Paper Short Abstract:

This paper argues that among the minority Muslim Tatar community in Poland roots are discursively called upon to connect individuals and stabilize group identity formations, while also serving as an affectively dense form of resistance and disruption of exclusionary national narratives of belonging.

Paper Abstract:

The rhizome has become an enduring metaphor of the modern age as identity is often analysed by social scientists as a fragmented, mercurial process of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). In this paper I call for a return to the arborescent imagery of tress and roots to understand how identity can both be experienced as a stable, enduring aspect of people’s lives and simultaneously contain the possibility of change and fluidity. This paper argues that among the Muslim Tatar community in the borderlands of Poland, roots are discursively called upon to connect individuals as members of a minority collective and stabilize identity formations, and yet these roots disrupt deeply held notions of belonging to the Polish nation at large. Roots of place-belonging describe the group’s historical ties to the region of Podlasie and thus integration to the Polish nation, while family trees bind kin with past and present ties both within Poland and across national borders. I argue that these roots serve to discursively hold members together in a time in which the future of the group is seen by participants as increasingly uncertain, threatened by emigration to the West and exogamous marriage practices. This process of root-ing produces affectively dense resonances, as shame of difference during the socialist past has been transformed into current expressions of pride in alterity. These roots of place and kin serve as a sort of resistance to the dislocations of modernity, disrupting exclusionary national narratives of belonging.