Paper short abstract:

From a more actor-centered perspective the performing of historically warranted incidents (reenactment) appears to be a less deficient romanticizing of the past. Rather more diverse and ambivalent motivations become evident, even utopian negotiations of a better society, of "home".

Paper long abstract:

When the so-called "Battle of the Nations" was performed in nearby Leipzig (Germany) in 2013 on the occasion of its 200th anniversary, some reporters expressed a certain alienation considering the costly staged reenactment of the historical combat operations. In their eyes it came close to an inappropriate "spectacle somewhere between a fair and the commemoration of a gory massacre" (quote from ZEIT Online 2013). But the performative dealing with history also takes place in private or semi-public spheres aside from such large events and as part of leisure activities.

From a more actor-centered perspective - which is surprisingly underrepresented in the contemporary research of "doing history" - the phenomenon appears to be a less deficient romanticizing of the past. Rather more diverse and ambivalent motivations and notions become evident - in particular concrete negotiations of "home".

On the basis of first results from a current ethnographic research project I'd like to discuss emic understandings and "makings" of home and intrepret reenacting as a "resonant relationship to a re-appropriated piece of the world" (Hartmut Rosa, "Resonanz", 2016, p. 602) - in other words: as a satisfying and meaningful way of dealing with the "foreign" and the "self". In a slightly exaggerated way one could support the hypothesis, that reenactments (especially reenactments of historical everyday life) - understood as a cultural technique of dwelling (being at home) in the past - can also be seen as an utopian effort for answers to self-experienced deficits of the (post-)modern age.

Paper short abstract:

With land reform in 1945, expropriated soil was given to 210,000 families, mostly WW II refugees. According to the Soviet Military Administration, house building should help them settle. How did the families cope with political regimentation, architectural requirements and appropriate space?

Paper long abstract:

With land reform in 1945, the nature of ownerships and power structures changed drastically in the Soviet Occupation Zone: soil was expropriated and given to about 210,000 families, i.e. refugees due to WW II. They had lost nearly all their possessions, social networks, and homes. According to an order of the Soviet Military Administration house building should help them to settle. As a result, the farmer families were supposed to form a particular societal group.

An unprecedented demolition campaign started, effecting manor houses and castles. In their places thousands of small farmhouses arose with prescribed designs, either ignoring the needs of the families or not allowing the conduct of efficient agricultural businesses. The image of the village was radically changed.

The paper intends to illuminate the dilemmas emerging between state decrees, economic necessity, and individual needs. We discuss the concept of the farmhouses as both a form of livelihood and a symbol. Interviews with contemporary witnesses demonstrate ways of housing adaptation and of using space. This is where the conflict between a strategy of withdrawal within a segregated residential area versus an active 'occupation' of a village appears.

The data basis is made up of archival sources (such as building plans/blueprints and regulations, as well as contemporary photographs), newspaper clippings, and extensive personal interviews. Since 2010 the source material has been collected as part of a research project at the ISGV.

Paper short abstract:

In Canada,the Indian Act has rendered Indigenous identity visible through the paradigm of bounded space: reservations and traditional territories. This is a restrictive framework to apply to the individual experiences of diasporic Métis people with multiple forms of origin.

Paper long abstract:

Individuals often use strict definitions of 'place' to describe themselves and to confirm their membership in particular groups within recognizable spatial territories. In Canada, colonization, confederation, and the Indian Act have rendered Indigenous identity visible through the paradigm of bounded space: reservations and traditional territories. Land and identity are inextricably bound in Indigenous law, policy, academia and self-identification. This is a restrictive framework to apply to the individual experiences of Métis people. Home is diverse. Home is often not a concrete dwelling or spatial territory, but rather a connection to family, culture, history and memory.

Red River Settlement is often thought of as an origin, and as a home for Métis people. However, there has been great diversity within not only the population, but within its meanings of 'home'. Métis origins in the Red River Settlement are diverse. George Bryce outlined three distinct communities of Métis within the region: French Métis, English-Métis, and Selkirk Settlers (1896). Each group was unique in geographical area, language and religion, and were structured by varying forms of kinship and ancestry.

Using RedRiverAncestry.com as a primary source, this paper will examine stories of Métis families that fit within Bryce's divisions of community to demonstrate that Métis cannot be situated in a uniform time or place. In addition, many Métis people have physically or spiritually left their communities, forever changing their relationship to 'home'. The lack of cultural community, and difference in past life-ways is evidence that Métis identity has become fluid.

