Ethnographies of Home and Mobility

Shifting Roofs

Alejandro Miranda Nieto, Aurora Massa, Sara Bonfanti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

This book lays out a framework for understanding connections between home and mobility, and situates this within a multidisciplinary field of social research. The authors show how the idea of home offers a privileged entry point into forced migration, diversity and inequality. Using original fieldwork, they adopt an encompassing lens on labour, family and refugee flows, with cases of migrants from Latin America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

With the book structured around these key topics, the authors look at how practices of home and mobility emerge along with emotions and manifold social processes. In doing so, their scope shifts from the household to streets, neighbourhoods, cities and even nations. Yet, the meaning of 'home' as a lived experience goes beyond place; the authors analyse literature on migration and mobility to reveal how the past and future are equally projected into imaginings of home.

1
Scales

Alejandro Miranda Nieto

Introduction

In an evocative book about the tensions between space and place, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (2001: 149) reflects on how our experience of place is shaped by scale. ‘Place exists at different scales,’ he says. ‘At one extreme a favourite armchair is a place, at the other extreme the whole earth.’ In a similar fashion, home occurs at different scales, unfolding from the corner of an armchair through the dwelling place and beyond. ‘When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place,’ Tuan (2001: 73) reminds us. Home may emerge through a form of familiarity that occurs in more than one place. It is increasingly common to find in scholarly debates the idea of home extending to a range of spatial scales: home as a household or a café, a street or neighbourhood, a city or a nation. It is even more common to think about scales as smaller or larger, as in the body or the domestic space as smaller scales and regions or nations as larger ones. Yet, notions of what home is, the emotions associated with feeling or not at home and the processes of home-making at different scales remain elusive. In what ways does home take place inside a house or extend across different spaces? What does it mean to be at home, feel at home or identify one’s home with non-domestic spaces such as a neighbourhood, a city, a region or a nation? This chapter explores the intersection between home and migration in light of contemporary theorizations on geographical scale, as well as my own ethnographic research with South American migrants in Madrid.

Households have been widely studied as a site of diverse social processes, namely consumption, gender relations, reproduction and learning (Briganti and Mezei 2012). In more recent decades there has also been a growing body of scholarly literature on home as social process that occurs in different contexts beyond the dwelling place. These discussions have been influenced to various extents by theoretical advances on scale, mobilities and socio-spatial practices. Blunt and Dowling (2006), for instance, develop a critical geography of home that focuses on various scales, such as domestic, urban, regional, national and transnational spaces. Another example comes from Duyvendak’s (2011) study on the politics of feeling at home as a multi-scalar phenomenon. Still, the investigation of home as a set of relationships that unfold across different registers of the social is infrequently made explicit. This chapter analyses some of the ways in which scalar thinking (both in everyday practice and scholarly analysis) is used in relation to home and migration. It is guided by the intuition that examining home within and beyond the household can greatly benefit from engaging with the rich conceptual repertoire of contemporary theorizations of scale.

Scholarly debates on scale have considerably advanced during the last four decades, mostly in the field of human geography. These discussions have been stimulated by the relevance that ‘global’ phenomena have acquired and also by the necessity to understand what globalism and localism are, how they relate to other scales such as the regional, national or transnational and, more generally, how scale relates to other key concepts in geography, such as space, place or territory. The various turns of these debates have influenced the ways in which some scholars address issues of geographical scale in relation to domesticity and diaspora (see, for instance, Blunt 2005). But there is much to be learnt from investigating what is ‘scalar’ about home, how scales of home come into existence and how they relate to each other in the context of migration.

