Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 21st – 22nd 2013 Ethnographies of Mobility International seminar Programme and Book of Proceedings 1 Ethnographies of Mobility – International seminar Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 21st – 22nd 2013 2 Ethnographies of Mobility – International seminar Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 21st – 22nd 2013 Editors: Nataša Gregorič Bon, Špela Kalčić, Nataša Rogelja Organisation Špela Kalčić, Nataša Rogelja, Nataša Gregorič Bon, committee: Jaka Repič, Alenka Janko Spreizer, Marko Juntunen Organisers: Slovenian Migration Institute, ZRC SAZU; Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies ZRC SAZU; School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Tampere Publisher: ZRC Publishing House For Publisher: Oto Luthar Reviewer: Nina Vodopivec Design: Špela Kalčić Picture: Nataša Rogelja CIP – Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 39:314.15(082) 314.15(082) 316.444(082) ZNANSTVENO raziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. International Seminar (2013, Ljubljana) Ethnographies of mobility : conference programme and book of proceedings / International Seminar Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts ; [editors Nataša Gregorič Bon, Špela Kalčić, Nataša Rogelja]. - Ljubljana : ZRC Publishing House, 2013 ISBN 978-961-254-479-9 (pdf) 1. Gl. stv. nasl. 2. Gregorič Bon, Nataša, Kalčić, Špela, Rogelja, Nataša 268624896 © 2013, ZRC Publishing House, ZRC SAZU All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. 3 Ethnographies of Mobility International seminar Programme and Book of Proceedings Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia August 21st – 22nd 2013 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This seminar is a result of two Bilateral projects cooperation between Slovenia and Finland held by Dr Špela Kalčić, Institute for Migration Studies and Dr Nataša Gregorič Bon, Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) between 2012 and 2013. Without the financial support of the Slovenian Research Agency this seminar would not be possible and we extend our gratitude for this funding. We are also indebted to ZRC SAZU which hosted this seminar and would like to express our gratitude to Professor Oto Luthar, Director of ZRC SAZU for his help during the preparation of this seminar. We are also grateful to Melita Robič, Technical Secretary of the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Alenka Koren and Maja Stipar, both Technical Secretaries of the ZRC SAZU Administration Office, and Teja Komel, Technical Secretary of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Research, for their kind technical and practical help during the seminar. Last but not least we wish to thank the members of the Organisation Committee and all other colleagues who contributed to the solution of the variety of organisational, administrative and other issues. Nataša Gregorič Bon Nataša Rogelja Špela Kalčić 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MOBILITY – INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR 13 PROGRAMME 15 ABSTRACTS 19 SEMINAR PAPERS: Keynote - ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MOBILITY: WHAT’S IN A NAME? Noel B. Salazar 27 SEASONAL MOBILITY AND MIGRATION IN GORIČKO REGION OF PREKMURJE IN THE 20TH CENTURY Ivanka Huber 37 ABSENCES AND ATTACHMENTS: MISSING PERSONS AND REBUILT HOUSES IN POST-WAR BOSNIAN TRANSNATIONAL LANDSCAPE Laura Huttunen 45 TRANSNATIONAL POSTED WORKERS AND THEIR FAMILIES: DEBATING CLASS MAKING ON THE MOVE Anna Matyska 48 THE CONCEPT OF MARGINAL MOBILITY Špela Kalčić, Marko Juntunen, Nataša Rogelja 53 MASCULINE, MOBILE AND MARGINAL: MOROCCAN MEN BETWEEN MOROCCO AND SPAIN Marko Juntunen 58 CONCEPTUALISING THE NEW EUROPEAN NOMADS Špela Kalčić 63 LIFESTYLE MIGRATION ON THE SEA: ENVIRONMENT, IMAGINARIES AND ETHNOGRAPHY Nataša Rogelja 68 FROM ROMANI TRAVEL AND HOMEPLACE TO PERMANENT SETTLEMENTS: MULTIPLE MEANING OF MOVEMENTS AND PLACE IN ROMANI NARRATIVES Alenka Janko Spreizer 74 JAZZ COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE METHOD OF HOPE IN A SMALL SLOVENIAN TOWN Miha Kozorog 79 MOVEMENT, CENTRALITY, AND EMBODIED ENCOUNTERS – AMAZONIAN INDIGENOUS CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF PLACE Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen 84 APPROACHING RETURN MOBILITIES FROM SLOVENIAN DIASPORA IN ARGENTINA Jaka Repič 92 BETWEEN KURBET AND SHTËPI Nataša Gregorič Bon 98 6 ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MOBILITY – INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Ljubljana, Slovenia, August 21st – 22nd 2013 Organisers: Slovenian Migration Institute, ZRC SAZU; Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies ZRC SAZU; and School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Tampere Organisation committee: Špela Kalčić, Nataša Rogelja, Nataša Gregorič Bon, Jaka Repič, Alenka Janko Spreizer, Marko Juntunen The first seminar “Ethnographies of Mobility” held in Tampere, Finland (May 2012) focused on the several emergent forms of mobile lifestyles that question officially recognized and legally privileged forms of human mobility. The seminar sought to open new theoretical perspectives on new mobile lives with the specific focus on the following themes: a) the interplay between mobile lifestyle strategies and global economic and political transformations; b) new theoretical perspectives for studying mobile lives and mobile subjectivities and c) the production of hierarchies of mobilities and their interplay in particular landscapes of their encounters. The aim of the second seminar “Ethnographies of Mobility” in Ljubljana, Slovenia (August 2013) is to continue discussions from Tampere and round them up, with a purpose of formulating new research questions, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches in the domain of mobility and migration studies. 7 PROGRAMME Conference venue: Geographical Museum, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Gosposka ulica 16, 1000 Ljubljana Wednesday, 21.8.2013 9.00 - 10.30 Opening speech Nataša Rogelja (ZRC SAZU), Marko Juntunen (University of Tampere), Špela Kalčić (ZRC SAZU) Oto Luthar (Director, ZRC SAZU) Keynote lecture Noel Salazar (University Leuven) Ethnographies of Mobility: What’s in a Name? 10.30 – 10.40 Coffee break 10.40 – 12.10 Session 1 CENTRAL EUROPEAN SOCIETIES IN TRANSNATIONAL LANDSCAPES Session 1 will round up three presentations dealing with multicultural heritage of Prekmurje, post-war Bosnian transnational landscape and transnational posted workers. Cases deal with central European societies in the context of global modernity marked with absences and attachments as well as with mobilities and moorings. Oto Luthar (ZRC SAZU) Linzerteig and Dobos Torta: Language Mobility in Central-European Peripheral (and) Multiethnic Society of the Late 19th Century Laura Hutunen (University of Tampere) Absences and Attachments: Missing Persons and Rebuilt Houses in Post-war Bosnian Transnational Landscape Anna Matyska (University of Tampere Transnational Posted Workers and Their Families: Debating Class Making on the Move 8 12.10 – 14.00 Lunch 14.00 – 16.40 Session 2 MARGINAL MOBILITY BETWEEN THEORY AND ETHNOGRAPHY Session 2 will focus on the analytical potentials and shortcomings of the theoretical framework of the “marginal mobility”, a heuristic tool that enables comparative research of contemporary mobilities. Participants will present their comments on marginal mobility framework on the ground of their ethnography as well as through theoretical approaches such as lifestyle migration, peripatetic nomadism, nomadism, irregular migration, etc. 14.00 – 15.00 Špela Kalčić (ZRC SAZU) The Concept of Marginal Mobility (M. Juntunen, Š. Kalčić, N. Rogelja) Marko Juntunen (University of Tampere) Masculine, Mobile and Marginal: Moroccan Men between Morocco and Spain 15.00 – 15.10 Coffee break 15.10 – 16.40 Špela Kalčić (ZRC SAZU) Conceptualising the New European Nomads Nataša Rogelja (ZRC SAZU) Lifestyle Migration on the Sea: Environment, Imaginaries and Ethnography Mari Korpela (University of Tampere) Comparing Lifestyle Migration and Marginal Mobility: Similarities and Differences 19.00 Dinner Thursday, 22.8.2013 9.00 – 11.50 Session 3 (IM)MOBILITY AND PLACE-MAKING Session 3 addresses interrelatedness between practices and politics of place-making and movement as a mode of mobility and immobility. The core idea is that movement engenders moving places – places which locations are not thought as fixed but relative. Contributions explore the specificities of a given region, address issues of place-making, the topographic and social positioning of its inhabitants, the production of centrality and marginality, and the 9 concepts of return as either physical or symbolic movements in space, with the attendant notions of roots, rootedness and locality. 09.00 – 10.30 Alenka Janko Spreizer (University of Primorska) From Romani Travel and Homeplace to Permanent Settlements: Multiple Meaning of Movements and Place in Romani Narratives Miha Kozorog (University of Ljubljana) Jazz Cosmopolitanism and the Method of Hope in a Small Slovenian Town Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen (University of Helsinki and Centre EREA, France) Movement, Centrality, and Embodied Encounters – Amazonian Indigenous Conceptualisations of Place 10.30 – 10.40 Coffee break 10.40 – 11.40 Jaka Repič (University of Ljubljana) Approaching Return Mobilities from Slovenian Diaspora in Argentina Nataša Gregorič Bon (ZRC SAZU) Between Kurbet and Shtëpi 11.40 – 11.50 Coffee break 11.50 – 12.50 ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION Final discussion will close the seminar and round up ideas with the purpose of formulating new research questions, methodological and theoretical approaches in domain of mobility and migration studies. Discussant: Jaka Repič (University of Ljubljana) 12.50 – 14.00 Lunch 15.00 Trip to the village Krka and dinner 10 ABSTRACTS Session 1 CENTRAL EUROPEAN SOCIETIES IN TRANSNATIONAL LANDSCAPES Linzerteig and Dobos Torta: Language Mobility in Central-European Peripheral (and) Multiethnic Society of the Late 19th Century Oto Luthar Professor, Director Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia oto.luthar@zrc-sazu.si, phone 00386 14706412 By using old multilingual recipe manuscripts the author is trying to show that despite the break up of old all-encompassing nationalistic identity schemes caused by (delayed) modernization, the people living in Central-European border areas in the late 19th and early 20th century, in their everyday life, still shared the same transnational rhetoric for both self- identification and recognition of others. One of the ways to argue this is to analyze the language use connected to food. Nevertheless, food has everything in the world to tell us about the mentalities of an age, its desiring tropes and geographies. Understood as part of the history of the world, the subject of food can be embraced as a history of particular society. Using the collection of recipes and other household instructions for housewives, where in one sentence, two and sometimes even three languages are used the author argues that this multicultural way of remembering and sharing professional expertise was the usual practice of everyday communication until the end of the WWII when, with the creation of socialist Yugoslavia, the three newly politicized national/ethnic (identities), two religious identities, and (after 1945) one exclusive ideology produced a new set of practices of cohabitation and differentiation. KEYWORDS: multilingualism, cooking recipe manuscripts, ethnicity, food Seasonal Mobility and Migration in Goričko Region of Prekmurje in the 20th Century Ivanka Huber PhD, Research Assistant Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Centre for Interdisciplinary Research Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia ivanka.huber@zrc-sazu.si In this article, I would like to represent sociological and historical aspects of seasonal work and emigration in Goričko Region as one of cultural practices in the perspective of family and individual. On the basis of case study and individually guided interviews, with the help of 11 which I gained family stories, I wanted to determine how seasonal work and emigration as a permanent lifestyle in Goričko Region affected family and individual, as well as regulated family dynamics. The process of migration caused changes in the types of families and types of education and also the transmission of cultural patterns and a different lifestyle. KEY WORDS: migration, seasonal work, Goričko Region, family Absence and Attachments: Missing Persons and Rebuilt Houses in post-War Bosnian Transnational Landscape Laura Huttunen Senior Research Fellow School of Social Sciences and Humanities FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland laura.huttunen@uta.fi The war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 created a world-wide diaspora of Bosnian refugees who left the country, while simultaneously attracting to the country a large amount of foreign experts and professionals. In this presentation I will look at the post-war Bosnian transnational space as a social landscape created through these migratory movements and regulated by resources controlled by these different moving actors. My focus will be on two cases of loss and absence: houses destroyed in campaigns of aggression, and on persons gone missing during the war. There are huge projects of material and intellectual investment created around both of these tragedies. This has meant that diaspora Bosnians face their losses and renegotiate their belongings in a social and political landscape mediated through a multitude of local, transnational and international agents that control important resources and channel possibilities of movement. KEYWORDS: transnationalism, Bosnia-Herzegovina, mobility, reconstruction, missing persons, NGOs, professionals Transnational Posted Workers and Their Families: Debating Class Making on the Move Anna Matyska PhD student, Researcher School of Social Sciences and Humanities FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland ana.matyska@uta.fi The paper will discuss my forthcoming project on the transnational class making among Polish posted workers residing in Finland, Norway, Sweden and/or Denmark, and their families who stayed in Poland, in the context of changing conditions and institutional channels of mobility in the Cold War and post-Cold War period. The term “posted worker” refers to workers who are employed by firms subcontracted by local companies for short- term projects, mainly for manual labour. The project focuses on Polish posted workers with the long-term experience of mobility, including Poles who themselves or whose parents were contracted for work outside Poland during the Cold War. The project will involve multi-sited ethnography, conducted in workers’ country of origin and destination. The project aims at the ethnographic exploration of the implication of transnationalism for the class making of posted workers and their families. It asks can we conceptualize posted workers’ and their family/household members’ life in Poland in class terms, and if yes, what heuristic benefits the concept of class brings in this particular transnational context and how it helps to understand the stratification systems produced by 12 communist and capitalist regimes. I will stress the emic class-related categories stemming from the historical particularities of Polish social stratification system and Polish mobility. I recognize that class is always gendered. KEYWORDS: transnational mobility, Poland, Nordic, posted workers, class Session 2 MARGINAL MOBILITY BETWEEN THEORY AND ETHNOGRAPHY The Concept of Marginal Mobility Špela Kalčić and Nataša Rogelja Research Fellows at the Slovenian Migration Institute Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia spela.kalcic@zrc-sazu.si, natasa.rogelja@zrc-sazu.si Marko Juntunen Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology School of Social Sciences and Humanities FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland marko.juntunen@uta.fi Today various mobile subjects construct their mobile lives in a highly comparable manner, as well as share very similar experiences. We argue that what we have at hand are researchable entities that challenge the widely shared academic consensus for drawing clear analytical and conceptual boundaries between the mobile subjects from the Global North and South. As the contemporary analytical language of migration and mobility studies lacks an appropriate term for such mobile lifestyles, we prefer to conceptualise them as marginal mobilities. According to our understanding, these mobilities can be compared by the following five unifying characteristics: they are highly mobile (1), not entirely forced nor voluntary lifestyles (2) that occur along loosely defined trajectories (3). They generally lack politicized public spheres (4) and they are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation against the sedentary norm of the nation state (5). Comparing different ethnographic cases is therefore important and can offer an opportunity to delve deeper into the cultural logic of contemporary mobile lifestyles. KEYWORDS: marginal mobility, globalization, emerging mobile lifestyles, marginality, comparative study Masculine, Mobile and Marginal: Moroccan Men between Morocco and Spain Marko Juntunen Assistant Professor of Social Anthropogy School of Social Sciences and Humanities FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland marko.juntunen@uta.fi, phone 00358 50318 6103 This article aims to demonstrate by reference to extended ethnographic fieldwork among marginal mobile Moroccan men the kinds of challenges anthropologists face today when attempting to understand masculinity in contexts involving rapid social change, dispersion through international mobility, and complex geopolitical power struggles. Instead of 13 addressing masculinity as a problem to be solved, and tool for analyzing change and conflict ethnographers need to focus on the ways in which our interlocutors understand their lives in multidimensional constructions including state institutions and security practices. KEYWORDS: marginal mobility, masculinity, Morocco, irregular migration, urban poor Conceptualising the New European Nomads Špela Kalčić PhD in Social Anthropology, Research Fellow at the Slovenian Migration Institute Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia spela.kalcic@zrc-sazu.si / spela.kalcic@gmail.com, phone 00386 51442211 / 00386 51886715 The recession of 2008 pushed many Europeans to resort to peripatetic survival strategies (i.e. nomadism that exploits social rather than natural resources) or to migrate to places where they are able to reduce living costs, for example to Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Turkey) or to Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa. Many of these newly emergent European nomads (moving in and out of Europe) include people who use a mobile lifestyle to “muddle through” the period of unemployment till they obtain their pension, or alternatively, work and use several income making strategies while on the move. The nomadism of these people is not rooted in a tribal system and organised through descent groups, belonging is not based on blood relations, but rather marked by pronounced individualism. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the ways in which these new European nomads could be conceptualised by exploring their mobile practices and strategies through lenses of traditional peripatetic nomadism (Berland, Salo 1986), neo-nomadism (D’Andrea 2006, 2007), bohemian lifestyle migration (Korpela 2009), and marginal mobility (Juntunen et al. forthcoming). KEYWORDS: New European nomads, peripatetic nomadism, neo-nomadism, bohemian lifestyle migration, marginal mobility Lifestyle Migration on the Sea: Environment, Imaginaries and Ethnography Nataša Rogelja Research Fellow at the Slovenian Migration Institute Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia natasa.rogelja@zrc-sazu.si As a result of the rapid development of navigation and communication technology, boat building and car producing technology, increased living standards, as well as recession and disillusionment with the national states’ system, a constantly increasing number of people from the Global North adopt mobility as a way of life. They travel, live and work in boats. The aim of this paper is to contextualise cultural perceptions of the sea and the movement with the ethnography of liveaboards in the Mediterranean. Their experiences of deterritorialization in perpetual motion and practices of mobile dwelling that epitomise ideals of individual freedom and self-sufficiency will be contextualised 1) with broader cultural-historical framework of ideas and practices attached to the sea and 2) with the contemporary context of late modernity that promotes, enables and generates “the escape” to the sea. 14 KEYWORDS: lifestyle migration, the sea, imaginaries, environment, Mediterranean Comparing Lifestyle Migration and Marginal Mobility: Similarities and Differences Mari Korpela PhD in Social Anthropology, Research Fellow School of Social Sciences and Humanities FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland mari.korpela@uta.fi This paper elaborates on the similarities and differences between lifestyle migration and marginal mobility. Lifestyle migration is often characterised as a privileged phenomenon but at a close look it shares many characteristics with marginal mobility. First of all, the reasons for becoming a lifestyle migrant are often (although not always) similar to those listed in terms of marginal mobility. Moreover, although lifestyle migration is often understood as a permanent move abroad, in practice many lifestyle migrants are involved in frequent transnational mobility - sometimes voluntarily, at other times not. However, lifestyle migrants are not as uprooted and liminal as the marginally mobile people are and sometimes, they form a visible, even politicised, public space. When comparing lifestyle migration to marginal mobility, I take into account the typology of various kinds of lifestyle migrants that has been set up by Karen O'Reilly and Michaela Benson: some lifestyle migrants can be termed as residential tourists, others search for rural idyll and the third category consists of bohemians. I argue that bohemian lifestyle migration is very similar to marginal mobility but other kinds of lifestyle migrants are significantly different although also they share certain characteristics with the marginally mobile. Eventually, I elaborate on how the concepts of marginal mobility and lifestyle migration help us to understand the different kinds of mobility that are becoming increasingly popular nowadays, yet, remain rather invisible and un-theorised so far. KEYWORDS: Lifestyle migration, marginal mobility, bohemian lifestyle migrants, sedentary norm, marginality, nation state Session 3 (IM)MOBILITY AND PLACE-MAKING From Romani Travel and Homeplace to Permanent Settlements: Multiple Meaning of Movements and Place in Romani Narratives Alenka Janko Spreizer Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska Titov trg 5, 6000 Koper alenka.janko.spreizer@fhs.upr.si, phone 00386 56637 740 The paper illustrates how the frequency of movement can also engender marginality of people and places. It demonstrates how the myth of Roma people as “restless nomads”, grounded in the sedentarist logic that roots people in space and time, serves the state policy of discrimination, constituting the Roma people as a marginal group inhabiting, or moving through, marginal places. The discourses of sedentarism and marginality enable Roma people from Krško in Slovenia to generate their claims of being an “autochthonous ethnic population” of Slovenia. These claims are based on Roma peoples’ narratives about their 15 past movement and present homecoming through which they appropriate their place of dwelling and reconstitute their locality and belonging. KEYWORDS: mobility, enclosure, marginality, space and place, Roma Jazz Cosmopolitanism and the Method of Hope in a Small Slovenian Town Miha Kozorog Researcher, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana miha.kozorog@uni-lju.si This paper discusses the activities of jazz festival organisers in the Slovenian town of Cerkno. The organisers act on the basis of local affiliation, but with a view to transcend existing local conditions. As regards the latter, I consider experiences concerning the emigration of coevals. The organisers aim to transform these conditions by attracting people, media and employing cosmopolitan aesthetics. As the aim of the festival is to create a more cosmopolitan environment, I label the organisers locals-cosmopolitans. However, as they are only partially successful, the festival can also be defined as, in Hirokazu Miyazaki’s terms, their “method of hope”. KEY WORDS: locals-cosmopolitans, festival, place, mobility, method of hope Movement, Centrality, and Embodied Encounters – Amazonian Indigenous Conceptualisations of Place Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of World Cultures, Latin American studies Helsinki University and the Centre EREA (Enseignement et Recherche en Ethnologie Amérindienne) PL 24 (Unioninkatu 40) 00014, HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO, Finland and Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense, France pirjo.virtanen@helsinki.fi, phone 00358 407455121 This papers focuses on the Manchineri Indians’ conceptualisations of places other than those situated in their demarcated forestry land. The results show that personal experiences and embodied relationship of the space make places to exist. For the Manchineri “living well” is related to the close relationship between the body and movement. They consider movement and corporeal transformations important elements of well-being, such as during hunting and looking for other forest resources that play a crucial part in the everyday lives. Likewise do moving to urban areas and interaction with non-Indians. These allow embodying non-Indians’ ways of producing new knowledge and power, such as conducting politics. While the centres of encounter with the non-kin contribute to economic, political, cultural and social sustenance, places of similar kinds of beings are valued as places of maximisation of relatedness and maintain the centrality in the Manchineri’s view of the world. KEYWORDS: Amazonia, indigenous people, movement, the body, return Approaching Return Mobilities from Slovenian Diaspora in Argentina Jaka Repič Associate Professor, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology 16 Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana jaka.repic@uni-lj.si, phone 00386 12411526 The paper explores relations between conceptualisation of roots and homeland, and mythology, politics and practices of return mobilities in Slovene diasporic community in Argentina. Return is often referred to as tracing roots, and represents ontological movement between spatial and temporal dimensions, comprising layers and sediments of experiences, memories and imaginaries. Home and homeland are explored as places not spatially fixed but configured through relations and movement. Imaginaries of homeland and experiences of return engender relations between places of dwelling and home-places, charged with meanings of cultural rootedness and belonging. Return also instigates reconfiguration of relations between social memories, present experiences and aspirations for future mobilities. KEYWORDS: Slovenian diaspora, Argentina, home, homeland, return mobilities Between Kurbet and Shtëpi Nataša Gregorič Bon Research Fellow at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana ngregoric@zrc-sazu.si The paper addresses the significant mobility tradition called kurbet, which is besides home ( shtëpi) one of the important social institutions in Albania. Kurbet originates from the Arabic word ghurbah which means journey to and sojourn in a foreign land or being far from home or homeland. Today the word is also sometimes used to describe the suffering migration, both for the migrant and the family left behind (Papailias 2003: 1064). In Albanian language there is no distinction between “home” and “house” as the word shtëpi is used for both. The latter refers to one of the core units of Albanian kinship alongside the term fis (patrilineage) and is the basis of the individuals’ mode of “dwelling” (cf. Ingold 2000). The paper will particularly address the migrants’ seasonal return-journeys to their home-place through which they generate their shtëpi that is grounded in the set of activities such as nostalgia, a painful journey back home. Though none of them plan to return on a permanent basis, they define their home-place in the Southern Albania as the place ( vendi) of their roots ( rrënjët). Based on the extended ethnographic research in Southern Albania the paper questions the meaning of kurbet and its relation to shtëpi. It argues that these two social institutions should be understood as a continuum between movement and stasis and are vital for the understanding of peoples' sense of dwelling. KEYWORDS: kurbet, home ( shtëpi), return movements, (im)mobility traditional practices 17 SEMINAR PAPERS Keynote ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MOBILITY: WHAT’S IN A NAME? Noel B. Salazar1 It is fashionable to imagine the world as being on the move (Salazar 2011, 2013b). As a concept-metaphor, mobility captures the common impression that our lifeworld is in flux, with people, cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. Mobility entails much more than mere motion; it is movement infused with meaning. While recognizing that boundary-crossing mobility is not a phenomenon that is unique to the present age, what are the (dis)advantages of looking at the current human condition through an analytical mobility lens? I do not discuss movement as a brute fact here but, rather, I analyze mobilities as socio-cultural assemblages (Salazar 2013c). Practices favoring mobility seem to have become commonplace, at least for those with the required resources. Temporary relocation, and not permanent migration, is promoted as being a desirable and even normative path towards “success” in life: educational achievement through studying abroad, career achievement through translocal work experience, and quality-of-life achievement through lifestyle migration and long-stay tourism. Despite their structural marginality, such practices are not an isolated part of life, but have become central to the structuring of people’s lives. In many parts of the world, moving back and forth is seen as an important way of belonging to today’s society. We can identify many different types of “movers”: tourists and pilgrims; migrants and refugees; diplomats, businesspeople, and those working for international organizations; missionaries, NGO-workers and people belonging to the most diverse transnational networks; students, teachers, and researchers; sportspeople and artists; soldiers and journalists; the children and partners (and service personnel) accompanying the people in any of the previously mentioned roles; and those in the traffic and transport industries who move people (including themselves) across the globe. Mobility research calls attention to the myriad ways in which people become parts of multiple translocal networks and linkages. However, no systematic studies exist on the importance of the culturally inflected meanings, values, and impacts of translocal human flows, despite repeated claims about their being the fastest growing phenomena of our time and, increasingly, an issue of public and political concern. In my own scholarly work, I propose to move beyond the conventional approach in mobility of clearly delineated subfields (e.g. migration and tourism studies) and instead outline a critical anthropology of 1 Research Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45 (P.O. Box 3615), 3000 Leuven, noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be, phone 061/123149 18 mobility, a theory that simultaneously addresses the normalization of boundary-crossing movements and the relations of differential power that are generative of these mobilities, their representations and societal significance (Glick Schiller, Salazar 2013; Salazar 2010; Salazar, Smart 2011). I advocate for a social theory that includes boundary-crossing mobilities as an integral part of the ordinary structuring of human sociability (including for “stayers”). ROUTES AND ROOTS Ideas of mobility have a long history in anthropology (see Salazar 2013a). They are already present in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transcultural diffusionism, which understood the movement of people, objects, and ideas as an essential aspect of cultural life. Illustrative here is the work of Alfred Kroeber, who pointed to the interflow of cultural material between civilizations. Franz Boas, diffusionist and one of the discipline’s founding fathers in North America, conducted his first fieldwork in 1883-84 on the migration patterns of the Baffin Island Inuit in Canada. A migrant himself —moving from Germany to America, and from the discipline of physics to geography and on to anthropology—Boas developed a life-long scholarly interest in migration as a cause of change. He argued that as people move from one place to another, and as the cultural context changes over time, the elements of a culture, and their meanings, will change. Around that same time in Europe, French structuralists developed notions of movement more fully in their theorizing of exchange. In his classic study, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology (1904), Marcel Mauss, for example, related the Inuit’s seasonal mobility (in keeping with the previous example) to their moral and religious life. Bronisław Malinowski, a founding father in Europe, is credited for moving the discipline beyond armchair philosophizing and putting notions of migrancy at the heart of ethnographic practice—often seen as the original, defining form of the participant observation method. He was also a migrant, born in Poland, studying in the UK and working in the USA, and moving from mathematics to psychology and then on to anthropology. Malinowski became famous for his 1915–16 fieldwork on the kula trading cycle of the Trobriand (now Kiriwina) Islands. Seeking to challenge the unilineal, cultural evolutionist theories of his time, he pointed to the complexity of the circular movements of the Kula ring trade, which preserved the systems that predicate their circulation. Malinowski’s work is often assumed to present the methodological ideal of studying a territorially bound culture. As Paul Basu and Simon Coleman point out, “in fact he was describing a ‘migrant world’, albeit a very particular kind of one, where the significances of exchanges were articulated within an outwardly ramifying yet also confined sphere, constructed by the players in a system of exchange that spread across different islands” (2008: 322). Malinowski’s work is thus better read as an early account of the interrelationships between mobile people and objects: “Was Malinowski not a ‘multi-sited’ ethnographer when he dealt with the Kula, if all that is meant by multisitedness is this circulation between geographically non-contiguous spaces? Was he not an ethnographer of movement rather than stillness?” (Hage 2005: 467). The mainstream anthropological study of colonized societies was based mostly on models of homogeneity and continuity, reflecting colonial administrative policies and structures rather than an older set of local structures. Exceptions include scholars such as Edmund Leach, who famously claimed that anthropologists frequently take the existence of ethnic groups with well-defined boundaries as a given, whereas these are, in reality, ethnographic fictions. Sedentarism was deeply embedded in British structural-functional anthropology (e.g. the work of Edward Evans-Pritchard and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown), which portrayed non-Western societies as homogeneous, largely unchanging, and isolated from other groups. The role of anthropologists in the negative valuation of mobility is not to be underestimated. 