Liminal Moves: Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times 9781800730496

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. (Im)Mobilities and Liminalities
Chapter 2. The Street as Liminal: Itinerant Monkey-Training Performances in Japan
Chapter 3. Writing as Liminal: Youths Talking about Migration in Italy
Chapter 4. Waiting as Liminal: Male Accompanying Partners in Switzerland and Beyond
Conclusion. Liminal Moves
References
Index

Citation preview

LIMINAL MOVES

Edited by Noel B. Salazar, University of Leuven, in collaboration with ANTHROMOB, the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network This transdisciplinary book series features empirically grounded studies from around the world that disentangle how people, objects and ideas move across the planet. With a special focus on advancing theory as well as methodology, the series considers movement as both an object and a method of study. Volume 9 LIMINAL MOVES Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times Flavia Cangià

Volume 4 MOMENTOUS MOBILITIES Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel Noel B. Salazar

Volume 8 PACING MOBILITIES Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements Edited by Vered Amit and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 3 INTIMATE MOBILITIES Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World Edited by Christian Groes and Nadine T. Fernandez

Volume 7 FINDING WAYS THROUGH EUROSPACE West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside Joris Schapendonk

Volume 2 METHODOLOGIES OF MOBILITY Ethnography and Experiment Edited by Alice Elliot, Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 6 BOURDIEU AND SOCIAL SPACE Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements Deborah Reed-Danahay Volume 5 HEALTHCARE IN MOTION Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access Edited by Cecilia Vindrola-Padros, Ginger A. Johnson, and Anne E. Pfister

Volume 1 KEYWORDS OF MOBILITY Critical Engagements Edited by Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram

Liminal Moves Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times Flavia Cangià

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Flavia Cangià

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2021004784 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-048-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-049-6 ebook

To Eva and Lia

Contents

List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments

viii ix xii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

(Im)Mobilities and Liminalities

20

Chapter 2

The Street as Liminal: Itinerant Monkey-Training Performances in Japan

50

Chapter 3

Writing as Liminal: Youths Talking about Migration in Italy

78

Chapter 4

Waiting as Liminal: Male Accompanying Partners in Switzerland and Beyond

108

Conclusion

Liminal Moves

132

References Index

142 159

Figures

1.1

“The wayfarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go” (Ingold 2011: 150). Photo by Biondo Egidio.

30

2.1

Sarumaiza walking along the streets of Heino town, Japan. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

61

2.2

Audience’s reactions during the performance. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

63

2.3

The applause. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

67

2.4

The monkey does not collaborate. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

68

2.5

The monkey jumps through the two hoops. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

69

2.6

The monkey bites the trainer. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

73

3.1

The ship Vlora docked in the port of Bari (southeast Italy, 1991). Wikimedia Commons.

79

3.2

A street in Prenestino-Centocelle. Photo by Fabiana Cangià.

85

3.3

“Apocalypse Casilina.” Photo by Alessio Ferraro.

100

Preface

The Great Khan asked Polo “you return … and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use of all your traveling?” … Marco Polo imagines answering … that … what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo travels the kingdom of the emperor Kublai Khan and brings tales of his journey back to the monarch. Marco Polo’s tales about his journeys across imagined cities, as Italo Calvino describes in this quote, perfectly capture what happens when we travel, and in a way the “use of traveling.” Calvino tells us that traveling, through the pathways, imaginings, reflections, and pauses that it entails, can bring about a potential change, where we may search for or end up with something ahead of us, while revisiting our past. When we travel, we may be confronted with our own transformation. We encounter others, tell others or imagine telling others about our journey. This book is the result of a long journey along my research fieldworks, but it also comes from my reflections about travel and the construction of work and life trajectories. Over the last fifteen years, I have been traveling for various reasons, including tourism, study, research, work, and family. In 2004, I left Italy, my country of birth, for the first time, staying away for a few months and studying in Japan. I arrived in Switzerland the year after for professional purposes. There I met the man who became my husband, and with whom, at the time, I started a long-distance relationship across Switzerland, Italy, and Japan. Between 2007 and 2009, I traveled back and forth to Japan to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for my doctorate. I rented a small apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo and continued to travel back to Rome and Switzerland to visit my family and friends while pursuing my studies. I moved back to Italy in 2012, and then to Geneva in 2014 to work. In recent

x 䡲 Preface

years, I have been commuting between different Swiss cities for work-related reasons. During these years of travel for study, work, and love, others’ mobility or immobility, as well as the physical and geographical distance from—or absence of—my family and friends, affected my decisions and interpretation of mobility more than the excitement of traveling around and living in other countries was capable of doing. One day, I realized that a couple of my socks were split up, one in a drawer in my apartment in Rome and the other somewhere in my small apartment in Tokyo. I was stuck in an in-between hotspot symbolized by my separated socks, between work opportunities, distinct phases of my life, and geographical destinations. During my first experiences of work between Switzerland and Italy, I constantly met other people who moved often for their work, with lots of exciting experiences and travels to tell. I often wondered if I should do the same. I also started thinking about the migration of my father when he was young, and later of my parents-in-law, and about the emotional cost of relocating to a new and completely unknown place that makes migration, as one form of mobility, all but an exciting experience. At the same time, part of my family and some of my friends remained in their hometown, and a part of me definitely did the same. In 2014, after a year of being unemployed and my husband’s return to Switzerland, I decided to follow him, which coincided with me once again being employed. Until that moment, Switzerland had represented the first and most important destination of my migratory trajectory. It was here that I had my first professional experiences, continued my studies, and met my husband. In Switzerland, I had my two daughters. Having my first child had an impact on the way I traveled and planned to travel. Having a child represented the crucial moment at which I recognized the opportunities with which this country could provide me. In a certain sense, I might say that my migratory journey would find its final destination here. Yet my mind often imagines being back home or visiting possible future destinations. In my mind, I could live in my apartment in Rome but imagine it with a view of the Mont Blanc from the window, the view I used to have when I moved back to Geneva in 2014. This book is about liminal experiences in human mobility, including but not limited to migration as one of the many forms that mobility can take. It is about that condition of in-betweenness between here and there, before and after, self and other, lives lived and unlived, and the potential change that this might entail. This condition can involve a sense of disorientation, uncertainty, and ambivalence. It might also encompass a margin of freedom where everything is still possible, at least at the imaginative level. The imaginative and temporal space between my apartment interior in Rome and the external view over the Mont Blanc in Geneva, between my socks,

Preface 䡲 xi

one in Rome and one in Tokyo, is not an empty field. Within this hotspot, I built my work life and my family. This is not the whole story, though. In my mind, there are some work opportunities on which I am missing out, a work life that I could be leading if I had made other choices. I imagine possible destinations to which my family and I could move one day for work reasons. This imaginative space between Tokyo, Rome, and Geneva is not simply a spatial field. It is a temporal and symbolic pathway I travel along, when I move between my past and my future, between the multiple ways I define myself and the world around me. The writing of this book is also an (im)mobile experience in itself. The idea of writing it arose over the last few years in Switzerland. I started seeing a common thread running through my past and current studies and fieldwork across the world conducted during this time. When I had a clearer idea about this book, I was pregnant with my second daughter, and I was about to finish my work contract. I was “moving” to a new phase in my life. While writing it, I was often on the move physically, commuting between my various workplaces, traveling across Europe for conferences and holidays, waiting at the airport, or flying on a plane. I was sitting in restaurants, bars, in my office, or in the living room of my apartment. I was working, then unemployed, then working again. During this time, I encountered multiple ways of experiencing mobility, immobility and in-betweenness. It was also when I was finishing writing this book that the coronavirus started spreading around the globe, and particularly in Italy, my home country, during its initial phase. I was not allowed to travel to visit my family and friends in Rome, as traveling in and out of certain countries was permitted only for work or health reasons during that period. This event soon had an impact on my cross-border movements to visit my family, on my plans to visit them, and on my whole idea of what a migratory life should be like. Switzerland also closed schools and kindergartens in March 2020 as a reaction to the virus. I started working from home, with my children and husband at home at the same time. During the lockdown, I finished writing the first draft of this book. I could not help but wonder about the human capacity to control and organize movement, about our not-so-“free” mobile possibilities as “privileged” travelers and how the restrictions of movement for some relate to the restrictions or movement capacity for others. Immobility, like the one during the lockdown, can take on different meanings, at times showing its unequal nature, at others its potential. This book is about this potential and the change that might come with it. I dedicate it to my two daughters Eva and Lia who represent my most meaningful, enduring, and promising change imaginable.

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book would not have been possible without the support of many people around me during this time. I am grateful to all those who participated in my fieldwork research and who shared their own personal experiences and ideas with me, as well as all the colleagues I have met and with whom I have worked over the years. The writing of this book has been supported by NCCR—On the Move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I am grateful to those at NCCR—On the Move for having given me the opportunity to think more broadly about the issues of migration and mobility. In particular, I am grateful to Tania Zittoun of the Institute of Psychology and Education at the University of Neuchâtel for her precious collaboration and support in recent years, and her countless and constructive comments about the initial makeup of this book proposal and more in general about my research. During these years at NCCR—On the Move, I also benefited from the pleasant and inspiring conversations with Déborah Levitan. A special thanks goes to her. The list of people toward whom I owe gratitude is long, and I might be forgetting someone. However, I am particularly grateful to, and would like to thank especially, those scholars who helped me look at the issues of diversity, mobility, and/or liminality from a broader and more constructive perspective. In particular, during the last few years, I was privileged to encounter Noel Salazar, Paul Stenner, Vincent Kaufmann, and Alex Gillespie. I hope that the book shows what I have learned from these scholars. A special thanks goes to my colleague and great friend Camilla Pagani for her valuable advice, and for always encouraging clarity in my writing style. A special thank you also goes to my current colleagues Eric Davoine and Nicky Le Feuvre for welcoming me at NCCR LIVES during this last year; to Giorgio de Finis, Brigitte Suter, Metka Hercog, Luca Ciabarri, Valerio Simoni; to all the people with whom I had the chance to collaborate in one way or another during these years, or who have constructively commented on the initial idea and proposal of this book. My gratitude extends to Fabiola Mancinelli, and the conveners and members of the EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network (ANTHROMOB), as well as to the team of ERC HOMInG

Acknowledgments 䡲 xiii

(The Home-Migration Nexus), with whom I recently had the pleasure to discuss my book. Special thanks also go to my students at the University of Neuchâtel, and previously at the University of Fribourg, who listened to my ideas, and who were curious about and actively participated in my classes on diversity, migration, and mobility. I benefited immensely from the comments and questions I received from them. I thank all people from whom I had a chance to obtain comments, queries, criticism, support, and suggestions regarding this book or regarding my current and future work plans. Thanks also to the anonymous book reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, and the editors of Berghahn Books in particular for their support and patience during the publication process. Thanks to my parents, family, and friends around the globe. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to my daughters Eva and Lia and my husband Biondo, who accompanied me with great patience and support on this long journey as I researched and wrote about all that is in these pages.

Introduction In a movement, it is not the change of position which interests us, it is the positions themselves, the one the movement has left, the one it will take, the one it would take if it stopped on the way. —Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind

As I am finishing the writing of this book, the coronavirus is spreading around the globe. In order to limit this spread, governments have implemented various restrictive measures. People are asked to stay home and not go to work or school. Travel to certain destinations and public gatherings are now forbidden. Many flights have been grounded. Entire towns and regions have been put in quarantine, and movement in and out these places is banned. Italy is currently subjected to a nationwide restriction on movement, and Switzerland and other countries are moving closer to the same regulations. The spread of this new and unknown virus has affected—and may continue to affect—our daily actions, our sense of the surrounding environment and the way we relate to others, as well as our plans regarding movement. The pandemic crisis has certainly had an impact on the way people move, rendering some immobile. It represents an extreme case of an event that (regardless of humans’ responsibility) is happening to us, an event that is “a new becoming that was not there in advance” (Stenner 2017: 268), with uncertain ramifications. It makes us reflect on the fact that movement is undeniably a crucial aspect of human life, that this movement can still be stopped at any time, and that we may be incapable of changing our everyday and habitual movements. We move daily to reach our place of work or go to the grocery store. We move to go for a walk, meet friends, or go on holiday. We do not only move physically, though. We can imagine distant places, explore multiple directions for life, or project a future elsewhere. We encounter others and can be affected in one way or another by others’ movements. We may be confronted with what we become when moving, with new roles and positions that may change over a period of time as we travel, enhance our career, or simply grow old. In our daily life, events

2    Liminal Moves

other than the coronavirus—whether long-lasting or transitory, unsettling or entertaining, small-scale or massive—can always happen to us unexpectedly, affect our routine, have an impact on the way we move physically, the way we perceive and move toward others, or the way we gravitate toward future moves. As a result, we can decelerate and interrupt our routine activities, change our life or work plans and experience a new rhythm in our lives, or feel immobile in various life domains or situations. We can come to accept or refuse change or the fact that others move toward or away from us; we can imagine or wait for our (or others’) next moves. This book is about these spatial, symbolic,1 and temporal moves along places, meanings, and times, or between positions, “the one the movement has left, the one it will take, the one it would take if it stopped on the way” (Bergson 2007: 168). It is about “the change of position” and related state of betwixt and between that might occur on the occasion of these moves (which will later be conceptualized as liminality), and about the encounters that this state gives rise to. The image of betwixt and between is a powerful one. Victor Turner perfectly defines this state and calls it the liminal period: “The liminal period is that time and space betwixt and between one context of meaning and action and another” (Turner 2001: 113). It is when a person, meaning, event, or place is neither-this-nor-that. The book draws upon ethnographic explorations of different individual or community experiences of mobility. I explore the itinerancy of a group of monkey-training performers in Japan, who travel across the country, take spectators on the street by surprise, and ask them to stop their daily activities in order to participate in the show. I also explore the writings of adolescents at school who, during a “normal” school day are surprised by researchers in their classroom and write about the impact of migration on Italy and their lives. Finally, I describe the relocation to Switzerland of men following their partners on overseas work assignments and the ruptures to their working life and daily rhythms. These experiences are unique and very different from each other. Yet, despite their diversity, they present something in common. In all three there is a movement occurring at the spatial level, but also an act of moving at the symbolic and temporal levels. In all three, the events affecting people’s daily course of life are represented by one or the other (performers’, researchers’, migrants’, or family’s) spatial movement. Spatial movement can mean different things for different people at different times. It can be a valuable experience for both those who move and those who do not move, but “not all movements are equally meaningful and life-shaping” (Salazar 2014a: 60). Not all can move for the same reason, in the same way, under the same conditions, and at the same velocity. Not all spatial movements automatically imply mobility (Kaufmann 2002).

Introduction 䡲 3

When it comes to being infused with meanings intertwined with social norms, power, and imaginaries, and with change, movement stops being merely physical motion and becomes what in the social sciences is known as mobility. Mobility is an actual or potential act of physical movement that is profoundly and ambivalently entangled with the experience, aspiration, or refusal of change, and with a person’s biography and life world. As a brute fact, mobility can be simply measured as “a thing in the world, an empirical reality” (Cresswell 2006: 3). The routes through which one moves, but also the velocity, rhythm, and spatial scale at which one moves, all define mobility as a physical movement. Then, there are imaginaries and representations of what mobility means in sociocultural contexts (e.g. freedom, creativity, transgression, or threat). As a social construct and practice, mobility is influenced by social norms and its embeddedness within specific sociocultural and political contexts (Vannini 2009). Finally, and most importantly for this book, mobility is experienced, practiced, signified, and embodied by the people themselves: “The way we walk, for instance, says much about us. We may be in love, we may be happy, we may be burdened and sad. We inhabit mobility differently according to our mood. Human mobility is an irreducibly embodied experience” (Cresswell 2006: 3–4). Mobility, as a human experience, is made of an infinite number of components, which pertain to self-ascribed and attributed meanings, imaginaries, norms, experiences, and practices of movement (Frello 2008; Salazar and Smart 2011; Cresswell 2006). These components can hinder or enable the whole experience of mobility. I can be physically stopped by others or by external causes, or resist the idea of moving for the sense I attach to it (as I am afraid of flying), or find migrating to another country or commuting every day an impediment to my life project. I can block or accept the idea of another person moving, either as a barrier or a resource to my personal life progress. The embodied practice of mobility can range from being an exciting experience of freedom to being a dangerous or boring act. Mobility is also composed of various tempos, velocities, and intensities, and it is temporally oriented. As we move, we may stop or be stopped, we may slow down, wait, or resist our movement or the movement of others. Our travel speed can be reduced the very moment we are stopped at the frontier to show our passport, when our train is delayed, or when we wait for the airplane to take off. We can be physically stuck in border zones for a period of time, or we may experience a rupturing event on the occasion of a relocation that alters the routine of daily life. When we travel, we can go back to the past through memory or be oriented to a possible future through imagination (Salazar 2011b; Cangià and Zittoun 2020). Mobility, including all these and other forms of spatial, symbolic, or temporal displacement and blockage, is hence inextricably linked to the way individuals navigate

4 䡲 Liminal Moves

places, meanings, and times. It is linked to the way individuals engage with the environment and experience change. Insofar as the experience of mobility is ambivalently entangled with an actual or potential change from one state to another, how can we explore this change? I propose to explore the change related to the human experience of mobility through the lens of liminality. The concept of liminality has recently acquired an increasing interest across many disciplines in the social sciences, ranging from anthropology to marketing. In its general sense, liminality refers to the experience of being in an in-between position, of transiting between states, stages, and forms, an experience where the boundaries of inside and outside, before and after, here and there are blurred and can coexist. Thomassen and other scholars (Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra 2015; Thomassen 2014) proposed to view liminality as a prism for understanding the multiple and ambivalent transformations characterizing our contemporary world: Liminality became established at the core of the modern project. Play, comedy, gambling, sexuality, entertainment, violence—in short, all the most evident aspects of liminality linked to human experience— took central stage within cultural, political and economic modernity. Simultaneously, at the level of thought, the human sentiments of fear, anxiety, skepticism and doubt (quintessential liminal sentiments) were established as anthropological foundations. (Thomassen 2014: 14)

The experience of liminality certainly acquires a new centrality in our times, where events such as global pandemics, global security politics (e.g. the Global War on Terror), climate change, the “24-hours-a-day” economy, and the increasing digitalization and Uberization of the world of work now blur spatial and temporal boundaries, create unprecedented existential uncertainty and social and economic insecurity, and have an impact on human mobility. The concept of liminality represents a vantage point to understand the potentialities of the human experience of mobility and its interplay with immobility (Khan 2016). While humans can remain trapped in an inbetween position between destinations, meanings, and times, this entrapment is all but a static condition. Despite the ambivalent and indefinite character of this state, within which future developments are mostly unknown, this condition can generate a terrain for possible transformations. The person, far from being completely immobile, continues moving across the multiple possible and yet uncertain paths that life might take. It is in this experience of immobility that the terrain for change and becoming can develop: “Within … immobility, things are not still at all” (Cocker 2010: 4). In this sense, liminality is not only about an in-between position but also about a potential

Introduction 䡲 5

becoming (Stenner 2017; Thomassen 2014), prompted by the potentialities and transformative qualities inherent to transitional moments, “when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (Turner 2001: 44). I think about street performances, writings, and waiting for work in terms of liminalities in a double sense. First, these experiences represent transitional passages to new symbolic forms, on the occasion of an event that creates a condition of liminal affectivity, an affective “condition of potentiality for being affected and affecting events” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 170). In these passages, a state of suspension and ambivalence between identities, meanings, places, and times emerges. Second, performances, writings, and waiting can work as liberating and channeling forces to bring about the unexpected transformative power of people’s creativity, desire, feelings, and imagination.

The Book A large piece of research, drawing upon the work of Victor Turner on pilgrimage, has already attempted to explore the relationship of mobility and liminality. Anthropologists and cultural psychologists alike have examined how pilgrimage, tourism, and migration (as examples of mobility) in particular become occasions for symbolic transformation for individuals, who, by distancing from everyday settings and lives, can go through a liminal experience and then continue or come back by reconstructing, in the new context, a habitual environment with a changed status and state (Turner and Turner 1995; Hage 2009a; Salazar 2011b; Salazar and Graburn 2014; Graburn 1977; Gillespie 2007b, 2006). Other scholars have primarily explored how certain places of travel become liminal for the very fact of being marginal, dangerous, or transitory (Augé 2009; Andrews and Roberts 2012). While shedding light on the important interrelationship between travel and liminality, this research has mostly maintained a separation between spatial, symbolic, and temporal levels. The present book extends the analytical lens provided by this past research in various ways. Firstly, I combine the analysis of the spatial dimension with the analysis of the temporal and symbolic dimensions characterizing mobility. Secondly, I underline the interplay of mobility and immobility and see how liminality enters in between the two. I aim to explore how the spatial, symbolic, and temporal dimensions intertwine, and how liminality occurs at these multiple levels. Empirical cases here are not only liminal spaces but also and most importantly those inbetween meanings and times across which individuals navigate when they

6 䡲 Liminal Moves

experience various forms of movement and stasis. In this sense, I aim to overcome the analytical separation between different forms of (im)mobility (Kaufmann 2002): spatial mobility is entangled with a multiplicity of (im)mobilities, including professional, social, semantic, and existential. I will give special attention not only to the realized forms of mobility but also to the potential character of mobility. When usual and meaningful patterns of movement are disrupted, or one experiences stasis, people can use the force of imagination and creativity to move toward, come to accept, or even transform personal or others’ identity and change; to picture a life elsewhere; or to go back to the past (Cangià and Zittoun 2020). An approach that takes into account not only the realized forms of mobility but also the potential and aspirational character of mobility (in a word motility) can provide support in exploring those situations where mobility can occur at some levels (e.g. spatial, symbolic) yet remains merely a potentiality or is impossible to attain at others (e.g. professional, spatial, existential). This book is inspired by an ethnographic methodological and multimethod approach. It includes various qualitative methods, such as participant observation, diaries and writings, and person-centered, biographical, and reflexive interviews.2 The structure of the book is divided into four main chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 presents the theoretical framework and proposes conceptual integration in mobility and liminality studies. Firstly, I will present the concept of mobility and the “mobility turn” in the social sciences. Then, I will introduce my understanding of mobility and the various dimensions that are relevant for the sake of this study. I will hence describe mobility in relation to immobility. I suggest exploring the dynamic between mobility and immobility by considering the role that spatiality plays, but also the temporal and symbolic dimensions in the context of mobility. I will elaborate on the importance of considering the semantic encounter with alterity in the study of mobility. I will then discuss how mobility and immobility connect with the concept of liminality, and what liminality means in relation to the experience of (im)mobility. The chapter continues by examining recent theoretical transdisciplinary approaches to liminality in contemporary times and proposes using the concept of liminal hotspot as the analyzer for the study of the interplay between mobility and immobility. I will briefly introduce the migration of refugees in order to define the condition of liminal hotspot. Chapter 2 will draw upon ethnographic research conducted in Japan with a group of monkey performers known as the Monkey Dance Company. I explore the mobile practices of the group’s itinerant street monkey training (the so-called jo¯geyuki practice of traveling around the country) within the context of the discrimination against the Buraku minority people in Japan, also known as the “Buraku-min” (literally “hamlet people”). The physical traveling across the country to perform the traditional practice of monkey

Introduction 䡲 7

training to a larger audience represents a way of counteracting social immobility for the Buraku people. The street and the street performance, more specifically, represent an embodied and yet symbolic liminal space between identities, where boundaries between the “Burakumin” and the “Japanese” are blurred, and the Buraku cultural identity is reclaimed by partly transforming it into “Japanese national culture.” This chapter will also illustrate how the performance simultaneously becomes the depiction of past and future by revisiting tradition and, at the same time, shedding new light on the Buraku issue for future generations. Chapter 3 will present my study conducted among adolescents in a high school in the suburbs of Rome in Italy. I will discuss adolescent writings about their feelings and opinions concerning migration. I consider the encounter with alterity and others’ movement as part and parcel of the whole human experience of mobility. I present some of the ways in which adolescents move between different, and at times conflicting, affective states and meanings when talking about migration. These adolescents can move around the image of the “migrant” in different ways, by blocking any engagement with alterity, opening up to migrants’ positions and motivations, or finally reinterpreting the very meaning of movement altogether. I will also explore how adolescents can remain in a liminal affective and semantic space between self and other, between migrant and nonmigrant, between meanings and feelings. The movement—or blockage—toward the migrant revolves around the imagination of, and feelings regarding, the future, be it in the form of fear, anticipation, desire, hope, or uncertainty, through which these pupils can empathize with or erect barriers to the migrants and their motivations for migrating. Chapter 4 explores the experiences of migration of men who moved with the family for the assignment of the working partner, quit their job for the move, and relocated temporarily to Western Switzerland. I will describe the experiences of waiting for another job and the rupture and transitions in working life for these men, as well as their ambivalent understanding of work, family, and masculinity. The way these men decide to move with their families, understand the flow of their working lives, and make sense of family life with regard to the move can be affected by social and cultural norms and expectations around being a man and an accompanying partner rather than a breadwinner. Their work transitions are characterized by a condition of temporal immobility. By transiting from a professional work situation to another that is not yet in place and remains uncertain, such individuals may experience a condition of being betwixt and between identities, places, and times in their life trajectory. They find themselves face to face with unemployment, along with a new role in the family and rhythm of life within which they may feel suspended as they wait for a new job to come.

8 䡲 Liminal Moves

In the conclusion of this book, I summarize some of the observations made in the other chapters, the major aspects characterizing the interplay of mobility and immobility, and how a focus on liminality can assist in better understanding this interplay and the increasing uncertainty that characterizes our contemporary times. I briefly define the idea of change as it is experienced in the three empirical cases.

Moving along “Unconventional” Routes This book is a journey along what I would call “unconventional routes.” These routes include phenomena and methodological perspectives that have received less attention from or that only recently started gaining interest across the social sciences, and that have proved at times to be “unconventional” or even “uncomfortable” in a way for me as a researcher in the field. For one thing, the phenomena under exploration represent alternative and marginal ways of practicing mobility (Vannini 2009). They include situations where mobility produces immobility and vice versa, where those who do not move spatially reflect on the spatial movement of others, and finally where those who are usually viewed as “hypermobile” and “privileged” people are immobilized by the impact and imperatives of mobility. I choose to talk about the three phenomena presented above for two main reasons. The first reason is mostly personal, as the combination of these case studies contribute to marking the trajectory of my (im)mobile work and life journeys during the last decade. The other reason is more theoretical, as these case studies are suggestive of an important point I would like to make in this book: that mobility is a multidimensional experience involving moves and blockages at the social, spatial, symbolic, and temporal level simultaneously. These phenomena are representative of the possible zones of in-betweenness created by the experience of mobility, where people move and remain suspended between places, meanings, and times. Immobility, in these case studies, relates to forms of deceleration in daily moves, semantic barriers in the understanding of others’ motivations, and social and professional ruptures and a related sense of stuckness and waiting in life. Immobility is an integral and crucial part, and not merely the opposite, of any experience of mobility. The phenomena under exploration illustrate some of the multiple movements at stake when we talk about mobility: movements at the spatial level, in the form of physical traveling, encountering others who move; at the symbolic level, in the transformation of the sense attached to places, identities, and experiences; at the temporal level, in the act of revisiting the past to remake sense of the present, making sense of the present in view of an unknown and imagined future.

Introduction 䡲 9

The experiences herein illustrated are composed of various timings and rhythms marking physical movements, and bring about the complex interplay between spatial, social, professional, and existential (im)mobilities. They are representative of the complex and ambivalent interplay between mobility and immobility: itinerant performers stop along the path of their travel and ask spectators to interrupt their daily activities to attend the performance; adolescents at school, merely viewed as “stayers” talking about the migration of someone else, can resist others’ movement and erect barriers that inhibit any form of engagement with the Other; male accompanying partners experience an alteration of their working life and a deceleration of their everyday rhythm as a result of their multiple overseas relocations, and wait for a new work opportunity to come. These phenomena also represent three interesting manifestations of liminality. The mobile performance of itinerant monkey trainers resembles what Turner has called a “ritual of reversal,” a “pseudo-liminal” event that “exposes, attacks, or derides what it considers to be vices, follies, stupidities, or abuses, but its criterion of judgment is usually the normative structural frame of officially promulgated values” (Turner 2001: 40). The writing of the adolescents in the classroom about migration or the arrival of researchers in the school interrupting their daily routine illustrates an example of a staged liminal experience, or in Stenner’s words (Stenner 2017), a “fabulated” and “devised” liminal event, that is, a performative event artfully crafted by the researchers for provoking a transformation. Our research intervention in the classroom represents a form of liminal affective technology (Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel 2013), crafted into the dispositif of the school to provoke an affective change in the act of writing for adolescents. Finally, the experience of migration and the various implications of relocating to a new context (including the implications on one’s working life) can trigger an unstaged—and in a way unpredictable—liminal experience, where individuals find themselves involved in a passage from a place, state, status, or condition toward one that might be unknown and uncertain. All three cases represent good examples for exploring the semantic character of a liminal hotspot revolving around sociocultural and gendered identities (the Burakumin, the migrant, and the male accompanying partner) and around the whole experience of mobility (itinerancy, and vicarious and personal experiences of migration). I now explore the contexts of street performances, writings, and waiting, respectively, and describe how specifically the study of performances, “nonmigrants,” and “privileged migrants,” respectively, are important for the whole study of mobility. I will briefly introduce the case studies and my own fieldwork, the methods and the multiple positionalities, travels, and (im)mobilities of the researcher in the field.

10 䡲 Liminal Moves

Street Performances: (Im)mobility Producing (Im)mobility The first case is the monkey-training performance of the Monkey Dance Company in Japan. The monkey-training performance is considered one of the traditional occupations of the Buraku, a people commonly described as the descendants of premodern-era outcasts, who were engaged in special jobs historically considered as impure (e.g. leather industry, meat packing, street entertainment, drum making), and were compelled to live in separate areas. A variety of Buraku activists and communities now engage in initiatives surrounding the idea of “Buraku culture.” These initiatives are local re-elaborations of national policies, grassroots and individual activities of cultural promotion, and local implementation of human rights education, which at times may extend to central institutions. Partly with the support of governmental, municipal, or self-governing bodies, partly independently, these initiatives adopt and revisit national measures of community development and cultural promotion, concepts and images relating to “culture” and “tradition” sponsored by nationalism since the 1960s, as well as human rights education programs. Despite their heterogeneity, most of these initiatives provide for new readings and a “trans-cultural” language for the Buraku by being simultaneously grounded in very diverse principles (e.g. everyday life, skills, industries, hometown, and human rights) (Cangià 2013c; 2012; 2013a; 2013b). Between 2007 and 2009, I conducted ethnographic research across the urban communities and leather towns of Kinegawa (Tokyo) and Naniwa (Osaka), as well as across various monkey performance sites throughout the country together with the performers. I paid particular attention to specific social contexts in which the Buraku are represented, namely Archives Kinegawa—the Museum of Education and Leather Industry, the monkey performance of the Monkey Dance Company, the Road of Human Rights and Taiko, the Museum of Human Rights “Liberty Osaka,” and a group of drum performers known as Ikari. During my fieldwork, I linked up with key relevant persons and members of various organizations, visited museums and other exhibition halls, and conversed and shared opinions with a number of individuals. I have conducted participant observation during performances and community events, informal interviews, and conversations with teaching staff, museum personnel, children, residents of districts, supporters of the Buraku Liberation League, performers, and spectators and other individuals navigating in these social fields. A significant portion of the data collected included documentation displayed in the museums (labels, diaries, poems, and artifacts), performances, and rehearsals, as well as other visual material (photographs, videos, documentaries, and blogs). During the time spent with the performers, I traveled across the country from the

Introduction 䡲 11

Yamaguchi Prefecture to Hokkaido Island. I followed the performers during their everyday life, rehearsals, and performances, and I accompanied one of the trainers during his walks with the monkey around his house. Monkey performers use mobility in the form of traveling across the country to counteract the social immobility of the Buraku people and spread Buraku art in terms of “Japanese tradition.” At the same time, immobility during their performance, in the form of deceleration in the everyday life of the spectators (who are invited to stop their activities and join the performance), is crucial for creating collaborative participation and hence the success of the show. Performances, apart from a small exception (Vannini 2011; Cocker 2010; Fleishman 2014), have received limited attention in the context of mobility studies. However, and I am borrowing Vannini’s words here, “performance—like travel—is flow: it is the route from mooring to mooring, and it is mooring on the move. Even before being a symbolic phenomenon, performance is a kinesthetic event” (Vannini 2011: 245), relating to a person’s bodily movements. Performances are interesting contexts for studying mobility, as they are constituted of a specific structure and timing that goes along with actions of movement, including the action of gathering, the performance itself, and finally the dispersing and moving-on of spectators and people after the show (Schechner 2003): “To perform is to transition from gathering to dispersing, and therefore to move about, to go from a here to a there and back, or even from a then to a now, or from a now to a then and back again” (Vannini 2011: 245). These movements around the performance site are emblematic of a liminal affectivity created with the event of performing in the street and taking people by surprise in their daily life. Performances provide for a vantage point to explore the bodily dimension of mobility, the way the body functions as one of the major channels for feeling and experiencing movement (Fleishman 2014). However, performances also represent an interesting context for understanding the symbolic and temporal dimensions of mobility, the way people construct meanings about identities and mobilities through materiality, images, movement, representations, and relations. Performances, like in the case of the Monkey Dance Company in this book, become an important vehicle to mobilize and reclaim the social value of public space through mobility and immobility, and by extension to revisit cultural and social identities (Jephta 2014).

Writings: Traveling without Moving The second case under exploration relates to adolescent writings about migration in Italy. My colleague and I visited these adolescents in their classrooms in spring 2013, in a high school located in Centocelle in the eastern

12 䡲 Liminal Moves

part of Rome, an area inhabited by a large number of immigrants (Cangià and Pagani 2014a; 2014b). We asked pupils to write about their opinions and feelings concerning the fact that an increasing number of people from different cultural backgrounds live in Italy. The topic was mostly interpreted in terms of migration to Italy, but also at times in terms of migration from Italy toward other destinations and at other periods in history. Pupils were asked to indicate their gender only and were not requested to specify whether they were immigrant or Italian. Some adolescents explicitly stated they were Italian, immigrant, or had parents of mixed nationalities. Sometimes, when no explicit mention was made, it was possible to infer from the text whether the pupil was Italian or not. My interest here is in how adolescents who did not experience an international migration but were born and raised in Italy (not necessarily in the same town, though, and not necessarily from a family of Italian citizens) make sense of migration in their writings. Empirically, these writings provide firsthand insights into people’s constantly shifting thoughts and on the emotional resonance of the issue of migration. In this regard, a recent postmigration approach proposed to demigranticize migration research (Dahinden 2016), to challenge the ethnicitycentered epistemology that has long informed migration studies, and to reorient the focus of investigation away from migrant people toward the whole (also nonmigrant) population (Schewel 2019; Hjälm 2014; Jonsson 2014). Previous research has explored everyday life in multicultural neighborhoods (Baumann 1996), while other research has focused attention on different institutional contexts (e.g. school or immigration administrative offices) (Duemmler, Moret, and Dahinden 2010; Cangià and Pagani 2014a; Graham 2002) in order to explore how individuals construct categories of difference and similarity in their everyday life. These approaches demonstrate how the logic of the nation-state and a “mobility bias” have long informed social scientific research using categories such as “nation,” “ethnicity,” and now “migrant” and “mobile” people as “naturally given” and self-evident. A reorientation of the unit of analysis from migrants and mobile people to the whole population supports in overcoming the dichotomy between migrant/mobile and nonmigrant/immobile people, while at the same time maintaining mobility as significant experiences for various people. A reorientation of the unit of analysis in this sense can also involve rethinking the sites of movement as sites of exploration when thinking about mobility experience (Jensen 2009). Mobility does not merely occur across spaces but most importantly along places, meaning, and times, in those spaces of encounter, like, in this case, in the writing, but also in the classroom. So here the focus is not merely on nonmigrant adolescents, but on the writing itself, and more largely on the classroom with its own rules

Introduction 䡲 13

and roles. I propose considering the writing as a context where a form of movement occurs at the semantic and affective level, “an itinerant, progressive, and regulated practice—a ‘walk’” (Certeau 2011: 135). The writing involves a variety of meanings and feelings, in particular when young people show that they are affected by the issue, when they criticize, demonstrate empathy for, or identify with the migrants by making sense of their personal and vicarious experiences. I agree with Vergunst and Ingold when they state that thinking and feeling (an integral part of the act of writing) are themselves to be considered a way of walking, and hence movement: To think and feel is not to set up a relation of external contact or correspondence between subjective states of mind and objectively given conditions of the material world, but rather to make one’s way through a world-in-formation, in a movement that is both rhythmically resonant with the movements of others around us—whose journeys we share or whose paths we cross—and open-ended, having neither a point of origin nor any final destination. (Vergunst and Ingold 2008: 2)

This resonates with what in sociocultural psychology has been conceptualized as semantic movements (described in chapter 1), as those movements occurring in the semantic world when a person moves along various social, temporal, and imagined geographic positions at the level of meaning and representations (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012).

