Flavia Cangià - Liminal Moves: Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times

This transdisciplinary book series features empirically grounded studies from around the world that disentangle how people, objects and ideas move across the planet. With a special focus on advancing theory as well as methodology, the series considers movement as both an object and a method of study.

Volume 9
LIMINAL MOVES
Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times
Flavia Cangi

Volume 8
PACING MOBILITIES
Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements
Edited by Vered Amit and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 7
FINDING WAYS THROUGH EUROSPACE
West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside
Joris Schapendonk

Volume 6
BOURDIEU AND SOCIAL SPACE
Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements
Deborah Reed-Danahay

Volume 5
HEALTHCARE IN MOTION
Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access
Edited by Cecilia Vindrola-Padros, Ginger A. Johnson, and Anne E. Pfister

Volume 4
MOMENTOUS MOBILITIES
Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel
Noel B. Salazar

Volume 3
INTIMATE MOBILITIES
Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World
Edited by Christian Groes and Nadine T. Fernandez

Volume 2
METHODOLOGIES OF MOBILITY
Ethnography and Experiment
Edited by Alice Elliot, Roger Norum and Noel B. Salazar

Volume 1
KEYWORDS OF MOBILITY
Critical Engagements
Edited by Noel B. Salazar and Kiran Jayaram

First published in 2021 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

2021 Flavia Cangi

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2021004784

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-048-9 hardback
ISBN 978-1-80073-049-6 ebook

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The Great Khan asked Polo you return and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use of all your traveling? Marco Polo imagines answering that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In Calvinos Invisible Cities, Marco Polo travels the kingdom of the emperor Kublai Khan and brings tales of his journey back to the monarch. Marco Polos tales about his journeys across imagined cities, as Italo Calvino describes in this quote, perfectly capture what happens when we travel, and in a way the use of traveling. Calvino tells us that traveling, through the pathways, imaginings, reflections, and pauses that it entails, can bring about a potential change, where we may search for or end up with something ahead of us, while revisiting our past. When we travel, we may be confronted with our own transformation. We encounter others, tell others or imagine telling others about our journey. This book is the result of a long journey along my research fieldworks, but it also comes from my reflections about travel and the construction of work and life trajectories. Over the last fifteen years, I have been traveling for various reasons, including tourism, study, research, work, and family. In 2004, I left Italy, my country of birth, for the first time, staying away for a few months and studying in Japan. I arrived in Switzerland the year after for professional purposes. There I met the man who became my husband, and with whom, at the time, I started a long-distance relationship across Switzerland, Italy, and Japan. Between 2007 and 2009, I traveled back and forth to Japan to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for my doctorate. I rented a small apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo and continued to travel back to Rome and Switzerland to visit my family and friends while pursuing my studies. I moved back to Italy in 2012, and then to Geneva in 2014 to work. In recent years, I have been commuting between different Swiss cities for work-related reasons.

During these years of travel for study, work, and love, others mobility or immobility, as well as the physical and geographical distance fromor absence ofmy family and friends, affected my decisions and interpretation of mobility more than the excitement of traveling around and living in other countries was capable of doing. One day, I realized that a couple of my socks were split up, one in a drawer in my apartment in Rome and the other somewhere in my small apartment in Tokyo. I was stuck in an in-between hotspot symbolized by my separated socks, between work opportunities, distinct phases of my life, and geographical destinations. During my first experiences of work between Switzerland and Italy, I constantly met other people who moved often for their work, with lots of exciting experiences and travels to tell. I often wondered if I should do the same. I also started thinking about the migration of my father when he was young, and later of my parents-in-law, and about the emotional cost of relocating to a new and completely unknown place that makes migration, as one form of mobility, all but an exciting experience. At the same time, part of my family and some of my friends remained in their hometown, and a part of me definitely did the same. In 2014, after a year of being unemployed and my husbands return to Switzerland, I decided to follow him, which coincided with me once again being employed. Until that moment, Switzerland had represented the first and most important destination of my migratory trajectory. It was here that I had my first professional experiences, continued my studies, and met my husband. In Switzerland, I had my two daughters. Having my first child had an impact on the way I traveled and planned to travel. Having a child represented the crucial moment at which I recognized the opportunities with which this country could provide me. In a certain sense, I might say that my migratory journey would find its final destination here. Yet my mind often imagines being back home or visiting possible future destinations. In my mind, I could live in my apartment in Rome but imagine it with a view of the Mont Blanc from the window, the view I used to have when I moved back to Geneva in 2014.

This book is about liminal experiences in human mobility, including but not limited to migration as one of the many forms that mobility can take. It is about that condition of in-betweenness between here and there, before and after, self and other, lives lived and unlived, and the potential change that this might entail. This condition can involve a sense of disorientation, uncertainty, and ambivalence. It might also encompass a margin of freedom where everything is still possible, at least at the imaginative level. The imaginative and temporal space between my apartment interior in Rome and the external view over the Mont Blanc in Geneva, between my socks, one in Rome and one in Tokyo, is not an empty field. Within this hotspot, I built my work life and my family. This is not the whole story, though. In my mind, there are some work opportunities on which I am missing out, a work life that I could be leading if I had made other choices. I imagine possible destinations to which my family and I could move one day for work reasons. This imaginative space between Tokyo, Rome, and Geneva is not simply a spatial field. It is a temporal and symbolic pathway I travel along, when I move between my past and my future, between the multiple ways I define myself and the world around me.