Paper short abstract:

The paper explores relations between history and belonging at the example of historical reenactment in Poland. I investigate how representing transnational history is used to establish sense of belonging on a local or national and rather rarely transnational level.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I refer to the concept of transnational history (see Iriye 2013) which may be perceived as a point of reference for common experiences and shared fate of various nations and ethnic groups. I discuss the example of Poland where nationalistic and often also xenophobic attitudes are visible in the public sphere, somehow contradictory to the more and more translocal and transnational character of social life. I focus on representing transnational history of WWII which results in construing communities of values guided by one of two main principles: 1) perceiving Poles as members of a transnational community, sharing some common historical experiences and facing common present challenges or 2) seeing Poland as superior to other nations, as a country which needs to protect itself from negative outside influences. Transnational history is used (by reenactors and by their audiences: spectators, journalists, politicians) to support both above mentioned interpretations of the past. Therefore I pay particular attention to the performative power of reenacting the past, since history not only roots in community (exceeding reenactment groups and including people having similar understanding of the past and thus of the present), but it also establishes and redefines boundaries of such communities. I am convinced that in a moment of increasing nationalistic attitudes in Western world it is especially important to investigate how choosing particular interpretation of a transnational history strengthens sense of national belonging, in fact supporting divisions and polarizations between nations and ethnic groups.

Paper short abstract:

The memory of the war-time Finnish concentration camps in Russian Karelia was silenced in Soviet time and became a powerful resource in national and transnational negotiations of belongings in the Post-Soviet time. Today it is instrumentalized in producing ‘neovictimized’ Russian identity.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation deals with the memory of the Finnish concentration camps in Russian Karelia in different temporal and (trans)national contexts. During Continuation war (1941-1944) big part of Soviet Karelia was occupied by Finland. Approximately 20% of pre-war population (86000) remained in the occupied territories. Half of the remained were ethnically non-Karelians, and up to 24000 of them were incarcerated in the concentration camps. 44% of the camps’ population were children under 17 years old. Approximately 4600 of the prisoners died, mostly of starvation.

In my presentation I look at the identities of survivors of the camps as they are being constructed in their memoirs, interviews, edited books and documentaries. During the Soviet time the memory of the camps did not belong to the national heroic narrative of Great patriotic war. In Soviet Karelia, the concentration camps were silenced due to the foreign political reasons. In Post-Soviet time, the organization of ‘Juvenile prisoners of concentration camps’ was founded and started to make the memory of the camps and victims visible and known. This memory became a powerful resource in national and transnational contexts in negotiations of national and transnational belongings through the discourses of reconciliation and formation of a new Russian national identity. Today, the memory of the concentration camps is instrumentalized by the Russian state in producing ‘neovictimized’ Russian identity. Simultaneously, the turn from the politics of reconciliation to the politics of self-victimization has transnational effects, since thousands of dwellers of Russian Karelia have emigrated to Finland.

Paper short abstract:

The paper takes you to Gumpa Gurpishey in South Sikkim, discusses the legends of a deity rGyal po sku lnga, and the linkage these offer between Tibet and Sikkim (India). It will illustrate how villagers reflect on the presence of this controversial deity, and create their own identity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper invites its listeners to Gumpa Gurpishey, a village in South Sikkim that houses the Nga Dag Monastery and the Kongso lhagang (a place where rituals are carried out) and is steeped in legends of the Bhutia people about a deity named rGyal po sku lnga (King with five heads). This deity was not always a resident there, but migrated, as did the Bhutia people themselves, from Tibet (Samye Monastery) to the (then) Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim.

Theorising upon the concept of supernatural 'liminality' (Turner:1967), I discuss the controversy surrounding the place and the legends as well as its linkage to the relationship between Tibet Autonomous Region of China and India. More broadly, I explore how villagers reflect on the presence of rGyal po sku lnga on their soil and the deity's complicity in the murder of Princess Pende Ongmo at the hands of Chogyal Chagdor Namgyal, the third King of Sikkim.

rGyal po sku lnga has always been a part of my life since my relatives have been inflicted by the deity occasionally. However, my interest was triggered when I went back to conduct fieldwork in 2017-2018 and discovered how the villagers propitiate the deity with fear and hostility, emotions that are present in Sikkim's relationship with Tibet Autonomous Region of China.

