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- Convenors:
-
Tatjana Pezdir
(Faculty of Arts and Sciences)
Maja Povrzanovic Frykman (Malmö University)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- R4
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
This workshop explores the travel of people and objects from the perspectives of how belonging is embodied, reciprocity is materialised and social networks re-created in different locations within transnational spaces.
Long Abstract:
The expansion of relatively cheap travel options and the enormous quantities of objects - mostly intended for everyday use - transported in overloaded cars, buses, ships and planes, plead for ethnographic descriptions and interpretations that outline relationships and processes embedded in transnational practices.
This workshop explores the travel of people and objects, led by the interest in how belonging is embodied, reciprocity materialised and social networks re-created in different locations within the transnational spaces created by migrants. The focus is on practices through which migrants accomplish inclusion in different locations and in different networks. What do they do, send or carry in order to stay connected - to be accepted, remembered, needed or appreciated? Which objects do they consider crucial to the maintenance of their private everyday normality in different locations of attachment? To what extent is involvement in personal relations and social networks achieved or proved through objects, and to what extent does this require physical presence and personal travel?
The theoretical intention is to avoid focusing on immigrants' ethnicity. While certainly not denying the reality of experiences of group belonging, our intention is rather to turn the importance of ethnicity into an empirical question. We also want to warn against the assumption that certain practices are only characteristic of migrants in conditions of disadvantage. Ethnographic insights into practices and lived experiences, motivations and concerns with regard to particular social networks, may reveal significant similarities between migrants of varying class and ethnic backgrounds.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
This paper follows the trajectory of a container of used computers and furniture from Denmark to Ghana, analyzing the different meaning and decision making processes at various stages of the journey as well as from different locations and positions in the transnational space.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the donation, coordination and receiving of objects by following the trajectory of a container of used computers and furniture donated by a small Ghanaian association in Denmark to educational institutions in a smaller town in Ghana. It analyzes the different meaning and decision making processes at various stages of the journey of the container as well as from different locations and positions in the transnational space, including the sending NGO, the practical coordination of the goods in Ghana, and the recipient schools. A key question is what kinds of belonging and positions are established through charity and how these are enacted, recognized, or contested by different actors and from different perspectives. Finally, the paper analyzes the negotiations and mobilization of competing kinds of loyalties, such as kin, ethnicity, school affiliation, nationality, and a broader sense of solidarity.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will discuss the ways in which Filipino immigrants build their transnational belonging in two countries, and uncover the practices that underlie it. I want to look at the material aspects of giving and the basis of reciprocity. My paper is based on my doctoral research of Filipino immigrants’ engagement in development projects at home.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will discuss the ways in which Filipino immigrants build their transnational belonging in two countries, and uncover the practices that underlie it. I want to look at the material aspects of giving and the basis of reciprocity - starting from the debt of gratitude towards one's parents and godparents, the will to help siblings and cousins, and the debt felt towards the home country.
I also want to look at objects through which transnational belonging to the Philippines and the United States is built and through which it is embodied - objects which flow between the sending and receiving country, and those which are significant in the everyday experience of the immigrants, be they clothes, devotional objects, or photographs.
My case is based on my doctoral research of Filipino immigrants' engagement in development projects at home through a non-governmental charity organization called "Gawad Kalinga". The giving achieves here the level of public giving, which goes over the privacy of family reciprocity, and builds the feeling of national belonging. The act of giving at the same time assures others of the success of the immigrant abroad, and is used for building one's status.
Paper short abstract:
The main question addressed in this contribution comparing examples of Arabs and Bosniaks in Slovenia, is incorporation of remittances in the system of social networks emerging from migrants' transnational activities.
Paper long abstract:
The paper addresses motivations, patterns and sorts of remittances possible which can be defined as a set of gifts in different forms. Generally speaking, remittances refer to economic transfers between migrants on one hand and individuals or groups remaining in countries of origin on the other. The latter most often include both near and extended families. Beside economic transfers, the paper deals with the processes of incorporation and preservation of migrants' sense of belonging to the place of origin and with processes of linking them with places of immigration. Furthermore, the authors discuss the essence of social responsibility evident in migrants' incorporation, maintenance of their sense of belonging, their image, social authority, substance, respect and inclusion into their sending societies. The focus is on migrants' motivation as well as factors existing in countries involved in transnational connections stimulating and hindering processes of remitting. The authors discuss social and demographic distribution and the importance of social pressures faced by migrants and expectations of other members of those social networks, which play an essential part in the above mentioned processes.
Comparing Arabs and Bosniaks in Slovenia is possible and reasonable because of the common Islamic tradition as a way of life in countries of origin and Slovenia. Nonetheless, the research does not focus on groups, but rather on individuals engaged in processes of establishing and maintaining social networks and processes of remitting within.
Paper short abstract:
Based on the life narratives of Goan families living in Portugal, this paper discusses how the analysis of domestic consumption practices constitutes a positive contribution to the understanding of their migration trajectories, past and present positioning strategies and policies of belonging.
