Migrants of Identity

Perceptions of 'Home' in a World of Movement

Andrew Dawson, Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000324280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Global movement is commonly characterized as one of the quintessential experiences of our age. Market forces, territorial conflicts and environmental changes uproot an increasing number of people, while mass communication, travel, tourism, and a global market of commodities, texts, tastes, fashions and ideologies place individuals more than ever in a global arena. As traditional conceptions of individuals as members of stationary, fixed and separate societies and cultures no longer convince, to what extent does movement become central to individuals' self-conceptions? How do people cultivate, negotiate, nurture and maintain an identity? To what extent do individuals become 'migrants of identity' whose home is movement?Defining 'home' as 'where one best knows oneself', this pioneering book explores the various ways in which people perceive themselves to be 'at home' in today's world. Through a series of case studies, authors show that for a world of travellers, labour migrants, exiles and commuters, 'home' comes to be found in behavioural routines and techniques, in styles of dress and address, in memories, myths and stories, in jokes and opinions. In short, people who live their lives in movement make sense of their lives as movement.

Acknowledgements

In drawing up this volume, many debts have been incurred. In particular, the editors would like to thank Robert Paine for his critique of an earlier gathering of papers and speakers in a workshop ('At Home (or Homeless) in Europe?') at the 1994 Association of American Anthropologists conference in Atlanta. The Universities of Hull and St Andrews were also generous in providing grants for conference travel and administration.

Further debts are owed to the following for their constructive commentaries at various stages of the project's becoming: Michael Anderson, Aleksander Boskovic, Peter Collins, Eve Darian-Smith, Judith Doyle, Milyan Hills, Julia Holdsworth, Tamara Kohn, Stuart Mclean, Caroline Oliver, Nerys Roberts, Jonathan Skinner, Deborah Wickering and Thomas Wilson. At Berg Publishers, Kathryn Earle has remained a most supportive editor. Finally, we are grateful to Andrew Strathern for nominating an alternative title for our theme: 'On the dialectic between motion and emotion'.

As the project was being undertaken, two overwhelmingly sad deaths occurred: that of Robert Paine's wife, Lisa Gilad, in a car accident in Canada; and that of Ladislav Holy, from cancer, shortly after the writing of his chapter had been completed (with the help of Kate Mortimer). We miss them both, and it is to their memories, with respect and love, that this volume is dedicated.

NJR and AD
St Andrews and Hull 1998

The Topic and the Book

Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson

'Migrants of identity' was the phrase that Theodore Schwartz used in the mid-1970s to describe the continual search by American youth for an identity that they found 'acceptable and authentic' (1975:130). Individual identity was always and everywhere dynamic, Schwartz suggested, always something 'problematic', something calling for a resolution that was never wholly acquired, because it was through the search that the individual per se came to be defined. However, what he felt was particular to the search of contemporary Americans was the location of that search in time as well as space; individuals increasingly used time as an anchor for their identity, as a means of bounding and expressing their membership of groups, so that cultural difference became synonymous with generational difference. Certainly, as global travel and communications made distinctive identities set up purely in terms of place and geographical difference (geophysical criteria alone) less viable and attractive, Schwartz concluded (1976:217-21), so 'authentically different identities' encompassed other, new kinds of difference.

Since Schwartz wrote, much ink has been spilled in anthropology concerning 'modern cultural identity'. Schwartz was not the first to consider space-time co-ordinates, or to hypothesize a play-off between time and space in the constitution of modern identities (vide Innes, McLuhan); but his ideas certainly resonate with what has become of major anthropological import: an appreciation of the practices of identity-formation in a world (modern, late-capitalist, postmodern, fin-de-siècle, supermodern) where processes of globalization (creolization, compression, hybridity, synchronicity) have made traditional conceptions of individuals as members of fixed and separate societies and cultures redundant.

