HOMEINTHEFRAMEWORK OF THEORY

Explorations of diasporic homes in this volume rely on an integrative theoretical framework. Like many other researchers of material culture (see, e.g., Berger 2014; Buchli 2020; Dant 1999; Knapett 2011), we advocate investigating human–object relations from a multidisciplinary vantage point, applying theories tested in the fields as diverse as anthropology and sociology, consumer and market research, sociolinguistics and semiotics. Applying a number of theories which could serve as perspectives focusing the researchers’ attention on the connections between home and society with its wide repertoire of discourses and practices seems to be an appropriate approach to gain different perspectives and thus gain a richer and more critical vision of home, homemakers and artefacts with which they interact (Berger 2014: 13–27; Durham and Kellner 2012: 3–4). The suitability of the chosen theories is determined by their effectiveness in providing modes of explanation and interpretation of sociocultural practices and structures related to home. And here we agree with Durham and Kellner (2012) who write that cultural and social theories are descriptive and interpretive; they highlight specific topics, make connections, contextualise, provide interpretations and offer explanations. We are aware that ‘descriptive’ and ‘interpretive’ are often used as pejorative terms in evaluating research projects as devoid of scientific vigour, yet in issues related to human life and values we deal with subjectivities which are not amenable to quantification or modelling, and thorough descriptions and reflective interpretations may thus prove to be the most revealing.

In theorising culture in general, and material culture in particular, researchers are often confronted with the question of how knowledge of culture is acquired and whether it is inseparably connected to language. Influential work by Bloch (1991 and 2018) challenges the leading role of the language. He postulates that much cultural knowledge is nonlinear and non-sentential but purpose-dedicated, formed through the extensive practice of closely related activities. Fairchild also defines culture as communication of behavioural patterns that are transmitted by symbols, and does not even mention language (Fairchild 1966: 80).

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter the materiality of the migrant/diasporic home and its significance for understanding cultural identity and sense of belonging will be discussed by using the study of Russian migrants’ homes in the UK. The chapter will evaluate the role of material objects in the process of migrant/diasporic homemaking and how far particular objects contribute to a sense of home or non-home. In this sense, the chapter aims to show the ambivalent and complex nature of home in the context of migration and the related sense of being at home – one which material objects may help (re)construct or take away.

The chapter is located at the intersection of research into home and migration, the subfield of social sciences that has been gaining importance in recent years (Ahmed et al. 2003; Boccagni 2017; Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020; Fog Olwig 2007; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2017; Wiles 2008). Recent scholarship has shown that the notion of home, whether imagined, remembered or experienced, is closely interconnected with the experience of migration (Boccagni 2017) and thus reveals important insights into everyday life, identity and culture. Within this framework, home is defined as a multidimensional and multifaceted concept, one which combines notions of homeland (imagined, remembered or ‘real’) and dwelling, or ‘lived experiences, social relations and emotional geographies of home’ (Blunt 2005: 506). Researchers also emphasise the ambivalent character of migrant homemaking. For example, Ahmed et al. (2003) use the concept of uprootings/regroundings to describe an experience of migration during which one simultaneously uproots oneself from familiar contexts and regrounds with new ones.

Furthermore, some scholarly work on diasporic identities puts particular emphasis on the defining role of home within the process of identity construction (Ehrkamp 2005; Story and Walker 2016). Ehrkamp (2005) describes the connection between home and diasporic identity as negotiated, or (re)constructed in relation to ‘multiple societies and places’ (348), while for Silva (2009) diasporic identities are constituted through a continuous search for Home, where Home is an elusive construct linked to sensory experiences (Silva 2009: 694). Following Giogi and Fasulo, migrant homemaking can be described as a ‘work in progress that accompanies changes and different versions of identity through time’ (Giogi and Fasulo 2013: 113).

