Material Cultures, Migrations, and Identities

What the Eye Cannot See

Anna Pechurina

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349566136, 9781137321770
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321787
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on the experiences of Russian migrants to the United Kingdom, this book explores the connection between migrations, homes and identities. It evaluates several approaches to studying them, and is structured around a series of case studies on attitudes to homemaking, food and cooking, and clothing.

Part I

Diasporic Homes, Identities, and Communities

1

The Meaning of Diasporic Homes and Identities

The concept of ‘imagined communities’

This book develops alternative ways of using Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, which can be considered as one of the fundamental categories and as a classic example of the constructivist standpoint. By applying the concept to the Russian migrant community through using the qualitative ‘micro’ approach, I try to ascertain how an imagined community is defined through personal perspective, by its ordinary members. This enables me to move from an objective approach based on generalisations about a large group of people to a subjective one based on the accounts of ordinary people. Furthermore, by drawing on the postmodern understanding of cultural identity as diasporic and/or transnational (Glick-Schiller et al. 1995; Appadurai 1996) and integrating ideas of Brubaker (1996) into the concept, I shift from conceptualising identity in national terms (as a nation) to the definition of identity as a practice realised by individuals rather than by a localised community or structure. In the following section I will present the key ideas from the outlined theories and how they have been developed in relation to the study of Russian communities in the UK.

Imagined communities/transnationalism and diasporas

In his original definition of ‘imagined communities’, Anderson identifies ‘nation’ as a mental image of people who suggest the existence of each other. This is important because he treats it as an intangible concept rather than a real political entity:

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

(Anderson 1983: 15)

Thus, according to Anderson, one cannot visualise ‘nation’ as some real physical group, because the nation is imagined by people. People ‘are obliged to’ imagine their nation because it is too large for all its members to meet their compatriots. However, despite the fact that they cannot meet each other, people imagine the nation as limited and sovereign, which means that it is distinguished from other nations. In this sense, although it is separate, it is still and always remains a community: ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 1983: 7).

Moreover, the concept of imagined communities is well suited to both the citizens of a country who live within and those who live outside its physical borders. Migrants imagine themselves as part of any community; there is no need to be physically attached to the land. Or, with regard to the case of Russia: though outside Russia, Russians can still feel that they are part of it. At the same time, those living in Russia can identify themselves with some other ‘imagined community’, whether the UK or some other country. These ideas are particularly relevant to the contemporary context of transnationalism, in which the sense of belonging to one’s homeland has become even more blurred and unfixed than previously; in this situation, one person can simultaneously be involved in several networks and communities, often across national borders.

Full-time loyalty to one country and one culture is no longer self-evident: people may divide their physical pastimes, effort and identity between several societies. Citizenship and political participation are also becoming bi-focal, since some sending countries allow their expatriates to remain citizens, vote in national elections and establish political movements.

(Remennik 2002: 516)

Consequently, the actual location of a person is of less importance than the networks in which they are involved, both in and outside their current place of living.

The presented understanding of the concept of identity can be linked to the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘transnationalism’. Thus, ‘diaspora consciousness’ (Clifford 1994) presupposes a multiplicity of attachments to one’s ‘imagined community’, that is, a simultaneous experience of ‘home and away’ (Vertovec 1999). The transnational character of identity (Glick Schiller et al. 1995) adds an additional dimension that locates the everyday activities and cultural practices of displaced migrants into/within the mediated context where ‘multiple and constant interconnections across international borders’ continuously occur (Glick Schiller et al. 1995: 48). It can clearly be seen how recent modern changes which brought into place the phenomena of global media and transnational migration have taken the idea of ‘imagined communities’ to a new level. As a result, it would be more relevant to refer to modern migrants as diasporic communities, or ‘transmigrants’, defined by Glick Schiller (1995) as

immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state.

(Glick Schiller et al. 1995: 48)

Consequently, one cannot think of migrants as belonging to isolated communities but, rather, as diasporic communities involved in various types of network. What makes transmigrants a specific case is that a considerable part of their trans-border connections are realised through computer-mediated communication (CMC), which involves a range of networking activities such as emailing, participating in forums and chat-rooms, and social networking, among others.¹ One of the outcomes of such communications is the emergence of the so-called ‘transnational social spaces’ that represent stable social ties built by migrants beyond and across the borders of sovereign states (Faist 2004). These ties are associated with a variety of practices:

Transnational social spaces are constructed through the accelerated pace of transnational practices that become routine practices in social life. Such practices do not necessarily involve international migration. On the contrary, transnational interactions involve such routines as international calls, faxes, emails, satellite TV broadcasting, simultaneous media access through Internet sources and TV stations, international conferences, the different varieties of international tourism (ranging from recreational tourism to sex tourism or eco-tourism), as well as the everlasting formalized agreements and ongoing negotiations of a wide array of international organizations and non-governmental groups.

