Places of Habitation and Belonging

Abstract

Keightley and Pickering explore the neglected role of space and place in the remembering process. Using a rich body of ethnographic fieldwork examples, they specifically address the ways in which changes in place, ranging from relatively local shifts such as moving house to macro-scale processes of migration and displacement, are made sense of in vernacular remembering. They focus on how transitions in everyday places of habitation and belonging are negotiated through the remembering process, and how those transitions are remembered. Through analysis of extended interview extracts using their key concept of the mnemonic imagination, they consider how belonging is articulated and performed in the everyday memories of and between places, and how this contributes to a sense of individual self and collective identity in and through time. They conclude by considering what it means to remember well under conditions of spatial mobility.