Keyword- Legend, deity, identity, Narratives, Sikkim, Tibet and Politics of belonging.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the Finnish volunteers' reflections on Finnish Society. While they support the asylum seekers' "belonging" and integration, many of them depict experiences of "non-belonging", disappointment and estrangement with the Finnish society.

Paper long abstract:

In 2015, 32 000 people sought asylum in Finland. According to Finnish Red Cross, 5000 volunteers were involved in the reception and integration of asylum seekers in 2015-2016. Majority of these were new volunteers. The experiences of Finnish volunteers were the topic of the pilot study which I conducted with Dr Sofia Laine and the students of Folklore Studies at University of Helsinki during the spring term 2017. 15 interviews with volunteers were made, and we have published one joined article based on these materials (Laine & Salmi-Niklander in Flykt. Gränsløs No8/2017, http://journals.lub.lu.se/index.php/grl/article/view/16996).

I will focus on the volunteers' reflections on the Finnish Society. While they support the asylum seekers' "belonging" and integration, many of them are going through experiences of "non-belonging", disappointment and estrangement with the Finnish society. These experiences are based on their frustration and anger to the asylum seeking process, the forced deportations and the attitudes towards asylum seekers. Many volunteers have faced hate speech and even threat of violence. A memory collection campaign "Encounters", targeted to volunteers involved with asylum seekers will be opened in collaboration with our research group and Finnish Literature Society from 15 October 2018 until 15 March 2019. I will reflect the preliminary results of this campaign and make some comparisons between the volunteers' interviews and the written reminiscences.

Paper short abstract:

This paper elaborates on Estonian civil society initiatives bringing together Russian- and Estonian-speakers to learn each others' languages together and foster informal integration.

Paper long abstract:

Despite certain positive views on integration of Russian-speakers in Estonia (Laitin, 2003), most scholars agree that this group constituting 29% of Estonian population has experienced segregation from the majority ethnic Estonian group, which is visible in secondary and higher education, labor market, income, residential distribution, consumption, leisure, etc. Although the concepts of integration and segregation are overloaded with different meanings and difficult to measure, in Estonia, this is undoubtedly the language division which matters. Since gaining independence, Estonian state has struggled to foster Estonian language acquisition for Russian speakers through a variety of elaborated policies, however, a lot of resources have been spent on the infamous integration of Russophones in vain.

As a response to the state failures, several civil society initiatives emerged, providing platforms for informal integration. Among others, in this presentation, I focus on the particular case of language clubs providing venues for Estonian- and Russian-speakers interaction. They almost do not require financial or human resources yet become much more successful that their well-funded and thought-through state-sponsored counterparts. In this paper based on ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the vernacular perspective on the language clubs to analyze why these informal organizations are more successful than professional initiatives and how their experience may be beneficial for making improvements in the state-supported integration.

Paper short abstract:

With examples from my research projects on the African diaspora in different countries, my presentation explores how boundaries of belonging are negotiated and essentialist ideas of communities and cultures are contested in exhibitions focusing on African diaspora communities and cultures.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation examines how multiple identities and belonging are articulated in museums and exhibitions in which people have participated in knowledge production of their overlapping identifications and their activities as transnational diaspora subjects. My empirical examples are from two research projects focusing on African diaspora formations.

The purpose of the action phase of my research project on African diaspora in Finland (2011-2015), The African presence in Finland exhibition (The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas, 2015), was to represent African diaspora subjects in Finland as a part of the Finnish society, culture and history. Collaborative methodologies emphasizing the agency of people as racialized diaspora subjects and as Finnish citizens enabled an exploration of the complex processes of (non)belonging and individuals' negotiations of their multiple identities. The project also made visible transformations in Finnish society and Finnishness due to the rapid demographic changes caused by migration.

I have continued studying African diaspora(s) in Europe and the U.S. in my on-going project Rethinking diasporas, redefining nations. Representations of African diaspora formations in museums and exhibitions (2015-2020). Fieldwork in different countries allows an examination of diaspora communities and cultures in and between different locations. My presentation will focus on how many exhibitions contest what Brubaker (2002, 164) calls 'groupism', 'the tendency to take groups for granted in the study of ethnicity, race and nationhood'.

Paper short abstract:

Our paper explores the practices of constructing European belonging 'from below' in one of the most recent EU cultural initiatives, the European Heritage Label (EHL). We explore practices and meaning-making of 'doing European belonging' based on qualitative interviews with visitors at EHL sites.