Paper long abstract:
During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries a large number of Goans left their home country and migrated to Mozambique. This migration flux between the two Portuguese former colonies involved a significant number of members of the local Goan elites converted to Catholicism. The "Catholic Brahmin families" formed a strong and deeply organised community that played a significant role in the configuration and administration of the Mozambican colonial society. After the independence, most of the Goan Catholic elite migrated, this time to Portugal and other European and North American contexts.
Based both on the life narratives of a restrict group of families currently living in Lisbon (Portugal) and in the observation of the objects and consumption practices existing in their homes, this paper aims to discuss how material culture and consumption practices constitute a significant field to the understanding of these migrants trajectories, negotiation processes and position strategies across the different cultural contexts that make part of their biographies.
The analysis will focus particularly on the objects and consumption practices (food, music, literature) that, like and within the families, also travelled from Goa to Mozambique and/or, afterwards, to Portugal. The discussion of the objects' participation in the families' current daily lives and domestic routines made possible the analysis of their contemporary identity displays and social positioning with the Portuguese context, but also the emergence of significant features regarding their past contexts of integration and, therefore, contributed to highlight a series of dimensions transversal to all stages of the migration process.
Paper short abstract:
The example of ritualised reciprocity among Sicilian migrants in Germany shows how belonging is embodied through (ephemeral) ritual objects charged with notions of local identity and how these practices bear the potential of serving as cultural reserve for the dispersed community.
Paper long abstract:
I conducted fieldwork among Sicilian migrants living in and around an industrial city in southwest Germany. These migrants came as "guest workers" in the 1950s, stemming originally all from Mirabella Imbaccari, an "agrotown" located in the eastern part of Sicily. In my research I focussed on a Mirabellesian saint cult, the festival of St Joseph, which was revitalised in Germany when entire families had joined their emigrated men in the 1970s. On the day of the saint big banquets are erected inside the intimate, private space of single family households as "ex voto". The banquets are covered - next to more durable objects (like saint statues and images) - with many ephemeral objects representing elements of a particular local identity, i.e. local Sicilian dishes along with bread statues, which are imported from Sicily or are reproduced especially for that occasion by the migrated women in Germany and which are regarded as typically Mirabellesian. On the day of the saint friends and relatives (also coming from the distant Sicily for that occasion) visit the banquets, experiencing a momentary reunification of the dispersed migrant's community. The ritual reaches its peak when all the dishes on the banquets are offered to "poor" people representing the "Holy Family". The example shows in the context of ritualised reciprocity how belonging is embodied through ritual objects (not only of ephemeral nature) regarded as emblems of a local identity.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the shifting patterns of integration and transnationalism, enacted through the cross-border flow of people and goods, among the Polish migrants in Finland. The investigation is set against the changing geopolitical and economic conditions of the Polish and Finnish nation-states.
Paper long abstract:
The paper addresses the interplay of historical situatedness, class and the different modes of integration and transnationalism engaged in by the Polish migrants in Finland and their non-mobile kith and kin in Poland. I look at how the changing dynamics of the flow and consumption of goods and travel of people underpinned the constant reworking of the transnational social spaces and migrants' incorporation into the receiving communities across time. In this I am attentive to the political and economic shifts within and across Poland and Finland, including the collapse of communism and the Finnish economic crisis of the ninety-nineties. I indicate their impact on the meaning and direction of transnational commodity exchange and travel, enacted primarily within kinship group, and the structuring of migrants' possibilities for integration.
Temporally situated two-way transnational practices of sending goods and embodied mobility allow migrants to recreate and reinforce their links to people and places in Poland. Simultaneously through creating new intersection of 'Polish' and 'Finnish' social networks, they strengthen migrants' anchoring in Finland. Accordingly the transnationalism and integration emerge here as concurrent, dynamically intertwined processes. The class contingency is revealed as it were mainly the migrants from middle and upper social strata who had the necessary cultural and professional resources to achieve positive social inclusion. The term of class is conceptualized in the context of changing social structures of the Polish pre- and post-1989 society.
The paper is based on my ethnographic study of transnational families spanning Poland and Finland.
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographic research into the interplay of sociality and materiality can provide a foundation for critically interrogating ideas about migrants’ being and belonging as primarily defined by their ethnic and class background. Insights into material expressions of reciprocity can open up new avenues of understanding and create new conceptual lenses.
Paper long abstract:
Within the vast field of multidisciplinary research on international migration the importance of ethnography is unsurpassed in its ability to reach and represent the individual level of experience and everyday dynamics of sense-making. Ethnographic research into the interplay of sociality and materiality - experiences and memories embodied in and represented by objects - can also provide a solid foundation for critically interrogating ideas about migrants' being and belonging as primarily defined by their ethnic and class background. Ethnographic insights into material expressions of reciprocity, i.e. of migrants' involvement in personal relations and social networks achieved or proved through objects, can open up new avenues of understanding and create new conceptual lenses in studies of migration. This paper links the different contributions to this workshop together by discussing the theoretical benefits of investigating material expressions and practices of connection and belonging in the places where migrants live their everyday lives, in the places they keep returning to and on the journeys between them.