Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how migrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany (Osnabrück) search for ‘the good life’ and cope with social, political and economic realities around them. In what ways does the community life influence members' understanding of the ‘good life’?

Paper long abstract:

Ways of living possible ‘good life’ in Germany. The Migrants from the USSR in Osnabrück

Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne

nino.aivazishvili-gehne@univie.ac.at

In this paper I explore how migrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany (Osnabrück) search for ‘the good life’ and cope with social, political and economic realities around them. Engaging with a group of people organised informally around a ‘Georgian’ association (Osnabrücker Deutsch-Georgischer Kulturverein e.V. officially founded in 2019), the following questions guide my analysis: What new arrangements of belonging are formed among the migrants and why? In what ways does the community life influence members' understanding of the ‘good life’?

Through the extensive ethnographic fieldwork I show how the community sociality and active engagement in it (mutual help and get together) turn into the important ways and spaces for living a ‘good life’ in Germany. Cohesion as a community helps to overcome strangeness, distance from home, creating instead the joyful feelings. Focusing on the “good”, my material provides a “humane counterweight to the darkness of the work of neoliberal oppression and governmental constraint" (Ortner 2016: 60) framed as “dark anthropology” (ibid.). Since power and inequality, and the damage they impose, cannot be the whole of anthropology, this paper takes a caring and ethical approach, offering new perspectives to migrant people lives (ibid., see also Fassin 2018).

Cited References

Fassin, D. 2018. Life. A critical user’s manual. Medford: Polity Press.

Ortner, S. 2016. Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties. In. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73.