INTRODUCTION

Home, displacement and nostalgia

Home like roots – terms which are often assumed to imply spatial fixity can also be mobile. Mobility often implies a return, lack of movement or a fixed belonging, even in the process of movement. Across time, space and peoples, this idea of movement changes, generating fixity and continuity irrespective of the changes. A key element in understanding the relation between place, location, movement and people is what stays the same as change occurs. Often this is something social – for example the form of kinship in which people engage – or something conceptual – for example a cosmology or cultural approach towards belonging and movement (Green 2016).

Social and political revolutions, armed conflicts and wars typically trigger massive movement affecting the ability of people to move, as well as the meaning and relevance of that movement. What changes and what stays the same in such situations is not always self-evident. Here, we must also consider the difference between ‘locality’ and ‘location’. Appadurai describes locality as being ‘primarily relational and contextual rather than […] scalar or spatial’ (1995: 178). But the change of location, in the spatial sense, can be equally significant (Green 2016).

Homeland can mean a place or a region, but also territory and landscape, to which the migrant relates emotionally rather than politically or geographically (Medved 2000). It can also be linked to the concept of fatherland (or motherland), an idea or a territory. With the emergence of the modern nation state, we see the congruence between land and people and a strong relationship between blood and soil (Runblom 2000). For diaspora, blood and soil do not always coincide (Just 1989). Moreover, not all diasporans share a homing desire through a wish to return to a place of ‘origin’ (Brah 1996: 192). Brah further makes a distinction between ‘feeling at home’ and declaring a place as home. It is quite possible to feel at home in a place, and yet the experience of social exclusion may inhibit public proclamations of the place as home. ‘The concept of diaspora places the discourse of “home” and “dispersion” in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses on fixed origins’ (Brah 1996: 197). Hobsbawm also underlines this distinction between home and homeland. Home is primarily private. But in a wider sense, home is public, a collective definition, and, as such, a social construction (Hobsbawm 1991).

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary meaning of ‘home’ implies a mixture of connotations that together make it a particularly multi-layered concept. ‘Home’ embraces the ideas of privacy, stability, safety, solid materiality and personal distinctiveness as well as group belonging linked to ethnicity and nationality. It also subtly implies the physical, mental and emotional journey that one undertakes to obtain home or to claim a cosmopolitan stance. No wonder that home has been studied from a variety of angles and by a range of disciplines. As a tangible physical thing, a building or an apartment with its particular configuration and arrangement of material contents, home usually complies with the conceptions of a particular society and period of time as to what is good and proper for a home. From such a perspective, home embodies the previous and the current values held by its dwellers reified through material things. From another perspective, home is treated as a unique spacetime where traditions can be kept no matter how far in time and space their origins are. A place where one ‘feels at home’ denotes, among other things, a territory where one is able to act in correspondence with one's feelings, ideas and beliefs. In the context of emigration such an opportunity becomes vital. These conceptualisations do not exhaust all the aspects from which home is investigated and viewed.

The ‘diversification of diversity’ is defined by the sociologist Steven Vertovec as a phenomenon that ‘has not just occurred in terms of movements of people reflecting more ethnicities, languages and countries of origin, but also with respect to a multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live’ (2014: 86–7). The current patterns of mobility that allow either for settling in another place permanently or commuting between places, together with technological advances, have caused significant transformation of language practices across the globe (Aronin 2019b). Global transformations have changed our possibilities and our thinking about what a proper home should be. Such changes in real life have led to an interdisciplinarity of research fuelled by the interconnectedness of various aspects of human life. ‘Mind and matter no longer appear to belong to two separate categories, but can be seen as representing two complementary aspects of the phenomenon of life – process and structure’ (Capra 2015: 246).

This chapter emphasises the superdiversity and interconnectedness of all the aspects of home, and, most importantly, materialities and language.

