Hidden in the mountains: Celebrating Swedish heritage in rural Pennsylvania (original) (raw)

Place, Identity, and Relations: The Lived Experience of Two Northern Worlds

Arctic Anthropology, 2017

Letting Ingold and Turnbull set the scene, in this paper I visualize how "relations" trace the lived experience of being, learning, and understanding the world. I do so comparatively by drawing upon my research and travels in Greenland and Iceland, exploring how place, identity, and social relations reflect lived relations, amplifying how mobility, narratives, knowledge, and locality are closely entwined and cannot be delineated alone. This entwinement symbolizes strikingly similar allusions of the perception and movement of two northern worlds-spatially distant, yet comparatively close. This comparative approach, while emphasizing diversity, highlights similarity in the ways in which people live in and tell stories about the world. Traveling through the cultural landscapes of these two settings, the narratives embedded within them, it is amplified that one's world is never complete but continuously under construction, retracing a path through the world of others.

Unsettling Claims of Belonging

Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 2021

Starting from the premise that we have to know where we have been to know where we are going, this piece looks heavily to the past and considers the effects of differently experienced belonging in Canada across generations. This autobiographical reflection questions how we might read migrant-settler narratives of belonging alongside Indigenous struggles for sovereignty in such a way that desires for belonging do not displace or erase such struggles but rather support them. Reflecting on my experiences of belonging and shame as a Japanese Canadian of mixed Japanese and British ancestry, the article seeks to deconstruct and disrupt settler-migrant stories by examining citizenship and belonging from these different perspectives.

Belonging without Boundaries: Settlers, Sojourners and Travelers in the 21st Century

Romanian Journal of Psychiatry, 2013

“The Church of God sojourning in Rome to the Church of God sojourning in Corinth.” - Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians In Clement’s letter, the Greek paroikousa (sojourning) means a provisional abode as opposed to katokein, the citizen with residence, from which we may derive two modes of living: parokein (to sojourn like a stranger) and katokein (to reside like a citizen). His message was that the Church was not a permanent structure but a sojourn and that Christians live in messianic time. The 20th century saw so many displacements of peoples across borders, languages and cultures that the terms emigrants, immigrants and migrants are sprinkled across the literature of every field of human endeavour from law to literature, from politics to philosophy, and certainly from psychiatry to psychoanalysis. Things have only gotten more complex in the 21st century where the bipolar world of the Cold War and “the end of history” has given way to a multicentric, polyglot cacaphony where culture has replaced class as the dominant signifier and language has become the major expressive vehicle of that shift. In the European Union alone, there are 23 official languages, the UN has 6 official languages, and battles over language as the emblem of culture are evident among peoples affirming their identity everywhere—from Quebec to Catalonia, Rwanda to East Timor. Whither belonging in all this? The author argues that belonging has become a critical issue for sociocultural psychiatry and for global mental health. Belonging has a bi-valent, ambiguous, deeply unresolved/unresolvable quality, what philosophy calls an aporia, a puzzle. We can begin to describe this puzzle with the dichotomy settlers or sojourners: those who are “here” to settle and those who stay for work or other reasons, for shorter or longer periods, but do not make their home “there.” There is, however, a third state of being, intermediate between sojourners who merely stay a while and settlers who plant roots, and that is those who still on the journey, in transit, “betwixt and between,” as anthropologist Victor Turner described it, neither here nor there, travelers on the threshold. Whether it accompanies a language, a nation, a profession, or other organizing system of meaning, the construct of belonging can be more than an aporia for imagining identity and the very definition of subject and subjectivity. “Belonging” is a way of rethinking relational being, how we define mental health, how we understand the expression of its vicissitudes, and how we organize care and healing for sufferers. To do this, we need to recognize how belonging is experienced and negotiated, free of the constraints of our habitual patterns of practice and thought, to imagine belonging without borders for settlers, sojourners and travelers in the 21st century. Bibliography: 1. Di Nicola, Vincenzo F. (1997). A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. New York, NY and London, UK: W.W. Norton. 2. Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2004). Famiglie sulla soglia. Città invisibili, identità invisibili [Families on the threshold: Invisible cities, invisible identities]. In: Maurizio Andolfi, ed., Famiglie Immigrate e Psicoterapia Transculturale [Immigrant Families and Transcultural Psychotherapy]. Milano: FrancoAngeli, pp. 34-47.