Paper long abstract:

A deeper qualitative analysis of the notions of Europe and 'the European' among participants of EU cultural initiatives are rare. This paper scrutinizes how Europe and 'the European' are constructed 'from below' in one of the most recent EU cultural initiatives, the European Heritage Label (EHL). The initiative and its participants are examined using ethnographic methods based on field research conducted in eleven European Heritage Label sites in 2017 and 2018 that includes qualitative interviews with visitors and observations at the sites. Our analysis focuses on the objective of the EU's cultural policy to form 'a community of Europeans' and how the visitors of the EHL sites narratively, discursively, and performatively give meanings to this policy goal, i.e. the ideas of Europe and 'the European'. Our paper explores the practices of 'doing European belonging' through practices related to mobility and the everyday. The visitors' meaning-making processes involve complex ideas of borders and their transformations as well as belonging and non-belonging. They find various connections and similarities between people and cultural features in Europe, but also make distinctions between 'us' and 'them'. The visitor interviews are interpreted by using the concept of belonging, which, in this paper, is conceptualized as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (cf. Antonsich 2010). As such, it captures the desire for some sort of attachment to people, places or modes of being and the process of becoming more accurately than the concept of identity (Probyn 1996).

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Dubai's community of Argentine tango dancers. It explores how their embodied and discursive practices oscillate between belonging and non-belonging in the context of a highly transient and transnational urban environment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on Dubai's community of Argentine tango dancers whose embodied and discursive practices oscillate between belonging and non-belonging in the context of a highly transient and transnational urban environment.

Dubai is a city of strangers. Over 90 percent of its residents are foreigners who temporarily live and work in the city. Having de facto no access to Emirati citizenship creates a pervasive sense of impermanence among Dubai's foreign residents. However, beyond the formal structure of citizenship, recent studies have shown how Dubai's migrants engage in various forms of belonging, from establishing practical support networks to appropriating urban spaces and sharing leisure activities. While these studies illustrate the tensions between processes of inclusion and exclusion, they rarely address the emotional dimension of migrants' "permanent temporariness" (Vora 2013) and the challenge to negotiate their "geographies of the heart" (Walsh 2006).

My paper will show how the practices of Dubai's tangueros simultaneously engender feelings of belonging and non-belonging. The study explores, on the one hand, how the "instant intimacy" (Törnqvist 2018) created through tango dancing helps Dubai's tangueros to create a sense of home and thus transforms their perceptions of Dubai and their attachment to the city. Yet, the paper also illustrates how the liminoid time/space of tango allows for forms of "play" that are at odds with Dubai's sociocultural environment. Tango thus transports Dubai's dancers to an imaginary "elsewhere" and connects them with the transnational community of tango enthusiasts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which (non)belonging is practiced through food and in the context of changing border regimes and transnational practices. Moving beyond the framework of methodological nationalism, I examine (non)belonging within and beyond ethnic, national, and religious categories.

Paper long abstract:

Between 1953 and 1966 from 80,000 to 150,000 Muslims emigrated from communist Yugoslavia to Turkey following the "Independent Migration Agreement" signed between the two presidents: Josip Broz Tito and Adnan Menderes. Although the agreement was signed to enable the reunion of Turkish families, among the migrants were Muslims of different ethnic identifications. The paper explores life trajectories of migrants and their practices of (non)belonging within and beyond ethnic, national, and religious categories and in the context of changing border regimes and transnational practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and between Macedonia and Turkey between 2012 and 2018 this paper scrutinizes "paketčinja" - parcels of foods and other commodities - as polysemic carriers of meanings carried out between family members and close friends across the borders.

Different products and brands sent between dispersed family members become carriers of love and care. As sensory triggers of embodied past they evoke memories and imaginations of home and homeland, of landscape, family and nation, both lived and imagined. Through their engagements with foods migrants challenge existing nation-state borders and 'identity' categories: foods or brands bring back Yugoslavia or evoke memories of childhood and landscape. Whereas some migrants feel 'at home' in Turkey, others constantly negotiate their belonging between 'here' and 'there': between the (non)existing nation-states, rural and urban landscapes, different localities and times. Their practices of (non)belonging include consumption of particular foods or attempts to (re)claim Macedonian citizenship.