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- Convenors:
-
Jeanette Lykkegård
(Århus University)
Cecil Marie Schou Pallesen (Moesgaard Museum and Gender Museum Denmark)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Bodies, Affects, Senses, Emotions
- Location:
- A11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
How do people, who fled or left their home of origin, interact with, inhabit, and embody their physical surroundings in the new place? How do experiences of food, things, houses or other physical structures, nature, weather, or atmospheres form, enable or contest ways of belonging?
Long Abstract:
To what extend - and how - is our sense of belonging created and co-created with and within our material surroundings? Tim Ingold (2017) has argued that we live in a weather-world; a world we perceive with. According to this understanding, we live in the world and the world gets inside us, and saturates our awareness. So, we are immersed in and created through our environment. But what happens then, when we are, or are in risk of being, uprooted, from the places, we are connected to? Or when our lifeworlds are spread across long distances and national borders?
We hence wish to explore uncertain belongings through ethnographic studies of materiality; the approach of 'thinking through things' (Henare et al 2007); and the idea that materiality not only confines to things as such but the tactile more broadly: smells, tastes, light, sounds, and atmospheres. We invite papers that explore questions such as: How does it feel to (not) belong, or belong in ambiguous or contested ways? How do migrants and refugees interact with their physical surroundings, inhabit them, embody, shape - and take shape from them? Papers for this panel could focus on food, nature, personal belongings, houses or other physical structures, weather, atmospheres, aesthetics. We wish to make room for experimental ways of using language and visual media in the explorations of what it means to belong, when belonging is uncertain and challenged: we thus invite traditional papers as well as experimental writing and the use of various media.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 June, 2023, -Anna Kurpiel (University of Wroclaw) Katarzyna Maniak (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University)
Paper short abstract:
In our research on the post-migrant Polish regions, we propose two concepts: the integrity of things and place, and a sense of order. In both cases, the relationship with or through things fills the void left by broken genealogies and seals the appropriation of post-conflict materiality.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is based on research conducted in two Polish cities, Wrocław and Szczecin, which changed their state affiliation from German to Polish after WWII. The initial question of the research concerned the relationships between pre-war objects left behind by resettled Germans and the contemporary inhabitants of the cities. Our research employed a combination of ethnographic and artistic (photographic) methods.
The objects of research prompted a range of practices and attitudes, from emotional attachment to approaches toward profit-making. In this presentation, however, we will emphasize a certain form of relationships, which we categorize as the integrity of things and place, and the "proper" order of things. The former is grounded in the conviction of the harmony of a place that, if interrupted, requires re-integrative action. The latter reveals assumptions that attach social class perspectives to the material surroundings and practices of their usage. Both convictions, as we suggest, naturalize and legitimize the process of post-war appropriation, while at the same time appearing to bring forth a reparative effect by introducing the feeling that the turbulent past has been repaired.
Philip Dodds (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
I present findings from an interdisciplinary research project about the aesthetics of migrant home-making, focusing first on a series of aesthetic-ethnographic workshops with migrants. I also analyse how the Swedish artists Sirous Namazi and Lap-See Lam explore the materiality of migrant belonging.
Paper long abstract:
Making It Home: An Aesthetic Methodological Contribution to the Study of Migrant Home-Making and Politics of Integration (aka MaHoMe) is a NordForsk-funded project involving eight researchers from universities in the UK, Denmark and Sweden. It examines how migrants make and make sense of home amidst the complex and divergent politics of integration in these three so-called “host societies”. My role in the project has included: (1) co-organising and evaluating two “visual ethnography workshops” with migrants in Lund, Sweden, focusing on the objects and images of home, facilitated by the artist Henrik Teleman; (2) participating in and auto-ethnographically reflecting on two “aesthetic workshops” with migrants on Gotland, Sweden, focusing on the food of home, facilitated by the Baltic Art Centre; and (3) analysing how professional artists in Sweden have explored the theme of migrant home-making over the last decade. In this presentation, I will briefly discuss all three elements, but I will focus especially on the third. In particular, I will analyse the work of the artists Sirous Namazi (b. 1970, Iran) and Lap-See Lam (b. 1990, Sweden), who have featured in home-themed group exhibitions such as “Unhomed” (Uppsala Konstmuseum, 2020) and “A Home” (Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm, 2022). Both artists have used 3D scanning and printing technology to (imperfectly) recreate the objects of lost homes and their aesthetic explorations of the materiality of home contribute a rich understanding of migrant belonging.
Olena Martynchuk (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents an anthropological analysis of the social use of vernacular photographs among people with refugee experience. What are the ways in which photography affects people with refugee experience? How do photographs create new material surroundings and how it save the cultural identity?