Waiting: The Immobilities of Mobile People The third phenomenon under exploration is the experience of male partners of transnationally mobile professionals. The mobility of professionals and their families represents an important component of current migration flows. This form of mobility commonly refers to the cross-border migration of professionals, including, among others, corporate managers, diplomats, employees at international and humanitarian organizations, business specialists, and academics. This population is often easily associated with the image of “privileged” and “economically wanted” people (Cangià and Zittoun 2018; Hercog and Sandoz 2018). And yet, these migrants have become more numerous and diverse with regard to gender, ethnicity, education, nationality, legal status, and migration trajectory, as a result, among other things, of the expansion of international assignments, and of the diffuse perception—especially in certain professional sectors—of mobility as necessary for career progress (Smith and Favell 2006; Meier 2014). The study of these professionals and their families’ everyday experiences poses important questions about the meaning of global mobility and the

14 䡲 Liminal Moves

“freedom” of movement for these allegedly privileged travelers (Favell 2008; Cangià 2018; 2019). Their mobility is often all but a smooth experience. Apparently less subject to the structural and practical constraints of other forms of cross-border migration, and at times benefiting from more economic capacities and financial assistance than other categories of migrants, these mobile professionals can experience an unprecedented sense of “subjective insecurity” (Bourdieu 1999) and perceived risk of job loss, due to employment and job flexibility, to increased fixed-term contracts (Doogan 2015), and to the constant change of work destination (Cangià 2018). These migrants can face various challenges in the context of their international multiple relocations, with several implications on family life (Coles and Fechter 2012; Cangià, Levitan, and Zittoun 2018; Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019; Ryan 2008; Ryan and Mulholland 2014; Suter and Cangià 2020b), and with resulting forms of gender and social inequalities (Schaer, Dahinden, and Toader 2017; Riaño and Baghdadi 2007; Cangià 2019). Some can encounter barriers in their career development with job search difficulties (Cangià 2018; Ravasi, Salamin, and Davoine 2013), and some can face underemployment (Ariss and Syed 2011), status loss, and discrimination (Dietz et al. 2015). Often, their educational qualifications are not recognized and are rather devalued in the host country (Zikic, Bonache, and Cerdin 2010). In other cases, some short-term types of permit can create an obstacle in the job-search and application process. Often these professionals move globally with their families. The precarious and highly mobile character of their work can reflect on their family life and family arrangements, in particular on the partners’ plans and working life. These partners can experience a rupture in their professional trajectory and various challenges with regard to the relocation process. The experience of mobile professionals’ partners represents an important yet underresearched aspect of global capitalism and mobility. A focus on these people will shed light on the unexplored effects of neoliberalism on the subjectivity and interiority of a greater variety of individuals and migrants (Molé 2010). Between 2016 and 2018, I conducted person-centered, biographic, and reflexive interviews with eight male accompanying partners. I met three of these men again during this period for a second interview. I focused on their subjective experiences and feelings about the experience of migration and their work transitions. I also conducted participant observation at events organized by spousal organizations, in particular on business creation and job search. Interviews were guided by an “ethnographic imaginary” (Forsey 2010) and took a person-centered and reflexive approach (Levy and Hollan 1998; Ewing 2006): the interview becomes “a moment of engagement, a site of participation in the life of the person we meet and talk with” (Hockey and Forsey 2012: 75); it becomes an occasion for reflecting on

Introduction 䡲 15

the researchers’ positions in the field, as well as on the possible power and identity negotiations with the respondents. As I discuss in chapter 4, these male accompanying partners may feel they are losing the coordinates of their (male and professional) identities on the occasion of the relocation and the rupturing event of becoming a full-time nonworking dad. Yet, they can be driven by the hope and desire for change and by the need to confer new meanings onto their personal career and life trajectories, to their male identities, as well as to the surrounding world.

Moving across Fields My own personal experience—as a woman, foreigner, migrant, and academic—proved to be an important methodological tool contributing to understanding social phenomena from a reflexive point of view (Ellis 2003), as well as to influencing the conduct of field research, in particular the motivation and the emotional response to the specific topics under exploration. My own positionalities and moves across different roles in the field and with respect to my research work even created a liminal hotspot position for myself, as I was caught in “the paradox of in/exclusion in which one finds oneself simultaneously accepted and rejected, or perhaps included as excluded” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 176). In different circumstances during these years, I had to reflect on my own role in the research process, and at times to justify my choice of my research focuses in front of different audiences. In particular, during my research on the Buraku people, one of the most discriminated-against minorities in Japan, I was often confronted with the sensitive issue of how to present myself in public. As a matter of fact, mention of the Burakumin remains an unspoken taboo in public life and conversations. My self-presentation as a researcher in Japan changed every time depending on the situation, ranging from performances, TV documentaries, or generally with any people with whom I was not able to establish a relationship (situations in which I was supposed to introduce myself by saying “I study the Japanese culture”), to more intimate or academic-like situations (in which I was allowed to explicitly say “I am here to study the Buraku issue”). During my time and travels in Japan, I even tried to transform my feeling of “outsideness” into a strategic tool for becoming an “insider.” My own identity as a woman and a stranger became an integral part of the performance, at times by representing an additional attraction for spectators from the point of view of the performers, at others by assisting in the preparation of the performance site and show. With regard to research with adolescents at school, my being an adult stranger, who might look like a teacher but is not a teacher, makes me reflect on the liminal position of the researcher crafting the very practice

16 䡲 Liminal Moves

of research for the people involved. Pupils showed various reactions to our presence in their classroom on that morning. After all, we had crossed the “border” of the school, by traversing the door of their classroom and interrupting the flow of a typical school day. Some just expressed indifference. In one essay, someone explicitly referred to the writing exercise as a “fake analytical test.” Some expressed curiosity, and others looked bored about the idea of writing. During one of our conversations, some expressed interest in the work my colleague Camilla Pagani had conducted in the past with children in some elementary schools and asked us to read essays written by these children. We genuinely felt that we had left an imprint on those adolescents by giving them the opportunity to talk about an issue that matters in their lives. Through becoming a reflective space, the classroom, for a brief moment, turns into a “child-controlled” space (Pache-Huber and Spyrou 2012: 294), virtually beyond the institutional walls of the school, where public and private, formal and informal levels meet, and where children’s agency unfolds within the complexity of everyday life. When I started to collaborate on the project on mobile professionals and their families as part of NCCR—On the Move, our contributions were often either ignored or questioned during conferences or workshops on the grounds that the more the assumed economic and social privilege condition of a migrant (in this case the “expats”), the less the interest for academia. Other times, on the contrary, scholars welcomed our research by feeling part of it: a “finally, someone is doing research on us!” kind of reaction. During the interviews with male accompanying partners, my personal experience proved to be both of assistance and a limiting aspect at the same time. Like my research on the Buraku in Japan, my presumed and shifting “insiderness” and “outsiderness” were based on multiple positionalities, both adopted and ascribed by participants and myself, e.g. gender, parental, and professional status (Ryan 2015). These also played a role in my understanding of and emotional response to people’s stories. At times, I took advantage of my personal experience as a migrant working in a precarious context such as academia and becoming a mother in Switzerland. My personal experience, in this regard, helped me on various occasions to share similar experiences with these men and reflect on the emotional impact of job insecurity in mobility, parenthood, and professional life. It facilitated exchanges on issues of migration, work, and family life. These men, in general, seemed curious about my migratory experience. At the same time, being a woman and actively working created limitations in the way I thought I should formulate questions and discuss the issue of gender with these men. In the attempt to protect both the interviewee and myself from ensuing difficult feelings, I caught myself struggling to ask certain questions at times (Montgomery 2013).

Introduction 䡲 17

Another important aspect of this book is the combination of a variety of perspectives, from sociocultural anthropology to cultural psychology, sociology, and geography, representing another aspect of my work trajectory that has often made me feel as though I occupy a liminal hotspot between disciplines, and on occasion has created an obstacle for my own disciplinary identification within academia. At the theoretical level, this book is inspired by the anthropological work of Victor Turner on liminality and recent literature on liminality (as described above), including the work of Bjørn Thomassen in anthropology and Paul Stenner in social psychology. I draw upon recent literature (already initiated by Turner himself with his study on pilgrimage) on the relationship between mobility (tourism, pilgrimage, and migration) and liminality. As discussed previously, I follow a critical perspective on mobility, across disciplines including anthropology, sociology, and geography. Firstly, the anthropology of mobility, as theorized by Noel Salazar (Salazar and Smart 2011; Salazar 2018), contributes to a critical debate on the human experience of mobility, in particular by showing how mobility is a complex and contested construct and not merely a spatial phenomenon of physical motion. The theoretical approach on the potential and aspiration to move, as proposed by urban sociologist and mobility scholar Vincent Kaufmann, in turn, offers an interesting analytical lens to study the “not-yet” character of mobility. Finally, readings of “immobility,” and related concepts (e.g. stillness, friction) of scholars across geography and sociology such as Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, David Bissell, Ole B. Jensen, and Phillip Vannini, as well as the philosophical approach of Henri Bergson on immobility, also inspired this book. By borrowing meanings and resources from our surroundings, we constantly make sense of what “being mobile” means; we contribute to creating the world around us—whether we can or cannot move—through our thinking, actions, and embodiment in it. Cultural and social inquiry into phenomena like human mobility cannot hence be separated from a psychological attention to mental processes. I combine sociological and anthropological perspectives on mobility and liminality with a cultural psychological approach to the life-course. This approach is interested in exploring change and continuity along the unique lives of individuals moving constantly through a variety of experiences (Valsiner 2007; 2014; Teo 2015; Zittoun 2012; Zittoun et al. 2013). This approach considers the transactions between the person and the societal environment from a dynamic perspective. Like anthropology, it acknowledges that social and cultural conditions provide symbolic, institutional, and material guidance to individuals. However, people and groups engage in a constant work of internalization, appropriation, and (re)positioning. A cultural psychological perspective is interested in ever-changing semiotic dynamics, in

18 䡲 Liminal Moves

people’s ability to organize personal experiences under semiotic forms, and hence in the process of circulation of signs and meanings (or also semantic movements) through which people/groups make sense of self, others, and the surrounding world (Gillespie 2008; 2006; Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012). I analyze all the performances and different narratives from writings, diaries, and interviews from a combined ethnographic, interpretative, and dialogical perspective (Aveling, Gillespie, and Cornish 2015; Marková 2006; Irving 2011; Geertz 1977). I take into account the role of contextual aspects (e.g. interactions with others, spectators, partners, teachers, and peers; local social and political climate) and the more subjective processes of sense-making: I consider the dialogical constitution of sociocultural and political climate and the inner dialogues between self-other(s) emerging through explicit and implicit expressions and narratives in the performances, writings, and interviews. I use the unique stories told here as “experiential life-worlds” (Irving 2013) and “dialogical single case studies,” where individuals dialogue and negotiate with real or imagined other(s) around meanings, perspectives, and feelings, where “they evaluate their mutual actions, [and where] they interpret their communication and their intentions” (Marková, Zadeh, and Zittoun 2020: 6). I pay special attention to the aspects constituting a mobility experience: the rhythms, features, landscapes, meanings, social encounters, and temporal orientations of a human experience of mobility. Following an ethnographic approach, I consider what events or situations people experience as change when moving or reflecting on movement. This has enabled me to closely examine the diverse ways in which people deal with change, and the alternative meanings that people can create from their experiences. In addition, I consider the various positions from which people speak. At the same time, I explore how self and other categories emerge in their narratives. The presence of the Other in the narration is always an important aspect. It can take the form of an indirect quote of the opinion or idea of another person, or of a general or imagined Other, or of dominant discourses; or it can consist of a direct quote when the person adopts precisely the words of another person or refers to the “ways of doing” and attitudes of others. These combined analytical and theoretical approaches can contribute to the whole study of mobility and liminality through a special focus on how individuals navigate perspectives on the world and meanings about their and others’ experiences of change. This book, again, is about how humans deal with change on the move.

Introduction 䡲 19

NOTES 1. In the sense of semantic, relating to sense and meaning-making. 2. All three studies comprising this book were sensitive to an informed consent. Informed consent (written or verbal) was ensured and tailored depending on the context. Participants were informed that participation in this study was voluntary and withdrawal from the research could be undertaken at any time, without any consequences. They were also informed that the interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and fully anonymized. In the case of research with adolescents, school administration approval was required. The rights and welfare of all human subjects involved in the research were fully protected and guaranteed.

CHAPTER

1

(Im)Mobilities and Liminalities Life is a succession of events marked by changes in state. It is both cyclical, in that the same time-marking events occur day after day, year after year, and it is progressive or linear in that we pass through life by a series of changes in status, each of which is marked by a different (though similarly structured) rite of passage. An almost universal motif for the explanation and description of life is the journey, for journeys are marked by beginnings and ends, and by a succession of events along the way. —Nelson H. H. Graburn, Tourism

Many are those who move today geographically for one reason or another. They are migrants, refugees, businesspeople, employees at humanitarian organizations or multinational corporations, researchers, students and academics, partners and children of mobile workers, tourists and pilgrims, daily commuters, delivery workers, frequent walkers, soldiers, artists, journalists, athletes, and sportsmen. It is undeniable that how we travel and move today is different from how we did so in the past. New communication, information, and transport technologies offer different possibilities for people to move at a faster pace than ever before. It is now easier to dissolve the impact of distance between destinations. For some people, for example, it is now easier to visit or communicate with distant family and friends than it used to be fifty years ago. The fact that travel can now be accelerated and reach more distant destinations, however, does not necessarily translate into an increase of mobility for all, or into more freedom in people’s movements (Salazar and Jayaram 2016). It can also translate into an increasing

(Im)Mobilities and Liminalities 䡲 21

need for security, with the consequent erection of borders and restrictions of movement for those who are considered as a threat. Restrictions and limited access to mobility can affect a large variety of individuals, and cross the boundaries of categories such as migrants and refugees, to also touch the lives and movements of other types of travelers, such as tourists, students, or businesspeople (on the grounds of containing the threat of global pandemics like the recent coronavirus, for example). Moreover, those considered to be the most mobile persons might also be those who prefer to be more sedentary or construct a strong sense of continuity, who yet need to stay mobile to respond to the demands of their career or for the family (Levitan 2018; Zittoun, Levitan, and Cangiá 2018; Kaufmann, Jemelin, and Joye 2000). What changes is our potential for mobility, the way we picture our potential and capacity for mobility, and the way we aspire to it (Kaufmann 2002). It also changes our collective imaginary of what moving means today. Our experience of travel changes now from being an experience where the action of movement and the perception of time and space are coupled into one of “sensory deprivation” (Ingold 2011), where there is the risk of not being aware much of the distance we travel and of the time it takes to travel. It is our space consciousness that evidently changes. Lucy Budd in The View from the Air: The Cultural Geographies of Flight provides an interesting illustration of the space consciousness from the airplane and how it has changed throughout history. By drawing on written accounts of passengers’ stories and experiences from the 1920s to the present day, she shows how contemporary modes of air travel and the act of looking down from the windows of an airplane led to a new spatial consciousness. With the progress in aero mobility and high-altitude jets, travel time has diminished, and so have the possible dangers associated with past modes of flying. This, while making travel easier and safer, has also led to a different visual perception and to a new cultural discourse of what it means to become and be mobile: “Whereas in the 1930s many people wanted to fly simply to experience the views that could be obtained, and airlines operated special sightseeing flights and encouraged passengers to look out of the window, modern discourses of commercial aviation portray flying as a boring and uncomfortable ‘dead time’ between departure and arrival, with nothing to see or do” (Budd 2009: 86–87). History also shows that movement and circulation have always been an integral part of human life. Like all living beings, humans have frequently moved in search of food, shelter, or better environmental conditions, as well as for social purposes. Large-scale movements have always coexisted with smaller-scale everyday movements. So why is it important to study mobility now? Throughout history, mobility has been regulated and made sense of in different ways (Cresswell 2006).

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Nowadays, mobility is considered a significant and inalienable condition of people’s lives and belonging to our “accelerated” contemporary society, generally implying a positive connotation of change. It brings structure to people’s lives like never before. Border-crossing mobility has now become an imperative (Bilecen and Mol 2017), especially for many professional sectors, an injunction (Montulet and Mincke 2019) viewed as a desirable path for success or for personal development for many (Salazar 2018). Mobility often embodies the idea of freedom by giving the impression that individuals can now establish relationships beyond spatial or temporal boundaries and are free to choose to move, stay put, or return. Spatial mobility comes to be viewed as defining other forms of mobility, like social and symbolic “climbing” (Salazar 2018), on the grounds that one should conform to the logic of mobility to move up economically, socially, or culturally (i.e., becoming more cosmopolitan) (Kaufmann and Montulet 2008; Salazar 2018). Lifestyle migration and tourism, for example, are often viewed as a way not only to move geographically but also to ameliorate the quality of life or to occasion personal growth (Salazar 2014b; Benson and O’Reilly 2009). Moving for work or educational reasons can be easily associated with social, professional, or life progress. For students and researchers, traveling internationally translates into educational achievements, transnational collaborations, and experience (Salazar 2018). Migration, in turn, represents a significant experience of geographical mobility that involves a person’s project. People, under certain circumstances and when not forced to migrate, move in search of a space appropriate for progressing in their lives, socially and existentially, “a space where the quality of their ‘goingness’ is better than in the space they are leaving behind” (Hage 2009a: 2). Mobility, however, especially with regard to the velocity and intensity it is often associated with, can also embody an image of danger, effort, and loss. Recent increases in the number of tourists in places like Venice, for example, instead of showing how tourism and travel can be an occasion for cultural and economic enrichment, brings about the possible social and environmental risks of such a massive phenomenon. In certain cases, in the name of mobility, some may not be capable of changing their habits so easily, as the crisis of the coronavirus globally, and the consequent restrictions of movements, has clearly showed.1 People may change, aspire to or refuse change, through these (at times blocked or decelerated) movements, regardless of whether a positive change happens or not. It is the fact that we value and make sense of the change that the spatial movement brings about—and of what instead remains unchanged—that determines the significance of mobility as a human experience. It goes without saying that the way we value and make sense of this change varies across individuals, communities, times, and places.

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Mobility is not only an object of study but also an analytical lens. The study of movement and travel is not new to the social sciences, at least not in anthropology. Many scholars in anthropology were themselves migrants. In general, anthropologists, for whom ethnographic travel represents an essential aspect of work, have long explored cross-border movement, traveling, and the feeling of disorientation of “being there in the field.” Anthropologists have also largely showed how processes of global and transnational displacements often bring about forms of exclusion and various inequalities. Movement particularly acquired larger interest across the discipline when James Clifford, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), encouraged viewing travel not only as a way of conducting ethnography but also as a significant aspect of our way of living, and hence a crucial focal point for research. From this point of view, rather than discovering the roots of sociocultural forms, anthropologists should explore the routes and the ways in which identities are produced and performed through movement. Travel and practices of displacements do not merely shift cultural meanings, identities, and norms but are also constitutive of these. A focus on the combination of the two processes of localization and mobility, of dwelling and travel, challenges the traditional assumptions of roots and immobility as always preceding routes, movement, and mobility, and as the basis of any form of collective life: “Cultural centers, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things” (Clifford 1997: 3).

Turning to Mobility The “restless movements of people and things” have become a common and fashionable image of our contemporary times. Postmodern and globalization studies in the 1990s have put a particular emphasis on the fact that people, images, capital, ideas, and objects alike can now move at more accelerated speeds and greater distances than before (Appadurai 1996; Castells 2009; Bauman 2000b; Harvey 1991). Scholars started turning to movement, rather than stasis, as the foundational aspect of human life and social relations, as an ontological absolute in our contemporary world. They emphasized how flows and fluidity now disrupt the idea of fixity and cultural unity. These approaches certainly had the advantage of challenging those sedentarist perspectives that, in the social sciences, had long hypothesized a linear correspondence between cultures, identities, and places. From these perspectives, mobility represented a disruptive experience in a world constituted mainly by rootedness and belonging (Cresswell 2006).

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On the contrary, metaphors such as “liquidity” (Bauman 2000a), “scapes” (Appadurai 1996), “deterritorialization” and “nomadism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), or “time-space compression” (Harvey 1991) started being used to depict the transformations occurring with globalization and with the advances in transport, information, and telecommunication technologies. Scholars in migration and diaspora studies and literary and cultural studies, in particular, have proposed reconceptualizing the static categories of nation, place, ethnicity, and identity in favor of notions such as dislocation, disjuncture, dialogism, and hybridity (Bhabha 2004; Gilroy 1995; Ong 1999). The mobile life of those such as refugees, migrants, and other “nomads” becomes a transgressed experience of resistance toward the remains of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. It is in the theory of Deleuze and Guattari that the image of the “nomad” becomes a central figure of resistance. “Nomads,” by using multiple locations to design and travel along various pathways, were contrasted with “migrants,” who on the contrary tend to move from one place to another. The nomad is never reterritorialized like the migrant but moves across a metaphorical space like the desert. These “nomadic” identities were also accompanied by a new reconceptualization of the spaces of mobility. The first to conceptualize the spaces of transit for movers and travelers was Marc Augé in 1992 with his idea of “non-places” (Augé 2009), including hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, airports, railway stations, superstores, leisure parks, and large retail outlets. Augé defines non-places as those transit points that are now proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions: Spaces in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future. (Augé 2009: 87)

A contemporary turn toward the concept of mobility, also called the “new mobilities paradigm,” originates from the work of Urry (2007). In the introduction to a special issue on Materialities and Mobilities, Sheller and Urry describe the nature of this turn: A “mobility turn” is spreading into and transforming the social sciences, transcending the dichotomy between transport research and social research, putting social relations into travel and connecting different forms of transport with complex patterns of social experience conducted through communications at-a-distance. It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the “new mobilities” paradigm. (Sheller and Urry 2006: 208)

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This paradigm encouraged moving beyond narrow conceptions of human and material travel and taking into consideration a larger spectrum of mobilities as well as the complex interplay between networks and (distant) spaces. For many scholars, the issue of mobility came to be framed in the plural, and also began including alternative forms of movement (Vannini 2009) other than the mobility of airplanes and cars (usually considered in transport studies). Various ways of practicing mobility with different temporal durations and spatial scales started being explored under the register of mobility. These included human geographical displacements, such as cross-border migration, residential migration, daily commuting, and travel, but also the mobility of objects, virtual mobility, as well as the mobility of images and communication. Phenomena such as “money laundering, the drug trade, sewage and waste, infections, urban crime, asylum seeking, arms trading, people smuggling, slave trading, and urban terrorism” (Sheller and Urry 2006: 220) started being contemplated as examples of mobility. Next to the idea of the “nomad,” the mobilities paradigm scholars introduced the image of the “passenger” moving through a contingent “nonplace” to another. These approaches tend, however, to view mobility as a “frictionless” and self-evident phenomenon, in contrast to stasis and immobility, the latter being considered as normative while mobility is celebrated instead (Kaufmann 2002; Salazar and Jayaram 2016; Cresswell 2006). Not all the works in the context of mobility studies, however, suggest that notions such as borders, place, and landscape are no longer relevant to our world in the twenty-first century and dismiss place, dwelling, and stasis from its analytical perspective. The idea of “friction” and the interplay between mobility and immobility, travel and dwelling, have been important aspects for mobility studies. Scholars in this context, in particular, rather than simply contrasting mobility with immobility, tried to analyze the contingent relations between various forms of movement, and the multiple ways these relations are routed, enabled, or constrained by stasis (Urry 2007; Cresswell 2014). A critical perspective on mobility (Jensen 2009; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Bissell and Fuller 2010; Adey 2006; Kaufmann 2002) in this regard suggests going beyond the mere dichotomy between mobility and immobility and starting to look not only at the multiple alternative ways of practicing mobilities but also at the multiplicity of experiences of immobility. Here, I follow this perspective in its view of mobility as constituted by and constitutive of spatial, temporal, social, and symbolic practices, and by the ambivalent and complex interplay between mobility and immobility. Our lives happen not in static enclaves but in all the “intermediaries and circulation in-between places” between departures and arrivals (Jensen

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2009: 154). Then the sites of mobility, and therefore those places that are described by Augè as solitary non-places instrumental in moving from A to B, are actually sites of potential change. These sites are not mere dots on a dotted line on a map. They are the sites where meanings can be transformed through the movement and blockages of people. They are moments of encounter when mobile and immobile trajectories intersect and interact (Amin and Thrift 2002: 30): “You are, on that train, traveling not across space-as-surface … you are traveling across trajectories” (Massey 2005: 119, emphasis in original). Mobility becomes a cultural and signifying practice happening in these interstices: “It is the mobile sense-making, experiencing and meaningful engagement with the environment that ‘makes mobility’” (Jensen 2009: 140).

Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times In the most general sense, mobility refers to a process of change that has implications on people’s life trajectories and identities (Kaufmann 2002). It can be spatial, designating a movement to a new place or places of residence (cross-border or internal migration, residential movement), a journey for sightseeing or spiritual travel (tourism, pilgrimage), or a movement associated with actions performed outside the home (commuting, riding, walking). It can also refer to a change of status and position of an individual (professional, social) in the social space with no spatial movement (Kaufmann and Montulet 2008). I view mobility as an actual or potential act of physical movement that is profoundly and ambivalently entangled with change at various levels, with the actual experience of—or simply the aspiration or refusal of—change, with a person’s biography and life-world, and with norms, meanings, and identity. Mobility is not simply a matter of physical motion. It is intimately interrelated with the way people interact with and make sense of the surrounding environment, make and remake sense of personal and others’ identities, alterity, and life trajectory, and experience and value time. When we move, we traverse and inhabit places, we move along trajectories that lead from place to place (Ingold 2011). We are defined by the way we move. We never move simply as individuals. We move as drivers, migrants, riders, tourists, or refugees, men and women (Cresswell 2006). While moving, we make sense of, and at times transform, these identities, categories, and lifeworlds. Finally, we move across time, experience time on the move in many ways, and can even move with our mind where our physical body cannot go. The first dimension I want to highlight here is the spatial dimension. Tim Ingold offers an illustrative idea of the different dynamics and

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understandings of “movement” at the spatial level: as a lateral movement across a surface and between points, and as lineal movement along pathways. He distinguishes between wayfaring, the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the world, and transport: By transport, I mean the displacement or carrying across of an already constituted, self-contained entity from one location to another, rather like the “move,” in draughts or chess, of a piece across the board. This is how all movement is understood in the terms of the genealogical model. In wayfaring, by contrast, things are instantiated in the world as their paths of movement, not as objects located in space. They are their stories. Here it is the movement itself that counts, not the destinations it connects. Indeed wayfaring always overshoots its destinations, since wherever you may be at any particular moment, you are already on your way somewhere else. (Ingold 2011: 162)

Transport is destination oriented and moves passengers and goods from location to location. Differently from transport, in wayfaring, the movement and the in-between sites that the wayfarer traverses and inhabits during travel become more important than the destination itself. The idea of wayfaring appropriately captures the interplay between movement, stasis, and change, and helps overcome the dualism between dwelling and travel, localization and mobility: The wayfarer is continually on the move. More strictly, he is his movement. … The wayfarer is instantiated in the world as a line of travel. It is a line that advances from the tip as he presses on, in an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal. As he proceeds, however, the wayfarer has to sustain himself, both perceptually and materially, through an active engagement with the country that opens up along his path. Though from time to time he must pause for rest, and may even return repeatedly to the same place to do so, each pause is a moment of tension that—like holding one’s breath—becomes ever more intense and less sustainable the longer it lasts. Indeed the wayfarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go. (Ingold 2011: 150)

The image of wayfaring, with its engagement with surroundings along the path, captures the “meaningful engagement with the environment that ‘makes mobility’” not simply a matter of movement (Jensen 2009: 140). Here, I borrow the image of wayfaring to describe mobility as a combination of spatial, symbolic, social, and temporal movements. Mobility is first of all an act of moving along places (places that, far from being “non-places,” acquire meaning both for those who move and those who do not move). Places here are considered in “mobile terms”: in Cresswell’s

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words, places are events “marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence,” “intersections of flows and movement” in “a constant state of becoming” (Cresswell 2015: 71). Places are traced by movement, become meaningful for people through the act of moving along them rather than merely being confined within and living in a particular place. That is why, either for those who are viewed as stayers and do not move from their place of origin, experience cannot be “circumscribed by the restricted horizons of a life lived only there” (Ingold 2010: 34). In addition, for those who do not move, mobility can play an important role in the way they make sense of themselves, others, and the world around them. Mobility is hence a movement infused by and constitutive of meanings and values. The sense we associate with and around the experience of mobility or “being mobile” is never constituted in isolation from others. First of all, any form of spatial mobility leads to an encounter with other people, others’ perspectives and ways of viewing the world. It entails an encounter with one’s own and others’ potential transformation across time. This leads to the symbolic dimension, a second important aspect I would particularly like to emphasize here. Recent approaches across sociocultural anthropology and cultural psychology explore individuals’ encounter with alterity from a dialogical and symbolic perspective, by considering forms of interior dialogue through narrative, visual, and sensorial perspectives (Irving 2011; Marková 2006; Valsiner 2002). Encountering alterity cannot be reduced to the physical co-presence with others crossing the same geographical space. The encounter also happens at the level of meanings and representation (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012). While, on the spatial level, self and other are fundamentally and physically distinct, on the symbolic level, they can become interrelated and can interact in “the mind’s conversations with itself” (James 1890: 239). Hence, the self does not merely enter into contact with other outside individuals. Other people occupy different positions in inner dialogues. The encounter with alterity occurs through the multiple ways the person may relate, open up, and become responsible to the other (Lévinas 1991), by repositioning him/herself and semantically moving toward the other’s perspectives and motivations. With respect to this encounter, the notion of semantic movement has been recently conceptualized in sociocultural psychology, by particularly stressing the importance of meaning-making processes in the experience of human mobility. Two processes are at stake when we talk about semantic movements in relation to geographical movements: one is the movement at the level of meanings and representations, and one is the inner movement across temporal orientations (a return to the past or a jump into the future through memory and imagination). The process of making sense of a new place does not simply follow being physically located in that very place

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(Zittoun 2020). Being physically located in a place does not guarantee being mentally present or being automatically recognized by the inhabitants of that place (Ellis and Stam 2018). The movement of bodies in geographical space is hence distinct and not always parallel to the movement of self and other at the level of meanings and representations and across temporal orientations with the mind: In further opposition to the geographic body, the semantic world enables us to move between and occupy many social, temporal, and imagined geographic positions simultaneously or in rapid sequence. At a semantic and psychological level, the past, present, and future can coexist along with counterfactual presents, imagined pasts, and wished-for or feared futures. (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’SullivanLago 2012: 697)

What does this have to do with mobility? I use the example of migration here. When migrants arrive in a new place, local residents might not recognize these newcomers’ presence. A person who moves can also resist her new position in the new context and the change this move entails. She can erect semantic barriers to oppose the alternative representation of herself as a migrant. Semantic barriers are ways of thinking and talking about the other, including “rigid oppositions, negative associations, prohibitions, clear-cut separations, stigmatizing the other, undermining their motive” (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012: 700) that block interaction between different ideas and perspectives. Semantic barriers are used to inhibit any possible engagement with the Other. “Movement always involves constructions of and relationships to both space and time” (Amit and Salazar 2020: 2). Mobility is also a movement focused on time, both in terms of subjective understanding of time (Cornejo and Olivares 2015), that is the sense subjectively given to time by the person, and objective understanding of time, a time marked by the rhythm of social life. Let us return to Ingold’s wayfarer for a moment. The wayfarer does not only have a physical destination to reach. When s/he moves, s/he is also moving along temporal trajectories, by means of imagination, anticipation, expectation, potentiality, as well as hope about what and when movement will bring her/him to. This leads to the third important dimension: the temporal dimension of mobility. This is composed of two aspects: (1) the aspirational, the not-yet and temporally oriented character of mobility, and (2) the subjective experience of time on the move and the pacing of mobility (including the tempos, velocities, and timing of our movements). In my initial definition of mobility in the introduction, I used both the adjectives actual and potential. Mobility (and the change that it is supposed

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Figure 1.1. “The wayfarer has no final destination, for wherever he is, and so long as life goes on, there is somewhere further he can go” (Ingold 2011: 150). Photo by Biondo Egidio.

to entail) is not always realized but can remain a potentiality—that is, an immanent and not-yet-actualized capacity (Bryant and Knight 2019; Strathern 1996). People can show a potentiality to become mobile or simply aspire to move according to their circumstances (Kaufmann 2002). This potentiality does not depend only on the actual conditions of access and skills of a person to move but also on a person’s biography, motivations, aspirations, and directions of life trajectory. It can depend on how a person perceives and selects possible and available options for mobility, depending on the circumstances, her needs, values, and opportunities, as well as intentions and aspirations to be mobile. Movement in general is linked to humans’ ability to imagine alternatives (Papastergiadis 2018). Here are some examples. Migration, even before the physical move itself, entails the experience of existential mobility (Hage 2005), a feeling that life is going somewhere, a reflection on the multiple possible directions of our lives as well as the projection of a possible life elsewhere. Before a person actually migrates, she can think about moving and imagine what living in the new place will be like. Or a migrant, while relocating to a new

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destination, can constantly go back to her home country with her mind. In return migration, we can physically go back home, and, although we could never feel like we felt in the past, through imagination we can also travel back to the memories of that very same place and make the not-yet-realized aspects of return possible (Cangià and Zittoun 2020). In the case of tourism, finally, the journey can follow different temporal directions: forward, with the tourist striving to actualize some aspect of an imagined future and self (Gillespie 2007b); backward, with tourists looking for a nostalgic journey to an imagined or lost past (Ivy 1995; Salazar 2011a); or in the present, by inhabiting a semantic world in which what is experienced through travel combines with what was imagined before departure (through films, books, guides) (Gillespie 2007b; Cangià and Zittoun 2020). Further to that, people experience time in mobility in various ways. These multiple timings cannot be merely reduced to travel time: “Waiting, accelerating, queuing, being still, stopping, repeating etc. are among the different experiences of the journey, although they are not, of course, experienced equally by all” (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013: 11). The timings in mobility can vary during the journey. We can slow down our traveling, accelerate our speed, or pause for a moment. Ingold’s wayfarer, for example, from time to time pauses for rest, can return repeatedly to the same place. Variations of tempo (slowing down, waiting) can be different for different people (e.g. irregular migrants feeling outside the “normal” time of others [Griffiths 2014]), or can be ambivalent for the same person (e.g. a migrant feeling frustrated about both imminent change and absent change). These variations are linked to ways of looking at time as a resource, as a surplus, or as a scarcity. These three dimensions—spatial, symbolic, and temporal—are not mutually exclusive and are inextricably linked with the social and affective dimensions that characterize the experience of mobility. These dimensions give us an idea of how mobility represents not only a mere movement across spaces but also a trail along the places that make space meaningful, along those meanings that define both mobile and immobile people, and finally along the temporal trajectories that move us back and forth across past, present, and future. These dimensions also shed light on an important aspect in the study of mobility: the interplay of mobility and immobility, to which I now turn.

(Im)Mobilities … In Keywords of Mobility, Salazar and Jayaram state something that at first may seem straightforward to any scholar studying mobility but is, on the contrary, not so obvious after all: “To assess the extent or nature of movement, or, indeed, even ‘observe’ it sometimes, one needs to spend a lot of

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time studying things that stand still (or change at a much slower pace)” (Salazar and Jayaram 2016: 3). These “things” can be borders, nations, institutions, “the (imagined) sedentary ‘home’ cultures of those that do not move” (Salazar 2020: 772). Or the sense of home for those who move: “It is impossible simply to feel at home everywhere if one does not feel at home somewhere” (Thomassen 2014: 226, emphasis in original). Often viewed as the counterpart to movement, immobility is not merely “an absence of movement” (Bergson 2007: 168). Immobility may be viewed as the outcome of structural constraints that hinder the capacity to move. It may be viewed as “spatial continuity in an individual’s center of gravity over a period of time” (Schewel 2019: 2), as those points of space through which movement passes (like borders for example) or, more positively speaking, the realization of a desire and the aspiration not to move, or something in between (Schewel 2019). Immobility, as Khan defines it, is “a cipher for assemblages of blocked, stuck, and transitional movement” (emphasis mine) that involves multiple sociopolitical, economic, cultural, geographical, and human components in dynamic and contingent relation with movement (Khan 2016: 93). In his book Global Complexity (2002), Urry describes our contemporary mobile world as characterized by a relationship between mobilities and immobilities. Later, Sheller and Urry, in their manifesto of mobility studies, more clearly define this relationship. Mobility needs immobility, immobile infrastructures and spaces, in order to happen: Mobile machines, mobile phones, cars, aircraft, trains, and computer connections, all presume overlapping and varied time-space immobilities. … Such immobilities include wire and coaxial cable systems, the distribution of satellites for radio and television, the fibre-optic cabling carrying telephone, television, and computer signals, the mobile phone masts that enable microwave channels to carry mobile phone messages (with new mobile phones now more common in the world than conventional land-line phones), and the massive infrastructures that organise the physical movement of people and goods. (Sheller and Urry 2006: 11)

Tim Cresswell, in turn, offered an important contribution to the theorization of mobility and its relation with what he calls “frictions” (Cresswell 2010). He defined three interconnected dimensions composing mobility, namely movement, meaning, and practice, and discussed how these dimensions combine into different “constellations of mobility,” which are the different historical senses and meanings that have been attributed to mobility and which give rise to differently mobile phenomena. Mobility is about politics, in the sense that is differentially accessed, and is relative to

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the slowness and immobility of others. Mobility, as a complex and “turbulent” phenomenon (Papastergiadis 2018), can be slowed or other times enabled by other social phenomena of various kinds, by frictions. Friction, differently from moorings as “moments of relative stillness,” indicates an ambivalent stillness that both impedes and enables mobility (Cresswell 2014: 109). At times friction can prevent movement. At other times it can only slow movement down and create a turbulence or “disordered mobility” (Cresswell 2020). Friction can also enable movement: “If you try and run on ice in shoes with smooth soles you will simply fall over. If, however, you use rubber soles and walk on tarmac it is friction that creates the possibility of movement. In other words, friction hinders and enables mobilities” (Cresswell 2014: 113). Mobility is often impossible without friction. In these perspectives, mobility and immobility are viewed as profoundly relational. The velocity and speed of some are contingent to the slowness and immobility of others. Bissell and Fuller in their Stillness in a Mobile World critically reflect on this relational approach to mobility and immobility, movement and stillness (Bissell and Fuller 2010). A relational view on mobility-immobility captures only one aspect of immobility. It captures only immobility’s being “just an effect, a function of, or an enabler of movement” (Bissell and Fuller 2010: 6), and does not understand its potentialities. Stillness (immobility) is a specific mode of engagement with the world that moves forces and can hence show a latent political and ethical nature. In their being apparently static, things are “always already in a state of ontogenic transformation” (Bissell and Fuller 2010: 4). In having reached the “position” in Bergson’s terms, things are not still at all. Adey provides a powerful image of the relational dialectics between mobility and immobility when he describes the illusions of movement in an aircraft, the very same that we can often also experience when sitting in a train: As I sit on an aircraft waiting to take off on my night flight, I watch the lights of an aircraft nearby. As the aircraft gradually disappears out of view of my window, I assume that we are pushing back towards the runway. Not so. We are still—well, relatively so in relation to tectonic shifts, the rotation of the Earth or the orbit of the planet that moves us. The other aircraft which was moving gave the illusion that the aircraft I was sitting in was mobile instead. (Adey 2006: 84)

Despite the feeling that we are moving with the airplane, we are actually still, and we realize that what moves is the other aircraft. Bergson, on the contrary, describes the illusion of immobility and uses the image of two trains. The train moves at the same speed, in the same direction on parallel tracks. They both seem immobile to the travelers seated in the other:

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When two trains move at the same speed, in the same direction, on parallel tracks: each of the two trains is then immovable to the travellers seated in the other. But a situation of this kind which, after all, is exceptional, seems to us to be the regular and normal situation, because it is what permits us to act upon things and also permits things to act upon us: the travellers in the two trains can hold out their hands to one another through the door and talk to one another only if they are “immobile,” that is to say, if they are going in the same direction at the same speed. (Bergson 2007: 168)

Immobility, or illusion thereof, becomes a part of the experience of movement itself, like the illusion of movement becomes an experience of immobility, in a relational sense: we see and experience something as immobile/ mobile in relation to our mobility/immobility. What I want to highlight here is a little different, but takes the same image of the illusion of movement/ immobility. We realize that we are immobile in fact, as it is the other aircraft that moves, yet there is still movement happening, the movement of the other aircraft, the “tectonic shifts, the rotation of the Earth or the orbit of the planet that moves us” (Adey 2006: 84), and, most importantly, our mind moving by anticipating what comes next. Similarly, despite the illusion of the two immobile trains, we realize we are moving, and yet there is something immobile that is the encounter with another trajectory and the perception of it. There is something inherently potential in this (illusionary) immobility, a movement that might occur at other levels than the physical one. As a matter of fact, at the interplay of mobility and immobility, questions arise regarding the relation between mind and body, sense-making and our social world, and more generally, between the potential for change and continuity. The boundary between mobility and immobility is a fine one: for one can move all around the word and still have an immobile imaginative experience or feel like s/he has not changed at all; or conversely, one may be place bound, be stuck in an endless present and have the feeling that life goes nowhere, yet travel fast across places and times with the mind (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Salazar 2011a). One can jump in time with the mind and live unlived lives (Phillips 2013), or go physically and imaginatively back home while psychologically or socially never being able to return to the place that was before (Schutz 1945). Immobility is not passive but is instead a complex experience that may have positive, negative, and even ambivalent developments. Immobility can take many forms and can transform categories, imaginaries, and identities; it can open up new possibilities, even when it seems impossible. Ideas, aspirations, or dreams of immobility can enable or hinder movement, for example when immobility in the form of settlement comes to represent an idealized end for migrants, or when immobility becomes a psychological reaction (e.g. trauma) to a

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forced movement, like in the case of refugees (Khan 2016). From this perspective, roots do not precede routes, but the two are constitutive of each other. When moving, we transit from a state, meaning, or event that feels relatively similar across time (Zittoun and Gillespie 2015) to a distinct state, meaning, and event, and it is in this passage that we experience the liminal.

