Open AccessWalking with Lina in Zamora
Author(s) -
Andreea Racleș
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
intersections
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.206
H-Index - 9
ISSN - 2416-089X
DOI - 10.17356/ieejsp.v4i2.386
Subject(s) - materiality (auditing) , negotiation , perspective (graphical) , bespoke , sociology , embodied cognition , settlement (finance) , concreteness , locality , history , aesthetics , anthropology , visual arts , epistemology , political science , art , social science , law , philosophy , world wide web , payment , computer science , linguistics
This paper discusses how concreteness of place and locality matter for Roma in negotiating belonging and in engaging with home-making practices. The idea of ‘fluid identities’ or ‘flows’ permeated Roma/Gypsies related scholarly approaches and migration studies to a point that corporeality and materiality of movement and settlement became rather marginalised. Criticising this trend, the translocality perspective (Brickell and Datta, 2011) emerged as an agency-oriented approach that sheds more light on how local-to-local connections are made. To tackle these facets, in this article I analyse a walking tour in Zamora with Lina. With the ability to stimulate embodied, exploratory and relational experiences of space (O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010), this walking episode enabled Lina, a Romanian Roma woman, to reflect on the places that mattered to her life abroad. Based on her reflections, the article discusses how Lina dwells simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’, and imagines dwelling translocally.