European Spaces: Portuguese Migrants’ Notions of Home and Belonging

Abstract

Movement, dislocation, and contingent, multilocal forms of belonging are increasingly prevalent and normalized ways of life. Ethnographers of transnationalism are documenting the various ways in which people connect the complex geographies of their lives and attempt to forge meaningful identities within multiple and protracted disjunctures. According to this literature, mobility, travel, transience, and liminality are the common themes of latetwentieth-century existence (Appadurai; Clifford; Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, “New Migration”); the notion of “home” is increasingly uncoupled from the location of daily life (Amit-Talai; Berking; Goldring; Olwig; Rapport and Dawson, “Home”; Smith); and citizenship is not the only status through which people acquire social and political rights or national identities (Kearney; Soysal). Recent explorations of transnational migration have expanded traditional conceptualizations of the subject and site of anthropological research in order to capture the complex experiences of these on-going global interconnections (see, e.g., Rouse; Mountz and Wright). These efforts have successfully challenged assumptions that movement is unidirectional, that migration is a circumscribed and temporary event in individuals’ lives, and that daily lives and imagined futures are always firmly anchored in a single location (see Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc; Pries, Migration; Rapport and Dawson, Migrants).