19 However, even during colonialism some scholars went to great lengths to include what was visibly variable and obviously subject to change in the colonies in their ethnographies. Take the example of Meyer Fortes, a South African-born anthropologist originally trained in psychology. Fortes observed dramatic changes in the communities of origin and in particular in Ghanese migrants’ identities when returning from abroad. His work influenced that of the Manchester School (and its Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in what is present day Zambia), which held labor migration in Africa to be an important and recurring theme of research. Even here, though, the study of mobility remained subsumed under broad concepts such as class, social structure, kinship, or geographic space. Such studies did not fit in well among the mainstream anthropological approaches of the first half of the twentieth century, be they in Europe or in the USA. In the late 1920s, while conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, Margaret Mead noted that young boys could spend sometimes as many as seven years away from their villages working for the colonizers. Similarly, more than half of the men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were working as migrant laborers and therefore absent from the New Guinea village where Mead was living in 1933. Despite these observations, Mead’s ethnographic descriptions of life in New Guinea are largely portraits of discrete and timeless cultures unaffected by the outside world. This is mainly because many “salvage” anthropologists had as their primary task documenting the lives and customs of vanishing natives. Classical monographs mostly confined their analyses of mobility to the areas of kinship (marriage mobility), politics (structure of nomadic peoples), and religion (pilgrimage). It is important to recognize various (historical) forms of mobility, because the ways people move exert strong influences on their culture and society. People across the globe have long been interconnected, populations often have been mobile, and their identities have long been fluid, multiple, and contextualized. As Anna Tsing states, the classical type of anthropology constituted cultures “as essentially immobile or as possessing a mobility that is cyclical and repetitive… Those with culture are expected to have a regular, delimited occupation of territory. If they move, they must do so cyclically, like transhumant pastoralists or kula-ring sailors” (1993: 123). Indeed, mobility was too often limited as a defining characteristic of groups such as hunter-gatherers or traveler-gypsies. Mobility was used as a concept describing physical or abstract movement, not as an ethnographic object in its own right and something implying social or cultural change in and of itself. In the 1960s, Victor Turner started studying the symbolic aspects of mobility in life, particularly in rites of passage. There is a remarkable parallel between his studies of pilgrimage and more recent concerns with the geography and sociality of mobility. Nelson Graburn applied Turner’s conceptualizations to international tourism, and Marc Augé’s “non-places,” where people pass through while traveling, are strikingly similar to Turner’s liminal, “as if”, stage in rituals, when people are “betwixt and between”. Turner’s work left its mark on migration studies, where transnational migrants are frequently represented as liminal and as experiencing temporary migration in certain contexts has been interpreted as an almost mandatory rite of passage, with those who do not attempt it being seen as lazy, not entrepreneurial, and undesirable as potential partners. In addition, the earlier (but related) anthropological work on threshold rites by Arnold van Gennep is being recycled these days to understand the dynamics of transnational borders. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars such as Eric Wolf were instrumental in demonstrating that non-Western societies had always been deeply implicated in border-crossing mobilities related to labor and capital (e.g. slave trades). While classical anthropology tended to ignore or regard boundary-crossing movements as deviations from normative place-bound communities, cultural homogeneity, and social integration, discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism (that became dominant since the end of the Cold War) shifted the pendulum in the opposite direction. In the 1990s, globalization—largely theorized in terms of trans-border “flows”—was often promoted as normality, and too much place attachment a digression or resistance against 20 globalizing forces. Mobility became a predominant characteristic of the modern globalized world. This led to a new focus on transnational mobilities that deterritorialize identity. Arjun Appadurai’s provoking notion of “ethnoscapes,” for instance, privileges mobile transnational groups and individuals, such as immigrants, exiles, tourists, and guest workers. Relevant in this context is that Appadurai proposes that globalization fundamentally alters the “movement” of individuals, technology, money, media, and ideas. As Aihwa Ong explains, “Trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (1999: 4). While globalization grew in popularity, anthropologists were for a long time absent in the interdisciplinary discussion around mobility studies. BOUNDARIES AND BORDERS By the turn of the millennium, there were already serious cracks appearing within the master narrative of unfettered mobility (in the form of seemingly effortless globetrotting), which accompanied the discourse of the benefits and necessity of (economic) globalization. “The new anthropology of mobility … reintroduced a teleology of progress that had previously been derided and, so it seemed, discarded” (2006: 10). As Anna Tsing remarks, “if older anthropological frameworks were unable to handle interconnection and mobility, this is a problem with the frameworks and a reason for new ones but not the mirror of an evolutionary change in the world” (2000: 356). The language of mobility has inadvertently distracted attention from how the fluidity of global markets shapes flexibility in modes of control. In other words, it is not because one focuses attention on the “fluid” aspects of society that societal structure disappears entirely. Barriers to border-crossing movements have increased dramatically, particularly since 9/11, and have been accompanied by the counter-narrative of securitization. In fact, critically engaged anthropologists were among the first to point out that modern forms of mobility need not signify privilege. Not all mobilities are valued as being equally positive and the very processes that produce global movements also result in immobility and exclusion. Anthropologists have questioned the nature of mobility itself because “neglecting the practices that create the objects and processes of mobility leads analysts to miss alternative constructions that seriously challenge neat and teleological narratives of globalization” (Maurer 2000: 688). To assess the extent or nature of transnational mobility, for example, one needs to spend time studying things that stand still (or change at a much slower pace): the borders, institutions, and territories of nation-states, and the sedimented “home” cultures of those that do not move across borders. The increasing concern with human “flows” across the planet, especially in the context of thinking about globalization and cosmopolitanism, has also stimulated theorizing on the changing nature of geographical borders and socially constructed boundaries and the various ways in which they can function as fault lines and sites of difference. Borders between nation-states, as an example of the most apparent socially constructed boundaries, are not singular and unitary, but are designed to not hinder various kinds of mobility (business travelers, tourists, skilled migrant workers, students) and discourage others (illegal migrants, refugees). The present, post 9/11, era is full of examples showing how globalization dynamics give rise to significant forms of immobility for the political regulation of people. Consideration of these themes breaks with theoretical tendencies (mostly outside anthropology) that celebrate unbounded movement, and instead focuses scholarly attention upon the political-economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, and allowed or forced to move. Such studies show how mobility is materially grounded. The dangers of conflating the metaphorical with the material has been noted since the discourse of mobility became popular. The physical movement of people entails not only a measure of economic, social, and cultural mobility, but also a corresponding evolution of institutions and well-determined circuits of human mobility. Importantly, the substance of such circuits 21 is “the movement of people (and money, goods, and news, but primarily people) as well as the relative immobility of people who do not travel the circuit” (Rockefeller 2010: 222). Mobility and immobility are social constructs, and the distinction between ”mobile” and ”immobile” phenomena is not an innocent exercise: “The mobility approach … in fact reifies the cleavage between mobility and immobility, relegating immobility to a passive, undertheorized position, and collapsing the complex workings of power, thus foreclosing a dialectical understanding of the contradictory albeit co-produced processes of mobilization and immobilization” (Franquesa 2011: 1012). Along similar lines, I advocate for a relational approach attentive to the dialectics of mobility and stability, continuity and change. After all, mobility and immobility always define each other (Glick Schiller, Salazar 2013). Despite the rise in the availability of movement, the ability to move freely is spread very unevenly within countries and across the planet. For the very processes that produce movement and global linkages also promote immobility, exclusion, and disconnection. This presents a serious criticism to the overgeneralized discourse that assumes “without any research to support it that the whole world is on the move, or at least that never have so many people, things and so on been moving across international borders” (Friedman 2002: 33). Transnational travels as a form of human experience are the exception rather than the norm. The boundaries people are faced with are not only related to a lack of resources (mostly economic) but can also be linked to social class, gender, age, lifestyle, ethnicity, nationality and disability—all of which have been addressed by anthropological research in some way or other. Although there is often a perceived disconnect between the expectation of boundary-crossing mobility and the barriers that have been erected in front of it, mobilities and boundaries remain as non-antithetical things. “This is not a world without borders but a world in which all borders operate according to uniform terms that make mobility their priority” (Chalfin 2008: 525). As people move translocally, authorities at various levels attempt to maintain control over the interpretation of their movement. They try to regulate, repress, and coerce mobility all at once. Mobility has often been seen in a negative light by ruling powers. In the Middle Ages, for instance, undesirable forms of mobility (e.g. vagrancy) became punishable under a series of decrees and laws—the stigmatization of gypsies today is history repeating itself. The first stages of the industrial revolution were marked by nation- states trying to contain their labor within borders. In my own work, I empirically analyze the (perceived) force of mobility and attempt to come to terms with the common confusion between mobile practices and mobility potential (which can be transformed into mobility). Many contemporary theorists valorize, if not romanticize, ideas of travel and mobility. As mentioned before, this way of thinking destabilizes the fixed and ethnocentric categories of mainstream traditional anthropology and locates culture and identity in “radical” movement, both material and imagined, rather than in place. The idea of “becoming through mobility” ( movo ergo sum) is part and parcel of the perceived shift from inherited or acquired identities to a focus on identification, a change from relatively stable (place-based) identities to hybrid (achieved) identities characterized by flux. This recasting of identity in terms of flexibility, adaptability and instant transformation poses important challenges to issues of social belonging and cultural rootedness. In response, a renewed impulse to engage in a phenomenologically informed existential analysis of global culture around issues of “home,” “belonging” and “place” has emerged from sociocultural anthropology. METHODS ON THE MOVE From Bronisław Malinowski’s pioneering fieldwork forward, the notion of ethnographers as itinerant and “going somewhere”—traditionally from the West to non-Western cultures— has been reinforced and reproduced, as has the notion of “being there” (in a fixed place), even if only for a short period of time (hereby reasserting the implicit connection between 22 culture and place). Bronisław Malinowski conducted his famous 1915–16 fieldwork on the Trobriand (now Kiriwina) Islands. He became stranded in the Pacific due to the outbreak of World War I. Not allowed to return to Europe (involuntary immobility), he embraced the opportunity to conduct research in Melanesia. Although the whole history of ethnography is intertwined with (technologies of) travel, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously argued that this has no place in the written work of anthropologists; travel merely serves as a method to gather the ethnographic material necessary to the writing of ethnographies. Of course, such a strong emphasis on place risks overlooking the constructed nature of all ethnographic fieldwork and ethnographic fields, particularly in research projects where participants are mobile. In his book Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), James Clifford advocates for traveling as a way of doing ethnography and argues that anthropologists need to leave their preoccupation with discovering the “roots” of socio- cultural forms and identities behind and instead trace the “routes” that (re)produce them. Rather than focusing on the local anchorage of peoples and cultures, the notion of routes points toward their mobility, their movements, encounters, exchanges, and mixtures. Malinowksi’s work on the kula ring, for instance, illustrates how people in Melanesia move through the places (i.e. things) that they cause to travel. This kind of thinking is further elaborated in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which transforms the social into a “circulation”. While recognizing the importance of the nation-state, research on mobility should not be bound by national borders as its main analytical frame. I concur with Jo Vergunst that “ethnography is an excellent way to get at important aspects of human movement, especially in relating its experiential and sensory qualities to social and environmental contexts” (2011: 203). Observational and participatory modes of fieldwork through places constitute insightful ways through which to investigate mobility, both geographically and across social hierarchies. Focusing on movement as a way of understanding social spaces offers a means by which to get beyond biases inherent in the social science of space. The development of field diaries and monographs, which bear subtle differences from the genre of travel writing generally, has been an interesting way to narrate physical as well as cultural mobility undertaken by anthropologists in search of otherness. Some ethnographies have even been written in a style “borrowed” from the cultural practices of the mobile people under study. Ethnographers have often been concerned with the movements of their informants. Anthropologists’ unease in relation to rapidly changing global connectivities may be clearly understood as a result of the way their discipline has traditionally delineated its object of study in time (synchronic studies, the use of the ethnographic present) and in space (a community, a small-scale society): a discipline which builds its epistemology around the immersion of oneself in a single place (over a period of a year or more) is hardly well-suited for dealing with translocal connectivities and flows. It is worth remembering that the classical model of fieldwork, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a reaction to the accounts of “arm chair anthropologists” and traveler-explorers as main sources of knowledge. The former were criticized for being “immobile”, the latter for their lack of scientific basis. However, it should be remembered that mobile research, in the sense of a multi-sited strategy, existed alongside stationary fieldwork. It even flourished in the first half of the twentieth century as anthropologists, cultural relativists especially, required comparative data in order to back up their arguments with empirical evidence… Later, Lévi-Strauss’s many short trips to various countries and continents helped him demonstrate the universal character of the structures underlying patterns of behavior and meaning systems (Weissköppel 2009: 252). 23 Epistemologies that treat society as a given, a contained entity, have problems explaining the increased interconnectedness of objects and subjects. David Coplan, for example, focuses on rural cultures of mobility that accrue with migrancy in South Africa. He uses his empirical data to show that cultural customs are comprised both of practices “on the road” and “in the village/homelands”. There is also anthropological research on how (im)mobility impacts on people’s identities or even creates new ones. The single-sited methodology, its sensibility and epistemological presuppositions, are by many in the anthropological community no longer felt to be adequate to the realities of an increasingly mobile, shifting, and interconnected world. This explains the popularity of “multi-sited ethnography”. According to George Marcus, who proposed the term, multi-sited ethnographies may focus on persons, things, metaphors, stories, allegories, or biographies. Anna Tsing, for instance, abandons the fixed locale of the village to follow her informants, whose communities can be understood only “within the context of … mobility—from daily visits to annual field movements to long-term trajectories across the landscape” (1993: 124). However, as Matei Candea rightly points out, traditional ethnography also “gave rise in practice to works which were as mobile and, in some senses, ‘multi-sited’ as the Argonauts of the Western Pacific or those arising from the Manchester School’s ‘extended case method’” (2007: 169—170). Susan Frohlick has challenged notions of multi-sited methodology as a matter of systematically following the circulation of people, objects, or practices within globalized worlds. Rather than her simply following mobile informants, the latter follow (or bump into) her in contexts other than her conventional field, leading her to develop very new understandings of them. Marianne Lien suggests a complementary approach to the field based on multi-temporality . Instead of juxtaposing field-sites that differ in space, she juxtaposes the configurations of a single field-site as it differs over time . Indeed, mobility has spatial/geographic, temporal/local, historical as well as symbolic features. Michaela Benson revisits the centrality of mobility to fieldwork methodologies which investigate mobile formations. She proposes a multi-faceted approach that embraces innovative thinking and flexible ways of building rapport with the subjects by engaging in mutual forms of everyday life mobilities. Informed by the inductive tradition that constitutes the research canon in anthropology, Benson argues that alternative fieldwork strategies for mobilities studies, while sensitive to mobility, must not be determined or bound by it as an a priori category. In his “anthropology of movement”, Alain Tarrius proposes a “methodological paradigm of mobility” articulated around the space-time-identity triad, along with four distinct levels of space-time relations, indicating the circulatory process of migratory movements whereby spatial mobility is linked to other types of mobility (informational, cognitive, technological, and economic). What he describes as “circulatory territories” are new spaces of movement that “encompass the networks defined by the mobility of populations whose status derives from their circulation know-how” (Tarrius 2000: 124). This notion reaffirms that geographical movement is always invested with social meaning. Discussing the concept of social navigation, Henrik Vigh illustrates the analytical advantages of mobility-related concept-metaphors. His concept of social navigation, as both process and practice, “joins two separate social scientific perspectives on movement, that is, the movement and change of social formations and societies, and the movement and practice of agents within social formations” (Vigh 2009: 426). Such an approach reveals that social contexts are often not as solid as they have been imagined to be and this influences the way people move within them. The use of mobile technologies, especially for recording, is well established in anthropology. In the 1950s, for instance, the portable film camera reshaped ethnography’s ongoing investigation and recording of exotic peoples (e.g. the influential work of Jean Rouch). Film can approach the mobility of ordinary movement and provide a way of creating ethnographic data collaboratively. Anthropological methods in general have had a significant impact on mobility studies. While direct participation in analyzing mobile practices is not at 24 all new in anthropological research, what emerges as innovative in recent scholarship on mobilities is a concern with the singularity of mobility as a sui generis mode of phenomena requiring particular methodological and conceptual work. Despite the long tradition, “the impact of movement (and motility) upon a researcher’s own research remains largely unproblematized at the level of analytical representation” (D'Andrea, Ciolfi, Gray 2011: 154). Anthropology also has a long tradition of research on (semi-)nomadic people. This traditional field of study contributes to a more general understanding of mobility. Take, for example, the work of Joachim Habeck who proposes a shift in the perspective from the potential of movement (or motility) to mobility “acted out” in order to “obtain more nuanced insights in how nomads and transhumant herders see the world that surrounds them and how they interact with the surroundings while doing their work” (Habeck 2006: 138). In her research on the Tuareg population in the central Sahara (called ishumar), Ines Kohl describes how “although there is little to nothing left of the pastoralists’ original cyclical movements with their livestock, ishumar still embody a certain philosophy of being mobile” (2010: 452). There is some excellent ethnographic work on everyday mobile practices and the actual processes of movement rather than the systems of mobility. Tim Ingold has not only written extensively on the comparative anthropology of hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies, but also offers a more grounded approach to human movement, sensitive to embodied skills of footwork. Mobility infrastructure is being increasingly seen, not as “non- places”, but as “the ideal place where an anthropologist can perceive, study, and even touch the various dynamic transnational and fluid sociocultural formations, literally in the making, from both below and above, and on the move” (Dalakoglou 2010: 146). CONCLUSION Mobility research does not refer to a new subject of scholarly investigation, much less a new discipline. Rather, it directs new questions towards traditional anthropological subjects. What is ultimately at stake is not just an objective change of the human condition, calling for new theories and new analytical tools, but a power struggle over representation. This is why it is necessary to question mobility ideologies that associate particular forms of movement with specific meanings and causalities. People are moving all the time, but not all movements are equally meaningful and life-shaping (both for those who move and those who stay put). Mobility gains meaning through its embeddedness within societies, culture, politics, and histories (which are themselves, to a certain extent, mobile). Mobility may be the key difference – and otherness – producing machine of our age, involving significant inequalities of speed, risk, rights, and status, with both mobile and immobile people being engaged in the construction of complex politics of location and movement. The question is not so much about the overall rise or fall of mobility, but how various mobilities are formed, regulated, and distributed across the globe, and how the formation, regulation, and distribution of these mobilities are shaped and patterned by existing social, political, and economic structures. How to study (im)mobilities without reinventing the wheel? I have previously illustrated, border-crossing human mobilities – be they physical or virtual – can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, meaning, and practice, involving a complex politics of hierarchy, of inclusion and exclusion. The effects of these mobilities are multiple (and by no means necessarily beneficial); new boundaries are constructed even as borders are crossed, and such boundaries are multiple and multifaceted. Mobility remains formidably difficult for many; sometimes more so than before. To understand mobility, we thus need to pay attention to immobility, to the structures (which, once again, are changing too) that facilitate certain movements and impede others. The difficulty of seeing movement as an aspect of social life in general is related to the fact that mobility, as far as it involves settled people, has been regarded as a special and temporary phenomenon that has been examined under headings such as migration and tourism studies. We need to expand and redefine 25 these separate thematic lines as a subset of mobility studies. Paradoxically, focusing on boundaries requires border-crossing transdisciplinary approaches, bringing together geographers, political scientists, sociologists, historians, literary scholars, legal experts, and anthropologists. Ultimately, if we seek a broader and more comprehensive understanding of mobility, drawing on multiple theories, perspectives and methods will add profoundly to the more formal economic, demographic, and sociological studies upon which migration and tourism studies have been built originally. Anthropology can contribute to the current debate in the social sciences by detailing how human mobility is a contested ideological construct involving much more than mere physical movement. It can assess, for instance, how imaginary activities and social relations concerning mobility are variously materialized, enacted, and inculcated across the globe. The distinct contribution of anthropology to debates on mobility lies in its capacity to show the actual limits of the fantasies that imaginaries of mobility produce. An ethnographic focus enables anthropologists to document the many ways in which mobility, in association with processes of globalization, transforms everyday life, both for those on the move and for those who stay behind. Grounded ethnographies of mobility direct our attention to the relations among different experiences of (im)mobility and the relations between them. Such an approach recognizes the growing importance of mobility in the contemporary era, stressing how it is variously constructed and imagined across the world. It acknowledges that people can make, imagine, or remember their “home” in this world in one place, in multiple places, or while being on the move… REFERENCES Basu, Paul, Coleman, Simon (2008). Migrant Worlds, Material Cultures. Mobilities 3/3, 313- 330. Candea, Matei (2007). Arbitrary Locations: In Defence of the Bounded Field-Site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13/1, 167—184. Chalfin, Brenda (2008). Sovereigns and Citizens in Close Encounter: Airport Anthropology and Customs Regimes in Neoliberal Ghana. American Ethnologist 35/4, 519—538. D'Andrea, Anthony, Ciolfi, Luigina Gray, Breda (2011). Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Mobilities Research. Mobilities 6/2, 149—160. Dalakoglou, Dimitris (2010). The Road: An ethnography of the Albanian–Greek Cross-Border Motorway. American Ethnologist 37/1, 132—149. Franquesa, Jaume (2011). “We’ve Lost our Bearings”: Place, Tourism, and the Limits of the “Mobility Turn”. Antipode 43/4, 1012—1033. Friedman, Jonathan (2002). From Roots to Routes: Tropes for Trippers. Anthropological Theory 2/1, 21—36. Glick Schiller, Nina, Salazar, Noel B. (2013). Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39/2, 183—200. Habeck, Joachim O. (2006). Experience, Movement and Mobility: Komi Reindeer Herders' Perception of the Environment. Nomadic Peoples 10/2, 123—141. Hage, Ghassan (2005). 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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18/6, 576-598. Salazar, Noel B. (2013a). The Anthropology of Mobility. The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (eds. P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman, M. Sheller) London: Routledge. Salazar, Noel B. (2013b). Imagining Mobility at the "End of the world". History and Anthropology 24/2, 233—252. Salazar, Noel B. (2013c). Mobility. Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology Vol. 1 (eds. R. J. McGee, R. L. Warms). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Salazar, Noel B., Smart, Alan (2011). Anthropological Takes on (Im)mobility: Introduction. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18/6, i—ix. Tarrius, Alain (2000). Les nouveaux cosmopolitismes: Mobilités, identités, territoires. Paris: Editions de l'Aube. Tsing, Anna L. (1993). In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna L. (2000). The Global Situation. Cultural Anthropology 15/3, 327—360. Vergunst, Jo (2011). Technology and Technique in a Useful Ethnography of Movement. Mobilities 6/2, 203—219. Vigh, Henrik (2009). Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation. Anthropological Theory 9/4, 419—438. Weissköppel, Cordula. (2009). Traversing Cultural Sites: Doing Ethnography Among Sudanese Migrants in Germany. Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research (ed. M.-A. Falzon ). ). Farnham: Ashgate, 251—270. 27 SEASONAL MOBILITY AND MIGRATION IN GORIČKO REGION OF PREKMURJE IN THE 20TH CENTURY Ivanka Huber2 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW According to the sources available, the beginning of seasonal work in Prekmurje occurred in the 19th century. Košič (1992: 26) stated in his writings O Slovencih na Ogrskem (About Slovenes in Hungary) from the year 1824, that people from Gornja-Lendava went to Hungary in the summer to harvest, mow and tresh for money or grain. They used the earnings for reconstruction of their houses. Vilfan (1980: 386−387) has also stated that the broad expansion of seasonal work should be placed in the 19th century and that it occurred first in the northern and north-eastern part of Goričko Region. Around the year 1880, when Prekmurje was already overpopulated, people started going to Austria for construction work. Around the year 1900 “palirski sistem” for hiring workers was established – there was a foreman between the employer and the employee, who entered into a contract with both of them and had his share of profit. “Palirska pogodba”, a contract from the year 1932 from Križevci is a document that proves the existence of “palirski sistem” of hiring workers (PAM/0039; fasc. 7).3 Before and after the World War I, People from Goričko Region also went to America for several years; sometimes it has happened that they have never returned to their home town, although their family was waiting for them at home. In a smaller extent, emigration to Slavonia, Hungary and Austria also took place before the World War I, but in a greater extent it started after the World War I (until the year 1930), mostly to other regions in Slovenia and also to Vojvodina and Slavonia, France and Germany. People were mostly agrarian seasonal workers who wanted to improve their living conditions at home (Ilešič 1934: 9). In the years 1929−1931 most of the emigrants were women, their number increased every year. The share of women who emigrated was 29% in 1929, 36% in 1930 and 41% in 1931 (Drnovšek 2005: 247). The articles in the Catholic calendar (Kalendar Srca Jezušovega 1929: 36; 1932: 42−44) published in Prekmurje, judged people for going abroad and not working hard on the abandoned home land, which was especially common in Goričko Region. Many times newly married men went abroad and their wives often returned back to their parents’ home because they did not get along with their husband's family (ibid. 1929: 36). Some, especially Catholic circles, advised against working abroad and emigrating, but others encouraged and promoted it (Huber 2011: 78). On the covers of two consecutive issues of the weekly newspaper Murska krajina in 1935 there was a call for women entitled Workwomen! Unemployment office in Sobota announced that every Wednesday from then on it will hire women to work in France. It also said that women should pay for the way from Murska Sobota to the place of work themselves, so only the ones with enough money (1,450 Din) to do it should apply for the job. Each workwoman had to be healthy and able of carrying out certain jobs. To be accepted, they also needed a certificate of baptism and an employment record book. A warning was added: “Please note that we are currently not 2 PhD, Research assistant, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Centre for interdisciplinary research, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia, ivanka.huber@zrc-sazu.si 3 In the contract, the signed businessman commits himself to provide 24 seasonal workers, who will bring their own sickles and scythes. Wage per worker was 90 kg of wheat, 50 dinars and food. The employee provided the following things for a worker for one month: 24 kg of bread flour, 6 kg of cooking flour, 12 kg of potatoes, 2 kg of peas, 1 kg of fat, 1 kg of salt, 1 kg of fresh or dried meat and 5 dinars for spices. Workers had to work from sunrise to sunset with a half-an-hour break for breakfast and one-hour break for lunch. If the worker was ill, he was only entitled to food and no payment for the days he was ill. After eight days the employee could fire him – this also applied in the case of riots. 28 hiring male workers. When unemployment office receives orders for male workers, it will be published in newspapers. We politely ask male workers not to sign for any work and thus save their time and money” (Murska krajina, 30. Jun. 1935: 1). The need for women was so big that there was another call for women in the next issue of the weekly newspaper. It said that unemployment office in Sobota urgently needs women workers to go to France, they had to be healthy, eager to work, honest and at least 21 years old. Hiring of women workers took place every day except on Tuesday and Friday. Married women could also apply, but not the elderly and weak ones because work in France was hard and they would not be able to do it. “We recommend to all poor and those in need of money not to miss the chance. They should appear as soon as possible, when there is still enough work for them” (Murska krajina, 7. Jul. 1935: 1). It was important how the workwomen from Prekmurje behaved abroad. Catholic and other newspapers asked the women to behave decently and morally. In Murska krajina, they announced A serious warning to our workwomen (Murska krajina, 24. Apr. 1938:3) , which said they had received reports from Germany about indecent behaviour of some women from Prekmurje working there. They, too, reminded women of decent behaviour (Huber 2011: 78). After 1930, seasonal and permanent workers mostly went to France, then Austria and Germany and also Vojvodina, Bačka, Banat and Hungary. Not even the World War II managed to stop the migrations of people from Prekmurje. In spite of war, people tried to continue with their normal life in a struggle for survival, so the war surprised many of them in a foreign country, while they were there for seasonal or permanent work. Some returned home earlier than planned because of the war. Interviewee (H. R., b. 1916) said that she had been working in England for three years and planned to stay longer. But because of the war she packed her things and returned home. Some workers did not want to return home during the war and did not even know what was happening in their home country because they have lived abroad for the whole war period (S. H., b. 1913). In the year 1944 they left Goričko Region for seasonal work to manor houses, organized with the help of “paler” (intermediary of seasonal work; C. F., . 