Paper short abstract:

Attachment to places and events has got too little attention in regional identity research. Identity is constructed personally in a process where historical consciousness plays a central role. This paper researches home experience in Finnish Järviseutu Region using geographic information system.

Paper long abstract:

The data consist of a sampling (N=117) made by the use of geographic information system (SoftGIS questionnaire) over the net and a series of group discussions which took place in Finnish Järviseutu in 2016.

Home is studied in its broader meaning of Heimat, as a question of belonging somewhere. How do the inhabitants of Järviseutu area see their homely sites and landscapes? What are the key factors and deeper structures of their home in historical and geographical perspectives? The experiential theory of home serves as a theoretical framework for the study. It provides that every person has a specific, unique perception of home that has been built and is continually being built from personal experiences. Home is a personal relation to both history and geography at the same time. In short, home as Heimat means the totality of the things among which an individual feels at home. The general view of the region as home will be outlined by way of the key factors indicated by the inhabitants themselves and by the deeper historical and geographical structures sketched by researchers. The data will be analyzed in three parts. The main emphasis will be firstly on the natural environment, secondly on the built environment, and finally on the social and mental environments of home.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores homes that have been and are no longer: the temporary tents of Scottish Travellers. Traveller dwellings today – tent or building – represent a response to a departed world, one both sorely missed and proudly forgotten, and a conscious (re)formulation of identity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores homes - and the culture that goes with them - that have been and are no longer. For centuries, until the 1950s, Scottish Travellers lived a (semi-)nomadic existence, following seasonal and itinerant work, in simple portable canvas structures, the bow tent. As a succession of forces - economic, governmental, and social - came into play from the 50s onwards, this mobility has been mostly eliminated. Nevertheless, narratives of these dwellings and the life they symbolize continue to shape Traveller identity, both positively and negatively, as many try to celebrate their heritage while others deny it in order to avoid prejudice, and some do both. I explore three main responses to this tension: Distancing (denial), Acknowledgement (nostalgia), and Engagement (active performance of lifestyle or culture). Common to these is the bow tent narrative and the accompanying material performance of identity (e.g., 'settled' houses and their internal decor), which are used to support essentially opposite positions. The bow tent narrative supports a nostalgic view of an idealized past, in which Travellers were free from the strictures, and beyond the control of, settled authority. Likewise, the tent can also be symbolic of the lack of a 'home', in the prosaic sense of a fixed abode. In the end, dwellings in Traveller culture, be it a traditional bow tent, a caravan, or a suburban home, symbolize a world departed, one both sorely missed and proudly forgotten, a testament to the complexity of identity, community, and the human condition of a group on the margins.

Paper short abstract:

The poetics of home is a key element in Karelian folklore. The paper treats autobiographical poems portraying the loss of home and identity. Representation of homelessness is based on inversions and negations that link political allegiances and historical events with the symbolism of the otherworld.

Paper long abstract:

The poetics of home and belonging is a pervasive theme and stylistic feature in Karelian oral poetry. The paper discusses autobiographical poems and laments that portray losing one's home and identity. From the early nineteen-twenties to the early nineteen-forties, the Viena Karelian people on the Finnish-Russian border experienced a series of dramatic historical developments including military campaigns, a civil war, a revolution, the gulag, two occupations by alien forces, and exile. People who had to leave their homes gave shape and meaning to their experiences, fears and hopes in poems that build their imagery on the traditional portrayal of the mythic otherworld, mythic adversaries and death. Representation of homelessness is based on inversions and negations that link political allegiances and historical events with the symbolism of the otherworld grounded in the pre-modern belief tradition and the fictive universe of epic poetry. In this intricate poetics of displacement the predicament of exile and political persecution could be verbalized, communicated and even used for building new bonds, symbolic abodes and ideologies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the nation is imagined as home and homeland in the Finnish national anthem and in recent debates on immigrants and asylum seekers by those welcoming or unwelcoming them.

Paper long abstract:

It is a commonplace to speak of the nation or the state as home, and it is no less common to observe this idea in use for example in the term 'domestic policy'. However, we do not always stop to examine in detail the politicized meanings attached to the concept of home in the discourses on the nation and the state.

