Sammendrag
Lives within the ‘transitional spaces’ are filled with hope and aspiration as well as uncertainties, contingencies, and dilemmas. How do people encounter, negotiate, suffer, or imagine circumstances that are individual and situational but also social and structural in origin? How do the different forms of structural inequality place the migrants in vulnerable positions related to home and homemaking? These questions, I argue, should motivate anthropological studies of migration and homemaking as an individual, existential phenomenon as well one operating on a global and political scale. This talk considers the everyday life experience of homeawayness for rural migrants in urban China and both the capacity and vulnerability entailed in the process of homemaking. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the southern Chinese city of Shantou—working and living together with migrant factory workers for 14 months, this talk explores the migrants’ inner struggles between their search for a home and their uncertain status in the absence of established social support structures. The notion of homeawayness introduced in this talk will contribute to a better understanding of the rural migrant workers’ lack of emplacement in urban China and the struggles they experience in creating a future-oriented home. Arguing that the capacity and vulnerability entailed in homemaking is at once individually experienced and socially produced, the talk reveals migrants’ inner struggles that are often ignored in studies of migration and homemaking.
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