Chaired by Sabiha Huq
Lu Chen: Temporality in Reterritorializing under State-Led Urbanized Development: A Case Study of Time Space Productions in Villages in Zhejiang, China
Under the state ideology of rural urban integration in China, villages have been observing dramatic transformations not only in terms of increasing built environment but also of rural societies in general due to migrations to the cities. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in three villages in Zhejiang Province, I explore villagers’ responses towards such state-led deterritorializing process with a focus on their forms of time space production. In this case study, the impacts of the state’s rural urban integration differ in these three villages respectively. In the first village, the local government imposed urbanized and individualized time through concentrated resettlement in town seat for disaster reconstruction. Villagers appropriated the state-planned time space for socializing to synchronize villagers’ time and attended to rural productive routines to add their own rhythm. In the second village, the road construction company contracted by the local government damaged the stairs to access to the step stone bridge across the village river. Villagers protested to demand restoration by associating the long duration of the step stone as tradition and also a possible mode of leisurely time-spending for potential tourism in the future. In the third village, its peripheral position in local economy has left it only with the elders, which greatly affected villagers’ social life and aroused emotions of anxiety. Villagers kept the rhythm of rural productivities attending to the multiple temporalities in their surroundings, but also adapted and acquired new meanings aligned with cherished values such as freedom, sense of control, as well as mobility and health. Villagers thus exert their agency through time manifest in rhythm and pace to produce, contest and reproduce their own territories embedded in the large-scale urbanizing time space.
Bio: Lu Chen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. Her PhD research explores the impact of, and adaptation to environmental and climate change in rural China. She has recently published her two co-authored articles on themes of gender, environmentalism and rural revitalization.
Alejandro Miranda-Nieto: Aspirational return among migrants: ambivalence, temporality and sense of home
The experience of home has a variety of spatial and temporal connotations. People's sense of home, for instance, can refer to several other places apart from the actual dwelling place. The geographical dispersion of a sense of home is particularly evident among migrants, whose home tends to be identified with different places at once. Yet, the experience of home among migrants not only spreads out across locations, but also across temporal dimensions. In discussing temporal dimensions of migrants' sense of home, this paper focuses on aspirational return. That is, the tension that comes from aspiring to move out or stay in the place of immigration. In reflecting about the ways in which anticipation shapes the present experience of home, this paper illustrates how planning, desiring, intending and vacillating between staying or leaving inform migrants' sense of home. I draw from participant observation and interviews with highly qualified migrants living in Oslo to argue that anticipation shapes the present experience of home, producing an ambiguous attitude towards the place of residence.
Bio: Alejandro Miranda-Nieto is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Diversity Studies Centre Oslo, Oslo Metropolitan University. His current research looks at homemaking, dwelling and dynamics of integration among migrant professionals in Oslo. He is the author of academic articles on mobilities, home, migration, music and ethnography. His monograph Musical Mobilities has been published in the Routledge Advances in Ethnography series, and the co-authored book Ethnographies of Home and Mobility in the Routledge Home series.
Ben Grafstrom: Vanishing Temporalities in Rural Japan
Japan is in the midst of a massive population decline that is putting centuries-old traditions at risk of disappearing. Given that shared senses of time and temporality are essential to society and culture, the question I address is: how is population decline in Japan’s rural regions affecting individuals’ (and whole communities’) sense of temporality? The folk religious festivals I am examining are connected to cycles of mountain worship traditions and to agricultural practices in the Tohoku region.
Bio: Ben Grafstrom earned his MA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Japanese literature) from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is currently a PhD research fellow in the University of Oslo’s Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages. He is part of the “Religious Festivals in Asia: Power, Aspirations, and Play” research group. For his thesis research, he is examining the effects that mass depopulation in rural Japan is having on the ways residents interact with their local folk religious festivals. He is on the steering committees of the Japanese Society for Time Studies (JSTS) and Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ), and is also a member of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST).
Derek Basler: Live Long Like the Mountains: Hope, Pessimism, and Conceptions of the Future in a Northern Albanian Village
Once one of the most prosperous villages in the northern Albanian mountains, Curraj i Epërm has experienced a dramatic period of depopulation following the collapse of the communist regime in 1991, from around 600 individuals to about twenty, nearly all of whom now live there on a seasonal basis. Failing infrastructure, an unstable state, and precarious economic conditions were the primary motivations for leaving. As one resident said, “Democracy began and people left, because what is there to do here?”
This question, rhetorical in nature but delivered with an unmistakable tone of pessimism, implies a future state; that there is something unsettled and bleak in the present that yields a precarious imagination of future possibilities, one that is perhaps less so elsewhere. On the one hand, those who have left Curraj seem to have been spurred by cynical outlooks towards economic and social opportunities. On the other hand, a sense of hope for a viable future in the village has emerged among those who have remained, manifest in the modest tourism industry that residents have been developing in recent years.
This research examines the temporal imaginaries of those who leave and those who stay, how they are shaped by the social and economic conditions (both real and perceived) of the village, Albania, and abroad, and how they encourage (im)mobility. Moreover, it aims to understand how conceptions of the future shifted following the collapse of the communist regime, when mobility, which before was almost entirely limited, became a possibility coupled with a new overarching economic logic.
Bio: I am a Ph.D. student at Central European University in Vienna. My research examines the forces behind rural depopulation, experiences of migration, and attachments to home among the villages of the northern Albanian mountains. I have also conducted research revolving around the reemergence of blood feuding as an urban phenomenon in post-communist Albania