According to research conducted by Lea Laitinen, in the original Swedish-language 11 stanza poem that is used as the Finnish national anthem, composed by J. L. Runeberg in 1846, there are altogether 14 occurrences of the word 'here' and 22 occurrences of 'our', but only one occurrence of the phrase 'the Finnish people'. The Swedish word 'fosterland', with four occurrences, denotes the native land, the land in which one has grown, or where one was born. In the many Finnish translations and adaptations of Runeberg's poem, this word was often translated as 'homeland' or' land of dwelling', although the standard translation is 'birthland'. In the Finnish translations and adaptations from the 19th and 20th centuries, 'home' and 'homeland' are of key symbolic significance, but in the Swedish-language original, both the word and the idea of home are altogether missing.

In my paper, I will discuss the notions of 'home' and 'homeland' in the Finnish translations and adaptations of Runeberg's poem and juxtapose these imaginings to archived arguments concerning home and homeland in recent heated debates on immigrants and asylum seekers in Finland.

Paper short abstract:

Starting from the narrative discourse that unfolds through the juncture of the refugee crisis, we attempt to perceive latent analogies and dominant symbolisms corresponding to initiation narratives and ritual patterns, in real places, times, itineraries and life histories.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is triggered by the current geopolitical juncture of hundreds of thousands of refugees moving through places which have merged cultures for millennia but suddenly turn into "non places", to quote Marc Augé's term; into transitory, de-symbolized places for admission and transfer to final destinations.

We take this opportunity to investigate the (a-symbolic) traits of these homeless stopovers and the processes of temporary place appropriation through symbolic investments. Moreover, these mass population shifts interest us as life histories, as liminal experiences between life and death, but also as mental representations guiding each of these thousands of routes separately.

A major issue that arises concerns the extent of interaction between individual perceptions and collective representations in the midst of two worlds dictating consecutive dualisms, subject to controversy for both parties. Minor actors, passages from one world to another, life-threatening risks, non-places traversed — all these invest the current itineraries with strong liminality patterns, but rarely lead to a happy end. Starting from this observation and in terms of narrative discourse, we investigate potential correspondences between specific individual passages and narrative maps resulting from stereotypical narrative patterns of universal scope, such as fairy tales.

Our material is drawn from participant observation data, the narrative discourse of the refugees themselves along with dominant accounts at the reception places.

Paper short abstract:

The war in Syria and the continual bombardment of cities and homes has ensured that many citizens have been displaced. Syrian Refugees are now living in liminal spaces while their status and relocation is processed. What are their lives like in these unfamiliar places?

Paper long abstract:

Near the town of Lehaina (Myrsini Ileias, Greece), an abandoned holiday resort has become a temporary home to 238 Syrian refugees who have fled their homes at a time of war. The mayor of the town, of Syrian background, left Syria and settled in Lehaina with his Greek wife. He saw the plight of his country and the people fleeing and offered a partial solution. The inhabitants have come as individuals, in small family groups and in larger ones. Their journeys to this place have been varied and complex and their origins span the range of occupations that reflect a modern society. What do they make of their 'new' homes? How do they live their daily lives? What challenges do they face and what alliances have they needed to cultivate? These are just some of the issues that are canvassed in this narrative of displacement and search for a new home. Video diaries and interviews with children living at the L & M refugee center highlight their former lives within this liminal space and their desire for a new home. How do they reconcile all these challenges in a time of strife? The video ethnographies and informal interviews with the children reveal the complexities of defining home and the un/certainties associated with being displaced. The rich conversations illustrate the fact that while the anchor of the 'homeland' remains in place, moving towards a future in which one is allowed to thrive enables new hopes that are yet to be realized.

Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to feel at home in a post-conflict reality of changing meanings of identity and belonging? The case of the Donbas region will serve as an example to show how people cope with changes in their imagined homeland and desirable landscapes of local space of possibility.