… and Liminalities The liminal can be simply defined as the passage from one state, event, and form to another, as the transitional stage of a process of becoming. The term derives from the Latin word “limen,” literally “threshold,” and implies the presence of a boundary. A threshold, in order to be passed, requires that the individual does not merely meet the limit of a certain situation but confronts it (Thomassen 2012) and passes through it. A liminal experience, hence, is a “going through” experience, an experience of becoming, when a state (socio-psycho-organic-physical) that usually preserves us, constitutes our lives, and feels the same across time is, for some reason, suspended and transformed into something else (Stenner 2017). The most classic way of picturing a liminal experience is to imagine those life events that mark a person’s change in state (reaching the adult age, giving birth) or in status (getting married or divorced, being promoted at work, becoming a citizen). The liminal has long been associated with rituals, such those marking some of the abovementioned turning passages. It was Arnold van Gennep in his Les Rites de Passage who first introduced the term liminal while describing the transitional phase of rituals (Van Gennep 1961). Van Gennep stressed the importance of transitions in any society. Rites of passage are the universal way societies demarcate transitions. They can be defined as the rituals and ceremonies marking the passage of an individual or social group from a place, social position, or state—that is a “relative fixed or stable condition” (Turner 1970: 93)—to enter another one. Van Gennep classified all existing rites of passage between those marking the passage from one social status to another (e.g. marriage) and those marking the passage of time (e.g. harvest, New Year), and defined three recurrent phases characterizing rites: the phase of separation, the liminal middle and transitional stage, and the postliminal phase of incorporation. In the first phase of separation, the individual or group separates physically and symbolically from a fixed position in the social structure (a “state”). During the liminal phase, the state of the individual/group is ambiguous, the previous social state is temporarily suspended, and the new social state is not reached yet. Finally, in the third phase, the individual/group returns with a new social status and reintegrates into a stable social order. Van

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Gennep’s rites of passage represented the official ways to symbolize an experience of “going through” and passing from one state to a new one. It was Victor Turner who rediscovered van Gennep’s work and made it resonate in anthropological circles. Turner came across van Gennep’s book almost by chance in 1963 when he defined himself as being in a liminal state, after having resigned from Victoria University of Manchester and selling his house, and while still waiting for his U.S. visa, delayed as a consequence of his refusal of armed military service during World War II (Thomassen 2014). The reading of The Rites of Passage inspired Turner to write the chapter titled “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage” in his book The Forest of Symbols (Turner 1970). Turner explored the experience of liminality through a processual approach, attentive to the transformative aspect characterizing it. He drew a distinction between a state and position during stable and predictable times (structure), on the one hand, and liminal conditions (antistructure) on the other. According to Turner, liminality as a concept is useful not only in identifying the relevance of in-between periods but also, and this is an aspect I would like to emphasize here, in understanding how human beings experience change (Thomassen 2015). Liminality, from this perspective, is not only a transition but also a potentiality. It is not only about what is “going to be” but also about “what may be” (Turner and Turner 1995: 3). Turner associated the concept of liminal with that of “play,” and art, performances and industrial leisure in particular, genres that he called liminoid experiences. In these playful events, creativity and uncertainty can emerge out of the ordinary time of “labor.” Leisure time provides the freedom to escape from institutional obligations prescribed by social organization, and from the regulated rhythms of labor time. Leisure time also offers the freedom to enter new symbolic worlds and transcend social structural limitations, to play with the as-if, with words, ideas, and social relations (Turner 1974). Liminal events can be spontaneous/unstaged or devised/ staged. Spontaneous liminal events refer to those that happen to us, and that throw us into an unpredictable and ambivalent situation, like an earthquake, a significant death, a riot, or a pandemic. Devised liminal episodes, on the contrary, are those episodes that are planned or artfully created to generate moving experiences and possibly induce transformation, what Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel called liminal affective technologies (Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel 2013). Performances or rituals such as marriages can be viewed as devised liminal episodes. Here, I want to quote Paul Stenner, who interestingly enough describes a liminal passage in the same way we have previously defined mobility: “This business of leaving and entering worlds is not simply to move across space from place A to place B, as if ‘world’ were a simple external reality, but the

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process of (a system/environment unity) really becoming something different” (Stenner 2017: 13). It is in the “process of really becoming something different,” in the experience of an actual or potential change, and how humans deal with that, that we can find a first important connection between liminality and mobility. An experience of mobility, when we embark upon a journey, more specifically, can generate a rupture, a change in the habitual flow of things, and associated transition, where previous positions and roles are withdrawn in favor of new ones. A condition of liminality, in turn, can involve the need for physical separation from habitual spaces to move to new ones. The Ndembu neophytes, in initiation and puberty rites studied by Turner, for example, go through an initial phase of spatial separation from their community and village and move into the wilderness to a sacred site where the ritual takes place. This movement is not merely physical, as it implies a temporary withdrawal from structural positions, “values, norms, sentiments and techniques associated with those positions” (Turner 1970: 105). Turner and Turner (1995) also explored the interplay between pilgrimage and liminality, and examined the symbolic dimension of religious pilgrimage as a form of transformative travel. Pilgrimage, like rituals, motivates people to move from their everyday life and enter into other spiritual worlds in order to be, like in a ritual passage, transformed into something else. The pilgrim, like the tourist, moves voluntarily and separates physically from her home community to embark on a journey to a new place, and hence becomes liminal. This journey represents a transformation from one social position to another and a process of becoming something else. Beckstead, more recently in his study on pilgrimage, suggests how pilgrims, by going through liminal passages of transformation resulting from their movement to faraway and sacred places, go beyond the here-and-now context to imagine other worlds and hoped-for futures (e.g. success in business, health in childbearing) (Beckstead 2012: 713). With regard to tourism, Graburn offered an interesting reading of this phenomenon in terms both of “play” and “sacred,” involving a physical movement away from work and home (Graburn 1977). The magic and sacred character of tourism comes from the movement and the nonordinary setting, from the temporary opportunity that tourism provides to become “a nonentity” (Graburn 1977: 18), from the idea that it represents an exciting and self-fulfilling experience. Tourists depart their ordinary life for vacations with the uncertainty about finally returning home (due to an unexpected plane, train, or car accident): “We say goodbye as we depart and some even cry a little … for we are dying symbolically” (Graburn 1977: 22). The return is also ambivalent: we come back to our former life and past selves, yet “we are a new person who has gone through recreation and, if we

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do not feel renewed, the whole point of tourism has been missed” (Graburn 1977: 22). More recently, Alex Gillespie, in Becoming Other, has explicitly defined the tourist’s travel as a liminal experience. Tourists, like pilgrims, escape the gaze of their community and hence become liminal: “They lose their history, their reputation, and their familiar social positions—they become nobody” (Gillespie 2006: 63). By voluntarily moving from their home community, tourists escape the constraints of social expectations and become free to play with their own identity and explore new social positions, as well as new modes of self-presentation and styles. At the same time, tourists, while distancing themselves from their original home communities, encounter others when moving and have to face the gaze of the locals and other tourists. At the end of the journey, they need to return to the gaze of their home community. The tourist, hence, faces all the different social positions and perspectives resulting from the movement and needs to account in one way or another for the identity change presumably occurred through traveling. The scholars mentioned already put the emphasis on the symbolic inversion, suspension, or transformation of the normative structure and ordinary life that define travelers’ identities before the departure. Marc Augé’s (1995) idea of non-places partly resembles these representations of travel, the travelers’ temporary condition of being “betwixt and between,” yet it mostly emphasizes the spatialization of a liminal passage. The space and time of travel, according to Augé, are suspended in nonplaces, in an intermediate spatialized state between departure and destination. In these spaces in between, as Augé made it clear, identity, relations, or history do not make any sense for people in transit to their intended destinations. Other scholars tend to look at how various landscapes in the context of tourism, pilgrimage, and, more generally, mobility are liminal, as they are primarily marginal and dangerous spaces, where travelers’ identities are threatened rather than simply suspended or positively transformed into something else. These landscapes are liminal as they subvert identities through social control, technological surveillance, territorialization, or even terror rather than consumption, ludic behavior, and deterritorialization, as examined earlier. Andrews and Roberts in their Liminal Landscape reconceptualize the liminal in relation to danger, marginality, and risk attached to certain spaces (sites of abandonment and decay, disaster zones, frontier zones, and coasts) and the movements associated with these spaces (adventurous and dangerous tourism, illegal immigration, travelers and walkers, road movies) (Andrews and Roberts 2012). All these studies represented a significant exploration of the interplay of mobility and liminality. However, they focused primarily either on the

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spatial dimension, namely the uses and practices of space in various forms of travel and mobility, or on the symbolic dimension of becoming in mobility. Others have already partly explored the temporal dimension of liminality in mobility. The experiences of migrants moving cross-border, for example, have been considered as temporally liminal in migration studies (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Wilson and Donnan 1998; Mzayek 2019; Cangià 2018; Suter 2019). Migration is an experience of living in a limbo, as a journey that is never complete but repeatedly caught between moments of departure and arrival. The experience of undocumented and irregular migrants symbolizes this condition: these migrants are not only trapped at the borders but also stuck in time, “unable to visit elderly and infirm relatives, or children who grow up in their absence, leaving the migrant fixed in an ‘eternal present’ of things-as-they-had-been when they left” (Donnan and Wilson 1999: 12). Migration is not only an experience of entrapment, but it can turn into an experience of transformation where migrants can imagine or live alternative or parallel timescapes to contest their liminal condition (Donnan and Wilson 1999). Trajectories and projects of migration, in certain cases, however, run the risk of being studied as a homogeneous block, with minimum differentiation between states of in-betweenness for labor migrants, asylum seekers, business travelers, or other professional mobile workers (Grillo 2007). Vered Amit, with regard to international student and youth travel, explored how, in the case of university exchanges and working holidays for young travelers, liminality limits possibilities of transformation rather than creating them. These forms of travel are usually presented by institutional actors like tourism, academia, or governments as being significant for the transition to adulthood for these young travelers. These youths’ experiences of traveling, however, do not finally conform to the normative discourse about progressing toward certain (positive) types of adult roles through travel. Quite the contrary, they represent a temporal escape from adult responsibilities: “Thus this form of travel is more likely to offer a detour from, rather than a bridge through, life transitions” (Amit 2010: 64). This book presents two major contributions to this trend of study. By drawing upon Thomassen’s scales and dimensions of liminality (Thomassen 2014), the book aims to bring together the three dimensions (spatial, temporal, and symbolic) characterizing liminality in the context of mobility. The physical movement along places (both for those who move and those who do not move but reflect on others’ movement) can trigger a confrontation with one’s own and others’ alterity, a reinterpretation of what means to be(come) mobile, and finally a reflection on the passage from past and future events. All these processes are liminal as they involve an experience “that is happening but has not yet happened” (Stenner 2017: 3), as they

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are situated at the threshold of and on the moment in between two phases, between what it was and what it could be. Secondly, the book proposes a specific focus for exploring the relationship between mobility and liminality that is a focus on immobility and the different rhythms and timings of mobility. It explores those episodes in which immobility shapes (and not merely prevents or enables) the movements people embark upon, make sense of, or imagine. Immobility can give sense to the whole experience of mobility; it can be the basis for liminal passages, for example, when we are stopped at the frontier or at the airport before we take off with the airplane; when we are immobile and yet look at others moving. In these immobile moments in the occurrence of a transition, where our status, state, or form is in transformation to become something else and it has not yet arrived, we become liminal. Pilgrimage, tourism, or the non-places across which people move are cases where mobility as movement creates the basis for the passage. Here, however, I want to explore cases where immobility in mobile experiences (in the form of stillness and deceleration for the sake of performance, in the form of semantic barriers and movements, in the form of waiting and slowdown of working life) brings to liminal episodes.

Transiting across Multiple Worlds: What Counts as a Liminal Episode? But, first, what is it that counts as a liminal episode? In its original and anthropological sense, a liminal episode is clearly defined both at the temporal and spatial level: “There is a way into liminality, and there is a way out of it. Members of society are themselves aware of the liminal state: they know that they will leave it sooner or later” (Thomassen 2015: 52). Victor Turner was the first to explore the experience of liminality out of the ritual context and to associate the concept with out-of-the-ordinary mundane experiences or playful events like art or performances. Other scholars, after him, have related this concept to a broader range of human experiences than rituals—experiences through which, in one way or another, we distance ourselves from the ordinary of our lives. These experiences are characterized by instability, ambivalence, and uncertainty (e.g. political revolutions and riots, and migration). Thomassen (2014) went a bit further than that and defined contemporary leisure such as extreme sports (e.g. bungee jumping) or gambling as liminal, or better, limivoid, experiences. Different from other forms of leisure, activities of this kind are most often characterized by the search for brief excitement and near-death experiences beyond the boundaries of the ordinary everyday life.

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Liminality is not simply embedded within ritual structures but also refers to experiences and events “that simply happen to us” (Thomassen 2015: 41). A liminal episode occurs when an individual passes from a certain state of things to another following a rupture in the “normal” flow of life, and then transits from a sphere of experience to another one while changing identity, meanings, or status on the occasion of this passage. The “normal” refers to “whatever people living at a given time and place were taking for granted as normal and ordinary in their lives” (Szakolczai 2017: 233). This definition of a liminal episode draws upon Schutz’s idea of “multiple worlds of experience,” upon a cultural psychological perspective of the life-course, as well as upon Stenner’s ontological liminality. Alfred Schutz, by drawing upon William James’s idea of “sub-universes” and Bergson’s concept of “planes of experience,” wrote of “multiple worlds of experience,” “multiple realities,” “finite provinces of meaning” or realms (Schutz 1945). Reality is not made of unique, homogeneous, and noncontradictory realms but is composed of a variety of irreducible subworlds, including the worlds of dream, work, children’s play, theater, and the world of religion. Things and experiences that are possible in a certain province of meaning (e.g. play) are compatible with others in the same province and can feel somehow stable in that context. On the contrary, they are normally incompatible with those of a different realm (e.g. religion). In their daily life, individuals move spatially and temporally through a variety of worlds and transit from one province of experience to another, which in cultural psychology have also been conceptualized as “spheres of experience” (Zittoun 2012)—a concept that I will use here to refer to these worlds of experience along which the person moves. Spheres of experience are those configurations of experiences that look relatively “the same” for the person and across time, and can include certain ways of doing, routines and activities, representations, emotional qualities, personal sense, and orientation (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016). These spheres can be “proximal,” supported by the actual, present, and material reality (e.g. cooking dinner or watching a movie), or they can be more “distal,” enabled by imagination and the mental movement away from the here and now (Zittoun 2012). An individual can alternate myriad spheres of experience in a single day, from one to another (moving from home to work) or even within the same sphere (while working in front of my computer, I can stop working for a moment and go with my mind to the destination of my travel planned for the next day). I can live on several realms of reality at the same time with my mind. Schutz makes the example of writing, a complex action taking shape across many realms, including the world of everyday life, imagination of a parallel world, the world of school (in the case of the adolescents in this book for example), and other alternative worlds (Schutz 1970). A rupture can occur

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when moving from “routine patterns of thought and action” (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016: 10) that are expected in a specific sphere, toward other patterns in another sphere. Picture the following situation: the police unexpectedly ring the door during the day, while you are preparing to go to work. This small-scale (and yet unforeseen) event can have repercussions on the normal expected sequence of your day. You pass from moving from a taken-for-granted action (preparing to go to work) to being interrupted from the unexpected arrival of the police. Like any other passage from one sphere of experience to another, this is likely to require the “undoing” of the previous sphere and the “making” of new knowledge and personal redefinitions relating to the new situation. Why are the police in front of the door and what should you do? You start reflecting on whether you have done something wrong lately. This “undoing” and “making” can imply a process of change (Stenner 2017: 160), with an initial rupture or a shock experience, as Schutz writes: The shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the curtain in the theatre rises as the transition to the world of the stage play; the radical change in our attitude if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world; our quandary relaxing into laughter if, in listening to a joke, we are for a short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in relation to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of foolishness; the child’s turning toward his toy as the transition into the play-world; and so on. (Schutz 1945: 553)

With regard to these micro and daily moves, Greco and Stenner proposed a broader meaning of liminality so as to provide the concept with an ontological magnitude. Liminality pertains to transformations occurring within any given form-of-process (or system of experience) or on the occasion of any kind of transition between given forms-of-process: “a condition of ontological indeterminacy that is at play in occasions of transition, in the phase where an existing form-of-process is suspended … and a new one is not yet in place” (Greco and Stenner 2017: 152). Liminality hence is about the emergence of new events and experiences that were previously not present (Stenner 2017). It refers to moments of transition during which “the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction” (Thomassen 2014: 1). When a rupturing event happens, we transition to a new pattern of thought and action. You stop the action of going to work and your thoughts and answer the door wondering why the police are there. Some ruptures

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and transitions can be more shocking than others. Transiting from home to work or answering the ringing telephone that interrupts our actions, for example, are not necessarily shocking. However, over a longer period of time, some spheres of experiences can disappear, leaving room for new ones: a divorce, or moving to a new country, for example, can represent more shocking ruptures and transitional experiences. In a liminal passage, a new sphere of experience is elaborated until it also feels as “normal” as before. Other times, meanings and identities in this passage can remain stuck between what it was and the uncertainty of what it will be and, at times, be perceived as permanently in between.

Permanently In Between: “Liminal Hotspots” Consider the following story. Sam, a Syrian man who migrated to Switzerland a few years ago and asked for asylum, tells about his first days in the new country: When I arrived in Switzerland … we went to the center to ask for asylum. The first two weeks were so hard and shocking for me … it was like a prison there! We were deprived of our mobile phone for example, and then the building was closed everywhere … we were forbidden to go out during the first week, I don’t know why! And then we had the first interview and we changed the center. The new center was underground and was also horrible in terms of health, but we stayed there only for a week. … We didn’t know whether or not they were going to accept our request for asylum … if not, we had to change the country, and we didn’t know where to go. … And then they studied our case for, I don’t know, three to four months, and then they granted us the visa. … In fact, our second interview was two years later than the first interview … it’s a very long wait! So I got the permit after two years.

I met Sam while carrying out fieldwork in 2020 as part of a project on qualified Syrian refugees in Switzerland.2 Here, Sam describes the initial phase of asylum seeking. Upon arrival in Switzerland, asylum seekers are sent to one of the Swiss Reception and Procedure Centers where their application for asylum is taken into consideration. During this time, they don’t know whether they will be granted the status of refugee or not, or which canton they will be sent to and for how long. Sam in the center, like other asylum seekers, is trapped in the paradoxes of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013): while being first forced to move and leave his country, Sam, once in the new destination, cannot move from the center for the initial months, and then, once he is granted legal status, he may face restrictions

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of movement across cities or countries. His present and future movements are controlled by the system of asylum seeking (first the reception center), which decides whether Sam and many like him will be granted asylum first, and where they will—or won’t—move then (if so, to another center, and the assigned canton). The center represents what has been called a “hotspot” in the literature. Tazzioli and Garelli, for example, recently explored strategies of containment of migrants in Italy and Greece through a look at hotspot and border sites where migrants are controlled and selected (Tazzioli and Garelli 2018). In EU political language, the word “hotspot” designates border sites where interventions of security and military control are in place. In the last decades, the term was used to refer to migration, to indicate “hot” sites (e.g. detention camps) for regulating migrants’ arrivals in the European Union (Tazzioli and Garelli 2018). Hotspots are not merely detention sites, though, but relate to a larger political system that channels the movements and forced mobility of migrants. The hotspot system, more broadly speaking, is the system of control and regulation of these sites. And yet hotspots are not merely spaces or systems of control. If we take the case of refugees’ migration, first we have the reception center where people like Sam pass through. The center represents an embodied case of a hotspot where people might subjectively feel suspended in the limbo situation of waiting for asylum and not knowing whether s/he will get it or not while being physically contained. Being confined within the walls of the center can make the person feel in a limbo situation where what comes next is unknown. When they get out of the center, some can start their lives in Switzerland. Refugees with qualifications soon realize that often their education is not recognized in the new country, and they begin to face a variety of challenges in finding a job. They cannot leave the country, cannot often work due to their permit and other restrictions. People with the permit N (application still being processed) or F (temporarily accepted) are not permitted to work for the first three months, cannot leave the country, and cannot change canton during the whole duration of the permit. These refugees might have to revisit their entire area of expertise, as they most probably cannot work in their original professional domain. Some of refugees report feelings of “being trapped between two walls” (the walls being Switzerland and Syria), of being “under the water and going deeper and deeper,” “not having control over their lives,” and “starting from zero” after years of work and education. Hotspots are hence also a subjective condition of being trapped in specific uncertain and ambivalent circumstances defined by a metaphorical containing of physical and temporal space (e.g. walls, water, being blocked at home between the time-passing and not being able to control one’s life or having to go back and start from zero). Being physically in the center

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firstly, being physically blocked in Switzerland with no right to leave the country and waiting for asylum, and then being trapped in an endless job search with no success generate a sense of time-passing (Jeffrey 2010b) and in-betweenness (Mzayek 2019), with a consequent feeling of physical, professional, and existential immobility. The refugees’ life is on hold, and opportunities diminish with the passing of time. Not knowing how the situation will end (will they get asylum or not, will they find a job finally or not?) puts the person into a feeling of uncertainty that might be perceived as permanent: the normal, everyday state of affairs becomes suspended and permanent at the same time, and the person comes to feel lost with regard to what will be next. I used the experience of these refugees here as an extreme case of a condition that combines the two experiences of liminality and the hotspot in the context of an experience of mobility: the so-called liminal hotspot. A liminal hotspot has been recently defined as a condition of uncertainty and ambivalence, “in which people feel ‘caught suspended’ in the limbo of an in-between phase of transition” (Greco and Stenner 2017: 147). Whether or not Sam and other asylum seekers go out from the center or find a job in their work domain right away or after long time, they can experience a liminal hotspot condition as soon as they perceive the possible permanent character of their situation and become uncertain about when this will come to an end. Arpad Szakolczai identified “permanent liminality” as a specifically modern condition, a paradoxical condition of stasis, where the “more things change, the more they stay the same” (Szakolczai 2017: 244). Permanent liminality happens when “a temporary suspension of the normal or everyday taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent, generating a loss of reality, even a sense of unreality in daily existence” (Szakolczai 2017: 233). It is an entrapment between states that, given its permanent character, generates emotional overheat and, indeed, a liminal hotspot. During liminal occasions, the structural logic of either/or is suspended, and the both/and is tolerated. In liminal hotspots, the logic of either/or turns into a paradoxical logic that includes both/and and neither/nor. The both/and and neither/nor formulation was already present in Turner’s work. This formulation suitably captures the ambiguity of liminal occasions: “Neophytes are neither living nor dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories” (Turner 1970: 96–97, emphasis mine). I propose using the concept of “liminal hotspot” as the analyzer of the interplay between mobility and immobility, both as a form of stasis and entrapment in the experience of change and as a not-yet movement prompted by the potentialities and transformative qualities inherent in transitional moments. The idea of potentiality is important to highlight here: we

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cannot always say from a liminal episode if the state is going to change with long-lasting effects on what follows. Rightly enough, Amit asked in this regard, “Is [liminality] likely, in and of itself, to foment change?” (Amit 2010: 69). We temporarily evade normative conventions and move to another state when in a liminal passage, but, in the reintegration phase, everything might also go back to what it was before, especially in a liminal hotspot, when we don’t know what the next phase will be. However, what interests me here in the definition of a liminal event and liminal hotspot is precisely its potentiality for change: this is the brief and temporary capacity of a liminal episode to affect, and the political, pedagogical, and ethical promises that come with it. The permanent and unknown character of an experience should affect in one way or another the person/group—also if for a brief instant—to present all the attributes of a liminal event. To go back to your door, that something unpredictable and shocking about the arrival of the police, about the process of “undoing” the previous sphere and the “making” of the new one, makes the experience liminal. The potentiality for a real and long-lasting transformation will become an actual possibility depending on the circumstances and material conditions under which the experience occurs. A liminal hotspot is here conceptualized around three dimensions, spatial, semantic, and temporal: “the ‘hotness of the spot’ increases as these various dimensions of liminality come together, transforming affective ties and relations, which burst into the open” (Georgsen and Thomassen 2017: 199). As in the case of Sam, a liminal hotspot manifests through the presence of physical or metaphorical borders: the center, the imagined containing walls of two countries (and past and present), or the water in which one might feel they can drown. A liminal hotspot manifests through the co-presence of different meanings regarding oneself and the situation (being a refugee or not, having qualifications or not), as well as multiple temporal dimensions in place (the stuck present, the gone past, and the uncertain future), the time passing vis-à-vis a blocked and out-of-control life. The spatialization of liminal hotspots relates to the presence of real or imagined borders that the event creates and that the person perceives as interrupting the normal flow of everyday life. The interruption of the normal flow of everyday life, regardless of its duration, happens to the person (in the case of Sam as a consequence of forced migration away from Syria) and makes her/him suspended in the liminal hotspot. The performance sites, the writing exercise at school as well as waiting in the context of migration, imaginatively become spatial liminal zones with meaningful borders separating the places along which the person moves. The liminal experiences in these contexts are spatialized: the physical border becoming meaningful for the person and circumscribing the moment (the performance site in chapter

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2, the school classroom in chapter 3, the place where migrants live in chapter 4) define the spatial limits of the liminal experience. And yet, inside and outside are still co-present. Life outside the reception center goes on while the person waits inside. The person is both presently inside and potentially outside. And yet s/he is neither completely inside nor totally outside with her/ his mind. In a staged or unstaged liminal event, the individual makes and remakes sense of the ongoing situation. The liminal episode is triggered by a rupture of a socially situated and significant sphere of experience toward another one, a sphere of experience that feeds a certain interpretation of the self (e.g. I-as-Italian) and of others (them-as-migrants). More than based on knowledge, this interpretation involves feelings and the need to conform to certain values associated with identities specific to the surrounding sociocultural environment. There might be multiple understandings of “beingan-Italian” or “being-a-migrant,” for example, understandings that are constructed on the basis of generalized meanings available in the environment. Opposite and contradictory meanings can be co-present and never finally reintegrated in a coherent meaning. In this book, I draw upon studies in cultural psychology that have investigated the notion of liminal hotspot in semantic terms (Salvatore and Venuleo 2017). A liminal hotspot condition can emerge in the dynamics of sense-making, when two components of meaning interact in the narration of the person experiencing a transitional event: more specifically, the observable meaning—that is, the rupturing event directly experienced by the person who remakes sense of the situation—and a generalized meaning or the semiotic scenario—that is, the meaning that makes the experience interpretable by the person. In a liminal hotspot, the affective and semantic scenario of the previous condition (what-has-been-so-far) does not vanish completely and maintains its salience in the new sense given to the new situation what-is-from-now-on (Salvatore and Venuleo 2017: 222). Being caught in a permanent in-between condition can also and most importantly present a temporal character: the person can feel suspended in an everlasting present, where the secureness of what used to be in the past is lost and the future remains ungraspable and uncertain. Being trapped in an endless present can feel like a permanent state of exception, where past and future start intertwining with the present moment and when imagination assists in escaping the entrapment. The three case studies introduced in this book are illustrative of the liminal hotspot at the various levels. In all three cases, I examine an event that generates a passage toward a new state or meaning, as well as a form of entrapment between these two states and meanings. As we will see, the permanent character of these episodes is not fundamentally or always

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negative (Szakolczai 2017: 234), but it generates an ambivalent possibility of coexistence of states and meanings. Performances, writing, and waiting, from being the occasion for a permanentization of a liminal condition, can also work as what Zittoun has described for psychotherapy as a “laboratory for change”: A playful zone, where things from various spheres of experiences might be freely and playfully questioned and imagined differently, and where even the boundaries between spheres of experience might be questioned and overlooked. Imagining new possible meanings, new views of the world and new boundaries—creating new semiotic forms—is the first step for making them actual. (Zittoun 2011: 333)

In chapter 2, from being a static place, the public street for itinerant performances becomes a space of encounter where social categories can be revisited. Leisure time then becomes an occasion to cross symbolic boundaries and provoke a transformation of social and cultural meanings. At the same time, these very boundaries are symbolically mantained to emphasize the specialness of the monkey performance art: the Buraku people become Japanese during the performance when similarity is stressed (the Buraku monkey dance culture as an integral part of the Japanese traditional culture), and yet, when difference is celebrated, the Buraku stay in a hotspot where both the Buraku and the non-Buraku coexist. In chapter 3, the writings of adolescents at school about migration are permanent liminal spaces where a similar transformation occurs but is then interrupted by the emotional ambivalence that migration of other people provokes for these youths: the migrant can be close to the Italian, even become a friend sharing the same aspirations, hopes, and fears, and yet the migrant can still provoke a sense of insecurity and anger and goes back to being “different.” Finally, in chapter 4, the relocation to a new country, the deceleration in work life, and the wait for new employment become permanent liminal episodes for accompanying male partners, where these men come to navigate meanings about masculinity across their past and present identities, their difference from and similarity with their working wives on the ground of the (ideal) gender equality in the family: these men used to be professionals, they are now full-time dads, and they also value their lives in comparison to their working partners. Will they find a job and go back to being professionals? These case studies are stories of encounters across difference and “on-the-move,” between people of different social groups, between people of different backgrounds or identities, or between oneself before and after, in the past, in the present, and in an imagined future. As discussed later

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in the book, all the narratives in the case studies move from an image of essential difference between Self and Other (Buraku versus Japanese, Italians versus migrants, men versus women) and between different Selves, to representations of essential sameness. These representations can encourage the semantic movement between self and other positions in a dialogical (rather than dialectical) sense, and help construct new meanings regarding identities, categories, and experiences: “If categories are unstable, we must watch them emerge within encounters” (Tsing 2015: 29). Meanings are not dichotomized, but contaminated, to borrow Tsing’s term. They can remain in a liminal hotspot where contradictory values, identities, senses, and feelings matter simultaneously. NOTES 1. Jason Horowitz and Emma Bubola, “On Day 1 of Lockdown, Italian Officials Urge Citizens to Abide by Rules,” New York Times, updated 19 March 2020, retrieved 8 March 2020 from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/world/europe/italy-coro navirus-quarantine.html 2. This is ongoing research conducted at the University of Fribourg in collaboration with Eric Davoine. It is supported by the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research “LIVES—Overcoming Vulnerability: Life Course Perspectives” (NCCR LIVES) and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

CHAPTER

2

The Street as Liminal Itinerant Monkey-Training Performances in Japan

Pause then. Attend to the stillness of the public realm—those clustered groups gathered impassively in lines or squares, lone lovers impatiently anticipating the advent of another, the sorry standstill of sightseers who have lost their way. Stillness is always more than it seems, a habit of camouflage that refuses to give much away. Yet under scrutiny stillness becomes a site of perpetual and shifting transformation—for still waters run deep. Contrast the inaction of the habitually unmoved or (e)motionless with the sudden and unsettling hiatus felt when something stops you dead in your tracks. Or recall the perennial experience of enforced waiting: that resentful limbo produced by another’s failure to arrive. Standing still to attention always drifts towards lethargic distraction or careless daydreaming in time; the much-awaited immobility of pleasurable interlude—a performance willingly suspended. Muscles tensed in inflexible contraction inescapably yield to the demands of gravity, unable to resist exhaustion’s tireless pull. Inability to act can signal a form of resignation, the passive and acquiescent acceptance of the seemingly inevitable. Alternatively, failure to move is a defiant gesture of protest or refusal where digging in one’s heels is a tactic for persistently remaining (still) against the odds. To be static then means to be inert or incapacitated, yet it also has the potential to conjure from nowhere the force of hidden energies, unexpected powers. Stillness thus becomes a foil for infinite and limitless action. (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/65916/65917)

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These words are taken from a publicly distributed postcard prepared for one of the Open City performance walks across various cities. Open City is an ongoing, multilocal, and participatory art project established in 2006 that includes various artists and writers. The project invites people to stage participatory performances in the public space of the city. In some of these performances, for example, people are invited to take part in choreographed events and soundwalks throughout the city. A “soundwalk” is an excursion where sounds are recorded to a digital device along the route to explore space and combine listening with mobility (Brown 2017). The postcard quoted above is an invitation to the spectator to pause, to stop for a moment from daily activities, to enter “leisure time” and take part in the performance. The project makes the spectator reflect on how public behavior in the city is organized and controlled by a set of rules and daily movements, on how these can be renegotiated through participatory performance. The fact that people are invited to pause in the constant flow of routine movements does not mean that “stillness” is unproductive. Cocker has in this regard particularly explored “the potential of an active and resistant form of stillness” that is the Open City performance (Cocker 2010: 87). Stillness is often viewed in sharp dichotomy to mobility or, alternatively, as a form of resistance to the enforced rhythms at which we are required to perform in our lives (Cocker 2010). Performances like those of Open City, however, regenerate the transformative potentialities that are moved by the immobility of stillness (Bissell and Fuller 2010), by a single pause in the habitual movements of our accelerated daily lives. Stillness can be produced by mobile action. The postcard ends as follows: “To be static then means to be inert or incapacitated, yet it also has the potential to conjure from nowhere the force of hidden energies, unexpected powers. Stillness thus becomes a foil for infinite and limitless action.” This chapter is about these “hidden energies” and “unexpected powers” evoked by the dynamic between immobility and mobility. I explore the itinerant (in Japanese jo¯geyuki) and participatory performing style of Japanese monkey trainers known as the Monkey Dance Company (Sarumaiza). The art performance of Sarumaiza follows a similar participatory approach as that of Open City. It combines art with mobility. Yet stillness, in the form of pause for trainers to perform and spectators to attend the performance, is a significant aspect of Sarumaiza’s mobile art practice. Sarumaiza’s performance operates as a liminal zone with transformative potential. Through the deceleration in the lives of spectators and their active participation in the show, and through the constant conflict and negotiation between the trainer and the monkey, Sarumaiza aims to challenge normative social configurations and meanings (also and most importantly regarding the Buraku issue).

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Sarumaiza trainers (father and son) perform the old art practice of monkey training across Japan. In the 1980s, Murasaki Shuji founded the group in a Buraku ghetto of Hikari city in the Yamaguchi prefecture, known in Japan as the hometown of monkey training, to revitalize the traditional “original training” (honjikomi), a practice based on a comic and itinerant style. He was the only trainer of the group until 2005, when his son, Murasaki Ko ¯ hei, decided to join Sarumaiza. The symbols composing the name Sarumaiza reflect the three main ideas of this group’s monkey-training style: the nature of the monkey (saru), the art of dancing (mai), and the sitting of spectators (za). Exploring nature, producing culture, and collaborating with spectators are hence the three main objectives of the company. As part of their itinerant style, these performers repeatedly leave their original town in Yamaguchi prefecture and embark upon a journey throughout the country, driving their little van all across Japan. While traveling, the company slows down, stops to look for a good spot to perform, and invites others to interrupt their activities and join the show, which they set up at the corner of any street, in front of the door of a municipal house, or in the backyard of a school. People’s everyday life is organized and scheduled in the strict timing of the daily routine. In Sarumaiza’s performance, the walking and moving across the space of the city can be paused for a moment: spectators can gather around in a circle in order to discover the monkey training, to get free from “the forced, chronologically regulated rhythms” and free to “enter, even to generate new symbolic worlds of entertainment” (Turner 1974: 68). The show thus starts. I draw upon my fieldwork conducted with Sarumaiza in Japan, my participation in the shows across the whole country, and my field notes, including the testimonies of performers and spectators. I describe the aspects that are constitutive of Sarumaiza’s mobility, the rhythms and features of their movement, the stops during the journey, the landscapes and places of performances, the material constraints affecting the travel. I emphasize the pauses of trainers in front of spectators’ “doors” or on the street to invite people to take part in the show. I also explore the social character of this movement, including the encounters and connections with the people on the route. Then, by portraying a typical performance, I identify the main aspects of the artistic style of these performers. I highlight the dynamics between performers, the monkey, and the spectators, and the narration about the monkey and the Buraku emerging from the performance. The performance becomes a liminal zone of transformation of meanings regarding the monkey (and by extension the Buraku), a space where liminal affectivity among participants is evoked. However, the monkey, as I will describe, remains blocked in a symbolic hotspot where different meanings coexist. Firstly, I will introduce the Buraku issue in Japan.