(Roudometof 2005: 119)

Thus, one does not have to travel across a border in order to become involved in various transnational networks. Anderson himself uses the term ‘long-distance nationalism’ in his later works to describe the newly emerging type of nationalism that results from mass communications and mass migrations (Anderson 2001). While Anderson’s view continues to emphasise the political aspects of nationalism, the modification of the term by Glick Schiller (2002) also pays attention to the nature of the connections within the transnational community, defining long-distance nationalism as ‘an ideology of belonging that extends across the territorial boundaries of states, as well as across generational divides’ (Glick Schiller and Fouron 2002: 170) and that ‘binds together migrants, their descendants, dispersed minority populations, and people who continue to live within the territory claimed as the homeland into a single trans-border citizenry’ (Glick Schiller 2005: 290).

The main assumption that follows on from this is that there is no obvious connection between identity (that of the individual, the ethnic group, or even the nation) and a fixed locality or a state (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002: 6). Correspondingly, because transnational identity presumes a multiplicity of attachments, it must be based on a whole range of indicators, not just citizenship status and ethnicity. Defining features such as social distance, self-perception, and self-identification are becoming more important for developing an understanding of how a sense of belonging is developed and maintained:

If culture is in any way related to habitus, routine practices, modes of perception and meaning; and if identifications are linked to a sense of belonging, then the cultural differences between any two given groups are not necessarily equivalent to the mutually perceived distance perceived in terms of belonging.

(Grimson 2010: 64)

Another important development of Anderson’s ideas in a modern context was taken up by Appadurai (1996), who introduced the concepts of deterritorialised identity and trans-local senses of belonging into the discussion.

According to Appadurai, deterritorialisation refers to a ‘cultural dynamics’ that involves ‘transnational corporations, labour markets and also ethnic groups, sectarian movements, and political formations, which increasingly operate in ways that transcend specific territorial boundaries and identities’ (Appadurai 1996: 49). As a result of the process of deterritorialisation, identities become extremely fragmented and disrupted, since they are no longer based on associations with a single nation-state. As Appadurai puts it, ‘the loosening of bonds between people, wealth, and territories fundamentally alters the basis of cultural reproduction’ (Appadurai 1990: 193). Consequently, what is imagined by people is no longer the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state, but the imaginations of numerous ‘diasporic public spheres’. Appadurai gives the following example:

As Turkish guest workers in Germany watch Turkish films in their German flats, as Koreans in Philadelphia watch the 1988 Olympics in Seoul through satellite feeds from Korea, and as Pakistani cabdrivers in Chicago listen to cassettes of sermons recorded in mosques in Pakistan or Iran, we see moving images meet deterritorialised viewers.

(Appadurai 1996: 4)

To reiterate, Appadurai does not deny the existence of ‘imagined communities’; rather, he emphasises that the community/communities that are imagined are not local, but global (Gray 2000: 20).

In addition, Appadurai developed Anderson’s idea of the importance of shared language further, by outlining the particular role of mass communication and the global media in shaping ideas of homeland and nation. As he argues, the images that are globally produced and broadcast replace the real experiences and places that people might experience. ‘More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before’ (Appadurai 1996: 53); this is mainly because of their access to the global markets of the film and media industry. As a result, the community is not ‘imagined’ by people, but, rather, ‘imaginatively created for them’ by the media industry. In this context, the understanding of how the process of deterritorialisation affects lived and local experiences becomes an important ethnographical task. Appadurai formulates the question for consideration as follows: what is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalised, deterritorialised world? (Appadurai 1996: 52).

Turning to the subject of my research, if we think of ‘homelands’ as localities, we should also consider how they have been affected by the globalised world. Correspondingly, it could be argued that if communities and identities are imagined, ‘homelands’ are a part of this process too, meaning that they do not relate to a particular geographical locality. As Gupta and Ferguson (1992) show, in the reality of the deterritorialised world,

‘imagined communities’ come to be attached to imagined places, as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places, or communities.

(Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 10–11)

Frequent travels and changes of residence, along with constantly modifying life strategies, create a situation that can ultimately be described as a ‘generalised condition of homelessness’ (Said 1979, cited in Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 9): ‘a world where identities are increasingly coming to be, if not wholly deterritorialised, at least differently territorialised’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 9). At the same time, one does not have to be a migrant in order to develop a complex attachment to one’s home and/or homeland. For instance, in a multicultural society like Britain, the idea of homeland only represents a point of reference, and not a real, physical locality.²

In accordance with this, the understanding of home as a fixed place or locality is no longer relevant for those who are not settled in one place and have to (willingly or not) reside in another city or country. In other words, there is not just one place called home; rather, there are many places that incorporate various dimensions of ‘home’: ‘a homeland’, ‘a house’, ‘back home’, and so on. Ultimately, home becomes ‘a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination’ (Brah 1996, cited in Collins 2009: 840); home becomes a process, a lived experience that can be connected with different lands at different stages of a person’s life.