Contemporary analyses from the field of human geography offer valuable resources to address these issues. There has been a significant development of theories of scale investigating the processes through which space becomes represented as a series of discrete units, namely the local, regional, national or global. Notions of ‘production of scale’ (Smith 1992a), ‘construction of scale’ (Delaney and Leitner 1997; Marston 2000), ‘politics of scale’ (Smith 1992b; Swyngedouw 1997) and even discussions about the futility of scale as analytical category (Marston et al. 2005) are examples of the relevance of this debate and its capacity to permeate other areas of social enquiry. The notion of scale constitutes a resource for developing sharper approaches to home, as well as gaining insight into the relationships among the multiple forms that home takes within and beyond the domestic space. Here and throughout this chapter, I refer to scale in its areal connotation; that is, as geographical demarcations around specific spaces (Herod 2010: xi). This is the most common way in which the literature on home and migration has assumed issues of social scale. I therefore focus on geographical scale as areal and socially produced, leaving aside other forms (such as cartographic or temporal scales) that go beyond the scope of this volume.

This chapter is organized into two main sections. The following one discusses a series of examples from the scholarly literature on home within and beyond the dwelling place. There is a growing amount of scholarly contributions in the field of home, migration and mobility that highlight the need to develop current understandings of home as multi-located and multi-scalar. The second section draws on my ethnographic work conducted with South American migrants in Madrid. I analyse the case of Mariana, a young woman whose sense of home has been rescaled throughout her migratory experiences. My overall aim is to argue that migrating can disrupt people’s sense of home, and that such transformations are negotiated amid socio-spatial relations that take shape at different scales.

Scaling the domestic

Scales of home constitute representations about the extent to which home-related practices, relationships and experiences occur in a given place. Throughout this chapter I use the notion of ‘scales of home’ to refer to scalar thinking applied to home, either as categories of practice or categories of analysis. In this way, scales are not concrete spaces, places or locations, but ways of framing social activity. They produce and constrain particular forms of engagement with material worlds by underpinning a sense of home. The body, households, streets, neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations are some of the most common registers of the social (but not the only) to which meanings of home are assigned. As representations of social phenomena, these scales are not directly manifest in the materiality of the settings in question, but constitute ordering devices (Herod 2010: 31) for engaging with, and making sense of, our experience of home in relation to the world. A city or a neighbourhood, for example, is not directly affected by the fact that some of their inhabitants assign or not a sense of home to them. Yet, living in a city or a neighbourhood that one experiences as home is an outcome of complex social interactions that shapes one’s engagement with that particular place.

More generally, the notion of scale has transitioned from a term used to differentiate levels of analysis, namely global and local (Delaney and Leitner 1997: 93), to a sophisticated conceptual framework and theorization in human geography and other disciplines interested in space and place (for an overview of scale in human geography see Herod 2010). Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) observation that space is socially produced, recent geographical theorizations have sought to question the apparent objectivity and neutrality of space and its presumed hierarchical divisions into scales. Much of this literature agrees that scales are representations of space that come into existence through social processes. Hence, the production of scale as a political phenomenon dominated most of the debates for several decades. Neil Smith (1992a), David Delaney and Helga Leitner (1997), and Sallie A. Marston (2000), for instance, have shown how scales are produced through economic and political processes. The ‘production of scale’ as an object of analysis was introduced by Smith (1992a) to describe how capital negotiates the tension between investing in a particular location and moving to locations with the objective of increasing profit. In contrast to this and many other subsequent studies centred in how economic and political activity produces scale, Delaney and Leitner (1997) advanced the notion of ‘construction of scale’ to refer to a ‘bottom-up’ process of differentiation and boundary construction. Globalization, of course, is a prominent theme at the core of analyses of the relationship between state and capital (Smith 1995; Brenner 1997; Leitner 1997; Miller 1997) or political activism (Brown 1996; Miller 2000), among other themes. The common denominator among these and other studies of scale is a focus on processes of scale production through the examination of large structural capitalist transformations.