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*** The Buraku (Japanese for “hamlet”) is a fluid social construct that encompasses individuals of different cultural and social backgrounds. People labeled as Burakumin (hamlet people) are commonly described as the descendants of outcast groups during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) in Japan, compelled to live in separate areas and engaged in special occupations. Traditionally, these occupations included leather industry, meat packing, shoe manufacturing, tatami floor mat and drum making, as well as artistic, religious, and shamanistic practices undertaken during funerals and various rituals. Some other categories of people were also included, such as criminals, prostitutes, diviners, prisoners’ guards, and wandering monks (De Vos 1972). While some of these people did not have permanent residence, others resided in settlements such as those on riverbanks, under bridges, and near slopes. Monkey-training performers were also discriminated against, especially for the wandering character of their art. Performers were considered to be outsiders who came from the road, wandered, and performed in shrines, in street crossroads, in gateways, in front of private homes and manors, and sometimes in the gardens and rooms of the Imperial Palace. The most common term used to describe their performances during the Muromachi period (from approximately 1336 to 1573) was kadozuke, literally “attached to the gate” (Law 1997). Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney in The Monkey as Mirror (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987) masterfully analyzed the symbolic cultural meaning attached to the monkey in Japanese history. The author explains how the meaning of the monkey has changed throughout history and makes a link between the history of the performance and the history of the “special status people” (the Buraku people): Historical study of the monkey performance necessarily involves historical study of the special status people. Contrary to the stereotypical image held by people both in and out of Japan, historical sources testify that traditional Japanese arts, especially the performing arts, owe a great deal to individuals from this group. (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987: 8)

In the past, the dominant meaning of the monkey was that of mediator between human and deities. The most important role assigned to the monkey training was that of a ritual at horse stables for maintaining the health of these animals or for rice harvesting. The monkey in the role of sacred mediator between human and nature appeared as early as the eighth century, and this remained the dominant meaning until the mid-thirteenth century (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987). Between the mid-thirteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the dominant meaning of the

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monkey shifted from that of mediator between deities and humans in early historical times to that of metaphor for human scapegoats exemplified by the negative expression of “a human minus three pieces of hair” (OhnukiTierney 1987: 33). This shift in the cultural meaning attached to the animal also changed the nature and profile of the monkey performance, from a ritual to a street entertainment art. Monkey performance as a form of street entertainment became common across the years and was performed at various sites, such as public streets, at the doorways of individual homes, in makeshift theaters, and on the grounds of temples and shrines (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987). With the development of the Meiji Restoration, the kadozuke performances faced a period of decline and eventually disappeared by the late 1940s (Law 1997: 86). Monkey trainers’ mobility started being regulated by a regime of immobility, according to which these performances should be discouraged as a form of begging, and hence despised. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the passage to a modern “Japanese nation” has been marked by conflicting discourses over the “Japanese national identity” and by a number of measures to “assimilate” (or better “harmonize”) sociocultural diversity in the country. Since the 1980s in particular, the increase of migrant workers, the aging of the population, and the decrease in birth rates represented key challenges for the government. As a result, there has been an intensive effort to “internationalize” the country, reinforce the image of Japan overseas, and at the same time strengthen a “national cultural identity” to confront the increased number of newcomers. “Multiculturalism,” in particular, was adopted as the ideal political scenario to replace previous policies keeping minorities separate and at the bottom of society with new forms of exchanges between “citizens” and other social and ethnic groups. In addition, the huge presence of immigrants changed the focus of the government on other internal minorities and indigenous groups that have long existed in Japan (Cangià 2013c). Two opposite yet coexisting interests were still present in the new political agenda: to increase awareness among the population about “multicultural” Japan, on the one hand, and to maintain the image of homogeneity and cultural uniqueness, on the other (Willis and Rappleye 2011). Although support for minority festivals, holidays, and celebrations has long been low, most localities have started holding international exchange events with growing attention to interethnic cultural practices, including music, food, and language (Burgess 2007). Nevertheless, many minority cultural practices remained marginalized in the Japanese official narratives, which targeted only specific groups. Although the history of the Buraku and cases of discrimination have been included in the curricula of some schools and new self-awareness programs activated throughout the country, the Buraku

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people are still affected by huge social gaps, and a high percentage have remained unemployed, illiterate, and socially marginalized. The modern category of the Buraku has been subject to constant reconfigurations as a result of processes of industrialization, urbanization, migration, and intermarriage. Despite the heterogeneity of these populations, determination of Buraku origin has remained fixed over time and is based on one’s birth, one’s former or current residence in a Buraku, and one’s engagement in a Buraku occupation. After the abolition of the status system in 1871, and the 1969 implementation of the Law for Special Measures for Do ¯ wa (assimilation) Projects (projects that came to an end in March 2002), the condition of these people slightly improved. With the Meiji Restoration (in 1871) and the Emancipation Edict, these groups of people were officially granted the freedom to move and participate in all social activities. However, a large variety of individuals (often including migrants and people from different social backgrounds) were all lumped together into the modern category of the Buraku and continuously associated with ideas of poverty and impurity linked to certain occupations and spaces. Since the late 1960s, the identification of Buraku areas by the government was characterized by the official denomination as Do¯wa Chiku (assimilation area) that served to identify the areas for implementation of affirmative actions (Cangià 2013c). At the end of the Do¯wa Policy projects period in 2002, the government started to officially consider the problem as being “solved” (Neary 2020). However, in the following years, as Japan went through international scrutiny by United Nations human rights committees, the government started demonstrating renewed interest in the problem. A Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (LPEBD) was introduced in 2016 (Neary 2020). Despite these official attempts to respond to UN criticism, nowadays the Buraku people still face discrimination in terms of access to education and housing, discriminatory messages circulating on the web, and background checks conducted by private agencies on the occasion of employment and marriage. A common way to identify Buraku areas and people in the past was the koseki system (family register), established in 1872: addresses, births, and deaths in the family and social status (in the old koseki) of all heads of family were recorded and enlisted and held open as public record. These Buraku lists comprise a series of directories containing information on Buraku community locations, number of households, major occupations, etc. In 1968, the lists ceased to be freely available. However, cases of discriminatory practices through illegal consultation of these lists continued, in particular with private companies and detective agencies inquiring into the background of job applicants in recruitment, individuals in the case of marriage, or areas in the case of real estate (Cangià 2013c).

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In general, the ambiguity associated with the Buraku has long related to the image of impurity of certain occupations, as well as to the residency in peripheral and marginal locations. Sarumaiza monkey performers tactically use movement, space, and materiality to transform negative discourses regarding the Buraku. Like other Buraku activists and communities, they transform the image of “dirtiness” and “poverty” associated with Buraku work practices and spaces into more socially accepted features, while keeping alive the special nature and skillfulness of this industry and work (Cangià 2012; 2013a; 2013b; 2013c). This transformation, however, is all but a complete process. The boundaries (and borders) between the Buraku and the non-Buraku are blurred but not completely so. Moving out of the Buraku ghettos, touring around the country, surprising people in their daily lives, and inviting them to take part in the show are the first steps of this symbolic unfinished transition.

Tours All Over the Country A poster presents the itinerant character of the show as follows: “Sarumaiza … is a group that in the past used to travel around to perform the traditional itinerant style of the Japanese monkey training called the ‘original training.’ … They represent the foundational entertainment industry based on free offers, called ‘tours all over the country.” The “tours all over the country” and the use of public spaces represent important practices for Sarumaiza to revive and maintain the traditional form of monkey performance. However, the traveling is not simply a movement in the space but is characterized by the different encounters during the journey, the relationships and cultural discovery that these encounters entail. Performers put special emphasis on the fact that the monkey training, unlike other performing arts, has a large and very diverse kind of audience, which goes from older people to the youngest. The very fact that the performance takes place all around the country and in public places allows performers to gain the attention of a larger audience. According to the trainers, the itinerant character of the performance also represents a way of better learning about Japan by discovering local food from various regions, in the form of exchange between various “traditions” (the monkey performances and the local customs encountered during the journey). But what are the routes through which the journey takes place? Temples, historical sites, touristic landscapes, urban or rural contexts are part of the journey. The description of the places visited during the tours is a recurrent

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theme in the 1983 journal of Murasaki Shuji and more recently in Ko ¯ hei’s 1 blog. In his journal, Murasaki Shuji often describes the destinations of their travel and the different stages and features of the performance. He tells about the setting of the performing stage, the landscape and weather conditions, the “calling” of people in the street from their routine lives, the food, and the encounter with those who finally gather around the stage. In a similar vein, Ko ¯ hei tells about travels, performances and the monkey’s mood, weather conditions, the encounter with local people, from children to the elderly. The travel is not always easy or pleasant, and the performers’ travel can be disrupted. Ko ¯ hei, for example, tells about natural obstacles such as earthquakes and typhoons. On the occasion of the big earthquake and tsunami that struck the eastern part of the country in March 2011, Ko ¯ hei prayed during the show, as his blog reveals (Cangià 2013c). Recently, with the outbreak of the coronavirus also affecting Japan, Ko ¯ hei expresses his concerns about the future and the possibility of performing in a time where gatherings are highly discouraged: “The future is uncertain with the new coronavirus, but I would like to thank everyone and do my best” (Ko ¯ hei’s blog, 16 February 2020). Performances take place in diverse places ranging from shrines or other religious sites and festival venues to walkways or public institutional corners, like the entrance of a public office or the backyard of a school. The show is free and open to everybody. And yet spectators are invited to participate by bringing offerings, often in the form of food and drinks. In the past, the circulation of food and drinks represented a practice of exchange between local people and the performers, the social act mediating the movement in and out of these “outsiders” (the trainers), between “two realms of existence: the settled realms of everyday and the realm of the sacred, represented by the itinerant ritual artist” (Law 1997: 84). Most of the performances start or finish with banquets between performers and the local people taking care of them during their stay. The circulation of gifts reinforces the relationship established with local people who support performers during the journey by offering lodgings and hospitality. This practice is also aimed at mediating the movements of the performers in and out of people’s houses, their arrival and departure: Because itinerant performers aroused apprehension, their arrival and departures were carefully mediated. Arrivals were timed and departures were noted with exchange of gifts. Usually the host in the village where the artist performed would give the performer either food, money, or temporary lodgings. Far from being merely payment for services rendered, this exchange of money or goods must be understood as a ritual exchange between two realms of existence: the settled realms of

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everyday, profane life and the realm of sacred, represented by the itinerant ritual artist. (Law 1997: 84)

Sarumaiza makes use of the offers (usually food or money) and the exchanging of gifts, integral to the wandering style of the performance (the historical cause of discrimination), as vehicles to invert the negative image associated with the monkey training into a positive occasion for meeting people. By moving across streets and traveling across various towns, the itinerant monkey art does not aim to unilaterally reach the audience through structuring the tempos and modalities of the performances (like in a static, planned theater schedule) but shows different directions and rhythms. The performers travel across the country by driving their van. They choose a location for the show on street corners, or in front of municipal houses or a school. Then, they go in front of the spectators’ doors to surprise them and interrupt their everyday life, getting their attention by playing music and announcing the show. The itinerant aspect of the performance becomes extremely important in crossing the spatial limits of the Buraku areas and enlarging the boundaries within the wider context of “the Nation.” But there is not only a movement out of the Buraku here that matters. There is also a passage toward the realm of the Other, thanks to movement, the reappropriation of space, and the immobility required in the lives of others. It is through this spatial movement occurring at different scales (the simple approaching of the spectators’ “doors” and the travels across the whole country) that a liminal event is created: “This [spatial movement] may take the form of a mere opening of doors or the literal crossing of a threshold which separates two distinct areas. … On the other hand, the spatial passage may involve a long, exacting pilgrimage and the crossing of many national frontiers before the subject reaches his goal” (Turner 2001: 25). The choice of central sites of social interaction, such as schools or other public places, represents a tactical (Certeau 2011) attempt to make the marginal less peripheral through the use of public and dominant places, through a circular movement from the inside to the outside and vice versa (Cangià 2013a). The street (including the “door” of spectators’ houses as initial step for meeting the audience) as the site of cultural performance becomes a liminal space where identities and meanings come into contact. The street, like Clifford’s sites of cultural performance (Clifford 1997), is a contact zone crossed by things and people. This contact during the monkey performance creates a form of spontaneous communitas, “a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities” (Turner 2001: 47). Victor Turner talked about performances and artistic leisure activities as cases of subversion of structural orders, of “play with the factors of culture, sometimes assembling

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them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking, usually experimental combinations” (Turner 2001: 71). However, Turner explains, many genres of artistic production do not simply reverse but also reinforce and justify the prevailing social and cultural orders. He makes the example of satire, as a conservative genre that “exposes, attacks, or derides what it considers to be vices, follies, stupidities, or abuses, but its criteria of judgment are usually the normative structural frame of values” (Turner 2001: 72). In satire, “disorder is no permanent substitution for order.” Like a mirror, it “inverts but also reflects an object” (Turner 2001: 72). Sarumaiza’s monkey performance follows a similar tactic: artists challenge social meanings without taking them over entirely (Certeau 2011: xix). The Buraku (epitomized by the monkey) is not Buraku anymore, yet not completely non-Buraku. Performers make use of the dominant image of the “Japanese culture and tradition” as a way to translate the Buraku into something familiar. They play with the elements of the familiar, of the Japanese, and defamiliarize them (Turner 1974: 60). As I will describe, however, the Buraku, rather than being transformed completely into something else, remain in a symbolic hotspot between different meanings about the Buraku. To achieve this aim, the performance requires an attentive demarcation of the space, a constant slippage between roles and characters, along with constant movement in and out of the show’s focal point. Turbulence and problems occurring during the show come to be an integral part of the performance. It is when turbulence occurs, when for example the monkey does not want to do the exercise and does not obey the human, that the normative structural frame of social roles is derided yet not completely reversed, that authorities are ridiculed, with the human being subject to the volatility of the animal, even being bitten by the monkey. At this very moment of the show, spectators become essential to the continuation and success of the performance. The monkey that is supposed to be obedient to humans’ orders can decide to do otherwise and make the show go wrong. Then the trainer, who should have the power to manage the progress and tempo of the show, asks the spectators for help. The applause is likely to change the monkey’s mood, and he may finally wish to do the exercise correctly. I now present the various stages of the monkey performance: these include the “calling of the audience” ritual, the setting of the stage, the creation of communitas during the show, and finally the various phases of the performance itself. My description is based on some elements of my field notes and my participation in various shows of Sarumaiza across the country. I have assembled these various elements to portray a typical performance and its stages (including before and after it) and to highlight some of the recurrent aspects of the show.

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Wandering and Pausing at the Doorway: Walking the Streets of Heino In November 2008, I visit Sarumaiza in the Yamaguchi prefecture. After some time spent with the trainers during the day, the performance’s schedule finally starts. We travel in a van to get to the various destinations and, after a couple of stops on our way, arrive at Heino, a little town in the center of Suo ¯ -Oshima Island. Performers choose a small square in front of the municipal house as the performance space. The “preparation of the scene” phase includes traveling across the country, wandering around the streets, calling the audience, and setting the performance stage. Once in Heino, the ritual of calling the spectators begins. This is a very old practice, Murasaki Shuji says, in which the performers, by playing the flute and a little hand drum and presenting the monkey training, walk around the streets of the town, surprise people at the doorways of their houses, or stop them in the street and invite them to attend the show. Jane Marie Law, in her Puppets of Nostalgia, perfectly describes the importance of the “gate” as a threshold between insiders and outsiders, locals and strangers, in the traditional performances of ancient times: The visit of strangers at certain times of the year was associated with the arrival of sacred forces from beyond the human realm. Because of the way that the world “out there” beyond the settled and defined parameters of village life was perceived, strangers who arrived from unknown places were clearly associated with the power of the unknown. The term kadozuke arises from a common understanding of the gate as a boundary between two orders of meaning. … It is a barrier between “inside” and “outside” as an important element of Japanese order. … The character “gate” in kadozuke refers not to a particular gate but rather to a metaphorical quality of space. Neither inside the house nor part of the street itself, the gate is the no-man’s-land to which all meanings can be attached and onto which all projections of potentiality and danger can be projected. (Law 1997: 78–79)

The arrival at and the “opening” (Turner 1974) of the “door” of spectators’ houses have a symbolic valence, where the boundaries separating the two realms of the Buraku and non-Buraku are blurred for a moment, and where all structurally given positions can be temporarily suspended. Ko ¯ hei continues introducing the show: Everyone! Your attention please! A performance that has recently become famous and of national interest to our country, the monkey training, will be held today at 2:30 P.M. in front of the municipal house. The entrance is free, but presents for the monkey, like tubers or

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Figure 2.1. Sarumaiza walking along the streets of Heino town, Japan. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

bananas, and for performers, like beer, sake, or money, are welcomed. Please, feel free to invite other people and join us at the municipal house.

Some people gather in front of their houses, someone riding a bicycle stops. Some children appear at the door to see what happens. Some people seem surprised, others get curious and come closer. Public spaces are transformed into performance sites. A break in the spectators’ routine is transformed into an occasion of cultural re-creation. Finally, during the show, all characters involved in the performance are constantly transformed into something else. The direct presence and participation of the audience before, during, and after the performance is an inalienable character of Sarumaiza’s show. Nobody in the scene is left out. Fixed roles and responsibilities are dissolved in favor of a mutual collaboration and negotiation between all the subjects present, the trainer, the monkey, and the spectators, as well as me, the researcher. First, the trainers, as the liminal personae placed between spectators (the non-Buraku/ culture) and the monkey (the Buraku/nature), play multiple identities

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in the show, as “themselves and as the characters they were playing” (Schechner 2003: 196). The trainer plays the role of storyteller of the character he is supposed to play (how to convince the monkey to perform, in a collaborative way) and as an actual trainer of the monkey, at times in conflict with the animal: The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. (Turner 1969: 95)

My participation during the events was also not merely confined to the role of spectator. At the beginning of the show, Shuji often introduced me as a “researcher of Japanese culture” so as to frame the monkey training within the wider register of Japanese culture. Then at the end of the performance, I was asked to go around the audience with the little basket to collect gifts. According to Shuji, offers at the end of the show were expected to be more generous thanks to my presence as the “stranger woman” who could work as a sort of “attraction.” Besides, my role during the show gradually moved from just taking pictures for my research to actively setting up the photographic portrayal with the collaboration of the monkey trainers. The way I have often chosen to set up a typical photographic image, for instance, has gradually changed according to the disclosure of various elements of the performance and the monkey trainers’ recommendations. Whereas at the beginning I tended to focus the camera on the performers and the monkey, they vividly suggested I move the focus to the audience. As a matter of fact, spatial movement is not unidirectional. It is not only the performer who travels to the spectators to interrupt the flow of their daily lives and to invite them to the performance (Cangià 2013c). The progressive formation of the audience, the fact that spectators choose to join the show, how spectators approach and leave the performance (Schechner 2003), are also extremely important for the performers. This is highly valued in Ko ¯ hei’s discourses as much as in the photographs he took and included in his blog: some of these pictures portray the point of view of the performer looking at the space of performance that in the photos is empty and gradually gets filled with spectators. These pictures aim at describing the change of and among the audience, and in particular how people approach the stage. The evaluation of spectators’ reactions is a constant concern for the trainers, also proven by the composition of photographs they take during performances. Shuji

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Figure 2.2. Audience’s reactions during the performance. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

repeatedly suggested I take pictures of people’s expressions and reactions to the performance, particularly when the monkey makes its entry on stage. Ko ¯ hei, in turn, was especially interested in the gradual approach of spectators around the stage. The focus moves thus from the performers to the audience (Cangià 2013c). The arrival and gathering of the audience becomes a sign of “attunement,” where people show that they are affected by an ongoing event. The performance of the monkey training with its different tempos (the calling, the staging, the show) works as a form of cultural encounter, like art and sport, different from rituals and ceremonies (Kofoed 2008; Thomassen 2014; Turner 1969), where people are surprised in their daily life and invited to participate in the making of something new: “How do gatherings sometimes become ‘happenings,’ that is, greater than the sum of their parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge” (Tsing 2015: 23).

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Setting the Stage, Making Communitas The pre-performance phase is also composed by the identification of the space for the performance followed by the preparation of the stage. In case of casual staging (when monkey trainers are not invited to perform in specific institutions), the space for the performance is chosen based on some criteria: the performance spot needs to be quiet (to avoid distractions for the monkey) and large enough for the audience. The object marking the territory, and from which the rest of the stage is then defined, is the stool used for the monkey to sit during the show. Ko ¯ hei puts great emphasis on the stool and on how to position it on stage. Some pictures in Ko ¯ hei’s blog indeed portray only the stool in the scene. Others are pointed from the stool itself to the audience. Along with the recurrent makeup of these pictures, the portrayal of the stool alone before the beginning of the show represents not only the limitation and reappropriation of space but also and most importantly the focal point of observation, thereby identifying the change and gradual transformation of the audience arena (Cangià 2013c). Some benches, chairs, or carpets are placed in a semicircle all around the stage, usually but not necessarily delimited by a rope that the spectators are not allowed to cross. These seats are reserved for the audience. As soon as enough spectators take a seat, Shuji, usually placed on the left side of the stage, announces the beginning of the performance by playing a little taiko drum. The entry of the monkey onto the stage is an incredible moment, in which expressions of the spectators are an eloquent mix of delight and surprise. The monkey’s entrance on Ko ¯ hei’s shoulders is also really impressive for what it seems to communicate to the audience: the monkey standing on the human’s shoulders appears to be a natural act. Ko ¯ hei begins by asking the audience to applaud, and then warning spectators not to get too close to the monkey or to cross the space delimited for the show, since the monkey could get very wild. With great emphasis, Ko ¯ hei also asks anyone who will take all of these rules seriously to raise their hand. Spectators respond by raising their hands while Shuji vigorously plays the drum in the background, and eventually everyone breaks into strong applause. While the trainer talks to the spectators to introduce the rules, the monkey moves around, sits on the little stool, looks for some herbs to eat, and sometimes bites Ko ¯ hei when he pulls the rope linking the animal to the trainer’s wrist (Cangià 2013c). The relationship between the trainer and the audience is gradually established through the introduction and by the role described for the spectators during the performance. Ko ¯ hei explains, “As this is a street performance art, it is not only achieved through my efforts. But as traditional street entertainment, it absolutely requires the collaboration of all the spectators.”

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The spectators’ rules prove how collaboration is an essential aspect of the show. Ko ¯ hei’s emphasis then shifts to the difficulty of the performance for everyone, including spectators who, in contrast to other kinds of monkey training, have an important responsibility in changing the development of the show. The monkey bites Ko ¯ hei’s arm. “See? He does not listen to what I say. So, to convince him to collaborate we can take advantage of the fact that he likes it when people praise him. And how can you do that? By clapping your hands.” People break into strong and energetic applause, which is accompanied by Shuji’s vigorous drumming. However, as Ko ¯ hei explains, there are specific times for applause, so he invites spectators to learn how to identify them. The performance goes on with a general introduction about the group and the itinerant aspect of this performance. Then Ko ¯ hei compares the disobedience of the monkey and the troubles occurring during the show to other forms of monkey performance in Japan. According to Ko ¯ hei, today in all Japan there are about four hundred groups of monkey performers. Sarumaiza’s monkey performance, however, is the oldest and, he explains, the poorest when compared to the others. Ko ¯ hei stresses two main differences between the two styles in particular: the wandering versus static character of the show, and respect for the monkey versus an authoritarian approach. He continues: Currently monkey training is becoming a great business and is famous on television. But the performances you see on TV are very short shows held in big theaters or always in the same location. On the other hand, our style of monkey training is based on the idea of traveling all around the country, calling people by playing the flute and taiko drums, and making them gather in front of the performance site. … In the monkey training held on television or in theaters, mistakes are severely forbidden for the monkey. This is because the spectators pay for a ticket. Whatever happens, whatever the mood of the monkey is, the animal must follow the trainer’s leads. See, now the monkey is not following mine … it never follows my orders … [people laugh]. Even if I give something to eat to the monkey, he doesn’t listen. So how can I make the monkey listen to my orders? Currently, in the recent monkey training you can see on TV, trainers beat the animal to teach it how to perform and to make the monkey follow the leads during the performance. The monkey is thus frightened and, as a consequence, does what the trainer orders, of course. We are the only trainers who do not beat the monkey, all the others do [makes the monkey do a funny fake dance following the sound of taiko]. Cute, isn’t it? Ah … shame isn’t it [referring to the monkey]? … One is sixty years old, that is the man over there [points to

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his father], the other is around forty and lives in Kyushu, the other one is me, who started recently. Applause please?

The audience breaks into strong applause. Respect for the monkey, which is compared to a child, is an important aspect of Sarumaiza’s show, in contrast to other training styles in Japan. Ko ¯ hei continues to explain: “How to train the monkey without beating him? The monkey now is four years old. He is like a child in fifth or sixth grade in school.” Ko ¯ hei calls the monkey and gently invites him to get closer, making soothing noises. Then he holds the animal and tickles it playfully. He continues by comparing the monkey to an artist: I have been learning this art for two years. Usually, it takes less time to learn the other type of monkey training, the one in which the monkey is beaten. Our relationship, between the monkey and myself, is similar to that between a child and his mother. I try to communicate my feelings to him. And I can more or less understand how he feels. We are artists, and so is the monkey. I like people praising me. When people clap their hands and praise me, well, I feel very good, I feel like I did my work well. This is the very positive feeling that I try to communicate to the monkey, and this is the result of you having fun and enjoying the performance. This is the way to convince the monkey to help me out during the performance and follow my leads. So, what is necessary? The monkey will feel good when you clap your hands and hopefully do the exercise [sound of taiko].

The taiko drum and the flute are the instruments that serve first to call the audience and then to communicate with them during the show. During the performance, the taiko sound coming from the left side of the stage (played by Shuji) serves as a signal of the beginning of the show, and it also indicates the changing of argument and mood during the show. Ultimately, it serves to follow and emphasize the sound of the applause. In this first phase of the show, a spontaneous communitas is constituted with the presence and involvement of everybody in the art-practice. Everyone in the show plays with and relates to others, “free from the culturally defined encumbrances of his role, status, reputation, class, caste, sex, or other structural niche” (Turner 1979: 45). All characters involved, the performers, the monkey, and the audience, are placed at the same level since all of them have to get involved for the success of the performance. As in Schechner’s “performance nest” (Schechner 2003: 198), the show is not the mere representation of the trainer’s identity via the monkey, through a unilateral communication between two different and separate social groups. It is rather the narration of a story played for, and with, the active collaboration of everybody. This is the encounter performers want to

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Figure 2.3. The applause. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

create by means of mobility, through traveling across the country, meeting people and making the spectators participate actively in the show. Through this encounter, a collaboration, or “contamination” “across difference,” to borrow Tsing’s words, is possible, and new sense of social categories can be made (Tsing 2005). Spectators’ reactions toward the monkey performance, according to some comments collected after the shows, reveal a particular interest in the trainers and the monkey simultaneously. According to most of the spectators, the performance represents a comic attempt to transform nature (the monkey) into culture (humans) yet with unknown results: would the monkey do the exercise properly (as a human would do) or not?

A Turbulent Show The first exercise of the usual repertoire is sitting on a little chair. The monkey is supposed to sit on a green, parallelepiped-shaped piece of wood, placed on a long wooden stick. The monkey is required to climb and stand on it. Other exercises are the simple bipedal posture and the walk of the two

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Figure 2.4. The monkey does not collaborate. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

together, the turn of the trainer and the monkey, the latter held by the former’s hands. An aspect worth highlighting is the relationship between the trainer and the monkey during the performance, as much as in their daily life. During the show, the two seem to communicate strongly by looking into each other’s eyes. As Ko ¯ hei told me once, the trainer can rely a lot on the eyes and gaze of the monkey, even if he cannot say properly what the animal thinks all the time. Another means of communication is the monkey’s bite. The more elaborate the exercise, the more bites the trainer gets from the monkey when the animal does not want to perform. The second exercise of the show involves a little red-and-white hoop, which the monkey must jump through. Sometimes external factors (e.g. a car passing by) can distract the monkey and make it reluctant to do the exercise. It takes a few minutes to reestablish the normal development of the show. When Ko ¯ hei tries the exercise in that very moment, the monkey does not collaborate. He makes a sign for the audience to stay silent and takes a big breath, looks at the monkey, and slowly and kindly tries the exercise again. The monkey turns around and eats some herbs. Ko ¯ hei asks the audience if the car has gone and confirms that the time is finally right.

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Figure 2.5. The monkey jumps through the two hoops. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

Suddenly he displays renewed energy, prepares the hoop for the exercise, and calls the monkey with a vigorous voice: “Let’s go,” he says. The monkey leaps through the hoop and the audience applauds loudly. The exercise is not over and Ko ¯ hei invites the monkey to jump again. He raises the hoop and waits for the monkey to jump, but the animal, by standing in bipedal fashion, takes the hoop with its front paws, lowering it to the ground. Spectators break into laughter. The exercise becomes a bit more difficult when Ko ¯ hei uses two hoops— the monkey now has to jump through both simultaneously. Ko ¯ hei introduces the exercise by singing. The monkey does not seem to be interested and continues to eat herbs. Ko ¯ hei looks at him and asks gently what he is doing, and as he realizes that the monkey will not pay any attention, he asks vigorously for a big round of applause: “Hakushu [applause]!!” However, the monkey does not follow the order and turns around. The audience breaks into laughter. Ko ¯ hei tries to raise the hoops for a few seconds, but nothing changes, so he tries to call the monkey by gently poking his shoulder with his hand to get his attention. He asks the audience to stop applauding, takes the monkey closer to him, caresses him, and says in a nice

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voice, “There is only one other exercise, OK? Please …” “Hakushu!” he says referring to the audience, and there is a huge round of applause. This time the monkey jumps properly through the two hoops twice (Cangià 2013). As already mentioned, during my conversations with the two trainers and throughout most of the performances, a recurrent theme is the identification of the training as “original” (honjikomi). According to Murasaki Shuji, this style is different to the most common performance in Japan, the Osaruland Company versions known as “the unexpected training” (niwakajikomi). Whereas the latter is based on a hierarchical relationship between the trainer and the monkey and extraordinary exercises centered on the imitation of human posture, the original training is grounded on the respect and valorization of the animal’s “real nature.” The continuous emphasis put on the difference between honjikomi and niwakajikomi training is mainly based on the idea of “original” as older (motto furui) and poorer (motto binbo¯na), as if the more traditional the style, the more authentic the performance. Difficulties and turbulences, embodied in the disobedience and bites of the monkey as a form of resistance, become stylistic modules of the show. Interruptions during the performance, such as the trainer talking to the monkey in order to convince the animal to do the exercise or the animal biting the trainer when he does not want to collaborate, represent, borrowing Schechner’s words, the “natural and genuine meeting between performer and problem” (Schechner 2003: 46). Differently from other monkey-training styles, spontaneous disobedience is the entire repertoire for Sarumaiza. Their performance is based on the eruption of problems and interruptions during the show, precisely the kind of turbulences that the trainer can only in part foresee. The training means indeed searching for a solution to the turbulence. Interruptions during the speech are represented by funny interactions with the monkey, little fights, and improvised dances. Often the monkey breaks the order by pulling the rope or making objects fall. Other times the monkey bites the trainer, who, despite the pain, plays strongly with the fact that bites and fights between the two are a fun part of the entertainment. The mood of the monkey is key in the show: In the original monkey training it is possible that the monkey is not in a suitable mood and does not want to do the exercise. The problem of how to convince the monkey to do the exercise becomes a funny and involving aspect of the performance, since it requires the deep collaboration of the audience and my skill to make the disobedience as funny as possible. I think that people can remain more interested and have fun while continuously wondering, “Will the monkey do it? Won’t he?” (Ko ¯ hei)

The constant change of the monkey’s mood, the uncertainty of whether the monkey will do the exercise properly or not, and the consequent success

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of the show becomes the very attraction of the whole performance. Turbulence during the show is an essential part of the complicity and relationship the trainers want to build with the audience, which would otherwise remain separate from the performance. Turbulence works as a way to maintain the audience in a continuous state of suspense, in a state of liminal affectivity, that is “a transformed and heightened condition of potentiality for being affected and affecting events” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 170). This liminal affectivity is what makes spectators want to participate in the show as soon as they realize that their applause may change the course of the event and possibly contribute to the success of the performance: “Any significant shift in the taken-for-granted order of things can provoke the heightened emotionality and transformed consciousness typical of a liminal event. … This passage, as we shall see, will become a hotspot” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 170). What matters in Sarumaiza’s training, and what supposedly makes the audience have the greatest fun, is the fact that the monkey may not act like a human. The collaboration between the trainer and spectators can help convince the monkey to do the exercise but cannot change its nature and make the monkey act exactly like a human. Yet the monkey is not simply just an animal either, as it is often represented through the description of human feelings and compared to a child, or to the trainers. Let us return for a moment to Ko ¯ hei’s introduction about the original training in the first part of the show: How to train the monkey without beating him? The monkey now is four years old. He is like a child in fifth or sixth grade in school. … Our relationship, between the monkey and myself, is more or less as the one between a child and his mother. I try to communicate my feelings to him. And I can more or less understand what he feels like. We are artists, and so is the monkey. I like people praising me. When people clap their hands and praise me, well, I feel very good, I feel like I did my work well. This is the very positive feeling I try to communicate to the monkey, and this is the result of you having fun and enjoying the performance. This is the way to convince the monkey to help me out during the performance and follow my leads. So, what is necessary? Only by the clap of your hands the monkey could feel good and hopefully he would make the exercise.

During my conversations with the trainers, when I tried to further investigate the meaning of the monkey’s nature, I realized that the definition and degree of “natural-ness” of the monkey is highly variable, and depends on the elements the trainers want to highlight. At first, the trainer refers to the historical role played by performers as mediation between humans (culture) and the animal (nature), and especially emphasizes the differences between

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the two realms. Sarumaiza strongly disagrees with the philosophy, diffused among other training groups, that the trainer must establish dominance over the monkey. According to Sarumaiza, it is necessary to create a harmonious and egalitarian relationship with the animal, through training based on the respect and valorization of the animal’s “real nature,” without any form of violence. In one of our conversations, Shuji explains: Everyone usually thinks that the monkey trainer forces the animal to do things, but it is not true. If the monkey’s enthusiasm is dormant, we cannot work. … This is why we cannot say when we start, and we cannot say when we finish. … It is when the monkey acts naturally and maybe does not follow the trainer’s order that we have the very nature of the monkey, and it is the very moment that the audience starts to laugh. We train by ensuring maximum respect for the will of the monkey.

The monkey’s nature is what makes the performance fun for spectators (“It is when the monkey acts naturally and maybe does not follow the trainer’s orders that we have the very nature of the monkey, and it is the very moment that the audience starts to laugh”) and should therefore be respected by the trainers. As a response to the positive reactions of the audience to the monkey (like the comic aspect of the performance, in particular the fact that the monkey would probably not act as a human), the trainer plays with and maintains the essential difference between humans and animal: the monkey is just an animal yet is trying to act as a human, but can fail. It is then, while describing the collaboration to convince the animal to do the exercise, that the trainers realize that spectators see the monkey as “just an animal,” and this is the reason why the monkey cannot do the exercise. They soon react to the Other’s (the spectators’) imagined perspective and translate the monkey’s acts into readable human-like attitudes. Human and animal stop being essentially different: the animal’s nature is translated into the human, and for a moment the monkey becomes essentially the same as a human (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012). He disobeys because he is in a “bad mood,” or because he can “act as a child.” Yet, like the trainer (“we are artists, and so is the monkey”), the monkey can appreciate praise and, as soon as applause comes from the spectators, he will most probably do the exercise correctly. Human feelings (“when people clap their hands and praise me, well, I feel very good, I feel like I did my work well”) are projected onto the animal. However, the monkey often bites the trainer. The bite becomes normal and the only way to communicate when words are not available. Ko ¯ hei does not seem worried about all the scars he has on arms and hands. When

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Figure 2.6. The monkey bites the trainer. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

he showed me his arm covered with bites for the first time, he emphasized the good relationship he has with the monkey. He reveals that the bites are quite painful, but he does not fight against these, he says, as he firmly believes that the monkey has no other way of communicating with the trainer. When spectators during the show react to the bites with negative surprise and preoccupation, Ko ¯ hei soon explains that the monkey is not like humans, he cannot speak, and this is his only way of communicating, and the monkey reverts to being just an animal again. In a liminal hotspot, when the person is caught in a space in between states, meanings, and perspectives, the usual either/or logic of liminality is subverted and replaced with a neither/nor logic: the monkey remains in a liminal hotspot and oscillates between being an animal, a child and an artist, between both/neither animal (nature) and/nor human (culture). In this hotspot, the monkey stops representing the Buraku and for a brief moment enters the realm of the “Japanese culture,” only to go back to being what he is, and reinforcing the special-ness of the Buraku as opposed to the Japanese. The mastery of the performer in training the monkey (and making it more human and no longer an animal) and the conflict between

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performer and the monkey (because after all the monkey is an animal and not a human) is what keeps the Buraku special. The spectators (nonBuraku) cannot do the same as the trainer, cannot have the same relationship with the animal, and cannot withstand the bites of the monkey. What is usually perceived as an “anomaly” (the bites all over the arms and hands of the trainer; the monkey acting as an animal) should not be removed altogether, but instead becomes a symbol of specialness, skills, and art (Bhabha 2004). The confrontation with the “anomaly” does not translate into a complete denial and removal of the sign of the difference, but it requires the maintenance of ambivalence between the two ways of being and not being of the monkey, both animal and human, and neither animal nor human. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with Ko ¯ hei, when he said, “What does Buraku mean after all? I am supposed to be Burakumin, as my father is, because I was born in a Buraku district, but we don’t live there anymore. We are supposed to be Burakumin because of our job. But we love our job, so I came to think that if I am a Burakumin because of my profession as a monkey trainer, well, being a Burakumin is not a bad thing at all.”

Performing the Past, Building the Future During my stay in Fukagawa, I followed Sarumaiza on one of their tours to the northern island of Hokkaido, where the trainers and I had dinner with the local people who organized the performance event. After a rich meal where we all sat around a table, everyone started to share opinions about the performance held that afternoon in front of the town’s cultural institute. People stressed the importance of preserving tradition through the improvement of cultural events and the spread of monkey training throughout the country, thanks to the wandering style of the company. In general, many people interpreted the whole experience not only in terms of entertainment but also as an occasion to discover a “Japanese traditional art” and recreate tradition in a collaborative way. In other words, they received the message of the trainer during the performance in the same way that it was supposed to be communicated by Ko ¯ hei: Sarumaiza does not want to communicate all the past pain and the discrimination faced by the trainers. Actually I think that many people do not make a direct connection between this profession and the Buraku problem anymore. So I think we have to stress this fact, and do our best to communicate a new message, precisely by making people have fun and support us in recreating tradition, everyone’s tradition.