INTRODUCTION

The possessions people are attached to help us to identify who they are. In migration, when people uproot their lives and adapt to another country, material objects from the place of their origin are likely to be especially meaningful and play an important role in the understanding of immigrant identity. This chapter examines the effect of a new culture on the life of immigrants by comparing possessions that people bring with them to Australia with possessions remaining in their households years later. Altogether, there have been several major waves of immigration from Russia and the Soviet Union to Australia: (1) from the late nineteenth century to World War I (pre-revolutionary labour and political immigration); (2) from the early 1920s to World War II (post-revolutionary immigration); (3) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s (post-war immigration); (4) from the mid-1950s to the second half of the 1980s (immigration from China and Europe) and (5) from the late 1980s to the present day (perestroika and post-perestroika immigration) (Gentshke et al. 2014; Kanevskaya 2008; Ryan 2005; Usuyama 2015). Some researchers, however, prefer different divisions of these flows. Thus, Ryazantsev (2013) singles out six immigration waves, whereas Ters (2015) claims there have been eight, and both of them give a finer division relying on differences between contingencies and motives. I focus on immigrants who moved to Australia from Russia and Ukraine or from the corresponding republics of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as in the 2000s.

Possessions are viewed as providing valuable insights into how people present themselves and identify their membership in society. Various prior studies have examined possessions of immigrants and their role in securing identity, including the identity of Russian immigrants. For example, Pechurina (2011) focuses on the possessions of Russian immigrants in the UK that serve as a ‘symbolic representation’ of Russia and ‘Russianness’. Protassova and Reznik (2019) examine why Russian immigrants to Finland value some objects as special possessions and get rid of others. Some studies focus on the classification of migrants’ possessions. Suleimanova (2015), for example, distinguishes three main types: (1) one's own everyday household items (e.g. furniture, electrical appliances, dishes); (2) ‘symbolic items’ that satisfy spiritual needs (family photographs and other memorabilia) and (3) everyday household items provided by landlords (e.g. furniture and appliances).

INTRODUCTION

Migration is invariably connected to a voluntary or involuntary loss of home. In the ideology of Israel, the ‘Law of Return’ guaranteeing every Jew the right to become a citizen is one of the main legal acts of the country.1 Moreover, providing Jews with a homeland was the main reason for forming the State of Israel (Richmond 1993). So, newcomers are referred to as ‘repatriates’, people returning to the lost home and ‘recalling’ the language of their forefathers. Yet, the majority of the people who emigrated from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel in the 1970s, 1990s and in the present century are descendants of families that lived in the Russian Empire and then in the USSR for many generations. Most of them were secular and did not observe Jewish traditions in their countries of origin. Therefore, together with other scholars, I view their coming to Israel as immigration followed by gradual immersion into the culture which was previously either vaguely familiar or completely unknown to them (Al-Haj 2004; Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2018; Remennick 2007; Ryazantsev et al. 2018). Like migrants every-where, members of this group have various problems integrating into the host society, both in terms of socio-economic and identity challenges (see, e.g., Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2013; Remennick 2012; Zbenovich 2016). While many aspects of the immigration experience of Russian-speaking Israelis have been thoroughly researched, so far their material culture – and the culture of homemaking in particular – has seldom been the focus of anthropological, sociological or linguistic research. Among the few exceptions are Lipshitz 1997, Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007 and Levin 2014. Yet it is from the interaction with objects in homes that we can learn about their owners’ interests, customs, values and language habits; in other words, people's material environment can give us important insights into their everyday practices and inner world.

The project reported in this chapter analyses the perception of home by first-generation immigrants from the FSU. Using the convenience sampling method of finding research participants, I conducted thirteen focus interviews with sixteen people, all of them in Russian.2 The participants can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of those who arrived in Israel as adults. Three other interviewees, although technically first-generation immigrants, underwent socialisation while already in Israel: one was nine years old upon arrival in Israel, the other two were mere infants.

As Tonya was showing me around her rented apartment in Tokyo, shared with her husband and two young children, she pointed to a steel stovetop kettle. It was black from long usage.

