks and experience a high amount of mobility from the day of their birth. This mobility can be both physical, for instance visits of the parent(s) home country, as well as mental, in the shape of a mobile mindset and an awareness of one's ethnicity.
This is where this presentation on descendants of Germans in contemporary Helsinki, Finland, links to. Based on material of her dissertation project, D. Breier analyses how the possibilities those people have influence their feeling of belonging and the decisions they make. How did the knowledge of being part of both cultures shape them, their thoughts and wishes? What were the personal consequences arising from their families' constitutions and the (mobile) strategies and life-courses they chose for finding their spot in life? How do they reflect upon themselves and the experiences they had while being on the move?
By connecting her case-study with results from other research and reflections on topical issues of our societies, the aim of this presentation is to emphasise the importance of putting qualitative research into a larger context for being able to understand its deeper meaning, in this case the impact of a particular setting on the experiences, thoughts and feelings of people involved.
Anastasia Rogova (University of British Columbia )
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine how Russian-speaking immigrants in Canada maintain, adapt and modify their parenting practices in a double effort to simultaneously secure their Russian identities and occupy a desired class position in the Canadian society.
Paper long abstract:
My focus on intensive parenting in its transnational forms, as practiced in Russian-speaking immigrant communities, aims to examine its everyday aspects, which bear a visible Soviet-era heritage, yet are used by many post-Soviet families as a resource to pursue social mobility in new - both domestic and foreign - environments. Although most of my collaborators are determined not to return to their country of origin, a lot of them nevertheless purposefully immerse their children in the Russian language and culture. Russian literacy has become an important skill in immigrant families, and large North American and European urban centers, including Toronto, have multiple educational facilities where immigrant children are taught competences and conventions of the Russian culture. The paradox of this situation is that these practices often reproduce values of the Russian educational system outside of Russia, and they are adopted by people who are often very skeptical of the current political regime in Russia. This paper will examine the question of why, having left Russia, many immigrants nevertheless choose to reproduce practices that we can interpret as aimed at creating subjects of the Russian state, even though they have located themselves in a position that is external to this state.
Rumel Halder (University of Manitoba)
Paper short abstract:
Not applicaple
Paper long abstract:
: In the context of Bangladeshi Bengali migration to Canada and immigrants' cultural, religious and social practices within a new transnational location, multiculturalism as "cultural pluralism" (Wilson 1993); "acceptance and tolerance" (Berry 1990); device of integration (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis 1992) and "a new form of nationalism" (Mackey 1999) in Canada demands critical examination. Based on doctoral field research among three major religious groups (Muslims, Hindus, and Christians) of Bangladeshi immigrants in Toronto, and my current lived experience in Winnipeg, the primary objective of this paper is to underscore whether multicultural policy in Canada creating a free space for practicing culture, sharing diversity and accepting differences or creating a powerful white dominated hegemonic space by introducing various norms and rules. Furthermore, by practicing core local cultural practices, gendered norms, religious values and doctrines, and transnational Bangladeshi nationalism (created within colonial and post-colonial nationalist struggles), Bangladeshi immigrants are trying to create and recreate immigrant space as "areas of argument" (Werbner 1998) and "every day forms of resistance" (Scott 1985). Therefore, local, colonial and post-colonial cultural, religious and national identity struggles must be critically addressed within multicultural contexts. Ethnic culture can be contested, diversified and fragmented and therefore, it is problematic to see culture as a homogenous unit. In the context of current global "rhetoric" it could be more dangerous to put it in our celebratory multicultural box.
Anna Wieczorkiewicz (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on intersections of flows of people and flows of objects. By juxtaposing two case studies, I analyze modes in which objects associated with ‘other cultures’ are involved in creating individual post-nomadic identities.
Paper long abstract:
In systems of global culture industry, diverse material objects flow through private spaces. From the anthropological point of view, the most informative factor is the flow of objects that connote the spatial and cultural distance (called 'exotic'), especially if the trajectory of this object's movement intersects with the life trajectory of an individual whose biography is not bound by this individual to a single place.
Can these mobile systems be used to establish the individual orders of identity that are perceived as stable? If so, then what is the cultural mechanism of production of practices that are involved in it? How, in this case, are the meanings of objects that are typically associated with exoticism re-constructed?
Two case studies will be used for searching for answers to these questions. My research is conducted using the ethnographic method in Warsaw. I selected cases of individuals whose biographies indicate how important the experience of physical and cultural mobility is (repetitive travels and long stays in one place as well as living in different countries). In my research I was focused primarily on objects that (more or less occasionally) are associated with the Orient,
This allows to observe multiple meanings that are formed where biographies of people and biographies of things intersect and examples of modes can be distinguished, in which, on the one hand, the order of identity is merged, and, on the other hand, a version of 'orientality' that defines the object's biography is re-invented.
Nicola Mooney (University of the Fraser Valley)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the cultural poetics of Punjabi migration in relation to rural objects and objectifications among urban and transnational Punjabis. Via a select curation, I argue that the objects of tradition embody both the imagining of continuous belonging and the impossibility of return.
Paper long abstract:
People in motion have long carried objects, and for perhaps almost as long, objects have been crafted to express the experiences and meanings of movements of people. This paper explores the relations between movement, materiality, memory, and modernity which emerge in the Punjabi diaspora, and particularly in those material, spatial, visual, and textual practices which seek to recreate notions of home and identity in contexts of migration. Such practices of tradition are attached to objects of everyday life and ritual, as well as in a cultural poetics which focuses on village pasts. As such, a diverse material culture circulates in the Punjabi diaspora, alongside materially-based images, texts, mediations, and practices which objectify and imagine Punjabi culture in its places of origin and departure (e.g. housewares such as kitchen utensils, bodily objects such as dress and cosmetics, household art, heirloom goods, and the representational imageries of bhangra videos, Punjabi cinema, and tourism venues). These 'objects of tradition' may serve practical purposes, such as producing traditional foods, but they also engage nostalgic and powerful imaginaries which help to maintain continuous notions of belonging, identity, and ethnicity, even as they may memorialize and reify the same. These objectifying processes can endow new powers of affect and representation on the objects themselves, even as in other ways Punjabi material culture engages modernity. Via objects and objectifications, I consider the power of village objects in urban and transnational contexts with regard to notions of belonging and the imagining, infinite regress, and impossibility of return.
Brenda Beck (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will tell the story of an oral folk epic that, in the course of 52 years, has traveled from South India to Canada (and beyond). It will detail a variety of ways the tale has been retold and how different audiences have reacted, especially multicultural school groups near Toronto.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will describe the 52 year journey of an oral folk epic and its anthropologist- collector. First tape recorded in rural India this story has now traveled extensively in Asia, Europe and North America. The anthropologist initially transcribed, translated and published a core text. Dissatisfied with the limited academic interest expressed in this version of the tale she later animated the story in 26 episodes by hiring a local folk artist. He was the grandson of a local folk bard, who came to Canada to work on this project. Following this she also produced a 900 page graphic novel, two websites and several museum displays. All these materials have been well received, both in India and in Canada. The story is now being told in several Toronto area schools and has also been performed at a Scarborough street festival. This paper will discuss the varying reactions of audiences and readers to this fresh legend in several parts of the world. It will focus on the wide variety of culturally-linked ways it has been re-framed to make it more locally meaningful.