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Buraku-related meanings are hidden behind the past image of “Japanese tradition.” However, it is not only the past that counts in Sarumaiza’s art. The constitution of a new message concerning the Buraku issue through reinterpreting tradition is an important goal in terms of their style. Time, social relations, and mobility are not separated. When I asked the trainers why it is important for them to maintain the traditional “original training,” they both stressed the social and symbolic importance of this practice. The originality of their practice and, in their words, the “realness” of their style lie in the mobile character of their monkey performance. It is only by moving across the country and going to meet and surprise people, in front of their doors or in the street, that a constructive relationship can be established with people met on their journeys. It is the wandering style of the art that makes the training something accessible and participative for everyone. The transformational process in which the roles of the participants in the show are intermingled and shared not only makes people experience deep participation in the event but also helps overcome the fixity of monolithic categories and change people’s perceptions in view of the future. Sarumaiza’s audience is variegated and composed of young and old people. According to Ko ¯ hei, Sarumaiza performers take advantage of the fact that children have the power to change a long and established attitude toward the Buraku issue and create “a new perspective.” At the same time, they want to reconstruct old memories for older people. It is in the liminal event that is created during the performance that a change in perspective can occur: “Even if they think something before and after the performance, I am sure they would stop thinking during the show and start participating to convince the monkey to do the exercise,” Ko ¯ hei says. An interesting aspect of Sarumaiza’s monkey training is the attempt to overcome the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, which is one of most powerful arguments in Japanese nationalism, according to which a longing for a pre-modernity and the survival of traditional authenticity have required a constant opposition to modernity. The ambiguous relation between tradition and modernity also became very powerful in the common vernacular and studies on Japan during the twentieth century. According to Sarumaiza, as people’s lives change over time, tradition cannot stay out of this temporal movement but has to be transformed accordingly. Tradition is no longer in contrast to modernity. Ko ¯ hei believes in the importance of sending a new and different message to forthcoming generations: Our work involves constant movement, we move back and forth around the country, we meet many people almost every day. This constant movement keeps changing us and the people we meet. We cannot say if people who see our show are Burakumin or not; they cannot say that

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about us either, apart from the fact that we do monkey training. But people do not really make a connection with the Buraku anymore as they did before in the past. I think we can take advantage of this, the fact that many people do not even think about us being Burakumin, or even the fact that, if people know, they do not say much about it. Whatever their thoughts about the Buraku might be, they could change perspective as soon as they have fun during the show. Even if they think something before and after the performance, I am sure they would stop thinking during the show and start participating to convince the monkey to do the exercise. Then there are children, who do not know much about the problem and do not care. I am sure they can create a new perspective. I want to talk to them and start over from new generations. These next generations will only remember the performance and ask less about the trainers’ background. As for older people, they will remember where the monkey performance comes from for sure, but I also think that they have good old memories they may want to remember.

Mobility and immobility, as well as the active use of spaces and bodies during the performance, might help modify the power inscribed into simple categories and meanings. The practice of wandering becomes a spatial, social, temporal, and embodied movement toward new destinations, new social relations and meanings, and a new era where history can be revisited. As I described in the case of Sarumaiza’s performances, this movement remains incomplete at the symbolic level, as the trainers do not stop identifying with Buraku but rather play with identities and with the monkey as a symbol of difference and sameness in various ways. Trainers move from one temporal and spatial dimension to another. They move constantly from one region to another, changing audience and the introduction to their performance accordingly; at times they perform the “Buraku culture,” at times the “Japanese tradition.” They change features and are continuously transformed into something different; they are Burakumin in some circumstances, in others they are not. They imaginatively play with, reject, and transform meanings associated with diversity. They keep moving across the country. On the occasion of this spatial movement, people can meet, pause for a moment, and collaborate for something new to emerge. Mobility in this sense is always contingent: the movement of someone is contingent on the slowing down of others and vice versa. Mobility can become a break in the flow of routine events, a break that is not still but “a mode of playful resistance to—or refusal of—societal norms … within which alternative, even unexpected possibilities—for life—might emerge” (Cocker 2010: 87). While self and other are fundamentally and physically distinct in the spatial world, they can become interrelated on the symbolic level. The symbolic

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world enables us to move across various social, temporal, and geographic positions simultaneously, or one after the other. The past, present, and future self and other can coexist in the symbolic world, while in the geographic world they are mutually exclusive. Gillespie et al. provide a clear explanation of this point: In the geographic world, the difference between self and other is absolute because self and other occupy mutually exclusive space-time trajectories … at a semantic level, the oppositions between self and other; between us and them; between me and you; can shift and slide, sometimes collapse or even reverse. … The difference is not only “out there;” it is also within us. Humans experience alterity, represent it, and position themselves in relation to it. (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’SullivanLago 2012: 697)

The transgression of spatial, temporal, and symbolic boundaries can only be accomplished inasmuch as the performance becomes as readable as possible and is based, like in a “writing game” (Derrida 1988), on the absence of the receiver and the (future) readability of its message. It is in this absence that the freedom of the performer from stereotypes and categorical boundaries finds its space and provides the addressee (the spectator) with the space for imagination and the liberty to fashion the performer and the monkey in a different way, both/neither animal and/nor human. In the next chapter, I will explore this “writing game.” NOTES For this chapter, I reworked and expanded parts of my book Performing the Buraku: Narratives on Cultures and Everyday Life in Contemporary Japan (Cangià 2013c).

1. https://blog.goo.ne.jp/sarumaiza588; twitter.com/sarumaizawaka.

CHAPTER

3

Writing as Liminal Youths Talking about Migration in Italy

It was 8 August 1991. Long before the rise of migrants landing on the Mediterranean coasts, an Albanian cargo ship, named Vlora, full of thousands of people, arrived in the port of Bari, a city in the southeast of Italy. The Vlora was returning from Cuba with a load of sugar, and, as its main engines were out of order, it docked in Durrës to go through repairs. It was there that thousands of people who sought to migrate away from Albania, gathered in the port hoping to board the ship and use it to reach Italy. They stormed the Vlora and forced it to change its route. In 2012, Daniele Vicari, in his documentary film La Nave Dolce (The human cargo), masterly narrated the arrival of the Vlora and its journey from Durrës to Bari. He tells the story of the Vlora as an epochal event, one that changed the perception of migration in Italy. The landing of the Vlora in southeastern Italy represented one of the first (certainly one of the most sensational) migrant sea landings in the country. The documentary starts with the visual and affective potency of the opening scene, depicting the storming of the cargo ship, when people run toward it and leave everything behind, without having the time to prepare for the (unexpected) travel. The spectator is suddenly brought into the ship’s departure and later into the arrival of the cargo in Italy, as it was an emergent event: “The emergent always and only arises within the present, but its appearance creates a new standpoint—a new present—from which the past is looked back upon, and reconstructed” (Stenner 2017: 268). From then on, we hear the narration of the people traveling on the Vlora to reach Italy, reconstruct their past, and remake their lives anew. Among the voices, we hear those witnessing the Vlora arriving in Bari. Some tell of the impact that the arrival of the cargo full of migrants had. Others

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Figure 3.1. The ship Vlora docked in the port of Bari (southeast Italy, 1991). Wikimedia Commons.

described the political deadlock between local and national governments on how to deal with this event. The migrants who arrived with the Vlora were imprisoned in a stadium as ordered by the central government. The stadium becomes the hotspot where these people wait to find out about their destiny. The description of the days lived in and around the stadium provides a clear and potent image of how a liminal affectivity arises in such suspended transitional events, for all the parties involved. Various encounters are described by the narrating voices both of the migrants and the local people. An Albanian man tells of his encounter with a policeman while repeatedly trying to escape from the stadium. Ironically enough, the man tells of the very same policeman who blocks him several times on the perimeter of the stadium. The Albanian then decides to “play on emotions” and convince the policeman to let him go by telling how his situation is complicated, and how he needs to escape as his father is dying in Albania and his family is poor. The policeman breaks into tears and apologizes for having stopped him. According to what this Albanian man tells us, the policeman is profoundly affected by the migrant’s condition and personal story. In this chapter, I zoom in for a closer view of those who, like the policeman in La Nave Dolce, are to be regarded as “stayers,” “non-movers,” or “non-migrants” (Hjälm 2014). I explore adolescents’ narrations about the

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migrants arriving in Italy. I focus on the school and all that happens in and around the school, more specifically the neighborhood, the classroom, and, in particular, the act of writing, as contexts where experiences can be explored by challenging sharp dichotomies between movement and stasis. The neighborhood is a context where movement occurs on a daily basis for its inhabitants, and yet a place where students can feel immobile, as a result of a larger movement, the cross-border movement of migrants arriving on the coastlines of Italy. The class in a high school in the suburbs of a big city represents (at first glance) an immobile space for encounter. The class, however, becomes the microcosm of the human encounter with alterity in all its forms, e.g. with migrant pupils daily, with researchers less often, and with teachers and adults more generally. This chapter draws upon reflections based on a large study of youths’ conceptions of sociocultural diversity conducted since 2002 in various state high schools in central Italy (Pagani and Robustelli 2010; Pagani, Robustelli, and Martinelli 2011; Pagani 2019). In spring 2013, similar research was carried out with seventy-nine pupils (aged fourteen to sixteen) in a state high school located in Centocelle in the east of Rome (Cangià and Pagani 2014a; 2014b; Cangià 2014; 2016; Pagani 2014). The school specializes in scientific studies, which, as part of its program, includes a series of measures intended for foreign pupils, with special regard to “linguistic and cultural gaps.” The other researcher involved in this study (Camilla Pagani) and I visited the school for the first time in April 2013.1 We presented the principal activities of our institute and the aim of our research to the pupils. Each pupil received a brief note with the following instructions: “For a long time now, Italy has been inhabited not only by Italians but also by many immigrants.2 We are interested in what you think about this topic. Tell us about your experiences and the experiences of others, also referring to what happens both at school and in society in general.” The youths were given an hour and a half to complete their assignment. Teachers were asked not to be present in order to avoid any kind of interference with the research. We assured the pupils that their essays would remain anonymous and that they would not be graded or judged on them. We also assured them that their teachers would not read their writings. A group discussion was also conducted with them in their classroom right after the task. We visited them a second time, in order to further discuss some of the themes that were raised and seemed to be mostly relevant in their writings. I consider various scales of movement through which these adolescents make sense of the phenomenon of migration. In particular, I explore how movements at the urban level, the physical movement across the neighborhood and its environs, come to channel a variety of feelings

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regarding the presence of the migrants. I subsequently focus on the act of crossing borders as a form of symbolic movement often brought about as the materialization of migration to Italy by youths in their writings and conversations. Moving in the urban space surrounded by migrants and migrants’ crossing borders becomes salient to these adolescents. I agree with Hage when he states that the significance of movement in migration should not be taken for granted. Migration is a form of mobility that marks people differently when compared to the ordinary movement that individuals engage in during their everyday lives. But in what sense is this movement significant? “The significance of crossing borders is not some objective experience that defines international migration regardless of who is crossing the borders. To sense that one’s movement across international borders is significant it has to involve a sense of being uprooted from things that one is familiar with and a sense of being out of place” (Hage 2005: 470). Crossing borders becomes significant for young people when they describe their sense of being uprooted in their familiar (and national) context, and the threat or (positive) challenge that the arrival of migrants can bring about. Or when they express their sense of being left behind by the state, and various feelings regarding the fact that migrants in Italy are in a better socioeconomic condition than Italians. When they express, in other words, what Hage defines as a sense of “mobility envy,” a feeling that they are not moving well-enough, whereas migrants are (Hage 2009a). *** Even before the events of summer 2018, when hundreds of African migrants were stranded on board the Aquarius rescue vessel in the Mediterranean Sea,3 migration has long been represented in the public and political debate in Italy with a special emphasis on coast landings (in Italian, sbarchi). Since 2011, the political instability in Libya and the conflict in Syria have contributed to increasing departures from North Africa and the Middle East. The 2013 migrant shipwreck off Lampedusa Island represented an exemplar event that led to the launch of the Operation Mare Nostrum by the Italian government. With specific regard to news media, sites that become “border spectacles” (De Genova 2017) include the Mediterranean Sea, Lampedusa Island, and, more generally, the “Italian coasts.” Border crossing by land seems to have less visual impact in the dominant vernacular on migration. Maritime borders are often associated with ideas of “security” and “emergency,” as well as with images of “cross-border human flow”: the Mediterranean, especially, “has incontestably earned the disgraceful distinction of being the veritable epicenter of such lethal border crossings”

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(De Genova 2017: 3). The Mediterranean becomes a liminal zone, a “hotspot-like space” (Tazzioli 2018) where the European “migration crisis” converges. The sea becomes liminal like the stadium in the case of the Vlora in various senses: as the heart of the transitional and conflicting conditions affecting Italy; as a country often portrayed as “abandoned” in the management of the “migration crisis” and the geographical passage toward other destinations for many migrants; as the mirror of many imaginaries regarding migrants, often depicted as people passing through the sea from a past of suffering to future possibilities and a “good life” in the destination country. The frequent use of emotional terms relating to migrants’ and refugees’ journeys and to national borders, as well as in general the emotionally laden tone (based on images of hope and fear mostly), is a familiar aspect of journalism and of the public and political vernacular in Italy as in other countries, especially in the post-Brexit and Trump era, and more recently with the outbreak of the coronavirus.4 The case of Italy seems especially interesting, considering the political and socioeconomic critical phase that the country has been going through in the last few years and now with the recent pandemic. The political instability of the latest governments has already contributed to fueling a general sense of social and economic insecurity and distrust among the population. It seems to have affected the results of the political elections in 2018, with the rise of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Stars Movement) and Lega government. “Crisis” was mobilized in narratives regarding various social phenomena as a turning point in history directed toward an unknown future (Roitman 2013). For instance, a “migration crisis,” recently subject to a strong political debate between different parties, started being viewed as a new disrupting long-lasting event that, like never before in history, is currently changing Italy’s socioeconomic life. Dominant public discourses tend to depict migrants’ legal status and socioeconomic role in society as worsening the already severe conditions under which Italians live. Sharp dichotomies are easily constituted: the diffused sense of insecurity and anger among the populations, especially under precarious times of scarcity of dwelling and employment (casa and lavoro in Italian) on the one hand, and government favoritism toward migrants on the other; the illegality of migrants on the one hand, and the positive social and economic contribution that the newcomers are supposed to bring to the “host society” on the other. While prescribing “tolerance for migrants” in the name of a “multicultural and democratic society,” these discourses also quickly identify migrants’ acceptable behaviors for integration into the “host society” based on favorable values, like work and family (Cangià and Pagani 2014b). These discourses partly refer to what Zembylas has defined a “multicultural humanistic

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discourse” and a “socio-economic discourse”: the “respect for those who are recognized as being ‘different’ yet in reality they are not, they are also humans,” and the “respect for the struggles that migrants go through to better their lives” (Zembylas 2012: 201), respectively. “Invasion” and the portrayal of migrants in needy and desperate conditions are pervasive in the media language about migration. On the one hand, terms and phrases such as “illegality,” “undocumented persons,” or “clandestines (clandestini) invading the country” have been a news media leitmotif for years. On the other hand, adjectives and phrases (“poor,” “slaves,” “desperate,” “in line, naked and in the cold”) describing the vulnerability of migrants escaping from dangerous situations, as well as more personal and individual stories of migrants, are also very common (Sciortino and Colombo 2004). When talking about migration more generally, youths seem to draw on these dominant representations. However, youths can also express more personal opinions and feelings based on everyday life, including their own contact with peers at school, the experience of a close friend, or their encounter with migrants in their neighborhood in the suburbs of Rome (Cangià 2016).

Urban, Cross-Border, and Semantic Movements The city of Rome represents an “in-between city” falling “between the ‘northern postindustrial hypercities’ and the ‘southern ever-growing megacities’” (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 7). Rome has become the hub of international diplomacy, labor migration, and tourism, and it has long been the urban incarnation of the imaginaries of artists, writers, and religious pilgrims around the world. During the last thirty years, the city has experienced a vast demographic transformation, with an increasing influx of migrants and refugees, many of whom become permanent residents. While affecting the social fabric of the city in all its aspects, including its lifestyles, urban morphology, local economy, and artistic vibrancy, this sociocultural diversity has become a highly discussed problem in the local political debate. Rome is indeed the nucleus of many contradictions: The city of Rome … is a living miracle, incorporating opposite extremes of almost everything human beings have ever produced. Its endless and timeless beauty persists side by side with urban degeneration, pollution, and crime proliferation in some of Europe’s most desolate city areas, often built illegally. The warmth and openness of its inhabitants can turn into closure and xenophobia. … Rome is a laboratory of intricate human relations and curious forms of sociability, of diffidence and civility, cynicism and humour, rudeness and kindness, a chaotic

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blend of distance and closeness, carelessness, apathy, and engagement. (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 1)

The urban configuration of this city is based on such contradictions. Practices of settlement in the city on the part of residents have had to confront forms of urban development entangled with real estate speculation. The presence of migrants in such social conditions has been exploited by speculators in the context of the housing market, to amplify the social conflicts between communities over access to public spaces and dwelling rights (Marinaro and Thomassen 2014: 114). The school where this study was conducted is located in a suburb in the eastern part of the city, between the larger neighborhoods of Casilina and Prenestina, in an area known as Centocelle,5 which is characterized by a high rate of immigration and inhabited by a large number of low- and middle-working-class families, including artisans, workers, and clerical workers. In 2013, migrants in Rome amounted to 362,4936 and represented approximately 10 percent of the whole population, with this number increasing in recent years. At the time, the Romanian community represented the vastest migrant population in Rome (22.6 percent of the total population in the year 2012), with a significant concentration in Casilino and Prenestino/ Centocelle areas (Caritas Roma, Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS 2012). More specifically, Centocelle and the nearby Pigneto-Torpignattara district have long been inhabited by a large community of immigrants of different origins (Conti and Strozza 2006; Lombardi-Diop 2014). Between 2009 and 2014, the number of migrant pupils enrolled in Italian schools increased considerably, by 19.2 percent. At the time of the research, the school already represented a place where youths could meet with migrants on a daily basis. The area of Centocelle, according to adolescents, is a context where one could easily meet people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds in the shops, on the bus, on the streets, and in the school itself. The walkability of the neighborhood and the surrounding environs influences adolescents’ descriptions of Centocelle as a place of encounter with migrants. I agree with Jensen when he states that the meaning of urban spaces is constituted by movement and not only by their morphological properties (Jensen 2009). Meanings about the neighborhood and the city of Rome in general are here shaped by the mobile urban practices and mobile sense-making of these adolescents as places of relational encounters between various mobile and immobile trajectories, where self and other are constantly constructed and reconstructed: “Our lives are not just what happens in static enclaves, but also in all the intermediaries and circulation in-between places. … The way we bodily engage with places through multiple ways of circulating in, out of and across them shape an important part

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Figure 3.2. A street in Prenestino-Centocelle. Photo by Fabiana Cangià.

of the practical engagement with the world that ultimately constructs our understandings of self and other” (Jensen 2009: 154–55). Michela is sixteen years old. In one of our visits to the school and during the class discussion, she describes her encounter with migrants, her movements across the neighborhood and surroundings. She explains how, while not being categorically against all those who come to Italy, she does not feel safe to move around her city because of the presence of migrants: I am not against any person who comes here, but for example, when I am walking, I hear appreciations that honestly get on my nerves and that most of the times, or maybe always, come from the part of a

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Romanian or something like that. If I have to walk around at a specific time of the day, I am scared because I do not feel safe. Today they almost hit us with a truck as they looked at us, we were crossing the street, to look at us they whistle and sound the horn, well this annoys me. I think this is why all the anger and the annoyance. My best friend is Romanian, so I don’t have anything against [them], but honestly if they come here and do things that maybe in their countries they cannot do because the state allows them and sends them to jail for 48 hours and then lets them free. Why should I feel protected? That’s it. I think the anger does not originate from the fact that they smell, or that they have different customs, because maybe we also smell for them. I mean, I heard that the skin odor is different. So maybe the anger I guess comes from their attitudes toward us.

In her words, the physical arrival of migrants in Italy, interpreted more explicitly as migrants’ presence at the urban level, has a definite impact on her ability to move and walk around the city. Youths like Michela walk in the neighborhood and surroundings every day, along streets, walkways, and transit zones, and that is how they meet with migrants. Movements in the neighborhood and across the city, as well as the possibilities and abilities to move spatially, are inextricably connected with the way youths think and feel about themselves vis-à-vis others. Not only does Michela not feel safe, she also views this sense of insecurity and the resulting impossibility of moving without feeling scared as precisely that which defines the attitude of the migrants, and by the same token the “vulnerability” of the Italians as a broader category. The specific (and at times troubled) encounter with the migrants taking place in Centocelle and its surroundings becomes the small-scale version of a more extensive virtual encounter occurring when Italians picture the passage of migrants through the borders of the nation. National borders come to enclose certain identity-related elements that can make crossing borders an emotionally fraught and transformative experience both for the ones who arrive and for the ones who observe others entering the country. Crossing borders becomes the occasion for a competitive confrontation between residents and migrants: a battle that revolves around a form of “existential mobility” (Hage 2009a), where life is viewed as going nowhere and is threatened by the arrivals of others. According to these adolescents, migrants often force Italians, already experiencing a “crisis,” to migrate, as their life is not moving enough, while migrants come and find a job. Migrants’ physical journey can generate and channel a form of liminal affectivity, which is not only the presence of conflicting feelings but the propensity for becoming affected by a specific event, as it also is for those who observe this journey. What can be a painful experience for those who move

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can also be viewed as putting at risk the identity of those who do not move, their normal flow of life, their sense of safety and stability. It can put Italians in a vulnerable position. Watching others crossing borders can hence have a strong emotional impact for those who “receive” the migrants, as portrayed by the movie La Nave Dolce. National borders become too “soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others” (Ahmed 2004: 2). The oscillation between the desire to be more understanding toward migrants and the expression of a sense of personal insecurity associated with the “porosity” of the borders is often present in these adolescents’ words (Cangià and Pagani 2014a). The attempt to deconstruct borders, to make them less salient to the preservation of identities and “permeable” for migrants to cross, can be motivated by their personal experience and relationships with some migrants, or by the imagination of others’ feelings regarding migratory journeys. Other times, the deconstruction of borders can be affected by youths’ need to adjust their opinions and conform to socially acceptable values (their peers or their families’ opinions) or to avoid negative judgments (Pagani and Robustelli 2010), or for lack of self-confidence or indifference. Yet, the deconstruction of borders can soon be followed by their reconstitution, as soon as the internal conflict with their feelings of insecurity makes pupils understand others’ migration as harmful. At other times, youths change their point of view and try to make sense of how they feel unsafe meeting migrants in their everyday life: from being initially okay with the idea that migrants cross the border to enter Italy, they suddenly start drawing upon images such as migrants’ “endless landings,” change their perspective on the issue, and describe their fear about migrants (Cangià and Pagani 2015). But what happens in this very symbolic space where youths attempt to deconstruct and then reconstruct the physical border of the nation? By describing others crossing the border, trying to soften the significance of this border and yet again erecting a new line between Italians and migrants, youths express ambivalent feelings both toward “Italians” (who are good and bad) and “migrants.” Migration becomes the catalyzer—rather than the cause—of these feelings. Scapegoating mechanisms, in which many hostile opinions are concentrated on the one who becomes the scapegoat (Girard 1979), in this case the migrant, entails the creation and channeling of affect and desires. This channeling appears to be liminal in several senses: adolescents start questioning the threshold of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belonging of people and groups, while fostering a sense of communitas (“us” as “good citizens,” “us” as the “vulnerable ones”) (Turner 1969); they cross ordinary and structural forms of expression and meanings allowed in the formal institutional context of the school and lead to more

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ambivalent ones. Similarly to Arpad Szakolczai’s definition of a “listening and reading experience” as a liminal experience (Szakolczai 2013), I like to view the writing of these adolescents as a liminal event, a devised liminal experience (Stenner 2017), artfully crafted by the researchers. With our research intervention that morning, we acted following what Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel called a liminal affective technology (Stenner and MorenoGabriel 2013); we occasioned the specific experience for the pupils within the institutional and structural context of the school to provoke an affective change and a “breaking out” from structural rules and roles for a brief moment through the act of writing. While pupils’ written texts standing alone can count as mere data, it is the specificity of the small event of the research conducted in the classroom and more in general in the context of the school that makes the act of writing a liminal experience.

“It Is Most Common to Hear of a Tree That Falls Than a Forest That Grows” As in the act of walking, “written words are separated by spaces, as are footprints on the ground” (Vergunst and Ingold 2008: 8). As a form of incomplete walking, or a “thinking movement” (Vergunst and Ingold 2008), writing can become a liminal event in various senses. These young people’s writings can become a profoundly affective experience, the space where meanings associated with social and structural positions are temporarily suspended, at times subverted and brought to drastic nuances, “only to return to structure revitalized” (Turner 1969: 97). Meanings that normally sustain and lend predictability to these pupils’ lives at the school (e.g. dominant discourses heard from media, from adults or their peers about migration) can briefly leave space for more personal, affective, and embodied experiences of everyday encounters and relationships. These pupils, at least some of them, admit in their writings that they want to be honest, engaging at times in extreme opinions that might go against socially favored representations. Youths’ words are betwixt and between personal experiences and those elements that are linked to contextual values and social relationships relevant in these adolescents’ everyday life: these values can pertain to gender differences, personal and social networks, culture-based conventions of acceptable behavior, as well as more situational elements such as social desirability7 when writing to “official” recipients (schoolteachers or researchers). A formal institutional context like the school can produce particular kinds of voices (Spyrou 2011): “What children can or cannot do, say or not say, at school is circumscribed by the institutional parameters in place” (Pache-Huber and Spyrou 2012:

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294). Aside from these parameters, other factors can also include children’s general knowledge of racism (Essed 1991): information concerning discrimination acquired through formal (e.g. education) or informal (e.g. friends, family) channels, their knowledge about others’ experiences of similar discrimination, and the language of media and adults, which children, most probably, come into contact with. The writing can also show a potency, characteristic of liminal situations, to deconstruct representations and create new ones, “the conditions for an experiential confrontation with what it means to be a human being outside of and beyond a structurally given social position or state” (Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel 2013: 12). Liminal events can be highly emotional and formative experiences. At times, they can engender a “sentiment of humankindness” (Turner 1969) or a sense of communitas. The writing, like a liminal event, becomes “a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience” (Deleuze 1998: 1). Youths can actively and creatively make sense of self and other, they can actively participate in the construction of their everyday life and the world around them (Essed 1991). Adolescents appear to be placed between divergent positions, perspectives, and images of past, present, and future. These perspectives are not passively mirrored in these adolescents’ words, but actively produce new representations and meanings. Youths’ lived experience and affectivity emerging in the text can continually escape social categories and identities. Adolescents can move around the image of the “migrant” in various ways. They can block any engagement with alterity by erecting “semantic barriers” against migrants in general. These barriers are well illustrated by rigid oppositions and the association of migrants’ physical arrival on the Italian coastline with negative socioeconomic issues such as crime and the precarious conditions Italians face. Adolescents can open up to migrants’ positions and motivations while trying to integrate different perspectives and affective states or reinterpret the very meaning of movement altogether. More often, they can remain suspended in a liminal hotspot, where two components of meaning and conflicted feelings, the nearness and remoteness of migrants, are co-present and interact with one another (Salvatore and Venuleo 2017): “The consciousness of having the absolutely general in common [with the stranger] has exactly the effect of putting a special emphasis on that which is not common” (Simmel 1972: 148). They often represent migration ambivalently by drawing on socially shared images and by expressing their feelings (e.g. fear, hate, anger). Other adolescents try to make sense of the tension between positive and negative aspects of migration based on more personal experiences (e.g. friendship with migrants, experiences in the neighborhood).

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The following is the essay written by a fourteen-year-old boy whom I call Davide here8: I AM IN FAVOR OF IMMIGRATION, I AM PLEASED BY THE FACT THAT MANY PEOPLE WANT TO LIVE IN ITALY, BUT IT MAKES ME ANGRY THE FACT THAT MANY COME HERE TO CREATE TROUBLES, I KNOW THAT IT IS MOST COMMON TO HEAR OF A TREE THAT FALLS THAN A FOREST THAT GROWS, BUT I AM SO ANGRY BECAUSE WHEN I WALK I HAVE TO FEEL SCARED, IN THE NEIGHBORHOODS WHERE I GO AND IN THE STREETS WHERE I GO, BECAUSE THERE ARE BAD PEOPLE, SURE THESE CAN BE ALSO ITALIAN, BUT OFTEN THESE ARE IMMIGRANTS. ANOTHER THING THAT MAKES ME ANGRY IS THAT THERE ARE ITALIANS OF MANY GENERATIONS WHO DIE OF STARVATION AND DO NOT HAVE A JOB, IN CONTRAST THERE ARE IMMIGRANTS WHO LEAD AN EASY LIFE WITH THREE JOBS, THIS MAKES ME VERY PISSED OFF, I DO NOT STAND IT, THAT ALSO THE FIRST GENERATION OF IMMIGRANTS ARE YOUNG, WE SHOULD DO LIKE AMERICANS DO: PUT A LIMIT TO THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO CAN BECOME ITALIANS PER YEAR. THOSE WHO LAND IN SICILY I WOULD SEND THEM BACK TO THEIR COUNTRIES, HOLY COW! WE ARE THE ONLY COUNTRY THAT ACCEPTS THEM, THAT’S WHY THEY COME HERE, WE SHOULD SEND THEM BACK TO THEIR COUNTRY BY THE SAME BOAT THEY ARRIVED. SOMETHING THAT ANNOYS VERY MUCH IS MUSLIMS THAT OTHER THAN SMELLING A LOT, COME HERE AND PRETEND TO IMPOSE THEIR RELIGION, I WOULD KICK THEM BACK THEIR COUNTRIES, AS IF ONE TRIES TO DO THE SAME IN A MUSLIM COUNTRY THEY KILL HIM, THEY DO TO HIM THE WORST. THEN, I HATE A RACE, GYPSIES, A PROFOUND HATE, I HAVE NEVER MET A SINGLE GYPSY WHO IS CLEAN AND WELL MANNERED. I DON’T HAVE A SPECIFIC EXPERIENCE, I KNOW A LOT FROM OTHER PEOPLE FOR EXAMPLE A FRIEND OF MINE, SHE HAS BEEN ROBBED MANY TIMES BY GYPSIES, ROMANIANS AND NORTH AFRICANS, SHE SAID THEY THREATENED HER WITH KNIVES, AND SHE WAS OBVIOUSLY TERRIFIED AND ALWAYS GIVEN THEM ALL SHE HAD. I HAVE MANY FRIENDS WHO ARE NOT ITALIANS, AND THIS IS THE PROOF THAT THERE ARE ALSO GOOD IMMIGRANTS, MY GRANDFATHER RENT AN APARTMENT OUT TO A ROMANIAN GUY, AND THIS ROMANIAN GUY IS NICE, WELL MANNERED, PRECISE, HE IS COMMITTED IN HIS JOB AND DOES NOT HAVE BAD HABITS, NOW HE IS ALSO CREATING A FAMILY, THE WIFE IS ALSO NICE AND SHE IS ALSO ROMANIAN, THIS IS THE PROOF OF WHAT I WAS SAYING, IT IS MORE COMMON TO HEAR ABOUT A TREE THAT FALLS THAN A FOREST THAT GROWS, SURELY, AS

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THIS FRIEND OF MINE, THERE ARE MILLIONS OF SIMILAR PEOPLE, WELL MANNERED AND HONEST, AND THIS IS THE PEOPLE THAT I THINK WANTS TO BECOME ITALIAN. THERE IS ALSO ANOTHER FRIEND OF MINE, WE HAD A FIGHT, HE WAS GOOD AND NICE, HE WAS SENEGALESE, AND USED TO LIVE IN FRANCE WHEN HE WAS YOUNG. IN MY SCHOOL THERE ARE NOT MANY IMMIGRANTS AND IN CASE THEY ARE WELL INTEGRATED. IN THIS SOCIETY I FEEL LIKE AN AMERICAN WHO LIVED DURING THE GREAT MIGRATION, MORE “POWERFUL,” BUT I AM AFRAID TO GO TO NEIGHBOURHOODS INHABITED BY OTHER ETHNICITIES, I WOULD FEEL IMPOTENT.

I chose to include the whole essay. I believe that, as a whole, it follows a specific rhythm illuminating a condition of liminal affectivity typical of liminal events: Davide writes his essay in capital letters; his voice goes through up-and-down tones, he arrives at a climax in the middle of the text where he starts talking about hate and expresses a violent reaction against the migrants, only to go back then to quieter shades, acknowledge the positive side of the issue, and finally present himself as feeling vulnerable. The essay is a good illustration of all the aspects discussed before with regard to the movements around the local environs associated with the encounter with migrants; a competitive comparison along with a defensive and self-indulgent confrontation with migrants (Solomon 1993); and a variety of ambivalent feelings regarding the issue of migration as the boy seems to be highly affected by the arrival of migrants (both for his own safety and the wellbeing of the community). The boy tells of his movements in the neighborhood and explains how these movements are constrained by the presence of “dangerous” migrant people. He emphasizes how Italians are in a more vulnerable and difficult position in terms of socioeconomic conditions, while migrants “live an easier life” and have jobs. The resentment and anger expressed toward these circumstances make the boy wish to erect borders to subvert the movement of migrants and send them back home. Davide finally admits feeling “scared” of and “vulnerable” to migrants’ negative attitudes. Yet, while explaining why people tend to see the negative side of migration (“a tree that falls”), this boy also acknowledges the presence of a positive side of the issue (“a forest that grows”). He is “pleased” that migrants choose Italy as their destination, and views this as a reason for feeling “powerful” while referring to certain friends or people who have given him a different and more positive impression. The sense Davide makes about the issue of migration is literally suspended between “a tree that falls” and “a forest that grows.” The boundary constantly

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shifts across various categories involving different levels of identification (migrants and Italians in general, and yet again a “good migrant” versus a “bad migrant,” “good Italians” versus “bad Italians,” and the politicians) (Cangià 2016). Youths express and make sense of ambivalent feelings, as well as of the internal conflict between a sense of freedom (to freely talk) and anxiety (to conform to shared values, and to make sense of more concrete experiences with a migrant friend). In their words, at times, no socially shared value matters, and yet, the meanings deriving from these values and beliefs become overdetermined. The ways these pupils understand the issue of migration in Italy is not, however, merely a matter of ambivalence: something emerges on the threshold between affective states, representations, and meanings, between personal and vicarious experiences, that is, the emotional world and everyday life of these young people. Between “a tree that falls” and “a forest that grows,” there is a liminal symbolic space where meanings can be subverted, yet also taken to their extreme.

Giorgia: Both/Neither Italian And/Nor Migrant Probably in 1962, Pier Paolo Pasolini9 wrote about the story of Alì Blue Eyes as part of a longer poem known as Prophecy. Alì is a young Arab with blue eyes. The poem tells us that Alì, along with other migrants, crosses the Mediterranean Sea from Algeria and lands on the coast of Calabria (South of Italy). Considered a prophecy of the migration crisis of our times, the poem portrays an encounter, occurring between migrants and the locals, where the latter view migrants as “brothers” to stand together with an impetus to react against the mutation and loss of values in neocapitalist society. Let us now focus on the blue eyes, a detail that was taken up in the movie directed by Claudio Giovannesi in 2012 and called Alì ha occhi azzurri (Alì blue eyes) after the poem.10 Here the blue eyes of the title refer to the eyes of Nader, the main character, a sixteen-year-old Italian-born son of Egyptian parents living in Ostia11 on the outskirts of Rome. Nader wears blue-colored contact lenses to look more Italian. His lenses, like the eyes of Alì in the poem by Pasolini, can be viewed as a form of ambivalence, where different meanings coexist in the symbolic space represented by the blue eyes of the migrant “non-White” subject. My case here is shaped around a central figure pictured through my reading and analysis of a text written by a sixteen-year-old girl that I will call Ilaria here: the character is Giorgia, Ilaria’s Bangladeshi friend. The image of Giorgia seems to typify an in-between symbolic position, like Alì’s blue eyes, a position within which the image of the migrant moves, between

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nearness and remoteness, inclusion and exclusion. This figure, however, brings not only the ambivalence regarding migrants to the fore but also the “affective volatility” surrounding these adolescents’ sense of belonging to a group or their sense of self. The personal conflicts that Giorgia, as her friend describes her, might go through due to her family’s religious background seem to mirror Ilaria’s tensions. While being affectively close to Ilaria, Giorgia also incarnates the kind of alterity that appears to be “too extreme” (as defined in a conversation in the classroom). I have transcribed the entire essay as follows: Like for anything else, there is a positive and negative aspect. Personally, I believe that unfortunately the majority of people who migrate to Italy in search of a better condition or anyway a job, are people who live in poor conditions. We all should learn from the famous saying: “Don’t paint with a broad brush here” but the human species is on my account selfish and something “racist” (often in the essays or in any other written document I tend to pass from one topic to another especially when I have much to say). Personally, I firmly believe that the habits, races, and cultures in the world are often discordant and opposed sometimes; as a result, a peaceful living together is not possible. To support this thesis, I have lots of argumentations. In neighborhoods like mine, there are many ethnic minorities (that now are almost the majority). The attitude of most of them is awful. I cannot sleep anymore during the night ’cause the drunk “Romanians” start fights in front of my place, leave alcohol bottles all over the place and harass people, like for example it was 9 P.M. (summer), I get up the tram to go to have an ice cream with a friend, given that my parents don’t let me get out at night in Centocelle, and I am scared, a Bengalese comes closer and starts making advances to me. When I, sick of that behavior, raised the tone of my voice threatening to call the police and asking help from the driver, the man replied that Italian women are “morally loose.” Something I cannot tolerate is the Muslim idea of the woman. It is not even a humanly thinkable idea. There is a friend of mine (whom I would call here Giorgia) who is from Bangladesh and she cannot have a smartphone, she cannot go out in the afternoon, she cannot have Italian friends, and cannot even come to my place for studying. Once she went out secretly with a friend and her parents caught her. Her father beats her because he thinks that his daughter is being corrupted by the ideals of our country. So I wonder: is it possible that a 16-year-old girl should live like in prison? What’s wrong with them is the attitude: according to my education I think there are some ways of doing that are pretentious. If they came to Italy to work, to educate their children with honesty and behave, they would be more than welcome. The only time I went to visit Giorgia, I entered and apologized for disturbing. Giorgia’s mother, she looked at me, she did not answer and went away. After one hour she came to Giorgia’s

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room and spoke in Bangladeshi (even if she speaks fluently Italian) and excluded me totally from the conversation as I do not exist at all. But there are also some minorities that comfort me, like a couple of persons: Alì and a Chilean caregiver (Milena). Alì is a 28-year-old guy who works in the mechanic’s workshop of my father. Even if he is not a saint, I think he is one of the most altruistic and kindest persons in the world. He has been working for my father since a while already and there is now a friendship relation. Last year, we were on vacation in his home country but with the rest of the population there I don’t feel at ease. Milena is the babysitter of two kids (of my neighbors at my beach house). She is always smiling and shiny. These are the few persons who make you reflect on the distinction between races. With my previous argument I don’t mean to say that Italians do not get drunk or don’t create brawls or any kind of problem. I think that the human species is the worst on earth. If the human being disappeared from the earth it would be better. Many human beings are worse than animals, in fact I correct myself, they are always worse than animals. (I am getting off topic, let’s go back where we were.) When I go abroad I am sorry to see Italians’ attitudes. It is since I was born that I spend summer vacations in Greece. I love Greece more than Italy, and seeing Italians polluting beaches, breaking corals, and slaughtering starfish to bring “souvenirs” to their relatives is very sad. The human race, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, should learn to respect others. If you go to a foreign country (for vacation or for good) you should respect everything, environment and people.