In this multi-themed narrative, the kettle emerges as a locus of intersecting experiences and emotions. It serves the purpose – despite having been purchased in Japan – of a physical reminder of Tonya's pre-migratory past. This was a past in which warmth, emanating from hot tea, was facilitated through electricity, despite Sakhalin Island possessing abundant gas reserves (Henderson and Moe 2016). For Tonya, access to this ‘native’ gas was finally realised once she had crossed the sea to the Japanese archipelago. As her first purchase in Japan, the kettle epitomises the act of Tonya's relocation, embodying her experiences as a cross-border migrant. Here, the ‘intrinsic gathering and enduring capacities of materials’ (Olsen 2010: 110) come into play. Yet, paradoxically, the kettle also mediates the relationship between past and present, and between two locations – Russia and Japan. The kettle ‘pulls in’ and throws these temporalities and spaces together through its concreteness as a device that had received the tangible touch of the Sakhalin gas when Tonya first came to Japan. Additionally, despite its worn-out look about which Tonya warned me, the kettle encapsulates the story of upward mobility. For Tonya, this purchase symbolically ensured access to the gas originally meant for capital cities such as Moscow and so-called first-world neighbours such as Japan.

In this chapter I refer to such narratives as ‘material stories’. In these stories, a material object emerges as a central actor and a meaning-making component; it attracts and accumulates or distances people's experiences, memories, affects, emotions and aspirations. When analysing such material stories, I focus on the practice that is conceptualised here as ‘cross-referencing’.

THERUSSIAN-SPEAKING HOMEAND MIGRATION

Habitation is the intersection of spatial and material, storage of memory, continuation of personal space, realisation of oneself in culture, relation of private and public, epoch and individuality, financial possibilities and aesthetic principles. Recently, linguists and anthropologists have become more and more engaged in understanding the importance of the house in the construction of discourse. Folklore tradition assumes strict continuity in the maintenance of the house, passed down from generation to generation and associated with the mythological reading of small and large spaces (Adon’eva 2011). As a stronghold of the family, as protection and as place of self-reflection, the home becomes an anthropological centre for the formation and maintenance of identity (Dushakova 2005). The idea of the house as a starting point of existence, continuity, and spiritual and physical strength grows in the language consciousness through a variety of associations and phraseological units (Fedorova 2016). Each nation has its own persistent stereotypes about the significance of the house, its parts and its furnish-ings (Filippova and Archakova 2013). Despite many real losses, people constantly re-examine and reimagine things that they have ceased to own (Gramatchikova 2018).

In Soviet times, the boundaries between the external and internal world of housing became blurred, traditional values were destroyed, symbols of housebuilding changed, and a new housing culture was formed, which, in turn, broke down during the transition from a disciplinary society to a society of achievements, where less attention was paid to the home and more to work (Kim Joon Seok 2018). In the aftermath of the Soviet Union, different generations formed diverse cultures of living, from refurbished old apartments in city centres to cheap dwellings in the suburbs, from giant mansions in the countryside to small family dachas or village izbas (log houses) inherited from grandparents. Different waves of Russian speakers have moved abroad with their own ideals of a proper or decent lifestyle. In general, in the philosophy of culture of the twentieth century, the idea of home appears as a place of peace and tranquillity, protection and reliability; however, in parallel, thoughts about permanent or temporary homelessness or about the entire universe as a home are actively discussed (Rymarovich 2013).

In traditional Russian culture, as in many others, the space of the house symbolically reflected the structure of the world; the home was a living being and the embodiment of the universe (Baiburin 1983; Boal 2000).