This is a book about contemporary identity; it is a book where identity is treated as a search, either physical or cognitive, and is conceived of in terms of fluidities - of time and space, time or space. It is also a book that explores the implications of such fluidity for anthropological theory. More precisely, in place of traditional anthropological classifications of identity, we discuss and analyse the search for identity in terms of conceptualizations of 'home'.

Comprising eight substantive chapters, plus a polemical introductory essay and a concluding critique, the book intends to offer a new slant on questions of identity in the modern world in two main ways. First, identity is treated in relation to, even as inextricably tied to, fluidity or movement across time and space. Second, the book is animated by the claim that traditional anthropological classifications of identity fail to convey this movement. Hence, the book calls for the anthropological appreciation of 'home' as a useful analytical construct: as a means of encapsulating, linking and also transcending traditional classifications.

Furthermore, the dual approach of examining contemporary identity in terms of home and of movement enables the book to treat migrancy both physically and cognitively. 'A world of movement' can be understood in terms of actual physical motion around the globe and also as an imagination: an awareness of movement as a potentiality and a vicarious knowledge of movement as a phenomenon of overriding impingement.

In short, this volume explores physical and cognitive movement within and between homes, and the relations between the two; in treating analytically a contemporary 'migrancy of identity', the book examines individuals and groups in movement within and between conceptions of home.

A World of Movement

A traditional concern of anthropological description and analysis has been the identification of socio-cultural 'places': fixities of social relations and cultural routines localized in time and space. Societies were identified with cultures conceived as complete wholes; here were localized universes of meaning, with individuals and groups as their transparent components, their representative expressions.

Of late, this localizing image of separate and self-sufficient worlds (of relations, culture, identity and history) has come in for much criticism, from perspectives professional, epistemological and political. At the root of this criticism is the claim that the image may never have been more than a useful ideology that served the interests of (some) local people, and a provisional myth that was animated by the practices of (some) anthropologists. For example, at one level, the image has been compounded by claiming fleldwork - in its traditional sense of going to a place, undergoing a process of acculturation, and returning from that place - as a professional rite of passage. The point is that the transition metaphor becomes meaningless if cultures are not seen as separate entities that can be entered and exited.

At another level, the image is compounded by anthropology's traditionally authoritative, realist and objectivist style of writing (cf. James et al. 1996:1). The separate socio-cultural place, usually expressed as the 'field', has its uses as a trope of authority. It is represented variously as the locus of a panoptical gaze, as a part through which one can represent the cultural whole, and, evoking the authoritative tones of natural science, as a pseudo-laboratory (cf. Clifford 1992:98-9). In this respect, too, the narratives of entry and exit that the idea of separateness facilitates are crucial, for it is distance that is seen to enable objectivity (cf. Pratt 1986).

At another level still, and somewhat paradoxically (given that the anthropological construction of separate socio-cultural places as coherent universes of meaning grew out of an entirely laudable concern to challenge the implicit ethnocentrism of Western modes of understanding), the image resonates with a series of politically reactionary discourses: from the idea of primitive cultures perfectly attuned to their usually remote and marginal environments (cf. Ellen 1986), to hegemonic discourses of sedentarism, and modern-day and exclusionary nationalist ideologies (cf. Foster 1991:91; Kapferer 1988:88).

Finally, the image is reinforced by anthropology's own exclusionary practices. In an era characterized by challenges to its territory from other disciplines, anthropology appears often torn. On the one hand, there is a recognition of the need to develop methodological practices that come to terms with the global interconnectedness of societies and cultures (e.g. Marcus 1995). On the other hand, anthropology engages in a defensive strategy whereby its distinctiveness is defined ever more in terms of a methodological commitment to spending an appreciable time in one local setting (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997:4).