Longing to belong: Stories of (non)belonging in multi-ethnic Sweden

Nordic Journal of Migration Research , 2017

The aim of this article is to contribute to an understanding of contemporary processes of negotiations concerning belonging and non-belonging to the Swedish social community. Taking on a theoretical approach on belonging inspired by Yuval-Davis and Jacobsen, the article analyses three individual stories of women who have migrated to Sweden. Out of this analysis, focusing on how these women claim their belonging to a Swedish social community at the same time as they in different ways are denied such belonging by others, we may conclude that although each of the stories told is unique and articulates an individual experience, there are striking similarities in how their claims of belonging, with its related implications for belonging, are not acknowledged by others. In a way, these individual stories tell us something about some of the crucial challenges regarding belonging in contemporary multi-ethnic Sweden, as well as Europe.

Longing to Belong: Stories of (non)belonging in multi-ethnic Sweden

Nordic journal of migration research, 2017

The aim of this article is to contribute to an understanding of contemporary processes of negotiations concerning belonging and non-belonging to the Swedish social community. Taking on a theoretical approach on belonging inspired by Yuval-Davis and Jacobsen, the article analyses three individual stories of women who have migrated to Sweden. Out of this analysis, focusing on how these women claim their belonging to a Swedish social community at the same time as they in different ways are denied such belonging by others, we may conclude that although each of the stories told is unique and articulates an individual experience, there are striking similarities in how their claims of belonging, with its related implications for belonging, are not acknowledged by others. In a way, these individual stories tell us something about some of the crucial challenges regarding belonging in contemporary multi-ethnic Sweden, as well as Europe.

Belonging and Identity: Past and Present

Journal of Law and Religion , 2022

Like many others, I believe that the information revolution is a constitutive moment in human history, and not only because of the development of technologies that change our habits and improve the quality of our lives. More than anything else, it is because the information revolution profoundly and dramatically changes our self-concept. That revolution is changing our understanding of the place we occupy in the universe (the erosion of anthropocentrism), forcing us to rethink our uniqueness as human beings and our human essence. I believe that the preconditions of our existence are changing dramatically nowadays, and consequently, our notions of belonging and identity require revision.

Longing to Belong

Nordic Journal of Migration Research

The aim of this article is to contribute to an understanding of contemporary processes of negotiations concerning belonging and non-belonging to the Swedish social community. Taking on a theoretical approach on belonging inspired by Yuval-Davis and Jacobsen, the article analyses three individual stories of women who have migrated to Sweden. Out of this analysis, focusing on how these women claim their belonging to a Swedish social community at the same time as they in different ways are denied such belonging by others, we may conclude that although each of the stories told is unique and articulates an individual experience, there are striking similarities in how their claims of belonging, with its related implications for belonging, are not acknowledged by others. In a way, these individual stories tell us something about some of the crucial challenges regarding belonging in contemporary multi-ethnic Sweden, as well as Europe.

Identity Formation and Diversity: Introduction

Identity Formation and Diversity in the Early Medieval Baltic and Beyond

Though the role of archaeologists and archaeological research connected to nation building has been heavily debated, the majority of archaeological studies are still performed on material within the borders of one single country. Thus the significance of current national borders is perpetuated and implicitly treated as boundaries separating people long before the nation-state came to existence. This book will instead undertake and pick up on research that goes beyond existing national borders, in order to capture interaction between regions. We will in particular investigate how this interaction contributed to regional diversity and to a variety of cultural identities within and between regions, of which some cut across current national borders. For many, the trading networks, family ties and formal partners around the Baltic were not less important parts of the self and cultural identity than were historical belongings or existing embryonic states. Intermarriage between partners of different groups and regions was common on all societal levels and one’s original belonging was then likely to shift and change through life.

Identity Belonging Changes through Migration

Abstract The concept of identity has been changing rapidly today. New dimensions are added to the ties dating from the past. The dimensions are the learnt concept of identity, the extended mentality of male dominance and transmission of sense of belonging down to next generations. Identity means symbolising one’s way of perceiving the self, and making the individual visible. The concept of identity played pioneering roles in determining communities, and today it also plays pioneering roles in describing individual identifies due to the fact that borders become indistinct with globalisation. This transformation experienced in belonging of identity is re-shaped with the efforts to protect the heritage left by ancestors. A part of Muslims living in the Balkans in the Ottoman period migrated to Anatolia for various reasons. People living in the areas migrated to give such nicknames as” new comers in the ninety threes”, and thus turned the migration into a symbolic system of meanings in the society. Dikili district of İzmir was an area of such intensive migration. Immigrants coming from the Balkans settled in in the city centres as well as in some villages. This study was conducted in 2016 in the district of Dikili and in its villages. This research investigated those immigrants identity belonging. Thus, it focussed on how they identified themselves. The research used the technique of in-depth face to face interviews. Conversations on migration stories are also included in the research. Audio and video recordings were made in the research, and the recordings were then decoded and interpreted. Key words: Identity, Migration, Albanian, Nomadic, Dikili