The Romanoffs (2018), a recent online television series, was met harshly by critics, with the self-declared Duchess Marie of Russia calling it ‘fatally indulgent’ (Marshall 2018), not unlike the tsars themselves. Yet, the series has brought the continuity of Hollywood's fascination with Russian royalty to the fore. The origins of this discourse go back to the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and its colony of White émigrés, which, in the 1930s, counted about 1,500 members (Day 1934: 1). Its economic commodification can be best illustrated by a 1932 exhibition of Russian decorative art objects belonging to the Romanovs, chosen from the collection of Dr Armand Hammer at Bullocks, a luxury department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Russian actor Ivan Lebedeff and American pianist and actress Norma Boleslavsky (Drury) posed for the Los Angeles Times holding an empty royal champagne bucket, a testimony to the refugees’ social drama, albeit with a price tag attached.

In his review of the exhibition, Arthur Millier expressed his disapproval of the tsarist regime while simultaneously examining the meaning of this spectacle within the context of multicultural Los Angeles: ‘So don't be astonished if, in the near future, when you dine in Hollywood, some blond lady of the screen says casually: “Oh, yes – these belonged to my great aunt, the late Czarina. The double eagle was our family crest, doncherknow”’ (Millier B13).

Back in 1932, Millier's class-conscious example was certainly plausible because Los Angeles restaurant goers had long been familiar with those double-headed avians, among other heraldic paraphernalia, of Hollywood's Russian colony. While many cities across the world, including Berlin, Paris, Shanghai and New York, also hosted large populations of Russian émigrés with their own restaurants, it was the proximity of the Hollywood film industry that contributed to the uniqueness of the local Los Angeles nightlife. The exilic identity struggles that these restaurants endured mimicked the way in which Russia itself was captured on screen, described by Olga Matich as a ‘slippery relation between invented and authentic Russianness, between simulacra and their originals’ (Matich 2005: 209).

This chapter is dedicated to the history of Los Angeles's restaurants of the first wave of Russian immigrants, also known as the White emigration, and the complexities of its identity as gleaned from these establishments’ interior decorations, menus and biographies of their owners.

INTRODUCTION

Russian-speaking ex-Soviet immigrants constitute one of the most numerous immigrant communities in Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, in 2019 the total number of foreign citizens living in Turkey with a residence permit was 1,531,180, and 258,588 out of this number were foreigners from the former Soviet countries (TÜİK 2019). These numbers do not include foreigners having Turkish citizenship. According to TÜİK's Place of Birth Statistics, 531,430 citizens of the Turkish Republic were born in former Soviet countries (TÜİK 2020b). Therefore, according to official statistics, the total number of Russian-speaking ex-Soviet immigrants in Turkey amounts to 790,018. It can be considered among the largest Russian-speaking immigrant communities in the world.

The most important feature of this community is the predominance of women. Turkey's case is a good illustration of the observed fact that migration movements have feminised with the intensification of glo-balisation processes. In Turkey, Russian-speaking immigration definitely has a female face. This has been mostly related to the so-called ‘marriage migration’, which remains the most important reason for Russian-speaking women's immigration to Turkey.

There is a long tradition of identifying the woman/mother with the house/home. Women are seen as the ‘pivots of home’ (Chapman 1999), as those who are responsible for its construction and representation. It is not simply the house itself which is coded as feminine, but also the realm of tradition, culture, community and nation are often understood as women's business (Morley 2000 in Bozkurt 2009: 69). Women are seen as ‘ethnic actors’ (Anthias 2000) who are responsible for preserving values, guarding traditions, transmitting the language to the young, and retaining/communicating nationhood and belongingness (Yuval-Davis 1997 in Bozkurt 2009: 69). However, conventional understandings of ‘home’ as a stable and fixed location have long been problematised. People's relationship with places has changed with growing mobility. Unfixed, plural and multi-referential understandings of home have emerged, especially in the context of migration and everyday practices of homemaking abroad (Bozkurt 2009: 31).

How do migrant women and in particular those who migrate because of marriage with a foreigner make their homes in an unfamiliar environment and how do they find their way between two value systems and between two different ethnic/cultural ‘homes’? Do communication technologies help or hinder the onset of immigrants’ feeling at home in the new country? This chapter attempts to deepen our understanding of migrant women's perceptions of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ using Turkey as an example.

