Paper short abstract:

Transnational migration involves mobilization of ‘roots’ as an ‘inscription’ into (home)lands and shared pasts. How such an ‘inscription’ is reproducible, reclaimable or un-done by different generations of Lithuanian migrants in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia due to conditions in their homeland.

Paper long abstract:

Transnational migration involves enactment of human agency in mobilization of ‘roots’ as an ‘inscription’ into particular connections to (home)lands and shared pasts.

I will deal with three cases of how such an ‘inscription’ is reproducible, reclaimable or un-done by different generations of both forced and voluntary Lithuanian migrants who are resident in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia due to the social conditions created by communism and post-communism in eastern Europe. Firstly, I will explore the experiences of the first generation’s up-rootedness from their homeland. Secondly, I will consider re-rootedness of the subsequent generations in the host lands through the heritagization of diasporic memories and pasts. Individuals in the descending generations often become interested in their families or their own ancestral roots deriving from overseas and manifested for politics of subjectivity (Collier 1997). Thus the diasporic obligation to be a ‘link in the chain’, in which heritage culture must be retained, is intricately linked with the ways in which ‘roots’ are individually re-done, re-invented or shaped as ‘cosmopolitanism with roots’ or used for ‘roots tourism’. In the third case, the mobilization of ‘roots’ reveals itself in the diasporic form of homeland nationalism (Glick Shiller 2005) that was used in rebuilding nation states in the post-communist Europe of the 1990s. Currently this process is changing into a moral economy of remitting social capital and social norms by (re)migrants transferring social remittances (Ciubrinskas et al. 2023) as one of their reciprocal obligations to those "left behind' in homelands.