Embodied Transnational Belonging

Abstract

This article, based on a collection of 53 interviews with people who migrated from Poland to Norway, discusses how transnational sentiments, nostalgia, and attachments to places and people materialize through the bodily experiences of the mobile subjects. It conceptualizes the notion of embodied transnational belonging, understood as a dynamic, bodily felt materialization of social, cultural, political, economic, and affective processes that assist the emplacement of mobile people in new localities, and that span the borders of nation-states. Theoretically, the article builds on the premises of the sensory turn in social sciences and utilizes the concepts from anthropology, health studies and migration and mobility studies interdisciplinarily. Methodologically, it employs photo elicitation interviews. It discusses how the concept of embodied transnational belonging can be used to extend the understanding of migrant persons’ transnationality. By doing so, it addresses a knowledge gap in transnational studies, attempting to theoretically open the conceptualization of transnational belonging to the bodily dimension. The article suggests that transnationalism is exercised on a level of a bodily experience of the migrant persons, and hence transnationality is not a solely mental/rational phenomenon, but also a bodily/physical one.