In Ilaria’s words, Giorgia, like other migrants, moves from being “migrant” to being closer to “Italians,” only to return and once again become a migrant, albeit different, when alterity becomes too much to bear. The migrant, like in many other writings, comes to be both/neither similar to Italians and/nor different: both belonging to the Italian society (if good and honest workers) and different, neither belonging to the Italian society (when they act dangerously or when they appear to look different because of their customs and behaviors) nor different. During the liminal event emerging in the classroom and created by our intervention that day, we moved from the typical structural logic of either/ or to a paradox, including both the school and the writing exercise. The structural logic of the either/or characteristic of structural relations (either you are a migrant or Italian, you are at school or not at school) is temporarily suspended and becomes both/and (the migrant as both different and similar; the adolescents both as pupils in a formal context like the school and as young people experiencing alterity in their everyday life—and most importantly being affected by it). The migrant is described as neither totally

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different nor similar to Italians, neither included nor excluded in the broader society, and comes to be the scapegoat for pupils’ anxieties that transcend the dualistic dichotomy between them and us. The writing then starts to present a quality of both/and and neither/nor characteristic of liminal hotspots: in the representation of the migrant (or of oneself) as both included and excluded; in the liminal affectivity (coexistence of myriad feelings that resist being reduced to any feeling) emerging from youths’ anticipation of the risks associated with migration; in their ambivalent position vis-à-vis the formal context of the school, as both at school and not at school, being physically inside the school and temporally not in a “real” lesson. Finally, the writer can remain suspended in a liminal hotspot of conflicting images associated with the “I” and “me,” while self-reflecting and trying to “move semantically” around the migrant’s perspective. For one thing, pupils can neither totally act as pupils in the school dynamics (and talk according to socially accepted rules, as they want to be honest and express more negative feelings) nor step out from the school dynamics for the short moment of the research (so as to be free to talk about personal opinions and feelings, as they become aware of the possible standpoints of the reader about them). Semantic movements, in this sense, are also fundamentally dialogical, as they entail variations in the way self and other are made sense of through their relationship and the way they intertwine in the inner world of the person. These semantic and dialogical movements bring about a potentiality for change and creativity; or, the voice of the (real or imagined) interlocutor “draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 354).

Ilaria: The Migrant as Friend, the Migrant as the Other Here, I wish to quote Gillespie et al. again,12 when they describe the encounter with alterity at the semantic level: In the geographic world, the difference between self and other is absolute because self and other occupy mutually exclusive space-time trajectories … at a semantic level, the oppositions between self and other; between us and them; between me and you; can shift and slide, sometimes collapse or even reverse. … The difference is not only “out there;” it is also within us. Humans experience alterity, represent it, and position themselves in relation to it. (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’SullivanLago 2012: 697)

In this encounter, a person can move toward, and come to accept, others’ ideas, perspectives, and lifestyles. At other times, she can erect “semantic

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barriers” through ways of speaking and thinking that inhibit transformational interaction with others (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012). Or a person can stay ambivalent toward the same object, as is often the case with these adolescents, who can make sense of very different experiences and perspectives simultaneously (in the neighborhood with a stranger migrant, with regard to a more intimate relation with a migrant, or as a pupil acting in the formal context of the school). They can navigate among different selves (e.g. being Italian, being a friend of a migrant, being a neighbor or a peer) through reflecting on the self, and change perspective (and often remain stuck in between divergent perspectives) along with this movement. But how does this movement occur? Let’s go back to Ilaria’s text. At the beginning of her essay, Ilaria, like many other adolescents, presents the issue in a dichotomist manner, as divided into a positive and negative perspective. However, she soon interprets migrants’ experience as a difficult one. She demonstrates feeling involved in this state of things, as she explicitly refers to the category of humans (of which she seems to see herself as being part), defined as “selfish” and “racist.” She shows how the issue can have an affective impact on her: she expresses interest in and involvement with the issue (“often in the essays or in any other written document I tend to pass from one topic to another,” “especially when I have much to say”). Already Ilaria “steps out” of her ongoing utterance: as she probably reads her own words, she starts reflecting upon herself from the point of view of a potential other, the reader, then acknowledges that she is “pass[ing] from one topic to another.” Suddenly we are catapulted into another perspective: against her first disappointed acknowledgment that the human species is racist, Ilaria now states that “habits, races, and cultures in the world are often discordant and opposed.” She seems here to take on those negative perspectives dominant in the broader society, where the migrant is viewed as essentially different. Ilaria seems outraged by the fact that migrants in her neighborhood act in awful ways and is even offended that some of these migrants (they) question the morality of Italian women (us). Similarly, Ilaria feels intolerant toward those who have certain views concerning women, like her friend Giorgia’s father, or certain attitudes, like Giorgia’s mother, who excludes her from the conversation. Yet Ilaria writes from within the walls of the formal context of the school, and she seems to interpret the exercise in these terms (“often in the essays or in any other written document I tend to pass from one topic to another”), so we can guess she still wants to maintain an overall positive perspective on the issue. But Ilaria also appears to be anxious to express her own opinions about it. The writing comes to represent the affectively charged tension between divergent voices and social positions.

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After this, there is again a change of perspective in Ilaria’s words. This change relates to what in psychology is known as self-reflection, “a temporary phenomenological experience in which self becomes an object to oneself” (Gillespie 2007a: 678): “In self-reflection we become other to ourselves, we react to ourselves, and we guide our action from the standpoint of others” (Gillespie 2006: 205). The self, according to this perspective, is already an “other” within the social act (Mead 1910), where different points of view interact: “In self-reflection the ‘I’ moves between these divergent perspectives, thus becoming other to self, that is, self-reflecting” (Gillespie 2006: 205). In this sense, in self-reflection, there is a dynamic emergence of a “novel me” (Gillespie 2006: 209), and fundamentally a transformation: self becomes other by perceiving and reacting to self from the point of view of the other. In Ilaria’s words, we can see this emergence, a movement around different perspectives, and an incomplete transformation in different moments of her writing, first through a simple yet emotionally laden reference to Alì and Milena’s personal experiences. The reference to a migrant friend, classmate, or acquaintance, who are often described as lovely and affectionate, frequently help these adolescents arrive at a different perspective, according to which migration also presents a positive side. A migrant friend is a person with whom adolescents spend their time and share experiences in the neighborhood or at school, or with whom they feel an emotional bond based on shared values, hopes, and beliefs. Adolescents often depict the migrant friend as a good person who moves to another place seeking a better life and better opportunities. A migrant friend is often identified with those people who move in search of a “good life” and through emotionally laden images. The emotional experience shared by a migrant friend, as well as the relationship of friendship, often become in these youths’ words a narrative means that helps the passage from a negative and positive view on migration to making sense of a change of perspective, or explaining why adolescents prefer distancing themselves from others’ negative opinions on the issue. Through considering her relationship with a migrant, Ilaria starts blocking those negative views that previously permeated her text in favor of an idea of essential sameness (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012). From being initially viewed as a generalized Other, the migrant comes to be understood as closer to the person, and as reflecting the positive values of (good) Italian citizens. At a certain point, Ilaria becomes aware of the potential view of the reader. She seems to think that we could interpret what she says as Italians are not bad while migrants are: “With my previous argument I don’t mean to say that Italians do not get drunk or don’t create brawls or any kind of problem.” She goes back again to the idea that the whole human species is evil: “If the human being disappeared from the earth it would be better.”

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Ilaria, from a brief moment, “steps into” the whole issue at stake. She, as an Italian, is not seen as separate from the experience of migration anymore. Italians, she says, can also move and misbehave when abroad after all. Again, it is the “human race” that should learn to respect others: “If you [human beings] go to a foreign country (for vacation or for good) you should respect everything, environment and people.” With these constant movements around different meanings and perspectives, there is no reintegration in the liminal passage from one meaning and perspective to another. Ilaria remains suspended in a semantic and affective liminal hotspot, between both/neither writing as a pupil at school and/nor writing “honestly”; between both/neither being similar to her migrant friend and/nor being different from that friend when feeling excluded in her home; between both/neither being “Italian” and/nor being different from those Italians who misbehave abroad. After all, every human being is “evil”: “Many human beings are worse than animals, in fact I correct myself, they are always worse than animals,” Ilaria says. The boundaries between migrant/nonmigrants constructed by these adolescents are not neat and coherent and do not define unequivocally self and other. They rather represent ambivalent lines located in between different feelings, meanings, events, and places in these young peoples’ lives. Adolescents can often undo and then remake the boundaries between themselves and the migrants. “This undoing of a clear distinction between self and other is a characteristic feature of liminal hotspots” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 168): distinctions that appear significant one moment yet become insignificant the next (Szakolczai 2009). The both/and and neither/ nor formulation, defining both the migrant and the Italian in the adolescents’ words, has the advantage of capturing both the negative and the positive characters of a liminal condition: “When liminality becomes troubled in a hotspot, the positive value of both having your cake and eating it can morph into the negative value of neither having it nor eating it” (Kofoed and Stenner 2017: 178). These boundaries are constituted, deconstructed, and reconstituted in the passage from one meaning or feeling to another, through imagination, curiosity, and these adolescents’ complex emotional worlds, where the real and the imaginary, the past, present, and future self and other always coexist. Like in any liminal experience, this virtual encounter with the Other can involve creativity and destruction at the same time: The qualities pertaining to the concept of liminality are perplexing. On the one hand liminality involves a potentially unlimited freedom from any kind of structure. This sparks creativity and innovation, peaking in transfiguring moments of sublimity. … On the other hand liminality

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also involves a peculiar kind of unsettling situation in which nothing really matters, in which hierarchies and standing norms disappear, in which sacred symbols are mocked at and ridiculed, in which authority in any form is questioned, taken apart and subverted. … Human experiences of freedom and anxiety (they do belong together) are condensed in liminal moments. (Thomassen 2014: 1)

These adolescents’ writings, while remaining physically confined within the texts, can escape semantically and affectively. The adolescents themselves should not be considered as constituted and confined by dominant discourses and structural relations in the machinery of the school. Youths talk, with both freedom and anxiety about what could be (and not merely of what it is and what it was). They bring to light the desire, fear, hopes from their own and others’ past and present, the potentialities of migration, and start imagining the future.

Portraits of a Migrant: The Aspiration of a “Good Life” On the morning of 3 February 2018, Luca Traini, a member of the right-wing party Lega, shot twenty-five-year-old Jennifer Odion from his Alfa Romeo. Odion was working in the small Italian town of Macerata as hairdresser. On that day, she was waiting at a bus stop, and the bullet caused severe injuries to her shoulder. This event occurred a few days after a Nigerian was arrested in connection with the murder of an eighteen-year-old Italian woman in Macerata. Luca Traini shot five more people, targeting anyone who looked like they might be an African migrant. Kofi Wilson, a twenty-year-old man from Ghana who was waiting to obtain asylum status and learning Italian in the meantime, was also shot and injured that day, on his way to get a haircut.13 The events in Macerata evoked violent protests against migrants that started in 2015 and continued in various peripheral areas of some Italian cities, including Rome. These events represent extreme cases of racism. However, they also appear to be symptomatic of a specific social, economic, and political climate and diffused sense of precariousness and distrust in Italy, particularly exacerbated in the past few years. Recent scandals for institutional and systemic corruption, especially those regarding the business around migration in the city of Rome, have mainly contributed to fueling these forms of extremism (exemplified by the rise of Lega as one of the parties that received the most votes in the 2018 political elections), and a general sense of resentment, fear, and at times vigilantism among the population. Within the dominant vernacular on migration in Italy, migrants

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Figure 3.3. “Apocalypse Casilina.” Photo by Alessio Ferraro.

have usually been associated with those who come and steal Italians’ jobs or houses, who benefit from various favors from the state, yet who are often associated with illegality and violent crimes. Lately, this association has become a hot topic. Protests organized by extremist right-wing parties and directed toward those migrants who are assigned housing rights “in the place of Italians” are increasing. What has struck me the most about the facts in Macerata and these protests is that some of their features, as well as the way a large part of the population reacts ambivalently to these events, are mirrored in the writings of adolescents. While being subjective and unique, the writings appear as a forerunner to the moment currently being experienced by Italy. Often labeled a “crisis,” the present historical and political moment in Italy seems to be characterized by a large-scale and incomplete transition toward an unknown future (especially now with the pandemic), toward socioeconomic conditions not yet in place, a transition that generates an unprecedented sense of insecurity and uncertainty among the population. In this climate, with that single shooting in Macerata, the potential futures of those six people, who were conducting what adolescents often consider a “good life,” have somehow been threatened or voluntarily compromised. This is the very same future that, in youths’ words, represents the primary motivation for migrants to come to and remain in Italy, the same future that these adolescents consider under imminent threat for themselves, in the form of unknown socioeconomic conditions or possible physical risk.

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Adolescents orient themselves and the migrants to temporality, through sentiments of fear, uncertainty, and hope, by moving across time, imagining or remembering the past, and picturing the future. A blurred image of the migrant emerges from these adolescents’ personal experiences and understanding of change. This image revolves around the imagination of a past from which a person migrates, around various feelings regarding the future (the future of the migrants, of these adolescents individually, and of society at large), as well as around the imagination of one’s possible migration. Imagination can support symbolically escaping from the here and now of the immediate present (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016) and navigate between what it is and what it may be. Imagined futures and the potential character of mobility can trigger a sense of shared purpose and common aspirations, and encourage a better understanding of others’ motives to migrate (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013; Bauböck 2002). Other times, picturing the risks of living with migrants can reinforce the boundaries between self and other (Cangià 2016). The “migrant,” in this portrayal, remains stuck in a liminal temporal hotspot between a remembered and imagined past life “before” and a potential future “after,” between not being there anymore and not being here yet. Migration is hence defined by these youths as a form of potentiality: what counts in the presence and movement of migrants now for these youths is what the migrant can become, although not yet (Bryant and Knight 2019). In the following essay written by a boy of sixteen, the focus on the future through imagining migrants’ intentions and the possible risks for Italians shapes his present relationship with the migrant and leads to the coexistence of an ambivalent image (the migrant being the one who can become a potential criminal but also has the potential to become a good person): Italy is a place where there are many immigrants, partly it is a positive thing, partly it is negative. It can be positive for different reasons, here immigrants can have the opportunity to redeem themselves, to live a new life, new emotions, in any case they have to get used to a new reality to face, different from the one they have faced before. By leaving their country we can imagine they faced various challenges, because changing country means change and leaving everything behind, and so, by coming here, they look for a redemption, for a “second chance.” Of course, next to these positive arguments, there are also negative [factors] that can cause negative consequences. These negative factors can be that maybe those people who come here in Italy are evil and they can cause big problems, they can be murderers, thieves, drug dealers, and so on. I don’t have anything against them, if they come with the best will in the world they are well accepted but if they come here to make the situation of our country worse well then I don’t like it.

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This boy is concerned with the capacity of the migrant to become something else, something that will affect the future for Italians and the presumably difficult conditions in which Italians now live. Concerns are often expressed by these adolescents regarding the critical socioeconomic moment that their country is facing, the fear for a possible threat to the “nation” brought about by the influx of migrants, as well as a possible imminent risk of living in contact with migrants. These youths picture what the migrant might do negatively for their country, or more concretely how the migrant might act violently in their everyday encounters in the neighborhood. Some adolescents, especially girls, explicitly express fear and anxiety relating to a possible danger in the streets when encountering migrants. Migrants are hence portrayed based on their imagined potentiality to become either a better person or an evil one and, as a consequence, either a resource or a threat to the future of Italians. This space between an imagined past of the migrant and a potential future represents a threshold, the “presence of an absence” (Agamben 1998). In this threshold, the migrant stays suspended between both/neither a potentially good person leaving behind the past and orienting to (a better) future life in Italy, and/ nor a potential criminal hence compromising the future of Italians. The migrant, in these youths’ words, is present in her/his absence: the migrant’s future is imminent, yet absent in the now, “nurtured in the present but not yet seen or realized” (Bryant and Knight 2019: 107). In other cases, the imagination of a better future and the search for a good life offer a way out of this liminal semantic condition for adolescents. The migrant then becomes an actuality for becoming a good person and conducting a good life, as these adolescents, or Italians in general, will possibly do in the future. An imagined migration, a better life somewhere else, and an occasion for positive transformation, from merely being a potentiality for the migrant moving now, also becomes a possibility for these youths maybe moving in the future, a variation on how they can grow and a way to temporarily understand migrants’ motivations. Migration, as a specific form of mobility, entails a reflection on the multiple possible directions of our lives, a projection and imagination of a potential (better) life elsewhere (Hage 2009a). Through imagination, a person can move across spatial, temporal, and symbolic realms, escape from linear and measurable time and space, and simultaneously travel across past, present, and future, and across borders. Through imagination, we can jump in time and space (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016), we can move with our mind to places where we are not yet moved, we can engage with the absent, a not-yet future (Adam and Groves 2007), the elsewhere and nowhere (Jovchelovitch, Priego-Hernández, and Glaˇveanu 2017). Migrants’ aspirations to and imagination of a “good life,” the work of becoming (an)other and the emotional cost associated with it, are recurrent

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themes among these adolescents. The migrant is imagined as a person who looks for better opportunities and goes through various challenges when leaving behind family, friends, and the past in view of another life. A “good life,” better than the one that migrants were supposed to conduct before departure, is here morally laden, often entailing ideas of virtue, social obligation, worth (like honesty), and a decent work and family, but also people’s desires and aspirations for safety, social relations, dignity, and commitment to shared values (Fischer 2014). The aspiration for a good life entails a form of potentiality intrinsic to mobility when a person sees her/ his life potentially going somewhere: “A potential of setting something into movement that may be the route to some kind of social change” (Leivestad 2016: 141). This aspiration involves various sentiments, which according to some youths, should be respected by Italians. Those who do not migrate should put themselves in the shoes of those who go through the experience of migration. Often imagining how migrants aspire and search for a “good life” also leads to the imagination of one’s possible migration, or the imagination for a better future for the whole society. Youths often imagine being in the migrant’s place and embarking on long and arduous journeys in their future for similar reasons. They can also refer to the amelioration of Italians’ lives, thanks to the presence of migrants and cultural diversity, as portrayed in this fourteen-year-old girl’s essay: Italy is a very diverse country from an ethnic point of view, nowadays the number of immigrants is very high. With the term “immigrant” we define all those people who come from another country, with a lighter skin, darker, with maybe a lighter color of eyes and hair of a specific color, with some face traits characteristic of their own home country, but who is really an immigrant? How does someone feel like when changing home, job, habits … who basically changes life? Well, an immigrant is who makes a big choice with courage and determination and leaves everything behind: family, friends, colleagues … and who leaves. Most of the time this departure is due to the desire of ameliorating one’s own living conditions, or even if on a smaller percentage, due to the desire, since one is a child, of living in one’s dream place. In both cases this proof of radical change should be, by many Italians, defended, admired, appreciated, and envied, but it seems that it is only judged and criticized. You wander around and hear saying: “Go back home instead of coming here to make Italy a poor country.” I am personally struck by these words, since although I am Italian, I imagine myself in another country and honestly to know I could be treated like this from people who do not even know me, who do not even know the reason why you are there on that very moment, who don’t know anything about you, this makes me think about how these poor people can feel like, who rather than being helped in a moment of change, are judged. So to conclude I would say that the presence of all these

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immigrants in Italy is useful for us, for growing up and reaching the idea that there are not barriers between a country and another one, which block the passage from a place to another, and that the world is free, inhabited by people who can decide freely where to live, without being judged because nobody is the owner of the world.

Imagination leads to the transformation of the meaning of “being a migrant,” from what is generally accepted in society to whom the essay writer thinks a migrant is. For this girl, a migrant is a person who, moved by desire, dreams, or external conditions, decides to move away from her/his past in view of a better future. The imagination of herself in a similar situation helps the girl empathize with migrants and imagine their feelings. Through these words, she reaches a possible conclusion (and semantic reintegration), according to which hosting migrants can represent an enriching experience of transformation both at the personal and the societal level. Imagination is central to these youths’ understanding of mobility. As a creative embodied and semiotic process central to human consciousness (Sartre 1973), imagination presents a “going-beyond” quality (Rapport and Overing 2000) for “transcending both physical and sociocultural distance” (Salazar 2011a: 577). Often adolescents seem to imagine what the reader or listener could think about their views concerning the migrant. A step out from their previous perspective through imagination can support them in overcoming the impasse associated with a liminal condition and can represent a form of semantic reintegration of different meanings that remain otherwise suspended. We can imagine ourselves being or becoming mobile in order to put ourselves in a migrant’s shoes and picture how a person would feel when migrating. Imagination can support us in remaking sense of the issue by creating a “third” component of meanings, where migrants’ motivations start being viewed from another perspective, where the search for a “good life” replaces the potential for committing crimes. Existential mobility and the aspiration for a “good life” become a point of connection between the Italian and the migrant rather than being at the heart of a competitive comparison: after all, “the reasons for staying put or for moving physically are closely attached to aspirations of social mobility, or, put differently: how we imagine our future to be” (Leivestad 2016: 143).

Remembering the Past, Becoming (An)Other Other times, it is the understanding of concrete and personal experiences of change from the past that helps to blur the boundaries defining the migrant and challenges the very meaning of movement. The experience of

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becoming another person and of a personal change occurring as a result of spatial movement can at times help these adolescents put themselves in the migrant’s shoes, empathize with them, and challenge premade conceptualizations about migration. The following essay is illustrative in this sense. The fourteen-year-old author, whom I will call Sofia here, interprets the issue by narrating her experience of transformation when changing from a private to a public school: Hello everybody, I am a pupil at the high school and I am glad to answer your question and I want to tell you some of my experiences on this topic after all much discussed nowadays, “immigrants in Italy.” I would like to start with a jump to the past. During the years in the kindergarten, elementary school, and the three years at the secondary school I have been in private schools, very expensive, because my father always wanted for me to attend a safe environment, people of a certain level and above all Italians. If I think again about it I think it is absurd, even a thing of “cavemen,” yet the mentality was that one. However, since I was a child I always wanted to go to a school (how can I define it?) “normal,” where it was not important if you dress in designer labels or not, and especially where it doesn’t matter if you are Italian or born in another country. So when I finished the secondary school I decided to attend a public school. “Are you scared?” my father asked me the first day of school. “About what? Instead I cannot wait,” I answered. Now months have passed since that day and if I have to be honest I am very happy that I have embarked upon this new journey! I love everybody here and especially I love the way I can relate to them by being just myself. This is true with everybody, also with who is “D.O.C.” Italian like I am! It is nice because you can relate to different cultures and customs, and discover new worlds! So I want to say that I hate racism and think that the important thing is to respect everybody! Because we are all the same, even if at times more tanned (like some mums tell their child when they see a black child), or just a bit “yellow” and slant-eyed!

The migrant is not always explicitly present in these adolescents’ texts, yet an imagined migrant’s voice can at times reverberate in their words and be invoked in its absence (Bakhtin 1986). While narrating her transformation that occurred as a result of a past movement from one school to another, Sofia comes to impersonate the other: she becomes “the migrant” in the narration. It is through this transformation that she tries to understand what the issue of migration is all about. At the beginning of the girl’s text, we are invited to move temporarily with her, to “jump into the past.” She acknowledges the perspective of her father with regard to going to a private school and being surrounded by people from the same background in a “safe environment.” However, Sofia already expresses her opinion by

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considering this view as absurd. She wants to escape from a school where people cannot dress the way they want. It is interesting to read how the girl describes the very moment of movement in the first day at a new school. She describes vividly the way she felt, as well as the divergent perspective of her father regarding this movement. Sofia makes sense of these past feelings in terms of the way she feels today, “happy to have embarked in this new journey.” She arrives at a conclusion based on her present and past feelings about the change that occurred during this journey. She now expresses her opinion against racism and in favor of a society where diversity should be respected. She transforms the meaning of the movement implied in the experience of migration into a more general experience of change, a change that she has appreciated for herself and an experience that has made her understand what migration is. After all, migration is first and foremost a matter of becoming. When adolescents acknowledge that migration, as with any form of movement, can bring about change and a potentiality to become someone else, they can accept the migrant, and elaborate different and at times divergent perspectives, by putting themselves into the migrant’s shoes or recognizing the added value for Italian society to receive migrant people. They can do it through imagination or memories, by orienting toward what it was or what might be, and therefore making the most out of semantic liminal conditions where meanings are subverted. Imagination, viewed as a process at the basis of creativity, a “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky 2004), and an expansion of experience (Zittoun and Cerchia 2013), can bring to the surface the potentiality of liminality: “Liminality is not only a transition but also a potentiality, both what is ‘going to be’ and more importantly also ‘what may be’” (Turner and Turner 1995: 3). Other times youths keep the migrant in this temporal liminal space, where she/he is not seen as a person with her characteristics but as a potentiality oriented either toward a better life or toward something evil: While bodies can be only here or there, at the level of identity and representation we can occupy multiple and even contradictory positions. … And thus before [immigrants-to-be] have physically moved they have engaged in semantic movements. … The self stretches back to encompass all the positions we have occupied and it can stretch forward to imagine future ones we may occupy. (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012: 697)

The migrant becomes a figure of potentiality, waiting for an unknown future and the not-yet character of mobility to come. In the next chapter, I explore this experience of wait in mobility.

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NOTES Parts of this chapter are based on extended and revised versions of Cangià and Pagani 2014 and Cangià 2016. The analysis of data here follows a different perspective than the one offered in the above-mentioned articles. 1. The project was conducted at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies and funded by the National Research Council (CNR-Italy) as part of the Project “Migration” of the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Cultural Heritage. 2. It is important to point out that “immigrants” is the translation of stranieri, the Italian term we used in this brief note. As a matter of fact stranieri has a slightly broader meaning than “immigrants,” as it includes the meaning of “immigrants” but also the more general meaning of “foreigners,” which in turn includes tourists, various types of migrants, refugees, and other foreign people. However, we can state that, as a general rule, the word stranieri for these pupils immediately and above all echoed the idea of “immigrants” and “refugees.” 3. The Aquarius was a vessel used to rescue refugees and illegal migrants stranded in the Mediterranean sea starting in 2016. In summer 2018, the ship spent several days at sea with 629 migrants after it was denied port by Italy and Malta. 4. Daniel Trilling, “Migrants Aren’t Spreading Coronavirus—but Nationalists Are Blaming Them Anyway,” The Guardian, 28 February 2020, retrieved 29 October 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/28/corona virus-outbreak-migrants-blamed-italy-matteo-salvini-marine-le-pen 5. Recently known also for attacks against some local antifascist libraries. 6. Statistics available at https://www.comune.roma.it/web/it/roma-statistica-popo lazione.page 7. That is, the tendency to portray oneself in a generally favorable fashion. 8. The essays were simply translated directly into English but deliberately without any grammatical editing. 9. Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual who lived between 1922 and 1975. 10. Camilla Pagani, in Diversity and Complexity (Pagani 2019), provides an interesting analysis of this movie, and in particular of some scenes with regard to the human relationship with sociocultural diversity. 11. Where Pasolini was found dead in 1975. 12. See chapter 2. 13. Marta Cosentino, “Kofi Wilson, colpito da un proiettile a Macerata,” Open Migration, 15 February 2018, retrieved 30 October 2020 from https://openmigra tion.org/analisi/kofi-wilson-colpito-da-un-proiettile-a-macerata/; James Reynolds, “Italy Migrants Attack: Macerata Shooting Reveals a Bitter National Debate,” BBC News, 12 February 2018, retrieved 30 October 2020 from https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-43030951

CHAPTER

4

Waiting as Liminal

Male Accompanying Partners in Switzerland and Beyond

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting. —John Cage, Silence

The daily rhythm of our life provides us with the reassuring sense of being oriented toward a predictable and immediate series of activities, which we are mostly able to foresee based on our routinized actions (Bourdieu 2000). We can normally say what we are going to do or what we plan to do in the next day or the next week or the next month, if we are going to work like we do every day, or if there is a forthcoming holiday. When we are catapulted out of this rhythm or when a rupturing event occurs and interrupts the flow of our routine life, however, the orientation toward this forthcoming future can stop (Jeffrey 2008). As a consequence, a person can feel trapped in the present and can enter into a state of waiting for something to go away, for something new to come, or simply for a chance to go back to the way things used to be (Hage 2009b). While at first glance waiting can seem a passive and boring experience, its passivity is ambivalent. As a form of “passive activity” or “active passivity” (Crapanzano 1985; Hage 2009b), waiting “involves both a subjection to the elements or to certain social conditions and at the same time a braving of these conditions” (Hage 2009b: 102).

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Waiting, as a form of immobility, is not simply a “slow rhythm” and a deceleration of mobility to be reaccelerated and sped up: Contrary to thinking through the event of waiting as a slowed rhythm, perhaps it does take effort and therefore some form of intentional action to wait. In other words, for the body to be immobile, it is still primarily pursuing an active purposive role of making-of-the-world and maintenance of meaning. In many ways, an active doing of waiting and how a subject comes to wait could be seen as an achievement of a specific set of ongoing embodied tasks. These might include the agentive capacity of making decisions of where to wait and what to do while waiting. (Bissell 2007: 285)

The experience of waiting can make us maintain our reassuring coordinates of sense-making or give us new ones to reformulate our lives. When waiting, a person can remake sense of the new situation and of oneself in the world. She/he can remake sense of one’s identity, anticipate the future, or reinterpret the past based on the present. I talk here about waiting because, in this chapter, I suggest that the transnational (often repeated) mobility that many professionals now experience in many work sectors can create zones of temporal immobility, where movers are forced or decide to stop and can live the passage of time differently than before. This is also—and often—the case of the partners of these professionals, those people who accompany their working partners on international assignments, quit their jobs to move with the family, start taking care of children, and at times struggle to find new employment in the destination country. These people are also known in the literature as “trailing spouses” (Cangià 2018), “secondary movers” (Tissot 2016), or “tied migrants” (Ledin et al. 2007). I explore liminality in the experience of waiting that results from the mobility of these migrants, with a special focus on the experience of men accompanying their female working partners. These men might quit their jobs before the move. They may experience a transition in their working lives, from a previous professional life to a work situation that is not yet in place, passing through a phase of unemployment, alternative employment, and a mix of feelings and uncertainty about the future. This transition is marked by a “suspension of the ordinary, takenfor-granted structures of life” (Szakolczai 2015: 28), by a condition of liminal hotspot between meanings these men associate with work, family, and masculinity (Stenner, Greco, and Motzkau 2017). Mobility for these people can become an experience of social, physical, or existential immobility: they can see no sign of progress in their career, they can feel stuck in the present and that their life is going nowhere. Time starts being experienced

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in alternative ways (Suter and Cangià 2020a). Waiting represents one of these ways: “Waiting is the tension of subjects as they exist on a boundary between a present (or even a past) world that they cannot leave and a future one that they cannot automatically or immediately enter” (Rundell 2009: 44). The sense of stuckness and the condition of waiting resulting from the move creates a liminal zone where a person can remake sense of family life, gender identities, and the current and new situation. I propose exploring the relationship between masculinity on the move and liminality through the conceptual lens of a liminal hotspot in a double sense: masculinity as emerging from the subjective experience of a transition that occurs after a rupturing event (in this case migration) and is oriented toward an unknown future; masculinity as the semantic byproduct of the dynamics of sense-making. Meanings about masculinity, being inextricably incomplete, emerge from the co-presence of, and interaction between, different and at times conflicted images and voices about becoming an accompanying partner. The interaction between images and voices can lead to a liminal condition of both/and and neither/nor, where these men define their identity neither completely with regard to work and their past self (as previously provider and professional) nor with regard to home and their present self (as contributing to domestic work). At the same time, they describe themselves as both being professional, and hence in search of a good work opportunity, and an active parent and family member enjoying this “time out.” I have conducted interviews and informal conversations with fifteen accompanying partners, of which eight were men.1 These men, despite the diversity of their backgrounds, stories, and life trajectories, have something in common: they quit their previous jobs to follow their working partners on an overseas assignment and relocate to an urban context or a small town in western Switzerland; they all move with the determination to find new employment. Very often, the job search appears to be harder than expected. At the time of the interview, they were unemployed, were unemployed shortly before, or were alternatively employed in some—at times precarious—form of occupation (e.g. freelance, temporary consultancies, cross-border commuting jobs, volunteering). Some were trying to reinvent themselves with alternative work and were actively engaged in activities organized for spouses on how to open a business in Switzerland. They all used to be fully or temporarily employed in a job corresponding to their level of education and expertise before migration. The interviews (lasting up to two hours) were held at a time and place chosen by participants, usually a public space such as a coffee bar or restaurant. Questions concerned their migratory trajectory with their family, everyday life in Switzerland, social networks, work situation, and future

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plans. The interviews were conducted in ways that enabled people to freely propose new topics during the course of the conversation (e.g. concerns about job search, family life, ideas on possible alternatives or future destinations). Exchanges between the researcher and the respondents concerning respective migration and working life proved to be an advantage in allowing people to talk about their personal experiences. My being a foreigner living in Switzerland facilitated exchanges on the issue of migration, as some of these men demonstrated curiosity about my migratory trajectory and my past experience of being accompanied by my partner in international mobility. The fact that I am a researcher and that I work in a context—academia—commonly recognized in Europe as being highly precarious (Lempiäinen 2015) helped me create an understanding with these men and share ideas about career trajectories and future planning under conditions of job insecurity. My experiential and emotional affinity to these people’s stories, as well as my personal feelings and thoughts, played a role in and after the interviews, in particular with regard to my motivation to conduct this project and the choice of, and the emotional response to, the specific topic under exploration (Ellis 2003). What are the understandings of “being a man” emerging in these migrants’ experience of work transitions, in the wait for work, and in the suspension between various conflicted meanings? How do these meanings and voices interact? How does the development of alternative skills to use in view of future moves and unexpected trajectories contribute to revisiting given images of a working man? How does remaking sense of this transitional phase affect one’s sense of being the nonworking partner and a parent?

What in the Name of Mobility: Moving Family, Moving Gender The mobility of professionals commonly refers to the transnational relocation of “highly skilled migrants,” a notion often easily associated with the image of “privileged” and “economically wanted” people, who migrate across countries predominantly through the channel of work migration (Cangià and Zittoun 2018; Hercog and Sandoz 2018; Smith and Favell 2006). While in the past this form of mobility has commonly been connected to the work of diplomats, it now touches the lives of a diverse group of people, both in terms of education, gender, ethnicity, and legal status. People with high qualification and skills in a specific sector can also migrate for reasons other than work, as in the case of refugees and asylum seekers (Mozeticˇ 2018). Qualified migrants very often include people who in the destination country of migration do not manage to work or do work at a different level than their qualification for various reasons.

