Paper short abstract:

What happens if members of a community spend at most some hours per week together, boundaries are mostly imaginary, and the belongings of each member multiple? This paper seeks to analyse these issues by considering fieldwork amongst liberal Jews in Cologne within and beyond the community setting.

Paper long abstract:

While the community at the focus of this paper is a liberal Jewish community - examined in regard to perceptions of being liberally Jewish of its individual members - this paper considers the implications on anthropological theory and methods that researching such a community poses. These arise as the time spent in the community setting by members is very limited, and boundaries exist mainly in members' imaginations. These boundaries are in turn influenced by the multiple belongings of the single persons (Simmel, 1890/Mecheril, 2003) and their constant movements. With its multiple options, the urban landscape of Cologne offers multiple possibilities of identification and belonging for each single member. Against this backdrop, neither traditional approaches on migration focusing on ethnicity, nor newer locality stressing approaches hold true. In order to gain an understanding how the multiple options of the city influence the individual members in their approaches to being Jewish, I centered my framework on the analysis of individual members' lived experience as the "concrete of anthropological research" (Augé, 1995), and looked at what unites them in this loosely defined community, and where the balance between overarching concepts of Jewishness and individual conceptions of agency comes into play. This analysis presents both an expansion of Augé's analytical framework as well as shedding light on the changing meanings of agency and determination of the self within translocal communities.