1928). They worked in the field from spring to autumn and they often had to run from the field and hide because there was a threat of bomb attacks. Sometimes they also had to wake up at night and hide (Huber 2012: 82−84). Going to work abroad after the World War II was different from the previous period. People who left were not only the poorest, but all of the people who wanted to improve their living standard in a short period of time, especially the young (P. E., b. 1938; Č. K., b. 1945). Permanent work in their country did not attract people. Even though they could find a job at home, masses of people rather went to work abroad as soon as possible and leave their region. For this period we cannot say that working abroad was the only option for employment and that it was the cause for migrations. The cause was more the tradition of seasonal work, a desire to improve people's material conditions and earlier economic independence. We also have to take into account that old landowners did not give their estates to the heirs until their death – in Goričko Region this is mostly the case even today – and it caused conflicts between generations. For a lot of young people going abroad was the way out of the situation (Korpič Horvat 1992: 94−95). The highest number of employment abroad was in years 1964 – 1968, when there was a growing unemployment because of the introduction of an economic reform. An important factor was also the fact that Germany opened its borders in 1962. Usually, they gave an authorization to work abroad only to unemployed workers and to those from sufficitary professions, which undoubtedly resulted in even greater emigration of unemployed people. Later (in the 70s of the 20th century) the main reason for working abroad was again better payment (ibid.). People from Goričko Region did not look for work only abroad, but also in other regions in Slovenia, for example in Ljubljana and its surroundings, Gorenjska, Bled and other places in different time periods in the 20th century. With the help of the questionnaires I have found out that it was mostly a short-time employment or a permanent migration from 29 the birth town. In the years from 1956 to 1977 a family in Kančevci received postcards with greetings, short descriptions of well-being, health and weather from their family friend (6 postcards) and most likely a relative (4 postcards) who were working and living for many years or permanently in Bled (Source: B. M. Kančevci, kept by Ivanka Huber). CAUSES FOR MIGRATION/SEASONAL WORK AND EMIGRATION There are many causes for migration and they are different in particular time periods, but the main reason for migration in Pomurje was economical. Increasing unemployment affected greater migration flows and changing of demographic picture. The most difficult regions for finding employment were agrarian areas, which caused people from the areas to look for jobs abroad. To affect the trend of permanent or temporary migration (immigration) Slovenian authority defined a measure to speed the development of less developed areas of Slovenia in 1971. As such were considered eleven municipalities, mostly on the periphery of the Pannonian Basin. The promotion of investment in employment in these areas didn't show any results and consequently most of the job seekers in foreign countries came from these areas (Slovenski zgodovinski atlas 2011: 203). In Goričko Region, the share of people looking for employment abroad was over 6%, the highest percentage in Slovenia (Picture 1). Picture 1: Goričko Region with the highest percentage of people temporarily working abroad, 1971 Source: Slovenski zgodovinski atlas, 2011 CONSEQUENCES AND THE EFFECT OF SEASONAL WORK AND EMIGRATION/MIGRATION ON FAMILIES Seasonal and permanent emigration (to America, Canada, Australia, France, Germany) was a constant in everyday life in Goričko Region and it left permanent consequences on families and also individuals. Many people met their husband or wife abroad or left their family at home. Children were often left in the care of grandparents. Families left at home were broken: children without parents, wives without husbands or husbands without wives and in 30 a foreign country there were parents without children. Migrations, most commonly because of economic reasons, were crucial for regression or progression of population.4 Consequences of migration due to employment in foreign countries were various, from economic, political, cultural, social and other. Earnings were a lot better abroad. Banks had an ear for favourable credit terms and there were often houses and outbuildings quickly renovated or built anew, people also bought agricultural machinery, cars and other things. Migrants sent money to their families at home and consequently raised their standard of living (Korpič Horvat 1992: 95). Due to emigration, a young couple could build their own home, earned abroad. It was also easier to get married. A lot of people did not even have money to buy a wedding dress, they borrowed it and with working abroad, alone or with a wife, earned the money to buy it and also to help the family to survive. Emigration gave young people autonomy, independence, ambition, curiosity and a desire to be completely self-reliant. Its effect could even been seen on the food emigrants ate and the clothes they wore. Foreign country broadened people's minds, it gave them a special world view and inventiveness (Škafar 1942: 28−31). Besides positive (economic) consequences, employment abroad also had less positive, even negative consequences, especially social ones, which were mostly felt by the emigrants' family members. Seasonal work/emigration was an indirect cause for divorces in Goričko Region in the beginning of the 20th century (in years 1921 – 1932). The reason for husbands or wives going to the USA before 1914 was to earn money and pay off debts or ensure a better life for themselves and their family. Most of the times husbands and wives did not return home, they started a new life or a family (sometimes even an illegitimate one) in a foreign country. They let the family know about their intention either directly through letters, also notary letters, or indirectly through friends, relatives or people from the same town, working with them in a foreign country and returning to their home town. They didn't have or even want to have any contact with their spouse. […] we were living together in my parents' house until the accused left for America just before the World War started in 1914 […] from then on, the accused has not returned back […] As soon as he got to America he started a domestic partnership with […], they live together from then on as a husband and wife and have several children together […] The accused has also let me know in front of other people that he doesn't like me anymore. He is not returning from America anymore and I can do whatever I want to do and I should make my future as I wish […] he also states in this paper, in front of a notary, that he completely rejects me and that he is never coming back to me (PAM/0645; spis o pravdi Cg I 2/27; divorced in1927/28, married in 1912). It has also happened that the spouse who stayed at home broke the wedding wow and had illegitimate children: We were living together in my parents' house until I went to America just before the World War started in 1914 […] I have not returned home since then. My wife stayed in Prekmurje and moved to her parents' house […] During that time she broke our wedding wow with several men. She gave birth to two illegitimate children (1923) during my absence. As I haven't seen my wife since 1914 I cannot be a father of these children and they must be a result of an illegitimate partnership […] (PAM/0645; spis o pravdi Cg I 30/25, divorced in 1925, married in 1910). 4 In the year 1910 (Černy 1953: 132) 20% of population from north Goričko Region was abroad; in the year 1971 the share was more than 6% (Slovenski zgodovinski atlas 2011: 203). 31 Another example is about a wife leaving for America, where she lived with another man and did not intend to return home: The accused left me mischievously about 6 years ago and moved to Philadelphia in America, where she now lives with another man and does not intend to return back to me again. She authorizes me to take every needed action to divorce her (PAM/0645; spis o pravdi Cg I 85/21, divorced in 1921, married in 1905). The prevailing type of family in Goričko Region in the 20th century was vertically extended family. It was this type of family that made seasonal life possible5 because it had members who functionally took care of the missing member's tasks and responsibilities. In the period of interviewees' childhood out of 25 families in Kančevci and Križevci (in the years 1920 – 1966) there were 84% vertically extended families. These also include families where one of the grandparents had already died and also families with one parent and grandparents. On the basis of gathered empirical data I have found out that one of the parents, either mother or father, often left for a longer time to work abroad. Originally, all of the families I have researched were extended, even those where the only family members were parents and children because grandparents had died. In the time from 1920 to 1966 there were 12 % of families which for a specific period of time (from 7 to 12 years) consisted only of grandparents and children (grandchildren) because parents were working abroad. All of the interviewees experienced one of the members of their family missing due to working abroad. The phrase that there was not a family in Goričko Region which didn't know seasonal work or emigration proved to be true for the researched families. The interviewees often went to work abroad when they themselves were already parents (in the years from 1941−1984 on). They left their children at home with their parents, children's grandmothers and grandfathers (P. J., b. 1939; Č. O., b. 1952; Č. I., b. 1926). In some cases women – mothers went to work abroad and left their children with their father and grandparents. Even if they did not work abroad, the children were left in the care of grandparents while parents worked on the field or on homestead. It has also happened that children were born abroad and they sent them home to live with their grandparents after a while (H. K., b. 1931). The public has also noticed the problem of broken families and warned about it in newspaper articles. Parents abroad, children at home; The language of empty fireplaces; Children of emigrants and the family fireplace were titles of articles in newspaper Vestnik in the second half of the 20th century. Authors of these articles warned about the problem of broken families, families consisting of grandparents and children and children without parents because the parents were working abroad. Even though the golden years of emigration were over at the end of 80s in the 20th century, there were still many children growing up with their grandparents. A child without parents by his/her side was obviously deprived, even if he/she was materially taken care of. These children had lower school achievement because it was difficult for grandparents to spend enough time with their grandchildren and could not give them the help that was necessary in the process of education. The children also had to help with farm and household chores because of their grandparents' old age (Vestnik, 31. Mar. 1988, 3). Similar problems connected to emigration were noticed in the municipality of Radgona: in the year 1966 in Apače Valley and Videm ob Ščavnici (Vestnik, 24. Nov. 1966, 6). 5 Sieder (1998: 149) highlights that the unity of production, consumption and family life were especially typical for farm economy. Almost none of other production systems required such ''family oriented'' organization of work, built on complementary and gender roles of a husband, wife and children (in Goričko Region also grandparents and aunts and uncles in the case of horizontally extended families). Division of labour in Goričko Region in the 20th century had to be functional if the family wanted to survive, since every now and then a family member was absent due to seasonal or permanent work. 32 4th generation : Children’s family 3rd Seasonal 1st generation generation : work/emigra : Interviewe tion Grandpare es’ family nts’ family 2nd generation : Parents’ family Picture 2: Continuous cycle of cultural practices transfer from generation to generation Source: Huber According to the Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS) data from the year 2010, out of a total 27,112 people from 11 Goričko municipalities, there were 77 people that moved to a foreign country (33 men and 44 women). It is interesting that, according to official Slovenian statistics, in the same year (2010) 833 people moved from Slovenia to Austria (Statistik Austria, Wanderungsstatistik 2008−2010). According to Eurostat data, there were 15,937 emigrants coming from Slovenia in the year 2010, compared to year 2000 when there were only 3,570. It has been typical of Slovenia for more than a decade that every year more people leave Slovenia than return back (SURS). Due to work, the number of daily migration abroad, especially to Austria, is increasing. The exact number of people who daily migrate to another country cannot be exactly determined because many of them work abroad occasionally, without insurance and appropriate licence. We can approximately estimate the number on the basis of the number of people with the foreign insurance. In 2012, there were 2,047such people in Pomurje (Zavod za zdravstveno zavarovanje Slovenije, 2013). CONCLUSION Seasonal working or emigration directly affected the family and the individual in the way that they have experienced emigration themselves or in the circle of extended family. The consequence of seasonal way of living and emigration were broken families, either for shorter or longer periods of time. It meant the absence of at least one member of the family and with it deprivation of members that stayed at home because the missing members did not perform their roles. Among other things, seasonal working and emigration also brought 33 intercultural dialogue and multi and intercultural practices of cross-border cooperation (meeting of different cultures). In the meaning of migration, the Pannonian Basin has been dynamical ever since the 19th century, in some periods more than in others. Recently, daily migrations to foreign countries have been the most common. In the long-time perspective, seasonal work and emigration were necessary and were a way out that helped people from Goričko Region to survive. In the past, it was a part of mentality and general cultural image of a certain region and today it is an established pattern of behaviour in many villages in Goričko Region. SOURCES Audio recordings and recordings of interviews in this article are kept by the author, who conducted the interviews with the interviewees. B., M. (b. 1931). Interview. Markišavci, 15. January 2011. C., F. (b. 1928). Interview. Poznanovci, 23. August 2010. Č., I. (b. 1926). Interview. Kančevci, 23. February 2010. Č., K. (b. 1945). Interview. Križevci, 2. February 2011. Č., O. (b. 1952). Interview. Križevci, 2. February 2011. H., K. (b. 1931). Interview. Križevci, 10. February 2011. H., R. (b. 1916). Interview. Kuzma, 10. June 2010. P., E. (b. 1938). Interview. Kančevci, 16. March 2010. P., J. (b. 1939). Interview. Kančevci, 22. September 2010. S., H. (b. 1913). Interview. Čepinci, 2. July 2010. Düševni list, 20. avg. 1923. Kalendar Srca Jezušovega, 1929. Kalendar Srca Jezušovega, 1932. Murska krajina, 30. Jun. 1935. Murska krajina, 7. Jul. 1935. Murska krajina, 24. Apr. 1938. PAM/0039 Zbirka gradiva za Prekmurje. PAM/0645 Okrožno sodišče Maribor 1898−1941; pravdni spisi. Vestnik, 24. nov. 1966, 6. Vestnik, 27. avg. 1970. Statistik Austria, Wanderungsstatistik 2008−2010, http://www.statistik.at (20.6. 2012) Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS), http://pxweb.stat.si/pxweb/Dialog/varval.asp?ma=05I2002E&ti=Migration+change+%28abs olute+numbers+and+values%29%2C+municipalities%2C+Slovenia%2C+annually&path=../Dat abase/Demographics/05_population/25_Migration_Change/10_05I20_Migration_Change/& lang=1 (20. 6. 2012) Zavod za zdravstveno zavarovanje Slovenije. 2013. Statistika obveznih zdravstvenih zavarovanj na dan 31. 3. 2013 REFERENCES Baš, Franjo (1934). Narodopisni položaj Slovenske krajine. Slovenska krajina (ed. Vilko Novak). Beltinci: Konzorcij, 108−115. Černy, Dragica (1953). Rast prebivalstva v Prekmurju: pregled gibanja prebivalstva od leta 1869 do leta 1948. Kronika: časopis za slovensko krajevno zgodovino 2, 131−137. Drnovšek, Marjan (2005). Prekmurski sezonski delavci. Slovenska kronika XX. stoletja, 1900−1941. Ljubljana, 247. 34 Ilešič, Svetozar (1934). Geografski pregled Slovenske krajine. Slovenska krajina (ed. Vilko Novak). Beltinci: Konzorcij, 5−12. Huber, Ivanka (2011). Vzgoja in izobraževanje deklet na Goričkem v letih od 1850 do 1950. Šolska kronika – revija za zgodovino šolstva in vzgoje, 20/1−2, 69−84. Huber, Ivanka (2012). Občutenje druge svetovne vojne na Goričkem. Vojne na Slovenskem: pričevanja, spomini, podobe (ed. Maja Godina Golija). Ljubljana, Petanjci: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU, 77−91. Korpič Horvat, Etelka (1992). Zaposlovanje in deagrarizacija pomurskega prebivalstva. Murska Sobota: Pomurska založba. Košič, Jožef (1992). Življenje Slovencev med Muro in Rabo. Budimpešta: G-Nyomd sz BT Sieder, Reinhard (1998). Socialna zgodovina družine. Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis: ZRC. Slovenski zgodovinski atlas. Ljubljana: Nova revija. Škafar, Ivan (1942). Pomen i vpliv našega izseljevanja. Kalendar Szrca Jezusovega, 28−31. Trstenjak, Anton (2006). Slovenci na Ogrskem: narodopisna in književna črtica. Objava arhivskih virov. Maribor: Pokrajinski arhiv Maribor. Vilfan, Sergej (1980). Delavci v agrarnem gospodarstvu. Gospodarska in družbena zgodovina Slovencev: Zgodovina agrarnih panog. II zvezek. Družbena razmerja in gibanja. Ljubljana: DZS, SAZU: Zgodovinski inštitut Milka Kosa, 355−402. 35 ABSENCES AND ATTACHMENTS: MISSING PERSONS AND REBUILT HOUSES IN POST-WAR BOSNIAN TRANSNATIONAL LANDSCAPE Laura Huttunen6 In this presentation, I experiment with the idea of a “transnational landscape”, a space traversed by people on the move with various agendas and various purposes. I rely on such theoretical developments as “regimes of mobility” (Glick Schiller, Salazaar 2013) and “migration order” (van Hear 1998) to capture the idea of mobility structured by global power relations. In this particular presentation I am interested in the capacity of human tragedies, such as the Bosnian war (1992−1995) to create multiple mobilities: it created both a world-wide refugee diaspora of people escaping from the country, and an influx of a vast array of professionals and volunteers into the country. This situation has given rise to new social and political configurations; I suggest that these could be analyzed with the concept of “transnational governmentality” (Ferguson, Gupta 2002). My focus is on two cases of loss and absence: houses destroyed in campaigns of aggression, and on persons gone missing during the war. There are huge projects of material and intellectual investment created around both of these tragedies; these investments, in their turn, have created peculiar kinds of mobilities. This has meant that diaspora Bosnians face their losses and renegotiate their belongings in a social and political landscape mediated through a multitude of local, transnational and international agents that control important resources and channel possibilities of movement. In a way, my ethnographic gaze is turned around in this presentation: while I have previously looked at the mobility away from Bosnia (and sometimes back to Bosnia by the same people), now I will look at this particular place or location, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to see mobility into the place as well as away from it. THE BOSNIAN WAR 1992–1995 – NEW FORMS OF MOBILITY Of course, the former Yugoslavia has its own, ling history of mobility to and from the area (see e.g. Malcolm 1994; Mazover 2000). The dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the war in Bosnia opened up what I call a new era of international mobility into the country. The peace- keeping forces coming into the area were a new kind of presence, characterized by short term stay, a certain social distance from the local population, and real power over the life circumstances of local people. The armed forces controlled resources that were of vital importance for the locals, not always in the way in which the locals would appreciate. The way in which the local people related to these powerful newcomers prefigures the ambiguity towards to post-war mobile professionals. There is both hope and resentment, need and disappointment connected to these mobile groups that come as professionals but become entangled in multi-faceted political questions. RECONSTRUCTION OF LANDSCAPE After the war, the concrete material reconstruction of the devastated country, as well as the political reconstruction of the state has meant a huge influx of people into the country, for varying purposes and for varyingly long periods. Quite a big number of the peace keepers stayed in the country after the peace agreement. Moreover, the Dayton peace accords established The Office of the High Representative (OHR) in the country, to oversee the 6 Senior research fellow, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland, laura.huttunen@uta.fi 36 implementation of the civilian aspects of the peace agreement. Around the OHR, there is a whole architecture of international involvement in the political reconstruction of Bosnia. This has meant a steady influx into the country of legal experts, business advisors, human rights consultants, UN development agencies, NGO personnel, journalists, anthropologists and other researchers. Post-war Bosnia became a landscape of countless organizations engaging in countless projects of material, social and political reconstruction. During my travels in Bosnia since 2001, up to recent years, people have sought to identify me as an employee of one or another international organization in the area, with an initiatory question “For which organization do you work?”. Again, both gratitude and resentment have characterized the local people’s relationship to this influx of people, money and resources. The countless NGOs working in the country have engaged in many issues that are highly political in the local scene, e.g. through asserting certain understanding of post-war reconciliation. Both the reconstruction of the Bosnian state through the involvement of the international community, and the agency of countless NGOs in post-war Bosnian society fit well into Ferguson and Gupta’s (2002) formulation of the “profoundly transnational character” of both “the state” and “the local” in present-day world. Gupta and Ferguson urge us to pay attention to “the crucial mechanisms of governmentality that take place outside of, and alongside, the nation-state” (ibid. 995). According to some estimates, 80 000 family houses were destroyed in Bosnia during the war, in campaigns of ethnic cleansing. The rebuilding of these family houses created an interesting sphere of mobility. Bosnians in diaspora relate to their country of origin through family and friends, but also through pseudo-political projects of rebuilding into the landscape their family houses that were destroyed in campaigns of ethnic cleansing (Huttunen 2009). Many Bosnians have invested money earned in diaspora to these rebuilding projects, and they have pooled family resources, and spent summer holidays in Bosnia in concrete building work. Simultaneously, however, many international organizations and smaller NGOs funded and executed projects of reconstructing these family houses with donor money. Again, these organizations have brought their personnel to Bosnia, creating an influx of people and resources into the country. MISSING PERSONS The armed conflicts following the dissolution of Yugoslavia left around 40 000 people missing in the area, around 30 000 of these in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The fate of these missing has been another tragedy with the capacity to create particular kind of mobility. Identifying the huge amount of the missing in the area has been an enormous effort, requiring huge investments in both material and intellectual terms. The huge amount of missing, and the way in which the question of the missing was tied to political controversies in the area, as well as the guilt of Western powers in the fall of Srebrenica led to the early involvement of outsiders in the identification process. First the International Red Cross and the Physicians without Borders initiated and regulated efforts for identify bodies found in various locations. Finding the mass graves around Srebrenica and elsewhere accelerated the process (see e.g. Stover, Peress 1998; Wagner 2004). The fall of Srebrenica, and the shameful failure by the UN in preventing the catastrophe, were by some estimations the key incentives behind the establishment of the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) – an initiative by the U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1996 following the G-7 summit in Lyon, France. The ICMP soon established itself as the leading organization regulating the exhumations and identification of the mortal remains that were found across the ex- Yugoslavian territories. The material and intellectual resources invested in this huge tragedy created again new influx of various professionals. An array of foreign experts came into the country: archeologists, forensic anthropologists, dentists and other experts came to work on the mass grave sites; legal experts and human rights consultants to work with the issue, and 37 with the ICMP. Many of these experts came to the country with a strong human rights frame of reference. Many of them stay only short periods, but their presence, and their work may have long lasting influence on Bosnian society. Some of these forensic experts have become international celebrities of some kind, publishing their memoirs with international publishers (e.g. Coff 2004; Stover, Peress 1998). Many of these experts have created a career of travelling from a crisis point to another – many conflicts and crises create two-directional mobility: refugees fleeing the country, international experts coming into the country. The voices of these experts bring local political issues to international political arenas rather effectively, and they affect local political issues very strongly, even if they often stay strictly in their professional roles. The introduction of the new DNA-based technology in the identification of the mortal remains brought a real breakthrough in the identification process in Bosnia. The experts at the ICMP developed a system of comparing DNA extracted from the bones of the mortal remains with DNA from blood samples given by family members of those reported missing. The method was new, DNA was never before applied as a tool for identification in such a mass scale. This innovation has, again, created new mobility: now Bosnian experts, educated by the ICMP, travel to pother crisis spots in the world to help with the identification work (see http://www.ic-mp.org/). REFERENCES Ferguson, James, Gupta, Akhil (2002). Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. American Ethnologist, 29/4, 981–1002. Glick Schiller, Nina, Salazaar, Noel B. (2013). Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39/2, 183–200. Huttunen, Laura (2009.) Undoing and Redoing Homes: The Bosnian War and Diasporic Home-making. Homes in Transformation: Dwelling, Moving, Belonging (eds. Kirsi Saarikangas, Hanna Johansson). Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Koff, Clea (2004). The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. London: Atlantic Books. Malcolm, Noel (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. London: MacMillan. Mazower, Marck (2004). The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day. London: Phoenix Press. Stover, Eric, Gilles, Peress (1998). The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. Zurich: Scalo. Wagner, Sarah (2004). To know where he lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. University of California Press. 38 TRANSNATIONAL POSTED WORKERS AND THEIR FAMILIES: DEBATING CLASS MAKING ON THE MOVE Anna Matyska7 INTRODUCTION This paper discusses my forthcoming research project aimed at the analysis of the process of transnational class making among Polish posted workers residing in the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden and/or Denmark), and their families who stayed in Poland. In this project, I ask how workers and their family members in Poland experience, negotiate and produce class and across borders vis-à-vis each other, other workers and employers, in the context of objective structures of production and mobility regimes. The focus will be placed on workers with long-term experience of mobility. The project draws on transnational anthropology, anthropological perspectives on class and post-socialism. It is empirically grounded in the multi-sited ethnography conducted in Poland and Nordic countries. Polish transnational posted workers, that is workers posted by their regular companies or staffing agencies to work abroad for short-term projects, have become an increasingly visible labour force in contemporary Europe, in the Nordic countries reaching between 10000-20000 people yearly. They not only live between two countries and in fragmented households, but also in fragmented employment spaces, with employers in two countries and with salaries on pair with (or close to) the Western standards, but spend and taxed in Poland. Posted workers are thus exemplary of class transformations linked to transnational mobility, which, by producing multiple national sites of class enactment and reference points, forces us to rethink established class categories, experiences and class identity politics. In Europe, these transformations are underpinned by the simultaneous processes of integration and economic polarization, exemplified by the tensions between post-socialist “neo-capitalist” Poland and the “better capitalism” of welfare state Nordic countries within the European Union. This project, thus, will help us to understand the implications of transnational mobility for the class formation and for Polish and Nordic social structures in their mutual entanglement with the European integrationist and capitalist policies. At the practical level, the project will produce a webpage with the information on the project as well as practical information regarding posted work in the Nordic countries. In the Nordic, Polish posted workers are mostly men whose wives and children stay in Poland. Therefore, in this project, class will have a distinct gender dimension. KEY RESEARCH CONCEPTS: TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY AND CLASS The project looks at posted workers’ mobility and their class formation from transnational perspective. It conceptualizes transnational mobility as a process of creating and maintaining multi-stranded relations across borders through mobility of people and images. From transnational perspective, mobility creates and remakes linkages rather than brings definite ruptures as the standard model of emigration-immigration-assimilation assumed (Basch et al. 1994). It encompasses and is dependent upon the reciprocal relationship between mobile and (relatively) immobile actors as well as structures within which they move and maintain transnational relations. The project considers class formation and negotiation as one of the key elements of transnational mobility. Class considerations encourage people to move transnationally and 7 PhD student, researcher, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland, ana.matyska@uta.fi 39 bring individual and collective class transformations in the process (Basch et al. 1992). Although transnational studies from the onset called for the consideration of class in transnational processes, most of transnational studies have fairly crude and under-theorized understanding of class (among the exceptions are Sklair 2001 and Olwig 2007), equating class with occupation position and often using it interchangeably with the concept of status. They often operate with as-if self-evident, occupation-based concepts of working class, middle class or the upper class, not pondering much on the individual definitions, conceptual differences in social stratification system and current debates on class which are at the crossroads of giving validity to class analysis or delegitimizing it completely (Clark, Lipset 2001; Pakulski, Waters 1996). In contrast, this project attempts to introduce more nuanced and culturally- informed class analysis. I consider class as a differential access to various forms of resources or capital (economic, social, cultural) and the way people define and redefine their situation drawing on the cultural repository of meanings and values they possess. Class is a constant project, a matter of becoming rather a static fixture of social systems (Ortner 2003). Class, as Ortner says, is “always being made or kept or defended, feared or desired” in the context of objective life circumstances. Thus, I recognize the importance of the material conditions of life, but I also stress lived experience, self-perceptions and emic “class” related categories - the social reality of the lifeworld and how it is mapped onto the material order of things (Buchowski 2003) and how it transforms it in the process. I consider such theoretical approach to class as particularly suited to transnational context and to the Polish and Nordic experience. In Poland, despite capitalist changes privileging the economic capital, a substantial weight is still given to cultural capital and intelligentsia ethos. The communist policies of classlessness and Catholic ideology propagated moderate consumption. The communist regime complicated the coherence of status indicators and capitalism still, as it seems, did not manage to produce coherent class groups. In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, much policies and political rhetoric was devoted to class compromises and leveling of people’s life standard. Simultaneously, studies indicate that division persists (Melin 2013) and are enhanced by large immigration rates. The foreign workers and the “native” workers seem to belong to different “working class” (Mulinari, Neergaard 2006) and silently undermine the vision of universal welfare, creating spaces of exceptions and exclusions. My unit of class is gendered and socially embedded person, along the lines of anthropological theorization and against the social policy and labour market scholars who see migrant workers as autonomous and independent decisions makers. I assume that workers’ class actions and experiences will be affected by family members, friends and working community in the destination and sending country. I speculate that transnational family members back home will be an important factor affecting workers’ trade union activism and the amount of “exploitation” they are ready to endure abroad. In their class actions and identifications important will be also their gender, including the intimate link between wage work and breadwinner status as a “normative essence” of masculine identities (Hart 1989). Workers’ wives in Poland will perform work at home or outside of it, both of which I consider as important for their class experiences in transnational households. The gendered class approach allows to show that migrant workers are always engaged in multiple layers of exploitation, not only in a single capitalist one as many scholars are ready to point out (see e.g. Anderson 2010; Lille 2006). The situation of migrant workers may be exploitative and precarious, but they themselves by being transnational family members, also may engage in an interpersonal and intimate kind of exploitation, pressuring and taking advantage of each other’s inter-dependent positions in a transnational family. Consequently, I also assume that wives’ and husbands’ class experiences and aspirations may differ. 