From the migrants’ perspective, the reality of displacement and permanent or temporal detachment from their homeland calls for even greater attention to be paid to the question of ‘what makes place home’ (Flynn 2007: 463). Places that once were unfamiliar become their new or ‘second’ homes after a while. In other words, roots and even identities can be re-established as new places (Flynn 2007: 463). Consequently, ‘the journeys of migration involve a splitting of home as a place of origin and home as the sensory world of everyday experience’ (Ahmed 1999, cited in Collins 2009: 840).

It can be argued that home itself becomes a transnational experience, often realised as or presented through a process of imagining belonging to a particular place, neighbourhood, or community (Collins 2009: 840). Through practices of ‘regrounding’, migrants articulate their ‘feeling of being at home’ while staying abroad. One example of such practices might be an ‘engagement with objects like food and photographs, encounters with familiar bodies and languages, or efforts to reconnect life/living “here” with lives “at home” ’ (Collins 2009: 840). One of the implications of this process is that, through exploring the ‘familiar bodies, languages’ and objects, a researcher can reconstruct migrants’ ideas of home, and the meanings they ascribe to home. Material objects and possessions (or ‘symbols of home’) that people keep in their homes act as important mediators that represent a person’s attachments and feelings.

Importantly, all of the discussion presented above can be linked back to Anderson’s argument. Thus, describing the concepts of imagined communities, Anderson mentions that ‘communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson 1983: 15). Correspondingly, identity is a phenomenon of multiple meanings and manifestations. Following on from the quotation, it is clear that the image of one’s community can be realised on different levels (official or personal) and constructed in different ways (by performing national rituals, celebrating national holidays, or keeping the national flag at home).

In my research I define ‘styles of imagining’ as different ways of representing the nation in everyday practices by different people. In thinking about different ways of representing imagined communities, it can be argued that the actual meanings of material objects can be replaced by their symbolic function, linked to particular aspects of the community. For instance, the community can be represented by the national anthem (e.g. the Marseillaise) as well as traditional food (the croissant), festivals (commemoration day) and souvenirs (matrioshka dolls). Furthermore, the process of maintaining a community is not necessarily static. The invention of nation takes place in practice while listening to the national song, dancing the national dance, or using any other objects related to national identity and considered as such by their owners. (A detailed overview of how material possessions can be linked to identity is presented in Chapter 2.)

Explanation of terminology: From nation to nation-ness

Because this research deals with personal definitions provided by ordinary people, it requires a more flexible approach to the understanding of identity, which is defined here as ‘always multiple, contested, and, at times, pragmatically constituted’ (Christensen 2012: 893). In this regard, it is useful to refer to one of the valuable developments of Anderson’s ideas by Brubaker, whose elaboration of the general definition of nation was effectively applied in my research. In his analysis of the national question in a post-Soviet ‘New Europe’, Brubaker insists on moving on from an analysis of nationalism based on the understanding of nation as ‘substantial entity’:

Instead of focusing on nations as real groups, we should focus on nationhood and nationness, on ‘nation’ as practical category, institutionalised form, and contingent event. ‘Nation’ is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) the category of analysis. To understand nationalism, we have to understand the practical uses of category of ‘nation’, the ways it can come to structure perception, to inform thought and experience, to organise discourse and political action.

(Brubaker 1996: 7)

The idea of thinking about nation as a set of practices can be directly linked to my research. Thus, to unite Brubaker’s and Anderson’s ideas, a nation can be defined not as a collective of people but as a practice realised by people who ‘imagine’ themselves as a collective. This also enables me to replace the ‘common’ research question of ‘what is the nation?’ with its modified version, ‘how has the nation been (re)created and (re)presented?’ by focusing on a more personal level of the process. In the same way, the term ‘nation’ can be replaced by its modified version ‘nation-ness’ in order to emphasise the practised and contingent aspects. Consequently, the images I study are images of ordinary people; the practices by which they maintain their connections are the practices of the everyday, daily routine. The reason for this emphasis lies in the assumption that people can negotiate and manipulate their nation-ness, making it more or less visible to others. In other words, it means that people can ‘display/ demonstrate’ their national belonging to others, and this can include all sorts of practices, from performing national rituals to bringing back locally made sausages from one of their regular trips to Russia. Ultimately, it leads to the consideration that nation-ness originates from the practices and imaginings of ordinary people and can thus be studied as a subjective rather than objective category. The subjective approach reveals that national identity can be based on more complex grounds and includes a variety of indicators apart from citizenship, status, and ethnicity.

Taking this into account, I argue that using terms such as ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’ would not be entirely applicable to the study of Russian migrants’ homes. One of the main reasons for this is that I do not study the Russian nation, but, rather, research the individual and personal conceptions of Russian culture as lived and practised by Russian migrants to the UK. Corresponding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Diasporic Homes, Identities, and Communities
• Part II: Researching Russianness: A Discussion of Methods
• Part III: Interpreting Research Results: Objects and Homes in Immigration
• Appendix: List of Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index