Motherlines, thin places and somatic orientations: An embodied inquiry

Abstract

In this article, I explore the role of ancestrally connected sites as places of somatic orientation and potentially as sites of embodied memory. Inspired by seeking connection with my Irish great-great-great grandmother, Jane O’Brian and her lineage, I travelled to Ireland as a North American woman, undertaking a circling journey to a land of my Motherlines. In this article, I explore touchstone moments on the land in Ireland, including my serendipitous stumble to the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Ireland. The article explores, in particular, the communication between my own body and particular places on earth, undergirded by other literature that explores human-land-based connection. I draw on the methodologies of embodied inquiry and autoethnography. Echoing and contrasting with the journeys of other writer–researchers who have engaged in their own ancestral journeys, I ask questions about land-based connections, and how these connections are challenged and remembered in the process of migration and uprooting. Acknowledging the possibility of nostalgic projection by diasporic returnees I touch on the potential pitfalls of such an exploration while weaving an autoethnographic and embodied inquiry which explores land-based connections as dynamic, multi-layered and a potential site of somatic re-orientation.