Paper long abstract:
The military action in Ukraine provoked by the Russian invasion have forced some 7-10 million residents of Ukraine to leave the country. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, saving themselves from the war, more than 5 million people have sheltered in Poland. Within 11 months of the ongoing war, some people have decided to return to Ukraine, others, with nowhere to return to, are trying to repair their lives in a new socio-cultural context. The photos, along with other personal items "thrown" into the so-called "emergency bag" have a special place in the lives of their owners, giving feeling of connection to family and/or close persons, society.
My propose a paper is a kind of reaction to the current situation. In the everyday life, photographs accompany people in various ways. Moreover, they are social actors and have the potential to enter into dynamic interactions with people. As Elizabeth Edwards has noted, objects, including photographs, are therefore not only a scenography for human actions and meanings, but are part of their (Edwards, Hart, 2011). According to my anthropological observations, in situations involving the necessity to leave the country, photographs are often the objects that have a place among the personal belongings necessary for evacuation. Taken from their original context of functioning, they get a new life, they travel in the company of other objects with which they had no contact so far, they appropriate the space of a temporary home, become mediators in communication with, for example, family.
Jeanette Lykkegård (Århus University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine seeps in and out through the bodies, minds and 'souls' of Ukrainian refugees in Denmark, and colours their experience and ways of navigating their current, unwished for, lifesituation as temporarily displaces people.
Paper long abstract:
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, over 30.000 Ukrainians have sought refuge in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between April 2022 and May 2023 in the southern and central part of Jutland, Denmark; this paper explores how Ukrainian refugees in Denmark experience and understand home and homeliness, and what it means to build a temporary home in a foreign country while your Motherland is at war.
"My body is here, but my heart and soul is still there", a woman said one day when speaking of the above theme. How is it to live when the sense of self is dispersed across such a large distance?
This paper explores how the Motherland, Ukraine seeps in and out through the bodies, minds and 'souls' of the Ukrainian refugees I am in contact with here in Denmark. The presentations explores and unfolds whether (,and if yes, how,) Tim Ingolds theories of 'weatherworld' and 'correspondence' can deepen our understand of what it means to live and be at home in a situation such as theirs. If we perceive with and correspond with our surroundings, what does it mean to be human when you have to flee the place in which you are immersed in and created through? And what does it do to your experience of home when that home that lives inside you are being bombed? How does the new environment in which you live as a refugee become part of you concurrently?
Mette Lind Kusk (Aarhus University) Emilie Lund Mortensen (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
How do Congolese UN-quota refugees manage to cook familiar meals in materially unfamiliar homes upon arrival to Denmark? Drawing on Ahmed (2000), we show how everyday practices of cooking and sharing familiar meals create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ through well-known smells and tastes.
Paper long abstract:
In refugee and migration studies, radical rupture or estrangement (Ahmed 2000) – social, material, and temporal - related to the migration experience are often given central attention. Attempting to nuance this focus, this paper highlights how, despite radical rupture, recently resettled refugees manage to create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ through cooking familiar meals (see also Verdasco 2022; Povrzanović Frykman 2017). The paper hence unpacks a seeming paradox: How do Congolese UN-quota refugees manage to cook familiar meals in the materially unfamiliar accommodations and kitchens they are referred to live in upon arrival to Denmark? Upon their arrival, their new homes are already equipped with basic furniture and kitchen tools, reflecting Danish norms and notions of “home”. Technologies, which have not previously been part of the families’ everyday lives now take up central space in the kitchens: Electric stoves, refrigerators, and ovens.
To these families, inhabiting their new homes, including a Danish kitchen, thus entail a radical material rupture and a disorienting experience (Ahmed 2006).
Thinking along the lines of Sara Ahmed (2000), we consider the sensory world of everyday experience a central aspect of feeling at home in the world. Thus, by zooming in on everyday practices of cooking and sharing familiar meals, we show how the families create moments of ‘sensory continuity’ in their new accommodations through well-known smells, tastes, and textures. This, we suggest, provides an important counterweight to a life situation marked by rupture, disorientation.
Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will explore materialities of gardens of descendents of Polish migrants in Brazil. Using the concept of 'landscaping' as affective and embodied practice I will look at how knowledge about plants is passed on how local landscape is adapted to inhabitants' identities and customs.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will analyse materialities of gardens and gardening practices of descendents of Polish migrants in southern Brazil. I will base on my ethnographic and sociolinguistic research on Polish diaspora heritage conducted in 2015-2016 and 2019-2021.
The first settlers - peasants, farmers who came to Brazil from various Polish regions at the end of 19th century, found different smells, sounds, tastes and images than they knew from the place of origin. By transforming the landscape, introducing familiar architectural elements, crops and livestock, introducing their own music and familiar-sounding words, they tamed and adapted it. By building churches and schools and marking out paths, they gave meaning to the space: they valued it and measured it. In other words, they landscaped it (Wylie 2007).