40 POLISH TRANSNATIONAL POSTED WORKERS: (IN)VISIBLE MOBILITY In 2012, Polish companies posted abroad over 200000 workers, according to the Polish insurance statistics. After Poland joined the European Union in 2004, Poles have constituted the leading group of posted workers in the European Union. In the Nordic countries, Polish posted workers work in the construction, manufacturing and catering sector. However, their lives are understudied both in quantities and qualitative terms. On the one hand, the exact numbers of their mobility and destination places are difficult to estimate as they are posted transnationally under the conditions of providing services and statistically speaking are not migrants. On the other hand, scholars who study Polish posted workers ubiquitously represent industrial relations and social policy fields, and focus on the employment relations and trade union activism (e.g. for Norway see Frieberg 2013; for Finland see Lille, Sippola 2011). These studies, albeit contributing to our understanding of economic aspects of posted work, nevertheless produce a simplified and incomplete image of Polish posted workers due to particular focus and methodological limitation. Methodology is limited to interviews via a Polish interpreter and conducted only in a host country, and as such fails to correspond to workers’ transnational lives and social embeddedness. Workers are treated as autonomous individuals, whose transnational social relations, even if recognized, seem to be irrelevant to their working life abroad and relationship with trade unions and other workers. The issue of class is reduced to Marxist perspective of class as a position in the relations of production and posted workers are considered as a migrant working class by default. As a sending society, Poland with its particular stratification system and as a place of consumption and class production for the workers is present only on the margins, while the Nordic context is reduced to trade unionism and high salaries. The fact that most of posted workers in the Nordic countries are male and thus produce particular gendered class communities is disregarded. Finally, their relations with multiple employers and the latter’s role in shaping workers’ transnational life remains understudied. I encountered this group of workers during my doctoral fieldwork in Finland, and although I was not able to explore the issue further, I noticed the gap that existed between workers’ classed worlds and their representation in the literature. Interrelated with the above, I noticed that their situation can help us understand the everyday repercussions of transnationalism and capitalism, including its effect on people’s solidarities and life projects. I argue that the anthropological study of the transnational class making among the posted workers and their families will contribute to our understanding of people’s transnational solidarities, divisions, identity politics (including trade unionism) and futures of their families, as well as multiple layers of cooperation and exploitation that happens transnationally. It will help us to understand changes in Europe, and Poland the Nordic countries in particular, and their embeddedness in the global capitalist processes. Finally, it will allow for the de-essentialization of the Eastern European migrant working class which emerges as the new Other, who invades the Western European space “from within”. Countering the “Othering” of the Eastern Europe migrants appears as vital particularly nowadays, in the midst of economic crisis and with growing anti-immigration tendencies spreading throughout the West, including the Nordic countries. OBJECTIVES The project aims to understand how transnational posted workers and their families experience and produce their classed worlds, and by these, to offer more rich and nuanced analysis of transnational mobility impact on class. Specifically, the study asks:  How posted work, and interrelated with it type of transnational mobility and employment relations affects workers and their families’ class experience? 41  In what cultural, social, discursive and economic practices of class making they engage in within and across national borders, in transnational family and working communities?  How do they relate to different stratification systems in the countries of origin and destination? At the practical level, the study also aims to produce a webpage with the information on the project as well as practical information regarding posted work in the Nordic countries. The webpage will be in Polish to offset English as the academic language of the project. METHODOLOGY The study will be conducted through the multi-sited ethnography encompassing in-depth interviews and participant observation. I consider multi-sited ethnography as the most suitable method to meet the study objectives. It allows for getting to know closer the interlocutors, look at their everyday practices and explore their lives across borders, not only in the host society. Fieldwork sites will include Hämmenlina, Turku and Helsinki in Finland, Oslo in Norway, Stockholm in Sweden and/or Copenhagen in Denmark as well as Poland. I will conduct participant observation among posted workers as well as conduct 45 in-depth interviews (15 in each country) with the posted workers with the long term experience of mobility and 10 to 20 interviews with family members, particularly spouses, in Poland. I will spend a period of time with each family in Poland. I would conduct at least 10 interviews with workers who had the Cold War experience of posted work or whose parents had one. Multiple fieldwork cities will allow me to observe the making of transnational class in different national context, thereby observing similarities and differences between particular Nordic countries and strengthening the generalisability of my study. REFERENCES Anderson , Bridget. (2010). Migration, Immigration Controls and the Fashioning of Precarious Workers. Work, Employment and Society 24/2, 300–317. Buchowski, M. (2003). Coming to Terms with Capitalism: An Example of a Rural Community in Poland. Dialectical Anthropology 27, 47–68. Clark, Terry, Nichols, Lipset, Seymour, Martin (eds.) (2001). The Breakdown of Class Politics: a Debate on Post-Industrial Stratification. Washington (D.C.): Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Friberg, John, Horger (2013). The Polish Worker in Norway. Emerging Patterns of Migration, Employment and Incorporation After EU's eastern enlargement. PhD dissertation. Fafo- report 06. Glick Schiller, Nina, Basch, Linda., Szanton Blanc, Cristina. (eds.) (1992). Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645. Hart, Nicky (1989). Gender and the Rise and Fall of Class Politics, New Left Review I/175. Lillie Nathan (2006). Globalization and Class Analysis: Prospects for Labour Movement Influence in Global. Governance, Industrielle Beziehungen 13/3, 223–237. Lillie, Nathan, Sippola, Markku (2011). National Unions and Transnational Workers: The Case of Olkiluoto 3, Finland. Work, employment & society 25/2, 292–308. Melin, Harri (2013). The Nordic Model and Social Inequalities. To be Published in Springer Verlag: Berlin. Mulinari, Diana, Neergaard, Anders (2006). Black Skull Consciousness: The New Swedish Working Class. Race & Class 46/3, 55–72. Olwig, K. F. (2007). Caribbean Journeys : An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham: Duke University Press. 42 Ortner, Sherry B. (2003). New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58. Durham: Duke University Press. Pakulski, Jan, Waters Malcolm (1996). The Death of Class. London: Sage. Sklair, Leslie (2001). The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. 43 THE CONCEPT OF MARGINAL MOBILITY Špela Kalčić, Marko Juntunen, Nataša Rogelja8 INTRODUCTION In this presentation we will focus on analytical potentials and shortcomings of the “marginal mobility concept” (Juntunen et al. forthcoming; Kalčić et al. 2013), developed together with Nataša Rogelja and Marko Juntunen during our collaboration within the project Runaway World: Marginal African and European Mobilites – Confronting Perceptions (European Scientific Fundation, programme EuroUnderstanding, 2010). In 2010 the project was elected among five best in the EU and recommended for financing, but later on we continued on our own, without any support from EU and consequently also without Norwegian and Danish partners. The Slovenian part of the project Chasing dreams, confronting realities: European Neo-nomadism in Sahara and the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coasts was financed by the Slovenian Research Agency, while the Finnish collaboration was made possible by the generous help of The School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tampere. The main focus of our collaborative research was on contemporary mobilities that challenge conventional conceptualizations of mobility, while the main motive for opening the marginal mobility discussion was to demonstrate that at present, people from both the Global North and South are responding to increasingly globalized social, political, and economic challenges in a comparable manner. COMMON THREAD Certain forms of mobilities are characterized by being legal, privileged, and even desired – such as tourism and the movement of skilled professionals, while other forms of human mobilities are marginalised, as they simply remain invisible in these schemes or are alternatively perceived as undesirable or irregular. We believe that many among these contemporary mobilities share certain common threads. The seminar Ethnographies of Mobility that took place in Tampere, Finland, last year somehow confirmed this claim, as we managed to “persuade” some other researchers who attended the seminar that their case studies could be considered within the marginal mobility concept and later on also agreeing to contribute with their case studies to the Thematic Section on Marginal Mobilities, forthcoming in the next number (38) of the Two Homelands journal. Within the Marginal Mobilities Thematic Section, Marko Juntunen presented the case of economically marginal Moroccan migrants moving between Morocco and Spain, while Špela Kalčić and Nataša Rogelja introduced their accounts of newly emerged nomadic lifestyles among European “housetruckers”9 and “liveaboards”10 in the Mediterranean region, moving between Europe, West Africa, and elsewhere. The seminar featured three further case studies which can be considered within the marginal mobility framework and 8 Špela Kalčić and Nataša Rogelja, Research Fellows at the Slovenian Migration Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, spela.kalcic@zrc-sazu.si and natasa.rogelja@zrc-sazu.si; Marko Juntunen, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland, marko.juntunen@uta.fi 9 The term “housetruckers” is an etic term referring to Westerners travelling and living in cars, jeeps, vans, caravans, buses or trucks converted into mobile homes (Kalčić 2012). The closest emic term that some of them use to describe their lifestyle is “nomads”. 10 The term “liveaboards” is used as a descriptor referring to the people who have adopted a lifestyle that revolves around living, working and traveling on boats. Liveaboards are a very diverse group and can be found throughout the canals, rivers and along the sea coasts. Some of them cruise continuously, some are permanently moored and some alternate between cruising and mooring. 44 were included in the thematic section. These are ethnographic works on ishumar11 Tuareg drifting transnationally12 between Saharan states (Ines Kohl), Westerners living between Goa, their native countries, and often also destinations such as Thailand, Ibiza or Bali (Mari Korpela), and Travellers/Gens du Voyage and Gypsies/Roma in Great Britain, France and Slovenia (Alenka Janko Spreizer). All these mobilities stand in complex relation to recognised and unrecognised forms of mobility. They overlap significantly with recognised forms of mobilities such as asylum, economic, and circular migrations, lifestyle migration (not as a concept but a form!), sabbatical tourism, travelling and traditional peripatetic13 nomadism. However, we argue that there are numerous criteria which allow us to talk about them as representatives of distinctive types of contemporary mobilities, which are characterized by peripatetic nomadism as an economic strategy, marginality and inventiveness. MARGINAL MOBILITIES We share the belief that it is entirely valid to critically examine the mobile lives around us and challenge the widely shared academic consensus for drawing clear analytical and conceptual boundaries between the mobile subjects from the Global North and Global South. In our work, we argue that what we have at hand are researchable entities that demand a new theoretical reflection from migration and mobility studies. As the contemporary analytical language of migration and mobility studies lacks an appropriate term for such mobile lifestyles, we prefer to conceptualise them as marginal mobilities. According to our understanding, these mobilities can be compared according to the following five unifying characteristics: 1. the movement is constant, and occurs along loosely defined trajectories 2. the mobility is not entirely voluntary nor forced 3. the social world is marked by uprootedness and liminality and 4. a lack of politicized public space 5. the subjects are in a constant process of negotiation with the state bureaucracies that impose a sedentary norm on their lives. Our intention is not to suggest a strict and all-encompassing definition of marginal mobility, but rather to use it as an analytical prism that opens new possibilities for understanding contemporary mobilities. We understand the concept of marginal mobility as a heuristic tool that enables a comparative study of mobilities in the contemporary globalised world regardless of their ethnic, national or geographic provenance and not as the only possible 11 The term ishumar derives from the French chômeur, unemployed person, and was transported into Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg. Originally it described those Tuareg who gave up their nomadic life and went to the surrounding neighbouring states, above all to Algeria and Libya, to look for a job. In a second step the Tuareg rebels of the 1990s have been attached to that term. Today, ishumar refers to a generation of border-crossers whose living conditions have created special mobility strategies (Kohl 2007, 2009, 2010a, b, c). 12 By “transnational” we refer to various forms of interactions and communication that link both people and institutions across the borders of nation-states in increasingly globalized ways (Basch, Glick Schiller, Szanton Blanc 1992; Portes, Guarnizo, Landolt 1999; Smith and Guarnizo 1998). A focus on transnational processes and phenomena has enabled anthropologists to understand complex social and cultural processes that reach beyond spatially bounded communities and strictly spatialized referents of social identification. While transnational ethnography has profoundly contributed to the understanding of the ways in which mobility shapes people’s lives, the careful cross-cultural analysis of the contemporary forms of highly mobile lives is a largely unexplored question in anthropology. 13 Nomadism that exploits social rather than natural resources, as in the case of pastoral and hunter-gatherer nomadic societies (Berland, Salo 1986). 45 theoretical framework through which different contemporary mobilities can be analysed and explained.14 We are fully aware that we are walking on thin ice; it is unorthodox to focus simultaneously on the mobile lives of people whose travel trajectories overlap but who are positioned in different terms in the global order. In fact we were criticized by several colleagues who argued that our comparative approach disregards the institutional inequalities between the white Western and non-Western mobile subjects, their unequal class statuses, and positions in the migrant regimes, the systems of surveillance and the racist and xenophobic practices and discourses. However, we believe that comparing different ethnographic cases can create the space to delve deeper into the cultural logic of contemporary mobile lifestyles. A comparative approach to our data certainly does not mean that we are blind to our interlocutors’ clearly unequal subject positions. CASE STUDIES At the moment, increasing numbers of people are taking up highly mobile lives. For example, in the Mediterranean and West African settings there are many Africans with EU passports but also a considerable number of Europeans who engage in mobile lifestyles and travel between Europe and Africa. Many Europeans who engage in housetrucking or liveaboard lifestyles use mobility to “muddle through” periods of unemployment until they obtain their pensions, or alternatively, they work and use several income-making strategies while on the move (Kalčić 2013; Rogelja 2013). Among them many resort to peripatetic survival strategies, i.e. nomadism that exploits social rather than natural resources (Berland, Salo 1986). Being without regular income they have to resort to flexible economic strategies: temporary work in marinas and construction sites, periodic work in agriculture while in Europe, distance work through the Internet, and – especially among the housetruckers – transnational trading activities of second-hand vehicles, car parts and consumer goods (Kalčić 2013; Rogelja 2013). These economic strategies are comparable to those of the Moroccan men (Juntunen 2013) and other West Africans that Marko Juntunen and Špela Kalčić followed along their transnational trajectories (Juntunen, Kalčić forthcoming). The Moroccan migrant men in Spain work in the very same unregulated economic niches as the Westerners described before; namely in agriculture, construction and services, and more recently, actively engage in second-hand trade activities that demand constant mobility across the continents (ibid.). The Westerners observed by Mari, who spend several months every year in Goa, India, also need to work to support their mobile lifestyles. They engage in very similar work strategies as housetruckers and liveaboards. They work, for example, as fashion or jewellery designers (who sell their products in Indian tourist markets), artists, yoga teachers, massage therapists and spiritual healers, or run restaurants, guesthouses or nurseries. During the summers, some of them work at festivals around Europe (Korpela 2013). The trajectories of the mobile subjects of sedentary background presented in the thematic section (Juntunen, Kalčić, Korpela and Rogelja) differ from migratory movements (economic, asylum, returning and circular migration) that occur typically along more or less fixed routes, and also do not resemble temporary movements (usually taking place in a 14 For example, lifestyle migration (LM) has been recognized as a growing and disparate phenomenon with important implications for individuals, societies (Benson, O’Reilly 2009a, 2009b) and places (Hoey 2010). Michaela Benson and Karen O’Reilly defined LM in a broad, working definition as spatial mobility of “relatively affluent individuals of all ages moving either part-time or full time, permanently or temporarily to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life (2009b: 612).” Some examples of marginal mobility (Kalčić 2013; Korpela 2013; Rogelja 2013) could also be considered within the theoretical framework of LM, yet there are certain points where alternative perspectives can be added. One of the greatest shortcomings of the LM theory is its focus on mobile people from Global North only, which does not allow comparison with mobile subjects from other parts of the world. 46 limited number of places) such as the movement of tourists or sabbatical travellers (Richards, Wilson 2009). These subjects seem to blur the existing concepts, sometimes resembling tourists and travellers but at other times resembling economic migrants and circular migrants. They are involved in constant15 and loosely patterned travel much like traditional peripatetic nomads (Berland, Salo 1986), yet the surrounding context of their lifestyles is that of global modernity.16 The mobility patterns of those with nomadic backgrounds (cf. Janko Spreizer 2013; Kohl 2013) have also changed. A border-crossing generation of Tuareg, who are originally a pastoral nomadic society, no longer move in traditional nomadic cycles with their livestock, but according to individual choice. Their itinerant mobility between Nigeria, Algeria and Libya, sometimes expanded also to the EU, represents a peripatetic survival strategy created by changed living conditions aggravated by droughts, pollution and increased insecurity produced by international interferences guided by neoliberal economic interests in oil, gas, phosphate and uranium in the Sahara and Sahel regions. In large parts of the Nigerian Sahara, nomadic pastoralist activities are no longer feasible for ecological reasons and owing also to global economic interests. This is why younger generations of Tuareg have given up the pastoral nomadic life and in search of jobs have started to engage in transnational lifestyles between Saharan states (Kohl 2013). On the other hand, the mobility of traditionally peripatetic European nomads such as Travellers/Gens du Voyage or Gypsies/Roma had to adapt to the control situations imposed on them throughout history by repressive regimes, nation states and local communities. Historically marginalized as socially unacceptable and, being nomads, wrongly understood as people who are constantly mobile, their need for immobile platforms that make nomadic lifestyle possible was ignored, which contributed to the diminishing of their mobility or sedentarisation (Janko Spreizer 2013). REFERENCES Basch Green, Linda, Glick Schiller, Nina, Szanton Blanc, Cristina (1992). Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. New York: Gordon and Breach. Benson, Michaela, O’Reilly, Karen (eds.) (2009a). Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations and Experiences. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Benson, Michaela, O’Reilly, Karen (2009b). Migration and the Search for a Better Way of life: a Critical Exploration of Lifestyle Migration. The Sociological Review 57/4, 608625. Berland, Joseph C., Salo, Matt T. (1986). Peripatetic Communities: An Introduction. Peripatetic peoples. Nomadic Peoples. Special Issue 21/22. Castells, Manuel (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoey, A. Brian (2010). Place for Personhood: Individual and Local Character in Lifestyle Migration. Midwestern City & Society 22/2, 237261. Janko Spreizer, Alenka (2013). Roma, Gypsy Travellers, Gens du Voyage: People who Travel? Two Homelands 38, 87–98. 15 By “constant” we do not want to say that these people move without ever stopping. Rather, we want to stress their enhanced mobility. For most nomadic populations relative levels of mobility and/or sedentarisation are not viewed as opposites. The states of being relatively mobile or static are perceived as particular strategies to be utilized as opportunities warrant and depend on specific conditions (Berland, Salo 1986: 45). This also holds true for the mobile subjects discussed here. 16 We use global modernity as a descriptive term that refers to globalized (neoliberal) capitalism and time-space compression through modern communications technology and travel (Castells 2000; Giddens 1990). 47 Juntunen, Marko (2013). Arranging Mobile Lives: Marginalised Moroccan Men in Transnational Space. Two Homelands 38, 21–32. Juntunen, Marko, Kalčić, Špela, Rogelja, Nataša (forthcoming). Mobility, Marginality and the Global Economic Recession. Western Nomads and Mobile Moroccan Men. Nordic Journal of Migration Research. Juntunen, Marko, Kalčić, Špela (forthcoming). Nomads in the Era of Global Economic Crisis: Mobile Lifestyles between Morocco and Mediterranean Europe. Migration, Space and Borders in the Western Mediterranean – A Post Arab Spring Assessment (eds. Hassan Bousett, Laure-Anne Bernes, Caroline Zickgraf). Ulg: University Liège. Kalčić, Špela (2012). The Ethnography of Housetrucking in West Africa: Tourists, Travellers, Retired Migrants and Peripatetics. Two Homelands 36, 101–118. Kalčić, Špela (2013). Going Nomad: New Mobile Lifestyles among Europeans. Two Homelands 38, 33–48. Kalčić, Špela, Juntunen, Marko, Rogelja, Nataša (2013). Marginal Mobility: A Heuristic Tool for Comparative Study of Contemporary Mobilities. Two Homelands 38, 7–20. Kohl, Ines (2007). Tuareg in Libyen. Identitäten zwischen Grenzen, Berlin: Reimer. Kohl, Ines (2009). Beautiful Modern Nomads: Bordercrossing Tuareg between Niger, Algeria and Libya, Berlin: Reimer. Kohl, Ines (2010a). Modern Nomads, Vagabonds, or Cosmopolitans? Reflections on Contemporary Tuareg Society. Journal of Anthropological Research, 66/4, 449–462. Kohl, Ines (2010b). Saharan “Borderline”-Strategies: Tuareg Transnational Mobility. Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies (ed. Tilo Grätz). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 92–105. Kohl, Ines (2010c). Libya, the “Europe of Ishumar”: Between Losing and Reinventing Tradition. Tuareg Society within a Globalized World: Saharan Life in Transition (eds. Anja Fischer, Ines Kohl). London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 143–154. Kohl, Ines (2013). Vagabonds or Elites? The Mobile Lifestyle of Contemporary Tuareg. Two Homelands 38, 73–86. Korpela, Mari (2013). Marginaly Mobile? The Vulnerable Lifestyle of Westerners in Goa. Two Homelands 38, 63–72. Portes, Alejandro, Haller, William J., Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo (2002). Transnational Entrepreneurs: An Alternative Form of Immigrant Economic Adaptation. American Sociological Review 67/2, 278–98. Richards, Greg, Wilson, Julie (2009). The Global Nomad. Backpacker Travel in Theory and Practice. Clevedon: Channel View Publications. Rogelja, Nataša (2013). Contemporary Peripatetic Adaptations: Mobility, Marginality and Inventiveness. Two Homelands 38, 49–62. Smith, Michael Peter, Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo (eds.) (1998). Transnationalism from Below. Comparative Urban and Community Research. Special Issue. 48 MASCULINE, MOBILE AND MARGINAL: MOROCCAN MEN BETWEEN MOROCCO AND SPAIN Marko Juntunen17 INTRODUCTION In a recent article Paul Amar argued that popularized theories of masculinity and public discourses on “masculinities in crisis” are guilty of misrecognizing, de-politicizing and de- racializing emergent social forces in the Middle East (Amar 2011). To briefly summarize his argument, Amar claimed that representations of masculinity as a problem to be solved have transformed into public tools for analyzing political change and social conflict in the region involving a wide range of phenomena such as irregular migration, sexual repression, Islamic radicalism, and the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. These discourses, Amar suggests, rather obscure that reveal the social realities of multipolar geopolitical developments in the region. Following Amar, this paper is concerned with the need to expand the ways in which masculinities are scrutinized in the transnational space between Morocco and Spain. My interest is in the emergent styles of masculinity and masculine sentiments associated with highly mobile and economically marginal Moroccan men from poor urban quarters who were introduced into transnational circuits through irregular migration to Spain. By the sentiments and styles of masculinity, I refer to representations and practices that these men adopt in order to construct their social position and identity (Osella, Osella 2000). In the landscape between Northern Morocco and Spain where I have carried out ongoing fieldwork since 1998, the international mobility regimes, the changing security climate and the policies of enclosure have generated vast economic and cultural effects on Moroccans, young men from urban poor quarters in particular. Masculinities are thus produced and reproduced within increasingly complex and multidimensional constructions including state institutions and security practices.18 MOROCCO, URBAN POOR AND THE PROBLEM OF MASCULINITY After the turn of the Millennium Morocco underwent a period of a heated public debate concerning men and masculinities. Both national and global media, civic organizations and international think tanks published hundreds of articles concerning politico-religious violence, the rise of the Islamic revivalist movement and the deteriorating social conditions in poor and abandoned urban areas, contexts that were routinely perceived as crisis zones that produce alienation, frustration, crime, terrorists and irregular migrants. Following the terrorist strikes perpetrated by young Moroccan men in Casablanca (2003) and Madrid (2004) the situation in Morocco resembled a moral panic characterized by the criminalization of the urban poor and massive police repression in impoverished urban areas. Moreover, calls for social justice and improvement of living conditions of the urban poor were high on the agenda of activists and national and international non- governmental organizations. 17 Assistant Professor of Social Anthropogy (fixed term), School of Social Sciences and Humanities, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland, marko.juntunen@uta.fi, +358 50 318 6103 18 By focusing on the wider geopolitical contexts my intention is not to deny the fact that cultural representations of masculinity are constructed through relations with women, households and domestic contexts – all perspectives that have been scrutinized from a variety of perspectives in the contemporary anthropology of the Middle East. 49 Along these developments, young men from poor urban quarters perceived the departure from Morocco, and engagement in international mobility as nearly compulsory yet often unrealizable project. As departure (by open boats, pateras, or other means offered by migrant smugglers) became costlier, more difficult and more dangerous, migration rapidly changed its meaning in the changing geopolitical climate.19 Mobility in my fieldwork setting is a part of wider identity projects contributing to the formation of subjectivities with associating social categories. In my context of study one of the key masculinized categories is the concept l-harg, “the burning” referring to clandestine departure from Morocco individually or via more or less organized networks of migrant smugglers using various different methods. Moreover l-harg entails an entire marginal mobile lifestyle that follows the departure (see Juntunen 2002). L-harg derives from the verb haraqa “to burn”. It relates to a vast range of cultural imaginaries; on one hand to “burned’ life” – an escape from physically and culturally enclosed life; departure from urban quarters perceived as uninhabitable; movement towards a brighter horizon, self-creation, personal liberation from political, economic and sexual repression kebt and experimentation drawing on an imaginary of the elsewhere and of exile. L-harg is widely represented, diagnosed and debated in the Moroccan and international media but also in the popular and private discourses all over Morocco. For its main protagonists – young men – the personal narratives of departure contain, as well, an adventurous dimension. L-harg is a cultural platform for the display of dominant masculine qualities such as courageousness, heroism, social cleverness and ability to withstand suffering. While some women also engage in l-harg, the phenomenon is nearly entirely debated in relation to men and masculinity.20 It furthermore forms a strong bond between those who share the sentiments of social abandonment and non-belonging, all expressed in terms of the vernacular concept l-ghorba; referring to sentiments of alienation, exile and homesickness which can be felt both in Morocco and abroad. RITUALS OF MASCULINITY, RITUALS OF INCORPORATION Ethnographic interest in men and masculinity has steadily increased since the 1990s (see Cornwall, Lindisfarne 1994; Hart 1994; Kandiyoti 1994; Loizos 1994; Loizos, Papataxiarchis 1991). The center of analysis shifted gradually away from the monolithic conceptions of gender and masculinity was understood as a contextually acted, contested and verbalized category. These works above, among others, underlined the fact that in every society there are various versions of masculinity and different dominant and subordinate versions are mutually constructed. Towards the turn of the millennium, several ethnographers begun to observe the social and cultural processes by which men distinguish themselves and the contexts and criteria by which this is done. Such accounts managed to point out several informal ritualistic domains which construct different understandings of masculinity (Gilsenan 1996; Gutmann 1996; Vale de Almeida 1996). Informal modes of stereotyped male social interaction are sometimes called "rituals of masculinity" (Driessen 1983). Such symbolic practices have been scrutinized particularly often by ethnographers working in the Mediterranean region (Bowman 1989; Driessen 1983; 19 The increasingly restrictive migration policy in the EU resulted in sharply reducing numbers of attempted arrivals and arrests of irregular migrants from Morocco, but also lethal accidents in land and sea. Through complex forms of political and financial incentives the EU gradually managed to transport its migration control agenda to its southern frontier, turning Morocco into one of the main buffer zones of south − north mobility (see Fargues, Fandrich 2012; GADEM 2010). 20 In the context of the urban poor women’s departure from Morocco is facilitated by male migrants (brothers, fathers husbands) who provide a safe departure from Morocco through process if family reunification marriage, work visa etc.) . In most cases women engaging in l-harq are women without men, who often remain invisible in public and popular discourses regarding l-harq (divorcees, widows and orphan). 