Paper long abstract:

Due to the long-established stereotype of land of 'soviet people' strengthened by ongoing military conflict, the Donbas region is widely seen as a breeding ground for separatism rather than a land of hope. Yet for many the core of ongoing dramatic events is to be sought elsewhere - in social discontent fueled by nonfading affect for the homeland. A complicated history made Donbas home for many people of mixed origins, backgrounds and professions, creating a bond that for many comes before any other identification. Now striking differences in attitudes toward the very concepts of belonging, identity and citizenship could be seen in Ukrainian government-controlled parts of the region alone. How do people (re)create their feeling-at-home sentiment after experiencing war? Is there a place for a narrative other than national (e.g. local, regional) in post-conflict Donbas? How do people cope with uncertainty and a feeling of losing their imagined homeland without even moving away? How do they see its future? Especially after the events of Euromaidan (and Antimaidan) the materiality of the place brings many ambivalent meanings to the landscapes of national and local imaginary, including the question of what it means to be Ukrainian and/or Donbas inhabitant in this turbulent place of specific social memory. I am especially interested in discussing how everyday materialisations of statehood make people (not) feel at home and how different social actors try to influence and challenge what can be called 'desirable landscapes' of local space of possibility.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the material, ideological and symbolic ways in which Kalymnian Greeks of Tarpon Springs, Florida, recreate and experience homeland and transmit their heritage to succeeding generations, by responding to real and 'imagined' needs, over the period of a century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Tarpon Springs, Florida, home to a community of Greeks originating from the island of Kalymnos in the southeastern Aegean. Kalymnians first migrated to Tarpon Springs in 1905 to work as sponge divers in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then they have dominated the sponge industry and diversified into other economic activities over successive waves of migration.

I investigate the ways in which Kalymnians (re)create and experience home in Tarpon Springs at present. This requires that one examine how they perceive and discuss the continuities and differences between their American and their Greek homelands. The process of such home recreation oscillates between reality and imagination, and is the result of interaction between real needs, mostly economic, and qualities evoked by imagination, such as values and cultural representations of gender, history and myth. To explore such recreations of home, I examine Kalymnians in their long-term interaction with non-Kalymnian Greeks and with non-Greek Americans of Tarpon Springs, as well as with islander Kalymnians, since they move regularly between their island home and the U.S.A, mainly as the result of economic crises.

This diasporic group being established for a century in the U.S.A., I examine the impact of different historical generations upon the formation, negotiation, reconceptualization and transmission of Kalymnian heritage, tangible and intangible, as manifested in the realms of material culture, narrative, ritual practices and symbols, and ideologies.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will bring to focus a contemporary case study from the IDP village in Tserovani, with the story of a woodcarver family, which brought the traditional old wood-carved column dedabodzi, from their original house to the new one as a symbol of memory and sacredness of place.

Paper long abstract:

The home, the dwelling, perceived as a sacred place and more specifically as a microcosm, has long been a tradition in Georgian culture. The most ancient type amongst such homes is 'darbazi' - the hall type dwelling predominantly found in southern and eastern Georgia. It has a central hall with a graded wooden dome named 'gvirgvini', which literally means 'the crown'. The only opening in the middle of the dome symbolized the heavenly light and emphasized the sacredness of the place. Our focus, however, would be another essential element of this traditional dwelling, namely the central wooden column 'dedabodzi', the mother pillar. Rising in the middle of the central hall of the dwelling, widening up to the dome, decorated with wood-carved geometric ornamental patterns, it bears the astral imagery and reflects the ancient cult of sacred Tree - axis mundi maintained in Georgia for centuries.

The paper will present a contemporary case study from the IDP village in Tserovani, Georgia, the cottage settlement where people displaced during the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia live. Due to this war nearly 26,000 Georgians living in the Tskhinvali region lost their homes and became internally displaced persons. The paper will discuss the case of a woodcarver family, who brought the mother pillar with them from their original house and installed it in a completely new and typical cottage. The paper will explore the myriad ways in which this object, as a symbol of home, is recreated in a new context.

Paper short abstract:

A song of exile in the Promised Land? Political Art by Young Mizrahi (oriental Jews) artists in Israel: Identity making, narratives of loss and desire of return. Artistic creation as the imagined/symbolic homeland of origin and the nostalgic projection of an idealized place.

Paper long abstract:

Nowadays in Israel, young artists from the third generation of Mizrahim are leading a counterculture movement. They re/learned to sing in Darija-Moroccan, write bilingual poetry in Arabic and Hebrew and reinterpret traditional Yemeni dances. They often define themselves as "Arab Jews" and have decided to resolutely re-appropriate the culture and history of their ancestors, which had long been silenced. Through their art, they claim their place in the Middle East, and attempt to reconnect with their country of origin. The collective identities that emerge from these different Mizrahi arts are deeply rooted in nostalgia for a forgotten past and in a strong desire of returning « home ». But where/what is home when you live in the Promised Land and you're longing for a lost Jewish heritage from the Muslim world?