Liminal Moves: Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times

By Flavia Cangià

Moving, slowing down, or watching others moving allows people to cross physical, symbolic, and temporal boundaries. Exploring the imaginative power of liminality that makes this possible, Liminal Moves looks at the (im)mobilities of three groups of people - street monkey performers in Japan, adolescents writing about migrants in Italy, and men accompanying their partners in Switzerland for work. The book explores how, for these ‘travelers’, the interplay of mobility and immobility creates a ‘liminal hotspot’: a condition of suspension and ambivalence as they find themselves caught between places, meanings and times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800730496

Flavia Cangià

Flavia Cangià is Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) conducting research on work and mobility as part of NCCR LIVES and NCCR on-the-move. Her current research focuses on im/mobilities, work transitions, precarity, imagination and digitalization.

Book preview

LIMINAL MOVES

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 8

PACING MOBILITIES

Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements

Edited by Vered Amit and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 7

FINDING WAYS THROUGH EUROSPACE

West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside

Joris Schapendonk

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 4

MOMENTOUS MOBILITIES

Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel

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 2

METHODOLOGIES OF MOBILITY

Ethnography and Experiment

Edited by Alice Elliot, Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar

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

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

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

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.

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

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

2.3 The applause. Photo by Flavia Cangià.

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

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

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

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

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

3.3 Apocalypse Casilina. Photo by Alessio Ferraro.

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 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, 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 (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 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). 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