50 Gilmore 1991; McDonogh 1992; Papataxiarchis 1991; Peteet 1994; Vale de Almeida 1996). Moreover, the framework emerges as well in many ethnographic accounts of migration. Rural men in Kerala, India understand migration as a culturally constructed stepping stone in their attempts to acquire the material and symbolic capital associated with adult masculine status at home (Osella, Osella 2000). Similarly Chinese Malay men observed by Nonini perceive work abroad as critical to their assertions of successful masculine identities and authority at home (Nonini 1997). These works, among many others suggest that successful adult masculinities are constructed through participation in the migration ritual – and the display of success occurs in national setting back at home in which the men are more or less rooted. What about men who display only occasional and lose ties to national settings? It is evident that international mobility in my field work context has several gendered, ritualistic features which work in a persuasive manner. Men move because they are persuaded to meet sets of cultural representations of dominant masculinity (wealth, independence, ability to provide). However, it is clear that understanding migration as a ritual of masculinity in the light of a passage from male status to another is in many ways problematic. It is obvious that many men are never able to participate in the migration rite and many men fail to enter Spain or are deported immediately after the arrival. Also many mobile men experience continuous up-rootedness and alienation both in Morocco and abroad. They meet their expenses by precarious work in dangerous, underpaid occupations in Spain or elsewhere in the Mediterranean Europe and often live in extremely deficient and crowded dwellings and make shift camps. Moreover, in many cases they lack the ability to "cash" the symbolic and social capital back in Morocco. Even in the case of materially successful mobile men there is very rarely any aggregation back to the social surroundings occupied prior to the departure from Morocco. The vast majority of my interlocutors who managed to regularize their residence status in the EU territory lead lives characterized by constant mobility between the two continents. It is more fruitful to view l-harg and the subsequent mobile lives in the light of the idea of "the rite of institution" suggested by Bourdieu (1991). According to Bourdieu, it is important to pay attention to the fact that societies distinguish between people for whom particular rites pertain and those who never participate in them (or pass through them). Rather than constituting passages from one male status to another the major function of such rites is to create arbitrary conceptual boundaries. In this light, rather than constituting identity passage, l-harg emphasizes particular (essentialised) masculine representations (courage, heroism, ability to withstand suffering, ability to provide) and persuades men to meet particular gendered expectations which, to use the words of Vale de Almeida (1996, 5) create "controlling effects" upon young men's lives, but also – and more importantly – forms of resistance towards norms expressed with references to tradition in Morocco. HARRAGA MASCULINITIES Following of the life courses of the harraga – the ones who engage in l-harg – reveals that the mobile lives of the men differ considerably from earlier forms of Moroccan migrant mobility. The migrant worker is replaced by mobile figure (the hawker, the suitcase trader, the street vendor, the mobile seasonal laborer). Unlike in the case of earlier generations of Moroccan migrants the notion of the nation-state is no longer relevant for the understanding of the cultural dynamics and social commitments in which the harraga organise their lives. These men live between several worlds, occupying a network oriented social reality in which the fellow Moroccans sharing largely the similar life situations provide information and know-how that enables their access to flexible economic strategies. After gaining permanent EU residence the vast majority of these men circulates constantly between the two continents and engages in small scale transnational trade. They provide financial help for family members in Morocco (or at least aim to do so), but 51 simultaneously they are clearly detached from their original territorial grounding in Morocco. Moreover they rarely construct firm ties to the host countries in the EU territory in which they move and work (see Juntunen 2002). CONCLUSIONS The brief insight into the cultural context of marginally mobile Moroccan men aimed to demonstrate the kinds of challenges anthropologists face today when attempting to understand masculinity in contexts involving rapid social change, dispersion through international mobility, political upheavals and complex geopolitical power struggles. Instead of addressing masculinity as a problem to be solved, and tool for analyzing change and conflict we need to focus on the ways in which the ethnographers’ subjects understand their lives in multidimensional constructions including state institutions and security practices. More and more often researchers are encountering subjects such as marginal Moroccan men who maintain only lose occasional ties to national settings and local communities and identify themselves through alienation, exile and liminality. Today there is a large body of work on the incorporation of poor women into global labor markets (for example, as domestic workers, sex workers and multinational factory workers) and only recently the attention has turned to men—marked as men—and their transnational practices (Charsley 2006; Donaldson et al. 2009; Osella, Osella 2000). The ethnographers focusing on masculinity in contemporary marginal mobile settings face three central challenges; how to explicate the globally inflected processes in their locally specific forms, how to follow the understandings, conceptualizations and embodied practices the mobile subjects construct and finally, how to understand the connections the people make across economic and social contexts. REFERENCES Bowman, Glenn (1989). Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem Old City. Critique of Anthropology 9/2, 77 93. Cornwall, Andrea, Lindisfarne Nancy (eds.) (1994). Dislocating Masculinit y. Comparative Ethnographies. London: Routledge. Charsley, Katherine (2006). Unhappy Husbands: Masculinity and Migration in Transnational Pakistani Marriages. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11/1, 85-105. Driessen, Henk (1983). Male Sociability and Rituals of Masculinity in Rural Andalusia. Anthropological Quarterly 56/3, 125 133. Donaldson, Mike , Hibbins, Raymond, Howson, Richard , Pease, Bob (eds.) (2009). Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience. London: Routledge. Fargues, Philippe, Fandrich, Cristine (2012). Migration after the Arab Spring. Research report 2012/9. Badia Fiesolana: Migration Policy Centre (MPC), European University Institute. GADEM (2010). The Human Rights of Sub-Saharan Migrants in Morocco. A document produced through the Justice Without Borders Project. Groupe antiracist d’accompagnement et de défense des étrangers et migrants, http://www.jsf-jwb- migrants.org/documents%20-%20all/phaseI_studies/justice-Gadem-eng.pdf, (15.11 2012). Gilsenan, Michael (1996). Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. Berkeley: University of California. Gilmore, David (1991). Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University. Gutmann, Mathew (1996). The Meaning of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California. 52 Hart, Angie (1994). Missing Masculinity? Prostitutes Clients in Alicante, Spain. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (eds. Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne). London: Routledge, 48 66. Kandiyoti, Deniz (1994). The Paradoxes of Masculinity. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (eds. Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne). London: Routledge, 197 213. Loizos, Peter, Papataxiarchis, Evthymios (eds.) (1991). Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece. Princeton: Princeton University. Loizos, Peter (1994). A Broken Mirror: Masculine Ethnography in Greece. Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (eds. Andrea Cornwall, Nancy Lindisfarne). London: Routledge, 66– 96. McDonogh, Gary (1992). Bars, Gender, and Virtue: Myth and practice in Barcelona's Barrio Chino. Anthropological Quarterly 65/1, 19–33. Nonini, Donald (1997). Shifting Identities, Positioned Imaginaries: Transnational Traversals and Reversals by Malaysian Chinese. Ungrounded Empires: the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (eds. Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini). London: Routledge, 203–27. Osella, Filippo, Osella, Caroline (2000). Migration Money and Maculinity in Kerala . Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 6/1, 117 133. Peteet, Julie (1994). Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance: Intifada, Cultural Politics of Violence. American Ethnologist 21/1, 31–49. Papataxiarchis, Evthymios (1991). Friends of the Heart: Male Commensal Solidarity, Gender and Kinship in Aegean Greece. Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece. (eds. Peter Loizos, Evthymios Papataxiarchis). Princeton: Princeton University, 156–179. Vale de Almeida, Miguel (1996). The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town. Oxford: Berghan Books. 53 CONCEPTUALISING THE NEW EUROPEAN NOMADS Špela Kalčić21 NAVIGATING THROUGH THE FIELD Since July 2006, I have travelled extensively in the West African Atlantic coastal regions and in different parts of the Sahara and Sahel (Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Guinea). I came across many Westerners, who resembled tourists and travellers to me, yet these people were in their working age and I gradually learned that they were not involved in any way in the labour market of their home societies. For them, travelling was clearly not simply a holiday escape but a way of life; while many of those whom I met travelled and lived in vehicles converted to mobile homes, others carried backpacks and used public transport or hitchhiked. They were far from a homogenous group. First, their connectedness to sedentary life differed considerably. Some of them told me that they had real estate and land property in their country of origin where they returned frequently. Many others, however, confessed to not owning anything else of value but the mobile home in which they lived in the both continents. I met several people who spent part of the year parked in areas where they were left in peace; in suburban areas of Berlin, mountains and forests of Portugal, Spain and France or in Britain in camp sites established by Travellers/Gens du Voyage, Roma people etc.. Others lived in close vicinity of squatters in Toulouse, Marseille, London, and other places but it was not uncommon to meet those who lived part time in squats or alternatively turned to their friends, families, and the official rental market for housing while in Europe. They represented not only several, mostly European nationalities (the largest groups being French and British) but also different age groups, with a variety of educational and professional backgrounds. There appeared to be varieties of mobile households. The most common form consisted of a couple without children (the minority with children commonly stated that mobile life with children requires more economic resources, planning, security and time-consuming household chores. Others travelled in pairs of friends, however single men on the road were not an uncommon sight in Africa. Single women on the road were rare exceptions. Most of my interlocutors had left sedentary life after the year 2000. While some lived off savings or had regular income thanks to a pension or wage work facilitated by the internet or other ITC technology, the large majority had to resort to various flexible economic strategies while on the road. A clearly shared common trait among these people was a common sentiment and cultural logic of engaging in mobile life. More in-depth conversations revealed that the decision to leave sedentary life in Europe was taken amidst unfortunate or unsatisfactory circumstances; in most cases involving crisis with family, personal frustrations such as unsatisfactory professional situation, economic difficulties or general personal disharmony with dominant values of the consumption oriented background society. Many among my interlocutors come from the lower economic strata of their background societies and had previously suffered from precarious positions in the labour and housing market. 21 PhD in Social Anthropology, Research fellow, Slovenian Migration Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, spela.kalcic@zrc-sazu.si / spela.kalcic@gmail.com, phone 00386 51442211 / 00386 51886715 54 STELLA’S STORY Thirty-two year old Stella was in many ways representative: after she completed her PhD in 2006, her research funds ended. The research institute where she used to work could not provide resources to extend her work contract and she became unemployed. As she had never travelled for a longer period of time, she was very happy to join her partner on a trip with an old Land Rover to Niger. Like many other travellers to West Africa, they covered their travel expenses by selling the car in Africa. After her return, Stella applied without success for several postdoctoral positions. To survive, she worked as an underpaid part-time entertainer in team-building events for big companies. She said her monthly housing expenses exceeded her salary. Soon afterwards, her partner informed her that he had found a mobile home; an affordable four wheel drive truck. Instead of a postdoctoral project, she decided to try out this alternative possibility. In West Africa she began to write articles for newspapers. Together with her partner, she also engaged in occasional tour guiding in Morocco and they gained experience in the trade of second hand goods. In the second half of the year 2008 the newspapers she had cooperated with stopped buying articles from freelance journalists. Due to budgetary cuts in her home country, Stella’s options for gaining academic scholarships reduced greatly. Stella and her partner were now forced to find a new source of income. They decided to fly back to Europe in order to buy a truck, which they could sell for profit in Bamako, Mali. THE PHENOMENON OF NOMADIZATION AMONG EUROPEANS Stella stands as an example for many Europeans who decided to resort to nomadic survival strategies. This decision developed gradually and was additionally stimulated by the financial crisis in 2008. According to unofficial estimates in 2011, approximately 50.000 French people who are not ethnic nomads live in converted vehicles within the French territory (Angeras 2011). Their movement is not about changing a place of residence or the radical break up of social ties. It is rather about circulating among coincidental and previously researched places of more or less temporary stops. These stops consist of unauthorised makeshift encampments on unused lands or verges of roads, parking areas, forests, occasionally in authorised camps and hotels or rental housing, as well as places held by friends, family members or acquaintances, not excluding their own property, located along their trajectories. Furthermore, for these people travelling represents a settled way of life, not an exception as in the case of classic migrants. Going back to the relation between nomadism and sedentarism John Urry and Mimi Sheller argue that “moorings configure and enable mobilities” (Sheller, Urry 2006: 3). Urry further defines nomadism as a constant mobility that also includes temporary rests, i.e. “moorings”: “Temporary rest and replenishment are conditions of mobility. Overall it is the moorings that enable movements” (Urry 2003: 126). Similarly, Joseph C. Berland and Matt T. Salo have observed that among peripatetic nomads “relative levels of mobility and/or sedentarisation are not viewed as opposites” (Berland, Salo 1986: 45). Therefore the constant mobility of a nomadic lifestyle should not be considered without sedentary periods as a constitutive part of nomadism. The aim of this presentation is to discuss the ways in which these new European nomads could be conceptualised by exploring their mobile practices and strategies through lens of traditional peripatetic nomadism (Berland, Salo 1986), neo-nomadism (D’Andrea 2006, 2007), bohemian lifestyle migration (Korpela 2009) and marginal mobility (Juntunen et al.). 55 Traditional Peripatetic Nomadism Peripatetic nomads are according to Joseph C. Berland and Matt T. Salo (1986) defined as nomads engaged in a nomadic strategy “that exploits social rather than natural resources in larger ecocultural systems” (ibid.: 3). They have been labelled by other researchers also as “service nomads” (Hayden 1979), “commercial nomads” (Acton 1981), “non-food producing nomads” (Rao 1982) and “symbiotic nomads” (Misra 1982). As defined by Thomas Acton (2010: 7), peripatetic nomadism presents a specific form of exploitation of resources that are available at the particular territory and is based on the circulation of individuals in the middle of social entities that organise access to this exploitation. As in the case of my interlocutors, peripatetics provide their services and certain skills. However, the demand for these services, merchandise and labour is intermittent, which is why movement to another place which provides new opportunities for work and gains is required. Peripatetic nomadism is according to Thomas Acton defined also as “the recurrent exploitation of spatially and temporally discontinuous economic opportunities” (Acton 2010: 6), as well as an economically, not culturally driven movement, which builds on pursuit of better living standard (Acton 2010: 7). Peripatetic nomadism was so far used mostly for people of nomadic background. These European nomads (moving in and out of Europe) engage in several income-making strategies while on the move, but their nomadism is not rooted in a tribal system and organised through descent groups as in the case of traditional nomads where kinship presents the structural and organising principle of community (Berland, Salo 1986: 4). Belonging is not based on blood relations, but rather marked by pronounced individualism, based on a personal decision to change their lifestyle. Therefore, the sense of ethnic or national identity is extremely weak. The individualism of these people is the main trait which distinguishes their peripatetic nomadic practices from the traditional forms. Neo-nomadism, Bohemian Lifestyle Migration For these people, nomadism has become a strategy of survival due to the economic problems, as well as feelings of futility and the lack of prospects they faced in their sedentary life in Europe. For many European nomads, nomadism in fact represents a form of resilience in times of financial and moral crisis of the contemporary world. The existential dimension of this mobility in my opinion also represents a crucial moment of discordance with lifestyle migration which is more about voluntary travel to and residence at localities where living costs are low, the climate pleasantly warm and life relaxed, i.e. better, and financed by pensions or periodical work in the Global North. Lifestyle migration has been defined as a spatial mobility of “relatively affluent individuals of all ages moving either part-time or full time, permanently or temporarily to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life” (Benson, O’Reilly 2009: 612). Nevertheless, these new nomads could be placed side by side with people categorised as the bohemian wing of lifestyle migrants (Korpela 2009), sometimes denominated as “expressive expatriates” or “global nomads” (D’Andrea 2006, 2007), who lead accentuated mobile transnational lifestyles, embrace more spiritual and artistic aspirations (Korpela 2009: 29) and circulate through global circuits of countercultural lifestyle (D’Andrea 2006), where they usually establish permanent homes (that they regularly leave and stay away for several months), but also earn money utilising their (artistic, spiritual) skills, establish their own businesses etc. (Korpela 2013). The characteristics of bohemian lifestyle migrants and the subjects of my study do indeed coincide, but I nevertheless argue that my interlocutors seem to challenge the deeply rooted academic convention of analytically separating the “privileged” mobilities of the subjects from the Global North from those of the Global South, considered as “unprivileged”, and 56 that the concept of lifestyle migration itself represents one of such analytical frameworks which does not consider looking past this separation. Marginal Mobility The new European nomads are in many ways comparable with less affluent and less privileged contemporary mobile subjects of various geographic and ethnic provenances such as Travellers/Gens du Voyage, border-crossing Tuareg ishumar22 (Kohl 2009, 2013), or once irregular migrants, today marginalized Moroccan men in transnational space between Morocco and other European countries (Juntunen 2013; Juntunen, Kalčić forthcoming). That is why I prefer to conceptualise them as “marginal mobile subjects” (Juntunen et al. forthcoming). According to the concept of marginal mobility (Juntunen et al. forthcoming; Kalčić et al. 2013), which aims to transcend the Global South-North separation, these mobile subjects are highly mobile (1). The voluntary – forced mobilities classification does not bear relevance with regard to these people. The reasons for their lifestyle are neither entirely forced nor voluntary. Many of my interlocutors conceive of themselves as being “pushed from behind” (Bauman 2001) in a variety of ways and marginalized by their background society (2). Their mobility occurs along loosely defined trajectories and not between a limited number of sending and receiving communities where they reside for extended periods of time (3). Therefore, the social relations have a fleeting and situational character and unlike many contemporary migrant and diasporic communities, and due to the simple reason that they are constructed by individuals who are most of the time on the move, these mobile fluid “groups” do not create politicized identities nor politicized public spheres (4). Social weightlessness and a readiness to test how life would work elsewhere characterize their relation to spaces traversed, and mark them by sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation against the sedentary norm of the nation state (5). REFERENCES Acton, Thomas (1981). Gypsylorism in the Far East. Newsletter of the Gypsy Lore Society 4/1, 26. Acton, Thomas (2010). Theorising Mobility: Migration, Nomadism and the Social Reconstruction of Ethnicity. Romani Mobilities in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspective. Conference proceedings (ed. Nando Sigona). Oxford: Oxford University, Refugee Studies Centre, 5–11. Angeras, Anaïs (2011). Du nomadisme contemporain en France. Avec les saisonniers agricol qui vivent en camion. Master 2 Recherche Spécialité Dynamique des Cultures et des Sociétés 2010. Lyon: Université Lumière Lyon II. Bauman, Zygmunt (2001). Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benson, Michaela, O’Reilly, Karen (2009). Migration and the Search for a Better Way of Life: a Critical Exploration of Lifestyle Migration. The Sociological Review 57/4, 608625. Berland, Joseph C., Salo, Matt T. (1986). Peripatetic Communities: An Introduction. Peripatetic Peoples (eds. Joseph C. Berland, Matt Salo). Special Issue of Nomadic Peoples 21/22, 16. 22 The term ishumar derives from the French chômeur, unemployed person, and was transported into Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg. Originally it described those Tuareg who gave up their nomadic life and went to the surrounding neighbouring states, above all to Algeria and Libya, to look for a job. In a second step, the Tuareg rebels of the 1990s have been associated with that term. Today, ishumar refers to a generation of border- crossers whose living conditions have created special mobility strategies (Kohl 2007, 2009, 2010a, b, c). 57 D’Andrea, Anthony (2006). Neo-Nomadism: A Theory of Post-Identitarian Mobility in the Global Age. Mobilities 1/1, 95119. D’Andrea, Anthony (2007). Global Nomads. Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge. Hayden, Robert (1979). The Cultural Ecology of Service Nomads. The Eastern Anthropologist 32/4, 297309. Juntunen, Marko, Kalčić, Špela, Rogelja, Nataša (forthcoming). Mobility, Marginality and the Global Economic Recession. Western Nomads and Mobile Moroccan Men. Nordic Journal of Migration Research. Juntunen, Marko, Kalčić, Špela (forthcoming). Nomads in the Era of Global Economic Crisis: Mobile Lifestyles between Morocco and Mediterranean Europe. Migration, Space and Borders in the Western Mediterranean – A Post Arab Spring Assessment (eds. Hassan Bousett, Laure-Anne Bernes, Caroline Zickgraf). Ulg: University Liège. Kalčić, Špela, Juntunen, Marko, Rogelja, Nataša (2013). Marginal Mobility: A Heuristic Tool for Comparative Study of Contemporary Mobilities. Two Homelands 38, 3348. Kohl, Ines (2007). Tuareg in Libyen. Identitäten zwischen Grenzen, Berlin: Reimer. Kohl, Ines (2009). Beautiful Modern Nomads: Bordercrossing Tuareg between Niger, Algeria and Libya, Berlin: Reimer. Kohl, Ines (2010a). Modern Nomads, Vagabonds, or Cosmopolitans? Reflections on Contemporary Tuareg Society. Journal of Anthropological Research, 66/4, 449–462. Kohl, Ines (2010b). Saharan “Borderline”-Strategies: Tuareg Transnational Mobility. Mobility, Transnationalism and Contemporary African Societies (ed. Tilo Grätz). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 92–105. Kohl, Ines (2010c). Libya, the “Europe of Ishumar”: Between Losing and Reinventing Tradition, Tuareg Society within a Globalized World: Saharan Life in Transition (eds. Anja Fischer, Ines Kohl). London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 143–154. Kohl, Ines (2013).Vagabonds or Elites? The Mobile Lifestyle of Contemporary Tuareg. Two Homelands 38, 7386. Korpela, Mari (2009). More Vibes in India. Westerners in Search of a Better Life in Varanasi. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Misra, Pankaj K., Misra, Rajalakshmi (1982). Nomadism in the Land of Tamils between 1 A.D. and 600 A.D. Nomads in India (eds. Pankaj K. Misra, Kailash Chandra Melhotra). Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India. Rao, Aparna (1982). Non-food-producing Nomads and Problems of Their Classification: the Case of the Ghorbat in Afghanistan. The Eastern Anthropologist 35/2, 115134. Sheller, Mimi, Urry, John (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning 38, 207–226. Urry, John (2003). Global Complexity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 58 LIFESTYLE MIGRATION ON THE SEA: ENVIRONMENT, IMAGINARIES AND ETHNOGRAPHY Nataša Rogelja23 INTRODUCTION The general background of this paper is knitted around the question of how people relate to the sea. More specifically, we will be interested in how people's thoughts and actions are being attuned to the physical and symbolic realities of the sea but also the movement, the latter being deeply connected with the two. Myths, symbols and rituals but also lived experiences of people will be of special importance. Within this general focus we will pay attention to the Western perceptions of the sea, as the ethnographic material surrounding the paper and centered around people comes mainly from the so called “Western countries”. My involvement in this research was two-faceted. In the first two years I was involved in this lifestyle as an insider. As an unemployed anthropologist I was involved in precarious work as a free-lance journalist living and traveling on a boat and fulfilling my dream of spending time with my children while traveling. In the next two years, I was working on an anthropological project registered at the European Scientific Foundation studying lifestyle migrations of people that are living and traveling on sailing boats in Greece and Turkey. As for my interlocutors, they can be considered a highly heterogeneous group - touching on several migration forms such as IRM (International Retirement Migration), long term (sabbatical) travel, lifestyle migration and peripatetic adaptations (Rogelja 2012, Rogelja 2013), yet their common denominator is the sea. In the presentation we will navigate our exploration between environment, literature and ethnography. In the first part of the presentation we will discuss the sea as a physical environment, conceptualising it with mobility, fluidity and change. I will continue with stories and images exploring the sea's potential as an idea. Furthermore, in the ethnographic part this broader framework of ideas attached to the sea will be confronted with experiences and practices of my interlocutors. In the concluding part their experiences of perpetual motion and practices of mobile dwelling that epitomise ideals of individual freedom and self-sufficiency will be placed within the contemporary context of global modernity24 that promotes, enables and generates “the escape” to these places. OUT THERE OR THE SEA AS PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT The sea is connected with motion, as one hardly can dwell at the sea. Islands function as shelters while the sea is traversed and left behind while the waves obliterate the tracks. They are empty and full at the same time; full of routes, memories and symbols yet empty, hardly deserving to be called a place. As Jake Phelan put it: “What is there for us at sea then? Nothing but a boat, one's body and endless waves…” (2007: 5). The sea is therefore on 23 Fellow researcher; Slovenian Migration Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana; natasa.rogelja@zrc-sazu.si 24 Reffering to global modernity, the authors emphasize the sense of the world as a single place (Robertson 1992), time-space compression (Giddens 1990), increased involvement in the network society (Castells 2000) as well as post industrial economic change and neoliberal globalization. Arif Dirlik writes about a global modernity, that is modernity globalised where the political economic integration of the globe has been accompanied by new fragmentations as well as intensification of earliest ones (2011: 4). The ethnography of liveaboards can be understood in the context of economic globalization and technological development that has changed the nature of the human mobility and caused new fragmentations resulting in blurred distinctions between moving subjects. 59 a practical level characterised by crossing, movement, connection but also with fractures, hardship and disuniting. Change and fluidity, together with motion, are also useful concepts to bear in mind when dealing with the sea as a physical environment. Constant shifts of the wind, the phases of the moon and fluctuation of the sand support the idea of change and fluidity on the practical level. Many of my interlocutors described the total contrast between the romantic and highly comfortable calm sea and the horror of the storm as well as the joy of sailing a choppy sea. The landscape changes or disappears as the boat moves by, the layer of the water around the boat is unsettled and even the movement of the boat itself exhibits many characters. The only one who is not moving is the seaman. As the boat moves he waits patiently, struggling to accommodate his body to the motion of the waves and the boat. All these characteristics can be compared with the concept of the smooth space discussed by Deleuze and Guatari (1988). They developed a distinction between a smooth and striated space, the latter being ordered and regulated by a fixed scheme while smooth space allows and requires irregularities. As Jake Phelan wrote, “the smooth space is characterised by an entire region, a desert or sea, without definite borders” (2007: 12). Regardless of its disobedient character, the land-attuned view has always tried to put permanent marks on the sea by imposing charts, latitude and longitude. With the development of GPS technology and its applications such as the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used for identifying and locating vessels by electronically exchanging data with other nearby ships, AIS base stations and satellites, it seems like the sea has been finally controlled. There are sailors who agree and other who disagree with this point. One can hardly get lost and surprised with the new technology but on the other hand, borders are still difficult to set and the wind still blows as it wants, allowing irregularities to happen (one can end in a different place that he/she initially planned). STORIES AND IMAGES OF THE SEA Places are not merely the physical surface and substance but are deeply interconnected with images imposed on them. Initial models of the sea within the Western world were connected with fear and horror (Corbin 1994). The sea as a locus of horror, one that witnesses The Flood, is according to Corbin associated with two main sources, the Bible and a considerable body of classical texts.25 In Corbin's view, this context was prevalent before the 18th century. Later on, during the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism, a different perception of the sea was brought forth with more idyllic images.26 The sea of English and Anglo-Scottish Romantic poets such as John Keats (1795–1821), William Wordsworth (1770– 1850), George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), to name just a few, was portrayed with admiration. If the Romantics were democrats and freedom fighters (Raban 1993: 18), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), a precursor of modernist literature who wrote stories and novels with nautical settings, sailed in the other direction. His far-right political beliefs directed him to set sails – in reality and through literature – because “…the land was polluted beyond repair – by socialism and ‘radical reform’ […]” (ibid). For Conrad, the sea was a strong national 25 One must nevertheless pay attention to the broader frame of Corbin's observations about the 16th and 17th century French Renaissance authors that actually turned only very rarely to the ancient authors in describing the spectacle offered by the waves and the beach and were entirely ignorant of the stillness of the sea. On the other hand they were very sensitive to everything in ancient texts that evoked fear and horror (Corbin 1994: 10–12). 26 Early examples of artistic representations of this “new sea” can be found in Dutch seascape paintings, the most famous example probably being Jan van Goyen's (1596–1656) Beach of Scheveningen. 60 symbol and the last untainted, venerable and holy place left on the earth's surface,27 where one can still maintain the order (Raban 1993: 18–19). Conrad as well as many of his romantic ancestors not only wrote about the sea but were passionate amateur sailors, travellers or had worked in a merchant navy.28 They wrote about the sea and they got soaked by the sea as well. In the context of this intimate relationship between the sea and the man, the small boat sailors and their writings had a special place in the sea-symbolism throughout the 19th and 20th century. Despite of the fact that a small-boat sailing was well established in England at the end of the 19th century, it was the Americans who first circumnavigated the world in a small sailing boat. In 1895, Joshua Slocum – a seaman, adventurer and writer – was the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. A book he published in 1900, Sailing Alone Around the World can be found even today on many liveaboards' boats, on swap-book shelves in marina toilets and club rooms in shipyards. Slocum, a trained and experienced sailor, wrote about the sea and his experience in a much less spectacular manner as his ancestors did. In the course of the 20th century the idea of self-reliance together with the anti- consumerism movement found its way in many sea travelogues, and the sea once again served as a sanctuary for fugitives. One of the most popular examples from the period of the student revolution around 1968, followed mostly by the younger French generation was the French sailor Bernard Moitessier, who sailed on a boat named Joshua, in honour of Joshua Slocum. Apart from his books where he writes about distancing himself from consumerism and environmental destruction of the West, he became almost a legend with his public gesture of “stepping out”. In 1968 he participated in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, which would reward the first and the fastest sailor to circumnavigate the Earth solo and non- stop. Although Moitessier had a good chance of winning, he quit the race and continued on to Tahiti rather than returning to England. Apart from the life that the sea lives within the contemporary literature and travelogues, a special branch of sea-images celebrating the benevolent side of the sea developed after the 1950s with the rise of tourism. As Henk Drissen noted, this idealized view of the sea “is an image constructed from a cruise ship, beach and bathing perspective during the daytime in the spring and summer seasons” (2004: 49). Drissen furthermore contrasts this perspective with the experience of contemporary migrants, showing the sharp opposition between a romantic and agonistic view of the Mediterranean Sea in the twenty- first century (ibid: 48). Drissen's example shows that despite the general trend after the 18th century that gave rise to more positive connotations, the symbolism of the sea has always had many faces. THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF LIVEABOARDS29 In the second part of the 20th century, long term cruising on small sailing boats was no longer connected just with “heroic actions”, sportive achievements or short term amateur 27 On the other hand his American contemporaries started to observe the sea more as a natural phenomenon and not so much as a national symbol. The wilderness of the land and the wilderness of the sea were no different for the Americans (Raban 1994: 20–23). 28 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), a Romantic poet and a passionate sailor drowned on one of his voyages near Italy and later on became a romantic hero (Raban 1994: 25). 29 In this presentation I will sometimes refer to my interlocutors with the word liveaboards and will use it as a descriptor. The word liveaboards is used mainly in the Anglo-Saxon context reffering to the people that are living and traveling on the sailing boats or river boats. As the most popular sailing blogs and forums are in English language the word liveaboards came to use also within more general public as it was evident in my ethnographic research. Even though the term is used here as a general descriptor for all my interlocutors, the differences in terminology between various cultural contexts should not be overlooked. 