In this presentation I will look closely at the processes of landscaping in home gardens, especially backyard vegetable gardens, in one southern Brazilian village, inhabited predominantly by descendents of Polish migrants, still living from agriculture. I will analyse what species of edible plants are grown, how are they called and used. This way I will try to see the intergenerational transfer of knowledge about gardening and eating practices, and their connection to people's customs, memories and identities.
Cecil Marie Schou Pallesen (Moesgaard Museum and Gender Museum Denmark)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the tactile experiences of house work and practices of home among Tanzanian Indians. With footage from a Tanzanian Indian home, I show how attending to the tactile details of everyday life is a way to explore the intimate politics of belonging in a migrant minority.
Paper long abstract:
"Home is like a temple", Pushpa says. Three times a day she cooks healthy meals for herself and her family. She peels the vegetables, cuts them in perfect pieces, grinds the spices, boils the tea, churns the butter with a steady hand. She crochets blankets that decorate the tv and the furniture. She rolls the cotton wigs for the mandir; the little temple she keeps in the bedroom for prayers. Throughout the day, Pushpa uses her hands and feet to sustain and nourish the home, its ambience, comfort, and healthiness. The thorough attention to the details points towards several issues that I wish to discuss in the paper:
- the home and its safety and comfort has a special and important meaning for Tanzanian Indians, not least after nationalizations in 1972
- food is a very fundamental way of making home and feeling home for Tanzanian Indians
- the tactile qualities of the house work, and its thoroughness, is an intimate way for the Tanzanian Indian women in particular to connect to and maintain their cultural and religious background.
In the paper I show footage from a Tanzanian Indian home, where I as an anthropologist and filmmaker attend to the tactile details of everyday life and try to understand experiences of home as not only stretched in time and across continents, but also a highly concrete practice centered in the body.
Shilan Masrour (Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)) Atwa Jaber (The Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)) Ryan Whitacre (Graduate Institute (IHEID)) Shirin Heidari (Geneva Graduate Institute)
Paper short abstract:
Unfamiliarity with the novel physical environment compounds everyday challenges of forced migration. This paper examines the difficulties refugees encounter when transitioning to new spaces, as well as the strategies they employ to foster a sense of home and belonging.
Paper long abstract:
In the liminal space between dreams and reality, migrants are forced to explore, rebuild, and confront the materiality of their newly discovered surroundings. Refugees arrive in Switzerland with high expectations of legal protection, safe accommodation, financial stability, free education, and state-sponsored health care. The material realities of migrant housing belie their idealised representations of Switzerland: in migrant homes, notions of Swiss beauty, cleanliness and protection contrast with the actual experiences of small, outlying uncertain spaces with an average standard of living.
Between August 2021 and October 2022, we conducted participant observation in several refugee residences that provide services for refugees and asylum-seekers in the Canton of Geneva; focus groups (2); and in-depth interviews (35) with refugees and asylum-seekers of various origins, mainly Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Drawing on this research, this paper explores how migrants navigate the foreign material surroundings that structure their everyday life in Geneva. Physical buildings provide a sense of stability for migrants who have been uprooted from their homes, and provide a tangible reminder of the past. However, migrant housing is often located on the urban periphery, where migrants are confronted with a process of marginalisation; and must work to find reliable information and resources, or even support from the local community. We observe migrants as they traverse different transitional spaces seeking access to resources and a sense of belonging to their new homes while they are constantly in a state of material transition, uncertain of what the future holds.
Ieva Garda-Rozenberga (Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia)
Paper short abstract:
Based on in-depth interviews with Latvian Roma the aim of the paper is to analyse how do they “do belonging” and to reveal materiality of home at a time when a large part of the Roma is in movement (~40% have emigrated to UK) and the lives of many of them take place in a virtual environment.
Paper long abstract:
A century and a half of accelerated movement in north Eastern Europe as well as the recent months of forced migration from Ukraine both highlight the necessity and provides opportunities to examine the conceptualization and new understandings of place, home, and belonging for different generations and ethnic communities. This can also be seen in the case of Latvian Roma. Roma people in Latvia are characterized by a strong feeling of place attachment fundamentally shaped by habitual social interactions, ethnic traditions, and their neighborhoods. However, the regime changes during the 20th and 21th century and waves of emigration have intensified the question of relationships between place, home, and belonging. Based on in-depth interviews with Latvian Roma who have left the country since the 2000s as well as those who have returned to their home country or are still settling down after remigration, the aim of the paper is to analyse how do they “do belonging”. Does the environment or place where they live affect everyday practices, identity and social relations (i.e., what one can or cannot do in the place, compared to other places)? How do translocal networks and experiences contribute to the process of belonging? The multidisciplinary approach to life story analysis will reveal Roma’s sense of belonging and materiality of home at a time when a large part of the Roma is in movement and the lives of many of them take place in a virtual environment.