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Moving through a work-related migration channel, mobile professionals often conform to the demands of the contemporary world of work and to the “imperative of mobility” (Bilecen and Mol 2017). According to this imperative, employees are told to change work destination and often their assignment within the same company as a requirement for “excellence,” success, and “good performance.” The more a person is able and ready to move internationally, the more s/he is expected to show “adaptability” and “flexibility” to work (Cangià 2019; Montulet and Mincke 2019). In the context of corporate life, international mobility becomes necessary in order to develop transferable skills and show “employability” (Smith and Favell 2006). In the context of academic work, in turn, staying abroad, visiting a new academic environment, helps “broaden academic horizons” (Schaer, Dahinden, and Toader 2017: 1292) and create significant and transnational research collaborations. All this comes at a cost for mobile professionals. These people can experience insecurity with regard to their flexible and temporary contracts, fear of losing their jobs, and constant change of work destination (Bourdieu 1999; Doogan 2015). Precarious working conditions, ranging from unemployment or temporary employment to freelance and self-employed occupations now characterize the career and life trajectories of these workers (Bourdieu 1999; Castel 2002; Della Porta et al. 2015; Cooper 2014; Standing 2014). Repeated geographical mobility and change of work assignment, while being valued as important for professional and social mobility, at times can create fragmented career paths and intensify the individual sense of job insecurity (Callea, Caggiano, and Ballone 2009). These diversified career paths, while enriching one’s profile and skills, can at times complicate the identification of personal professional specificity. Mobile professionals often move with their families, and their mobile work trajectories can have an impact on their family lives and arrangements. While the so-called dual career couple, where both partners negotiate their work trajectories in order to continue their careers on the move, has become the norm for many families (Hardill 2002), partners can at times choose to quit their jobs and take care of family duties. The experience of mobility can hence have an impact on partners’ plans and work lives, with experienced ruptures in professional trajectories and various challenges with regard to the relocation process. These can include loss of occupation, lack of social network in the arrival destination, or issues relating to work permits. Some types of short-term permit, for example, can create an obstacle in the job search and application process. These types of permit can be easily associated with constant movement, and local employers can show a preference for employing someone who will probably not need to move again (Permits Foundation 2008). Challenges can also pertain to more subjective experiences relating

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to the interruption of work and the change of environment, as well as to the confrontation with dominant representations concerning work and gender (Cole 2012; Harvey and Wiese 1998). Moving across countries, while offering interesting opportunities for self-exploration, can also create a sense of disorientation and uncertainty regarding the future, in particular as a result of the transition from a routine of everyday working life to unemployment. A sense of precariousness for these partners can relate to the flexibility to move—often required of, or chosen from, their working partners—to the breaks in professional histories and uncertainty regarding the next step in their career trajectory, as well as to the making and unmaking of their occupational identities (Cangià 2018). The perceived risk of job loss and temporary contracts of their working partners can also affect the way accompanying partners experience job search and the social expectation to find employment within a reasonable time (especially for men). For these partners, usually in charge of the more practical relocation and settling-in process, the “adjustment” to the host country can be harder than for the working partner, who generally continues to rely on the workplace as a possible anchorage in the new environment (Ravasi, Salamin, and Davoine 2013). At the same time, partners’ emotional and practical support has been viewed as a relevant aspect in assignees’ “effectiveness” (Lauring and Selmer 2010; Cole 2011) and target of great attention from the part of the employers. The provision of dual career programs for spouses (job search assistance, language courses, “intercultural training”), also through specific associations like the International Dual Career Network (IDCN) and university welcome centers, hence become an integral part of the relocation agenda of companies, organizations, and academic institutions (Levitan, Zittoun, and Cangià 2018). Gender plays a significant role in the way in which these men experience the rupturing event of migration as an accompanying partner. While recognizing the increasing presence of dual-career couples, where both partners negotiate their work trajectories in order to continue their mobile careers, studies have identified the imperative of mobility as an important factor contributing to the maintenance of gender inequality in some professional sectors (e.g. academia) (Ackers 2004; Schaer, Dahinden, and Toader 2017; Jöns 2011). Gender works hence “as a powerful machine for movement” (Elliot 2016: 80), by shaping the social and cultural expectations and imaginaries on how men and women are supposed to move as a couple. An increasing number of women nowadays become expatriate employees and move with their male partners. This is an interesting phenomenon, considering that accompanying one’s partner in overseas assignments has long been associated with the image of a male-led migration supported by a nonworking wife, as well as with the dominant masculinity of some highly skilled

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work sectors (Callan and Ardener 1984). However, gender differences still characterize the career and family arrangements of these mobile couples, with a relatively high proportion of female partners abandoning their work plans for family ties (Riaño and Baghdadi 2007). Mobility both reproduces gender inequalities and is shaped by preexisting gender relations within the household (Kofman and Raghuram 2005). The quality of temporariness associated with being relocated as an accompanying partner and being out of work is often affected by gender and family roles and expectations (Shaw 1992) and can in turn affect the subjective experience of parenthood. While often concerned with their professional lives and the possible gaps in their career trajectories, many women can interpret the temporary experience of becoming a mother as a socially accepted reason to stop working, to be “out of work,” to follow their partner and take care of children. In contrast to male accompanying partners, women who face difficulties in integrating in the local job market tend to choose to focus on children (Yeoh and Willis 2005), especially in the case of Switzerland where finding a space in childcare institutions is not always easy and affordable (Tissot 2016). For men, the decision to follow the female partner is usually based on economic and work-based evaluation, on who has the job that is better paid and with greater career prospects at the time of migration. The decision to move is thus not followed by a decision to stop working altogether. The usual plan for these people is to quit their current jobs yet start looking for a new one as soon as possible in the new destination. Male partners appear to experience greater social pressure to go back to work and “hurry up” finding new employment. A major concern for men relates to the long time spent out of the labor market and the temporal “gap” in their career trajectory, with them frequently describing the need to justify this gap to possible future employers. They report tension between the urgency to find a new job (especially considering the pressure of being a man with no job and not contributing to the household), on the one hand, and the value of time for self-exploration and family, on the other. Gender, as a socially and relationally constructed category (Butler 2015; Lutz 2010), is both reproduced and transformed by these men. Accompanying partners can reproduce gender norms from which they may be affected, yet they can simultaneously challenge meanings and reinterpret gendered identities, and the notions of family, work, and time (Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019; Suter and Cangià 2020a), through considering their intimate relations, their personal experience, and the surrounding environment. Mobility can also be an occasion for renegotiating and transforming gender relations within the partnership, especially for those couples where both partners work and invest in their careers (Coles and Fechter 2012; Schaer, Dahinden, and Toader 2017). At times, accompanying

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partners can be confronted with a change in the previous couple arrangements and can try to reconfigure gender patterns. Being at home and out of labor time can also be considered and practiced as an opportunity for sustaining family ties while at the same time fulfilling family and social obligations (Suter and Cangià 2020a). *** In Switzerland, various cities and regions now attract international newcomers, due to the increasing number of companies and international humanitarian organizations. Switzerland has recently become an attractive destination for these mobile workers, in view of career opportunities, as well as the quality of family life. Over half of all migrants of working age in the country are highly qualified (Swiss Federal Statistical Office 2016). Also, in the context of academia, a number of international programs attracting people from around the world have been recently established. Transnational mobility currently represents a formal requirement for obtaining a professorship or funding opportunities in Swiss universities (Toader and Dahinden 2018). Switzerland hence represents an interesting context in which to explore the mobility of professionals and their partners. Whereas the choice of relocating to Switzerland can be based on the idea of this country as characterized by a promising labor market where one can easily find a job, once arrived, a different situation is often reported. Switzerland is described as a place where people do not feel welcome with regard to work, and where certain previous ideas about work have to be reviewed for adjustment (Cangià 2019). It is described as a “closed” labor market with “its own rules” and with fewer work opportunities than expected, where employers tend to favor “locals” or younger people with “less experience,” and where building social networks becomes crucial (Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019). The high cost of life here may also represent an additional concern for these people, who may view their economic contribution to the household as crucial. Male and female accompanying partners here, while sharing similar concerns, can relate to the relocation process in different ways, with regard to gender roles and their position within the family and within the surrounding social context (Anderson 2001; Copeland and Norell 2002). Men may face stronger feelings of isolation and challenges concerning the change in their status, especially when they are confronted with a larger population of working men among expatriates, as in the case of Switzerland (Davoine et al. 2013). Male accompanying partners sometimes find building up a social network difficult in a situation where the overwhelming majority of accompanying partners are women. However, gender norms appear to be

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relatively flexible in the urban spaces of Switzerland. The relatively small presence of male accompanying partners can even play out as a form of “exotic bonus” (Davoine et al. 2013), involving particular consideration and treatment that can at times facilitate their interaction with the locality. Men may encounter other male accompanying partners in Switzerland through various social fields, and this can help alleviate their sense of isolation. This can be especially true in the case of what is often considered to be a “privileged” form of migration, as in the case of highly qualified migrants, which can often come from cultural environments where gender equality is a norm. In the case of female accompanying partners, maternity, while representing a socially accepted reason to stop working, can also work as an additional challenge. Other obstacles and reasons for refusal from the part of the employers include local language skills, skill mismatch, and difficult recognition of international educational certificates. As a result, some partners start looking for a job across borders, and may even consider the possibility of changing country and leaving their family behind. The migration to a new country as an accompanying partner can represent a rupturing event in which the time previously marked by everyday working routine is altered, suddenly slowed down, and comes to be experienced in a context outside of the labor market (Jeffrey 2010a). Accompanying partners at times describe a feeling similar to what Jeffrey has called “having a surplus time” (Jeffrey 2008), a period in addition to the usual time dedicated to job search, which can be spent on personal hobbies and interests, for the family and any other matter that does not include work. For men who used to be employed mostly full time in the past, this represents a very new situation. Previously active in the fast and predictable rhythm of their quotidian (as they often describe their past as professionals) these men now spend lots of time at home, taking care of children or bringing them to school, cooking, cleaning, or running errands. These men implicitly describe a condition of “waiting out” (Hage 2009a) for the unemployment phase to be over, and waiting for a new job and new opportunities to come. They can feel stuck in a temporal suspension with no sign of social or personal progress (Cangià 2020). This condition presents different emotional tones and a specific character of ambivalence. Men may experience uncertainty or excitement about what comes next (at times they can engage in imagining business ideas or work alternatives). They may feel anxious and frustrated due to the absence of work, yet at the same time they enjoy having a space for self-development or family time. Having surplus time can be associated with a feeling of “heightened suspense” (Jeffrey 2008) and with certain expectations regarding employment, financial independence, or gender equality. This temporal suspense may be amplified by

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a feeling of “lost time” and of being left behind (Jeffrey 2008). People can feel excluded by the local labor market, they may feel trapped into altered social categories (a man following his breadwinner wife), and they may be unable to conform to the social time of work (Ÿian 2004). These men are at times unable to imagine a stable and proximate reassuring future, and they oscillate between moments of urgency to look for a job and moments of profound boredom and demotivation for job search. In this oscillation, they relate to and play with gendered stereotypes. On the one hand, they feel a continuous pressure from others to quickly find a job, the frustration in sending applications and being rejected or not receiving any response, as well as the concern about not contributing financially to the household. On the other, they can joke about the fact that they are men enjoying their free time while women work hard; or they can even wonder whether staying at home full time should be a condition only for “nonworking moms,” or if also a man could proudly be and remain a “nonworking dad” after all. Paradoxically enough, imagining possible alternative paths (e.g. study at the university) clashes with the need to wait for employment in order to have the financial resources for paying for these paths. The following are the words of Yannick, a man in his forties who accompanied his partner to Switzerland for her assignment in a multinational company: “I think I would like to do another degree in political sciences … but I am waiting to find a job … because it’s not fair … I don’t feel comfortable because my wife is working and I’m not.” In the transition from stable and at times powerful jobs to being unemployed or working in jobs that are not up to their qualification, these men start questioning their own professional and personal position in the surrounding society and in the family. Some report a gap between the level of their expertise and actual work opportunities, between the way they feel about themselves and the way others recognize them in the job market. However, these people do not experience this phase of their life in a passive manner. They can reappropriate this “slow but potentially fruitful time of waiting” (Griffiths 2014: 1996) and remake sense of it through new practices. They can reinterpret the temporariness of mobility, which puts into question their professional, gender, and personal identities, as a transformative space (Cangià 2018; Suter and Cangià 2020a). While being at times characterized by a sense of social, professional, and physical immobility, this transition can also be associated with temporariness and exceptional status. The temporariness and exceptionality associated with this phase, and with the possibility to migrate again or to finally find a job, represents a quality that makes these people better able to deal with the difficulties of being unemployed (Slobodin 2018) and to keep picturing a better future.

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From Professional to Full-Time Dad As already discussed, these men can experience a rupture in their working life, a temporal suspension with no progress in their career and social life, and a feeling of stuckness in a transition between a previous professional life, the endless present of unemployment, and a future condition of work that is still unknown. In this blocked transition, they may feel they are losing the coordinates of their professional and family-related identity and may start to experience a new rhythm in their life as full-time dads. Nicolas migrated to Switzerland to follow his female partner during her international assignment for a multinational company. Once in Switzerland, he says, he found himself in a very different situation taking care of children and the household and having more time to spend during the day: “I used to work a lot, and for me at the beginning it was kind of hard … because I also missed my life and job, being in charge of all this, talking with a lot of people, working, and now most of the time I’m alone home doing different things, and of course I have friends, things to do in the morning but it’s different, it’s not the same.” These men may be confronted with a sense of social immobility, the sense that their career is blocked and that this moment will represent a visible gap in their résumé. Yet they may be driven by the imaginative mobilization of new skills and meanings with regard to this transitional phase. These partners are confronted with cultural values and gendered expectations regarding work, social, and family life (e.g. the man as the breadwinner in the family) but may transform common cultural values on gender into more personal and affective meanings. With the (re)making of family relations within the household, these partners’ sense of masculinity may be challenged not only in the professional and social domain but also in their more intimate and domestic life. Hopkins and Noble, in their idea of “mobile masculinities” (Hopkins and Noble 2009), aptly describe how migration entails a reworking of gender relations and reinterpretation of gender norms and orders: “Migration entails a constant reworking of masculinity in which tensions between gender ideologies in the homeland and the country of settlement, a renegotiation of work and social life within changing networks of family and employment, in which gender, ethnicity and class are much more complicated than singular relations of identity and power” (Hopkins and Noble 2009: 815). I view meanings about masculinity as constantly changing not only across space (from a unilateral movement from A to B and related gender norms) but also across the various contexts in which these people happen to live, travel, and confront with gendered meanings: “Masculinity is, in essence, a liminal conception that changes in form, is dependent on time and context,

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and is performed in line with the interpretation of certain situational cues. Masculinity is thus what men do as opposed to who they are” (Doyle 2016: 198–99). In these partners’ words, dominant representations of gender roles manifest at three interrelated levels: the structure of the job market, with a population of expatriate managers still dominated by men who could not understand a man following his wife; social expectations and perceived pressure from others to quickly find a job; and the way they feel about themselves and about the change in their professional and family life (Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019). The kind of cultural values and norms they relate to, including gender, is all but homogeneous. In general, these men refer mostly to an “international” and “expat” network of people, a context in which meanings associated with gender can vary greatly. However, these men demonstrate being affected by the common gendered images of the man as normally being the breadwinner and the women as the homemaker (Suter and Cangià 2020). Meanings of masculinity emerge from, and remain suspended in, an ambivalent movement across gender norms, concrete opportunities, and constraints, people’s more intimate life-worlds and affective experiences. After some time, the wait and the status of nonworking become “normal” for these men. They stop interpreting this condition through the lens of cultural representations concerning gender and start evaluating it on the basis of family relations and intimate lives. Nicolas once again offers a good example in this sense. In this part of our conversation, Nicolas’s words demonstrate how changes in the couple’s male and female roles are to be also viewed in terms of family relationships, as an occasion for sustaining intimate ties and fulfilling other forms of social obligations (act as a father and participate actively in the household): N: This is also a good change for me, because back home I was really a workaholic, so I spent most of my time at work, I used to leave early, like at seven, seven thirty and then be back very late, like seven, eight P.M. So, I didn’t look after my children, and my wife and my grandparents were in charge of them, and now it’s the opposite. F: How do you feel about this? N: Very good, I like it. For me it’s an opportunity to reconnect with them. It’s not easy because you have a lot of responsibilities, which is something that we don’t realize when we are working, we always say or we always think that staying at home is easy, because you don’t have pressure or you don’t have any real responsibility. It’s like some perspective that we as Latin Americans have, maybe the “macho” point of view, you know what I mean?

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In what follows, I explore the cases of Jerome, Victor, and Yannick, who are men aged between thirty-five and forty-two coming from different countries across Europe and North Africa. They have followed their female partners, all of whom are employed by multinational companies. Jerome, Victor, and Yannick used to be employed at the professional level before the move. Each experience for these men is unique, and each presents some particularities linked to their specific past and current life in and beyond Switzerland. However, I view these cases in a continuum, as variations of the same phenomenon at stake, namely the liminal character of the meanings associated with masculinity. Meanings of masculinities emerge from these people’s experience of work transition; from the stuckness between a past professional life and current unemployment and the wait for a new job; from the internal conversation between various voices and meanings interacting during the narration on becoming an accompanying partner. The explored cases bring to the fore the ambivalent nature of these work transitions, highly affected both by family and working life. The cases also shed light on the dialogical nature of masculinity. Meanings of masculinity bring together, in ambivalent yet imaginative ways, different voices on gender norms, on the local sociocultural and institutional opportunities and constraints, and on these individuals’ unique biographies. These men can semantically move around their new identity as a man who accompanies his female working partner in ambivalent ways. They can reconsider the opportunity of having free time as a chance to remake sense of their new role in the family. Or, they can live the new experience resulting from the move and be forced to remake sense of their new position. Jerome, Yannick and Victor clearly illustrate these dynamics. I will go on to introduce Jerome’s experience and the image of the role model provider.

The Role Model Provider The first time Jerome and I met, he had just moved to Switzerland with his family to follow his female partner, who was recently relocated with her company. The move to Switzerland is not the first experience of migration for this couple. Before arriving here, they both used to work. Unemployment is a new situation for Jerome. He tells me that he is surprised to find out that looking for a job in Switzerland is much harder than he expected. He explains that his certificates and qualifications are not recognized here, and his knowledge of the local language and years of professional experience do not suffice in helping him find a job. The “specificity of the local job market,” he explains, is what makes him experience a big rupture in his work trajectory and professional identity. During this time of unemployment,

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Jerome takes care of the household and the family. His understanding of being a nonworking and stay-at-home man is ambivalent. During the first interview, he resisted his new identity position by remaining silent on this topic (Nagar-Ron and Motzafi-Haller 2011). When I ask to talk about his feelings about accompanying his partner and being unemployed, during this first encounter, he dis-identifies from this position (Goffman 1986). There is nothing “weird” about staying at home, as Jerome says his relationship with his wife is based on equality, and they are used to negotiating household chores: [Being a stay-at-home man] was never like this [weird] for me because even when I was working, I was doing the same. We were sharing everything … even when I was younger and living in my parents’ house, I was doing this [laughter]. … This is something that in my education, let’s say, is normal. But if one of the two is working, this is something that might also be the same for the woman if the woman is at home. So, if one is working and not the other, the one who’s working considers that the other has to do all the stuff at home. While, if both are working, they are sharing.

When talking specifically about Switzerland, he continues by making sense of housekeeping and childrearing as not relating to gender differences, as tasks equally shared between the partners. The words of others, like people in his social network, reverberate in Jerome’s narrative and influence the way he makes sense of couple relations and gender equality: “I have heard from many that in Switzerland women have to take care of the kids and stay at home. For example, on Wednesday all women have to stay at home, taking care of the kids. I don’t agree with this vision, I’m doing it. … I have some, some couples around me … alternating in taking care of children … The man one Wednesday, the woman the other Wednesday.” Here, Jerome constructs a “semantic barrier” based on an idea of essential sameness (Gillespie, Kadianaki, and O’Sullivan-Lago 2012) between his partner and himself. He does so in order to resist the image of a man as the breadwinner: apart from financial reasons like the household relying on a single salary and some external pressure from society, being a man in the house has never been a problem for Jerome (Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019). This essential sameness is thus based on a constructed similarity between Jerome and his partner by using past images of them working, or the model and voices of other real people. Being a male accompanying partner today is repositioned semantically in his words, from the gendered image of the breadwinner man to the more equally oriented image of the couple. I meet Jerome again a year later at a coffee shop on Lake Leman. Jerome looks more engaged when talking with me about his difficult job-search

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situation of this time. The process of settling in in Switzerland is over now, and Jerome and his family have made their home here. However, he explains how difficult the job search has become, and that he is now considering looking for employment in nearby countries. He does not bring up the fact that he is still the nonworking partner. At the end of this second meeting, I ask Jerome if he wants to add anything. He spontaneously starts talking about his role as a father in the house. Here, the very same meaning of the man as the provider in the household that was resisted before emerges through the quoted voice of an external other (Aveling, Gillespie, and Cornish 2015): [I would like to add something] about the home work and all the stuff, [about] the fact that I’m a man. Actually, as I told you, I don’t consider it like this, but it’s maybe something genetic, I would say [laughter]. Because it’s related to our kid, we have this support and so on. And we’ve been talking with a person who was saying, “Yeah, in fact, for you, as a man, it’s very difficult, because you have to show for your child, for your child the status of a man, of the father. But at the same time you are not working, and you’re taking care of the household.” Maybe I was not aware of it before, but yeah, it’s something very hard. I wouldn’t say that it’s the fact that I’m a man, but it’s more the fact that I’m not working, and by the way I have to give the example and the model of a man for my child.

Jerome now seems to recognize and embrace his position as a male accompanying partner with regard to his role within the family. The “counselor” with whom Jerome talked about his situation comes, in his narration, to verbalize all the concerns about the parent model. The expected role model as a man and father that he should exemplify for his own child comes now to define what being a man means for Jerome. Previously when he has spoken about the relationship with his wife, an idea of equality seems to alleviate the tension between different social and personal meanings and voices. It is then in the parent-child relation and in the liminal passage from being a “working father” to being a “stay-at-home father” that the ambivalence between identities, meanings, and images comes to the surface. In a liminal hotspot condition, the two components of meaning regarding the new situation interact, and what has been so far does not vanish completely (Salvatore and Venuleo 2017). The rupturing event for Jerome of becoming an accompanying partner, while being in line with the semantic scenario of a past equally gendered relationship first, comes in contrast to the past semantic scenario of being the breadwinning figure in the family. The liminal passage as a male accompanying partner can also make a man change ideas about cultural stereotypes, feel more comfortable with

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his new role in the family, and, as a result, reposition himself vis-à-vis the boundary between oneself and others. However, this process of selfrepositioning can again be contrary to social expectations and family obligations. The case of Yannick illustrates how the wait can become a valuable time for personal development and partly contribute to revisiting personal roles in the household.

The Housekeeper Yannick arrived with his family in Switzerland in 2014. After years of international mobility with his partner as a dual career couple, changing employment every time with no problem at all, Yannick is now experiencing unemployment. Before moving, he decided to quit his job based on the expectation that he would easily find new employment once in Switzerland. He has been looking for employment since then. During our first interview, Yannick talks a lot about his interests and hobbies, in particular learning new languages, reading books, and being well-informed about politics. The positive aspect of being unemployed, he explains, is that he finally has plenty of time to take care of his own interests and personal development, but also to spend with his child: “I have time and I want to use this time in a productive way, ’cause if I find a full-time job, it’s not going to be possible anymore,” he explains. Being at home entails taking care of the household, a task that Yannick accepts and is also starting to enjoy: “I try to combine some language learning with some housework,” he continues. After approximately one year, we meet again. Yannick has become used to taking care of the household, he explains, and being the housekeeper does not appear to be as bad as it was at the beginning. After all, he says, while he has not contributed financially to the household, his work at home has become important: It’s always a dilemma for me that even if I manage to find a job, it would be great in terms of more income for us and the fact that I would finally be doing something productive, but now we have settled really well into these family roles. My wife works and I stay home and look after everything in the household: all the work in the house, the laundry, ironing, cooking, shopping, and looking after our child so it’s perfect. If I found a job, somehow the balance would be interrupted.

It is with regard to the housework that various meanings and voices meet in Yannick’s words, in a liminal space in which he can neither completely accept not being a professional anymore nor feel fully comfortable with becoming a housekeeper altogether and quitting the job search. Yannick

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recognizes the important value of spending time for personal development and for sustaining his family relationships. Having free time gives him the opportunity to improve his language skills, to strengthen his relationship with his child, or to become “stronger and more balanced so I don’t get stressed or angry, ’cause as a parent, I would improve my parenting skills,” he says. Exhausted by the long job search, Yannick starts enjoying his new role as a housekeeper. However, his words resonate with various meanings and voices that differently interact in his narration. The presence of an inner “real” other’s voice (Bakhtin 1982; Irving 2011) here is relevant. While Yannick accepts his role as a housekeeper, in his words this view is often challenged by the presence of his wife. On the one hand, she criticizes the way he takes care of housekeeping: There are some tensions sometimes like she says, “Oh, look at the dust—when was the last time you dusted in the living room,” and I’m like, “Oh come on, last week” [laughter]. Then I’m like, “You know one day I’ll find a job and we will have someone to do it.” [laughter] … Sometimes she is like, “Oh, where is my shirt?” and I’m like, “It’s downstairs, I have to iron it but you have other shirts.” “No, but I want that shirt!” Things like that because she is like, “Oh, if I was at home like you everything would have been perfectly done in time and you never iron on time” [laughter].

On the other hand, according to Yannick, she feels “relieved” that he takes care of these tasks in the household. The voice of his partner intertwines with the voice of a “generalized” Other (Aveling, Gillespie, and Cornish 2015), of those who press men to find a job, as well as with the uncertain and precarious work conditions that make the household relying on a single salary insecure. When asked about how he feels concerning the possibility to quit looking for a job altogether, Yannick continues: I said to my wife the same thing, yeah I did, I meet so many moms at school and they haven’t worked for years, for ten or more years, and they’re okay. They have two or three children so it’s even more work and it’s kind of necessary really to be at home but for them nobody is asking the work question: What do you do, when are you going to work? … For me, like for nonworking dads, that’s always a question, like, “When are you going to find a job, when are you going back to work?” Do I really have to, you know. … We need more income but for now we can survive with [her] salary. … We can definitely live a good life but there is no security ’cause things can happen and there is always some process of restructuring and some people get fired. So it could also happen to my wife, and in that case there would be problems, so in that respect

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it would be good if I worked to have some security … because she feels the pressure of being responsible for the whole family. She’s like, “What if I get sick, what if I cannot work anymore, what if something happens if I get fired?” Then I say to her, “Okay I’m joking,” but try to look at the positive side, look at these other moms not working and nobody’s asking them to go back to work.

Yannick accepts staying at home and not working, after all, if this means having time to develop his interests, while contributing to the housekeeping and childrearing. He accepts it especially if it gives him an opportunity to become a “better person,” a “better father,” while undertaking all the housekeeping tasks: cooking, gardening, taking the child to school, and grocery shopping. Housekeeping for a man, from being a frustrating business, becomes a skillful and enjoyable activity. Masculinity starts interacting with home, intimate, and domestic life. This, however, is in constant tension with more socially shared meanings and voices, which require a man to contribute financially to the household, as well as with the personal experience of this infinite wait for a job, including the negative responses from employers. Yannick’s words illustrate how two main dimensions, one more personal and the other more social, can interact and make masculinity emerge in a semantic liminal hotspot of both/and and neither/nor: on the one hand, the wait as quality time spent with the family and for one’s personal development, a more subjective aspect that blurs the boundaries between female and male partners (Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019; Wimmer 2008); on the other, waiting as charged with the social pressure of having to find a job as a guy, which reconstitutes the boundary between the “nonworking moms” and the “nonworking dads.” While remaking sense of the new unexpected situation, a person can also transform the dimension of self-evaluation (Miller 2002) and the resulting meaning of becoming an accompanying partner. This can make one look at the new experience of being a stay-at-home dad from a new perspective, at times as a positive opportunity, at other times in a more ambivalent way, like in the case of Victor.

The Full-Time Dad Victor arrived in Switzerland in 2014 with his family, when his partner was relocated for work. Before that, they lived separately for long time. The choice to reunite and relocate together to a new place was based on the birth of their first child. This is when Victor decided to quit his job, become full-time father, and take paternity leave, until he finds new employment in the new destination:

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We then decided that I would take two months paternity leave, which for me meant that for those two months I wouldn’t receive any pay from my work from my employer but I would receive the government’s stipend. … So it meant a little money came in, but then the opportunity to move here to take time out to be a full-time father is really good for guys. To actually have the opportunity to do that or even to consider the possibility.

Once in Switzerland, however, Victor had problems finding a new job. He realized that being at home as a full-time dad is different from what he expected. During our interview, he vividly recalls the difficult experience of becoming an accompanying partner when relocating to Switzerland. This transitional experience allowed him to have more time to spend with the family, yet it also led to an increase in domestic work and family duties, to feelings of “guilt” for not being able to support the family financially, and to an “unequal” relationship within the couple: The first few months were very difficult for me. … We [Victor and his wife] had always been very equal in terms of our relationship and … although income levels were different we were always very level in terms of the type of work and the intensity of work that we were doing, and suddenly we moved here. I was the only one looking after my daughter, I had no social circle around me, I had no support network, while Margaret had a really exciting job in the company and was reconnecting with a lot of her old work colleagues who were still here in Switzerland. So we had a very unequal relationship. That has changed and we have worked through those difficulties. Once we were able to get our child into a crèche I started volunteering.

His experience of not working is measured against his wife’s working life. Whereas she moves on in her career, he stays home. Their positions in the family, while being always “level” in terms of timing and type of work, have been affected by the move to Switzerland. When asked about the time spent at home and taking care of the child, he expresses ambivalent feelings and opinions: It’s one of the great opportunities as a guy to take time off, to look after your child full time, so that was fantastic you know, but it was also really hard work when your wife’s working, and Margaret was traveling abroad a lot. I was isolated, didn’t have a social network, didn’t have a support network, and the kinds of conversations that we had when Margaret would come home was lots of “Work’s great! And I had a really interesting lunch with this person and great time with this person” [enthusiastic voice], and I’m going [changes voice], “Yeah the kid has slept for two hours, and she’s used this number of nappies.” So the

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level of equality between us had totally changed. Margaret was earning the money and I wasn’t contributing financially at all and was feeling guilty about spending money on some of my clothes.

The time spent as a full-time dad, while being a voluntary choice on the occasion of the move, brings about ambivalent feelings for Victor concerning his new role in the household, as the nonprovider on the one hand, and a contributor to housekeeping and childrearing on the other. Two main images, related meanings and imagined voices that iterate these conflicted meanings, are co-present: on the one hand, there is Victor who in the past used to contribute financially and was equal to his partner; on the other, there is a spouse who contributes to the household, but not financially. He recognizes the importance of taking care of family duties, yet these meanings remain suspended in a liminal space, where Victor activates a form of ambivalent resistance between being both/neither a full-time worker and/ nor a full-time dad. Victor did not accept being a spouse in the house, he wanted to contribute financially and felt frustrated by this new situation of inequality between him and his partner. At the same time, he recognized the importance of being a full-time father. Being a man becomes an ambivalent mixture of responsibility as an active part of the family (symbolized by his opinion about the importance of paternity) and the unavoidable financial contribution that the guy should be able to provide for his family. Recently, Victor managed to find temporary employment. With lots of determination, he managed to reinvent himself based on the needs of the company and his own personal and professional profile. He now works as a consultant, freelancing on the basis of his past professional experience, his previous volunteering job during his unemployed time in Switzerland, his past life working internationally, and his family background. Victor perfectly illustrates the tension between generalized semantic scenarios (i.e. the man as the breadwinner), his feelings, and the social recognition of the contribution that full-time dads provide, a recognition that he dialogically ventriloquizes through the voice of a symbolic other in a quoted or imagined conversation (Bakhtin 1982). This is evident when he explains how he felt when earning money after long unemployment: The first time that some money came in from my first contract it was just like, “Hey!” [happy voice] and you know as a guy I started thinking about it, and I know, “Hey, you’re making a contribution to your house by not working, by looking after your child.” Yeah but I’m a guy, part of my kind of upbringing and brainwashing and gender stereotyping is that I earn money. That’s what I’ve been told to do ever since I was a kid, so actually bringing money into the house yeah that felt good.

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Yet this job still keeps him in a liminal position where he could not completely place his own and his family life. Where are they going to live next? What comes next when the contract is over? For Jerome, Yannick, and Victor, various meanings of masculinity emerge in the transition from being full-time professional workers and providers in the family to being temporarily unemployed and responsible for housekeeping and childcare. While being at home and waiting for a new job, these men reflect on their personal role in the household vis-à-vis their working partners and the larger society that expects them to “hurry up” to go back to work. The end state of this period of waiting for Victor, Yannick, and Jerome could be staying “nonworking dad and partner.” Victor resists this because he finds that it clashes with his identity as a father. Yannick faces his partner’s complaint about housekeeping techniques (he leaves dust, and perhaps he cannot take it seriously enough). Jerome, in turn, struggles with the idea of being the only one responsible for household tasks (as if his masculinity was compatible with sharing these tasks but not with leading them). In these ways, all get “blocked” and “heated” in the hotspot of being an accompanying partner. Resulting meanings about masculinity are the byproduct of dynamics of sense-(re)making, where different and at times conflicted voices are co-present and interact. The affective and semantic scenario of the previous condition (being a professional and the provider) does not fade away and interact in ambivalent ways with meanings associated with the new situation and the future. This phase is not an “uneventful waiting” but a time of transformation in which a person can experience oneself “as a split between past and future” (Kowal 2009: 213). The present for these men is informed by an anticipated image of themselves in the future, as professionals and male breadwinners again or as unemployed and nonworking parents. At the same time, these men reinterpret themselves in the past as, at times, “workaholic” professionals in view of their present as full-time parents while revisiting their idea of the world of work and its accelerated rhythm through a new lens. Meanings of masculinity remain suspended between distinct times, spaces, norms, and values. On the one hand, there is a past life, including the dominant social and cultural expectations about work and gender, which define masculinity through its interplay with work, the breadwinner role, and a career. On the other hand, there is the present and more private life, including family obligations and personal desires and feelings, which define masculinity through its interplay with home, intimate life, and family. Both/neither work and/nor home are co-present and relevant in the way these men make sense of and value masculinity. The sense of security in returning to a reintegration stage (e.g. finally finding a new job, going back to being a working parent) and the creative possibilities that

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a liminal experience can bring about (Turner 1969) are what makes this phase everything but a passive wait, and rather a space for self-reflection and imagination. It is in the exceptionality of this phase and the creative power of imagination associated with it that people find a way out from the infinite character of their wait.

A Way Out? Imagination and the Not-Yet The alteration of personal and social identity resulting from job loss and from a new routine as the nonworking person in the family is an important aspect characterizing the mobility of accompanying partners, both men and women. The shift to the new role in the family, in particular, can affect these people’s self-image, the way they feel about what they do in the course of their everyday life, and how others recognize them (Jenkins 2008; Lamont 1992). These people can act upon the new temporal and material conditions resulting from mobility by reconsidering past life in order to make sense of the not-yet character of their work and life trajectories. Accepting the new role as an accompanying partner, far from being only an experience of immobility on multiple levels, can become a creative and imaginative process. These people can imaginatively use the diversity of the surrounding cultural environment in order to reimagine gender stereotypes and work-life balance, and to enjoy the surplus time in alternative ways. The men I met for my research consider the move as an important occasion for self-exploration and personal development. Recurrent in the stories of these individuals is the imagination of the future, in particular of alternative work opportunities where occupational identities are revisited. Imagination represents an ambivalent aspect of these people’s mobile life and the sense of precariousness they may face. It can help challenge the common assumption that experiences of immobility, the sense of stuckness and the process of waiting lack the transformative power brought about by mobility. Immobility, as experienced by these men, can create zones of liminality that show a potential for change precisely through imagining alternatives, remaking sense of identities, and navigating between what it is and what it may be. Imagination represents an ambivalent aspect of people’s experience of mobility. The field of possibilities in mobility (not only geographical) can be permeated with imagined lives and future selves. Where I cannot move physically, I can go through means of imagination. Or a person’s imagination can be triggered, blocked, or changed across time by the actual experience of (im)mobility (Cangià and Zittoun 2020). For one can move all around the world and still have a limited imaginative experience. Or one may be stuck in an endless present yet is able to travel across places

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and times through imagination (Rapport and Dawson 1998; Salazar 2011) and picture the next destination of one’s mobile trajectory. In mobility, the two—imagination and the uncertain nature of work—can affect each other simultaneously. Imagination of alternative possibilities and the future can alleviate the impact of a person’s mobile life and the sense of precariousness associated with it and can offer a safe space when revisiting identities. On the one hand, imagining alternative possibilities can help lessen the negative feelings associated with being unemployed, the waiting, and the potential for imminent change by providing for a privileged space where personal skills and interests are explored. On the other hand, the imagination of alternative and future routes can be blocked by the frustration, impatience, uncertainty, and anxiety associated with a mobile life (Cangià 2018). Acts of imagining often entail the presence of other people who can enable or prevent individual imagination of alternative futures (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016), and who can play an important role in affecting the capacity and possibility for change. There are at times reactions of intolerance for the liminal conditions associated with the particular life moments of these men. These reactions may come from the part of a friend, partner, family member, colleague, employer, or the labor market, those multiple and shifting collective voices in the self that one can refer to, or quote, by remembering past conversations or imagining new ones (Hermans 2001; Aveling, Gillespie, and Cornish 2015; Marková 2003). Imagination can also be complicated by the overlapping of different temporalities that might clash with those of others: the need to give oneself the right time not to settle for just any job vis-à-vis the urge to find a job as soon as possible and to earn money for the security of the rest of the family; the positive aspects of having free time to spend with oneself, the family, and children, vis-à-vis the passage of time and the risk of getting too old to find employment. Other times, the imagination of the future can be blocked altogether by the impossibility of planning ahead without knowing the family’s next place of residence, and by the uncertainty of what comes next. Masculinity for these partners can be reimagined in different ways, yet it always has something to do with the dimension of work. These men demonstrate maintaining a constant distinction between labor taking place inside and outside the household, the financial support of a breadwinner, and the more intimate and domestic work of the housekeeper. Masculinity can include more relational aspects, such as fatherhood, intimacy, and emotional life. However, these men still know that finding a job will be the main goal for them after all. The link between their male identity and work is never completely challenged. This phase of staying at home and the waiting

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associated with it remains and will remain in their minds just a temporal parenthesis of life. NOTES 1. This research was conducted as part of a larger project on mobile families in Switzerland at the University of Neuchâtel, supported by NCCR—On the Move and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Cangià 2018; Cangià, Zittoun, and Levitan 2019; Cangià 2019; Cangià, Levitan, and Zittoun 2018; Zittoun, Levitan, and Cangiá 2018; Cangià 2020).