61 sailing excursions, but was supplemented with long term living and/or traveling on sailing boats. The following story outlines this phenomenon in the last 30 years.30 In 1976 we sold our house, waved goodbye to the family, and took to the sea in a boat we had built ourselves. We became long-distance, liveaboard cruisers […]. Abandoning brick walls and gardens, property taxes, and interference from authorities who continually tried to order what we might or might not do, we took on the less comfortable but much more invigorating life of responsibility for our own actions, health, welfare and safety […] (Cooper, Cooper 1994: 11). The broader beginning is usually marked with the books they read, with the stories they heard (usually about the man who sailed off) or with youth experiences with the sea or sailing. Even though such symbolic beginnings necessary include romantic sea imagery, my interlocutors generally did not talk about the sea in romantic terms during our interviews. As Tom, who spent 15 years living on a boat with his wife explained: “For me the sea has the same meaning as it has for the fish. For me, the sea must be there. My body needs it. The smell, the air… I do not think of it anymore, or admire it anymore so much…” During the interviews, sea passages were also described in a highly realistic way, many times including fear or at least caution and respect for the sea. Nataly, a mother of two children who is living and traveling with her family on a 50-foot home-built sailing boat explained: “You know it is a lot about waiting. Waiting is a special experience… I mean for your body and your mind. You are changed… but… It can be quite boring and tiring… I like it… you sit and you wait. That's it!” The experience of always being on watch, never relaxed, never getting enough sleep, always in motion, never allowing yourself to stop, even during the calm, is described often in the interviews as well as in the books. This experience is in contrast with the tourists' sea and supports the idea of a “smooth” voyage where the self is not static but is always in the zone between multiplicities (Phelan 2007: 15), longing for irregular results. The perpetual motion is in interviews described as something “normal”, characterizing the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st as well as – in the case of sailing and liveaboards experience – as a ticket to step out from the fast spinning world. In contrast with such descriptions of sea-passage experiences, letters for friends, the blogs or books they wrote were set many times against a quite different, at times very romantic tone which is not fake but is in my opinion simply the other side of their story. One such letter from Nataly began as follows: “It's my turn to be at the wheel. It's night and we are passing Spain. Stars above me, stars bellow me. There is a silver track of plankton behind us. Stars in the sea. It is hard to explain how beautiful it is…” The concrete occasions, the point when the departure happened is on the other side usually connected with very specific event – a retirement or a possibility for early retirement, a redundancy, a political event, blocked career choices, disease, divorce or accident, the birth of children, set up on one's one (in the case of younger generation) or an inheritance as well as other kinds of financial circumstances that enable the beginning of the journey. One of my interlocutors, who lost a son in a car accident and shortly after the accident decided to sail around the world with her second partner, described her experience in a following way: “After the accident all was easy for me. I know it sounds weird. I lost fear… it was very easy for me to decide quickly and left behind all what was not important… At that time I just needed emptiness, loneliness, a space with nothing… The sea fitted me.” After spending a few years living on the sea, many of my interlocutors described the sea as 30 Other liveaboard examples include liveabaords living on European rivers, traditional examples from Southeast Asia where several groups as Tanka, Moken and others live on boats and maintain a nomadic life on the sea or other local examples such as San Francisco Bay where during the World War II, when housing was scarce, many labourers created living quarters from old boats and any other materials they could scrounge (http://www.baycrossings.com/Archives/2001/07_August/barging_in.htm, 17.5. 2013). Each of these examples must be put in a specific socio-historical context. 62 an infection, as a virus or as a drug; “…from all the drugs, the sea is the most intoxicating”; “…once you test this kind of life you cannot return to the land anymore…”. The idea is furthermore supported with the stories of land-life being constrained by administrative rules. For those who combine work and travel, mobility is central as they develop a lifestyle on the move. Their mobility is stimulated by various reasons. Bob and Liz for example move further because “…we are fed up with the place, we might find a better job/life somewhere else, because we want to travel, because we want adventure, because we belong nowhere, because we do not want to live in a rat race, because we are used to move, because boats can be untied.” Constant mobility, ongoing quest and mobile economic practices - although interspersed with periods of sedentarism - are deeply incorporated in this way of life and constitute its everydayness. For my interlocutors, the sea functions mostly as a place of ultimate freedom but also as a road to pride “Every man dreams of the sea but only sailors set up the sails”, wrote Croatian sailor Vlado Horvat (1996: 5). Quite aside from this heroic position, there were also cases such as Helka’s, whom I met in Corfu, where this kind of life was described as a prison. She left Finland with her husband in 2007 even though she did not want to go. That was how they planned it 27 years ago, when they got married. They sold their house and put their dog down. Helka did not have children and she told me that her dog was like her only child. She sometimes feels the boat is her prison. For my interlocutors the sea also functions as a place where the on-going mobility is not questionable and where one can still be invisible. A German family that I met in the Corinth Canal explained they often use travel as a camouflage in front of their family, friends and school back home. At the same time, they also stated that they are very inclined towards traveling and sailing but their main reason for leaving their previous life behind was based on their desire to spend more quality time together. Due to several reasons (high costs of living, long working hours in order to pay the bills…), this was not possible for them in Germany. As the mother explained: “It would be weird to go and live somewhere in the mountains in order to spend time together. […] If you say I travel you are normal… If you say I sail you are like a hero.” CONCLUSION In the conclusion we will bring to the fore two questions: What can we learn about the relationship between people and the sea on the grounds of the ethnography of liveaboards, and what is the significance of the sea in the contemporary context of late modernity that - as it was evident on the ground of the presented ethnography – promotes, enables and generates “the escape” to these places? The ethnography presented here speaks about the interconnectedness and symbiotic relationship of material and symbolic aspects of the sea, where both aspects are equally important and can mutually explain each other. Furthermore, we can observe how different perceptions and experiences of the sea are not present just in a diachronic perspective but can also differ synchronically. The perceptions of my interlocutors are different from the perceptions of contemporary migrants described by Henk Drissen, but neither they resemble the tourists' sea. Being involved in the bodily experience with the sea over longer periods and not just observing it from the beach or cruiseship in summer months, they experience the different faces and movements of the sea. The sea of my interlocutors is not just the benign, calm, turquoise summer sea or a sublime romantic sea, it is also a grey coloured place of winter storms forcing human bodies to accustom to the fluid circumstances. Being involved in voluntary lifestyle migration and equipped with modern boats and navigational technology as well as with their skills, they possess a high degree of control and cannot be compared with migrants' experience either. 63 I claim that in the contemporary context, the sea still functions as a place of freedom and escape as it did for centuries before. Following ethnographic accounts, the sea as the physical environment offered refuge in times of personal crisis; it becomes a sanctuary because it is still difficult to conquer and control; a playground for heroes and polygon for adventure because it is unstable and unpredictable; as such, as a places that is difficult to attend, it also becomes an invisible cloak for those who search for alternative lifestyle solutions or those who are pushed towards it in a variety of ways in the context of global modernity. Being deeply connected with Western perceptions of the sea, I claim that my interlocutors “juggle” with established cultural imageries and myths of freedom, the escape and romance of travel to fulfil their needs and dreams, but also with the expected outlines demanded by the dominant sedentary society. This creative social acrobatic can, on the grounds of the present ethnography, be interpreted as a resilience strategy or as subversive actions where the sea offers a perfect physical and symbolic platform from which such subversive actions can be manifested. REFERENCES A Short History of Liveaboards on the Bay, http://www.baycrossings.com/Archives/2001/07_August/barging_in.htm (26 Aug. 2013) Castells, Manuel (2000). The Rise of Network Society. London: Blackwell Publishers. Cooper Bill and Laurel Cooper (1994). Sell up and Sail. London: Adlard Coles Nautical. Corbin, Alain (1994). The Lure of the Sea. The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze Gilles and Felix Guattari (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Dirlik, Arif (2011). Guoxue/National Learning in the Age of Global Modernity. China Perspectives 1, 4–13. Drissen, Henk (2004). A Janus-Faced Sea. Contrasting Perceptions and Experiences of the Mediterranean. MAST 3/1, 41–51. Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horvat, Joža (1996). Besa 1-2 . Zagreb: Mozaik knjiga. Robertson, Roland (1992). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Phelan, Jake (2007). Seascapes: Tides of thought and being in Western perception of the sea. Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers. London: Goldsmith University of London. Raban, Johnatan (2001). The Oxford Book of the Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogelja, Nataša (2012). Liveaboards in the Mediterranean: Luxury or Marginality? Ethnographic Reflections on Maritime Lifestyle Migrations. Two Homelands 36 119–130. Rogelja, Nataša (2013). Contemporary Peripatetic Adaptations: Mobility, Marginality and Inventiveness, Two Homelands 38, 49–62. Slocum Joshua (1956). Sam z jadrnico okoli sveta. Ljubljana, Globus. 64 FROM ROMANI TRAVEL AND HOMEPLACE TO PERMANENT SETTLEMENTS: MULTIPLE MEANING OF MOVEMENTS AND PLACE IN ROMANI ARRATIVES Alenka Janko Spreizer31 My contribution to this conference explores the concept of marginality in relation with space and movement and discusses the social construction of space and place. It is based on the narration of a Roma family within the temporal framework of the state’s imposed regime of territorial ordering of Romani settlements in South-Eastern Slovenia, and within a framework dealing with the marginality of particular people and place. This presentation follows the recent contribution of a new anthropology of mobility to issues of place and space. Moreover, it tackles the question of belonging within Gypsy studies (Theodosiou 2003) and explores movement and place as constructed by Roma in unequal, differential and contested processes of emplacement in the outskirts of Krško, in the southeast part of Slovenia. MOVEMENT, MOBILITY, MARGINALITY AND ENCLOSURES As a theoretical background, I will follow the suggestions of “a new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller, Urry 2006) and of recent studies on mobility and movement (Bönisch-Brednich, Trundle 2010; Jansen, Löfving 2009; Kirby 2009). Cunnigham and Heyman underlined the importance of political and economical processes, which have an impact on the mobility and immobility of people, ie. a movement “within the context of mobilities enjoined with enclosures” (Cunnigham, Heyman 2004: 293). The analytical description of Romani narrations of their locations and travels, on the one hand dwells on the concept of marginality, which transgress the culture of a (Roma) poverty thesis (cf. Day, Papataxiarchis, Stewart 1999) and focuses on the places and spaces of marginality (Green 2005). My presentation is based on the notion of marginality of people and places and on “ambiguous marginality” (Green 2005). Recent studies on Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, and space (Kendall 1999; Levinson, Sparkes 2004; Sigona 2005; Theodosiou 2003) have also stressed the importance of movement. In her contribution, Aspasia Theodosiou showed that “emplaced belonging” may also be important for those known as nomads and labelled as Gypsies (cf. Theodosiou 2003). MOVEMENT AND BELONGING This text focuses on Romani movements as travels that were practiced in and perceived by Roma and locals, who saw them at the one hand as roamers, wanderers or even vagabonds and as homeless people or people with no home place. The article explores multiple meanings of movement and place in Romani narrations in relation to their travel and home place and permanent settlement. I will attempt to bridge the gap between sedentary and nomadic perceptions of the social world proposed by recent scholars of mobility and space. Following concepts of emplacement and displacement, the paper explores how practices of identification are 31 Alenka Janko Spreizer, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska, Titov trg 5, 6000 Koper, alenka.janko.spreizer@fhs.upr.si, phone 00386 56637 740 65 connected to particular territories and how, through home-making, Roma developed their own understanding of locality and belonging. ETHNOGRAPHY ON MARGINAL MOBILITY OF ROMA I started to study Roma as a young researcher of social anthropology and PhD student in the middle of 1990s. Besides living with some Roma families during successive periods of field work, I also followed several political and cultural events, such as celebrations of the International Romani Day. For this text I am using ethnographic material collected on those occasions, and ethnographic material collected during my recent fieldwork in the summer of 2010, when I explored topics of space, place and emotions. “When they stopped ... the troubles began” I participated at the Round table in Krško, held on 8 April 2000. At the time, a majority of mayors, state public employees for ethnic minority questions, environment and planning, farming and foresting, researchers, media journalists, NGOs representatives and others were discussing the problem of legalisation of Romani settlements in Slovenia. During the discussion, Roma were seen both as Others and also as a marginalized population, often imagined as socially excluded people, “whose life in freedom is not understandable to sedentary people”, who are placeless or uprooted and “who had not found their own place under the sun”. In her introductory comments, the moderator from the local community explained to people participating at that event that “Roma used to be mobile people whose life was interwoven by many routes”. She also added that at a certain moment the “Roma stopped, stabilized and began to live”. “When they stopped”, continued the moderator, “they became a part of the life of inhabitants of Krško, and in following years the troubles began”. Portraying Roma as new comers and not indigenous, acknowledging their presence “around there” but denying them their locality while according to this narrative, their main problems were basic living needs, such as “a roof over their head and a piece of land”. It took 10 years for some Romani settlements around Krško to be legalised and for some inhabitants of Romani settlements to buy land, legalise their planning permissions for their new or older buildings, connected electricity, water and the other communal services. Ambiguity of Romani settlement Drnovo is geographically located on the outskirts of the village with the same name, where Roma bought land in 1950s and then built their huts. As a space of marginality, this place is ambiguous (cf. Green 2005): somehow problematic, because it is populated by Roma who are on the one hand socially excluded, but are on the other hand in better socio-economic situations compared to other Roma from Kerinov Grm, Rimš and Loke (three Romani settlements in Krško). This place is ambiguous due to its relative location: it was “the where”, not only “the who”, that was important. Moreover, the marginality of Drnovo is described as “a kind of periphery containing distinct people or places that have been ignored and/or oppressed, and/or misrepresented by the centre” Green 2005: 5): nevertheless, this place needs to be controlled because it geographically lays within “the third protective regime for archaeological monuments”, being situated nearby the former riverbed of the Sava river which is considered as a geomorphologic area of natural heritage. Dwelling in travel and enclosure I spoke with an elder Romani woman and her granddaughter-in-law: for both, I use pseudonyms. The elder woman, Tončka, explained that the frictions with the dominant 66 society started immediately after they bought their land; their placement was contested by villagers who did not want Roma as neighbours : “These people were not friendly; they claimed that we would not be able to stay here. And the whole village collected money to buy us off, and demanded we should go away”. Her father did not sell his land : he would not give up his plot for any money. “We were around this village, and we were here before the second Romani site in the area. We have always been around here. And we went in the direction to another Romani site”, responded Tončka on the questions about their movements and emplacements. Roma families appropriated certain locations and constructed them as Roma places where they belong. They considered themselves almost as locals there, since they were always around, dwelling in travel through a shifting area of locations, or on relative locations (Green 2005), which could not been pinned down to a certain geographical location, This was a location where Roma move and return from time to time and where they were allowed to stay for a while. When they bought land in that particular location, their place was still constructed by movements, since they did not stop travelling despite having settled. An interpretation based on the mobility-enclosure continuum (cf. Ballinger 2012; Cunningham, Heyman 2004) may additionally shed light upon on Tončka’s family mobility: the Roma could move, but their movement was enabled within recognized limitations: they were moving around locations, collective lands or plots of commons, which allowed them to stop and stay overnight. “When I was a little girl, from the beginning, I did not like travelling. I do not know, maybe the others feel differently. My brothers and sister do not miss nomadic life”. Places of travelling to were constructed out of practice, and had not been seen as fixed locations, static and separated from their visitors; to paraphrase Sheller and Urry, “places travelled to depend in part upon what is practiced within them” (2006: 214). In Tončka’s case, places travelled to depend upon dealing with practices of handling horses and collecting herbs. Emplacements, displacements Interlocutors from the Roma settlement saw the move from tents to a house as emplacement, as a life in another world which was different to the difficult life in tents. When they talked about travel in connection with life in tents, they remembered the never-ending demands for displacement from places of camping owned by villagers, from which they were evicted by police or expelled by inhabitants. They were mainly searching for common land where they could stay. When it was raining outside, it was not raining on us. We sat inside and I looked outside ... But when we were in a tent, it was pouring on us. People could not wash, we went to sleep dressed, but when we were in the cottage ( bajta), life was entirely different. Pluriolocality and hibridity of home Home in this narration is something plurilocal and hybrid: it is both here/around Krško in a tent and there/abroad, at her husband’s house. Conflating home and house, (cf. Rapport, Dawson 1999: 6) sedentary people imagined that nomads have no home, since they do not have physical shelter in the form of a house. In Tončka’s narration, the notion of home is sometimes used as a synonym for house, but on the other side, by home she also describes physical space and a certain geographical location. The notions of home may be explained also as enclosure, paying 67 regards to the interaction between the place of her father’s family and terrible social relationships, unequal power and abusive social relations within her family. CONSCLUSION The narration about ending tent life was not constructed within a definite temporal framework, but it does seem connected with the formal purchase of land and subsequently, the building of a house. It is important to underline that having a house is not incompatible with habiting in a tent; in the narratives there is no clear demarcation of a permanent transition from a tent to a house as set by the sedentary logic of social Darwinism which sees a transition from nomadic to sedentary dwelling as irreversible and permanent. The sense of place was not seen as fixed or given, or separated from its visitors. Portrayed in an indefinite past and reconstructed from the memory of places they travelled to with their horses, they were seen in relations to people and were connected with certain economic activities, such as collecting herbs and mushrooms, and practicing agricultural work while travelling: “Being on the move can involve sets of ‘occasioned’ activities” (Lyons, Urry in Sheller, Urry 2006: 213). The routes were reconstructed in relation with those economic activities within certain spatial boundaries and geopolitical borders. REFERENCES Ballinger, Pamela (2012). Borders and the Rhythms of Displacement, Emplacement and Mobility. A Companion to Border Studies, (ed Thomas N. Wilson and Hastings Donnan). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 389–404. Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte, Trundle, Catherine (eds.) (2010). Local Lives. Migration and the Politics of Place. Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate. Cunningham, Hilary and Josiah McC. Heymann (2004). Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11, 289–302. Day, Sophie, Papataxiarchis, Evthymios , Stewart, Michael (eds.)(1999). Lilies of the Field. Marginal People who live for the Moment. Colorado, Oxford: Westview Press. Green, Sarah (2005). Notes from the Balkans. Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Ingold, Tim (2009). Against Space. Place, Movement, Knowledge. Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement (ed. Peter Wynn Kirby). Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 29–43. Jansen, Stef, Löfving, Staffan (2009). Struggle for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kendall, Sally (1999). Sites of Resistance: Places on the Margin – The Traveller “Homeplace”. Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity (ed. Thomas Acton). Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 29–43. Kirby, Peter Wynn (2009). Lost in “Space”: An Anthropological Approach to Movement. Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement (ed. Peter Wynn Kirby). Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 1–27. Levinson, Martin P., Sparkes, Andrew C. (2004). Gypsy Identity and Orientations to Space. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 33/6, 704–734. Mallett, Shelley. (2004). Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature. The Sociological Review 52/1, 62–89. McVeigh, Robbie( 1997). Theorising Sedentarism: The Roots of Anti-Nomadism. Gypsy Politics and Traveller Identity. A Companion Volume to Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity (ed. Thomas Acton). Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 7–25. 68 Rapport, Nigel, Dawson, Andrew (eds.) (1998). Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in the World of Movement. Oxford, New York: Berg. Sheller, Mimi, Urry, John (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning 38, 207–226. Sigona, Nando (2005). Locating “The Gypsy problem”. The Roma in Italy: Stereotyping, Labelling and “Nomad Camps”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31/4, 741–756. Stewart, Michael (1999). “Brothers” and “Orphans”: Images of Equality Among Hungarian Rom. Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment. Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination (eds. Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, Michael Stewart). Westview: Westview Press. Theodosiou, Aspasia (2003). “Be-longing” in a “Doubly Occupied Place”: The Parakalamos Gypsy Musicians. Romani Studies 14/2, 25–58. 69 JAZZ COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE METHOD OF HOPE IN A SMALL SLOVENIAN TOWN Miha Kozorog32 In my recent study of newly established art and pop festivals in Slovenia I paid attention to the relations between festival and place. Festivals are usually thought of as condensed presentations of a number of artistic acts, yet they may also be considered in spatial terms. A festival is a rooted activity, but through its content, visitors, media coverage etc. it is embedded within broader cultural spaces. There are several research themes which deal with the relations between festival, place and incorporated spaces. These include place- making, place-branding, tourism, mobility, contested narratives of place and the production of locality among others. In this paper I will pay attention to a particular attitude of some festival organisers towards the places where they organise festivals. The festival organisers I will pay attention to are those who are usually involved with festivals in only one place, which they consider home. I would like to propose that their organisational activities are primarily motivated by that place, although they declaratively do it for the sake of art, youth culture or some alternative values. The large majority of the fifteen such festival organisers, whom I have interviewed, claimed that they would not move their festivals anywhere, although better conditions were offered in other places. The organiser of the jazz festival in the town of Cerkno, around which I will construct my argument, claimed the following: No, no way. Look, there were offers and here, well, there were big problems here too, there always are. Generally, no one will support you. When they go around the world, they like to boast: “Well, I’m from Cerkno, there, where the jazz is”, but when you go to the same person and ask for sponsorship, he’d give you a look, as if you were from Mars, as if he didn’t get what you were talking about... Many say: “Move the festival elsewhere, go to some other place, where they’ll give you money.” No! Not a chance. We’ll do it here or nowhere. The festival organiser operates on the basis of an attachment to place, encompassing a motivation to actively transform the place he feels attached to. In what follows I would like to propose that his festival engagement has a certain cosmopolitan agenda, which is transcending mere place-attachment or belonging. In addition, I will propose that this agenda essentially concerns local material conditions and operates, in Hirokazu Miyazaki’s terms (2004), on hopeful endurance. There is something else I wish to add: I have focused on organisers in non-central and usually small Slovenian towns and the thesis I am proposing applies precisely to such environments. Before I turn to the case of Cerkno, let me briefly elaborate on the apparently contradictory concept of the “local-cosmopolitan”. By contradictory, I refer to such elaborations of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as notoriously proposed by Ulf Hannerz (1996 [1990]). “[T]here are cosmopolitans, and there are locals” (1996: 102), as he described it in simple terms. The first are “footloose, on the move in the world” (1996: 104), and thus willing “to engage with the Other” (1996: 103), the latter stuck in the taken-for-granted worlds. Hannerz was later criticised for this elitist juxtaposition, by Noel Salazar (2010) among others. Salazar instead portrays place-attached service providers in tourism as culture brokers and as actors who introduce cosmopolitan worldviews into local 32 Researcher, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana, miha.kozorog@uni-lju.si 70 environments. It is in this manner that I understand my own elaboration of festival organisers as locals-cosmopolitans. I consider their cosmopolitanism as an “imagination that is articulated in cultural models of world openness that enable novel understandings and explanations of the local/global nexus” (Nowicka, Rovisco 2009: 6). A festival is thus a cultural model with which they engage in order to flood “their” place with cosmopolitan worldviews and supra-local cultural spaces, as represented through art and popular culture. The town of Cerkno lies in a mountainous part of western Slovenia and has a population of around two thousand. Historically, the area has been an open environment. In Socialist Yugoslavia the area’s economy, which traditionally relied on agriculture, came to be increasingly based around ETA Cerkno, a manufacturer of electrothermal appliances. This enterprise has been integrated into global markets since the end of the 1960s. There is also a strong emphasis on tourism: Franja, a partisan hospital from the Second World War today remains a relevant monument and is included in the European Heritage Label programme and UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage; in 1956 the town’s at that point extinct Shrove Tuesday tradition was revived and rendered a tourist attraction. From 1984 a relatively successful ski centre has also been operating. Today, the Franja hospital and the ski centre attract many guests during their respective seasons on a daily basis. However, the Shrove Tuesday celebration is a slightly different story, since according to some locals it is becoming increasingly “local” in character. While attending the jazz festival in 2010, I asked two ladies, both retired pedagogical workers (aged approximately sixty and eighty), about their local views on the festival. “We’re proud of it,” said the younger one and added, “It’s all we have, and then there won’t be anything in Cerkno throughout the year. Three days and then nothing.” I objected, mentioning that they also have Shrove Tuesday. Appalled, they explained that it has become merely a platform for making local political accusations. The older one added that many young people, especially the the intelligentsia, are moving away, and that she sees the jazz festival as an event during which all these people return. Interestingly enough, before the festival started in 1996, Cerkno had not had any jazz history. For most locals, then, jazz is not “their” music, but Jazz Cerkno has nonetheless become “their” festival. A local explained to me: “People here are peasants. They’re not interested in jazz and they don’t like that kind of music, but they like the festival. They will never embrace jazz, but they have embraced the festival.” Cosmopolitan aesthetics thus create a “friction” (Tsing 2005) through which the festival inflicts a cosmopolitan “blow” to local conditions. How did this festival find its home in Cerkno? It was during the mid-1990s that three local youngsters opened a bar with a concert venue and soon added a festival. Nevertheless, it seems that a key motive was a perception of a certain social crisis, which they experienced in the local environment. A comparison with the conditions that prompted organisers from Hultsfred in Sweden, studied by Jonas Bjälesjö, to start the Rockparty festival there in 1981, may be instructive: “The picture that these young people painted was that of an ordinary small industrial town with little activity, industries closing down and people, particularly young people, moving away from the area” (2002: 20). Young people in Hultsfred thus engaged themselves in producing a festival to fight feelings of geographical marginalisation. The organiser from Cerkno evoked a similar “structure of feeling” (Williams 2005 [1977]): Before we opened the bar, students were not returning to Cerkno at all. They stayed out of Cerkno for a fortnight, three weeks, for as long as they had clean underwear, then they’d come back to Cerkno, change garments, and take the first bus back to Ljubljana. [...] As soon as possible back to Ljubljana, into life. We were going there too, but we had enough of it, because we had to go to Ljubljana; but why would you have to go to Ljubljana, why there, when we could do something here. [...] After we achieved that students could hardly wait to come back to Cerkno. In three years we had reversed the trend. 