The concept of scale has also been used to examine the dwelling place. The household became a relevant focus in the theorization of scale through the work of Marston (2000, 2004). In questioning approaches that focused on the production of scale mostly through the prism of economic and political processes, Marston argued that the mechanisms of reproduction and consumption under capitalism had been largely overlooked. The household, she reminds us, is a key site of the production of scale. Her analysis of feminist movements in the United States during the nineteenth century illustrates how household activities shaped the organization of social welfare and consumption from households to the levels of local states and Federal institutions. ‘Nineteenth-century middle-class women’, Marston (2000: 238) argues, ‘altered the prevailing “Gestalt of scale” by altering the structures and practices of social reproduction and consumption’, having impacts ‘beyond the home to the city, the country and the globe.’ Marston’s contributions are some of the most explicit examples addressing home from a scalar perspective.

In thinking about scales of home, it is often assumed that ‘smaller’ scales are nested in ‘larger’ ones. There is a common tendency to imagine scales as organized in a hierarchical manner, which probably owes to the origins of the term. Scale derives from the late Latin scala, ladder, which alludes to images of vertical movement, ascending and descending. And just as with other concepts, metaphors constitute powerful devices that shape how we approach and portray the relationships and limits of the notion in question. Another common way of imagining scale is to think about concentric circles or areas in which the ‘larger’ units contain the ‘smaller’ ones. In this case the relationship among scales is that of larger and smaller, rather than higher and lower (Herod 2010: 45–56). Other representations are ‘Chinese boxes’ as a series of boxes or containers that fit inside each other, much like a matryoshka or Russian doll. These representations hold much in common with the concentric one, although there is a strict sequential progression from one scale to the other that poses several limits on the relationships among the different scales. Alternative metaphors of geographical scale have emerged from theorizations of networks applied to scales, focusing on nonlinear relationships and approaches such as ‘scale-free networks’ (Barabási 2002).

In approaching scale as an ordering device, one does not necessarily need to look at it in terms of static size or level. Scale can also be understood in relational terms. Richard Howitt (1998) advances such an understanding of scale from a musical point of view by taking into consideration the example of musical scales. In a tonal system, the relationships between a series of musical notes define the character of the scale in question. These relationships are hierarchical and have a central tone, but the functions of the notes can change when the tone changes. This perspective highlights how certain elements ‘remain consistent in a geographical analysis that spans across different geographical scales’, while others change. Elements such as ‘features on a landscape, the sites involved in a production process, the ecological processes affecting a social formation, the cultural practices performed by people’ may be stable, while the changes become manifest in ‘the relationships that we perceive between them and the ways in which we might emphasize specific elements for analytical attention’ (1998: 55).

Howitt’s argument on the relational character of geographical scale is relevant for the study of home and mobility because it shows that scales of home are not merely about their relative or absolute size – as in home at a large or small scale, see Montello (2013) – or about places nested into each other – as in home contained in a neighbourhood, a city, a region or a country. Rather, a given scale of home has to do with changing relationships among the different elements that compose home. In the next section of this chapter, I draw from Howitt’s relational approach to scale to analyse how the experience of migration involves changes in socio-spatial relationships that I refer to as the rescaling of home. I specifically focus on the experiences of a Peruvian migrant in Madrid to examine how the complex of relationships that compose her sense of home become rescaled through the experience of dwelling. What is relevant to highlight at this point of the argument is that a relational approach to scale addresses the continuities and shifts of the scope of a sense of home as dynamic phenomena.

In following contemporary debates in human geography to understand home and migration, the caveat is to avoid taking scale as a pre-given category. There is nothing ‘natural’ about home-making in relation to a register of the social, namely the body, household, neighbourhood or city. This is why there is much to be learnt from the examination of how home shapes and becomes shaped by the social across different scales (Marston 2004: 173). From this perspective, assigning a sense of home to a house could be investigated as socially intricate and political, just as the politics of identity pervading discourses of the nation-as-home (Walters 2004) could be analysed in relation to intimacy, privacy and control. The key issue here is not to treat scales of home as if they came into being through similar processes, but to investigate how they shape each other and how they become historically constituted. A way of doing so is to examine the enactment of home-related practices in relation to specific spaces. The ‘scope’ of home is often based on dichotomies such as private and public, domestic and foreign, or inter...