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I can’t think of any period in human history when people were really certain what to do, had no surprises and no unexpected developments. What is novel is not uncertainty; what is novel is a realization that uncertainty is here to stay. … [Therefore], we are challenged with a task, which I think is unprecedented—and the task is to develop an art, to develop an art of living permanently with uncertainty. —Zygmunt Bauman, in Bartek Dziadosz, director, The Trouble with Being Human These Days

While the distances we travel nowadays are expanding, the time and effort we spend on reaching our destinations has been reduced. This was not always the case in the past, and it is not always the case for some people on the move even now, whose journeys were/are long and hard, regardless of distance, and who may undertake these journeys with significant physical effort, with travail (literally “work”), as in the French etymology of the term travel. The etymology (travail) of the word travel suggests an assumed connection between mobility and transformation (Salazar 2018). According to this assumption, as discussed in chapter 1, geographical mobility often translates (both in the literature and in the popular debate) into social and upward symbolic mobility (Kaufmann 2002), in terms of more economic resources, more status, or a more pronounced “cosmopolitan” disposition (Salazar 2018). Those who go through any form of travel (as a form of travail) are viewed as subjects of (positive) transformation and enrichment. Humans (or better, some) can undoubtedly travel faster now to reach destinations, to move from A to B, but the way they make sense of their own and others’ movement and stasis, of what happens during the journey, of what they leave behind and find then can follow another tempo and course of action. I can move spatially at high velocity and yet feel that my life is going nowhere, that it goes too slow, or that time does not pass at all. I can move, and yet I might want to stay immobile with my mind in a place where I feel

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safe. Or I can stay put physically and move across the world with imagination or plan my next moves. I can move and live in a new place and never feel at home, never identify myself as a migrant, or never be accepted by the new people I meet. Mobility, as this book shows, is a complex interplay of these spatial, semantic, temporal, and social movements and blockages. Mobility is not always a choice for many (like in the case of refugees in chapter 1), it can become an imperative for social progress or the only option for some (chapter 2 and chapter 4), or even a disrupting event for those who do not move (chapter 3). It becomes crucial to understand the interplay of mobility and immobility, movement and stasis (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), travel and travail, so to speak. The case studies presented in this book show how human movement, far from being “free,” can be constrained by structural and more subjective conditions that define who is (im)mobile, how, and when (Dean 2016). Exploring the interplay between mobility and immobility sheds light on how human beings not only move (or stay put) geographically but can move or stop at other levels, when constructing meanings about the surrounding world, when traveling between a past one leaves behind, a present where possibilities1 emerge, and a future of potential change. When mobility is involved, humans move along meanings and imaginaries about self and others, departures, traversals, and destinations. Most importantly, as discussed in this book, it is in the interplay of mobility and immobility—when the routes, meanings, or rhythms of what normally counts as movements are disrupted—that people go through a liminal experience. This book suggests exploring this interplay through the lens of liminality, defined as “the experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position” (Thomassen 2015: 40), spatially, temporally, and, I suggest, semantically. Liminality does not merely relate to the inbetween position but, indeed, to the experience of finding oneself in this position, and to the subjective consequence that this experience can bring about: “A limen is not just a line or a boundary serving as limit between one space or time and another, but a sensitive threshold which mediates transformation as one form-of-process becomes another” (Stenner, Greco, and Motzkau 2017: 142). But what is this change that people value as positive or threatening in the experience of mobility? Geographical mobility can have several consequences for travelers and nontravelers, can represent for many “an act of exploration, research, escape, transformation, and encountering the Other” (Salazar 2018: 158). Under certain circumstances, as in the case of tourism or migration for example, geographical mobility can challenge what a person perceives as a routine and a sense of continuity in favor of new experiences and (imagined) opportunities in life, with consequent sentiments ranging from pain to excitement. Mobility entails various experiences, as

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the three case studies showed, including the encounter with one’s change across time and others’ alterity, the ruptures when transiting from a sphere of experience to a new (unexpected) one, and actual and imagined identity transformations across time. Mobility in this sense becomes a significant human experience for people for the assumed potentiality to become someone else or something different. This future orientation—and the implicit travail associated with it—shapes the way individuals and communities make sense of themselves or others and how they value movement and stasis. Liminality, fundamentally relating to this becoming, refers to the social, symbolic, and temporal processes associated with it. It refers, precisely, not only to the passage between places but also, and most importantly for this book, to the semantic and temporal moves along meanings and times of both mobile and immobile people. These liminal moves, as shown in the book, are liminal as they present a potentiality for change. And yet they bring an uncompleted change and a permanently in-between passage from forms that are known to forms that are uncertain and ambivalent. Firstly, the book showed that immobility—far from merely preventing or enabling movement—is at the heart of any experience of mobility. It is a crucial, relational, and multifaceted part of it. Like in the images showed in chapter 1, namely Adey’s image of the immobile plane in the airport surrounded by moving planes and Bergson’s image of two trains that both seem immobile while traveling next to each other, we are always (im)mobile in relation to the (im)mobility of someone or something else. We are immobile in relation to a moving train, “to the moving bicycle, car or plane, the Internet” (Bissell and Fuller 2010, 25). We are mobile in relation to an immobile airplane. With the increasing imperative of mobility, humans become paradoxically and potentially more mobile and more immobile at the same time, more mobile or immobile in relation to someone or something else (even indeed to highly mobile viruses!). The massification of tourism and other forms of travel (e.g. international education), the transnationalization of migration, sport, and other global events, the digitalization, “internationalization,” and Uberization of the world of work; and the globalization of business and humanitarian work are some instances of how mobility becomes an imperative for many, enters more and more in our imaginary, and comes to define the way we are and the way we move at other levels (e.g. professionally, socially) like never before. Conforming to these demands and to the impact of widening imaginaries on mobility leads to a parallel need for security vis-à-vis perceived increasing risks, vulnerabilities, and inabilities to control what or who moves and how they do it. The case studies in this book show how immobility is not merely a negative form of travail linked to travel. Immobility—here physical, semantic, and temporal—is a condition of getting stuck in life journeys along places,

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meanings, and times. It can lead to self-reflection and new possibilities and can bring about the qualities of an experience of liminality in general: “liminality is not only transition but also potentiality, not only ‘going to be’ but also ‘what may be’” (Turner and Turner 1995: 3, emphasis in the original). The case studies in this book demonstrate how the interplay of mobility and immobility is mediated by a liminal hotspot condition resulting from a geographical movement (personal or vicarious) and the occurrence of an event that changes the course—or simply the rhythm—of our daily movements at various levels. This condition can make the person and the meanings one constructs immobile. It makes a person define oneself as immobile in relation to others, on the one hand, and yet it can create the terrain for a change, on the other. Change in this case refers to a symbolic (in terms of relation to status), semantic, and temporal move, where all the potentialities and intrinsic qualities of a liminal experience come to the fore and can at times lead to a transformation of one’s present conditions vis-à-vis the past. For the itinerant monkey-training performers, as discussed in chapter 2, the wandering style of the art has long represented a stigma for their communities and has long defined their low status as Buraku people. The Monkey Dance Company appropriates the travail implicit in their traditional wandering style, the negative and hard character of this form of mobility, and makes it a positive quality of the art and an occasion for change in the public perception of the monkey training. By traveling across the country, performers aim to reach a larger audience of spectators and create relations with local people. While traveling, performers slow down, meet people on the street, and take them by surprise in their daily activities by introducing the monkey training. Performers ask spectators to decelerate the rhythm of their activities in order to enter a new sphere of experience that is the performance. The performance is an emergent event that happens to people on the street, while they are carrying on their routine actions. The unexpected quality of the performance brings about an effect of liminal affectivity that is the potentiality for spectators of being affected by the event and actively affecting the course of the event by participating in the show. By making spectators actively participate in the show and sympathize both with the trainer and the monkey, the aim is to provoke a change in the way spectators apprehend and rethink the monkey both as animal and human, the performance as both “Japanese culture” and “Buraku culture” simultaneously. The Buraku, in the form of monkey training, become essentially the same as Japanese culture and tradition, through the travel/ travail. Performers attempt to imagine and transform spectators’ future possible understandings of the Buraku issue. And yet the Buraku remain in a semantic liminal hotspot where both meanings and representations

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coexist without ever undertaking a complete move. The fact that a complete shift does not occur is strategic for the performers in order to maintain the nature of the monkey and of the performance, and by extension the specialness of the “Buraku culture,” in a full-of-potential liminal hotspot of both/neither Japanese/human and/nor Buraku/nature. This strategy presents a future-oriented goal for social change. The transformation of social relations and the Buraku issue through the performance and the sharing of roles between trainers, monkey, and spectators during the show takes place in the mise-en-scène of “tradition” (the monkey performance as representation of “Japanese tradition”). This occurs in order to construct a more comprehensive knowledge of the past, in particular about “Japanese tradition” (including the Buraku as well), to change perspectives in their present with an eye to the future. This change of perspective is especially evident in the case of the adolescents in the school in Rome, as described in chapter 3. With our visit in their classroom that day, my colleague and I took the pupils, who were expecting a usual day of class and instead saw two strangers entering the door, by surprise. They were asked to write about sociocultural diversity in Italy. That day, from being a habitual day of school, became the occasion for taking time to reflect on an important issue, as various pupils commented in one group discussion later. It became an occasion for reflecting on the impact of migration as a long-lasting event on the lives of these adolescents: the impact of migration on their daily actions of moving across the city and the neighborhood streets, going to school or meeting with peers; the impact of migration on their self-identification as “Italians” and their feelings regarding the threat or the enrichment “migrants” bring to Italy; and finally, the impact migration has on these adolescents’ capacity and willingness to imagine the future. The writings of these youths appear to mirror a general affective social and political climate of insecurity, uncertainty about the future, and precarious feelings regarding self and others. The apparent immobility of these adolescents (as “nonmigrants” reflecting on others’ migration) is shaped by the mobility of others. At times, their image of themselves as “Italians” and “nonmigrants” is reinforced; other times, they reflect on others’ movements so as to understand their own past or future movements (from one school to another, as Sofia pondered in chapter 3). Adolescents, from being immobile in their classroom during a routine day of school, start moving semantically in their writings, passing from one perspective to another. Migration, in these young people’s words, is travail. It means fatigue, pain, fear, and uncertainty for all the people involved. It also means hope, and a positive imagined change. For one thing, these adolescents demonstrate being aware of the travail entailed in mobility when they make sense of the long journeys

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the migrant should embark upon and go through to get to the destination. They are impressed by the courage this physical and temporal travel entails. It is then that the migrant can become “human” in the words of these adolescents, more similar to “Italians,” essentially the same. Youths are also able to move imaginatively across time when understanding migration. They can imagine migrants’ past, picture themselves doing the same in the future, or imagine what the migrant may become. They often orient this movement to their and others’ memories of the past, the hardship of the present journey, and the future possibilities deriving from it: “Hardships and difficulties of travel are not trivial annoyances to be avoided, but rather prepare the travelers for some form of personal or social transformation” (Beckstead 2012: 712). When expressing their opinions and feelings about the social and cultural diversity they experience in their everyday life, adolescents make sense of this personal and social transformation. This being a transformation of their perspective throughout time, a change occurred in their life as a result of a physical movement or an encounter with someone, a change their society is facing by going through a critical moment, or finally a change in their surrounding environs. These adolescents often remain trapped between meanings and representations of themselves and the migrants. The image of the “migrant” gets stuck between a multiplicity of positions, meanings, and potentialities: both/neither the same, and hence a potentially good person, and/nor different, and hence a potentially bad person. The multiplicity of positions one can assume in life is what also characterizes the experience of mobility for those men who follow their working partners in an overseas assignment (chapter 4). Their experience of mobility is all but a smooth one. It is also travail and entails a slower velocity of mobility than the one these people might have imagined before the move. The decision to move to Switzerland with the family for these men is often based on the idea of Switzerland as a favorable labor market, where they can easily find a new job. In reality, the facts often prove to be the opposite. These men soon become aware of the multiple challenges of their relocation. The job search in Switzerland is more difficult than expected. Spousal associations partly support them but do not do much to change their condition. Childcare in Switzerland is expensive, and these men are often obliged to take care of children, with reduced time allocated for the job search. Moving can result in being out of the job market and spending more time at home. The alteration of personal professional trajectory and the condition of unemployment due to migration bring these individuals to experience a rupture in the course of their daily lives. As a result, these people experience negative feelings concerning the difficult job search, reflect on their work trajectories, and come to deal with dominant representations relating to gender roles. Migrating to Switzerland and having their expectations about

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their imagined life in a new place (where one easily finds a job and continues one’s career path) disappointed, are the events that disrupt their daily routine. The period of being out of the labor market, the job search, and the time spent waiting for opportunities can have long-lasting effects on their career trajectory and professional identity. These men are confronted with gendered images and stereotypes; they navigate meanings about masculinity by revisiting their past and imagining their future, and by dialoguing with real or imagined other(s) (e.g. their partners, employers, etc.). They come to make sense of the change in their gendered identities in multiple ways. These men construct representations of essential similarity between themselves and their female working partners based on images of gender equality in the couple. On the one hand, they come to value the time spent at home as a specialness of their moment of waiting, as a way to regain control over time, over personal and family life, while questioning their previous life as the breadwinner partner. On the other hand, these men cannot imagine themselves out of their previous career trajectory and social time, and thus they contrast or integrate the images of full-time dad/housekeeper with images of breadwinner and professional role model provider. Immobility, these cases show, is at the core of personal and vicarious experiences of mobility for these different people, performers, spectators, adolescents, migrants, and their partners. Mobility can also transform into immobility in multiple ways: the rhythm can be decelerated in the name of a social and symbolic move (chapter 2); the movement can bring a person to block or accept her/his engagement with the Other and with change (chapter 3), and create stuckness and waiting in between different places, meanings, and times (chapter 4). These case studies represent examples of how the experience of mobility can create a condition of suspension and stuckness, at a semantic level in particular. In the cases illustrated here, including that on refugees briefly presented in chapter 1, mobility and immobility are ambivalently intertwined. I used the liminal hotspot concept to explore the condition of entrapment and what happens in between mobility and immobility when change does not come to an end. An event happens to us and has an impact on our daily moves. In the case studies here, this event is represented by travel and migration (performer, migrant, or family). As a consequence of this event, people can alter the rhythm of their moves, their sense of the surrounding world, their way of imagining what comes next. They can or do stop; or they can or do continue moving. In this space between when one/others do or can move and when one/others do not or cannot move, ambivalent and at times conflicted meanings can coexist, and interact. In this hotspot, everything and nothing is possible. People can come to remake the sense of boundaries between self and others, challenge stereotypes, or discover diversity for the first time. They can empathize with

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another and imagine themselves in another’s shoes. They can change a sense regarding personal life as it used to be in the past and imagine a different future. People can also not be ready to modify their prejudices about others as they live their relations with others ambivalently. They cannot take another path of life, as the future is uncertain. The stories I have told in this book demonstrate how imagination—a form of “symbolic mobility” (Zittoun 2020)—helps us move beyond the boundaries of the categories and meanings to which we are accustomed. *** Uncertainty, now more than ever, characterizes people’s lives in contemporary times, and, at a micro scale, the histories told in this book. If we agree with Zygmunt Baumann when he says that “what is novel is not uncertainty; what is novel is a realization that uncertainty is here to stay,” now more than ever it becomes urgent to “develop an art of living permanently with uncertainty,”2 an art “of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going” (Tsing 2015: 2). The condition of a liminal hotspot, as an example of lived uncertainty, is now becoming ordinary for many people who live the unpredictability, emergencies, vulnerabilities and precariousness of our contemporary times, including migrants, refugees, workers, families, and many others. Undoubtedly, these are times in which often “reality is experienced as contingent and uncertain, with lasting forms yet to be made” (Thomassen 2014: 117), in which humans are confronted with an unprecedented sense of permanent precarity, “of trouble without end” (Tsing 2015: 2). The recent developments at the global level, with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic across the globe, but also past events, such as the global financial crisis in 2008, the “migration crisis” in Europe in 2015, and the war against global terrorism in recent decades, have put people and societies in what I have described in this book as a liminal hotspot condition. With the spread of the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, people in many countries around the globe were put in quarantine, compelled to stay home, or avoid “unnecessary” movements. People’s daily routines might have changed, the freedom to move that many of us consider as part of our daily life may momentarily be gone. The effects of this situation on the mobilities of people are diverse, especially for those who cannot rely on a secure shelter during the lockdown, for whom staying home is not possible or is even dangerous, or who cannot count on a stable income and work. Again, (im)mobility is not experienced by everyone in the same way. The pandemic crisis represents a contemporary and still ongoing example of a liminal hotspot (Stenner and Kaposi 2020). As in a liminal hotspot

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situation, we now know what our life looked like before, we don’t know when things will go back to “normal” again and what will happen when they do, nor do we know whether things will even go back to the way they used to be at all. We can hope for, imagine, refuse, or be afraid about what this will be and what our life will become after. We don’t know whether a liminal condition will finally “foment change” (Amit 2010: 69), at times even for the better. However, we need to accept and better understand the ambivalence associated with being in between multiple and uncertain routes, meanings, and events that represent the fabric of our (im)mobile lives. A way to do so can be “to grant the phase of transition the dignity of its own reality” (Stenner and Kaposi 2020), or better, to grant the uncertainty of transitions “the dignity of its own reality.” To make way for our future in the aftermath of a liminal and suspended experience, we need to engage with the uncertainty of in-betweenness, reflect on what we make during this time, regardless of whether or not a change will eventually occur. We should reflect on the “undoing” of previous norms and values and the “making” of a more meaningful and sustainable “normality.” I like the image proposed by Stenner and Kaposi of a song playing and then pausing: “How it can be that the song playing after the pause may be different from that which was playing before. And further, how the song we thought was playing before the pause can turn out to have been a different song all along” (Stenner and Kaposi 2020). We may find ourselves positively surprised by the many ways in which the uncertainty and ambivalence of a liminal event can make us re-configure our past and the way we used to look at the world around us. What a liminal experience makes of us “will depend upon what we will make of it, and this will require the blend of ideals and practicality that underpin creative thought and imaginative action” (Stenner and Kaposi 2020). If we take the case of the coronavirus pandemic crisis once again, this liminal event teaches us that humans and societies can reconfigure the way they move and stay put. The recent lockdown has certainly showed the relational, multifaceted, and complex interplay between mobility and immobility. This crisis can make us reflect on whether and how we change our mobilities for the future, on how the world we live in makes mobility (like tourism especially) a transformative experience only for some, and whether or not we should change it to make a transformation-through-mobility possible for all (Brouder et al. 2020). The concept of liminality provides us with a critical, universal, and temporally sensitive lens to understand the existential and societal consequences of the massive transformations occurring in our world today, as well as to simultaneously explore experiences that are usually not analyzed as part of the same (Thomassen 2014). This concept helps to unpack

Conclusion 䡲 141

diverse experiences and inequalities while shedding light on the potentialities of human lives and (im)mobilities. By emphasizing the potentialities of liminality like I did in this book, I may have most probably run the risk of sounding too idealistic and celebratory toward transitions and their transformative qualities, “towards the non-systemic and towards creativity, play and fantasy” (Thomassen 2014: 10). Liminality is not always positive. There are many ways to experience liminality. However, liminality can help us understand how social processes of change work (Thomassen 2014). It can bring about what Stenner and Kaposi called an “imaginative action” that is the combination of idealism and practical know-how to deal with the paradoxes of our contemporary times (like the one symbolized by the pandemic crisis), paradoxes that we have the responsibility to address as humans, in one way or another. A liminality perspective could help us avoid the risks of permanentizing transitional and uncertain phases of history and individual experiences, and rather build on the human capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2004) and to “collaborate across difference” (Tsing 2015) to make images of transformation possible when it does not seem to be the case. A liminal experience can hence become the space for a new form of existential encounter among humans and the occasion for a change, where alternative routes to walk and meanings to construct can emerge: “The evolution of our ‘selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounter; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration” (Tsing 2015: 29). The stories I have told here show how these encounters—with real or imagined Others, with others’ or our own diversity—can contribute to challenging our relation with and imagination of the world around us, our perception of ourselves and others in this world, and the way we, from now on, will reflect upon our own and others’ (liminal) moves. NOTES 1. A recent publication by Glaˇveanu (2020), in particular, explores the nexus between mobility and possibility through a psychological perspective. 2. From Bartek Dziadosz’s documentary about Professor Zygmunt Bauman, The Trouble with Being Human These Days (http://www.beinghumanthesedays.org/).

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Index

accompanying partners. See also male accompanying partners female, 115–16 gender of, 114–15 identity development for, 129–30 methodological approach to, 110–11 as Other, 124–25 uncertainty for, 109 Adey, Peter, 17 adolescents, on migration, in Italy, 11–13, 80–81 as betwixt and between, 88 conceptions of sociocultural diversity, 80 imaginaries about migrant life, 91 imagination and, 104 methodological research with, 15 nonmigrant adolescents, 12–13 on Otherness of migrants, 104–6 temporal dimensions for, 101 writing by, 9, 88–92, 101–2 affective technology, liminal, 9, 36, 88 affectivity. See liminal affectivity alterity, 28, 93–95, 134 Amit, Vered, 39 anthropology liminality and, 4 mobility and, 23 sociocultural anthropology perspective, 17 appropriation, in cultural psychology perspective, 17 Aquarius (ship), 107n3 asylum seeking liminal hotspots and, 43–44 by refugees, 44 in Switzerland, 45 Augè, Marc, 24–26, 38 barriers. See semantic barriers

Baumann, Zygmunt, 132, 139 becoming, liminality as experience of, 35 Becoming Other (Gillespie), 38 belonging communitas and, 87 mobility and, 23–24 Bergson, Henri, 1, 33, 41 betwixt and between, 2 adolescents as, 88 non-places and, 38 professionals as, 7 Bissell, David, 17, 33 blockage, 3, 32 borders, migration and, 87. See also cross-border migration; Italy; migrants; migration Buraku culture. See also Monkey Dance Company; monkey performances; monkey trainers as fluid social construct, 53 as Japanese tradition, 10–11, 135–36 koseki system and, 55 meanings in, 75 during Meiji Restoration, 54 during Muromachi period, 53 negative aspects associated with, 56 past traditions for, 74–77 social gaps in, 55 special status people in, 53–54 during Tokugawa era, 53 trans-cultural language, 10 Buraku Liberation League, 10 Buraku-min, 6 Centocelle neighborhood, in Rome, 84–87 change, 22, 26–29, 45–46, 133–41 change of position, 2 child-controlled space, classrooms as, 16 classrooms, 9, 16

160 䡲 Index Clifford, James, 23 collaboration, in monkey performances, with monkeys, 67–68, 72–73 communitas belonging and, 87 through liminal events, 89 spontaneous, 58, 64–67 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) global spread of, 1–2 in Japan, 57 as liminal hotspot, 139–40 movement influenced by, 1 The Creative Mind (Bergson), 1 Cresswell, Tim, 17, 27–28, 32 cross-border migration, 80 as form of symbolic movement, 81 human geographical displacement and, 25 in Italy, 81–82 of mobile professionals, 13 cultural psychology perspective, 17–18 culture. See also Buraku culture for minorities, through cultural practices, 54–55 nationalism and, 10

exclusion. See paradox of inclusion/ exclusion paradox of inclusion/exclusion, 15 thresholds of, 87 existential immobility/mobility, 30 existential mobility, 30 experience. See spheres of experience; staged liminal experience; unstaged liminal experience Bergson on, 41 liminality and, 41 liminoid, 36, 40 of mobility, 3 sense-making through, 6 spheres of, 41 experiential life-worlds, 18

deterritorialization, 24 dialogical perspectives, 18, 28, 49 on masculinity, 120 on semantic movements, 95 dialogical single case studies, 18 dialogism, 24 dialogue. See inner dialogue dimensions. See semantic dimension; spaces; spatial dimension; symbolic dimension; temporal dimension discrimination, as learned by children, 89 against monkey trainers, 53 disjuncture, 24 dislocation, 24 diversity. See sociocultural diversity doors, 42, 52 in monkey performances, 58, 60–63 dual career couples, 112–13 dwelling, travel and, dualism between, 27

gender. See also accompanying partners; female accompanying partners; male accompanying partners; masculinity of accompanying partners, 114–15 dominant representation of roles, 119 migration and, 113 mobility and, 111–17 role models and, 120–23 uncertainty and, 116 geographical space, 29 Gillespie, Alex, 38 Giovannesi, Claudio, 92–95 Global Complexity (Urry), 32 global security politics, liminality and, 4 Graburn, Nelson H. H., 20 hotspots, 44–45. See also liminal hotspots human geographical displacement, 25 hybridity, 24

Emancipation Edict, Japan, 55 essential sameness, 49, 97, 121 ethnography/ethnographic research, 1–2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 23

IDCN. See International Dual Career Network identity for accompanying partners, 129–30

family, masculinity and, 109 female accompanying partners, of mobile professionals, 115–16 flow and fluidity, in mobility, 23 The Forest of Symbols (Turner), 36 freedom, mobility as, 22 Fuller, Gillian, 33

Index 䡲 161

national, for Japan, 54 for nomads, 24 sense-making through, 6 transformation of sense through, 6 imagination for adolescents, 104 for male accompanying partners, 129–31 for mobility, 3 transformation of meaning through, 104 immobility/immobile blocked assemblages, 32 definition of, 31–32 existential, 30 friction, 25, 32–33, 45–46 illusion of, 34 liminality and, 4–5 mind-body relations and, 34 of mobile people, 13–15 monkey performances and, 76 multiplicity of, 6 scope of, 32 sense-making and, 34 spatial mobility and, 6 in-between, liminal hotspot, 43–49 in-betweenness, zones of, 8 inclusion paradox of inclusion/exclusion, 15 thresholds of, 87 incorporation phase, of rites, 35–36 Ingold, Tim, 26–27 inner dialogue, 18, 28 insecurity. See outsiderness; subjective insecurity insiderness, 16 internalization, in cultural psychology perspective, 17 International Dual Career Network (IDCN), 113 irregular and undocumented migrants, 39 Italy. See also adolescents; migrants; migration; Rome cross-border migration in, 81–82 Lega Party, 82, 99–100 migration in, adolescent writings about, 11–13, 80–81, 101–2 Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Stars Movement) in, 82 Operation Mare Nostrum, 81 racism in, 99–100

right-wing parties in, 99–100 sociocultural diversity in, 136 Vlora arrival in, 78–80, 82 itinerant performances, 9. See also Monkey Dance Company James, William, 41 Japan. See also Buraku culture; Monkey Dance Company; monkey trainers; street performances abolition of status system in, 5 coronavirus epidemic in, 57 Emancipation Edict, 55 insiderness in, as feeling, 16 Law for Special Measures for Do ¯wa (assimilation) Projects, 55 Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Administration, 55 Meiji Restoration, 54 during modern era, 54 multiculturalism in, 54 Muromachi period, 53 national identity for, 54 nationalism in, 75 outsiderness in, as feeling, 16 Tokugawa era, 53 Jayaram, Kiran, 31–32 Jensen, Ole B., 17 jo¯geyuki. See monkey training Kaufmann, Vincent, 17 Keywords of Mobility (Salazar and Jayaram), 31–32 Kinegawa, Japan, as leather town, 10 kinesthetic events, performances as, 11 koseki system, 55 Law, Jane Marie, 60 Law for Special Measures for Do ¯wa (assimilation) Projects, Japan (1969), 55 Law on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Administration, Japan (2016), 55 Lega Party, in Italy, 82, 99–100 lifestyle migration, mobility and, 22 liminal. See also specific topics affective technologies, 9, 36, 88 anthropological applications of, 4 definition of, 35

162 䡲 Index episodes, 40–43 in migration studies, 39 play and, 36 semantic conditions, 106 liminal affectivity, 5, 52, 71 liminal episodes, 40–43 liminal events, 46–47 communitas through, 89 ruptures of, 47 staged, 9, 36, 47 unstaged, 9, 36, 47 writings about, 89 liminal hotspots asylum seeking and, 43–44 coronavirus pandemic, 139–40 definition of, 45–46 in-between, 43–49 masculinity and, 110 meanings in, 49 migrants in, 101 monkey performances as, 73 permanence of, 47–48 semantic dimension of, 46–47 sense-making and, 47 spatial dimension of, 46–47 temporal dimension of, 46–47 uncertainty and, 45, 139 liminality/liminalities components of, 41 conceptual scope of, across disciplines, 4–5, 140–41 coronavirus pandemic and, 4 definition of, 4 as experience of becoming, 35 experiences and, 41 global security politics and, 4 immobility and, 4–5 methodological approach to, 6, 15–18 mobility and, 38–39 in modern world, 4 multiple worlds and, 40–43 permanent, 45 pilgrimage and, 37 potentiality of, 36, 45–46, 106, 135 rituals and, 35–36 ruptures and, 41–43 Thomassen on, 39 as transformations, 42 travel and, 5

Turner on, 40 liminal middle phase, of rites, 35–36 liminal period, 2 liminal space, 5, 7, 48, 58, 106, 123, 127 liminoid experiences, 36, 40 liquidity, 24 localization, mobility and, dualism between, 27 male accompanying partners, of mobile professionals, 115–16 imagination for, 129–31 masculinity of, 118–20, 130–31 methodological approach to, 14–15 as parents, 125–29 in Switzerland, 120–25 theoretical approach to, 13–15 masculinity dialogical perspectives on, 120 in domestic contexts, 125 family and, 109 liminal hotspots and, 110 for male accompanying partners, 118–20, 130–31 meanings of, 119–20, 128 mobile, 118 sense-making and, 110, 128 work and, 109 Materialities and Mobilities, 24 meanings in Buraku culture, 75 in liminal hotspots, 49 of masculinity, 119–20, 128 of mobility, 28 transformation of, through imagination, 104 travel along, 26–31 measurement, of mobility, 3 Mediterranean region, 81–83, 82, 107n3. See also Italy; migrants; migration methodological research with adolescents, 15 cultural psychology perspective, 17–18 dialogical single case studies, 18 experiential life-worlds, 18 informed consent in, 19n2 on liminality, as concept, 6, 15–18 the Other in, 18 paradox of inclusion/exclusion, 15

Index 䡲 163

sociocultural anthropology perspective, 17 migrants. See also refugees; Rome affection and friendship with, 97 Aquarius and, 107n3 aspirations of, 99–104 both/neither dynamic for, 92–95 cross-border movement of, 80 either/or dynamic for, 92–95 essential sameness of, 97 imaginaries about, 91 irregular and undocumented, 39 in Italian films, 92–95 in liminal hotspot, 101 nonmigrants and, 9, 79, 98–99 non-movers, 79 as Other, 95–99, 104–6 potentiality of, 102 privileged, 9 scapegoating mechanisms for, 87 stayers, 79 tied, 109 uncertainty for, 36, 100 on Vlora, 78–80, 82 migration. See also Italy; refugees; Rome academic discourses on, 82–83 adolescent writings about, 9, 11–13, 88–92, 101–2 emotional framework of, 82–83 gender and, 113 in Italian films, 92–95 lifestyle, 22 liminal and, 39 in Mediterranean region, 81–83 mobility and, 81, 102 national borders and, 87 in La Nave Dolce, 78–80, 87 postmigration approach, 12 research studies on, 12 residential, 25 as symbol of transformation, 5 writing on, 9, 88–91, 101–2 mind-body relations, immobility and, 34 minorities, 54–55 mobile. See mobility/mobile mobile masculinity, 118 mobile professionals. See also accompanying partners; male accompanying partners; nomads

cross-border migration of, 13 dual career couples, 112–13 as economically-wanted people, 13 fixed-term contracts for, 14 freedom of movement for, 14 imperative of mobility for, 112 in International Dual Career Network, 113 NCCR-On the Move program, 16 as privileged, 13 subjective insecurity for, 14 in Switzerland, 115–17 temporariness of mobility for, 117 mobility bias, 12 mobility/mobile. See also immobility/immobile; specific topics academic focus on, 23–26 as actual, 29–30 analysis of, 23 anthropological approach to, 23 belonging and, 23–24 blockage and, 3 as change, 26 through commuting, 25 components of, 3 critical perspective on, 25–26 definition of, 3, 26, 29–30 existential, 30 experience of, 3 flows and fluidity in, 23 as freedom, 22 friction with immobility, 25, 32–33, 45–46 gender and, 111–17, 113–14 geographical, 132–33 globalization studies on, 23 imaginaries of, 3 imperative of, 112, 134 as inalienable condition, 22 intensity of, 22 lifestyle migration and, 22 liminality and, 38–39 limited access to, 21 localization and, dualism between, 27 meanings of, 28 measurement of, 3 monkey performances and, 76 new mobilities paradigm, 24–25 norms of, 3

164 䡲 Index paradoxes of, 43 postmodern studies on, 23 as potential act, 3, 26–27, 29–30 potential for, 21 practices of, 8 of professionals, 111–17 regulation of, 21–22 residential migration and, 25 rootedness and, 23–24 sedentarist perspectives on, 23 in sociocultural contexts, 3 spatial consciousness and, 21 spatial dimension of, 26–27 spatial movement as distinct from, 2–3 tourism and, 22 across trajectories, 26 as turbulent phenomenon, 33 types of, 22 values of, 28 velocity of, 22 The Monkey as Mirror (Ohnuki-Tierney), 53 Monkey Dance Company, 10–11, 135 monkey performances collaboration with monkeys as part of, 67–68, 72–73 contamination as result of, 63, 67 as cultural encounter, 63 doors and doorways in, 58, 60–63 gift-giving as part of, 57–58 immobility and, 76 itinerant performances, 9 liminal affectivity of, 71 as liminal hotspot, 73 mobility and, 76 monkeys during, 68–69 national tours of, 56–59 Open City performance, 51 Osaruland Company, 70 pausing at doorway symbolism in, 60–63 in public spaces, 61 setting the stage phase, 64–67 spectator participation in, 57–58, 62–63 spectator reaction during, 63, 67 as spontaneous communitas, 58, 64–67 as street performances, 54, 58–59 tradition preserved through, 74–77 as turbulent, 67–74 Turner on, 58–59 violence against trainer, 73

wandering phase of, 60–63, 76 monkey trainers (Sarumaiza), training and, 51–52. See also street performances audiences and, relationship with, 64–65 Buraku-min, 6 discrimination against, 53 liminal affectivity and, 52 as liminal personae, 61–62 meaning of training for, 70–71 as mediator between human and animal, 71–72 as storyteller, 62 tradition preserved through, 74–77 training styles, main ideas for, 52 violence against, during performances, 73 movement. See also liminal movement; semantic movement; spatial movement coronavirus pandemic as influence on, 1 places traced by, 28 practices of, 3 routes for, 23 stasis and, 23, 27, 80 Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Stars Movement), in Italy, 82 multiculturalism, 54 multiple liminalities, as multiple worlds, 40–43 Naniwa, Japan, as leather town, 10 national identity, for Japan, 54 nationalism culture and, 10 in Japan, 75 tradition sponsored by, 10 nation-states, mobility bias and, 12 La Nave Dolce (The Human Cargo), 78–80, 87 NCCR-On the Move program, 16 negative associations, 29 new mobilities paradigm, 24–25 nomads, 24–25 nonmigrants, 9, 12–13, 79, 98–99 non-places for Augè, 24–26, 38 betwixt and between and, 38 for nomads, 25 travel and, 38 non-working parents. See parents Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 53

Index 䡲 165

Open City performance, 51 Osaruland Company, 70 the Other, 18 accompanying partners as, 124–25 adolescents on, 104–6 essential difference with Self, 49 migrants as, 95–99, 104–6 stigmatization of, 29 outsiderness, 16 Pagani, Camilla, 16, 107n10 paradoxes of mobility, 43 paradox of inclusion/exclusion, 15 parents employment contexts for, 128 male accompanying partners as, 125–29 partners. See accompanying partners; male accompanying partners Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 92, 107n9, 107n11 performances itinerant, 9 as kinesthetic event, 11 permanent liminality, 45 liminal hotspots and, 47–48 perspectives. See cultural psychology perspective; sedentarist perspectives; sociocultural anthropology perspective; sociocultural perspective pilgrimage, 5, 37 places traced by movement, 28 transformation of sense through, 6 travel along, 26–31 play liminal and, 36 tourism as, 37 potentiality of liminality, 36, 45–46, 106, 135 of migrants, 102 mobility as, 3, 26–27, 29–30 privileged migrants, 9. See also mobile professionals; professionals professionals. See accompanying partners; mobile professionals as betwixt and between, 7 mobility of, 111–17 Prophecy (Pasolini), 92 pseudo-liminal events, 9 psychology. See cultural psychology

public spaces, monkey performances in, 61 pupils. See adolescents; classrooms Puppets of Nostalgia (Law), 60 refugees, asylum seeking by, 44 religious pilgrimage, 37 repositioning, in cultural psychology perspective, 17 residential migration, 25 rigid oppositions, 29 rites, phases of, 35–36 Les Rites de Passage (van Gennep), 35–36 rituals liminality and, 35–36, 40 of reversal, 9 transitional phase of, 35 Rome, Italy, 83–88 rootedness, mobility and, 23–24 roots routes and, 35 of sociocultural perspectives, 23 routes for movement, 23 roots and, 35 Routes (Clifford), 23 rupture of liminal event, 47 liminality and, 41–43 sacred, tourism as, 37 Salazar, Noel, 17, 31–32 sameness. See essential sameness Sarumaiza. See Monkey Dance Company; monkey trainers scapes, 24 schools. See also classroom interventions liminal affective technology in, 9 writing for adolescents in, 9 Schurz, Alfred, 41–42 secondary movers, 109 security politics. See global security politics sedentarist perspectives, on mobility, 23 Self, essential differences with Other, 49 self-reflection, 97 semantic barriers, 29, 121 semantic dimension, of liminal hotspots, 46–47 semantic liminal conditions, 106 semantic movements

166 䡲 Index conceptualization of, 28–29 dialogical perspectives on, 95 sense-making through experiences, 6 through identity, 6 immobility and, 34 liminal hotspots and, 47 masculinity and, 110, 128 through places, 6 separation phase, of rites, 35–36 Shuji, Murasaki, 57 social climbing, spatial mobility and, 22 social movement, wandering as, 76 sociocultural anthropology perspective, 17 sociocultural diversity conceptions of, 80 in Italy, 136 sociocultural perspective anthropology in, 17 in methodological research, 17 mobility from, 3 roots of, 23 spaces. See also spatial dimension child-controlled, classrooms as, 16 geographical, 29 liminal, 5, 7, 48, 58, 106, 123, 127 physical, 44–45 temporal, 44–45 time-space compression, 24 spatial consciousness, 21 spatial dimensions, of movement, 2 as form of displacement, 3 for liminal hotspots, 46–47 for mobility, 26–27 spatial mobility immobility and, 6 social climbing and, 22 symbolic climbing and, 22 spatial movement meanings of, 2–3 mobility as distinct from, 2–3 wandering as, 76 special status people, in Buraku culture, 53–54 spectators, for monkey performances, 63, 67 spheres of experience, 41 spontaneous communitas, 58, 64–67 staged liminal event, 9, 36, 47 stasis, 6, 25, 80, 132–34

movement and, 23, 27, 80 as paradox, 45 stayers, 9, 28, 79 Stenner, Paul, 17, 36–37 stillness, 50–51 Stillness in a Mobile World (Bissell and Fuller), 33 street performances. See also Buraku; Buraku culture; Monkey Dance Company as cultural performances, 58 immobility and, 10–11 kadozuke performances, 54 mobility and, 10–11 monkey performances, 54, 58–59 Open City performance, 51 streets, as liminal space, 58 stuckness, 8, 138 waiting and, 110, 118, 120, 129 subjective insecurity, for mobile professionals, 14 Switzerland, 137–38 asylum seeking in, 45 male accompanying partners in, 120–25 mobile professionals in, 115–17 symbolic climbing, spatial mobility and, 22 symbolic dimensions, of movement, 2–3 Szakolczai, Arpad, 45, 88 technology. See specific topics temporal dimensions, of movement, 2 adolescents on, 101 as form of displacement, 3 for liminal hotspots, 46–47 tourism and, 31 wandering and, 76 for wayfarers, 29 temporal space, hotspots and, 44–45 Thomassen, Bjørn, 17, 39 thresholds, of exclusion or inclusion, 87 tied migrants, 109 time, travel and, 26–31. See also temporal dimensions; temporal space time-space compression, 24 tourism massification of, 134 mobility and, 22 as play, 37 as sacred, 37 as symbol of transformation, 5

Index 䡲 167

temporal trajectories for, 31 Tourism (Graburn), 20 tradition Buraku culture and, 10–11, 135–36 through monkey performances, 74–77 through monkey trainers, 74–77 nationalism and, 10 trailing spouses, 109 trainers. See monkey trainers Traini, Luca, 99–100 training. See monkey trainers trajectories mobility across, 26 for tourism, 31 for wayfaring, 29 transformation, symbols of, 5 transitional stage, of rites, 35–36 transport, definition of, 27 travail, travel and, 134–37 travel dwelling and, dualism between, 27 liminality and, 5 along meanings, 26–31 non-places and, 38 along places, 26–31 along times, 26–31 Turner, Victor, 2, 5, 17, 36. See also pilgrimage on liminality, ritual context and, 40 on performances, 58–59 uncertainty, 139–40 for accompanying partners, 109 creativity and, 36 existential, 4 gender and, 116 liminal hotspots and, 45, 139 for males, 116 for migrants, 36, 100

undocumented migrants. See irregular and undocumented migrants unstaged liminal event, 9, 36, 47 unstaged liminal experience, 9, 36 Urry, John, 32 values, of mobility, 28 van Gennep, Arnold, 35–36 Vannini, Phillip, 17 Vicari, Daniele, 78–80 The View from the Air (Budd), 21 Vlora (ship), 78–80, 82 wait/waiting active passivity of, 108 as form of immobility, 109 passive activity of, 108 sense-making and, 109 stuckness and, 110, 118, 120, 129 wandering phase in monkey performances, 60–63, 76 as social movement, 76 as spatial movement, 76 as temporal movement, 76 wayfarers, wayfaring and, 27–30 work, masculinity and, 109 writings by adolescents, on migration, 9, 88–92, 101–2 about liminal events, 89 on migration, 9, 88–91 about migration in Italy, 11–13 by nonmigrant adolescents, 12 youth. See adolescents Zittoun, Tania, 48 zone of proximal development, 106 zones of in-betweenness, 8