71 I find the material conditions, the emigration of coevals and the moving away of the intelligentsia (as the above quoted lady mentions) as important background which provides a texture for understanding the youngsters’ engagement with “their” place. Through their activities they tried to trigger movement in the opposite direction. However, why then a festival and why a jazz festival, and not just the initial bar? In fact, in the year when they opened the bar, they initiated two rock festivals and a funk festival. Obviously the point lay in organising a festival, not in the kind of music to be performed, and jazz was added only later. The purpose was “to make something bigger happen here around”. Since the mid-1990s this has been a common strategy in many localities throughout Slovenia. Whilst having a common strategy in place-branding and tourism, the approach taking was overwhelmingly a grass-roots approach, only later followed up by local developmental and tourist institutions. In the 1990s, in places where “not much was going on”, for young people a youth (or a student) club/bar and a festival represented promises of change and transformation. However, the two “promises” operated within different temporalities and spatial frames. A club/bar functions as a local meeting point, designed with the aim of invigorating the local environment throughout the year. However, although destined to empower local conditions precisely with cosmopolitanism, it has in many places unveiled the impotence of local environments, when week after week the “same old faces” would observe how not very much has changed. On the other hand festivals operate according to a different temporality, because their purpose is not to change the day-to-day atmosphere of a place, but to have an impact once in a year. A successful festival may thus turn out to be much more effective in reaching the goal of bringing about cosmopolitan change. A festival which is able to attract visitors from afar, about which reports are made by national and international media, and which can initiate narratives that travel along the worlds of art and popular culture, has the obvious capacity to change a place entirely (although apparently just temporarily). I would like to apply Miyazaki’s ideas on the “method of hope” (2004) to festivals, youth venues, and their time frames. As already mentioned, the bar in Cerkno has redefined many young people’s attitudes towards their home town. However, as time has gone by, the bar owners/festival organisers have discovered that in fact they have not really changed the local conditions and that they have to keep on fighting for each and every young person’s inclination towards the town. The festival functions on a different time frame; as time-out- of-time in Falassi’s terms (1987). Their continuous work in the bar is thus complemented by their work on this other time-frame, which feeds back and empowers the first one. The festival is therefore the organisers’ method of hope, an event which takes place once a year, demonstrating that a profound change in the local environment is possible, although after it finishes everything goes back to how it was before. However, does it really go back to how it was before? The organisers have discovered that festival interventions may indeed have more enduring consequences. In this respect jazz turned out to be of strategic value. Due to its references to both high and popular culture, it was on the one hand able to access state funds and a certain amount of political support, and on the other hand was able to gain popularity and media attention, which both empowered the festival’s position regarding local matters. However, there is something else worth mentioning here, what Steven Feld terms “jazz cosmopolitanism” (2012). Feld describes the ability of jazz musicians to know a certain broader world through sound, to intimately experience this world as their own, and to ironically comment on local environments via engagement through musical practices and experiences. In Cerkno “jazz cosmopolitanism” has certainly seeded its weeds. For example, the local church did not agree to quiet bell-ringing during the festival, a fact which was pretty annoying for some musicians. Nevertheless, musicians improvised and incorporated the bell-ringing into their music. However, when a Bosnian musician ironically replied to the bells by imitating an imam’s call to prayer, the local clerk perceived it as a message about tolerance and consequently made his own practice a more tolerant one – during subsequent festivals the 72 church bells remained quiet. This is just one small story of how cosmopolitanism was used to implement a change. The strength of the festival lies precisely in its cosmopolitan character, and the strength of its organisers in the ability to shift between local idioms and jazz cosmopolitanism. The festival’s position in local matters is consolidated by its ability to bring the world into the town and to make the town travel the world. As Sarah Green has shown (2005), for people from certain places, what is important for them is where they come from and what kind of myths or narratives are formed around “their” places. In Cerkno people are well aware that the distinctiveness of Cerkno also derives from jazz. A local artist commented: Our parents, the type like my mum, who are traditional people, follow this thing from a distance. They think it’s something good, I think partly because it’s covered quite a lot by the media. What they get from elsewhere is good enough… [...] I think it’s only because of the media coverage and recognition. Yet it is not only the media coverage that gives them a feeling of participation in the broader world; there are international artists and audiences that frequent local inns, audio and film recordings that travel along international artistic paths, and organisers themselves who have become ambassadors of the town. Mobility has an obvious ideological load here. To conclude, I have discussed a group of place-attached cultural organisers, who are, rather than moving themselves, engaged in the making of a moving place. In other words, they engage in movement through the movement of “their” place. The place, which is obviously lacking certain kinds of mobility, predominantly those associated with popular culture, arts and education (to name just a few hegemonic social fields of our time), is being held hostage by the festival, which colonizes it via artists, audiences, journalists etc., who then take it into the world through narratives, souvenirs and so forth. The cosmopolitan agenda of the organisers is thus to some degree fulfilled, but at the same time they remain aware that their cosmopolitan project is only modestly transforming the place, which is why the festival provides a method for keeping their hopes regarding the place alive. REFERENCES Bjälesjö, Jonas (2002). The Place in Music and Music in Place. Ethnologia Scandinavica 32, 20–33. Falassi, Alessandro (1987). Festival: Definition and Morphology. Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (ed. Alessandro Falassi). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1–10. Feld, Steven (2012). Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Green, Sarah F. (2005). Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London, New York: Routledge. Miyazaki, Hirokazu (2004). The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nowicka, Magdalena, Rovisco, Maria (2009). Introduction: Making Sense of Cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism in Practice (eds. Magdalena Nowicka, Maria Rovisco). Farnham, Burlington: Ashgate, 1–16. Salazar, Noel B. (2010). Tourism and Cosmopolitanism: A View from Below. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology 1/1: 55–69. Tsing, Anna L. (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 73 Williams, Raymond (2005 [1977]). Navadna kultura: izbrani spisi [ Ordinary Culture: Selected Writings]. Ljubljana: Studia Humanitatis. 74 MOVEMENT, CENTRALITY, AND EMBODIED ENCOUNTERS – AMAZONIAN INDIGENOUS CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF PLACE Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen33 INTRODUCTION This paper considers the Manchineri, an Arawakan-speaking indigenous group, and their movement and conceptions of places other than those situated in their demarcated forestry land. The Manchineri live by the Yaco river, in the largest demarcated indigenous reserve, Mamoadate, of the state of Acre, Brazil. There live the majority of the Manchineri people, some 800 persons. Some 200 Manchineris reside in urban areas, especially in Rio Branco (the state capital), and a few families in Assis Brasil, the closest municipality to the reserve (80 km from the Yaco River). The reserve is divided into ten villages. The Manchineri people live by hunting, gathering, and maintaining agricultural activities. Some Manchineris have also been active in indigenous politics at state, regional, and national levels. In general, many native groups experience diverse contacts with urban areas. In this paper I will demonstrate that in Amazonia personal experiences and embodied relationship of the space make places to exist. The place-formation is closely related to movement that order memories, values, attitudes, as well as define “us”, persons, and friends in new ways. The ethnography shows that movement as a process is essential for the Manchineri, because their body is considered in a constant change and is nourished by new knowledge and transformations related to movement. The Manchineri reserve has remained relatively closed off to non-Indians: the direction of the visits is more from the Mamoadate reserve to the outside, rather than from the outside in. In the summer time, the Manchineri can access the closest town, Assis Brasil, in one day. First one has to reach the small settlement of Icuriã by the Yaco River, which is approximately a two-hour canoe trip from the nearest Manchineri village. In the dry season (June–October), the hilly path of 80 km from Icuriã to Assis Brasil can be covered by jeep (taking approximately three hours). In the winter (November–April), people cover the distance on foot, taking approximately two days, as the rainy season turns the path very muddy. Assis Brasil, with a population of 6,000, is a border town on the Brazilian–Peruvian frontier. Rio Branco, the state capital, with a population of 335,796, is five hours’ drive from Assis Brasil along the BR-317 highway. In the Acre state, the indigenous population numbers approximately 16,000, representing 15 different indigenous groups. The population as well as the urbanisation has been growing at an accelerating rate since the 2000s. I am interested in looking at indigenous conceptualizations of movement through the theories looking at personhood and the body are thought of in Amazonia. For many Amerindians, personhood is produced in convivial relations and the body is considered in relations to other subjects, including also non-humans (such as animal and plant spirits). The non-human beings, such as animals and plants, have similar capacities for knowledge and desire to human beings, but their processes of sociality are different. The other is, however, the source of dynamism of Amazonian socio-cosmology (See e.g. Descola 2005; Stolze Lima 1999[1996]; Viveiros de Castro 1996). I show how the relationality of each agent in Amazonian socio-cosmos is altered when subjectivities move altering the ways the world 33 Post doctoral Researcher at the Department of World Cultures, Latin American studies, Helsinki University and the Centre EREA (Enseignement et Recherche en Ethnologie Amérindienne), Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense, France, PL 24 (Unioninkatu 40) 00014, HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO, Finland, pirjo.virtanen@helsinki.fi, phone 00358 407455121 75 and places are viewed. I add to the Amazonian social philosophy the theories of place making. In the analysis of the movement I also apply the theories of Tim Ingold (2000, 2009, 2011) and Doreen Massey (2005), who regard places as relational. Their views differ from each other, because for Ingold, the regions where wayfaring occurs is a matrix of movement constituted by its inhabitants’ histories of moving to and from the place. He looks at the individual experiences of locations and their histories, whereas Massey takes more into account power geographies and addresses altering margins and centers. I will show that Manchineri's places and movement can be understood in Ingold's term of wayfaring, but for the Manchineri, additionally, centrality is reproduced while moving and by power of those who reproduce their relations to the kin, and are empowered by the knowledge of the non- indians. It is essential to know the objective of one’s movement. Centrality is shaped by social relations and production that enable and reproduce a “home” and “us”. That also makes return to “home” an essential in the process of movement. CENTRALITY The Amazonian indigenous settlements of the kin are places to create relatedness and sociality. Houses are often situated next to the central plaza that functions as the centre of the social life – meetings, dances, plays, rituals – and it is the place where visits to people’s homes as well as arrivals at the village and departures are seen. All Manchineri villages are situated next to the river Yaco. In the most Manchineri villages, the houses are situated around an open space, where the communal buildings such as schoolhouses, a hut for the VHF communication radio, telephone, a women’s house for handicrafts, a telephone booth, and sanitary facilities are found. The village centre is the point and direction of looking at the world, as the position of the houses show in the drawing below by a Manchineri girl from the Extrema village, where I have also resided the most. The central open place is also used for football, and in two villages it serves as an airstrip for light aircraft as is also shown in the drawing (the Yaco River is pictured in yellow). On the other hand, the village centre is also place from where the people see the world around them, which is their central point of view to the word. When men and women leave the village centre for fishing, men for hunting, gardening, or women to collect manioc and gathering, they follow the land paths that lead to the forest, lakes, and other parts by the river shore. The river and its tributaries also form one of the Manchineri’s paths that can also be used when hunting, fishing, accessing forest resources, or visiting houses that are distant from the village centre. The difference of fluvial ways from land paths is that they have other types of non-humans (fish, different types water beings, and beings underwater), who have to take into consideration. In general, for Manchineri, the natural environment is inhabited by various non-human beings, such as animal, tree, ancestor, and plant spirits. Some of them are referred in kin terms due to long historical convivial relations. Movement related to hunting, gathering, and looking for various resources is also a part of indigenous peoples’ way of understanding their history and ecological agency (Rival 2002). Land and water paths are shared with the kin and ancestors typically used them. For the Manchineri, the movement from and to the centre, where people relate to kinsfolk by diverse embodied shared practices, establish social, economic, and cultural production of the community, makes their home villages meaningful (cf. also Feld and Basso 1996), and contrasts them to the others. It also constitutes one’s body, as it defines the relations to other beings in the world, both human and non-human, including objects and elements in the forest environment and the “centre”. It has been described that the Amazonian Indians see the body in the process of becoming (see e.g. Vilaça 2005). In fact, the whole Amerindian epistemological system is constructed on the importance of the body and bodies have different points of view. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996: 128) notes, in Amerindian thought ‘the point of view is located in the body’. 76 A different type of corporal movement and the type of body as a centre essentially defines the person. The Manchineri usually even receive their Manchineri names according to the way they move their bodies or how their body appears and embody the space. For instance, if a person likes to visit places and moves fast, he can be called “bee” ( Wrolo). The Manchineri names are commonly used between the Manchineri, and elders, who see the essential character of a child through their bodies, give the Manchineri names. The Manchineri’s naming shows how the way the person embodies the place is fundamental for their personhood. CONCEPTUALISATION OF PLACES AND TRAJECTORIES OF LIFE When I worked with young Manchineris, I asked the youths in the reserve to name cities and foreign countries they knew or had heard of. The drawings and young people’s explanations about them led me to realize that the places with which the youth of the reserve have no contact are all similarly abstract and meaningless for them. Many of the maps sketched by the young Manchineri illustrated only the places that form destinations of visits from the reserve. The world viewed from the reserve is clearly represented in the sketch map made by a 19-year-old young woman. On her map, the indigenous territory ( terra indígena) and three closest urban centres are marked – namely, Rio Branco, Sena Madureira and Assis Brasil – and the paths between the indigenous territory and Assis Brasil, the paved route from Assis Brasil to Rio Branco and the new road to Peru. These four locations are the destinations of Manchineri undertaking longer journeys, and are closely related to their lives. The central position of the state capital in the drawing is confirmed by diverse economic and socio-political relations that form the Manchineri’s present and future: it is the destinations of the visits to the principal indigenous health centre of the region, and in the state capital many encounters take place, such as political negotiations, cultural manifestations, and training courses. Although Rio Branco is in a central place in the sketch map, on the map more importance is afforded the indigenous land and Assis Brasil, the closest municipality to the indigenous land with the most contacts and knowledge. Interestingly, the paved road to the state capital is also pictured in the very centre. Furthermore, in the drawing, Sena Madureira is placed as the furthest town on the eastern side of Rio Branco, even though on the maps elaborated by “the dominant society’s offices of geography” it is situated on the northwestern side of it. The reason for the Manchineri young woman to position it further than Rio Branco may be that the Manchineri have less interaction with Sena Madureira as it is no longer administratively responsible for the indigenous area, though it is the only city people can access directly by the Yaco River. Some Manchineri sketch maps narrated several countries, states, and cities outside the closest region, but the city of Rio Branco was still placed in the centre. Centrality of Rio Branco, state capital, can be understood through relating to new people, beings, production, exchange, and transformation. The state capital distributes its administrative influence to the municipalities in the state, and the state power was reflected in the governmental social benefits paid to indigenous people, programmes of indigenous education, health care, territorial protection, and so called cultural revitalisation. Thus, the integration of the indigenous population to the state through these programmes also shapes the Manchineri’s movement from their lands. The state capital is also the source of the flux of many commodities to smaller municipalities, and eventually to indigenous territory, including ammunition, gasoline, clothes, food (especially salt, coffee, sugar, vegetable oil), candles and detergents. The system of transport and economic system was already created in the colonialisation of the Amazon region, making Rio Branco one of the strategic centres, especially in the rubber epoch (cf. Castro 2009). 77 Manchineri’s ways of conceptualizing places can be understood as personal trajectories because their places are formed movements to places where a person had visited or had heard talked about. The places exist in relation to one’s own subjectivity forming as well as other people’s relations with places. For the Manchineri, places are located or viewed from a certain position, or point of view. Therefore the conceptualisation of places can alter depending on the relation the person and the people closest to her or him have with places. The places familiar to the Manchineri have histories and are related to their knowledge. Places do not have locations, as Ingold (2000: 29) says, but histories. With histories we can understand the experiences of places. Moreover, Manchineri’s movement to particular places taken together form a meshwork described by Ingold (2000, 2009), in which lines are threads of movement and “concentration” of threads form kind of knots. As Ingold has presented, the threads of movement connect the knots in the meshwork, but threads can also exist as “open ended” lines (such as in this slide we saw in the path to Peru that is solely a path away from Assis Brasil). And as he puts it, one situates oneself in the meshwork of journeys that form the history of the region (Ingold 2000, 2009). Different views to places were well presented in the detailed maps of some Manchineri students at a more advanced level. It can be observed that the places with whom they have no contact or personal relationship are all similarly abstract and meaningless. Their names, despite of being cities, states or countries, were equally mixed and treated alike. In this more detailed map were many names of states, cities, and countries, but it was a network of names, as if they were equal. The name of Peru and Bolivia were also usually marked, owing to increased visits to the Peruvian side to make purchases, more frequent discussions on illegal loggers, traffickers and smugglers coming from Peru and Bolivia. As a comparison, in the sketch maps produced by the young Manchineri in Rio Branco, different continents were marked and the names of cities and foreign countries were hierarchically separated. The Manchineri who live in the urban centres need more detailed knowledge to pass their school exams, for instance. The use of information on various places in Brazil, countries, and continents had thus appeared at school, and conversations in urban areas and the media were also important factors in situating the places in reference to other places. On the drawings, Brazil and Latin America, as well as countries more familiar to the youths, were illustrated. Places are processes, because personal experiences and embodied relationship of the space make places to exist. The places as knots are histories of movement and relations (cf. Ingold 2000, 2009) that have different meanings for people, as they have different experiences of them and with people from there (cf. Casey 1987). INTERGROUP RELATIONS AND TRANSLOCATIONS TO URBAN AREAS For many Amazonian indigenous groups, the encounters with new agents, such as non- Indians and other indigenous groups, have changed the way the world and “us” are viewed (e.g. Albert, Ramos 2000; Turner 1991; Vilaça 2005). Now it is even more essential to create social networks and collaboration with other groups, both indigenous and non-indigenous. Therefore, urban areas as centres of encounter are seen, sometimes, as a source of power (cf. Green 2005 on the ambiguity of margins; Massey 2005 on altering power geometries). In general, Manchineri’s movement from the reserve to nearby municipalities has changed in the last ten years. Movement to urban areas are increasing as a result of visits to health centres, education, making purchases, selling products, registering the births of babies, collecting pensions and governmental benefits, negotiation with officials, and just getting to know new areas. The threats to the forest environment, such as overhunting, overfishing, logging, and pollution, have to be solved through relations with the dominant society. Likewise, the production of artwork and craftwork depends on transportation and 78 market outlets. For designing productive communal economic activities that bring cash economy, the people of the reserve needs to become used to take actions in the urban area economic projects, price negotiation, and selling (see Virtanen 2009). For the Manchineri, the visits to urban areas are related to learning new habits, nourishment, discourses, and taken care of new errands typical to non-Indians. The Manchineri aim at a better understanding of non-India ways of thinking, acting, making politics, political administration, bureaucracy, conservation policy, and state laws mentioning indigenous people. Manchineri’s learning is not limited only to the destinations of their visits, because they learn during their travels to urban areas, for instance while exchanging news with the non-Indians on the way. Thus, Manchineri’s movement is not linear, and following the argument of Tim Ingold (2000, 2009) can be called wayfaring. For the Manchineri, moving is about being able to approach new people and being able to move one’s body in new places with others. In an urban environment one learns how to relate to city people: government officers, non-governmental workers, church people, and different people on the streets. The experience of travel really is close to wayfaring. Urban areas (where typically non-Indians live) are becoming more interconnected with the reserve through processes of indigenous politics, consumer culture, and demands for better health, education, and economic conditions (see Chaves 2010; Pacheco de Oliveira 2004; Virtanen 2010, 2012). This can be seen in the interconnection of rural and urban areas, for instance, in a drawing by a Manchineri girl living in the Mamoadate reserve, in which the village, the Yaco River, and the closest town are all depicted. EMBODIED LEARNING, OBJECTIVE AND RETURN In the cities one enters alone to new situations with the symbolic power of white people ( brancos/ payri) and the necessity of money. The first independent visits to urban areas, which are however important for well-being of the community, occur during the teenage years. Consequently, personal experiences of the urban areas are significant in defining adulthood. According to my study, for young people visiting urban area is a kind of a rite of passage in a transition to adulthood (Virtanen 2012). The city alters relatedness, previous routines and corporeal differences, because then one is not personified as in the village, laughing with known people at them ceases, and one becomes accustomed to different ways of eating, moving, and how to obtain alimentation. Experiencing the way of living and moving in the city is essential in order to have new information and skills. Once the person has learned gradually how to behave in the town, the visits – which for many indigenous peoples today are essential – become easier. Young people often assist older people in their trips to urban areas. From the point of view of an indigenous resident in the city, the indigenous territory is an existing place, but very distant from everyday experience. Indigenous identities have been traditionally rooted in certain territories, even if indigenous people have been moving and continue to do so (e.g. Chaves 2010). The Manchineri constitute the village as a distinct place to continue the existence of the different ways of doing and thinking about things, the home of the Other. On the other hand, so is the city. They become ambiguous margins in certain time and place (cf. Green 2005). However, it sets social boundaries to “our way of doing things”. It is a cultural category that maintains certain categorisations. The indigenous territory is the place where Manchineri’s knowledge of the past, including practices and stories, still exists, as dimensions with which the people can identify. Moreover, the forest environment plays a distinctive role in this clear distinction between the city and the villages. Doreen Massey (2005) reminds us that there are no places that are nostalgic and different per se, but their social relations to others make people feel about them in a certain way. Places are always relational, and they change in relation to history and many other elements of human life. The ideas of urban areas as well as of other Indians and non-Indians generate through the movements of community members. 79 Even if a person cannot move as a result of their age, disability, disinterest, and incapability to interact with non-Indians, or the lack of transport, there are other kin who negotiate with the others in places of urban encounter. Thus, it is not necessary for everybody to travel to the city. For the Manchineri, intermediation with places outside the community shall involve a return. Return has especially been emphasised in migration studies. Scholars have also pointed out that movement is as much about emplacement as it is about displacement (e.g. Ballinger 2012). For the Manchineri, the idea of return is closely related to the idea of having an objective for a trip. Even if Manchineris love moving around, their movement shall have an aim. Especially if they are about to relate with other beings, people are more attentive to their dreams and signs that might indicate if it is good to part for a trip or not. This is common before a hunting trip or trip to a city, for instance. Weather might be bad, predators in the way, accidents happen, and so forth. In the reserve, people who are moving away from the “centre” are also asked where they are going to, and those who do not have a clear response to give, such as “to collect wood/ materials”, may be regarded as dangerous beings. When people are travelling, they often sing Manchineri chants that animate them, and maintain their objective to return well to the kin. In urban area, looking for members of own group or even other indigenous groups is common. In general, a few indigenous leaders commented that people coming to urban area shall arrive there with a determination to accomplish their aims and then return to their communities with new knowledge. Earlier it has been noted that in Amazonia those residing in a distance for a longer period can even be considered as non-kin (cf. McCallum 1996; Virtanen 2009). From the perspective of the Manchineri in the reserve, those people, who stay in cities are considered to non-kin, not only because changing the processes of sociality people, but because their processes of return and objective of their movement are not directed to the community. Manchineris often commented that the city changes a person’s pace of life, so that it is no longer the pace of nature. But that pace can be good if it benefits in the end the community, such as the return of the shamans who spend long periods in the jungle learning from the forest spirits. In the sense of Ingold (2009, 2011) the lines of movement are essential for well- being, but differing from his sense, the centrality, considered to “knots”, remain also essential, because humanness and kinship are defined in the processes of relatedness, proximity, living together, and returning to the kin. The indigenous land, its forest and waters, are personified with ancestors, knowledge, and memories about the past, as well as with their links to other places of encounter. It is the centre of the threads of movement people can identify with, and where stories about the past and present movements are lived and told over and over again. A Manchineri wayfarer as knowledge-maker (cf. Ingold 2000) shall thus have the objective for the wayfaring in his/her body and mind, or otherwise s/he may loose her or his Manchineriness. CONCLUSIONS: PLACES OF ENCOUNTER, MOVEMENT AND THE BODY As I have discussed in this paper, for the Manchineri the objective of the movement and return are very important aspects of the movement. It also gives for the movement its rhythm (cf. Lefebvre 2004). The Manchineri’s ways of shaping their places is tied to their experiences, values, ideas, and practices, where the human body is in the centre. Personal and communal histories and memories are important elements in understanding the relations to different places: the place making itself. Locations are changing knots related to trajectories of life, and the movement continues in these knots (Ingold 2000, 2009). For Amazonian indigenous peoples, the way the space is embodied in certain time is closely related to movement, which is thus never paused or discontinued. During the continuous movement, the Manchineri live they lives encountering various beings and embodying new 80 knowledge. Previous personal movements embodied form their knowledge at personal level and shapes them as persons. The conceptualisation of places alter, because places may turn into significant centre of encounter (cf. Green 2005; Massey 2005 on relationality of places), especially when looking at power of others that for Amerindians is continuously crucial part of “us”. As we have seen here, the Manchineri villages can turn into marginality when viewed as lacking the power, productivity, and knowledge of the urban areas. Urban areas are crucial places contributing to well-being of many indigenous groups as discussed here. Some places as centres of encounter become more important than others, if they carry more political, economic, historical, or spiritual importance than others. As a result of the body’s connection to multiple agencies in the place or elsewhere, they become centres in the matrix of their movement. As Massey (2005: 130) opines: “Places not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events.” Besides the continuous movement and relationality of places, as emphasised by Tim Ingold and Doreen Massey, in the Manchineri’s view, certain centres remain essential. The centrality of indigenous community and their land are produced by the social and cultural differences in new places and producing relationships with others. Healthy bodies carry memories of the kin and reproduce their bodies with substances typical to the kin. The ancestral land moves with people in bodies and memories, and that is where Manchineri thinking is directed when they are away from their kin. Moreover, if their movement do not have objective neither the idea of the return to the collectivity of the kin – centre – they become dangerous beings, non-kin. The Manchineri aim to continue to move and be mobile, as they have been while hunting and searching other forest resources. These links guarantee their ability to live with the people they want to relate to and to have necessary material and immaterial resources for their lives. REFERENCES Albert, Bruce, Ramos, Alcida (eds.) (2000). Pacificando o Branco. Cosmologias do Contato no norte-Amazônico. São Paulo: Editora UNESP. Ballinger, Pamela (2012). Borders and the Rhythms of Displacement, Emplacement and Mobility. A Companion to Border Studies (eds. Thomas M. Wilson, Donnan Hastings). Wiley-Blackwell: London. Casey, Edward S (1987). Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Castro, Edna (2009). Cidades na Floresta. São Paulo: Annablume . Chavez, María Clemencia (2010). Normative Views, Strategic Views: The Geopolitical Maps in the Ethnic Territorialities of Putumayo. Editing Eden A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia (eds. Franck Hutchins,Patrick C. Wilson). Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 191–217. Conklin, Beth A., Morgan, Lynn M. (1996). Babies, Bodies, and the Production of Personhood in North America and a Native Amazonian Society. Ethnos 24/4 657–694. Descola, Philippe (2005). Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Feld, Steven, Basso, Keith H. (1996). Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Gow, Peter (1991). Of Mixed Blood. Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Green, Sarah F. (2005). Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Green, Sarah (2012). A Sense of Border. A Companion to Border Studies (eds. Thomas M. Wilson, Hastings Donnan). Blackwell Publishing: Blackwell Reference Online. 81 Ingold, Tim (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Articles in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. London and New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim (2009). Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge. Boundless Worlds. An Anthropological Approach to Movement (ed. Peter Wynn Kirby) . New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Ingold, Tim (2011). Being Alive. Articles on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri (2004). Rhythmanalysis. Space, Time and Everyday Life. London and New York: Continuum. Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage. McCallum, Cecilia (1996). Morte e Pessoa entre os Kaxinaw . Mana. Estudos de Antropologia Social 2/2, 49-84. Pacheco de Oliveira, João (2004[1999]). Uma etnologia dos ‘índios misturados’? Situação colonial, territorialização e fluxos culturais. A viagem de volta. Etnicidade, política e reelaboração cultural no Nordeste indígena (ed. João Pacheco de Oliveira). Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa, 13–42. Rival, Laura M (2002). Trekking through History. The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador. New York: Columbia University Press. Stolze Lima, Tânia (1999[1996]). The Two and Its Many: Reflections on Perspectivism in a Tupi Cosmology. Ethnos 64/1, 107–131. Vilaça, Aparecida (2005). Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporealities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11/3, 445–464. Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina (2009). New Interethnic Relations and Native Perceptions of Human to Human Relation in Brazilian Amazonia. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14/2, 332–354. Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina (2010). Amazonian Native Youths and Notions of Indigeneity in Urban Areas. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 17/2–3, 154–175. Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina (2012). Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia: Changing Lived Worlds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1996). Os Prononomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo Ameríndio. Mana. Estudos de Antropologia Social 2/2, 115–144. 