INTRODUCTION

When we talk about Russian immigrants in Uruguay, the city of San Javier, which was founded as a Russian colony in 1913, is the first thing mentioned. Immigrants from the southern provinces of the Russian Empire, followers of the religious movement New Israel, created under the leadership of Vasily Lubkov, settled there. After unsuccessful attempts to establish colonies in Russia, a decision was made to migrate to Uruguay, where between 1,500 and 2,000 migrants arrived in 1913–14 (Antonova 2010: 136; Petrov 2019a: 378).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, about half of the population of San Javier were descendants of Russian settlers (Petrov 2010: 76). The language situation in the Rio Negro department is unique because another group of Russians live in the vicinity of San Javier; these are the Old Believers who moved there in the mid-1950s from neighbouring Brazil. Russian communities in Uruguay, in addition to San Javier, can be also found in Young, Fray Bentos, Salta, Paysandú, Salto and Montevideo. The latter communities emerged as a result of both a secondary migration from San Javier and a primary migration of Eastern Slavs (Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians).

Recently, many scholars have published research on the language and culture of the Old Believers of Uruguay and neighbouring countries, specifically their identity and isolation; this has contributed to the preservation of their traditions (see Boiko de Semka 2009; Rovnova 2010, 2011, 2014a and 2014b). However, there are no studies on the language of the descendants of Russian immigrants in San Javier. An exception here are papers about the religious movement New Israel as well as the history of San Javier itself (Dubovik 2009; Martínez 2013; Moseikina 2003; Petrov 2010, 2019a and 2019b; Putiatova 2008; Roslik 2009). Studies of the San Javier Russian community present only fragmentary information about the language competences of the descendants of Russian immigrants. There is evidence that Russian is not spoken by the majority of the first immigrants’ descendants, and their language loss is associated with the lack of Russian language teaching at school (Roslik 2009: 66). The speakers’ language competences are characterised as ‘rudimentary’ (Petrov 2010: 66), as only a few are able to speak Russian (ibid.: 77); most of them are over sixty (ibid.: 78). In the scholarly literature we can also find information about the dynamics of language competences.

Different disciplines look at languages from different angles and multilingualism studies bring these together in order to work out a comprehensive view on multiple languages of the world. This chapter deals with some frequent and general questions pertaining to the most essential human resource – language. How can we distinguish one language from the other? How can we tell a language from its dialect? Is it possible to measure differences between languages and language varieties? What are pidgins, creoles and World Englishes? These are the issues explored in this chapter.

Languages and dialects

What is a language?

If asked, everyone would say that English, Japanese, Spanish (Castilian) and Swedish are languages. Usually, we can easily distinguish one named language from another, even without mastering all of them. But language varieties exist that have a very similar structure and vocabulary. How can we know whether there are two different languages or just one? And are they languages or dialects?

This is a complicated matter. Languages and dialects are studied in linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics and sociology of language. The perspectives of these areas of knowledge on language are somewhat different. Due to this, and also to the well-known elusiveness of the notion of ‘language’, approaches to what can be defined as a language, and on what premises, differ as well. Linguistics and sociolinguistics alike acknowledge that it is impossible to decide what a language is solely on the basis of linguistic criteria. Nor does there exist any unambiguous linguistic measure or series of features that could allow a distinction to be made between two close languages. Likewise, designating a language variety as either a language proper or a dialect cannot be performed on the basis of the linguistic features of a language, since there is no intrinsic value in the morphology or phonology of any linguistic variety. One of several English dialects, South-East Mercian, which dates back centuries, has become Standard English, ‘the bearer of nationhood, to carry the flag, or standard, of the emerging nation’ (Halliday 2020: 334), and is therefore a language, not a dialect.