Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography of Russian-speaking migrants in Japan and their material practices, this paper explores how the affective turn in social inquiry helps us better capture the cognitive-material messiness of the migrant experience.

Paper long abstract:

This paper mainly draws its data from the fieldwork on Russian female migrants in Japan, paying close attention to their material practices and, notably, their craftwork or DIY (do-it-yourself). The discussion focuses on the objects and clothes observed in localities where these material practices are enacted—migrants' homes as well as places where their festive events and performances take place. As a starting point, the study takes an extended understanding of DIY as not only the items that are fully handmade by the migrants but also those adjusted to better suit their holders' needs or procured through non-traditional channels such as second-hand shops, flea markets, and "sayonara" sales. The paper also looks at the online groups for Russian-speaking migrants in Japan that serve as sites for the display and exchange of their material possessions. In these spaces of co-production, both offline and online, migrants search for ways to affectively reenact the materiality and accompanying sensations of their pre-migratory past while simultaneously interiorizing the material expressions of the host culture. By investigating the connection between migration and materiality through the sensory ethnography approach, this study attempts to explore how the affective turn in social inquiry helps us better capture the cognitive-material messiness of the migrant experience. The processes of procuring, making, and sensing that the migrants are engaged in and the resulting objects function as locales charged with the affective force that enables their actors to subdue the displacement they have experienced as a result of migration and try out new meanings and modes of being.