Paolo Boccagni will give a talk at the forthcoming symposium on Return Migration convened by Jasna Capo at the  Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, in the framework of the  “Transnational Return Migration to Croatia, Kosovo and North Macedonia” funded by the Research Group Linkage Programme of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2021-2025). Paolo’s talk will be on Aspiring to the past, encountering the future: disentangling the temporalities of return migration in conversation with home and death studies. See the abstract below.

Aspiring to the past, encountering the future: disentangling the temporalities of return migration in conversation with home and death studies

Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento)What is the “tense” of return migration, as a life project and an actual experience? My presentation interrogates it in the light of the contrasting temporalities that shape it, drawing on the apparently disconnected fields of home and death studies. 

An implicitly circular view of time often underpins the emic construction of return among potential and effective returnees. Across the diverse background of its drivers, degrees of (im)permanence and impacts, return retains a strong symbolic power. It is not infrequent for distant kin to perceive it as a way of healing the wound produced by migration, and even more by forced displacement. As a prospect or an accomplishment, return feels like a much-needed restoration of “normal” life, in a “sedentary” or “methodologically nationalist” mindset as decried by social scientists, as implicitly and stubbornly shared in many transnational families. More analytically put, return should enable a time reversal in the social and moral texture of group life, back to the “good old times”, however idealized. This circular temporality is also nourished, in the contexts of settlement, by nostalgia, by awareness of one’s deeper familiarity with the context of origin, and possibly by painful conditions or even careers of discrimination and marginalization. 

In practice, as much research has illustrated, the assumption that the place of origin will keep being “home” in a positive sense is problematic. Return is unlikely to ever end in a mere repetition of the past. It rather demands readaptation, even when returnees find effective and rewarding ways of reincorporation, based on the capitals they accrued abroad and on the opportunities they encounter in the context of origin. In short, return has more to do with the future than with the past. To that extent, it is an exemplary field to explore larger questions of homing, or lifelong struggles to achieve a life arrangement that may eventually be home (or homely enough) for all those who haven’t one or were dispossessed of it.  

This future orientation holds true, I contend, even for the most radical (and least researched) variant of return -the posthumous one. The return of the living sometimes goes along with, or is replaced by, the return of the dead, whenever migrants wish to be repatriated after death and some of the living make that possible. Even so, an expected way of anchoring back to the past turns into an opening into the future – the only possible future for one’s identity and memory. On the one hand, body repatriation re-establishes a literal connection with the ancestral homeland. On the other, though, it affords ongoing ritual, shared and culturally appropriate memorialization from the living. It is ultimately an endeavour to reassert and project a past memory into the future. 

In short, return as homecoming, even in its posthumous form, is as normatively past-oriented, as socially and effectively future-bound. This is not to deny the significance of its past-bound moral constructions, which demand respect for a very intimate human desire, i.e. to be sooner or later back to one’s “natural” place. Nevertheless, the gap between expected and effective temporalities invites further conversation and mutual understanding between researchers and their participants. On either side, albeit in different ways, migrants’ new encounters with their places of origin reveal a temporal tension that is central to the negotiation of return for the living, and even for the dead.