The irresolvable unease about be-longing: Exploring globalized dynamics of homecoming

Abstract

Homecomings tend to be unsettling. Any effort of embarking on the balancing act of bringing cosmopolitan experience and local life together is mediated by absence and sequences of life lived elsewhere. Return, consequently, is by no means a concluding movement in geographic space but an enduring process of regaining the precarious good of social ‘recurrence’. Thus, despite global flow of information, ‘homecomers’ often find themselves as involuntary marginals in the local societies that used to be ‘home’ because they have missed out on the crucial process of an onrolling local everyday life. This in turn often sets into motion a process of actively generating elective soils of significance. Based on Alfred Schütz’s phenomenology of the modern ‘homecomer’, this article attempts to outline the life world–related potential of contemporary return. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, this article aims at revealing the typical features of the ‘art of reconnecting’ that lies at the heart of what is conventionally called ‘reembedding’.