Having said this, our interest here, however, is the substantive critique: the image of socio-cultural 'places' rests on a conceptualization of time and space that, it is widely held, contemporary movement in the world now overwhelms and relativizes. As John Berger phrased it (1984:55), market forces, ideological conflicts and environmental change now uproot such a number of people that migration can more and more be portrayed as 'the quintessential experience' of the age. At the least, mass media of communication, a global economy (of individual entrepreneurship), global politics, ease of travel, global tastes, fashions, texts and entertainments in a word, a global eclecticism-now more and more make of the world an actual 'oyster' in the way Shakespeare had Pistol, four hundred years ago, boast of it, metaphorically, to Falstaff. Hence, from an ideology of totalizing 'places', one moves to an actuality of individuals and groups entering and leaving spaces. Or, in the terminology of Marc Auge, it is 'non-places' that have become the real measure of our time (1995:79). Here are transit points and temporary abodes: wastelands, building sites, waiting-rooms, refugee camps, stations, malls, hotels, where travellers break step and thousands of individual itineraries momentarily converge. It is not, Auge admits, that socio-cultural places (groups, goods and economies) cannot reconstitute themselves in practice, but that place and non-place now represent ongoingly contrastive modalities. Certainly in terms of individual awareness, even if not of universal practice, movement has become fundamental to modern identity, and an experience of non-place (beyond 'territory' and 'society') an essential component of everyday existence.

Home

If population movement, travel, economy and communication make the globe a unified space, then, for Auge, no place is completely itself and separate, and no place is completely other (cf. Massey 1991,1992). And in this situation, people are always and yet never 'at home': always and never 'at ease with the rhetoric of those with whom they share their lives' (Auge 1995:108). In John Berger's commentary, in a quintessentially migrant age, the idea of 'home' undergoes dramatic change at the least.

Salient among traditional conceptualizations of home was the stable physical centre of one's universe - a safe and still place to leave and return to (whether house, village, region or nation), and a principal focus of one's concern and control. Even if the potential mobility of home was attested to - the tent of the nomad - still the focus was on the necessary controlling of space. 'Home' easily became a synonym for 'house', within which space and time were structured functionally, economically, aesthetically and morally, so that the coordinated workings of home were seen to give on to an 'embryonic' or 'virtual community' (Douglas 1991).

As Douglas elaborated, home could be defined as a pattern of regular doings, furnishings and appurtenances, and a physical space in which certain communitarian practices were realized. Homes began by bringing space under control and thus giving domestic life certain physical orientations: 'directions of existence' (Douglas 1991:290). Homes also gave structure to time and embodied a capacity for memory and anticipation. In short, homes could be understood as the organization of space over time, and the allocation of resources in space and over time. Then again, the routinization of space-time was also aesthetic and moral; it provided a model for redistributive justice, sacrifice, and the common, collective good. Homes were communities in microcosm, which coordinated their members by way of open and constant communication, a division of labour, rights and duties, a commensal meal, and a rotation of access to resources. They encompassed total prestatory systems that exerted possibly tyrannous control over their members' minds, bodies and tongues in their search for solidarity.

However, to understand homes in this way - as being synonymous with Durkheimian notions of solidary communities and coercive institutions in microcosm - is anachronistic, and provides little conceptual purchase on a world of contemporary movement. A broader understanding is possible and necessary, one concerned less with the routinization of space and time than with their fluidity and with individuals' continuous movement through them (cf. Minh-ha 1994:14). In essence, a far more mobile conception of home should come to the fore, as something 'plurilocal' (Rouse 1991), something to be taken along whenever one decamps. As Berger describes, for a world of travellers, of labour migrants, exiles and commuters, home comes to be found in a routine set of practices, a repetition of habitual interactions, in styles of dress and address, in memories and myths, in stories carried around in one's head. People are more at home nowadays, in short, in 'words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat' (Berger 1984:64). 'Home', in Bammer's words, 'is neither here nor there (...) rather, itself a hybrid, it is both here and there - an amalgam, a pastiche, a performance' (1992:ix). Or else, in a reactionary refusing of the world of movement, one is at home in a paradoxical clamouring for 'particularisms': in a multiplicity of invented, 'primordial', places for which one is perhaps willing to kill and die (Auge 1995:35; cf. also Harvey 1989). Here, in Robins' depiction (19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index