82 APPROACHING RETURN MOBILITIES FROM SLOVENIAN DIASPORA IN ARGENTINA Jaka Repič34 SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL IMPLICATIONS OF DIASPORA AND RETURN Exploring interrelatedness between mobility, immobility and place-making contradicts sedentaristic inclinations to essentialise and fixate the relationship between place, culture and identity. In the past, social sciences have often trivialised the importance of movement for culture and society. “[S]edentarism locates bounded and authentic places or regions or nations as the fundamental basis of human identity and experience and as the basic units of social research” (Sheller, Urry 2006: 208–209). The relationships between place, culture and identity were often understood through a sedentarist logic as rooting people and culture in places. This logic is however highly dubious when exploring mobilities, migration and diasporic contexts. Specifically, I want to discuss return mobilities. Although significant in contemporary social and political reality, they have largely been overlooked or neglected in migration studies, which rarely focused on return and even where they did, this was primarily focused on the return of the “first generation” (see Gmelch 1980; cf. King, Christou 2011). I analyse the spatial and temporal implications of political exile from Slovenia to Argentina after the Second World War and various forms of return mobilities that occurred after the Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. I address the mythology as well as different practices of return mobilities, for example tourist visits, pilgrimages, school excursions, as well as actual (return) migration to their (ancestral) homeland. My questions are how politics and practices of (im)mobility influenced the constitution of a Slovenian diaspora in Argentina, the making of meaningful places (especially home and homeland), spatial relations and how they engendered recent return mobilities. Homeland orientation is one of the main attributes of diasporas, where a real or imagined homeland presents an “authoritative source of value, loyalty and identity” (Brubaker 2005: 5; cf. Saffran 1991). Ideas of an eventual return to one’s homeland appear in myths, practices and in life trajectories. POST-WAR EXILE AND CONSTITUTION OF SLOVENIAN DIASPORA IN ARGENTINA I will very quickly summarise the historical background of the Slovenian diaspora in Argentina. It was constituted by political migrants that left Slovenia after the Second World War because of the communist revolution and secret mass executions of political opponents and soldiers of the anti-communist collaborationist force, the Slovenian Homeguard. In the few months after the war, over 80,000 people of different nationalities (Slovenians, Croatians, Serbians, German soldiers etc.) were executed. Over 14,000 of them were Slovenians and most of those were repatriated from refugee camps in Austria. The rest of the refugees dispersed across Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and South America. The largest community was established in Argentina, consisting of migrants who settled there between 1947 and 1951. It was a closed diasporic community with cultural centres, schools, rituals and celebrations, with a recurrent theme of exile, loss of homeland and the mythology of eventual return. 34 Jaka Repič, Associate Professor, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Zavetiška 5, 1000 Ljubljana, jaka.repic@uni-lj.si, phone 00386 12411526 83 Even though the lives of the refugees were initially characterised by exile and migration, this was later replaced with a sense of immobility, as they could not return home. Because of a prevailing sense of loss, of injustice and of long-term inability to return, the struggle of preserving “Slovenianness”, “roots” and knowledge of home(land) is still considered a principal moral obligation. The inability to return during the Socialist regime in Yugoslavia did not diminish their aspirations to do so. Some of the migrants immediately abandoned hopes of return because they were often too traumatised to go back even if they could have. However, a majority including community “leaders” preserved the idea of an eventual return and victory over communism. In refugee camps it was initially believed that communism in Yugoslavia would not last long and that they would soon be able to return without facing some sort of retaliation (see Švent 1995: 46). After testimonies of hidden mass executions by those who managed to escape them and returned to the refugee camps, hopes of returning home soon started disappearing (cf. Žigon 2001: 61–62). Even after their migration to Argentina, the hope of return was still present, though it was soon realised that their migration was not simply a temporary one. The aspirations of return were expressed in numerous narratives, publications, community ideology, and even in projections of distant future. TRACING ROOTS AND RETURN MOBILITIES The cultural and political symbols of homeland, images of landscape, and symbols of traditional culture, such as folklore, food and music, are recurrent in daily life of individuals, but particularly in the community’s schools, rituals and celebrations (cf. Golob 2009; Repič 2012). Spatial representations of homeland are often very peculiar. On one occasion, when we were sitting at the table, talking and drinking tea with my hosts, Marija offered some honey. She said: “try this honey, it’s very good, home-made from eucalyptus.” And then she added: “And it is Slovenian honey”. I was curious how eucalyptus honey can be Slovenian and she explained that her father produced it in Argentina, but that the bees that collected the honey originated from Slovenia. It turned out her father had brought several queen bees from his visits to Slovenia and raised “Slovenian bee families”.35 She said: “He raised real Slovenian bees /.../ that are more diligent than the usual American bees”. This example shows that homeland is not merely a physical territory, but a cultural concept, defined by various cultural, moral, social and environmental characteristics and can be represented by pictures, images, narratives, memories, food, folklore and even bees. Most of the houses I visited during my fieldwork in Argentina were full of such representations. Often, there were images of “typical” Slovenian cultural landscape,36 political symbols such as flags, pictures, paintings and postcards depicting towns, villages and churches, or publications, calendars, and even tourist souvenirs from Slovenia. One of my informants mentioned on several occasions that “the village of Loški potok”, where his parents originated, “is the most beautiful place on earth” even though he had not yet visited the place or Slovenia at the time we first talked about his parents’ home village. He pointed out a painting of the village decorating his house in Buenos Aires. After he visited Slovenia and his father’s village, he admitted it was different to what he had imagined. However, when walking around the village, he could recognise places from his father’s numerous accounts. For another informant, returning to her home village was a painful experience. Not only did she remember vividly how her relatives were killed, she was even more shocked at how much the place had changed. In her memories, the place was different as it was located 35 In fact, he brought several queen bees of species Kranjska čebela (Latin name: Apis mellifera carnica), which is recognised as an autochthonous bee species in Slovenia and is a globally renowned bee species in apiculture. 36 For discussion on landscape as a national symbol in Slovenia, see Kučan (1998). 84 in a different time. Upon returning, she realised it was a different place altogether, and changed relations to her home-village: “After that visit I will never go back there again.” When I visited the Slovenian association in San Martín, Buenos Aires, the first thing I noted were two large coats of arms on the wall, one of Slovenia and another of the association. Inside there were three main areas. The first one was intended for casual meetings and Sunday breakfasts after Mass. There was a kitchen, a bar and a large room with chairs and tables. The walls were decorated with different emblems, such as paintings with motifs of exile and of Slovenia, memorial plaques, posters, even a cloth with an embroidered Slovenian anthem and some tourist souvenirs. Next, I was shown the open courtyard dominated by two large linden trees that were planted to provide shade, though linden was chosen because of its special position in Slovenian history, folklore and mythology. The second place was a large hall for cultural and sport events, performances, and celebrations. Adjacent was the third area, housing the “Gregorij Rožman” school, with three classrooms and a small library filled with maps of Slovenia, religious, historical and political books and Argentine and Slovenian flags. In schools, generations of children have been taught Slovenian geography, history, language, traditional culture, music and folk songs, etc. During regular Slovenian Mass and various rituals and celebrations, the social memory of exile is often reaffirmed and the importance of remaining true to ideals of anti- communism and Catholic and traditional values are stressed. Memories and narratives of having been exiled from home, imagery and mythology referring to the original homeland and aspirations of return enable the construction and preservation of a specific “diasporic consciousness” (Ahmed 1999: 343; Vertovec 1999), in which the ultimate goal is to build and preserve a home away from home. Often I was shown specific plants, images, furniture etc. with an explanation that they are reminders of home. Milena, a woman who was 88 years of age when we talked in her house in Bariloche in 2011, showed me a room in the house that resembled very much a typical living room in a traditional mid-20th century house somewhere in the northern alpine region of Slovenia. A large green-tiled furnace dominated the room. Next to it were a wooden table, covered by a cloth that resembled Idrija lace, and carved wooden chairs. Above the table hung a chandelier made of ornamental black steel in a typical Kropan fashion. She proudly explained the chandelier was in fact from the Slovenian village of Kropa, and that she had designed every bit of the room and furniture and then had a Slovenian carpenter, also living in Bariloche, make it. She offered me some tea and potica 37 and explained she had designed the room in order to have a place that reminds her of home. Various symbols, images, stories, myths and socially communicated and remembered experiences merge in the concepts of origin, home and homeland (Ahmed 1999; Chapman 2001; Rapport, Dawson 1998). They represent a relentless spatial mapping in which individuals and the community position themselves in relation to home(lands) and places of residence. Home is not merely a physical place one claims and belongs to, but represents a localised set of meanings, narratives, imaginaries and practices. A place of origin can be conceptualised, remembered or narrated in a form of a house, a village, a city, a country or a homeland (cf. Al-Ali, Koser 2002). But its relative location (in space and in time) is constructed in diaspora as it is always spatially and temporally defined, and placed into (changing) relationships with other places. In diaspora, home(land) is a distant place and belongs to another time. The search for homeland is for example expressed in the art works of Cecilija Grbec. She was born in Buenos Aires to second-generation Slovenian migrants and was raised with a strong sense of being an ethnic Slovenian. In some of her paintings she expressed a personal search for home. Among her early exhibitions was one entitled Trails of my Roots and another one called Flames of Searching. Her early exhibited work depicts images from her childhood, 37 Potica is a traditional Slovenian cake, made from rolled dough with usually walnut filling. Slovenian emigrants popularised it in several countries, especially in USA. 85 images of her roots and origin, for example paintings of landscape and nature, all symbolising specific places where she either lived, felt connected to, or even had a sense of belonging (cf. Repič 2010). For the exhibition Trails of my Roots, an art critique Ana Sitar observed:38 In her work, two worlds, two homelands, meet. South America is the world of her childhood, the world where she grew up and where she was constantly aware of another world, the homeland of her ancestors …The diversity of (her) works confirms the eternal connection and interweavement of not only two actual worlds and homelands but the interrelation of the experienced world to the vast world of memory. Her “search for roots” is also a movement, artistic on the one hand, but resulted in “return” migration to Slovenia. Movement is always relational and engenders reconstructing spatial relations. Art as personal expression as well as actual migration intertwine the social memories of homeland with personal experiences of return mobilities. The homeland had been conceptualised at a different place, in diaspora, and invokes a different time located in memories. After the artist migrated to Slovenia, her search for roots was not over, because the location of meaningful places and the relations between them had changed. In late 1980s Slovenia went through a period of intense democratisation and in 1991 it declared independence from Yugoslavia. In Argentina the 1980s was also a period of democratisation after the end of military dictatorship in 1983. There was a strong process of national revival and search for “roots” in European countries (Schneider 2000: 271). The Slovenian community in Argentina was very socially and politically active in support of independence. Most of those families who actively preserved their Slovenian identity acquired Slovenian citizenship and many engaged in “return” mobilities.39 Andrej, who was only a small child when his family left Slovenia, explained his understanding of return: ”My wife and I have always contemplated that the natural ending of our life path that took us away from Slovenia in our childhood would be to return home.” Return migration started around the independence of Slovenia from Yugoslavia in 1991 and culminated after 2002 because of an economic crisis in Argentina. In the past twenty years most Argentine Slovenians established some sort of relation with families in Slovenia, often travelled “home” or even moved to Slovenia. Boštjan migrated to Slovenia in 1990 and expressed his return in the following way: “After the (Slovenian) independence some of us returned to Slovenia. I have returned even though I was born in Argentina. However, my spiritual homeland has always been Slovenia.” Many other forms of mobility are also considered as returning home, for example tourist visits or even pilgrimages. For the past 20 years, each summer students who successfully finish the Slovenian high school in Argentina, take a month-long excursion to Slovenia. The trip is a reward for the effort not only of finishing 12 years of voluntary ethnic schooling, but also for preserving Slovenian language and identity. It is a pilgrimage: students visit particular important places they learnt about in school or from their families. They for example visit executions sites in Kočevski Rog, meet their relatives, visit the home villages of their parents and usually even climb Triglav, the highest Slovenian mountain. This “pilgrimage” also has some very pragmatic consequences, such as getting acquainted with the possibilities of migrating to Slovenia. CONCLUSION 38 http://www.mirenski-grad.si/slikarska-razstava-cecilije-grbec-prepletanje-svetov (reviewed 1.9. 2013). 39 Compared to studies of Slovenian emigration, studies of return are rather rare (for studies of return from Argentina see e. g. Batič 2003; Čebulj Sajko 2004; Lukšič-Hacin 2002, 2004; Mlekuž 2003; Repič 2006; Toplak 2004). 86 The recent scholarly proliferation of diaspora studies has placed significant emphasis on the myths of return (see Anwar 1979; Clifford 1997), “return” of descendants of migrants, but also on the variegated forms of returning, ranging from tourism, holidays, family visits, and pilgrimages to return migration to one’s real or imagined homeland. King and Christou (2011: 425) suggest a focus on the analysis of the emic perspective of return (any movement which individuals or communities regard as returning to homeland with which they have significant emotional, cultural and historical connection). This widens the concept of return and enables better understanding of how home(land) as a cultural and moral reference point and mythology of return are imagined in diaspora. In this article I offered some analytical approaches of mobility and immobility among Slovenians in Argentina and return migrants. After the fall of communism in Yugoslavia and forty years of inability to return, Slovenian migrants, and particularly their descendants, have started returning to Slovenia, either for visits, pilgrimages, school excursions or actually resettled “permanently”. Return, however, is not unproblematic, as the place they called home has changed. It engenders a reconceptualisation of spatial and temporal relations. By returning, personal and social memories and imaginaries of places clash with contemporary spatial experiences. The knowledge of homeland, either remembered or imagined through stories, schools, publications and images, is being modified or embodied through experiences of returning. For Slovenians in Argentina, home(land) is not only a place elsewhere, it is also a place located in a different time(s). It is a place left behind, remembered and preserved in memories and mythology. It is also a place of aspiration towards which life trajectories can gravitate. Whatever the case, and wherever it is located, home(land) is a place not geographically fixed, but configured through spatial, temporal and social relations and above all, through movement. REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara (1999). Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2/3, 329–347. Al-Ali, Nadje, Koser, Khalid (2002). Transnationalism, International Migration and Home. New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (eds. Nadje Al-Ali, Khalid Koser). London, New York: Routledge, 1–14. Anwar, Muhammad (1979). The Myth of Return: Pakistanis in Britain. London: Heinemann. Batič, Ksenija (2003). Domovina je tu in domovina je tam. Raziskava med primorskimi izseljenci o njihovi vrnitvi v Slovenijo. Two Homelands 18, 181–202. Brubaker, Rogers (2005). The “Diaspora” Diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28/1, 1–19. Chapman, Tony (2001). There’s No Place Like Home. Theory, Culture & Society 18/6, 135– 146. Clifford, James (1997). Diasporas. The Ethnicity Reader. Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration (eds. Montserrat Guibernau, Jon Rex). Cambridge, Oxford, Malden: Polity Press, 283–290. Čebulj-Sajko, Breda (2004). Etnologija in povratništvo. Two Homelands 19, 197–211. Gmelch, Georg (1980). Return Migration. Annual Review of Anthropology 9, 135–159. Golob, Tea (2009). Slovenian Migrants in Transnational Social Spaces: Exploring Multilayered Identifications and Ambivalent Belongings. Anthropological Notebooks 15/3, 65–77. King, Russel, Christou, Anastasia (2011). Of Counter-Diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland. Mobilities 6/4, 451–466. Kučan, Ana (1998). Krajina kot nacionalni simbol. Ljubljana: Znanstveno in publicistično središče. 87 Lukšič-Hacin, Marina (2002). Povratniki kot del migracijskega toka. Two Homelands 15, 179– 193. Lukšič-Hacin, Marina (2004). Vračanje Slovencev iz Argentine. Two Homelands 20, 13–34. Mlekuž, Jernej (2003). “Mali” prispevek k vprašanjem “povratništva”. Življenjske pripovedi migrantov povratnikov iz Beneške Slovenije – potovanje brez vrnitve? Two Homelands 17, 67–94. Rapport, Nigel, Dawson, Andrew (1998). The Topic and the Book. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (eds. Nigel Rapport, Andrew Dawson). Oxford, New York: Berg, 3–17. Repič, Jaka (2006). “Po sledovih korenin”. Transnacionalne migracije med Argentino in Evropo. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta. Repič, Jaka (2010). Ambivalent Identities Emerging in Transnational Migrations between Argentina and Slovenia. Two Homelands 31, 121–134. Repič, Jaka (2012). Les Slovènes d’Argentine: le concept de patrie dans la construction d’une communauté diasporique. Ethnologie française 42/2, 231–240. Safran, Wiliam (1991). Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Diaspora 1/1, 83–99. Schneider, Arnd (2000). Futures Lost: Nostalgia and Identity among Italian Immigrants in Argentina. Oxford et al.: Peter Lang. Sheller, Mimi, Urry, John (2006). The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning 38, 207–226. Švent, Rozina (2007). Slovenski begunci v Avstriji 1945–1950. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU. Toplak, Kristina (2004). Dobrodošli doma? Vračanje slovenskih izseljencev v Republiko Slovenijo. Two Homelands 20, 35–51. Vertovec, Stephen (1999) Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22/2, 447–462. Žigon, Zvone (2001). Iz spomina v prihodnost. Slovenska politična emigracija v Argentini. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU. 88 BETWEEN KURBET AND SHTËPI Nataša Gregorič Bon40 ACT ONE: HOME COMING Albania, August 1st 2005, 8am – a long line of cars is slowly moving along the coastal road, most of them going from the Greek-Albanian border to different destinations in Albania. Though the majority of cars display Greek number plates, their drivers are Albanian emigrants who have been living and working in Greece for many years already, and regularly return by routes of their roots every August when the collective holidays in Greece and Albania start. Among this swarm of migrants are also those who are going to Himarë (official, Albanian name) or Himara (local, Greek name) area in southern Albania to spend their summer holidays there. Most of them were born after 1950s and declare themselves as Himariotes despite the fact they never lived in this area - this however is the place where at least one of their (grand)parents originated. Before they migrating to Greece after the fall of communist regime in 1990, many of these emigrants lived in the cities of the central or northern Albania, where their parents moved after the establishment of the communist cooperative in Himarë/Himara in 1957. Emigrants return to the villages of Himarë/Himara almost exclusively in the summer months to spend their holidays on its coastal plains. Bonds with the area are knitted either through the links with their parents who live there, through houses and/or tourist facilities they are running on the coast in summer, or simply through nostalgia. The narrow coastal road with its long line of passing cars could easily symbolise the route that leads emigrants to the roots of their “home place”. This paper questions how the emigrants living in Greece constitute their feelings of rootedness and home through different modes of movement. It addresses the traditional (im)mobility practices of kurbet and home ( shtëpi), which are important social institutions in Albania. These two practices are viewed as tropes of a route with its temporal and spatial implications. The meaning of home does not relate to a single place or location but is spatially and temporally diverse and multiple. As people move between various homes, past and present, deserted and newly built, imaginary and material, etc., the meaning of home continuously shifts (Rapport in Dawson 1998). KURBET, TRADITIONAL MOBILITY PRACTICE Mobility and movement are not phenomena of the 20th century period in this area, as people have been moving to and from it throughout its history. In Albania, movement is an important part of the traditional mobility practice called kurbet that appeared in the period of the Ottoman Empire. Etymologically, kurbet originates from the Arabic word l ghurbeh which means “journey or sojourn in a foreign land”, usually for work purposes, being far from home and homeland. Even nowadays, the notion is still imbued with emotions such as pain ( dhimbje) and longing for home and family. Numerous Albanian folk songs as well as literature (Çajupi 2007: 79) describe kurbet and the related suffering of migrants (kurbetilli) and their relatives. Kurbet according to Papailias (2003: 1064) means “being in the world” and “naturalises” gender hierarchies and labour divisions, as it is often associated with the male domain; a known proverb says “burrin e njeh kurbeti/gruan e njeh djepi” or “a man becomes a man out in the world ( kurbet) / a women becomes a women over the cradle”.41 40 Research Fellow; Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Novi trg 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana; ngregoric@zrc-sazu.si 41 Or literally “kurbet knows the man / cradle knows the woman” (see Pistrick 2010: 30, fn. 1) 89 Despite social, political, economic and historical changes, this traditional mobility practice still bears an important role in Albania today and is in many contexts often used as a synonym for migration (see also Papailias 2003: 1064; Pistrick 2009, 2010; Dalipaj in preparation). In Himarë/Himara people often refer to kurbet in narratives about their ancestors who were moving through the area due to economic reasons in the interwar period or who joined the massive migrations following the fall of communism. Due to the soil erosion and lack of land suitable for cultivation, but also because of other social, economic, and political changes, many people in Himarë/Himara left for kurbet to areas of today’s Italy, Greece, Turkey, France, Egypt, USA, etc. in the past centuries (Gregorič Bon 2008a: 7–27; see also Polo 2001). Many interlocutors describe kurbet in positive terms, noting that it has brought civilisation ( civilizim), economic development ( zhvilim) and general well-being to the area and its people. While nowadays the meaning of kurbet, as was typical for the interwar period, is often idealised, the migration ( mëgrim) itself is rather paradoxically described in several rhapsodies as a painful loss of emigrants who left their homes and heroically sacrificed themselves for their families (Pistrick 2010). Kurbet is also a part of the material culture, materialised in different objects brought from abroad ( nga jashtë), foreign influences on architecture and place in general. Many of the houses built with money or material that kurbetilli (migrants in the interwar period) were sending from abroad are called “the American houses” ( shtëpija Amerikane/to Amerikaniko spiti). Today, the houses built with remittances sent by migrants living in Greece or Italy are similarly called Greek ( shtëpija Greke/Eleniko spiti) or Italian houses ( shtëpija Italiane/Italiko spiti; see also Dalakoglou 2009).42 During the communist period, when the totalitarian regime of Enver Hoxha forbade ownership of private cars and any kind of border crossing, and importantly limited the in- country movements (see Gregorič Bon 2008a: 51 op. 18), the mobility practice of kurbet was stopped. It was only after the fall of communism and the ensuing massive migrations to Greece and Italy (Mai in Schwandner-Sievers 2003; King in Vullnetari 2003; Vullnetari 2007: 14) that this practice was revived again and in many situations kurbet became synonymous with migration ( mëgrim). While mëgrim reflects administrative and political movements, kurbet addresses the way of being in the world and bears a wider moral, social and psychological meaning in Albanian society. The bilingual inhabitants of Himarë/Himara (speaking Greek and Albanian) are in contrast to the people living in the areas with a recognised Greek minority not considered an official minority in Albania. This is in contrast to their status in Greece, where they are, according to national politics and mainstream public opinion, recognised as omogheneis or co-ethnic Greeks living in Albania. The status of co-ethnicity gives them the right to apply for the Special Cards for Aliens of Greek Descent, which allow them unrestricted passage across the Albanian-Greek and other European Schengen borders. In spite of the fact that in practice most of the villagers never travel beyond Greece, they frequently emphasize their ability to travel “freely” to the countries of “Western” Europe. They often use this privilege to differentiate themselves from other citizens of Albania, whose border-crossings, notwithstanding the liberalisation of the visa regime in December 2010, are still controlled, albeit not fully restricted anymore. 43 The mountainous terrain and seasonally wet Mediterranean climate are two main reasons for the erosion and land degradation in Himarë/Himara area and elsewhere on the southern coast, as well as in the mountain areas of northern Albania (see Dedej 2002: 12). All these movements – of land, landscape and its people – that took place in different historical periods, constituted and defined various locations of Himarë/Himara in its wider 42 Due to the economic and fiscal crisis which started after 2008, any kind of remittances are now really rare and in some cases we can speak about reverse remittances. 43 Despite the liberalisation of the visa regime, Albanian citizens have to present a letter of reference from a physical person or a legal institution when they cross the Schengen border. Besides this, they have to prove on site that they carry enough money with them (at least 50 euro per day for the duration of their stay). 90 geopolitical and social space. These locations have always been defined in relation to other people and places through which the local people and migrants have been moving. As several scholars have argued (de Certeau 1984; Green 2005; Gupta, Ferguson 2001; Ingold 1993, 2000; Lefebvre 1974) people and places are always constituted in a dynamic interrelation with other people and places. As Green says: “People are never alone with their places anywhere in the world; they never constitute places as places on their own” (Green 2005: 90, italics original). This means that places are not characterized by their homogeneity, but through a set of relations with various people and places. ACT TWO: RETURNING HOME Dhërmi/Drimades, August 1st 2005, at 7pm – a dusty Mercedez Benz with Greek number plates is parked by the side of a narrow road in the village of Dhërmi/Drimades in the Himarë/Himara area. A man, who looks around 50, steps out of the car and begins stretching his arms and legs. His tired gaze goes up the hill where old, grey, stone houses patiently wait for their owners to return and inhabit them for a week or two. Some seconds later Zaharula, a woman around the same age as her husband, steps out from the back of the car and quickly proceeds to open the front door in order to help an old woman get out of the car. Tired “travellers” begin the walk uphill, taking a path that leads towards one of the old stone houses. Both the man and woman hold the hands of the old woman, helping her up the slope. Zaharula and Dimitris are emigrants who migrated with their children to Athens after the collapse of communism in 1990. They both originate from Dhërmi/Drimades, though during the communist period, they moved to the close-by coastal city of Vlora soon after their wedding. Dimitris worked as a mechanic and Zaharula in the sewing factory. They lived in a block of apartments where they started a family. With the first migration flow in December 1990, they moved to Athens. At first they knew nobody there. A few years later, when they managed to settle in and rent an apartment, Dimitris’ two sisters joined them. In 2000, when his father died, his mother moved to their place in Athens because she was, according to Dimitris, too old to live on her own in the village. In the first years of their life in Greece, Zaharula and Dimitris were doing different kinds of jobs – from construction, house cleaning, farming, etc. Dimitris later got a stable job in a construction company, while Zaharula was employed as a cleaning lady in one of the primary schools in Athens. Almost every summer they regularly return to their native village. Their children are now grown up and married and live in their own apartments in Athens. According to Zaharula, they cannot wait for August, when they can return to the village to meet their relatives and friends whom they have not seen for the last year or more. “Every time I walk up hill from where I see my house and have a view on all the village, mountains, and the sea, I remember that my roots are here in Drimades”, noted Zaharula in one of our conversations. My heart is beating very strong, like in those times when I was young and in love. Though nobody except loads of work is waiting for me in this house, I still crave to see and smell it. This is my home/house (spiti/shtëpi). No matter that I have a home in Athens too, this home is different as my roots are here. SHTËPI, INSTITUTION OF (IM)MOBILITY In Albanian as well as in Greek, there is no distinction between “home” and “house” (Dalagoglou 2009: 63fn.). They use the word spiti (Greek) and shtëpi (Albanian) for both. Shtëpi, alongside the term fis (patrilineage), refers to one of the core units of Albanian kinship (de Rapper 2012: 81). In the Himara area, the spiti/ shtëpi is the basis of the individuals’ mode of “dwelling” (Ingold 2000). Jackson (1995: 148), in his study of Warlpiri in Australia, writes that “sense of home is grounded less in a place per se than in activity that 91 goes on in a place”. Thus, in their return-journeys to their home-place for example, Zaharula and Dimitris, along with other emigrants, generate their spiti/ shtëpi, which is grounded in a set of activities such as nostalgia44 and longing (see also Rapport, Dawson 1998: 8), individual activities (cleaning and rebuilding the house) as well as communal practices (visiting relatives, gift-giving). Though none of them plan to return here on a permanent basis, they define their home-place of the Himara as the topos/ vendi of their roots ( rizes/rrënjët). Home-making is thus “a dynamic social process in which relationships to places and persons are produced” (Jansen 2007: 16). It is a material manifestation of the migrants’ perpetual state of homecoming and of their claims to a definite locality (see also Dalakoglou 2010: 733). Spitai/shtëpisë (houses) stand in as the material presence of absent migrants because they materialise the relationships between the migrants and the spiti/shtëpi they have left behind. The spiti/shtëpi not only eradicates the spatial distance between Athens and the Himara area, but also temporally merges the past with the present and the future. This temporal merging is also present in the emigrants’ processes of homecoming, which seem to culminate in different practices of (im)mobility. In the nostalgic memories of their past home-place, they idealise social relations while at the same time transgress both the mundane, harsh realities of their migrant lives in Greece as their host country, and of Albania as their home country. CONCLUSION Mobility in Albania is not only a “norm” of contemporary life but has been part of people’s way of dwelling throughout the centuries. Various modes of (im)mobility such as kurbet and shtëpi have significantly marked the history of the Himarë/Himara area. Kurbet is present as an important social institution in various folk songs, collective memories and individual narratives. Through them, local people and emigrants constitute feelings of locality and rootedness in “their home place”. The meanings of locality, home place and home ( shtëpi) are defined through emigrants’ claims of rootedness on the one hand and through their movements through/in/from places in the area and beyond on the other. When migrants express their feelings of belonging, they generate the meaning of home ( shtëpi) as well as their ability to move ( kurbet). The relation between kurbet and shtëpi engenders continuum between mobility and rootedness. Through (im)mobility, the emigrants are rooting their routes which they relate to their home place in Himarë/Himara and their home destination in Athens. Their roots are not grounded in a single location but are according to Ingold (2011: 10) defined as lines connecting various locations, entangled in a meshwork where human dwelling unfolds. Thus the Himarë/Himara people’s lives unfold through pathways of their travel and not in the places they inhabit. To paraphrase Ingold, the emigrants of Himarë/Himara dwell in the world as wayfarers who continuously move between Greece and Albania. Accordingly, the meaning of their home is not defined as a fixed location but rather as a relational process since people in a given historical, political, economic and social context continuously shift its meaning. Despite social, political and economic changes, the traditional practices of (im)mobility, kurbet and shtëpi are still important social institutions in Himarë/Himara. Both are part of the same continuum and engender roots in particular locations as well as routes of movements and migrations. 44 According to Seremetakis (1991) the etymological meaning of ”nostalgia” derives from the Greek word nostalgos, where nostó means to return or travel back to one's homeland, and algó means desire or longing for something with a burning pain, as in longing to undertake the journey back. 92 REFERENCES Çajupi, Andon Zako (1990). Baba-Tomorri. Tiranë: Shtëpia Botuese “Naim Frasheri”. de Certeau, Michael (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 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