Lengua de términos de indización y calificadores

In order to understand migrant realities, it is not sufficient to study how migrants take on the cultural forms of the countries in which they reside, or whether they participate in local labour markets. It is also necessary to understand how migrants relate to their countries of origin in their imaginaries, in the cultural forms they practice, the political identities they associate themselves with and the discourses they engage in. (Mazzucato, 2010:207) In my dissertation, I intend to have a closer look at individual strategies the Estonian migrants use

in their everyday life to cope with living abroad as well as maintaining the aforementioned ties with their homeland and families.

Sara Ahmed (1999:343, in Aksoy and Robins, 2008) considers migration as a process of estrangement from what was home and homeland. It involves both spatial and temporal dislocation which will cause acute discomfort and the failure to fully inhabit the present or present space. According to her, the old life in the country of origin can be substituted only partially. In most cases, traditions and structures from the old homeland will be applied to new circumstances.

A concept of home is an important part of identity, it is in nowadays transnational world described by several researchers as a ‘flexible, changing and negotiated

geographical/social space’ (Rabikowska, 2010a). According to Morley (2000:244), recent technological advances have also disrupted elements in traditional notions of home. The author explains that for example new mass media has enabled communities to be mediated at different spatial and geographical scales. He argues that the mobile nature of our present world has changed our ideas of borders – they are now fluid, rather than static, but

nevertheless present. These new fluctuating boundaries mean that according to Morley our notion(s) of ‘home’ themselves are liable to fluctuation, and indeed become context dependent. Thus the idea of ‘home’ becomes a “nodal point on a cultural continuum of belonging” rather than a static idea, shaped by the particular identity of the person in that instance, in a specific context-dependent situation. Rapport and Dawson (1998: 8) mention that home is created through social relations. Home brings together memory and longing, the spatial and the temporal, the local and the global. The era of mass migration has brought about a situation where the idea of home has undergone dramatic changes. Home has become more mobile, more individuated and privatized; everyone can now choose their own home (Ibid., 1998: 27). At the same time home can be seen in language, as David Morley (2000) explores different (micro and macro) levels of home in his research. ‘Home’ to him does not solely have to be a physical place, but can equally be a ‘virtual’ or ‘discursive’ space – for example language. Home can also be seen in homeland’s nature (Holy, 1988).

In the case of war refugees, home has been taken away, as for example Raychaudhury (2004) talks about the same feelings in connection to ‘home’ in her interviews with Bengali refugees. People who have lost home due to war and violence feel nostalgic about

their homes which cannot be reinvented and remain only in the refugees’ memories where this loss has left a permanent scar. It is also interesting to explore how the second

generation sees home. Le Espiritu and Tran (2002: 369) argue that transnationalism, especially in the second generation, takes place not only in literal but at the symbolic level – at the level of imagination, shared memory, and inventions of traditions. ‘Homeland’ is not only a physical place to visit, but also a concept and desire, a place to return to through the imagination. Sutton (2004) has noticed the same in the case of Caribbean second- generation migrants whose identity of home and family can be enlarged to a whole nation/country. Kibria (2002) has researched Chinese migrants in the USA, for whom homeland is a ‘matter of blood’. She calls this a ‘primordialist conception’ of homeland membership. Therefore, homeland can be viewed as something that is already existing in blood. In this dissertation, I will look closer to Estonians’ home-building strategies and other parts of their identity and concept of home, as language, food and national artefacts and objects.

In her book Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities (1996:193) Avtar Brah asks: “When does a location become home? What is the difference between ’feeling at home’ and staking claim to a place as one’s own?” She argues that it is possible to feel at home and to experience social exclusion, some migrants may feel more at home abroad, but still insist defining themselves through their ethnic identity, and the position of the second generation migrants is different from the first generation, who has all memories of

displacement and what was left behind. She argues that people may feel anchored in their place of settlement, but still experience ’double, triple, or multi-placedness of home’ in the imaginary. According to Brah (1996:4), ‘home’, can be an invocation of narratives of ’the nation’, or as is commonly imagined, the site of everyday lived experiences, the place where rootedness emerges - it “signifies the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighbourhood or a home town”. Madan Sarup (1994:94) asks the same question, and points out that the children of many migrants are not sure where they belong. He thinks about words ’homecoming’, ’home-made’, ’Make yourselves at home’, ’Home is where the heart is’, concluding that “home is (often) associated with pleasant memories, intimate situations, a place of warmth and protective security amongst parents, brothers and sisters“ (Ibid.). Like Brah, Sarup realises that home is connected to identity – “the story we tell of ourselves and which is also the story others tell of us“ (1994:95) For him, identity “not to do with being but with becoming“ – identity is a

construction, a consequence of a process of interaction between people, institutions and practices (Ibid. p.102). In this research I refer to the Estonian identity as in Nimmerfeldt (2009) – it has been actively constructed as an ethno-cultural group, united by native origin, common culture, history, national traditions, feelings, language, preservation of and pride in their culture and traditions, a deep connection with the Estonian territory and landscape. In my research I will try to bring these topics (identity, ethnicity, language, homeland and home) together.