(Non-)Return: Can Migrants Become Former Migrants?

Abstract

The return of migrants home is problematic because it manifests important gaps at the social, identificational, and everyday levels. The social gaps are caused by forced restructuring of social networks. Breaks at the identificational level are associated with acquisition of the migrant’s unique experience of being “out”, with the transnational multiplication of social reality, as well as with the production of distance from the host community. Breaks at the level of everyday life are embodied in the assimilation of new social practices and corporeal idioms. The study of the phenomenon of return through the transnational, biographical, and identificational lenses seems informative and nonobvious. The analysis of migrants’ emotions, perceptions of the past and the future (in particular, the phenomenon of nostalgia and myth of the return), as well as everyday practices and their physical incarnations provides rich material for the interpretation of the phenomenon.